Troubled Blood

49

At 8 a.m. on the morning she should have been meeting her estranged husband for mediation, Robin emerged from Tottenham Court Road station beneath a cerulean sky. The sunshine felt like a minor miracle after the long months of rain and storms and Robin, who had no surveillance to do today, had put on a dress, glad to be out of her everlasting jeans and sweatshirts.

Angry as she felt at Matthew for calling off the session with only twenty-four hours’ notice (“My client regrets that an urgent matter of a personal nature has arisen. Given my own unavailability for the latter part of March, I suggest we find a mutually convenient date in April”), suspicious as she was that Matthew was dragging out the process merely to demonstrate his power and add pressure to give up her claim on their joint account, her spirits were raised by the dusty glow of the early morning sunshine illuminating the eternal roadworks at the top of Charing Cross Road. The truth, which had been borne forcibly upon Robin during the five days off that Strike had insisted she take, was that she was happier at work. With no desire to go home to Yorkshire and face the usual barrage of questions from her mother about the divorce and her job, and insufficient funds to get out of London to take a solitary mini-break, she’d spent most of her time taking care of her backlog of chores, or working on the Bamborough case.

She had, if not precisely leads, then ideas, and was now heading into the office early in the hope of catching Strike before the business of the day took over. The pneumatic drills drowned out the shouts of workmen in the road as Robin passed, until she reached the shadowy calm of Denmark Street, where the shops hadn’t yet opened.

Almost at the top of the metal staircase, Robin heard voices emanating from behind the glass office door. In spite of the fact that it was not quite eight-fifteen, the light was already on.

“Morning,” said Strike, when she opened the door. He was standing beside the kettle and looked mildly surprised to see her so early. “I thought you weren’t going to be in until lunchtime?”

“Canceled,” said Robin.

She wondered whether Strike had forgotten what she’d had on that morning, or whether he was being discreet because Morris was sitting on the fake leather sofa. Though as handsome as ever, Morris’s bright blue eyes were bloodshot and his jaw dark with stubble.

“Hello, stranger,” he said. “Look at you. Proper advert for taking it easy.”

Robin ignored this comment, but as she hung up her jacket, she found herself wishing she hadn’t worn the dress. She greatly resented Morris making her feel self-conscious, but it would have been easier just to have worn jeans as usual.

“Morris has caught Mr. Smith at it, with the nanny,” said Strike.

“That was quick!” said Robin, trying to be generous, wishing Morris hadn’t been the one to do it.

“Red-handed, ten past one this morning,” said Morris, passing Robin a night vision digital camera. “Hubby was pretending to be out with the boys. Nanny always has a night off on Tuesdays. Silly fuckers said goodbye on the doorstep. Rookie error.”

Robin scrolled slowly through the pictures. The voluptuous nanny who so resembled Strike’s ex Lorelei was standing in the doorway of a terraced house, locked in the arms of Mrs. Smith’s husband. Morris had captured not only the clinch, but the street name and door number.

“Where’s this place?” Robin asked, flicking past pictures of the clinch.

“Shoreditch. Nanny’s best mate rents it,” said Morris. “Always useful to have a friend who’ll let you use their place for a sneaky shag, eh? I’ve got her name and details, too, so she’s about to get dragged into it all, as well.”

Morris stretched luxuriously on the sofa, arms over his head, and said through a yawn,

“Not often you get the chance to make three women miserable at once, is it?”

“Not to mention the husband,” said Robin, looking at the handsome profile of the commodity broker’s husband, silhouetted against a streetlamp as he made his way back to the family car.

“Well, yeah,” said Morris, holding his stretch, “him too.”

His T-shirt had ridden up, exposing an expanse of toned abdomen, a fact of which Robin thought he was probably well aware.

“Don’t fancy a breakfast meeting, do you?” Strike asked Robin. He’d just opened the biscuit tin and found it empty. “We’re overdue a Bamborough catch-up. And I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Great,” said Robin, immediately taking down her jacket again.

“You never take me out for breakfast,” Morris told Strike, getting up off the sofa. Ignoring this comment, Strike said,

“Good going on Smith, Morris. I’ll let the wife know later. See you tomorrow.”

“Terrible, isn’t it,” said Robin, as she and Strike walked back out of the black street door onto the cool of Denmark Street, where sunlight still hadn’t penetrated, “this missing plane?”

Eleven days previously, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 had taken off from Kuala Lumpur and disappeared without trace. More than two hundred people were missing. Competing theories about what had happened to the plane had dominated the news for the last week: hijack, crew sabotage and mechanical failure among them. Robin had been reading about it on the way into work. All those relatives, waiting for news. It must, surely, come soon? An aircraft holding nearly two hundred and fifty people wasn’t as easily lost as a single woman, melting away into the Clerkenwell rain.

“Nightmare for the families,” agreed Strike, as they headed out into the sun on Charing Cross Road. He paused, looking up and down the road. “I don’t want to go to Starbucks.”

So they walked to Bar Italia in Frith Street, which lay opposite Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, five minutes from the office. The small metal tables and chairs outside on the pavement were all unoccupied. In spite of its sunny promise, the March morning air still carried a chill. Every high stool at the counter inside the café bore a customer gulping down coffee before starting their working day, while reading news off their phones or else examining the shelves of produce reflected in the mirror that faced them.

“You going to be warm enough if we sit out here?” asked Strike doubtfully, looking from Robin’s dress to the counter inside. She was starting to really wish she’d worn her jeans.

“I’ll be fine,” said Robin. “And I only want a cappuccino, I already ate.”

While Strike was buying food and drink, Robin sat down on the cold metal chair, drew her jacket more tightly around her and opened her bag, with the intention of taking out Talbot’s leather notebook, but after a moment’s hesitation, she changed her mind and left it where it was. She didn’t want Strike to think that she’d been concentrating on Talbot’s astrological musings over the last few days, even though she had, in fact, spent many hours poring over the book.

“Cappuccino,” said Strike, returning to her and setting the coffee in front of her. He’d bought himself a double espresso and a mozzarella and salami roll. Sitting down next to her, he said,

“How come mediation was canceled?”

Pleased he’d remembered, Robin said:

“Matthew claims something urgent came up.”

“Believe him?”

“No. I think it’s more mind games. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but at least it would’ve been over. So,” she said, not wanting to talk about Matthew, “have you got anything new on Bamborough?”

“Not much,” said Strike, who’d been working flat out on other cases since his return from Cornwall. “We’ve got forensics back on that blood smear I found in the book in the Athorns’ flat.”

“And?”

“Type O positive.”

“And did you call Roy to find out…”

“Yeah. Margot was A positive.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

“My hopes weren’t high,” said Strike, with a shrug. “It looked like a smear from a paper cut, if anything.

“I’ve found Mucky Ricci, though. He’s in a private nursing home called St. Peter’s, in Islington. I had to do a fair bit of impersonation on the phone to get confirmation.”

“Great. D’you want me to—?”

“No. I told you, Shanker issued stern warnings about upsetting the old bastard, in case his sons got wind of it.”

“And you feel, of the two of us, I’m the one who upsets people, do you?”

Strike smirked slightly while chewing his roll.

“There’s no point rattling Luca Ricci’s cage unless we have to. Shanker told me Mucky was gaga, which I hoped meant he was a bit less sharp than he used to be. Might even have worked in our favor. Unfortunately, from what I managed to wheedle out of the nurse, he doesn’t talk any more.”

“Not at all?”

“Apparently not. She mentioned it in passing. I tried to find out whether that’s because he’s depressed, or had a stroke, or whether he’s demented, in which case questioning him is obviously pointless, but she didn’t say.

“I went to check out the home. I was hoping for some big institu­tional place where you might slip in and out unnoticed, but it’s more like a B&B. They’ve only got eighteen residents. I’d say the chances of getting in there undetected or passing yourself off as a distant cousin are close to zero.”

Irrationally, now that Ricci seemed unreachable, Robin, who hadn’t been more interested in him than in any of the other suspects, immediately felt as though something crucial to the investigation had been lost.

“I’m not saying I won’t take a bash at him, eventually,” said Strike. “But right now, the possible gains don’t justify making a bunch of professional gangsters angry at us. On the other hand, if we’ve got nothing else come August, I might have to see whether I can get a word or two out of Ricci.”

From his tone, Robin guessed that Strike, too, was well aware that more than half their allotted year on the Bamborough case had already elapsed.

“I’ve also,” he continued, “made contact with Margot’s biographer, C. B. Oakden, who’s playing hard to get. He seems to think he’s far more important to the investigation than I do.”

“Is he after money?”

“I’d say he’s after anything he can get,” said Strike. “He seemed as interested in interviewing me as letting me interview him.”

“Maybe,” suggested Robin, “he’s thinking of writing a book about you, like the one he did on Margot?”

Strike didn’t smile.

“He comes across as equal parts wily and stupid. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that I must know a lot about his dodgy past, given that I managed to track him down after multiple name changes. But I can see how he conned all those old women. He puts up a good show over the phone of knowing and remembering everyone around Margot. There was a real fluency to it: ‘Yes, Dr. Gupta, lovely man,’ ‘Oh yes, Irene, bit of a handful.’ It’s convincing until you remember he was fourteen when Margot disappeared, and probably met them all a couple of times, tops.

“But he wouldn’t tell me anything about Brenner, which is who I’m really interested in. ‘I’ll need to think about that,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I want to go into that.’ I’ve called him twice so far. Both times he tried to divert the conversation back onto me, I dragged it back to Brenner, and he cut the call short, pretending he had something urgent to take care of. Both times, he promised to phone me back but didn’t.”

“You don’t think he’s recording the calls, do you?” asked Robin. “Trying to get stuff about you he can sell to the papers?”

“It occurred to me,” Strike admitted, tipping sugar into his coffee.

“Maybe I should talk to him next time?”

“Might not be a bad idea,” said Strike. “Anyway,” he took a gulp of coffee, “that’s all I’ve done on Bamborough since I got back. But I’m planning to drop in on Nurse Janice the moment I’ve got a couple of clear hours. She’ll be back from Dubai by now, and I want to know why she never mentioned she knew Paul Satchwell. Don’t think I’ll warn her I’m coming, this time. There’s something to be said for catching people unawares. So, what’s new your end?”

“Well,” said Robin, “Gloria Conti, or Jaubert, as she is these days, hasn’t answered Anna’s email.”

“Pity,” said Strike, frowning. “I thought she’d be more likely to talk to us if Anna asked.”

“So did I. I think it’s worth giving it another week, then getting Anna to prod her. The worst that can happen is another definite ‘no.’ In slightly better news, I’m supposed to be speaking to Amanda White, who’s now Amanda Laws, later today.”

“How much is that costing us?”

“Nothing. I appealed to her better nature,” said Robin, “and she pretended to be persuaded, but I can tell she’s quite enamored of the idea of publicity, and she likes the idea of you, and of getting her name in the papers again as the plucky schoolgirl who stuck to her woman-in-the-window story even when the police didn’t believe her. That’s in spite of the fact that her whole shtick, when I first contacted her, was that she didn’t want to go through all the stress of press interest again unless she got money out of it.”

“She still married?” asked Strike, taking his cigarettes out of his pocket. “Because she and Oakden sound like a good match. Mightn’t be a bad sideline for us, setting grifters up with each other.”

Robin laughed.

“So they can have dodgy children together, thus keeping us in business forever?”

Strike lit his cigarette, exhaled and then said,

“Not a perfect business plan. There’s no guarantee breeding two shits together will produce a third shit. I’ve known decent people who were raised by complete bastards, and vice versa.”

“You’re nature over nurture, are you?” asked Robin.

“Maybe,” said Strike. “My three nephews were all raised the same, weren’t they? And—”

“—one’s lovely, one’s a prick and one’s an arsehole,” said Robin.

Strike’s loud burst of laughter seemed to offend the harried-looking suited man who was hurrying past with a mobile pressed to his ear.

“Well remembered,” Strike said, still grinning as he watched the scowling man march out of sight. Lately he, too, had had moods where the sound of other people’s cheerfulness grated, but at this moment, with the sunshine, the good coffee and Robin beside him, he suddenly realized he was happier than he’d been in months.

“People are never raised the same way, though,” said Robin, “not even in the same house, with the same parents. Birth order matters, and all kinds of other things. Speaking of which, Wilma Bayliss’s daughter Maya has definitely agreed to talk to us. We’re trying to find a convenient date. I think I told you, the youngest sister is recovering from breast cancer, so I don’t want to hassle them.

“And there’s something else,” said Robin, feeling self-conscious.

Strike, who’d returned to his sandwich, saw, to his surprise, Robin drawing from her bag Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which Strike had assumed was still in the locked filing cabinet in the office.

“I’ve been looking back through this.”

“Think I missed something, do you?” said Strike, through a mouthful of bread.

“No, I—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Perfectly possible. Nobody’s infallible.”

Sunshine was slowly making its way into Frith Street now, and the pages of the old notebook glowed yellow as Robin opened it.

“Well, it’s about Scorpio. You remember Scorpio?”

“The person whose death Margot might have been worried about?”

“Exactly. You thought Scorpio might be Steve Douthwaite’s married girlfriend, who killed herself.”

“I’m open to other theories,” said Strike. His sandwich finished, he brushed off his hands and took out his cigarettes. “The notes ask whether Aquarius confronted Pisces, don’t they? Which I assumed meant Margot confronted Douthwaite.”

In spite of his neutral tone, Strike resented remembering these star signs. The laborious and ultimately unrewarding task of working out which suspects and witnesses were represented by each astrological glyph had been far from his favorite bit of research.

“Well,” said Robin, taking out two folded photocopies, which she’d been keeping in the notebook, “I’ve been wondering… look at these.”

She passed the two documents to Strike, who opened them and saw copies of two birth certificates, one for Olive Satchwell, the other for Blanche Satchwell.

“Olive was Satchwell’s mother,” said Robin, as Strike, smoking, examined the documents. “And Blanche was his sister, who died aged ten—possibly with a pillow over her face.”

“If you’re expecting me to deduce their star signs from these birthdays,” said Strike, “I haven’t memorized the whole zodiac.”

“Blanche was born on the twenty-fifth of October, which makes her a Scorpio,” said Robin. “Olive was born on the twenty-ninth of March. Under the traditional system, she’d be Aries, like Satchwell…”

To Strike’s surprise, Robin now took out a copy of Astrology 14 by Steven Schmidt.

“It was quite hard to track this down. It’s been out of print for ages.”

“A masterwork like that? You amaze me,” said Strike, watching Robin turn to a page listing the dates of revised signs according to Schmidt. Robin smiled, but refusing to be deflected said,

“Look here. By Schmidt’s system, Satchwell’s mother was a Pisces.”

“We’re mixing up the two systems now, are we?” asked Strike.

“Well, Talbot did,” Robin pointed out. “He decided Irene and Roy should be given their Schmidt signs, but other people were allowed to keep the traditional ones.”

“But,” said Strike, well aware that he was trying to impose logic on what was essentially illogical, “Talbot made massive, sweeping assumptions on the basis of people’s original signs. Brenner was ruled out as a suspect solely because he was—”

“—Libra, yes,” said Robin.

“Well, what happens to Janice being psychic and the Essex Butcher being a Capricorn if all the dates start sliding around?”

“Wherever there was a discrepancy between the traditional sign and Schmidt sign, he seems to have gone with the sign he thought suited the person best.”

