Career of Evil

“Such as having her leg cut off and being in a wheelchair and being pushed to the edge of the stage and watching One Direction and having them come and make a big fuss of her afterwards because she was disabled,” said Hazel on a single breath. “Imagine that. It’s disgusting. There are people who are really disabled and they never wanted it. I’m a nurse. I know. I see them. Well,” she said, with a glance at Strike’s lower legs, “you don’t need telling.

“You didn’t, did you?” she asked suddenly, point blank. “You didn’t — you didn’t cut — do it — yourself?”

Was that why she had wanted to see him, Strike wondered. In some confused, subconscious manner, trying to find her moorings in the sea on which she was suddenly adrift, had she wanted to prove a point — even though her sister was gone and beyond understanding — that people didn’t do that, not in the real world where cushions stood neatly on points and disability came only by mischance, through crumbling walls or roadside explosives?

“No,” he said. “I was blown up.”

“There you are, you see!” she said, tears erupting again, savagely triumphant. “I could have told her that — I could have told her if she’d only... if she’d asked me... but what she claimed,” said Hazel, gulping, “was that her leg felt like it shouldn’t be there. Like it was wrong to have it and it needed to come off — like a tumor or something. I wouldn’t listen. It was all nonsense. Ray says he tried to talk sense into her. He told her she didn’t know what she was asking for, that she wouldn’t want to be in hospital like he was after he broke his back, laid up for months in plaster, skin sores and infections and all the rest of it. He didn’t get angry with her, though. He’d say to her, come and help me in the garden or something, distract her.

“The police told us she was talking to people online who were like her. We had no idea. I mean, she was sixteen, you can’t go looking on their laptops, can you? Not that I’d know what to look for.”

“Did she ever mention me to you?” Strike asked.

“The police asked that. No. I can’t remember her ever talking about you and nor can Ray. I mean, no offense, but — I remember the Lula Landry trial, but I wouldn’t have remembered your name from that, or recognized you. If she’d brought you up I’d remember. It’s a funny name — no offense.”

“What about friends? Did she go out much?”

“She hardly had any friends. She wasn’t the popular sort. She lied to all the kids at school too, and nobody likes that, do they? They bullied her for it. Thought she was strange. She hardly ever went out. When she was meeting this supposed Niall, I don’t know.”

Her anger did not surprise Strike. Kelsey had been an unplanned addition to her spotless household. Now, for the rest of her life, Hazel would carry guilt and grief, horror and regret, not least that her sister’s life had been ended before she could grow out of the peculiarities that had helped estrange them.

“Would it be all right if I used your bathroom?” Strike asked.

Dabbing her eyes, she nodded.

“Straight ahead, top of the stairs.”

Strike emptied his bladder while reading a framed citation for “brave and meritorious conduct,” awarded to firefighter Ray Williams, which was hanging over the cistern. He strongly suspected that Hazel had hung that there, not Ray. Otherwise the bathroom displayed little of interest. The same meticulous attention to cleanliness and neatness displayed in the sitting room extended all the way to the inside of the medicine cabinet, where Strike learned that Hazel was still menstruating, that they bulk-bought toothpaste and that one or both of the couple had hemorrhoids.

He left the bathroom as quietly as he could. Faintly, from behind a closed door, came a soft rumbling indicating that Ray was asleep. Strike took two decisive steps to the right and found himself in Kelsey’s box room.

Everything matched, covered in the same shade of lilac: walls, duvet, lampshade and curtains. Strike thought he might have guessed that order had been forcibly imposed on chaos in here, even had he not seen the rest of the house.

A large cork noticeboard ensured that there would be no unsightly pin marks on the walls. Kelsey had plastered the cork with pictures of five pretty young boys whom Strike assumed were One Direction. Their heads and legs protruded outside the frame of the board. There was a particular recurrence of a blond boy. Other than the pictures of One Direction, she had cut out puppies, mostly shih-tzus, random words and acronyms: OCCUPY, FOMO and AMAZEBALLS, and many recurrences of the name NIALL, often stuck onto hearts. The slapdash, random collage told of an attitude completely at odds with the precision with which the duvet had been laid on the bed and the exactly square position of the lilac rug.