Troubled Blood

8

When Strike and Robin broke the news of her husband’s bigamy, the white-faced woman they now called the Second Mrs. Tufty had sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Her small but charming house in central Windsor was quiet that Tuesday morning, her son and daughter at primary school, and she’d cleaned before they arrived: there was a smell of Pledge in the air and Hoover marks on the carpet. Upon the highly polished coffee table lay ten photographs of Tufty in Torquay, minus his toupee, laughing as he walked out of the pizza restaurant with the teenage boys who so strongly resembled the young children he’d fathered in Windsor, his arm around a smiling woman who might have been their client’s older sister.

Robin, who could remember exactly how she’d felt when Sarah Shadlock’s diamond earring had fallen out of her own marital bed, could only guess at the scale of pain, humiliation and shame behind the taut face. Strike was speaking conventional words of sympathy, but Robin would have bet her entire bank account that Mrs. Tufty hadn’t heard a word—and knew she’d been right when Mrs. Tufty suddenly stood up, shaking so badly that Strike also struggled to his feet, mid-sentence, in case she needed catching. However, she walked jerkily past him out of the room. Shortly afterward, they heard the front door open and spotted their client through the net curtain, approaching a red Audi Q3 parked in front of the house with a golf club in her hand.

“Oh shit,” said Robin.

By the time they reached her, the Second Mrs. Tufty had smashed the windscreen and put several deep dents in the roof of the car. Gawping neighbors had appeared at windows and a pair of Pomeranians were yapping frenziedly behind glass in the house opposite. When Strike grabbed the four iron out of her hand, Mrs. Tufty swore at him, tried to wrestle it back, then burst into a storm of tears.

Robin put her arm around their client and steered her firmly back into the house, Strike bringing up the rear, holding the golf club. In the kitchen, Robin instructed Strike to make strong coffee and find brandy. On Robin’s advice, Mrs. Tufty called her brother and begged him to come, quickly, but when she’d hung up and begun scrolling to find Tufty’s number, Robin jerked the mobile out of her well-manicured hand.

“Give it back!” said Mrs. Tufty, wild-eyed and ready to fight. “The bastard… the bastard… I want to talk to him… give it back!”

“Bad idea,” said Strike, putting coffee and brandy in front of her. “He’s already proven he’s adept at hiding money and assets from you. You need a shit-hot lawyer.”

They remained with the client until her brother, a suited HR executive, arrived. He was annoyed that he’d been asked to leave work early, and so slow at grasping what he was being told that Strike became almost irate and Robin felt it necessary to intervene to stop a row.

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, as they drove back toward London. “He was already married to someone else when he married your sister. How hard is that to grasp?”

“Very hard,” said Robin, an edge to her voice. “People don’t expect to find themselves in these kinds of situations.”

“D’you think they heard me when I asked them not to tell the press we were involved?”

“No,” said Robin.

She was right. A fortnight after they’d visited Windsor, they woke to find several tabloids carrying front-page exposés of Tufty and his three women, a picture of Strike in all the inside pages and his name in one of the headlines. He was news in his own right now, and the juxtaposition of famous detective and squat, balding, wealthy man who’d managed to run two families and a mistress was irresistible.

Strike had only ever given evidence at noteworthy court cases while sporting the full beard that grew conveniently fast when he needed it, and the picture the press used most often was an old one that showed him in uniform. Nevertheless, it was an ongoing battle to remain as inconspicuous as his chosen profession demanded, and being badgered for comment at his offices was an inconvenience he could do without. The storm of publicity was prolonged when both Mrs. Tuftys formed an offensive alliance against their estranged husband. Showing an unforeseen taste for publicity, they not only granted a women’s magazine a joint interview, but appeared on several daytime television programs together to discuss their long deception, their shock, their newfound friendship, their intention to make Tufty rue the day he’d met either of them and to issue a thinly veiled warning to the pregnant mistress in Glasgow (who, astonishingly, seemed disposed to stand by Tufty) that she had another think coming if she imagined he’d have two farthings to rub together once his wives had finished with him.

September proceeded, cool and unsettled. Strike called Lucy to say sorry for being rude about her sons, but she remained cold even after the apology, doubtless because he’d merely expressed regret for voicing his opinion out loud, and hadn’t retracted it. Strike was relieved to discover that her boys had weekend sporting fixtures now that school had started again, which meant he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa on the next visit to St. Mawes, and could devote himself to Ted and Joan without the distraction of Lucy’s tense, accusatory presence.

Though as desperate to cook for him as ever, his aunt was already enfeebled by the chemotherapy. It was painful to watch her dragging herself around the kitchen, but she wouldn’t sit down, even when Ted implored her to do so. On Saturday night, his uncle broke down after Joan had gone to bed, and sobbed into Strike’s shoulder. Ted had once seemed an unperturbable, invulnerable bastion of strength to his nephew, and Strike, who could normally sleep under almost any conditions, lay awake past two in the morning, staring into the darkness that was deeper by far than a London night, wondering whether he should stay longer, and despising himself for deciding that it was right that he should return to London.

In truth, the agency was so busy that he felt guilty about the burden it was placing on Robin and his subcontractors by taking a long weekend in Cornwall. In addition to the five open cases still on the agency’s books, he and Robin were juggling increased management demands made by the expanded workforce, and negotiating a year’s extension on the office lease with the developer who’d bought their building. They were also trying, though so far without luck, to persuade one of the agency’s police contacts to find and hand over the forty-year-old file on Margot Bamborough’s disappearance. Morris was ex-Met, as was Andy Hutchins, their most longstanding subcontractor, a quiet, saturnine man whose MS was thankfully in remission, and both had tried to call in favors from former col­leagues as well, but so far, responses to the agency’s requests had ranged from “mice have probably had it” to “fuck off, Strike, I’m busy.”

One rainy afternoon, while tailing Shifty through the City, trying not to limp too obviously and inwardly cursing the second pavement seller of cheap umbrellas who’d got in his way, Strike’s mobile rang. Expecting to be given another problem to sort out, he was caught off guard when the caller said,

“Hi, Strike. George Layborn here. Heard you’re looking at the Bamborough case again?”

Strike had only met DI Layborn once before, and while it had been in the context of a case where Strike and Robin had given material assistance to the Met, he hadn’t considered their association close enough to ask Layborn for help on getting the Bamborough file.

“Hi, George. Yeah, you heard right,” said Strike, watching Shifty turn into a wine bar.

“Well, I could meet you tomorrow evening, if you fancy it. Feathers, six o’clock?” said Layborn.

So Strike asked Barclay to swap jobs, and headed to the pub near Scotland Yard the following evening, where he found Layborn already at the bar, waiting for him. A paunchy, gray-haired, middle-aged man, Layborn bought both of them pints of London Pride, and they removed themselves to a corner table.

“My old man worked the Bamborough case, under Bill Talbot,” Layborn told Strike. “He told me all about it. What’ve you got so far?”

“Nothing. I’ve been looking back at old press reports, and I’m trying to trace people who worked at the practice she disappeared from. Not much else I can do until I see the police file, but nobody’s been able to help with that so far.”

Layborn, who had demonstrated a fondness for colorfully obscene turns of phrase on their only previous encounter, seemed oddly subdued tonight.

“It was a fucking mess, the Bamborough investigation,” he said quietly. “Anyone told you about Talbot yet?”

“Go on.”

“He went off his rocker,” said Layborn. “Proper mental breakdown. He’d been going funny before he took on the case, but you know, it was the seventies—looking after the workforce’s mental health was for poofs. He’d been a good officer in his day, mind you. A couple of junior officers noticed he was acting odd, but when they raised it, they were told to eff off.

“He’d been heading up the Bamborough case six months before his wife called an ambulance in the middle of the night and got him sectioned. He got his pension, but it was too late for the case. He died a good ten years ago, but I heard he never got over fucking up the investigation. Once he recovered he was mortified about how he’d behaved.”

“How was that?”

“Putting too much stock in his own intuitions, didn’t take evidence properly, had no interest in talking to witnesses if they didn’t fit his theory—”

“Which was that Creed abducted her, right?”

“Exactly,” said Layborn. “Although Creed was still called the Essex Butcher back then, because he dumped the first couple of bodies in Epping Forest and Chigwell.” Layborn took a long pull on his pint. “They found most of Jackie Aylett in an industrial bin. He’s an animal, that one. Animal.”

“Who took over the case after Talbot?”

“Bloke called Lawson, Ken Lawson,” said Layborn, “but he’d lost six months, the trail had gone cold and he’d inherited a right balls-up. Added to which, she was unlucky in her timing, Margot Bamborough,” Layborn continued. “You know what happened a month after she vanished?”

“What?”

“Lord Lucan disappeared,” said Layborn. “You try and keep a missing GP on the front pages after a peer of the realm’s nanny gets bludgeoned to death and he goes on the run. They’d already used the Bunny Girl pictures—did you know Bamborough was a Bunny Girl?”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

“Helped fund her medical degree,” said Layborn, “but according to my old man, the family didn’t like that being dragged up. Put their backs right up, even though those pictures definitely got the case a bit more coverage. Way of the world,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“What did your dad think happened to her?” asked Strike.

“Well, to be honest,” sighed Layborn, “he thought Talbot was prob­ably right: Creed had taken her. There were no signs she meant to disappear—passport was still in the house, no case packed, no clothes missing, stable job, no money worries, young child.”

“Hard to drag a fit, healthy twenty-nine-year-old woman off a busy street without someone noticing,” said Strike.

“True,” said Layborn. “Creed usually picked them off when they were drunk. Having said that, it was a dark evening and rainy. He’d pulled that trick before. And he was good at lulling women’s suspicions and getting their sympathy. A couple of them walked into his flat of their own accord.”

“There was a van like Creed’s seen speeding in the area, wasn’t there?”

“Yeah,” said Layborn, “and from what Dad told me it was never checked out properly. Talbot didn’t want to hear that it might have been someone trying to get home for their tea, see. Routine work just wasn’t done. For instance, I heard there was an old boyfriend of Bamborough’s hanging around. I’m not saying the boyfriend killed her, but Dad told me Talbot spent half the interview trying to find out where this boyfriend had been on the night Helen Wardrop got attacked.”

“Who?”

“Prostitute. Creed tried to abduct her in ’73. He had his failures, you know. Peggy Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at a bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was off Paradise Park. He got careless toward the end. Arrogance did for him.”

“You know a lot about this, George.”

“Yeah, well, Dad was one of the first into Creed’s basement after they arrested him. He wouldn’t ever talk about what he saw in there, and he’d seen gangland killings, you name it… Creed’s never admitted to Bamborough, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. That cunt will keep people guessing till he’s dead. Evil fucking bastard. He’s played with the families of his known victims for years. Likes hinting he did more women, without giving any details. Some journalist interviewed him in the early eighties, but that was the last time they let anyone talk to him. The Ministry of Justice clamped down. Creed uses publicity as a chance to torment the families. It’s the only power he’s got left.”

Layborn drained the last of his pint and checked his watch.

“I’ll do what I can for you with the file. My old man would’ve wanted me to help. It never sat right with him, what happened with that case.”

The wind was picking up by the time Strike returned to his attic flat. His rain-speckled windows rattled in their loose frames as he sorted carefully through the receipts in his wallet for those he needed to submit to the accountant.

At nine o’clock, after eating dinner cooked on his single-ringed hob, he lay down on his bed and picked up the second-hand biography of Dennis Creed, The Demon of Paradise Park, which he’d ordered a month ago and which had so far lain unopened on his bedside table. Having undone the button on his trousers to better accommodate the large amount of spaghetti he’d just consumed, he emitted a loud and satisfying belch, lit a cigarette, laid back against his pillows and opened the book to the beginning, where a timeline laid out the bare bones of Creed’s long career of rape and murder.

1937: Born in Greenwell Terrace, Mile End.

1954: April: began National Service.

November: raped schoolgirl Vicky Hornchurch, 15.

Sentenced to 2 years, Feltham Borstal.

1955–61: Worked in a variety of short-lived manual and office jobs. Frequented prostitutes.

1961: July: raped and tortured shop assistant Sheila Gaskins, 22.

Sentenced to 5 years HMP Pentonville.

1968: April: abducted, raped, tortured and murdered schoolgirl Geraldine Christie, 16.

1969: September: abducted, raped, tortured and murdered secretary and mother of one Jackie Aylett, 29.

Killer dubbed “The Essex Butcher” by press.

1970: January: moved to Vi Hooper’s basement in Liverpool Road, near Paradise Park.

Gained job as dry-cleaning delivery man.

February: abducted dinner lady and mother of three Vera Kenny, 31. Kept in basement for three weeks. Raped, tortured and murdered.

November: abducted estate agent Noreen Sturrock, 28. Kept in basement for four weeks. Raped, tortured and murdered.

1971: August: failed to abduct pharmacist Peggy Hiskett, 34.

1972: September: abducted unemployed Gail Wrightman, 30. Kept imprisoned in basement. Raped and tortured.

1973: January: murdered Wrightman.

December: failed to abduct prostitute and mother of one Helen Wardrop, 32.

1974: September: abducted hairdresser Susan Meyer, 27. Kept imprisoned in basement. Raped and tortured.

1975: February: abducted PhD student Andrea Hooton, 23. Hooton and Meyer were held concurrently in basement for 4 weeks.

March: murdered Susan.

April: murdered Andrea.

1976: January 25th: attempted to abduct nightclub singer Melody Bower, 26.

January 31st: landlady Vi Hooper recognizes Creed from description and photofit.

February 2nd: Creed arrested.

Strike turned over the page and skim-read the introduction, which featured the only interview ever granted by Creed’s mother, Agnes Waite.

Strike stubbed out his cigarette and reached for the can of Tennent’s sitting beside the ashtray. A light rain pattered against his windows as he flicked a little further on in the book, pausing midway through chapter two.

Yawning, Strike flicked on, coming to rest on a passage in chapter four.

Strike paused to light himself a fresh cigarette, then flicked ten chapters on through the book, until a familiar name caught his eye.

Strike’s mobile rang. Trying not to lose his page, Strike groped for it and answered it without looking at the caller’s identity.

“Strike.”

“Hello, Bluey,” said a woman, softly.

Strike set the book on the bed, pages down. There was a pause, in which he could hear Charlotte breathing.

“What d’you want?”

“To talk to you,” she said.

“What about?”

“I don’t know,” she half-laughed. “You choose.”

Strike knew this mood. She was halfway into a bottle of wine or had perhaps enjoyed a couple of whiskies. There was a moment of drunkenness—not even of drunkenness, of alcohol-induced softening—where a Charlotte emerged who was endearing, even amusing, but not yet combative or maudlin. He’d asked himself once, toward the end of their engagement, when his own innate honesty was forcing him to face facts and ask hard questions, how realistic or healthy it was to wish for a wife forever very slightly drunk.

“You didn’t call me back,” said Charlotte. “I left a message with your Robin. Didn’t she give it to you?”

“Yeah, she gave it to me.”

“But you didn’t call.”

“What d’you want, Charlotte?”

The sane part of his brain was telling him to end the call, but still he held the phone to his ear, listening, waiting. She’d been like a drug to him for a long time: a drug, or a disease.

“Interesting,” said Charlotte dreamily. “I thought she might have decided not to pass on the message.”

He said nothing.

“Are the two of you together yet? She’s quite good-looking. And always there. On tap. So conven—”

“Why are you calling?”

