Troubled Blood

15

In the second week of November, Joan’s chemotherapy caused her white blood cell count to plummet dangerously, and she was admitted to hospital. Strike left Robin in charge of the agency, Lucy left her three sons in the care of her husband, and both hurried back to Cornwall.

Strike’s fresh absence coincided with the monthly team meeting, which for the first time Robin led alone, the youngest and arguably least experienced investigator at the agency, and the only woman.

Robin wasn’t sure whether she had imagined it, but she thought Hutchins and Morris, the two ex-policemen, put up slightly more disagreement about the next month’s rota, and about the line they ought to take on Shifty, than they would have done had Strike been there. It was Robin’s opinion that Shifty’s PA, who’d now been extensively wined and dined at the agency’s expense without revealing anything about the hold her boss might have over his CEO, ought to be abandoned as a possible source. She’d decided that Morris ought to see her one last time to wrap things up, allaying any suspicion about what he’d been after, after which Robin thought it time to try and infiltrate Shifty’s social circle with a view to getting information direct from the man they were investigating. Barclay was the only subcontractor who agreed with Robin, and backed her up when she insisted that Morris was to leave Shifty’s PA well alone. Of course, as Robin was well aware, she and Barclay had once gone digging for a body together, and such things create a bond.

The memory of the team meeting was still bothering her as she sat with her legs up on the sofa in the flat in Finborough Road later, now in pajama and a dressing gown, working on her laptop. Wolfgang the dachshund was curled at her bare feet, keeping them warm.

Max was out. He’d suddenly announced the previous week­end that he feared he was in danger of passing from “introvert” to “recluse,” and had accepted an invitation to go to dinner with some actor friends, even though, in his bitter words on parting, “They’ll all be pitying me, but I suppose they’ll enjoy that.” Robin had taken Wolfgang for a quick walk around the block at eleven, but otherwise had spent her evening on the Bamborough case, for which she’d had no time while Strike had been in St. Mawes, because the other four cases on the agency’s books were absorbing all working hours.

Robin hadn’t been out since her birthday drinks with Ilsa and Vanessa, which hadn’t been as enjoyable as she’d hoped. The conversation had revolved entirely around relationships, because Vanessa had arrived with a brand-new engagement ring on her finger. Since then, Robin had used pressure of work during Strike’s absence to avoid nights out with either of her friends. Her cousin Katie’s words, it’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us, were hard to forget, but the truth was that Robin didn’t want to stand in a bar while Ilsa and Vanessa encouraged her to respond to the advances of some overfamiliar, Morris-like man with a line in easy patter and bad jokes.

She and Strike had now divided between them the people they wished to trace and re-interview in the Bamborough case. Unfortunately, Robin now knew that at least four of her allocated people had passed beyond the reach of questioning.

After careful cross-referencing of old records, Robin had managed to identify the Willy Lomax who’d been the long-serving handyman of St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell. He’d died in 1989 and Robin had so far been unable to find a single confirmed relative.

Albert Shimmings, the florist and possible driver of the speeding van seen on the night of Margot’s disappearance, had also passed away, but Robin had emailed two men she believed to be his sons. She sincerely hoped she’d correctly identified them, otherwise an insurance agent and a driving instructor were both about to get truly mystifying messages. Neither had yet responded to her request to talk to them.

Wilma Bayliss, the ex-practice cleaner, had died in 2003. A mother of two sons and three daughters, she’d divorced Jules Bayliss in 1975. By the time she died, Wilma hadn’t been a cleaner, but a social worker, and she’d raised a high-achieving family, including an architect, a paramedic, a teacher, another social worker and a Labor councilor. One of the sons now lived in Germany, but Robin nevertheless included him in the emails and Facebook messages she sent out to all five siblings. There’d been no response so far.

Dorothy Oakden, the practice secretary, had been ninety-one when she died in a North London nursing home. Robin hadn’t yet managed to trace Carl, her only child.

Meanwhile, Margot’s ex-boyfriend, Paul Satchwell, and the receptionist, Gloria Conti, were proving strangely and similarly elusive. At first Robin had been relieved when she’d failed to find a death certificate for either of them, but after combing telephone directories, census records, county court judgments, marriage and divorce certificates, press archives, social media and lists of company staff, she’d come up with nothing. The only possible explanations Robin could think of were changes of name (in Gloria’s case, possibly by marriage) and emigration.

As for Mandy White, the schoolgirl who’d claimed to have seen Margot at a rainy window, there were so many Amanda Whites of approximately the right age to be found online that Robin was starting to despair of ever finding the right one. Robin found this line of inquiry particularly frustrating, firstly because there was a good chance that White was no longer Mandy’s surname, and secondly because, like the police before her, Robin thought it highly unlikely that Mandy had actually seen Margot at the window that night.

Having examined and discounted the Facebook accounts of another six Amanda Whites, Robin yawned, stretched and decided she was owed a break. Setting her laptop down on a side table, she swung her legs carefully off the sofa so as not to disturb Wolfgang, and crossed the open-plan area that combined kitchen, dining and living rooms, to make herself one of the low-calorie hot chocolates she was trying to convince herself was a treat, because she was still, in the middle of this long, sedentary stretch of surveillance, trying to keep an eye on her waistline.

As she stirred the unappetizing powder into boiling water, a whiff of tuberose mingled with the scent of synthetic caramel. In spite of her bath, Fracas still lingered in her hair and on her pajama. This perfume, she’d finally decided, had been a costly mistake. Living in a dense cloud of tuberose made her feel not only perpetually on the verge of a headache, but also as though she were wearing fur and pearls in broad daylight.

Robin’s mobile, which was lying on the sofa beside Wolfgang, rang as she picked up her laptop again. Startled from his sleep, the disgruntled dog rose on arthritic legs. Robin lifted him to safety before picking up her phone and seeing, to her disappointment, that it wasn’t Strike, but Morris.

“Hi, Saul.”

Ever since the birthday kiss, Robin had tried to keep her manner on the colder side of professional when dealing with Morris.

“Hey, Robs. You said to call if I had anything, even if it was late.”

“Yes, of course.” I never said you could call me “Robs,” though. “What’s happened?” asked Robin, looking around for a pen.

“I got Gemma drunk tonight. Shifty’s PA, you know. Under the influence, she told me she thinks Shifty’s got something on his boss.”

Well, that’s hardly news, thought Robin, abandoning the fruitless search for a writing implement.

“What makes her think so?”

“Apparently he’s said stuff to her like, ‘Oh, he’ll always take my calls, don’t worry,’ and ‘I know where all the bodies are buried.’”

An image of a cross of St. John slid across Robin’s mind and was dismissed.

“As a joke,” Morris added. “He passed it off like he was joking, but it made Gemma think.”

“But she doesn’t know any details?”

“No, but listen, seriously, give me a bit more time and I reckon I’ll be able to persuade her to wear a wire for us. Not to blow my own horn here—can’t reach, for one thing—no, seriously,” he said, although Robin hadn’t laughed, “I’ve got her properly softened up. Just give me a bit more time—”

“Look, I’m sorry, Saul, but we went over this at the meeting,” Robin reminded Morris, suppressing a yawn, which made her eyes water. “The client doesn’t want us to tell any of the employees we’re investigating this, so we can’t tell her who you are. Pressuring her to investigate her own boss is asking her to risk her job. It also risks blowing the whole case if she decides to tell him what’s going on.”

“But again, not to toot—”

“Saul, it’s one thing her confiding in you when she’s drunk,” said Robin (why wasn’t he listening? They’d been through this endlessly at the team meeting). “It’s another asking a girl with no investigative training to work for us.”

“She’s all over me, Robin,” said Morris earnestly. “It’d be crazy not to use her.”

Robin suddenly wondered whether Morris had slept with the girl. Strike had been quite clear that that wasn’t to happen. She sank back down on the sofa. Her copy of The Demon of Paradise Park was warm, she noticed, from the dachshund lying on it. The displaced Wolfgang was now gazing at Robin from under the dining table, with the sad, reproachful eyes of an old man.

“Saul, I really think it’s time for Hutchins to take over, to see what he can do with Shifty himself,” said Robin.

“OK, but before we make that decision, let me ring Strike and—”

“You’re not ringing Strike,” said Robin, her temper rising. “His aunt’s—he’s got enough on his plate in Cornwall.”

“You’re so sweet,” said Morris, with a little laugh, “but I promise you, Strike would want a say in this—”

“He left me in charge,” said Robin, anger rising now, “and I’m telling you, you’ve taken it as far as you can with that girl. She doesn’t know anything useful and trying to push her further could backfire badly on this agency. I’m asking you to give it up now, please. You can take over on Postcard tomorrow night, and I’ll tell Andy to get to work on Shifty.”

There was a pause.

“I’ve upset you, haven’t I?” said Morris.

“No, you haven’t upset me,” said Robin. After all, “upset” wasn’t quite the same as “enrage.”

“I didn’t want to—”

“You haven’t, Saul, I’m only reminding you what we agreed at the meeting.”

“OK,” he said. “All right. Hey—listen. Did you hear about the boss who told his secretary the company was in trouble?”

“No,” said Robin, through clenched teeth.

“He said, ‘I’m going to have to lay you or Jack off.’ She said, ‘Well, you’ll have to jack off, because I’ve got a headache.’”

“Ha ha,” said Robin. “Night, Saul.”

“Why did I say ‘ha ha’?” she asked herself furiously, as she set down her mobile. Why didn’t I just say, “Stop telling me crap jokes?” Or say nothing! And why did I say sorry when I was asking him to do what we all agreed at the meeting? Why am I cossetting him?

She thought of all those times she’d pretended with Matthew. Faking orgasms had been nothing compared to pretending to find him funny and interesting through all those twice-told tales of rugby club jokes, through every anecdote designed to show him as the cleverest or the funniest man in the room. Why do we do it? she asked herself, picking up The Demon of Paradise Park without considering what she was doing. Why do we work so hard to keep the peace, to keep them happy?

Because, suggested the seven ghostly black and white faces behind Dennis Creed’s, they can turn nasty, Robin. You know just how nasty they can turn, with your scar up your arm and your memory of that gorilla mask.

But she knew that wasn’t why she’d humored Morris, not really. She didn’t expect him to become abusive or violent if she refused to laugh at his stupid jokes. No, this was something else. The only girl in a family of boys, Robin had been raised, she knew, to keep everyone happy, in spite of the fact that her own mother had been quite the women’s libber. Nobody had meant to do it, but she’d realized during the therapy she’d undertaken after the attack that had left her forearm forever scarred, that her family role had been that of “easy child,” the non-complainer, the conciliator. She’d been born just a year before Martin, who had been the Ellacotts’ “problem child”: the most scattered and impetuous, the least academic and conscientious, the son who still lived at home at twenty-eight and the brother with whom she had least in common. (Though Martin had punched Matthew on the nose on her wedding day, and the last time she’d been home she’d found herself hugging him when he offered, on hearing how difficult Matthew was being about the divorce, to do it again.)

Wintry specks of rain were dotting the window behind the dining table. Wolfgang was fast asleep again. Robin couldn’t face perusing the social media accounts of another fifty Amanda Whites tonight. As she picked up The Demon of Paradise Park, she hesitated. She’d made a rule for herself (because it had been a long, hard journey to reach the place where she was now, and she didn’t want to lose her current good state of mental health) not to read this book after dark, or right before bed. After all, the information it contained could be found summarized online: there was no need to hear in his own words what Creed had done to each of the women he’d tortured and killed.

Nevertheless, she picked up her hot chocolate, opened the book to the page she had marked with a Tesco receipt, and began to read at the point she’d left off three days previously.

16

Four days later, at a quarter past five in the morning, the “Night Riviera” sleeper train pulled into Paddington station. Strike, who’d slept poorly, had spent long stretches of the night watching the ghostly gray blur of the so-called English Riviera slide past his compartment window. Having slept on top of the covers with his prosthesis still attached, he turned down the proffered breakfast on its plastic tray, and was among the first passengers to disembark into the station, kit bag over his shoulder.

There was a nip of frost in the early morning air and Strike’s breath rose in a cloud before him as he walked down the platform, Brunel’s steel arches curving above him like the ribs of a blue whale’s skeleton, cold dark sky visible through the glass ceiling. Unshaven and slightly uncomfortable on the stump that had missed its usual nightly application of soothing cream, Strike headed for a bench, sat down, lit a much-needed cigarette, pulled out his mobile and phoned Robin.

He knew she’d be awake, because she’d just spent the night parked in Strike’s BMW outside the house of the weatherman, watching for Postcard. They’d communicated mostly by text while he’d been in Cornwall, while he divided his time between the hospital in Truro and the house in St. Mawes, taking it in turns with Lucy to sit with Joan, whose hair had now fallen out and whose immune system appeared to have collapsed under the weight of the chemotherapy, and to minister to Ted, who was barely eating. Before returning to London, Strike had cooked a large batch of curry, which he left in the freezer, alongside shepherd’s pies made by Lucy. When he raised his cigarette to his mouth he could still smell a trace of cumin on his fingers, and if he concentrated, he could conjure up the deadly smell of hospital disinfectant underlain with a trace of urine, instead of cold iron, diesel and the distant waftings of coffee from a nearby Starbucks.

“Hi,” said Robin, and at the sound of her voice Strike felt, as he had known he would, a slight easing of the knot of tension in his stomach. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” he said, slightly surprised, before he recollected that it was half past five in the morning. “Oh—yeah, sorry, this isn’t an emergency call, I’ve just got off the sleeper. Wondered whether you fancied getting breakfast before you head home to bed.”

“Oh, that’d be wonderful,” said Robin, with such genuine pleasure that Strike felt a little less tired, “because I’ve got Bamborough news.”

“Great,” said Strike, “so’ve I. Be good to have a catch-up.”

“How’s Joan?”

“Not great. They let her go home yesterday. They’ve assigned her a Macmillan nurse. Ted’s really low. Lucy’s still down there.”

“You could’ve stayed,” said Robin. “We can cope.”

“It’s fine,” he said, screwing his eyes up against his own smoke. A shaft of wintry sunlight burst through a break in the clouds and illuminated the fag butts on the tiled floor. “I’ve told them I’ll go back for Christmas. Where d’you want to meet?”

“Well, I was planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery before I went home, so—”

“You were what?” said Strike.

“Planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery. I’ll explain when I see you. Would you mind if we meet somewhere near there?”

“I can get anywhere,” said Strike, “I’m right by the Tube. I’ll head that way and whoever finds a café first can text the other.”

Forty-five minutes later, Robin entered Notes café, which lay on St. Martin’s Lane and was already crowded, though it was so early in the morning. Wooden tables, some of them as large as the one in her parents’ kitchen in Yorkshire, were crammed with young people with laptops and businessmen grabbing breakfast before work. As she queued at the long counter, she tried to ignore the various pastries and cakes spread out beneath it: she’d taken sandwiches with her to her overnight surveillance of the weatherman’s house, and those, she told herself sternly, ought to suffice.

Having ordered a cappuccino, she headed for the back of the café, where Strike sat reading The Times beneath an iron chandelier that resembled a large spider. She seemed to have forgotten over the previous six days how large he was. Hunched over the newspaper, he reminded her of a black bear, stubble thick on his face, tucking into a bacon and egg ciabatta roll, and Robin felt a wave of liking simply for the way he looked. Or perhaps, she thought, she was merely reacting against clean-jawed, slim and conventionally handsome men who, like tuberose perfumes, seemed attractive until prolonged exposure made you crave escape.

“Hi,” she said, sliding into the seat opposite him.

Strike looked up, and in that moment, her long shining hair and her aura of good health acted upon him like an antidote to the fug of clinical decay in which he had spent the past five days.

“You don’t look knackered enough to have been up all night.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment and not as an accusation,” said Robin, eyebrows raised. “I was up all night and Postcard still hasn’t shown herself—or himself—but another card came yesterday, addressed to the television studio. It said Postcard loved the way he smiled at the end of Tuesday’s weather report.”

Strike grunted.

Robin said, “D’you want to go first on Bamborough, or shall I?”

“You first,” said Strike, still chewing, “I’m starving.”

“OK,” said Robin. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad. The bad news is nearly everyone I’ve been trying to trace is dead, and the rest might as well be.”

She filled Strike in on the deceased status of Willy Lomax, Albert Shimmings, Wilma Bayliss and Dorothy Oakden, and on the steps she’d taken, so far, to contact their relatives.

“Nobody’s got back in touch except one of Shimmings’ sons, who seems worried that we’re journalists trying to pin Margot’s disappearance on his father. I’ve written a reassuring email back. Hope it works.”

Strike, who had paused in his steady demolition of the roll to drink half a mug of tea, said,

“I’ve been having similar problems. That ‘two women struggling by the phone boxes’ sighting is going to be nigh on impossible to check. Ruby Elliot, who saw them, and the Fleury mother and daughter, who almost certainly were them, are all dead as well. But they’ve both got living descendants, so I’ve fired off a few messages. Only one response so far, from a Fleury grandson who doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about. And Dr. Brenner doesn’t seem to have a single living relative that I can see. Never married, no kids, and a dead sister who didn’t marry, either.”

“D’you know how many women there are out there called Amanda White?” sighed Robin.

“I can imagine,” said Strike, taking another large bite of roll. “That’s why I gave her to you.”

“You—?”

“I’m kidding,” he said, smirking at her expression. “What about Paul Satchwell and Gloria Conti?”

“Well, if they’re dead, they didn’t die in the UK. But here’s something really weird: I can’t find a single mention of either of them after ’75.”

“Coincidence,” said Strike, raising his eyebrows. “Douthwaite, he of the stress headaches and the dead mistress, has disappeared as well. He’s either abroad, or he’s changed his identity. Can’t find any address for him after ’76, and no death certificate, either. Mind you, if I were in his shoes, I might’ve changed my name, as well. His press reviews weren’t good, were they? Crap at his job, sleeping with a colleague’s wife, sending flowers to a woman who then disappears—”

“We don’t know it was flowers,” said Robin, into her coffee cup.

Other kinds of presents are available, Strike.

“Chocolates, then. Same applies. Harder to see why Satchwell and Conti took themselves off the radar, though,” said Strike, running his hand over his unshaven chin. “The press interest in them died away fairly fast. And you’d have found Conti online if it was a simple case of a married name. There can’t be as many ‘Gloria Contis’ as there are Amanda Whites.”

“I’ve been wondering whether she went to live in Italy,” said Robin. “Her dad’s first name was Ricardo. She could’ve had relatives there. I’ve sent off a few Facebook inquiries to some Contis, but the only people who’ve responded so far don’t know a Gloria. I’m pretending I’m doing genealogical research, because I’m worried she might not respond if I mention Margot straight off.”

“Think you’re probably right,” said Strike, adding more sugar to his tea. “Yeah, Italy’s a good idea. She was young, might’ve fancied a change of scene. Satchwell disappearing’s odd, though. That photo didn’t suggest a shy man. You’d think he’d have popped up somewhere by now, advertising his paintings.”

“I’ve checked art exhibitions, auctions, galleries. It really is as though he dematerialized.”

“Well, I’ve made some progress,” said Strike, swallowing the last mouthful of his roll and pulling out his notebook. “You can get a surprising amount of work done, sitting around in a hospital. I’ve found four living witnesses, and one of them’s already agreed to talk: Gregory Talbot, son of Bill who went off his rocker and drew pentagrams all over the case file. I explained who I am and who hired me, and Gregory’s quite amenable to a chat. I’m going over there on Saturday, if you want to come.”

“I can’t,” said Robin, disappointed. “Morris and Andy have both got family stuff on. Barclay and I have got to cover the weekend.”

“Ah,” said Strike, “shame. Well, I’ve also found two of the women who worked with Margot at the practice,” said Strike, turning a page in his notebook. “The nurse, Janice, is still going by her first married name, which helped. The address Gupta gave me was an old one, but I traced her from there. She’s now in Nightingale Grove—”

“Very appropriate,” said Robin.

“—in Hither Green. And Irene Bull’s now Mrs. Irene Hickson, widow of a man who ran a successful building contractor’s. She’s living in Circus Street, Greenwich.”

“Have you phoned them?”

“I decided to write first,” said Strike. “Older women, both living alone—I’ve set out who we are and who’s hired us, so they’ve got time to check us out, make sure we’re kosher, maybe check with Anna.”

“Good thinking,” said Robin.

“And I’m going to do the same with Oonagh Kennedy, the woman waiting for Margot in the pub that night, once I’m sure I’ve got the right one. Anna said she was in Wolverhampton, but the woman I’ve found is in Alnwick. She’s the right age, but she’s a retired vicar.”

Robin grinned at Strike’s expression, which was a mixture of suspicion and distaste.

“What’s wrong with vicars?”

“Nothing,” he said, adding a moment later, “much. Depends on the vicar. But Oonagh was a Bunny Girl back in the sixties. She was standing beside Margot in one of the pictures the press used, named in one of the captions. Don’t you think the transition from Bunny Girl to vicar is fairly unlikely?”

“Interesting life trajectory,” Robin admitted, “but you’re speaking to a temporary secretary who became a full-time detective. And speaking of Oonagh,” she added, drawing her copy of The Demon of Paradise Park out of her handbag and opening it. “I wanted to show you something. There,” she said, holding it out to him. “Read the bit I’ve marked with pencil.”

“I’ve already read the whole book,” said Strike. “Which bit—?”

“Please,” Robin insisted, “just read where I’ve marked.”

Strike wiped his hand on a paper napkin, took the book from Robin and read the paragraphs next to which she had made a thick pencil line.

“What the—?” began Strike, looking thunderstruck. “My copy hasn’t got this bit. You’ve got an extra three paragraphs!”

“I thought you hadn’t read it,” said Robin, sounding satisfied. “Yours can’t be a first edition. Mine is. Look here,” she said, flicking to a place at the back of the book, while Strike still held it. “See there, the endnote? ‘Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? by C. B. Oakden, published 1985.’ Except it wasn’t published,” said Robin. “It was pulped. The author of this,” she said, tapping The Demon of Paradise Park, “must’ve got hold of an advance copy. I’ve been digging,” Robin went on. “All this happened pre-internet, obviously, but I found a couple of mentions of it online, in legal articles about suing for libel to stop publication.

“Basically, Roy Phipps and Oonagh Kennedy brought a joint action against C. B. Oakden and won. Oakden’s book was pulped and there was a hasty reprint of The Demon of Paradise Park, without the offending passage.”

“C. B. Oakden?” repeated Strike. “Is he—?”

“Dorothy-the-practice-secretary’s son. Exactly. Full name: Carl Brice Oakden. The last address I’ve got for him was in Walthamstow, but he’s moved and I haven’t managed to track him down yet.”

Strike re-read the paragraphs relating to the abortion clinic, then said,

“Well, if Phipps and Kennedy succeeded in suing to stop publication, they must have convinced a judge that this was partly or completely false.”

“Horrible thing to lie about, isn’t it?” said Robin. “Bad enough if he was saying Margot had the abortion, but hinting that Oonagh had it, and was covering up where Margot was that night—”

“I’m surprised he got it past lawyers,” said Strike.

“Oakden’s publisher was a small press,” said Robin. “I looked them up, too. They went out of business not long after he had his book pulped. Maybe they didn’t bother with lawyers.”

“More fool them,” said Strike, “but unless they had some kind of death wish, this can’t have been entirely invented. He must’ve had something to base it on. And this bloke,” he held up The Demon of Paradise Park, “was a proper investigative journalist. He wouldn’t have theorized without seeing some proof.”

“Can we check with him, or is he—?”

“Dead,” said Strike, who sat for a moment, thinking, then went on:

“The appointment must’ve been made in Margot’s name. The question is whether she had the procedure, or whether somebody used her name without her knowing.” Strike re-read the first few lines of the passage. “And the date of the appointment isn’t given, either. ‘Shortly before her disappearance’… weasel words. If the appointment had been made for the day she disappeared, the author would say so. That’d be a major revelation and it’d have been investigated by the police. ‘Shortly before her disappearance’ is open to wide interpretation.”

“Coincidence, though, isn’t it?” said Robin. “Her making an appointment so close to Creed’s house?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, but after a moment’s consideration he said, “I don’t know. Is it? How many abortion clinics were there in London in 1974?”

Handing the book back to Robin, he continued,

“This might explain why Roy Phipps was jumpy about his daughter talking to Oonagh Kennedy. He didn’t want her telling his teenage daughter her mother might’ve aborted her sibling.”

“I thought of that, too,” said Robin. “It’d be an awful thing to hear. Especially when she’s lived most of her life wondering whether her mother ran out on her.”

“We should try and get hold of a copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough?” said Strike. “There might still be copies in existence if they got as far as printing them. He could’ve given some away. Review copies and the like.”

“I’m already on it,” said Robin. “I’ve emailed a few different second-hand book places.”

This wasn’t the first time she had found herself doing something for the agency that made her feel grubby.

“Carl Oakden was only fourteen when Margot disappeared,” she continued. “Writing a book about her, milking the connection, claiming Margot and his mother were close friends—”

“Yeah, he sounds a common-or-garden shit,” Strike agreed. “When did he leave his address in Walthamstow?”

“Five years ago.”

“Had a look on social media?”

“Yes. Can’t find him.”

Strike’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. Robin thought she saw a flicker of panic in his face as he fumbled to find it, and knew that he was thinking of Joan.

“Everything all right?” she asked, watching his expression darken as he looked down at his mobile screen.

Strike had just seen:

Bruv, can we please talk this over face to face? The launch and the new album are a big deal for Dad. All we’re asking—

“Yeah, fine,” he said, stuffing the phone back in his pocket, the rest of the message unread. “So, you wanted to go to—?”

For a moment, he couldn’t remember the unlikely place Robin had told him she wanted to visit, and which was the reason they were currently sitting in this particular café.

“The National Portrait Gallery,” she said. “Three of Postcard’s postcards were bought in their gift shop.”

“Three of—sorry, what?”

He was distracted by what he’d just read. He’d been quite clear with his half-brother that he had no wish either to attend the party celebrating his father’s new album, or to feature in the photograph with his half-siblings which was to be their congratulatory gift to him.

“Postcard’s postcards—the person who’s persecuting our weatherman,” she reminded him, before mumbling, “it doesn’t matter, it was just an idea I had.”

“Which was?”

“Well, the last-but-one picture Postcard sent was of a portrait they said ‘always reminded’ them of our weatherman. So I thought… maybe they see that painting a lot. Maybe they work at the gallery. Maybe they secretly want him to know that, to come looking for them?”

Even as she said it, she thought the theory sounded far-fetched, but the truth was that they had absolutely no leads on Postcard. He or she had failed to turn up at the weatherman’s house since they’d been watching it. Three postcards bought in a single place might mean something, or perhaps nothing at all. What else did they have?

Strike grunted. Unsure whether this indicated a lack of enthusiasm for her theory about Postcard, Robin returned her copy of The Demon of Paradise Park to her handbag and said,

“Heading for the office after this?”

“Yeah. I told Barclay I’ll take over watching Twinkletoes at two.” Strike yawned. “Might try and get a couple of hours’ kip first.”

He pushed himself into a standing position.

“I’ll call you and let you know how I get on with Gregory Talbot. And thanks for holding the fort while I was away. Really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” said Robin.

Strike hoisted his kit bag onto his shoulder and limped out of the café. With a slight feeling of anti-climax, Robin watched him pause outside the window to light a cigarette, then walk out of sight. Checking her watch, Robin saw that there was still an hour and a half before the National Portrait Gallery opened.

There were doubtless more pleasurable ways of whiling away that time than in wondering whether the text that Strike had just received had come from Charlotte Campbell, but that was the distraction that occurred to Robin, and it occupied her for a surprising proportion of the time she had left to kill.

17

Jonny Rokeby, who’d been almost entirely absent from his eldest son’s life, had nevertheless been a constant, intangible presence, especially during Strike’s childhood. Parents’ friends had owned his father’s albums, had Rokeby’s poster on their bedroom walls as teenagers and regaled Strike with their fond memories of Deadbeats’ concerts. A mother at the school gate had once begged the seven-year-old Strike to take a letter from her to his father. His mother had burned it later, at the squat where they were then staying.

Until he joined the army, where, by his choice, nobody knew either his father’s name or his profession, Strike regularly found himself contemplated like a specimen in a jar, bothered by questions that under normal conditions would be considered personal and intrusive, and dealing with unspoken assumptions that had their roots in envy and spite.

Rokeby had demanded Leda take a paternity test before he’d accept that Strike was his son. When the test came back positive, a financial settlement had been reached which ought to have ensured that his young son would never again have to sleep on a dirty mattress in a room shared with near-strangers. However, a combination of his mother’s profligacy and her regular disputes with Rokeby’s representatives had merely ensured that Strike’s life became a series of confusing bouts of affluence that usually ended in abrupt descents back into chaos and squalor. Leda was prone to giving her children wildly extravagant treats, which they enjoyed while wearing too-small shoes, and to taking off on trips to the Continent or to America to see her favorite bands in concert, leaving her children with Ted and Joan while she rode around in chauffeured cars and stayed in the best hotels.

He could still remember lying in the spare room in Cornwall, Lucy asleep in the twin bed beside him, listening to his mother and Joan arguing downstairs, because the children had arrived back at their aunt and uncle’s in the middle of winter, without coats. Strike had twice been enrolled in private schools, but Leda had both times pulled him out again before he’d completed more than a couple of terms, because she’d decided that her son was being taught the wrong values. Every month, Rokeby’s money melted away on handouts to friends and boyfriends, and in reckless ventures—Strike remembered a jewelry business, an arts magazine and a vegetarian restaurant, all of which failed, not to mention the commune in Norfolk that had been the worst experience of his young life.

Finally, Rokeby’s lawyers (to whom the rock star had delegated all matters concerning the well-being of his son) tied up the paternity payments in such a way that Leda could no longer fritter the money away. The only difference this made to the teenage Strike’s day-to-day life had been that the treats had stopped, because Leda wasn’t prepared to have her spending scrutinized in the manner demanded by the new arrangement. From that point onwards, the paternity payments had sat accumulating quietly in an account, and the family had survived on the smaller financial contributions made by Lucy’s father.

Strike had only met his father twice and had unhappy memories of both encounters. For his part, Rokeby had never asked why Strike’s money remained unspent. A tax exile of long standing, he had a band to front, several homes to maintain, two exes and a current wife to keep happy, five legitimate and two illegitimate children. Strike, whose conception had been an accident, whose positive paternity test had broken up Rokeby’s second marriage and whose whereabouts were usually uncertain, came low on his list of priorities.

Strike’s uncle had provided the model of manhood to which Strike had aspired through his mother’s many changes of lover, and a childhood spent in the long shadow cast by his biological father. Leda had always blamed Ted, the ex-military policeman, for Strike’s unnatural interest in the army and investigation. Speaking from the middle of a blue haze of cannabis smoke, she would earnestly attempt to dissuade her son from a career in the army, lecturing him on Britain’s shameful military history, on the inextricable links between imperialism and capitalism, and trying, without success, to persuade him to learn the guitar or, at the very least, to let his hair grow.

Yet with all the disadvantages and pain they had brought, Strike knew that the peculiar circumstances of his birth and upbringing had given him a head start as an investigator. He’d learned early how to color himself according to his environment. From the moment he learned that penalties attached to not sounding like everyone else, his accent had switched between London and Cornwall. Before the loss of a leg had hampered his full range of physical movement, he’d been able, in spite of his distinctive size, to move and talk in ways that made him appear smaller than he really was. He’d also learned the value of concealing personal information, and of editing the stories you told about yourself, to avoid becoming entangled in other people’s notions of who you must be. Most importantly of all, Strike had developed a sensitive radar for the changes in behavior that marked the sudden realization that he was a famous man’s son. He’d been wise to the ways of manipulators, flatterers, liars, chancers and hypocrites ever since he was a child.

These dubious gifts were the best his father had given him, for, apart from child support, there’d never been a birthday card or a Christmas present. It had taken his leg being blown off in Afghanistan for Rokeby to send Strike a handwritten note. Strike had asked Charlotte, who had been sitting next to his hospital bed when he received it, to put it in the bin.

Since Strike had become of interest to the newspapers in his own right, Rokeby had made further tentative attempts to reconnect with his estranged son, going so far as to suggest in recent interviews that they were on good terms. Several of Strike’s friends had sent him links to a recent online interview with Rokeby in which he’d spoken of his pride in Strike. The detective had deleted the messages without a response.

Strike was grudgingly fond of Al, the half-brother whom Rokeby had recently used as an emissary. Al’s dogged pursuit of a relationship with Strike had been maintained in spite of his older brother’s initial resistance. Al appeared to admire in Strike those qualities of self-reliance and independence that the latter had had no choice but to develop. Nevertheless, Al was showing an antagonizing bull-headedness in continuing to push Strike into celebrating an anniversary which meant nothing to Strike, except in serving as yet another reminder of how much more important Rokeby’s band had always been to him than his illegitimate son. The detective resented the time he spent on Saturday morning, crafting a response to Al’s latest text message on the subject. He finally chose brevity over further argument:

Haven’t changed my mind, but no hard feelings or bitterness this end. Hope all goes well & let’s get a beer when you’re next in town.

Having taken care of this irksome bit of personal business, Strike made himself a sandwich, put on a clean shirt over his T-shirt, extracted from the Bamborough case file the page on which Bill Talbot had written his cryptic message in Pitman shorthand, and set off by car for West Wickham, where he had an appointment with Gregory Talbot, son of the late Bill.

Driving through intermittent sun and rain, and smoking as he went, Strike refocused his mind on business, mulling not only the questions he planned to ask the policeman’s son, but also the various concerns related to the agency that had arisen since his return. Certain issues that needed his personal attention had been raised by Barclay the previous day. The Scot, who Strike was inclined to rate as his best investigator after Robin, had firstly expressed himself with characteristic bluntness on the subject of the West End dancer on whom they were supposed to be finding dirt.

“We’re not gonnae get anythin’ on him, Strike. If he’s shaggin’ some other bird, she must be livin’ in his fuckin’ wardrobe. I ken e’s wi’ oor lassie for her credit card, but he’s too smart tae fuck up a good thing.”

“Think you’re probably right,” said Strike, “but I said we’d give the client three months, so we keep going. How’re you getting on with Pat?” he added. He was hoping that somebody else found the new secretary as much of a pain in the arse as he did, but was disappointed.

“Aye, she’s great. I ken she sounds like a bronchial docker, but she’s very efficient. But if we’re havin’ an honest talk aboot new hires, here…” Barclay said, his large blue eyes looking up at his boss from under thick brows.

“Go on,” said Strike. “Morris not pulling his weight?”

“I wouldnae say that, exactly.”

The Glaswegian scratched the back of his prematurely gray head, then said,

“Robin not mentioned anything to ye?”

