“Oh, they couldn’t matter less,” said Joan, moving at once to the stairs. “I’ll fetch the carpet sweeper.”
“No,” said Strike at once, “I’ve already—”
“There are still bits all over the carpet,” Luke said. “I trod on them.”
I’ll tread on you in a minute, arsehole.
Strike and Luke followed Joan back to the sitting room, where Strike insisted on taking the carpet sweeper from Joan, a flimsy, archaic device she’d had since the seventies. As he plied it, Luke stood in the kitchen doorway watching him, smirking while shoveling Coco Pops into his mouth. By the time Strike had cleaned the carpet to Joan’s satisfaction, Jack and Adam had joined the early morning jamboree, along with a stony-faced Lucy, now fully dressed.
“Can we go to the beach today, Mum?”
“Can we swim?”
“Can I go out in the boat with Uncle Ted?”
“Sit down,” Strike told Joan. “I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”
But Lucy had already done it. She handed Joan the mug, threw Strike a filthy look, then turned back to the kitchen, answering her sons’ questions as she went.
“What’s going on?” asked Ted, shuffling into the room in pajamas, confused by this break-of-dawn activity.
He’d once been nearly as tall as Strike, who greatly resembled him. His dense, curly hair was now snow white, his deep brown face more cracked than lined, but Ted was still a strong man, though he stooped a little. However, Joan’s diagnosis seemed to have dealt him a physical blow. He seemed literally shaken, a little disorientated and unsteady.
“Just getting my stuff together, Ted,” said Strike, who suddenly had an overpowering desire to leave. “I’m going to have to get the first ferry to make the early train.”
“Ah,” said Ted. “All the way back up to London, are you?”
“Yep,” said Strike, chucking his charging lead and deodorant back into the kit bag where the rest of his belongings were already neatly stowed. “But I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. You’ll keep me posted, right?”
“You can’t leave without breakfast!” said Joan anxiously. “I’ll make you a sandwich—”
“It’s too early for me to eat,” lied Strike. “I’ve had a cup of tea and I’ll get something on the train. Tell her,” he said to Ted, because Joan wasn’t listening, but scurrying for the kitchen.
“Joanie!” Ted called. “He doesn’t want anything!”
Strike grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair and hoisted the kit bag out to the hall.
“You should go back to bed,” he told Joan, as she hurried to bid him goodbye. “I really didn’t want to wake you. Rest, all right? Let someone else run the town for a few weeks.”
“I wish you’d stop smoking,” she said sadly.
Strike managed a humorous eye roll, then hugged her. She clung to him the way she had done whenever Leda was waiting impatiently to take him away, and Strike squeezed her back, feeling again the pain of divided loyalties, of being both battleground and prize, of having to give names to what was uncategorizable and unknowable.
“Bye, Ted,” he said, hugging his uncle. “I’ll ring you when I’m home and we’ll fix up a time for the next visit.”
“I could’ve driven you,” said Uncle Ted feebly. “Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”
“I like the ferry,” lied Strike. In fact, the uneven steps leading down to the boat were almost impossible for him to navigate without assistance from the ferryman, but because he knew it would give them pleasure, he said, “Reminds me of you two taking us shopping in Falmouth when we were kids.”
Lucy was watching him, apparently unconcerned, through the door from the sitting room. Luke and Adam hadn’t wanted to leave their Coco Pops, but Jack came wriggling breathlessly into the tiny hall to say,
“Thanks for my badges, Uncle Corm.”
“It was a pleasure,” said Strike, and he ruffled the boy’s hair. “Bye, Luce,” he called. “See you soon, Jack,” he added.
5
He little answer’d, but in manly heart
His mightie indignation did forbeare,
Which was not yet so secret, but some part
Thereof did in his frouning face appeare…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The bedroom in the bed and breakfast where Robin spent the night barely had room for a single bed, a chest of drawers and a rickety sink plumbed into the corner. The walls were covered in a mauve floral wallpaper that Robin thought must surely have been considered tasteless even in the seventies, the sheets felt damp and the window was imperfectly covered by a tangled Venetian blind.
In the harsh glare of a single lightbulb unsoftened by its shade of open wickerwork, Robin’s reflection looked exhausted and ill-kempt, with purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her backpack contained only those items she always carried on surveillance jobs—a beanie hat, should she need to conceal her distinctive red-blonde hair, sunglasses, a change of top, a credit card and ID in a couple of different names. The fresh T-shirt she’d just pulled out of her backpack was heavily creased and her hair in urgent need of a wash; the sink was soapless and she’d omitted to pack toothbrush or toothpaste, unaware that she was going to be spending the night away from home.
Robin was back on the road by eight. In Newton Abbot she stopped at a chemist and a Sainsbury’s, where she purchased, in addition to basic toiletries and dry shampoo, a small, cheap bottle of 4711 cologne. She cleaned her teeth and made herself as presentable as possible in the supermarket bathroom. While brushing her hair, she received a text from Strike:
I’ll be in the Palacio Lounge café in The Moor, middle of Falmouth. Anyone will tell you where The Moor is.
The further west Robin drove, the lusher and greener the landscape became. Yorkshire-born, she’d found it extraordinary to see palm trees actually flourishing on English soil, back in Torquay. These twisting, verdant lanes, the luxuriance of the vegetation, the almost sub-tropical greenness was a surprise to a person raised among bare, rolling moors and hillside. Then there were the glints to her left of a quicksilver sea, as wide and gleaming as plate glass, and the tang of the salt now mixed with the citrus of her hastily purchased cologne. In spite of her tiredness she found her spirits buoyed by the glorious morning, and the idea of Strike waiting at journey’s end.
She arrived in Falmouth at eleven o’clock, and drove in search of a parking space through streets packed with tourists and past shop doorways accreted in plastic toys and pubs covered in flags and multicolored window boxes. Once she’d parked in The Moor itself—a wide open market square in the heart of the town—she saw that beneath the gaudy summertime trappings, Falmouth boasted some grand old nineteenth-century buildings, one of which housed the Palacio Lounge café and restaurant.
The high ceilings and classical proportions of what looked like an old courthouse had been decorated in a self-consciously whimsical style, which included garish orange floral wallpaper, hundreds of kitschy paintings in pastel frames, and a stuffed fox dressed as a magistrate. The clientele, which was dominated by students and families, sat on mismatched wooden chairs, their chatter echoing through the cavernous space. After a few seconds Robin spotted Strike, large and surly-looking at the back of the room, seeming far from happy beside a pair of families whose many young children, most of whom were wearing tie-dyed clothing, were racing around between tables.