“I’ll see you later. Keep me posted on what you’re up to and where you are.”

He let himself into his office, closed the door, sat down at his desk and slumped backwards in his chair. He had done all he could to stop her getting back on the street. Now, he wanted nothing more than to hear her leave.

40

… love is like a gun

And in the hands of someone like you

I think it’d kill.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Searchin’ for Celine”

Robin was a decade younger than Strike. She had arrived in his office as a temporary secretary, unsought and unwelcome, at the lowest point of his professional life. He had only meant to keep her on for a week, and that because he had almost knocked her to her death down the metal stairs when she arrived, and he felt he owed her. Somehow she had persuaded him to let her stay, firstly for an extra week, then for a month and, finally, forever. She had helped him claw his way out of near insolvency, worked to make his business successful, learned on the job and now asked nothing more than to be allowed to stand beside him while that business crumbled again, and to fight for its survival.

Everyone liked Robin. He liked Robin. How could he fail to like her, after everything they had been through together? However, from the very first he had told himself: this far and no further. A distance must be maintained. Barriers must remain in place.

She had entered his life on the very day that he had split from Charlotte for good, after sixteen years of an on-off relationship that he still could not say had been more pleasurable than painful. Robin’s helpfulness, her solicitousness, her fascination with what he did, her admiration for him personally (if he was going to be honest with himself, he should do it thoroughly) had been balm to those wounds that Charlotte had inflicted, those internal injuries that had long outlasted her parting gifts of a black eye and lacerations.

The sapphire on Robin’s third finger had been a bonus, then: a safeguard and a full stop. In preventing the possibility of anything more, it set him free to… what? Rely on her? Befriend her? Allow barriers to become imperceptibly eroded, so that as he looked back it occurred to him that they had each shared personal information that hardly anybody else knew. Robin was one of only three people (he suspected) who knew about that putative baby that Charlotte claimed to have lost, but which might never have existed, or was aborted. He was one of a mere handful who knew that Matthew had been unfaithful. For all his determination to keep her at arm’s length, they had literally leaned on each other. He could remember exactly what it felt like to have his arm around her waist as they had meandered towards Hazlitt’s Hotel. She was tall enough to hold easily. He did not like having to stoop. He had never fancied very small women.