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“Ilsa? Need help.”
“Hi, Corm, nice to hear from you. We’re fine, thanks. Your godson is doing great.”
“Sorry.” Strike was glad his old friend couldn’t see him rolling his eyes. He stepped to the side a little, his mobile pressed to his ear, aware he was blocking the aisle in the small, cramped supermarket, and his eyes scanned the meagre selection of boxes of chocolates. His heart sank further.
Ilsa's voice was warm. “I’m only messing with you. What can I do for you? Another client need defending?”
“No,” Strike replied, wishing it were that simple. “I’m in Sainsbury’s.”
“You normally manage to buy groceries without any help,” she teased. “What’s the trouble?”
“I need something for Robin. I’m going to visit her.”
Ilsa sounded puzzled. “It was only a broken wrist. She’ll be home tomorrow.”
“I know, but she’s always visited me in hospital, so…” Strike trailed off. In front of him, a box of salted caramels sat square and stolid, mocking him. Of course he couldn’t buy her chocolates. He moved back towards the entrance of the shop.
“Um, well, anything, surely? Chocolates?”
“No. Don’t like the look of any of them.”
“Okay, flowers.”
“Christ, no. I’m not allowed.”
“Sounds like there’s a story there,” Ilsa said, intrigued.
“There is, but it's one we don’t have time for,” Strike said impatiently. He was starting to feel a little panicky. He didn’t want to be late for visiting hours, and his old BMW was on a meter that was rapidly running out.
“You’re in a supermarket. Grapes. Some nice fruit.”
“She’s not eighty."
Ilsa sighed. “Oh, god, then I don’t know. Fancy soaps.”
Strike pondered this, and wondered whether soap conveyed the message I don’t like how you smell, or I wish you’d wash more. “No.”
“Fuck’s sake,” Ilsa muttered.
There was a pause.
“A plant.”
“A what?” Strike pressed his phone harder against his ear as he stepped back out onto the street, London traffic rumbling by.
“Another plant,” Ilsa said loudly. “She loves that one you gave her as a housewarming. What was it?”
“Philodendron,” Strike said automatically. How did Ilsa know that he’d given Robin a plant?
To his bemusement, Ilsa began to laugh. “That’s why she’s called it Phyllis.”
Strike blinked, oblivious to a woman with a pushchair sighing exaggeratedly as she had to navigate around him on the pavement. “It’s got a name?”
There was an arch tone in Ilsa’s voice now. “Oh, Robin is very fond of Phyllis,” she said. “Phyllis was a hit.”
Strike looked around, wondering where the nearest florist was. Wondering if another plant was too unimaginative.
“Okay, so d’you think she’d like another plant?”
“Mate, I think she’d like anything you give her. It’s Robin.”
“That’s not true,” Strike retorted. “I’ve been told off for flowers and chocolates.”
“Because they’re generic,” Ilsa said. “No thought put into them. Just get something you think she’d like.”
Strike sighed. How was he supposed to know what Robin would like? Why did women make the simple act of buying a thing purely so as not to turn up empty-handed so bloody complicated?
He realised he was standing outside a small independent bookshop that lay next to the supermarket. In the window, next to a display of books that contained, Strike noted absently, the latest Gothic offering from Michael Fancourt, was a smaller arrangement of items of stationery. An A5 notebook was stood on end amongst a cluster of pens, its soft green pages fanned, its front adorned with forest-green heart-shaped leaves against a pale teal background. He thought about the cheap notebook on Robin’s desk, battered and tatty, with so many pages torn out, it was barely more than a pamphlet’s thickness now.
“Okay, thanks, Ilsa,” he said abruptly. “You’ve been a great help.”
“Really?” She sounded surprised. “Great. You all sorted?”
“Yup.”
“See you soon, then.”
“Yeah, see you soon. Bye.”
Strike hung up, pushed open the door of the bookshop and entered to the tinkling of a bell above him.
…
“Strike, I love it.”
Strike was alarmed to see that Robin looked tearful as she gazed down at the notebook on her lap. He hadn’t had time to wrap it, about which he had felt guilty until he realised as he gave it to her in its brown paper bag from the shop that she wouldn’t have been able to open it if he had, with her left arm still in a cast and strapped to her chest.
