The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)(79)
Author: J.K. Rowling

“I wouldn’t expect you to match what they’d give me,” Robin said thickly.

“I couldn’t come close,” said Strike.

(But she knew the state of Strike’s finances almost as well as he did and had already guessed at the most she could expect. The previous evening, when Matthew had found her in tears at the prospect of leaving, she had told him her estimate of Strike’s best offer.

“But he hasn’t offered you anything at all,” Matthew had said. “Has he?”

“No, but if he did…”

“Well, it would be up to you,” Matthew had said stiffly. “It’d be your choice. You’d have to decide.”

She knew that Matthew did not want her to stay. He had sat for hours in Casualty while they stitched Strike up, waiting to take Robin home. He had told her, rather formally, that she had done very well, showing such initiative, but he had been distant and faintly disapproving ever since, especially when their friends clamored for the inside details on everything that had appeared in the press.

But surely Matthew would like Strike, if only he met him? And Matthew himself had said that it was up to her what she did…)

Robin drew herself up a little, blew her nose again and told Strike, with calmness slightly undermined by a small hiccough, the figure for which she would be happy to stay.

It took Strike a few seconds to respond. He could just afford to pay what she had suggested; it was within five hundred pounds of what he himself had calculated that he could manage. She was, whichever way you looked at it, an asset that it would be impossible to replace at the price. There was only one tiny fly in the ointment…

“I could manage that,” he said. “Yeah. I could pay you that.”

The telephone rang. Beaming at him, she answered it, and the delight in her voice was such that it sounded as though she had been eagerly anticipating the call for days.

“Oh, hullo, Mr. Gillespie! How are you? Mr. Strike’s just sent you a check, I put it in the post myself this morning…All the arrears, yes, and a little bit more…Oh no, Mr. Strike’s adamant he wants to pay off the loan…Well, that’s very kind of Mr. Rokeby, but Mr. Strike would rather pay. He’s hopeful he’ll be able to clear the full amount within the next few months…”

An hour later, as Strike sat on a hard plastic chair at the Amputee Center, his injured leg stretched in front of him, he reflected that if he had known that Robin was going to stay, he would not have bought her the green dress. The gift would not, he was sure, find favor with Matthew, especially once he had seen her in it, and heard that she had previously modeled it for Strike.

With a sigh, he reached for a copy of Private Eye lying on the table beside him. When the consultant first called him, Strike did not respond; he was immersed in the page headed “LandryBalls,” crammed with examples of journalistic excess relating to the case that he and Robin had solved. So many columnists had mentioned Cain and Abel that the magazine had run a special feature.

“Mr. Strick?” shouted the consultant, for the second time. “Mr. Cameron Strick?”

He looked up, grinning.

“Strike,” he said clearly. “My name’s Cormoran Strike.”

“Oh, I do apologize…this way…”

As Strike limped after the doctor, a phrase floated up out of his subconscious, a phrase he had read long before he had seen his first dead body, or marveled at a waterfall in an African mountainside, or watched the face of a killer collapsing as he realized he was caught.

I am become a name.

“On to the table, please, and take off the prosthesis.”

Where had it come from, that phrase? Strike lay back on the table and frowned up at the ceiling, ignoring the consultant now bending over the remainder of his leg, muttering as he stared and gently prodded.

It took minutes to dredge up the lines Strike had learned so long ago.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees; all times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name…