Troubled Blood

1

“You’re a Cornishman, born and bred,” said Dave Polworth irritably. “‘Strike’ isn’t even your proper name. By rights, you’re a Nancarrow. You’re not going to sit here and say you’d call yourself English?”

The Victory Inn was so crowded on this warm August evening that drinkers had spilled outside onto the broad stone steps which led down to the bay. Polworth and Strike were sitting at a table in the corner, having a few pints to celebrate Polworth’s thirty-ninth birthday. Cornish nationalism had been under discussion for twenty minutes, and to Strike it felt much longer.

“Would I call myself English?” he mused aloud. “No, I’d probably say British.”

“Fuck off,” said Polworth, his quick temper rising. “You wouldn’t. You’re just trying to wind me up.”

The two friends were physical opposites. Polworth was short and spare as a jockey, weathered and prematurely lined, his sunburned scalp visible through his thinning hair. His T-shirt was crumpled, as though he had pulled it off the floor or out of a washing basket, and his jeans were ripped. On his left forearm was tattooed the black and white cross of St. Piran; on his right hand was a deep scar, souvenir of a close encounter with a shark.

His friend Strike resembled an out-of-condition boxer, which in fact he was; a large man, well over six feet tall, with a slightly crooked nose, his dense dark hair curly. He bore no tattoos and, in spite of the perpetual shadow of the heavy beard, carried about him that well-pressed and fundamentally clean-cut air that suggested ex-police or ex-military.

“You were born here,” Polworth persisted. “So you’re Cornish.”

“Trouble is, by that standard, you’re a Brummie.”

“Fuck off!” yelped Polworth again, genuinely stung. “I’ve been here since I was two months old and my mum’s a Trevelyan. It’s identity—what you feel here,” and Polworth thumped his chest over his heart. “My mum’s family goes back centuries in Cornwall—”

“Yeah, well, blood and soil’s never been my—”

“Did you hear about the last survey they done?” said Polworth, talking over Strike. “‘What’s your ethnic origin?’ they asked, and half—half—ticked ‘Cornish’ instead of ‘English.’ Massive increase.”

“Great,” said Strike. “What next? Boxes for Dumnones and Romans?”

“Keep using that patronizing fucking tone,” said Polworth, “and see where it gets you. You’ve been in London too fucking long, boy… There’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you came from. Nothing wrong with communities wanting some power back from Westminster. The Scots are gonna lead the way, next year. You watch. When they get independence, that’ll be the trigger. Celtic peoples right across the country are going to make their move.”

“Want another one?” he added, gesturing toward Strike’s empty pint glass.

Strike had come out to the pub craving a respite from tension and worry, not to be harangued about Cornish politics. Polworth’s allegiance to Mebyon Kernow, the nationalist party he’d joined at sixteen, appeared to have gained a greater hold over him in the year or so since they had last seen each other. Dave usually made Strike laugh like almost nobody else, but he brooked no jokes upon Cornish independence, a subject that for Strike had all the appeal of soft furnishings or train-spotting. For a second Strike considered saying that he needed to get back to his aunt’s house, but the prospect of that was almost more depressing than his old friend’s invective against supermarkets that resisted putting the cross of St. Piran on goods of Cornish origin.

“Great, thanks,” he said, passing his empty glass to Dave, who headed up to the bar, nodding left and right to his many acquaintances.

Left alone at the table, Strike’s eyes roamed absently over the pub he’d always considered his local. It had changed over the years, but was still recognizably the place in which he and his Cornish mates had met in their late teens. He had an odd double impression of being exactly where he belonged, and where he’d never belonged, of intense familiarity and of separateness.

As his gaze moved aimlessly from timber floor to nautical prints, Strike found himself looking directly into the large, anxious eyes of a woman standing at the bar with a friend. She had a long, pale face and her dark, shoulder-length hair was streaked with gray. He didn’t recognize her, but he’d been aware for the past hour that certain locals were craning their necks to look at him, or else trying to catch his eye. Looking away, Strike took out his mobile and pretended to be texting.

Acquaintances had a ready excuse for conversation, if he showed the slightest sign of encouraging them, because everyone in St. Mawes seemed to know that his aunt Joan had received a diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer ten days previously, and that he, his half-sister, Lucy, and Lucy’s three sons had hastened at once to Joan and Ted’s house to offer what support they could. For a week now he’d been fielding inquiries, accepting sympathy and politely declining offers of help every time he ventured out of the house. He was tired of finding fresh ways of saying “Yes, it looks terminal and yes, it’s shit for all of us.”

Polworth pushed his way back to the table, carrying two fresh pints.

“There you go, Diddy,” he said, resuming his bar stool.

The old nickname hadn’t been bestowed, as most people assumed, in ironic reference to Strike’s size, but derived from “didicoy,” the Cornish word for gypsy. The sound of it softened Strike, reminding him why his friendship with Polworth was the most enduring of his life.

Thirty-five years previously, Strike had entered St. Mawes Primary School a term late, unusually large for his age and with an accent that was glaringly different from the local burr. Although he’d been born in Cornwall, his mother had spirited him away as soon as she’d recovered from the birth, fleeing into the night, baby in her arms, back to the London life she loved, flitting from flat to squat to party. Four years after Strike’s birth, she’d returned to St. Mawes with her son and with her newborn, Lucy, only to take off again in the early hours of the morning, leaving Strike and his half-sister behind.

Precisely what Leda had said in the note she left on the kitchen table, Strike had never known. Doubtless she’d been having a spell of difficulty with a landlord or a boyfriend, or perhaps there was a music festival she particularly wanted to attend: it became difficult to live exactly as she pleased with two children in tow. Whatever the reason for her lengthening absence, Leda’s sister-in-law, Joan, who was as conventional and orderly as Leda was flighty and chaotic, had bought Strike a uniform and enrolled him in the local school.

The other four-and-a-half-year-olds had gawped when he was introduced to the class. A few of them giggled when the teacher said his first name, Cormoran. He was worried by this school business, because he was sure that his mum had said she was going to “home school” him. He’d tried to tell Uncle Ted that he didn’t think his mum would want him to go, but Ted, normally so understanding, had said firmly that he had to, so there he was, alone among strangers with funny accents. Strike, who’d never been a great crier, had sat down at the old roll-top desk with a lump like an apple in his throat.

Why Dave Polworth, pocket don of the class, had decided to befriend the new boy had never been satisfactorily explained, even to Strike. It couldn’t have been out of fear of Strike’s size, because Dave’s two best friends were hefty fishermen’s sons, and Dave was in any case notorious as a fighter whose viciousness was inversely proportional to his height. By the end of that first day Polworth had become both friend and champion, making it his business to impress upon their classmates all the reasons that Strike was worthy of their respect: he was a Cornishman born, a nephew to Ted Nancarrow of the local lifeguard, he didn’t know where his mum was and it wasn’t his fault if he spoke funny.

Ill as Strike’s aunt was, much as she had enjoyed having her nephew to stay for a whole week and even though he’d be leaving the following morning, Joan had virtually pushed him out of the house to celebrate “Little Dave’s” birthday that evening. She placed immense value on old ties and delighted in the fact that Strike and Dave Polworth were still mates, all these years later. Joan counted the fact of their friendship as proof that she’d been right to send him to school over his feckless mother’s wishes and proof that Cornwall was Strike’s true home, no matter how widely he might have wandered since, and even though he was currently London-based.

Polworth took a long pull on his fourth pint and said, with a sharp glance over his shoulder at the dark woman and her blonde friend, who were still watching Strike,

“Effing emmets.”

“And where would your garden be,” asked Strike, “without tourists?”

“Be ansom,” said Polworth promptly. “We get a ton of local visitors, plenty of repeat business.”

Polworth had recently resigned from a managerial position in an engineering firm in Bristol to work as head gardener in a large public garden a short distance along the coast. A qualified diver, an accomplished surfer, a competitor in Ironman competitions, Polworth had been relentlessly physical and restless since childhood, and time and office work hadn’t tamed him.

“No regrets, then?” Strike asked.

“Fuck, no,” said Polworth fervently. “Needed to get my hands dirty again. Need to get back outside. Forty next year. Now or never.”

Polworth had applied for the new job without telling his wife what he was doing. Having been offered the position, he’d quit his job and gone home to announce the fait accompli to his family.

“Penny come round, has she?” Strike asked.

“Still tells me once a week she wants a divorce,” Polworth answered indifferently. “But it was better to present her with the fact, than argue the toss for five years. It’s all worked out great. Kids love the new school, Penny’s company let her transfer to the office in the Big City,” by which Polworth meant Truro, not London. “She’s happy. Just doesn’t want to admit it.”

Strike privately doubted the truth of this statement. A disregard for inconvenient facts tended to march hand in hand with Polworth’s love of risk and romantic causes. However, Strike had problems enough of his own without worrying about Polworth’s, so he raised his fresh pint and said, hoping to keep Polworth’s mind off politics:

“Well, many happy returns, mate.”

“Cheers,” said Polworth, toasting him back. “What d’you reckon to Arsenal’s chances, then? Gonna qualify?”

Strike shrugged, because he feared that discussing the likelihood of his London football club securing a place in the Champions League would lead back to a lack of Cornish loyalties.

“How’s your love life?” Polworth asked, trying a different tack.

“Non-existent,” said Strike.

Polworth grinned.

“Joanie reckons you’re gonna end up with your business partner. That Robin girl.”

“Is that right?” said Strike.

“Told me all about it when I was round there, weekend before last. While I was fixing their Sky Box.”

“They didn’t tell me you’d done that,” said Strike, again tipping his pint toward Polworth. “That was good of you, mate, cheers.”

If he’d hoped to deflect his friend, he was unsuccessful.

“Both of ’em. Her and Ted,” said Polworth, “both of ’em reckon it’s Robin.”

And when Strike said nothing, Polworth pressed him, “Nothing going on, then?”

“No,” said Strike.

“How come?” asked Polworth, frowning again. As with Cornish independence, Strike was refusing to embrace an obvious and desirable objective. “She’s a looker. Seen her in the paper. Maybe not on a par with Milady Berserko,” Polworth acknowledged. It was the nickname he had long ago bestowed on Strike’s ex-fiancée. “But on the other hand, she’s not a fucking nutcase, is she, Diddy?”

Strike laughed.

“Lucy likes her,” said Polworth. “Says you’d be perfect together.”

“When were you talking to Lucy about my love life?” asked Strike, with a touch less complaisance.

“Month or so ago,” said Polworth. “She brought her boys down for the weekend and we had them all over for a barbecue.”

Strike drank and said nothing.

“You get on great, she says,” said Polworth, watching him.

“Yeah, we do,” said Strike.

Polworth waited, eyebrows raised and looking expectant.

“It’d fuck everything up,” said Strike. “I’m not risking the agency.”

“Right,” said Polworth. “Tempted, though?”

There was a short pause. Strike carefully kept his gaze averted from the dark woman and her companion, who he was sure were discussing him.

“There might’ve been moments,” he admitted, “when it crossed my mind. But she’s going through a nasty divorce, we spend half our lives together as it is and I like having her as a business partner.”

Given their longstanding friendship, the fact that they’d already clashed over politics and that it was Polworth’s birthday, he was trying not to let any hint of resentment at this line of questioning show. Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution. The Polworths, for instance, seemed to exist in a permanent state of mutual animosity. Strike had more often heard Penny refer to her husband as “that twat” than by his name, and many was the night when Polworth had regaled his friends in happy detail of the ways in which he’d managed to pursue his own ambitions and interests at the expense of, or over the protests of, his wife. Both seemed happiest and most relaxed in the company of their own sex, and on those rare occasions when Strike had enjoyed hospitality at their home, the gatherings always seemed to follow a pattern of natural segregation, the women congregating in one area of the home, the men in another.

“And what happens when Robin wants kids?” asked Polworth.

“Don’t think she’s does,” said Strike. “She likes the job.”

“They all say that,” said Polworth dismissively. “What age is she now?”

“Ten years younger than us.”

“She’ll want kids,” said Polworth confidently. “They all do. And it happens quicker for women. They’re up against the clock.”

“Well, she won’t be getting kids with me. I don’t want them. Anyway, the older I get, the less I think I’m the marrying kind.”

“Thought that myself, mate,” said Polworth. “But then I realized I’d got it all wrong. Told you how it happened, didn’t I? How I ended up proposing to Penny?”