“I’ve told you, I wanted to talk to you… d’you know what day it is today? The twins’ first birthday. The entire famille Ross has turned up to fawn over them. This is the first moment I’ve had to myself all day.”

He knew, of course, that she’d had twins. There’d been an announcement in The Times, because she’d married into an aristocratic family that routinely announced births, marriages and deaths in its columns, although Strike had not, in fact, read the news there. It was Ilsa who’d passed the information on, and Strike had immediately remembered the words Charlotte had said to him, over a restaurant table she had tricked him into sharing with her, more than a year previously.

All that’s kept me going through this pregnancy is the thought that once I’ve had them, I can leave.

But the babies had been born prematurely and Charlotte had not left them.

Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is.

There’d been two previous tipsy phone calls to Strike like this one in the past year, both made late at night. He’d ended the first one mere seconds in, because Robin was trying to reach him. Charlotte had hung up abruptly a few minutes into the second.

“Nobody thought they’d live, did you know that?” Charlotte said now. “It’s,” she whispered, “a miracle.”

“If it’s your kids’ birthday, I should let you go,” said Strike. “Goodnight, Char—”

“Don’t go,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Don’t go, please don’t.”

Hang up, said the voice in his head. He didn’t.

“They’re asleep, fast asleep. They don’t know it’s their birthday, the whole thing’s a joke. Commemorating the anniversary of that fucking nightmare. It was hideous, they cut me open—”

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’m busy.”

“Please,” she almost wailed. “Bluey, I’m so unhappy, you don’t know, I’m so fucking miserable—”

“You’re a married mother of two,” he said brutally, “and I’m not an agony aunt. There are anonymous services you can call if you need them. Goodnight, Charlotte.”

He cut the call.

The rain was coming down harder. It drummed on his dark windows. Dennis Creed’s face was now the wrong way up on the cast-aside book. His light-lashed eyes seemed reversed in the upside-down face. The effect was unsettling, as though the eyes were alive in the photograph.

Strike opened the book again and continued to read.

9

George Layborn still hadn’t managed to lay hands on the Bamborough file when Robin’s birthday arrived.

For the first time in her life, she woke on the morning of October the ninth, remembered what day it was and experienced no twinge of excitement, but a lowering sensation. She was twenty-nine years old today, and twenty-nine had an odd ring to it. The number seemed to signify not a landmark, but a staging post: “Next stop: THIRTY.” Lying alone for a few moments in her double bed in her rented bedroom, she remembered what her favorite cousin, Katie, had said during Robin’s last trip home, while Robin had been helping Katie’s two-year-old son make Play-Doh monsters to ride in his Tonka truck.

“It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us.”

Then, seeing something in Robin’s face that made her regret her words, Katie had hastily added,

“I don’t mean it in a bad way! You seem really happy. Free, I mean! Honestly,” Katie had said, with hollow insincerity, “I really envy you sometimes.”

Robin hadn’t known a second’s regret for the termination of a marriage that, in its final phase, had made her deeply unhappy. She could still conjure up the mood, mercifully not experienced since, in which all color seemed drained from her surroundings—and they had been pretty surroundings, too: she knew that the sea captain’s house in Deptford where she and Matthew had finally parted had been a most attractive place, yet it was strange how few details she could remember about it now. All she could recall with any clarity was the deadened mood she’d suffered within those walls, the perpetual feelings of guilt and dread, and the dawning horror which accompanied the realization that she had shackled herself to somebody whom she didn’t like, and with whom she had next to nothing in common.

Nevertheless, Katie’s blithe description of Robin’s current life as “happy” and “free” wasn’t entirely accurate. For several years now, Robin had watched Strike prioritize his working life over everything else—in fact, Joan’s diagnosis had been the first occasion she’d known him to reallocate his jobs, and make something other than detection his top concern—and these days Robin, too, felt herself becoming taken over by the job, which she found satisfying to the point that it became almost all-consuming. Finally living what she’d wanted ever since she first walked through the glass door of Strike’s office, she now understood the potential for loneliness that came with a single, driving passion.

Having sole possession of her bed had been a great pleasure at first: nobody sulking with their back to her, nobody complaining that she wasn’t pulling her weight financially, or droning on about his promotion prospects; nobody demanding sex that had become a chore rather than a pleasure. Nevertheless, while she missed Matthew not at all, she could envisage a time (if she was honest, was perhaps already living it) when the lack of physical contact, of affection and even of sex—which for Robin was a more complicated prospect than for many women—would become, not a boon, but a serious absence in her life.

And then what? Would she become like Strike, with a succession of lovers relegated firmly to second place, after the job? No sooner had she thought this than she found herself wondering, as she’d done almost daily since, whether her partner had called Charlotte Campbell back. Impatient with herself, she threw back the covers and, ignoring the packages lying on top of her chest of drawers, went to take a shower.

Her new home in Finborough Road occupied the top two floors of a terraced house. The bedrooms and bathroom were on the third floor, the public rooms on the fourth. A small terraced area lay off the sitting room, where the owner’s elderly rough-coated dachshund, Wolfgang, liked to lie outside on sunny days.

Robin, who was under no illusions about property available in London for single women on an average wage, especially one with legal bills to pay, considered herself immensely fortunate to be living in a clean, well-maintained and tastefully decorated flat, with a double room to herself and a flatmate she liked. Her live-in landlord was a forty-two-year-old actor called Max Priestwood, who couldn’t afford to run the place without a tenant. Max, who was gay, was what Robin’s mother would have called ruggedly handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of thick, dark blond hair and a perpetually weary look about his gray eyes. He was also an old friend of Ilsa’s, who’d been at university with his younger brother.

In spite of Ilsa’s assurances that “Max is absolutely lovely,” Robin had spent the first few months of her tenancy wondering whether she’d made a huge mistake in moving in with him, because he seemed sunk in what seemed perpetual gloom. Robin tried her very best to be a good flatmate: she was naturally tidy, she never played music loudly or cooked anything very smelly; she made a fuss of Wolfgang and remembered to feed him if Max was out; she was punctilious when it came to replacing washing-up liquid and toilet roll; and she made a point of being polite and cheery whenever they came into contact, yet Max rarely if ever smiled, and when she first arrived, he’d seemed to find it an immense effort to talk to her. Feeling paranoid, Robin had wondered at first whether Ilsa had strong-armed Max into accepting her as a tenant.

Conversation had become slightly easier between them over the months of her tenancy, yet Max was never loquacious. Sometimes Robin was grateful for this monosyllabic tendency, because when she came in after working a twelve-hour stretch of surveillance, stiff and tired, her mind fizzing with work concerns, the last thing she wanted was small talk. At other times, when she might have preferred to go upstairs to the open-plan living area, she kept to her room rather than feel she was intruding upon Max’s private space.

She suspected the main reason for Max’s perennially low mood was his state of persistent unemployment. Since the West End play in which he had had a small part had ended four months ago, he hadn’t managed to get another job. She’d learned quickly not to ask him whether he had any auditions lined up. Sometimes, even saying “How was your day?” sounded unnecessarily judgmental. She knew he’d previously shared his flat with a long-term boyfriend, who by coincidence was also called Matthew. Robin knew nothing about Max’s break-up except that his Matthew had signed over his half of the flat to Max voluntarily, which to Robin seemed remarkably generous compared with the behavior of her own ex-husband.

Having showered, Robin pulled on a dressing gown and returned to her bedroom to open the packages that had arrived in the post over the past few days, and which she’d saved for this morning. She suspected her mother had bought the aromatherapy bath oils that were ostensibly from her brother Martin, that her veterinarian sister-in-law (who was currently pregnant with Robin’s first niece or nephew) had chosen the homespun sweater, which was very much Jenny’s own style, and that her brother Jonathan had a new girlfriend, who’d probably chosen the dangly earrings. Feeling slightly more depressed than she had before she’d opened the presents, Robin dressed herself all in black, which could take her through a day of paperwork at the office, a catch-up meeting with the weatherman whom Postcard was persecuting, all the way to birthday drinks that evening with Ilsa and Vanessa, her policewoman friend. Ilsa had suggested inviting Strike, and Robin had said that she would prefer it to be girls only, because she was trying to avoid any further occasions on which Ilsa might try and matchmake.

On the point of leaving her room, Robin’s eye fell on a copy of The Demon of Paradise Park which she, like Strike, had bought online. Her copy was slightly more battered than his and had taken longer to arrive. She hadn’t yet read much of it, partly because she was generally too tired of an evening to do anything other than fall into bed, but partly because what she had read had already caused a slight recurrence of the psychological symptoms she had carried with her ever since her forearm had been sliced open one dark night. Today, however, she stuffed it into her bag to read on the Tube.

A text from her mother arrived while Robin was walking to the station, wishing her a happy birthday and telling her to check her email account. This she did, and saw that her parents had sent her a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound voucher for Selfridges. This was a most welcome gift, because Robin had virtually no disposable income left, once her legal bills, rent and other living expenses had been paid, to spend on anything that might be considered self-indulgent.

Feeling slightly more cheerful as she settled into a corner of the train, Robin took The Demon of Paradise Park from her bag and opened it to the page she had last reached.

The coincidence of the first line caused her an odd inward tremor.

Robin skipped the next page and a half. She had no particular desire to read the particulars of the harm Creed had visited upon Geraldine Christie.

Twenty minutes after boarding the train, Robin got out at Leicester Square. As she emerged into daylight, her mobile phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw a text from Strike. Drawing aside from the crowd emerging from the station, she opened it.

News: I’ve found Dr. Dinesh Gupta, GP who worked with Margot at the Clerkenwell Practice in 1974. He’s 80-odd but sounds completely compos mentis and is happy to meet me this afternoon at his house in Amersham. Currently watching Twinkletoes having breakfast in Soho. I’ll get Barclay to take over from me at lunchtime and go straight to Gupta’s. Any chance you could put off your meeting with Weatherman and come along?

Robin’s heart sank. She’d already had to change the time of the weatherman’s catch-up meeting once and felt it unfair to do so a second time, especially at such short notice. However, she’d have liked to meet Dr. Dinesh Gupta.

I can’t mess him around again, she typed back. Let me know how it goes.

Right you are, replied Strike.

Robin watched her mobile screen for a few more seconds. Strike had forgotten her birthday last year, realizing his omission a week late and buying her flowers. Given that he’d seemed to feel guilty about the oversight, she’d imagined that he might make a note of the date and perhaps set an alert on his mobile this year. However, no “Happy birthday, by the way!” appeared, so she put her mobile back in her pocket and, unsmiling, walked on toward the office.

10

“You are thinking,” said the small, spectacled, elderly doctor, who was dwarfed by both his suit and his upright armchair, “that I look like Gandhi.”

Strike, who’d been thinking exactly that, was surprised into a laugh.

The eighty-one-year-old doctor appeared to have shrunk inside his suit; the collar and cuffs of his shirt gaped and his ankles were skinny in their black silk socks. Tufts of white hair appeared both in and over his ears, and he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. The strongest features in his genial brown face were the aquiline nose and dark eyes, which alone appeared to have escaped the aging process, and were as bright and knowing as a wren’s.

No speck of dust marred the highly polished coffee table between them, in what bore the appearance of a seldom-used, special occasion room. The deep gold of wallpaper, sofa and chairs glowed, pristine, in the autumn sunshine diffused by the net curtains. Four gilt-framed photographs hung in pairs on the wall on either side of the fringed drapes. Each picture showed a different dark-haired young woman, all wearing mortarboards and gowns, and holding degree certificates.

Mrs. Gupta, a tiny, slightly deaf, gray-haired woman, had already told Strike what degrees each of her daughters had taken—two medicine, one modern languages and one computing—and how well each was doing in her chosen career. She’d also shown him pictures of the six grandchildren she and her husband had been blessed with so far. Only the youngest girl remained childless, “but she will have them,” said Mrs. Gupta, with a Joan-ish certainty. “She’ll never be happy without.”

Having provided Strike and her husband with tea served in china cups, and a plate of fig rolls, Mrs. Gupta retreated to the kitchen, where Escape to the Country was playing with the sound turned up high.

“As it happens, my father met Gandhi as a young man when Gandhi visited London in 1931,” said Dr. Gupta, selecting a fig roll. “He, too, had studied law in London, you see, but a while after Gandhi. But ours was a wealthier family. Unlike Gandhi, my father could afford to bring his wife to England with him. My parents decided to remain in the UK after Daddy qualified as a barrister.

“So my immediate family missed partition. Very fortunate for us. My grandparents and two of my aunts were killed as they attempted to leave East Bengal. Massacred,” said Dr. Gupta, “and both my aunts were raped before being killed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, who, not having anticipated the turn the conversation had taken, had frozen in the act of opening his notebook and now sat feeling slightly foolish, his pen poised.

“My father,” said Dr. Gupta, nodding gently as he munched his fig roll, “carried the guilt with him to his grave. He thought he should have been there to protect them all, or to have died alongside them.

“Now, Margot didn’t like hearing the truth about partition,” said Dr. Gupta. “We all wanted independence, naturally, but the transition was handled very badly, very badly indeed. Nearly three million went missing. Rapes. Mutilation. Families torn asunder. Dreadful mistakes made. Appalling acts committed.

“Margot and I had an argument about it. A friendly argument, of course,” he added, smiling. “But Margot romanticized uprisings of people in distant lands. She didn’t judge brown rapists and torturers by the same standards she would have applied to white men who drowned children for being the wrong religion. She believed, I think, like Suhrawardy, that ‘bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.’”

Dr. Gupta swallowed his biscuit and added,

“It was Suhrawardy, of course, who incited the Great Calcutta Killings. Four thousand dead in a single day.”

Strike allowed a respectful pause to fill the room, broken only by the distant sound of Escape to the Country. When no further mention of bloodshed and terror was forthcoming, he took the opening that had been offered to him.

“Did you like Margot?”

“Oh yes,” said Dinesh Gupta, still smiling. “Although I found some of her beliefs and her attitudes shocking. I was born into a traditional, though Westernized, family. Before Margot and I went into practice together, I had never been in daily proximity to a self-proclaimed liberated lady. My friends at medical school, and the partners in my previous practice, had all been men.”

“A feminist, was she?”

“Oh, very much so,” said Gupta, smiling. “She would tease me about what she thought were my regressive attitudes. She was a great improver of people, Margot—whether they wished to be improved or not,” said Gupta, with a little laugh. “She volunteered at the WEA, too. The Workers’ Educational Association, you know? She’d come from a poor family, and she was a great proponent of adult education, especially for women.

“She would certainly have approved of my girls,” said Dinesh Gupta, turning in his armchair to point at the four graduation photographs behind him. “Jheel still laments that we had no son, but I have no complaints. No complaints,” he repeated, turning back to face Strike.

“I understand from the General Medical Council records,” said Strike, “that there was a third GP at the St. John’s practice, a Dr. Joseph Brenner. Is that right?”

“Dr. Brenner, yes, quite right,” said Gupta. “I doubt he’s still alive, poor fellow. He’d be over a hundred now. He’d worked alone in the area for many years before he came in with us at the new practice. He brought with him Dorothy Oakden, who’d done his typing for twenty-odd years. She became our practice secretary. An older lady—or so she seemed to me at the time,” said Gupta, with another small chuckle. “I don’t suppose she was more than fifty. Married late and widowed not long afterward. I have no idea what became of her.”

“Who else worked at the practice?”

