Chapter 53 finds Strike anticipating a day off, but preoccupied with Bijou and the possibility he could be a father.
Strike, who had Saturday afternoon off, was currently standing in the inner office, once again contemplating the noticeboard where material relevant to the silver vault case was pinned, which he’d just rearranged.
He is looking over the pictures of "William Wright's" body, and puzzling over the footprint, which is unusual for three reasons: 1) it's unusually small 2) it appears to have had time to dry before the body was placed on top of it and 3) as Strike notes this time, the wear on the shoe sole suggests that its owner has a slight limp. We also learn that Strike has taken down Robin's clipping of the Reata Lindvall article, one of several decisions he makes that increases Robin's anger at him. He starts to review Murdoch's book on Freemasonry, but is interrupted by Barclay's urgent call saying he needs someone to relieve him on Plug, thanks to an unfortunate encounter with an unlabeled prawn that triggers his allergy.
The call terminated as Barclay began to vomit again.
Chapter 55 is quite short:
Strike had arrived outside Plug’s mother’s house in Vestry Road to take over from the stricken Barclay. The sun had set and the puddle of pinkish vomit in the gutter he’d noticed when he arrived had faded into darkness.
Strike watches Plug leave his mother's house and walk to a nearby train station, where he meets up with an equally unsavory-looking character. He is able to hear some conversation about someone or something that is worth more that a grand because "she's got a lot more in 'er." Strike follows them onto the train, where he catches more about "trouble in Ipswich" and "Gaz's bitch might do it" as:
The train rattled on towards London Bridge.
So, onto the Robin chapters. She starts off Chapter 52 in a bad place, emotionally, and it's only going to get worse.
Robin’s Friday really only ended in the early hours of Saturday morning, when the lights in Plug’s mother’s house in Camberwell went out, and she knew her target, who’d done a lot of shouting that afternoon, had finally gone to bed.
She goes home to get a little rest before taking over surveillance of Jim Todd from Dev at midday on Saturday. But, she is preoccupied with a lot of worries: her ethical conflict over how Strike is insisting on handling the Decima Mullins case, pressure from RFM to view more houses and the fact that every woman of child-bearing age that she knows seems to be bearing children. She is still processing her own ectopic pregnancy and is increasingly thinking of the incident as a loss of potential life, rather than just a painful medical incident. Interestingly, she repeats a Don't think about it mantra to herself. This reminds of her repeated Think about something else as she was anticipating the search for Margot's body in Troubled Blood.
When she meets up with Dev, another, and more concerning worry is added to her list.
“Why’s Bijou Watkins calling Strike?"
"When did Bijou Watkins call him?" asked Robin, surprised.
"Yesterday. I was filing expenses at the office yesterday afternoon and I heard Pat passing on the message.”
"Underage is underage."
Strike had never seen Shah look that uncompromising before.
"I agree. But I'm not sure you can judge what goes on in there by normal standards."
"Fuck normal standards. Keep your dick in your pants around kids."
There was a short, charged silence, following which Dev announced he needed ot get some sleep, having been up all night in the car, and departed.
On the Three Broomsticks episode I did on Strike and Potter characters, Dev was mentioned as a possible analog to Neville Longbottom. In Goblet of Fire, Neville reacted strongly to both the demonstration of the Cruciatus curse in "Moody's" Defense Against the Dark Arts class and to Malfoy's snide remark about the long-term ward of St. Mungo's. We later learn there was a reason for both reactions: Neville's parents were tortured by Death Eaters and left so brain-damaged that they are confined to that ward. I am wondering if we will eventually learn something about Shah's own history that explains his strong reactions to sex crimes.
As for Robin, though she tries to assure Dev that the call was probably innocent, she is left "confused and worried" about Shah's report and is preoccupied with that as she sets off to tail Jim Todd onto the Tube.
Todd took the first available train east and sat down, short, fat legs splayed, apparently playing a game on his phone, while Robin stood and swayed, holding on to a ceiling hand strap, ready to move when Todd did, her thoughts a long way away from the egg-shaped man whose reflection she was watching in the dark window.
Chapter 54 finds her still watching Todd, while pondering the Strike and Bijou situation.
Robin was still tailing Jim Todd, who’d got off the first train at Liverpool Street and changed on to the Circle Line, which, for reasons so far undiscovered, appeared to be by far his favourite.