“Don’t think so,” said Strike.

“I never told you about the whole Tolstoy thing?” asked Polworth, surprised at this omission.

Strike, who’d been about to drink, lowered his glass in amazement. Since primary school, Polworth, who had a razor-sharp intelligence but despised any form of learning he couldn’t put to immediate, practical use, had shunned all printed material except technical manuals. Misinterpreting Strike’s expression, Polworth said,

“Tolstoy. He’s a writer.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Thanks. How does Tolstoy—?”

“Telling you, aren’t I? I’d split up with Penny the second time. She’d been banging on about getting engaged, and I wasn’t feeling it. So I’m in this bar, telling my mate Chris about how I’m sick of her telling me she wants a ring—you remember Chris? Big guy with a lisp. You met him at Rozwyn’s christening.

“Anyway, there’s this pissed older guy at the bar on his own, bit of a ponce in his corduroy jacket, wavy hair, and he’s pissing me off, to be honest, because I can tell he’s listening, and I ask him what the fuck he’s looking at and he looks me straight in the eye,” said Polworth, “and he says: ‘You can only carry a weight and use your hands, if you strap the weight to your back. Marry, and you get the use of your hands back. Don’t marry, and you’ll never have your hands free for anything else. Look at Mazankov, at Krupov. They’ve ruined their careers for the sake of women.’

“I thought Mazankov and Krupov were mates of his. Asked him what the fuck he was telling me for. Then he says he’s quoting this writer, Tolstoy.

“And we got talking and I tell you this, Diddy, it was a life-changing moment. The lightbulb went on,” said Polworth, pointing at the air over his balding head. “He made me see it clearly. The male predicament, mate. There I am, trying to get my hole on a Thursday night, heading home alone again, poorer, bored shitless; I thought of the money I’ve spent chasing gash, and the hassle, and whether I want to be watching porn alone at forty, and I thought, this is the whole point. What marriage is for. Am I going to do better than Penny? Am I enjoying talking shit to women in bars? Penny and me get on all right. I could do a hell of a lot worse. She’s not bad-looking. I’d have my hole already at home, waiting for me, wouldn’t I?”

“Pity she can’t hear this,” said Strike. “She’d fall in love with you all over again.”

“I shook that poncey bloke’s hand,” said Polworth, ignoring Strike’s sarcasm. “Made him write me down the name of the book and all. Went straight out that bar, got a taxi to Penny’s flat, banged on the door, woke her up. She was fucking livid. Thought I’d come round because I was pissed, couldn’t get anything better and wanted a shag. I said, ‘No, you dozy cow, I’m here because I wanna marry you.’”

“And I’ll tell you the name of the book,” said Polworth. “Anna Karenina.” He drained his pint. “It’s shit.”

Strike laughed.

Polworth belched loudly, then checked his watch. He was a man who knew a good exit line and had no more time for prolonged leave-taking than for Russian literature.

“Gonna get going, Diddy,” he said, getting to his feet. “If I’m back before half eleven, I’m on for a birthday blowie—which is the whole point I’m making, mate. Whole point.”

Grinning, Strike accepted Polworth’s handshake. Polworth told Strike to convey his love to Joan and to call him next time he was down, then squeezed his way out of the pub, and disappeared from view.

2

Still grinning at Polworth’s story, Strike now realized that the dark woman at the bar was showing signs of wanting to approach him. Her spectacled blonde companion appeared to be advising against it. Strike finished his pint, gathered up his wallet, checked his cigarettes were still in his pocket and, with the assistance of the wall beside him, stood up, making sure his balance was everything it should be before trying to walk. His prosthetic leg was occasionally uncooperative after four pints. Having assured himself that he could balance perfectly well, he set off toward the exit, giving unsmiling nods to those few locals whom he could not ignore without causing offense, and reached the warm darkness outside without being importuned.

The wide, uneven stone steps that led down toward the bay were still crowded with drinkers and smokers. Strike wove his way between them, pulling out his cigarettes as he went.

It was a balmy August night and tourists were still strolling around the picturesque seafront. Strike was facing a fifteen-minute walk, part of it up a steep slope, back to his aunt and uncle’s house. On a whim he turned right, crossed the street and headed for the high stone wall separating the car park and ferry point from the sea. Leaning against it, he lit a cigarette and stared out over the smoke gray and silver ocean, becoming just one more tourist in the darkness, free to smoke quietly without having to answer questions about cancer, deliberately postponing the moment when he’d have to return to the uncomfortable sofa that had been his bed for the past six nights.

On arrival, Strike had been told that he, the childless single man and ex-soldier, wouldn’t mind sleeping in the sitting room “because you’ll sleep anywhere.” She’d been determined to shut down the possibility, mooted by Strike on the phone, that he might check into a bed and breakfast rather than stretch the house to capacity. Strike’s visits were rare, especially in conjunction with his sister and nephews, and Joan wanted to enjoy his presence to the full, wanted to feel that she was, once again, the provider and nurturer, currently weakened by her first round of chemotherapy though she might be.

So the tall and heavy Strike, who’d have been far happier on a camp bed, had lain down uncomplainingly every night on the slippery, unyielding mass of satin-covered horsehair, to be woken each morning by his young nephews, who routinely forgot that they had been asked to wait until eight o’clock before barging into the sitting room. At least Jack had the decency to whisper apologies every time he realized that he’d woken his uncle. The eldest, Luke, clattered and shouted his way down the narrow stairs every morning and merely sniggered as he dashed past Strike on his way to the kitchen.

Luke had broken Strike’s brand-new headphones, which the detective had felt obliged to pretend didn’t matter in the slightest. His eldest nephew had also thought it amusing to run off into the garden with Strike’s prosthetic leg one morning, and to stand waving it at his uncle through the window. When Luke finally brought it back, Strike, whose bladder had been very full and who was incapable of hopping up the steep stairs to the only toilet, had delivered Luke a quiet telling-off that had left the boy unusually subdued for most of the morning.

Meanwhile, Joan told Strike every morning, “you slept well,” without a hint of inquiry. Joan had a lifelong habit of subtly pressurizing the family into telling her what she wanted to hear. In the days when Strike was sleeping in his office and facing imminent insolvency (facts that he had admittedly not shared with his aunt and uncle), Joan had told him happily “you’re doing awfully well” over the phone, and it had felt, as it always did, unnecessarily combative to challenge her optimistic declaration. After his lower leg had been blown off in Iraq, a tearful Joan had stood at his hospital bed as he tried to focus through a fog of morphine, and told him “You feel comfortable, though. You aren’t in pain.” He loved his aunt, who’d raised him for significant chunks of his childhood, but extended periods in her company made him feel stifled and suffocated. Her insistence on the smooth passing of counterfeit social coin from hand to hand, while uncomfortable truths were ignored and denied, wore him out.

Something gleamed in the water—sleek silver and a pair of soot-black eyes: a seal was turning lazily just below Strike. He watched its revolutions in the water, wondering whether it could see him and, for reasons he couldn’t have explained, his thoughts slid toward his partner in the detective agency.

He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.

He checked his watch. She was having a day off, but there was an outside chance she’d still be awake and he had a decent pretext for texting: Saul Morris, their newest subcontractor, was owed his month’s expenses, and Strike had left no instructions for sorting this out. If he texted about Morris, there was a good chance that Robin would call him back to find out how Joan was.

“Excuse me?” a woman said nervously, from behind him.

Strike knew without turning that it was the dark woman from the pub. She had a Home Counties accent and her tone contained that precise mixture of apology and excitement that he usually encountered in those who wanted to talk about his detective triumphs.

“Yes?” he said, turning to face the speaker.

Her blonde friend had come with her: or perhaps, thought Strike, they were more than friends. An indefinable sense of closeness seemed to bind the two women, whom he judged to be around forty. They wore jeans and shirts and the blonde in particular had the slightly weather-beaten leanness that suggests weekends spent hill walking or cycling. She was what some would call a “handsome” woman, by which they meant that she was bare faced. High-cheekboned, bespectacled, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she also looked stern.

The dark woman was slighter in build. Her large gray eyes shone palely in her long face. She had an air of intensity, even of fanaticism, about her in the half-light, like a medieval martyr.

“Are you… are you Cormoran Strike?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, his tone uninviting.

“Oh,” she breathed, with an agitated little hand gesture. “This is—this is so strange. I know you probably don’t want to be—I’m sorry to bother you, I know you’re off duty,” she gave a nervous laugh, “but—my name’s Anna, by the way—I wondered,” she took a deep breath, “whether I could come—whether I could come and talk to you about my mother.”

Strike said nothing.

“She disappeared,” Anna went on. “Margot Bamborough’s her name. She was a GP. She finished work one evening, walked out of her practice and nobody’s seen her since.”

“Have you contacted the police?” asked Strike.

Anna gave an odd little laugh.

“Oh yes—I mean, they knew—they investigated. But they never found anything. She disappeared,” said Anna, “in 1974.”

The dark water lapped the stone and Strike thought he could hear the seal clearing its damp nostrils. Three drunk youths went weaving past, on their way to the ferry point. Strike wondered whether they knew the last ferry had been and gone at six.

“I just,” said the woman in a rush, “you see—last week—I went to see a medium.”

Fuck, thought Strike.

He’d occasionally bumped up against the purveyors of paranormal insights during his detective career and felt nothing but contempt for them: leeches, or so he saw them, of money from the pockets of the deluded and the desperate.

A motorboat came chugging across the water, its engine grinding the night’s stillness to pieces. Apparently this was the lift the three drunk boys were waiting for. They now began laughing and elbowing each other at the prospect of imminent seasickness.

“The medium told me I’d get a ‘leading,’” Anna pressed on. “She told me, ‘You’re going to find out what happened to your mother. You’ll get a leading and you must follow it. The way will become clear very soon.’ So when I saw you just now in the pub—Cormoran Strike, in the Victory—it just seemed such an incredible coincidence and I thought—I had to speak to you.”

A soft breeze ruffled Anna’s dark, silver-streaked hair. The blonde said crisply,

“Come on, Anna, we should get going.”

She put an arm around the other’s shoulders. Strike saw a wedding ring shining there.

“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she told Strike.

With gentle pressure, the blonde attempted to turn Anna away. The latter sniffed and muttered,

“Sorry. I… probably had too much wine.”

“Hang on.”

Strike often resented his own incurable urge to know, his inability to leave an itch unscratched, especially when he was as tired and aggravated as he was tonight. But 1974 was the year of his own birth. Margot Bamborough had been missing as long as he’d been alive. He couldn’t help it: he wanted to know more.

“Are you on holiday here?”

“Yes.” It was the blonde who had spoken. “Well, we’ve got a second home in Falmouth. Our permanent base is in London.”

“I’m heading back there tomorrow,” said Strike (What the fuck are you doing? asked a voice in his head), “but I could probably swing by and see you tomorrow morning in Falmouth, if you’re free.”

“Really?” gasped Anna. He hadn’t seen her eyes fill with tears, but he knew they must have done, because she now wiped them. “Oh, that’d be great. Thank you. Thank you! I’ll give you the address.”

The blonde showed no enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing Strike again. However, when Anna started fumbling through her handbag, she said, “It’s all right, I’ve got a card,” pulled a wallet out of her back pocket, and handed Strike a business card bearing the name “Dr. Kim Sullivan, BPS Registered Psychologist,” with an address in Falmouth printed below it.

“Great,” said Strike, inserting it into his own wallet. “Well, I’ll see you both tomorrow morning, then.”

“I’ve actually got a work conference call in the morning,” said Kim. “I’ll be free by twelve. Will that be too late for you?”

The implication was clear: you’re not speaking to Anna without me present.

“No, that’ll be fine,” said Strike. “I’ll see you at twelve, then.”

“Thank you so much!” said Anna.

Kim reached for Anna’s hand and the two women walked away. Strike watched them pass under a street light before turning back toward the sea. The motorboat carrying the young drinkers had now chugged away again. It already looked tiny, dwarfed by the wide bay, the roar of its engine gradually deadened into a distant buzz.

Forgetting momentarily about texting Robin, Strike lit a second cigarette, took out his mobile and Googled Margot Bamborough.

Two different photographs appeared. The first was a grainy head-and-shoulders shot of an attractive, even-featured face with wide-set eyes, her wavy, dark blonde hair center-parted. She was wearing a long-lapelled blouse over what appeared to be a knitted tank top.