“Well, let’s see… there was Janice Beattie, the district nurse, who was the best nurse I ever worked with. An Eastender by birth. Like Margot, she understood the privations of poverty from personal experience. Clerkenwell at that time was by no means as smart as it’s become since. I still receive Christmas cards from Janice.”

“I don’t suppose you have her address?” asked Strike.

“It’s possible,” said Dr. Gupta. “I’ll ask Jheel.”

He made to get up.

“Later, after we’ve talked, will be fine,” said Strike, afraid to break the chain of reminiscence. “Please, go on. Who else worked at St. John’s?”

“Let’s see, let’s see,” said Dr. Gupta again, sinking slowly back into his chair. “We had two receptionists, young women, but I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with both of them… now, what were their names…”

“Would that be Gloria Conti and Irene Bull?” asked Strike, who’d found both names in old press reports. A blurry photograph of both young women had shown a slight, dark girl and what he thought was probably a peroxide blonde, both of them looking distressed to be photographed as they entered the practice. The accompanying art­icle in the Daily Express quoted “Irene Bull, receptionist, aged 25,” as saying “It’s terrible. We don’t know anything. We’re still hoping she’ll come back. Maybe she’s lost her memory or something.” Gloria was mentioned in every press report he’d read, because she’d been the last known person to see Margot alive. “She just said ‘Night, Gloria, see you tomorrow.’ She seemed normal, well, a bit tired, it was the end of the day and we’d had an emergency patient who’d kept her longer than she expected. She was a bit late to meet her friend. She put up her umbrella in the doorway and left.”

“Gloria and Irene,” said Dr. Gupta, nodding. “Yes, that’s right. They were both young, so they should still be with us, but I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea where they are now.”

“Is that everyone?” asked Strike.

“Yes, I think so. No, wait,” said Gupta, holding up a hand. “There was the cleaner. A West Indian lady. What was her name, now?”

He screwed up his face.

“I’m afraid I can’t remember.”

The existence of a practice cleaner was new information to Strike. His own office had always been cleaned by him or by Robin, although lately, Pat had pitched in. He wrote down “Cleaner, West Indian.”

“How old was she, can you remember?”

“I really couldn’t tell you,” said Gupta. He added delicately, “Black ladies—they are much harder to age, aren’t they? They look younger for longer. But I think she had several children, so not very young. Mid-thirties?” he suggested hopefully.

“So, three doctors, a secretary, two receptionists, a practice nurse and a cleaner?” Strike summarized.

“That’s right. We had,” said Dr. Gupta, “all the ingredients of a successful business—but it was an unhappy practice, I’m afraid. Unhappy from the start.”

“Really?” said Strike, interested. “Why was that?”

“Personal chemistry,” said Gupta promptly. “The older I’ve grown, the more I’ve realized that the team is everything. Qualifications and experience are important, but if the team doesn’t gel…” He interlocked his bony fingers, “… forget it! You’ll never achieve what you should. And so it was at St. John’s.

“Which was a pity, a very great pity, because we had potential. The practice was popular with ladies, who usually prefer consulting members of their own sex. Margot and Janice were both well liked.

“But there were internal divisions from the beginning. Dr. Brenner joined us for the conveniences of a newer practice building, but he never acted as though he was part of the team. In fact, over time he became openly hostile to some of us.”

“Specifically, who was he hostile to?” asked Strike, guessing the answer.

“I’m afraid,” said Dr. Gupta, sadly, “he didn’t like Margot. To be quite frank, I don’t think Joseph Brenner liked ladies. He was rude to the girls on reception, as well. Of course, they were easier to bully than Margot. I think he respected Janice—she was very efficient, you know, and less combative than Margot—and he was always polite to Dorothy, who was fiercely loyal to him. But he took against Margot from the start.”

“Why was that, do you think?”

“Oh,” said Dr. Gupta, raising his hands and letting them fall in a gesture of hopelessness, “the truth is that Margot—now, I liked her, you understand, our discussions were always good-humored—but she was a Marmite sort of person. Dr. Brenner was no feminist. He thought a woman’s place was at home with her children, and Margot leaving a baby at home and coming back out to work full time, he disapproved of that. Team meetings were very uncomfortable. He’d wait for Margot to start talking and then talk over her, very loudly.

“He was something of a bully, Brenner. He thought our receptionists were no better than they should be. Complained about their skirt lengths, their hairstyles.

“But actually, although he was especially rude to ladies, it’s my opinion that he didn’t really like people.”

“Odd,” said Strike. “For a doctor.”

“Oh,” said Gupta, with a chuckle, “that’s by no means as unusual as you might think, Mr. Strike. We doctors are like everybody else. It is a popular myth that all of us must love humanity in the round. The irony is that our biggest liability as a practice was Brenner himself. He was an addict!”

“Really?”

“Barbiturates,” said Gupta. “Barbiturates, yes. A doctor couldn’t get away with it these days, but he over-ordered them in massive quantities. Kept them in a locked cupboard in his consulting room. He was a very difficult man. Emotionally shut down. Unmarried. And this secret addiction.”

“Did you talk to him about it?” asked Strike.

“No,” said Gupta sadly. “I put off doing so. I wanted to be sure of my ground before I broached the subject. From quiet inquiries I made, I suspected that he was still using his old practice address in addition to ours, doubling his order and using multiple pharmacies. It was going to be tricky to prove what he was up to.

“I might never have realized if Janice hadn’t come to me and said she’d happened to walk in on him when his cupboard was open, and seen the quantities he’d amassed. She then admitted that she’d found him slumped at his desk in a groggy state one evening after the last patient had left. I don’t think it ever affected his judgment, though. Not really. I’d noticed that at the end of the day he might have been a little glazed, and so on, but he was nearing retirement. I assumed he was tired.”

“Did Margot know about this addiction?” asked Strike.

“No,” said Gupta, “I didn’t tell her, although I should have done. She was my partner and the person I ought to have confided in, so we could decide what to do.

“But I was afraid she’d storm straight into Dr. Brenner’s consulting room and confront him. Margot wasn’t a woman to back away from doing what she thought was right, and I did sometimes wish that she would exercise a little more tact. The fallout from a confrontation with Brenner was likely to be severe. Delicacy was required—after all, we had no absolute proof—but then Margot went missing, and Dr. Brenner’s barbiturate habit became the least of our worries.”

“Did you and Brenner continue working together after Margot disappeared?” asked Strike.

“For a few months, yes, but he retired not long afterward. I continued to work at St. John’s for a short while, then got a job at another practice. I was glad to go. The St. John’s practice was full of bad associations.”

“How would you describe Margot’s relationships with the other people at work?” Strike asked.

“Well, let’s see,” said Gupta, taking a second fig roll. “Dorothy the secretary never liked her, but I think that was out of loyalty to Dr. Brenner. As I say, Dorothy was a widow. She was one of those fierce women who attach themselves to an employer they can defend and champion. Whenever Margot or I displeased or challenged Joseph in any way, our letters and reports were sure to go straight to the bottom of the typing pile. It was a joke between us. No computers in those days, Mr. Strike. Nothing like nowadays—Aisha,” he said, indicating the top right-hand picture on the wall behind him, “she types everything herself, a computer in her consulting room, everything computerized, which is much more efficient, but we were at the mercy of the typist for all our letters and reports.

“No, Dorothy didn’t like Margot. Civil, but cold. Although,” said Gupta, who had evidently just remembered something, “Dorothy did come to the barbecue, which was a surprise. Margot held a barbecue at her house one Sunday, the summer before she disappeared,” he explained. “She knew that we weren’t pulling together as a team, so she invited us all around to her house. The barbecue was supposed to…” and, wordlessly this time, he again illustrated the point by interlacing his fingers. “I remember being surprised that Dorothy attended, because Brenner had declined. Dorothy brought her son, who was thirteen or fourteen, I think. She must have given birth late, especially for the seventies. A boisterous boy. I remember Margot’s husband telling him off for smashing a valuable bowl.”

A fleeting memory of his nephew Luke carelessly treading on Strike’s new headphones in St. Mawes crossed the detective’s mind.

“Margot and her husband had a very nice house out in Ham. The husband was a doctor too, a hematologist. Big garden. Jheel and I took our girls, but as Brenner didn’t go, and Dorothy was offended by Margot’s husband telling off her son, Margot’s objective wasn’t achieved, I’m afraid. The divisions remained entrenched.”

“Did everyone else attend?”

“Yes, I think so. No—wait. I don’t think the cleaning lady—Wilma!” said Dr. Gupta, looking delighted. “Her name was Wilma! I had no idea I still knew it… but her surname… I’m not even sure I knew it back then… No, Wilma didn’t come. But everyone else, yes.

“Janice brought her own little boy—he was younger than Dorothy’s and far better behaved, as I remember. My girls spent the afternoon playing badminton with the little Beattie boy.”

“Was Janice married?”

“Divorced. Her husband left her for another woman. She got on with it, raised her son alone. Women like Janice always do get on with it. Admirable. Her life wasn’t easy when I knew her, but I believe she married again, later, and I was glad when I heard about it.”

“Did Janice and Margot get along?”

“Oh yes. They had the gift of being able to disagree without taking personal offense.”

“Did they disagree often?”

“No, no,” said Gupta, “but decisions must be made in a working environment. We were—or tried to be—a democratic business…

“No, Margot and Janice were able to have rational disagreements without taking offense. I think they liked and respected each other. Janice was hit hard by Margot’s disappearance. She told me the day I left the practice that a week hadn’t passed since it happened that she hadn’t dreamed about Margot.

“But none of us were ever quite the same afterward,” said Dr. Gupta quietly. “One does not expect a friend to vanish into thin air without leaving a single trace behind them. There is something—uncanny about it.”

“There is,” agreed Strike. “How did Margot get along with the two receptionists?”

“Well, now, Irene, the older of the two,” sighed Gupta, “could be a handful. I remember her being—not rude, but a little cheeky—to Margot, at times. At the practice Christmas party—Margot organized that, as well, still trying to force us all to get along, you know—Irene had rather a lot to drink. I remember a slight contretemps, but I really couldn’t tell you what it was all about. I doubt it was anything serious. They seemed as amicable as ever the next time I saw them. Irene was quite hysterical after Margot disappeared.”

There was a short pause.

“Some of that may have been theatrics,” Gupta admitted, “but the underlying distress was genuine, I’m sure.

“Gloria—poor little Gloria—she was devastated. Margot was more than an employer to Gloria, you know. She was something of an older sister figure, a mentor. It was Margot who wanted to hire her, even though Gloria had almost no relevant experience. And I must admit,” said Gupta judiciously, “she turned out to be a good appointment. Hard worker. Learned fast. You only had to correct her once. I believe she was from an impoverished background. I know Dorothy looked down on Gloria. She could be quite unkind.”

“And what about Wilma, the cleaner?” asked Strike, reaching the bottom of his list. “How did she get on with Margot?”

“I’d be lying if I said I could remember,” said Gupta. “She was a quiet woman, Wilma. I never heard that they had any kind of problem.”

After a slight pause, he added,

“I hope I’m not inventing things, but I seem to remember that Wilma’s husband was something of a bad lot. I think Margot told me that Wilma ought to divorce him. I don’t know whether she said that directly to Wilma’s face—though she probably did, knowing Margot… as a matter of fact,” he continued, “I heard, after I left the practice, that Wilma had been fired. There was an allegation of drinking at work. She always had a Thermos with her. But I may be misremembering that, so please don’t set too much store by it. As I say, I’d already left.”

The door to the sitting room opened.

“More tea?” inquired Mrs. Gupta, and she removed the tray and the now-cooling teapot, telling Strike, who had risen to help her, to sit back down and not to be silly. When she’d left, Strike said,

“Could I take you back to the day Margot disappeared, Dr. Gupta?”

Appearing to brace himself slightly, the little doctor said,

“Of course. But I must warn you: what I mostly remember about that day now is the account of it I gave the police at the time. Do you see? My actual memories are hazy. Mostly, I remember what I told the investigating officer.”

Strike thought this an unusually self-aware comment for a witness. Experienced in taking statements, he knew how wedded people became to the first account they gave, and that valuable information, discarded during that first edit, was often lost forever beneath the formalized version that now stood in for actual memory.

“That’s all right,” he told Gupta. “Whatever you can remember.”

“Well, it was an entirely ordinary day,” said Gupta. “The only thing that was slightly different was that one of the girls on reception had a dental appointment and left at half past two—Irene, that was.”

“We doctors were working as usual in our respective consulting rooms. Until half past two, both girls were on reception, and after Irene left, Gloria was there alone. Dorothy was at her desk until five, which was her regular departure time. Janice was at the practice until lunchtime, but off making house calls in the afternoon, which was quite routine. I saw Margot a couple of times in the back, where we had, not exactly a kitchen, but a sort of nook where we had a kettle and a fridge. She was pleased about Wilson.”

“About who?”

“Harold Wilson,” said Gupta, smiling. “There’d been a general election the day before. Labor got back in with a majority. He’d been leading a minority government since February, you see.”

“Ah,” said Strike. “Right.”

“I left at half past five,” said Gupta. “I said goodbye to Margot, whose door was open. Brenner’s door was closed. I assumed he was with a patient.

“Obviously, I can’t speak with authority about what happened after I left,” said Gupta, “but I can tell you what the others told me.”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Strike. “I’m particularly interested in the emergency patient who kept Margot late.”

“Ah,” said Gupta, now placing his fingertips together and nodding, “you know about the mysterious dark lady. Everything I know about her came from little Gloria.

“We operated on a first-come, first-served basis at St. John’s. Registered patients came along and waited their turn, unless it was an emergency, of course. But this lady walked in off the street. She wasn’t registered with the practice, but she had severe abdominal pain. Gloria told her to wait, then went to see whether Joseph Brenner would see her, because he was free, whereas Margot was still with her last registered patient of the day.

“Brenner made heavy weather of the request. While Gloria and Brenner were talking, Margot came out of her consulting room, seeing off her last patients, a mother and child, and offered to see the emergency herself as she was going from the practice to the pub with a friend, which was just up the road. Brenner, according to Gloria, said ‘good of you’ or something like that—which was friendly, for Brenner—and he put on his coat and hat and left.

“Gloria went back into the waiting room to tell the lady Margot would see her. The lady went into the consulting room and stayed there longer than Gloria expected. Fully twenty-five, thirty minutes, which took the time to a quarter past six, and Margot was supposed to be meeting her friend at six.

“At last the patient came out of the consulting room and left. Margot came out shortly afterward in her coat. She told Gloria that she was late for the pub, and asked Gloria to lock up. She walked out into the rain… and was never seen again.”

The door of the sitting room opened and Mrs. Gupta reappeared with fresh tea. Again, Strike stood to help her, and was again shooed back into his chair. When she’d left, Strike asked,

“Why did you call the last patient ‘mysterious’? Because she was unregistered, or—?”

“Oh, you didn’t know about that business?” said Gupta. “No, no. Because there was much discussion afterward as to whether or not she was actually a lady.”

Smiling at Strike’s look of surprise, he said,

“Brenner started it. He’d walked out past her and told the investigating officer that he’d thought, on the brief impression he had of her, that she was a man and was surprised afterward to hear that she was female. Gloria said she was a thickset young lady, dark—gypsy-ish, was her word—not a very politically correct term, but that’s what Gloria said. Nobody else saw her, of course, so we couldn’t judge.

