Chapter Text
‘I’m leaving now.’
Robin looked up at her husband from her bed, a partially read novel in her right hand.
‘But I thought you didn’t take over until midnight?’
Cormoran’s bulky frame, slightly overweight once more after eight years of marriage, took up most of the doorway.
‘The tube’s down so it’s going to be a long journey to Bermondsey. May as well go now instead of sitting around here.’
‘Oh… OK’.
Strike turned to leave, hesitated, and then looked back at his wife.
‘I.. er… depending upon how it goes, I will probably head straight to the office and kip there.. so don’t worry if I’m not here when you wake up.’
Robin put her book down in earnest now.
‘Surely you’ll be finished by two, three at the latest? And we’ve both booked tomorrow off.’
Strike wore his fifty years well, but he looked tired, despite the fact that he had a long night of work ahead.
‘Well, I’ve got a fair bit of paperwork to catch up on.. and it’s not like we’ve planned to do anything.’
‘Right. As per usual,’ Robin retorted, under her breath.
Strike opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and then turned away from the door.
Robin sighed, closed her eyes for a moment, and then reopened them and returned to her book. She heard Strike shuffling around the spare room (or, as she now thought of it, ‘his’ bedroom) and then the kitchen, before finally the front door slammed. He hadn’t called out goodbye.
Robin tried to return to her book, but her concentration was shot. She glanced at the clock: 10:06 pm. She had been intending to get an early night, the last few weeks of frantic work having taken its toll, but this most recent altercation with her husband had distracted her, and Robin realised that an evening of rumination was likely ahead of her instead of blissful sleep.
Ironically, what had perturbed Robin the most about the exchange with Cormoran was not the fact that they had almost argued.. it was the fact that he had simply given up and silently walked away, an air of resignation left in his place. The Cormoran of old would have angrily challenged that statement, and whilst it may have resulted in a fight, Robin felt that a fight right now, where grievances are raised and, hopefully, apologies are made, is probably what they needed right now. Instead, with a virtual shrug of the shoulders, Cormoran had simply left.
When had the decline started? Robin couldn’t pinpoint it. She just knew that there had been an almost imperceptible shift in their happiness as each year had passed. In a way it was worse that there was no obvious cause.. on the surface everything was fine.. any complaints sounded frivolous when aired out loud, but the slow drip drip drip was taking its toll.
Strike, refusing to come with her on her last visit home to Masham, feigning pressure of work. His distracted, one word answers, fiddling with his phone, when she tried to make conversation that didn’t revolve around a case. His longer and more frequent trips to the pub.. sometimes with Nick, sometimes alone, but never with her.
Robin, to her shame, had openly ridiculed and dismissed Strike’s suggestion on a line of enquiry in a team meeting, something she would never have done to one of their sub-contractors. She had intended to apologise after the meeting, but Cormoran had rushed off to another appointment, and the issue had been left unresolved.
And now of course, they had separate bedrooms. It had started about six months ago, during a busy period of surveillance shifts followed by Cormoran having a heavy cold. What started as an act of consideration, to allow the other to get a decent night’s sleep, had become a habit. When the long shifts had died down, and the illnesses had passed, Strike had not returned.
She knew that they needed to talk, but neither it seemed had the inclination, or perhaps the bravery, to start the conversation.
‘Fairytales’, Robin thought. They all end with the assumption of ‘happily ever after’.. but you don’t see the day-to-day life afterwards. The drudgery, the setbacks, the stresses. The worry when the business struggled during the pandemic (not too many spouses need tailing in a national lockdown) and then the smouldering resentment that the other wasn’t pulling their weight at home when life got frantic. The realisation that, year on year, just a little bit less thought had gone into marking each other’s special occasions. Robin would now be grateful, she realised with more than a hint of irony, for a bunch of flowers.
All attempts at sleep abandoned, Robin got up, poured herself a glass of wine, and took it to the living room. She pondered the unthinkable.. the thought that for several weeks now she had kept pushed into the corner of her mind.. in the same corner where she had tried to push any thoughts of attraction to her now husband before it became impossible. Was their relationship irretrievably broken? And if so, would this be the end of the Agency?
Practical matters first. If it was the end of their relationship, surely they could go back to being business partners, even if not friends? Lots of people ran businesses with individuals whose company they didn’t enjoy out of work. And even if their relationship did break down, it wouldn’t be from a lack of trust in each other. They could still run the business successfully, Robin was sure of it.
Did they still trust each other? Robin thought so. At least, she trusted Strike. Ever since the day they got together, despite his somewhat questionable romantic history, he had never given her a single reason to doubt his faithfulness. Hers? Perhaps not quite so clearcut.
About six months previously (around the same time, Robin realised with a start, that her husband had started sleeping in the spare room), she had arranged a lunch with Ryan Murphy, back in London on a quick visit from his new home in Spain. They had split up over eight years ago by this point, and the feelings of acrimony on Ryan’s side had long since faded. Robin accepted his lunch invitation for old time’s sake. It was a genuinely innocent encounter.. but Robin did not tell her husband about it… reasoning with herself that it would only be misconstrued.
The problem was that, the next day, Ryan sent a bouquet of flowers to the office.. Robin found them on her desk upon return from a surveillance. All perfectly innocent.. but when Strike had quirked an eyebrow and asked who they were from, Robin had lied ‘Oh, just from Mrs Baxter, grateful for the work we did for her’. It was only a few days later that their office manager had let slip that Cormoran had taken delivery of them himself… directly from Ryan.
Robin sighed as she re-entered the kitchen, not bothering to turn on the lights, and tipped away the rest of her wine. Getting drunk was not going to help the situation. She needed a clear head to think through what her next step should be. Consult a solicitor? Not to start divorce proceedings of course, not yet.. but at least to see where things stood. What her options were. The very idea would have been unthinkable this time last year, but Robin was tired. Tired of the silent treatment, tired of the isolation.. there were few downsides to marrying your best friend, but the big one is that, when things start to go wrong, you don’t have many options for a debrief.
Robin could speak to her parents, of course, but her stubbornness guaranteed that would never happen. She could imagine the conversation with her mother now.. the inevitable ‘I told you so’, never vocalised, but the implication loud and clear. And Ilsa, busy with her husband and son, would surely try and downplay any of her worries.
She missed talking to her best friend. She missed the stupid intimate jokes that only they understood, the ease of simply, finally, being together. Now, several years later, the joy had been replaced by other feelings: annoyance, self-doubt, the feeling of treading on eggshells to avoid a snarky and patronising response, the irresistible urge to have the last word and, if not stick the knife in, at least a little drawing pin.
Robin returned to her bedroom, and settled back into bed.