Page 262 of Troubled Blood

“What’s funny?”

“I give a whole soul-searching speech on the subject and you’re just: no.”

“I shouldn’t be here, should I?” said Strike, out of the darkness. “I’m an accident. I’m not inclined to perpetuate the mistake.”

There was a pause, then Robin said, with asperity,

“Strike, that’s just bloody self-indulgent.”

“Why?” said Strike, startled into a laugh. When he’d said the same to Charlotte, she’d both understood and agreed with him. Early in her teens, her drunken mother had told Charlotte she’d considered aborting her.

“Because… for God’s sake, you can’t let your whole life be colored by the circumstances of your conception! If everyone who was conceived accidentally stopped having kids—”

“We’d all be better off, wouldn’t we?” said Strike robustly. “The world’s overpopulated as it is. Anyway, none of the kids I know make me particularly keen to have my own.”

“You like Jack.”

“I do, but that’s one kid out of God knows how many. Dave Polworth’s kids—you know who Polworth is?”

“Your best mate,” said Robin.

“He’s my oldest mate,” Strike corrected her. “My best mate…”

For a split-second he wondered whether he was going to say it, but the whisky had lifted the guard he usually kept upon himself: why not say it, why not let go?

“… is you.”

Robin was so amazed, she couldn’t speak. Never, in four years, had Strike come close to telling her what she was to him. Fondness had had to be deduced from offhand comments, small kindnesses, awkward silences or gestures forced from him under stress. She’d only once before felt as she did now, and the unexpected gift that had engendered the feeling had been a sapphire and diamond ring, which she’d left behind when she walked out on the man who’d given it to her.

She wanted to make some kind of return, but for a moment or two, her throat felt too constricted.

“I… well, the feeling’s mutual,” she said, trying not to sound too happy.

Over on the sofa, Strike dimly registered that somebody was on the metal staircase below their floor. Sometimes the graphic designer in the office beneath worked late. Mostly Strike was savoring the pleasure it had given him to hear Robin return his declaration of affection.

And now, full of whisky, he remembered holding her on the stairs at her wedding. This was the closest they’d come to that moment in nearly two years, and the air seemed thick with unspoken things, and again, he felt as though he stood on a small platform, ready to swing out into the unknown. Leave it there, said the surly self that coveted a solitary attic space, and freedom, and peace. Now, breathed the flickering demon the whisky had unleashed, and like Robin a few minutes previously, Strike was conscious that they were sitting mere feet from a double bed.

Footsteps reached the landing outside the glass outer door. Before either Strike or Robin could react, it had opened.

“Is the power oot?” said Barclay, and he flicked on the light. After a moment in which the three blinked at each other in surprise, Barclay said,

“You’re a friggin’ genius, R—the fuck happened tae yer face?”

59

The warlike Britonesse…

… with such vncouth welcome did receaue

Her fayned Paramour, her forced guest,

That being forst his saddle soone to leaue,

Him selfe he did of his new loue deceaue:

And made him selfe then ample of his follie.

Which done, she passed forth not taking leaue,

---