“An appeal was put out for her, but nobody came forward, and in the absence of any information to the contrary, the investigating officer put a great deal of pressure on Gloria to say that she thought the patient was really a man in disguise, or at least, that she could have been mistaken in thinking she was a lady. But Gloria insisted that she knew a lady when she saw one.”

“This officer being Bill Talbot?” asked Strike.

“Precisely,” said Gupta, reaching for his tea.

“D’you think he wanted to believe the patient was a man dressed as a woman because—”

“Because Dennis Creed sometimes cross-dressed? Yes,” said Gupta. “Although we called him the Essex Butcher back then. We didn’t know his real name until 1976. And the only physical description of the Butcher at the time said he was dark and squat—I suppose I see why Talbot was suspicious but…”

“Strange for the Essex Butcher to walk into a doctor’s surgery in drag and wait his turn?”

“Well… quite,” said Dr. Gupta.

There was a brief silence while Gupta sipped tea and Strike flicked back through his notes, checking that he had asked everything he wanted to know. It was Gupta who spoke first.

“Have you met Roy? Margot’s husband?”

“No,” said Strike. “I’ve been hired by her daughter. How well did you know him?”

“Only very slightly,” said Gupta.

He put the teacup down on the saucer. If ever Strike had seen a man with more to say, that man was Dinesh Gupta.

“What was your impression of him?” asked Strike, surreptitiously clicking the nib back out of his pen.

“Spoiled,” said Gupta. “Very spoiled. A handsome man, who’d been made a prince by his mother. We Indian boys know something about that, Mr. Strike. I met Roy’s mother at the barbecue I mentioned. She singled me out for conversation. A snob, I should say. She didn’t consider receptionists or secretaries worth her time. I had the strong impression that she thought her son had married beneath him. Again, this opinion is not unknown among Indian mothers. He’s a hemophiliac, isn’t he?” asked Gupta.

“Not that I’ve heard,” said Strike, surprised.

“Yes, yes,” said Gupta “I think so, I think he is. He was a hematologist by profession, and his mother told me that he had chosen the specialty because of his own condition. You see? The clever, fragile little boy and the proud, overprotective mother.

“But then the little prince chose for a wife somebody utterly unlike his mother. Margot wasn’t the kind of woman to leave her patients, or her adult learners, to rush home and cook Roy’s dinner for him. Let him get his own, would have been her attitude… or the little cousin could have cooked, of course,” Gupta went on, with something of the delicacy he had brought to the mention of “black ladies.” “The young woman they paid to look after the baby.”

“Was Cynthia at the barbecue?”

“That was her name, was it? Yes, she was. I didn’t talk to her. She was carrying Margot’s daughter around, while Margot mingled.”

“Roy was interviewed by the police, I believe,” said Strike, who in fact took this for granted rather than knowing it for certain.

“Oh yes,” said Gupta. “Now, that was a curious thing. Inspector Talbot told me at the start of my own police interview that Roy had been completely ruled out of their inquiries—which I’ve always thought was an odd thing to tell me. Don’t you find it so? This was barely a week after Margot’s disappearance. I suppose it was only just dawning on us all that there really was no mistake, no innocent explanation. We’d all had our hopeful little theories in the first couple of days. She’d maybe felt stressed, unable to cope, and gone off alone somewhere. Or perhaps there’d been an accident, and she was lying unconscious and unidentified in a hospital. But as the days went by, and the hospitals had been checked, and her photograph had been in all the papers and still there was no news, everything started to look more sinister.

“I found it most peculiar that Inspector Talbot informed me, unasked, that Roy wasn’t under suspicion, that he had a complete alibi. Talbot struck all of us as peculiar, actually. Intense. His questions jumped around a lot.

“I think he was trying to reassure me,” said Gupta, taking a third fig roll and examining it thoughtfully as he continued. “He wanted me to know that my brother doctor was in the clear, that I had nothing to fear, that he knew no doctor could have done anything so terrible as to abduct a woman, or—by then, we were all starting to fear it—to kill her…

“But Talbot thought it was Creed, of course, from the very start—and he was probably right,” sighed Gupta, sadly.

“What makes you think so?” asked Strike. He thought Gupta might mention the speeding van or the rainy night, but the answer was, he thought, a shrewd one.

“It’s very difficult to dispose of a body as completely and cleanly as Margot’s seems to have been hidden. Doctors know how death smells and we understand the legalities and procedures surrounding a dead human. The ignorant might imagine it is nothing more than disposing of a table of equivalent weight, but it is a very different thing, and a very difficult one. And even in the seventies, before DNA testing, the police did pretty well with fingerprints, blood groups and so forth.

“How has she remained hidden for so long? Somebody did the job very cleverly and if we know anything about Creed, it’s that he’s very clever, isn’t that so? It was living ladies who betrayed him in the end, not dead. He knew how to render his corpses mute.”

Gupta popped the end of the fig roll in his mouth, sighed, brushed his hands fastidiously clean of crumbs, then pointed at Strike’s legs and said,

“Which one is it?”

Strike didn’t resent the blunt question, from a doctor.

“This one,” he said, shifting his right leg.

“You walk very naturally,” said Gupta, “for a big man. I might not have known, if I hadn’t read about you in the press. The prosthetics were not nearly as good in the old days. Wonderful, what you can buy now. Hydraulics reproducing natural joint action! Marvelous.”

“The NHS can’t afford those fancy prosthetics,” said Strike, slipping his notebook back into his pocket. “Mine’s pretty basic. If it’s not too much trouble,” he continued, “could I ask you for the practice nurse’s current address?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Gupta. He succeeded in rising from his armchair on the third attempt.

It took the Guptas half an hour to find, in an old address book, the last address they had for Janice Beattie.

“I can’t swear it’s current,” said Gupta, handing the slip of paper to Strike in the hall.

“It’ll give me a head start on finding her, especially if she’s got a different married name now,” said Strike. “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Gupta. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Gupta, considering Strike with his shrewd, bright brown eyes, “it would be a miracle if you found her, after all this time. But I’m glad somebody’s looking again. Yes, I’m very glad somebody’s looking.”

11

Strike walked back toward Amersham station, past the box hedges and twin garages of the professional middle classes, thinking about Margot Bamborough. She’d emerged from the old doctor’s reminiscences as a vivid and forceful personality and, irrationally, this had been a surprise. In vanishing, Margot Bamborough had assumed in Strike’s mind the insubstantiality of a wraith, as though it had always been predestined that she would one day disperse into the rainy dusk, never to return.

He remembered the seven women depicted on the front cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. They lived on in ghostly black and white, sporting the hairstyles that had become gradually more unfashionable with every day they’d been absent from their families and their lives, but each of those negative images represented a human whose heart had once beaten, whose ambitions and opinions, triumphs and disappointments had been as real as Margot Bamborough’s, before they ran into the man who was paid the compliment of full color in the cover photograph of the dreadful story of their deaths. Strike still hadn’t finished the book, but knew that Creed had been responsible for the deaths of a diverse array of victims, including a schoolgirl, an estate agent and a pharmacist. That had been part of the terror of the Essex Butcher, according to the contemporary press: he wasn’t confining his attacks to prostitutes who, it was implied, were a killer’s natural prey. In fact, the only working girl who was known to have been attacked by him had survived.

Helen Wardrop, the woman in question, had told her story in a television documentary about Creed, which Strike had watched on YouTube a few nights previously while eating a Chinese takeaway. The program had been salacious and melodramatic, with many poorly acted reconstructions and music lifted from a seventies horror movie. At the time of filming, Helen Wardrop had been a slack-faced, slow-spoken woman with dyed red hair and badly applied fake eyelashes, whose glazed affect and monotone suggested either tranquilizers or neurological damage. Creed had struck the drunk and screaming Helen what might have been a fatal blow to the head with a hammer in the course of trying to force her into the back of his van. She turned her head obligingly for the interviewer, to show the viewers a still-depressed area of skull. The interviewer told her she must feel very lucky to have survived. There was a tiny hesitation before she agreed with him.

Strike had turned off the documentary at that point, frustrated by the banality of the questioning. He, too, had once been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and bore the lifelong consequences, so he perfectly understood Helen Wardrop’s hesitation. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion that had taken Strike’s foot and shin, not to mention the lower half of Sergeant Gary Topley’s body and a chunk of Richard Anstis’s face, Strike had felt a variety of emotions which included guilt, gratitude, confusion, fear, rage, resentment and loneliness, but he couldn’t remember feeling lucky. “Lucky” would have been the bomb not detonating. “Lucky” would have meant still having both his legs. “Lucky” was what people who couldn’t bear to contemplate horrors needed to hear maimed and terrorized survivors call themselves. He recalled his aunt’s tearful assertion that he wasn’t in pain as he lay in his hospital bed, groggy with morphine, her words standing in stark contrast to the first Polworth had spoken to him, when he visited Strike in Selly Oak Hospital.

“Bit of a fucker, this, Diddy.”

“It is, a bit,” Strike had said, his amputated leg stretched in front of him, nerve endings insisting that the calf and foot were still there.

Strike arrived at Amersham station to discover he’d just missed a train back to London. He therefore sat down on a bench outside in the feeble autumn sunshine of late afternoon, took out his cigarettes, lit one, then examined his phone. Two texts and a missed call had come in while he’d been interviewing Gupta, his mobile on mute.

The texts were from his half-brother Al and his friend Ilsa, and could therefore wait, whereas the missed call was from George Layborn, whom he immediately phoned back.

“That you, Strike?”

“Yeah. You just phoned me.”

“I did. I’ve got it for you. Copy of the Bamborough file.”

“You’re kidding!” said Strike, exhaling on a rush of exhilaration. “George, that’s phenomenal, I owe you big time for this.”

“Buy me a pint and mention me to the press if you ever find out who did it. ‘Valuable assistance.’ ‘Couldn’t have done it without him.’ We can decide the wording after. Might remind this lot I deserve promotion. Listen,” added Layborn, more seriously, “it’s a mess. The file. Real mess.”

“In what way?”

“Old. Bits missing, from what I’ve seen, though they might just be in the wrong order—I haven’t had time to go systematically through the whole thing, there’s four boxes’ worth here—but Talbot’s record-keeping was all over the place and Lawson coming in and trying to make sense of it hasn’t really helped. Anyway, for what it’s worth, it’s yours. I’ll be over your way tomorrow and drop it in at the office, shall I?”

“Can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, George.”

“My old man would’ve been dead happy to know someone was going to take another look,” said Layborn. “He’d’ve loved to see Creed nailed for another one.”

Layborn rang off and Strike immediately lit a cigarette and called Robin to give her the good news, but his call went straight to voicemail. Then he remembered that she was in a meeting with the persecuted weatherman, so he turned his attention to the text from Al.

Hey bruv, it began, chummily.

Al was the only sibling on his father’s side with whom Strike maintained any kind of ongoing relationship, spasmodic and one-sided though it was, Al making all the running. Strike had a total of six Rokeby half-siblings, three of whom he’d never even met, a situation which he felt no need to remedy, finding the stresses of his known relatives quite sufficient to be going on with.

As you know, the Deadbeats are celebrating 50 years together next year—

Strike hadn’t known this. He’d met his father, Jonny Rokeby, who was lead singer of the Deadbeats, exactly twice in his life and most of the information he had about his rock-star father had come either from his mother Leda, the woman with whom he had carelessly fathered a child in the semi-public corner of a party in New York, or from the press.

As you know, the Deadbeats are celebrating 50 years together next year and (super confidential) they’re going to drop a surprise new album on 24th May. We (families) are throwing them a big London bash that night at Spencer House to celebrate the launch. Bruv, it would mean the world to all of us, especially Dad, if you came. Gaby’s had the idea of getting a picture taken of all the kids together, to give him as a present on the night. First ever. Getting it framed, as a surprise. Everyone’s in. We just need you. Think about it, bruv.

Strike read this text through twice, then closed it without replying and opened Ilsa’s, which was far shorter.

It’s Robin’s birthday, you total dickhead.

12

The television weatherman brought his wife to the catch-up meeting with Robin. Once ensconced in the agency’s inner office, the couple proved hard to shift. The wife had arrived with a new theory to present to Robin, triggered by the most recent anonymous postcard to arrive by post at the television studio. It was the fifth card to feature a painting, and the third to have been bought at the National Portrait Gallery shop, and this had caused the weatherman’s thoughts to turn to an ex-girlfriend, who’d been to art school. He didn’t know where the woman was now, but surely it was worth looking for her?

Robin thought it was highly unlikely that an ex-girlfriend would choose anonymous postcards to reconnect with a lost love, given the existence of social media and, indeed, the publicly available contact details for the weatherman, but she agreed diplomatically that this was worth looking into, and took down as many details of this long-vanished love interest as the weatherman could remember. Robin then ran through all the measures the agency was so far taking to trace the sender of the cards, and reassured husband and wife that they were continuing to watch the house at night, in the hopes that Postcard would show themselves.

The weatherman was a small man with reddish-brown hair, dark eyes and a possibly deceptive air of apology. His wife, a thin woman several inches taller than her husband, seemed frightened by the late-night hand deliveries, and slightly annoyed by her husband’s half-laughing assertions that you didn’t expect this sort of thing when you were a weatherman, because, after all, he was hardly the film star type, and who knew what this woman was capable of?

“Or man,” his wife reminded him. “We don’t know it’s a woman, do we?”

“No, that’s true,” said her husband, the smile fading slowly from his face.

When at last the couple had left, walking out past Pat, who was stoically typing away at her desk, Robin returned to the inner office and re-examined the most recent postcard. The painting on the front featured the portrait of a nineteenth-century man in a high cravat. James Duffield Harding. Robin had never heard of him. She flipped the card over. The printed message read:

She turned the card over again. The mousy man in side-whiskers did resemble the weatherman.

A yawn caught her by surprise. She’d spent most of the day clearing paperwork, authorizing payment of bills and tweaking the rota for the coming fortnight to accommodate Morris’s request for Saturday afternoon off, so that he could go and watch his three-year-old daughter perform in a ballet show. Checking her watch, Robin saw that it was already five o’clock. Fighting the low mood that had been held at bay by hard work, she tidied away the Postcard file, and switched her mobile ringer back on. Within seconds, it had rung: Strike.

“Hello,” said Robin, trying not to sound peeved, because as the hours had rolled by it had become clear to her that Strike had indeed forgotten her birthday yet again.

“Happy birthday,” he said, over the sound of what Robin could tell was a train.

“Thanks.”

“I’ve got something for you, but I won’t be back for an hour, I’ve only just got on the train back from Amersham.”

Have you hell got something, thought Robin. You forgot. You’re just going to grab flowers on the way back to the office.

Robin was sure Ilsa must have tipped Strike off, because Ilsa had called her just before the client had arrived, to tell Robin that she might be unavoidably late for drinks. She’d also asked, with unconvincing casualness, what Strike had bought her, and Robin had answered truthfully, “Nothing.”

“That’s nice, thanks,” Robin said now, “but I’m just leaving. Going out for a drink tonight.”

“Oh,” said Strike. “Right. Sorry—couldn’t be helped, you know, with coming out here to meet Gupta.”

“No,” said Robin, “well, you can leave them here in the office—”

“Yeah,” said Strike, and Robin noted that he didn’t dispute the word “them.” It was definitely going to be flowers.

“Anyway,” said Strike, “big news. George Layborn’s got hold of a copy of the Bamborough file.”

