11

… let us stifle all memories in our sense of freedom, in joy, in passion.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Lorelei Bevan lived in an eclectically furnished flat over her thriving vintage clothes store in Camden. Strike arrived that night at half past seven, a bottle of Pinot Noir in one hand and his mobile clamped to his ear with the other. Lorelei opened the door, smiled good-naturedly at the familiar sight of him on the phone, kissed him on the mouth, relieved him of his wine and returned to the kitchen, from which a welcome smell of Pad Thai was issuing.

“… or try and get into CORE itself,” Strike told Barclay, closing the door behind him and proceeding to Lorelei’s sitting room, which was dominated by a large print of Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylors. “I’ll send you everything I’ve got on Jimmy. He’s involved with a couple of different groups. No idea whether he’s working. His local’s the White Horse in East Ham. Think he’s a Hammers fan.”

“Could be worse,” said Barclay, who was speaking quietly, as he had just got the teething baby to sleep. “Could be Chelsea.”

“You’ll have to admit to being ex-army,” said Strike, sinking into an armchair and hoisting his leg up onto a conveniently positioned square pouf. “You look like a squaddie.”

“Nae problem,” said Barclay. “I’ll be the poor wee laddie who didnae know whut he was gettin’ himself intae. Hard lefties love that shit. Let ’em patronize me.”

Grinning, Strike took out his cigarettes. For all his initial doubts, he was starting to think that Barclay might have been a good hire.

“All right, hang fire till you hear from me again. Should be sometime Sunday.”

As Strike rang off, Lorelei appeared with a glass of red for him.

“Want some help in the kitchen?” Strike asked, though without moving.

“No, stay there. I won’t be long,” she replied, smiling. He liked her fifties-style apron.

As she returned to the kitchen, he lit up. Although Lorelei did not smoke, she had no objection to Strike’s Benson & Hedges as long as he used the kitsch ashtray, decorated with cavorting poodles, that she had provided for the purpose.

Smoking, he admitted to himself that he envied Barclay infiltrating Knight and his band of hard-left colleagues. It was the kind of job Strike had relished in the Military Police. He remembered the four soldiers in Germany who had become enamored of a local far-right group. Strike had managed to persuade them that he shared their belief in a white ethno-nationalist super-state, infiltrated a meeting and secured four arrests and prosecutions that had given him particular satisfaction.

Turning on the TV, he watched Channel 4 News for a while, drinking his wine, smoking in pleasurable anticipation of Pad Thai and other sensual delights, and for once enjoying what so many of his fellow workers took for granted, but which he had rarely experienced: the relief and release of a Friday night.

Strike and Lorelei had met at Eric Wardle’s birthday party. It had been an awkward evening in some ways, because Strike had seen Coco there for the first time since telling her by phone that he had no interest in another date. Coco had got very drunk; at one in the morning, while he was sitting on a sofa deep in conversation with Lorelei, she had marched across the room, thrown a glass of wine over both of them and stormed off into the night. Strike had not been aware that Coco and Lorelei were old friends until the morning after he woke up in Lorelei’s bed. He considered that this was really more Lorelei’s problem than his. She seemed to think the exchange, for Coco wanted nothing more to do with her, more than fair.

“How d’you do it?” Wardle had asked, the next time they met, genuinely puzzled. “Blimey, I’d like to know your—”

Strike raised his heavy eyebrows and Wardle appeared to gag on what had come perilously close to a compliment.

“There’s no secret,” said Strike. “Some women just like fat one-legged pube-headed men with broken noses.”

“Well, it’s a sad indictment of our mental health services that they’re loose on the streets,” Wardle had said, and Strike had laughed.

Lorelei was her real name, taken not from the mythical siren of the Rhine, but from Marilyn Monroe’s character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her mother’s favorite film. Men’s eyes swiveled when she passed them in the street, but she evoked neither the profound longing nor the searing pain that Charlotte had caused Strike. Whether this was because Charlotte had stunted his capacity to feel so intensely, or because Lorelei lacked some essential magic, he did not know. Neither Strike nor Lorelei had said “I love you.” In Strike’s case this was because, desirable and amusing though he found her, he could not have said it honestly. It was convenient to him to assume that Lorelei felt the same way.

She had recently ended a five-year-long live-in relationship when, after several lingering looks across Wardle’s dark sitting room, he had strolled across to talk to her. He had wanted to believe her when she had told him how glorious it was to have her flat to herself and her freedom restored, yet lately he had felt tiny spots of displeasure when he had told her he had to work weekends, like the first heavy drops of rain that presage a storm. She denied it when challenged: no, no, of course not, if you’ve got to work…

But Strike had set out his uncompromising terms at the outset of the relationship: his work was unpredictable and his finances poor. Hers was the only bed he intended to visit, but if she sought predictability or permanence, he was not the man for her. She had appeared content with the deal, and if, over the course of ten months, she had grown less so, Strike was ready to call things off with no hard feelings. Perhaps she sensed this, because she had forced no argument. This pleased him, and not merely because he could do without the aggravation. He liked Lorelei, enjoyed sleeping with her and found it desirable—for a reason he did not bother to dwell on, being perfectly aware what it was—to be in a relationship just now.

The Pad Thai was excellent, their conversation light and amusing. Strike told Lorelei nothing about his new case, except that he hoped it would be both lucrative and interesting. After doing the dishes together, they repaired to the bedroom, with its candy-pink walls and its curtains printed with cartoonish cowgirls and ponies.

Lorelei liked to dress up. To bed that night, she wore stockings and a black corset. She had the talent, by no means usual, of staging an erotic scene without tipping into parody. Perhaps, with his one leg and his broken nose, Strike ought to have felt ludicrous in this boudoir, which was all frivolity and prettiness, but she played Aphrodite to his Hephaestus so adeptly that thoughts of Robin and Matthew were sometimes driven entirely from his mind.

There was, after all, little pleasure to compare with that given by a woman who really wanted you, he thought next day at lunchtime, as they sat side by side at a pavement café, reading separate papers, Strike smoking, Lorelei’s perfectly painted nails trailing absently along the back of his hand. So why had he already told her that he needed to work this afternoon? It was true that he needed to drop off the listening devices at Chiswell’s Belgravia flat, but he could easily have spent another night with her, returned to the bedroom, the stockings and the basque. The prospect was certainly tempting.