The second picture showed the same woman looking younger and wearing the famous black corset of a Playboy Bunny, accessorized with black ears, black stockings and white tail. She was holding a tray of what looked like cigarettes, and smiling at the camera. Another young woman, identically dressed, stood beaming behind her, slightly bucktoothed and curvier than her willowy friend.

Strike scrolled down until he read a famous name in conjunction with Margot’s.

3

Had her day gone as planned, Robin Ellacott would have been tucked up in bed in her rented flat in Earl’s Court at this moment, fresh from a long bath, her laundry done, reading a new novel. Instead, she was sitting in her ancient Land Rover, chilly from sheer exhaustion despite the mild night, still wearing the clothes she’d put on at four-thirty that morning, as she watched the lit window of a Pizza Express in Torquay. Her face in the wing mirror was pale, her blue eyes bloodshot, and the strawberry blonde hair currently hidden under a black beanie hat needed a wash.

From time to time, Robin dipped her hand into a bag of almonds sitting on the passenger seat beside her. It was only too easy to fall into a diet of fast food and chocolate when you were running surveillance, to snack more often than needed out of sheer boredom. Robin was trying to eat healthily in spite of her unsociable hours, but the almonds had long since ceased to be appetizing, and she craved nothing more than a bit of the pizza she could see an overweight couple enjoying in the restaurant window. She could almost taste it, even though the air around her was tangy with sea salt and underlain by the perpetual fug of old Wellington boots and wet dog that imbued the Land Rover’s ancient fabric seats.

The object of her surveillance, whom she and Strike had nicknamed “Tufty” for his badly fitting toupee, was currently out of view. He’d disappeared into the pizzeria an hour and a half previously with three companions, one of whom, a teenager with his arm in a cast, was visible if Robin craned her head sideways into the space above the front passenger seat. This she did every five minutes or so, to check on the progress of the foursome’s meal. The last time she had looked, ice cream was being delivered to the table. It couldn’t, surely, be much longer.

Robin was fighting a feeling of depression which she knew was at least partly down to utter exhaustion, to the stiffness all over her body from many hours in the driving seat, and to the loss of her long-awaited day off. With Strike unavoidably absent from the agency for an entire week, she’d now worked a twenty-day stretch without breaks. Their best subcontractor, Sam Barclay, had been supposed to take over the Tufty job today in Scotland, but Tufty hadn’t flown to Glasgow as expected. Instead, he’d taken a surprise detour to Torquay, leaving Robin with no choice but to follow him.

There were other reasons for her low spirits, of course, one of which she acknowledged to herself; the other, she felt angry with herself for dwelling on.

The first, admissible, reason was her ongoing divorce, which was becoming more contentious by the week. Following Robin’s discovery of her estranged husband’s affair, they’d had one last cold and bitter meeting, coincidentally in a Pizza Express near Matthew’s place of work, where they’d agreed to seek a no-fault divorce following a two-year separation. Robin was too honest not to admit that she, too, bore responsibility for the failure of their relationship. Matthew might have been unfaithful, but she knew that she’d never fully committed to the marriage, that she’d prioritized her job over Matthew on almost every occasion and that, by the end, she had been waiting for a reason to leave. The affair had been a shock, but a release, too.

However, during the twelve months that had elapsed since her pizza with Matthew, Robin had come to realize that far from seeking a “no-fault” resolution, her ex-husband saw the end of the marriage as entirely Robin’s responsibility and was determined to make her pay, both emotionally and financially, for her offense. The joint bank account, which held the proceeds of the sale of their old house, had been frozen while the lawyers wrangled over how much Robin could reasonably expect when she had been earning so much less than Matthew, and had—it had been strongly hinted in the last letter—married him purely with a view to obtaining a pecuniary advantage she could never have achieved alone.

Every letter from Matthew’s lawyer caused Robin additional stress, rage and misery. She hadn’t needed her own lawyer to point out that Matthew appeared to be trying to force her to spend money she didn’t have on legal wrangling, to run down the clock and her resources until she walked away with as close to nothing as he could manage.

“I’ve never known a childless divorce be so contentious,” her lawyer had told her, words that brought no comfort.

Matthew continued to occupy almost as much space in Robin’s head as when they’d been married. She thought she could read his thoughts across the miles and silence that separated them in their widely divergent new lives. He’d always been a bad loser. He had to emerge from this embarrassingly short marriage the winner, by walking away with all the money, and stigmatizing Robin as the sole reason for its failure.

All of this was ample reason for her present mood, of course, but then there was the other reason, the one that was inadmissible, that Robin was annoyed with herself for fretting about.

It had happened the previous day, at the office. Saul Morris, the agency’s newest subcontractor, was owed his month’s expenses, so, after seeing Tufty safely back into the marital home in Windsor, Robin had driven back to Denmark Street to pay Saul.

Morris had been working for the agency for six weeks. He was an ex-police officer, an undeniably handsome man, with black hair and bright blue eyes, though something about him set Robin’s teeth on edge. He had a habit of softening his voice when he spoke to her; arch asides and over-personal comments peppered their most mundane interactions, and no double entendre went unmarked if Morris was in the room. Robin rued the day when he’d found out that both of them were currently going through divorces, because he seemed to think this gave him fertile new ground for assumed intimacy.

She’d hoped to get back from Windsor before Pat Chauncey, the agency’s new office manager, left, but it was ten past six by the time Robin climbed the stairs and found Morris waiting for her outside the locked door.

“Sorry,” Robin said, “traffic was awful.”

She’d paid Morris back in cash from the new safe, then told him briskly she needed to get home, but he clung on like gum stuck in her hair, telling her all about his ex-wife’s latest late-night texts. Robin tried to unite politeness and coolness until the phone rang on her old desk. She’d ordinarily have let it go to voicemail, but so keen was she to curtail Morris’s conversation that she said,

“I’ve got to get this, sorry. Have a nice evening,” and picked up the receiver.

“Strike Detective Agency, Robin speaking.”

“Hi, Robin,” said a slightly husky female voice. “Is the boss there?”

Given that Robin had only spoken to Charlotte Campbell once, three years previously, it was perhaps surprising that she’d known instantly who was on the line. Robin had analyzed these few words of Charlotte’s to a perhaps ludicrous degree since. Robin had detected an undertone of laughter, as though Charlotte found Robin amusing. The easy use of Robin’s first name and the description of Strike as “the boss” had also come in for their share of rumination.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Robin had said, reaching for a pen while her heart beat a little faster. “Can I take a message?”

“Could you ask him to call Charlotte Campbell? I’ve got something he wants. He knows my number.”

“Will do,” said Robin.

“Thanks very much,” Charlotte had said, still sounding amused. “Bye, then.”

Robin had dutifully written down “Charlotte Campbell called, has something for you” and placed the message on Strike’s desk.

Charlotte was Strike’s ex-fiancée. Their engagement had been terminated three years previously, on the very day that Robin had come to work at the agency as a temp. Though Strike was far from communicative on the subject, Robin knew that they’d been together for sixteen years (“on and off,” as Strike tended to emphasize, because the relationship had faltered many times before its final termination), that Charlotte had become engaged to her present husband just two weeks after Strike had left her and that Charlotte was now the mother of twins.

But this wasn’t all Robin knew, because after leaving her husband, Robin had spent five weeks living in the spare room of Nick and Ilsa Herbert, who were two of Strike’s best friends. Robin and Ilsa had struck up their own friendship during that time, and still met regularly for drinks and coffees. Ilsa made very little secret of the fact that she hoped and believed that Strike and Robin would one day, and preferably soon, realize that they were “made for each other.” Although Robin regularly asked Ilsa to desist from her broad hints, asserting that she and Strike were perfectly happy with a friendship and working relationship, Ilsa remained cheerfully unconvinced.

Robin was very fond of Ilsa, but her pleas for her new friend to forget any idea of matchmaking between herself and Strike were genuine. She was mortified by the thought that Strike might think she herself was complicit in Ilsa’s regular attempts to engineer foursomes that increasingly had the appearance of double dates. Strike had declined the last two proposed outings of this type and, while the agency’s current workload certainly made any kind of social life difficult, Robin had the uncomfortable feeling that he was well aware of Ilsa’s ulterior motive. Looking back on her own brief married life, Robin was sure she’d never been guilty of treating single people as she now found herself treated by Ilsa: with a cheerful lack of concern for their sensibilities, and sometimes ham-fisted attempts to manage their love lives.

One of the ways in which Ilsa attempted to draw Robin out on the subject of Strike was to tell her all about Charlotte, and here, Robin felt guilty, because she rarely shut the Charlotte conversations down, even though she never left one of them without feeling as though she had just gorged on junk food: uncomfortable, and wishing she could resist the craving for more.

She knew, for instance, about the many me-or-the-army ultimatums, two of the suicide attempts (“The one on Arran wasn’t a proper one,” said Ilsa scathingly. “Pure manipulation”) and about the ten days’ enforced stay in the psychiatric clinic. She’d heard stories that Ilsa gave titles like cheap thrillers: the Night of the Bread Knife, the Incident of the Black Lace Dress and the Blood-Stained Note. She knew that in Ilsa’s opinion, Charlotte was bad, not mad, and that the worst rows Ilsa and her husband Nick had ever had were on the subject of Charlotte, “and she’d have bloody loved knowing that, too,” Ilsa had added.

And now Charlotte was phoning the office, asking Strike to call her back, and Robin, sitting outside the Pizza Express, hungry and exhausted, was pondering the phone call yet again, much as a tongue probes a mouth ulcer. If she was phoning the office, Charlotte clearly wasn’t aware that Strike was in Cornwall with his terminally ill aunt, which didn’t suggest regular contact between them. On the other hand, Charlotte’s slightly amused tone had seemed to hint at an alliance between herself and Strike.

Robin’s mobile, which was lying on the passenger seat beside the bag of almonds, buzzed. Glad of any distraction, she picked it up and saw a text message from Strike.

Are you awake?

Robin texted back:

No

As she’d expected, the mobile rang immediately.

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” said Strike, without preamble. “You must be knackered. What’s it been, three weeks straight on Tufty?”

“I’m still on him.”

“What?” said Strike, sounding displeased. “You’re in Glasgow? Where’s Barclay?”

“In Glasgow. He was ready in position, but Tufty didn’t get on the plane. He drove down to Torquay instead. He’s having pizza right now. I’m outside the restaurant.”

“The hell’s he doing in Torquay, when the mistress is in Scotland?”

“Visiting his original family,” said Robin, wishing she could see Strike’s face as she delivered the next bit of news. “He’s a bigamist.”

Her announcement was greeted with total silence.

“I was outside the house in Windsor at six,” said Robin, “expecting to follow him to Stansted, see him safely onto the plane and let Barclay know he was on the way, but he didn’t go to the airport. He rushed out of the house looking panicky, drove to a lock-up, took his case inside and came out with an entirely different set of luggage and minus his toupee. Then he drove all the way down here.

“Our client in Windsor’s about to find out she’s not legally ­married,” said Robin. “Tufty’s had this wife in Torquay for twenty years. I’ve been talking to the neighbors. I pretended I was doing a survey. One of the women along the street was at the original wedding. Tufty travels a lot for business, she said, but he’s a lovely man. Devoted to his sons.

“There are two boys,” Robin continued, because Strike’s stunned silence continued unabated, “students, both in their late teens and both the absolute spit of him. One of them came off his motorbike yesterday—I got all this out of the neighbor—he’s got his arm in a cast and looks quite bruised and cut up. Tufty must’ve got news of the accident, so he came haring down here instead of going to Scotland.

“Tufty goes by the name of Edward Campion down here, not John—turns out John’s his middle name, I’ve been searching the online records. He and the first wife and sons live in a really nice villa, view of the sea, massive garden.”

“Bloody hell,” said Strike. “So our pregnant friend in Glasgow—”

“—is the least of Mrs.-Campion-in-Windsor’s worries,” said Robin. “He’s leading a triple life. Two wives and a mistress.”

“And he looks like a balding baboon. There’s hope for all of us. Did you say he’s having dinner right now?”

“Pizza with the wife and kids. I’m parked outside. I didn’t manage to get pictures of him with the sons earlier, and I want to, because they’re a total giveaway. Mini-Tuftys, just like the two in Windsor. Where d’you think he’s been pretending to have been?”

