Robin withdrew again. To her displeasure, Kim was taking her time about leaving the office, standing beside the door and fiddling with the contents of her shoulder bag.
KFC is being both passive-aggressive and smug about the news she had to tell Strike that she "probably shouldn't say" to Robin. I'm sure Robin was pleased when she left.
Strike, in the meantime, is probably as panicked as we've ever seen him, with the possible exceptions of the times he's thought Robin in danger. He calls Ilsa, redialing when she doesn't pick up at once.
What is a bit surprising to me is that Ilsa didn't call Strike immediately when she heard about the super-injunction and the rumors that Bijou's baby could be his. It makes us wonder how long it would have been before he found out if KFC hadn't told him? I guess Bijou herself would have called him that afternoon, regardless.
"He's slept with bloody Bijou Watkins! Well, I say 'slept'- apparently it was standing up, against her bedroom wall.
Robin realized she was gaping and closed her mouth.
"He - hasn't mentioned it to me."
"No, I'll bet he bloody hasn't.... I thought he'd have the sense, after meeting her and seeing what she's like, of not going within and hundred miles of her. You need to warn him: she's insane. She can't keep her bloody mouth shut, half of Chambers will have heard all the details by now--"
"Ilsa, I can't tell him who to sleep with. Or shag standing up against a bedroom wall," Robin added.
"But she's a total nutcase! All she wants is a rich husband and a baby, she's completely open about it."
"Strike's not rich," said Robin.
"She might not realise that, after all those high-profile cases he keeps solving. You've got to warn him--"
"Ilsa, I can't. You warn him, if you want to. His sex life's hardly my business."
"Look, I hope you don't think I'm interfering..."
"Tell me what you've got to say, then I'll tell you if you're interfering," said Strike, without bothering to sound too friendly.
"Well, you're about to get a call from Bijou."
"Which you know because--?"
"Because she just told me. Actually, she told me, and three other people I was having a conversation with."
Of course, half the reason for Strike's anger is the fact that Robin had the audacity to take and enjoy a phone call from her boyfriend in the office.
In the inner office, Robin was laughing at something else Ryan had said. The man simply couldn't be that fucking funny.
"Go on," Strike said to Ilsa, striding towards the inner door and closing it rather more firmly than was necessary. "Say your piece."
"Corm, she's crazy. She's already told--"
"You've called to give me unsolicited advice on my love life, is that it?"
Robin, who'd just finished her call with Ryan, got to her feet and opened the door in time to hear Strike say,
"--no, I don't. So yeah, don't interfere."
Strike knows both women well enough to guess they had already spoken about this.
"Did you know Ilsa was planning to tell me how to conduct my private life?"
"What?" said Robin, startled by both question and tone. "No!" ...She might have told Ilsa to talk to Strike, but she hadn't known she was going to do it.
"I'd like to see Nick's face if Bijou gets herself knocked up on purpose. I don't s'pose you know--"
"Ilsa, if you're about to ask me if I quiz Strike on his contraceptive habits--"
"You realize she told me-- with five other people within earshot, incidentally-- that she took a used condom out of the bin, while she was having and affair with that married QC, and inserted it inside herself?"
"Jesus," said Robin, startled and very much wishing she hadn't been given this information, "well, I--I suppose that's Strike's lookout, isn't it?"
"I was trying to be a good friend. However much of a dickhead he is, I don't want him paying child support to bloody Bijou Watkins for the next eighteen years."
In Chapter 22, Robin is preparing to leave for Chapman Farm when she notices an emoji-filled text arrive on Strike's phone.
For a moment or two, she considered passing on Ilsa's warning about Bijou's bedroom behavior, but given Strike's reaction the last time someone tried to interfere with his new relationship, she decided against it. After all, this was the last time she was going to see her business partner for a while, and she preferred not to part on bad terms.
