Chapter Text
Chapter 1: 2004.
The pub was full of students from Cambridge University, being scandalously loud and getting drunk, but the small trio had managed to find a small private corner where three large beers were set on the table, as they reminisced of their best youth moments and plotted how to make it so that one of them could come to the other two’s wedding. RMP SIB Corporal Cormoran Strike was only in England for a week, having just returned from a long year deployed in South Sudan, and he would leave for Iraq that Monday for what could easily be another year or more. He often rejected the months of vacation between deployments and any other break, because he liked to stay on the move, he loved his job and the action, but now he was considering it for his best friends’ wedding, because he was the best man.
“Plan the wedding for next year,” Strike sentenced, “take whatever time you need, I’ll help as much as I can from Iraq, and when the time comes if I’m not back I’ll get a permit, I’ve rejected months of holidays a billion times so there surely won’t be any problem.”
“I really don’t understand what’s the rush, you just came back, why leave so soon and for so long to Iraq no less?” Strike smiled softly at his best female friend, the future Mrs Herbert.
“You sound like Lucy and Joan.”
“Perhaps then you should listen,” Ilsa retorted, raising her eyebrows. She was a young lawyer, and had long fair hair pushed back into a ponytail, with squared black glasses in front of her green eyes. Ilsa was Strike’s oldest female friend, as her mother and his Cornish aunt Joan had been best friends since school and later became neighbours, so Ilsa and Strike met when they were babies, which prompted for them to have a platonic, brother-sister relationship.
Ilsa had met her future husband, Nick Herbert, at Strike’s 18th birthday party in Whitechapel, London, during a weekend of celebrations in which she had travelled to London for the first time and she and Nick had been love at first sight. They had had all their first times together, but only lasted a few months, as they were starting university, one law, the other medicine, and their studies were too time-consuming, extenuating and demanding for a long-distance relationship, she in Devon and he in the King’s College in London. His medical studies lasted longer so eventually, she had travelled to London to look for better working opportunities than St Mawes could provide, and perhaps meet Nick again. Instead, she’d become engaged to her university boyfriend, but then in the year 2000 she had had to go to the hospital for a burst appendix and found Nick there by surprise. Within weeks they’d each left their partners and were dating, determined to get married, as they knew they were the other’s ‘the one’ as soon as Nick finished his entire medical education and they paid their school debts and had money enough. That moment had finally come seven months ago, and then in August, during a holiday in St Mawes, Nick had gone down on one knee and proposed. Strike had received the exciting news between shrieks through a phone call in South Sudan.
“I just love my job,” Strike shrugged. “I get bored if I have too many days off at once. But this time I’ve had time for everything, a few days in St Mawes with Ted and Joan, hanging out with Lucy’s babies to please her,” his little sister had two babies, Luke, who was about to turn two, and Jack, who’d been born during his final days deployed in Southwick a year and a half before, and Strike had nearly missed his flight to Nigeria due to his sister’s insistence that he was the godfather and they baptised the baby before his uncle went off ‘to war’. Strike’s reassurances that it wasn’t really back and he’d only be gone a few months had fallen on deaf ears, “and now my friends and bye. I love travelling, I love investigating, and nobody here really needs me in life or death so it’s absurd to remain too long.”
“What about Charlotte?” inquired Nick, taking a sip of his beer with his hand intertwined with Ilsa’s on the table. Her diamond engagement ring shone with the pub’s dim light. Nick, like Ilsa and Strike, was thirty, although Strike wouldn’t turn them for nearly twenty days yet, and he was tall and skinny, fit through a love for jogging, cycling and canoeing wherever he could, whenever he could. He had sandy receding hair, trimmed short, and a long, stubbly face with honey eyes.
“I told you, we’re over,” at least, so Strike hoped. Eight months before Charlotte had broken-up with him for the fourth time since they first got together twelve years previously, and Strike liked to think he wouldn’t go back again. He always forgave her, she always came back crying, but then she always left him, sometimes even with just a text or an email, because of his job. The first time she’d left him because he decided to enlist in the army after his mother had been murdered. Still, he knew he was in love with her, and he thought she was in love with him, and it was hard to stop that, even when none of her friends and family liked Charlotte in the slightest.