“Oil rig?” suggested Strike. “Abroad? Middle East? Maybe that’s why he’s so keen on keeping his tan topped up.”

Robin sighed.

“The client’s going to be shattered.”

“So’s the mistress in Scotland,” said Strike. “That baby’s due any minute.”

“His taste’s amazingly consistent,” said Robin. “If you lined them up side by side, the Torquay wife, the Windsor wife and the mistress in Glasgow, they’d look like the same woman at twenty-year intervals.”

“Where are you planning to sleep?”

“Travelodge or a B&B,” said Robin, yawning again, “if I can find anything vacant at the height of the holiday season. I’d drive straight back to London overnight, but I’m exhausted. I’ve been awake since four, and that’s on top of a ten-hour day yesterday.”

“No driving and no sleeping in the car,” said Strike. “Get a room.”

“How’s Joan?” asked Robin. “We can handle the workload if you want to stay in Cornwall a bit longer.”

“She won’t sit still while we’re all there. Ted agrees she needs some quiet. I’ll come back down in a couple of weeks.”

“So, were you calling for an update on Tufty?”

“Actually, I was calling about something that just happened. I’ve just left the pub…”

In a few succinct sentences, Strike described the encounter with Margot Bamborough’s daughter.

“I’ve just looked her up,” he said. “Margot Bamborough, twenty-nine-year-old doctor, married, one-year-old daughter. Walked out of her GP practice in Clerkenwell at the end of a day’s work, said she was going to have a quick drink with a female friend before heading home. The pub was only five minutes’ walk away. The friend waited, but Margot never arrived and was never seen again.”

There was a pause. Robin, whose eyes were still fixed on the window of the pizza restaurant, said,

“And her daughter thinks you’re going to find out what happened, nearly four decades later?”

“She seemed to be putting a lot of store on the coincidence of spotting me in the boozer right after the medium told her she’d get a ‘leading.’”

“Hmm,” said Robin. “And what do you think the chances are of finding out what happened after this length of time?”

“Slim to non-existent,” admitted Strike. “On the other hand, the truth’s out there. People don’t just vaporize.”

Robin could hear a familiar note in his voice that indicated rumination on questions and possibilities.

“So you’re meeting the daughter again tomorrow?”

“Can’t hurt, can it?” said Strike.

Robin didn’t answer.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, with a trace of defensive­ness. “Emotionally overwrought client—medium—situation ripe for exploitation.”

“I’m not suggesting you’d exploit it—”

“Might as well hear her out, then, mightn’t I? Unlike a lot of people, I wouldn’t take her money for nothing. And once I’d exhausted all avenues—”

“I know you,” said Robin. “The less you found out, the more interested you’d get.”

“Think I’d have her wife to deal with unless I got results within a reasonable period. They’re a gay couple,” he elaborated. “The wife’s a psychol—”

“Cormoran, I’ll call you back,” said Robin, and without waiting for his answer, she cut the call and dropped the mobile back onto the passenger seat.

Tufty had just ambled out of the restaurant, followed by his wife and sons. Smiling and talking, they turned their steps toward their car, which lay five behind where Robin sat in the Land Rover. Raising her camera, she took a burst of pictures as the family drew nearer.

By the time they passed the Land Rover, the camera was lying in her lap and Robin’s head was bowed over her phone, pretending to be texting. In the rear-view mirror she watched as the Tufty family got into their Range Rover and departed for the villa beside the sea.

Yawning yet again, Robin picked up her phone and called Strike back.

“Get everything you wanted?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Robin, checking the photographs one-handedly with the phone to her ear, “I’ve got a couple of clear ones of him and the boys. God, he’s got strong genes. All four kids have got his exact features.”

She put the camera back into her bag.

“You realize I’m only a couple of hours away from St. Mawes?”

“Nearer three,” said Strike.

“If you like—”

“You don’t want to drive all the way down here, then back to London. You’ve just told me you’re knackered.”

But Robin could tell that he liked the idea. He’d traveled down to Cornwall by train, taxi and ferry, because since he had lost a leg, long drives were neither easy nor particularly pleasurable.

“I’d like to meet this Anna. Then I could drive you back.”

“Well, if you’re sure, that’d be great,” said Strike, now sounding cheerful. “If we take her on, we should work the case together. There’d be a massive amount to sift through, cold case like this, and it sounds like you’ve wrapped up Tufty tonight.”

“Yep,” sighed Robin. “It’s all over except for the ruining of half a dozen lives.”

“You didn’t ruin anyone’s life,” said Strike bracingly. “He did that. What’s better: all three women find out now, or when he dies, with all the effing mess that’ll cause?”

“I know,” said Robin, yawning again. “So, do you want me to come to the house in St. M—”

His “no” was swift and firm.

“They—Anna and her partner—they’re in Falmouth. I’ll meet you there. It’s a shorter drive for you.”

“OK,” said Robin. “What time?”

“Could you manage half eleven?”

“Easily,” said Robin.

“I’ll text you a place to meet. Now go and get some sleep.”

As she turned the key in the ignition, Robin became conscious that her spirits had lifted considerably. As though a censorious jury were watching, among them Ilsa, Matthew and Charlotte Campbell, she consciously repressed her smile as she reversed out of the parking space.

4

Strike woke shortly before five the following morning. Light was already streaming through Joan’s thin curtains. Every night the horsehair sofa punished a different part of his body, and today he felt as though he had been punched in a kidney. He reached for his phone, noted the time, decided that he was too sore to fall back asleep, and raised himself to a sitting position.

After a minute spent stretching and scratching his armpits while his eyes acclimatized to the odd shapes rising on all sides in the gloom of Joan and Ted’s sitting room, he Googled Margot Bamborough for a second time and, after a cursory examination of the picture of the smiling, wavy-haired doctor with widely spaced eyes, he scrolled through the results until he found a mention of her on a website devoted to serial killers. Here he found a long article punctuated with pictures of Dennis Creed at various ages, from pretty, curly-haired blond toddler all the way through to the police mugshot of a slender man with a weak, sensual mouth and large, square glasses.

Strike then turned to an online bookstore, where he found an account of the serial killer’s life, published in 1985 and titled The Demon of Paradise Park. It had been written by a well-respected ­investigative journalist, now dead. Creed’s nondescript face appeared in color on the cover, superimposed over ghostly black and white images of the seven women he was known to have tortured and killed. Margot Bamborough’s face wasn’t among them. Strike ordered the second-hand book, which cost £1, to be delivered to the office.

He returned his phone to its charging lead, put on his prosthetic leg, picked up his cigarettes and lighter, navigated around a rickety nest of tables with a vase of dried flowers on it and, being careful not to nudge any of the ornamental plates off the wall, passed through the doorway and down three steep steps into the kitchen. The lino, which had been there since his childhood, was icy cold on his remaining foot.

After making himself a mug of tea, he let himself out of the back door, still clad in nothing but boxers and a T-shirt, there to enjoy the cool of early morning, leaning up against the wall of the house, breathing in salt-laden air between puffs on his cigarette, and thinking about vanished mothers. Many times over the past ten days had his thoughts turned to Leda, a woman as different to Joan as the moon to the sun.

“Have you tried smoking yet, Cormy?” she’d once asked vaguely, out of a haze of blue smoke of her own creation. “It isn’t good for you, but God, I love it.”

People sometimes asked why social services never got involved with Leda Strike’s family. The answer was that Leda had never stayed still long enough to present a stable target. Often her children remained in a school for mere weeks before a new enthusiasm seized her, and off they went, to a new city, a new squat, crashing on her friends’ floors or, occasionally, renting. The only people who knew what was going on, and who might have contacted social services, were Ted and Joan, the one fixed point in the children’s lives, but whether because Ted feared damaging the relationship between himself and his wayward sister, or because Joan worried that the children might not forgive her, they’d never done so.

One of the most vivid memories of Strike’s childhood was also one of the rare occasions he could remember crying, when Leda had made an unannounced return, six weeks into Strike’s first term at St. Mawes Primary School. Amazed and angry that such definitive steps as enrolling him in school had been taken in her absence, she’d ushered him and his sister directly onto the ferry, promising them all manner of treats up in London. Strike had bawled, trying to explain to her that he and Dave Polworth had been going to explore smugglers’ caves at the weekend, caves that might well have had no existence except in Dave’s imagination, but which were no less real to Strike for that.

“You’ll see the caves,” Leda had promised, plying him with sweets once they were on the train to London. “You’ll see what’s-his-name soon, I promise.”

“Dave,” Strike had sobbed, “he’s called D-Dave.”

Don’t think about it, Strike told himself, and he lit a second cigarette from the tip of his first.

“Stick, you’ll catch your death, out there in boxers!”

He looked around. His sister was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a woolen dressing gown and wearing sheepskin slippers. They were physically so unalike that people struggled to believe that they were related, let alone half-siblings. Lucy was small, blonde and pink-faced, and greatly resembled her father, a musician not quite as famous as Strike’s, but far more interested in maintaining contact with his offspring.

“Morning,” he said, but she’d already disappeared, returning with his trousers, sweatshirt, shoes and socks.

“Luce, it’s not cold—”

“You’ll get pneumonia. Put them on!”

Like Joan, Lucy had total confidence in her own judgment of her nearest and dearest’s best interests. With slightly better grace than he might have mustered had he not been about to return to London, Strike took his trousers and put them on, balancing awkwardly and risking a fall onto the gravel path. By the time he’d added a shoe and sock to his real foot, Lucy had made him a fresh mug of tea along with her own.

“I couldn’t sleep, either,” she told him, handing over the mug as she sat down on the stone bench. It was the first time they’d been entirely alone all week. Lucy had been glued to Joan’s side, insisting on doing all the cooking and cleaning while Joan, who found it inconceivable that she should sit down while the house was full of guests, hovered and fussed. On the rare moments that Joan wasn’t present, one or more of Lucy’s sons had generally been there, in Jack’s case wanting to talk to Strike, the other two generally badgering Lucy for something.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” said Lucy, staring out over the lawn and Ted’s carefully tended flower-beds.

“Yeah,” sighed Strike. “But fingers crossed. The chemo—”

“But it won’t cure her. It’ll just prolong—pro—”

Lucy shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled piece of toilet roll she pulled out of her dressing-gown pocket.

“I’ve rung her twice a week for nigh on twenty years, Stick. This place is a second home for our boys. She’s the only mother I’ve ever known.”

Strike knew he oughtn’t to rise to the bait. Nevertheless, he said,

“Other than our actual mother, you mean.”

“Leda wasn’t my mother,” said Lucy coldly. Strike had never heard her say it in so many words, though it had often been implied. “I haven’t considered her my mother since I was fourteen years old. Younger, actually. Joan’s my mother.”

And when Strike made no response, she said,

“You chose Leda. I know you love Joan, but we have entirely different relationships with her.”

“Didn’t realize it was a competition,” Strike said, reaching for another cigarette.

“I’m only telling you how I feel!”

And telling me how I feel.

Several barbed comments about the infrequency of Strike’s visits had already dropped from his sister’s lips during their week of enforced proximity. He’d bitten back all irritable retorts. His primary aim was to leave the house without rowing with anyone.

“I always hated it when Leda came to take us away,” said Lucy now, “but you were glad to go.”

He noted the Joan-esque statement of fact, the lack of inquiry.

“I wasn’t always glad to go,” Strike contradicted her, thinking of the ferry, Dave Polworth and the smugglers’ caves, but Lucy seemed to feel that he was trying to rob her of something.

“I’m just saying, you lost your mother years ago. Now I’m—I might be—losing mine.”

She mopped her eyes again with the damp toilet roll.

Lower back throbbing, eyes stinging with tiredness, Strike stood smoking in silence. He knew that Lucy would have liked to excise Leda forever from her memory, and sometimes, remembering a few of the things Leda had put them through, he sympathized. This morning, though, the wraith of Leda seemed to drift on his cigarette smoke around him. He could hear her saying to Lucy, “Go on and have a good cry, darling, it always helps,” and “Give your old mum a fag, Cormy.” He couldn’t hate her.

“I can’t believe you went out with Dave Polworth last night,” said Lucy suddenly. “Your last night here!”

“Joan virtually shoved me out of the house,” said Strike, nettled. “She loves Dave. Anyway, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

“Will you?” said Lucy, her eyelashes now beaded with tears. “Or will you be in the middle of some case and just forget?”