I wonder if Strike will ever find out that both Ilsa and Robin knew that Bijou might attempt a pregnancy trap and were so put off by his attitude that they decided not to warn him. It will also be interesting to see if, by the start of Book Nine, Robin will make the same mistake as Strike does here (and on a larger scale); be so resentful of Strike's unsolicited advice that she accepts RFM's proposal, against her better judgement. Like him and as with her marriage to the Flobberworm, she will regret it almost immediately.
Naturally, Strike is a lot more receptive to what Ilsa has to say this time and is thrown for a loop when she tells him not only about Bijou's semen-swiping habit (of which, interestingly, some suspected Madeline back in The Ink Black Heart!) but the fact that 1) the baby has been born already and 2) that Humbold was on a medication that would lower his sperm count. He asks Ilsa not to tell Robin, saying that he plans to, himself. I guess this wasn't one of those vows that he trusted himself to keep.
Understandably, he can't really get the potential baby off of his mind, even as he and Robin prepare for their lunch with Decima. They discuss a few things seen in the photographs, like the unusually small footprint in blood, and Robin again starts to bring up the time issue.
“You know, if Medina was driving that Peugeot to pick Oz up after the killing, she might not have seen blood on him," said Robin. "Whoever did it waited for livor mortis to start setting in before they got started cutting the body up…”
Unfortunately, this attempt is interrupted by the news of Jenny's emergency c-section and pictures of Robins new nephew. We should know by now to pay attention to any thoughts that are interrupted, especially those that happen twice in consecutive chapters.
“They’re calling him 'Barnaby'," said Robin, looking at the picture of her new nephew, who was bright red, swaddled in a hospital towel, with a sumo wrestler’s indignant face. "Born on Friday the thirteenth.’
"Who was?" said Strike.
"My nephew. Today’s Friday—"
"Oh," said Strike. "Yeah, of course."
He wasn’t a superstitious man, but he thought that might well change, after today.
Chapter 49 picks up with Strike making one of his major mistakes of the book:
Strike’s conscience was whispering that he ought to tell Robin exactly what fresh, unforeseen calamity had descended upon him, that he had to warn her that another deluge of tabloid smut might be about to engulf them. However, after the story about the call girl, and his forced admission that he’d slept with Nina Lascelles, not to mention Robin’s rape being made public on the back of his newsworthy love life, Strike didn’t much fancy adding to the already unsavoury heap of circumstances in his disfavour that there was a remote chance – please, God, a fucking remote chance – he’d fathered a child with a woman he detested. A primitive sense of self-interest therefore shouted conscience down: he’d fix things without Robin ever having to know.
The problem with this plan is that Robin's a damn good detective. It's going to take him until Valentine's Day and a major dog bite to recover from this ethical lapse. Despite this, I think Robin--and the readers-- may be a bit hard on Strike, at least at this point. The fact that he might have fathered a child with Bijou is, after all, part of his private life, and could even be considered medical health information, just like Robin's ectopic pregnancy was. True, Robin's condition did not risk bringing damaging tabloid attention down on the agency, but it absolutely affected her work: she lost Plug and couldn't drive to meet Decima. Unlike with the Candy case, where Strike's about to make everything worse by threatening Culpepper, this time he has a reasonable plan in place to head off the problem: warn Bijou to live like an agoraphobic nun and force Humbold to take a paternity test. The issue is, with Ilsa (and, apparently, all of her co-workers!) knowing, a super-injunction that could be broken at any time, plus the likely possibility that Bijou could try to contact him via Pat, there's just too much of a chance the story will get out. It is an indicator of Strike's panic that he doesn't see this.
On the way to the Quo Vadis** club, Strike makes his first offer to help finance a new Land Rover. Though touched, Robin doesn't think she can accept. And note that this offer, however much she wants it and however generous and thoughtful, does not provoke the same warm feelings that the silver charm bracelet did.
 |
| "Dark blue walls, bookshelves and orb-shaped lamps." |
Perhaps the most bizarre reaction is Decima's apparently being far more upset by the thought of Rupert tearing up his lucky White Lion T-shirt than she was about him being murdered and mutilated in a silver vault. But, the fact that he destroyed something with connections to both Peter Fleetwood and to Decima's pregnancy is another pointer to the incest hypothesis.