“Which makes a mockery of the whole business. And also,” said Strike, “calls all my identifications of signs and suspects into question.”

“I know,” said Robin. “Even Talbot seems to have got very stressed trying to work across both systems, which is when he began concentrating mainly on asteroids and the tarot.”

“OK,” said Strike, blowing smoke away from her, “go on with what you were saying—if Satchwell’s sister was a Scorpio, and her mother was Pisces… remind me,” said Strike, “exactly what that passage about Scorpio says?”

Robin flicked backward through Talbot’s notebook until she found the passage decorated with doodles of the crab, the fish, the scorpion, the fish-tailed goat and the water-bearer’s urn.

“‘Aquarius worried about how Scorpio died, question mark,’” she read aloud. “And—written in capitals—‘SCHMIDT AGREES WITH ADAMS.’ Then, ‘Did Aquarius challenge Pisces about Scorpio? Was Cancer there, did Cancer witness? Cancer is kind, instinct is to protect,’ then, in capitals, ‘INTERVIEW AGAIN. Scorpio and Aquarius connected, water, water, also Cancer, and Capricorn,’ in capitals, ‘HAS A FISH’S TAIL.’”

Brow furrowed, Strike said:

“We’re assuming Cancer still means Janice, right?”

“Well, Janice and Cynthia are the only two Cancerians connected with the case, and Janice seems to fit this better,” said Robin. “Let’s say Margot decided she was going to act on her suspicion that Satchwell’s mother killed his sister. If she phoned Olive from the surgery, Janice might have overheard a phone call, mightn’t she? And if Janice knew the Satchwell family, or was involved with them in some way we don’t know about, she mightn’t have wanted to tell the police what she’d overheard, for fear of incriminating Olive.”

“Why would Margot have waited years to check out her suspicions about the pillow dream?” asked Strike, but before Robin could supply an answer, he did it himself. “Of course, people do sometimes take years to decide what action to take on something like that. Or to muster up the courage to do it.”

He handed Robin back the two photocopies.

“Well, if that’s the story behind the Scorpio business, Satchwell’s still a prime suspect.”

“I never got his address in Greece,” said Robin guiltily.

“We’ll get at him through his surviving sister if we have to.”

Strike took a swig of coffee then, slightly against his better judgment, asked,

“What did you say about asteroids?”

Robin flicked further on through the notebook, to show Strike the page she’d pored over in Leamington Spa, which she thought of as the “horns page.”

“As the case went on, he seemed to give up on normal astrology. I think Schmidt had confused him so much he couldn’t work it any more, so he starts inventing his own system. He’s calculated the asteroids’ positions for the evening Margot disappeared. See here—”

Robin was pointing to the symbol …

“That symbol stands for the asteroid Pallas Athena—remember that ugly clock at the Phippses’ house?—and he’s using it to mean Margot. The asteroid Pallas Athena was in the tenth house of the zodiac on the night Margot disappeared, and the tenth house is ruled by Capricorn. It’s also supposed to govern businesses, upper classes and upper floors.”

“You think Margot’s still in someone’s attic?”

Robin smiled, but refused to be deflected.

“And see here…” She angled the notebook toward him, “assuming the other asteroids also refer to living people, we’ve got Ceres, Juno and Vesta.

“I think he’s using Vesta, ‘keeper of the hearth,’ to represent Cynthia. Vesta was in the seventh house, which is the house of marriage. Talbot’s written ‘FITS’—so I think he’s saying Cynthia was in Margot’s marital home, Broom House.

“I think ‘nurturing, protective Ceres’ sounds like Janice again. She’s in the twelfth house, and so’s Juno, who’s associated with ‘wives and infidelity,’ which might take us back to Joanna Hammond, Douthwaite’s married girlfriend…”

“What’s the twelfth house represent?”

“Enemies, secrets, sorrows and undoing.”

Strike looked at her, eyebrows raised. He’d indulged Robin because it was sunny, and he was enjoying her company, but his tolerance for astrology was now wearing very thin.

“It’s also Pisces’ house,” said Robin, “which is Douthwaite’s sign, so maybe—”

“You think Janice and Joanna Hammond were both in Douthwaite’s flat when Margot was abducted, do you?”

“No, but—”

“Because that’d be tricky, given that Joanna Hammond died weeks before Margot disappeared. Or are you suggesting her ghost was haunting Douthwaite?”

“All right, I know it might mean nothing,” said Robin, half-laughing as she plowed on, “but Talbot’s written something else here: ‘Ceres denies contact with Juno. Could Cetus be right?’”

She was pointing at the whale symbol representing Irene.

“I find it hard to imagine Irene Hickson being right about very much,” said Strike. He pulled the leather notebook toward him to look more closely at Talbot’s small, obsessive writing, then pushed the notes away again with a slightly impatient shrug. “Look, it’s easy to get sucked into this stuff. When I was going through the notes I started making connections while I was trying to follow his train of thought, but he was ill, wasn’t he? Nothing leads anywhere concrete.”

“I was just intrigued by that ‘Could Cetus be right?’ because Talbot mistrusted Irene from the start, didn’t he? Then he starts wondering whether she could have been right about… about something connected to enemies, secrets and undoing…”

“If we ever find out what happened to Margot Bamborough,” said Strike, “I’ll bet you a hundred quid you’ll be able to make equally strong cases for Talbot’s occult stuff being bang on the money, and completely off beam. You can always stretch this symbolic stuff to fit the facts. One of my mother’s friends used to guess everyone’s star signs and she was right every single time.”

“She was?”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike. “Because even when she was wrong, she was right. Turned out they had a load of planets in that sign or, I dunno, the midwife who delivered them was that sign. Or their dog.”

“All right,” said Robin, equably. She’d expected Strike’s skepticism, after all, and now put both the leather-bound notebook and Astrology 14 back into her bag. “I know it might mean nothing at all, I’m only—”

“If you want to go and see Irene Hickson again, be my guest. Tell her Talbot thought she might’ve had profound insight into something connected to asteroids and—I dunno—cheese—”

“The twelfth house doesn’t govern cheese,” said Robin, trying to look severe.

“What number’s the house of dairy?”

“Oh, bugger off,” she said, laughing against her will.

Robin’s mobile vibrated in her pocket, and she pulled it out. A text had just arrived.

Hi Robin, if you want I can talk now? I’ve just agreed to work a later shift, so I’m not needed at work for a few hours. Otherwise it’ll have to be after 8 tonight—Amanda

“Amanda White,” she told Strike. “She wants to talk now.”

“Works for me,” said Strike, relieved to be back on firm investigative ground. Liar or not, Amanda White would at least be talking about an actual woman at a real window.

Robin pressed Amanda’s number, switched the mobile to speaker­phone and laid it on the table between her and Strike.

“Hi,” said a confident female voice, with a hint of North London. “Is that Robin?”

“Yes,” said Robin, “and I’m with Cormoran.”

“Morning,” said Strike.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” said Amanda, sounding delighted. “I am honored. I’ve been dealing with your assistant.”

“She’s actually my partner,” said Strike.

“Really? Business, or the other?” said Amanda.

“Business,” said Strike, not looking at Robin. “I understand Robin’s been talking to you about what you saw on the night Margot Bamborough disappeared?”

“That’s right,” said Amanda.

“Would you mind if we take a recording of this interview?”

“No, I s’pose not,” said Amanda. “I mean, I want to do the right thing, although I won’t pretend it hasn’t been a bit of a dilemma, because it was really stressful, last time. Journalists, two police interviews, and I was only fourteen. But I’ve always been a stubborn girl, haha, and I stuck to my guns…”

So Amanda told the story with which Strike and Robin were already familiar: of the rain, and the angry schoolfriend, and the upper window, and the retrospective recognition of Margot, when Amanda saw her picture in the paper. Strike asked a couple of questions, but he could tell that nothing would ever change Amanda’s story. Whether she truly believed she’d seen Margot Bamborough at the window that night or not, she was evidently determined never to relinquish her association with the forty-year-old mystery.

“… and I suppose I’ve been haunted ever since by the idea that I didn’t do anything, but I was fourteen and it only hit me later, I could’ve been the one to save her,” she ended the story.

“Well,” said Robin, as Strike nodded at her, signaling he had everything he wanted, “thank you so much for talking to us, Amanda. I really—”

“There’s something else, before you go,” said Amanda. “Wait until you hear this. It’s just an amazing coincidence, and I don’t think even the police know about this, because they’re both dead.”

“Who’re dead?” asked Robin, while Strike lit himself another cigarette.

“Well,” said Amanda, “how’s this for strange? My last job, this young girl at the office’s great-aunt—”

Strike rolled his eyes.

“—was in a hospice with, guess who?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin politely.

“Violet Cooper,” said Amanda. “You probably don’t—”

“Dennis Creed’s landlady,” said Robin.

“Exactly!” said Amanda, sounding pleased that Robin appreciated the significance of her story. “So, anyway, isn’t that just weird, that I saw Margot at that window, and then, all those years later, I work with someone whose relative met Vi Cooper? Only she was calling herself something different by then, because people hated her.”

“That is a coincidence,” said Robin, making sure not to look at Strike. “Well, thank—”

“That’s not all!” said Amanda, laughing. “No, there’s more to it than that! So, this girl’s great-aunt said Vi told her she wrote to Creed, once, asking if he’d killed Margot Bamborough.”

Amanda paused, clearly wanting a response, so Robin, who’d already read about this in The Demon of Paradise Park, said,

“Wow.”

“I know,” said Amanda. “And apparently, Vi said—this is on her deathbed, so you know, she was telling the truth, because you would, wouldn’t you?—Vi said the letter she got back, said he had killed her.”

“Really?” said Robin. “I thought the letter—”

“No, but this is direct from Violet,” Amanda said, while Strike rolled his eyes again, “and she said, he definitely did, he as good as told her so. He said it in a way only she’d understand, but she knew exactly what he meant.

“Crazy, though, isn’t it? I see Margot at the window, and then, years later—”

“Amazing,” said Robin. “Well, thanks very much for your time, Amanda, this has been really… er…”

It took Robin another couple of minutes, and much more insincere gratitude, to get Amanda off the line.

“What d’you think?” Robin asked Strike, when at last she’d succeeded in getting rid of Amanda.

He pointed a finger at the sky.

“What?” said Robin, looking up into the blue haze.

“If you look carefully,” said Strike, “you might just see an asteroid passing through the house of bollocks.”

50

Agency work unconnected with the Bamborough case consumed Strike for the next few days. His first attempt to surprise Nurse Janice Beattie at home was fruitless. He left Nightingale Grove, a nondescript street that lay hard against the Southeastern railway line, without receiving any answer to his knock.

His second attempt, on the following Wednesday, was made on a breezy afternoon that kept threatening showers. Strike approached Janice’s house from Hither Green station, along a pavement bordered to the right with railings and hedge, separating the road from the rail tracks. He was thinking about Robin as he trudged along, smoking, because she’d just turned down the opportunity of joining him to interview Janice, saying that there was “something else” she needed to do, but not specifying what that something was. Strike thought he’d detected a trace of caginess, almost amounting to defensiveness, in Robin’s response to the suggestion of a joint interview, where usually there’d have been only disappointment.

Since she’d left Matthew, Strike had become used to more ease and openness between him and Robin, so this refusal, coupled with her tone and lack of an explanation, made him curious. While there were naturally matters he might not have expected her to tell him about—trips to the gynecologist sprang to mind—he would have expected her to say “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” at least.

The sky darkened as Strike approached Janice’s house, which was considerably smaller than Irene Hickson’s. It stood in a terrace. Net curtains hung at all the windows, and the front door was dark red. Strike didn’t immediately register the fact that a light was shining from behind the net curtains at the sitting-room window until he was halfway across the road. When he realized that his quarry must be in, however, he successfully pushed all thoughts about his business partner out of his mind, crossed the road at a quicker pace and knocked firmly on the front door. As he stood waiting, he heard the muffled sounds of a TV on high volume through the glass of the downstairs window. He was just considering knocking again, in case Janice hadn’t heard the first time, when the door opened.

In contrast to the last time they’d met, the nurse, who was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, looked shocked and none too pleased to see Strike. From behind her, two female American voices rang out from the out-of-sight TV: “So you love the bling?” “I love the bling!”

“Er—’ave I missed a message, or—?”

“Sorry for the lack of warning,” said Strike insincerely, “but as I was in the area, I wondered whether you could give me a couple of minutes?”

Janice glanced back over her shoulder. A camp male voice was now saying, “The dress that Kelly is in love with is a one-of-a-kind runway sample…”

Clearly disgruntled, Janice turned back to Strike.

“Well… all right,” she said, “but the place is in a mess—and can you please wipe your feet properly, because the last bloke who turned up ’ere unannounced brought dog shit in wiv ’im. You can close the door be’ind you.”

Strike stepped over the threshold, while Janice strode out of sight into the sitting room. Strike expected her to turn off the TV but she didn’t. While Strike wiped his feet on the coconut mat inside the door, a male voice said: “This one-of-a-kind runway gown might be impossible to find, so Randy’s on the search…” After hesitating for a moment on the doormat, Strike decided that Janice expected him to follow her, and entered the small sitting room.

Having spent a significant part of his youth in squats with his mother, Strike had a very different idea of “mess” to Janice’s. Although cluttered, with something on almost every surface, the only signs of actual disorder in the room were a copy of the Daily Mirror lying in one armchair, some crumpled packaging lying beside an open packet of dates on the low coffee table and a hairdryer, which was lying incongruously on the floor beside the sofa, and which Janice was currently unplugging.

“… Antonella’s pulling the closest gown to Kelly’s pick, a blinged-out $15,000 dress…”

“The mirror down ’ere’s better for drying my ’air,” Janice explained, straightening up, pink in the face, hairdryer in her hand and looking slightly cross, as though Strike was forcing her to justify herself. “I would’ve appreciated some warning, you know,” she added, looking as stern as such a naturally smiley-looking woman could. “You’ve caught me on the ’op.”

Strike was unexpectedly and poignantly reminded of Joan, who’d always been flustered if guests dropped in while the Hoover or the ironing board were still out.

“Sorry. As I say, I happened to be in the area…”

“Even as Kelly steps into dress number one, she still can’t get her dream dress off her mind,” said the narrator loudly, and both Strike and Janice glanced toward the TV, where a young woman was wriggling into a clinging, semi-transparent white dress covered in silver rhinestones.

“Say Yes to the Dress,” said Janice, who was wearing the same navy jumper and slacks as the last time Strike had seen her. “My guilty pleasure… D’you want a cup of tea?”

“Only if it’s no trouble,” said Strike.

“Well, it’s always some trouble, innit?” Janice said, with her first glimmer of a smile. “But I was going to make myself some at the first advert break, so you might as well ’ave some.”

“In that case, thanks very much,” said Strike.

“If I don’t find this dress,” said the camp male wedding consultant on-screen, rifling urgently through racks of white dresses, his eyebrows so sharply plucked they looked drawn on, “it’s not gonna be—”

The screen went blank. Janice had turned it off with her remote control.

“Wanna date?” she asked Strike, holding out the box.

“No thanks,” said Strike.

“Got boxes of ’em in Dubai,” she said. “I was gonna give ’em as presents, but I just can’t stop eating ’em. ’Ave a seat. I won’t be two ticks.”

Strike thought he caught another downward glance toward his lower legs as she marched out of the room, hairdryer in one hand, dates in the other, leaving Strike to take an armchair, which creaked beneath his weight.