“Oh, that’s great!” said Robin, enthusiastic in spite of herself.

“Yeah, isn’t it? He’s going to bring it over tomorrow morning.”

“How was Gupta?” asked Robin, sitting down on her side of the partners’ desk which had replaced Strike’s old single one.

“Interesting, especially about Margot herself,” said Strike, who became muffled as, Robin guessed, the train went through a tunnel. Robin pressed the mobile closer to her ear and said,

“In what way?”

“Dunno,” said Strike distantly. “From the old photo, I wouldn’t have guessed an ardent feminist. She sounds much more of a personality than I’d imagined, which is stupid, really—why shouldn’t she have a personality, and a strong one?”

But Robin knew, somehow, what he meant. The hazy picture of Margot Bamborough, frozen in blurry time with her seventies middle parting, her wide, rounded lapels, her knitted tank top, seemed to belong to a long-gone, two-dimensional world of faded color.

“Tell you the rest tomorrow,” said Strike, because their connection was breaking up. “Reception’s not great here. I can hardly hear you.”

“OK, fine,” said Robin loudly. “Speak tomorrow.”

She opened the door into the outer office again. Pat was just turning off Robin’s old PC, electronic cigarette sticking out of her mouth.

“Was that Strike?” she asked, crow-like, with her jet-black hair and her croak, the fake cigarette waggling.

“Yep,” said Robin, reaching for her coat and bag. “He’s on his way back from Amersham. Lock up as usual though, Pat, he can let himself in if he needs to.”

“Has he remembered your birthday yet?” asked Pat, who seemed to have taken sadistic satisfaction in news of Strike’s forgetfulness that morning.

“Yes,” said Robin, and out of loyalty to Strike she added, “he’s got a present for me. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

Pat had bought Robin a new purse. “That old one was coming apart at the seams,” she said, when Robin unwrapped it. Robin, touched in spite of the fact that she might not have chosen bright red, had expressed warm thanks and at once transferred her money and cards across into the new one.

“Good thing about having one in a nice bright color, you can always find it in your bag,” Pat had said complacently. “What’s that Scottish nutter got you?”

Barclay had left a small wrapped package with Pat to give to Robin that morning.

“Cards,” said Robin, smiling as she unwrapped the package. “Sam was telling me all about these, look, when we were out on surveillance the other night. Cards showing Al-Qaeda’s most wanted. They gave packs out to the American troops during the Iraq War.”

“What’s he given you those for?” said Pat. “What are you supposed to do with them?”

“Well, because I was interested, when he told me,” said Robin, amused by Pat’s disdain. “I can play poker with them. They’ve got all the right numbers and everything, look.”

“Bridge,” Pat had said. “That’s a proper game. I like a nice game of bridge.”

As both women pulled on their coats, Pat asked,

“Going anywhere nice tonight?”

“For a drink with a couple of friends,” said Robin. “But I’ve got a Selfridges voucher burning a hole in my pocket. Think I might treat myself first.”

“Lovely,” croaked Pat. “What d’you fancy?”

Before Robin could answer, the glass door behind her opened and Saul Morris entered, handsome, smiling and a little breathless, his black hair sleek, his blue eyes bright. With some misgiving, she saw the wrapped present and card clutched in his hand.

“Happy birthday!” he said. “Hoped I’d catch you.”

And before Robin could prevent it, he’d bent down and kissed her on the cheek; no air kiss, this, but proper contact of lips and skin. She took half a step backward.

“Got you a little something,” he said, apparently sensing nothing amiss, but holding out to her the gift and card. “It’s nothing really. And how’s Moneypenny?” he said, turning to Pat, who had already removed her electronic cigarette to smile at him, displaying teeth the color of old ivory.

“Moneypenny,” repeated Pat, beaming. “Get on with you.”

Robin tore the paper from her gift. Inside was a box of Fortnum & Mason salted caramel truffles.

“Oh, very nice,” said Pat approvingly.

Chocolates, it seemed, were a far more appropriate gift for a young woman than a pack of cards with Al-Qaeda members on them.

“Remembered you like a bit of salted caramel,” said Morris, looking proud of himself.

Robin knew exactly where he’d got this idea, and it didn’t make her any more appreciative.

A month previously, at the first meeting of the entire expanded agency, Robin had opened a tin of fancy biscuits that had arrived in a hamper sent by a grateful client. Strike had inquired why everything these days was salted caramel flavor, and Robin had replied that it didn’t seem to be stopping him eating them by the handful. She’d expressed no personal fondness for the flavor, but Morris had evidently paid both too little and too much attention, treasuring up his lazy assumption for use at some later date.

“Thanks very much,” she said, with a bare minimum of warmth. “I’m afraid I’ve got to dash.”

And before Pat could point out that Selfridges would still be there in a half an hour, Robin had slid past Morris and started down the metal stairs, his card still unopened in her hand.

Exactly why Morris grated on her so much, Robin was still pondering as she moved slowly around Selfridges’ great perfume hall half an hour later. She’d decided to buy herself some new perfume, because she’d been wearing the same scent for five years. Matthew had liked it, and never wanted her to change, but her last bottle was down to the dregs, and she had a sudden urge to douse herself in something that Matthew wouldn’t recognize, and possibly wouldn’t even like. The cheap little bottle of 4711 cologne she’d bought on the way to Falmouth was nowhere near distinctive enough for a new signature scent, and so she wandered through a vast maze of smoked mirrors and gilded lights, between islands of seductive bottles and illuminated pictures of celebrities, each little domain presided over by black-clad sirens offering squirts and testing strips.

Was it pompous of her, she wondered, to think that Morris the subcontractor ought not to assume the right to kiss an agency partner? Would she mind if the generally reserved Hutchins kissed her on the cheek? No, she decided, she wouldn’t mind at all, because she’d now known Andy over a year, and in any case, Hutchins would do the polite thing and make the greeting a matter of brief proximity of two faces, not a pressing of lips into her face.

And what about Barclay? He’d never kissed her, though he had recently called her “ya numpty” when, on surveillance, she had accidentally spilled hot coffee all over him in her excitement at seeing their target, a civil servant, leaving a known brothel at two o’clock in the morning. But she hadn’t minded Barclay calling her a numpty in the slightest. She’d been a numpty.

Turning a corner, Robin found herself facing the Yves Saint Laurent counter, and with a sudden sharpening of interest, her eyes focused on a blue, black and silver cylinder bearing the name Rive Gauche. Robin had never knowingly smelled Margot Bamborough’s favorite perfume before.

“It’s a classic,” said the bored-looking salesgirl, watching Robin spraying Rive Gauche onto a fresh testing strip and inhaling.

Robin tended to rate perfumes according to how well they reproduced a familiar flower or foodstuff, but this wasn’t a smell from nature. There was a ghostly rose there, but also something strangely metallic. Robin, who was used to fragrances made friendly with fruit and candy, set down the strip with a smile and a shake of her head and walked on.

So that was how Margot Bamborough had smelled, she thought. It was a far more sophisticated scent than the one Matthew had loved on Robin, which was a natural-smelling concoction of figs, fresh, milky and green.

Robin turned a corner and saw, standing on a counter directly ahead of her, a faceted glass bottle full of pink liquid: Flowerbomb, Sarah Shadlock’s signature scent. Robin had seen it in Sarah and Tom’s bathroom whenever she and Matthew had gone over for dinner. Since leaving Matthew, Robin had had ample time to realize that the occasions on which he had changed the sheets mid-week, because he’d “spilled tea” or “thought I’d do it today, save you doing it tomorrow” must have been as much to wash away that loud, sweet scent, as any other, more obviously incriminating traces that might have leaked from careful condoms.

“It’s a modern classic,” said the hopeful salesgirl, who’d noticed Robin looking at the glass hand grenade. With a perfunctory smile, Robin shook her head and turned away. Now her reflection in the smoked glass looked simply sad, as she picked up bottles and smelled strips in a joyless hunt for something to improve this lousy birthday. She suddenly wished that she were heading home, and not out for drinks.

“What are you looking for?” said a sharp-cheekboned black girl, whom Robin passed shortly afterward.

Five minutes later, after a brief, professional interchange, Robin was heading back toward Oxford Street with a rectangular black bottle in her bag. The salesgirl had been highly persuasive.

“… and if you want something totally different,” she’d said, picking up a fifth bottle, spraying a little onto a strip and wafting it around, “try Fracas.”

She’d handed the strip to Robin, whose nostrils were now burning from the rich and varied assault of the past half hour.

“Sexy but grown-up, you know? It’s a real classic.”

And in that moment, Robin, breathing in heady, luscious, oily tuberose, had been seduced by the idea of becoming, in her thirtieth year, a sophisticated woman utterly different from the kind of fool who was too stupid to realize that what her husband told her he loved, and what he liked taking into his bed, bore about as much resemblance as a fig to a hand grenade.

13

In retrospect, Strike regretted the first gift he’d ever given Robin Ellacott. He’d bought the expensive green dress in a fit of quixotic extravagance, feeling safe in giving her something so personal only because she was engaged to another man and he was never going to see her again, or so he’d thought. She’d modeled it for Strike in the course of persuading a saleswoman into indiscretions, and that girl’s evidence, which Robin had so skillfully extracted, had helped solve the case that had made Strike’s name and saved his agency from bankruptcy. Buoyed by a tide of euphoria and gratitude, he’d returned to the shop and made the purchase as a grand farewell gesture. Nothing else had seemed to encapsulate what he wanted to tell her, which was “look what we achieved together,” “I couldn’t have done it without you” and (if he was being totally honest with himself) “you look gorgeous in this, and I’d like you to know I thought so when I saw you in it.”

But things hadn’t panned out quite as Strike had expected, because within an hour of giving her the green dress he’d hired her as a full-time assistant. Doubtless the dress accounted for at least some of the profound mistrust Matthew, her fiancé, had henceforth felt toward the detective. Worse still, from Strike’s point of view, it had set the bar uncomfortably high for future gifts. Whether consciously or not, he’d lowered expectations considerably since, either by forgetting to buy Robin birthday and Christmas gifts, or by making them as generic as was possible.

He purchased stargazer lilies at the first florist he could find when he got off the train from Amersham, and bore them into the office for Robin to find next day. He’d chosen them for their size and powerful fragrance. He felt he ought to spend more money than he had on the previous year’s belated bunch, and these looked impressive, as though he hadn’t skimped. Roses carried an unwelcome connotation of Valentine’s Day, and nearly everything else in the florist’s stock—admittedly depleted at half past five in the afternoon—looked a little bedraggled or underwhelming. The lilies were large and yet reas­suringly impersonal, sculptural in quality and heavy with fragrance, and there was safety in their very boldness. They came from a clinical hothouse; there was no romantic whisper of quiet woods or secret garden about them: they were flowers of which he could say robustly “nice smell,” with no further justification for his choice.

Strike wasn’t to know that Robin’s primary association with stargazer lilies, now and for evermore, would be with Sarah Shadlock, who’d once brought an almost identical bouquet to Robin and Matthew’s housewarming party. When she walked into the office the day after her birthday and saw the flowers standing there on the partners’ desk, stuck in a vase full of water but still in their cellophane, with a large magenta bow on them and a small card that read “Happy birthday from Cormoran” (no kiss, he never put kisses), she was affected exactly the same way she’d been by the hand-grenade-shaped bottle in Selfridges. She didn’t want these flowers; they were a double irritant in reminding her of Strike’s forgetfulness and Matthew’s infidelity, and if she had to look at or smell them, she resolved, it wouldn’t be in her own home.

So she’d left the lilies at the office, where they stubbornly refused to die, Pat conscientiously refilling their water every morning and taking such good care of them that they lived for nearly two weeks. Even Strike was sick of them by the end: he kept getting wafts of something that reminded him of his ex-girlfriend Lorelei’s perfume, an unpleasant association.

By the time the waxy pink and white petals began to shrivel and fall, the thirty-ninth anniversary of Margot Bamborough’s disappearance had passed unmarked and probably unnoticed by anyone except, perhaps, her family, Strike and Robin, who both registered the fateful date. Copies of the police records had been brought to the office as promised by George Layborn, and now lay in four cardboard boxes under the partners’ desk, which was the only place the agency had room for them. Strike, who was currently the least encumbered by the agency’s other cases, because he was holding himself in readiness to go back down to Cornwall should the need arise, set himself to work systematically through these files. Once he’d digested their contents, he intended to visit Clerkenwell with Robin, and retrace the route between the old St. John’s practice where Margot had last been seen alive, and the pub where her friend had waited for her in vain.

So, on the last day of October, Robin left the office at one o’clock and hurried, beneath a threatening sky and with her umbrella ready in her hand, onto the Tube. She was quietly excited by the prospect of this afternoon, the first she and Strike would spend working the Bamborough case together.

It was already drizzling slightly when Robin caught sight of Strike, standing smoking as he surveyed the frontage of a building halfway down St. John’s Lane. He turned at the sound of her heels on the wet pavement.

“Am I late?” she called, as she approached.

“No,” said Strike, “I was early.”

She joined him, still holding her umbrella, and looked up at the tall, multi-story building of brown brick, with large, metal-framed windows. It appeared to house offices, but there was no indication of what kind of businesses were operating inside.

“It was right here,” said Strike, pointing at the door numbered 29. “The old St. John’s Medical Practice. They’ve remodeled the front of the building, obviously. There used to be a back entrance,” he said. “We’ll go round and have a shufti in a minute.”

Robin turned to look up and down St. John’s Lane, which was a long, narrow one-way street, bordered on either side by tall, multi-windowed buildings.

“Very overlooked,” commented Robin.

“Yep,” said Strike. “So, let’s begin with what Margot was wearing when she disappeared.”

“I already know,” said Robin. “Brown corduroy skirt, red shirt, knitted tank top, beige Burberry raincoat, silver necklace and earrings, gold wedding ring. Carrying a leather shoulder bag and a black umbrella.”

“You should take up detection,” said Strike, mildly impressed. “Ready for the police records?”

“Go on.”

“At a quarter to six on the eleventh of October 1974 only three people are known to have been inside this building: Margot, who was dressed exactly as you describe, but hadn’t yet put on her raincoat; Gloria Conti, who was the younger of the two receptionists; and an emergency patient with abdominal pain, who’d walked in off the street. The patient, according to the hasty note Gloria took, was called ‘Theo question mark.’ In spite of the male name, and Dr. Joseph Brenner’s assertion that he thought the patient looked like a man, and Talbot trying hard to persuade her that Theo was a man dressed as a woman, Gloria never wavered in her assertion that ‘Theo’ was a woman.

“All the other employees had left before a quarter to six, except Wilma the cleaner, who hadn’t been there at all that day, because she didn’t work Fridays. More of Wilma later.

“Janice, the nurse, was here until midday, then making house visits the rest of the afternoon and didn’t return. Irene, the receptionist, left at half past two for a dental appointment and didn’t come back. According to their statements, each of which were corroborated by some other witness, the secretary, Dorothy, left at ten past five, Dr. Gupta at half past and Dr. Brenner at a quarter to six. Police were happy with the alibis all three gave for the rest of the evening: Dorothy went home to her son and spent the evening watching TV with him. Dr. Gupta attended a large family dinner to celebrate his mother’s birthday and Dr. Brenner was with the spinster sister he shared his house with. Both Brenners were seen through the sitting-room window later that evening, by a dog walker.