Strike blew smoke out into the constantly lightening air, which had that flat blue tinge that precedes sunrise. Far to the right, hazily visible over the rooftops of the houses on the slope that was Hillhead, the division between sky and water was becoming clearer on the horizon.

“No,” he said, “I won’t forget.”

“Because you’re good in a crisis,” said Lucy, “I don’t deny that, but it’s keeping a commitment going that you seem to have a problem with. Joan’ll need support for months and months, not just when—”

“I know that, Luce,” said Strike, his temper rising in spite of himself. “I understand illness and recuperation, believe it or—”

“Yeah, well,” said Lucy, “you were great when Jack was in hospital, but when everything’s fine you simply don’t bother.”

“I took Jack out two weeks ago, what’re you—?”

“You couldn’t even make the effort to come to Luke’s birthday party! He’d told all his friends you were going to be there—”

“Well, he shouldn’t have done, because I told you explicitly over the phone—”

“You said you’d try—”

“No, you said I’d try,” Strike contradicted her, temper rising now, in spite of his best intentions. “You said ‘You’ll make it if you can, though.’ Well, I couldn’t make it, I told you so in advance and it’s not my fault you told Luke differently—”

“I appreciate you taking Jack out every now and then,” said Lucy, talking over him, “but has it never occurred to you that it would be nice if the other two could come, too? Adam cried when Jack came home from the War Rooms! And then you come down here,” said Lucy, who seemed determined to get everything off her chest now she’d started, “and you only bring a present for Jack. What about Luke and Adam?”

“Ted called with the news about Joan and I set straight off. I’d been saving those badges for Jack, so I brought them with me.”

“Well, how do you think that makes Luke and Adam feel? Obviously they think you don’t like them as much as Jack!”

“I don’t,” said Strike, finally losing his temper. “Adam’s a whiny little prick and Luke’s a complete arsehole.”

He crushed out his cigarette on the wall, flicked the stub into the hedge and headed back inside, leaving Lucy gasping for air like a beached fish.

Back in the dark sitting room, Strike blundered straight into the table nest: the vase of dried flowers toppled heavily onto the patterned carpet and before he knew what he was doing he’d crushed the fragile stems and papery heads to dust beneath his false foot. He was still tidying up the fragments as best he could when Lucy strode silently past him toward the door to the stairs, emanating maternal outrage. Strike set the now empty vase back on the table and, waiting until he heard Lucy’s bedroom door close, headed upstairs for the bathroom, fuming.

Afraid to use the shower in case he woke Ted and Joan, he peed, pulled the flush and only then remembered how noisy the old toilet was. Washing as best he could in tepid water while the cistern refilled with a noise like a cement mixer, Strike thought that if anyone slept through that, they’d have to be drugged.

Sure enough, on opening the bathroom door, he came face to face with Joan. The top of his aunt’s head barely came up to Strike’s chest. He looked down on her thinning gray hair, into once forget-me-not blue eyes now bleached with age. Her frogged and quilted red dressing gown had the ceremonial dignity of a kabuki robe.

“Morning,” Strike said, trying to sound cheerful and achieving only a fake bonhomie. “Didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, no, I’ve been awake for a while. How was Dave?” she asked.

“Great,” said Strike heartily. “Loving his new job.”

“And Penny and the girls?”

“Yeah, they’re really happy to be back in Cornwall.”

“Oh good,” said Joan. “Dave’s mum thought Penny might not want to leave Bristol.”

“No, it’s all worked out great.”

The bedroom door behind Joan opened. Luke was standing there in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes ostentatiously.

“You woke me up,” he told Strike and Joan.

“Oh, sorry, love,” said Joan.

“Can I have Coco Pops?”

“Of course you can,” said Joan fondly.

Luke bounded downstairs, stamping on the stairs to make as much noise as possible. He was gone barely a minute before he came bounding back toward them, glee etched over his freckled face.

“Granny, Uncle Cormoran’s broken your flowers.”

You little shit.

“Yeah, sorry. The dried ones,” Strike told Joan. “I knocked them over. The vase is fine—”

“Oh, they couldn’t matter less,” said Joan, moving at once to the stairs. “I’ll fetch the carpet sweeper.”

“No,” said Strike at once, “I’ve already—”

“There are still bits all over the carpet,” Luke said. “I trod on them.”

I’ll tread on you in a minute, arsehole.

Strike and Luke followed Joan back to the sitting room, where Strike insisted on taking the carpet sweeper from Joan, a flimsy, archaic device she’d had since the seventies. As he plied it, Luke stood in the kitchen doorway watching him, smirking while shoveling Coco Pops into his mouth. By the time Strike had cleaned the carpet to Joan’s satisfaction, Jack and Adam had joined the early morning jamboree, along with a stony-faced Lucy, now fully dressed.

“Can we go to the beach today, Mum?”

“Can we swim?”

“Can I go out in the boat with Uncle Ted?”

“Sit down,” Strike told Joan. “I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”

But Lucy had already done it. She handed Joan the mug, threw Strike a filthy look, then turned back to the kitchen, answering her sons’ questions as she went.

“What’s going on?” asked Ted, shuffling into the room in pajamas, confused by this break-of-dawn activity.

He’d once been nearly as tall as Strike, who greatly resembled him. His dense, curly hair was now snow white, his deep brown face more cracked than lined, but Ted was still a strong man, though he stooped a little. However, Joan’s diagnosis seemed to have dealt him a physical blow. He seemed literally shaken, a little disorientated and unsteady.

“Just getting my stuff together, Ted,” said Strike, who suddenly had an overpowering desire to leave. “I’m going to have to get the first ferry to make the early train.”

“Ah,” said Ted. “All the way back up to London, are you?”

“Yep,” said Strike, chucking his charging lead and deodorant back into the kit bag where the rest of his belongings were already neatly stowed. “But I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. You’ll keep me posted, right?”

“You can’t leave without breakfast!” said Joan anxiously. “I’ll make you a sandwich—”

“It’s too early for me to eat,” lied Strike. “I’ve had a cup of tea and I’ll get something on the train. Tell her,” he said to Ted, because Joan wasn’t listening, but scurrying for the kitchen.

“Joanie!” Ted called. “He doesn’t want anything!”

Strike grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair and hoisted the kit bag out to the hall.

“You should go back to bed,” he told Joan, as she hurried to bid him goodbye. “I really didn’t want to wake you. Rest, all right? Let someone else run the town for a few weeks.”

“I wish you’d stop smoking,” she said sadly.

Strike managed a humorous eye roll, then hugged her. She clung to him the way she had done whenever Leda was waiting impatiently to take him away, and Strike squeezed her back, feeling again the pain of divided loyalties, of being both battleground and prize, of having to give names to what was uncategorizable and unknowable.

“Bye, Ted,” he said, hugging his uncle. “I’ll ring you when I’m home and we’ll fix up a time for the next visit.”

“I could’ve driven you,” said Uncle Ted feebly. “Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”

“I like the ferry,” lied Strike. In fact, the uneven steps leading down to the boat were almost impossible for him to navigate without assistance from the ferryman, but because he knew it would give them pleasure, he said, “Reminds me of you two taking us shopping in Falmouth when we were kids.”

Lucy was watching him, apparently unconcerned, through the door from the sitting room. Luke and Adam hadn’t wanted to leave their Coco Pops, but Jack came wriggling breathlessly into the tiny hall to say,

“Thanks for my badges, Uncle Corm.”

“It was a pleasure,” said Strike, and he ruffled the boy’s hair. “Bye, Luce,” he called. “See you soon, Jack,” he added.

5

The bedroom in the bed and breakfast where Robin spent the night barely had room for a single bed, a chest of drawers and a rickety sink plumbed into the corner. The walls were covered in a mauve floral wallpaper that Robin thought must surely have been considered tasteless even in the seventies, the sheets felt damp and the window was imperfectly covered by a tangled Venetian blind.

In the harsh glare of a single lightbulb unsoftened by its shade of open wickerwork, Robin’s reflection looked exhausted and ill-kempt, with purple shadows beneath her eyes. Her backpack contained only those items she always carried on surveillance jobs—a beanie hat, should she need to conceal her distinctive red-blonde hair, sunglasses, a change of top, a credit card and ID in a couple of different names. The fresh T-shirt she’d just pulled out of her backpack was heavily creased and her hair in urgent need of a wash; the sink was soapless and she’d omitted to pack toothbrush or toothpaste, unaware that she was going to be spending the night away from home.

Robin was back on the road by eight. In Newton Abbot she stopped at a chemist and a Sainsbury’s, where she purchased, in addition to basic toiletries and dry shampoo, a small, cheap bottle of 4711 cologne. She cleaned her teeth and made herself as presentable as possible in the supermarket bathroom. While brushing her hair, she received a text from Strike:

I’ll be in the Palacio Lounge café in The Moor, middle of Falmouth. Anyone will tell you where The Moor is.

The further west Robin drove, the lusher and greener the landscape became. Yorkshire-born, she’d found it extraordinary to see palm trees actually flourishing on English soil, back in Torquay. These twisting, verdant lanes, the luxuriance of the vegetation, the almost sub-tropical greenness was a surprise to a person raised among bare, rolling moors and hillside. Then there were the glints to her left of a quicksilver sea, as wide and gleaming as plate glass, and the tang of the salt now mixed with the citrus of her hastily purchased cologne. In spite of her tiredness she found her spirits buoyed by the glorious morning, and the idea of Strike waiting at journey’s end.

She arrived in Falmouth at eleven o’clock, and drove in search of a parking space through streets packed with tourists and past shop doorways accreted in plastic toys and pubs covered in flags and multi­colored window boxes. Once she’d parked in The Moor itself—a wide open market square in the heart of the town—she saw that beneath the gaudy summertime trappings, Falmouth boasted some grand old nineteenth-century buildings, one of which housed the Palacio Lounge café and restaurant.

The high ceilings and classical proportions of what looked like an old courthouse had been decorated in a self-consciously whimsical style, which included garish orange floral wallpaper, hundreds of kitschy paintings in pastel frames, and a stuffed fox dressed as a magistrate. The clientele, which was dominated by students and families, sat on mismatched wooden chairs, their chatter echoing through the cavernous space. After a few seconds Robin spotted Strike, large and surly-looking at the back of the room, seeming far from happy beside a pair of families whose many young children, most of whom were wearing tie-dyed clothing, were racing around between tables.

Robin thought she saw the idea of standing to greet her cross Strike’s mind as she wound her way through the tables toward him, but if she was right, he decided against. She knew how he looked when his leg was hurting him, the lines around his mouth deeper than usual, as though he had been clenching his jaw. If Robin had looked tired in the dusty bed and breakfast mirror three hours previously, Strike looked utterly drained, his unshaven jaw appearing dirty, the shadows under his eyes dark blue.

“Morning,” he said, struggling to make himself heard over the merry shrieking of the hippy children. “Get parked OK?”

“Just round the corner,” she said, sitting down.

“I chose this place because I thought it would be easy to find,” he said.

A small boy knocked into their table, causing Strike’s coffee to slop over onto his plate, which was littered with croissant flakes, and ran off again. “What d’you want?”

“Coffee would be great,” said Robin loudly, over the cries of the children beside them. “How’re things in St. Mawes?”

“Same,” said Strike.

“I’m sorry,” said Robin.

“Why? It’s not your fault,” grunted Strike.

This was hardly the greeting Robin had expected after a two-and-a-half drive to pick him up. Possibly her annoyance showed, because Strike added,

“Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. Oh, don’t pretend you can’t see me, dipshit,” he added crossly, as a young waiter walked away without spotting his raised hand.

“I’ll go to the counter,” said Robin. “I need the loo anyway.”

By the time she’d peed and managed to order a coffee from a harassed waiter, a tension headache had begun to pound on the left-hand side of her head. On her return to the table she found Strike looking like thunder, because the children at the next tables were now shrieking louder than ever as they raced around their oblivious parents, who simply shouted over the din. The idea of giving Strike Charlotte’s telephone message right now passed through Robin’s mind, only to be dismissed.

In fact, the main reason for Strike’s foul mood was that the end of his amputated leg was agony. He’d fallen (like a total tit, as he told himself) while getting onto the Falmouth ferry. This feat required a precarious descent down worn stone steps without a handhold, then a step down into the boat with only the boatman’s hand for assistance. At sixteen stone, Strike was hard to stabilize when he slipped, and slip he had, with the result that he was now in a lot of pain.

