Chapter Text
“He ain’t mine,” Jonny Rokeby told Leda Strike. “You’ve been with half o’ London. Could be anybody’s.”
Then came the HLA test. His legal team told him to insist on proof of paternity before he committed to giving Leda money on a regular basis. His manager, meanwhile, told him it might be better to pay Leda than to let her go to the press, because the news-reading public would probably believe her about the baby.
They all knew that Leda had been around; but there’d also been that time when Jonny’d done Leda on a beanbag whilst The Deadbeats were partying on their first US tour: people knew she was someone he’d slept with because they’d bloody seen them at it. And although she hadn’t exactly looked like she didn't want to, a few people said afterwards that you shouldn’t really do that stuff when a girl was as out-of-it as all that… Even so, no one tried to put a stop to it – instead they’d let it happen and watched.
If Leda went public, then it might not look that great for Jonny – or for his management, which was the the thing his manager didn’t fully say. Rokeby complained that the whole thing was a fucking ball-ache and that a girl like Leda was asking for anything she got. But he went to the clinic and told Leda to get herself and the kid tested too: if it turned out the nipper was really his, then he’d pay up, no problem.
And that was how he found out that Leda Strike’s boy, Cormoran Blue, really was his second-born child.
He told his people to sort out the money.
*
It ended up in the press anyway, because when Carla sued him for divorce and for anything else she could get her hands on, her lawyer brought the whole thing up in court. It probably cost him one helluva lot in additional alimony, and it definitely made for a load of bloody awkward questions from Maimie, his oldest, who was ten by then, and clever enough to have worked some things out by herself. The year Cormoran was conceived had been the year after Jonny’s split from Shirley, Maimie’s mother. Rokeby hadn’t seen much of his daughter back then, and he’d also been dating Carla at the time. Even at ten, Maimie could do the maths…
Leda sent him a picture of Cormoran when he was around five, though in fact he looked a lot older. “He’s bleedin’ massive,” said Rokeby to Peter Gillespie, his lawyer (and self-proclaimed ‘enforcer’). He handed the photo to Gillespie, who chucked it in the bin.
The kid didn’t really seem real to Rokeby, and even with the paternity test, he still didn’t completely trust that the boy was actually his. He looked nothing like Jonny, and everyone knew the way Leda put it about: she’d slept with other musicians besides him, even on that one bloody US tour…
To Jonny it seemed like people were always wanting some shit or other from him: attention, an autograph, an interview, money, a sellout tour, another album as good as Hold it Back… Leda was just a bird he’d shagged who was out to play him. She was just like all the rest, only worse. Everyone wanted a fucking piece of him, and they could all go fuck themselves, for all he cared.
One day in 1982 Leda turned up at the studio where they were recording Dark Day in Summer. She had the kid with her, and she wanted more money, or something, and she and Rokeby ended up screaming at each other about how he was a cruel, uncaring dad, and how she was a loser whore who always pissed away everything he paid her. Rokeby was furious, and in the end he shouted her down, telling her that she’d better not try this game ever again, and that the kid was only a bloody accident anyway. The boy was crying, which Jonny didn’t like, and again he looked much older than he was. (Later Rokeby worked out that Cormoran must’ve only been about seven.) He was way too big for his clothes, his nose was runny, and he looked clumsy, oafish, and a mess. Rokeby instructed security at the studio to see Leda off the premises and went back to the recording booth.
“Kid seems like a fucking retard,” he told Deadbeats base player, Mickey Divine.
He didn’t see Cormoran again for another eleven years after that.
*
It turned out the kid wasn’t a retard.
When Cormoran was eighteen, Ted Nancarrow, Leda’s brother, wrote to Rokeby telling him that the boy had a place at Oxford University. Rokeby’s financial obligation to Cormoran was over now, since he was legally an adult, but when Rokeby’s accountant finally got around to checking, they discovered that the money Jonny had been paying his illegitimate son hadn’t been touched in years. Leda had been disbarred from handling it several years before, and for some reason Cormoran and his uncle hadn’t accessed it since. Rokeby hadn’t given the kid or the money a thought in ages – he hadn’t actually seen that much of Gaby and Dani, his girls with Carla, lately either, but he had two boys with Jenny now and they were properly his. Al and Ed. His sons.
