The Winter Season in Strike
The snow had temporarily passed, but the cold was, if anything, worse than it had been.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
London is a city of contrasts in every season, but the differences are particularly marked during the winter season, when the streets can seem more hostile than ever, and the warmth of the pub interiors are even more tempting. Let’s look at how Strike and Robin have celebrated (or simply survived) the wintery holiday season throughout the series.
The sleet was sliding wetly against the windows. She could still feel how it had burned her face as she hurried over the slippery pavements, desperate to get inside.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
The result in the Lula Landry case might have made the agency’s name, but when Strike agrees to look for missing writer, Owen Quine (The Silkworm), he still has a little of the loan from his father to pay back, and money is tight. That means he worries about paying out for taxis, though as the weather becomes snowy, and his leg becomes more and more painful, he should be making more use of them. Robin notices Strike is putting all his weight on his good leg, and he downs his coffee before getting on the tube, not trusting himself to balance coffee and himself on the wet, icy floors. In cold weather the carriages on the underground smell of wet wool, grime and Gore-Tex.
London can look drab and dingy on a bleak winter’s day, as the agent of Owen Quine, Elizabeth Tassel’s, house does on the Fulham Palace Road. The garden is dank and overgrown, and the upper windows look over the cemetery where bare trees reach boney arms into the white sky and sleet. Strike can’t resist the temptation of the Albion on the Hammersmith Road after that. The interior is cosy, full of polished wood, and there is even an open fire, though the seats near it are taken so Strike eats his pie and talks over the case with Robin under a picture of his own father – one of the rock legends whose photographs decorate the pub walls.
Lighting a cigarette, he limped away through the knife-sharp cold.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
Strike can still walk the streets, even in pain and in dirty weather, and when Jerry Waldegrave, Quine’s drunk and miserable editor, drops his glasses in the slush, it’s Strike who picks them up and hands them back to him. Then Jerry disappears off into the swirling snow past the laden Christmas shoppers. Still, on the way back to the office Strike moves with difficulty through the accumulating snow and can’t resist an envious look into the lights gleaming on brass beer pumps, the comfortable chairs and convivial company in the Coach and Horses on Wellington Street. The glance means he catches sight of his would-be attacker reflected in the window, and as they follow him back to the office, passing the portico of the Royal Opera House, he continues to observe their pursuit before turning into the dark alley just off Denmark Street and turning the tables.
The cab was gliding beneath the Christmas lights of Oxford Street, large, fragile parcels of silver wrapped with golden bows.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
On the last day of November, Strike can already spot three Christmas trees from the spot where he stand in the snow, watching the Battersea flat of the possibly unfaithful Miss Brocklehurst. Before long Robin has, unapologetically, put a miniature Christmas tree on her desk, complete with tiny baubles and snatches of canned carols and seasonal pop songs are drifting out of the storefronts on Oxford Street. Even the hurt and grieving Kathryn Kent and Pippa are decorating a tree with lights and ornaments including a mouse dressed as Santa.
When Strike heads off to meet his half-brother Al at the River Café, just before he finds the solution to the mystery of Quine’s disappearance, Christmas is assailing him from every window he passes; spangled lights, mounds of new objects, toys and gadgets, and among the pre-Christmas revellers on the tube he notices girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses, risking hypothermia.
The winter Thames glints darkly beyond the restaurant windows, iron-cold and menacing, but inside Strike is subsumed by light, warmth and noise. Before Christmas finally arrives, the case will have reached its dramatic conclusion, among shattered glass and under the sparkling Christmas lights of a snowy Sloane Square.
‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ trilled from the speakers as they entered the realm of crystallised fruits and expensive teas, both lost in painful thought.
Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith
Strike always finds shopping for presents difficult, but the bustle of a busy Christmas trip in Soho and Regent Street as the Margot Bamborough investigation continues (Troubled Blood) almost kills him. Three years after the death of Owen Quine, the Christmas trees Strike sees in the windows while on surveillance, and the lights swinging in the rain over Denmark Street, only remind him of how little time he had left to shop. He leaves it to the last minute and plunges into crowds of shoppers and shrieking Christmas tunes in the cold rain. After struggling for hours, he wonders if some of his fellow shoppers are genetically programmed to seek and find the right gifts. An attempt to buy Robin perfume in the landmark, black and white timbered shop, Liberty, on Great Marlborough Street proves disastrous. The perfume department is small and laden with fragile cargos of glass bottles which look like jewels, but Strike, sick and weary, can’t find any perfume for Robin whose name doesn’t sound like a declaration of very unbusinesspartner-like sentiments. He tells Robin later they all sounded like ‘Shaggable You’. He buys her poorly received salted-caramel chocolates instead.
Though she’s been living in London since early 2010, it’s only now in late 2013, during the Bamborough investigation that Robin makes it into Fortnum & Mason’s, the luxury department store on Piccadilly famous for its Christmas decorations. Early for a meeting with Oonagh, Margot’s friend, Robin peers through clear circles of glass surrounded by artificial snow, at heaps of jewel-like crystallised fruits, silk scarves, gilded tea canisters, and wooden nutcrackers shaped like fairy-tale princes. A gust of particularly cold, rain-flecked wind sweeps her inside the sumptuous seasonal fantasy, through a door flanked by a doorman in an overcoat and top hat.
Feeling she should get her new niece something London themed, Robin buys a stuffed Paddington Bear, but a call darkens her mood, and when she and Strike are in the café, their talk is of murder, not Christmas.
As Oonagh says though, when she battles her way past the queues to meet Robin and Strike ready for cappuccino and carrot cake, Fortnum and Mason’s do sell a lovely mustard.
‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, disinclined to go into her reasons. ‘I’d rather stay in London. You missed Christmas last year.’
The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith
Robin and Strike both need to recover from the Christmas of 2013, and the case of Margot Bamborough takes them through to summer in the city and at the seaside. The following Christmas Robin spends in London on surveillance, and then New Year admiring the natural beauty of the snow-capped mountains round Zermatt. She returns home to roadworks, chilly streets, and a strange visit from a woman being harassed online (The Ink Black Heart). Strike, however, greets 2015 in an explosion of glitter among London’s elite. He’s on surveillance with the new subcontractor, Midge, in Annabel’s, the exclusive nightclub in Berkeley Square surrounded by golden helium balloons and ribbons. He also meets a beautiful jewellery designer, Madeline. Midge might have spent midnight in the toilet, but Strike begins the year wiping off lipstick, surrounded by a jubilant crowd.