Chapter Text
She was not sure why she ended up at The Tottenham. She supposed it was because the pub was familiar to her but it also had the added bonus of being a pub in which Matthew had never set foot in, so there weren’t any memories of shared meals and laughter between them within these dark paneled walls. He would, therefore, be unlikely to come looking for her there. Instead, she wagered that he would check all the places connected to him. He would believe her to be some pathetic lump, crying on the steps of the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus or into her wine glass at that bloody Thai restaurant he’d taken her to before he proposed. Maybe he’d even check the pubs nearby their flat or the ones that he frequented and think to himself that he’d checked everywhere, done all he could to find her. The lazy narcissist, she thought with an audible scoff.
But, if she were being honest, that was only part of it. Her background in psychology, short as it had been, floated to the forefront of her mind and a wild part of herself that she normally tucked firmly away was finally allowed to admit that she had formed an association between Strike and this place. It was, after all, his local. She’d also found him here once, soothing his own broken heart with excessive amounts of Doom Bar.
The glass of red wine she’d ordered for herself sat on the table in front of her, mostly untouched save for a few small sips. Banishing thoughts of Strike, she unlocked her mobile and began scrolling through Travelodges nearby. She had missed yet another call from Strike while she’d been in the bathroom splashing cool water on her face and she resolved to call him back after she’d sorted out her lodging for the night. Truthfully, she wanted to leave the pub as soon as possible. She knew that men nearby were eyeing her and she knew what she must look like to them. A woman, tear stained and alone with a holdall at her feet. She knew she was projecting emotional vulnerability, knew that she was looking like easy prey. She knew she looked like a woman who’d just run from a relationship. Perhaps they thought she’d been ditched and that she’d be looking for a quick rebound shag.
The unwanted attention she was receiving was a big reason as to why she wasn’t drinking the wine she’d been craving nearly all day. She also hadn’t eaten much throughout the day and did not want to put herself in the kind of desperate situation that seemed to occur between vulnerable drunk women and the type of bad men who liked to press their advantage. Truthfully, she was starting to feel like prey and it was rapidly turning her sadness into a potent mix of anger and fear.
For several moments, Robin scrolled angrily on her mobile and thought about how unfair it was that she, a woman, couldn’t just walk into a pub and get as pissed as Strike had done for the fear of being raped. She scrolled back up to the top of her phone, realizing she’d missed all of the nearby Travelodges and had been looking at lodging miles away. She picked one at random, put her mobile on standby, and placed it face down on the table.
She felt only marginally calmer, now that she’d sorted out where she’d sleep, and the idea of calling her mother slid across her mind. It would put the men off of approaching her, at least. She quickly dismissed the idea, realising that she was too raw to speak to her mother right now, and instead thought of calling Strike. She had a sudden, desperate need to hear his voice and tried to tell herself, much as she had about fleeing to Tottenham in the first place, that it was only because he was her best friend in London. Her only friend, really. It was only natural that she would think of him and connect him to comfort in times such as these, wasn’t it?
A large man in a beanie caught her attention momentarily as he entered the pub. He looked somehow familiar, as if she’d seen him before, but she shrugged it off. Perhaps it was just that he was near Cormoran’s height, maybe even a bit taller.
For Christ’s sake, you’ve just ended your relationship, you trollop, she thought, pushing her tongue into her cheek as she swung her eyes from the man in the beanie to examine the glass cupola overhead. Your fiancé has only just admitted to cheating and all you can think of is your boss?
The sudden sound of a deep voice startled her out of her thoughts and she nearly knocked her wine over. “Are you alone?”
Robin glanced at him, almost unconsciously noting his blond hair and blue eyes so light in color they looked as if he’d washed them in bleach. She gave him a tight smile, the rage that filled her moments ago dissipated. She quickly told him she was waiting for someone, careful not to give him any more attention than strictly necessary, and hoped he would be on his way.
“Can I wait with you?” He asked, already moving toward the chair across from her. As if her answer was a foregone conclusion. He clearly had not believed her and she felt her anxiety spike. She was so focused on his hand, now resting on the back of the chair, that she nearly jumped out of her skin when a second male voice joined the fray.
“No, you fucking can’t.”
Cormoran, she thought, sagging ever so slightly in relief. The blond stranger melted away with bad grace and she tried very hard not to feel as if she’d conjured Strike out of thin air. She’d given him more headspace than she was comfortable with, in the last few hours.
“What are you doing here?” She asked, trying to tame the wild rush of surprise and adrenaline that she suddenly felt.
“Looking for you,” he said simply.
“How did you know I was—?”
“I’m a bloody detective, Robin,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching. He eyed her barely touched glass of wine and asked, “How many of those have you had?”