Cormoran followed the instructions sent to him and made an appointment with Rokeby’s manager. Jonny found he didn’t really mind seeing him this time. Oxford was a big, fucking surprise: Rokeby had always assumed the boy would end up a dope-head like his mother, but now he was turning out all right Jonny was starting to think that maybe the kid wasn’t totally unlike him after all. Not that he’d ever come close to Oxford and all that shit: he’d always been London-bound, living in a squat in Chelsea and playing in clubs for no money – before attending, then dropping out, of art college. But he could’ve gone to a top university, he reckoned, if he’d wanted to, and he liked the thought that he was helping this boy, his kid, to go. Maybe Cormoran might even turn out to be a good influence on Al and Ed… Jenny had said she wouldn’t mind if they saw him, from time to time.
Rokeby smiled at Cormoran and shook his hand. “Well done,” he told him, feeling benevolent, generous, and pleased with Cormoran, himself and the world. “All that money in that account. That’s yours. It’s a nice little nest egg for your future. See you through university and beyond. Whatever you wanna do.”
Cormoran stared back stonily, his eyes dark, brooding and belligerent. Then he said in a low, slow, deliberate voice, “You. Can. Take. Your. Fucking. Money. Stuff it up yer arse. And set fire to it, fer all I care.” And he turned around and walked out.
For the first time it truly hit Jonny Rokeby that Cormoran Strike really was his son.
*
Leda Strike died of a heroin overdose on a filthy mattress surrounded by stoned squatters who failed to notice for six hours that she had ceased to breath. Her monstrous, psychopath man-child of a husband pleaded not guilty to her murder and was acquitted – probably because no one who’d been around either Leda or her husband at the time was capable of giving credible evidence against him.
“That’s fucked up, man,” said Mickey Divine profoundly.
“Yeah. It’s shit,” agreed Rokeby. He didn’t dwell on the matter for very long.
He didn’t write to Cormoran. It wasn’t his business any more, and the boy was nineteen now, and not his responsibility anyway. Cormoran had decided he didn’t like his dad, or his dad’s money, and Rokeby told himself that he was doing the boy a favour by not hassling him when he wanted to be left alone.
Also, he didn’t much want to deal with a kid who’d just lost his mum that way. As Mickey said – it was fucked up.
Through Ted Nancarrow he found out that after Leda’s death, Cormoran had left Oxford and joined the army.
…The fucking army… and not just the army, but the military fucking police.
The fleeting moment of connection he’d felt with the angry, rebellious eighteen-year-old who’d told him to incinerate his own money was lost in Rokeby’s complete incomprehension of an act entirely foreign to him. “He’s gone and joined the bloody fascists,” Jonny told Mickey, because that was how he had always thought of Her-Majesty’s-Armed-fucking-Forces… the British Empire, the Gulf War… and Maggie Thatcher sending troops to the Falklands so that she could be photographed in a tank and win a bloody election… Why in God’s name would anyone want to join the army, wondered Rokeby. And how the hell was that kid even Leda’s, let alone his?
Nancarrow wrote that Cormoran had been sent to monitor UN peacekeeping in Sarajevo. “We’re very proud of him,” proclaimed Leda’s brother.
“Kid’s a bleedin’ freak of nature,” muttered Rokeby, remembering Leda Strike and her glassy-eyed hippiness.
But he put the letter away in the box Jenny had given him, where he kept pictures, scribblings and keepsakes of Maimie, Gaby, Dani and Pru. Dani was bloody brilliant at art, and the box was full of drawings and home-made birthday cards she’d given him over the years. Prudence was Rokeby’s other, illegitimate ‘accident,’ besides Cormoran, and Jonny didn’t really know what she was good at. (Her mother said she was doing well at school.) Rokeby still thought that the army was a fucking fucked-up choice for any son of his, but he started to pay a bit more attention to news reports about Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially when British troops were sent home in body bags.
Later Cormoran was posted to Cyprus. Rokeby didn’t hear anything from him, or from Ted Nancarrow, for several years.