She was out of bed today and sat in a chair, looking much more awake than she had when she’d returned from her emergency surgery yesterday, bandaged up and dopey on morphine. She’d clearly showered and washed her hair, and was looking more like herself again.
“Are you sure?” he asked anxiously as she wiped her eyes. “I can take it back, find something better.” Maybe another plant would have been safer.
“No,” she said firmly, though her voice wobbled. “I love it, honestly.”
Strike nodded, but doubtfully, as she wiped her eyes again. He drew up a chair from the next bed which was temporarily empty, and sat down next to her.
“I rang Ilsa,” he confessed as he laid her post on the table by her bed. “But she wasn’t much help. She suggested another plant.”
Robin chuckled damply. “Another plant would have been lovely,” she said. “But I like this. It reminds me of the philodendron you gave me when I moved into my flat.”
“Me, too, that’s why I chose it,” Strike said, and then, as further tears spilled onto Robin’s cheeks: “Shit, sorry, Robin. I feel like I keep saying the wrong thing.”
“You don’t,” she replied, trying to pull a tissue from the box sitting on the table next to her water jug and the letters Strike had brought, and only succeeding in tugging the whole box towards herself. “Bugger…”
Strike reached out a large hand and held the box still for Robin to extract a tissue, and waited while she mopped her eyes.
“Sorry,” she said indistinctly. “I don’t know why I’m being so emotional.”
“You’ve had a rough 36 hours,” Strike said. “You managed to fall down half a flight of stairs yesterday—”
“Like a tit,” she said, in an echo of his own words of years ago. “And I can’t even claim to have been tailing anyone, I’m just a clumsy idiot.”
“—and you broke your wrist and needed surgery to set it,” Strike said. “It’s been a shock.”
“And you’ve been brilliant,” Robin said thickly, wiping her eyes again. “Sorting my stuff out, bringing me here, keeping an eye on my flat, fetching my post—”
Strike remembered her bemused state of half-shock as she insisted on continuing to stuff clothes into a rucksack even after he arrived at her flat, clutching her clearly broken wrist to her chest while he carried her dropped shopping up the stairs and tried to persuade her to stop packing and let him take her to A&E. As it turned out, the clothes had been needed. He was fiercely glad that it was him she had called, him she had entrusted with her house keys, him who she wanted to visit her.
“It’s what friends do, innit?” he said gruffly, laying a large, hairy-backed hand gently on her knee.
Robin stuffed the soggy tissue into her pocket and placed her hand over his, clutching his fingers in hers. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Any time,” he replied.
Silence fell, and the air somehow felt awkward as Robin clung to Strike’s hand so that he couldn’t remove it, and he tried not to think about the warmth of her knee under his palm, the softness of her thigh under his fingers, the squeeze of her hand around his.
“Strike…” Her voice was hesitant.
“Mm?” He met her gaze, and his heart began to hammer in his chest at the way she was looking at him.
“We never did talk about what you said in the office, last September.”
Strike swallowed. “Robin, we don’t have to talk about that here.”
“Did you notice the groceries you picked up?”
Strike blinked at the apparent non-sequitur, trying to remember. There had been steaks in a supermarket pack, some kind of leaves, a bag of ridiculously small onions. He hadn’t really been paying attention.
“I was going to invite you for dinner,” Robin said quietly, her gaze on their entwined hands on her leg now. “I was going to ask you—” she swallowed “—if you still felt the same.” She laughed a little, nervous. “Or if it’s taken me too long to get rid of Ryan and sort myself out, if maybe things have changed—”
“Robin,” Strike said softly, willing her to look at him. His hand squeezed her knee gently as her eyes found his again. “Nothing has changed. My feelings are the same as they were last year, and they’re not going anywhere. But you don’t have to—”
She leaned forward and silenced his mouth with her own, and for a delicious moment Strike drowned in the taste and feel of her before hurriedly drawing back, feeling somehow that he was taking advantage of his best friend who was currently in a very vulnerable state.
“Robin—”
“Strike,” she said, smiling, looking suddenly happier and more confident than she had in weeks. “Shut up and kiss me.”
He grinned. “Okay.”