Page 19 of Troubled Blood

“You realize in a week’s time it’s going to be harder to sack her? Her probation period’s nearly up.”

“I don’t want to sack her,” said Robin. “I think she’s great.”

“Well, then, on your head be it if she causes trouble down the line.”

“It won’t be on my head,” said Robin. “You’re not pinning Pat on me. Hiring her was a joint decision. You were the one who was sick of temps—”

“And you were the one who said ‘it might not be a bad idea to get a more traditional manager in’ and ‘we shouldn’t discount her because of her age’—”

“—I know what I said, and I stand by the age thing. We do need someone who understands a spreadsheet, who’s organized, but you were the one who—”

“—I didn’t want you accusing me of ageism.”

“—you were the one who offered her the job,” Robin finished firmly.

“Dunno what I was bloody thinking,” muttered Strike, flicking ash out of the window.

Patricia Chauncey was fifty-six and looked sixty-five. A thin woman with a deeply lined, monkeyish face and implausibly jet-black hair, she vaped continually in the office, but was to be seen drawing deeply on a Superking the moment her feet touched the pavement at the end of the day’s work. Pat’s voice was so deep and rasping that she was often mistaken for Strike on the phone. She sat at what once had been Robin’s desk in the outer office and had taken over the bulk of the agency’s phone-answering and administrative duties now that Robin had moved to full-time detection.

Strike and Pat’s relationship had been combative from the start, which puzzled Robin, who liked them both. Robin was used to Strike’s intermittent bouts of moodiness, and prone to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially when she suspected he was in pain, but Pat had no compunction about snapping “Would a ‘thanks’ kill you?” if Strike showed insufficient gratitude when she passed him his phone messages. She evidently felt none of the reverence some of their temps had displayed toward the now famous detective, one of whom had been sacked on the spot when Strike realized she was surreptitiously filming him on her mobile from the outer office. Indeed, the office manager’s demeanor suggested that she lived in daily expectation of finding out things to Strike’s discredit, and she’d displayed a certain satisfaction on hearing that the dent in one of the filing cabinets was due to the fact that he’d once punched it.

On the other hand, the filing was up to date, the accounts were in order, all receipts were neatly docketed, the phone was answered promptly, messages were passed on accurately, they never ran out of teabags or milk, and Pat had never once arrived late, no matter the weather and irrespective of Tube delays.

It was true, too, that Pat liked Morris, who was the recipient of most of her rare smiles. Morris was always careful to pay Pat his full tribute of blue-eyed charm before turning his attention to Robin. Pat was already alert to the possibility of romance between her younger colleagues.

“He’s lovely-looking,” she’d told Robin just the previous week, after Morris had phoned in his location so that the temporarily unreachable Barclay could be told where to take over surveillance on their biggest case. “You’ve got to give him that.”

“I haven’t got to give him anything,” Robin had said, a little crossly.

It was bad enough having Ilsa badger her about Strike in her leisure time without Pat starting on Morris during her working hours.

“Quite right,” Pat had responded, unfazed. “Make him earn it.”

“Anyway,” said Strike, finishing his cigarette and crushing the stub out in the tin Robin kept for that purpose in the glove compartment, “you’ve wrapped up Tufty. Bloody good going.”

“Thanks,” Robin said. “But there’s going to be press. Bigamy’s always news.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Well, it’s going to be worse for him than us, but it’s worth trying to keep our name out of it if we can. I’ll have a word with Mrs.-Campion-in-Windsor. So that leaves us,” he counted the names on his thick fingers, “with Two-Times, Twinkletoes, Postcard and Shifty.”

It had become the agency’s habit to assign nicknames to their targets and clients, mainly to avoid letting real names slip in public or in emails. Two-Times was a previous client of the agency, who’d recently resurfaced after trying other private detectives and finding them unsatisfactory. Strike and Robin had previously investigated two of his girlfriends. At a superficial glance, he seemed most unlucky in love, a man whose partners, initially attracted by his fat bank balance, seemed incapable of fidelity. Over time, Strike and Robin had come to believe that he derived obscure emotional or sexual satisfaction from being cheated on, and that they were being paid to provide evidence that, far from upsetting him, gave him pleasure. Once confronted with photographic evidence of her perfidy, the girlfriend of the moment would be confronted, dismissed and another found, and the whole pattern repeated. This time round, he was dating a glamour model who thus far, to Two-Times’ poorly concealed disappointment, seemed to be faithful.

Twinkletoes, whose unimaginative nickname had been chosen by Morris, was a twenty-four-year-old dancer who was currently having an affair with a thirty-nine-year-old double-divorcée, notable mainly for her history of drug abuse and her enormous trust fund. The socialite’s father was employing the agency to discover anything they could about Twinkletoes’ background or behavior, which could be used to prize his daughter away from him.

Postcard was, so far, an entirely unknown quantity. A middle-aged and, in Robin’s opinion, fairly unattractive television weather forecaster had come to the agency after the police had said there was nothing they could do about the postcards that had begun to arrive at his place of work and, most worryingly, hand delivered to his house in the small hours. The cards made no threats; indeed, they were often no more than banal comments on the weatherman’s choice of tie, yet they gave evidence of knowing far more about the man’s movements and private life than a stranger should have. The use of postcards was also a peculiar choice, when persecution was so much easier, these days, online. The agency’s subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, had now spent two solid weeks’ worth of nights parked outside the weatherman’s house, but Postcard hadn’t yet shown themselves.

Last, and most lucrative, was the interesting case of Shifty, a young investment banker whose rapid rise through his company had generated a predictable amount of resentment among overlooked colleagues, which had exploded into full-blown suspicion when he’d been promoted to the second-in-command job ahead of three undeniably better qualified candidates. Exactly what leverage Shifty had on the CEO (known to the agency as Shifty’s Boss or SB) was now a matter of interest not only to Shifty’s subordinates, but to a couple of suspicious board members, who’d met Strike in a dark bar in the City to lay out their concerns. Strike’s current strategy was to try to find out more about Shifty through his personal assistant, and to this end Morris had been given the job of chatting her up after hours, revealing neither his real name nor his occupation, but trying to gauge how deep her loyalty to Shifty ran.

“D’you need to be back in London by any particular time?” Strike asked, after a brief silence.

“No,” said Robin, “why?”

“Would you mind,” said Strike, “if we stop for food? I didn’t have breakfast.”

Despite remembering that he had, in fact, had a plate full of croissant crumbs in front of him when she arrived at the Palacio Lounge, Robin agreed. Strike seemed to read her mind.

“You can’t count a croissant. Mostly air.”

Robin laughed.

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