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They’re in Masham. He’s not there under duress; she wouldn’t have minded if he’d said no and frankly, that’s reason enough to say ‘yes’, but he’s discovered that he quite likes Yorkshire in general, and Masham in particular, for reasons that are mostly to do with the local beer. Also, it makes her happy when he’s there too sometimes and it’s not like she asks him for a lot. It’s one of the easier, simpler things in his life; making Robin happy, so he does what he can, with what he hopes is good grace.
The house is quiet and settled around him, cast in a muffled stillness that is worlds away from the continual rumble of London or the crashing surf of St Mawes. Robin left half an hour ago because she goes running when she’s in Yorkshire. Only in Yorkshire, never in London. No fresh air in London she’d told him, when they came back to her flat after their first joint visit and she’d set her trainers down in the empty spot waiting for them at the bottom of her wardrobe. No point in it. It had come as something of a surprise, the first time they’d visited; the sight of her perched on the end of the bed, lacing up the unfamiliar technical-looking shoes. That this is her habit, is something he had not known about her until he did, is something about her that no one else knows, is a fact he guards with a strange possessiveness, like a child with an inconsequential treasure.
He is revelling in the novelty of an expansive, unfilled day before him, stretching and sitting up in bed; the new bed that Linda and Michael had picked out to replace the old one that had once been purchased with a teenage girl in mind, not an adult woman and her six foot three, sixteen stone boyfriend. The new bed, he reckons, is the most conclusive evidence he’s going to glean from Linda that he is forgiven for his near-calamitous arrival into her daughter’s life, and all the subsequent earthquakes and aftershocks that have followed what he considers to be the most fortuitous morning of his life. Linda has come to accept his continued presence, even if it’s clear that she’s still not completely convinced that her daughter hasn’t taken leave of her senses.
Boyfriend.
It’s a ridiculous thing to refer to himself as, a word that continues to sound foreign to his own ears, even now they’re over three years in. And yet, boyfriend appears to be another thing he likes more than he thought he would. He hasn’t been a boyfriend since he was fifteen, though it’s not like he doesn’t have a long and chequered history of being other things. Partner, fiancée, lover, the bloke I’m seeing, casual shag, that wanker, but not a boyfriend. It also hasn’t escaped his notice that he’s the one calling himself it. He’s never heard Robin call him anything other than his name, or, very occasionally, when he's really pissed her off, arse. She’s certainly never used the word boyfriend in front of him.
Nomenclature aside, the fact of them; that they actually work, that lots of the time it’s nowhere near as impossible a feat as he once thought it would be, feels like a sort of miracle. If he wasn’t a man who had staked his entire existence on logic, he would say that he and Robin defy it. As it is, his highly reputable name has been built on the seeking, acquisition and application of rationality, so he settles for feeling as if they have pulled off a gamble with impossibly long odds. A last throw of the dice before leaving the table; the winning EuroMillions ticket in their back pocket all along.
He gets up and makes his way down to the kitchen. The banister, worn smooth by years of passing Ellacott palms, feels solid under his grip; he can lean most of his weight on it without fear, which feels like another sort of acceptance. In the hall, he pauses to give Rowntree, the oldest dog he has ever met, a scratch behind the ears and the dog’s tail beats lazily against the floor.
In the kitchen, the lino cold under his foot, he fills the kettle and leans against the counter whilst it boils. The garden beyond the window is just coming to life; clumps of snowdrops, vivid green shocks against brown, are pushing their way through the hard, cold earth. The hedges are just beginning to bud; in a few weeks’ time the neighbour’s gardens will be hidden from view.
The kettle clicks off the boil and he makes tea, stirring the bag and depositing it in the compost bin beside the draining board. He likes Robin’s parents’ house. Quite apart from the reliable presence of Betty’s teabags and good biscuits, the house is warm and worn, clean and tidy. It reminds him of Ted and Joan’s; makes him think of fortresses that hold the worst of the world at bay.
Strike’s attention is caught by a box sitting on the scrubbed wooden table, and he grins because it so clearly used to belong to a teenage girl, and he knows there’s only ever been one of those living in this house. Shoebox sized and bedazzled with plastic rhinestones and pictures of squeaky-clean pop stars he doesn’t recognise, there are anacronyms like I.D.S.T scribbled in faded permanent marker, in writing that is vaguely familiar to him. On the top corner, a more neatly printed label Robin’s Photos reveals the inherently organised and efficient woman this teenager would turn out to be, notwithstanding the little heart in place of a dot over the ‘i’ in her name.