For a look at White Lion, the "Little Fighter" song and the possible significance of the lyrics, see here.
Strike's major goal of the meeting is not to update the client, but to get her to confirm, in front of Robin, that she wants them to check out the other Wright possibilities:
“You’re probably aware the police considered other contenders for Wright, aside from Jason Knowles?
Robin couldn’t understand the abrupt change of subject, but Strike was acting entirely out of self-interest. He had a nasty feeling that immediately after this interview, Robin was going to tell him they had a moral duty to convince Decima that her boyfriend had never been William Wright, but he wasn’t going to sacrifice the imminent trip to Crieff and Ironbridge; he needed that Lake District hotel. It was essential, therefore, that Robin heard from Decima’s own lips that she wanted them to rule out all other possible contenders for the dead man in the vault...
“You said you wanted proof of who the man in the vault was," said Strike. "That necessarily means looking at the other possibilities, but if you’d rather we focused solely on Rupert, and what happened to him—"
"He’s dead, I know he’s dead!" said Decima, now with a trace of hysteria. "I do want certainty – but I know who it was in the vault…"
"So you’d like us to try and rule out those two men?" said Strike.
"I suppose, if you can, it might make the police wake up and take Rupe more seriously," said Decima, wiping her eyes on the napkin.
And, just like in Chapter 2 (Strike's first meeting with Decima), Chapter 49 ends with Decima wailing.
“The last time I ever spoke to him… I was so angry at him for stealing the nef, it was such a stupid thing to do… it’s my fault, it’s all my fault, I was angry and Rupe felt he had no other choice but to try and sort out the whole mess alone… I killed him," wailed Decima Mullins, "and one day I’ll have to explain to Lion what I did!”
Chapter 50, I must confess, is one of my least favorite in the book, because it exemplifies so much of what goes wrong with Strike and Robin in this volume. In particular, it shows us Strike compromising both his professional ethics and his usual logic. I would argue that his ethical lapses here are, at heart, greater failures than his choice to keep his potential fatherhood quiet, and contribute as much or even more to Robin's later distrust of him than the Bijou issue (pardon the pun).
An hour after they’d sat down with Decima, and with no more information gained than they’d learned within the first quarter of an hour of lunch, Strike and Robin left Quo Vadis, both aware that their client was considerably unhappier for having met them.
Problem 1 is the illogic. Neither Strike nor Robin genuinely thinks the body is Rupert's. If that is true, there are two ways of proving that definitively to their client 1) locate Rupert alive, (or even dead, someplace else!) or 2) positively identify the body as someone else. Somehow, Strike has to make the case that it is OK for them to do #2 but not #1, even though neither is exactly what the client wants them to do: to prove the body is Rupert's. If that were genuinely their only job, the only thing they would be doing is trying to get a DNA sample from the body, so they could run it against little Lion's. Jim Todd can't be that good a cleaner; they could probably scrape some residual blood out of a floor crack. Or, they could just have the Kimphomaniac intoxicate or sleep with every man in the Met until she finds a cop willing to sneak into the morgue and yank out a few hairs. I'm sure she'd be willing, and problem solved.
"I'm afraid," said Strike. "I can't take the case on those terms, Izzy."
"Why not?"
"The client doesn't get to tell me what I can and can't investigate. Unless you want the whole truth, I'm not your man."
Strike's determination to spend the night with Robin in a Lake District hotel means he now has to argue the exact opposite:
“What we can’t justify is trying to find the living Fleetwood, because the client’s expressly said she doesn’t want us to!"
"But she’s going to have to face the possibility at some point!"