“Has there been trouble between them?” asked Strike, more sharply.

“Not tae say trouble, exactly,” said Barclay slowly, “but he doesnae like takin’ orders from her. Makes that plain behind her back.”

“Well, that’ll have to change. I’ll have a word.”

“An’ he’s got his own ideas aboot the Shifty case.”

“Is that right?” said Strike.

“He still thinks he’s gonnae win over the PA. Robin told him it wus time tae let it go, time tae put Hutchins in. She’s found oot—”

“That Shifty belongs to Hendon Rifle Club, yeah, she emailed me. And she wants to get Hutchins in there, to try and befriend him. Smart plan. Shifty fancies himself a bit of a macho man, from all we know about him.”

“But Morris wants tae do it his way. He said tae her face he was happy wi’ the new plan, but—”

“You think he’s still seeing the PA?”

“‘Seein’ ’ might be a polite way o’ puttin’ it,” said Barclay.

So Strike had called Morris into the office and laid it down in plain language that he was to leave Shifty’s PA alone, and concentrate for the next week on Two-Times’ girlfriend. Morris had raised no objections: indeed, his capitulation had been tinged with obsequiousness. The encounter had left a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. Morris was, in nearly all respects, a desirable hire, with many good contacts in the force, but there had been something in his manner as he hurried to agree that denoted a slipperiness Strike couldn’t like. Later that night, while Strike was following the taxi containing Twinkletoes and his girlfriend through the West End, he remembered Dr. Gupta’s interlaced fingers, and the old doctor’s verdict that what made a successful business was the smooth functioning of a team.

Entering West Wickham, he found rows of suburban houses with bay windows, broad drives and private garages. The Avenue, where Gregory Talbot lived, was lined with solid family residences that spoke of conscientious middle-class owners who mowed their lawns and remembered bin day. The houses weren’t as palatial as the detached houses on Dr. Gupta’s street, but were many times more spacious than Strike’s attic flat over the office.

Turning into Talbot’s drive, Strike parked his BMW behind a skip that blocked the front of the garage. As he switched off his engine, a pale, entirely bald man with large ears and steel-rimmed glasses opened his door looking cautiously excited. Strike knew from his online research that Gregory Talbot was a hospital administrator.

“Mr. Strike?” he called, while the detective was getting carefully out of the BMW (the drive was slick with rain and the memory of tripping on the Falmouth ferry, still fresh).

“That’s me,” said Strike, closing his car door and holding out his hand as Talbot came walking toward him. Talbot was shorter than Strike by a good six inches.

“Sorry about the skip,” he said. “We’re doing a loft conversion.”

As they approached the front door, a pair of twin girls Strike guessed to be around ten years old came bursting outside, almost knocking Gregory aside.

“Stay in the garden, girls,” called Gregory, though Strike thought the more pressing problem was surely that they had bare feet, and that the ground was cold and wet.

“Thtay in the garden, girlth,” imitated one of the twins. Gregory looked mildly over the top of his glasses at the twins.

“Rudeness isn’t funny.”

“It bloody is,” said the first twin, to the raucous laughter of the second.

“Swear at me again, and there’ll be no chocolate pudding for you tonight, Jayda,” said Gregory. “Nor will you borrow my iPad.”

Jayda pulled a grotesque face but did not, in fact, swear again.

“We foster,” Gregory told Strike as they stepped inside. “Our own kids have left home. Through to the right and have a seat.”

To Strike, who lived in a slightly Spartan minimalism by choice, the cluttered and very untidy room was unappealing. He wanted to accept Gregory’s invitation to sit down, but there was nowhere he could do so without having to first shift a large quantity of objects, which felt rude. Oblivious to Strike’s plight, Gregory glanced through the window at the twins. They were already running back indoors, shivering.

“They learn,” he said, as the front door slammed and the twins ran upstairs. Turning back to face the room, he became aware that none of the seats were currently usable.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” he said, though with none of the embarrassment that Strike’s Aunt Joan would have displayed had a casual visitor found her house in this state of disorder. “The girls were in here this morning.”

Gregory swiftly cleared a leaking bubble-gun, two naked Barbie dolls, a child’s sock, a number of small bits of brightly colored plastic and half a satsuma off the seat of an armchair to allow Strike to sit down. He dumped the homeless objects onto a wooden coffee table that was already piled high with magazines, a jumble of remote controls, several letters and empty envelopes and further small plastic toys, including a good deal of Lego.

“Tea?” he offered. “Coffee? My wife’s taken the boys swimming.”

“Oh, there are boys, too?”

“Hence the loft conversion,” said Gregory. “Darren’s been with us nearly five years.”

While Gregory fetched hot drinks, Strike picked up the official sticker album of this year’s Champions League, which he’d spotted lying on the floor beneath the coffee table. He turned the pages with a feeling of nostalgia for the days when he, too, had collected football stickers. He was idly pondering Arsenal’s chances of winning the cup when a series of crashes directly overhead, which made the pendant light sway very slightly, made him look up. It sounded as though the twins were jumping on and off their bed. Setting the sticker book down, he pondered, without finding an answer, the question of what could have motivated Talbot and his wife to bring into their home children with whom they had no biological relationship. By the time Gregory reappeared with a tray, Strike’s thoughts had traveled to Charlotte, who had always declared herself entirely unmaternal, and whose premature twins she’d vowed, while pregnant, to abandon to the care of her mother-in-law.

“Would you mind shifting—?” Gregory asked, eyes on the coffee table.

Strike hastened to move handfuls of objects off it, onto the sofa.

“Cheers,” said Gregory, setting down the tray. He scooped yet another mound of objects off the second armchair, dumped them, too, onto the now considerable pile on the sofa, picked up his mug, sat down and said,

“Help yourself,” indicating a slightly sticky sugar bowl and an unopened packet of biscuits.

“Thanks very much,” said Strike, spooning sugar into his tea.

“So,” said Gregory, looking mildly excited. “You’re trying to prove Creed killed Margot Bamborough.”

“Well,” said Strike, “I’m trying to find out what happened to her and one possibility, obviously, is Creed.”

“Did you see, in the paper last weekend? One of Creed’s drawings, selling for over a grand?”

“Missed that,” said Strike.

“Yeah, it was in the Observer. Self-portrait in pencil, done when he was in Belmarsh. Sold on a website where you can buy serial-killer art. Crazy world.”

“It is,” agreed Strike. “Well, as I said on the phone, what I’d really like to talk to you about is your father.”

“Yes,” said Gregory, and some of his jauntiness left him. “I, er, I don’t know how much you know.”

“That he took early retirement, following a breakdown.”

“Well, yes, that’s it in a nutshell,” said Gregory. “His thyroid was at the bottom of it. Overactive and undiagnosed, for ages. He was losing weight, not sleeping… There was a lot of pressure on him, you know. Not just from the force; the press, as well. People were very upset. Well, you know—a missing doctor—Mum put him acting a bit oddly down to stress.”

“In what way was he acting oddly?”

“Well, he took over the spare room and wouldn’t let anyone in there,” said Gregory, and before Strike could ask for more details, he continued: “After they found out about his thyroid and got him on the right drugs, he went back to normal, but it was too late for his career. He got his pension, but he felt guilty about the Bamborough case for years. He blamed himself, you know, thinking that if he hadn’t been so ill, he might’ve got him.

“Because Margot Bamborough wasn’t the last woman Creed took—I suppose you’ll know all about that? He abducted Andrea Hooton after he took Bamborough. When they arrested him and went into the house and saw what was in the basement—the torture equipment and the photos he’d taken of the women—he admitted he’d kept some of them alive for months before he killed them.

“Dad was really upset when he heard that. He kept going back over it in his head, thinking if he’d caught him earlier, Bamborough and Hooton might’ve still been alive. He beat himself up for getting fixated—”

Gregory cut himself off.

“—distracted, you know.”

“So, even once your father had recovered, he still thought Creed had taken Margot?”

“Oh yeah, definitely,” said Gregory, looking mildly surprised that this was in question. “They ruled out all the other possibilities, didn’t they? The ex-boyfriend, that dodgy patient who had a thing for her, they all came up clean.”

Rather than answering this with his honest view, which was that Talbot’s unfortunate illness had allowed valuable months to pass in which all suspects, Creed included, had had time to hide a body, cover up evidence, refine their alibis, or all three, Strike took from an inside pocket the piece of paper on which Talbot had written his Pitman message, and held it out to Gregory.

“Wanted to ask you about something. I think that’s your father’s handwriting?”

“Where did you get this?” asked Gregory, taking the paper cautiously.

“From the police file. It says: ‘And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth’—and then there’s an unknown word—‘Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book,’” said Strike, “and I was wondering whether that meant anything to you?”

At that moment, there came a particularly loud crash from overhead. With a hasty “excuse me,” Gregory laid the paper on top of the tea tray and hurried from the room. Strike heard him climbing the stairs, and then a telling-off. It appeared that one of the twins had overturned a chest of drawers. Soprano voices united in exculpation and counter-accusation.

Through the net curtains, Strike now saw an old Volvo pulling up outside the house. A plump middle-aged brunette in a navy raincoat got out, followed by two boys, whom he guessed to be around fourteen or fifteen. The woman went to the boot of the car and took out two sports bags and several bags of shopping from Aldi. The boys, who’d begun to slouch toward the house, had to be called back to assist her.

Gregory arrived back at the sitting-room door just as his wife entered the hall. One of the teenage boys shoved his way past Gregory to survey the stranger with the amazement appropriate to spotting an escaped zoo animal.

“Hi,” said Strike.

The boy turned in astonishment to Gregory.

“Who’s he?” he asked, pointing.

The second boy appeared beside the first, eyeing Strike with precisely the same mixture of wonder and suspicion.

“This is Mr. Strike,” said Gregory.

His wife now appeared between the boys, placed a hand on their shoulders and steered them bodily away, smiling at Strike as she did so.

Gregory closed the door behind him and returned to his armchair. He appeared to have momentarily forgotten what he and Strike had been talking about before he had gone upstairs, but then his eye fell upon the piece of paper scrawled all over with his father’s handwriting, dotted with pentagrams and with the cryptic lines in Pitman shorthand.

“D’you know why Dad knew Pitman shorthand?” he said, with forced cheerfulness. “My mother was learning it at secretarial college, so he learned it as well, so he could test her. He was a good husband—and a good dad, too,” he added, a little defiantly.

“Sounds it,” said Strike.

There was another pause.

“Look,” said Gregory, “they kept the—the specifics of Dad’s illness out of the press at the time. He was a good copper and it wasn’t his fault he got ill. My mother’s still alive. She’d be devastated if it all got out now.”

“I can appreciate—”

“Actually, I’m not sure you can,” said Gregory, flushing slightly. He seemed a polite and mild man, and it was clear that this assertive statement cost him some effort. “The families of some of Creed’s victims, afterward—there was a lot of ill feeling toward Dad. They blamed him for not getting Creed, for screwing it all up. People wrote to the house, telling him he was a disgrace. Mum and Dad ended up moving… From what you said on the phone, I thought you were interested in Dad’s theories, not in—not in stuff like that,” he said, gesturing at the pentagram-strewn paper.

“I’m very interested in your father’s theories,” said Strike. Deciding that a little duplicity was called for, or at least a little reframing of the facts, the detective added, “Most of what your father wrote in the case file is entirely sound. He was asking all the right questions and he’d noticed—”

“The speeding van,” said Gregory quickly.

“Exactly,” said Strike.

“Rainy night, exactly like when Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman were abducted.”

“Right,” said Strike, nodding.

“The two women who were struggling together,” said Gregory. “That last patient, the woman who looked like a man. I mean, you’ve got to admit, you add all that together—”

“This is what I’m talking about,” said Strike. “He might’ve been ill, but he still knew a clue when he saw one. All I want to know is whether the shorthand means anything I should know about.”

Some of Gregory’s excitement faded from his face.

“No,” he said, “it doesn’t. That’s just his illness talking.”

“You know,” said Strike slowly, “your father wasn’t the only one who saw Creed as satanic. The title of the best biography of him—”

“The Demon of Paradise Park.”

“Exactly. Creed and Baphomet have a lot in common,” said Strike.

In the pause that followed, they heard the twins running downstairs and loudly asking their foster mother whether she’d bought chocolate mousse.

“Look—I’d love you to prove it was Creed,” said Gregory at last. “Prove Dad was right all along. There’d be no shame in Creed being too clever for him. He was too clever for Lawson, as well; he’s been too clever for everyone. I know there wasn’t any sign of Margot Bamborough in Creed’s basement, but he never revealed where he’d put Andrea Hooton’s clothes and jewelry, either. He was varying the way he disposed of bodies at the end. He was unlucky with Hooton, chucking her off the cliffs; unlucky the body was found so quickly.”

“All true,” said Strike.

Strike drank his tea while Gregory absentmindedly chewed off a hangnail. A full minute passed before Strike decided that further pressure was required.

“This business about transcribing in the true book—”

He knew by Gregory’s slight start that he’d hit the bullseye.

“—I wondered whether your father kept separate records from the official file—and if so,” said Strike, when Gregory didn’t answer, “whether they’re still in existence.”

Gregory’s wandering gaze fixed itself once more on Strike.

“Yeah, all right,” he said, “Dad thought he was looking for something supernatural. We didn’t know that until near the end, until we realized how ill he was. He was sprinkling salt outside our bedroom doors every night, to keep out Baphomet. He’d made himself what Mum thought was a home office in the spare room, but he was keeping the door locked.

“The night he was sectioned,” said Gregory, looking miserable, “he came running out of it, ah, shouting. He woke us all up. My brother and I came out onto the landing. Dad had left the door to the spare room open, and we saw pentagrams all over the walls and lit candles. He’d taken up the carpet and made a magic circle on the floor to perform some kind of ritual, and he claimed… well, he thought he’d conjured some kind of demonic creature…

“Mum called 999 and an ambulance came and… well, you know the rest.”

“Must’ve been very distressing for all of you,” said Strike.

“Well, yeah. It was. While Dad was in hospital, Mum cleaned out the room, took away his tarot cards and all the occult books, and painted over the pentagrams and the magic circle. It was all the more upsetting for her, because both had been committed churchgoers before Dad had his breakdown…”

“He was clearly very ill,” said Strike, “which wasn’t his fault, but he was still a detective and he still had sound copper sense. I can see it in the official record. If there’s another set of records anywhere, especially if it contains stuff that isn’t in the official file, it’s an import­ant document.”

Gregory chewed his nail again, looking tense. Finally, he seemed to reach a decision:

“Ever since we spoke on the phone, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should give you this,” he said, standing up and heading over to an overflowing bookcase in the corner. From the top, he took a large leather-bound notebook of old-fashioned type, which had a cord wrapped around it.

“This was the only thing that didn’t get thrown away,” said Gregory, looking down at the notebook, “because Dad wouldn’t let go of it when the ambulance arrived. He said he had to record what the, ah, spirit had looked like, the thing he’d conjured… so the notebook got taken to hospital with him. They let him draw the demon, which helped the doctors understand what had been going on in his head, because at first he didn’t want to talk to them. I found all this out afterward; they protected me and my brother from it while it was going on. After Dad got well, he kept the notebook, because he said if anything was a reminder to take his medicine, this was it. But I wanted to meet you before I made a decision.”

Resisting the urge to hold out his hand, Strike sat trying to look as sympathetic as his naturally surly features would allow. Robin was far better at conveying warmth and empathy; he’d watched her persuading recalcitrant witnesses many times since they’d gone into business together.

“You understand,” said Gregory, still clutching the notebook, and evidently determined to hammer the point home, “he’d had a complete mental breakdown.”

“Of course,” said Strike. “Who else have you shown that to?”

“Nobody,” said Gregory. “It’s been up in our attic for the last ten years. We had a couple of boxes of stuff from Mum and Dad’s old house up there. Funny, you turning up just as the loft was being mucked out… maybe this is all Dad’s doing? Maybe he’s trying to tell me it’s OK to pass this over?”

Strike made an ambiguous noise designed to convey agreement that the Talbots’ decision to clear out their loft had been somehow prompted by Gregory’s dead father, rather than the need to accommodate two extra children.

“Take it,” said Gregory abruptly, holding out the old notebook. Strike thought he looked relieved to see it pass into someone else’s possession.

“I appreciate your trust. If I find anything in here I think you can help with, would it be all right to contact you again?”

“Yeah, of course,” said Gregory. “You’ve got my email address… I’ll give you my mobile number…”

Five minutes later, Strike was standing in the hall, shaking hands with Mrs. Talbot as he prepared to return to his office.

“Lovely to meet you,” she said. “I’m glad he’s given you that thing. You never know, do you?”

And with the notebook in his hand, Strike agreed that you never did.

18

Robin, who’d recently given up many weekends to cover the agency’s workload, took the following Tuesday and Wednesday off at Strike’s insistence. Her suggestion that she come into the office to look at the notebook Gregory Talbot had given Strike, and to go systematically through the last box of the police file, which neither of them had yet had time to examine, had been sternly vetoed by the senior partner. Strike knew there was no time left this year for Robin to take all the leave she was owed, but he was determined that she should take as much as she could.

However, if Strike imagined that Robin derived much pleasure from her days off, he was wrong. She spent Tuesday dealing with mundanities such as laundry and food shopping, and on Wednesday morning, set off for a twice-postponed appointment with her solicitor.

When she’d broken the news to her parents that she and Matthew were to divorce a little over a year after they’d married, her mother and father had wanted her to use a solicitor in Harrogate, who was an old family friend.

“I live in London. Why would I use a law firm in Yorkshire?”

Robin had chosen a lawyer in her late forties called Judith, whose dry humor, spiky gray hair and thick black-rimmed glasses had endeared her to Robin when first they met. Robin’s feeling of warmth had abated somewhat over the ensuing twelve months. It was hard to maintain fondness for the person whose job it was to pass on the latest intransigent and aggressive communications from Matthew’s lawyer. As the months rolled past, Robin noticed that Judith occasionally forgot or misremembered information pertinent to the divorce. Robin, who always took care to give her own clients the impression that their concerns were uppermost in her mind at all times, couldn’t help wondering whether Judith would have been more meticulous if Robin had been richer.

Like Robin’s parents, Judith had initially assumed that this divorce would be quick and easy, a matter of two signatures and a handshake. The couple had been married a little over a year and there were no children, not even a pet to argue over. Robin’s parents had gone so far as to imagine that Matthew, whom they’d known since he was a child, must feel such shame at his infidelity that he’d want to compensate Robin by being generous and reasonable over the divorce. Her mother’s growing fury toward her ex-son-in-law was starting to make Robin dread her phone calls home.

The offices of Stirling and Cobbs were a twenty-minute walk away from Robin’s flat, on North End Road. Zipping herself into a warm coat, umbrella in hand, Robin chose to walk that morning purely for the exercise, because she’d spent so many long hours in her car of late, sitting outside the weatherman’s house, waiting for Postcard. Indeed, the last time she’d walked for a whole hour had been inside the National Portrait Gallery, a trip that had been fruitless, except for one tiny incident that Robin had discounted, because Strike had taught her to mistrust the hunches so romanticized by the non-investigative public, which, he said, were more often than not born of personal biases or wishful thinking.

Tired, dispirited and knowing full well that nothing she was about to hear from Judith was likely to cheer her up, Robin was passing a bookie’s when her mobile rang. Extracting it from her pocket took a little longer than usual, because she was wearing gloves, and she consequently sounded a little panicky when she finally managed to answer the unknown number.

“Yes, hello? Robin Ellacott speaking.”

“Oh, hi. This is Eden Richards.”

For a moment, Robin couldn’t for the life of her think who Eden Richards was. The woman on the end of the line seemed to divine her dilemma, because she continued,

“Wilma Bayliss’s daughter. You sent me and my brothers and sisters messages. You wanted to talk to us about Margot Bamborough.”

“Oh, yes, of course, thank you for calling me back!” said Robin, backing into the bookie’s doorway, her finger in the ear not pressed against the phone, to block out the sound of traffic. Eden, she now remembered, was the oldest of Wilma’s offspring, a Labor councilor from Lewisham.

“Yeah,” said Eden Richards, “well, I’m afraid we don’t want to talk to you. And I’m speaking for all of us here, OK?”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Robin, watching abstractedly as a passing Doberman Pinscher squatted and defecated on the pavement while its scowling owner waited, a plastic bag hanging from his hand. “Can I ask why—?”

“We just don’t want to,” said Eden. “OK?”

“OK,” said Robin, “but to be clear, all we’re doing is checking statements that were made around the time Margot—”

“We can’t speak for our mother,” said Eden. “She’s dead. We feel sorry for Margot’s daughter, but we don’t want to drag up stuff that—it’s something we don’t particularly want to relive, any of our family. We were young when she disappeared. It was a bad time for us. So the answer’s no, OK?”

“I understand,” said Robin, “but I wish you’d reconsider. We aren’t asking you to talk about anything pers—”

“You are, though,” said Eden. “Yeah, you are. And we don’t want to, OK? You aren’t police. And by the way: my youngest sister’s going through chemotherapy, so leave her alone, please. She doesn’t need the grief. I’m going to go now. The answer’s no, OK? Don’t contact any of us again, please.”

And the line went dead.

“Shit,” said Robin out loud.

The owner of the Doberman Pinscher, who was now scooping a sizable pile of that very substance off the pavement, said,

“You and me both, love.”

Robin forced a smile, stuffed her mobile back into her pocket and walked on. Shortly afterward, still wondering whether she could have handled the call with Eden better, Robin pushed open the glass door of Stirling and Cobbs, Solicitors.

“Well,” said Judith five minutes later, once Robin was sitting opposite her in the tiny office full of filing cabinets. The monosyllable was followed by silence as Judith glanced over the documents in the file in front of her, clearly reminding herself of the facts of the case while Robin sat watching. Robin would much rather have sat for another five minutes in the waiting room than witness this casual and hasty revision of what was causing her so much stress and pain.

“Umm,” said Judith, “yes… just checking that… yes, we had a response to ours on the fourteenth, as I said in my email, so you’ll be aware that Mr. Cunliffe isn’t prepared to shift his position on the joint account.”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“So, I really think it’s time to go to mediation,” said Judith Cobbs.

“And as I said in my reply to your email,” said Robin, wondering whether Judith had read it, “I can’t see mediation working.”

“Which is why I wanted to speak to you face to face,” said Judith, smiling. “We often find that when the two parties have to sit down in the same room, and answer for themselves, especially with impartial witnesses present—I’d be with you, obviously—they become far less intransigent than they are by letter.”

“You said yourself,” Robin replied (blood was thumping in her ears: the sensation of not being heard was becoming increasingly common during these interactions), “the last time we met—you agreed that Matthew seems to be trying to force this into court. He isn’t really interested in the joint account. He can outspend me ten times over. He just wants to beat me. He wants a judge to agree that I married him for his bank account. He’ll think it money well spent if he can point to some ruling that says the divorce was all my fault.”

“It’s easy,” said Judith, still smiling, “to attribute the worst possible motives to ex-partners, but he’s clearly an intelligent—”

“Intelligent people can be as spiteful as anyone else.”

“True,” said Judith, still with an air of humoring Robin, “but refusing to even try mediation is a bad move for both of you. No judge will look kindly on anyone who refuses to at least try and settle matters without recourse to the courts.”

The truth, as perhaps Judith and Robin both equally knew, was that Robin dreaded having to sit face to face with Matthew and the lawyer who had authored all those cold, threatening letters.

“I’ve told him I don’t want the inheritance he got from his mother,” said Robin. “All I want back out of that joint account is the money my parents put into our first property.”

“Yes,” said Judith, with a hint of boredom: Robin knew that she’d said exactly this, every time they’d met each other. “But as you’re aware, his position—”

“Is that I contributed virtually nothing to our finances, so he ought to keep the whole lot, because he went into the marriage out of love and I’m some kind of gold-digger.”

“This is obviously upsetting you,” said Judith, no longer smiling.

“We were together ten years,” said Robin, trying, with little success, to remain calm. “When he was a student and I was working, I paid for everything. Should I have kept the receipts?”

“We can certainly make that point in mediation—”

“That’ll just infuriate him,” said Robin.

She raised a hand to her face purely for the purpose of hiding it. She felt suddenly and perilously close to tears.

“OK, fine. We can try mediation.”

“I think that’s the sensible thing to do,” said Judith Cobbs, smiling again. “So, I’ll contact Brophy, Shenston and—”

“I suppose I’ll get a chance to tell Matthew he’s a total shit, at least,” said Robin, on a sudden wave of fury.

Judith gave a small laugh.

“Oh, I wouldn’t advise that,” she said.

Oh, wouldn’t you really? thought Robin, as she hitched on another fake smile, and got up to leave.

A blustery, damp wind was blowing when she left the solicitor’s. Robin trudged back toward Finborough Road, until finally, her face numb, her hair whipping into her eyes, she turned into a small café where, in defiance of her own healthy eating rules, she bought a large latte and a chocolate brownie. She sat and stared out at the rainswept street, enjoying the comfort of cake and coffee, until her mobile rang again.

It was Strike.

“Hi,” she said, through a mouthful of brownie. “Sorry. Eating.”

“Wish I was,” he said. “I’m outside the bloody theater again. I think Barclay’s right: we’re not going to get anything on Twinkletoes. I’ve got Bamborough news.”

“So’ve I,” said Robin, who had managed to swallow the mouthful of brownie, “but it isn’t good news. Wilma Bayliss’s children don’t want to talk to us.”

“The cleaner’s kids? Why not?”

“Wilma wasn’t a cleaner by the time she died,” Robin reminded him. “She was a social worker.”

Even as she said it, Robin wondered why she felt the need to correct him. Perhaps it was simply that if Wilma Bayliss was to be forever referred to as a cleaner, she, Robin, might as well be forever called “the temp.”

“All right, why don’t the social worker’s kids want to talk to us?” asked Strike.

“The one who called me—Eden, she’s the eldest—said they didn’t want to drag up what had been a difficult time for the family. She said it had nothing to do with Margot—but then she contradicted herself, because when I said we only wanted to talk about Margot—I can’t remember her exact words, but the sense was that talking about Margot’s disappearance would involve them talking about the family’s personal stuff.”

“Well, their father was in jail in the early seventies and Margot was urging Wilma to leave him,” said Strike. “It’s probably that. Think it’s worth calling her back? Trying a bit more persuasion?”

“I don’t think she’s going to change her mind.”

“And she said she was speaking for her brothers and sisters, as well?”

“Yes. One of them’s having chemotherapy. She warned me specif­ically away from her.”

“OK, avoid her, but one of the others might be worth a shot.”

“That’ll annoy Eden.”

“Probably, but we’ve got nothing to lose now, have we?”

“S’pose not,” said Robin. “So what’s your news?”

“The practice nurse and the receptionist, the one who isn’t Gloria Conti—”

“Irene Bull,” said Robin.

“Irene Bull, now Hickson, exactly—they’re both happy to talk to us. Turns out they’ve been friends since the St. John’s practice days. Irene will be delighted to host Janice and us at her house on Saturday afternoon. I think we should both go.”

Robin turned her mobile to speakerphone so that she could check the rota she kept on her phone. The entry for Saturday read: Strike’s birthday/TT girlfriend.

“I’m supposed to be following Two-Times’ girlfriend,” said Robin, switching back from speakerphone.

“Sod that, Morris can do it,” said Strike. “You can drive us—if you don’t mind,” he added, and Robin smiled.

“No, I don’t mind,” she said.

“Well, great,” said Strike. “Enjoy the rest of your day off.”

He rang off. Robin picked up the rest of the brownie and finished it slowly, savoring every bite. In spite of the prospect of mediation with Matthew, and doubtless because of a much-needed infusion of chocolate, she felt a good deal happier than she had ten minutes previously.

19

Strike never told anyone that his birthday was imminent and avoided announcing it on the day itself. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate people remembering: indeed, he tended to be far more touched when they did than he ever let show, but he had an innate dislike of scheduled celebration and forced jollity, and of all inane practices, having “Happy Birthday” sung to him was one of his least favorites.

As far back as he could remember, the day of his birth had brought up unhappy memories on which he chose, usually successfully, not to dwell. His mother had sometimes forgotten to buy him anything when he was a child. His biological father had never acknowledged the date. Birthdays were inextricably linked with the knowledge, which had long since become part of him, that his existence was accidental, that his genetic inheritance had been contested in court, and that the birth itself had been “fucking hideous, darling, if men had to do it the human race would be extinct in a year.”

To his sister, Lucy, it would have been almost cruel to let a loved one’s birthday pass without a card, a gift, a phone call or, if she could manage it, a party or at the very least a meal. This was why he usually lied to Lucy, pretending to have plans so as to avoid having to go all the way out to her house in Bromley and participate in a family dinner that she’d enjoy far more than he would. Not long ago, he’d happily have celebrated with a takeaway at his friends Nick and Ilsa’s, but Ilsa had suggested Robin accompany Strike, and as Strike had decided many weeks ago that Ilsa’s increasingly open attempts at matchmaking could only be successfully countered by a blanket refusal to cooperate, he’d pretended that he was going to Lucy’s instead. The one joyless hope Strike had for his thirty-ninth birthday was that Robin would have forgotten it, because, if she did, his own omission would be canceled out: they’d be quits.

He descended the metal stairs to the office on Friday morning and saw, to his surprise, two packages and four envelopes sitting beside the usual pile of mail on Pat’s desk. The envelopes were all of different colors. Apparently, friends and family had decided to make sure birthday greetings reached him in time for the weekend.

“Is it your birthday?” Pat asked in her deep, gravelly voice, still staring at her monitor and typing, electronic cigarette jammed between her teeth as usual.

“Tomorrow,” said Strike, picking up the cards. He recognized the handwriting on three of them, but not the fourth.

“Many happy returns,” grunted Pat, over the clacking of her keyboard. “You should’ve said.”

Some spirit of mischief prompted Strike to ask,

“Why? Would you’ve baked me a cake?”

“No,” said Pat indifferently. “Might’ve got you a card, though.”

“Lucky I didn’t say, then. One fewer tree’s died.”

“It wouldn’t have been a big card,” said Pat, unsmiling, her fingers still flying over the keyboard.

Grinning slightly, Strike removed himself, his cards and packages into the inner office, and later that evening took them upstairs with him, still unopened.

He woke on the twenty-third with his mind full of his trip to Greenwich with Robin later, and only remembered the significance of the day when he saw the presents and cards on the table. The packages contained a sweater from Ted and Joan, and a sweatshirt from Lucy. Ilsa, Dave Polworth and his half-brother Al had all sent joke cards which, while not actually making him laugh, were vaguely cheering.

He slipped the fourth card out of its envelope. It had a photograph of a bloodhound on the front, and Strike considered this for a second or two, wondering why it had been chosen. He’d never owned a dog, and while he had a mild preference for dogs over cats, having worked alongside a few in the military, he wouldn’t have said dog-loving was one of his salient characteristics. Flicking the card open, he saw the words:

For a few moments, Strike merely looked at the words, his mind as blank as the rest of the card. The last time he’d seen his father’s writing, he’d been full of morphine after his leg had been blown off. As a child, he’d occasionally caught a glimpse of his father’s signature on legal documents sent to his mother. Then, he’d stared awestruck at the name, as though he were glimpsing an actual part of his father, as though the ink were blood, and solid proof that his father was a real human being, not a myth.

Quite suddenly, and with a force that shocked Strike, he found himself full of rage, rage on behalf of the small boy who would once have sold his soul to receive a birthday card from his father. He’d grown well beyond any desire to have contact with Jonny Rokeby, but he could still recall the acute pain his father’s continual and implacable absence had so often caused him as a child: while the primary class was making Father’s Day cards, for instance, or when strange adults questioned him about why he never saw Rokeby, or other children jeered at him, singing Deadbeats songs or telling him his mother had got pregnant with him purely to get Rokeby’s money. He remembered the longing that was almost an ache, always most acute around birthdays and Christmas, for his father to send something, or phone: anything, to show that he knew Strike was alive. Strike hated the memory of these fantasies more than he hated remembering the pain caused by their eternal unfulfillment, but most of all he hated remembering the hopeful lies he’d told himself when, as a very young boy, he’d made excuses for his father, who probably didn’t know that the family had moved yet again, who’d sent things to the wrong address, who wanted to know him but simply couldn’t find him.

Where had Rokeby been when his son was a nobody? Where had Rokeby been every time Leda’s life came off the rails, and Ted and Joan rode, again, to the rescue? Where had he been on any of the thousands of occasions when his presence might have meant something real, and genuine, rather than an attempt to look good to the papers?

Rokeby knew literally nothing about his son except that he was a detective, and that explained the fucking bloodhound. Fuck you and fuck your fucking card. Strike tore the card in half, then into quarters, and threw the pieces into the bin. But for a disinclination to trigger the fire alarm, he might have put a match to them.

Anger pulsed like a current through Strike all morning. He hated his own rage, as it showed that Rokeby still had some emotional hold on him, and by the time he set out for Earl’s Court, where Robin was picking him up, he was not far off wishing that birthdays had never been invented.

Sitting in the Land Rover just outside the station entrance some forty-five minutes later, Robin watched Strike emerge onto the pavement, carrying a leather-bound notebook, and noted that he looked as grumpy as she’d ever seen him.

“Happy birthday,” she said, when he opened the passenger door. Strike immediately noticed the card and the small wrapped package lying on the dashboard.

Fuck.

“Cheers,” and climbed in beside her, looking even grumpier.

As Robin pulled out onto the road, she said,

“Is it turning thirty-nine that’s upset you, or has something else happened?”

Having no desire to talk about Rokeby, Strike decided an effort was required.

“No, I’m just knackered. I was up late last night, going through the last box of the Bamborough file.”

“I wanted to do that on Tuesday, but you wouldn’t let me!”

“You were owed time off,” said Strike shortly, tearing open the envelope of her card. “You’re still owed time off.”

“I know, but it would’ve been a lot more interesting than doing my ironing.”

Strike looked down at the front of Robin’s card, which featured a watercolor picture of St. Mawes. She must, he thought, have gone to some trouble to find it in London. “Nice,” he said, “thanks.”

Flipping it open, he read,

Many happy returns, love Robin x

She’d never put a kiss on any message to him before, and he liked it being there. Feeling slightly more cheerful, he unwrapped the small package that accompanied the card, and found inside a pair of replacement headphones of the kind Luke had broken while he’d been in St. Mawes over the summer.

“Ah, Robin, that’s—thanks. That’s great. I hadn’t replaced them, either.”

“I know,” said Robin, “I noticed.”

As Strike put her card back in its envelope, he reminded himself that he really did need to get her a decent Christmas present.

“Is that Bill Talbot’s secret notebook?” Robin asked, glancing sideways at the leather-bound book in Strike’s lap.