Robin took paracetamol out of her bag.

“Headache,” she said, catching Strike’s eye.

“I’m not bloody surprised,” he said loudly, looking at the parents shouting at each other over the raucous yells of their offspring, but they didn’t hear him. The idea of asking Robin for painkillers crossed Strike’s mind, but this might engender inquiries and fussing, and he’d had quite enough of those in the past week, so he continued to suffer in silence.

“Where’s the client?” she asked, after downing her pills with coffee.

“About five minutes’ drive away. Place called Wodehouse Terrace.”

At this point, the smallest of the children racing around nearby tripped and smacked her face on the wooden floor. The child’s shrieks and wails of pain pounded against Robin’s eardrums.

“Oh, Daffy!” said one of the tie-dyed mothers shrilly, “what have you done?”

The child’s mouth was bloody. Her mother crouched beside their table, loudly castigating and soothing, while the girl’s siblings and friends watched avidly. The ferry-goers this morning had worn similar expressions when Strike had hit the deck.

“He’s got a false leg,” the ferryman had shouted, partly, Strike suspected, in case anyone thought the fall was due to his negligence. The announcement had in no way lessened Strike’s mortification or the interest of his fellow travelers.

“Shall we get going?” Robin asked, already on her feet.

“Definitely,” said Strike, wincing as he stood and picked up his holdall. “Bloody kids,” he muttered, limping after Robin toward the sunlight.

6

Wodehouse Terrace lay on a hill, with a wide view of the bay below. Many of the houses had had loft conversions, but Anna and Kim’s, as they saw from the street, had been more extensively modified than any other, with what looked like a square glass box where once there had been roof.

“What does Anna do?” asked Robin, as they climbed the steps toward the deep blue front door.

“No idea,” said Strike, “but her wife’s a psychologist. I got the impression she isn’t keen on the idea of an investigation.”

He pressed the doorbell. They heard footsteps on what sounded like bare wood, and the door was opened by Dr. Sullivan, tall, blonde and barefoot in jeans and a shirt, the sun glinting off her spectacles. She looked from Strike to Robin, apparently surprised.

“My partner, Robin Ellacott,” Strike explained.

“Oh,” said Kim, looking displeased. “You do realize—this is only supposed to be an exploratory meeting.”

“Robin happened to be just up the coast on another case, so—”

“I’m more than happy to wait in the car,” said Robin politely, “if Anna would rather speak to Cormoran alone.”

“Well—we’ll see how Anna feels.”

Standing back to admit them, Kim added, “Straight upstairs, in the sitting room.”

The house had clearly been remodeled throughout and to a high standard. Everywhere was bleached wood and glass. The bedroom, as Robin saw through an open door, had been relocated to the ground floor, along with what looked like a study. Upstairs, in the glass box they’d seen from the street, was an open-plan area combining kitchen, dining and sitting room, with a dazzling view of the sea.

Anna was standing beside a gleaming, expensive coffee machine, wearing a baggy blue cotton jumpsuit and white canvas shoes, which to Robin looked stylish and to Strike, frumpy. Her hair was tied back, revealing the delicacy of her bone structure.

“Oh, hello,” she said, starting at the sight of them. “I didn’t hear the door over the coffee machine.”

“Annie,” said Kim, following Strike and Robin into the room, “this is Robin Ellacott, er—Cameron’s partner. She’s happy to go if you’d rather just talk to—”

“Cormoran,” Anna corrected Kim. “Do people get that wrong a lot?” she asked Strike.

“More often than not,” he said, but with a smile. “But it’s a bloody stupid name.”

Anna laughed.

“I don’t mind you staying,” she told Robin, advancing and offering a handshake. “I think I read about you, too,” she added, and Robin pretended that she didn’t notice Anna glancing down at the long scar on her forearm.

“Please, sit down,” said Kim, gesturing Strike and Robin to an inbuilt seating area around a low Perspex table.

“Coffee?” suggested Anna, and both of them accepted.

A ragdoll cat came prowling into the room, stepping delicately through the puddles of sunlight on the floor, its clear blue eyes like Joan’s across the bay. After subjecting both Strike and Robin to dispassionate scrutiny, it leapt lightly onto the sofa and into Strike’s lap.

“Ironically,” said Kim, as she carried a tray laden with cups and biscuits to the table, “Cagney absolutely loves men.”

Strike and Robin laughed politely. Anna brought over the coffee pot, and the two women sat down side by side, facing Strike and Robin, their faces in the full glare of the sun until Anna reached for a remote control, which automatically lowered cream-colored sun blinds.

“Wonderful place,” said Robin, looking around.

“Thanks,” said Kim. “Her work,” she said, patting Anna’s knee. “She’s an architect.”

Anna cleared her throat.

“I want to apologize,” she said, looking steadily at Strike with her unusual silver-gray eyes, “for the way I behaved last night. I’d had a few glasses of wine. You probably thought I was a crank.”

“If I’d thought that,” said Strike, stroking the loudly purring cat, “I wouldn’t be here.”

“But mentioning the medium probably gave you entirely the wrong… because, believe me, Kim’s already told me what a fool I was to go and see her.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool, Annie,” Kim said quietly. “I think you’re vulnerable. There’s a difference.”

“May I ask what the medium said?” asked Strike.

“Does it matter?” asked Kim, looking at Strike with what Robin thought was mistrust.

“Not in an investigative sense,” said Strike, “but as he—she?—is the reason Anna approached me—”

“It was a woman,” said Anna, “and she didn’t really tell me anything useful… not that I…”

With a nervous laugh, she shook her head and started again.

“I know it was a stupid thing to do. I—I’ve been through a difficult time recently—I left my firm and I’m about to turn forty and… well, Kim was away on a course and I—well, I suppose I wanted—”

She waved her hands dismissively, took a deep breath and said,

“She’s quite an ordinary-looking woman who lives in Chiswick. Her house was full of angels—made of pottery and glass, I mean, and there was a big one painted on velvet over the fireplace.

“Kim,” Anna pressed on, and Robin glanced at the psychologist, whose expression was impassive, “Kim thinks she—the medium—knew who my mother was—that she Googled me before I arrived. I’d given her my real name. When I got there, I simply said that my mother died a long time ago—although of course,” said Anna, with another nervous wave of her thin hands, “there’s no proof that my mother’s dead—that’s half the—but anyway, I told the medium she’d died, and that nobody had ever been clear with me about how it happened.

“So the woman went into a—well, I suppose you’d call it a trance,” Anna said, looking embarrassed, “and she told me that people thought they were protecting me for my own good, but that it was time I knew the truth and that I would soon have a ‘leading’ that would take me to it. And she said ‘your mother’s very proud of you’ and ‘she’s always watching over you,’ and things like that, I suppose they’re boilerplate—and then, at the end, ‘she lies in a holy place.’”

“‘Lies in a holy place’?” repeated Strike.

“Yes. I suppose she thought that would be comforting, but I’m not a churchgoer. The sanctity or otherwise of my mother’s final resting place—if she’s buried—I mean, it’s hardly my primary concern.”

“D’you mind if I take notes?” Strike asked.

He pulled out a notebook and pen, which Cagney the cat appeared to think were for her personal amusement. She attempted to bat the pen around as Strike wrote the date.

“Come here, you silly animal,” said Kim, getting up to lift the cat clear and put her back on the warm wooden floor.

“To begin at the beginning,” said Strike. “You must’ve been very young when your mother went missing?”

“Just over a year old,” said Anna, “so I can’t remember her at all. There were no photographs of her in the house while I was growing up. I didn’t know what had happened for a long time. Of course, there was no internet back then—anyway, my mother kept her own surname after marriage. I grew up as Anna Phipps, which is my father’s name. If anybody had said ‘Margot Bamborough’ to me before I was eleven, I wouldn’t have known she had any connection to me.

“I thought Cynthia was my mum. She was my childminder when I was little,” she explained. “She’s a third cousin of my father’s and quite a bit younger than him, but she’s a Phipps, too, so I assumed we were a standard nuclear family. I mean—why wouldn’t I?

“I do remember, once I’d started school, questioning why I was calling Cyn ‘Cyn’ instead of ‘Mum.’ But then Dad and Cyn decided to get married, and they told me I could call her ‘Mum’ now if I wanted to, and I thought, oh, I see, I had to use her name before, because they weren’t married. You fill in the gaps when you’re a child, don’t you? With your own weird logic.

“I was seven or eight when a girl at school said to me, ‘That’s not your real mum. Your real mum disappeared.’ It sounded mad. I didn’t ask Dad or Cyn about it. I just locked it away, but I think, on some deep level, I sensed I’d just been handed the answer to some of the strange things I’d noticed and never been given answers to.

“I was eleven when I found out properly. By then, I’d heard other things from other kids at school. ‘Your real mum ran away’ was one of them. Then one day, this really poisonous boy said to me, ‘Your mum was killed by a man who cut off her head.’”

“I went home and I told my father what that boy had said. I wanted him to laugh, to say it was ridiculous, what a horrible little boy… but he turned white.

“That same evening he and Cynthia called me downstairs out of my bedroom, sat me down in the sitting room and told me the truth.

“And everything I thought I knew crumbled away,” said Anna quietly. “Who thinks something like this has happened in their own family? I adored Cyn. I got on better with her than with my father, to tell you the truth. And then I found out that she wasn’t my mum at all, and they’d both lied—lied in fact, lied by omission.

“They told me my mother walked out of her GP’s practice one night and vanished. The last person to see her alive was the receptionist. She said she was off to the pub, which was five minutes up the road. Her best friend was waiting there. When my mother didn’t turn up, the friend, Oonagh Kennedy, who’d waited an hour, thought she must have forgotten. She called my parents’ house. My mother wasn’t there. My father called the practice, but it was closed. It got dark. My mother didn’t come home. My father called the police.

“They investigated for months and months. Nothing. No clues, no sightings—at least, that’s what my father and Cyn said, but I’ve since read things that contradict that.

“I asked Dad and Cyn where my mother’s parents were. They said they were dead. That turned out to be true. My grandfather died of a heart attack a couple of years after my mother disappeared and my grandmother died of a stroke a year later. My mother was an only child, so there were no other relatives I could meet or talk to about her.

“I asked for photographs. My father said he’d got rid of them all, but Cyn dug some out for me, a couple of weeks after I found out. She asked me not to tell my father she’d done it; to hide them. I did: I had a pajama case shaped like a rabbit and I kept my mother’s photographs in there for years.”

“Did your father and stepmother explain to you what might have happened to your mother?” Strike asked.

“Dennis Creed, you mean?” said Anna. “Yes, but they didn’t tell me details. They said there was a chance she’d been killed by a—by a bad man. They had to tell me that much, because of what the boy at school had said.

“It was an appalling idea, thinking she might have been killed by Creed—I found out his name soon enough, kids at school were happy to fill me in. I started having nightmares about her, headless. Sometimes she came into my bedroom at night. Sometimes I dreamed I found her head in my toy chest.

“I got really angry with my father and Cyn,” said Anna, twisting her fingers together. “Angry that they’d never told me, obviously, but I also started wondering what else they were hiding, whether they were involved in my mother disappearing, whether they’d wanted her out of the way, so they could marry. I went a bit off the rails, started playing truant… one weekend I took off and was brought home by the police. My father was livid. Of course, I look back, and after what had happened to my mother… obviously, me going missing, even for a few hours…

“I gave them hell, to tell you the truth,” said Anna shamefacedly. “But all credit to Cyn, she stuck by me. She never gave up. She and Dad had had kids together by then—I’ve got a younger brother and sister—and there was family therapy and holidays with bonding activities, all led by Cyn, because my father certainly didn’t want to do it. The subject of my mother just makes him angry and aggrieved. I remember him yelling at me, didn’t I realize how terrible it was for him to have it all dragged up again, how did I think he felt…

“When I was fifteen I tried to find my mother’s friend, Oonagh, the one she was supposed to be meeting the night she disappeared. They were Bunny Girls together,” said Anna, with a little smile, “but I didn’t know that at the time. I tracked Oonagh down in Wolverhampton, and she was quite emotional to hear from me. We had a couple of lovely phone calls. She told me things I really wanted to know, about my mother’s sense of humor, the perfume she wore—Rive Gauche, I went out and blew my birthday money on a bottle next day—how she was addicted to chocolate and was an obsessive Joni Mitchell fan. My mother came more alive to me when I was talking to Oonagh than through the photographs, or anything Dad or Cyn had told me.