“The last registered patients, a mother and child, were Margot’s, and they left the practice shortly before Brenner did. The patients testified that Margot was fine when they saw her.

“From that point on, Gloria is the only witness. According to Gloria, Theo went into Margot’s consulting room and stayed there longer than expected. At a quarter past six, Theo left, never to be seen at the practice again. A police appeal was subsequently put out for her, but nobody came forward.

“Margot left no notes about Theo. The assumption is that she intended to write up the consultation the following day, because her friend had now been waiting for her in the pub for a quarter of an hour and she didn’t want to make herself even later.

“Shortly after Theo left, Margot came hurrying out of her consulting room, put on her raincoat, told Gloria to lock up with the emergency key, walked out into the rain, put up her umbrella, turned right and disappeared from Gloria’s sight.”

Strike turned and pointed up the road toward a yellow stone arch of ancient appearance, which lay directly ahead of them.

“Which means she was heading in that direction, toward the Three Kings.”

For a moment, both of them looked toward the old arch that spanned the road, as though some shadow of Margot might materialize. Then Strike ground out his cigarette underfoot and said,

“Follow me.”

He walked the length of number 28, then paused to point up a dark passageway the width of a door, called Passing Alley.

“Good hiding place,” said Robin, pausing to look up and down the dark, vaulted corridor through the buildings.

“Certainly is,” said Strike. “If somebody wanted to lie in wait for her, this is tailor made. Catch her by surprise, drag her up here—but after that, it’d get problematic.”

They walked along the short passage and emerged into a sunken garden area of concrete and shrubs that lay between two parallel streets.

“The police searched this whole garden area with sniffer dogs. Nothing. And if an assailant dragged her onwards, through there,” Strike pointed to the road that ran parallel to St. John’s Lane, “onto St. John Street, it would’ve been well-nigh impossible to go undetected. The street’s far busier than St. John’s Lane. And that’s assuming a fit, tall twenty-nine-year-old wouldn’t have shouted and fought back.”

He turned to look at the back entrance.

“The district nurse sometimes went in the back, rather than going through the waiting room. She had a little room to the rear of the building where she kept her own stuff and sometimes saw patients. Wilma the cleaner sometimes went out the back door as well. Otherwise it was usually locked.”

“Are we interested in people being able to enter or leave the building through a second door?” asked Robin.

“Not especially, but I want to get a feel for the layout. It’s been nearly forty years: we’ve got to go back over everything.”

They walked back through Passing Alley to the front of the building.

“We’ve got one advantage over Bill Talbot,” said Strike. “We know the Essex Butcher turned out to be slim and blond, not a swarthy thickset person of gypsy-ish appearance. Theo, whoever she was, wasn’t Creed. Which doesn’t necessarily make her irrelevant, of course.

“One last thing, then we’re done with the practice itself,” said Strike, looking up at number 29. “Irene, the blonde receptionist, told the police that Margot received two threatening, anonymous notes shortly before she disappeared. They’re not in the police file, so we’ve only got Irene’s statement to go on. She claims she opened one, and that she saw another on Margot’s desk when bringing her tea. She says the one she read mentioned hellfire.”

“You’d think it was the secretary’s job to open mail,” commented Robin. “Not a receptionist’s.”

“Good point,” said Strike, pulling out his notebook and scribbling, “we’ll check that… It seems relevant to add here that Talbot thought Irene was an unreliable witness: inaccurate and prone to exaggeration. Incidentally, Gupta said Irene and Margot had what he called a ‘contretemps’ at a Christmas party. He didn’t think it was a particularly big deal, but he’d remembered it.”

“And is Talbot—?”

“Dead? Yes,” said Strike. “So’s Lawson, who took over from him. Talbot’s got a son, though, and I’m thinking of getting in touch with him. Lawson never had kids.”

“Go on, about the anonymous notes.”

“Well, Gloria, the other receptionist, said Irene showed her one of the notes, but couldn’t remember what was in it. Janice, the nurse, confirmed that Irene had told her about them at the time, but said she hadn’t personally seen them. Margot didn’t tell Gupta about them—I called him to check.

“Anyway,” said Strike, giving the street one last sweeping look through the drizzle, “assuming nobody abducted Margot right outside the practice, or that she didn’t get in a car yards from the door, she headed toward the Three Kings, which takes us this way.”

“D’you want to come under this umbrella?” Robin asked.

“No,” said Strike. His densely curling hair looked the same wet or dry: he had very little vanity.

They continued up the street and passed through St. John’s Gate, the ancient stone arch decorated with many small heraldic shields, emerging onto Clerkenwell Road, a bustling two-way street, which they crossed, arriving beside an old-fashioned scarlet phone box which stood at the mouth of Albemarle Way.

“Is that the phone box where the two women were seen struggling?” asked Robin.

Strike did a double take.

“You’ve read the case notes,” he said, almost accusingly.

“I had a quick look,” Robin admitted, “while I was printing out Two-Times’ bill last night. I didn’t read everything; didn’t have time. Just looked at a few bits and pieces.”

“Well, that isn’t the phone box,” said Strike. “The important phone box—or boxes—come later. We’ll get to them in due course. Now follow me.”

Instead of proceeding into a paved pedestrian area that Robin, from her own scant research, knew Margot must have crossed if she had been heading for the Three Kings, Strike turned left, up Clerkenwell Road.

“Why are we going this way?” asked Robin, jogging to keep up.

“Because,” said Strike, stopping again and pointing up at a top window on the building opposite, which looked like an old brick warehouse, “some time after six o’clock on the evening in question, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl called Amanda White swore she saw Margot at the top window, second from the right, banging her fists against the glass.”

“I haven’t seen that mentioned online!” said Robin.

“For the good reason that the police concluded there was nothing in it.

“Talbot, as is clear from his notes, disregarded White because her story couldn’t be fitted into his theory that Creed had abducted Margot. But Lawson went back to Amanda when he took over, and actually walked with her along this stretch of road.

“Amanda’s account had a few things going for it. For one thing, she told the police unprompted that this had happened the evening after the general election, which she remembered because she had an argument with a Tory schoolfriend. The pair of them had been kept back after school for a detention. They’d then gone for a coffee together, over which the schoolfriend went into a huff when Mandy said it was good that Wilson had won, and refused to walk home with her.

“Amanda said she was still angry about her friend getting stroppy when she looked up and saw a woman pounding on the glass with her fists. The description she gave was a good one, although by this time, a full description of Margot’s appearance and clothing had been in the press.

“Lawson contacted the business owner who worked on the top floor. It was a paper design company run by a husband and wife. They produced small runs of pamphlets, posters and invitations, that kind of stuff. No connection to Margot. Neither of them were registered with the St. John’s practice, because they lived out of the area. The wife said she sometimes had to thump the window frame to make it close. However, the wife in no way resembled Margot, being short, tubby and ginger-haired.”

“And someone would’ve noticed Margot on her way up to the third floor, surely?” said Robin, looking from the top window to the front door. She moved back from the curb: cars were splashing through the puddles in the gutter. “She’d have climbed the stairs or used the lift, and maybe rung the doorbell to get in.”

“You’d think so,” agreed Strike. “Lawson concluded that Amanda had made an innocent mistake and thought the printer’s wife was Margot.”

They returned to the point where they had deviated from what Robin thought of as “Margot’s route.” Strike paused again, pointing up the gloomy side road called Albemarle Way.

“Now, disregard the phone box, but note that Albemarle Way is the first side street since Passing Alley I think she could plausibly have entered—voluntarily or not—without necessarily being seen by fifty-odd people. Quieter, as you can see—but not that quiet,” admitted Strike, looking toward the end of Albemarle Way, where traffic was passing at a steady rate. Albemarle Way was narrower than St. John’s Lane, but similar in being bordered by tall buildings in unbroken lines, which kept it permanently in shadow. “Still a risk for an abductor,” said Strike, “but if Dennis Creed was lurking somewhere in his van, waiting for a lone woman—any woman—to walk past in the rain, this is the place I can see it happening.”

It was at this moment, as a cold breeze whistled up Albemarle Way, that Strike caught a whiff of what he had thought were the dying stargazer lilies, but now realized was coming from Robin herself. The perfume wasn’t exactly the same as the one that Lorelei had worn; his ex’s had been strangely boozy, with overtones of rum (and he’d liked it when the scent had been an accompaniment to easy affection and imaginative sex; only later had he come to associate it with passive-aggression, character assassination and pleas for a love he could not feel). Nevertheless, this scent strongly resembled Lorelei’s; he found it cloying and sickly.

Of course, many would say it was rich for him to have opinions about how women smelled, given that his signature odor was that of an old ashtray, overlain with a splash of Pour Un Homme on special occasions. Nevertheless, having spent much of his childhood in conditions of squalor, Strike found cleanliness a necessary trait in anyone he could find attractive. He’d liked Robin’s previous scent, which he’d missed when she wasn’t in the office.

“This way,” he said, and they proceeded through the rain into an irregular pedestrianized square. A few seconds later, Strike suddenly became aware that he’d left Robin behind, and walked back several paces to join her in front of St. John Priory Church, a pleasingly sym­metrical building of red brick, with long windows and two white stone pillars flanking the entrance.

“Thinking about her lying in a holy place?” he asked, lighting up again while the rain beat down on him. Exhaling, he held the cigarette cupped in his hand, to prevent its extinguishment.

“No,” said Robin, a little defensively, but then, “yes, all right, maybe a bit. Look at this…”

Strike followed her through the open gates into a small garden of remembrance, open to the public and full (as Robin read off a small sign on the inner wall) of medicinal herbs, including many used in medieval times, in the Order of St. John’s hospitals. A white figure of Christ hung on the back wall, surrounded with the emblems of the four evangelists: the bull, the lion, the eagle and the angel. Fronds and leaves undulated gently beneath the rain. As Robin’s eyes swept the small, walled garden, Strike, who’d followed her, said,

“I think we can agree that if somebody buried her in here, a cleric would have noticed disturbed earth.”

“I know,” said Robin. “I’m just looking.”

As they returned to the street, she added,

“There are Maltese crosses everywhere, look. They were on that archway we just passed through, too.”

“It’s the cross of the Knights Hospitaller. Knights of St. John. Hence the street names and the emblem of St. John ambulance; they’ve got their headquarters back in St. John’s Lane. If that medium Googled the area Margot went missing, she can’t have missed Clerkenwell’s associations with the Order of St. John. I’ll bet you that’s where she got the idea for that little bit of ‘holy place’ padding. But bear it in mind, because the cross is going to come up again once we reach the pub.”

“You know,” said Robin, turning to look back at the Priory, “Peter Tobin, that Scottish serial killer—he attached himself to churches. He joined a religious sect at one point, under an assumed name. Then he got a job as a handyman at a church in Glasgow, where he buried that poor girl beneath the floorboards.”

“Churches are good cover for killers,” said Strike. “Sex offenders, too.”

“Priests and doctors,” said Robin thoughtfully. “It’s hardwired in most of us to trust them, don’t you think?”

“After the Catholic Church’s many scandals? After Harold Shipman?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Robin. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”

“Think you’re onto something there,” said Strike, as they entered a short pedestrian lane called Jerusalem Passage. “I told Gupta it was odd that Joseph Brenner didn’t like people. I thought that might be a basic job requirement for a doctor. He soon put me right.

“Let’s stop here a moment,” Strike said, doing so. “If Margot got this far—I’m assuming she’d’ve taken this route, because it’s the shortest and most logical way to the Three Kings—this is the first time she’d have passed residences rather than offices or public buildings.”

Robin looked at the buildings around them. Sure enough, there were a couple of doors whose multiple buzzers indicated flats above.

“Is there a chance,” said Strike, “however remote, that someone living along this lane could have persuaded or forced her inside?”

Robin looked up and down the street, the rain pattering onto her umbrella.

“Well,” she said slowly, “obviously it could have happened, but it seems unlikely. Did someone wake up that day and decide they wanted to abduct a woman, reach outside and grab one?”

“Have I taught you nothing?”

“OK, fine: means before motive. But there are problems with the means, too. This is really overlooked as well. Does nobody see or hear her being abducted? Doesn’t she scream or fight? And I assume the abductor lives alone, unless their housemates are also in on the kidnapping?”

“All valid points,” admitted Strike. “Plus, the police went door to door here. Everyone was questioned, though the flats weren’t searched.

“But let’s think this through… She’s a doctor. What if someone shoots out of a house and begs her to come inside to look at an injured person—a sick relative—and once inside, they don’t let her go? That’d be a good ploy for getting her inside, pretending there was a medical emergency.”

“OK, but that presupposes they knew she was a doctor.”

“The abductor could’ve been a patient.”

“But how did they know she’d be passing their house at that particular time? Had she alerted the whole neighborhood that she was about to go to the pub?”

“Maybe it was a random thing, they saw her passing, they knew she was a doctor, they ran out and grabbed her. Or—I dunno, let’s say there really was a sick or dying person inside, or someone’s had an accident—perhaps there’s an argument—she disagrees with the treatment or refuses to help—the fight becomes physical—she’s accidentally killed.”

There was a short silence, while they moved aside for a group of chattering French students. When these had passed, Strike said,

“It’s a stretch, I grant you.”

“We can find out how many of these buildings are occupied by the same people they were thirty-nine years ago,” said Robin, “but we’ve still got the problem of how they’ve kept her body hidden for nearly four decades. You wouldn’t dare move, would you?”

“That’s a problem, all right,” admitted Strike. “As Gupta said, it’s not like disposing of a table of equivalent weight. Blood, decomposition, infestation… plenty have tried keeping bodies on the premises. Crippen. Christie. Fred and Rose West. It’s generally considered a mistake.”

“Creed managed it for a while,” said Robin. “Boiling down severed hands in the basement. Burying heads apart from bodies. It wasn’t the corpses that got him caught.”

“Are you reading The Demon of Paradise Park?” asked Strike sharply.

“Yes,” said Robin.

“D’you want that stuff in your head?”

“If it helps us with the case,” said Robin.

“Hmm. Just thinking of my health and safety responsibilities.”

Robin said nothing. Strike gave the houses a last, sweeping look, then invited Robin to walk on, saying,

“You’re right, I can’t see it. Freezers get opened, gas men visit and notice a smell, neighbors notice blocked drains. But in the interests of thoroughness, we should check who was living here at the time.”

They now emerged onto the busiest road they had yet seen. Aylesbury Street was a wide road, lined with more office blocks and flats.

“So,” said Strike, pausing again on the pavement, “if Margot’s still walking to the pub, she would’ve crossed here and turned left, into Clerkenwell Green. But we’re pausing to note that it was there,” Strike pointed some fifty yards to the right, “that a small white van nearly knocked down two women as it sped away from Clerkenwell Green that evening. The incident was witnessed by four or five onlookers. Nobody got the registration number—”

“But Creed was putting fake license plates on the delivery van he was using,” said Robin, “so that might not help anyway.”

“Correct. The van seen by witnesses on the eleventh of October 1974 had a design on the side. The onlookers didn’t all agree what it was, but two of them thought a large flower.”

“And we also know,” said Robin, “that Creed was using removable paint on the van to disguise its appearance.”