Strike found the small sitting room oppressive. Predominantly red, the carpet was decorated in a scarlet, swirling pattern, on top of which lay a cheap crimson Turkish rug. Dried flower pictures hung on the red walls, between old photographs, some black and white, and the colored ones faded, displayed in wooden frames. A china cabinet was full of cheap spun-glass ornaments. The largest, a Cinderella carriage pulled by six glass horses, stood in pride of place on the mantelpiece over the electric fire. Evidently, beneath Janice’s no-nonsense clothing, there beat a romantic heart.

She returned a few minutes later, holding a wicker-handled tray bearing two mugs of tea with the milk already added, and a plate of chocolate Hobnobs. The act of making tea seemed to have put her into slightly better humor with her guest.

“That’s my Larry,” she said, catching Strike looking toward a double frame on the small side table beside him. On one side was a sleepy-eyed, overweight man with a smoker’s teeth. On the other was a blonde woman, heavy but pretty.

“Ah. And is this—?”

“My little sister, Clare. She died ’97. Pancreatic cancer. They got it late.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike.

“Yeah,” said Janice, with a deep sigh. “Lost ’em both around the same time. To tell you the truth,” she said, as she sat down on the sofa and her knees gave audible clicks, “I walked back in ’ere after Dubai and I fort, I really need to get some new pictures up. It was depressing, coming back in ’ere, the number of dead people…

“I got some gorgeous ones of Kev and the grandkids on ’oliday, but I ’aven’t got ’em printed out yet. The lad next door’s going to do it for me. All my old ones of Kev and the kids are two years out of date. I gave the boy the memory… board, is it?”

“Card?” suggested Strike.

“That’s the one. The kids next door just laugh at me. Mind you, Irene’s worse’n I am. She can ’ardly change a battery. So,” she said, “why d’you want to see me again?”

Strike, who had no intention of risking an immediate rebuff, was planning to ask his questions about Satchwell last. Drawing out his notebook and opening it, he said,

“A couple of things that have come up since I last saw you. I asked Dr. Gupta about this first one, but he couldn’t help, so I hoped you might be able to. Would you happen to know anything about a man called Niccolo Ricci, sometimes nicknamed ‘Mucky’?”

“Old gangster, weren’t ’e?” said Janice. “I knew ’e lived local, in Clerkenwell, but I never met ’im. Why d’you want—oh, ’as Irene been telling you about the foundations thing?”

“The what?” asked Strike.

“Oh, it’s nuffing, really. There was this rumor, back when they were doing a load of redevelopment round Clerkenwell in the early seventies, that some builders ’ad found a body buried in concrete under one of the demolished buildings. The story was that Little Italy gangsters ’ad hidden it there, back in the forties. But Eddie—this is Irene’s Eddie, the builder she ended up marrying—that’s ’ow they met, local pub, when ’is firm was doing a lot of the redevelopment—Eddie told us it was all cobblers. I ’adn’t ever believed it. I fink Irene ’ad, a bit,” Janice added, dunking a biscuit in her tea.

“How does this tie in with Margot?” Strike asked.

“Well, after Margot disappeared, there was a theory ’er body ’ad been put into one o’ the open foundations and covered in concrete. They was still doing a bit of building round there in ’74, see.”

“Were people suggesting Ricci had killed her?” asked Strike.

“Gawd, no!” said Janice, with a shocked little laugh. “What would Mucky Ricci ’ave to do with Margot? It was only because of that old rumor. It put the idea in people’s minds, you know, burying bodies in concrete. People can be bloody silly. My Larry said to me—’e was a builder, you know—it’s not like workmen wouldn’t’ve noticed a load of fresh concrete when they turned up for work.”

“Were you aware that Ricci attended the St. John’s practice Christmas party?”

“’E what?” said Janice, with her mouth full.

“He and another couple of men arrived toward the end of the party, possibly to escort Gloria home.”

“They—what?” Janice said, looking unaffectedly astonished. “Mucky Ricci and Gloria? Come off it. Is this because—no, look, you don’t wanna pay no attention to Irene, not about Gloria. Irene… she gets carried away. She never much liked Gloria. And she gets the wrong end of the stick sometimes. I never ’eard Gloria’s family ’ad any criminal connections. Irene watched way too many Godfather movies,” said Janice. “We saw the first one togevver, at the cinema, and I went back and saw it again twice more on me own. James Caan, you know,” she sighed. “My dream man.”

“Ricci was definitely at the practice party,” said Strike. “From what I can tell, he turned up right at the end.”

“Well then, I’d already left. I needed to get ’ome to Kev. Is ’e still alive, Ricci?”

“Yes,” said Strike.

“Must be really getting on, is ’e?”

“He is,” said Strike.

“That’s odd, though. What on earth would Ricci be doing at St. John’s?”

“I’m hoping to find out,” said Strike, flipping over a page of his notebook. “The next thing I wanted to ask you was about Joseph Brenner. You remember the family you thought might be called Applethorpe? Well, I found—”

“You never tracked ’em down!” said Janice, looking impressed. “What was their name?”

“Athorn.”

“Athorn!” said Janice, with an air of relief. “I knew it wasn’t Applethorpe. That bugged me for days, after…’Ow are they? It’s Fragile X they’ve got, isn’t it? They’re not in an ’ome, or—?”

“Still living together in the old flat,” said Strike, “and getting on reasonably well, I think.”

“I ’ope they’re being well supported, are they?”

“There’s a social worker involved, who seems very much on their side, which brings me to what I was going to ask you.

“The social worker says that since Gwilherm’s death, Deborah’s disclosed…” Strike hesitated, “… well, the way the social worker put it, was that Gwilherm was, er, pimping Deborah out.”

“’E was what?” said Janice, the smile sliding off her face.

“It’s an unpleasant idea, I know,” said Strike unemotionally. “When I was talking to her, Deborah told me about Dr. Brenner visiting her at home. She said he’d—er—asked her to take off her pants—”

“No!” said Janice, in what seemed instinctive revulsion. “No, I’m sure—no, that’s not right. That’s not ’ow it would’ve ’appened, if she’d needed an intimate examination. It would have ’appened at the surgery.”

“You said she was agoraphobic?”

“Well—yeah, but…”

“Samhain, the son, said something about Dr. Brenner being a ‘dirty old man.’”

“’E… but… no, it… it must’ve been an examination… maybe after the baby was born? But that should’ve been me, the nurse… that’s upset me, now,” said Janice, looking distressed. “You think you’ve ’eard everything, but… no, that’s really upset me. I mean, I was in the ’ouse that one time to see the kid and she never said a word to me… but of course, ’e was there, the father, telling me all about ’is bloody magic powers. She was probably too scared to… no, that’s really upset me, that ’as.”

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, “but I have to ask: did you ever hear that Brenner used prostitutes? Ever hear any rumors about him, locally?”

“Not a word,” said Janice. “I’d’ve told someone, if I’d ’eard that. It wouldn’t be ethical, not in our catchment area. All the women there were registered to our practice. She’d’ve been a patient.”

“According to Talbot’s notes,” said Strike, “somebody claimed they saw Brenner in Michael Cliffe House on the evening Margot disappeared. The story Brenner gave the police was that he went straight home.”

“Michael Cliffe ’Ouse… that’s the tower block on Skinner Street, innit?” said Janice. “We ’ad patients in there, but otherwise…” Janice appeared sickened. “You’ve upset me,” she said again. “’Im and that poor Athorn woman… and there’s me defending ’im to all and sundry, because of ’is experiences in the war. Not two weeks back, I ’ad Dorothy’s son sitting exactly where you are now—”

“Carl Oakden was here?” said Strike sharply.

“Yeah,” said Janice, “and ’e didn’t wipe ’is feet, neither. Dog shit all up my ’all carpet.”

“What did he want?” asked Strike.

“Well, ’e pretended it was a nice catch-up,” said Janice. “You’d think I might not recognize ’im after all this time, but actually, ’e don’t look that much diff’rent, not really. Anyway, ’e sat in that chair where you are, spouting all sorts of rubbish about old times and ’is mum remembering me fondly—ha! Dorothy Oakden, remember me fondly? Dorothy thought Irene and me were a pair of hussies, skirts above our knees, going out to the pub togevver…

“’E mentioned you,” said Janice, with a beady look. “Wanted to know if I’d met you, yet. ’E wrote a book about Margot, you know, but it never made it into the shops, which ’e’s angry about. ’E told me all about it when ’e was ’ere. ’E’s finking of writing another one and it’s you what’s got ’im interested in it. The famous detective solving the case—or the famous detective not solving the case. Either one’ll do for Carl.”

“What was he saying about Brenner?” asked Strike. There would be time enough later to consider the implications of an amateur biographer tramping all over the case.

“Said Dr. Brenner was a sadistic old man, and there I was, sort of sticking up for Dr. Brenner… but now you’re telling me this about Deborah Athorn…”

“Oakden said Brenner was sadistic, did he? That’s a strong word.”

“I fort so, too. Carl said ’e’d never liked ’im, said Dr. Brenner used to go round Dorothy’s ’ouse a lot, which I never realized, for Sunday lunch and that. I always fort they were just workmates. You know, Dr. Brenner probably told Carl off, that’s all. ’E was an ’oly terror when ’e was a kid, Carl, and ’e comes across as the kind of man ’oo ’olds a grudge.”

“If Oakden comes round here again,” said Strike, “I’d advise you not to let him in. He’s done time, you know. For conning…” He just stopped himself saying “old” “… single women out of their money.”

“Oh,” said Janice, taken aback. “Blimey. I’d better warn Irene. ’E said ’e was going to try ’er next.”

“And he seemed primarily interested in Brenner, did he, when he came round here?”

“Well, no,” said Janice. “’E seemed mostly interested in you, but yeah, we talked about Brenner more’n anyone else at the practice.”

“Mrs. Beattie, you wouldn’t happen to still have that newspaper obituary of Brenner you mentioned? I think you said you kept it?”

“Oh,” said Janice, glancing toward the drawer at the base of her china cabinet, “yeah… Carl wanted to see that, too, when ’e ’eard I ’ad it…”

She pushed herself out of the sofa and crossed to the china cabinet. Gripping the mantelpiece to steady herself, she knelt down, opened the drawer and began rummaging.

“They’re all in a bit of a state, my clippings. Irene finks I’m bonkers, me and my newspapers,” she added, wrist-deep in the contents of the drawer. “She’s never been much for the news or politics or any of that, but I’ve always saved interesting bits and pieces, you know: medical fings, and I won’t lie, I do like a story on the royals and…”

She began tugging on what looked like the corner of a cardboard folder.

“… and Irene can fink it’s strange all she likes, but I don’t see what’s wrong—with saving—the story of…”

The folder came free.

“… a life,” said Janice, walking on her knees to the coffee table. “Why’s that morbid? No worse’n keeping a photo.”

She flipped open the folder and began looking through the clippings, some of them yellow with age.

“See? I saved that for ’er, for Irene,” said Janice, holding up an art­icle about holy basil. “Supposed to ’elp with digestive problems, I fort Eddie could plant some in the garden for ’er. She takes too many pills for ’er bowels, they do as much ’arm as good, but Irene’s one of those ’oo, if it doesn’t come in a tablet, she don’t wanna know…

“Princess Diana,” said Janice with a sigh, flashing a commemorative front page at Strike. “I was a fan…”

“May I?” asked Strike, reaching for a couple of pieces of newsprint.

“’Elp yourself,” said Janice, looking over her spectacles at the pieces of paper in Strike’s hand. “That article on diabetes is very interesting. Care’s changed so much since I retired. My godson’s Type One. I like to keep up with it all… and that’ll be the fing about the kid ’oo died of peritonitis, in your other ’and, is it?”

“Yes,” said Strike, looking at the clipping, which was brown with age.

“Yeah,” said Janice darkly, still turning over bits of newspaper, “’e’s the reason I’m a nurse. That’s what put the idea in me ’ead. ’E lived two doors down from me when I was a kid. I cut that out an’ kept it, only photo I was ever gonna ’ave… bawled my bloody eyes out. The doctor,” said Janice, with a hint of steel, “was called out and ’e never bloody turned up. ’E would’ve come out for a middle-class kid, we all knew that, but little Johnny Marks from Bethnal Green, ’oo cared… and the doctor was criticized, but never struck off… If there’s one thing I ’ate, it’s treating people diff’rent because of where they were born.”

With no apparent sense of irony, she shifted more pictures of the royals out of the way, looking puzzled.

“Where’s Dr. Brenner’s thing?” she muttered.

Still clutching several clippings, she walked on her knees back toward the open drawer and rummaged in there again.

“No, it really isn’t ’ere,” said Janice, returning to the coffee table. “That’s very odd…”

“You don’t think Oakden took it, do you?” Strike suggested.

Janice looked up.

“That cheeky sod,” she said slowly. “’E could of bloody asked.”

She swept her clippings back into their folder, returned it to her drawer, used the mantelpiece to pull herself back up, knees clicking loudly again, then sat back down on the sofa with a sigh of relief and said,

“You know, ’e was always light-fingered, that boy.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Money went missing, back at the practice.”

“Really?” said Strike.

“Yeah. It all come to ’an ’ead after Margot disappeared. Little bits of money kept going missing and they fort it was Wilma, the cleaner—ev’ryone except me. I always fort it was Carl. ’E used to drop in after school, and in the school ’olidays. I dropped a word in Dr. Gupta’s ear, but I dunno, probably ’e didn’t want to upset Dorothy, and it was easier to push Wilma out. True, there were ovver issues wiv Wilma… she drank,” said Janice, “and ’er cleaning wasn’t the best. She couldn’t prove she never nicked it, and after there was a staff meeting about it, she resigned. She could see the way it was going.”

“And did the thefts stop?”

“Yeah,” said Janice, “but so what? Carl might’ve thought ’e’d better give it rest, after nearly being found out.”

Strike, who tended to agree, said,

“Just a couple more questions. The first’s about a woman called Joanna Hammond.”

“I should know ’oo that is, should I?”

“She was Steve Douthwaite’s—”

“—girlfriend, ’oo killed ’erself,” said Janice. “Oh yeah.”

“Can you remember whether she was registered with the St. John’s practice?”

“No, she weren’t. I fink they lived over in Hoxton.”

“So Margot wouldn’t have been involved with the coroner, or had any other professional connection with her death?”

“No, she’ll ’ave been same as me: never knew the woman existed till she was already dead and Steve come looking for ’elp. I bet I know why you’re asking, though,” said Janice. “Talbot was dead set on Steve being the Essex Butcher, wasn’t ’e? On and on about Steve, in all those interviews I ’ad with ’im. But honestly, Steve Douthwaite was a gentle soul. I grew up wiv a couple of proper violent men. Me father was one. I know the type, and Steve definitely weren’t it.”

Remembering how endearing some women had found the apparent vulnerability of Dennis Creed, Strike merely nodded.

“Talbot asked wevver I’d ever visited that Joanna, as a nurse. I told ’im she wasn’t a St. John’s patient, but that didn’t put ’im off. Did I think there was anything fishy about ’er death, even so? I kept saying, ‘I never met the woman. ’Ow do I know?’ I was getting worn down wiv it all by then, honestly, being treated like I was Gypsy bloody Rose Lee. I told Talbot, go see what the coroner said!”

