It was winter, which meant at least that the balaclava did not look out of place. He buried the fake plates in a wood and hurried on, head bowed, hands in his pockets on his treasured souvenirs. He had considered burying them too, but he could not bring himself to do it. He had covered the bloodstains on his trousers with mud, kept his balaclava on at the station, acting drunk in a corner of the train carriage to keep people away from him, muttering to himself, projecting that aura of menace and madness that acted like a cordon when he wished to be left alone.

By the time he reached home they had found her body. He watched it on the TV that night, eating off a tray in his lap. They found the burnt-out car, but not the plates and—this really was proof of his own inimitable luck, the strange protective blessing the cosmos gave him—the boyfriend with whom she had argued was arrested, charged and, though the evidence against him was transparently weak, convicted! The thought of that dickhead serving his time still made him laugh sometimes…

Nevertheless, those long hours of driving through the darkness when he had known an encounter with the police might be fatal, when he had feared a request to turn out his pockets or a shrewd-eyed passenger noticing dried blood on him had taught him a powerful lesson. Plan every detail. Leave nothing to chance.

That was why he needed to nip out for some Vicks VapoRub. The number-one priority right now was to make sure that It’s stupid new scheme did not interfere with his own.

30

I am gripped, by what I cannot tell…

Blue Öyster Cult, “Lips in the Hills”

Strike was inured to the shifts between frenetic activity and enforced passivity demanded by investigations. Nevertheless, the weekend following their round-trip to Barrow, Market Harborough and Corby found him in a strange state of tension.

The gradual re-immersion in civilian life that had taken place over the past couple of years had brought with it pressures from which he had been protected while in the military. His half-sister Lucy, the only sibling with whom he had shared a childhood, called early on Saturday morning to ask why he had not responded to her invitation to his middle nephew’s birthday party. He explained that he had been away, unable to access mail sent to the office, but she barely listened.

“Jack hero-worships you, you know,” she said. “He really wants you to come.”

“Sorry, Lucy,” said Strike, “can’t make it. I’ll send him a present.”

Had Strike still been in the SIB, Lucy would not have felt entitled to exert emotional blackmail. It had been easy to avoid family obligations then, while he was traveling the world. She had seen him as an inextricable part of the army’s immense and implacable machine. When he steadily refused to yield to her word picture of a desolate eight-year-old nephew looking in vain for Uncle Cormoran at the garden gate, she desisted, asking instead how the hunt for the man who had sent the leg was progressing. Her tone implied that there was something disreputable about being sent a leg. Keen to get her off the phone, Strike told her untruthfully that he was leaving everything up to the police.