“Correct again. So, on the surface, this looks like our first proper hint that Creed might’ve been in the area. Talbot, of course, wanted to believe that, so he was uninterested in the opinion of one of the witnesses that the van actually belonged to a local florist. However, a junior officer, presumably one of those who’d realized that his lead investigator was going quietly off his onion, went and questioned the florist, a man called Albert Shimmings, who absolutely denied driving a speeding van in this area that night. He claimed he’d been giving his young son a lift in it, miles away.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t Shimmings,” said Robin. “He might have been worried about being done for dangerous driving. No CCTV cameras… nothing to prove it one way or the other.”

“My thoughts exactly. If Shimmings is still alive, I think we should check his story. He might’ve decided it’s worth telling the truth now a speeding charge can’t stick. In the meantime,” said Strike, “the matter of the van remains unresolved and we have to admit that one possible explanation is that Creed was driving it.”

“But where did he abduct Margot, if it was Creed in the van?” asked Robin. “It can’t’ve been back in Albemarle Way, because this isn’t how he’d have left the area.”

“True. If he’d grabbed her in Albemarle Way, he’d’ve joined Aylesbury Street much further down and he definitely wouldn’t have come via Clerkenwell Green—which leads us neatly to the Two Struggling Women by the Phoneboxes.”

They proceeded through the drizzle into Clerkenwell Green, a wide rectangular square which boasted trees, a pub and a café. Two telephone boxes stood in the middle, near parked cars and a bike stand.

“Here,” said Strike, coming to a halt between the phone boxes, “is where Talbot’s craziness really starts messing with the case. A woman called Ruby Elliot, who was unfamiliar with the area, but trying to find her daughter and son-in-law’s new house in Hayward’s Place, was driving around in circles in the rain, lost.

“She passed these phone boxes and noticed two women struggling together, one of whom seemed, in her word, ‘tottery.’ She has no particularly distinct memory of them—remember, it’s pouring with rain and she’s anxiously trying to spot street signs and house numbers, because she’s lost. All she can tell the police is that one of them was wearing a headscarf and the other a raincoat.

“The day after this detail appeared in the paper, a middle-aged woman of sound character came forward to say that the pair of women Ruby Elliot had seen had almost certainly been her and her aged mother. She told Talbot she’d been walking the old dear across Clerkenwell Green that night, taking her home after a little walk. The mother, who was infirm and senile, was wearing a rainhat, and she herself was wearing a raincoat similar to Margot’s. They didn’t have umbrellas, so she was trying to hurry her mother along. The old lady didn’t take kindly to being rushed and there was a slight altercation here, right by the phone boxes. I’ve got a picture of the two of them, incidentally: the press got hold of it—‘sighting debunked.’

“But Talbot wasn’t having it. He flat-out refused to accept that the two women hadn’t been Margot and a man dressed like a woman. The way he sees it: Margot and Creed meet here by the phone boxes, Creed wrestles her into his van, which presumably was parked there—” Strike pointed to the short line of parked cars nearby, “then Creed takes off at speed, with her screaming and banging on the sides of the van, exiting down Aylesbury Street.”

“But,” said Robin, “Talbot thought Theo was Creed. Why would Creed come to Margot’s surgery dressed as a woman, then walk out, leaving her unharmed, walk to Clerkenwell Green and grab her here, in the middle of the most public, overlooked place we’ve seen?”

“There’s no point trying to make sense of it, because there isn’t any. When Lawson took over the case, he went back to Fiona Fleury, which was the respectable middle-aged woman’s name, questioned her again and came away completely satisfied that she and her mother had been the women Ruby Elliot saw. Again, the general election was useful, because Fiona Fleury remembered being tired and not particularly patient with her difficult mother, because she’d sat up late the night before, watching election coverage. Lawson concluded—and I’m inclined to agree with him—that the matter of the two struggling women had been resolved.”

The drizzle had thickened: raindrops were pounding on Robin’s umbrella and rendering the hems of her trousers sodden. They now turned up Clerkenwell Close, a curving street that rose toward a large and impressive church with a high, pointed steeple, set on higher ground.

“Margot can’t have got this far,” said Robin.

“You say that,” said Strike, and to her surprise he paused again, looking ahead at the church, “but we now reach one last alleged sighting.

“A church handyman—yeah, I know,” he added, in response to Robin’s startled look, “called Willy Lomax claims he saw a woman in a Burberry raincoat walking up the steps to St. James-on-the-Green that evening, around the time Margot should’ve been arriving at the pub. He saw her from behind. These were the days, of course, when churches weren’t locked up all the time.

“Talbot, of course, disregarded Lomax’s evidence, because if Margot was alive and walking into churches, she couldn’t have been speeding away in the Essex Butcher’s van. Lawson couldn’t make much of Lomax’s evidence. The bloke stuck fast to his story: he’d seen a woman matching Margot’s description go inside but, being a man of limited curiosity, didn’t follow her, didn’t ask her what she was up to and didn’t watch to see whether she ever came out of the church again.

“And now,” said Strike, “we’ve earned a pint.”

14

On the opposite side of the road from the church hung the sign of the Three Kings. The pub’s curved, tiled exterior wall mirrored the bend in the road.

As she followed Strike inside, Robin had the strange sensation of walking back in time. Most of the walls were papered in pages from old music papers dating back to the seventies: a jumble of reviews, adverts for old stereo systems and pictures of pop and rock stars. Hallowe’en decorations hung over the bar, Bowie and Bob Marley looking down from framed prints, and Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix looked back at them from the opposite wall. As Robin sat down at a free table for two and Strike headed to the bar, she spotted a newspaper picture of Jonny Rokeby in tight leather trousers in the collage around the mirror. The pub looked as though it hadn’t changed in many years; it might even have had these same frosted windows, these mismatched wooden tables, bare floorboards, round glass wall lamps and candles in bottles back when Margot’s friend sat waiting for her in 1974.

For the first time, looking around this quirky, characterful pub, Robin found herself wondering exactly what Margot Bamborough had been like. It was odd how professional people’s jobs defined them in the imagination. “Doctor” felt, in many ways, like a complete identity. Waiting for her companion to buy the drinks, her eyes drifting from the skulls hanging from the bar to the pictures of dead rock stars, Robin was struck by the odd idea of a reverse nativity. The three Magi had journeyed toward a birth; Margot had set out for the Three Kings and, Robin feared, met death along the way.

Strike set Robin’s wine in front of her, took a satisfying mouthful of Sussex Best, sat down and then reached inside his overcoat and pulled out a roll of papers. Robin noticed photocopied newspaper reports among the typed and handwritten pages.

“You’ve been to the British Library.”

“I was there all day yesterday.”

He took the top photocopy and showed it to Robin. It showed a small clipping from the Daily Mail, featuring a picture of Fiona Fleury and her aged mother beneath the caption: Essex Butcher Sighting “Was Really Us.” Neither woman would have been easy to mistake for Margot Bamborough: Fiona was a tall, broad woman with a cheery face and no waist; her mother was shriveled with age and stooped.

“This is the first inkling that the press were losing confidence in Bill Talbot,” said Strike. “A few weeks after this appeared, they were baying for his blood, which probably didn’t help his mental health… Anyway,” he said, his large, hairy-backed hand lying flat on the rest of the photocopied paper. “Let’s go back to the one, incontrovertible fact we’ve got, which is that Margot Bamborough was still alive and inside the practice at a quarter to six that night.”

“At a quarter past six, you mean,” said Robin.

“No, I don’t,” said Strike. “The sequence of departures goes: ten past five, Dorothy. Half past five, Dinesh Gupta, who catches sight of Margot inside her consulting room before he leaves, and walks out past Gloria and Theo.

“Gloria goes to ask Brenner if he’ll see Theo. He refuses. Margot comes out of her consulting room and her last scheduled patients, a mother and child, come out at the same time and leave, also walking out past Theo in the waiting room. Margot tells Gloria she’s happy to see Theo. Brenner says ‘good of you’ and leaves, at a quarter to six.

“From then on, we’ve only got Gloria’s uncorroborated word for anything that happened. She’s the only person claiming Theo and Margot left the surgery alive.”

Robin paused in the act of taking a sip of wine.

“Come on. You aren’t suggesting they never left? That Margot’s still there, buried under the floorboards?”

“No, because sniffer dogs went all over the building, as well as the garden behind it,” said Strike. “But how’s this for a theory? The reason Gloria was so insistent that Theo was a woman, not a man, was because he was her accomplice in the murder or abduction of Margot.”

“Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to write down a girl’s name instead of ‘Theo’ if she wanted to hide a man’s identity? And why would she ask Dr. Brenner if he could see Theo, if she and Theo were planning to kill Margot?”

“Both good points,” admitted Strike, “but maybe she knew perfectly well Brenner would refuse, because he was a cantankerous old bastard, and was trying to make the thing look natural to Margot. Humor me for a moment.

“Inert bodies are heavy, hard to move and difficult to hide. A living, fighting woman is even harder. I’ve seen press photographs of Gloria and she was what my aunt would call a ‘slip of a girl,’ whereas Margot was a tall woman. I doubt Gloria could have killed Margot without help, and she definitely couldn’t have lifted her.”

“Didn’t Dr. Gupta say Margot and Gloria were close?”

“Means before motive. The closeness could’ve been a front,” said Strike. “Maybe Gloria didn’t like being ‘improved’ after all, and only acted the grateful pupil to allay Margot’s suspicions.

“Be that as it may, the last time there are multiple witnesses to Margot’s whereabouts was half an hour before she supposedly left the building. After that, we’ve only got Gloria’s word for what happened.”

“OK, objection sustained,” said Robin.

“So,” said Strike, as he took his hand off the pile of paper, “having granted me that, forget for a moment any alleged sightings of her at windows or walking into churches. Forget the speeding van. It’s entirely possible that none of that had anything to do with Margot.

“Go back to the one thing we know for certain: Margot Bamborough was still alive at a quarter to six.

“So now we turn to three men the police considered plausible suspects at the time and ask ourselves where they were at a quarter to six on the eleventh of October 1974.”

“There you go,” he said, passing Robin a photocopy of a tabloid news story dated 24 October 1974. “That’s Roy Phipps, otherwise known as Margot’s husband and Anna’s dad.”

The photograph showed a handsome man of around thirty, who strongly resembled his daughter. Robin thought that if she had been looking to cast a poet in a cheesy movie, she’d have put Roy Phipps’s headshot to the top of the pile. This was where Anna had got her long, pale face, her high forehead and her large, beautiful eyes. Phipps had worn his dark hair down to his long-lapelled collar in 1974, and he stared up out of this old newsprint harrowed, facing the camera, looking up from the card in his hand. The caption read: Dr. Roy Phipps, appealing to the public for help.

“Don’t bother reading it,” said Strike, already placing a second news story over the first. “There’s nothing in there you don’t already know, but this one will give you a few tidbits you don’t.”

Robin bent obediently over the second news story, of which Strike had photocopied only half.

“What’s von Willebrand Disease?” asked Robin.

“A bleeding disorder. I looked it up. You don’t clot properly. Gupta remembered that wrong; he thought Roy was a hemophiliac.

“There are three kinds of von Willebrand Disease,” said Strike. “Type One just means you’d take a bit longer than normal to clot, but it shouldn’t leave you bedbound, or unable to drive. I’m assuming Roy Phipps is Type Three, which can be as serious as hemophilia, and could lay him up for a while. But we’ll need to check that.

“Anyway,” said Strike, turning over the next page. “This is Talbot’s record of his interview with Roy Phipps.”

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

The page was covered in small, slanting writing, but the most distinctive feature of the record were the stars Talbot had drawn all over it.

“See there?” said Strike, running a forefinger down a list of dates that were just discernible amid the scrawls. “Those are the dates of the Essex Butcher abductions and attempted abductions.

“Talbot loses interest halfway down the list, look. On the twenty-sixth of August 1971, which is when Creed tried to abduct Peggy Hiskett, Roy was able to prove that he and Margot were on holiday in France.

“So that was that, as far as Talbot was concerned. If Roy hadn’t tried to abduct Peggy Hiskett, he wasn’t the Essex Butcher, and if he wasn’t the Essex Butcher, he couldn’t have had anything to do with Margot’s disappearance.

“But there’s a funny thing at the bottom of Talbot’s list of dates. All refer to Creed’s activities except that last one. He’s circled December twenty-seventh, with no year. No idea why he was interested in December twenty-seventh.”

“Or, presumably, why he went Vincent van Gogh all over his report?”

“The stars? Yeah, they’re a feature on all Talbot’s notes. Very strange. Now,” said Strike, “let’s see how a statement should be taken.”

He turned the page and there was a neatly typewritten, double-spaced statement, four pages long, which DI Lawson had taken from Roy Phipps, and which had been duly signed on the final page by the hematologist.

“You needn’t read the whole thing now,” said Strike. “Bottom line is, he stuck to it that he’d been laid up in bed all day, as the cleaner and his nanny would testify.

“But now we go to Wilma Bayliss, the Phippses’ cleaner. She also happened to be the St. John’s practice’s cleaner. The rest of the practice didn’t know at the time that she’d been doing some private work for Margot and Roy. Gupta told me that he thought Margot might’ve been encouraging Wilma to leave her husband, and giving her a bit of extra work might’ve been part of that scheme.”

“Why did she want Wilma to leave her husband?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” said Strike, and he turned over another piece of paper to show a tiny photocopied news clipping, which was dated in Strike’s spiky and hard-to-read handwriting: 6 November 1972.

Rapist Jailed

Jules Bayliss, 36, of Leather Lane, Clerkenwell was today sentenced at the Inner London Crown Court to 5 years’ jail for 2 counts of rape. Bayliss, who previously served two years in Brixton for aggravated assault, pleaded Not Guilty.

“Ah,” said Robin. “I see.”

She took another slug of wine.

“Funnily enough,” she added, though she didn’t sound amused, “Creed got five years for his second rape as well. After they let him out, he started killing women as well as raping them.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I know.”

For the second time, he considered questioning the advisability of Robin reading The Demon of Paradise Park, but decided against.

“I haven’t yet managed to find out what became of Jules Bayliss,” he said, “and the police notes regarding him are incomplete, so I can’t be sure whether he was still in the nick when Margot was abducted.

“What’s relevant to us is that Wilma told a different story to Lawson to the one she told Talbot—although Wilma claimed she had, in fact, told Talbot, and that he didn’t record it, which is possible, because, as you can see, his note-taking left a lot to be desired.

“Anyway, one of the things she told Lawson was that she’d sponged blood off the spare-room carpet the day Margot disappeared. The other was that she’d seen Roy walking through the garden on the day he was supposedly laid up in bed. She also admitted to Lawson that she hadn’t actually seen Roy in bed, but she’d heard him talking from the master bedroom that day.”

“Those are… pretty major changes of story.”

“Well, as I say, Wilma’s position was that she wasn’t changing her story, Talbot simply hadn’t recorded it properly. But Lawson seems to have given Wilma a very hard time about it, and he re-interviewed Roy on the strength of what she’d said, too. However, Roy still had Cynthia the nanny as his alibi, who was prepared to swear to the fact that he’d been laid up all day, because she was bringing him regular cups of tea in the master bedroom.

“I know,” he said, in response to Robin’s raised eyebrows. “Lawson seems to have had the same kind of dirty mind as us. He questioned Phipps on the precise nature of his relationship with Cynthia, which led to an angry outburst from Phipps, who said she was twelve years younger than he was and a cousin to boot.”

It flitted across both Strike’s and Robin’s minds at this point that there were ten years separating them in age. Both suppressed this unbidden and irrelevant thought.

