Robin’s scream reverberated off the windows. She backed away from the desk, staring at the obscene object lying there. The leg was smooth, slender and pale, and she had grazed it with her finger as she pulled its packaging open, felt the cold rubbery texture of the skin.
She had just managed to quell her scream by clamping her hands over her mouth when the glass door burst open beside her. Six foot three and scowling, Strike’s shirt hung open, revealing a monkeyish mass of dark chest hair.
“What the—?”
He followed her stricken gaze and saw the leg. She felt his hand close roughly over her upper arm and he steered her out onto the landing.
“How did it arrive?”
“Courier,” she said, allowing him to walk her up the stairs. “On a motorbike.”
“Wait here. I’ll call the police.”
When he had closed the door of his flat behind her she stood quite still, heart juddering, listening to his footsteps returning downstairs. Acid rose in her throat. A leg. She had just been given a leg. She had just carried a leg calmly upstairs, a woman’s leg in a box. Whose leg was it? Where was the rest of her?
She crossed to the nearest chair, a cheap affair of padded plastic and metal legs, and sat down, her fingers still pressed against her numb lips. The package, she remembered, had been addressed to her by name.
Strike, meanwhile, was at the office window that looked down into the road, scanning Denmark Street for any sign of the courier, his mobile pressed to his ear. By the time he returned to the outer office to scrutinize the open package on the desk, he had made contact with the police.
“A leg?” repeated Detective Inspective Eric Wardle on the end of the line. “A fucking leg?”
“And it’s not even my size,” said Strike, a joke he would not have made had Robin been present. His trouser leg was hitched up to reveal the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He had been in the process of dressing when he had heard Robin’s scream.
Even as he said it, he realized that this was a right leg, like his own lost limb, and that it had been cut below the knee, which was exactly where he had been amputated. His mobile still clamped to his ear, Strike peered more closely at the limb, his nostrils filling with an unpleasant smell like recently defrosted chicken. Caucasian skin: smooth, pale and unblemished but for an old greenish bruise on the calf, imperfectly shaven. The stubbly hairs were fair and the unpainted toenails a little grubby. The severed tibia shone icy white against the surrounding flesh. A clean cut: Strike thought it likely to have been made by an axe or a cleaver.
“A woman’s, did you say?”
“Looks like—”
Strike had noticed something else. There was scarring on the calf where the leg had been severed: old scarring, unrelated to the wound that had taken it from the body.
How many times during his Cornish childhood had he been caught unawares as he stood with his back to the treacherous sea? Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality. When it slammed into them with the force of cold metal they were appalled. Strike had faced, worked with and managed fear all his professional life, but the sight of that old scarring rendered him temporarily winded by a terror all the worse for its unexpectedness.
“Are you still there?” said Wardle on the end of the line.
“What?”
Strike’s twice-broken nose was within an inch of the place where the woman’s leg had been cut off. He was remembering the scarred leg of a child he had never forgotten… how long was it since he had seen her? How old would she be now?
“You called me first…?” Wardle prompted.
“Yeah,” said Strike, forcing himself to concentrate. “I’d rather you did it than anyone else, but if you can’t—”
“I’m on my way,” said Wardle. “Won’t be long. Sit tight.”
Strike turned off his phone and set it down, still staring at the leg. Now he saw that there was a note lying underneath it, a typed note. Trained by the British Army in investigative procedure, Strike resisted the powerful temptation to tug it out and read it: he must not taint forensic evidence. Instead he crouched down unsteadily so that he could read the address hanging upside down on the open lid.
The box had been addressed to Robin, which he did not like at all. Her name was correctly spelled, typed on a white sticker that bore the address of their office. This sticker overlay another. Squinting, determined not to reposition the box even to read the address more clearly, he saw that the sender had first addressed the box to “Cameron Strike,” then overlain it with the second sticker reading “Robin Ellacott.” Why had they changed their mind?
“Fuck,” said Strike quietly.
He stood up with some difficulty, took Robin’s handbag from the peg behind the door, locked the glass door and headed upstairs.
“Police are on their way,” he told her as he set her bag down in front of her. “Want a cup of tea?”
She nodded.
“Want brandy in it?”
“You haven’t got any brandy,” she said. Her voice was slightly croaky.