“Yeah, cheers. I can probably handle it, though.”

Robin reached for the last envelope in the post pile, which felt stiff and had an additional thickness at one corner, as though it contained a card with some kind of novelty attached. On the point of opening it, Robin noticed that it had been addressed to her, not Strike. She paused, uncertain, looking at it. Her name and the address of the office had been typed. The postmark was from central London and the letter had been sent the previous day.

Strike and Shanker’s voices rose and fell but she could not have said what they were saying.

It’s nothing, she told herself. You’re overwrought. It couldn’t happen again.

Swallowing hard, she opened the envelope and gingerly removed the card.

The image showed a Jack Vettriano painting of a blonde sitting in profile on a chair, which was draped in a dustsheet. The blonde was holding a teacup and her elegant black stockinged, stilettoed legs were crossed and raised on a footstool. There was nothing pinned to the front of the card. The object that she had felt through the card was taped inside it.

Strike and Shanker were still talking. A whiff of decay caught her nostrils through the fug of Shanker’s body odor.

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly, but neither man heard her. She flipped over the Vettriano print.

A rotting toe was taped to the inner corner of the card. Carefully printed in capital letters were the words:

SHE’S AS BEAUTIFUL AS A FOOT

She dropped it onto the desk and stood up. In slow motion, it seemed, she turned to Strike. He looked from her stricken face to the obscene object lying on the desk.

“Get away from it.”

She obeyed, sick and trembling and wishing that Shanker was not there.

“What?” Shanker kept saying. “What? What is it? What?”

“Somebody’s sent me a severed toe,” said Robin in a collected voice that was not her own.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” said Shanker, moving forwards with eager interest.

Strike physically restrained Shanker from picking up the card, which lay where it had fallen from Robin’s hand. Strike recognized the phrase “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot.” It was the title of another Blue Öyster Cult song.

“I’ll call Wardle,” Strike said, but instead of taking out his mobile he scribbled a four-digit code on a Post-it note and extracted his credit card from his wallet. “Robin, go and get the rest of Shanker’s money out for him, then come back here.”

She took the note and the credit card, absurdly grateful for the prospect of fresh air.

“And Shanker,” said Strike sharply, as the two of them reached the glass door, “you walk her back here, all right? Walk her back to the office.”

“You got it, Bunsen,” said Shanker, energized, as he always had been, by strangeness, by action, by the whiff of danger.

34

The lies don’t count, the whispers do.

Blue Öyster Cult, “The Vigil”