“And you don’t know whether there was a death Margot was worried about?” Strike asked. “A death that was maybe categorized as natural, or accidental, but where she thought there might have been foul play?”

“What makes you ask that?” said Janice.

“Just trying to clear up something Talbot left in his notes. He seemed to think Margot might’ve had suspicions about the way somebody died. You were mentioned in connection with the death.”

Janice’s round blue eyes widened behind her glasses.

“Mentioned as having witnessed something, or perhaps been present,” Strike elaborated. “There was no hint of accusation.”

“I should bloody well ’ope not!” said Janice. “No, I never witnessed nothing. I’d’ve said if I ’ad, wouldn’t I?”

There was a short pause, which Strike judged it prudent not to break, and sure enough, Janice piped up again.

“Look, I can’t speak for Margot forty years on. She’s gone, i’n’t she? It isn’t fair on either of us. I don’t wanna be casting suspicion round, all these years later.”

“I’m just trying to eliminate possible lines of inquiry,” said Strike.

There was a longer pause. Janice’s eyes drifted over the tea tray and on to the picture of her late partner, with his stained teeth and his kind, sleepy eyes. Finally, she sighed and said,

“All right, but I want you to write down that this was Margot’s idea, not mine, all right? I’m not accusing no one.”

“Fair enough,” said Strike, pen poised over his notebook.

“All right then, well—it was very sensitive, because of us working wiv ’er—Dorothy, I mean.

“Dorothy and Carl lived wiv Dorothy’s mother. ’Er name was Maud, though I wouldn’t remember that if Carl ’adn’t been ’ere the ovver day. We were talking and I mentioned ’is gran, and ’e called ’er ‘bloody Maud,’ not ‘Grandma’ or nothing.

“Anyway, Maud ’ad an infection on ’er leg, a sore what was taking its time ’ealing. It needed dressing and looking after, so I was visiting the ’ouse a lot. Ev’ry time I was in there, she told me she owned the ’ouse, not Dorothy. She was letting ’er daughter and grandson live wiv ’er. She liked saying it, you know. Feeling the power.

“I wouldn’t say she’d be much fun to live with. Sour old lady. Nothing ever right for ’er. She moaned a lot about ’er grandson being spoiled—but like I said, ’e was an ’oly terror when ’e was younger, so I can’t blame ’er there.

“Anyway,” said Janice, “before the sore on ’er leg was ’ealed, she died, after falling downstairs. Now, ’er walking wasn’t great, because she’d been laid up for a bit with this sore leg, and she needed a stick. People do fall downstairs, and if you’re elderly, obviously that can ’ave serious consequences, but…

“Well, a week afterward, Margot asked me into ’er consulting room for a word, and… well, yeah, I got the impression Margot was maybe a bit uneasy about it. She never said anyfing outright, just asked me what I fort. I knew what she was saying… but what could we do? We weren’t there when she fell and the family said they was downstairs and just ’eard ’er take the tumble, and there she was at the bottom of the stairs, knocked out cold, and she died two nights later in ’ospital.

“Dorothy never showed no emotion about it, but Dorothy never did show much emotion about anything. What could we do?” Janice repeated, her palms turned upward. “Obviously I could see the way Margot’s mind was working, because she knew Maud owned the ’ouse, and now Dorothy and Carl were sitting pretty, and… well, it’s the kind of thing doctors consider, of course they do. It’ll come back on them, if they’ve missed anything. But in the end, Margot never done nothing about it and as far as I know there was never any bother.

“There,” Janice concluded, with a slight air of relief at having got this off her chest. “Now you know.”

“Thank you,” said Strike, making a note. “That’s very helpful. Tell me: did you ever mention this to Talbot?”

“No,” said Janice, “but someone else mighta done. Ev’ryone knew Maud ’ad died, and ’ow she died, because Dorothy took a day off for the funeral. I’ll be honest, by the end of all my interviews wiv Talbot, I just wanted to get out of there. Mostly ’e wanted me to talk about me dreams. It was creepy, honestly. Weird, the ’ole thing.”

“I’m sure it was,” said Strike. “Well, there’s just one more thing I wanted to ask, and then I’m done. My partner managed to track down Paul Satchwell.”

“Oh,” said Janice, with no sign of embarrassment or discomfort. “Right. That was Margot’s old boyfriend, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Well, we were surprised to find out you know each other.”

Janice looked at him blankly.

“What?”

“That you know each other,” Strike repeated.

“Me and Paul Satchwell?” said Janice with a little laugh. “I’ve never even met the man!”

“Really?” said Strike, watching her closely. “When he heard you’d told us about the sighting of Margot in Leamington Spa, he got quite angry. He said words to the effect,” Strike read off his notebook, “that you were trying to cause trouble for him.”

There was a long silence. A frown line appeared between Janice’s round blue eyes. At last she said,

“Did ’e mention me by name?”

“No,” said Strike. “As a matter of fact, he seemed to have forgotten it. He just remembered you as ‘the nurse.’ He also told Robin that you and Margot didn’t like each other.”

“’E said Margot didn’t like me?” said Janice, with the emphasis on the last word.

“I’m afraid so,” said Strike, watching her.

“But… no, sorry, that’s not right,” said Janice. “We used to get on great! Ovver than that one time wiv Kev and ’is tummy… all right, I did get shirty wiv ’er then, but I knew she meant it kindly. She fort she was doing me a favor, examining ’im… I took offense because… well, you do get a bit defensive, as a mother, if you fink another woman’s judging you for not taking care of your kids properly. I was on me own with Kev and… you just feel it more, when you’re on your own.”

“So why,” Strike asked, “would Satchwell say he knew you, and that you wanted to get him into trouble?”

The silence that followed was broken by the sound of a train passing beyond the hedge: a great rushing rumble built and subsided, and the quiet of the sitting room closed like a bubble in its wake, holding the detective and the nurse in suspension as they looked at each other.

“I fink you already know,” said Janice at last.

“Know what?”

“Don’t give me that. All them fings you’ve solved—you’re not a stupid man. I fink you already know, and all this is to try and scare me into telling you.”

“I’m certainly not trying to scare—”

“I know you didn’t like ’er,” said Janice abruptly. “Irene. Don’t bovver pretending, I know she annoyed you. If I couldn’t read people I wouldn’t ’ave been any good at my job, going in and out of strangers’ ’ouses all the time, would I? And I was very good at my job,” said Janice, and somehow the remark didn’t seem arrogant. “Listen: you saw Irene in one of ’er show-off moods. She was so excited to meet you, she put on a big act.

“It’s not easy for women, living alone when they’re used to company, you know. Even me, coming back from Dubai, it’s been a readjustment. You get used to ’aving family around you and then you’re back in the empty ’ouse again, alone… Me, I don’t mind me own company, but Irene ’ates it.

“She’s been a very good friend to me, Irene,” said Janice, with a kind of quiet ferocity. “Very kind. She ’elped me out financially, after Larry died, back when I ’ad nothing. I’ve always been welcome in ’er ’ouse. We’re company for each other, we go back a long way. So she might ’ave a few airs and graces, so what? So ’ave plenty of people…”

There was another brief pause.

“Wait there,” said Janice firmly. “I need to make a phone call.”

She got up and left the room. Strike waited. Beyond the net curtains, the sun suddenly slid out from behind a bullet-colored cloud, and turned the glass Cinderella coach on the mantelpiece neon bright.

Janice reappeared with a mobile in her hand.

“She’s not picking up,” she said, looking perturbed.

She sat back down on the sofa. There was another pause.

“Fine,” said Janice at last, as though Strike had harangued her into speech, “it wasn’t me ’oo knew Satchwell—it was Irene. But don’t you go thinking she’s done anyfing she shouldn’t’ve! I mean, not in a criminal sense. It worried ’er like ’ell, after. I was worried for ’er… Oh Gawd,” said Janice.

She took a deep breath then said,

“All right, well… she was engaged to Eddie at the time. Eddie was a lot older’n Irene. ’E worshipped the ground she walked on, an’ she loved ’im, too. She did,” said Janice, though Strike hadn’t contradicted her. “And she was really jealous if Eddie so much as looked at anyone else…

“But she always liked a drink and a flirt, Irene. It was ’armless. Mostly ’armless… that bloke Satchwell ’ad a band, didn’t ’e?”

“That’s right,” said Strike.

“Yeah, well, Irene saw ’em play at some pub. I wasn’t wiv ’er the night she met Satchwell. I never knew a fing about it till after Margot ’ad gone missing.

“So she watched Satchwell and—well, she fancied ’im. And after the band ’ad finished, she sees Satchwell come into the bar, and ’e goes right to the back of the room to Margot, ’oo’s standing there in a corner, in ’er raincoat. Irene fort Satchwell must’ve seen ’er from the stage. Irene ’adn’t spotted Margot before, because she was up the front, wiv ’er friends. Anyway, she watched ’em, and Satchwell and Margot ’ad a short chat—really short, Irene said—and it looked like it turned into an argument. And then Irene reckoned Margot spotted ’er, and that’s when Margot walked out.

“So then, Irene goes up to that Satchwell and tells ’im she loved the band and everything and, well, one thing led to another, and… yeah.”

“Why would Satchwell think she was a nurse?” asked Strike.

Janice grimaced.

“Well, to tell you the truth, that’s what the silly girl used to tell blokes she was, when they were chatting ’er up. She used to pretend to be a nurse because the fellas liked it. As long as they knew naff all about medical stuff she managed to fool ’em, because she’d ’eard the names of drugs and all that at work, though she got most of ’em wrong, God love ’er,” said Janice, with a small eye roll.

“So was this a one-night stand, or…”

“No. It was a two-, three-week thing. But it didn’t last. Margot disappearing… well, that put the kibosh on it. You can imagine.

“But for a couple of weeks there, Irene was… infatuated, I s’pose you’d say. She did love Eddie, you know… it was a bit of a feather in ’er cap to ’ave this older man, Eddie, successful business and everything, wanting to marry ’er, but… it’s funny, isn’t it?” said Janice quietly. “We’re all animals, when you take everything else away. She totally lost ’er ’ead over Paul Satchwell. Just for a few weeks. Tryin’ to see ’im as much as she could, sneaking around… I bet she scared the life out of ’im, actually,” said Janice soberly, “because from what she told me later, I fink ’e only took ’er to bed to spite Margot. Margot was ’oo ’e really wanted… and Irene realized that too late. She’d been used.”

“So the story of Irene’s sore tooth,” said Strike, “which then became the story of a shopping trip…”

“Yeah,” said Janice quietly. “She was with Satchwell that afternoon. She took that receipt off ’er sister to use with the police. I never knew till afterward. I ’ad her in floods of tears in my flat, pouring ’er ’eart out. Well, ’oo else could she tell? Not Eddie or ’er parents! She was terrified of it coming out, and losing Eddie. She’d woken up by then. All she wanted was Eddie, and she was scared ’e’d drop ’er if ’e found out about Satchwell.

“See, Satchwell as good as told Irene, the last time they met, ’e was using ’er to get back at Margot. ’E’d been angry at Margot for saying she’d only come to watch the band outta curiosity, and for getting shirty when ’e tried to persuade ’er to go back to ’is flat. ’E gave ’er that little wooden Viking thing, you know. ’E’d ’ad it on ’im, ’oping she’d turn up, and I fink ’e thought she’d just melt or somefing when ’e did that, and that’d be the end of Roy… like that’s all it takes, to walk out on a kid and a marriage, a little wooden doll… ’E said some nasty stuff about Margot to Irene… prick tease was the least of it…

“Anyway, after Margot went missing and the police got called in, Satchwell rings Irene up and says not to mention anyfing ’e’d said about being angry at Margot, and she begged ’im never to tell anyone about the both of ’em, and that’s ’ow they left it. And I was the only one ’oo knew, and I kept me mouth shut, too, because… well, that’s what you do when it’s a friend, isn’t it?”

“So when Charlie Ramage said he’d seen Margot in Leamington Spa,” said Strike, “were you aware—?”

“—that that’s where Satchwell come from? Not then, I wasn’t, not when Charlie first told me. But not long after, there was a news story about some old geezer in Leamington Spa what ’ad put up a sign in ’is front garden. ‘Whites united against colored invasion’ or some such ’orrible thing. Me and Larry was out for dinner with Eddie and Irene, and Eddie’s talking about this old racist in the news, and then, when Irene and I went to the loo, she says to me, ‘Leamington Spa, that’s where Paul Satchwell was from.’ She ’adn’t mentioned ’im to me in ages.

“I won’t lie, it give me a proper uncomfortable feeling, ’er telling me that, because I thought, oh my Gawd, what if Charlie really did see Margot? What if Margot ran off to be with ’er ex? But then I fort, ’ang on, though: if Margot only went as far as Leamington Spa, ’ow come she ’asn’t never been seen since? I mean, it’s ’ardly Timbuktu, is it?”

“No,” said Strike. “It isn’t. And is that all Irene’s ever told you about Margot and Satchwell?”

“It’s enough, innit?” said Janice. Her pink and white complexion seemed more faded than when Strike had arrived, the veins beneath her eyes darker. “Look, don’t give Irene an ’ard time. Please. She don’t seem it, but she’s soft under all that silly stuff. She worries, you know.”

“I can’t see why I’d have to give her a hard time,” said Strike. “Well, you’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Beattie. Thank you. That clears up quite a few points for me.”

Janice slumped backward on the sofa, frowning at Strike.

“You smoke, don’t you?” she said abruptly. “I can smell it off you. Didn’t they stop you smoking after you ’ad that amputation?”

“They tried,” said Strike.

“Very bad for you,” she said. “Won’t ’elp wiv your mobility, either, as you get older. Bad for your circulation and your skin. You should quit.”

“I know I should,” said Strike, smiling at her as he returned his notebook to his pocket.

“Hmm,” said Janice, her eyes narrowed. “‘ ’Appened to be in the area,’ my Aunt Fanny.”

51

The domed turrets of the Tower of London rose behind the wall of dirty yellow brick, but Robin had no attention to spare for ancient landmarks. Not only was the meeting she’d set up without Strike’s knowledge supposed to start in thirty minutes’ time, she was miles from where she’d expected to be at one o’clock, and completely unfamiliar with this part of London. She ran with her mobile in her hand, glancing intermittently at the map on its screen.

Within a few paces, the phone rang. Seeing that it was Strike, she answered the call.

“Hi. Just seen Janice.”

“Oh good,” said Robin, trying not to pant as she scanned her surroundings for either a Tube sign or a taxi. “Anything interesting?”

“Plenty,” said Strike, who was strolling back along Nightingale Grove. Notwithstanding his recent exchange with the nurse, he’d just lit a Benson & Hedges. As he walked into the cool breeze, the smoke was snatched from his lips every time he exhaled. “Where are you at the moment?”

“Tower Bridge Road,” said Robin, still running, still looking around in vain for a Tube sign.

“Thought you were on Shifty’s Boss this morning?”

“I was,” said Robin. It was probably best that Strike knew immediately what had just happened. “I’ve just left him on Tower Bridge with Barclay.”

“When you say ‘with’ Barclay—”

“They might be talking by now, I don’t know,” said Robin. Unable to talk normally while jogging, she slowed to a fast walk. “Cormoran, SB looked as though he was thinking of jumping.”

“Off Tower Bridge?” asked Strike, surprised.