Tea in hand, he takes a seat and pulls the shoebox to him. He wonders if he should look, but they’ve been together long enough now, and friends even longer than that; there can’t be anything here he doesn’t already know about it. Besides, he’s a detective; professionally nosy and honest enough with himself to admit that pictures of Robin as a child, or as an awkward teenager sporting an ill-advised haircut and bad nineties fashion, are things that he is deeply curious about.
He hesitates for a fraction of a second, before lifting off the lid. Easier, after all, to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.
The haul is just what he was hoping for.
A tiny, toddling Robin, clinging to a coffee table and smiling gummily at the camera.
A Robin who is clearly about to embark on her first day of school; all neatly pressed uniform and shiny shoes, her hair in pigtails. It was, he realises, closer to ginger when she was younger; age has lightened it. He files the fact away to tease her with later.
In another, she sits on top of a solid-looking little pony, fully kitted out in jodhpurs, boots and riding hat, something that looks suspiciously like a gymkhana in the background.
About halfway down the stack in the box he strikes gold; pictures of a pre-teen Robin, wearing embroidered jeans, a Spice Girls t-shirt and a denim jacket. She has one of those twirly plastic chokers around her neck, glitter on her face, sticky pink gloss on her lips and butterfly clips pinning back her hair.
There are a few grainy photos that were clearly taken on an instant camera; the washed-out images show an impossibly girly teenage Robin grinning or duck-facing at the camera, her arms around various female friends. Matt features in a few; conventionally handsome even at seventeen, the flash throwing his cheekbones and jawline into sharp relief, although, Strike notices with a flash of vindictive pleasure, not even Matthew Cunliffe escaped the ravages of puberty without a couple of spots.
There are photos of birthdays, Christmases, christenings, more photos of Robin and Angus, though none feature blue ribbons and most involve mud smears; Strike feels as pleased to see the Land Rover in the background of these photos as he would be to see an old friend. There is one of Robin and Matt at what must have been their sixth-year formal, awkwardly posing for the professional snap, not quite grown into themselves. A few appear to have been taken on an exam result celebration night; he recognises the pub in the background as being the Bay Horse. Robin and her schoolmates look jubilant, wine-glazed and younger than he remembers he and his friends ever looking at eighteen.
And then, just as he is about to conclude his investigation, more than satisfied with its outcome, he finds it, buried down near the very bottom of the stack and sandwiched between a picture of Robin beaming and brandishing R plates, and one of she and Steven, racing across a great sweep of sand in brightly coloured rain jackets, the sea and sky the colour of lead.
It’s a family shot; the Ellacotts all crammed onto the park bench so tightly that initially it is difficult to work out whose legs and arms are whose, and if it wasn’t for the familiar faces of the rest of them, he’s not sure he would have immediately recognised her.
The girl sitting in the middle of the family crush is thin. Painfully so and seeming to grow thinner the more closely he examines the photo. Everywhere he looks there are sharp angles and bones and hollows. Her face is pale and drawn, nearly gaunt, though he recognises the smile she has pinned up for the camera; I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. There are dark shadows under her eyes, which are so dull he can’t recognise them as the same blue-grey ones that have danced and sparkled and flashed and rolled and glittered so eloquently in his direction since the day she first walked into the office. The protruding collar bone, the brittle looking wrists and ankles exposed by her cut-off jeans and rolled up sleeves. It is her; it couldn’t be anyone else. It is her, and also it isn’t. Everything about the Robin captured in this photo is fragile, delicate. She looks as if a strong breeze could blow her away, and as if she is half hoping that it might do.
There is a rushing in his ears. He is unable to look away from the photo. She is a stranger in this picture; a distant echo of the woman he knows to be capable of eating three packets of crisps in one sitting.
He had known; she had told him. Both in the pub that night, the first night, the night the walls began to fall, and on other nights; nights where they set about the rubble of themselves with hammers and chisels and delicate excavation brushes, painstakingly chipping back to their foundations to see if they could build something new.
Everyone was a bit worried for a while, she had said. I couldn’t eat…after. And then I didn’t want to, so I…stopped. For a bit. He had frowned and she had shrugged matter-of-factly, without volunteering anything further. It hadn’t occurred to him that he could force the issue; those were the early days and neither of them had wanted to push their luck, accepting whatever nuggets the other offered up, too nervous to prospect for more. It had taken almost a week to remember that the rules had changed, that they had made a choice, together, to change them.