“According to Roy, the age difference and the blood relationship ought to have constituted a total prohibition on the relationship in the minds of all decent people. But as we know, he managed to overcome those qualms seven years later.

“Lawson also interrogated Roy about the fact that Margot had met an old flame for a drink three weeks before she died. In his rush to exonerate Roy, Talbot hadn’t paid too much attention to the account of Oonagh Kennedy—”

“The friend Margot was supposed to be meeting in here?” said Robin.

“Exactly. Oonagh told both Talbot and Lawson that when Roy found out Margot had been for a drink with this old boyfriend, he’d been furious, and that he and Margot weren’t talking to each other when she disappeared.

“According to Lawson’s notes, Roy didn’t like any of this being brought up—”

“Hardly surprising—”

“—and got quite aggressive. However, after speaking to Roy’s doctors, Lawson was satisfied that Roy had indeed had a serious episode of bleeding after a fall in a hospital car park, and would have found it well nigh impossible to drive to Clerkenwell that evening, let alone kill or kidnap his wife.”

“He could have hired someone,” suggested Robin.

“They checked his bank accounts and couldn’t find any suspicious payments, but that obviously doesn’t mean he didn’t find a way. He’s a hematologist; he won’t be lacking in brains.”

Strike took a further swig of beer.

“So that’s the husband,” he said, flipping over the four pages of Roy’s statement. “Now for the old flame.”

“God above,” said Robin, looking down at another press photograph.

The man’s thick, wavy hair reached well past his shoulders. He stood, unsmiling, with his hands on his narrow hips beside a painting of what appeared to be two writhing lovers. His shirt was open almost to his navel and his jeans were skin tight at the crotch and extremely wide at the ankle.

“I thought you’d enjoy that,” said Strike, grinning at Robin’s reaction. “He’s Paul Satchwell, an artist—though not a very highbrow one, by the sounds of it. When the press got onto him, he was designing a mural for a nightclub. He’s Margot’s ex.”

“She’s just gone right down in my estimation,” muttered Robin.

“Don’t judge her too harshly. She met him when she was a Bunny Girl, so she was only nineteen or twenty. He was six years older than her and probably seemed like the height of sophistication.”

“In that shirt?”

“That’s a publicity photo for his art show,” said Strike. “It says so below. Possibly he didn’t show as much chest hair in day-to-day life. The press got quite excited at the thought an ex-lover might be involved, and let’s face it, a bloke who looked like that was a gift to the tabloids.”

Strike turned to another example of Talbot’s chaotic note-taking, which like the first was covered in five-pointed stars and had the same list of dates, with scribbled annotations beside them.

“As you can see, Talbot didn’t start with anything as mundane as ‘Where were you at a quarter to six on the night Margot disappeared?’ He goes straight into the Essex Butcher dates, and when Satchwell told him he was celebrating a friend’s thirtieth birthday on September the eleventh, which was when Susan Meyer was abducted, Talbot basically stopped asking him questions. But once again, we’ve got a date unconnected with Creed heavily circled at the bottom, with a gigantic cross beside it. April the sixteenth this time.”

“Where was Satchwell living when Margot disappeared?”

“Camden,” said Strike, turning the page to reveal, again, a conventional typewritten statement. “There you go, look, it’s in his statement to Lawson. Not all that far from Clerkenwell.

“To Lawson, Satchwell explained that after a gap of eight years, he and Margot met by chance in the street and decided to go for a catch-up drink. He was quite open with Lawson about this, presumably because he knew Oonagh or Roy would already have told them about it. He even told Lawson he’d have been keen to resume an affair with Margot, which seems a bit too helpful, although it was probably meant to prove he had nothing to hide. He said he and Margot had a volatile relationship for a couple of years when she was much younger, and that Margot finally ended it for good when she met Roy.

“Satchwell’s alibi checked out. He told Lawson he was alone in his studio, which was also in Camden, for most of the afternoon on the day Margot disappeared, but took a phone call there round about five. Landlines—far harder to monkey about with than mobiles when you’re trying to set up an alibi. Satchwell ate in a local café, where he was known, at half past six, and witnesses agreed they’d seen him. He then went home to change before meeting some friends in a bar around eight. The people he claimed to have been with confirmed it all and Lawson was satisfied that Satchwell was in the clear.

“Which brings us to the third, and, I’d have to say, most promising suspect—always excepting Dennis Creed. This,” said Strike, moving Satchwell’s statement from the top of a now greatly diminished pile of paper, “is Steve Douthwaite.”

If Roy Phipps would have been a lazy casting director’s idea of a sensitive poet, and Paul Satchwell the very image of a seventies rock star, Steve Douthwaite would have been hired without hesitation to play the cheeky chap, the wisecracking upstart, the working-class Jack the Lad. He had dark, beady eyes, an infectious grin and a spiky mullet that reminded Robin of the young men featured on an old Bay City Rollers LP which Robin’s mother, to her children’s hilarity, still cherished. Douthwaite was holding a pint in one hand, and his other arm was slung around the shoulder of a man whose face had been cropped from the picture, but whose suit, like Douthwaite’s, looked cheap, creased and shiny. Douthwaite had loosened his kipper tie and undone his top shirt button to reveal a neck chain.

When Robin had finished reading, Strike, who’d just finished his first pint, said,

“Want another drink?”

“I’ll get these,” said Robin.

She went to the bar, where she waited beneath the hanging skulls and fake cobwebs. The barman had painted his face like Frankenstein’s monster. Robin ordered drinks absentmindedly, thinking about the Douthwaite article.

When she’d returned to Strike with a fresh pint, a wine and two packets of crisps, she said,

“You know, that article isn’t fair.”

“Go on.”

“People don’t necessarily tell their co-workers about their medical problems. Maybe Douthwaite did seem fine to his mates when they were all down the pub. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have anything wrong with him. He might have been mentally ill.”

“Not for the first time,” said Strike, “you’re bang on the money.”

He searched the small number of photocopied papers remaining in his pile and extracted another handwritten document, far neater than Talbot’s and devoid of doodles and random dates. Somehow Robin knew, before Strike had said a word, that this fluid, rounded handwriting belonged to Margot Bamborough.

“Copies of Douthwaite’s medical records,” said Strike. “The police got hold of them. ‘Headaches, upset stomach, weight loss, pal­pitations, nausea, nightmares, trouble sleeping,’” Strike read out. “Margot’s conclusion, on visit four—see there?—is ‘personal and employment-related difficulties, under severe strain, exhibiting signs of anxiety.’”

“Well, his married girlfriend had killed herself,” said Robin. “That’d knock anyone except a psychopath for six, wouldn’t it?”

Charlotte slid like a shadow across Strike’s mind.

“Yeah, you’d think. Also, look there. He’d been the victim of an assault shortly before his first visit to Margot. ‘Contusions, cracked rib.’ I smell angry, bereaved and betrayed husband.”

“But the paper makes it sound as though he was stalking Margot.”

“Well,” said Strike, tapping the photocopy of Douthwaite’s medical notes, “there are a hell of a lot of visits here. He saw her three times in one week. He’s anxious, guilty, feeling unpopular, probably didn’t expect his bit of fun to end in the woman’s death. And there’s a good-looking doctor offering no judgment, but kindness and support. I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility to think he might have developed feelings for her.

“And look at this,” Strike went on, turning over the medical records to show Robin more typed statements. “These are from Dorothy and Gloria, who both said Douthwaite came out of her room the last time he saw Margot, looking—well, this is Dorothy,” he said, and he read aloud, “‘I observed Mr. Douthwaite leaving Dr. Bamborough’s surgery and noticed that he looked as though he had had a shock. I thought he also looked angry and distressed. As he walked out, he tripped over the toy truck of a boy in the waiting room and swore loudly. He seemed distracted and unaware of his surroundings.’ And Gloria,” said Strike, turning over the page, “says: ‘I remember Mr. Douthwaite leaving because he swore at a little boy. He looked as though he had just been given bad news. I thought he seemed scared and angry.’

“Now, Margot’s notes of her last consultation with Douthwaite don’t mention anything but the same old stress-related symptoms,” Strike went on, turning back to the medical records, “so she definitely hadn’t just diagnosed him with anything life-threatening. Lawson speculated that she might’ve felt he was getting over-attached, and told him he had to stop taking up valuable time that could be given to other patients, which Douthwaite didn’t like hearing. Maybe he’d convinced himself his feelings were reciprocated. All the evidence suggests he was in a fragile mental state at the time.

“Anyway, four days after Douthwaite’s last appointment, Margot vanishes. Tipped off by the surgery that there was a patient who seemed a bit over-fond of her, Talbot called him in for questioning. Here we go.”

Once again, Strike extracted a star-strewn scrawl from amid the typewritten pages.

“As usual, Talbot starts the interrogation by running through the list of Creed dates. Trouble is, Douthwaite doesn’t seem to remember what he was doing on any of them.”

“If he was already ill with stress—” began Robin.

“Well, exactly,” said Strike. “Being interrogated by a police officer who thinks you might be the Essex Butcher wouldn’t help your anxiety, would it?

“And look at this, Talbot adds a random date again: twenty-first February. But he also does something else. Can you make anything of that?”

Robin took the page from Strike and examined the last three lines of writing.

“Pitman shorthand,” said Robin.

“Can you read it?”

“No. I know a bit of Teeline; I never learned Pitman. Pat can do it, though.”

“You’re saying she might be useful for once?”

“Oh sod off, Strike,” said Robin, crossly. “You want to go back to temps, fine, but I like getting accurate messages and knowing the filing’s up to date.”

She took a photograph on her phone and texted it to Pat, along with a request to translate it. Strike, meanwhile, was reflecting that Robin had never before called him “Strike” when annoyed. Perversely, it had sounded more intimate than the use of his first name. He’d quite enjoyed it.

“Sorry for impugning Pat,” he said.

“I just told you to sod off,” said Robin, failing to suppress a smile. “What did Lawson make of Douthwaite?”

“Well, unsurprisingly, when he tried to interview him and found out he’d left his flat and job, leaving no forwarding address, he got quite interested in him. Hence the tip-off to the papers. They were trying to flush him out.”

“And did it work?” asked Robin, now eating crisps.

“It did. Douthwaite turned up at a police station in Waltham Forest the day after the ‘Ladykiller’ article appeared, probably terrified he’d soon have Fleet Street and Scotland Yard on his doorstep. He told them he was unemployed and living in a bedsit. Local police called Lawson, who went straight over there to interview him.

“There’s a full account here,” said Strike, pushing some of the last pages of the roll he had brought with him toward Robin. “All written by Lawson: ‘appears scared’—‘evasive’—‘nervous’—‘sweating’—and the alibi’s not good. Douthwaite says that on the afternoon of Margot’s disappearance he was out looking for a new flat.”

“He claims he was already looking for a new place when she disappeared?”

“Coincidence, eh? Except that upon closer questioning he couldn’t say which flats he’d seen and couldn’t come up with the name of anyone who’d remember seeing him. In the end he said his flat-hunting had involved sitting in a local café and circling ads in the paper. Trouble was, nobody in the café remembered him being there.

“He said he’d moved to Waltham Forest because he had bad associations with Clerkenwell after being interviewed by Talbot and made to feel as though he was under suspicion, and that, in any case, things hadn’t been good for him at work since his affair with the co-worker’s suicidal wife.”

“Well, that’s credible enough,” said Robin.

“Lawson interviewed him twice more, but got nothing else out of him. Douthwaite came lawyered up to interview three. At that point, Lawson backed off. After all, they had nothing on Douthwaite, even if he was the fishiest person they interviewed. And it was—just—credible that the reason nobody had noticed him in the café was because it was a busy place.”

A group of drinkers in Hallowe’en costumes now entered the pub, giggling and clearly already full of alcohol. Robin noticed Strike casting an automatic eye over a young blonde in a rubber nurse’s uniform.

“So,” she said, “is that everything?”

“Almost,” said Strike, “but I’m tempted not to show you this.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think it’s going to feed your obsession with holy places.”

“I’m not—”

“OK, but before you look at it, just remember that nutters are always attracted by murders and missing person cases, all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin. “Show me.”

Strike flipped over the piece of paper. It was a photocopy of the crudest kind of anonymous note, featuring letters cut out of magazines.

“Another St. John’s Cross,” said Robin.

“Yep. That arrived at Scotland Yard in 1985, addressed to Lawson, who’d already retired. Nothing else in the envelope.”

Robin sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“Nutter, obviously,” said Strike, now tapping his photocopied art­icles and statements back into a pile and rolling them up again. “If you really knew where a body was buried, you’d include a bloody map.”

It was nearly six o’clock now, close to the hour at which a doctor had once left her practice and had never been seen again. The frosted pub windows were inky blue. Up at the bar, the blonde in the rubber uniform was giggling at something a man dressed as the Joker had told her.

“You know,” said Robin, glancing down at the papers sitting beside Strike’s pint, “she was late… it was pouring with rain…”

“Go on,” said Strike, wondering whether she was about to say exactly what he’d been thinking.

“Her friend was waiting in here, alone. Margot’s late. She would’ve wanted to get here as quickly as possible. The simplest, most plausible explanation I can think of is that somebody offered her a lift. A car pulled up—”

“Or a van,” said Strike. Robin had, indeed, reached the same conclusion he had. “Someone she knew—”

“Or someone who seemed safe. An elderly man—”

“Or what she thinks is a woman.”

“Exactly,” said Robin.

She turned a sad face to Strike.

“That’s it. She either knew the driver, or the stranger seemed safe.”

“And who’d remember that?” said Strike. “She was wearing a nondescript raincoat, carrying an umbrella. A vehicle pulls up. She bends down to the window, then gets in. No fight. No conflict. The car drives away.”

“And only the driver would know what happened next,” said Robin.

Her mobile rang: it was Pat Chauncey.

“She always does that,” said Strike. “Text her, and she doesn’t text back, she calls—”

“Does it matter?” said Robin, exasperated, and answered.

“Hi, Pat. Sorry to bother you out of hours. Did you get my text?”

“Yeah,” croaked Pat. “Where did you find that?”

“It’s in some old police notes. Can you translate it?”

“Yeah,” said Pat, “but it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Hang on, Pat, I want Cormoran to hear this,” said Robin, and she changed to speakerphone.

“Ready?” came Pat’s rasping voice.

“Yes,” said Robin. Strike pulled out a pen and flipped over his roll of paper so that he could write on the blank side.

“It says: ‘And that is the last of them, comma, the twelfth, comma, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth, comma’—and then there’s a word I can’t read, I don’t think it’s proper Pitman—and after that another word, which phonetically says Ba—fom—et, full stop. Then a new sentence, ‘Transcribe in the true book.’”

“Baphomet,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah,” said Pat.

“That’s a name,” said Strike. “Baphomet is an occult deity.”

“OK, well, that’s what it says,” said Pat, matter-of-factly.

Robin thanked her and rang off.

“‘And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book,’” Strike read back.

“How d’you know about Baphomet?” asked Robin.

“Whittaker was interested in all that shit.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

Whittaker was the last of Strike’s mother’s lovers, the man Strike believed had administered the overdose that had killed her.

“He had a copy of The Satanic Bible,” said Strike. “It had a picture of Baphomet’s head in a penta—shit,” he said, rifling back through the loose pages to find one of those on which Talbot had doodled many five-pointed stars. He frowned at it for a moment, then looked up at Robin.

“I don’t think these are stars. They’re pentagrams.”