“Why not Tower Bridge?” said Robin, as she rounded a corner onto a busy junction. “It was the nearest accessible high structure…”

“But his office isn’t anywhere near—”

“He got off at Monument as usual but he didn’t go into work. He looked up at the office for a bit, then walked away. I thought he was just stretching his legs, but then he headed out onto Tower Bridge and stood there, staring down at the water.”

Robin had spent forty anxious minutes watching SB stare down at the cement-colored river below, his briefcase hanging limply by his side, while traffic rumbled along the bridge behind him. She doubted that Strike could imagine how nerve-racking she’d found the wait for Barclay to come and relieve her.

There was still no sign of a Tube station. Robin broke into a jog again.

“I thought of approaching him,” she said, “but I was worried I’d startle him into jumping. You know how big he is, I couldn’t have held him back.”

“You really think he was—”

“Yes,” said Robin, trying not to sound triumphant: she’d just caught sight of a circular red Tube sign through a break in the traffic and started running. “He looked utterly hopeless.”

“Are you running?” asked Strike, who could now hear her feet hitting the ground even over the growl of traffic.

“Yes,” said Robin, and then, “I’m late for a dental appointment.”

She’d regretted not coming up with a solid reason earlier for not being able to interview Janice Beattie, and had decided on this story, should Strike ask again.

“Ah,” said Strike. “Right.”

“Anyway,” Robin said, weaving around passers-by, “Barclay arrived to take over—he agreed SB looked like he was thinking of jumping—and he said—”

She was developing a stitch in her side now.

“—said—he’d go and try—and talk to him—and that’s when I left. At least—Barclay’s big enough—to hold him back if he tries anything,” she finished breathlessly.

“But it also means SB will recognize Barclay in future,” Strike pointed out.

“Well, yeah, I know that,” said Robin, slowing to a walk again as she was almost at the Underground steps, and massaging the stitch in her side, “but given that we thought he might be about to kill himself—”

“Understood,” said Strike, who had paused in the shadow of Hither Green station to finish his cigarette. “Just thinking logistics. ’Course, if we’re lucky, he might spill the beans to Barclay about what Shifty’s got on him. Desperate men are sometimes willing to—”

“Cormoran, I’m going to have to go,” said Robin, who’d reached the Underground entrance. “I’ll see you back at the office after my appointment and you can fill me in about Janice.”

“Right you are,” said Strike. “Hope it doesn’t hurt.”

“What doesn’t hu—Oh, the dentist, no, it’s just a check-up,” said Robin.

Really convincing, Robin, she thought, angry at herself, as she shoved her mobile back into her pocket and ran down the steps into the Underground.

Once on the train, she stripped off her jacket, because she was sweating from running, and neatened her hair with the aid of her reflection in the dirty dark window opposite her. Between SB and his possibly suicidal ideation, lying to Strike, her feeble cover story and the potential risks of the meeting she was about to have, she felt jittery. There’d been another occasion, a couple of years previously, when Robin had chosen to pursue a line of inquiry while keeping it secret from Strike. It had resulted in Strike sacking her.

This is different, she tried to reassure herself, smoothing sweaty strands of hair off her forehead. He won’t mind, as long as it works. It’s what he wants, too.

She emerged at Tottenham Court Road station twenty minutes later and hurried with her jacket over her shoulder into the heart of Soho.

Only when she was approaching the Star café, and saw the sign over the door, did she register the coincidence of the name. Trying not to think about asteroids, horoscopes or omens, Robin entered the café, where round wooden tables stood on a red-brick floor. The walls were decorated with old-fashioned tin signs, one of which was advertising ROBIN CIGARETTES. Directly beneath this, perhaps deliberately, sat an old man wearing a black windcheater, his face ruddy with broken veins and his thick gray hair oiled into a quiff that had the appearance of not having changed since the fifties. A walking stick was propped against the wall beside him. On his other side sat a teenage girl with long neon-yellow hair, who was texting on her phone and didn’t look up until Robin had approached their table.

“Mr. Tucker?” said Robin.

“Yeah,” said the man hoarsely, revealing crooked brown teeth. “Miss Ellacott?”

“Robin,” she said, smiling as they shook hands.

“This is my granddaughter, Lauren,” said Tucker.

“Hiya,” said Lauren, glancing up from her phone, then back down again.

“I’ll just get myself a coffee,” said Robin. “Can I buy either of you anything?”

They declined. While Robin bought herself a flat white, she sensed the eyes of the old man on her. During their only previous conversation, which had been by phone, Brian Tucker had talked for a quarter of an hour, without pause, about the disappearance of his eldest daughter, Louise, in 1972, and his lifelong quest to prove that Dennis Creed had murdered her. Roy Phipps had called Tucker “half-insane.” While Robin wouldn’t have gone that far on the evidence to date, there was no doubt that he seemed utterly consumed by Creed, and with his quest for justice.

When Robin returned to the Tuckers’ table and sat down with her coffee, Lauren put her phone away. Her long neon extensions, the unicorn tattoo on her forearm, her blatantly false eyelashes and her chipped nail varnish all stood in contrast to the innocent, dimpled face just discernible beneath her aggressively applied contouring.

“I came to help Grandad,” she told Robin. “He doesn’t walk so well these days.”

“She’s a good girl,” said Tucker. “Very good girl.”

“Well, thanks very much for meeting me,” Robin told both of them. “I really appreciate it.”

Close to, Tucker’s swollen nose had a strawberry-like appearance, flecked as it was with blackheads.

“No, I appreciate it, Miss Ellacott,” he said in his low, hoarse voice. “I think they’re really going to let it happen this time, I do. And like I said on the phone, if they don’t, I’m ready to break into the television studio—”

“Well,” said Robin, “hopefully we won’t need to do anything that dras—”

“—and I’ve told them that, and it’s shaken them up. Well, that, and your contact nudging the Ministry of Justice,” he conceded, gazing at Robin through small, bloodshot eyes. “Mind you, I’m starting to think I should’ve threatened them with the press years ago. You don’t get anywhere with these people playing by the rules, they just fob you off with their bureaucracy and their so-called expert opinions.”

“I can only imagine how difficult it’s been for you,” said Robin, “but given that we might be in with a chance to interview him, we don’t want to do anything—”

“I’ll have justice for Louise if it kills me,” said Tucker. “Let them arrest me. It’ll just mean more publicity.”

“But we wouldn’t want—”

“She don’t want you to do nothing silly, Grandad,” said Lauren. “She don’t want you to mess things up.”

“No, I won’t, I won’t,” said Tucker. His eyes were small, flecked and almost colorless, set in pouches of purple. “But this might be our one and only chance, so it must be done in the right way and by the right interrogator.”

“Is he not coming?” said Lauren. “Cormoran Strike? Grandad said he might be coming.”

“No,” said Robin, and seeing the Tuckers’ faces fall, she added quickly, “He’s on another case just now, but anything you’d say to Cormoran, you can say to me, as his part—”

“It’s got to be him who interviews Creed,” Tucker said. “Not you.”

“I under—”

“No, love, you don’t,” said Tucker firmly. “This has been my whole life. I understand Creed better than any of the morons who’ve written books about him. I’ve studied him. He’s been cut off from any kind of attention for years, now. Your boss is a famous man. Creed’ll want to meet him. Creed’ll think he’s cleverer, of course he will. He’ll want to beat your boss, want to come out of it on top, but the temptation of seeing his name in the papers again? He’s always thrived on the publicity. I think he’ll be ready to talk, as long as your boss can make him believe it’s worth his while… he’s kosher, your boss, is he?”

Under almost any other circumstances, Robin would have said “he’s actually my partner,” but today, understanding what she was being asked, she said,

“Yes, he’s kosher.”

“Yeah, I thought he seemed it, I thought so,” said Brian Tucker. “When your contact got in touch, I went online, I looked it all up. Impressive, what he’s done. He doesn’t give interviews, does he?”

“No,” said Robin.

“I like that,” said Tucker, nodding. “In it for the right reasons. But the name’s known, now, and that’ll appeal to Creed, and so will the fact your boss has had contact with famous people. Creed likes all that. I’ve told the Ministry of Justice and I told your contact, I want this Strike to do it, I don’t want the police interviewing him. They’ve had their go and we all know how well that went. And no more bloody psychiatrists, thinking they’re so smart and they can’t even agree on whether the bastard’s sane or not.

“I know Creed. I understand Creed. I’ve made a lifelong study of his psychology. I was there every day in court, during the trial. They didn’t ask him about Lou in court, not by name, but he made eye contact with me plenty of times. He’ll have recognized me, he’ll have known who I was, because Lou was my spitting image.

“When they asked him in court about the jewelry—you know about the pendant, Lou’s pendant?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“She got it a couple of days before she disappeared. Showed it to her sister Liz, Lauren’s mother—didn’t she?” he asked Lauren, who nodded. “A butterfly on a chain, nothing expensive, and because it was mass-produced, the police said it could have been anyone’s. Liz remembered the pendant differently—that’s what threw the police off, she wasn’t sure at first that it was Lou’s—but she admitted she only saw it briefly. And when they mentioned the jewelry, Creed looked straight at me. He knew who I was. Lou was my spit image,” repeated Tucker. “You know his explanation for having a stash of jewelry under the floorboards?”

“Yes,” said Robin, “he said he’d bought it because he liked to cross-dress—”

“That he’d bought it,” said Tucker, talking over Robin, “to dress up in.”

“Mr. Tucker, you said on the phone—”

“Lou nicked it from that shop they all used to go to, what was it—”

“Biba,” said Lauren.

“Biba,” said Tucker. “Two days before she disappeared, she played truant and that evening she showed Lauren’s mum, Liz, what she’d stolen. She was a handful, Lou. Didn’t get on with my second wife. The girls’ mum died when Lou was ten. It affected Lou the worst, more than the other two. She never liked my second wife.”

He’d told Robin all of this on the phone, but still, she nodded sympathetically.

“My wife had a row with Lou the morning before she disappeared, and Lou bunked off school again. We didn’t realize until she didn’t come home that night. Rang round all her friends, none of them had seen her, so we called the cops. We found out later, one of her friends had lied. She’d smuggled Lou upstairs and not told her parents.

“Lou was spotted three times next day, still in her school uniform. Last known sighting was outside a launderette in Kentish Town. She asked some geezer for a light. We knew she’d started smoking. That was partly what she rowed with my wife about.

“Creed picked up Vera Kenny in Kentish Town, too,” said Tucker, hoarsely. “In 1970, right after he’d moved into the place by Paradise Park. Vera was the first woman he took back to that basement. He chained them up, you know, and kept them alive while he—”

“Grandad,” said Lauren plaintively, “don’t.”

“No,” Tucker muttered, dipping his head, “sorry, love.”

“Mr. Tucker,” said Robin, seizing her chance, “you said on the phone you had information about Margot Bamborough nobody else knows.”

“Yeah,” said Tucker, groping inside his windcheater for a wad of folded papers, which he unfolded with shaking hands. “This top one, I got through a warder at Wakefield, back in ’79. I used to hang round there every weekend in the late seventies, watch them all coming in and out. Found out where they liked to drink and everything.

“Anyway, this particular warder, I won’t say his name, but we got chummy. Creed was on a high-security wing, in a single cell, because all the other cons wanted to take a pop at him. One geezer nearly took out Creed’s eye in ’82, stole a spoon from the canteen and sharpened the handle to a point in his cell. Tried to stab Creed through the eyeball. Just missed, because Creed dodged. My mate told me he screamed like a little girl,” said Tucker, with relish.

“Anyway, I said to my mate, I said, anything you can find out, anything you can tell me. Things Creed’s saying, hints he gives, you know. I paid him for it. He could’ve lost his job if anyone had found out. And my mate got hold of this and smuggled it out to me. I’ve never been able to admit to having it, because both of us would be in trouble if it got out, but I called up Margot Bamborough’s husband, what was his name—”

“Roy Phipps.”

“Roy Phipps, yeah. I said, ‘I’ve got a bit of Creed’s writing here you’re going to want to see. It proves he killed your wife.’”

A contemptuous smile revealed Tucker’s toffee-brown teeth again.

“But he didn’t want to know,” said Tucker. “Phipps thought I was a crank. A year after I called him, I read in the paper he’d married the nanny. Creed did Dr. Phipps a good turn, it seems.”

“Grandad!” said Lauren, shocked.

“All right, all right,” muttered Tucker. “I never liked that doctor. He could’ve done us a lot of good, if he’d wanted to. Hospital consultant, he was the kind of man the Home Secretary would’ve listened to. We could’ve kept up the pressure if he’d helped us, but he wasn’t interested, and when I saw he was off with the nanny I thought, ah, right, everything’s explained.”

“Could I—” Robin began, gesturing toward the paper Tucker was still holding flat to the table, but he ignored her.

“So it was just me and Jerry for years,” said Tucker. “Jerry Wolfson, Kara’s brother. You know who that is?” he shot at Robin.

“Yes, the nightclub hostess—”

“Nightclub hostess, hooker on the side, and a drug habit as well. Jerry had no illusions about her, he wasn’t naive, but it was still his sister. She raised him, after their mother left. Kara was all the family he had.

“February 1973, three months after my Lou, Kara disappeared as well. Left her club in Soho in the early hours of the morning. Another girl left at exactly the same time. It wasn’t far from here, as a matter of fact,” said Tucker, pointing out of the door. “The two girls go different ways up the street. The friend looks back and sees Kara bending down and talking to a van driver at the end of the road. The friend assumed that Kara knew the driver. She walks off. Kara’s never seen again.

“Jerry spoke to all Kara’s friends at the club, after, but nobody knew anything. There was a rumor going round, after Kara disappeared, that she’d been a police informer. That club was run by a couple of gangland figures. Suited them, to say she was an informer, see? Scare the other girls into keeping shtum about anything they’d seen or heard in the club.

“But Jerry never believed Kara was a snitch. He thought it was the Essex Butcher from the start—the van was the giveaway. So we joined forces.

“He tried to get permission to visit Creed, same as me, but the authorities wouldn’t let us. Jerry gave up, in the end. Drank himself to death. Something like this happens to someone you love, it marks you. You can’t get out from under it. The weight of it crushes some people.

“My marriage broke up. My other two daughters didn’t speak to me for years. Wanted me to stop going on about Lou, stop talking about Creed, pretend it never—”

“That’s not fair, Grandad,” said Lauren, sternly.

“Yeah, all right,” mumbled Tucker. “All right, I grant you, Lauren’s mum, she’s come round lately. I said to Liz, ‘Think of all the time I should’ve spent with Lou, like I’ve spent with you and Lisa. Add it all up. Family meals and holidays. Helping her with her homework. Telling her to clean her room. Arguing with her—’ My God, she could be bolshie. Watching her graduate, I expect, because she was clever, Lou, even if she did get in trouble at school with all the bunking off. I said to Liz, ‘I never got to walk her up the aisle, did I? Never got to visit her in hospital when her kids were born. Add up all the time I would’ve given her if she’d lived—’”

Tucker faltered. Lauren put a plump hand over her grandfather’s, which had swollen, purple joints.

“—add all that time together,” Tucker croaked, his eyes filmy with tears, “and that’s what I owe her, to find out what happened to her. That’s all I’m doing. Giving her her due.”

Robin felt tears prickle behind her own eyelids.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, well,” said Tucker, wiping his eyes and nose roughly on the sleeve of his windcheater. He now took the top sheet of writing and thrust it at Robin. “There you are. That shows you what we’re up against.”

