Page 203 of Troubled Blood

“Nice idea,” said Polworth.

“Listen, mate—thanks for everything.”

“Shut up,” said Polworth. “You’d do it for me.”

“You’re right,” said Strike. “I would.”

“Easy to say, you cunt,” said Polworth, without skipping a beat, “seeing as my mum’s dead and I don’t know where the fuck my dad is.”

Strike laughed.

“Well, I’m a private detective. Want me to find him for you?”

“Fuck, no,” said Polworth. “Good riddance.”

They drank their pints. There was a brief break in the cloud and the sea was suddenly a carpet of diamonds and the bobbing seagull, a paper-white piece of origami. Strike was wondering idly whether Polworth’s passionate devotion to Cornwall was a reaction against his absent Birmingham-born father when Polworth spoke up again:

“Speaking of fathers… Joan told me yours was looking for a reunion.”

“She did, did she?”

“Don’t be narked,” said Polworth. “You know what she was like. Wanted me to know you were going through a tough time. Nothing doing, I take it?”

“No,” said Strike. “Nothing doing.”

The brief silence was broken by the shrieks and yells of Polworth’s two daughters sprinting out of the hotel. Ignoring their father and Strike, they wriggled under the chain separating road from damp shingle and ran out to the water’s edge, pursued a moment later by Strike’s nephew Luke, who was holding a couple of cream buns in his hand and clearly intent on throwing them at the girls.

“OI,” bellowed Strike. “NO!”

Luke’s face fell.

“They started it,” he said, turning to show Strike a white smear down the back of his black suit jacket, newly purchased for his great-aunt’s funeral.

“And I’m finishing it,” said Strike, while the Polworth girls giggled, peeking out over the rim of the rowing boat behind which they had taken refuge. “Put those back where you got them.”

Glaring at his uncle, Luke took a defiant bite out of one of the buns, then turned and headed back into the hotel.

“Little shit,” muttered Strike.

Polworth watched in a detached way as his girls began to kick cold seawater and sand at each other. Only when the younger girl overbalanced and fell backward into a foot of icy sea, eliciting a scream of shock, did he react.

“Fuck’s sake… get inside. Come on—don’t bloody whine, it’s your own fault—come on, inside, now!”

The three Polworths headed back into the Ship and Castle, leaving Strike alone again.

The bobbing seagull, which was doubtless used to a tide of tourists, to the chugging and grinding of the Falmouth ferry and the fishing boats passing in and out of the bay every day, had been unfazed by the shrieks and yells of the Polworth girls. Its sharp eyes were fixed upon something Strike couldn’t see, far out at sea. Only when the clouds closed again and the sea darkened to iron, did the bird take off at last. Strike’s eyes followed it as it soared on wide, curved wings into the distance, away from the shelter of the bay for open sea, ready to resume the hard but necessary business of survival.

PART FIVE

… lusty Spring, all dight in leaues of flowres…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

49

After long storms and tempests overblown,

---