“You deserve so much better than her, Oggy,” said Ilsa. Oggy was the nickname he’d somehow earned in Cornwall, after he used to get fat with those Cornish pasties as a child. It didn’t matter that Nick had never known him then, Ilsa’s influence meant both she and Nick frequently called him by that more than by his own name. It was one of countless nicknames Strike had, most frequently his surname.
Ilsa had now extended a hand to squeeze Strike’s over the table and gave him a small smile. They’d missed each other, and for a moment it wasn’t too hard to stop thinking of Charlotte. Strike sighed and nodded.
“Yeah, besides, there’s this girl, Tracey, she’s a colleague. We’re sorta… dating. Not formally, it’s just an arrangement,” confessed Strike.
“Oh, another SIB?” Ilsa’s interest spiked. “That’s awesome, you’ll have to introduce her to us.”
“Yeah, she’s a good friend,” said Strike. “Maybe when I return from Iraq, she’s gonna be there too. We’ll see.”
“Feel free to invite her to the wedding,” said Nick with half a smile. “Congrats mate, if it’s not Charlotte it surely is an upgrade, whoever she is. And she’s already got better points being a SIB.”
They chatted for a while longer over beers and dinner, before they decided it was time to return to Nick and Ilsa’s flat, that Strike would depart in twelve hours for the airport. Nick and Ilsa had mostly done life as adults in London, but when Nick had had to do the residence there weren’t many vacancies in London for him, and those that were required for them to rent unaffordable flats because of how expensive London was and how little he was still being paid. So instead they had packed and gone to Cambridge, where they both now worked and led a cheaper lifestyle, hoping to return to the capital as soon as Nick could have a better position as a more experienced gastroenterologist, and Ilsa would also have enough years under her belt to aspire to better paid jobs in London. Their aim was to have a small wedding and save a lot of money to buy a proper house in London and have children and perhaps, a cat or two.
At last, the three friends walked down the Cambridge streets surrounding the university campus. Strike was smoking a fag, aiming away from his friends, and he was laughing with them and having the most fun he had had in a long while. He had really missed them, even if they were in quite frequent contact through phone calls, emails and letters, depending on the condition of the place where he was. It was a late, cold night, and Strike watched with a soft smile as Nick wrapped a protective arm around his fiancée when they were hit with cold November breeze, and Ilsa lovingly thanked him with a kiss on the cheek, wrapping her arm around his waist. Strike was taller than both of them. At twenty-nine, he was young, fit, muscled and quite hairy, and his size was a stark contrast, because he had always been very tall and very broad and wide. His dark hair was cropped very short, and it was all curls, he had some stubble covering his cheeks and around his mouth, and the mane of chest hair peeked through the open first button of his shirt, over his jumper’s collar. He had thick dark eyebrows, a nose crooked from boxing and getting it broken a bit too often, a strong round jaw, and long-lashed dark hazel eyes.
As they walked, Strike stopped suddenly, his tremendously good hearing sharpening. He could’ve sworn he’d heard something, like an animal. His biological parents were a professional rock star and a former backup singer and model, so the music in the DNA had always given him quite a good ability to discern sounds and hear very well, and now he looked around like a wolf sniffling the air, narrowing his eyes in the dark. Nick and Ilsa saw he stopped and turned, curious, getting quiet.
“What is it?” asked Nick.
“I could’ve sworn I heard like… a fox, but it’s not mating season,” murmured Strike.
“An owl?” suggested Nick then.
“Owls don’t sound like that. You’re too Londoner,” joked Strike, but he felt uneasy. “This way, I’ve got a bad feeling.”