“The very same. I’ll show you after we’ve talked to Irene and Janice. Batshit crazy. Full of bizarre drawings and symbols.”

“What about the last box of police records? Anything interesting?” Robin asked.

“Yes, as it goes. A chunk of police notes from 1975 had got mixed in with a bunch of later stuff. There were a few interesting bits.

“For instance, the practice cleaner, Wilma, was sacked a couple of months after Margot disappeared, but for petty theft, not drinking, which is what Gupta told me. Small amounts of money disappearing out of people’s purses and pockets. I also found out a call was made to Margot’s marital home on Anna’s second birthday, from a woman claiming to be Margot.”

“Oh my God, that’s horrible,” said Robin. “A prank call?”

“Police thought so. They traced it to a phone box in Marylebone. Cynthia, the childminder-turned-second-wife, answered. The woman identified herself as Margot and told Cynthia to look after her daughter.”

“Did Cynthia think it was Margot?”

“She told police she was too shocked to really take in what the caller said. She thought it sounded a bit like her, but on balance it sounded more like someone imitating her.”

“What makes people do things like that?” Robin asked, in genuine perplexity.

“They’re shits,” said Strike. “There were also a bunch of alleged sightings of Margot after the day she disappeared, in the last box. They were all disproven, but I’ve made a list and I’ll email them to you. Mind if I smoke?”

“Carry on,” said Robin, and Strike wound down the window. “I actually emailed you a tiny bit of information last night, too. Very tiny. Remember Albert Shimmings, the local florist—”

“—whose van people thought they saw speeding away from Clerkenwell Green? Yeah. Did he leave a note confessing to murder?”

“Unfortunately not, but I’ve spoken to his eldest son, who says that his dad’s van definitely wasn’t in Clerkenwell at half past six that evening. It was waiting outside his clarinet teacher’s house in Camden, where his dad drove him every Friday. He says they told the police that at the time. His dad used to wait outside for him in the van and read spy novels.”

“Well, the clarinet lessons aren’t in the records, but both Talbot and Lawson believed Shimmings when they spoke to him. Good to have it confirmed, though,” he added, lest Robin think he was being dismissive of her routine work. “Well, that means there’s still a possibility the van was Dennis Creed’s, doesn’t it?”

Strike lit up a Benson & Hedges, exhaled out of the window, and said,

“There was some interesting material on these two women we’re about to meet, in that last box of notes. More stuff that came out when Lawson took over.”

“Really? I thought Irene had a dental appointment and Janice had house visits on the afternoon Margot disappeared?”

“Yeah, that’s what their original statements said,” said Strike, “and Talbot didn’t check either woman’s story. Took both at their word.”

“Presumably because he didn’t think a woman could be the Essex Butcher?”

“Exactly.”

Strike pulled his own notebook out of his coat pocket and opened it to the pages he’d scribbled on Tuesday.

“Irene’s first statement, which she gave to Talbot, said she’d had a grumbling toothache for a few days before Margot disappeared. Her friend Janice the nurse thought it might be an abscess, so Irene made an emergency appointment for three o’clock, leaving the practice at two-thirty. She and Janice were planning to go to the cinema that evening, but Irene’s face was sore and swollen after having a tooth removed, so when Janice phoned her to see how the dentist’s had gone, and to check whether she still wanted to go out that night, she said she’d rather stay at home.”

“No mobile phones,” mused Robin. “Different world.”

“Exactly what I thought when I was going over this,” said Strike. “These days Irene’s mates would’ve expected a minute-by-minute commentary. Selfies from the dental chair.

“Talbot gave his officers to understand that he’d personally contacted the dentist to check this story, but he hadn’t. Wouldn’t put it past him to have consulted a crystal ball.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m not kidding. Wait till you see his notebook.”

Strike turned a page.

“Anyway, six months later, Lawson takes over the case and goes systematically back through every single witness and suspect in the file. Irene told the dentist story again, but half an hour after she left him, she panicked and asked to see him again. This time she admitted she’d lied.

“There’d never been any tooth pain. She hadn’t visited the dentist. She said she’d been forced to do a lot of unpaid overtime at the surgery and resented it, and felt she was owed an afternoon off, so she faked toothache, pretended to have got an emergency appointment, then left the practice and went to the West End to do some shopping.

“She told Lawson that it was only when she got home—she was still living with her parents, incidentally—that it occurred to her that if she went out to meet Janice the nurse that evening, Janice might ask to see the place where the tooth had been extracted, or at least expect to see some swelling. So when Janice rang her to check they were still going to the cinema, she lied and said she didn’t feel up to it.

“Lawson gave Irene quite a hard time, judging from his notes. Didn’t she understand what a serious matter it was, lying to the police, people had been arrested for less, et cetera. He also put it to her that the new story showed she had no alibi for any point of the afternoon and evening, other than around half past six in the evening, when Janice rang her at home.”

“Where did Irene live?”

“Street called Corporation Row, which as it happens lies very close to the Three Kings, although not on the route Margot would have taken from the practice.

“Anyway, at the point alibis were mentioned, Irene became hysterical. She poured out a load of stuff about Margot having a lot of enemies, without being able to say who these enemies were, although she referred Lawson back to the anonymous letters Margot received.

“The next day, Irene went back to Lawson yet again, this time accompanied by her very angry father, who did her no favors by losing his temper at Lawson for daring to upset his daughter. In the course of this third interview, Irene presented Lawson with a receipt from Oxford Street, which was marked 3:10 p.m. on the day Margot disappeared. The receipt was for cash. Lawson probably took a lot of pleasure in telling Irene and her dad that all the receipt proved was that somebody had gone shopping on Oxford Street that day.”

“Still—a receipt for the right day, right time—”

“Could’ve been her mother’s. A friend’s.”

“Why would they have kept it for six months?”

“Why would she?”

Robin considered the matter. She regularly kept receipts, but these were matters of expenses while doing surveillance, to be presented to the accountant.

“Yeah, maybe it is odd she still had it,” she conceded.

“But Lawson never managed to get anything further out of her. I don’t think he genuinely suspected her, mind you. I get the impression he just didn’t like her. He pressed her very hard on the anonymous notes she claimed to have seen, the ones mentioning hellfire. I don’t think he believed in them.”

“I thought the other receptionist confirmed she’d seen one?”

“She did. Nothing to say they weren’t in cahoots, though. No trace of the notes was ever found.”

“But that’d be a serious lie,” said Robin. “With the fake dental appointment, I can see why she fibbed and why she’d have been frightened to admit it afterward. Lying about anonymous notes in the context of a missing person, though…”

“Ah, but don’t forget, Irene was already telling the story of the anonymous notes before Margot went missing. It’s more of the same, isn’t it? The two receptionists could’ve invented these threatening notes for the pleasure of starting a malicious rumor, then found it impossible to back away from the lie after Margot disappeared.

“Anyway,” said Strike, flicking over a couple of pages, “so much for Irene. Now for her best buddy, the practice nurse.

“Janice’s original statement was that she drove around all afternoon, making house calls. The last visit, which was to an old lady with multiple health issues, kept her longer than she expected. She left there around six and hurried straight to a call box to ring Irene at home, to see whether they were still on for the cinema that evening. Irene said she didn’t feel up to it, but Janice had already got herself a babysitter, and was desperate to see the movie—James Caan, The Gambler—so she went anyway. Watched the movie alone, then went back to the neighbor’s, picked up her son and went home.

“Talbot didn’t bother to check any of this, but a zealous junior officer did, on his own initiative, and it all checked out. All the patients confirmed that Janice had been at their houses at the right times. The babysitter confirmed that Janice returned to pick up her son when expected. Janice also produced a half-torn ticket for the movie out of the bottom of her handbag. Given that this was less than a week after Margot disappeared, it doesn’t seem particularly fishy, her still having it. On the other hand, a torn ticket is no more proof that she sat through the movie than the receipt is proof Irene went shopping.”

He threw his cigarette end out of the window.

“Where did Janice’s last patient of the day live?” asked Robin, and Strike knew that her mind was running on distances and timings.

“Gopsall Street, which is about a ten-minute drive from the practice. It would’ve been just possible for a woman in a car to have intercepted Margot on the way to the Three Kings, assuming Margot was walking very slowly, or was delayed somewhere along the route, or left the practice later than Gloria said she did. But it would’ve required luck, because as we know, some of the path Margot would’ve taken was pedestrianized.”

“And I can’t really see why you’d make arrangements with a friend to go to the cinema if you were planning to abduct someone,” said Robin.

“Nor can I,” said Strike. “But I’m not finished. When Lawson takes over the case he finds out that Janice lied to Talbot as well.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Turned out she didn’t actually have a car. Six weeks before Margot disappeared, Janice’s ancient Morris Minor gave up the ghost and she sold it for scrap. From that time onwards, she was making all her house calls by public transport and on foot. She hadn’t wanted to tell anyone at the practice that she was carless, in case they told her she couldn’t do her job. Her husband had walked out, leaving her with a kid. She was saving up to get a new car, but she knew it was going to take a while, so she pretended the Morris Minor was in the garage, or that it was easier to get the bus, if anyone asked.”

“But if that’s true—”

“It is. Lawson checked it all out, questioned the scrap yard and everything.”

“—then that surely puts her completely out of the frame for an abduction.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” said Strike. “She could’ve got a cab, of course, but the cabbie would’ve had to be in on the abduction, too. No, the interesting thing about Janice is that in spite of believing she was entirely innocent, Talbot interviewed her a total of seven times, more than any other witness or suspect.”

“Seven times?”

“Yep. He had a kind of excuse at first. She was a neighbor of Steve Douthwaite’s, Margot’s acutely stressed patient. Interviews two and three were all about Douthwaite, who Janice knew to say hello to. Douthwaite was Talbot’s preferred candidate for the Essex Butcher, so you can follow his thought processes—you would question neighbors if you thought someone might be butchering women at home. But Janice wasn’t able to tell Talbot anything about Douthwaite beyond what we already know, and Talbot still kept going back to her. After the third interview, he stopped asking her about Douthwaite and things got very strange indeed. Among other things, Talbot asked whether she’d ever been hypnotized, whether she’d be prepared to try it, asked her all about her dreams and urged her to keep a diary of them so he could read it, and also to make him a list of her most recent sexual partners.”

“He did what?”

“There’s a copy of a letter from the Commissioner in the file,” said Strike drily, “apologizing to Janice for Talbot’s behavior. All in all, you can see why they wanted him off the force as fast as possible.”

“Did his son tell you any of that?”

Strike remembered Gregory’s earnest, mild face, his assertion that Bill had been a good father and his embarrassment as the conversation turned to pentagrams.

“I doubt he knew about it. Janice doesn’t seem to have made a fuss.”

“Well,” said Robin, slowly. “She was a nurse. Maybe she could tell he was ill?”

She considered the matter for a few moments, then said,

“It’d be frightening, though, wouldn’t it? Having the investigating officer coming back to your house every five minutes, asking you to keep a dream diary?”

“It’d put the wind up most people. I’m assuming the explanation is the obvious one—but we should ask her about it.”

Strike glanced into the back and saw, as he’d hoped, a bag of food.

“Well, it is your birthday,” said Robin, her eyes still on the road.

“Fancy a biscuit?”

“Bit early for me. You carry on.”

As he leaned back to fetch the bag, Strike noticed that Robin smelled again of her old perfume.

20

Irene Hickson’s house lay in a short, curving Georgian terrace of yellow brick, with arched windows and fanlights over each black front door. It reminded Robin of the street where she’d spent the last few months of her married life, in a rented house that had been built for a sea merchant. Here, too, were traces of London’s trading past. The lettering over an arched window read Royal Circus Tea Warehouse.

“Mr. Hickson must’ve made good money,” said Strike, looking up at the beautifully proportioned frontage as he and Robin crossed the street. “This is a long way from Corporation Row.”

Robin rang the doorbell. They heard a shout of “Don’t worry, I’ll get it!” and a few seconds later, a short, silver-haired woman opened the door to them. Dressed in a navy sweater, and trousers of the kind that Robin’s mother would have called “slacks,” she had a round pink and white face. Blue eyes peeked out from beneath a blunt fringe that Robin suspected she might have cut herself.

“Mrs. Hickson?” asked Robin.

“Janice Beattie,” said the older woman. “You’re Robin, are you? An’ you’re—’

The retired nurse’s eyes swept down over Strike’s legs in what looked like professional appraisal.

“—Corm’ran, is that ’ow you say it?” she asked, looking back up into his face.

“That’s right,” said Strike. “Very good of you to see us, Mrs. Beattie.”

“Oh, no trouble at all,” she said, backing away to let them in. “Irene’ll be wiv us in a mo.”

The naturally upturned corners of the nurse’s mouth and the dimples in her full cheeks gave her a cheerful look even when she wasn’t smiling. She led them through a hall that Strike found oppressively over-decorated. Everything was dusky pink: the flowered wallpaper, the thick carpet, the dish of pot-pourri that sat on the telephone table. The distant sound of a flush told them exactly where Irene was.

The sitting room was decorated in olive green, and everything that could be swagged, flounced, fringed or padded had been. Family photographs in silver frames were crowded on side tables, the largest of which showed a heavily tanned forty-something blonde who was cheek to cheek over fruit-and-umbrella-laden cocktails with a florid gentlemen who Robin assumed was the late Mr. Hickson. He looked quite a lot older than his wife. A large collection of porcelain figurines stood upon purpose-built mahogany shelves against the shiny olive-green wallpaper. All represented young women. Some wore crinolines, others twirled parasols, still others sniffed flowers or cradled lambs in their arms.

“She collects ’em,” said Janice, smiling as she saw where Robin was looking. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

“Oh yes,” lied Robin.

Janice didn’t seem to feel she had the right to invite them to sit down without Irene present, so the three of them remained standing beside the figurines.

“Have you come far?” she asked them politely, but before they could answer, a voice that commanded attention said,

“Hello! Welcome!”

Like her sitting room, Irene Hickson presented a first impression of over-embellished, over-padded opulence. Just as blonde as she’d been at twenty-five, she was now much heavier, with an enormous bosom. She’d outlined her hooded eyes in black, penciled her sparse brows into a high, Pierrot-ish arch and painted her thin lips in scarlet. In a mustard-colored twinset, black trousers, patent heels and a large quantity of gold jewelry, which included clip-on earrings so heavy that they were stretching her already long lobes, she advanced on them in a potent cloud of amber perfume and hairspray.

“How d’you do?” she said, beaming at Strike as she offered her hand, bracelets jangling. “Has Jan told you? What happened this morning? So strange, with you coming today; so strange, but I’ve lost count of the number of times things like that happen to me.” She paused, then said dramatically, “My Margot shattered. My Margot Fonteyn, on the top shelf,” she said, pointing to a gap in the china figurines. “Fell apart into a million pieces when I ran the feather duster over her!”

She paused, waiting for astonishment.

“That is odd,” said Robin, because it was clear Strike wasn’t going to say anything.

“Isn’t it?” said Irene. “Tea? Coffee? Whatever you want.”

“I’ll do it, dear,” said Janice.

“Thank you, my love. Maybe make both?” said Irene. She waved Strike and Robin graciously toward armchairs. “Please, sit down.”

The armchairs placed Strike and Robin within view of a window framed in tasseled curtains, through which they could see a garden with intricate paving and raised beds. It had an Elizabethan air, with low box hedges and a wrought iron sundial.

“Oh, the garden was all my Eddie,” said Irene, following their gaze. “He loved his garden, bless his heart. Loved this house. It’s why I’m still here, although it’s too big for me now, really… Excuse me. I haven’t been well,” she added in a loud whisper, making quite a business of lowering herself onto the sofa and placing cushions carefully around herself. “Jan’s been a saint.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike. “That you’ve been unwell, I mean, not that your friend’s a saint.”

Irene gave a delighted peal of laughter and Robin suspected that if Strike had been sitting slightly nearer, Irene might have playfully cuffed him. With an air of giving Strike privileged information, she half-mouthed:

“Irritable bowel syndrome. It flares up. The pain is sometimes—well. The funny thing is, I was fine all the time I was away—I’ve been staying with my eldest daughter, they’re in Hampshire, that’s why I didn’t get your letter straight away—but the moment I got home, I called Jan, I said, you’ll have to come, I’m in that much pain—and my GP’s no use,” she added, with a little moue of disgust. “Woman. All my own fault, according to her! I should be cutting out everything that makes life worth living—I was telling them, Jan,” she said, as her friend backed into the room with a laden tea tray, “that you’re a saint.”

“Oh, carry on. Everyone likes a good review,” said Janice cheerfully. Strike was halfway out of his chair to help her with the tray, on which stood both teapot and cafetière, but like Mrs. Gupta she refused help, depositing it on a padded ottoman. An assortment of chocolate biscuits, some foil-wrapped, lay on a doily; the sugar bowl had tongs and the flowered fine bone china suggested “for best.” Janice joined her friend on the sofa and poured out the hot drinks, serving Irene first.

“Help yourself to biscuits,” Irene told her visitors, and then, eyeing Strike hungrily, “So—the famous Cameron Strike! I nearly had a heart attack when I saw your name at the bottom of the letter. And you’re going to try and crack Creed, are you? Will he talk to you, do you think? Will they let you go and see him?”

“We’re not that far along yet,” said Strike with a smile, as he took out his notebook and uncapped his pen. “We’ve got a few questions, mainly background, that you two might be able—”

“Oh, anything we can do to help,” said Irene eagerly. “Anything.”

“We’ve read both your police statements,” said Strike, “so unless—”

“Oh dear,” interrupted Irene, pulling a mock-fearful expression. “You know all about me being a naughty girl, then? About the dentist and that, do you? There’ll be young girls out there doing it, right now, fibbing to get a few hours off, but just my luck I picked the day Margot—sorry, I don’t mean that,” Irene said, catching herself. “I don’t. This is how I get myself in trouble,” she said, with a little laugh. “Steady, girl, Eddie would’ve said, wouldn’t he Jan?” she said, tapping her friend on the arm. “Wouldn’t he have said, steady, girl?”

“He would,” said Janice, smiling and nodding.

“I was going to say,” Strike continued, “that unless either of you have got anything to add—”

“Oh, don’t think we haven’t thought about it,” interrupted Irene again. “If we’d remembered anything else we’d have been straight down the police station, wouldn’t we, Jan?”

“—I’d like to clarify a few points.

“Mrs. Beattie,” said Strike, looking at Janice, who was absentmind­edly stroking the underside of her wedding ring, which was the only piece of jewelry she wore, “one thing that struck me when I read the police notes was how many times Inspector Talbot—”

“Oh, you and me both, Cameron,” Irene interrupted eagerly, before Janice could open her mouth. “You and me both! I know exactly what you’re going to ask—why did he keep pestering Jan? I told her at the time—didn’t I, Jan?—I said, this isn’t right, you should report it, but you didn’t, did you? I mean, I know he was having a breakdown, blah blah blah—you’ll know all about that,” she said, with a nod toward Strike, that simultaneously conveyed a compliment and an eagerness to fill him in should he require it, “but ill men are still men, aren’t they?”

“Mrs. Beattie,” repeated Strike, slightly louder, “why do you think Talbot kept interviewing you?”

Irene took the broad hint and allowed Janice to answer, but her self-restraint lasted only until Janice hit her stride, at which point she set up a murmured counterpoint, echoing Janice’s words, adding agreement and emphasis, and giving the general impression that she feared that if she did not make a noise every few seconds, Strike might forget she was there.

“I dunno, in all honesty,” said Janice, still fiddling with her wedding ring. “The first few times ’e saw me it was straightforward questions—”

“At first it was, yeah,” murmured Irene, nodding along.

“—about what I done that day, you know, what I could tell ’im about people coming to see Margot, because I knew a lot of the patients—”

“We got to know them all, working at the practice,” said Irene, nodding.

“—but then, it was like ’e thought I ’ad… well, special powers. I know that sounds bonkers, but I don’t fink—”

“Oho, well, I do,” said Irene, her eyes on Strike.

“—no, I honestly don’t fink ’e was—you know—” Janice seemed embarrassed even to say it, “keen on me. ’E did ask inappropriate things, but I could tell ’e wasn’t right, you know—in the ’ead. It was an ’orrible position to be in, honestly,” Janice said, switching her gaze to Robin. “I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone. ’E was police! I just ’ad to keep sitting there while ’e asked me about me dreams. And after the first few interviews that’s all he wanted to talk about, me past boyfriends and stuff, nothing about Margot or the patients—”

“He was interested in one patient, though, wasn’t—?” began Robin.

“Duckworth!” piped up Irene excitedly.

“Douthwaite,” said Strike.

“Douthwaite, yes, that’s who I meant,” muttered Irene, and to cover a slight embarrassment she helped herself to a biscuit, which meant that for a few moments, at least, Janice was able to talk uninterrupted.

“Yeah, ’e did ask me about Steve,” said Janice, nodding, “’cause ’e lived in my block of flats, down Percival Street.”

“Did you know Douthwaite well?” asked Robin.

“Not really. Ackshly, I never knew ’im at all until ’e got beaten up. I come ’ome late and found a load of people on the landing with ’im. People knew I was a nurse so—there’s me wiv my son Kevin under one arm and shopping in the other hand—but Steve was in a right state, so I ’ad to ’elp. ’E didn’t want the police called, but ’e’d ’ad the sort of beating that can leave you wiv internal injuries. The ovver geezer ’ad used a bat. Jealous ’usband—”

“Who had completely the wrong end of the stick, didn’t he?” interrupted Irene. “Because Douthwaite was queer!” she said, with a shout of laughter. “He was only friends with the wife, but this jealous idiot thinks—”

“Well, I don’t know if Steve was queer—” began Janice, but there was no stopping Irene.

“—man—woman—two and two makes five! My Eddie was exactly the same—Jan, bear me out, what was Eddie like?” she said, tapping Janice’s arm again. “Exactly the same, wasn’t he? I remember once, I said, ‘Eddie, you think if I so much look at a man—he can be queer, he can be Welsh—’ But after you told me, Jan, I thought, yeah, that Duckworth—Douth-thing—is a bit camp. When he came in the surgery afterward, I could see it. Good-looking, but a bit soft.”

“But I don’t know wevver ’e was queer, Irene, I didn’t know ’im well enough to—”

“He kept coming back to see you,” Irene chided her. “You told me he did. Kept coming back to your place for tea and sympathy and telling you all his problems.”

“It were only a couple of times,” said Janice. “We’d chat, passing on the stairs, and one time ’e ’elped me with my shopping and come in for a cup of tea.”

“But he asked you—” prompted Irene.

“I’m getting to that, dear,” said Janice, with what Strike thought was remarkable patience. “’E was getting ’eadaches,” she told Strike and Robin, “an’ I told ’im ’e needed to go and see a doctor for ’eadaches, I couldn’t diagnose ’im. I mean, I felt a bit sorry for ’im, but I didn’t want to get in the ’abit of ’olding out-of-hours clinics in me flat. I ’ad Kevin to look after.”

“So you think Douthwaite’s visits to Margot were because of his health?” asked Robin. “Not because he had a romantic interest in—?”

“He did send her chocolates one time,” said Irene, “but if you ask me, it was more like she was an agony aunt.”

“Well, ’e ’ad these ’ead pains and ’e was def’nitely nervous. Depressed, maybe,” said Janice. “Everyone ’ad blamed him for what happened to that poor girl ’oo killed ’erself, but I don’t know… and some of me ovver neighbors told me there were young men coming in and out of his flat—”

“There you are,” said Irene triumphantly. “Queer!”

“Might not’ve been that,” said Janice. “Coulda just been ’is mates, or drugs, or stuff falling off the back of a lorry… One fing I do know, ’cause people talked, locally: the ’usband of that girl who killed ’erself was knockin’ twelve bells out of ’er. Tragedy, really. But the papers pinned it all on Steve an’ ’e ran. Well, sex sells better’n domestic violence, doesn’t it? If you find Steve,” she added, “tell ’im I said ’ello. It wasn’t fair, what the papers did.”

Robin had been trained by Strike to organize her interviews and notes into the categories of people, places and things. She now asked both women,

“Were there any other patients you can ever remember giving cause for alarm at the practice, or perhaps having an unusual relationship with Marg—?”

“Well,” said Irene, “remember, Jan, there was that one with the beard down to here…” She placed her hand at waist level, “… remember? What was he called? Apton? Applethorpe? Jan, you remember. You do remember, Jan, he stank like a tramp and you had to go round his house once. He used to wander around near St. John’s. I think he lived on Clerkenwell Road. Sometimes he had his kid with him. Really funny-looking kid. Massive ears.”

“Oh, them,” said Janice, her frown disappearing. “But they weren’t Margot’s—”

“Well, he was stopping people on the street, afterward, telling them he’d killed Margot!” Irene told Strike excitedly. “Yeah! He was! He stopped Dorothy! Of course, Dorothy wasn’t going to tell the police, not Dorothy, she was all ‘load of stuff and nonsense,’ ‘he’s a lunatic,’ but I said to her, ‘What if he actually did do it, Dorothy, and you haven’t told anyone?’ Now, Applethorpe was a proper nutcase. He had a girl locked up—”

“She weren’t locked up, Irene,” said Janice, for the first time showing a trace of impatience. “Social work said she were agoraphobic, but she weren’t being kept there against ’er will—”

“She was peculiar,” said Irene stubbornly. “You told me she was. I think someone should’ve taken the kid away, personally. You said the flat was filthy—”

“You can’t take people’s children off them because they ’aven’t cleaned the ’ouse!” said Janice firmly. She turned back to Strike and Robin. “Yeah, I visited the Applethorpes, just the once, but I don’t fink they ever met Margot. See, it was diff’rent then: doctors ’ad their own lists, and the Applethorpes were registered with Brenner. ’E asked me to go round for ’im, check on the kid.”

“Do you remember the address? Street name?”

“Oh gawd,” said Janice, frowning. “Yeah, I think it was Clerkenwell Road. I think so. See, I only visited the once. The kid ’adn’t been well and Dr. Brenner wanted ’im checked and ’e’d never make an ’ouse call if ’e could avoid it. Anyway, the kid was on the mend, but I spotted right off the dad was—”

“Nutcase—” said Irene, nodding along.

“—jittery, bit out of it,” said Janice. “I went in the kitchen to wash my ’ands and there was a load of benzedrine lying in full view on the worktop. I warned both the parents, now the kid was walking, to put it away somewhere safe—”

“Really funny-looking kid,” interposed Irene.

“—and I went to Brenner after, an’ I said, ‘Dr. Brenner, that man’s abusing benzedrine.’ It was proper addictive, we all knew it by then, even in ’74. ’Course, Brenner thought I was being presumptuous, queryin’ ’is prescriptions. But I was worried, so I called social work wivout telling Brenner, and they were very good. They were already keeping a close eye on the family.”

“But the mother—” said Irene.

“You can’t decide for other people what makes ’em ’appy, Irene!” said Janice. “The mum loved that kid, even if the dad was—well, ’e was odd, poor sod,” Janice conceded. “’E thought ’e was a kind of—I don’t know what you’d call it—a guru, or a magic man. Thought ’e could put the evil eye on people. ’E told me that durin’ the ’ouse call. You do meet people wiv weird ideas, nursin’. I just used to say, ‘Really? ’Ow interesting.’ There’s no point challenging ’em. But Applethorpe thought he could ill-wish people—that’s what we used to call it, in the old days. ’E was worried ’is little boy ’ad got German measles because he’d got cross with ’im. ’E said ’e could do that to people… He died ’imself, poor sod. Year after Margot vanished.”

“Did he?” said Irene, with a trace of disappointment.

“Yeah. It would’ve been after you left, after you married Eddie. I remember, street cleaners found him early in the morning, curled up and dead under the Walter Street bridge. ’Eart attack. Keeled over and there was nobody there to ’elp him. Wasn’t that old, neither. I remember Dr. Brenner being a bit twitchy about it.”

“Why was that?” asked Strike.

“Well, ’e’d prescribed the Bennies the man was abusin’, ’adn’t ’e?”

To Robin’s surprise, a fleeting smile passed over Strike’s face.

“But it weren’t just Applethorpe,” Janice went on, who didn’t seem to have noticed anything odd in Strike’s response. “There was—”

“Oh, tons of people swore blind they’d heard something, or had a hunch, blah blah blah,” said Irene, rolling her eyes, “and there was us, you know, who were actually involved, it was terrible, just—excuse me,” she said, putting her hand on her stomach, “I must just nip to the—sorry.”

Irene left the room in something of a hurry. Janice looked after her, and it was hard, given her naturally smiley face, to tell whether she was more concerned or amused.

“She’ll be fine,” she told Strike and Robin quietly. “I ’ave told ’er the doc’s probably right tellin’ ’er to lay off the spicy food, but she wanted a curry last night… she gets lonely. Rings me up to come over. I stayed overnight. Eddie only died last year. Nearly ninety, bless ’im. ’E adored Irene and the girls. She misses ’im something rotten.”

“Were you about to tell us somebody else had claimed to know what happened to Margot?” Strike prompted her gently.

“What? Oh, yeah… Charlie Ramage. ’E ’ad an ’ot tub and sauna business. Wealfy man, so you’d think ’e ’ad better things to do with ’is time than make up stories, but there you go, people are funny.”

“What did he say?” asked Robin.

“Well, see, motorbikes were Charlie’s ’obby. ’E ’ad loads of ’em, and ’e used to go on these long rides all over the country. ’E ’ad a bad smash and ’e was at ’ome wiv two broken legs, so I was droppin’ in sev’ral times a week… this would’ve been a good two years after Margot disappeared. Well, Charlie was a man ’oo liked to talk, and one day, out of a clear blue sky, ’e swears blind ’e met Margot, about a week after she went missing, in Leamington Spa. But, you know,” Janice said, shaking her head. “I didn’t take it very serious. Lovely man, but like I say, ’e liked to talk.”

“What exactly did he tell you?” asked Robin.

“Said ’e’d been on one of ’is bike trips up north, and ’e stopped outside this big church in Leamington Spa, and ’e was leaning against the wall ’avin’ a cup of tea an’ a sandwich, an’ there was this woman walking in the graveyard on the other side of the railings, lookin’ at the graves. Not like she was in mourning or anyfing, just interested. Black ’air, accordin’ to Charlie. An’ ’e called out to ’er, ‘Nice place, innit?’ and she turned to look at ’im and—well, ’e swore blind it was Margot Bamborough, wiv ’er ’air dyed. ’E said ’e told ’er she looked familiar and she looked upset and hurried off.”

“And he claimed this happened a week after she disappeared?” asked Robin.

“Yeah, ’e said ’e recognized ’er because ’er picture was still all over the papers at the time. So I says, ‘Did you go to the police about this, Charlie?’ And ’e says, ‘Yeah, I did,’ an’ ’e told me ’e was friends with a policeman, quite an ’igh up bloke, an’ ’e told ’is friend. But I never saw or ’eard anyfing about it after, so, you know…”

“Ramage told you this story in 1976?” Strike asked, making a note.

“Yeah, musta been,” said Janice, frowning in an effort to remember, as Irene walked back into the room. “Because they’d got Creed by then. That’s ’ow it came up. ’E’d been reading about the trial in the papers and then ’e says, cool as you like, ‘Well, I don’t fink ’e done anyfing to Margot Bamborough, because I reckon I seen ’er after she disappeared.’”

“Did Margot have any connection with Leamington Spa, as far as you know?” asked Robin.

“What’s this?” said Irene sharply.

“Nuffing,” said Janice. “Just a stupid story some patient told me. Margot in a graveyard wiv dyed hair. You know.”

“In Leamington Spa?” said Irene, looking displeased. Robin had the impression that she greatly resented having left Janice in the spotlight while she was forced back to the bathroom. “You never told me that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Oh… well, it was in ’76,” said Janice, looking slightly cowed. “You must’ve just ’ad Sharon. You ’ad better fings to fink about than Charlie Ramage telling porkies.”

Irene helped herself to another biscuit, frowning slightly.

“I’d like to move on to the practice itself,” said Strike. “How did you find Margot to—”

“To work with?” said Irene, loudly, who seemed to feel it was her turn, having missed out on several minutes of Strike’s attention. “Well, speaking personally—”

Her pause was that of an epicure, savoring the prospect of coming pleasure.

“—to be totally honest, she was one of those people who think they know best about everything. She’d tell you how to live your life, how to do the filing, how to make a cup of tea, blah blah blah—”

“Oh, Irene, she weren’t that bad,” muttered Janice. “I liked—”

“Jan, come on,” said Irene loftily. “She’d never got over being the clever clogs in her family and thought all the rest of us were thick as mince! Well, maybe she didn’t think you were,” said Irene, with an eye roll, as her friend shook her head, “but she did me. Treated me like a moron. Patronizing isn’t it. Now, I didn’t dislike her!” Irene added quickly. “Not dislike. But she was picky. Veee-ry pleased with herself. We’d completely forgotten we came from a two-up, two-down in Stepney, put it that way.”

“How did you find her?” Robin asked Janice.

“Well—” began Janice, but Irene talked over her.

“Snobby. Jan, come on. She marries herself a rich consultant—that was no two-up, two-down, that place out in Ham! Proper eye-opener it was, seeing what she’d married into, and then she has the gall to come into work preaching the liberated life to the rest of us: marriage isn’t the be all and end all, don’t stop your career, blah blah blah. And always finding fault.”

“What did she—?”

“How you answered the phone, how you spoke to patients, how you dressed, even—‘Irene, I don’t think that top’s appropriate for work.’ She was a bloody Bunny Girl! The hypocrisy of her! I didn’t dislike her,” Irene insisted. “I didn’t, truly, I’m just trying to give you the full—oh, and she wouldn’t let us make her hot drinks, would she, Jan? Neither of the other two doctors ever complained we didn’t know what to do with a teabag.”

“That’s not why—” began Janice.

“Jan, come on, you remember how fussy—”

“Why would you say she didn’t like people making her drinks?” Strike asked Janice. Robin could tell that his patience was wearing thin with Irene.

“Oh, that was ’cause of when I was washing up mugs one day,” said Janice. “I tipped the dregs out of Dr. Brenner’s and I found an—”

“Atomal pill, wasn’t it?” asked Irene.

“—Amytal capsule, stuck to the bottom. I knew what it was from the col—”

“Blue,” interjected Irene, nodding, “weren’t they?”

“Blue ’Eavens, they used to call them on the street, yeah,” said Janice. “Downers. I always made sure everyone knew I didn’t ’ave nuffing like that in me nurse’s bag, when I was out makin’ ’ouse calls. You ’ad to be careful, in case you got mugged.”

“How did you know it was Dr. Brenner’s cup?” asked Strike.

