3

Half-a-hero in a hard-hearted game.

Blue Öyster Cult, “The Marshall Plan”

Robin’s scream reverberated off the windows. She backed away from the desk, staring at the obscene object lying there. The leg was smooth, slender and pale, and she had grazed it with her finger as she pulled its packaging open, felt the cold rubbery texture of the skin.

She had just managed to quell her scream by clamping her hands over her mouth when the glass door burst open beside her. Six foot three and scowling, Strike’s shirt hung open, revealing a monkeyish mass of dark chest hair.

“What the—?”

He followed her stricken gaze and saw the leg. She felt his hand close roughly over her upper arm and he steered her out onto the landing.

“How did it arrive?”

“Courier,” she said, allowing him to walk her up the stairs. “On a motorbike.”

“Wait here. I’ll call the police.”

When he had closed the door of his flat behind her she stood quite still, heart juddering, listening to his footsteps returning downstairs. Acid rose in her throat. A leg. She had just been given a leg. She had just carried a leg calmly upstairs, a woman’s leg in a box. Whose leg was it? Where was the rest of her?

She crossed to the nearest chair, a cheap affair of padded plastic and metal legs, and sat down, her fingers still pressed against her numb lips. The package, she remembered, had been addressed to her by name.

Strike, meanwhile, was at the office window that looked down into the road, scanning Denmark Street for any sign of the courier, his mobile pressed to his ear. By the time he returned to the outer office to scrutinize the open package on the desk, he had made contact with the police.

“A leg?” repeated Detective Inspective Eric Wardle on the end of the line. “A fucking leg?”

“And it’s not even my size,” said Strike, a joke he would not have made had Robin been present. His trouser leg was hitched up to reveal the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He had been in the process of dressing when he had heard Robin’s scream.

Even as he said it, he realized that this was a right leg, like his own lost limb, and that it had been cut below the knee, which was exactly where he had been amputated. His mobile still clamped to his ear, Strike peered more closely at the limb, his nostrils filling with an unpleasant smell like recently defrosted chicken. Caucasian skin: smooth, pale and unblemished but for an old greenish bruise on the calf, imperfectly shaven. The stubbly hairs were fair and the unpainted toenails a little grubby. The severed tibia shone icy white against the surrounding flesh. A clean cut: Strike thought it likely to have been made by an axe or a cleaver.

“A woman’s, did you say?”

“Looks like—”

Strike had noticed something else. There was scarring on the calf where the leg had been severed: old scarring, unrelated to the wound that had taken it from the body.