"It isn’t our job to tell the client what she wants investigating," said Strike. "We aren’t fucking social workers.”
Decima is the perfect example of a client who doesn't want the whole truth, but this time, Strike is fine with indulging her. Robin, having worked with Strike for seven years, can undoubtedly sense this change his approach. And, contrary to the narration of the previous chapter, it appears that Robin did "understand the abrupt change of subject" at Bar Italia.
“What’s best for her is that she stops blaming herself for getting Fleetwood murdered," said Strike, "because he wasn’t fucking murdered, and someone needs to prove it to her."
"But we could prove it, by following Albie Sim—"
‘If Mrs Two-Times hurries up and fucks someone else, or if Plug breaks the law, then yeah, we might have someone free to follow Simpson-White, but how exactly are we supposed to bill Decima for it, when she’s explicitly said that’s not what she wants?"
"So we let her pour money into investigating the whereabouts of men with no connection to her?"
"She agreed to it, back there—"
"You know perfectly well you made her say it!”
When the Candy story broke, (Chapter 32) Robin was confident enough that it was a complete fabrication that she defended Strike to everyone who brought it up, including her own mother. Any minor doubts she might have had, she kept to herself and focused on helping the agency recover from the damage by insisting he call Fergus Robertson. Two chapters from now, Dev's mention that Bijou Watkins had called the office will arouse her suspicions sufficiently that, when Strike is unexpectedly not at home and doesn't pick up his phone (for perfectly innocent reasons, as it happens) she decides to call Ilsa and bluff the story out of her. The knowledge that he is concealing the truth about Bijou will reduce her to tears and prompt her to cancel the entire Scottish trip.
So, what changed? I think, on some level, it was this conversation, when Robin sensed how much Strike was compromising his usual ethics that made the difference. She may mistake his motives; rather than conclude he's in love with her, she guesses he is is curious about the unidentified corpse, she is likely still speculating that he wants to disrupt her relationship to keep her at the agency, she even projects a little of RFM's fear that he wants to show up the Met. But, she can tell he is not behaving as the "superior man" we saw in The Running Grave. I think this conversation is what begins to seriously erode Robin's trust in Cormoran Strike, to the extent that, within a few days, and in combination with the Bijou lie-by-omission, a scumbag like Vile-lentine Longcaster can make her seriously entertain the possibility that Strike was a domestic abuser.
On top of that, Strike makes another tactical error:
And now Strike took the offensive; he hadn’t wanted to do it, because he’d hoped not to embark on their journey to Scotland with Robin angry at him, but with the trip itself in jeopardy he had no choice.
No, Strike, you have a choice; skip Scotland, don't deliberately make the woman you are trying to woo angry at you and figure out a way to tell her the truth here in London. You know her work schedule; show up when she's coming off a boring surveillance job and suggest you go to the pub together. Nothing work related, you just need to do that talking thing.
After a somewhat disgruntled Robin leaves, Pat calls again, with the information that Bijou has indeed called the office. Unbeknownst to us, Dev Shah is in the office at the time and overhears Pat relay the message, which will have consequences later.
Strike contemplated Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, which lay almost opposite the café where he was sitting, thinking about what he was about to say. Then he took a lungful of nicotine vapour and called Bijou’s number.
“Hello?"
"It’s me. Strike."
"Oh, thank God,’ said Bijou. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to have to drag you into this, but—”
Strike tells her exactly what he thinks of her, refuses to do a paternity test and in this three-page chapter--barely four minutes on the audiobook--he drops the f-bomb fourteen times. I think that's a record, even for Strike.
“Tell him you’ll see him in court, and leave me the fuck out of it."
Seething, Strike cut the call.
We'll finish up Part Four in the next installment. Part Five will be an equally bumpy ride.
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*The last time the word "truculent" was used in the series was in reference to Samhain Athorn, which tells us something about how mature Strike is being here.
**Latin for Where are you going?
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