“But my father found out I’d spoken to Oonagh and he was furious. He made me give him Oonagh’s number and called her and accused her of encouraging me to defy him, told her I was troubled, in therapy and what I didn’t need was people ‘stirring.’ He told me not to wear the Rive Gauche, either. He said he couldn’t stand the smell of it.

“So I never did meet Oonagh, and when I tried to reconnect with her in my twenties, I couldn’t find her. She might have passed away, for all I know.”

“I got into university, left home and started reading everything I could about Dennis Creed. The nightmares came back, but it didn’t get me any closer to finding out what really happened.

“Apparently the man in charge of the investigation into my mother’s disappearance, a detective inspector called Bill Talbot, always thought Creed took her. Talbot will be dead by now; he was coming up for retirement anyway.

“Then, a few years out of uni, I had the bright idea of starting a website,” said Anna. “My girlfriend at the time was tech-savvy. She helped me set it up. I was very naive,” she sighed. “I said who I was and begged for information about my mother.

“You can probably imagine what happened. All kinds of theories: psychics telling me where to dig, people telling me my father had obviously done it, others telling me I wasn’t really Margot’s daughter, that I was after money and publicity, and some really malicious messages as well, saying my mother had probably run off with a lover and worse. A couple of journalists got in touch, too. One of them ran an awful piece in the Daily Express about our family: they contacted my father and that was just about the final nail in the coffin for our relationship.

“It’s never really recovered,” said Anna bleakly. “When I told him I’m gay, he seemed to think I was only doing it to spite him. And Cyn’s gone over to his side a bit, these last few years. She always says, ‘I’ve got a loyalty to your dad, too, Anna.’ So,” said Anna, “that’s where we are.”

There was a brief silence.

“Dreadful for you,” said Robin.

“It is,” agreed Kim, placing her hand on Anna’s knee again, “and I’m wholly sympathetic to Anna’s desire for resolution, of course I am. But is it realistic,” she said, looking from Robin to Strike, “and I mean this with no offense to you two, to think that you’ll achieve what the police haven’t, after all this time?”

“Realistic?” said Strike. “No.”

Robin noticed Anna’s downward look and the sudden rush of tears into her large eyes. She felt desperately sorry for the older woman, but at the same time she respected Strike’s honesty, and it seemed to have impressed the skeptical Kim, too.

“Here’s the truth,” Strike said, tactfully looking at his notes until Anna had finished drying her eyes with the back of her hand. “I think we’d have a reasonable chance of getting hold of the old police file, because we’ve got decent contacts at the Met. We can sift right through the evidence again, revisit witnesses as far as that’s possible, basically make sure every stone’s been turned over twice.

“But it’s odds on that after all this time, we wouldn’t find any more than the police did, and we’d be facing two major obstacles.

“Firstly, zero forensic evidence. From what I understand, literally no trace of your mother was ever found, is that right? No items of clothing, bus pass—nothing.”

“True,” mumbled Anna.

“Secondly, as you’ve just pointed out, a lot of the people connected with her or who witnessed anything that night are likely to have died.”

“I know,” said Anna, and a tear trickled, sparkling, down her nose onto the Perspex table. Kim reached out and put an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe it’s turning forty,” said Anna, with a sob, “but I can’t stand the idea that I’ll go to my grave never knowing what happened.”

“I understand that,” said Strike, “but I don’t want to promise what I’m unlikely to be able to deliver.”

“Have there,” asked Robin, “been any new leads or developments over the years?”

Kim answered. She seemed a little shaken by Anna’s naked distress, and kept her arm around her shoulders.

“Not as far as we know, do we, Annie? But any information of that kind would probably have gone to Roy—Anna’s father. And he might not have told us.”

“He acts as though none of it ever happened; it’s how he copes,” said Anna, wiping her tears away. “He pretends my mother never existed—except for the inconvenient fact that if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “it’s the possibility that she just went away of her own accord and never came back, never wanted to see how I was doing, or let us know where she was, that really haunts me. That’s the thing I can’t bear to contemplate. My grandmother on my father’s side, who I never loved—she was one of the meanest women I’ve ever met—took it upon herself to tell me that it had always been her private belief that my mother had simply run away. That she didn’t like being a wife and a mother. That hurt me more than I can tell you, the thought that my mother would let everyone go through the horror of wondering what had happened to her, and never check that her daughter was all right…

“Even if Dennis Creed killed her,” said Anna, “it would be terri­ble—awful—but it would be over. I could mourn rather than live with the possibility that she’s out there somewhere, living under a different name, not caring what happened to us all.”

There was a brief silence, in which both Strike and Robin drank coffee, Anna sniffed, and Kim left the sofa area to tear off kitchen roll, which she handed to her wife.

A second ragdoll cat entered the room. She subjected the four humans to a supercilious glare before lying down and stretching in a patch of sunlight.

“That’s Lacey,” said Kim, while Anna mopped her face. “She doesn’t really like anyone, even us.”

Strike and Robin laughed politely again.

“How would this work?” asked Kim abruptly. “How d’you charge?”

“By the hour,” said Strike. “You’d get an itemized monthly bill. I can email you our rates,” he offered, “but I’d imagine you two will want to talk this over properly before coming to a decision.”

“Yes, definitely,” said Kim, but as she gave Strike her email address she looked with concern again at Anna, who was sitting with head bowed, still pressing kitchen roll to her eyes at regular intervals.

Strike’s stump protested at being asked to support his weight again so soon after sitting down, but there seemed little more to discuss, especially as Anna had regressed into a tearful silence. Slightly regretting the untouched plate of biscuits, the detective shook Anna’s cool hand.

“Thanks, anyway,” she said, and he had the feeling that he had disappointed her, that she’d hoped he would make her a promise of the truth, that he would swear upon his honor to do what everyone else had failed to do.

Kim showed them out of the house.

“We’ll call you later,” she said. “This afternoon. Will that be all right?”

“Great, we’ll wait to hear from you,” said Strike.

Robin glanced back as she and Strike headed down the sunlit garden steps toward the street, and caught Kim giving them a strange look, as though she’d found something in the pair of visitors that she hadn’t expected. Catching Robin’s eye, she smiled reflexively, and closed the blue door behind them.

7

As they headed out of Falmouth, Strike’s mood turned to cheerfulness, which Robin attributed mainly to the interest of a possible new case. She’d never yet known an intriguing problem to fail to engage his attention, no matter what might be happening in his private life.

She was partially right: Strike’s interest had certainly been piqued by Anna’s story, but he was mainly cheered by the prospect of keeping weight off his prosthesis for a few hours, and by the knowledge that every passing minute put further distance between himself and his sister. Opening the car window, allowing the familiar sea air to rush bracingly inside the old car, he lit a cigarette and, blowing smoke away from Robin, asked,

“Seen much of Morris while I’ve been away?”

“Saw him yesterday,” said Robin. “Paid him for his month’s expenses.”

“Ah, great, cheers,” said Strike, “I meant to remind you that needed doing. What d’you think of him? Barclay says he’s good at the job, except he talks too much in the car.”

“Yeah,” said Robin noncommittally, “he does like to talk.”

“Hutchins thinks he’s a bit smarmy,” said Strike, subtly probing.

He’d noticed the special tone Morris reserved for Robin. Hutchins had also reported that Morris had asked him what Robin’s relationship status was.

“Mm,” said Robin, “well, I haven’t really had enough contact with him to form an opinion.”

Given Strike’s current stress levels and the amount of work the agency was struggling to cover, she’d decided not to criticize his most recent hire. They needed an extra man. At least Morris was good at the job.

“Pat likes him,” she added, partly out of mischief, and was amused to see, out of the corner of her eye, Strike turn to look at her, scowling.

“That’s no bloody recommendation.”

“Unkind,” said Robin.

“You realize in a week’s time it’s going to be harder to sack her? Her probation period’s nearly up.”

“I don’t want to sack her,” said Robin. “I think she’s great.”

“Well, then, on your head be it if she causes trouble down the line.”

“It won’t be on my head,” said Robin. “You’re not pinning Pat on me. Hiring her was a joint decision. You were the one who was sick of temps—”

“And you were the one who said ‘it might not be a bad idea to get a more traditional manager in’ and ‘we shouldn’t discount her because of her age’—”

“—I know what I said, and I stand by the age thing. We do need someone who understands a spreadsheet, who’s organized, but you were the one who—”

“—I didn’t want you accusing me of ageism.”

“—you were the one who offered her the job,” Robin finished firmly.

“Dunno what I was bloody thinking,” muttered Strike, flicking ash out of the window.

Patricia Chauncey was fifty-six and looked sixty-five. A thin woman with a deeply lined, monkeyish face and implausibly jet-black hair, she vaped continually in the office, but was to be seen drawing deeply on a Superking the moment her feet touched the pavement at the end of the day’s work. Pat’s voice was so deep and rasping that she was often mistaken for Strike on the phone. She sat at what once had been Robin’s desk in the outer office and had taken over the bulk of the agency’s phone-answering and administrative duties now that Robin had moved to full-time detection.

Strike and Pat’s relationship had been combative from the start, which puzzled Robin, who liked them both. Robin was used to Strike’s intermittent bouts of moodiness, and prone to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially when she suspected he was in pain, but Pat had no compunction about snapping “Would a ‘thanks’ kill you?” if Strike showed insufficient gratitude when she passed him his phone messages. She evidently felt none of the reverence some of their temps had displayed toward the now famous detective, one of whom had been sacked on the spot when Strike realized she was surreptitiously filming him on her mobile from the outer office. Indeed, the office manager’s demeanor suggested that she lived in daily expectation of finding out things to Strike’s discredit, and she’d displayed a certain satisfaction on hearing that the dent in one of the filing cabinets was due to the fact that he’d once punched it.

On the other hand, the filing was up to date, the accounts were in order, all receipts were neatly docketed, the phone was answered promptly, messages were passed on accurately, they never ran out of teabags or milk, and Pat had never once arrived late, no matter the weather and irrespective of Tube delays.

It was true, too, that Pat liked Morris, who was the recipient of most of her rare smiles. Morris was always careful to pay Pat his full tribute of blue-eyed charm before turning his attention to Robin. Pat was already alert to the possibility of romance between her younger colleagues.

“He’s lovely-looking,” she’d told Robin just the previous week, after Morris had phoned in his location so that the temporarily unreachable Barclay could be told where to take over surveillance on their biggest case. “You’ve got to give him that.”

“I haven’t got to give him anything,” Robin had said, a little crossly.

It was bad enough having Ilsa badger her about Strike in her leisure time without Pat starting on Morris during her working hours.

“Quite right,” Pat had responded, unfazed. “Make him earn it.”

“Anyway,” said Strike, finishing his cigarette and crushing the stub out in the tin Robin kept for that purpose in the glove compartment, “you’ve wrapped up Tufty. Bloody good going.”

“Thanks,” Robin said. “But there’s going to be press. Bigamy’s always news.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Well, it’s going to be worse for him than us, but it’s worth trying to keep our name out of it if we can. I’ll have a word with Mrs.-Campion-in-Windsor. So that leaves us,” he counted the names on his thick fingers, “with Two-Times, Twinkletoes, Postcard and Shifty.”

It had become the agency’s habit to assign nicknames to their targets and clients, mainly to avoid letting real names slip in public or in emails. Two-Times was a previous client of the agency, who’d recently resurfaced after trying other private detectives and finding them unsatisfactory. Strike and Robin had previously investigated two of his girlfriends. At a superficial glance, he seemed most unlucky in love, a man whose partners, initially attracted by his fat bank balance, seemed incapable of fidelity. Over time, Strike and Robin had come to believe that he derived obscure emotional or sexual satisfaction from being cheated on, and that they were being paid to provide evidence that, far from upsetting him, gave him pleasure. Once confronted with photographic evidence of her perfidy, the girlfriend of the moment would be confronted, dismissed and another found, and the whole pattern repeated. This time round, he was dating a glamour model who thus far, to Two-Times’ poorly concealed disappointment, seemed to be faithful.

Twinkletoes, whose unimaginative nickname had been chosen by Morris, was a twenty-four-year-old dancer who was currently having an affair with a thirty-nine-year-old double-divorcée, notable mainly for her history of drug abuse and her enormous trust fund. The socialite’s father was employing the agency to discover anything they could about Twinkletoes’ background or behavior, which could be used to prize his daughter away from him.