“’E always used the same one, wiv his old university’s coat of arms on,” said Janice. “There’d ’ave been ’ell to pay if anyone else touched it.” She hesitated, “I don’t know wevver—if you’ve talked to Dr. Gupta—”

“We know Dr. Brenner was addicted to barbiturates,” Strike said. Janice looked relieved.

“Right—well, I knew ’e must’ve dropped it in there, accidental, when he was taking some. Probably didn’t realize, thought it ’ad rolled away on the floor. There’d have been a lot of questions asked, usually, at a doctor’s surgery, finding drugs in a drink. If something gets into someone’s tea by accident, that’s serious.”

“How much harm would a single capsule—?” Robin began.

“Oh, no real harm,” said Irene knowledgeably, “would it, Jan?”

“No, a single capsule, that’s not even a full dose,” said Janice. “You’d’ve felt a bit sleepy, that’s all. Anyway, Margot come out the back to make the tea when I was tryin’ to get the pill off the bottom of the mug with a teaspoon. We ’ad a sink and a kettle and a fridge just outside the nurse’s room. She saw me trying to scrape the pill out. So it weren’t fussiness, ’er making ’er own drinks after that. It were precautionary. I took extra care to make sure I was drinking out of me own mug, as well.”

“Did you tell Margot how you thought the pill had got in the tea?” asked Robin.

“No,” said Janice, “because Dr. Gupta ’ad asked me not to mention Brenner’s problem, so I just said ‘must’ve been an accident,’ which was technically true. I expected her to call a staff meeting and hold an inquiry—”

“Ah, well, you know my theory about why she didn’t do that,” said Irene.

“Irene,” said Janice, shaking her head. “Honestly—”

“My theory,” said Irene, ignoring Janice, “is Margot thought someone else had put the pill in Brenner’s drink, and if you’re asking me who—”

“Irene,” said Janice again, clearly urging restraint, but Irene was unstoppable.

“—I’ll tell you—Gloria. That girl was as rough as hell and she came from a criminal background—no, I’m saying it, Jan, I’m sure Cameron wants to know everything what was going on at that practice—”

“’Ow can Gloria putting something in Brenner’s tea—and by the way,” Janice said to Strike and Robin, “I don’t fink she did—”

“Well, as I was on the desk with Gloria every day, Jan,” said Irene loftily, “I knew what she was really like—”

“—but even if she did put the pill in ’is tea, Irene, ’ow could that ’ave anything to do with Margot disappearin’?”

“I don’t know,” said Irene, who seemed to be getting cross, “but they’re interested in who was working there and what went on—aren’t you?” she demanded of Strike, who nodded. With a “See?” to Janice, Irene plunged on, “So: Gloria came from a really rough family, a Little Italy family—”

Janice tried to protest, but Irene overrode her again.

“She did, Jan! One of her brothers was drug dealing, that sort of thing, she told me so! That Atomal capsule might not’ve come from Brenner’s store at all! She could’ve got it off one of her brothers. Gloria hated Brenner. He was a miserable old sod, all right, always having a go at us. She said to me once, ‘Imagine living with him. If I was his sister I’d poison the old bastard’s food,’ and Margot heard her, and told her off, because there were patients in the waiting room, and it wasn’t professional, saying something like that about one of the doctors.

“Anyway, when Margot never did anything about the pill in Brenner’s mug, I thought, that’s because she knows who did it. She didn’t want her little pet in trouble. Gloria was her project, see. Gloria spent half her time in Margot’s consulting room being lectured on feminism while I was left to hold the fort on reception… she’d’ve let Gloria away with murder, Margot would. Total blind spot.”

“Do either of you know where Gloria is now?” asked Strike.

“No idea. She left not long after Margot disappeared,” said Irene.

“I never saw her again after she left the practice,” said Janice, who looked uncomfortable, “but Irene, I don’t fink we should be flinging accusations—”

“Do me a favor,” said Irene abruptly to her friend, a hand on her stomach, “and fetch that medicine off the top of the fridge for me, will you? I’m still not right. And would anyone like more tea or coffee while Jan’s there?”

Janice got up uncomplainingly, collected empty cups, loaded the tray and set off for the kitchen. Robin got up to open the door for her, and Janice smiled at her as she passed. While Janice’s footsteps padded away down the thickly carpeted hall, Irene said, unsmiling,

“Poor Jan. She’s had an awful life, really. Like something out of Dickens, her childhood. Eddie and I helped her out financially a few times, after Beattie left her. She calls herself ‘Beattie,’ but he never married her, you know,” said Irene. “Awful, isn’t it? And they had a kid, too. I don’t think he ever really wanted to be there, and then he walked out. Larry, though—I mean, he wasn’t the brightest tool in the box,” Irene laughed a little, “but he thought the world of her. I think she thought she could do better at first—Larry worked for Eddie, you know—not on the management side, he was just a builder, but in the end, I think she realized—well, you know, not everyone’s prepared to take on a kid…”

“Could I ask you about the threatening notes to Margot you saw, Mrs. Hickson?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Irene, pleased. “So you believe me, do you? Because the police didn’t.”

“There were two, you said in your statement?”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t’ve opened the first one, only Dorothy was off, and Dr. Brenner told me to sort out the post. Dorothy was never off usually. It was because her son was having his tonsils out. Spoiled little so-and-so, he was. That was the only time I ever saw her upset, when she told me she was taking him into hospital the next day. Hard as nails, usually—but she was a widow, and he was all she had.”

Janice reappeared with refilled teapot and cafetière. Robin got up and took the heavy teapot and cafetière off the tray for her. Janice accepted her help with a smile and a whispered “thanks,” so that she didn’t interrupt Irene.

“What did the note say?” Strike asked.

“Well, it’s ages ago, now,” said Irene. Janice handed her a packet of indigestion tablets, which Irene took with a brief smile, but no thanks. “But from what I remember…” she popped pills out of the blister pack, “let me see, I want to get this right… it was very rude. It called Margot the c-word, I remember that. And said hellfire waited for women like her.”

“Was it typed? Printed?”

“Written,” said Irene. She took a couple of tablets with a sip of tea.

“What about the second one?” said Strike.

“I don’t know what that said. I had to go into her consulting room to give her a message, see, and I saw it lying on her desk. Same writing, I recognized it at once. She didn’t like me seeing it, I could tell. Screwed it up and threw it in the bin.”

Janice passed round fresh cups of tea and coffee. Irene helped herself to another chocolate biscuit.

“I doubt you’ll know,” said Strike, “but I wondered if you ever had any reason to suspect that Margot was pregnant before she—”

“How d’you know about that?” gasped Irene, looking thunderstruck.

“She was?” said Robin.

“Yes!” said Irene. “See—Jan, don’t look like that, honestly—I took a call from a nursing home, while she was out on a house call! They called the practice to confirm she’d be in next day…” and she mouthed the next few words, “for an abortion!”

“They told you what procedure she was going in for, over the phone?” asked Robin.

For a moment, Irene looked rather confused.

“They—well, no—actually, I—well, I’m not proud of it, but I called the clinic back. Just nosy. You do that kind of thing when you’re young, don’t you?”

Robin hoped her reciprocal smile looked sincerer than Irene’s.

“When was this, Mrs. Hickson, can you remember?” Strike asked.

“Not long before she disappeared. Four weeks? Something like that?”

“Before or after the anonymous notes?”

“I don’t—after, I think,” said Irene. “Or was it? I can’t remember…”

“Did you talk to anyone else about the appointment?”

“Only Jan, and she told me off. Didn’t you, Jan?”

“I know you didn’t mean any ’arm,” muttered Janice, “but patient confidentiality—”

“Margot wasn’t our patient. It’s a different thing.”

“And you didn’t tell the police about this?” Strike asked her.

“No,” said Irene, “because I—well, I shouldn’t’ve known, should I? Anyway, how could it have anything to do with her disappearing?”

“Apart from Mrs. Beattie, did you tell anyone else about it?”

“No,” said Irene defensively, “because—I mean, I wouldn’t have told anyone else—you kept your mouth shut, working at a doctor’s surgery. I could’ve told all kinds of people’s secrets, couldn’t I? Being a receptionist, I saw files, but of course you didn’t say anything, I knew how to keep secrets, it was part of the job…”

Expressionless, Strike wrote “protesting too much” in his notebook.

“I’ve got another question, Mrs. Hickson, and it might be a sensitive one,” Strike said, looking up again. “I heard you and Margot had a disagreement at the Christmas party.”

“Oh,” said Irene, her face falling. “That. Yes, well—”

There was a slight pause.

“I was cross about what she’d done to Kevin. Jan’s son. Remember, Jan?”

Janice looked confused.

“Come on, Jan, you do,” said Irene, tapping Janice’s arm again. “When she took him into her consulting room and blah blah blah.”

“Oh,” said Janice. For a moment, Robin had the distinct impression that Janice was truly cross with her friend this time. “But—”

“You remember,” said Irene, glaring at her.

“I… yeah,” said Janice. “Yeah, I was angry about that, all right.”

“Jan had kept him off school,” Irene told Strike. “Hadn’t you, Jan? How old was he, six? And then—”

“What exactly happened?” Strike asked Janice.

“Kev had a tummy ache,” said Janice. “Well, schoolitis, really. My neighbor ’oo sometimes looked after ’im wasn’t well—”

“Basically,’ interrupted Irene, “Jan brought Kevin to work and—”

“Could Mrs. Beattie tell the story?” Strike asked.

“Oh—yes, of course!” said Irene. She put her hand back on her abdomen again and stroked it, with a long-suffering air.

“Your usual childminder was ill?” Strike prompted Janice.

“Yeah, but I was s’posed to be at work, so I took Kev wiv me to the practice and give ’im a coloring book. Then I ’ad to change a lady’s dressing in the back room, so I put Kev in the waiting room. Irene and Gloria were keeping an eye on him for me. But then Margot—well, she took ’im into her consulting room and examined ’im, stripped ’im off to the waist and everything. She knew ’e was my son an’ she knew why ’e was there, but she took it upon herself… I was angry, I can’t lie,” said Janice quietly. ‘We ’ad words. I said, ‘All you ’ad to do was wait until I’d seen the patient and I’d’ve come in wiv ’im while you looked at him.’

“And I’ve got to say, when I put it to her straight, she backed down right away and apologized. No,” Janice said, because Irene had puffed herself up, “she did, Irene, she apologized, said I was quite right, she shouldn’t have seen him without me, but ’e’d been holding his tummy and she acted on instinct. It wasn’t badly intentioned. She just, sometimes—”

“—put people’s backs up, that’s what I’m saying,” said Irene. “Thought she was above everyone else, she knew best—”

“—rushed in, I was going to say. But she were a good doctor,” said Janice, with quiet firmness. “You ’ear it all, when you’re in people’s ’ouses, you ’ear what the patients think of them, and Margot was well liked. She took time. She was kind—she was, Irene, I know she got on your wick, but that’s what the patients—”

“Oh, well, maybe,” said Irene, with an if-you-say-so inflection. “But she didn’t have much competition at St. John’s, did she?”

“Were Dr. Gupta and Dr. Brenner unpopular?” Strike asked.

“Dr. Gupta was lovely,” said Janice. “A very good doctor, although some patients didn’t want to see a brown man, and that’s the truth. But Brenner was an ’ard man to like. It was only after he died that I understood why he might’ve—”

Irene gave a huge gasp and then began, unexpectedly, to laugh.

“Tell them what you collect, Janice. Go on!” She turned to Strike and Robin. “If this isn’t the creepiest, most morbid—”

“I don’t collect ’em,” said Janice, who had turned pink. “They’re just something I like to save—”

“Obituaries! What d’you think of that? The rest of us collect china or snow globes, blah blah blah, but Janice collects—”

“It isn’t a collection,” repeated Janice, still pink-faced. “All it is—” She addressed Robin with a trace of appeal. “My mum couldn’t read—”

“Imagine,” said Irene complacently, stroking her stomach. Janice faltered for a moment, then said,

“—yeah, so… Dad wasn’t bothered about books, but ’e used to bring the paper ’ome, and that’s ’ow I learned to read. I used to cut out the best stories. ’Uman interest, I s’pose you’d call them. I’ve never been that interested in fiction. I can’t see the point, things somebody’s made up.”

“Oh, I love a good novel,” breathed Irene, still rubbing her stomach.

“Anyway… I dunno… when you read an obituary, you find out ’oo people’ve really been, don’t you? If it’s someone I know, or I nursed, I keep ’em because, I dunno, I felt like somebody should. You get your life written up in the paper—it’s an achievement, isn’t it?”

“Not if you’re Dennis Creed, it isn’t,” said Irene. Looking as though she’d said something very clever she reached forwards to take another biscuit, and a deafening fart ripped through the room.

Irene turned scarlet. Robin thought for one horrible moment that Strike was going to laugh, so she said loudly to Janice,

“Did you keep Dr. Brenner’s obituary?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Janice, who seemed completely unperturbed by the loud noise that had just emanated from Irene. Perhaps she was used to far worse, as a nurse. “An’ it explained a lot.”

“In what way?” asked Robin, determinedly not looking at either Strike or Irene.

“’E’d been into Bergen-Belsen, one of the first medical men in there.”

“God,” said Robin, shocked.

“I know,” said Janice. “’E never talked about it. I’d never ’ave known, if I ’adn’t read it in the paper. What ’e must have seen… mounds of bodies, dead kids… I read a library book about it. Dreadful. Maybe that’s why ’e was the way ’e was, I dunno. I felt sorry, when I read it. I ’adn’t seen ’im in years by the time ’e died. Someone showed me the obituary, knowing I’d been at St. John’s, and I kept it as a record of him. You could forgive Brenner a lot, once you saw what ’e’d witnessed, what ’e’d been through… but that’s true of everyone, really, innit? Once you know, ev’rything’s explained. It’s a shame you often don’t know until it’s too late to—you all right, love?” she said to Irene.

In the wake of the fart, Robin suspected that Irene had decided the only dignified cover-up was to emphasize that she was unwell.

“D’you know, I think it’s stress,” she said, her hand down the waist­band of her trousers. “It always flares up when I’m… sorry,” she said with dignity to Strike and Robin, “but I’m afraid I don’t think I…”

“Of course,” said Strike, closing his notebook. “I think we’ve asked everything we came for, anyway. Unless there’s anything else,” he asked the two women, “that you’ve remembered that seems odd, in retrospect, or out of place?”

“We’ve fort, ’aven’t we?” Janice asked Irene. “All these years… we’ve talked about it, obviously.”

“It must’ve been Creed, mustn’t it?” said Irene, with finality. “What other explanation is there? Where else could she have gone? Do you think they’ll let you in to see him?” she asked Strike again, with a last flicker of curiosity.

“No idea,” he said, getting to his feet. “Thanks very much for your hospitality, anyway, and for answering our questions…”

Janice saw them out. Irene waved wordlessly as they left the room. Robin could tell that the interview had fallen short of her expectation of enjoyment. Awkward and uncomfortable admissions had been forced from her; the picture she’d painted of her young self had not been, perhaps, everything she would have wished—and nobody, Robin thought, shaking hands with Janice at the door, would particularly enjoy farting loudly in front of strangers.

21

“Well, I’m no doctor,” said Strike, as they crossed the road back to the Land Rover, “but I blame the curry.”

“Don’t,” said Robin, laughing against her will. She couldn’t help but feel a certain vicarious embarrassment.

“You weren’t sitting as near her as I was,” said Strike, as he got back into the car. “I’m guessing lamb bhuna—”

“Seriously,” said Robin, half-laughing, half-disgusted, “stop.”

As he drew his seatbelt back over himself, Strike said,

“I need a proper drink.”

“There’s a decent pub not far from here,” said Robin. “I looked it up. The Trafalgar Tavern.”

Looking up the pub was doubtless yet another Nice Thing that Robin had chosen to do for his birthday, and Strike wondered whether it was her intention to make him feel guilty. Probably not, he thought, but that, nevertheless, was the effect, so he passed no comment other than to ask,

“What did you think of all that?”

“Well, there were a few cross-currents, weren’t there?” said Robin, steering out of the parking space. “And I think we were told a couple of lies.”

“Me too,” said Strike. “Which ones did you spot?”

“Irene and Janice’s row at the Christmas party, for starters,” said Robin, turning out of Circus Street. “I don’t think it was really about Margot examining Janice’s son—although I do think Margot examined Kevin without permission.”

“So do I,” said Strike. “But I agree: I don’t think that’s what the row was about. Irene forced Janice to tell that story, because she didn’t want to admit the truth. Which makes me wonder… Irene getting Janice to come to her house, so we can interview them both together: was that so Irene could make sure Janice didn’t tell us anything she wouldn’t want told? That’s the trouble with friends you’ve had for decades, isn’t it? They know too much.”

Robin, who was busy trying to remember the route to the Trafalgar she’d memorized that morning, thought at once about all those stories Ilsa had told her about Strike and Charlotte’s relationship. Ilsa had told her Strike had refused an invitation to go over to their house that evening for dinner, claiming that he had a prior arrangement with his sister. Robin found it hard to believe this, given Strike’s and Lucy’s recent row. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but she’d also wondered whether Strike wasn’t avoiding being in her company outside work hours.

“You don’t suspect Irene, do you?”

“Only of being a liar, a gossip and a compulsive attention-seeker,” said Strike. “I don’t think she’s bright enough to have abducted Margot Bamborough and not given herself away in forty years. On the other hand, lies are always interesting. Anything else catch your interest?”

“Yes. There was something funny about that Leamington Spa story, or rather, Irene’s reaction when she heard Janice talking about it… I think Leamington Spa meant something to her. And it was odd that Janice hadn’t told her what that patient said. You’d think she definitely would have done, given that they’re best friends, and they both knew Margot, and they’ve stayed in touch all these years. Even if Janice thought that man Ramage was making it all up, why wouldn’t she tell Irene?”

“Another good point,” said Strike, looking thoughtfully at the neo-classical façade of the National Maritime Museum as they drove past wide stretches of beautifully manicured emerald lawn. “What did you think of Janice?”

“Well, when we were allowed to hear her speak, she seemed quite decent,” said Robin cautiously. “She seemed fair-minded about Margot and Douthwaite. Why she puts up with being treated as Irene’s skivvy, though…”

“Some people need to be needed… and there might be a sense of obligation, if Irene was telling the truth about her and her husband helping Janice out financially when she needed it.”

Strike spotted the pub Robin had chosen from a distance. Large and opulent-looking, with many balconies and awnings, not to mention window-baskets and coats of arms, it stood on the bank of the Thames. Robin parked and they proceeded past black iron bollards to the paved area where many wooden tables afforded a view over the river, in the midst of which a life-size black statue of the diminutive Lord Nelson faced the water.

“See?” said Robin, “you can sit outside and smoke.”

“Isn’t it a bit cold?” said Strike.

“This coat’s padded. I’ll get the—”

“No, I will,” said Strike firmly. “What d’you want?”

“Just a lime and soda, please, as I’m driving.”

As Strike walked into the pub, there was a sudden chorus of “Happy Birthday to You.” For a split-second, seeing helium balloons in the corner, he was horror-struck, thinking that Robin had brought him here for a surprise party; but a bare heartbeat later, it registered that he didn’t recognize a single face, and that the balloons formed the figure 80. A tiny woman with lavender hair was beaming at the top of a table full of family: flashes went off as she blew out the candles on a large chocolate cake. Applause and cheers followed, and a toddler blew a feathered whistle.

Strike headed toward the bar, still slightly shaken, taking himself to task for having imagined, for a moment, that Robin would have arranged a surprise party for him. Even Charlotte, with whom he’d had the longest and closest relationship of his life, had never done that. Indeed, Charlotte had never allowed anything as mundane as his birthday to interfere with her own whims and moods. On Strike’s twenty-seventh, when she’d been going through one of her intermittent phases of either rampant jealousy, or rage at his refusal to give up the army (the precise causes of their many scenes and rows tended to blur in his mind), she’d thrown his wrapped gift out of a third-floor window in front of him.

But, of course, there were other memories. His thirty-third birthday, for instance. He’d just been discharged from Selly Oak hospital, and was walking for the first time on a prosthesis, and Charlotte had taken him back to her flat in Notting Hill, cooked for him, and returned from the kitchen at the end of the meal holding two cups of coffee, stark naked and more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. He’d laughed and gasped at the same time. He hadn’t had sex for nearly two years. The night that had followed would probably never be forgotten by him, nor the way she had sobbed in his arms afterward, telling him that he was the only man for her, that she was afraid of what she felt, afraid that she was evil for not regretting his missing lower leg if it brought her back to him, if it meant that, at last, she could look after him as he had always looked after her. And close to midnight, Strike had proposed to her, and they’d made love again, and then talked through to dawn about how he was going to start his detective agency, and she’d told him she didn’t want a ring, that he was to save his money for his new career, at which he would be magnificent.

Drinks and crisps purchased, Strike returned to Robin, who was sitting on an outside bench, hands in her pockets, looking glum.

“Cheer up,” said Strike, speaking to himself as much as to her.

“Sorry,” said Robin, though she didn’t really know why she was apologizing.

He sat down beside her, rather than opposite, so both of them faced the river. There was a small shingle beach below them, and waves lapped the cold pebbles. On the opposite bank rose the steel-colored office blocks of Canary Wharf; to their left, the Shard. The river was the color of lead on this cold November day. Strike tore one of the crisp packets down the middle so that both could help themselves. Wishing she’d asked for coffee instead of a cold drink, Robin took a sip of her lime and soda, ate a couple of crisps, returned her hands to her pockets, then said,

“I know this isn’t the attitude, but honestly… I don’t think we’re going to find out what happened to Margot Bamborough.”

“What’s brought this on?”

“I suppose Irene misremembering names… Janice going along with her, covering up the reason for the Christmas party row… it’s such a long time ago. People are under no obligation to tell the truth to us now, even if they can remember it. Factor in people getting wedded to old theories, like that whole thing about Gloria and the pill in Brenner’s mug, and people wanting to make themselves important, pretending to know things and… well, I’m starting to think we’re attempting the impossible here.”

A wave of tiredness had swept over Robin while sitting in the cold, waiting for Strike, and in its wake had come hopelessness.

“Pull yourself together,” said Strike bracingly. “We’ve already found out two big things the police never knew.” He pulled out his cigarettes, lit one, then said, “Firstly: there was a big stock of barbiturates on the premises where Margot worked. Secondly: Margot Bamborough might well have had an abortion.

“Taking the barbiturates first,” he said, “are we overlooking something very obvious, which is that there were means on the premises to put someone to sleep?”

“Margot wasn’t put to sleep,” said Robin, gloomily munching crisps. “She walked out of there.”

“Only if we assume—”

“—Gloria wasn’t lying. I know,” said Robin. “But how do she and Theo—because Theo’s still got to be in on it, hasn’t she? How did Gloria and Theo administer enough barbiturates to render Margot unconscious? Don’t forget, if Irene’s telling the truth, Margot wasn’t letting anyone else make her drinks at that point. And from what Janice said about dosage, you’d need a lot of pills to make someone actually unconscious.”

“Well reasoned. So, going back to that little story about the pill in the tea—”

“Didn’t you believe it?”

“I did,” said Strike, “because it seems a totally pointless lie. It’s not interesting enough to make an exciting anecdote, is it, a single pill? It does reopen the question of whether Margot knew about or suspected Brenner’s addiction, though. She might’ve noticed him being odd in his manner. Downers would make him drowsy. Perhaps she’d seen he was slow on the uptake. Everything we’ve found out about Margot suggests that if she thought Brenner was behaving unprofessionally, or might be dangerous to patients, she’d have waded straight in and confronted him. And we’ve just heard a lot of interesting background on Brenner, who sounds like a traumatized, unhappy and lonely man. What if Margot threatened him with being struck off? Loss of status and prestige, to a man who has virtually nothing else in his life? People have killed for less.”

“He left the surgery before she did, that night.”

“What if he waited for her? Offered her a lift?”

“If he did, I think she’d have been suspicious,” said Robin. “Not that he wanted to hurt her, but that he was going to shout at her, which would’ve been in character, from what we know of him. I’d rather have walked in the rain, personally. And she was a lot younger than him, and tall and fit. I can’t remember now where he lived…”

“With his unmarried sister, about twenty minutes’ drive from the practice. The sister said he’d arrived home at the usual time. A dog-walking neighbor confirmed they’d seen him through the window round about eleven…

“But I can think of one other possibility regarding those barbitu­rates,” Strike went on. “As Janice pointed out, they had street value, and by the sounds of it, Brenner had amassed a big stock of them. We’ve got to consider the possibility that some outsider knew there were valuable drugs on the premises, set out to nick them, and Margot got in the way.”

“Which takes us back to Margot dying on the premises, which means—”

“Gloria and Theo come back into the frame. Gloria and Theo might have planned to take the drugs themselves. And we’ve just heard—”

“—about the drug-dealing brother,” said Robin.

“Why the skeptical tone?”

“Irene was determined to have a go at Gloria, wasn’t she?”

“She was, yeah, but the fact that Gloria had a drug-dealing brother is information worth knowing, as is the fact that there were a stack of drugs on the premises that were ripe for nicking. Brenner wouldn’t have wanted to admit he had them in the first place, so probably wouldn’t have reported the theft, which makes for a situation open to exploitation.”

“A criminal brother doesn’t make a person criminal in themselves.”

“Agreed, but it makes me even keener to find Gloria. The term ‘person of interest’ fits her pretty accurately…

“And then there’s the abortion,” said Strike. “If Irene’s telling the truth about the nursing home calling to confirm the appointment—”

“If,” said Robin.

“I don’t think that was a lie,” said Strike. “For the opposite reason to the pill in Brenner’s cup. That lie’s too big. People don’t make things like that up. Anyway, she told Janice about it at the time, and their little row about patient confidentiality rings true. And C. B. Oakden must’ve based the story on something. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that tip-off came from Irene. She doesn’t strike me as a woman who’d turn down a chance to speculate or gossip.”

Robin said nothing. She’d only once in her life had to face the possibility that she might be pregnant, and could still remember the relief that had flooded her when it became clear that she wasn’t, and wouldn’t have to face still more contact with strangers, and another intimate procedure, more blood, more pain.

Imagine aborting your husband’s child, she thought. Could Margot really have done that, when she already had that child’s sister at home? What had been going through her mind, a month before she disappeared? Perhaps she’d been quietly breaking down, like Talbot? The past few years had taught Robin how very mysterious human beings were, even to those who thought they knew them best. Infidelity and bigamy, kinks and fetishes, theft and fraud, stalking and harassment: she’d now delved into so many secret lives she’d lost count. Nor did she hold herself superior to any of the deceived and duped who came to the agency, craving truth. Hadn’t she thought she knew her own husband back to front? How many hundreds of nights had they lain entwined like Siamese twins, whispering confidences and sharing laughter in the dark? She’d spent nearly half her life with Matthew, and not until a hard, bright diamond ear stud had appeared in their bed had she realized that he was living a life apart, and was not, and perhaps never had been, the man she thought she knew.

“You don’t want to think she had an abortion,” said Strike, correctly deducing at least part of the reason for Robin’s silence. She didn’t answer, instead asking,

“You haven’t heard back from her friend Oonagh, have you?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Strike. “Yeah, I got an email yesterday. She is a retired vicar, and she’d be delighted to meet us when she comes down to London to do some Christmas shopping. Date to be confirmed.”

“That’s good,” said Robin. “You know, I’d like to talk to someone who actually liked Margot.”

“Gupta liked her,” said Strike. “And Janice, she’s just said so.”

Robin ripped open the second bag of crisps.

“Which is what you’d expect, isn’t it?” she said. “That people would at least pretend they liked Margot, after what happened. But Irene didn’t. Don’t you find it a bit… excessive… to be holding on to that much resentment, forty years later? She really put the boot in. Wouldn’t you think it was… I don’t know, more politic…”

“To claim to be friends?”

“Yes… but maybe Irene knew there were far too many witnesses to the fact that they weren’t friends. What did you think of the anonymous notes? True or false?”

“Good question,” said Strike, scratching his chin. “Irene really enjoyed telling us Margot had been called ‘the c-word,’ but ‘hell­fire’ doesn’t sound like the kind of thing she’d invent. I’d have expected something more in the ‘uppity bitch’ line.”

He drew out his notebook again, and scanned the notes he’d made of the interview.

“Well, we still need to check these leads out, for what they’re worth. Why don’t you follow up Charlie Ramage and Leamington Spa, and I’ll look into the Bennie-abusing Applethorpe?”

“You just did it again,” said Robin.

“Did what?”

“Smirked when you said ‘Bennies.’ What’s so funny about benzedrine?”

“Oh—” Strike chuckled. “I was just reminded of something my Uncle Ted told me. Did you ever watch Crossroads?”

“What’s Crossroads?”

“I always forget how much younger you are,” Strike said. “It was a daytime soap opera and it had a character in it called Benny. He was—well, these days you’d call him special needs. Simple. He wore a wooly hat. Iconic character, in his way.”

“You were thinking of him?” said Robin. It didn’t seem particularly amusing.

“No, but you need to know about him to understand the next bit. I assume you know about the Falklands War.”

“I’m younger than you, Strike. I’m not pig-ignorant.”

“OK, right. So, the British troops who went over there—Ted was there, 1982—nicknamed the locals ‘Bennies,’ after the character on Crossroads. Command gets wind of this, and the order comes down the line, ‘Stop calling these people we’ve just liberated Bennies.’ So,” said Strike, grinning, “They started calling them ‘Stills.’”

“‘Stills’? What does ‘Stills’ mean?”

“‘Still Bennies,’” said Strike, and he let out a great roar of laughter. Robin laughed, too, but mostly at Strike’s amusement. When his guffaws had subsided, both watched the river for a few seconds, drinking and, in Strike’s case, smoking, until he said,

“I’m going to write to the Ministry of Justice. Apply for permission to visit Creed.”

“Seriously?”

“We’ve got to try. The authorities always thought Creed assaulted or killed more women than he was done for. There was jewelry in his house and bits of clothing nobody ever identified. Just because everyone thinks it’s Creed—”

“—doesn’t mean it isn’t,” agreed Robin, who followed the tortured logic perfectly.

Strike sighed, rubbed his face, cigarette still poking out of his mouth, then said,

“Want to see exactly how crazy Talbot was?”

“Go on.”

Strike pulled the leather-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. Robin opened it and turned the pages in silence.

They were covered in strange drawings and diagrams. The writing was small, meticulously neat but cramped. There was much underlining and circling of phrases and symbols. The pentagram recurred. The pages were littered with names, but none connected with the case: Crowley, Lévi, Adams and Schmidt.

“Huh,” she said quietly, stopping on a particularly heavily embellished page on which a goat’s head with a third eye looked balefully up at her. “Look at this…”

She bent closer.

“He’s using astrological symbols.”

“He’s what?” said Strike, frowning down at the page she was perusing.

“That’s Libra,” said Robin, pointing at a symbol toward the bottom of the page. “It’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.”

“He’s using bloody star signs?” said Strike, pulling the book back toward him, looking so disgusted that Robin started to laugh again.

Strike scanned the page. Robin was right. The circles drawn around the goat’s head told him something else, too.

“He’s calculated the full horoscope for the moment he thought she was abducted,” he said. “Look at the date there. The eleventh of October 1974. Half past six in the evening… fuck’s sake. Astrology… he was out of his tree.”

“What’s your sign?” asked Robin, trying to work it out.

“No idea.”

“Oh sod off,” said Robin.

He looked at her, taken aback.

“You’re being affected!” she said. “Everyone knows their star sign. Don’t pretend to be above it.”

Strike grinned reluctantly, took a large drag on his cigarette, exhaled, then said,

“Sagittarius, Scorpio rising, with the sun in the first house.”

“You’re—” Robin began to laugh. “Did you just pull that out of your backside, or is it real?”

“Of course, it’s not fucking real,” said Strike. “None of it’s real, is it? But yeah. That’s what my natal horoscope says. Stop bloody laughing. Remember who my mother was. She loved all that shit. One of her best mates did my full horoscope for her when I was born. I should have recognized that straight off,” he said, pointing at the goat drawing. “But I haven’t been through this properly yet, haven’t had time.”

“So what does having the sun in the first house mean?”

“It means nothing, it’s all bollocks.”

Robin could tell that he didn’t want to admit that he’d remembered, which made her laugh some more. Half-annoyed, half-amused, he muttered,

“Independent. Leadership.”

“Well—”

“It’s all bollocks, and we’ve got enough mystic crap swimming round this case without adding star signs. The medium and the holy place, Talbot and Baphomet—”

“—Irene and her broken Margot Fonteyn,” said Robin.

“Irene and her broken fucking Margot Fonteyn,” Strike muttered, rolling his eyes.

A fine shower of icy rain began to fall, speckling the table top and over Talbot’s notebook, which Strike closed before the ink could run. In unspoken agreement, both got up and headed back toward the Land Rover.

The lavender-haired old lady who shared Strike’s birthday was now being helped into a nearby Toyota by what looked like two daughters. All around her car stood family, smiling and talking under umbrellas. Just for a moment, as he pulled himself back inside the Land Rover, Strike wondered where he’d be if he lived to eighty, and who’d be there with him.

22

Strike got himself a takeaway that night, to eat alone in his attic flat. As he upended the Singapore noodles onto his plate, he inwardly acknowledged the irony that, had Ilsa not been so keen to act as midwife to a romantic relationship between himself and Robin, he might now have been sitting in Nick and Ilsa’s flat in Octavia Road, enjoying a laugh with two of his old friends and indeed with Robin herself, whose company had never yet palled on him, through the many long hours they had worked together.

Strike’s thoughts lingered on his partner while he ate, on the kiss on the well-chosen card, on the headphones and the fact that she was now calling him Strike in moments of annoyance, or when the two of them were joking, all of them clear signs of increasing intimacy. However stressful the divorce proceedings, of which she’d shared few details, however little she might consciously be seeking romance, she was nevertheless a free agent.

Not for the first time, Strike wondered exactly how egotistical it was to suspect that Robin’s feelings toward him might be warmer than those of pure friendship. He got on with her better than he’d ever got on with any woman. Their mutual liking had survived all the stresses of running a business together, the personal trials each had endured since they had met, even the major disagreement that had once seen him sack her. She’d hurried to the hospital when he had found himself alone with a critically ill nephew, brooking, he had no doubt, the displeasure of the ex-husband Strike never forgot to call “that arsehole” inside his own head.

Nor was Strike unconscious of Robin’s good looks: indeed, he’d been fully aware of them ever since she’d taken off her coat in his office for the first time. But her physical appeal was less of a threat to his peace of mind than the deep, guilty liking for being, currently, the main man in her life. Now that the possibility of something more lay in front of him, now that her husband was gone, and she was single, he found himself seriously wondering what would happen, should they act upon what he was beginning to suspect was a mutual attraction. Could the agency, for which they’d both sacrificed so much, which for Strike represented the culmination of all his ambitions, survive the partners falling into bed together? However he reframed this question, the answer always came back “no,” because he was certain, for reasons that had to do with past trauma, not from any particularly puritanical streak, that what Robin sought, ultimately, was the security and permanence of marriage.