Why did you stop…? Saying it out loud had made him realise it was a stupid thing to ask, but in the beginning they’d both needed a little prompting. The sharing of confidences without the aid of a little whisky and some dim lighting had not been something that had come easily to either of them. He’d nodded to the plate of curry in front of her, punctuating the question he couldn’t finish. She’d popped a piece of naan into her mouth, frowned and said I wanted to disappear. I think I thought if I made myself small enough, nothing bad could happen to me again. Nothing bad could find me. She’d paused, chewing contemplatively. What happened… and then after… I couldn’t stop anything or change anything. Everything the doctors had to do in hospital, and then all the interviews, and having to go to court… I’d started up a massive machine by pressing charges. I had to be where everyone wanted me to be, when they wanted me to be there. I felt sick all the time, I couldn’t eat anything, and then...then it turned into something...the only thing that I had any say over. I didn’t know what his solicitor would say, or what questions I could be asked, but I could decide what I wanted to eat… if I wanted to eat anything. He’d wondered what she’d read on his face because then she’d said, with a little less certainty and a rueful smile Or maybe that’s what the therapist thought. The kitchenette had fallen away as he’d watched her, his focus narrowed to just her face and the minute movements of muscle beneath skin. So what changed? He’d thought she’d seemed a bit surprised that he’d asked that, like no one had ever asked to hear the end of the story before. I just… she had worried her lip as if he had asked her for a rudimentary explanation of String Theory. I just felt hungry one day. I woke up, and Mum had made toast and I felt really, really hungry for the first time in ages.
That conversation is years old now, so this picture really shouldn’t be a surprise. And yet he realises he has been holding his breath and lets it out with a slow exhale.
“Morning!”
Robin’s voice chimes as the front door slams, and he hears her stop to greet Rowntree in the hall. Moments later, the kitchen door bursts open, and she enters, the dog plodding in behind her to collapse on the bed in front of the range. She pours herself a glass of water from the tap, slightly breathless as she leans against the counter and, thrown off-balance by her sudden arrival, he can do nothing but look at the woman in front of him; fit and robust in her running gear and ponytail, her cheeks whipped to high colour by the stiff Dales breeze. She is beaming at him; her ankles are covered in mud spatters.
“I bloody hate running,” she announces as she finishes the water. Her expression is at odds with her words.
“Looks like you had an awful time.” He hopes his voice doesn’t sound as strained as it feels.
She pours a second glass of water and pulls a chair round to sit beside him at the table. He slides his half-finished mug of tea to her; it’s darker than she likes but he knows she’d rather have that than nothing. She is about to take a grateful slug, but her movements stutter into stillness as she sees what he is holding.
“What’s-?” She breaks off, staring at the photo in his hand. “What’s that?” she asks quietly, her smile faltering.
He nods towards the box.
“Your mum left that on the table. Curiosity got the better of me.”
He shrugs, aiming for a light-hearted that’s what you get for shagging a detective air. Under her flush, Robin’s face is draining of colour.
“Oh. Why-?”
He doesn’t know if it’s his motives she’s about to question, or her mother’s, but he’s cautious now. They are fiercely private people; the learning of each other, the merging of two separate lives into something shared has taken the slow, dedicated, and occasionally painful work of many, many months. He can’t think of anything, now, that he wouldn’t tell her, but she has always been more guarded than him. She is, for reasons he doesn’t need her to explain because he’s all too aware what they are, a little more cautious of things she might say that could later be used against her. Some habits, he knows, are hard to break.
“Maybe she wanted you to sort through them,” he says, with another shrug. He hopes his tone is easy, hopes she doesn’t think he is attributing more to this picture than it warrants; wishes that he wasn’t.
“Can I-?” she breaks off, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. “Can I have it back, please?”
He hands it over wordlessly. Her fingers shake as she twitches it from him. She studies it for a moment, and then looks at him.
“Robin-,” he starts, but she gets to her feet quickly.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It doesn’t really matter. I just-.”
She glances at the picture in her hand.
“I wish you hadn’t seen this.”
He feels awful, a bit sick, like he’s been told off, even though he hasn’t.
“Need a shower.” She gives him a tight smile and gets up from the table, taking the photo with her as she leaves.
********
He’s tempted to follow her up the stairs. He could trail her to the bedroom and then into the shower and make his nosiness up to her while the house is still deserted. But then he thinks about the strained little smile she gave him before leaving the kitchen and thinks better of it. She is a woman who needs her space, just like he is a man who requires his. They knew this about one another going in.
Instead, he listens to the noises overhead; the opening and closing of doors, the squeaky bathroom lock, the immersion kicking into life as the shower whirrs into life. Stupid, he thinks. Really fucking stupid Strike. They have lain bare so much of themselves to each other, but in their own time, and never before the other was ready to show it, and there is a difference between knowing and seeing.
