Robin felt as though she’d been away from London for a fortnight, instead of the forty-eight hours that had actually passed.
She meets RFM at an Italian* place for dinner Saturday night, and spends the night at his flat. On Sunday evening, as Robin is preparing for her Facetime with Wynn Jones, he decides to "do an hour at the gym" and leaves with his bag and infamous water bottle. He has barely exited when Strike calls.
The injury to Strike’s face looked even worse the following morning, the swelling slightly diminished but livid blue bruises dappling his skin. His face continued to ache and he chose not to shave, for fear of reopening the gash left by the spade.
Before heading back to the ferry, he and Robin walked a little way along La Coupée, which lay just beyond the Old Forge: a high, narrow isthmus connecting the main island from Little Sark.
Like Robin's black eyes in Troubled Blood, Strike's injury looks worse the next day. And, as sorry as I was not to see them cross La Coupée on horseback, I was happy, as in Skegness, to at least let them see a windy view of the sea together.
The plan for today's installment was Chapters 87 and 88. But, there is so much to love about Spaghetti in Sark that I'm going to devote the entire post to that. I'll try to cover Chapter 88 on Sunday
Pizzas eaten, Strike and Robin emerged half an hour later from the Bel Air and set off up the Avenue beneath a sky still threatening rain, and following the verbal directions given to them by the helpful barman.
They find the house with no problem and spy the gardener who is almost certainly their quarry, but Strike has to approach him alone (despite the clear evidence that the DeLion brothers are a potentially violent sort) because RFM picks that moment to call and try to determine, yet again, Robin's precise degree of emotional distress over an ectopic pregnancy that occurred almost three months earlier.
So, last week, I responded to the call from The Strike and Ellacott Files to submit pictures of chickens that looked like Strike's assorted girlfriends, I got a little too enthusiastic about the endeavor, and wound up getting asked to submit a guest blog post, which you can find here. Check it out; the article includes a few more of my thoughts on fan-created parody materials, as well as a few other links to some funny fan-fiction and character twitter accounts.
If you know of any other good, fan-created Cormoran Strike humor pieces that are available on the internet, please drop a link in the comments. I've love to have a centralized location for sharing, while we wait for Sleep Tight, Evangeline. It's going to be a long wait, and those of us determined to read the depressing Longfellow poem many need an antidote.
In the meantime:
Subscriptions and comments are easier for some on the Substack version of this blog.
“Jesus fucking Christ – what was in that bottle?" gasped Strike, who hadn’t put on his seatbelt, being unable to see, tears flooding from his eyes.
Though it doesn't start off that way in Chapter 80, we will actually wind up with the first happy Valentine's Day we've ever seen in an JKR/RG book, thanks, not to that stuffed pooch from RFM, but to Lennon, the attack dog* who has just taken a chunk out of Strike's thigh, prior to being pepper-sprayed by Robin. As our pair races away from the scene of the incident in a car, a very strong echo of the punch Robin took to the face in the American Bar unfolds, but is gender-reversed, with Strike the one trying to both staunch his bleeding and soothe his rapidly swelling eyes, while Robin apologizes and does as much as she can to comfort him.
