If only he hadn’t slapped It, he’d be feeling good now, excited, elated. The slap hadn’t been an auspicious start to the evening. No wonder he felt jumpy. There had been no time to stay and calm her down, turn her sweet: he had simply walked out, determined to get to The Temp, but he still felt jumpy… What if It called the police?

She wouldn’t. It had only been a slap. She loved him, she told him so all the time. When they loved you, they let you get away with fucking murder…

He experienced a tickling sensation at the back of his neck and looked around with the wild idea that he would see Strike looking at him from the corner of the carriage, but nobody remotely resembling that fat bastard was there, only several ill-kempt men grouped together. One of them, who had a scarred face and a gold tooth, was indeed watching him, but as he squinted back through his shades the man ceased his scrutiny and returned to fiddling with his mobile…

Perhaps he should call It when he got off the Tube, before heading for Corsica Studios, and tell It he loved her.

59

With threats of gas and rose motif.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Before the Kiss”

Strike was standing in shadow, his mobile in his hand, waiting. The deep pocket of his secondhand jacket, which was far too heavy in the warmth of this June evening, bulged and sagged with the weight of an object he was keen to conceal. What he planned would be best accomplished under cover of darkness, but the sun was taking its time to sink behind the ill-assorted rooftops visible from his hiding place.

He knew he ought to be concentrating only upon the dangerous business of the night, but his thoughts kept slinking back to Robin. She had not returned his call. He had set a mental deadline for himself: if she doesn’t ring by the end of this evening, she’s never calling. At twelve o’clock the following day she would be getting married to Matthew in Yorkshire, and Strike was sure that constituted a fatal cut-off point. If they did not speak before that ring landed on her finger, he thought that they were unlikely ever to speak again. If anything in the world had been calculated to make him recognize what he had lost, it had been the truculent, noisy presence of the woman with whom he had shared his office for the last few days, staggeringly good-looking though she was.

To the west, the sky over the rooftops blazed with colors as bright as a parakeet’s wing: scarlet, orange, even a faint trace of green. Behind this flamboyant show came a pale wash of violet faintly strewn with stars. Almost time to move.

As though Shanker had heard his thought, Strike’s mobile vibrated and he looked to see a message:

Pint tomorrow?

They had agreed on a code. If all of this came to court, which Strike thought overwhelmingly likely, his intention was to keep Shanker well away from the witness box. There must be no incriminating messages between them tonight. “Pint tomorrow?” meant “he’s in the club.”