Robin took the paper, on which was written two short paragraphs in clear, slanting writing, every letter separate and distinct, and began to read.

“You see?” said Tucker in a fierce whisper. “He had Margot Bam­borough chained in his basement. He’s enjoying writing about it, reliving it. But the psychiatrists didn’t think it was an admis­sion, they reckoned Creed was just churning out these bits of writing to try and draw more attention to himself. They said it was all a game to try and get more interviews, because he liked pitting his wits against the police, and reading about himself in the press, seeing himself on the news. They said that was just a bit of fantasy, and that taking it serious would give Creed what he wanted, because talking about it would turn him on.”

“Gross,” said Lauren, under her breath.

“But my warder mate said—because you know, there was three women they thought Creed had done whose bodies were never found: my Lou, Kara Wolfson and Margot Bamborough—and my warder mate said, it was the doctor he really liked being asked about. Creed likes high-status people, see. He thinks he could’ve been the boss of some multinational, or some professor or something, if he hadn’t of turned to killing. My mate told me all this. He said, Creed sees himself on that sort of level, you know, just in a different field.”

Robin said nothing. The impact of what she’d just read wasn’t easily dispelled. Margot Bamborough had become real to Robin, and she’d just been forced to imagine her, brutalized and bleeding, attempting to persuade a psychopath to spare her life.

“Creed got transferred to Belmarsh in ’83,” Tucker continued, patting the papers still laid in front of him, and Robin forced herself to concentrate, “and they started drugging him so he couldn’t get a—you know, couldn’t maintain…

“And that’s when I got permission to write to him, and have him write back to me. Ever since he was convicted, I’d been lobbying the authorities to let me question him directly, and let him write back. I wore them down in the end. I had to swear I’d never publicize what he wrote me, or give the letter to the press, but I’m the only member of a victim’s family he’s ever been allowed direct contact with… and there,” he said, turning the next two sheets of paper toward Robin. “That’s what I got back.”

The letter was written on prison writing paper. There was no “Dear Mr. Tucker.”

sRobin finished reading, and looked up.

“You can’t see it, can you?” said Tucker, with an oddly hungry expression. “No, of course you can’t. It isn’t obvious. I didn’t see it myself, at first. Nor did the prison authorities. They were too busy warning me they weren’t going to transfer him to Broadmoor, so I needn’t ask.”

He jabbed the bottom of the letter with a yellow-nailed finger.

“The clue’s there. Last line. First letter. My sentence. Put together the first letter of every sentence, and see what you get.”

Robin did as she was bidden.

“Y—O—U—R—D—A—U—G—H—T—E—R…” Robin read out loud, until, fearing where the message was going to end, she fell silent, until she reached the last sentence, when the taste of milky coffee seemed to turn rancid in her mouth, and she said, “Oh God.”

“What’s it say?” asked Lauren, frowning and straining to see.

“Never you mind,” said Tucker shortly, taking the letter back. “There you are,” he told Robin, folding up the papers and shoving them back into his inside pocket. “Now you see what he is. He killed Lou like he killed your doctor and he’s gloating about it.”

Before Robin could say anything, Tucker spun his next bit of paper to face her, and she saw a photocopied map of Islington, with a circle inked around what looked like a large house.

“Now,” he said, “there are two places nobody’s ever looked, where I think he might’ve hid bodies. I’ve been back over everywhere what had a connection with him, kid or adult. Police checked all the obvious, flats he’d lived and that, but never bothered with these.

“When Lou disappeared in November ’72, he wouldn’t’ve been able to bury her in Epping Forest, because—”

“They’d just found Vera Kenny’s body there,” said Robin.

Tucker looked grudgingly impressed.

“You do your homework at that agency, don’t you? Yeah, exactly. There was still a police presence in the forest at the time.

“But see that, there?” said Tucker, tapping on the marked building. “That’s a private house, now, but in the seventies it was the Archer Hotel, and guess who used to do their laundry? Creed’s dry cleaner’s. He used to pick up stuff from them once a week in his van, and bring it back again, sheets and bedspreads and what have you…

“Anyway, after he was arrested, the woman who owned the Archer Hotel gave a quote to the Mail, saying he always seemed so nice and polite, always chatty when he saw her…

“That isn’t marked on modern maps,” said Tucker, now moving his finger to a cross marked in the grounds of the property, “but it’s on the old deeds. There’s a well out the back of that property. Just a shaft into the ground that collects rainwater. Predated the current building.

“I tracked the owner down in ’89, after she’d sold up. She told me the well was boarded up in her time, and she planted bushes round it, because she didn’t want no kid going down it accidental. But Creed used to go through that garden to deliver laundry, right past the place where the well was. He’ll have known it was there. She couldn’t remember telling him,” said Tucker quickly, forestalling Robin’s question, “but that’s neither here nor there, is it? She wasn’t going to remember every word they said to her, was she, after all that time?

“Dead of night, Creed could’ve pulled up a van by the rear entrance, gone in through the back gate… but by the time I realized all this,” said Tucker, gritting his brown teeth in frustration, “the Archer’d gone back to being a private property, and now there’s been a bloody conservatory built over the old well.”

“Don’t you think,” said Robin cautiously, “when they built over it, they might have noticed—”

“Why would they?” said Tucker aggressively. “I never knew a builder who went looking for work when he could just slap concrete over it. Anyway, Creed’s not stupid. He’d’ve thrown rubbish down there on top of the body, wouldn’t he? Cover it up. So that’s a possibility,” he said firmly. “And then you’ve got this.”

Tucker’s last piece of paper was a second map.

“That there,” he said, tapping his swollen-knuckled finger on another circled building, “is Dennis Creed’s great-grandmother’s house. It’s mentioned in The Demon of Paradise Park. Creed said, in one of his interviews, the only time he ever saw countryside when he was a kid was when he got taken there.

“And look here,” said Tucker, pointing on a large patch of green. “The house backs right onto Great Church Wood. Acres of woodland, acres and acres. Creed knew the way there. He had a van. He’d played in those woods as a child.

“We know he chose Epping Forest for most of the bodies, because he had no known connection with the place, but by ’75, police were regularly checking Epping Forest by night, weren’t they? But here’s a different wood he knows, and it’s not so far away from London, and Creed’s got his van and his spades ready in the back.

“My best guess,” said Tucker, “is my Lou and your doc are in the well or in the woods. And they’ve got different technology now to what they had in the seventies. Ground-penetrating radar and what have you. It wouldn’t be difficult to see if there was a body in either of those places, not if the will was there.

“But,” said Tucker, sweeping the two maps off the table and folding them up with his shaking hands, “there’s no will, or there hasn’t been, not for years. Nobody in authority cares. They think it’s all over, they think Creed’ll never talk. So that’s why it’s got to be your boss who interviews him. I wish it could be me,” said Tucker, “but you’ve seen what Creed thought I was worth…”

As Tucker slid his papers back inside his windcheater, Robin became aware that the café around them had filled up during their conversation. At the nearest table sat three young men, all with amusingly Edwardian beards. So long attuned only to Tucker’s low, hoarse voice, Robin’s ears seemed suddenly full of noise. She felt as though she’d suddenly been transported from the distant past into a brash and indifferent present. What would Margot Bamborough, Louise Tucker and Kara Wolfson make of the mobile phones in almost every hand, or the sound of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” now playing somewhere nearby, or the young woman carrying a coffee back from the counter, her hair in high bunches, wearing a T-shirt that read GO F#CK YOUR #SELFIE?

“Don’t cry, Grandad,” said yellow-haired Lauren softly, putting her arm around her grandfather as a fat tear rolled down his swollen nose and fell upon the wooden table. Now that he’d stopped talking about Louise and Creed, he seemed to have become smaller.

“It’s affected our whole family,” Lauren told Robin. “Mum and Auntie Lisa are always scared if me and my cousins go out after dark—”

“Quite right!” said Tucker, who was now mopping his eyes on his sleeve again.

“—and all us grew up knowing it’s something that can really happen, you know?” said the innocent-faced Lauren. “People really do disappear. They really do get murdered.”

“Yes,” said Robin. “I know.”

She reached across the table and briefly gripped the old man’s forearm.

“We’ll do everything we can, Mr. Tucker, I promise. I’ll be in touch.”

As she left the café, Robin was aware that she’d just spoken for Strike, who knew absolutely nothing of the plan to interview Creed, let alone to try and find out what had happened to Louise Tucker, but she had no energy left to worry about that just now. Robin drew her jacket more closely around her and walked back to the office, her thoughts consumed by the terrible vacuum left in the wake of the vanished.

52

It was one o’clock in the morning, and Strike was driving toward Stoke Newington to relieve Robin, who was currently keeping watch over the terraced house that Shifty’s Boss was again visiting, and where he was almost certainly indulging in another bout of the blackmailable behavior Shifty had somehow found out about. Even though Shifty’s hold on his boss had driven the latter onto Tower Bridge, SB didn’t appear able or willing to give up whatever it was he was doing inside the house of Elinor Dean.

The night was crisp and clear, although the stars overhead were only dimly visible from brightly lit Essex Road, and Barclay’s voice was currently issuing from the speaker of the BMW. A week had passed since the Scot had managed to persuade SB to leave Tower Bridge and get a coffee with him.

“He cannae help himself, the poor bastard.”

“Clearly,” said Strike. “This is his third visit in ten days.”

“He said to me, ‘Ah cannae stop.’ Says it relieves his stress.”

“How does he square that with the fact he’s suicidal?”

“It’s the blackmail that’s makin’ him suicidal, Strike, no’ whatever he gets up tae in Stoke Newington.”

“And he didn’t give any indication what he does in there?”

“I told ye, he said he doesnae shag her, but that his wife’ll leave him if it gets oot. Could be rubber,” added Barclay, thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Rubber,” repeated Barclay. “Like that guy we had who liked wearin’ latex to work under his suit.”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike. “I forgot about him.”

The various sexual predilections of their clients often blurred in Strike’s memory. He could hear the hum of the casino in the background. Shifty had been in there for hours and Barclay had been keeping him company, unnoticed, from across the floor.

“Anyway,” said Barclay, “ye want me tae stay in here, do ye? Because it’s costin’ a small fortune and ye said the client’s gettin’ pissy aboot how much we’re chargin’. I could watch when the slimy bastard leaves, from ootside on the street.”

“No, stay on him, keep photographing him, and try and get something incriminating,” said Strike.

“Shifty’s coked oot o’ his head,” said Barclay.

“Half his colleagues will be cokeheads, as well. We’re going to need something worse than that to nail the bastard for blackmailing people onto high bridges…”

“You’re goin’ soft, Strike.”

“Just try and get something on the fucker and don’t place large bets.”

“It’s no’ the gamblin’ that’ll bankrupt us,” said Barclay, “it’s the drinks.”

He hung up, and Strike wound down the window and lit a cigarette, trying to ignore the pain in his stiff neck and shoulders.

Like SB, Strike could have used a respite from life’s problems and challenges, but such outlets were currently non-existent. Over the past year, Joan’s illness had taken from him that small sliver of time that wasn’t given over to work. Since his amputation, he no longer played any kind of sport. He saw friends infrequently due to the demands of the agency, and derived many more headaches than pleasures from his relatives, who were being particularly troublesome just now.

Tomorrow was Easter Sunday, meaning that Joan’s family would be gathering together in St. Mawes to scatter her ashes at sea. Quite apart from the mournful event itself, Strike wasn’t looking forward to yet another long journey to Cornwall, or to further enforced contact with Lucy, who’d made it clear over the course of several phone calls that she was dreading this final farewell. Again and again she returned to her sadness at not having a grave to visit, and Strike detected an undertone of blame, as though she thought Strike ought to have overruled Joan’s dying wishes. Lucy had also expressed disappointment that Strike wasn’t coming down for the whole weekend, as she and Greg were, and added bluntly that he’d better remember to bring Easter eggs for all three of his nephews, not just Jack. Strike could have done without transporting three fragile chocolate eggs all the way to Truro on the train, with a holdall to manage and his leg sore from days and weeks of nonstop work.

To compound his stress, both his unknown half-sister, Prudence, and his half-brother Al had started texting him again. His half-siblings seemed to imagine that Strike, having enjoyed a moment of necessary catharsis by shouting at Rokeby over the phone, was probably regretting his outburst, and more amenable to attending his father’s party to make up. Strike hadn’t answered any of their texts, but he’d experienced them as insect bites: determined not to scratch, they were nevertheless the source of a niggling aggravation.

Overhanging every other worry was the Bamborough case which, for all the hours he and Robin were putting into it, was proving as opaque as it had when first they’d agreed to tackle the forty-year-old mystery. The year’s deadline was coming ever closer, and nothing resembling a breakthrough had yet occurred. If he was honest, Strike had low hopes of the interview with Wilma Bayliss’s daughters, which he and Robin would be conducting later that morning, before Strike boarded the train to Truro.

All in all, as he drove toward the house of the middle-aged woman for whom SB seemed to feel such an attraction, Strike had to admit he felt a glimmer of sympathy for any man in desperate search of what the detective was certain was some form of sexual release. Recently it had been brought home to Strike that the relationships he’d had since leaving Charlotte, casual though they’d been, had been his only unalloyed refuge from the job. His sex life had been moribund since Joan’s diagnosis of cancer: all those lengthy trips to Cornwall had eaten up time that might have been given to dates.

Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t had opportunities. Ever since the agency had become successful, a few of the rich and unhappy women who’d formed a staple of the agency’s work had shown a tendency to size up Strike as a potential palliative for their own emotional pain or emptiness. Strike had taken on a new client of exactly this type the previous day, Good Friday. As she’d replaced Mrs. Smith, who’d already initiated divorce proceedings against her husband on the basis of Morris’s pictures of him with their nanny, they’d nicknamed the thirty-two-year-old brunette Miss Jones.

She was undeniably beautiful, with long legs, full lips and skin of expensive smoothness. She was of interest to the gossip columns partly because she was an heiress, and partly because she was involved in a bitter custody battle with her estranged boyfriend, on whom she was seeking dirt to use in court. Miss Jones had crossed and re-crossed her long legs while she told Strike about her hypocritical ex-partner’s drug use, the fact that he was feeding stories about her to the papers, and that he had no interest in his six-month-old daughter other than as a means to make Miss Jones unhappy. While he was seeing her to the door, their interview concluded, she’d repeatedly touched his arm and laughed longer than necessary at his mild pleasantries. Trying to usher her politely out of the door under Pat’s censorious eye, Strike had had the sensation of trying to prize chewing gum off his fingers.

Strike could well imagine Dave Polworth’s comments had he been privy to the scene, because Polworth had trenchant theories about the sort of women who found his oldest friend attractive, and of whom Charlotte was the purest example of the type. The women most readily drawn to Strike were, in Polworth’s view, neurotic, chaotic and occasionally dangerous, and their fondness for the bent-nosed ex-boxer indicated a subconscious desire for something rocklike to which they could attach themselves like limpets.

Driving through the deserted streets of Stoke Newington, Strike’s thoughts turned naturally to his ex-fiancée. He hadn’t responded to the desperate text messages she’d sent him from what he knew, having Googled the place, to be a private psychiatric clinic. Not only had they arrived on the eve of his departure for Joan’s deathbed, he hadn’t wanted to fuel her vain hopes that he would appear to rescue her. Was she still there? If so, it would be her longest ever period of hospitalization. Her one-year-old twins were doubtless in the care of a nanny, or the mother-in-law Charlotte had once assured him was ready and willing to take over maternal duties.