When the shower upstairs goes quiet, he starts the process of making them breakfast, pretending that he’s not buttering her toast a little more generously than she would. Damp-haired, she emerges in the kitchen, accepts the proffered plate with a smile and a peck on his cheek, and sits in her usual spot at the table, chewing aimlessly as she flicks through a day-old copy of the Yorkshire Post.
All seems normal again, though she is the master of inscrutability when she wants to be.
He knew.
She had told him because she trusted him. She trusts him to see her; her accomplishments and her potential; the very, very many things of which she is capable of, not just the bruising history that so frequently seems to stall other people. He has always treated the traumas of her past as if they were a comma, a parenthesis in her story, because that is how he sees them. She is the sum of all her parts, not just the hard ones. Her world isn’t pulled into orbit by the awful things that have happened to her, so his isn’t either, and if he starts treating her any differently now then she’ll know why.
She’ll know, so he doesn’t, even though he wants to. Even though a part of him wants to clutch her to him. Even though what he wants to say is I think you’re the most fucking incredible woman I’ve ever met and I wish this fucking horrible thing had never happened to you and I wish you’d never had to feel like that and, even though it makes no sense and he will never say it out loud to her; feels ridiculous that the thought has even crossed his mind because he’s all too aware life is not a fairy-story and she has not been waiting for a prince to rescue her I wish I’d been there to stop it happening. I wish I could’ve fixed it.
She’ll know, and she’ll hate it, so he doesn’t.
He simply makes himself a fresh mug of tea and sits beside her, reading through the case notes they have brought with them and allowing himself no more than the occasional idle squeeze of her knee.
*******
They don’t mention the picture again. Robin does not look through the box of photographs that Linda had left on the table. It disappears the same day, and though he notices, Strike doesn’t bring it up. On the surface, everything seems fine but there is an odd crackle in the atmosphere between them, like a storm in summer, refusing to break.
Back in London, she does what she’s always done; protects herself by reinforcing distance, taking over surveillance duties from Barclay and Michelle and not checking in half as much as he’d like her to, but enough that he can’t call her on it. The fact that he knows what she’s doing, that he’s spotted this pattern and understands it, doesn’t mean that he likes it. It takes everything he has not to respond in kind and if the circumstances were different, he’d be congratulating himself for this recently developed emotional maturity.
Instead, as she pulls back, he keeps her from drifting away entirely with tiny actions; a roll of the eyes in her direction at the mention of Two Times new bird in Monday morning’s meeting before she heads out for the day, an unprompted cup of perfectly made tea when she drops by the office on Tuesday evening to hand in her receipts, a squeeze of her shoulder as he passes her to talk to Pat about Andy’s expenses on Wednesday morning as she fires off emails before heading out again. He would not have believed, if someone had told him when they’d first decided that whatever there was between them was worth pursuing, that he would ever be the one to patiently wait out an emotional retreat. This isn’t retreat though, he finds himself silently explaining to those imagined observers; it is recalibration, and he understands the need to recalibrate better than most. If time is what she needs then she can have it in abundance; eons of it, acres of it, endless tides of it, as long as she comes home to him when she’s had her fill of it.
Still though, he won’t pretend he doesn’t miss her. His finding of that photo has disrupted the equilibrium between them. Something must be done to rectify the situation, and the only thing he can think of to fix things is to level the playing field. So, alone in his flat on the fifth evening she has returned to Earl’s Court and the space where he isn’t, he sifts through the contents of the one box he has never gotten round to unpacking. It is full of half-forgotten things, now rendered almost entirely obsolete by the passage of time; notebooks from his first year at Oxford, a dog-eared copy of Carmina, a Nick Cave album, several bootlegged, scratched DVDs and there, at the bottom, caught between two flaps of cardboard, a photo of his own.
*******
The next evening, too tired to contemplate another rush hour on the Tube, Robin makes her way up to Strike’s flat on her own. The two and half rooms are in their usual state of fastidious neatness and as she closes the door behind her, she feels her shoulders relax. She has felt off-kilter for days, but the quiet order that Strike imposes on his surroundings is soothing.
He is in Fulham, keeping watch over the mistress of their most recent client. He had texted her earlier Barclay taking over tomorrow morning at six. He wants her to know that he won’t be around, just in case she wants to stay the night, and the fact that he is offering up his space for her convenience, despite what she knows has been a very apparent desire to be left to her own thoughts since they returned from Masham, is enough to make her feel guilty. She tamps down hard on the feeling as she makes herself a cup of tea and takes stock of the contents of his fridge; that she is entitled to her feelings, and space in which to process her thoughts, is still something that feels slightly alien. He has seen something that she was not ready to show him, though she thinks she would have been eventually, and she has spent the last few days wondering how he will be able to assimilate the woman with whom he shares both desk and bed with the girl in that photo, and how she feels about the co-existence of those two very different people in his mind.
