Chapter Text
This ain't nothing but an invitation to the blues (Tom Waits)
Afterwards, Strike was not quite sure what happened.
Running late for an appointment, groggy after yet another poor night’s sleep, sweating copiously from the stifling heat of his attic rooms, he had locked the door to his flat and reached out for the metal stair rail, burnished smooth by the clutch of countless hands. His damp palm had slid treacherously and he was gone.
An abrupt slip, a buckle of the knee, a stomach-lurching drop, and a heavy landing left his enormous frame sprawled head first down the steps, legs twisted beneath him. The shock robbed him even of the breath to swear, until the hot stab from his knee hit his synapses. Then he thought he might die from the burning agony of it, from the pain that gave him an instant sweaty nausea and the inability to do anything but writhe, helpless.
There was no one to hear his curses and involuntary groans. His own agency’s office was closed, the graphic design business below them had gone under, and the 12 Bar Club at street level had been shut by the building’s new developers to much protest at the beginning of the year. The only sounds were his heavy, uneven gasps, and, at a distance, the repeated pound of a pneumatic drill from Soho’s constant roadworks.
He didn’t know how long it was before he found the will to move. It took all his courage and concentration to pull his bulk round and sit upright on a dusty metal step. His legs draped uselessly down the stairs, Strike tried to assess the damage. His right knee was obviously fucked, the prosthesis wrenched loose by the fall, but almost more concerning was the pain in his left ankle below the ridden-up hem of his trousers. He tentatively rotated it, and was rewarded with an excruciating spasm that left him panting.
Using his arms and clenching his teeth with the effort, Strike levered himself backwards up the stairs on his bottom, step by painful step. He was three-quarters of the way up when he noticed, lying on the landing below him, the keys that had been in his hand as he fell. By the time he had lowered himself down to retrieve them, and shuffled up again on his rear into the flat, he could only collapse limply onto the thin grey carpet, his face painful from grimacing. He was dirty and sweaty, and closer to tears than he had been for a very long time.
‘Fuck. It. All,’ he muttered, and closed his eyes in exhaustion.
He lay there, assessing his limited options. He suspected that the ankle was twisted rather than broken, so minimal movement with crutches might within a day or two be a slow and painful possibility, although stairs would be out of the question. He knew exactly what the doctors would tell him (analgesics, ice, rest), and he wasn’t going to call an ambulance (which was the only way they would be able to get him down from here) in order to hear them say it. He had painkillers, and ice packs, and an armchair with a footstool. He had a bit of food in his tiny kitchen, although he didn’t fancy his chances of standing up for any length of time to prepare it. He did have a phone, though, and the number of the takeaway down the street which delivered.
What he didn’t have was anyone he was prepared to ask for help.
It was a Thursday at the beginning of August. Lucy had just started a family holiday in Cornwall, mothering Ted with a zeal that Strike suspected might be less than appreciated two weeks in, and he would have to be beyond desperate before he allowed her to turn that kindly-meant attention on him. Nick and Ilsa had been his first point of call for years, and after the - Strike elided the details of the last few months to ‘the thing that happened’ - they had been good friends to him. But for the last couple of months Ilsa had been sinking into the dark waters of post-natal depression, and Nick had been holding her and the baby up, clasping them to his chest and swimming one-handed for shore, barely keeping his own head above the enveloping waves. There was no way Strike was going to call him.
Not a soul was in the office. The previous week had brought a record-breaking heatwave to London and the south east that made the agency's offices, which had no air-conditioning, all but uninhabitable. Strike had dismissed Pat to work from home as best she could, answering diverted calls, and organising appointments for after the return of the staff from their holidays. He himself had been slowly wrapping up an investigation – he rather thought his phone would already be full of missed calls from the client he had got up that morning to meet – and grasping with a desperate relief onto the stultifying silence of the empty building as some semblance of rest.
As for Robin, he refused to let even the briefest flickering thought of her cross his mind.