And he wasn’t the marrying kind. No matter the inconveniences, what he craved at the end of a working day was his private space, clean and ordered, organized exactly as he liked it, free of emotional storms, from guilt and recriminations, from demands to service Hallmark’s idea of romance, from a life where someone else’s happiness was his responsibility. The truth was that he’d always been responsible for some woman: for Lucy, as they grew up together in squalor and chaos; for Leda, who lurched from lover to lover, and whom he had sometimes had to physically protect as a teenager; for Charlotte, whose volatility and self-destructive tendencies had been given many different names by therapists and psychiatrists, but whom he had loved in spite of it all. He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he’d had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He’d sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.

Except that, almost against his will, he did care about Robin. He felt familiar stirrings of a desire to make her happy that irked him far more than the habit he’d developed of looking determinedly away when she bent over a desk. They were friends, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and he suspected the best way to guarantee that was never see each other naked.

When he’d washed up his plate, Strike opened the window to admit the cold night air, reminding himself that every woman he knew would have been complaining immediately about the draft. He then lit a cigarette, opened the laptop he’d brought upstairs and drafted a letter to the Ministry of Justice, explaining that he’d been hired by Anna Phipps, setting out his proven credentials as an investigator both within the army and outside it, and requesting permission to visit and question Dennis Creed in Broadmoor.

Once finished, he yawned, lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day and went to lie down on his bed, as usual undoing his trousers first. Picking up The Demon of Paradise Park, he turned to the final chapter.

Strike put down the book and lay for a while, smoking and thinking. Then he reached for Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which he’d earlier thrown onto his bed when taking off his coat.

Flicking through the densely packed pages, looking for something comprehensible, something he could connect with a solid fact or reference point, he suddenly placed a thick finger in the book to stop the pages turning, his attention caught by a sentence written mostly in English that seemed familiar.

It was an effort to get up and fetch his own notebook, but this he did. Slumping back onto his bed, he found the sentence that Pat had translated for him from Pitman shorthand:

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

The unknown word, Strike realized, was the same symbol that followed the word “Killer” in Talbot’s notebook.

With a feeling of both exasperation and curiosity, Strike picked up his phone and Googled “astrological symbols.”

A few minutes later, having read a couple of astrological web pages with an expression of mild distaste, he’d successfully interpreted Talbot’s sentence. It read: “Twelfth (Pisces) found. Therefore AS EXPECTED killer is Capricorn.”

Pisces was the twelfth sign of the zodiac, Capricorn the tenth. Capricorn was also the sign of the goat, which Talbot, in his manic state, appeared to have connected with Baphomet, the goat-headed deity.

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, turning to a fresh page in his notebook and writing something.

An idea now occurred to him: those strange, unexplained dates with crosses beside them on all the male witnesses’ statements. He wondered whether he could be bothered to get up and go downstairs to fetch the relevant pages from the boxes of police records. With a sigh, he decided that the answer was yes. He did up his flies, heaved himself to his feet, and fetched the office keys from their hook by the door.

Ten minutes later, Strike returned to his bedroom with both his laptop and a fresh notebook. As he settled down on top of the duvet again, he noticed that the screen of his mobile, which was lying on the duvet, was now lit up. Somebody had tried to call him while he’d been downstairs. Expecting it to be Lucy, he picked up the phone and looked at it.

He’d just missed a call from Charlotte. Strike lay the phone back down again and opened his laptop. Slowly and painstakingly, he set to work matching the unexplained dates on each male suspect’s witness statements with the relevant sign of the zodiac. If his hunch that Talbot had been checking the men’s star signs was correct, Steven Douthwaite was a Pisces, Paul Satchwell was an Aries and Roy Phipps, who’d been born on the twenty-seventh of December… was a Capricorn. Yet Talbot had cleared Roy Phipps of involvement early in the case.

“So that makes no fucking sense,” muttered Strike to the empty room.

He put down his laptop and picked up Talbot’s notebook again, reading on from the assertion that Margot’s killer must be Capricorn.

“Christ almighty,” Strike muttered, trying, but not entirely succeeding, to find sense among the mass of esoteric ramblings with the aid of his astrological websites. As far as he could tell, Talbot appeared to have absolved Roy Phipps from suspicion on the grounds that he wasn’t really a Capricorn, but some sign that Strike couldn’t make head nor tail of, and which he suspected Talbot might have invented.

Returning to the notebook, Strike recognized the Celtic cross layout of tarot cards from his youth. Leda fancied herself a reader of tarot; many times had he seen her lay out the cards in the very formation Talbot had sketched in the middle of the page. He had never, however, seen the cards given astrological meanings before, and wondered whether this, too, had been Talbot’s own invention.

His mobile buzzed again. He picked it up.

Charlotte had sent him a photograph. A naked photograph, of herself holding two coffees. The accompanying message said 6 years ago tonight. I wish it was happening again. Happy Birthday, Bluey x

Against his will, Strike stared at the body no sentient heterosexual man could fail to desire, and at the face Venus would envy. Then he noticed the blurring along her lower stomach, where she’d airbrushed out her Cesarean scar. This took care of his burgeoning erection. Like an alcoholic pushing away brandy, he deleted the picture and returned to Talbot’s notebook.

23

Eleven days later, Robin was woken at 8 a.m. by her mobile ringing, after barely an hour’s sleep. She’d spent the night on another pointless vigil outside the house of the persecuted weatherman, and had returned to her flat in Earl’s Court to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before hurrying out again to interview Oonagh Kennedy with Strike, in the café at Fortnum & Mason. Completely disorientated, she knocked a couple of items off the bedside table as she groped in the dark for her phone.

“’Lo?”

“Robin?” said a happy shout in her ear. “You’re an aunt!”

“I’m what, sorry?” she muttered.

Wisps of her dreams still clung about her: Pat Chauncey had been asking her out to dinner, and had been deeply hurt that she didn’t want to go.

“You’re an aunt! Jenny’s just had the baby!”

“Oh,” said Robin, and very slowly her brain computed that this was Stephen, her elder brother, on the line. “Oh, that’s wonder­ful… what—?”

“A girl!” said Stephen jubilantly. “Annabel Marie. Eight pounds eight ounces!”

“Wow,” said Robin, “that’s—is that big? It seems—”

“I’m sending you a picture now!” said Stephen. “Got it?”

“No—hang on,” said Robin, sitting up. Bleary-eyed, she switched to speakerphone to check her messages. The picture arrived as she was peering at the screen: a wrinkled, bald red baby swaddled in a hospital robe, fists balled up, looking furious to have been forced from a place of quiet, padded darkness into the brightness of a hospital ward.

“Just got it. Oh, Stephen, she’s… she’s beautiful.”

It was a lie, but nevertheless, tears prickled in the exhausted Robin’s eyes.

“My God, Button,” she said quietly; it was Stephen’s childhood nickname. “You’re a dad!”

“I know!” he said. “Insane, isn’t it? When are you coming home to see her?”

“Soon,” Robin promised. “I’m back for Christmas. Give Jenny all my love, won’t you?”

“I will, yeah. Gonna call Jon now. See you soon, Robs.”

The call was cut. Robin lay in darkness, staring at the brightly lit picture of the crumpled baby, whose puffy eyes were screwed up against a world she seemed to have decided already was not much of a place. It was quite extraordinary to think of her brother Stephen as a father, and that the family now had one more member.

Robin seemed to hear her cousin Katie’s words again: It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us. In the old days with Matthew, before she’d started work at the agency, she’d expected to have children with him. Robin had no strong feelings against having children, it was simply that she knew, now, that the job she loved would be impossible if she were a mother, or at least, that it would stop being the job she loved. Motherhood, from her limited observation of those her age who were doing it, seemed to demand as much from a woman as she could possibly give. Katie had talked of the perennial tug on her heart when she wasn’t with her son, and Robin had tried to imagine an emotional tether even stronger than the guilt and anger with which Matthew had tried to retain her. The problem wasn’t that Robin didn’t think she’d love her child. On the contrary, she thought it likely that she would love that child to the extent that this job, for which she had voluntarily sacrificed a marriage, her safety, her sleep and her financial security, would have to be sacrificed in return. And how would she feel, afterward, about the person who’d made that sacrifice necessary?

Robin turned on the light and bent to pick up the things she had knocked off her bedside table: an empty glass, thankfully unbroken, and the thin, flimsy paperback entitled Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? by C. B. Oakden, which Robin had received in the post the previous morning, and which she’d already read.

Strike didn’t yet know that she had managed to get hold of a copy of Oakden’s book and Robin had been looking forward to showing him. She had a couple more fragments of Bamborough news, too, but now, perhaps because of her sheer exhaustion, the feeling of anticipation at sharing them had disappeared. Deciding that she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, she got out of bed.

As she showered, Robin realized, to her surprise, that she was crying.

This is ridiculous. You don’t even want a baby. Get a grip of yourself.

When Robin arrived upstairs, dressed, with her hair blow-dried and concealer applied to the shadows under her eyes, she found Max eating toast in the kitchen.

“Morning,” he said, looking up from a perusal of the day’s news on his phone. “You all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin, with forced brightness. “Just found out I’m an aunt. My brother Stephen’s wife gave birth this morning.”

“Oh. Congratulations,” said Max, politely interested. “Um… boy or girl?”

“Girl,” said Robin, turning on the coffee machine.

“I’ve got about eight godchildren,” said Max gloomily. “Parents love giving the job to childless people. They think we’ll put more effort in, having no kids of our own.”

“True,” said Robin, trying to maintain her cheery tone. She’d been made godmother to Katie’s son. The christening had been the first time she’d been in the church in Masham since her wedding to Matthew.

She took a mug of black coffee back to her bedroom, where she opened up her laptop and decided to set down her new information on the Bamborough case in an email to Strike before they met. They might not have much time together before Oonagh Kennedy’s interview, so this would expedite discussion.

Sleep-deprived, Robin had added the kiss automatically and had sent the email before she could retract it. It was one thing to put a kiss on a birthday card, quite another to start adding them to work emails.

Shit.

She could hardly write a PS saying “Ignore that kiss, my fingers did it without me meaning to.” That would draw attention to the thing if Strike hadn’t thought anything of it.

As she closed her laptop, her mobile screen lit up: she’d received a long, excited text from her mother about baby Annabel Marie’s perfection, complete with a photograph of herself cradling her new granddaughter, Robin’s father beaming over his wife’s shoulder. Robin texted back:

She’s gorgeous!

even though the baby was quite as unprepossessing in the new photograph as she’d been in the old. Yet she wasn’t really lying: the fact of Annabel’s birth was somehow gorgeous, an everyday miracle, and Robin’s mysterious shower tears had been partly in acknowledgment of the fact.

As the Tube sped her toward Piccadilly Circus, Robin took out her copy of C. B. Oakden’s book, which she’d found at a second-hand bookshop in Chester, and flicked through it again. The dealer had said the book had been in his shop for several years, and had arrived in a job lot of books he’d taken off the hands of the family of an elderly local woman who’d died. Robin suspected that the dealer hadn’t known of the book’s murky legal status before Robin’s email inquiry, but he appeared to have no particular moral qualms about selling it. As long as Robin guaranteed by phone that she wouldn’t reveal where she’d got it, he was happy to part with it, for a hefty mark-up. Robin only hoped Strike would think the price justified, once he’d read it.

Robin’s particular copy appeared to have escaped pulping because it had been one of the author’s free copies, which must have been given to him before the court decision. An inscription on the fly-leaf read: To Auntie May, with every good wish, CB Oakden (Carl). To Robin, “with every good wish” seemed an affected, grandiose message to send an aunt.

Barely a hundred pages long, the flimsy paperback had a photograph of Margot as a Bunny Girl on the cover, a picture familiar to Robin because it had appeared in so many newspaper reports of her disappearance. Half cut off in this enlarged picture was a second Bunny Girl, who Robin knew to be Oonagh Kennedy. The photograph was reproduced in its entirety in the middle of the paperback, along with other pictures which Robin thought Strike would agree were the most valuable part of the book, though only, she feared, in terms of putting faces to names rather than helping the investigation.

Robin got off the Tube at Piccadilly Circus and walked in a strong wind up Piccadilly, beneath swaying Christmas lights, wondering where she might find a baby present for Stephen and Jenny. Having passed no appropriate shops, she arrived outside Fortnum & Mason with an hour to spare before the projected meeting with Oonagh Kennedy.

Robin had often passed the famous store since she had lived in London, but never gone inside. The ornate frontage was duck-egg blue and the windows, dressed for Christmas, some of the most beautiful in the city. Robin peered through clear circles of glass surrounded by artificial snow, at heaps of jewel-like crystallized fruits, silk scarves, gilded tea canisters, and wooden nutcrackers shaped like fairy-tale princes. A gust of particularly cold, rain-flecked wind whipped at her, and, without conscious thought, Robin allowed herself to be swept inside the sumptuous seasonal fantasy, through a door flanked by a doorman in an overcoat and top hat.

The store was carpeted in scarlet. Everywhere were mountains of duck-egg blue packaging. Close at hand she saw the very truffles that Morris had bought her for her birthday. Past marzipan fruits and biscuits she walked, until she glimpsed the café at the back of the ground floor where they’d agreed to meet Oonagh. Robin turned back. She didn’t want to see the retired vicar before the allotted time, because she wanted to reason herself into a more business-like frame of mind before an interview.

“Excuse me,” she asked a harried-looking woman selecting marzipan fruits for a client, “d’you sell anything for children in—?”

“Third floor,” said the woman, already moving away.

The small selection of children’s goods available were, in Robin’s view, exorbitantly priced, but as Annabel’s only aunt, and only London-based relative, she felt a certain pressure to give a suitably metropolitan gift. Accordingly, she purchased a large, cuddly Paddington bear.

Robin was walking away from the till with her duck-egg carrier bag when her mobile rang. Expecting it to be Strike, she saw instead an unknown number.

“Hi, Robin here.”

“Hi, Robin. It’s Tom,” said an angry voice.

Robin couldn’t for the life of her think who Tom was. She mentally ran through the cases the agency was currently working on—Two-Times, Twinkletoes, Postcard, Shifty and Bamborough—trying in vain to remember a Tom, while saying with what she intended to be yes-of-course-I-know-who-you-are warmth,

“Oh, hi!”

“Tom Turvey,” said the man, who didn’t appear fooled.

“Oh,” said Robin, her heart beginning to beat uncomfortably fast, and she drew back into an alcove where pricey scented candles stood on shelves.

Tom Turvey was Sarah Shadlock’s fiancé. Robin had had no contact with him since finding out that their respective partners had been sleeping together. She’d never particularly liked him, nor had she ever found out whether he knew about the affair.

“Thanks,” said Tom. “Thanks a fucking bunch, Robin!”

He was close to shouting. Robin distanced the mobile a little from her ear.

“Excuse me?” she said, but she suddenly seemed to have become all nerves and pulse.

“Didn’t bother fucking telling me, eh? Just walked away and washed your hands, did you?”

“Tom—”

“She’s told me fucking everything, and you knew a year ago and I find out today, four weeks before my wedding—”

“Tom, I—”

“Well, I hope you’re fucking happy!” he bellowed. Robin removed the phone from her ear and held it at arm’s length. He was still clearly audible as he yelled, “I’m the only one of us who hasn’t been fucking around, and I’m the one who’s been fucked over—”

Robin cut him off. Her hands were shaking.

“Excuse me,” said a large woman, who was trying to see the candles on the shelves behind Robin, who mumbled an apology and walked away, until she reached a curving iron banister, beyond which was a large, circular expanse of thin air. Looking down, she saw the floors had been cut out, so that she was able to see right into the basement, where compressed people were criss-crossing the space with baskets laden with expensive hams and bottles of wine. Head spinning, hardly aware of what she was doing, Robin turned and headed blindly back toward the department exit, trying not to bump into tables piled with fragile china. Down the red carpeted stairs she walked, trying to breathe herself back to calm, trying to make sense of what she’d just heard.

“Robin.”

She walked on, and only when somebody said “Robin” again did she turn and realize Strike had just entered the store via a side door from Duke Street. The shoulders of his overcoat were studded with glimmering raindrops.

“Hi,” she said, dazed.

“You all right?”

For a split-second she wanted to tell him everything: after all, he knew about Matthew’s affair, he knew how her marriage had ended and he’d met Tom and Sarah. However, Strike himself looked tense, his mobile gripped in his hand.

“Fine. You?”

“Not great,” he said.

The two of them moved aside to allow a group of tourists into the store. In the shadow of the wooden staircase Strike said,

“Joan’s taken a turn for the worse. They’ve readmitted her to hospital.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” said Robin. “Listen—go to Cornwall. We’ll cope. I’ll interview Oonagh, I’ll take care of everything—”

“No. She specifically told Ted she didn’t want us all dashing down there again. But that’s not like her…”

Strike seemed every bit as scattered and distracted as Robin felt, but now she pulled herself together. Screw Tom, screw Matthew and Sarah.

“Seriously, Cormoran, go. I can take care of work.”

“They’re expecting me in a fortnight for Christmas. Ted says she’s desperate to have us all at home. It’s supposed to be just for a couple of days, the hospital thing.”

“Well, if you’re sure…” said Robin. She checked her watch. “We’ve got ten minutes until Oonagh’s supposed to be here. Want to go to the café and wait for her?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Good thinking, I could use a coffee.”

“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” trilled from the speakers as they entered the realm of crystallized fruits and expensive teas, both lost in painful thought.

24

The café was reached by a flight of stairs that placed it on a higher level than the shop floor, which it overlooked. Once he and Robin had sat down at a table for four by the window, Strike sat silently looking down into Jermyn Street, where passers-by were reduced to moving mushrooms, eclipsed by their umbrellas. He was a stone’s throw from the restaurant in which he’d last seen Charlotte.

He’d received several more calls from her since the nude photograph on his birthday, plus several texts, three of which had arrived the previous evening. He’d ignored all of them, but somewhere at the back of his anxiety about Joan scuttled a familiar worry about what Charlotte’s next move was going to be, because the texts were becoming increasingly overwrought. She had a couple of suicide attempts in her past, one of which had almost succeeded. Three years after he’d left her, she was still trying to make him responsible for her safety and her happiness, and Strike found it equally infuriating and saddening. When Ted had called Strike that morning with the news about Joan, the detective had been in the process of looking up the telephone number of the merchant bank where Charlotte’s husband worked. If Charlotte threatened suicide, or sent any kind of final message, Strike intended to call Jago.

“Cormoran,” Robin said.

He looked round. A waiter had arrived at the table. When both had ordered coffee, and Robin some toast, each relapsed into silence. Robin was looking away from the window toward the shoppers stocking up on fancy groceries for Christmas down on the shop floor and re-running Tom Turvey’s outburst in her head. The aftershocks were still hitting her. Four weeks before my fucking wedding. It must have been called off. Sarah had left Tom for Matthew, the man she’d wanted all along, and Robin was sure she wouldn’t have left Tom unless Matthew had shown himself ready to offer her what Tom had: diamonds and a change of name. I’m the only one of us who hasn’t been fucking around. Everyone had been unfaithful, in Tom’s opinion, except poor Tom… so Matthew must have told his old friend that she, Robin, had been sleeping with someone else (which meant Strike, of course, of whom Matthew had been perennially jealous and suspicious from the moment Robin had gone to work for him). And even now that Tom knew about Matthew and Sarah, after his old friend’s duplicity and treachery had been revealed, Tom still believed the lie about Robin and Strike. Doubtless he thought his current misery was all Robin’s fault, that if she hadn’t succumbed to Strike, the domino effect of infidelity would never have been started.

“You sure you’re all right?”

Robin started and looked around. Strike had come out of his own reverie and was looking at her over his coffee cup.

“Fine,” she said. “Just knackered. Did you get my email?”

“Email?” said Strike, reaching for the phone in his pocket. “Yeah, but I haven’t read it, sorry. Dealing with other—”

“Don’t bother now,” said Robin hastily, inwardly cringing at the thought of that accidental kiss, even in the midst of her new troubles. “It isn’t particularly important, it’ll keep. I did find this, though.”

She took the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? out of her bag and passed it over the table, but before Strike could express his surprise, she muttered,

“Give it back, give it back now,” tugged it back out of his hand and stuffed it into her bag.

A stout woman was heading toward them across the café. Two bulging bags of Christmas fare were dangling from her hands. She had the full cheeks and large square front teeth of a cheerful-looking chipmunk, an aspect that in her youthful photos had added a certain cheeky charm to her prettiness. The hair that once had been long, dark and glossy was now chin-length and white, except at the front, where a dashing bright purple streak had been added. A large silver and amethyst cross bounced on her purple sweater.

“Oonagh?” said Robin.

“Dat’s me,” she panted. She seemed nervous. “The queues! Well, what do I expect, Fortnum’s at Christmas? But fair play, dey do a lovely mustard.”

Robin smiled. Strike drew out the chair beside him.

“T’anks very much,” said Oonagh, sitting down.

Her Irish accent was attractive, and barely eroded by what Robin knew had been a longer residence in England than in the country of her birth.

Both detectives introduced themselves.

“Very nice to meet you,” Oonagh said, shaking hands before clearing her throat nervously. “Excuse me. I was made up to get yer message,” she told Strike. “Years and years I’ve spent, wondering why Roy never hired someone, because he’s got the money to do it and the police never got anywhere. So little Anna called you in, did she? God bless that gorl, what she must’ve gone through… Oh, hello,” she said to the waiter, “could I have a cappuccino and a bit of that carrot cake? T’ank you.”

When the waiter had gone, Oonagh took a deep breath and said,

“I know I’m rattlin’ on. I’m nervous, that’s the truth.”

“There’s nothing to be—” began Strike.

“Oh, there is,” Oonagh contradicted him, looking sober. “Whatever happened to Margot, it can’t be anything good, can it? Nigh on forty years I’ve prayed for that girl, prayed for the truth and prayed God would look after her, alive or dead. She was the best friend I ever had and—sorry. I knew this would happen. Knew it.”

She picked up her unused cloth napkin and mopped her eyes.

“Ask me a question,” she said, half-laughing. “Save me from meself.”

Robin glanced at Strike, who handed the interview to her with a look as he pulled out his notebook.

“Well, perhaps we can start with how you and Margot met?” Robin suggested.

“We can, o’ course,” said Oonagh. “That would’ve been ’66. We were both auditioning to be Bunny Girls. You’ll know all about that?”

Robin nodded.

“I had a decent figure then, believe it or not,” said Oonagh, smiling as she gestured down at her tubby torso, although she seemed to feel little regret for the loss of her waist.

Robin hoped Strike wasn’t going to take her to task later for not organizing her questions according to the usual categories of people, places and things, but she judged it better to make this feel more like a normal conversation, at least at first, because Oonagh was still visibly nervous.

“Did you come over from Ireland, to try and get the job?” asked Robin.

“Oh no,” said Oonagh. “I was already in London. I kinda run away from home, truth be told. You’re lookin’ at a convent gorl with a mammy as strict as a prison warder. I had a week’s wages from a clothes shop in Derry in my pocket, and my mammy gave me one row too many. I walked out, got on the ferry, came to London and sent a postcard home to tell ’em I was alive and not to worry. My mammy didn’t speak to me for t’irty years.

“I was waitressing when I heard they were opening a Playboy Club in Mayfair. Well, the money was crazy good compared to what you could earn in a normal place. T’irty-five pounds a week, we started on. That’s near enough six hundred a week, nowadays. There was nowhere else in London was going to pay a working-class gorl that. It was more than most of our daddies earned.”

“And you met Margot at the club?”

“I met her at the audition. Knew she’d get hired the moment I looked at her. She had the figure of a model: all legs, and the girl lived on sugar. She was t’ree years younger than me, and she lied about her age so they’d take—oh, t’ank you very much,” said Oonagh, as the waiter placed her cappuccino and carrot cake in front of her.

“Why was Margot auditioning?” Robin asked.

“Because her family had nothing—and I mean, nothing, now,” Oonagh said. “Her daddy had an accident when she was four. Fell off a step-ladder, broke his back. Crippled. That’s why she had no brothers and sisters. Her mammy used to clean people’s houses. My family had more than the Bamboroughs and nobody ever got rich farming a place the size of ours. But the Bamboroughs were not-enough-to-eat poor.

“She was such a clever girl, but the family needed help. She got herself into medical school, told the university she’d have to defer for a year, then headed straight for the Playboy Club. We took to each other straight away, in the audition, because she was so funny.”

“Was she?” said Robin. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Strike look up from his notebook in surprise.

“Oh, Margot Bamborough was the funniest person I ever knew in my life,” said Oonagh. “In my loife, now. We used to laugh till we cried. I’ve never laughed like that since. Proper cockney accent and she could just make you laugh until you dropped.

“So we started work together, and they were strict, mind you,” said Oonagh, now forking cake into her mouth as she talked. “Inspected before you walked out on the floor, uniform on properly, nails done, and then there were rules like you’ve no idea. They used to put plain-clothes detectives in the club to catch us out, make sure we weren’t giving out our full names or our phone numbers.

“If you were any good at it, you could put a tidy bit of money away. Margot graduated to cigarette girl, selling them out of a little tray. She was popular with the men because she was so funny. She hardly spent a penny on herself. She split the lot between a savings account for medical school and the rest she gave her mammy. Worked every hour they’d let her. Bunny Peggy, she called herself, because she didn’t want any of the punters to know her real name. I was Bunny Una, because nobody knew how to say ‘Oonagh.’ We got all kinds of offers—you had to say no, of course. But it was nice to be asked, right enough,” said Oonagh, and perhaps picking up on Robin’s surprise, she smiled and said,

“Don’t think Margot and I didn’t know exactly what we were doin’, corseted up with bunny ears on our heads. What you maybe don’t realize is a woman couldn’t get a mortgage in dose days without a man co-signing the forms. Same with credit cards. I squandered my money at first, but I learned better, learned from Margot. I got smart, I started saving. I ended up buying my own flat with cash. Middle-class gorls, with their mammies and daddies paying their way, they could afford to burn their bras and have hairy armpits. Margot and I, we did what we had to.

“Anyway, the Playboy Club was sophisticated. It wasn’t a knocking shop. It had licenses it would’ve lost if things got seedy. We had women guests, too. Men used to bring their wives, their dates. The worst we had was a bit of tail-pulling, but if a club member got really handsy, he lost his membership. You should’ve seen what I had to put up with in my job before that: hands up my skirt when I bent over a table, and worse. They looked after us at the Playboy Club. Members weren’t allowed to date Bunny Girls—well, in t’eory. It happened. It happened to Margot. I was angry at her for that, I said, you’re risking everything, you fool.”

“Was this Paul Satchwell?” asked Robin.

“It was indeed,” said Oonagh. “He’d come to the club as someone’s guest, he wasn’t a member, so Margot t’ought it was a gray area. I was still worried she was going to lose the job.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“No, I didn’t like him,” said Oonagh. “T’ought he was Robert Plant, so he did, but Margot fell for him hook, line and sinker. She didn’t go out a lot, see, because she was saving. I’d been round the nightclubs in my first year in London; I’d met plenty of Satchwells. He was six years older than she was, an artist and he wore his jeans so tight you could see his cock and balls right through them.”

Strike let out an involuntary snort of laughter. Oonagh looked at him.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “You’re, ah, not like most vicars I’ve met.”

“I don’t t’ink the Good Lord will mind me mentioning cocks and balls,” said Oonagh airily. “He made ’em, didn’t he?”

“So they started dating?” asked Robin.

“They did,” said Oonagh. “Mad passion, it was. You could feel the heat off the two of them. For Margot—see, before Satchwell, she’d always had tunnel vision about life, you know, eyes on the prize: become a doctor and save her family. She was cleverer than any of the boys she knew, and men don’t like that much nowadays. She was taller than half of them, as well. She told me she’d never had a man interested in her brains before Satchwell. Interested in her brains, my aunt Nelly. The girl had a body like Jane Birkin. Oh, and it wasn’t only his looks, either, she said. He’d read t’ings. He could talk about art. He could talk for the hour about art, right enough. I heard him. Well, I don’t know a Monet from a poster of Margate, so I’m no judge, but it sounded a load of old bollocks to me.

“But he’d take Margot out to a gallery and educate her about art, then he’d take her home to bed. Sex makes fools of us all,” sighed Oonagh Kennedy. “And he was her very first and it was obvious, you know,” she nodded at Robin, “he knew what he was doing, so it was all that much more important to her. Mad in love, she was. Mad.

“Then, one night, just a couple o’ weeks before she was supposed to be starting medical school, she turns up at my flat howling. She’d dropped in on Paul unexpected after work and there was another woman at the flat with him. Naked. Modeling, he told her. Modeling—at midnight. She turned round and ran. He went chasin’ after her, but she jumped in a taxi and came to mine.

“Heartbroken, she was. All night, we sat up talking, me saying ‘You’re better off without him,’ which was no more than the truth. I said to her, ‘Margot, you’re about to start medical school. The place’ll be wall to wall with handsome, clever boys training to be doctors. You won’t remember Satchwell’s name after a week or two.’

“But then, near dawn, she told me a t’ing I’ve never told anyone before.”

Oonagh hesitated. Robin tried to look politely but warmly receptive.

“She’d let him take pictures of her. You know. Pictures. And she was scared, she wanted them back. I said to her, why in God’s name would you let him do such a t’ing, Margot? Because it would’ve killed her mother. The pride they had in her, their only daughter, their brilliant gorl. If those photos turned up anywhere, a magazine or I don’t know what, they’d have never lived it down, boastin’ up and down their street about their Margot, the genius.

“So I said, I’ll come with you and we’ll get them back. So we went round there early and banged on his door. The bastard—excuse me, now,” she said. “You’ll rightly say, that’s not a Christian attitude, but wait till you hear. Satchwell said to Margot, ‘I’ll speak to you, but not your nanny.’ Your nanny.

“Well, now. I spent ten years working with domestic abuse survivors in Wolverhampton and it’s one of the hallmarks of an abuser, if their victim isn’t compliant, it’s because she’s under someone else’s control. Her nanny.

“Before I know what’s going on, she’s inside and I’m stuck on the other side of a closed door. He’d pulled her in and slammed it in my face. I could hear them shouting at each other. Margot was giving as good as she got, God bless her.

“And then, and this is what I really wanted to tell you,” said Oonagh, “and I want to get it right. I told that Inspector Talbot and he didn’t listen to a word I was saying, and I told the one who took over, what was his name—?”

“Lawson?” asked Robin.

“Lawson,” said Oonagh, nodding. “I told both of ’em: I could hear Margot and Paul screaming at each other through the door, Margot telling him to give her the pictures and the negatives—different world, you see. Negatives, you had to get, if you didn’t want more copies made. But he refused. He said they were his copyright, the dirty bastard—so then I heard Margot say, and this is the important bit, ‘If you show those pictures to anyone, if they ever turn up in print, I’ll go straight to the police and I’ll tell them all about your little pillow dream—’”

“‘Pillow dream’?” repeated Robin.

“That’s what she said. And he hit her. A smack loud enough to hear through solid wood, and I heard her shriek. Well, I started hammering and kicking the door. I said, unless he opened it I was going for the police right now. That put the fear o’ God into him. He opened the door and Margot comes out, hand to her face, it was bright red, you could see his finger marks, and I pulled her behind me and I said to Satchwell, ‘Don’t you ever come near her again, and you heard what she said. There’ll be trouble if those pictures turn up anywhere.’

“And I swear to you, he looked murderous. He stepped right up to me, the way a man will when he wants to remind you what he could do, if he wanted. Almost standing on my toes, he was. I didn’t shift,” said Oonagh Kennedy. “I stood my ground, but I was scared, I won’t deny it. And he said to Margot, ‘Have you told her?’ And Margot says, ‘She doesn’t know anything. Yet.’ And he says, ‘Well, you know what’ll happen if I find out you’ve talked.’ And he mimed—well, never mind. It was an—an obscene pose, I suppose you’d say. One of the pictures he’d taken. And he walked back into his flat and slammed the door.”

“Did Margot ever tell you what she meant by the ‘pillow dream’?” asked Robin.

“She wouldn’t. You might t’ink she was scared, but… you know, I t’ink it’s just women,” sighed Oonagh. “We’re socialized that way, but maybe Mother Nature’s got a hand in it. How many kids would survive to their first birthday if their mammies couldn’t forgive ’em?

“Even that day, with his handprint across her face, she didn’t want to tell me, because there was a bit of her that didn’t want to hurt him. I saw it all the bloody time with my domestic abuse survivors. Women still protecting them. Still worrying about them! Love dies hard in some women.”

“Did she see Satchwell after that?”

“I wish to God I could say she didn’t,” said Oonagh, shaking her head, “but yes, she did. They couldn’t stay away from each other.

“She started her degree course, but she was that popular at the club, they let her go part time, so I was still seeing a lot of her. One day, her mammy called the club because her daddy had taken sick, but Margot hadn’t come in. I was terrified: where was Margot, what had happened to her, why wasn’t she there? I’ve often t’ought back to that moment, you know, because when it happened for real, I was so sure at first she’d turn up, like she had the first time.

“Anyway, when she saw how upset I’d been, t’inking she’d gone missing, she told me the truth. She and Satchwell had started things up again. She had all the old excuses down: he swore he’d never hit her again, he’d cried his eyes out about it, it was the worst mistake of his life, and anyway, she’d provoked him. I told her, ‘If you can’t see him now for what he is, after what he did to you first time round…’ Anyway, they split again and, surprise, surprise, he not only knocked her around again, he kept her locked in his flat all day, so she couldn’t get to work. That was the first shift she’d ever missed. She nearly lost the job over it, and had to make up some cock-and-bull story.

“So then at last,” said Oonagh, “she tells me she’s learned her lesson, I was right all along, she’s never going back to him, that’s it, finito.”

“Did she get the photographs back?” asked Robin.

“First t’ing I asked, when I found out they were back together. She said he’d told her he’d destroyed them. She believed it, too.”

“You didn’t?”

“O’ course I didn’t,” said Oonagh. “I’d seen him, when she t’reatened him with his pillow dream. That was a frightened man. He’d never have destroyed anyt’ing that gave him bargaining power over her.

“Would it be all right if I get another cappuccino?” asked Oonagh apologetically. “My t’roat’s dry, all this talking.”

“Of course,” said Strike, hailing a waiter, and ordering fresh coffees all round.

Oonagh pointed at Robin’s Fortnum’s bag.

“Been stocking up for Christmas, too?”

“Oh, no, I’ve been buying a present for my new niece. She was born this morning,” said Robin, smiling.