The reason won't remain undiscovered for long, as Robin sees Jim Todd upskirting a teenage girl; unfortunately for Todd, another, bigger passenger also notices and chases Todd off the train, and Robin loses him.
“Excuse me – excuse me!" Robin said loudly, trying to pass. Finally managing to fight her way out of the door, she looked frantically up and down the platform, but Todd was nowhere to be seen.
In Chapter 56, she searches the station for him, to no avail,
Robin had chased along passages and searched crowded escalators, but found no sign of Jim Todd.
This search must have taken considerable time, since Robin met Shah at "midday," then tailed Todd on the circle train for "nearly an hour" before the upskirting incident. By the time she leaves the station, night has fallen. Expecting Strike to be off that evening, she decides to call him to ask about Bijou, framing it as a concern of Dev's; but, with Strike on the train tailing Plug, her call goes to voice mail. She decides to check out Denmark Street, in hopes of speaking to Strike in person. As is usual, she is more concerned about Strike's potential relationship than her own.
Murphy had wanted to see her tonight, but she’d had to work, so they’d agreed to spend Sunday together. The thought of the following day spent with her boyfriend ought to be cheering her, should mitigate this awful mixture of fear and anger, but it didn’t.
Strike, naturally, is not in the office or in his flat. As Robin is prone to doing when she is angry with her partner, she starts inflating the situation in her head. We've seen this before, in The Silkworm, when she visualized a hypothetical new female detective who would displace her, and in Career of Evil, when Strike's "There is no 'we' right now" became "There is no 'we' anymore." In Robin's mind, Strike is off meeting Bijou.
He’s out with her.
You don’t know that.
Then why isn’t he picking up his phone?
Robin goes into the office, calls Ilsa at around 9 PM and uses the great bluffing skills she's developed at the agency to get Ms. Herbert to spill the entire can of beans. Once Robin has the full story:
a dam broke inside her, and the unshed tears of months poured forth at last, as the confused tangle of feelings inside her, some acknowledged, but most long repressed, burst free of all constraint.
She cries first over her ectopic pregnancy:
her child had been created through carelessness and ignorance, then there’d been agony for her, and death for the tiny person who’d lodged in her fallopian tube, forever barred from meeting its mother, and Robin hadn’t wanted that baby, but she mourned it now, full of shame that it had both lived and died…
Then, he mind drifts to the two men of her life and her conflicted feelings for both. Strike's sexual sins immediately get multiplied in her mind, and she becomes fixated again on the idea that he is manipulating her.
And Strike, for whom she had feelings she ought not to have, feelings she’d tried to extinguish but which lately had been gaining power over her again – he’d given her that bracelet, and he harped on Charlotte’s suicide note, and he offered her loans for a Land Rover, simply to keep her bound to him and the agency; it was all cynical, he wasn’t honest with her, he didn’t warn her that fresh scandals were going to explode like landmines under her feet. He didn’t want what Murphy was offering her; no, all he wanted was to keep sneaking around and hiding massive secrets about other women, and maybe she’d find out in another year’s time that he’d slept with Kim Cochran, and there’d be more sordid fallout and another shattering discovery for Robin, who needed to stop, now, for ever, feeling anything other than friendship for him – though right now she barely felt that…
And, just when she is calming down from this outburst, she gets exactly what she doesn't need, another threatening phone message:
You were told to leave it. Fucking leave it, or you’ll get what’s comin’ to ya, ya fuckin’ bitch!
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| Windermere, England's largest lake. |
Forty minutes later, she had two sound reasons, which had come so easily she felt as though some kindly fate had reached out through the screen to pat her on the head. Here. You deserve a break.
Note the reference to a "Fate"--- another play on Decima Mullins' name, similar to that seen in the playing of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" back in Chapter 16.
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| JKR/RG's Twitter Header from God's Own Junkyard |
Robin paused yet again, staring at the screen with stinging eyes, then typed on.
I won’t be able to hang around long in Ironbridge, because Ryan and I are looking at houses together and have got a couple lined up to view next week.See you Tuesday.
Even though she's just said shed meet him Wednesday. Either this is an authorial gaffe or Robin's too distraught to keep her dates straight. Or is this a Freudian slip, indicating her true desire to be with Strike on Tuesday, and on Tuesday night?
Thus closes Part 4, on a heartbreaking note. We'll pick up with Part Five on Tuesday.
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