“Just this one,” she answered truthfully, touching the base of the glass almost absently. Something in his tone had seemed to demand honesty and she felt obliged to comply. “Just a few sips, really. I was craving it all day and now…”
She watched him surreptitiously as he moved toward the bar to fetch himself a pint, telling herself that she shouldn’t be as surprised as she felt. He was a detective, of course, and she was in his local. He regularly came here, a fact she well knew. Strike, on the other hand, spent his short wait at the bar glaring at the blond man that had approached her. Neither seemed to see the man in the beanie slip out of the pub.
“What’s going on?” He asked without preamble upon his return.
She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly interested in tracing her fingernail along the wood grain of the table. “Nothing.”
He made a noise close to a scoff as he took a gulp of his beer. “Don’t give me that, you look like death.”
Despite herself, she laughed into her wine and said, “I can’t imagine how you manage with all these beautiful women with lines like that, Cormoran,” she said teasingly. ”Consider my morale boosted.”
He wanted to smile in return, to return her playful barbs, but asked instead, “Where’s your engagement ring?”
She took a swig of her wine, staring at him over the rim before setting the glass down on the table lightly. Her laugh was perhaps breathier than she had meant for it to be as she said, “My, you are a detective, aren’t you?”
They sat for a moment, staring at each other, before she dropped her gaze to watch her fingers play with the stem of her glass. Silence unfurled between them and she knew this was a tactic that he often used in questioning witnesses or suspects. One that he’d learned ages ago, before he’d ever met her.
“I’m not engaged anymore,” she said finally, sliding her gaze up to meet his.
He could see the ghost of a smile playing at her lips and there was something in her eyes that he couldn’t quite put a name to. It looked almost as if it were a challenge, a dare. He could see other things in her blood shot eyes, too, all tinged with a bit of heartbreak. He told himself he was only seeing what he wanted to see.
“Why not?” He asked softly, clearing his throat. His voice had sounded almost strangled to his own ears. He found himself leaning forward, resting his weight on his forearms against the table.
Her delicate fingers abandoned the stem of her wine glass as she sat back in her chair, a haughty scoff escaping her lips that was at odds with the playful smile on her lips. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
She could see confusion as it skipped across his face and wondered if it had been because of her tone or because of her question. She’d been going for teasing, sarcastic even, but had landed in the neighborhood of flirtatious.
“What’s rich?” He asked, his head slightly cocked to the side. He was staring at her as if she were a puzzle. She supposed she was. Her messages were mixing all over the place.
“We don’t talk about personal—” she stopped herself with a half smirk. ”No, I mean you. You don’t talk about personal stuff.”
A small smile played on his lips as he gestured to the pub around them and said, “That’s funny. I seem to remember spilling my guts to you in this very pub.”
“Once,” she muttered into her wine, taking a small sip. She was nearly half a glass in now and she was definitely feeling a buzz. She realised that she should probably eat because the wine was flavoring her tone with a flirtatiousness that shouldn’t have been there. It was making her eyes soft and her muscles relax. There was a slight tingle in her body and the edges of her mind were growing fuzzy.
Across the table, he eyed her pink cheeks and decided that she’d probably been telling the truth about how much she’d had to drink, but that she was rapidly crossing the line of sobriety headed toward drunk. “D’ya want something to eat?”
The memory of shouldering his weight, staggering down Tottenham Court Road toward Denmark street, and stopping for a kebab came to her unbidden, making her smile fondly. “Yes, but no kebabs.”
The warmth of his laugher seemed to settle into her bones as he pushed himself up and moved toward the bar again. When he returned, he handed her an open bag of crisps. She wondered first if he’d eaten any and second how he’d known what she needed.
“What’s going on?” He asked again, cutting straight to point.
She lifted a shoulder in a halfhearted shrug, waving her hand vaguely through the air as though waving off his question. Her eyes slid to the cupola above them as she reached into the bag to pull out a crisp. He tried not to appear too interestested in the way she popped it, whole, into her mouth and crunched down. “What’s going on between you and Matthew?”
Swallowing her crisp, she considered his question briefly before countering, “What’s happening with you and Elin?”
As soon as Robin said the words, she wished she could take them back. She didn’t even know why she’d asked. Dimly, she registered a flicker of jealousy within her, but couldn’t say if it was because he was seemingly happy in his relationship while hers was falling apart or...if it was something else altogether.
“How’s that important?” He asked, his confusion plain on his face. There was something hiding just underneath her tone and he couldn’t quite put a name to it. It almost sounded like jealousy, but he couldn’t imagine that it was or that it had anything to do with him specifically.
