Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike, #3)

by Robert Galbraith

Hell’s built on regret. Blue Öyster Cult, “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” Lyrics by Patti Smith

evil was always fascinating.

“He’s the turd that won’t flush,” as Strike put it to Lucy, who did not laugh.

Strike mistrusted anyone who was overreliant on instinct or intuition, but he was convinced that there was something wrong. He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.

I need to know whether you’re coming home tonight. I’m worried sick about you. Just text to tell me you’re alive, that’s all I’m asking. “Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” muttered Robin. “Like I’d kill myself over you.”

“Can I wait with you?” “No, you fucking can’t,” said another, familiar voice. Strike had arrived, massive, scowling, glaring at the stranger, who retreated with ill grace to a couple of friends at the bar.

“Don’t go thinking—it doesn’t make any difference!” she said desperately. “It was twenty minutes of my life. It was something that happened to me. It isn’t me. It doesn’t define me.”

“It doesn’t make any difference!” she repeated furiously. “I’m still the same!” “I know that,” he said, “but it’s still one fucking horrible thing to have happened to you.”

Later there had been days and weeks when she had felt as though she had in fact died, and was trapped in the body from which she felt entirely disconnected. The only way to protect herself, it had seemed, was to separate herself from her own flesh, to deny their connection. It had been a long time before she had felt able to take possession again.

She’s my partner. We work the same jobs.”

“Yeah, that would’ve changed everything,” said Strike. “You could’ve stuck her head back on and she’d have been fine.”

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.

He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed.

He had known, almost from the moment they had met, that Robin represented a threat to his peace of mind, but endangering the best working relationship of his life would be an act of willful self-sabotage that he, after years of a destructive on-off relationship, after the hard graft and sacrifice that had gone into building his business, could not and would not let happen.

A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door; men who ogled your breasts under the pretense of scanning the wine shelves; men for whom your mere physical presence constituted a lubricious invitation.

Robin was a decade younger than Strike. She had arrived in his office as a temporary secretary, unsought and unwelcome, at the lowest point of his professional life. He had only meant to keep her on for a week, and that because he had almost knocked her to her death down the metal stairs when she arrived, and he felt he owed her. Somehow she had persuaded him to let her stay, firstly for an extra week, then for a month and, finally, forever. She had helped him claw his way out of near insolvency, worked to make his business successful, learned on the job and now asked nothing more than to be allowed to stand beside him while that business crumbled again, and to fight for its survival. Everyone liked Robin. He liked Robin. How could he fail to like her, after everything they had been through together? However, from the very first he had told himself: this far and no further. A distance must be maintained. Barriers must remain in place.

Why the fuck did she go back to him? Why do women do that?” In the fractional hesitation before Robin replied, Strike realized that a certain personal interpretation could be put on these words. “I suppose,” began Robin, and simultaneously Strike said, “I didn’t mean—” Both stopped. “Sorry, go on,” said Strike. “I was only going to say that abused people cling to their abusers, don’t they? They’ve been brainwashed to believe there’s no alternative.” I was the bloody alternative, standing there, right in front of her!

As the steel joists of a building are revealed as it burns, so Strike saw in this flash of inspiration the skeleton of the killer’s plan, recognizing those crucial flaws that he had missed—that everyone had missed—but which might, at last, be the means by which the murderer and his macabre schemes could be brought down.

Robin understood only too well why people were scared of telling, of owning up to what had been done to them, of being told that the dirty, shameful, excruciating truth was a figment of their own sick imagination.