Robin, who’d spent much of the weekend pretending to be excited about the house she and Murphy were going to view on Thursday evening, was glad to have an excuse to get up before her boyfriend on Monday.
I rag on Strike quite a bit for acting like a middle schooler in this book, but Robin plays her share of games as well.
He hadn’t called over the weekend – not that she’d ordinarily have expected him to – but you’d have thought he’d have rung her to ask why her email was so unfriendly, and why she was dropping out of the Scotland part of the trip, and to tell her there’d be plenty of other opportunities to speak to Tia Thompson and Valentine Longcaster, wouldn’t you? But no. So much for friendship…
Passive-aggression is not a good look.
Robin's errand is to stake out Tia's school and find out what this friend might know about Sapphire Neagle. Robin is always good talking to teenagers and manages to get some valuable information from her, namely that Sapphire, shortly before she disappeared, made the acquaintance of an older man who claimed to be in the music business and who, as with Sofia Medina, bestowed ruby necklaces on the young girls that caught his eye. There are certainly enough connections to Sofia's "Oz" to warrant interest.
“Thanks, Tia," said Robin. "This is a big help. Shouldn’t you hide that?" she added, looking at the vape still clutched in the girl’s hand.
"Oh. Yeah," said Tia, smiling for the first time. She plunged it into her backpack, then turned, sprinted back across the road and into the rapidly emptying yard.
Once again, Robin uncovers a valuable bit of information that will eventually lead to the solving of not s mere silver heist, but a sex trafficking ring. I doubt Strike would agree right now, but considering that Sapphire's life will literally be saved by this connection, it was probably best Robin did this rather than road-trip to Scotland.
Cormoran Strike had been called many things by the women in his life, but "stupid" had never been one of them.
The women may not call him stupid, but he certainly makes some of the most foolish decisions we've ever seen of him over the next 24 hours, starting with the decision to load up on beer and whiskey on the sleeper train. He senses Robin is upset at him for something, but decides not to call her.
The tone of this message made him wonder whether to try and force a conversation, to send a facile "is everything all right?" text, but long experience of women who were angry at him made him suspect the most he’d get in return was a passive-aggressive ‘fine’. The sordid Bijou business was weighing on his conscience, but Robin couldn’t know anything about that, could she?
He was almost certainly right about the first, given the state Robin is in, but wrong about the second. He decides the one thing he could do to improve matters is to pretend to take Robin's Reata Lindvall lead seriously, so he reads up on the case. Yet another example of him doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Adding to his disgruntlement is a text from KFC with an article on Nina Lascelles wedding, which tells him one of her bridesmaids was indeed a past agency surveillance target. Worse, the article is located just above another Culpepper article about Charlotte's mother Tara, in which she blames him for her suicide.
Once Strike takes off for the lounge car of the train, his bit of consideration for his partner's Reata Lindvall hunch is rewarded with a stroke of luck similar to the one Robin had on Saturday night, as a chance encounter on the train with Fergus Robertson, the helpful anti-Culpepper journalist, gives him a bit more useful information relevant to his case. Turns out, Fergus has gotten very interested in the Masonic connections of one Lord Oliver Branfoot, who has apparently recently switched his membership from a lodge populated by bluebloods to one filled with boys in blue, including Detective Truman.
As longtime readers know, I am still salivating to learn the circumstances of Strike's medal. Thus, I was especially intrigued by this tidbit:
“Yeah. I got talking to a journo mate who was covering the masons in ’99," said Robertson, dropping his voice still lower. "When the Home Affairs Committee produced their report into Freemasonry in public life, remember that?"
"No," said Strike, who’d spent a good deal of 1999 in Kosovo. "What did it say?”
When I was in Kosovo... I investigated a porn case-- well, human trafficking. Coupla soldiers had paid for sex with underage girls. They were filmed without their knowledge an' the videos ended up on PornHub. Case ended up as part of an international civilian operation. Whole load of pre-pubescent boys and girls had been trafficked into porn. The youngest was seven.
- It's another Troubled Blood connection.
- It's the second mention of Strike's military service in Kosovo, meaning readers should consider the possibility that something that happened there could come up later.
- In LW, Strike mentioned Charlotte's thirtieth; in TB, Ilsa mentioned the Incident of the Black Lace Dress. Both were explained in THM.
- It foreshadows several elements of the resolution of The Hallmarked Man case, particularly the filming of sex acts without the parties' knowledge and the international sex trafficking ring.