“Congratulations,” said Strike, who was surprised Robin hadn’t already told him.

“Oh, how lovely,” said Oonagh. “My fifth grandchild arrived last month.”

The interval while waiting for the fresh coffees was filled by Oonagh showing Robin pictures of her grandchildren, and Robin showing Oonagh the two pictures she had of Annabel Marie.

“Gorgeous, isn’t she?” said Oonagh, peering through her purple reading glasses at the picture on Robin’s phone. She included Strike in the question, but, seeing only an angry-looking, bald monkey, his acquiescence was half-hearted.

When the coffees had arrived and the waiter moved away again, Robin said,

“While I remember… would you happen to know if Margot had family or friends in Leamington Spa?”

“Leamington Spa?” repeated Oonagh, frowning. “Let’s see… one of the gorls at the club was from… no, that was King’s Lynn. They’re similar sorts of names, aren’t they? I can’t remember anyone from there, no… Why?”

“We’ve heard a man claimed to have seen her there, a week after she disappeared.”

“There were a few sightings after, right enough. Nothing in any of them. None of them made sense. Leamington Spa, that’s a new one.”

She took a sip of her cappuccino. Robin asked,

“Did you still see a lot of each other, once Margot went off to medical school?”

“Oh yeah, because she was still working at the club part time. How she did it all, studying, working, supporting her family… living on nerves and chocolate, skinny as ever. And then, at the start of her second year, she met Roy.”

Oonagh sighed.

“Even the cleverest people can be bloody stupid when it comes to their love lives,” she said. “In fact, I sometimes t’ink, the cleverer they are with books, the stupider they are with sex. Margot t’ought she’d learned her lesson, that she’d grown up. She couldn’t see that it was classic rebound. He might’ve looked as different from Satchwell as you could get, but really, it was more of the same.

“Roy had the kind of background Margot would’ve loved. Books, travel, culture, you know. See, there were gaps in what Margot knew. She was insecure about not knowing about the right fork, the right words. ‘Napkin’ instead of ‘serviette.’ All that snobby English stuff.

“Roy was mad for her, mind you. It wasn’t all one way. I could see what the appeal was: she was like nothing he’d ever known before. She shocked him, but she fascinated him: the Playboy Club and her work ethic, her feminist ideas, supporting her mammy and daddy. They had arguments, intellectual arguments, you know.

“But there was something bloodless about the man. Not wet exactly, but—” Oonagh gave a sudden laugh. “‘Bloodless’—you’ll know about his bleeding problem?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Von Something Disease?”

“Dat’s the one,” said Oonagh. “He’d been cossetted and wrapped up in cotton wool all his life by his mother, who was a horror. I met her a few times. That woman gave me the respect you’d give something you’d got stuck on your shoe.

“And Roy was… still waters run deep, I suppose sums it up. He didn’t show a lot of emotion. Their flirtation wasn’t all sex, it really was ideas with them. Not that he wasn’t good-looking. He was handsome, in a kind of… limp way. As different from Satchwell as you could imagine. Pretty boy, all eyes and floppy hair.

“But he was a manipulator. A little bit of disapproval here, a cold look there. He loved how different Margot was, but it still made him uncomfortable. He wanted a woman the exact opposite to his mother, but he wanted Mammy to approve. So the fault lines were dere from the beginning.

“And he could sulk,” said Oonagh. “I hate a sulker, now. My mother was the same. T’irty years she wouldn’t talk to me, because I moved to London. She finally gave in so she could meet her grandchildren, but then my sister got tipsy at Christmas and let it slip I’d left the church and joined the Anglicans, we were finished forever. Playboy, she could forgive. Proddy, never.

“Even when they were dating, Roy would stop talking to Margot for days at a time. She told me once he cut her off for a week. She lost patience, she said, ‘I’m off.’ That brought him round sharp enough. I said, what was he sulking about? And it was the club. He hated her working there. I said, ‘Is he offering to support your family, while you study?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t like the idea of other men ogling me,’ she says. Girls like that idea, that little bit of possessiveness. They t’ink it means he only wants her, when o’ course, it’s the other way round. He only wants her available to him. He’s still free to look at other girls, and Roy had other people interested in him, girls from his own background. He was a pretty boy with a lot of family money. Well,” said Oonagh, “look at little cousin Cynthia, lurking in the wings.”

“Did you know Cynthia?” asked Robin.

“Met her once or twice, at their house. Mousy little thing. She never spoke more than two words to me,” said Oonagh. “But she made Roy feel good about himself. Laughing loike a drain at all his jokes. Such as they were.”

“Margot and Roy must have married right after medical school, did they?”

“Dat’s right. I was a bridesmaid. She went into general practice. Roy was a high-flier, he went into one of the big teaching hospitals, I can’t remember which.

“Roy’s parents had this very nice big house with huge lawns and all the rest of it. After his father died, which was just before they had Anna, the mother made it over to Roy. Margot’s name wasn’t on the deeds, I remember her telling me dat. But Roy loved the idea of bringing up his family in the same house he’d grown up in, and it was beautiful, right enough, out near Hampton Court. So the mother-in-law moved out and Roy and Margot moved in.

“Except, of course, the mother-in-law felt she had the right to walk back in any time she felt like it, because she’d given it to them and she still looked on it as more hers than Margot’s.”

“Did you and Margot still see a lot of each other?” asked Robin.

“We did,” said Oonagh. “We used to try and meet at least once every couple of weeks. Real best friends, we were. Even after she married Roy, she wanted to hold on to me. They had their middle-class friends, o’ course, but I t’ink,” said Oonagh, her voice thickening, “I t’ink she knew I’d always be on her side, you see. She was moving in circles where she felt alone.”

“At home, or at work, too?” asked Robin.

“At home, she was a fish out of water,” said Oonagh. “Roy’s house, Roy’s family, Roy’s friends, Roy’s everyt’ing. She saw her own mammy and daddy plenty, but it was hard, the daddy being in his wheelchair, to get him out to the big house. I t’ink the Bamboroughs felt intimidated by Roy and his mother. So Margot used to go back to Stepney to see them. She was still supporting them financially. Ran herself ragged between all her different commitments.”

“And how were things at work?”

“Uphill, all the way,” said Oonagh. “There weren’t that many women doctors back then, and she was young and working class and that practice she ended up at, the St. John’s one, she felt alone. It wasn’t a happy place,” said Oonagh, echoing Dr. Gupta. “Being Margot, she wanted to try and make it better. That was Margot’s whole ethos: make it better. Make it work. Look after everyone. Solve the problem. She tried to bring them together as a team, even though she was the one being bullied.”

“Who was bullying her?”

“The old fella,” said Oonagh. “I can’t remember the names, now. There were two other doctors, isn’t that right? The old one and the Indian one. She said he was all right, the Indian fella, but she could feel the disapproval off him, too. They had an argument about the pill, she told me. GPs could give it to unmarried women if they wanted—when it was first brought out, it was married women only—but the Indian lad, he still wouldn’t hand it out to unmarried women. The first family planning clinics started appearing the same year Margot disappeared. We talked about them. Margot said, t’ank God for it, because she was sure the women coming to their clinic weren’t able to get it from either of the other doctors.

“But it wasn’t only them. She had trouble with the other staff. I don’t t’ink the nurse liked her, either.”

“Janice?” said Robin.

“Was it Janice?” said Oonagh, frowning.

“Irene?” suggested Strike.

“She was blonde,” said Oonagh. “I remember, at the Christmas party—”

“You were there?” said Robin, surprised.

“Margot begged me to go,” said Oonagh. “She’d set it up and she was afraid it was going to be awful. Roy was working, so he couldn’t go. This was just a few months after Anna was born. Margot had been on maternity leave and they’d got another doctor in to cover for her, a man. She was convinced the place had worked better without her. She was hormonal and tired and dreading going back. Anna would only have been two or three months old. Margot brought her to the party, because she was breastfeeding. She’d organized the Christmas party to try and make a bit of a fresh start with them all, break the ice before she had to go back in.”

“Go on about Irene,” said Robin, conscious of Strike’s pen hovering over his notebook.

“Well, she got drunk, if she’s the blonde one. She’d brought some man with her to the party. Anyway, toward the end of the night, Irene accused Margot of flirting with the man. Did you ever in your loife hear anything more ridiculous? There’s Margot standing there with her new baby in her arms, and the girl having a proper go at her. Was she not the nurse? It’s so long ago…”

“No, Irene was the receptionist,” said Robin.

“I t’ought that was the little Italian girl?”

“Gloria was the other one.”

“Oh, Margot loved her,” said Oonagh. “She said the girl was very clever but in a bad situation. She never gave me details. I t’ink the girl had seen her for medical advice and o’ course, Margot wouldn’t have shared anything about her health. She took all of dat very seriously. No priest in his confessional treated other people’s secrets with more respect.”

“I want to ask you about something sensitive,” said Robin tentatively. “There was a book about Margot, written in 1985, and you—”

“Joined with Roy to stop it,” said Oonagh at once. “I did. It was a pack o’ lies from start to finish. You know what he wrote, obviously. About—”

Oonagh might have left the Catholic Church, but she balked at the word.

“—the termination. It was a filthy lie. I never had an abortion and nor did Margot. She’d have told me, if she was thinking about it. We were best friends. Somebody used her name to make dat appointment. I don’t know who. The clinic didn’t recognize her picture. She’d never been there. The very best t’ing in her life was Anna and she’d never have got rid of another baby. Never. She wasn’t religious, but she’d have t’ought that was a sin, all right.”

“She wasn’t a churchgoer?” Robin asked.

“At’eist t’rough and t’rough,” said Oonagh. “She t’ought it was all superstition. Her mammy was chapel, and Margot reacted against it. The church kept women down, was the way Margot looked at it, and she said to me, ‘If there’s a God, why’d my daddy, who’s a good man, have to fall off that step-ladder? Why’s my family have to live the life we’ve had?’ Well, Margot couldn’t tell me anything about hypocrisy and religion I didn’t already know. I’d left the Catholics by then. Doctrine of papal infallibility. No contraception, no matter if women died having their eleventh.

“My own mammy t’ought she was God’s deputy on this earth, so she did, and some of the nuns at my school were pure bitches. Sister Mary Theresa—see there?” said Oonagh, pushing her fringe out of her eyes to reveal a scar the size of a five-pence piece. “She hit me round the head wit’ a metal set square. Blood everywhere. ‘I expect you deserved it,’ Mammy said.

“Now, I’ll tell you who reminded me of Sister Mary Theresa,” said Oonagh. “Would she have been the nurse, now? The older one at Margot’s practice?”

“D’you mean Dorothy?”

“She was a widow, the one I’m t’inking of.”

“Yes, that was Dorothy, the secretary.”

“Spit image of Sister Mary Theresa, the eyes on her,” said Oonagh. “I got cornered by her at the party. They’re drawn to the church, women like dat. Nearly every congregation’s got a couple. Outward observance, inward poison. They say the words, you know ‘Father forgive me, for I have sinned,’ but the Dorothys of this world, they don’t believe they can sin, not really.

“One t’ing life’s taught me: where there’s no capacity for joy, there’s no capacity for goodness,” said Oonagh Kennedy. “She had it in for Margot, that Dorothy. I told her I was Margot’s best friend and she started asking nosy questions. How we’d met. Boyfriends. How Margot met Roy. None of her bloody business.

“Then she started talking about the old doctor, whatever his name was. There was a bit of Sister Mary Theresa in her, all right, but dat woman’s god was sitting a desk away. I told Margot about the talk I’d had with her afterward, and Margot said I was right. Dorothy was a mean one.”

“It was Dorothy’s son who wrote the book about Margot,” said Robin.

“Was it her son?” gasped Oonagh. “Was it? Well, there you are. Nasty pieces of work, the pair of them.”

“When was the last time you saw Margot?” Robin asked.

“Exactly two weeks before the night she disappeared. We met at The T’ree Kings then, too. Six o’clock, I had a night off from the club. There were a couple of bars nearer the practice, but she didn’t want to run into anyone she worked with after hours.”

“Can you remember what you talked about that night?”

“I remember everyt’ing,” said Oonagh. “You’ll think that’s an exaggeration, but it isn’t. I started by giving her a row about going for a drink with Satchwell, which she’d told me about on the phone. They’d bumped into each other in the street.

“She said he seemed different to how he used to be and that worried me, I’m not going to lie. She wasn’t built for an affair, but she was unhappy. Once we got to the pub, she told me the whole story. He’d asked to see her again and she’d said no. I believed her, and I’ll tell you why: because she looked so damn miserable that she’d said no.

“She seemed worn down, that night. Unhappy like I’d never seen her before. She said Roy hadn’t been talking to her for ten days when she ran into Satchwell. They’d had a row about his mother walking in and out of the house like she owned it. Margot wanted to redecorate, but Roy said it’d break his mother’s heart if they got rid of any of the things his father loved. So there was Margot, an outsider in her own home, not even allowed to change the ornaments.

“Margot said she’d had a line from Court and Spark running through her head, all day long. Joni Mitchell’s album, Court and Spark,” she said, seeing Robin’s puzzlement. “That was Margot’s religion. Joni Mitchell. She raved about that album. It was a line from the song ‘The Same Situation.’ ‘Caught in my struggle for higher achievements, And my search for love that don’t seem to cease.’ I can’t listen to that album to this day. It’s too painful.

“She told me she went straight home after havin’ the drink with Paul and told Roy what had just happened. I think partly she felt guilty about going for the drink, but partly she wanted to jolt him awake. She was tired and miserable and she was saying someone else wanted me, once. Human nature, isn’t it? ‘Wake up,’ she was saying. ‘You can’t just ignore me and cut me off and refuse all compromises. I can’t live like this.’

“Well, being Roy, he wasn’t the type to fire up and start throwing things. I t’ink she’d have found it easier if he had. He was furious, all right, but he showed it by gettin’ colder and more silent.

“I don’t t’ink he said another word to her until the day she disappeared. She told me on the phone when we arranged the drink for the eleventh, ‘I’m still living in a silent order.’ She sounded hopeless. I remember thinking then, ‘She’s going to leave him.’

“When we met in the pub that last time, I said to her, ‘Satchwell’s not the answer to whatever’s wrong with you and Roy.’

‘We talked about Anna, too. Margot would’ve given anything to take a year or two out and concentrate on Anna, and that’s exactly what Roy and his mother had wanted her to do, stay home with Anna and forget working.

“But she couldn’t. She was still supporting her parents. Her mammy was ill now, and Margot didn’t want her out cleaning houses any more. While she was working, she could look Roy in the face and justify all the money she was giving them, but his mother wasn’t going to let her precious, delicate son work for the benefit of a pair o’ chain-smokin’ Eastenders.”

“Can you remember anything else you talked about?”

“We talked about the Playboy Club, because I was leaving. I’d got my flat and I was thinking of going and studying. Margot was all for it. What I didn’t tell her was, I was thinking of a t’eology degree, what with her attitude to religion.

“We talked about politics, a bit. We both wanted Wilson to win the election. And I told her I was worried I still hadn’t found The One. Over t’irty, I was. That was old, then, for finding a husband.

“Before we said goodbye that night, I said, ‘Don’t forget, there’s always a spare room at my place. Room for a bassinet, as well.’”

Tears welled again in Oonagh’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She picked up her napkin and pressed it to her face.

“I’m sorry. Forty years ago, but it feels like yesterday. They don’t disappear, the dead. It’d be easier if they did. I can see her so clearly. If she walked up those steps now, part of me wouldn’t be surprised. She was such a vivid person. For her to disappear like that, just thin air where she was…”

Robin said nothing until Oonagh had wiped her face dry, then asked,

“What can you remember about arranging to meet on the eleventh?”

“She called me, asked to meet same place, same time. I said yes, o’ course. There was something funny in the way she said it. I said, ‘Everything all right?’ She said, ‘I need to ask your advice about something. I might be going mad. I shouldn’t really talk about it, but I t’ink you’re the only one I can trust.’”

Strike and Robin looked at each other.

“Was that not written down anywhere?”

“No,” said Strike.

“No,” said Oonagh, and for the first time she looked angry. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Why not?” asked Robin.

“Talbot was away with the fairies,” said Oonagh. “I could see it in the first five minutes of my interview. I called Roy, I said, ‘That man isn’t right. Complain, tell them you want someone else on the case.’ He didn’t, or if he did, nothing was done.

“And Lawson t’ought I was some silly little Bunny Girl,” said Oonagh. “Probably t’ought I was tellin’ fibs, trying to make myself interesting off the back of my best friend disappearing. Margot Bamborough was more like a sister than a friend to me,” said Oonagh fiercely, “and the on’y person I’ve ever really talked to about her is my husband. I cried all over him, two days before we got married, because she should’ve been there. She should’ve been my matron of honor.”

“Have you got any idea what she was going to ask your advice about?” asked Robin.

“No,” said Oonagh. “I’ve t’ought about it often since, whether it could have had anything to do with what happened. Something about Roy, perhaps, but then why would she say she shouldn’t talk about it? We’d already talked about Roy. I’d told her as plain as I could, the last time we met, she could come and live with me if she left, Anna as well.

“Then I t’ought, maybe it’s something a patient has told her, because like I said, she was scrupulous about confidentiality.

“Anyway, I walked up that hill in the rain to the pub on the eleventh. I was early, so I went to have a look at that church there, over the road, big—”

“Wait,” said Strike sharply. “What kind of coat were you wearing?”

Oonagh didn’t seem surprised by the question. On the contrary, she smiled.

“You’re t’inking of the old gravedigger, or whoever he was? The one who t’ought he saw Margot going in there? I told them at the time it was me,” said Oonagh. “I wasn’t wearing a raincoat, but it was beige. My hair was darker than Margot’s, but it was the same kind of length. I told them, when they asked me, did I think Margot might’ve gone into the church before meeting me—I said, no, she hated church. I went there! That was me!”

“Why?” asked Strike. “Why did you go in there?”

“I was being called,” said Oonagh simply.

Robin repressed a smile, because Strike looked almost embarrassed at the answer.

“God was calling me back,” said Oonagh. “I kept going into Anglican churches, t’inking, is this the answer? There was so much about the Catholics I couldn’t take, but still, I could feel the pull back toward Him.”

“How long d’you think you were in the church?” asked Robin, to give Strike time to recover himself.

“Five minutes or so. I said a little prayer. I was asking for guidance. Then I walked out again, crossed the road and went into the pub.

“I waited nearly the full hour before I called Roy. At first I t’ought, she’s been delayed by a patient. Then I t’ought, no, she must’ve forgotten. But when I called the house, Roy said she wasn’t there. He was quite short with me. I wondered whether somethin’ more had happened between them. Maybe Margot had snapped. Maybe I was going to get home and find her on the doorstep with Anna. So I went dashin’ home, but she wasn’t there.

“Roy called at nine to see whether I’d had any contact. That’s when I started to get really worried. He said he was going to call the police.

“You’ll know the rest,” said Oonagh quietly. “It was like a nightmare. You put all your hopes on t’ings that are less and less likely. Amnesia. Knocked down by a car and unconscious somewhere. She’s run away somewhere to t’ink.

“But I knew, really. She’d never’ve left her baby girl, and she’d never have left without telling me. I knew she was dead. I could tell the police t’ought it was the Essex Butcher, but me…”

“But you?” prompted Robin gently.

“Well, I kept t’inking, t’ree weeks after Paul Satchwell comes back into her life, she vanishes forever. I know he had his little alibi, all his arty friends backing him up. I said to Talbot and Lawson: ask him about the pillow dream. Ask him what that means, the pillow dream he was so frightened Margot would tell people about.

“Is that in the police notes?” she asked Strike, turning to look at him. “Did either of them ask Satchwell about the pillow dream?”

“No,” said Strike slowly. “I don’t think they did.”

25

Three evenings later, Strike was to be found sitting in his BMW outside a nondescript terraced house in Stoke Newington. The Shifty investigation, now in its fifth month, had so far yielded no results. The restive trustees who suspected that their CEO was being blackmailed by the ambitious Shifty were making ominous noises of discontent, and were clearly considering taking their business elsewhere.

Even after being plied with gin by Hutchins, who’d succeeded in befriending him at the rifle club, Shifty had remained as close lipped as ever about the hold he had over his boss, so it was time, Strike had decided, to start tailing SB himself. It was just possible that the CEO, a rotund, pinstriped man with a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, was still indulging in the blackmailable behavior that Shifty had uncovered and that had leveraged him into a promotion that neither Shifty’s CV, nor his personality, justified.

Strike was sure Shifty wasn’t exploiting a simple case of infidelity. SB’s current wife had the immaculate, plastic sheen of a doll newly removed from cellophane and Strike suspected it would take more than her husband having an affair to make her relinquish her taloned grip on a black American Express card, especially as she’d been married barely two years and had no children to guarantee a generous settlement.

Christmas tree lights twinkled in almost every window surrounding Strike. The roof of the house beside him had been hung with brilliant blue-white icicles that burned the retina if looked at too long. Wreaths on doors, glass panels decorated with fake snow and the sparkle of orange, red and green reflected in the dirty puddles all reminded Strike that he really did need to start buying Christmas gifts to take to Cornwall.

Joan had been released from hospital that morning, her drugs adjusted, and determined to get home and start preparing for the family festivities. Strike would need to buy presents not only for Joan and Ted but for his sister, brother-in-law and nephews. This was an irksome extra chore, given the amount of work the agency currently had on its books. Then he reminded himself that he had to buy something for Robin, too, something better than flowers. Strike, who disliked shopping in general, and buying gifts in particular, reached for his cigarettes to ward off a dim sense of persecution.

Having lit up, Strike took from his pocket the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? which Robin had given him, but which he hadn’t yet had time to read. Small tags marked the places Robin thought might be of some interest to the investigation.

With a quick glance at the still-closed front door of the house he was watching, Strike opened the book and skim-read a couple of pages, looking up at regular intervals to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged.

The first chapter, which Robin hadn’t marked, but which Strike flicked through anyway, dealt summarily with Margot’s childhood and adolescence. Unable to gain access to anybody with particularly clear memories of his subject, Oakden had to fall back on generalities, supposition and a good deal of padding. Thus Strike learned that Margot Bamborough “would have dreamed of leaving poverty behind,” “would have been caught up in the giddy atmosphere of the 1960s” and “would have been aware of the possibilities for consequence-free sex offered by the contraceptive pill.” Word count was boosted by the information that the mini-skirt had been popularized by Mary Quant, that London was the heart of a thriving music scene and that the Beatles had appeared on America’s Ed Sullivan Show around the time of Margot’s nineteenth birthday. “Margot would have been excited by the possibilities offered to the working classes in this new, egalitarian era,” C. B. Oakden informed his readers.

Chapter two ushered in Margot’s arrival at the Playboy Club, and here, the sense of strain that had suffused the previous chapter vanished. C. B. Oakden evidently found Playboy Bunny Margot a far more inspiring subject than child Margot, and he devoted many paragraphs to the sense of freedom and liberation she would have felt on lacing herself tightly into her Bunny costume, putting on false ears and judiciously padding the cups of her costume to ensure that her breasts appeared of sufficient fullness to satisfy her employer’s stringent demands. Writing eleven years after her disappearance, Oakden had managed to track down a couple of Bunny Girls who remembered Margot. Bunny Lisa, who was now married with two children, reminisced about having “a good laugh” with her, and being “devastated” by her disappearance. Bunny Rita, who ran her own marketing business, said that she was “really bright, obviously going places,” and thought “it must’ve been dreadful for her poor family.”

Strike glanced up again at the front of the house into which SB had disappeared. Still no sign of him. Turning back to C. B. Oakden, the bored Strike skipped ahead to the first place Robin had marked as of interest.

There followed several paragraphs that had clearly been cribbed from the press, covering the suicide of Steve Douthwaite’s married ex-girlfriend, his sudden flight from his job and the fact that Lawson had re-interviewed him several times. Making the most of his scant material, Oakden managed to suggest that Douthwaite had been at best disreputable, at worst, dangerous: a feckless drifter and an unprincipled lady’s man, in whose vicinity women had a habit of dying or disappearing. It was with a slight snort of sudden amusement, therefore, that Strike read the words,

After glancing up again to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged, Strike read on:

Oakden treated his readers to a brief history of Butlin’s, and ended the chapter with a paragraph of speculation on the opportunities a predatory man might find at a holiday camp.

Strike lit another cigarette, then flicked ahead to the second of Robin’s markers, where a short passage dealt with Jules Bayliss, husband of the office-cleaner-turned-social-worker, Wilma. The only piece of new information here was that convicted rapist Bayliss had been released on bail in January 1975, a full three months after Margot went missing. Nevertheless, Oakden asserted that Bayliss “would have got wind” of the fact that Margot was trying to persuade his wife to leave him, “would have been angry that the doctor was pressurizing his wife to break up the family” and “would have had many criminal associations in his own community.” The police, Oakden informed his readers, “would have looked carefully into the movements of any of Bayliss’s friends or relatives on the eleventh of October, so we must conclude,” he finished, anticlimactically, “that no suspicious activity was uncovered.”

Robin’s third tab marked the pages dealing with the abortion at Bride Street Nursing Home. Oakden ushered in this part of his story with considerable fanfare, informing his readers that he was about to reveal facts that had never before been made public.

What followed was interesting to Strike only in as far as it proved that an abortion had definitely taken place on the fourteenth of September 1974, and that the name given by the patient had been Margot Bamborough. As proof, Oakden reprinted photographs of the Bride Street medical records that had been provided by an unidentified employee of the nursing home, which had closed down in 1978. Strike supposed the unnamed employee would no longer have been fearful for their job when Oakden had come offering money for information in the eighties. The unnamed employee also told Oakden that the woman who had had the procedure didn’t resemble the picture of Margot that had subsequently appeared in the papers.

Oakden then posed a series of rhetorical questions that he and his foolhardy publishers appeared to think circumvented libel laws. Was it possible that the woman who had the abortion had used Margot’s name with her support and consent? In which case, who might Margot have been most eager to assist? Was it not most likely that a Roman Catholic would be particularly worried about anyone finding out she had had an abortion? Was it not also the case that complications could arise from such a procedure? Might Margot have returned to the vicinity of the Bride Street Nursing Home on the eleventh of October to visit somebody who had been readmitted to the clinic? Or to ask advice on behalf of that person? Could Margot possibly have been abducted, not from Clerkenwell, but from a street or two away from Dennis Creed’s basement?

To which Strike answered mentally, no, and you deserved to have your book pulped, pal. The string of events suggested by Oakden had clearly been put together in a determined attempt to place Margot in the vicinity of Creed’s basement on the night she disappeared. “Complications” were necessary to explain Margot returning to the nursing home a month after the abortion, but they couldn’t be Margot’s own, given that she was fit, well and working at the St. John’s practice all the way up to her disappearance. Once attributed to a best friend, however, undefined “complications” could serve two purposes: to give Margot a reason to head back to the clinic to visit Oonagh, and Oonagh a reason to lie about both women’s whereabouts that night. All in all, Strike considered Oakden lucky not to have been sued, and surmised that fear of the resultant publicity was all that had held Roy and Oonagh back.

He flicked forward to Robin’s fourth tab and, after checking again that the front door of the house he was watching remained closed, read the next marked passage.

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, turning the page and dropping his eyes to a brief paragraph Robin had marked with a thick black line.

Robin’s fifth and final tab came toward the end of the book, and after again checking that SB’s car was parked where he had left it, and that the front door of the house had not opened, Strike read:

Strike glanced up yet again at the house, saw no change, and flicked to the end of the book, which concluded in a final burst of speculation, supposition and half-baked theory. On the one hand, Oakden implied that Margot had brought tragedy on herself, that fate had punished her for being too sexual and too bold, for cramming herself into a corset and bunny ears, for hoisting herself hubristically out of the class into which she had been born. On the other hand, she seemed to have lived her life surrounded by would-be killers. No man associated with Margot escaped Oakden’s suspicion, whether it was “charming but feckless Stevie Douthwaite-turned-Jacks,” “domineering blood specialist Roy Phipps,” “resentful rapist Jules Bayliss,” “hot-tempered womanizer Paul Satchwell” or “notorious sex monster Dennis Creed.”

Strike was on the point of closing the book when he noticed a line of darker page edges in the middle, suggesting photographs, and opened it again.

Other than the familiar press headshot and the picture of Margot and Oonagh in their Bunny Girl costumes—Oonagh curvaceous and grinning broadly, Margot statuesque, with a cloud of fair hair—there were only three photos. All were of poor quality and featured Margot only incidentally.

The first was captioned: “The author, his mother and Margot.” Square-jawed, iron-gray-haired, and wearing winged glasses, Dorothy Oakden stood facing the camera with her arm around a skinny freckle-faced boy with a pageboy haircut, who had screwed up his face into a grimace that distorted his features. Strike was reminded of Luke, his eldest nephew. Behind the Oakdens was a long expanse of striped lawn and, in the distance, a sprawling house with many pointed gables. Objects appeared to be protruding out of the lawn close to the house: upon closer examination, Strike concluded that they were the beginnings of walls or columns: it looked as though a summerhouse was under construction.

Walking across the lawn behind Dorothy and Carl, unaware that she was being photographed, was Margot Bamborough, barefooted, wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt, carrying a plate and smiling at somebody out of shot. Strike deduced that this picture had been taken at the staff barbecue Margot had organized. The Phipps house was certainly grander than he’d imagined.

After looking up once more to check that SB’s car remained parked where he’d left it, Strike turned to the last two pictures, both of which featured the St. John’s practice Christmas party.

Tinsel had been draped over the reception desk and the waiting room cleared of chairs, which had been stacked in corners. Strike searched for Margot in both pictures and found her, baby Anna in her arms, talking to a tall black woman he assumed was Wilma Bayliss. In the corner of the picture was a slim, round-eyed woman with feathered brown hair, who Strike thought might be a young Janice.

In the second picture, all heads were turned away from the camera or partially obscured, except one. A gaunt, unsmiling older man in a suit, with his hair slicked back, was the only person who seemed to have been given notice that the picture was about to be taken. The flash had turned his eyes red. The picture was captioned “Margot and Dr. Joseph Brenner,” though only the back of Margot’s head was visible.

In the corner of this picture were three men who, judging from their coats and jackets, had just arrived at the party. The darkness of their clothing made a solid block of black on the right-hand side of the photo. All had their backs to the camera, but the largest, whose face was slightly turned to the left, displayed one long black sideburn, a large ear, the tip of a fleshy nose and a drooping eye. His left hand was raised in the act of scratching his face. He was wearing a large gold ring featuring a lion’s head.

Strike examined this picture until noises out on the street made him look up. SB had just emerged from the house. A plump blonde in carpet slippers was standing on her doormat. She raised a hand and patted SB gently on the top of the head, as you would pet a child or a dog. Smiling, SB bade her farewell, then turned and walked back toward his Mercedes.

Strike threw the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? into the passenger seat. Waiting for SB to pull out into the road, he set off in pursuit.

After five minutes or so, it became clear that his quarry was driving back to his home in West Brompton. One hand on the steering wheel, Strike groped for his mobile, then pressed the number of an old friend. The call went straight to voicemail.

“Shanker, it’s Bunsen. Need to talk to you about something. Let me know when I can buy you a pint.”

26

With five active cases on the agency’s books, and only four days to go until Christmas, two of the agency’s subcontractors succumbed to seasonal flu. Morris fell first: he blamed his daughter’s nursery, where the virus had swept like wildfire through toddlers and parents alike. He continued to work until a high temperature and joint pain forced him to telephone in his apologies, by which time he’d managed to pass the bug to a furious Barclay, who in turn had transmitted it to his own wife and young daughter.

“Stupid arsehole shoulda stayed at home instead o’ breathin’ all over me in the car,” Barclay ranted hoarsely over the phone to Strike early on the morning of the twentieth, while Strike was opening up the office. The last full team meeting before Christmas was to have taken place at ten o’clock, but as two of the team were now unable to attend, Strike had decided to cancel. The only person he hadn’t been able to reach was Robin, who he assumed was on the Tube. Strike had asked her to come in early so they could catch up with the Bamborough case before everyone else arrived.

“We’re supposedtae be flying to Glasgow the morra,” Barclay rasped, while Strike put on the kettle. “The wean’s in that much pain wi’ her ears—”

“Yeah,” said Strike, who was feeling sub-standard himself, doubtless due to tiredness, and too much smoking. “Well, feel better and get back whenever you can.”

“Arsehole,” growled Barclay, and then, “Morris, I mean. Not you. Merry fuckin’ Christmas.”

Trying to convince himself that he was imagining the tickle in his throat, the slight clamminess of his back and the pain behind his eyes, Strike made himself a mug of tea, then moved through to the inner office and pulled up the blinds. Wind and heavy rain were causing the Christmas lights strung across Denmark Street to sway on their cables. Just as they’d done on the five previous mornings, the decorations reminded Strike that he still hadn’t started his Christmas shopping. He took a seat on his accustomed side of the partners’ desk, knowing that he’d now left the job so late that he would be forced to execute it within a couple of hours, which at least obviated the tedious preliminary of carefully considering what anyone might like. Rain lashed the window behind him. He’d have liked to go back to bed.

He heard the glass door open and close.

“Morning,” Robin called from the outer office. “It’s vile out there.”

“Morning,” Strike called back. “Kettle’s just boiled and team meeting’s canceled. That’s Barclay down with flu as well.”

“Shit,” said Robin. “How’re you feeling?”

“Fine,” said Strike, now sorting out his various Bamborough notes.

But when Robin entered the inner office, carrying tea in one hand and her own notebook in the other, she didn’t think Strike looked fine at all. He was paler than usual, his forehead looked shiny and there were gray shadows around his eyes. She closed the office door and sat down opposite him without passing comment.

“Not much point to a team meeting anyway,” muttered Strike. “Fuck-all progress on any of the cases. Twinkletoes is clean. The worst you can say about him is he’s with her for the money, but her dad knew that from the start. Two-Times’ girlfriend isn’t cheating and Christ only knows what Shifty’s got on SB. You saw my email about the blonde in Stoke Newington?”

“Yes,” said Robin, whose face had been whipped into high color by the squally weather. She was trying to comb her hair back into some semblance of tidiness with her fingers. “Nothing come up on the address?”

“No. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s a relative. She patted him on the head as he left.”

“Dominatrix?” suggested Robin.

There wasn’t much she hadn’t learned about the kinks of powerful men since joining the agency.

“It occurred to me, but the way he said goodbye… they looked… cozy. But he hasn’t got a sister and she looked younger than him. Would cousins pat each other on the head?”

“Well, Sunday night’s all wrong for a normal counselor or a therapist, but patting’s quasi-parental… life coach? Psychic?”