*
Things were always easier with Prudence than they were with Cormoran. Her mother, Lindsey, made her own money and was also totally sane, unlike Leda. There were never any serious demands or recriminations from Lindsey Fanthrope, who was determined, resourceful and independent. She had her own life to lead, and had been getting on with living it for years now, having ended her brief affair with Jonny shortly before Pru was born.
Rokeby’s contact with Pru was infrequent, and the girl was shy around him, so the fleeting times they spent together tended to be awkward and tedious. But there was never any screaming or any sudden, uninvited appearances at recording studios, and there was no drug-overdose or murder trial, and no danger that the girl was going to end up killed in armed conflict overseas and that the press would turn up inconveniently on his doorstep demanding comments and tributes. Prudence was never much of a problem, really.
Jonny was vaguely aware, despite the fact that he never saw him, that Cormoran did all right with women. He might be no oil painting, and he might look nothing like his dad, but he seemed to be together, on-and-off, with a posh bird he met at Oxford called Charlotte Campbell. She was rich, sometimes worked as a model, and she was bloody gorgeous – the kind of girl who stopped traffic in the streets, she was so fucking beautiful.
Jonny had no idea how Cormoran had managed to pull a looker like that, and sometimes the girl was in the papers hooked up with some other bloke, but she and Cormoran always seemed to end up back together afterwards, from what Rokeby could tell. Rokeby knew that Charlotte’s father was Anthony Campbell, the guy off the telly who made documentaries about art and culture and shit – Jonny was introduced to him once at some award ceremony he went to with Jenny; they shook hands and neither man mentioned that their children knew each other and were apparently sleeping together.
It wasn’t Rokeby’s business what Strike got up to, anyway.
*
Cormoran was blown up in Afghanistan.
He survived.
A decorated war hero, he was shipped home to Selly Oak Hospital for treatment and recuperation. This time Rokeby sent him a note, wishing him a speedy recovery.
“You put ‘speedy recovery’?” asked Al, who had actually telephoned his older, illegitimate brother, with a view to visiting him at the Amputee Rehabilitation Unit. “Dad, he’s had half his leg blown off. Might not be the best choice of words.”
Gillespie laughed when he heard about Jonny’s faux pas. “Maybe I’ll send him a card saying ‘hope it grows back soon,’” he said, casually comical and cruel.
Al told Jonny that Cormoran seemed like a pretty cool guy, and that he kinda liked the idea of him being his brother. (Unlike Rokeby, who had maintained for decades the Cockney vowels he adopted at seventeen, Al and Ed spoke with fluid, transatlantic accents and vernacular, Jenny’s work having often taken them to Los Angeles during childhood. In his teens, Al had attended school in Switzerland, and he and Ed had also spent time in the home Jonny and Jenny owned in the Bahamas for tax reasons.)
By now Gaby and Dani were doing pretty well for themselves, Gaby having made the most of her stepmother’s contacts and secured a job at the BBC. Dani, meanwhile, had used money from her father to set up her own jewellery company: Jonny liked knowing he’d invested in his daughter’s business and that she was getting noticed and winning design awards. She’d been top of her class at The Slade, and she was bloody clever, was Dani.
One day she visited Jonny to tell him that she’d heard that Cormoran Strike wanted to start a business too. A fashion-photographer friend who knew Charlotte Campbell had told her and Gaby that Cormoran planned to set up a private detective agency. Maybe, suggested Dani tentatively, dad could give Cormoran some start-up capital too? Charlotte said he was a really good detective, and he’d won a medal and lost his leg, and he didn’t want an army desk job… Maybe dad could help him? Dad liked helping people, Dani reckoned…
It seemed like the right thing to do. And Rokeby couldn’t help reflecting that it would be better to help Cormoran out, than have him make money by selling his sob-story to the press…
The task of offering Cormoran financial assistance was given to Al as part of his sick-bed visit. Al was thrilled at his father’s thoughtfulness and generosity, so much so that he did not seriously consider the possibility that the gift might be turned down. He was dismayed and disappointed when it was, immediately and categorically.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” said Rokeby exasperatedly when he heard this. “Ask him again. Tell him it can be a bloody loan, if it makes him feel better.”