His friends didn’t question him, and followed him into the Cambridge Campus they were just bordering, entering the halls of residences. They walked quietly in the dark, and immediately could hear like struggling, so Strike gestured at them to be quiet and not to turn the lights on and approached the stairs the noise was coming from. They were big wooden stairs, and Strike could hear he heard some noise behind the staircase. The three stopped, attentive. Could be horny students having sex, in which case they didn’t want to know. But then they heard what really sounded like someone physically struggling and wrestling, and the noise of screams being muffled with a hand against a mouth. Strike knew the noise all too well and gestured for Nick and Ilsa to stand back. He regretted not having his guns on in that moment.
“Military Police, come out with your hands up where I can see them!” Strike shouted, punching the light switch on and grabbing his wallet for his military ID. His deep, strong and commanding voice reverberated in the corridor. For a moment, it was really quiet. Then slowly, a figure moved out of the staircase and into the light, hands up, slowly. It was a big man in his fifties, bald and clean-shaven, and it seemed all good if it wasn’t for a bruising eye, a bit of blood in his lip he was trying hard to clean quickly with his tongue, the open fly with a small bloodstain on the edge of his trousers’ waist, that his poorly accommodated jumper wasn’t hiding, and a hard-on hidden beneath his trousers. Details a man as trained as Strike only needed a second to store in his memory.
“You’re just a boy,” the man said, sounding surprised.
“Corporal Cormoran Strike, Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch,” said Strike, lifting his ID. He was still about two or three metres away. “What were you doing there?”
The man suddenly paled, his eyes widened, and he attempted a run. He was physically corpulent and bigger than Strike, and even though he looked about fifty something, he looked fit too. Strike, however, had too much of a good training, and in a heartbeat had tackled him to the ground and given him such a punch the man was knocked out cold. Strike grabbed his waist.
“Donald Trewin, fifty-three,” said Strike raising his voice for his friends to listen. “He doesn’t have any Cambridge ID, he’s not a student. Nick, hurry, call 999, I think he’s assaulted somebody,” Strike’s heart was accelerated as he lifted his jumper to see bruises below, and caught sight of a semen stain in the edge of the man’s shirt. He made sure the man was out cold before getting up, eyes glued to him.
“Corm! There’s someone there!” Ilsa alerted, and Strike turned to the bookcase, while Nick was on the phone.
“Stay away from the man in case he wakes up,” Strike warned them. “Nick, get an ambulance. I think he’s a rapist,” he walked with his friends closer to the bookcase, hearing a repressed, scared whimpering and sobbing, and saw a figure on the floor. “Hey,” he lowered his voice to make it softer, “I’m Cormoran, military police. Can I help you?”
“I think he’s raped her,” said Ilsa. Nick frowned, his phone against his ear, calling for police backup and an ambulance. “Let me, she won’t want more men…” she walked past Strike and carefully approached the figure, rolling it over gently so that the light hit her, revealing a young girl with long strawberry-blonde hair. Her clothes were torn, her trousers blood-stained and pulled down, her shirt had been yanked open, the buttons ripped, and she was trying to readjust her bra to cover her chest, that had angry nail marks over milky, freckled skin. Her neck was purple, her face covered in blood from what seemed like a broken nose, and her left eye was swollen shut and purple too, and as the woman tried to speak, her voice could barely come out. “Fuck sakes… hey, don’t worry, you’re safe now okay?” Ilsa said softly, removing her coat to cover the woman, helping her sit up against the wall. “I’m Ilsa, I’m a lawyer, and these are my friend Corm, he’s a soldier, he’s knocked that guy out so he won’t hurt you again, and my fiancé, he’s a doctor. Nick, Nick, come here…”
While Nick and Ilsa helped Robin, Strike went over to the assailant, Trewin, and checked he had a pulse before punching him again angrily, making his face bleed more. Then, he made sure Trewin was unarmed and because Strike himself didn’t know when he’d wake up and he was unarmed too, and didn’t have his handcuffs, he then dragged Trewin to a cleaning closet, pulling out a heavy cleaning cart full of cleaning things, and using it to keep the door blocked closed with the man inside on the floor. That should keep him from escaping while police came.