There isn’t much food in the fridge, so she settles for making herself some scrambled eggs, eating them one handed whilst skimming through an evidence folder that Wardle had couriered over earlier that day. She and Strike are investigating potential embezzlement, and she has been struggling to get her head around the financial minutiae of the case, so it takes her several minutes to notice the slightly crumpled photograph. Eventually though, her gaze snags on the thing that looks so out of place on the chipped Formica table, propped up against the mug he must have used that morning.
In the picture, Strike is both almost too tall for the bed he is lying in, and yet somehow smaller than she has ever known him. What she knows to be a Middle Eastern tan has started to fade, and underneath it he is ashen, grey shadows falling under cheekbones that Doom Bar and too many takeaways have hidden in the intervening years. The skin she can see, on his face and neck and forearms, is speckled with cuts and grazes and burns. The standard issue army haircut has started to grow out at slightly odd angles, his dense curls already asserting themselves. Strangely, though it is a sight she is entirely used to, the empty void where a lower leg should have been stands out, stark and uncompromising, as if Strike’s own shock at its absence has somehow been captured within the photo’s atoms. It is his eyes, however, that keep drawing her back to his face; expressionless black hollows that are utterly unrecognisable to the humorous, kind, intelligent, frequently tired but always warm brown pools that she has been learning to read for years.
She knew, of course.
He had told her in the whispered, pearl-grey light of the small hours inhabited by new lovers, when there is too much still to learn about each other to waste time on sleep. She knew about pain, the sound of metal wrenched from metal, about the particular smell of blood baking into sand. She knew about laughing through the unbearable. She knew about waking to an absence that ached and itched and burned with pain. She knew that almost the whole of a man’s sense of self can be contained in the bottom quarter of his right leg, so that when it is destroyed that man has to rebuild what he knows about himself from the ground up.
She knows all this because he has told her.
But there is a difference between knowing and seeing.
She flips the picture over.
A snapshot he has written in his cramped, hard to read handwriting. He has, she can see, written as legibly as he is able. When he wrote this message, he didn’t want her to misconstrue or second guess his meaning. Not the most important part of the story. C x
She stares at the message for a long time, felled by the reasoning behind it. Equal. Partners. Sacrifices made on the altar of Pride, so that they can look each other in the eye and say that whatever else they are, they are both those things. Equal. Partners.
Robin turns the picture over and over between her fingers, her eyes finding him and then his words again and again. Some women might cry, she thinks, stunned to tears by the evidence of the trauma before them. Others might laugh at how, by sharing the image, the subject had also revealed the depth of his feeling. But she knew already, has known now for years and even earlier than that, what she means to him. In a life that has been riven by doubt, the depths of him is one of the few things of which she is completely sure.
**********
When Strike’s phone glows into life at eleven o’clock, the mistress in the house across the road is locking up for the evening. From his vantage point, he has watched her tidy away her children’s toys, carry her wine glass into the kitchen and lower the blinds. As the text arrives, she has turned off the lights in the living room and he has seen her figure pass by the landing window on her way up the stairs. He restrains himself from snatching the mobile off the front passenger’s seat, and instead watches her close her bedroom curtains. Bedside light clicked off, the small suburban house finally plunged into darkness, Strike picks up his phone and opens Robin’s message with a little trepidation.
It had been a punt, leaving the photo that Lucy had taken in the very early days of his hospital stay for Robin to find, and his mind’s eye has been returning to the image of it, perched there against his mug in the one spot she was sure to see it, all day. It was only after he had left his flat that morning that he realised it might not be taken in the spirit in which it was meant. He hopes, is almost certain, that she will see it for what it is but for reasons he doesn’t need to analyse, he hasn’t been able to prevent himself turning over the possibility that he might just have made everything worse.
Thank you. See you in the morning.
He grins. When she had been his secretary, she’d sometimes signed her messages love, she’d left the occasional x. Now that they have seen each other naked, her texts are consistently business-like, almost perfunctory, indicating nothing.
Content, Strike slumps back in the driver’s seat, his eyes on the still and silent house across the road. There is a promisingly simple shift ahead of him, he has plenty of tea, a bag of snacks at his feet and endless hours in which to wrap his head around alternative asset investment. Barclay will relieve him at six, he will be home by six thirty and he is sure now that when he finally makes it into bed for a couple of hours kip, Robin will be there, asleep on her side of his bed.