A short distance away from Elinor Dean’s street, Strike called Robin.

“Is he still inside?”

“Yes. You’ll be able to park right behind me, there’s a space. I think number 14 must’ve gone away for Easter with the kids. Both cars are gone.

“See you in five.”

When Strike turned into the street, he saw the old Land Rover parked a few houses down from Elinor’s front door, and was able to park without difficulty in the space directly behind it. As he turned off his engine, Robin jumped down out of her Land Rover, closed the door quietly, and walked around the BMW to the passenger’s side, a messenger bag over her shoulder.

“Morning,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him.

“Morning. Aren’t you keen to get away?”

As he said it, the screen of the mobile in her hand lit up: somebody had texted her. Robin didn’t even look at the message, but turned the phone over on her knee, to hide its light.

“Got a few things to tell you. I’ve spoken to C. B. Oakden.”

“Ah,” said Strike.

Given that Oakden seemed primarily interested in Strike, and that Strike suspected Oakden was recording his calls, the two detectives had agreed that it should be Robin who warned him away from the case.

“He didn’t like it,” said Robin. “There was a lot of ‘it’s a free country,’ and ‘I’m entitled to talk to anyone I like.’ I said to him, ‘Trying to get in ahead of us and talk to witnesses could hamper our investigation.’ He said, as an experienced biographer—”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Strike under his breath.

“—he knows how to question people to get information out of them, and it might be a good idea for the three of us to pool our resources.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “That’s exactly what this agency needs, a convicted con man on the payroll. How did you leave it?”

“Well, I can tell he really wants to meet you and I think he’s determined to withhold everything he knows about Brenner until he comes face to face with you. He wants to keep Brenner as bait.”

Strike reached for another cigarette.

“I’m not sure Brenner’s worth C. B. Oakden.”

“Even after what Janice said?”

Strike took a drag on the cigarette, then blew smoke out of the window, away from Robin. “I grant you, Brenner looks a lot fishier now than he did when we started digging, but what are the odds Oakden’s actually got useful information? He was a kid when all this happened and nicking that obituary smacks of a man trying to scrape up things to say, rather than—”

He heard a rustling beside him and turned to see Robin opening her messenger bag. Slightly to his surprise, Robin was pulling out Talbot’s notebook again.

“Still carrying that around with you, are you?” said Strike, trying not to sound exasperated.

“Apparently I am,” she said, moving her mobile onto the dashboard so that she could open the book in her lap. Watching the phone, Strike saw a second text arrive, lighting up the screen, and this time, he caught sight of the name: Morris.

“What’s Morris texting you about?” Strike said, and even to his ears, the question sounded critical.

“Nothing. He’s just bored, sitting outside Miss Jones’s boyfriend’s house,” said Robin, who was flicking through Talbot’s notebook. “I want to show you something. There, look at that.”

She passed him the book, open to a page Strike remembered from his own perusal of the notes. It was close to the end of the notebook, where the pages were most heavily embellished with strange drawings. In the middle of this page danced a black skeleton holding a scythe.

“Ignore all the weird tarot drawings,” said Robin. “Look there, though. That sentence between the skeleton’s legs. The little symbol, the circle with the cross in it, stands for the Part of Fortune…”

“What’s that?” asked Strike.

“It’s a point in the horoscope that’s supposed to be about worldly success. ‘Part of Fortune in Second, MONEY AND POSSESSIONS.’ And ‘Mother’s House,’ underlined. The Oakdens lived on Fortune Street, remember? And the Part of Fortune was in the house of money and possessions when Margot disappeared, and he’s connecting that with the fact that Dorothy inherited her mother’s house, and saying that wasn’t a tragedy, but a stroke of luck for Dorothy.”

“You think?” said Strike, rubbing his tired eyes.

“Yes, because look, he then starts rambling about Virgo—which is Dorothy’s sign under both systems—being petty and having an ax to grind, which from what we know about her fits. Anyway,” said Robin, “I’ve been looking at dates of birth, and guess what? Under both the traditional and Schmidt’s systems, Dorothy’s mother was a Scorpio.”

“Christ’s sake, how many more Scorpios are we going to find?”

“I know what you mean,” said Robin, unfazed, “but from what I’ve read, Scorpio’s one of the most common birth signs. Anyway, this is the important bit: Carl Oakden was born on the sixth of April. That means he’s Aries under the traditional system, but Pisces under Schmidt’s.”

A short silence followed.

“How old was Oakden when his grandmother fell downstairs?” asked Strike.

“Fourteen,” said Robin.

Strike turned his face away from Robin to blow smoke out of the window again.

“You think he pushed his grandmother, do you?”

“It might not have been deliberate,” said Robin. “He could’ve pushed past her and she lost her balance.”

“‘Margot confronted Pisces.’ It’d be a hell of a thing to accuse a child of—”

“Maybe she never confronted him at all. The confrontation might have been something Talbot suspected, or imagined. Either way—”

“—it’s suggestive, yeah. It is suggestive…” Strike let out a slight groan. “We’re going to have to interview bloody Oakden, aren’t we? There’s a bit of a hotspot developing around that little grouping, isn’t there? Brenner and the Oakdens, outward respectability—”

“—inward poison. Remember? That’s what Oonagh Kennedy said about Dorothy.”

The detectives sat for a moment or two, watching Elinor Dean’s front door, which remained closed, her dark garden silent and still.

“How many murders,” Robin asked, “d’you think go undetected?”

“Clue’s in the question, isn’t it? ‘Undetected’—impossible to know. But yeah, it’s those quiet, domestic deaths you wonder about. Vulnerable people picked off by their own families, and everyone thinking it was ill health—”

“—or a mercy that they’ve gone,” said Robin.

“Some deaths are a mercy,” said Strike.

And with these words, in both of their mind’s eyes rose an image of horror. Strike was remembering the corpse of Sergeant Gary Topley, lying on the dusty road in Afghanistan, eyes wide open, his body missing from the waist down. The vision had recurred in Strike’s nightmares ever since he’d seen it, and occasionally, in these dreams, Gary talked to him, lying in the dust. It was always a comfort to remember, on waking, that Gary’s consciousness had been snuffed out instantly, that his wide-open eyes and puzzled expression showed that death had claimed him before his brain could register agony or terror.

But in Robin’s mind there was a picture of something she wasn’t sure had ever happened. She was imagining Margot Bamborough chained to a radiator (I whip her face and breasts), pleading for her life (the strategy is laughably transparent), and suffering torments (it could be raised to an ecstasy of pain, and then it knew it lived, and stood tremulously on the edge of the abyss, begging, screaming, begging for mercy).

“You know,” said Robin, talking partly to break the silence and dispel that mental image, “I’d quite like to find a picture of Dorothy’s mother, Maud.”

“Why?”

“For confirmation, because—I don’t think I told you, look…”

She flicked backward in the notebook to the page littered with water signs. In small writing beneath a picture of a scorpion were the words “MOLE (Adams).”

“Is that a new sign?” asked Strike. “The Mole?”

“No,” said Robin, smiling, “Talbot’s alluding to the fact that the astrologer Evangeline Adams said the true Scorpio often has a birthmark, or a prominent mole. I’ve read her book, got it second hand.”

There was a pause.

“What?” said Strike, because Robin was looking at him expectantly.

“I was waiting for you to jeer.”

“I lost the will to jeer some way back,” said Strike. “You realize we’re supposed to have solved this case in approximately fourteen weeks’ time?”

“I know,” sighed Robin. She picked up her mobile to check the time, and out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw yet another text from Morris. “Well, we’re meeting the Bayliss sisters later. Maybe they’ll have something useful to tell us… are you sure you want to interview them with me? I’d be fine to do it alone. You’re going to be really tired after sitting here all night.”

“I’ll sleep on the train to Truro afterward,” said Strike. “You got any plans for Easter Sunday?”

“No,” said Robin. “Mum wanted me to go home but…”

Strike wondered what the silent sequel to the sentence was, and whether she’d made plans with someone else, and didn’t want to tell him about it. Morris, for instance.

“OK, I swear this is the last thing I’m going to bring up from Talbot’s notebook,” Robin said, “but I want to flag something up before we meet the Baylisses.”

“Go on.”

“You said yourself, he seemed racist, from his notes.”

“‘Black phantom,’” Strike quoted, “yeah.”

“And ‘Black Moon Lilith—’”

“—and wondering whether she was a witch.”

“Exactly. I think he really harassed her, and probably the family, too,” Robin said. “The language he uses for Wilma—‘crude,’ ‘dis­honest’…” Robin flicked back to the page featuring the three horned signs, “and ‘woman as she is now in this eon… armed and militant.’”

“A radical feminist witch.”

“Which sounds quite cool when you say it,” said Robin, “but I don’t think Talbot meant it that way.”

“You think this is why the daughters didn’t want to talk to us?”

“Maybe,” said Robin. “So I think we need to be… you know. Sensitive to what might have gone on. Definitely not go in there looking as though we suspect Wilma of anything.”

“Point well made, and taken,” said Strike.

“Right then,” said Robin with a sigh, as she put the notebook back into her messenger bag. “I’d better get going… What is he doing in there?” Robin asked quietly, looking at Elinor Dean’s front door.

“Barclay thinks it might be a rubber fetish.”

“He’d need a lot of talcum powder to wriggle himself into anything made of rubber, the size of that belly.”

Strike laughed.

“Well, I’ll see you in…” Robin checked the time on her mobile, “seven hours, forty-five minutes.”

“Sleep well,” said Strike.

As she walked away from the BMW, Strike saw her looking at her mobile again, doubtless reading Morris’s texts. He watched as she got into the ancient Land Rover, then turned the tank-like vehicle in a three-point turn, raising a hand in farewell as she passed him, heading back to Earl’s Court.

As Strike reached for the Thermos of tea under his seat, he remembered the supposed dental appointment of the other day, about which Robin had sounded strangely flustered, and which had taken place (though Strike hadn’t previously made the connection) on Morris’s afternoon off. A most unwelcome possibility crossed his mind: had Robin lied, like Irene Hickson, and for the same reason? His mind darted to what Robin had said a few months previously, when she’d mentioned her ex-husband having a new partner: “Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I told Morris.”

As he unscrewed his Thermos, Strike mentally reviewed Robin’s behavior around Morris in the last few months. She’d never seemed to particularly like him, but might that have been an act, designed to deflect attention? Were his partner and his subcontractor actually in a relationship which he, busy with his own troubles, had failed to spot?

Strike poured himself tea, settled back in his seat, and glowered at Elinor Dean’s closed door through the steam rising from plastic-tasting tea the color of mud. He was angry, he told himself, because he should have established a work rule that partners weren’t allowed to date subcontractors, and for another reason which he preferred not to examine, because he knew perfectly well what it was, and no good could come of brooding upon it.

53

Seven hours later, in the cool, flat daylight of an overcast morning, Robin, who was back in her Land Rover, took a detour on her way to the café where she and Strike would be meeting the three Bayliss sisters.

When Maya, the middle sister, had suggested meeting in Belgique in Wanstead, Robin had realized how close she’d have to drive to the Flats where Dennis Creed had disposed of his second-to-last known victim, twenty-seven-year-old hairdresser Susan Meyer.

Half an hour ahead of the planned interview, Robin parked the Land Rover beside a stretch of shops on Aldersbrook Road, then crossed the street and headed up a short footpath, which led her to the reedy bank of the man-made Alexandra Lake, a wide stretch of water on which various wildfowl were bobbing. A couple of ducks came paddling hopefully toward Robin, but when she failed to produce bread or other treats, they glided away again, compact, self-sufficient, their onyx eyes scanning both water and bank for other possibilities.

Thirty-nine years ago, Dennis Creed had driven to this lake under cover of night, and rolled the headless, handless corpse of Susan Meyer into it, bound up in black plastic and rope. Susan Meyer’s distinctive wedge cut and shy smile had earned her a prominent place on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park.

The milky sky looked as opaque as the shallow lake, which resembled jade silk in which the gliding wildfowl made rippling creases. Hands in her pockets, Robin looked out over the water and the rustling weeds, trying to imagine the scene when a park worker had spotted the black object in the water, which he’d assumed initially was a tarpaulin swollen with air, until he hooked it with a long pole, felt the grisly weight and made an instant connection (or so he told the television crew who arrived shortly after the police and ambulance) with the bodies that kept turning up in Epping Forest, barely ten miles away.

Creed had abducted Susan exactly a month before Margot disappeared. Had they overlapped in Creed’s basement? If so, Creed had, for a brief period, held three women there simultaneously. Robin preferred not to think about what Andrea, or Margot, if she’d been there, must have felt on being dragged into Creed’s basement, seeing a fellow woman chained there, and knowing that she, too, would be reduced to that emaciated and broken-boned state before she died.

Andrea Hooton was the last woman Creed was known to have killed, and he’d varied the pattern when it came to disposing of her body, driving eighty miles from his house in Liverpool Road to throw the corpse off Beachy Head. Both Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats had become too heavily patrolled by then, and in spite of Creed’s evident wish to make sure the Essex Butcher was credited with every kill, as evidenced by the secret store of press clippings he kept beneath the floorboards in his basement flat, he’d never wanted to be caught.

Robin checked her watch: it was time to head to the interview with the Bayliss sisters. Walking back to the Land Rover, she pondered the divide between normalcy and insanity. On the surface, Creed had been far saner than Bill Talbot. Creed had left no half-crazed scribblings behind him to explain his thought processes; he’d never plotted the course of asteroids to guide him: his interviews with psychiatrists and police had been entirely lucid. Not for Creed the belief in signs and symbols, a secret language decipherable only by initiates, a refuge in mystery or magic. Dennis Creed had been a meticulous planner, a genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth.

When Robin arrived in the street where the café stood, she spotted Strike getting out of his BMW a short distance away from the entrance. Noticing the Land Rover in turn, Strike raised a hand in greeting and headed up the street toward her, while finishing what looked like a bacon and egg McMuffin, his chin stubbly, the shadows beneath his eyes purple.

“Have I got time for a fag?” were the first words he spoke, checking his watch as Robin got down out of the car and slammed the door. “No,” he answered himself, with a sigh. “Ah well…”

“You can take the lead on this interview,” he told Robin, as they headed together toward the café. “You’ve done all the legwork. I’ll take notes. Remind me what their names are?”

“Eden’s the eldest. She’s a Labor councilor from Lewisham. Maya’s the middle one, and she’s deputy headmistress of a primary school. The youngest is Porschia Dagley, and she’s a social worker—”

“—like her mother—”

“Exactly, and she lives just up the road from here. I think we’ve come to her neck of the woods because she’s been ill, so the others didn’t want her to have to travel.”

Robin pushed open the door of the café and led the way inside. The interior was sleekly modern, with a curved counter, a wooden floor and a bright orange feature wall. Close to the door at a table for six sat three black women. Robin found it easy to identify which sister was which, because of the photographs she’d seen on the family’s Facebook pages, and on the Lewisham Council website.

Eden, the councilor, sat with her arms folded, a wavy bob casting a shadow over most of her face, so that only a carefully lipsticked, unsmiling plum mouth was clearly visible. She wore a well-tailored black jacket and her demeanor was suggestive of a businesswoman who’d been interrupted during an important meeting.

