“You’re jumpy.”

“Bloody right I’m jumpy, Robin,” he said, drawing out a pack of cigarettes ready for the short walk to the Tube. “Someone sent us an effing leg.”

9

One Step Ahead of the Devil

Seeing Strike in the mutilated flesh, walking along the opposite pavement towards the Court, had been an unexpected bonus.

What a fat fucker he’d become since they had last seen each other, ambling up the road carrying his backpack like the dumb squaddie he had once been, without realizing that the man who had sent him a leg was sitting barely fifty yards away. So much for the great detective! Into the pub he’d gone to join little Secretary. He was almost certainly fucking her. He hoped so, anyway. That would make what he was going to do to her even more satisfying.

Then, as he had stared through his sunglasses at the figure of Strike sitting just inside the pub window, he thought that Strike turned and looked back. Of course, he couldn’t make out features from across the road, through two panes of glass and his own tinted lenses, but something in the distant figure’s attitude, the full disc of its face turned in his direction, had brought him to a high pitch of tension. They had looked at each other across the road and the traffic growled past in either direction, intermittently blocking them from view.

He had waited until three double-deckers had come crawling end to end into the space between them, then slid out of his chair, through the glass doors of the restaurant and up the side street. Adrenaline coursed through him as he stripped off his camouflage jacket and turned it inside out. There could be no question of binning it: his knives were concealed inside the lining. Around another corner, he broke into a flat-out run.

10

With no love, from the past.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Shadow of California”

The unbroken stream of traffic obliged Strike to stand and wait before crossing Tottenham Court Road, his eyes sweeping the opposite pavement. When he reached the other side of the street he peered through the window of the Japanese restaurant, but there was no camouflage jacket to be seen, nor did any of the men in shirts or T-shirts resemble the sunglasses-wearer in size or shape.

Strike felt his mobile vibrate and pulled it out of his jacket pocket. Robin had texted him:

Get a grip.

Grinning, Strike raised a hand of farewell towards the windows of the Court and headed off towards the Tube.

Perhaps he was just jumpy, as Robin had said. What were the odds that the nutter who had sent the leg would be sitting watching Robin in broad daylight? Yet he had not liked the fixed stare of the big man in the camouflage jacket, nor the fact that he had been wearing sunglasses: the day was not that bright. Had his disappearance while Strike’s view was occluded been coincidental or deliberate?