“That’s a thought,” said Strike, stroking his chin. “Stockholders wouldn’t be impressed if he’s making business decisions based on what his fortune teller in Stoke Newington’s telling him. I was going to put Morris on to the woman over Christmas, but he’s out of action, Hutchins is on Two-Times’ girl and I’m supposed to be leaving for Cornwall day after tomorrow. You’re off to Masham when—Tuesday?”

“No,” said Robin, looking anxious. “Tomorrow—Saturday. We did discuss this back in September, remember? I swapped with Morris so I could—”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” lied Strike. His head was starting to throb, and the tea wasn’t making his throat feel much more comfortable. “No problem.”

But this, of course, meant that if he was going to give Robin a Christmas present, he’d have to buy it and get it to her by the end of the day.

“I’d try and get a later train,” said Robin, “but obviously, with it being Christmas—”

“No, you’re owed time off,” he said brusquely. “You shouldn’t be working just because those careless bastards got flu.”

Robin, who had a strong suspicion that Barclay and Morris weren’t the only people at the agency with flu, said,

“D’you want more tea?”

“What? No,” said Strike, feeling unreasonably resentful at her for, as he saw it, forcing him to go shopping. “And Postcard’s a washout, we’ve got literally noth—”

“I might—might—have something on Postcard.”

“What?” said Strike, surprised.

“Our weatherman got another postcard yesterday, sent to the television studio. It’s the fourth one bought in the National Portrait Gallery shop, and it’s got an odd message on it.”

She pulled the postcard from her bag and handed it over the desk to Strike. The picture on the front reproduced a self-portrait of Joshua Reynolds, his hand shading his eyes in the stereotypical pose of one staring at something indistinct. On the back was written:

I hope I’m wrong, but I think you sent someone to my work, holding some of my letters. Have you let someone else see them? I really hope you haven’t. Were you trying to scare me? You act like you’re so kind and down-to-earth, no airs and graces. I’d have thought you’d have the decency to come yourself if you’ve got something to say to me. If you don’t understand this, ignore.

Strike looked up at Robin.

“Does this mean…?”

Robin explained that she’d bought the same three postcards that Postcard had previously sent from the gallery shop, then roamed the gallery’s many rooms, holding the postcards so that they were visible to all the guides she passed, until an owlish woman in thick-lensed glasses had appeared to react at the sight of them, and disappeared through a door marked “Staff Only.”

“I didn’t tell you at the time,” Robin said, “because I thought I might’ve imagined it, and she also looked exactly like the kind of person I’d imagined Postcard to be, so I was worried I was doing a Talbot, chasing my own mad hunches.”

“But you’re not off your rocker, are you? That was a bloody good idea, going to the shop, and this,” he brandished the postcard of the Reynolds, “suggests you hit the bullseye first throw.”

“I didn’t manage to get a picture of her,” said Robin, trying not to show how much pleasure Strike’s praise had given her, “but she was in Room 8 and I can describe her. Big glasses, shorter than me, thick brown hair, bobbed, probably fortyish.”

Strike made a note of the description.

“Might nip along there myself before I head for Cornwall,” he said. “Right, let’s get on with Bamborough.”

But before either could say another word, the phone rang in the outer office. Glad to have something to complain about, Strike glanced at his watch, heaved himself to his feet and said,

“It’s nine o’clock, Pat should—”

But even as he said it, they both heard the glass door open, Pat’s unhurried tread and then, in her usual rasping baritone,

“Cormoran Strike Detective Agency.”

Robin tried not to smile as Strike dropped back into his chair. There was a knock on the door, and Pat stuck her head inside,

“Morning. Got a Gregory Talbot on hold for you.”

“Put him through,” said Strike. “Please,” he added, detecting a martial look in Pat’s eye, “and close the door.”

She did so. A moment later, the phone rang on the partners’ desk and Strike switched it to speakerphone.

“Hi, Gregory, Strike here.”

“Yes, hello,” said Gregory, who sounded anxious.

“What can I do for you?”

“Er, well, you know how we were clearing out the loft?”

“Yes,” said Strike.

“Well, yesterday I unpacked an old box,” said Gregory, sounding tense, “and I found something hidden under Dad’s commendations and his uniform—”

“Not hidden,” said a querulous female voice in the background.

“I didn’t know it was there,” said Gregory. “And now my mother—”

“Let me talk to him,” said the woman in the background.

“My mother would like to talk to you,” said Gregory, sounding exasperated.

A defiant, elderly female voice replaced Gregory’s.

“Is this Mr. Strike?”

“It is.”

“Gregory’s told you all about how the police treated Bill at the end?”

“Yes,” said Strike.

“He could have kept working once he got treatment for his thyroid, but they didn’t let him. He’d given them everything, the force was his life. Greg says he’s given you Bill’s notes?”

“That’s right,” said Strike.

“Well, after Bill died I found this can in a box in the shed and it had the Creed mark on it—you’ve read the notes, you know Bill used a special symbol for Creed?”

“Yes,” said Strike.

“I couldn’t take everything with me into sheltered accommodation, they give you virtually no storage space, so I put it into the boxes to go in Greg and Alice’s attic. I quite forgot it was there until Greg started looking through his dad’s things yesterday. The police have made it quite clear they weren’t interested in Bill’s theories, but Greg says you are, so you should have it.”

Gregory came back on the line. They heard movement that seemed to indicate that Gregory was moving away from his mother. A door closed.

“It’s a can containing a reel of old 16mm film,” he told Strike, his mouth close to the receiver. “Mum doesn’t know what’s on there. I haven’t got a camera to run it, but I’ve held a bit up to the light and… it looks like a dirty movie. I was worried about putting it out for the binmen—”

Given that the Talbots were fostering children, Strike understood his qualms.

“If we give it to you—I wonder—”

“You’d rather we didn’t say where we got it?” Strike said, eyes on Robin’s. “I can’t see why we’d need to.”

Robin noticed that he hadn’t promised, but Gregory seemed happy.

“I’ll drop it off, then,” he said. “I’m coming up West this afternoon. Taking the twins to see Father Christmas.”

When Gregory had rung off, Strike said,

“You notice the Talbots are still convinced, forty years on—”

The phone rang in the outer office again.

“—that Margot was killed by Creed? I think I know what the symbol on this can of film is going to be, because—”

Pat knocked on the door of the inner office.

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, whose throat was starting to burn. “What?”

“Charming,” said Pat, coldly. “There’s a Mister Shanker on the line for you. It diverted from your mobile. He says you wanted to—”

“Yeah, I do,” said Strike. “Transfer it back to my mobile—please,” he added, and turning to Robin, he said, “sorry, can you give me a moment?”

Robin left the room, closing the door behind her, and Strike pulled out his mobile.

“Shanker, hi, thanks for getting back to me.”

He and Shanker, whose real name he’d have been hard pressed to remember, had known each other since they were teenagers. Their lives had been moving in diametrically different directions even then, Strike heading for university, army and detective work, Shanker pursuing a career of ever-deepening criminality. Nevertheless, a strange sense of kinship had continued to unite them and they were, occasionally, useful to each other, Strike paying Shanker in cash for information or services that he could get no other way.

“What’s up, Bunsen?”

“I wanted to buy you a pint and show you a photo,” said Strike.

“Up your way later today, as it goes. Going to Hamleys. Got the wrong fackin’ Monster High doll for Zahara.”

Everything except “Hamleys” had been gibberish to Strike.

“OK, call me when you’re ready for a drink.”

“Fair dos.”

The line went dead. Shanker didn’t tend to bother with goodbyes.

Robin returned carrying two fresh mugs of tea and closed the door with her foot.

“Sorry about that,” said Strike, absentmindedly wiping sweat off his top lip. “What was I saying?”

“That you think you know what symbol’s on Talbot’s can of old film.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Strike. “Symbol for Capricorn. I’ve been having a go at deciphering these notes,” he added, tapping the leather-bound notebook sitting beside him, and he took Robin through the reasons Bill Talbot had come to believe that Margot had been abducted by a man born under the sign of the goat.

“Talbot was ruling out suspects on the basis that they weren’t Capricorns?” asked Robin in disbelief.

“Yeah,” said Strike, frowning, his throat burning worse than ever. He took a sip of tea. “Except that Roy Phipps is a Capricorn, and Talbot ruled him out, too.”

“Why?”

“I’m still trying to deciper it all, but he seems to have been using a weird symbol for Phipps that I haven’t been able to identify on any astrological site so far.

“But the notes explain why he kept interviewing Janice. Her star sign’s Cancer. Cancer is Capricorn’s ‘opposing’ sign and Cancerians are psychic and intuitive, according to Talbot’s notes. Talbot concluded that, as a Cancerian, Janice was his natural ally against Baphomet, and that she might have supernatural insights into Baphomet’s identity, hence the dream diary.

“Even more significant in his mind was that Saturn, Capricorn’s ruler—”

Robin hid a smile behind her mug of tea. Strike’s expression, as he outlined these astrological phenomena, would have been appropriate to a man asked to eat weeks’-old seafood.

“—was in Cancer on the day of Margot’s disappearance. From this, Talbot deduced that Janice knew or had had contact with Baphomet. Hence the request for a list of her sexual partners.”

“Wow,” said Robin quietly.

“I’m just giving you a hint of the nuttery, but there’s plenty more. I’ll email you the important points when I’ve finished deciphering it. But what’s interesting is that there are hints of an actual detective trying to fight through his illness.

“He had the same idea that occurred to me: that Margot might’ve been lured somewhere on the pretext of someone needing medical assistance, although he dresses it all up in mumbo-jumbo—there was a stellium in the sixth house, the House of Health, which he decided meant danger associated with illness.”

“What’s a stellium?”

“Group of more than three planets. The police did check out patients she’d seen a lot of in the run-up to the disappearance. There was Douthwaite, obviously, and a demented old woman on Gopsall Street, who kept ringing the surgery for something to do, and a family who lived on Herbal Hill, whose kid had had a reaction to his polio vaccination.”

“Doctors,” said Robin, “have contact with so many people.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, “and I think that’s part of what went wrong in this case. Talbot took in a huge amount of information and couldn’t see what to discard. On the other hand, the possibility of her being lured into a house on a medical pretext, or attacked by an angry patient isn’t crazy. Medics walk unaccompanied into all kinds of people’s houses… and look at Douthwaite. Lawson really fancied him as Margot’s abductor or killer, and Talbot was very interested in him, too. Even though Douthwaite was a Pisces, Talbot tries to make him a Capricorn. He says ‘Schmidt’ thinks Douthwaite’s really a Capricorn—”

“Who’s Schmidt?”

“No idea,” said Strike, “but he or she is all over the notes, correct­ing signs.”

“All the chances to get actual evidence lost,” said Robin quietly, “while Talbot was checking everyone’s horoscope.”

“Exactly. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so serious. But his interest in Douthwaite still smacks of sound copper instinct. Douthwaite seems pretty bloody fishy to me, as well.”

“Ha ha,” said Robin.

Strike looked blank.

“Pisces,” she reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah,” said Strike, unsmiling. The throbbing behind his eyes was worse than ever, his throat complaining every time he swallowed, but he couldn’t have flu. It was impossible. “I read that bit you marked in Oakden’s book,” he continued. “The stuff about Douthwaite changing his name when he went to Clacton to sing at a holiday camp, but I can’t find any trace of a Steve, Steven or Stevie Jacks after 1976, either. One name change might be understandable after a lot of police attention. Two starts to look suspicious.”

“You think?” said Robin. “We know he was the nervous type, judging from his medical records. Maybe he was spooked by Oakden turning up at Butlin’s?”

“But Oakden’s book was pulped. Nobody beyond a couple of Butlin’s Redcoats ever knew Stevie Jacks had been questioned about Margot Bamborough.”

“Maybe he went abroad,” said Robin. “Died abroad. I’m starting to think that’s what happened to Paul Satchwell, as well. Did you see, Satchwell’s ex-neighbor said he went off traveling?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Any luck on Gloria Conti yet?”

“Nothing,” sighed Robin. “But I have got a couple of things,” she went on, opening her notebook. “They don’t advance us much, but for what they’re worth…

“I’ve now spoken to Charlie Ramage’s widow in Spain. The hot-tub millionaire who thought he saw Margot in the Leamington Spa graveyard?”

Strike nodded, glad of a chance to rest his throat.

“I think Mrs. Ramage has either had a stroke or likes a lunchtime drink. She sounded slurred, but she confirmed that Charlie thought he’d seen Margot in a graveyard, and that he discussed it afterward with a policeman friend, whose name she couldn’t remember. Then suddenly she said, ‘No, wait—Mary Flanagan. It was Mary Flanagan he thought he saw.’ I took her back over the story and she said, yes, that was all correct, except that it was Mary Flanagan, not Margot Bamborough, he thought he’d seen. I’ve looked up Mary Flanagan,” said Robin, “and she’s been missing since 1959. It’s Britain’s longest ever missing person case.”

“Which of them would you say seemed more confused?” asked Strike. “Mrs. Ramage, or Janice?”

“Mrs. Ramage, definitely,” said Robin. “Janice definitely wouldn’t have confused the two women, would she? Whereas Mrs. Ramage might have done. She had no personal interest: to her, they were just two missing people whose names began with ‘M.’”

Strike sat frowning, thinking it over. Finally he said, his tonsils burning,

“If Ramage was a teller of tall tales generally, his policeman mate can’t be blamed for not taking him seriously. This is at least confir­mation that Ramage believed he’d once met a missing woman.”

He frowned so intensely that Robin said,

“Are you in pain?”

“No. I’m wondering whether it’d be worth trying to see Irene and Janice separately. I’d hoped never to have to talk to Irene Hickson again. At the very least, we should keep looking for a connection between Margot and Leamington Spa. Did you say you had another lead?”

“Not much of one. Amanda Laws—or Amanda White, as she was when she supposedly saw Margot at that window on Clerkenwell Road—answered my email. I’ll forward her reply if you want to read it, but basically she’s angling for money.”

“Is she, now?”

“She dresses it up a bit. Says she told the police and nobody believed her, told Oakden and he didn’t give her a penny, and she’s tired of not being taken seriously and if we want her story she’d like to be paid for it this time. She claims she’s endured a lot of negative attention, being called a liar and a fantasist, and she’s not prepared to go through all of that again unless she gets compensated.”

Strike made a second note.

“Tell her it isn’t the agency’s practice to pay witnesses for their cooperation,” said Strike. “Appeal to her better nature. If that doesn’t work, she can have a hundred quid.”

“I think she’s hoping for thousands.”

“And I’m hoping for Christmas in the Bahamas,” said Strike, as rain dotted the window behind him. “That all you’ve got?”

“Yes,” said Robin, closing her notebook.

“Well, I’ve drawn a blank on the Bennie-abusing patient who claimed to have killed Margot, Applethorpe. I think Irene must’ve got the name wrong. I’ve tried all the variants that’ve occurred to me, but nothing’s coming up. I might have to call her back. I’ll try Janice first, though.”

“You haven’t told me what you thought of the Oakden book.”

“Bog-standard opportunist,” said Strike, “who did well to squeeze ten chapters out of virtually nothing. But I’d like to track him down if we can.”

“I’m trying,” sighed Robin, “but he’s another one who seems to have vanished off the face of the planet. His mother seemed to be his primary source, didn’t she? I don’t think he persuaded anyone who really knew Margot to talk to him.”

“No,” said Strike. “You’d highlighted nearly all the interesting bits.”

“Nearly?” said Robin sharply.

“All,” Strike corrected himself.

“You spotted something else?”

“No,” said Strike, but seeing that she was unconvinced, he added, “I’ve just been wondering whether someone might’ve put a hit on her.”

“Her husband?” said Robin, startled.

“Maybe,” said Strike.

“Or are you thinking about the cleaner’s husband? Jules Bayliss, and his alleged criminal connections?”

“Not really.”

“Then why—”

“I just keep coming back to the fact that if she was killed, it was done very efficiently. Which might suggest—”

“—a contract killer,” said Robin. “You know, I read a biography of Lord Lucan recently. They think he hired someone to kill his wife—”

“—and the killer got the nanny by mistake,” said Strike, who was familiar with the theory. “Yeah. Well, if that’s what happened to Margot, we’re looking at an assassin a damn sight more efficient than Lucan’s. Not a trace of her left behind, not so much as a drop of blood.”

There was a momentary silence, while Strike glanced behind him to see the rain and wind still buffeting the Christmas lights outside, and Robin’s thoughts flew to Roy Phipps, the man whom Oonagh had called bloodless, conveniently bedridden on the day of Margot’s disappearance.

“Well, I need to get going,” said Strike, pushing himself up out of his chair.

“I should, too,” sighed Robin, collecting her things.

“You’re coming back into the office later, though?” Strike asked.

He needed to give her the as-yet-unbought Christmas present before she left for Yorkshire.

“I wasn’t planning to,” said Robin. “Why?”

“Come back in,” Strike said, trying to think of a reason. He opened the door into the outer office. “Pat?”

“Yes?” said Pat, without looking round. She was once more typing fast and accurately, her electronic cigarette waggling between her teeth.

“Robin and I both need to head out now, but a man called Gregory Talbot’s about to drop off a can of 16mm film. D’you think you can track down a projector that’ll play it? Ideally before five o’clock?”

Pat swung slowly around on her desk chair to look at Strike, her monkey-ish face set, her eyes narrowed.

“You want me to find a vintage film projector by five o’clock?”

“That’s what I said.” Strike turned to Robin. “Then we can have a quick look at whatever Talbot had hiding in the attic before you leave for Masham.”

“OK,” said Robin, “I’ll come back at four.”

27

Some two and a half hours later, Strike stood beneath the awning of Hamleys on Regent Street, shopping bags by his feet, telling himself firmly that he was fine in spite of ample empirical evidence that he was, in fact, shivering. Cold rain was spattering all around him onto the dirty pavements, where it was kicked out of puddles by the marching feet of hundreds of passing pedestrians. It splashed over curbs in the wake of passing vehicles and dripped down the back of Strike’s collar, though he stood, theoretically, beneath shelter.

While checking his phone yet again for some sign that Shanker hadn’t forgotten they were supposed to be meeting for a drink, he lit a cigarette, but his raw throat didn’t appreciate the sudden ingestion of smoke. With a foul taste in his mouth, he ground out the cigarette after one drag. There was no message from Shanker, so Strike picked up his bulky shopping bags and set off again, his throat burning every time he swallowed.

He’d imagined optimistically that he might have finished all his shopping within two hours, but midday had come and gone and he still wasn’t done. How did people decide what to buy, when the speakers were all shrieking Christmas tunes at you, and the shops were full of too much choice, and all of it looked like junk? Endless processions of women kept ranging across his path, choosing items with apparently effortless ease. Were they genetically programmed to seek and find the right gift? Was there nobody he could pay to do this for him?

His eyes felt heavy, his throat ached and his nose had started running. Unsure where he was going, or what he was looking for, he walked blindly onwards. He, who usually had an excellent sense of direction, kept turning the wrong way, becoming disorientated. Several times he knocked into carefully stacked piles of Christmas merchandise, or buffeted smaller people, who scowled and muttered and scurried away.

The bulky bags he was carrying contained three identical Nerf blasters for his nephews; large plastic guns which shot foam bullets, which Strike had decided to buy on the dual grounds that he would have loved one when he was eleven, and the assistant had assured him they were one of the must-have gifts of the year. He’d bought his Uncle Ted a sweater because he couldn’t think of anything else, his brother-in-law a box of golf balls and a bottle of gin on the same principle, but he still had the trickiest gifts to buy—the ones for the women: Lucy, Joan and Robin.

His mobile rang.

“Fuck.”

He hobbled sideways out of the crowd and, standing beside a mannequin wearing a reindeer sweater, shook himself free from a few of his bags so that he could pull out his mobile.

“Strike.”

“Bunsen, I’m near Shakespeare’s ’Ead on Great Marlborough Street. See you there in twenty?”

“Great,” said Strike, who was becoming hoarse. “I’m just round the corner.”

Another wave of sweat passed over him, soaking scalp and chest. It was, some part of his brain acknowledged, just possible that he had caught Barclay’s flu, and if that was the case, he mustn’t give it to his severely immunosuppressed aunt. He picked up his shopping bags again and made his way back to the slippery pavement outside.

The black and white timbered frontage of Liberty rose up to his right as he headed along Great Marlborough Street. Buckets and boxes of flowers lay all around the main entrance, temptingly light and portable, and already wrapped; so easy to carry to the Shakespeare’s Head and take on to the office afterward. But, of course, flowers wouldn’t do this time. Sweating worse than ever, Strike turned into the store, dumped his bags once more on the floor beside an array of silk scarves, and called Ilsa.

“Hey, Oggy,” said Ilsa.

“What can I get Robin for Christmas?” he said. It was becoming difficult to talk: his throat felt raw.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fantastic. Give me an idea. I’m in Liberty.”

“Um…” said Ilsa. “Let’s th… ooh, I know what you can get her. She wants some new perfume. She didn’t like the stuff she—”

“I don’t need backstory,” said Strike ungraciously. “That’s great. Perfume. What does she wear?”

“I’m trying to tell you, Oggy,” said Ilsa. “She wants a change. Choose her something new.”

“I can’t smell,” said Strike, impatiently, “I’ve got a cold.”

But this basic problem aside, he was afraid that a perfume he’d personally picked out was too intimate a gift, like that green dress of a few years back. He was looking for something like flowers, but not flowers, something that said “I like you,” but not “this is what I’d like you to smell like.”

“Just go to an assistant and say ‘I want to buy a perfume for someone who wears Philosykos but wants a—’”

“She what?” said Strike. “She wears what?”

“Philosykos. Or she did.”

“Spell it,” said Strike, his head thumping. Ilsa did so.

“So I just ask an assistant, and they’ll give me something like it?”

“That’s the idea,” said Ilsa patiently.

“Great,” said Strike. “Appreciate it. Speak soon.”

The assistant thought you’d like it.

Yeah, he’d say that. The assistant thought you’d like it would effectively de-personalize the gift, turn it into something almost as mundane as flowers, but it would still show he’d taken some care, given it some thought. Picking up his carrier bags again, he limped toward an area he could see in the distance that looked as though it was lined with bottles.

The perfume department turned out to be small, about the size of Strike’s office. He sidled into the crowded space, passing beneath a cupola painted with stars, to find himself surrounded by shelves laden with fragile cargos of glass bottles, some of which wore ruffs, or patterns like lace; others which looked like jewels, or the kind of phial suitable for a love potion. Apologizing as he forced people aside with his Nerf guns, his gin and his golf balls, he met a slim, black-clad man who asked, “Can I help you?” At this moment Strike’s eye fell on a range of bottled scents which were identically packed with black labels and tops. They looked functional and discreet, with no overt suggestion of romance.

“I’d like one of those,” he croaked, pointing.

“Right,” said the assistant. “Er—”

“It’s for someone who used to wear Philosykos. Something like that.”

“OK,” said the assistant, leading Strike over to the display. “Well, what about—”

“No,” said Strike, before the assistant could remove the top of the tester. The perfume was called Carnal Flower. “She said she didn’t like that one,” Strike added, with the conscious aim of appearing less strange. “Are any of the others like Philo—”

“She might like Dans Tes Bras?” suggested the assistant, spraying a second bottle onto a smelling strip.

“Doesn’t that mean—?”

“‘In your arms,’” said the assistant.

“No,” said Strike, without taking the smelling strip. “Are any of the others like Phi—?”

“Musc Ravageur?”

“You know what, I’ll leave it,” said Strike, sweat prickling anew beneath his shirt. “Which exit is nearest the Shakespeare’s Head?”

The unsmiling assistant pointed Strike toward the left. Muttering apologies, Strike edged back out past women who were studying bottles and spraying on testers, turned a corner and saw, with relief, the pub where he was meeting Shanker, which lay just beyond the glass doors of a room full of chocolates.

Chocolates, he thought, slowing down and incidentally impeding a group of harried women. Everyone likes chocolates. Sweat was now coming over him in waves, and he seemed to feel simultaneously hot and cold. He approached a table piled high with chocolate boxes, looking for the most expensive one, one that would show appre­ciation and friendship. Trying to choose a flavor, he thought he recalled a conversation about salted caramel, so he took the largest box he could find and headed for the till.

Five minutes later, another bag hanging from his hands, Strike emerged at the end of Carnaby Street, where music-themed Christmas decorations hung between the buildings. In Strike’s now fevered state, the invisible heads suggested by giant headphones and sunglasses seemed sinister rather than festive. Struggling with his bags, he backed into the Shakespeare’s Head, where fairy lights twinkled and chatter and laughter filled the air.

“Bunsen,” said a voice, just inside the door.

Shanker had secured a table. Shaven-headed, gaunt, pale and heavily tattooed, Shanker had an upper lip that was fixed in a permanent Elvis-style sneer, due to the scar that ran up toward his cheekbone. He was absentmindedly clicking the fingers of the hand not holding his pint, a tic he’d had since his teens. No matter where he was, Shanker managed to emanate an aura of danger, projecting the idea that he might, on the slightest provocation, resort to violence. Crowded as the pub was, nobody had chosen to share his table. Incongruously, or so it seemed to Strike, Shanker, too, had shopping bags at his feet.

“What’s wrong wiv ya?” Shanker said, as Strike sank down opposite him and disposed of his own bags beneath the table. “Ya look like shit.”

“Nothing,” said Strike, whose nose was now running profusely and whose pulse seemed to have become erratic. “Cold or something.”

“Well, keep it the fuck away from me,” said Shanker. “Last fing we fuckin’ need at home. Zahara’s only just got over the fuckin’ flu. Wanna pint?”

“Er—no,” said Strike. The thought of beer was currently repellent. “Couldn’t get me some water, could you?”

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Shanker, as he got up.

When Shanker had returned with a glass of water and sat down again, Strike said, without preamble,

“I wanted to ask you about an evening, must’ve been round about ’92, ’93. You needed to get into town, you had a car, but you couldn’t drive it yourself. You’d done something to your arm. It was strapped up.”

Shanker shrugged impatiently, as much as to say, who could be expected to remember something so trivial? Shanker’s life had been an endless series of injuries received and inflicted, and of needing to get places to deliver cash, drugs, threats or beatings. Periods of imprisonment had done nothing but temporarily change the environment in which he conducted business. Half the boys with whom he had associated in his teens were dead, most killed by knives or overdoses. One cousin had died in a police car chase, and another had been shot through the back of the head, his killer never caught.

“You had to make a delivery,” Strike went on, trying to jog Shanker’s memory. “Jiffy bag full of something—drugs, cash, I don’t know. You came round the squat looking for someone to drive you, urgently. I said I’d do it. We went to a strip club in Soho. It was called Teezers.”

“Teezers, yeah,” said Bunsen. “Long gone, Teezers. Closed ten, fifteen year ago.”

“When we got there, there was a group of men standing on the pavement, heading inside. One of them was a bald black guy—”

“Your fucking memory,” said Shanker, amused. “You could do a stage act. ‘Bunsen, the Amazing Memory Man’—”

“—and there was a big Latin-looking bloke with dyed black hair and sideburns. We pulled up, you wound down the window and he came over and put his hand on the door to talk to you. He had eyes like a basset hound and he was wearing a massive gold ring with a lion’s—”

“Mucky Ricci,” said Shanker.

“You remember him?”

“Just said ’is name, Bunsen, d’in I?”

“Yeah. Sorry. What was his real name, d’you know?”

“Nico, Niccolo Ricci, but everyone called ’im ‘Mucky.’ Old-school villain. Pimp. ’E owned a few strip clubs, ran a couple of knocking shops. Real bit of old London, ’e was. Got his start as part of the Sabini gang, when ’e was a kid.”

“How’re you spelling Ricci? R—I—C—C—I, right?”

“What’s this about?”

Strike tugged the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? out of his coat pocket, turned to the photographs of the practice Christmas party and held it out to Shanker, who took it suspiciously. He squinted for a moment at the partial picture of the man with the lion ring, then passed the book back to Strike.

“Well?” said Strike.

“Yeah, looks like ’im. Where’s that?”

“Clerkenwell. A doctors’ Christmas party.”

Shanker looked mildly surprised.

“Well, Clerkenwell, that was the old Sabini stamping ground, warn’t it? And I s’pose even gangsters need doctors sometimes.”

“It was a party,” said Strike. “Not a surgery. Why would Mucky Ricci be at a doctors’ party?”

“Dunno,” said Shanker. “Anyone need killing?”

“Funny you should ask that,” said Strike. “I’m investigating the disappearance of a woman who was there that night.”

Shanker looked sideways at him.

“Mucky Ricci’s gaga,” he said quietly. “Old man now, innit.”

“Still alive, though?”

“Yer. ’E’s in an ’ome.”

“How d’you know that?”

“Done a bit o’ business wiv ’is eldest, Luca.”

“Boys in the same line of work as their old man?”

“Well, there ain’t no Little Italy gang any more, is there? But they’re villains, yeah,” said Shanker. Then he leaned across the table and said quietly, “Listen to me, Bunsen. You do not wanna screw wiv Mucky Ricci’s boys.”

It was the first time Shanker had ever given Strike such a warning.

“You go fuckin’ wiv their old man, you try pinnin’ anyfing on ’im, the Ricci boys’ll skin ya. Understand? They don’t fuckin’ care. They’ll torch your fuckin’ office. They’ll cut up your girl.”

“Tell me about Mucky. Anything you know.”

“Did you ’ear what I just said, Bunsen?”

“Just tell me about him, for fuck’s sake.”

Shanker scowled.

“’Ookers. Porn. Drugs, but girls was ’is main thing. Same era as George Cornell, Jimmy Humphries, all those boys. That gold ring ’e wore, ’e used to say Danny the Lion gave it ’im. Danny Leo, the mob boss in New York. Claimed they were related. Dunno if it’s true.”

“Ever run across anyone called Conti?” Strike asked. “Probably a bit younger than Ricci.”

“Nope. But Luca Ricci’s a fuckin’ psycho,” said Shanker. “When did this bint disappear?”

“1974,” said Strike.

He expected Shanker to say “Nineteen seventy fucking four?,” to pour scorn on the likelihood of finding any kind of solution after all this time, but his old friend merely frowned at him, his clicking fingers recalling the relentless progress of the deathwatch beetle, and it occurred to the detective that Shanker knew more about old crimes and the long shadows they cast than many policemen.

“Name of Margot Bamborough,” said Strike. “She vanished on her way to the pub. Nothing ever found, no handbag, door keys, nothing. Never seen again.”

Shanker sipped his beer.

“Professional job,” he said.

“That occurred to me,” said Strike. “Hence—”

“Fuck your fucking ‘hence,’” said Shanker fiercely. “If the bint was taken out by Mucky Ricci or any of his boys, she’s past fuckin’ savin,’ in’t she? I know you like bein’ the boy scout, mate, but the last guy who pissed off Luca Ricci, his wife opened the door few days later and got acid thrown in her face. Blind in one eye, now.

“You wanna drop this, Bunsen. If Mucky Ricci’s the answer, you need to stop askin’ the question.”

28

Somehow, Pat had managed to track down a vintage film projector. It had been promised for delivery at four, but Strike and Robin were still waiting for it at a quarter to six, at which time Robin told Strike she really did need to leave. She hadn’t yet packed for her trip home to Yorkshire, she wanted an early night before catching the train and, if she was honest, she was feeling insulted by Strike’s gift of unwrapped salted caramel chocolates, which he’d pulled hastily out of a Liberty bag when he saw her, and which she now suspected was the whole lousy reason he had forced her to come back to the office in the first place. As this had necessitated a long trip back to Denmark Street on a packed Tube, it was hard not to feel resentful about the time and trouble she had taken to find and wrap the DVD of two old Tom Waits concerts he’d mentioned wanting to watch, a few weeks previously. Robin had never heard of the singer: it had taken her some trouble to identify the man Strike had been talking about, and the concerts he’d never seen as those on No Visitors After Midnight. And in return, she got chocolates she was sure had been grabbed at random.

She left Strike’s present behind, untouched, in Max’s kitchen, before boarding the crowded train to Harrogate next morning. As she traveled north in her mercifully pre-booked seat, Robin tried to tell herself that her feeling of emptiness was merely tiredness. Christmas at home would be a wonderful break. She’d be meeting her new niece for the first time; there’d be lie-ins and home-cooked food and hours in front of the telly.

A toddler was shouting at the back of the carriage, his mother trying just as loudly to entertain and subdue him. Robin pulled out her iPod and put on headphones. She’d downloaded Joni Mitchell’s album, Court and Spark, which Oonagh had mentioned as Margot Bamborough’s favorite. Robin hadn’t yet had time to listen to it, or, indeed, to any other music, for weeks.

But Court and Spark didn’t soothe or cheer her. She found it unsettling, unlike anything she had ever listened to before. Expecting melodies and hooks, Robin was disappointed: everything felt unfinished, left open, unresolved. A beautiful soprano voice tumbled and swooped over piano or guitar chords that never led to anything as mundane as a chorus that you could settle into, or tap your foot to. You couldn’t hum along, you couldn’t have joined in unless you, too, could sing like Mitchell, which Robin certainly couldn’t. The words were strange, and evoked responses she didn’t like: she wasn’t sure she’d ever felt the things Mitchell sang about, and this made her feel defensive, confused and sad: Love came to my door, with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul…

A few seconds into track three, she turned off the iPod and reached instead for the magazine she had brought with her. At the back of the carriage, the toddler was now howling.

Robin’s mood of mild despondency persisted until she got off the train, but when she saw her mother standing on the platform, ready to drive her back to Masham, she was overtaken by a wave of genuine warmth. She hugged Linda, and for almost ten minutes afterward, while they wended their way, chatting, toward the car, passing a café out of which jangling Christmas music was emanating, even the dour gray Yorkshire skies and the car interior, which smelled of Rowntree the Labrador, felt comforting and cheery in their familiarity.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Linda said, when she had closed the driver’s door. Instead of turning the key in the ignition, Linda turned to Robin, looking almost fearful.

A sickening jolt of panic turned Robin’s stomach upside down.

“What’s happened?” she said.

“It’s all right,” Linda said hastily, “everyone’s well. But I want you to know before we get back to Masham, in case you see them.”

“See who?”

“Matthew,” said Linda, “has brought… he’s brought that woman home with him. Sarah Shadlock. They’re staying with Geoffrey for Christmas.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “Christ, Mum, I thought someone had died.”

She hated the way Linda was looking at her. Though her insides had just grown cold, and the fragile happiness that had briefly kindled inside her had been snuffed out, she forced a smile and a tone of unconcern.

“It’s fine. I knew. Her ex-fiancé called me. I should’ve guessed,” she said, wondering why she hadn’t, “they might be here for Christmas. Can we get home, please? I’m dying for a cup of tea.”

“You knew? Why didn’t you tell us?”

