Chapter Text
Well, the beginning, that is dead and buried.
(As You Like It)
Disoriented by fear and overwhelmed with nausea, Strike cannoned painfully into the door frame of the cubicle. He had just enough time and sense to bend over the toilet before his stomach revolted and cast up its contents in helpless heaves.
Eventually he rose unsteadily to lean, weak and grey-faced, against the side of the cubicle. He braced himself against the opposite wall, and let his head hang down, breathing deeply. The taste of bile was on his lips, and he wiped his mouth against his shirt.
Robin, he thought in anguish, and a sick fear rose again inside him.
The bathroom was empty; silent but for the echoing pulse of a dripping tap at the far end of the room, and his own rasping breaths. He walked slowly to the sink and bent to splash water on his face. When he lifted his head, dripping, he saw himself in the mirror, hulking and black-stubbled. Under the harsh white light, his face had the pallor and immobility of a corpse. Only his eyes were alive, gazing back at him with dark reproach.
This is all your fault, you stupid fucker.
He washed his hands, and pulled open the door. The corridor of the police station had the exhausted quiet of the very early hours of the morning. He heard only the slurred echo of his own steps as he walked wearily back the way he had come some minutes earlier, when he had stumbled out of the interview room, guts rebelling, unable to listen to the details of his failure any longer.
He passed the door, and through the glass panel he could see Robin’s golden hair draped down her black coat. She was seated with her back to him, answering the questions from the other side of the table, and Vanessa was sitting beside her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. His stomach churned again as he remembered her shaky voice describing the attack, and his feet carried him unresisting along the corridor, and out through the reception area into the bitter cold of the January night. Immediately he lit a cigarette, and drew on it with a sharp, urgent gasp. Vanessa would get Robin home safely, he thought with desperate relief. He did not want to talk to Robin just now. He could hardly bear even to think of her.
His phone vibrated in his coat pocket as he walked heedlessly along the pavement towards the main road. Lifting it out, he saw a message with a photo from the client whose case he had closed that morning. With predictable banality, Annabel’s banker husband had been sleeping with his personal assistant, and, in a series of sharply focused pictures, Strike had caught her coming out of the marital home, a be-columned and sepulchral Victorian terrace, while Annabel was at work.
Thanks again for all your help. You missed my ‘nailed the bastard’ drinks. Everyone gone, just me and the whiskey left now. Not too late to help me celebrate. Axx
The photograph was a selfie of an attractive dark-haired woman in her thirties holding a bottle of Laphroaig, red dress scooped low enough to show the curve and shade of alabaster breasts, and eyes full of the offer her text had made all but explicit. With a sudden wave of longing, he thought of drowning himself with alcohol and kisses, of being submerged deep in need and sensation to dull the noise of the accusations in his head. He saw coming towards him the funereal black of a London cab, and, tossing away his cigarette, he hailed it with just a moment’s hesitation, giving a Kensington address to the driver.
Only some hours later, after burying himself deep inside Annabel and closing his eyes to sink into whiskey-soaked oblivion enshrouded in her white-draped four-poster bed, did Strike finally stop seeing with every flicker of his eyelids Robin’s pale and stricken face.