Summer in the City

He returned to the inner office and pushed up the window, allowing the afternoon air, heavy with exhaust fumes and London’s particular smell of warm brick, soot and, today, a faint trace of leaves, trees and grass, to permeate the office.

Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith

The case which makes Strike’s name as detective in London – the death of supermodel Lula Landry (The Cuckoo’s Calling) – takes place in the spring of 2010, and the second case, which he works with Robin Ellacott, discovering the truth behind the gruesome fate of writer Owen Quine (The Silkworm), unfolds at the end of that same year, so it is only as spring turns to summer in 2011 do we see Denmark Street in the intermittent sunshine of an English summer.

Like any city it presents different faces through the year, so with the last summer bank holiday approaching, we thought we’d look at London through Strike and Robin’s eyes as the weather heats up.

Tourists and Londoners were still swarming everywhere like ants. Some of them had bought Union Jack umbrellas and hats. He barged into some of them for the simple pleasure of knocking them aside.

Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith

London is a very popular tourist destination with visitors drawn by the mystery and history of the city from all over the world, but some summers draw bigger crowds than others. One of which is the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in May of 2011, which means an influx of tourists pouring into the city to witness the ceremony. As preparations pick up pace and bunting begins to appear everywhere, Robin, in the midst of preparing for her own wedding, finds herself the target of a deranged and sadistic killer (Career of Evil).

As the investigation into who is hounding the agency progresses and grows darker, the romance of the royal wedding persuades Robin to go ahead with her own marriage to Matthew, in spite of her increasing doubts. Seeing him weeping as he watches William and Kate exchange their vows, she puts her engagement ring back on. That evening, under a marbled pink sky, the killer forces their way through streets still heaving with people, looking for what they need as a million Londoners and out-of-towners swarm the pavements: red, white and blue hats, Union Jacks and plastic crowns, bobbing and eddying on a tide of mawkish sentiment.

The following year, the city spends its summer bedecked in Union Jacks again (Lethal White). As Strike traces down the disturbed young man who burst into his office talking about a murder he witnessed as a child, there is a tinge of excitement and nervousness about the capital, born, Strike thinks, of the perennially British dread that the nation might make a fool of itself. The city is hosting the 2012 Olympics.

Robin has to fight her way through the visitors on her way to the Houses of Parliament when she is working there undercover in the office of Sir Jasper Chiswell, Minister for Culture. Whilst millions of extra tourists are coming through Camden, the owner of Wiccan jewellery shop Triquetra needs all the help she can get, and welcomes Robin to work there in the guise of Bobbi Cunliffe, as the case takes a sharp turn in direction.

As London basks for weeks in the world’s attention, Strike finds himself unusually restless and wakeful by night, listening to the increased noise from London now heaving with Olympics visitors. He’s not immune to the general mood of the city as the games begin though, willing the opening ceremony to be good in an upsurge of patriotic paranoia. This summer though, the mood of optimism and pride sweeping through London can’t save Robin’s marriage, as it did her engagement. Finding proof of Matthew’s infidelity, she leaves him.

Not all visitors enjoy the city. When Robin meets Strike’s oldest friend, Dave Polworth for the first time, he comments negatively on every aspect of London life, and even his wife, who insisted on the trip, talks about how expensive everything is (Troubled Blood). Visitors might also face other annoyances – Strike observes Wally, once the voice of Drek in The Ink Black Heart and MJ, his YouTube co-host, waylaying tourists in Whitehall Gardens by the Thames. As Strike watches their expressions change from polite or giggly to bemused, dismayed or angry, he realises the point of the film they are making is to take the piss out of foreigners.

She plucked the front of her shirt away from her skin, which was indeed clammy. His gaze fell to her chest and the usual lecherous grin resurfaced. ‘Though I shouldn’t say so, overheating rather suits you,’ said Winn, with the ghost of a smirk, and Robin forced a giggle.

Lethal White, Robert Galbraith

For the Shacklewell Ripper (Career of Evil), a heatwave is an enemy. The killer has nowhere to hide their knives in a T-shirt, and the hats and high collars on which he relies for disguise look out of place. When the weather breaks, he is delighted, but on another warm evening that summer, as the voices of his neighbours float out into the night through their open windows, Strike catches up with him.

London can be exhausting in the heat, but while working undercover at the Houses of Parliament, (Lethal White), the uncomfortable conditions give Robin an excuse when she is discovered in the midst of planting a bug in Geraint Winn’s office.  Thinking fast, she claims she was hoping to borrow the fan she just unplugged, as Chiswell’s office is a furnace. The excuse works, even if it gives Winn the opportunity to stare at her chest.

The London heat troubles her at another moment of high stress in an expensive nursing home two years later. In a room as warm as a greenhouse, she feels the violence coming off the son of the man she has come to visit in an attempt to make progress in the case of the disappearance of Margot Bamborough (Troubled Blood). As she feels the sweat prickling on her scalp, she prays her hair chalk won’t come off and betray her.

When Robin is undercover at Chapman Farm, investigating the Universal Humanitarian Church and the weather heats up (The Running Grave), even central London seems appealing by comparison. Though she knows it’s not the most comfortable place in a heatwave, she can imagine wearing a summer dress, buying water and walking where she likes as opposed to being under the control of the church elders, dressed in the UHC sweats.

Peering through the opening, Robin saw a church and mossy tombs lying amid an empty rose garden in full bloom. She finished her ice cream while wandering around St Nicholas’s, a strange amalgam of an old red-brick school grafted onto the rough stone tower. Finally she sat down on a wooden bench that had grown almost uncomfortably hot in the sun, stretched her aching back, drank in the delicious scent of warm roses.

Lethal White, Robert Galbraith

Whatever the challenges of summer in the city, Strike and Robin can both revel in it at times and treasure its accidental beauties. As Strike walks down Charing Cross Road, the dawn makes everything look dusty and fragile, a grey light full of pale shadows, and he takes his moments to enjoy the sunshine when he can. Walking round Deptford, Robin finds the space to consider her wedding and honeymoon, and how Matthew’s illness there persuaded her to stay rather than have the marriage immediately annulled.

Strike’s nephew becomes ill in the midst of the Chiswell case, and Robin comes straight to the hospital to help him keep vigil over the little boy until his parents can get home (Lethal White). After good news following an anxious night, the London summer seems full of charm to Strike, even when seen from a patch of lawn on the edge of a hospital carpark. Knowing his nephew will recover, and seeing Robin’s visit as a sign they can be as close as they were before her marriage, the dirt and heat of a London afternoon, with the smell of stocks in the air, seems suddenly full of beauty.