Postcard was, so far, an entirely unknown quantity. A middle-aged and, in Robin’s opinion, fairly unattractive television weather forecaster had come to the agency after the police had said there was nothing they could do about the postcards that had begun to arrive at his place of work and, most worryingly, hand delivered to his house in the small hours. The cards made no threats; indeed, they were often no more than banal comments on the weatherman’s choice of tie, yet they gave evidence of knowing far more about the man’s movements and private life than a stranger should have. The use of postcards was also a peculiar choice, when persecution was so much easier, these days, online. The agency’s subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, had now spent two solid weeks’ worth of nights parked outside the weatherman’s house, but Postcard hadn’t yet shown themselves.

Last, and most lucrative, was the interesting case of Shifty, a young investment banker whose rapid rise through his company had generated a predictable amount of resentment among overlooked colleagues, which had exploded into full-blown suspicion when he’d been promoted to the second-in-command job ahead of three undeniably better qualified candidates. Exactly what leverage Shifty had on the CEO (known to the agency as Shifty’s Boss or SB) was now a matter of interest not only to Shifty’s subordinates, but to a couple of suspicious board members, who’d met Strike in a dark bar in the City to lay out their concerns. Strike’s current strategy was to try to find out more about Shifty through his personal assistant, and to this end Morris had been given the job of chatting her up after hours, revealing neither his real name nor his occupation, but trying to gauge how deep her loyalty to Shifty ran.

“D’you need to be back in London by any particular time?” Strike asked, after a brief silence.

“No,” said Robin, “why?”

“Would you mind,” said Strike, “if we stop for food? I didn’t have breakfast.”

Despite remembering that he had, in fact, had a plate full of croissant crumbs in front of him when she arrived at the Palacio Lounge, Robin agreed. Strike seemed to read her mind.

“You can’t count a croissant. Mostly air.”

Robin laughed.

By the time they reached Subway at Cornwall Services, the atmosphere between the two of them had become almost light-hearted, notwithstanding their tiredness. Once Robin, mindful of her resolution to eat more healthily, had started on her salad and Strike had taken a few satisfying mouthfuls of his steak and cheese sandwich, he emailed Kim Sullivan their form letter about billing clients, then said,

“I had a row with Lucy this morning.”

Robin surmised that it must have been a bad one, for Strike to mention it.

“Five o’clock, in the garden, while I was having a quiet smoke.”

“Bit early for conflict,” said Robin, picking unenthusiastically through lettuce leaves.

“Well, it turns out we’re competing in the Who Loves Joan Best Handicap Stakes. Didn’t even know I’d been entered.”

He ate in silence for a minute, then went on,

“It ended with me telling her I thought Adam’s a whiny prick and Luke’s an arsehole.”

Robin, who’d been sipping her water, inhaled, and was seized by a paroxysm of coughs. Diners at nearby tables glanced round as Robin spluttered and gasped. Grabbing a paper napkin from the table to mop her chin and her streaming eyes, she wheezed,

“What—on earth—did you say that for?”

“Because Adam’s a whiny prick and Luke’s an arsehole.”

Still trying to cough water out of her windpipe, Robin laughed, eyes streaming, but shook her head.

“Bloody hell, Cormoran,” she said, when at last she could talk properly.

“You haven’t just had a solid week of them. Luke broke my new headphones, then ran off with my leg, the little shit. Then Lucy accuses me of favoring Jack. Of course I favor him—he’s the only decent one.”

“Yes, but telling their mother—”

“Yeah, I know,” said Strike heavily. “I’ll ring and apologize.” There was a brief pause. “But for fuck’s sake,” he growled, “why do I have to take all three of them out together? Neither of the others give a toss about the military. ‘Adam cried when you came back from the War Rooms,’ my arse. The little bastard didn’t like that I’d bought Jack stuff, that’s all. If Lucy had her way, I’d be taking them on group outings every weekend, and they’d take turns to choose; it’ll be the zoo and effing go-karting, and everything that was good about me seeing Jack’ll be ruined. I like Jack,” said Strike, with what appeared to be surprise. “We’re interested in the same stuff. What’s with this mania for treating them all the same? Useful life lesson, I’d have thought, realizing you aren’t owed. You don’t get stuff automatically because of who you’re related to.

“But fine, she wants me to buy the other two presents,” and he framed a square in mid-air with his hands. “‘Try Not Being a Little Shit.’ I’ll get that made up as a plaque for Luke’s bedroom wall.”

They bought a bag of snacks, then resumed their drive. As they turned out onto the road again, Strike expressed his guilt that he couldn’t share the driving, because the old Land Rover was too much of a challenge with his false leg.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Robin. “I don’t mind. What’s funny?” she added, seeing Strike smirking at something he had found in their bag of food.

“English strawberries,” he said.

“And that’s comical, why?”

He explained about Dave Polworth’s fury that goods of Cornish origin weren’t labeled as such, and his commensurate glee that more and more locals were putting their Cornish identity above English on forms.

“Social identity theory’s very interesting,” said Robin. “That and self-categorization theory. I studied them at uni. There are implications for businesses as well as society, you know…”

She talked happily for a couple of minutes before realizing, on glancing sideways, that Strike had fallen fast asleep. Choosing not to take offense, because he looked gray with tiredness, Robin fell silent, and other than the occasional grunting snore, there was no more communication to be had from Strike until, on the outskirts of Swindon, he suddenly jerked awake again.

“Shit,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “sorry. How long was I asleep?”

“About three hours,” said Robin.

“Shit,” he said again, “sorry,” and immediately reached for a ciga­rette. “I’ve been kipping on the world’s most uncomfortable sofa and the kids have woken me up at the crack of fucking dawn every day. Want anything from the food bag?”

“Yes,” said Robin, throwing the diet to the winds. She was in urgent need of a pick-me-up. “Chocolate. English or Cornish, I don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” Strike said for a third time. “You were telling me about a social theory or something.”

Robin grinned.

“You fell asleep around the time I was telling you my fascinating application of social identity theory to detective practice.”

“Which is?” he said, trying to make up in politeness now what he had lost earlier.

Robin, who knew perfectly well that this was why he had asked the question, said,

“In essence, we tend to sort each other and ourselves into groupings, and that usually leads to an overestimation of similarities between members of a group, and an underestimation of the similarities between insiders and outsiders.”

“So you’re saying all Cornishmen aren’t rugged salt-of-the-earthers and all Englishmen aren’t pompous arseholes?”

Strike unwrapped a Yorkie and put it into her hand.

“Sounds unlikely, but I’ll run it past Polworth next time we meet.”

Ignoring the strawberries, which had been Robin’s purchase, Strike opened a can of Coke and drank it while smoking and watching the sky turn bloody as they drew nearer to London.

“Dennis Creed’s still alive, you know,” said Strike, watching trees blur out of the window. “I was reading about him online this morning.”

“Where is he?” asked Robin.

“Broadmoor,” said Strike. “He went to Wakefield initially, then Belmarsh, and was transferred to Broadmoor in ’95.”

“What was the psychiatric diagnosis?”

“Controversial. Psychiatrists disagreed about whether or not he was sane at his trial. Very high IQ. In the end the jury decided he was capable of knowing what he was doing was wrong, hence prison, not hospital. But he must’ve developed symptoms since that to justify medical treatment.

“On a very small amount of reading,” Strike went on, “I can see why the lead investigator thought Margot Bamborough might have been one of Creed’s victims. Allegedly, there was a small van seen speeding dangerously in the area, around the time she should have been walking toward the Three Kings. Creed used a van,” Strike elucidated, in response to Robin’s questioning look, “in some of the other known abductions.”

The lamps along the motorway had been lit before Robin, having finished her Yorkie, quoted:

“‘She lies in a holy place.’”

Still smoking, Strike snorted.

“Typical medium bollocks.”

“You think?”

“Yes, I bloody think,” said Strike. “Very convenient, the way people can only speak in crossword clues from the afterlife. Come off it.”

“All right, calm down. I was only thinking out loud.”

“You could spin almost anywhere as ‘a holy place’ if you wanted. Clerkenwell, where she disappeared—that whole area’s got some kind of religious connection. Monks or something. Know where Dennis Creed was living in 1974?”

“Go on.”

“Paradise Park, Islington,” said Strike.

“Oh,” said Robin. “So you think the medium did know who Anna’s mother was?”

“If I was in the medium game, I’d sure as hell Google clients’ names before they showed up. But it could’ve been a fancy touch designed to sound comforting, like Anna said. Hints at a decent burial. However bad her end was, it’s purified by where her remains are. Creed admitted to scattering bone fragments in Paradise Park, by the way. Stamped them into the flower-beds.”

Although the car was still stuffy, Robin felt a small, involuntary shudder run through her.

“Fucking ghouls,” said Strike.

“Who?”

“Mediums, psychics, all those shysters… preying on people.”

“You don’t think some of them believe in what they’re doing? Think they really are getting messages from the beyond?”

“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

The mobile rang in Strike’s pocket. He pulled it out.

“Cormoran Strike.”

“Yes, hello—it’s Anna Phipps. I’ve got Kim here, too.”

Strike turned the mobile to speakerphone.

“Hope you can hear us all right,” he said, over the rumble and rattle of the Land Rover. “We’re still in the car.”

“Yes, it is noisy,” said Anna.

“I’ll pull over,” said Robin, and she did so, turning smoothly onto the hard shoulder.

“Oh, that’s better,” said Anna, as Robin turned off the engine. “Well, Kim and I have talked it over, and we’ve decided: we would like to hire you.”

Robin felt a jolt of excitement.

“Great,” said Strike. “We’re very keen to help, if we can.”

“But,” said Kim, “we feel that, for psychological and—well, candidly, financial—reasons we’d like to set a term on the investigation, because if the police haven’t solved this case in nigh on forty years—I mean, you could be looking for the next forty and find nothing.”

“That’s true,” said Strike. “So—”

“We think a year,” said Anna, sounding nervous. “What do you—does that seem reasonable?”

“It’s what I would have suggested,” said Strike. “To be honest, I don’t think we’ve got much chance in anything under twelve months.”

“Is there anything more you need from me to get started?” Anna asked, sounding both nervous and excited.

“I’m sure something will occur to me,” said Strike, taking out his notebook to check a name, “but it would be good to speak to your father and Cynthia.”

The other end of the line became completely silent. Strike and Robin looked at each other.

“I don’t think there’s any chance of that,” said Anna. “I’m sorry, but if my father knew I was doing this, I doubt he’d ever forgive me.”

“And what about Cynthia?”

“The thing is,” came Kim’s voice, “Anna’s father’s been unwell recently. Cynthia is the more reasonable of the two on this subject, but she won’t want anything to upset Roy just now.”

“Well, no problem,” said Strike, raising his eyebrows at Robin. “Our first priority’s got to be getting hold of the police file. In the meantime, I’ll email you one of our standard contracts. Print it out, sign it and send it back, we’ll get going.”

“Thank you,” said Anna and, with a slight delay, Kim said, “OK, then.”

They hung up.

“Well, well,” said Strike. “Our first cold case. This is going to be interesting.”

“And we’ve got a year,” said Robin, pulling back out onto the motorway.

“They’ll extend that if we look as though we’re onto something,” said Strike.

“Good luck with that,” said Robin sardonically. “Kim’s prepared to give us a year so she can tell Anna they’ve tried everything. I’ll bet you a fiver right now we don’t get any extensions.”

“I’ll take that bet,” said Strike. “If there’s a hint of a lead, Anna’s going to want to see it through to the end.”

The remainder of the journey was spent discussing the agency’s four current investigations, a conversation that took them all the way to the top of Denmark Street, where Strike got out.

“Cormoran,” said Robin, as he lifted the holdall out of the back of the Land Rover, “there’s a message on your desk from Charlotte Campbell. She called the day before yesterday and asked you to ring her back. She said she’s got something you want.”

There was a brief moment where Strike simply looked at Robin, his expression unreadable.

“Right. Thanks. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. No, I won’t,” he instantly contradicted himself, “you’ve got time off. Enjoy.”

And with a slam of the rear door he limped off toward the office, head down, carrying his holdall over his shoulder, leaving an exhausted Robin no wiser as to whether he did or didn’t want whatever it was that Charlotte Campbell had.