“How is she?” Strike asked, returning to his friends. His hand was hurting now, but it didn’t matter. Worried, he approached the small group. Nick and Ilsa had coaxed the young girl to come out of the small space under the stairwell and sit on the stairs so Nick could check her out with proper light. Now, Nick stood at a distance with a shaken expression and Ilsa sat with the girl, who sobbed hoarsely while Ilsa tried to calm her down, holding her carefully.
“She can hardly speak, poor thing he nearly strangled her to death,” Nick murmured to his friend, “but we’ve gotten to understand she didn’t know the man, he came out of nowhere, dragged her down there and tried to kill her while raping her. She was a virgin,” he added, lowering his voice, “so she’s bleeding and in pain, but I don’t think it’s anything major in terms of… it shouldn’t require surgery, I hope. It’s not my area of expertise.”
“I understand.”
“And she may have a cracked rib,” added Nick. “Otherwise, I think she should be able to heal-up. We told her police and an ambulance are coming and we’re not going to leave her alone. I think…” he glanced at both women, “Ilsa will want to go in the ambulance with her, so I’ll get the car and meet them in the hospital. The girl only feels safe with Ilsa, understandably, and is so shaken up now… wouldn’t want to make this more traumatic to her than it already is leaving her with strangers without the one person she seems to trust now.”
“Of course, we’ll do that. Thanks Nick,” Strike patted his shoulder and carefully approached the woman. He had dealt with situations alike at work a thousand times, but it never got any easier. “Hi there,” he said softly, “can I see your student card? We can call your parents if we know who you are.”
The woman looked at Strike with her one visible blue-grey eye full of tears and nodded, sniffling, but she was shaking too much to pull her wallet from her purse, that Ilsa had recovered from a corner. The strap was broken, but the rest seemed untouched and the lawyer helped her, taking her wallet and handing it to Strike, who opened it and found the student card.
“Okay, you’re a student, R. Ellacott,” read Strike. Cambridge’s cards had very little information, so he next dug out a driver’s license he found. “And you drive. Robin Venetia Ellacott, you just turned twenty, you’re from Masham. That’s Yorkshire isn’t it?” he tried to comfort her speaking of home, and Robin nodded nervously. “Yorkshire’s beautiful. You know, I used to live in Manchester when I was younger, for a few weeks only but… one hardly forgets so much green and so much beauty, uh?” he smiled small, returning her wallet to her purse.
“She’s understandably shaken,” Ilsa murmured. “But it’s only going to get better from here, okay Robin? This is rock bottom, tomorrow it’ll be better. And you know what? You’re going to need a lawyer, and you’ll have me, don’t worry about money. We’ll get that son of a bitch behind bars for life, you will see. He’s never hurting you again.”
Robin nodded, looking graceful, and rubbed her tears with a shaking hand.
“I’ll go see where the ambulance is, they’re going to need some help finding this stairwell,” said Nick, before going out into the street.
“Okay Robin,” Strike sat on the steps with her, but made sure to keep some distance, “I’ll tell you what comes now okay?” he said very gently. “Ilsa will accompany you in the ambulance, and they’ll get you to Addenbrooke Hospital, where Nick works, he’s a gastroenterologist, but he has tons of good friends who will take care of you. And I’ve locked that bastard in the cleaning closet, so police will arrest him, I’ll tell them everything that happened, and they’ll get him far, far away from you. And then we’re going to call your parents and I’ll stay with you until they arrive, okay? In fact, I could call your parents now if you want. Maybe your Dad, you want me to call him and tell him to come over?”
Robin sniffled and nodded, reaching for her purse with a shaking hand and taking her phone. After two attempts she had unlocked her phone and gave it to Strike.
“M-Michael,” she stuttered hoarsely.
“Okay,” Strike nodded, taking his own phone to call, checking the number on the screen. “Don’t worry Robin, Dad is on his way, and he’ll take you home, okay? Bet your teachers can send you the material home. Don’t worry,” Strike pressed his little Nokia against his phone, and took a deep breath.
He hoped more than anything he wasn’t telling Robin a blatant lie.