But Linda herself supplied the answer to that, as they drove. It neither soothed nor comforted Robin to have Linda storming about how outraged she’d been, when a neighbor told her that Matthew had been strolling hand in hand with Sarah through the middle of town. She didn’t feel comforted by strictures against her ex-husband’s morals and manners, nor did she appreciate having each family member’s reaction detailed to her (“Martin was all for punching him again”). Then Linda moved on to the divorce: what was going on? Why wasn’t it all settled yet? Did Robin honestly think mediation would work? Didn’t Matthew’s behavior, flaunting this woman in front of the whole of Masham, show how utterly lost to shame and reason he was? Why, oh why, hadn’t Robin agreed to let Harveys of Harrogate deal with it all, was she sure this London woman was up to it, because Corinne Maxwell had told Linda that when her daughter divorced without children it was all completely straightforward…

But at least there was little Annabel Marie, was the conclusion of Linda’s monologue, as they turned onto Robin’s parents’ street.

“Wait till you see her, Robin, just wait…”

The front door opened before the car came to a halt. Jenny and Stephen were standing on the threshold, looking so excited that an onlooker might have suspected it was they who were about to see their baby daughter for the first time, not Robin. Realizing what was expected of her, Robin hitched an eager smile onto her face, and within minutes found herself sitting on the sofa in her parents’ living room, a warm little sleeping body in her arms, wrapped up in wool, surprisingly solid and heavy, and smelling of Johnson’s baby powder.

“She’s gorgeous, Stephen,” Robin said, while Rowntree’s tail thumped against the coffee table. He was nosing at her, thrusting his head repeatedly under Robin’s hand, confused as to why he wasn’t receiving the fuss and love he was used to. “She’s gorgeous, Jenny,” Robin said, as her sister-in-law took photos of “Auntie Robin” meeting Annabel for the first time. “She’s gorgeous, Mum,” Robin said to Linda, who had come back with a tea tray and a craving to hear what Robin thought of their twenty-inch-long marvel.

“Evens things out, doesn’t it, having another girl?” said Linda delightedly. Her anger at Matthew was over now: her granddaughter was everything.

The sitting room was more cramped than usual, not only with Christmas tree and cards, but with baby equipment. A changing mat, a Moses basket, a pile of mysterious muslin cloths, a bag of nappies and an odd contraption that Jenny explained was a breast pump. Robin rhapsodized, smiled, laughed, ate biscuits, heard the story of the birth, admired some more, held her niece until she woke, then, after Jenny had taken back possession of the baby and, with a touch of new self-importance, settled herself down to breastfeed, said that she would nip upstairs and unpack.

Robin carried her bag upstairs, her absence unnoticed and unregretted by those below, who were lost in adoration of the baby. Robin closed the door of her old room behind her, but instead of unpacking, lay down on her old bed. Facial muscles aching from all her forced smiling, she closed her eyes, and allowed herself the luxury of exhausted misery.

29

With three days to go before Christmas, Strike was forced to abandon the pretense that he didn’t have flu. Concluding that the only sensible course was to hole up in his attic flat while the virus passed through his system, he took himself to a packed Sainsbury’s where, feverish, sweating, breathing through his mouth and desperate to get away from the crowds and the canned carols, he grabbed enough food for a few days, and bore it back to his two rooms above the office.

Joan took the news that he wouldn’t be joining the festivities in Cornwall predictably hard. She went so far as to suggest that it would be fine for him to come, as long as they sat at opposite ends of the dinner table, but to Strike’s relief, Ted overruled her. Strike didn’t know whether he was being paranoid, but he suspected Lucy didn’t believe he was genuinely ill. If she did, her tone suggested that he might have caught flu deliberately. He thought he heard a trace of accusation when she informed him that Joan was now entirely bald.

By five o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Strike had developed a cough that made his lungs rattle and his ribs ache. Drowsing on his bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, his prosthetic leg propped against a wall, he was woken abruptly by a loud noise. Footsteps seemed to be moving down the stairs, away from his attic door. A paroxysm of coughing seized him before he could call out to the person he thought had woken him. Struggling back into a sitting position to clear his lungs, he didn’t hear the second approach of footsteps until somebody knocked on his door. He greatly resented the effort it took to shout, “What?”

“D’you need anything?” came Pat’s deep, gravelly voice.

“No,” Strike shouted. The syllable emerged as a croak.

“Have you got food?”

“Yes.”

“Painkillers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m leaving some things outside the door for you.” He heard her setting objects down. “There are a couple of presents. Eat the soup while it’s still hot. See you on the twenty-eighth.”

Her footsteps were clanging down the metal stairs before he could respond.

He wasn’t sure whether he’d imagined the mention of hot soup, but the possibility was enough to make him drag his crutches toward himself and make his way laboriously to the door. The chill of the stairwell added gooseflesh to his fever sweats. Pat had somehow managed to carry the old video projector upstairs for him, and he suspected that it was the sound of her setting this down that had woken him. Beside it lay the can of film from Gregory Talbot’s attic, a small pile of wrapped Christmas gifts, a handful of cards and two polystyrene tubs of hot chicken soup that he knew she must have walked to Chinatown to fetch. He felt quite pathetically grateful.

Leaving the heavy projector and the can of film where they were, he pulled and prodded the Christmas gifts and card across the floor into the flat with one of his crutches, then slowly bent down to pick up the tubs of soup.

Before eating, he took his mobile from the bedside table and texted Pat:

Thanks very much. Hope you have a good Christmas.

He then wrapped the duvet around himself and ate the soup straight out of the tubs, tasting nothing. He’d hoped the hot liquid would soothe his raw throat, but the cough persisted, and once or twice he thought he was going to choke everything back up again. His intestines also seemed unsure whether they welcomed food. Having finished the two tubs, he settled back down beneath the duvet, sweating while he looked at the black sky outside, guts churning, and wondering why he wasn’t yet on the mend.

After a night of intermittent dozing interrupted by prolonged coughing fits, Strike woke on Christmas morning to find his fever unabated, and sweaty sheets tangled about him. His normally noisy flat was unnaturally quiet. Tottenham Court Road was suddenly, weirdly devoid of traffic. He supposed most of the taxi drivers were at home with their families.

Strike was not a self-pitying man, but lying alone in bed, coughing and sweating, his ribs sore and his fridge now virtually empty, he was unable to prevent his thoughts roaming back over Christmases past, especially those spent at Ted and Joan’s in St. Mawes, where everything proceeded as it did on the television and in story books, with turkey and crackers and stockings.

Of course, today was far from the first Christmas he’d spent away from family and friends. There’d been a couple such in the army, when he’d eaten foil trays of tasteless turkey in field canteens, among camouflage-wearing colleagues wearing Santa hats. The structure he’d enjoyed in the military had then consoled him in the absence of other pleasures, but there was no camaraderie to sustain him today, only the dismal fact that he was alone, ill and one-legged, stuck up in a drafty attic, forced to endure the consequences of his own firm repudiation of any relationship that might offer support in moments of illness or sadness.

The memory of Pat’s kindness became, this Christmas morning, still more touching in retrospect. Turning his head, he saw the few gifts that she’d brought upstairs still lying on the floor just inside the door.

He got up from his bed, still coughing, reached for his crutches and swung himself toward the bathroom. His urine was dark, his unshaven face in the mirror ashen. Though dismayed by his own debility and exhaustion, habits ingrained in him by the military prevented Strike from returning to bed. He knew that lying unwashed with his leg off would merely increase his hovering feeling of depression. He therefore showered, moving more carefully than usual to guard against the risk of falls, dried himself off, put on a clean T-shirt, boxers and dressing gown and, still racked with coughs, prepared himself a tasteless breakfast of porridge made with water, because he preferred to conserve his last pint of milk for his tea. As he’d expected to be well on the mend by now, his stocks of food had dwindled to some limp vegetables, a couple of bits of uncooked chicken two days out of date and a small chunk of hard Cheddar.

After breakfast Strike took painkillers, put on his prosthesis and then, determined to use what small amount of physical strength he could muster before the illness dragged him under again, stripped and remade his bed with clean sheets, removed his Christmas presents from the floor to his kitchen table, and carried the projector and roll of film inside from the landing where he had left them. The can, as he’d expected, bore the mark of Capricorn upon it, drawn in faded but clearly legible marker pen.

His mobile buzzed as he propped the can against the wall beneath his kitchen window. He picked it up, expecting a text from Lucy asking when he was going to call and wish everyone in St. Mawes a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas, Bluey. Are you happy? Are you with someone you love?

It had been a fortnight since Charlotte had last texted him, almost as though she’d telepathically heard his resolution to contact her husband if her messages became any more self-destructive.

It would be so easy to answer; so easy to tell her he was alone, ill, unsupported. He thought of the naked photo she’d sent on his birthday, which he’d forced himself to delete. But he’d come such a long way, to a place of lonely security against emotional storms. However much he’d loved her, however much she could still disturb his serenity with a few typed words, he forced himself, standing beside his small Formica table, to recall the only occasion on which he’d taken her back to St. Mawes for Christmas. He remembered the row heard all through the tiny house, remembered her storming out past the family assembled around the turkey, remembered Ted and Joan’s faces, because they’d so looked forward to the visit, having not seen Strike for over a year, because he was at that time stationed in Germany with the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police.

He set his mobile to mute. Self-respect and self-discipline had always been his bulwarks against lethargy and misery. What was Christmas Day, after all? If you disregarded the fact that other people were enjoying feasts and fun, merely a winter’s day like any other. If he was currently bodily weak, why shouldn’t he use his mental faculties, at least, to continue work on the Bamborough case?

Thus reasoning, Strike made himself a fresh cup of strong tea, added a very small amount of milk, opened his laptop and, pausing regularly for coughing fits, re-read the document he’d been working on before he’d fallen ill: a summary of the contents of Bill Talbot’s symbol-laden, leather-bound notebook, which Strike had now spent three weeks deciphering. His intention was to send the document to Robin for her thoughts.

Strike now deleted the last paragraph and substituted a name and a new note.

It cost Strike far more effort than it would usually have done to organize his thoughts on Mucky Ricci and set them down. Tired now, his throat raw and his intercostal muscles aching from coughing, he read through the rest of the document, which in his opinion contained little of real value other than the action points. After correcting a couple of typos, he attached the lot to an email and sent it to Robin.

Only after this had gone did it occur to him that some people might think emailing work colleagues on Christmas Day was unacceptable. However, he shrugged off any momentary qualms by telling himself that Robin was currently enjoying a family Christmas, and would be highly unlikely to check her email until tomorrow at the earliest.

He picked up his mobile and checked it. Charlotte hadn’t texted again. Of course, she had twins, aristocratic in-laws and a husband to keep happy. He set the phone down again.

Little energy though he had, Strike found the absence of anything to do still more enervating. Without much curiosity, he examined a couple of the Christmas presents lying beside him, both of which were clearly from grateful clients, as they were addressed to both him and Robin. Shaking the larger one, he deduced that it contained chocolates.

He returned to his bedroom and watched a bit of television, but the relentless emphasis on Christmas depressed him and he switched off midway through a continuity announcer’s wish that everyone was having a wonderful—

Strike returned to the kitchen and his gaze fell on the heavy projector and can of film lying just inside the door. After a moment’s hesitation, he heaved the heavy machine onto his kitchen table, facing a blank stretch of kitchen wall and plugged it in. It seemed to be in working order. He then prized the lid off the tin to reveal a large roll of 16mm film, which he took out and fitted into the projector.

Doubtless because he wasn’t thinking as clearly as usual, and also because of the need to stop regularly to cough up more sputum into kitchen roll, it took Strike nearly an hour to work out how to oper­ate the old projector, by which time he realized that he had regained something of an appetite. It was now nearly two o’clock. Trying not to imagine what was going on in St. Mawes, where a large turkey with all the trimmings was doubtless reaching the peak of bronzed perfection, but seeing this flicker of returned appetite as a sign of returning health, he took the pack of out-of-date chicken and the limp vegetables out of the fridge, chopped it all, boiled up some dried noodles and made a stir fry.

He could taste nothing, but this second ingestion of food made him feel slightly more human, and ripping the paper and cellophane off the box of chocolates, he ate several of them, too, before flicking the switch on the projector.

Onto the wall, pale in the sunlight, flickered the naked figure of a woman. Her head was covered in a hood. Her hands were bound behind her. A man’s black-trousered leg entered the shot. He kicked her: she stumbled and fell to her knees. He continued to kick until she was prone on the ground of what looked like a warehouse.

She’d have screamed, of course, she couldn’t have failed to scream, but there was no soundtrack. A thin scar ran from beneath her left breast down to her ribs, as though this wasn’t the first time knives had touched her. All the men involved had covered their faces with scarves or balaclavas. She alone was naked: the men merely pulled down their jeans.

She stopped moving long before they had finished with her. At one point, close to the end, when she was barely moving, when blood still dripped from her many stab wounds, the left hand of a man who seemed to have watched, but not participated, slid in front of the camera. It bore something large and gold.

Strike flicked off the projector. He was suddenly drenched in cold sweat. His stomach was cramping. He barely made it to the bathroom before he vomited, and there he remained, heaving until he was empty, until dusk fell beyond the attic windows.

30

Annabel was wailing in Stephen’s old bedroom, which was next door to Robin’s own. Her niece had cried through a substantial portion of Christmas night and Robin had been awake along with her, listening to Joni Mitchell on her headphones to block out the noise.

Four days stuck in her parents’ house in Masham had driven Robin back to Mitchell’s sprawling, wandering tunes and the lyrics that had made her feel strangely lost. Margot Bamborough had found something there she had needed, and hadn’t Margot Bamborough’s life been far more complicated than her own? Ailing parents to support, a new daughter to love and to miss, a workplace full of cross-currents and bullying, a husband who wouldn’t talk to her, another man lurking in the background, promising that he’d changed. What were Robin’s troubles, compared to those?

So Robin lay in the dark and listened as she hadn’t on the train. Then, she had heard an alienating sophistication in the words the beautiful voice had sung. Robin hadn’t had glamorous love affairs she could anatomize or lament: she’d had one proper boyfriend and one marriage, which had gone horribly wrong, and now she was home at her parents’ house, a childless twenty-nine-year-old who was “traveling in a different direction to the rest of us”: in other words, backward.

But in the darkness, really listening, she began to hear melodies among the suspended chords, and as she stopped comparing the music to anything she would usually have listened to, she realized that the images she had found alienating in their strangeness were confessions of inadequacy and displacement, of the difficulty of merging two lives, of waiting for the soulmate who never arrived, of craving both freedom and love.

It was with a literal start that she heard the words, at the beginning of track eight, “I’m always running behind the times, just like this train…”

And when, later in the song, Mitchell asked: “what are you going to do now? You got no one to give your love to,” tears started in Robin’s eyes. Not a mile from where she lay, Matthew and Sarah would be lying in bed in her ex-father-in-law’s spare room, and here was Robin, alone again in a room that for her would forever have a hint of prison cell about it. This was where she had spent months after leaving university, pinioned within four walls by her own memories of a man in a gorilla mask, and the worst twenty minutes of her life.

Since arriving home, everyone in the house had been keen to accompany her into Masham, “because you shouldn’t have to hide.” The implication, no matter their kind intention, was that it would be a natural response for a woman whose ex-husband had found a new partner to hide. There was shame in being single.

But listening to Court and Spark, Robin thought that it was perfectly true that she was traveling in a different direction to anyone she knew. She was fighting her way back to the person she should have been before a man in a mask reached for her from the darkness beneath a stairwell. The reason nobody else understood was that they assumed that her true self was to be the wife Matthew Cunliffe had wanted: a woman who worked quietly in HR and stayed home safely after dark. They didn’t realize that that woman had been the result of those twenty minutes, and that the authentic Robin might never have emerged if she hadn’t been sent, by mistake, to a shabby office in Denmark Street.

With a strange sense of having spent her sleepless hours fruitfully, Robin turned off her iPod. Four o’clock on Boxing Day morning and the house was silent at last. Robin took out her earbuds, rolled over and managed to fall asleep.

Two hours later, Annabel woke again, and this time, Robin got up and crept downstairs, bare-footed, to the big wooden table beside the Aga, carrying her notebook, her laptop and her phone.

It was pleasant to have the kitchen to herself. The garden beyond the window, covered in a hard frost, was dark blue and silver in the winter pre-dawn. Setting her laptop and phone on the table, she greeted Rowntree, who was too arthritic these days for early morning frolicking, but wagged his tail lazily from his basket beside the radiator. She made herself a cup of tea, then took a seat at the table and opened her laptop.

She hadn’t yet read Strike’s document summarizing the horoscope notes, which had arrived while she was busy helping her mother cook Christmas lunch. Robin had been adding the Brussels sprouts to the steamer when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the notification on her phone, which was charging on one of the few power points that wasn’t taken up by some piece of baby equipment: bottle steril­izer, baby alarm or breast pump. Seeing Strike’s name, her heart had momentarily lifted, because she was sure that she was about to read thanks for the gift of the Tom Waits DVD, and the fact that he’d emailed on Christmas Day was an indicator of friendship such as she had perhaps never received from him.

However, when she opened the email she simply read:

FYI: summary of Talbot’s horoscope notes and action points.

Robin knew her face must have fallen when she looked up and saw Linda watching her.

“Bad news?”

“No, just Strike.”

“On Christmas Day?” said Linda sharply.

And Robin had realized in that instant that Geoffrey, her ex-father-in-law, must have been spreading it around Masham that if Matthew had been unfaithful, it was only after being heinously betrayed himself. She read the truth in her mother’s face, and in Jenny’s sudden interest in Annabel, whom she was jiggling in her arms, and in the sharp look flung at her by Jonathan, her youngest brother, who was tipping bottled cranberry sauce into a dish.

“It’s work,” Robin had said coldly. Each of her silent accusers had returned hastily to their tasks.

It was, therefore, with very mixed feelings toward the author that Robin now settled down to read Strike’s document. Emailing her on Christmas Day had felt reproachful, as though she’d let him down by going back to Masham instead of remaining in London and single-handedly running the agency while he, Barclay and Morris were down with flu. Moreover, if he was going to email at all on Christmas Day, some kind of personal message might be seen as common politeness. Perhaps he’d simply treated her Christmas present with the same indifference she’d treated his.

Robin had just read to the bottom of “Possible leads” and was digesting the idea that a professional gangster had been, on at least one occasion, in close proximity to Margot Bamborough, when the kitchen door opened, admitting baby Annabel’s distant wails. Linda entered the room, wearing a dressing gown and slippers.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked, sounding disapproving, as she crossed to the kettle.

Robin tried not to show how irked she felt. She’d spent the last few days smiling until her face ached, helping as much as was physically possible, admiring baby Annabel until she doubted that a pore had been left unpraised; she’d joined in charades and poured drinks and watched films and unwrapped chocolates or cracked nuts for Jenny, who was constantly pinned to the sofa by the demands of breastfeeding. She’d shown an intelligent and sympathetic interest in Jonathan’s university friends’ exploits; she’d listened to her father’s opinions on David Cameron’s agricultural policy and she’d noticed, but shown no resentment about, the fact that not a single member of her family had asked what she was doing at work. Was she not allowed to sit quietly in the kitchen for half an hour, while Annabel rendered sleep impossible?

“Reading an email,” said Robin.

“They think,” said Linda (and Robin knew “they” must be the new parents, whose thoughts and wishes were of all-consuming importance just now) “it was the sprouts. She’s been colicky all night. Jenny’s exhausted.”

“Annabel didn’t have sprouts,” said Robin.

“She gets it all through the breast milk,” explained Linda, with what felt to Robin like condescension for being excluded from the mysteries of motherhood.

Bearing two cups of tea for Stephen and Jenny, Linda left the room again. Relieved, Robin opened her notebook and jotted down a couple of thoughts that had occurred to her while reading “Possible leads,” then returned to Strike’s document to read his short list of “Probably irrelevant” items gleaned from Talbot’s notebook.

The kitchen door opened again. Robin looked around. It was Linda again.

“You still here?” she said, still with a slight sense of disapproval.

“No,” said Robin, “I’m upstairs.”

Linda’s smile was reluctant. As she took more mugs from the cupboard, she asked,

“D’you want another tea?”

“No thanks,” said Robin, closing her laptop. She’d decided to finish reading Strike’s document in her room. Maybe she was imagining it, but Linda seemed to be making more noise than usual.

“He’s got you working over Christmas as well, then?” said Linda.

For the past four days, Robin had suspected that her mother wanted to talk to her about Strike. The looks she’d seen on her surprised family’s faces yesterday had told her why. However, she felt under no obligation to make it easy for Linda to interrogate her.

“As well as what?” asked Robin.

“You know what I mean,” said Linda. “Christmas. I’d have thought you were owed time off.”

“I get time off,” said Robin.

She took her empty mug over to the sink. Rowntree now struggled to his feet and Robin let him out of the back door, feeling the icy air on every bit of exposed skin. Over the garden hedge she could see the sun turning the horizon green as it made its way steadily up through the icy heavens.

“Is he seeing anyone?” Linda asked. “Strike?”

“He sees lots of people,” said Robin, willfully obtuse. “It’s part of the job.”

“You know what I mean,” said Linda.

“Why the interest?”

She expected her mother to back off, but was surprised.

“I think you know why,” she said, turning to face her daughter.

Robin was furious to find herself blushing. She was a twenty-nine-year-old woman. At that very moment, her mobile emitted a beep on the kitchen table. She was convinced that it would be Strike texting her, and so, apparently, was Linda, who, being nearer, picked up the phone to hand it to Robin, glancing at the sender’s name as she did so.

It wasn’t Strike. It was Saul Morris. He’d written:

Hope you’re not having as shit a Christmas as I am.

Robin wouldn’t normally have answered. Resentment at her family, and something else, something she didn’t particularly want to admit to, made her text back, while Linda watched:

Depends how shit yours is. Mine’s fairly shit.

She sent the message, then looked up at Linda.

“Who’s Saul Morris?” her mother asked.

“Subcontractor at the agency. Ex-police,” said Robin.

“Oh,” said Linda.

Robin could tell that had given Linda fresh food for thought. If she was honest with herself, she’d meant to do exactly that. Picking her laptop off the table, she left the kitchen.

The bathroom was, of course, occupied. Robin returned to her room. By the time she lay back down on her bed, laptop open again, Morris had texted her again.

Tell me your troubles and I’ll tell you mine. Problem shared and all that.

Slightly regretting that she’d answered him, Robin turned the mobile face down on her bed and continued reading Strike’s document.

Robin heard the bathroom door open and close. Now desperate for a pee, she jumped up and headed out of her room.

Stephen was crossing the landing, holding his washbag, puffy-eyed and yawning.

“Sorry about last night, Rob,” he said. “Jenny thinks it was the sprouts.”

“Yeah, Mum said,” Robin replied, edging around him. “No problem. Hope she feels better.”

“We’re going to take her out for a walk. I’ll see if I can buy you some ear plugs.”

Once she’d showered, Robin returned to her room. Her phone beeped twice while she was dressing.

Brushing her hair in the mirror, her eyes fell on the new perfume she’d received as a Christmas present from her mother. Robin had told her she was looking for a new fragrance, because the old one reminded her too much of Matthew. She’d been touched that Linda remembered the conversation when she opened the gift.

The bottle was round; not an orb, but a flattish circle: Chanel Chance Eau Fraîche. The liquid was pale green. An unfortunate association of ideas now made Robin think of sprouts. Nevertheless, she sprayed some on her wrists and behind her ears, filling the air with the scent of sharp lemon and nondescript flowers. What, she wondered, had made her mother choose it? What was it about the perfume that made her think “Robin”? To Robin’s nostrils it smelled like a deodorant, generic, clean and totally without romance. She remembered her unsuccessful purchase of Fracas, and the desire to be sexy and sophisticated that had ended only in headaches. Musing about the disparity between the way people would like to be seen, and the way others prefer to see them, Robin sat back down on her bed beside her laptop and flipped over her phone.

Morris had texted twice more.

Lonely and hungover this end. Not being with the kids at Christmas is shit.

When Robin hadn’t answered this, he’d texted again.

Sorry, being a maudlin dickhead. Feel free to ignore.

Calling himself a dickhead was the most likable thing she’d ever known Morris do. Feeling sorry for him, Robin replied,

It must be tough, I’m sorry.

She then returned to her laptop and the last bit of Strike’s document, detailing actions to be taken, and with initials beside each to show which of them should undertake it.

Robin couldn’t help but feel subtly criticized. Strike had now added his initials to action points that had previously been Robin’s alone, such as finding Satchwell, and persuading Wilma Bayliss’s children to give them interviews. She set the laptop down again, picked up her phone and headed back to the kitchen for breakfast.

An abrupt silence fell when she walked into the room. Linda, Stephen and Jenny all wore self-conscious looks of those who fear they might have been overheard. Robin put bread in the toaster, trying to tamp down her rising resentment. She seemed to sense mouthed speech and gesticulations behind her back.

“Robin, we just ran into Matthew,” said Stephen suddenly. “When we were walking Annabel round the block.”

“Oh,” said Robin, turning to face them, trying to look mildly interested.

It was the first time Matthew had been spotted. Robin had avoided midnight mass out of conviction that he and Sarah would be there, but her mother had reported that none of the Cunliffes had attended. Now Linda, Stephen and Jenny were all looking at her, worried, pitying, waiting for her reaction and her questions.

Her phone beeped.

“Sorry,” she said, picking it up, delighted to have a reason to look away from them all.

Morris had texted:

Why’s your Christmas so shit?

While the other three watched, she typed back:

My ex-father-in-law lives locally and my ex has brought his new girlfriend home. We’re currently the local scandal.

She didn’t like Morris, but at this moment he felt like a welcome ally, a lifeline from the life she had forged, with difficulty, away from Matthew and Masham. Robin was on the point of setting down the phone when it beeped again and, still with the other three watching her, she read:

That stinks.

It does, she texted back.

Then she looked up at her mother, Stephen and Jenny, forcing herself to smile.

“D’you want to tell me about it?” Robin asked Stephen. “Or do I have to ask?”

“No,” he said hurriedly, “it wasn’t much—we were just pushing Annabel up to the Square and back, and we saw them coming toward us. Him and that—”

“Sarah,” supplied Robin. She could just imagine them hand in hand, enjoying the wintry morning, the picturesque town, sleepy in the frost and early sunshine.

“Yeah,” said Stephen. “He looked like he wanted to double back when he saw us, but he didn’t. Said, ‘Congratulations in order, I see.’”

Robin could hear Matthew saying it.

“And that was it, really,” said Stephen.

“I’d’ve liked to have kicked him in the balls,” said Jenny suddenly. “Smug bastard.”

But Linda’s eyes were on Robin’s phone.

“Who are you texting back and forth on Boxing Day?” she asked.

“I’ve just told you,” said Robin. “Morris. He works for the agency.”

She knew exactly what impression she was giving Linda, but she had her pride. Perhaps there was no shame in being single, but the pity of her family, the thought of Matthew and Sarah walking through Masham, everyone’s suspicion of her and Strike, and the fact that there was nothing whatsoever to tell about her and Strike, except that he thought he’d better start taking over some of her leads because she’d got no results: all made her want to clutch some kind of fig leaf to her threadbare dignity. Smarmy and overfamiliar as he might be, Morris was today, perhaps, more to be pitied than censured, and was offering himself up to save Robin’s face.

She saw her mother and brother exchange looks and had the empty satisfaction of knowing that they were already haring after her false scent. Miserable, she opened the fridge and took out half a bottle of carefully re-corked champagne left over from Christmas Day.

“What are you doing?” asked Linda.

“Making myself a mimosa,” said Robin. “Still Christmas, isn’t it?”

One more night and she’d be back on the train to London. Almost as though she had heard Robin’s antisocial thought, a cry of anguish issued through the baby monitor just behind her, making Robin jump, and what she was starting to think of as the baby circus relocated from the kitchen to the sitting room, Linda bringing a glass of water for Jenny to drink while breastfeeding and turning on the TV for her, while Stephen ran upstairs to fetch Annabel.

Drink, Robin decided, was the answer. If you splashed in enough orange juice, nobody had to know you were finishing off a bottle of champagne single-handedly, and those feelings of misery, anger and inadequacy that were writhing in the pit of your stomach could be satisfactorily numbed. Mimosas carried her through to lunchtime, when everyone had a glass of red, although Jenny drank “just a mouthful” because of Annabel, and ignored Robin’s suggestion that alcoholic breast milk might help her sleep. Morris was still texting, mostly stupid Christmas knock-knock jokes and updates on his day, and Robin was replying in the same mindless manner that she sometimes continued eating crisps, with a trace of self-loathing.

My mother’s just arrived. Send sherry and excuses not to talk to her WI group about policework.

What’s your mother’s name? Robin texted back. She was definitely a little bit drunk.

Fanny, said Morris.

Robin was unsure whether to laugh or not, or, indeed, whether it was funny.

“Robs, d’you want to play Pictionary?” asked Jonathan.

“What?” she said.

She was sitting on an uncomfortable hard-backed chair in the corner of the sitting room. The baby circus occupied at least half the room. The Wizard of Oz was on the television but nobody was really watching.

“Pictionary,” repeated Jonathan, holding up the box. “Oh, yeah, and Robs, could I come and stay with you for a weekend in February?”

I’m only kidding, texted Morris. Frances.

“What?” Robin said again, under the impression somebody had asked her something.

“Morris is obviously a very interesting man,” said Linda archly, and everyone looked around at Robin, who merely said,

“Pictionary, yes, fine.”

Got to play Pictionary, she texted Morris.

Draw a dick, came back the instant answer.

Robin set down her phone again. The drink was wearing off now, leaving in its wake a headache that throbbed behind her right temple. Luckily, Martin arrived at that moment with a tray full of coffees and a bottle of Baileys.

Jonathan won Pictionary. Baby Annabel screamed some more. A cold supper was laid out on the kitchen table, to which neighbors had been invited to admire Annabel. By eight o’clock in the evening, Robin had taken paracetamol and started to drink black coffee to clear her head. She needed to pack. She also needed, somehow, to shut down her day-long conversation with Morris, who, she could tell, was now very drunk indeed.

Mohter gone home, complaining not seeing grandchioldren enough. What shall we talk about now? What are you wearing?

She ignored the text. Up in her bedroom, she packed her case, because she was catching an early train. Please, God, let Matthew and Sarah not be on it. She resprayed herself with her mother’s Christmas gift. Smelling it again, she decided that the only message it conveyed to bystanders was “I have washed.” Perhaps her mother had bought her this boring floral antiseptic out of a subconscious desire to wipe her daughter clean of the suggestion of adultery. There was certainly nothing of the seductress about it, and it would forever remind her of this lousy Christmas. Nevertheless, Robin packed it carefully among her socks, having no wish to hurt her mother’s feelings by leaving it behind.

By the time she returned downstairs, Morris had texted another five times.

I was joking.

Tell me u know I was joking.

Fukc have I offended u

Have I?

Answer me either way fuck’s sake

Slightly riled, and embarrassed now by her stupid, adolescent pretense to her family that she, like Matthew, had found another partner, she paused in the hall to text back,

I’m not offended. Got to go. Need an early night.

She entered the sitting room, where her family were all sitting, sleepy and overfed, watching the news. Robin moved a muslin cloth, half a pack of nappies and one of the Pictionary boards from the sofa, so she could sit down.

“Sorry, Robin,” said Jenny, yawning as she reached out for the baby things and put them by her feet.

Robin’s phone beeped yet again. Linda looked over at her. Robin ignored both her mother and the phone, because she was looking down at the Pictionary board where Martin had tried to draw “Icarus.” Nobody had guessed it. They’d thought Icarus was a bug hovering over a flower.

But something about the picture held Robin fixated. Again, her phone beeped. She looked at it.

Are you in bed?

Yes and so should you be, she texted back, her mind still on the Pictionary board. The flower that looked like a sun. The sun that looked like a flower.

Her phone beeped yet again. Exasperated, she looked at it.

Morris had sent her a picture of his erect dick. For a moment, and even while she felt appalled and repulsed, Robin continued to stare at it. Then, with a suddenness that made her father start awake in his chair, she got up and almost ran out of the room.

The kitchen wasn’t far enough. Nowhere would be far enough. Shaking with rage and shock, she wrenched open the back door and strode out into the icy garden, with the water in the birdbath she’d unfrozen with boiling water already milky hard in the moonlight. Without stopping to pause for thought, she called Morris’s number.

“Hey—”

“How fucking dare you—how fucking dare you send me that?”

“Fuck,” he said thickly, “I di’n—I thought—‘wish you were here’ or—”

“I said I was going to bloody bed!” Robin shouted. “I did not ask to see your fucking dick!”

She could see the neighbors’ heads bobbing behind their kitchen blinds. The Ellacotts were providing rich entertainment this Christmas, all right: first a new baby, then a shouting match about a penis.

“Oh shit,” gasped Morris. “Oh fuck… no… listen, I di’n’ mean—”

“Who the fuck does that?” shouted Robin. “What’s wrong with you?”

“No… shit… fuck… I’m s’rry… I thought… I’m so f’king sorry… Robin, don’t… oh Jesus…”

“I don’t want to see your dick!”

A storm of dry sobs answered her, then Robin thought she heard him lay down the phone on some hard surface. At a distance from the mouthpiece he emitted moans of anguish interspersed with weeping. Heavy objects seemed to be falling over. Then there was a clatter and he picked up his mobile again.

“Robin, I’m so fuckin’ sorry… what’ve I done, what’ve I…? I thought… I should fucking kill myself… don’t… don’t tell Strike, Robin… I’m fuckin’ begging you… if I lose this job… don’t tell, Robin… I lose this, I lose fuckin’ everything… I can’t lose my little girls, Robin…”

He reminded her of Matthew, the day that she’d found out he was cheating. She could see her ex-husband as clearly as though he was there on the ice-crusted lawn, face in his hands as he gasped his apologies, then looking up at her in panic. “Have you spoken to Tom? Does he know?”

What was it about her that made men demand that she keep their dirty secrets?

“I won’t tell Strike,” she said, shaking more with rage than with cold, “because his aunt’s dying and we need an extra man. But you’d better never send me anything other than an update on a case again.”

“Oh God, Robin… thank you… thank you… you are such a decent person…”

He’d stopped sobbing. His gushing offended her almost as much as the picture of his dick.

“I’m going.”

She stood in the dark, barely feeling the cold, her mobile hanging at her side. As the light in the neighbor’s kitchen went off, her par­ents’ back door opened. Rowntree came lolloping over the frozen lawn, delighted to find her outside.

“You all right, love?” Michael Ellacott asked his daughter.

“Fine,” said Robin, crouching to fuss Rowntree to hide her sudden rush of tears. “It’s all fine.”