He wavered for a few seconds before ultimately deciding to indulge her a bit. He answered all her questions about his relationship with Elin, though not all of them honestly, and allowed her to divert the conversation away from herself, her holdall, and the reason she looked like she’d been put through hell. He knew it was his strategy she was using, to let him talk about himself and his life, distracting him from the task at hand. He was slightly impressed by it, but his impatience soon won out. “Okay, your turn.”
“We’ve split up,” she said quietly, picking at the napkin underneath her drink. Her tone was rather calm, though her tear stained face proved that she had been anything but. She was pale, composed, and a bit detached. Again, he allowed the silence to fill the spaces between her words and his, blinking at her over the rim of his pint glass. Using familiar strategy again.
She sucked in a breath before saying, “He told me something...last night. We can’t go back from it. Not that.”
He had an odd feeling just then, in the pit of his stomach. It was both a sinking and a flutter. He knew, or thought he did rather, what Matthew must have said the night before, and the thought of it had created that short lived sinking feeling, but also, the flutter. He reckoned that flutter was probably hope and it was that feeling that was dangerous in relation to this woman.
“He slept with someone else,” she said, confirming it for him as she picked up her crisp packet again. Finding it empty, and with a slightly distracted air of annoyance about her, she dropped it back on the table. She didn’t remember finishing them, but she must have done. Fixing him squarely with her gaze she asked, “Did you eat any of my crisps?”
Strike took a pull of his beer, shaking his head at her almost belligerent question and allowing this surprise to settle. He wasn’t surprised that the twat had cheated. His impression of Matthew had not been a favourable one, after all. It came more from the fact that he’d chosen to tell her at all. He’d not taken Matthew for the type to admit to an affair. And he had, in fact, nicked a crisp or two on his way to the table with them.
“And not just once,” she said, using that same detached voice. She was looking away from him, a far off expression on her face. “He’d been doing it for months, with someone we both know. Sarah Shadlock, an old friend of his from university.”
“Christ,” he said, reaching a hand out toward hers. Her breath caught in her throat as the palm of his large hand made contact with the back of hers, engulfing it as he squeezed hers gently. “I’m so sorry.”
Despite the spark of elation and flutter of hope he was experiencing, he felt genuinely sorry for her. Normally, he kept a very tight lid on his feelings, utterly unwilling to even give name to them most of the time. And most especially when it came to her. However, the news of Matthew’s betrayal was punching holes in his resolve. Of course he knew he was being a stupid fucker. That was one thing that could never happen between them. It would royally mess everything up. He forced himself to focus on the task at hand and drew his hand from hers. He needed to be her friend right now, because he suspected strongly that she hadn’t any of her own. None that weren’t somehow connected to that twat.
“What made him tell you?”
Her eyes had followed his hand as it moved away from hers and had fixed on it as it lay flat against the table near his pint. Despite the awful memory his question recalled for her, the corner of her mouth twitched upward slightly. “We were in the middle of a row,” she explained. “About you, actually.”
“Me?” If Matthew cheating hadn’t caught him by surprise, this definitely did. He sat back in his chair a bit, his hand now loosely gripping his nearly empty pint glass as it rested on the table.
She considered him for a moment, wondering if she should go into detail about the argument or if she should be vague. “He doesn’t believe that you and I are just friends.”
Strike did not find himself surprised again. He’d long suspected that Matthew saw him as a threat in some way. There had been suspicion in his eyes, insecurity in his voice. Buying Robin that damn dress certainly hadn’t helped. He supposed it had given Matthew the wrong impression about him and what he wanted from his secretary. Any red blooded, straight male would have been blind not to notice how stunningly beautiful she had looked in it. He also suspected that he was not quite as good at hiding the dangerous mix of feelings that he felt whenever he was in Robin’s presence as he thought he was. Perhaps Matthew had been astute enough to see behind the veil in his eyes when he looked at her? He didn’t like Matthew much, but he supposed the tosser did have some cause to be suspicious and jealous.
“He thinks you’ll…” she trailed off, her cheeks turning a lovely shade of pink as she took a drink of her wine and said, “I don’t know, he thinks you’ll bend me over your desk while we work late one evening or something.”
Whatever Strike had been expecting her to say, it certainly hadn’t been that. The shock of it had him choking on the last swallow of his drink. “Jesus Christ,” he said hoarsely, sputtering and hammering the center of his chest with his large fist.
She was looking at him from under her lashes, laughing. Though he didn’t know if she was laughing to cover embarrassment or if she was genuinely amused by his reaction. He was suddenly having a very hard time not picturing her in a pencil skirt, bent over his desk on the pretense of fetching some paper or file.
“So,” she continued, her quiet voice breaking through a very erotic mental image involving those stockings with the line up the back and a garter belt. “I pointed out how ridiculous he was being, because we are just friends. Everything isn’t always When Harry Met Sally, men and women can be platonic friends. He should know, I said, because he had a platonic friend, dear old Sarah. And it wasn’t as if he’d shagged her, I said.”