- Most speculative: the Kosovo connection could be a pointer to Book 9.
- A couple of twitter headers, specifically the treehouse and the creepy dolls, have suggested a case involving children.
- Another twitter header shows Portsmouth, which, since 2005, has been the home and training site for the Redcaps.
- A really brilliant Reddit post (which I can't find!) suggested that the mysterious ignored phone call was Ralph Lawrence, who was unusually forthcoming with details at Niall Semple's wake, calling to recruit Strike for some sort of mission, for which his past military experience makes him particularly qualified, which would take him away from the agency for a time, allowing Robin to get her head together. I really love this idea. What if the British military needs his help on something or someone relating to the old Kosovo case?
- Lawrence would probably be much more aware of what happened there if that was the occasion of Strike earning his medal.
However, Strike, for now, is not focused on the past or future, but the present.
He had a bloody good reason, now, for digging deeper into Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Truman, who so coincidentally happened to share a masonic lodge with Lord Oliver Branfoot, and anyone who didn’t like Strike going after a member of the Met – Ryan Fucking Murphy, to take just one example – could stick their objections right up their arse.
The next morning, in Chapter 59, Strike awakes in his sleeper berth in a quite uncomfortable state for several reasons.
Ever since limping off the train at Glasgow Central at six that morning, the end of his stump sweaty and sore because he’d fallen asleep fully clothed with his prosthesis still on, Strike had felt atrocious: poorly rested, queasy and with a headache throbbing behind his temples.
We know from past books that sleeping with the prosthesis on is not good for Strike's knee and tends to start a cycle into pretty severe injury. The last time this happened was when sleeping over at Madeline's in TIBH; his leg got as bad as we;ve every seen it and he had to stay off it for weeks. On Sark, he will mention that it is almost as bad. He certainly does a lot of damage to it on this trip.
Fully aware that with nearly a bottle of Johnnie Walker inside him he was still over the alcohol limit, he picked up his hired automatic Audi A1 and set off north through yet more pelting rain, stopping on the way at a fast food van at the side of the road to buy and eat a fried bacon and egg roll, because he’d been in no condition to eat the plastic-smelling breakfast he’d been offered on the train.
He deserves every bit of discomfort he feels today. I have written before how I think Strike had his emotional nigredo in Troubled Blood and his physical nigredo in The Ink Black Heart. This book, for me, is his moral nigredo, where he lets his desire for Robin cloud his professional judgement, and his depression over not getting what he wants with her prompts a lot of other ethical shortcomings. This is not the "Superior Man" of The Running Grave.
 |
| "Looked as though someone had shoved a fox into a tumble dryer" |
Between the pain and the mud, he gets some information about Niall, including a the fact that he disappeared when Jade was away celebrating her 30th birthday. that he was from a family of Freemasons and became rather obsessive about the organization after his brain injury, that he took a long run but "got stuck" because of apparent fear to cross a masonic bridge and that he was overheard talking to a woman and arranging to meet her at "The Engineer"-- a pub in Camden. Jade now believes her husband has left her for this woman and no longer believes he was the body in the vault.
There is also a long and rather odd aside into Dave Polworth's marriage, including a lengthy quotation of his rationale for marrying Penny, as originally told to Strike in the Victory, in TB. No mention of the Tolstoy connection. Unless it is merely to show that Strike's emotional connection to Robin is very different (a point that has already been made many times over), it is not clear why this lengthy aside is present.
Overall, Robin was right. There was no need for two of them to make an overnight trip for this particular interview. Indeed, there was nothing here that couldn't have been covered in a phone call or Facetime, which would have been cheaper for Decima and better for Strike's leg.
“OK, well… good luck findin’ out ’oo that body was," she said, then turned, walked back to her husband’s house, and the new man who was waiting for her there.
Coming up next: the disastrous reunion in Ironbridge.
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*Interestingly, this name is only one letter different from Mia Thompson, the mysterious Aussie salesgirl and would-be makeup artist from Vashi's, who was added to Cuckoo's Calling post-publication to give Lula Landry's will a legally-required second witness (but the will was still invalid so what was the point...?)
** This is the third time we have encountered Pomeranians in the series. The first pair belonged to neighbor's of Mrs. Tufty in TB, and "yapped frenziedly behind glass of the house opposite" when she took a golf club to her bigamist husband's car. The next belonged to the next door neighbors of Grant and Heather Ledwell, and were equally yappy as out heroes good-copped/bad-copped information about Edie's coffin letter out of the couple.
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