“Do it!” Strike taunted them, standing his ground and opening his arms wide. “Bring the cops round your mobile crack den!”

The winded Whittaker made a gesture from the ground that had the effect of holding his friends at bay, which was the most common sense Strike had ever known him show. Faces were peering out of the pub window.

“You fucking mother… you motherfucker…” Whittaker wheezed.

“Yeah, let’s talk about mothers,” Strike said, jerking Stephanie to her feet. The blood was pounding in his ears. He itched to punch Whittaker until the yellow face was pulp. “He killed mine,” he told the girl, looking into her hollow eyes. Her arms were so thin that his hands almost met around them. “Did you hear that? He’s already killed one woman. Maybe more.”

Whittaker tried to grab Strike around his knees and bring him down; Strike kicked him off, still holding Stephanie. Whittaker’s red handprints stood out on her white neck, as did the imprint of the chain, from which hung the outline of a twisted heart.

“Come with me, now,” Strike told her. “He’s a fucking killer. There are women’s refuges. Get away from him.”

Her eyes were like boreholes into a darkness he had never known. He might have been offering her a unicorn: his proposal was madness, outside the realm of the possible, and incredibly, though Whittaker had squeezed her throat until she could not speak, she wrenched away from Strike as if he were a kidnapper, stumbled over to Whittaker and crouched protectively over him, the twisted heart swinging.

Whittaker allowed Stephanie to help him to his feet and turned to face Strike, rubbing his stomach where the punch had landed and then, in his manic way, he began cackling like an old woman. Whittaker had won: they both knew it. Stephanie was clinging to him as though he had saved her. He pushed his filthy fingers deep into the hair at the back of her head and pulled her hard towards him, kissing her, his tongue down her throat, but with his free hand he gestured to his still-watching friends to get back in the van. Banjo climbed into the driver’s seat.

“See ya, mummy’s boy,” Whittaker whispered to Strike, pushing Stephanie in front of him into the back of the van. Before the doors shut on the obscenities and jeers of his male companions, Whittaker looked directly into Strike’s eyes and made the familiar throat-slashing gesture in midair, grinning. The van moved away.

Strike became suddenly aware that a number of people were standing around him, staring, all gazing at him with the vacant yet startled expressions of an audience when the lights go up unexpectedly. Faces were still pressed up against the pub window. There was nothing left for him to do except memorize the registration number of the battered old van before it turned the corner. As he departed the scene, furious, the onlookers scattered, clearing his way.

42

I’m living for giving the devil his due.