© J.K. Rowling. All Rights Reserved.
Showing 6 results
Troubled Blood
Part Five - 54
Strike reached for the tartan Thermos sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d rinsed out and refilled in McDonald’s earlier, and poured himself a black coffee while the teenagers continued to gasp and snort with laughter. Doubtless they thought him comically odd and old, with his snores and his tartan Thermos, but a year of navigating swaying train carriages had taught him that his prosthetic leg appreciated as few trips to the catering car as possible. He drank a cup of plastic-tainted coffee, then re-settled himself comfortably, arms folded, looking out at the fields gliding past, bestridden with power pylons, the flat white cloud given a glaucous glow by the dust on the glass. The landscape registered only incidentally: Strike’s attention was focused inwards on the odd idea that had occurred to him after the interview with the Bayliss sisters.
Of course, the idea might be nothing but the product of an overburdened mind making spurious connections between simple coincidences. He mentally turned it this way and that, examining it from different angles, until finally, yawning, he inched sideways over into the empty seat beside him, and laboriously pulled himself up into a standing position in the aisle, so he could access the holdall in the luggage rack overhead. Beside his holdall sat a Waitrose bag, because he’d made a detour into the supermarket on the way to Paddington station, where he’d grabbed three Easter eggs for his nephews, or rather, three chocolate hedgehogs (“Woodland Friends”) because they were relatively compact. Now, groping in his holdall for The Demon of Paradise Park, he accidentally knocked over the carrier bag containing the chocolate. The uppermost hedgehog fell out: in his attempt to catch it, he accidentally batted it up into the air; the box bounced off the back of the elderly woman’s seat, causing her to squeak in surprise, and the box hit the floor.
The teenagers for whom Strike was unintentionally mounting a one-man comedy show were now openly gasping and crying with laughter. Only when Strike bent down awkwardly to pick up the now cracked chocolate hedgehog, one hand on the teenagers’ table to steady himself, did one of the young women spot the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He knew what she’d seen by the abrupt cessation of her laughter, and the frantic, whispered shushing of her friends. Panting, sweating and now aware of half the carriage’s eyes on him, he shoved the damaged hedgehog back into its bag, found The Demon of Paradise Park in his holdall and then, sweating slightly, but taking malicious pleasure in the po-faced shock of the teenagers beside him, sidled back into his window seat.
Troubled Blood
Part Five - 54
In spite of the coffee, Strike’s eyelids began to droop again. After another couple of minutes, his head sank sideways and the book slipped out of his slack grasp.
When he woke up again, the sky outside had turned coral pink, the laughing teenagers were gone, and he found himself ten minutes from Truro station. Stiffer than ever and in no mood for the family reunion, he wished he was heading back to his attic flat for a shower and some peace. Nevertheless, his heart lifted slightly when he saw Dave Polworth waiting for him on the platform. The bag of chocolate hedgehogs rattled slightly as Strike clambered laboriously off the train. He’d have to remember to give the broken one to Luke.
“All right, Diddy?” said Polworth, as they shook hands and patted each other on the back, Strike’s Waitrose bag impeding a hug.
Troubled Blood
Part Five - 54
She was tense, telling off her sons for looking at their phones during the meal, glaring at Strike when he checked his own, constantly glancing out of the window, to check the state of the weather. The detective was glad of an excuse to get out of the house to buy Polworth’s daughters Easter eggs, but he’d walked barely ten yards down the sloping road, cigarette in hand, when the family pulled up in their Dacia. When Strike confided his errand in an undertone, Polworth said,
“Fuck that, they’ve got enough chocolate for a year at home. Leave it.”
At eleven o’clock, with a leg of lamb left in the oven and the timer set, after Luke had been told that no, he couldn’t take his iPad on the boat, and one false start, due to the need to return to the house for the Polworths’ younger daughter to have the pee she’d insisted she didn’t need before they left, the party made its way successfully down to the harbor, where they met Kerenza the nurse, and boarded Ted’s old sailing boat, Jowanet.
Troubled Blood
Part Five - 54
At eleven o’clock, with a leg of lamb left in the oven and the timer set, after Luke had been told that no, he couldn’t take his iPad on the boat, and one false start, due to the need to return to the house for the Polworths’ younger daughter to have the pee she’d insisted she didn’t need before they left, the party made its way successfully down to the harbor, where they met Kerenza the nurse, and boarded Ted’s old sailing boat, Jowanet.
Strike, who’d once been his uncle’s proud helpmeet, no longer had the balance to work either sails or rudder. He sat with the women and children, spared the necessity of making conversation by the noise of wind against canvas. Ted shouted commands to Polworth and Jack. Luke was eating chocolate, his eyes screwed up against the cold breeze; Polworth’s daughters were huddled, shivering, beside their mother, who had her arms around them. Tears were already trickling down Lucy’s cheeks as she cradled the flat white urn in her lap. Beside her, Kerenza held a bunch of dark pink roses loosely wrapped in cellophane, and it was left to Greg and Polworth to shout at the children to watch out for the boom as they tacked around the peninsula where St. Mawes Castle stood sentinel.
The surface of the sea changed from second to second, from rippling plain of sage and gray, to mesh of diamond-bright sparkles. The smell of ozone was as familiar and comforting to Strike as that of beer. He was just thinking how glad he was that Joan had chosen this, and not a grave, when he felt his phone vibrate against his chest. Unable to resist the temptation to read what he knew would be a text from Charlotte, he pulled it out and read it.
Troubled Blood
Part Five - 54
I thought you’d come back I thought you’d stop me marrying him I didn’t think you’d let me do it
He put the phone back into his pocket. Luke was watching him and Strike thought he saw the idea occur of asking why Uncle Cormoran could look at his phone, whereas he was banned from bringing his iPad, but the look his uncle gave him seemed to make him think better of the idea, and he merely stuffed more chocolate in his mouth.
A feeling of constraint seemed to fall over everyone, even Luke, as Ted turned the boat into the wind and brought the boat slowly to a halt, the sail flapping loudly in the wind, St. Mawes Castle now the size of a sandcastle in the distance. Kerenza handed around the roses, one for everyone except Ted, who took the remainder of the bouquet between the hands that were forever sunburned. Nobody spoke, and yet the moment didn’t feel anticlimactic. While the sails flapped angrily overhead, Ted bent low over the side of the boat and dropped the urn gently into the sea, murmuring his farewell, and the object Strike had imagined would look inadequate and tawdry became, precisely because of its smallness as it bobbed gallantly on the ocean, affecting, and strangely noble. Soon, the last earthly remains of Joan Nancarrow would dissolve into the sea, and only the pink roses, tossed one by one into the sea by each of them, would remain to show the place where she’d disappeared.