5

Hell’s built on regret.

Blue Öyster Cult, “The Revenge of Vera Gemini”
Lyrics by Patti Smith

Much later, after he had seen Robin safely onto the Tube, Strike returned to the office and sat alone in silence at her desk, lost in thought.

He had seen plenty of dismembered corpses, seen them rotting in mass graves and lying, freshly blown apart, by roadsides: severed limbs, flesh pulped, bones crushed. Unnatural death was the business of the Special Investigation Branch, the plainclothes wing of the Royal Military Police, and his and his colleagues’ reflexive reaction had often been humor. That was how you coped when you saw the dead torn and mutilated. Not for the SIB the luxury of corpses washed and prettified in satin-lined boxes.

Boxes. It had looked quite ordinary, the cardboard box in which the leg had come. No markings to indicate its origin, no trace of a previous addressee, nothing. The whole thing had been so organized, so careful, so neat—and this was what unnerved him, not the leg itself, nasty object though it was. What appalled him was the careful, meticulous, almost clinical modus operandi.

Strike checked his watch. He was supposed to be going out with Elin this evening. His girlfriend of two months was in the throes of a divorce that was proceeding with the chilly brinkmanship of a grandmaster chess tournament. Her estranged husband was very wealthy, something that Strike had not realized until the first night he had been permitted to come back to the marital home and found himself in a spacious, wood-floored apartment overlooking Regent’s Park. The shared custody arrangements meant that she was only prepared to meet Strike on nights when her five-year-old daughter was not at home, and when they went out, they chose the capital’s quieter and more obscure restaurants as Elin did not wish her estranged husband to know that she was seeing anyone else. The situation suited Strike perfectly. It had been a perennial problem in his relationships that the normal nights for recreation were often nights that he had to be out tailing other people’s unfaithful partners, and he had no particular desire to kindle a close relationship with Elin’s daughter. He had not lied to Robin: he did not know how to talk to children.

He reached for his mobile. There were a few things he could do before he left for dinner.

The first call went to voicemail. He left a message asking Graham Hardacre, his ex-colleague in the Special Investigation Branch, to call him. He was not sure where Hardacre was currently stationed. The last time they had spoken, he had been due a move from Germany.

To Strike’s disappointment, his second call, which was to an old friend whose life path had run more or less in the opposite direction to that of Hardacre, was not picked up either. Strike left a second, almost identical message, and hung up.

Pulling Robin’s chair closer to the computer, he turned it on and stared at the homepage without seeing it. The image that was filling his mind, entirely against his will, was of his mother, naked. Who had known the tattoo was there? Her husband, obviously, and the many boyfriends who had woven in and out of her life, and anyone else who might have seen her undressed in the squats and the filthy communes in which they had intermittently lived. Then there was the possibility that had occurred to him in the Tottenham, but which he had not felt equal to sharing with Robin: that Leda had, at some point, been photographed in the nude. It would have been entirely in character.