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“Check this for fingerprints, and I’m pretty sure you’ll have your serial rapist.” Strike pushes the taser they’ve found in Yellow Tie's flat across his desk with a pencil. “And our client every reason she needs to divorce that monster.”
Wardle, sitting across from him, shrouded in the stubbly and wrinkled mood of a harrowing case, raises skeptical brows.
“You sure it’s him.”
“Yeah, the pieces of the puzzle fit,” Strike replies. “With this, we’ll have proof.”
Wardle purses his lips. Strike sees the usual battle of jealousy versus gratefulness going down behind the DI’s cool veneer. Jealousy that, once again, the Strike & Ellacott agency has solved a case the Met hasn’t been able to crack; gratefulness that a particularly disgusting piece of scum will be taken off London’s streets soon, and for good.
“Alright, Gooner,” he finally concedes. “I’ll have the lab process it. If an arrest comes out of it, I owe you one.”
“I’ll put it on your tab.” Strike leans back and crosses his arms, demonstratively magnanimous.
“Pfff...” Wardle snorts. “I’ll strike it off yours.”
They both grin at each other.
Behind the policeman, the door to the inner office swings open, and Robin breezes into the room. Her face is attractively flushed and glowing with happiness.
“Sorry for being late,” she says brightly. “It got a bit late last night, and I had to take the tube from the other side of… Never mind,” she finishes, looking away to conceal a mischievous glint in her eyes.
It doesn’t take more than a second for Strike to realize she’s spent the night with Ryan. She’s wearing yesterday’s clothes, she’s smelling of an unfamiliar shampoo with a musky, herbal note usually reserved for males. And she’s moving in the sated, confident way that good sex will leave a woman with after a night of feeling worshipped.
She might as well have grabbed the taser from Strike’s desk and applied it to his chest.
Wardle, with an eye for evidence like Strike has, tilts his head and casts her a teasing, suggestive look.
“He’s that good, is he?”
While Cormoran’s heart still seizes in his chest, he somehow manages to keep an even expression on his face.
Robin smiles, not quite as modestly as expected, cheeks pink, and opens her mouth to say something, but then she swivels around and, flustered, asks the room in general: “Tea, anybody? I could use one.”
And then she’s out of the inner office again, bustling about in the little kitchen, and Wardle looks at Strike. The DI’s expression changes from smugness to commiseration.
“Ouch, mate.”
Strike huffs exaggeratedly. “What are you talking about?” he says, chest still aching. “She’s happy. He’s good for her. I’m happy.”
“Yeeaah,” Wardle extends the word into at least three seconds of ironic length. “And if you say ‘happy’ one more time, I’m gonna puke.”
Strike almost fails at glowering at him.
Slapping his thighs, Wardle springs out of his chair and picks the taser up with his fingertips to slide it into an ‘evidence’ bag.
“I’m off duty once I’ve dropped this at the lab,” he announces. “How about a pint at the Tottenham in an hour?”
Strike wants to turn him down, but when Robin reappears, hips swinging, carrying a tray with steaming mugs and biscuits, looking painfully gorgeous, he reconsiders.
“Yeah,” he grunts morosely. “See you there.”