There was an edge to her tone now and he shifted in his seat, trying to control his breathing. The pretty blush on her face was spreading across her cheeks. He’d not expected such blunt honesty from her. He’d not expected to have erotic images put directly into his brain. He was having a hard time focusing his mind away from them.
“But...there was something on his face just then,” she was saying. “After I’d said it. A shadow that came and went,” she slid her hand across her face in demonstration, her gaze unfocused and her brows drawn together. “It all came out then. They had an affair at university while I was...while I was home.”
“That long ago?”
“Should I not mind it was seven years ago?” She asked, slightly defensive. “That he’s lied ever since and that we constantly see her?”
“No, I’m just surprised he admitted it after all this time,” Strike said, holding his hands up in surrender.
“Well, he was ashamed. Because of when it happened,” her voice sounded far off and her eyes unfocused again, drifting off to a place near his left ear.
“At university?” He asked, confused by what she meant. The details were becoming murky to him.
She realised suddenly that she was at a bridge she had to decide if she would cross. She had never intended to tell anyone this particular piece of her history. She’d never told anyone but her family and Matthew, but one glass of wine on an empty stomach had loosened her tongue and she thought, in for a penny in for a pound. If he was her best friend—her only friend—in London, she might as well tell him the truth. If she chose to turn away from the bridge, to keep this part of herself hidden, he wouldn’t have the full picture and couldn’t give her the kind of advice friends gave each other.
“It was after I dropped out,” she said, twisting her napkin in her hands now. “I didn’t want to leave uni, but...something happened,” she hesitated slightly. “And afterwards I had problems…”
She watched his brows knit together and decided she’d been too vague. “I was coming home from a friend’s, in another hall of residence. It wasn’t that late...only eight o’clock or something, but there had been a warning about him on the local news…”
Her hands were shredding her napkin now, their muscles and tendons filled with the nervous energy she was feeling. He watched her, the paper of the napkin falling to the table, and desperately wanted to reach out and take her delicate hands in his, but didn’t think it very appropriate. Especially for the story she was telling, as he thought he also knew where it might be headed.
“D’ya want more crisps?” He asked softly.
“Please,” she sounded so relieved that he’d asked, that he got up immediately and went to the bar for another packet. His motive, however, hadn’t been entirely altruistic. He strongly suspected that he would need another pint to get through the next bit of her story. He briefly considered buying her another glass of wine, but went with a soda instead. After all, there was a maniac out there that had sent her a severed leg and Strike didn’t need to be a detective to deduce that whoever this person was, they meant Robin harm. The last thing she needed was to be plied with alcohol and sent adrift into the night.
When he returned, she talked of how what happened did not define her, and other affirmational phrases he imagined she had learned in therapy. He took a large mouthful of his beer as she told him about being strangled, how she had gone limp and pretended to be dead. He was not surprised by her quick thinking under duress, nor was he surprised that her evidence was the key to the conviction of her rapist. He wasn’t surprised that she had noticed his vitiligo or the difference between his pupils. They lapsed into silence as she finished her crisps and he felt an almost overwhelming sense of affection for her just then.
“Afterward, I couldn’t leave my room,” she said, her eyes refocusing as she crumpled the empty bag. “The university sent me home. I was only supposed to take a term off, but I—I never went back.”
“And that’s when it happened?” He asked, understanding laced through his tone. It had obviously been an intensely emotional time for her. She’d needed to place her trust in someone safe and that miserable git had betrayed her.
“She was comforting him,” her voice was surprisingly docile. “Through the trauma of my rape. When I would visit him in Bath, she was always around. Laughing a little too hard at his jokes, always touching his arm or shoulder. I suppose I suspected it then, but I never said.”
They lapsed into another brief silence.
“Right,” he said, breaking the silence and wrapping his knuckles on the table. “We’ve got to get you a place to spend the night.”
“I’m going to the Travel—”
“No, you’re not.” He cut across her firmly. “I don’t want you staying in a place where people can come and go without question.”
“I can sleep in the office.” She suggested, moving to grab her holdall and standing. “If you’ve still got that camp—”
“No,” he said firmly. “You’re not sleeping in the office.” He tried to redirect his imagination, which had suddenly been thrown into overdrive, sudden mental images of the two of them, in his flat, in his bed, her bent over his desk again, flashing through his mind, and though he wanted to grin at the images, and the knowledge that Matthew would not like them, he continued, as he held the door to the pub open for her, “I know a good place. My aunt and uncle stayed there when they came up to see The Mousetrap. C’mon, I’ll take your holdall.”
And he led her out into the London night.