Jonny was aware that his other children wanted him to do right by Cormoran, and he grumbled to Gillespie that Cormoran’s bitch of a mother hadn’t been able to stop spending his money! What the hell was the problem with accepting a bit of cash off his old man?
As it turned out, Cormoran got back in touch before Al could make another offer: he requested a fraction of the original sum, stating his intention to pay it back in instalments. “Well, that’s bloody big of him,” muttered Rokeby irritably. He wanted to be seen to be magnanimous and he wanted Cormoran to acknowledge that he was doing a nice thing for him. Instead he felt like he was being accused of trying to buy Cormoran off. As Jonny told Jenny, when voicing his feelings on the subject, that was not what he was doing at all: he wasn’t that kind of bloke.
“No, of course not,” agreed Jenny soothingly.
Al was pleased to have even a small part of his father’s generosity accepted, and he also expressed admiration for his brother’s determined independence. In fact, Al seemed to have come away from the whole thing more impressed with his half-brother than with his father, and this also bothered Jonny more than he liked to admit. Irked by the entire situation, he decided to distance himself from the loan, its practicalities, terms and conditions. He told Gillespie to sort out the money, and asked no more about it.
*
When Lula Landry fell to her death on a cold, winter night in Mayfair, Rokeby thought that the story was sad. The girl had been gorgeous, and she was only twenty-three: Dani, who knew Lula a little and admired her a lot, cried and designed a white-gold necklace in her memory.
Then Cormoran Strike, private investigator, proved that Lula was pushed from her balcony by her adopted brother. A narcissist and a psychopath, John Bristow had killed both his adopted siblings, motivated by jealous hatred and by the desire to inherit Lula’s millions. So confident was he in his own unshakable impunity that he’d actually hired Strike himself in a bid to frame the birth-brother to whom Lula had bequeathed her fortune.
The press descended on Rokeby’s doorstep eager for comments: “The police said it was suicide, but your son caught the killer. How do you feel about that?” “Is Cormoran Strike a hero, Jonny? What can you tell us about your famous, PI son?”
Jonny could tell them virtually nothing – certainly nothing that they didn’t already know. But that didn’t stop him from holding court outside his London home, declaring to the journalists gathered there that Lula had been an angel, and that his son had done a brilliant job, bringing her killer to justice.
Other cases followed – Cormoran caught the murderer of a minor novelist (whose book sales received a posthumous boost as a result), and then the serial killer known as the Shacklewell Ripper. Jonny began speaking about his oldest son in interviews, making sure to tell the world that he was very proud of him. His sense of injury over the loan faded rapidly, and he found he now liked the idea of people associating him and Cormoran together: his boy – soldier, hero and latter-day Sherlock Holmes.
Cormoran never gave any interviews about Jonny, which his father appreciated. As Al attested, he seemed like a genuinely good guy.
Meanwhile the newspapers reported on how Cormoran’s ex-girlfriend was getting married to some toff who was the son of a viscount, and who was rumoured to have beaten his first wife. Then came the birth of photogenic twins and society-page spreads of the couple’s perfect home in Kensington; after that came reports that the husband was a drunk and a bully, and that Charlotte was in a private clinic, suicidal and only-just saved from death.
“Poor Charlotte!” exclaimed Gaby, full of genuine concern and enlivened curiosity.
“It does sound like Corm might be better off without her,” was Jenny’s understated observation on reading a colourful, gossip-column account of Charlotte Campbell Ross’s family and romantic history.
Cormoran himself was sometimes pictured in the press with a woman who apparently worked with him at the detective agency. Like the ex, she was sexy and gorgeous, although in a less glamorous, more wholesome-girl-next-door kind of way. Al said she and Corm weren’t together, but that Strike never seemed short of admirers and dates, and tended to attract incredibly beautiful women.
“Dunno how he does it,” remarked Al, puzzled and impressed.
“It’s called charisma,” replied Jonny. “All of us Rokeby men have it.”
*
Jonny Rokeby did not think that Cormoran Strike could have been just anybody’s any more. He liked people knowing that this man was his son.
*