Maya, the deputy headmistress, wore a cornflower blue sweater and jeans. A small silver cross hung around her neck. She was smaller in build than Eden, the darkest skinned and, in Robin’s opinion, the prettiest of the sisters. Her long, braided hair was tied back in a thick ponytail, she wore square-framed glasses over her large, wide-set eyes and her full mouth, with its naturally up-tilted corners, conveyed warmth. A leather handbag sat in Maya’s lap, and she was gripping it with both hands as though afraid it might otherwise escape.

Porschia, the youngest sister and the social worker, was also the heaviest. Her hair had been cropped almost to her skull, doubtless because of her recent chemotherapy. She’d penciled in the eyebrows that were just beginning to grow back; they arched over hazel eyes that shone gold against her skin. Porschia was wearing a purple smock top with jeans and long beaded earrings, which swung like miniature chandeliers as she looked around at Strike and Robin. As they approached the table Robin spotted a small tattoo on the back of Porschia’s neck: the trident from the Barbadian flag. Robin knew that Eden and Maya were both well into their fifties, and that Porschia was forty-nine, but all three sisters could have passed for at least ten years younger than their real ages.

Robin introduced herself and Strike. Hands were shaken, Eden unsmiling throughout, and the detectives sat down, Strike at the head of the table, Robin between him and Porschia, facing Maya and Eden. Everyone but Eden made labored small talk about the local area and the weather, until the waiter came to take their order. Once he’d left, Robin said,

“Thanks very much for meeting us, we really do appreciate it. Would you mind if Cormoran takes notes?”

Maya and Porschia shook their heads. Strike tugged his notebook out of his coat pocket and opened it.

“As I said on the phone,” Robin began, “we’re really after background, building up a complete picture of Margot Bamborough’s life in the months—”

“Could I ask a couple of questions?” interrupted Eden.

“Of course,” said Robin politely, though expecting trouble.

Eden swept her hair back out of her face, revealing ebony-dark eyes.

“Did you two know there’s a guy phoning around everyone who was connected to St. John’s, saying he’s going to write a book about you investigating Bamborough’s disappearance?”

Shit, thought Robin.

“Would this be a man called Oakden?” asked Strike.

“No, Carl Brice.”

“It’s the same bloke,” said Strike.

“Are you connected to him or—”

“No,” said Strike, “and I’d strongly advise you not to talk to him.”

“Yeah, we worked that out for ourselves,” said Eden, coolly. “But this means there’ll be publicity, won’t there?”

Robin looked at Strike, who said,

“If we solve the case, there’ll be publicity even without Oakden—or Brice, or whatever he’s calling himself these days—but that’s a big ‘if.’ To be frank, the odds are we’re not going to solve it, in which case I think Oakden’s going to find it very hard to sell any books, and whatever you tell us will never go any further.”

“What if we know something that might help you solve the case, though?” asked Porschia, leaning forwards, so that she could look past Robin at Strike.

There was an infinitesimal pause in which Robin could almost feel Strike’s interest sharpening, along with her own.

“Depends what that information is,” Strike answered slowly. “It might be possible not to divulge where we got it, but if the source is important to getting a conviction…”

There was a long pause. The air between the sisters seemed charged with silent communications.

“Well?” said Porschia at last, on an interrogative note.

“We did decide to,” Maya mumbled to Eden, who continued to sit in silence, arms folded.

“OK, fine,” said Eden, with a don’t-blame-me-later inflection.

The deputy headmistress reached absently for the little silver cross around her neck, and held it as she began to talk.

“I need to explain a bit of background, first,” she said. “When we were kids—Eden and I were already teenagers, but Porschia was only nine—”

“Eight,” Porschia corrected her.

“Eight,” Maya said obediently, “our dad was convicted of—of rape and sent to prison.”

“He didn’t do it, though,” said Eden.

Robin reached automatically for her coffee cup and took a sip, so as to hide her face.

“He didn’t, OK?” said Eden, watching Robin. “He had a white girlfriend for a couple of months. The whole of Clerkenwell knew. They’d been seen together in bars all over the place. He tried to end it, and she cried rape.”

Robin’s stomach lurched as though the floor had tilted. She very much wanted this story to be untrue. The idea of any woman lying about rape was repugnant to her. She’d had to talk through every moment of her own assault in court. Her soft-spoken fifty-three-year-old rapist and would-be murderer had taken the stand afterward to explain to the jury how the twenty-year-old Robin had invited him into the stairwell of her hall of residence for sex. In his account, everything had been consensual: she’d whispered that she liked it rough, which had accounted for the heavy bruising around her neck, she’d enjoyed it so much she’d asked him back the following night, and yes (with a little laugh in the dock), of course he’d been surprised, nicely spoken young girl like her, coming on to him like that, out of nowhere…

“Easy thing for a white woman to do to a black man,” said Eden, “’specially in 1972. Dad already had a record, because he’d got into a fight a few years before that. He went down for five years.”

“Must’ve been hard on the family,” said Strike, not looking at Robin.

“It was,” said Maya. “Very hard. The other kids at school… well, you know what kids are like…”

“Dad had been bringing in most of the money,” said Porschia. “There were five of us, and Mum had never had much schooling. Before Dad got arrested, she’d been studying, trying to pass some exams, better herself. We were just about making ends meet while Dad was bringing in a wage, but once he was gone, we struggled.”

“Our mum and her sister married two brothers,” said Maya. “Nine children between them. The families were really close, right up until Dad got arrested—but then everything changed. My Uncle Marcus went to court every day while Dad was on trial, but Mum wouldn’t go and Uncle Marcus was really angry at her.”

“Well, he knew it would’ve made a big difference, if the judge had seen Dad had the family united behind him,” snapped Eden. “I went. I bunked off school to go. I knew he was innocent.”

“Well, good for you,” said Porschia, though her tone was far from congratulatory, “but Mum didn’t want to sit in open court listening to her husband talk about how often he had sex with his girlfriend—”

“That woman was trash,” said Eden curtly.

“Dirty water does cool hot iron,” said Porschia, with a Bajan inflection. “His choice.”

“So, anyway,” said Maya hastily, “the judge believed the woman, and Dad got put away. Mum never went to visit him inside, and she wouldn’t take me or Porschia or our brothers, either.”

“I went,” piped up Eden again. “I got Uncle Marcus to take me. He was still our dad. Mum had no right to stop us seeing him.”

“Yeah, so,” continued Maya, before Porschia could say anything, “Mum wanted a divorce, but she had no money for legal advice. So Dr. Bamborough put her in touch with this feminist lawyer, who’d give legal help to women in difficult circumstances, for a reduced fee. When Uncle Marcus told Dad that Mum had managed to get herself a lawyer, Dad wrote to her from prison, begging her to change her mind. He said he’d found God, that he loved her and he’d learned his lesson and all he wanted was his family.”

Maya took a sip of her coffee.

“About a week after Mum got Dad’s letter, she was cleaning Dr. Bamborough’s consulting room one evening after everyone had left, and she noticed something in the bin.”

Maya unfastened the handbag she’d been holding on her lap, and took out a pale blue piece of heavily creased paper, which had clearly been crumpled up into a ball at some point in the past. She held it out to Robin, who laid it flat on the table so that Strike could read it, too.

The faded handwriting was a distinctive mix of capitals and lower-case letters.

LEAVE MY GIRL ALONE YOU CUNT OR I’LL MAKE SURE YOU GO TO HELL SLOW AND PAINFUL.

Robin glanced sideways at Strike and saw her own, barely disguised astonishment mirrored there. Before either of them could say anything, a group of young women passed their table, forcing Strike to push his chair in. Chatting and giggling, the women sat down at the table behind Maya and Eden.

“When Mum read that,” said Maya, speaking more quietly so that the newcomers couldn’t hear her, “she thought Dad had sent it. Not literally, because the prison censor would never have let that go out—she thought someone had done it for him.”

“Specifically, Uncle Marcus,” said Eden, arms folded and expression pinched. “Uncle Marcus, who was a lay preacher and never used the c-word in his life.”

“Mum took the note over to Uncle Marcus and Auntie Carmen’s,” said Maya, ignoring this interjection, “and asked Marcus straight out if he was behind it. He denied it, but Mum didn’t believe him. It was the mention of hell: Marcus was a fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher back then—”

“—and he didn’t believe Mum really wanted a divorce,” said Porschia. “He blamed Dr. Bamborough for persuading Mum to leave Dad, because, you know, Mum really needed a white woman to point out her life was shit. She’d never have noticed otherwise.”

“Going for a cigarette, OK?” said Eden abruptly. She pushed herself up and walked out, her heels rapping on the wooden floorboards.

Both younger sisters seemed to exhale in relief with her departure.

“She was Dad’s favorite,” Maya told Strike and Robin quietly, watching through the window as Eden took out a packet of Silk Cut, shook her hair out of her face and lit herself a cigarette. “She really loved him, even if he was a womanizer.”

“And she never got on with Mum,” said Porschia. “Their rows would’ve woken the dead.”

“In fairness,” said Maya, “them splitting up hit Eden hardest. She left school at sixteen, got herself a job at Marks & Spencer to help support—”

“Mum never wanted her to drop out of school,” said Porschia. “That was Eden’s choice. Eden likes to claim it was a sacrifice she made for the family, but come on. She couldn’t wait to get out of school, because Mum put so much pressure on her to get good grades. She likes to claim she was a second mother to all of us, but that’s not how I remember it. I mostly remember her whacking merry hell out of me if I so much as looked at her wrong.”

On the other side of the window, Eden stood smoking with her back to them.

“The whole situation was a nightmare,” said Maya sadly. “Mum and Uncle Marcus never made it up, and with Mum and Carmen being sisters…”

“Let’s just tell them now, while she can’t stick her oar in,” Porschia urged Maya, and turning to Strike and Robin, she said, “Auntie Carmen was helping Mum get the divorce, behind Uncle Marcus’s back.”

“How?” asked Robin, as a waiter passed their table on the way to the group of women at the next table.

“See, when the lawyer Dr. Bamborough had recommended told Mum what she charged, Mum knew she’d never be able to afford her, not even at the reduced rates,” said Porschia.

“Mum came home afterward and cried,” said Maya, “because she was desperate to have the divorce done and dusted before Dad got out of jail. She knew otherwise he’d just move right back in and she’d be trapped. Anyway, a few days later, Dr. Bamborough asked her how things had gone with the lawyer, and Mum admitted she wasn’t going to go through with the divorce, for lack of funds, so,” Maya sighed, “Dr. Bamborough offered to pay the lawyer, in exchange for Mum doing a few hours a week cleaning the house out in Ham.”

The women at the table behind theirs were now flirting with the young waiter, wondering whether it was too early for a cream cake, giggling about breaking their diets.

“Mum didn’t feel she could refuse,” said Maya. “But what with the costs of getting all the way out to Ham, and the time it would take her to get out there, when she already had two other jobs and exams coming up…”

“Your Aunt Carmen agreed to do the cleaning for her,” guessed Robin, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Strike glance at her.

“Yeah,” said Maya, eyes widening in surprise. “Exactly. It seemed like a good solution. Auntie Carmen was a housewife and Uncle Marcus and Dr. Bamborough were both out at work all day, so Mum thought neither of them would ever know the wrong woman was turning up.”

“There was one sticky moment,” said Porschia, “remember, M? When Dr. Bamborough asked us all over to a barbecue at her house?” She turned to Robin. “We couldn’t go, because Dr. Bamborough’s nanny would’ve realized Mum wasn’t the woman turning up once a week to clean. My Auntie Carmen didn’t like that nanny,” Porschia added. “Didn’t like her at all.”

“Why was that?” asked Strike.

“She thought the girl was after Dr. Bamborough’s husband. Went red every time she said his name, apparently.”

The door of the café opened and Eden walked back inside. As she sat down, Robin caught a whiff of smoke mingling with her perfume.

“Where’ve you got to?” she asked, looking cold.

“Auntie Carmen cleaning instead of Mum,” said Maya.

Eden re-folded her arms, ignoring her coffee.

“So the statement your mother gave the police, about the blood and Dr. Phipps walking across the garden—” said Strike.

“—was really her telling him everything Carmen had told her, yeah,” said Maya, feeling again for the cross around her neck. “She couldn’t own up that her sister had been going there instead of her, because my Uncle Marcus would’ve gone crazy if he’d found out. Auntie Carmen begged Mum not to tell the police and Mum agreed.

“So she had to pretend she was the one who’d seen the blood on the carpet and Dr. Phipps walking across the lawn.”

“Only,” interrupted Porschia, with a humorless laugh, “Carmen changed her mind about Dr. Phipps, after. Mum went back to her after her first police interview and said, ‘They’re asking whether I couldn’t have got confused and mistaken one of the workmen for Dr. Phipps.’ Carmen said, ‘Oh. Yeah. I forgot there were workmen round the back. Maybe I did.’”

Porschia let out a short laugh, but Robin knew she wasn’t truly amused. It was the same kind of laughter Robin had taken refuge in, the night she’d discussed rape with Max over the kitchen table.

“I know it isn’t funny,” said Porschia, catching Maya’s eye, “but come on. Carmen was always ditzy as hell, but you’d think she might’ve made sure of her facts then, wouldn’t you? Mum was liter­ally sick with stress, like, retching if she ate anything. And then that old bitch of a secretary at work found her having a dizzy spell…”

“Yeah,” said Eden, suddenly coming to life. “Next thing was, Mum was accused of being a thief and a drunk and the practice fired her. The old secretary claimed she’d had a secret sniff of Mum’s Thermos and smelled booze in it. Total fabrication.”

“That was a few months after Margot Bamborough disappeared, wasn’t it?” asked Strike, his pen poised over his notebook.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Eden said with icy sarcasm, “did I go off topic? Back to the missing white lady, everyone. Never mind what the black woman went through, who gives a shit?”

“Sorry, I didn’t—” began Strike.

“D’you know who Tiana Medaini is?” Eden shot at him.

“No,” he admitted.

“No,” said Eden, “of course you bloody don’t. Forty years after Margot Bamborough went missing, here we all are, fussing over her and where she went. Tiana Medaini’s a black teenager from Lewisham. She went missing last year. How many front pages has Tiana been on? Why wasn’t she top of the news, like Bamborough was? Because we’re not worth the same, are we, to the press or to the bloody police?”

Strike appeared unable to find an adequate response; doubtless, Robin thought, because Eden’s point was unarguable. The picture of Dennis Creed’s only black victim, Jackie Aylett, a secretary and mother of one, was the smallest and the least distinct of the ghostly black and white images of Creed’s victims on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. Jackie’s dark skin showed up worst on the gloomy cover. The greatest prominence had been given to sixteen-year-old Geraldine Christie and twenty-seven-year-old Susan Meyer, both of them pale and blonde.

“When Margot Bamborough went missing,” Eden said fiercely, “the white women at her practice were treated like bone china by the police, OK? Practically mopping their bloody tears for them—but not our mum. They treated her like a hardened con. That policeman in charge, what was his name—”

“Talbot?” suggested Robin.

“‘What are you hiding? Come on, I know you’re hiding something.’”

The mysterious figure of the Hierophant rose up in Robin’s mind. The keeper of secrets and mysteries in the Thoth tarot wore saffron robes and sat upon a bull (“the card is referred to Taurus”) and in front of him, half his size, stood a black priestess, her hair braided like Maya’s (“Before him is the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman…”). Which had come first, the laying out of tarot cards signifying secrecy and concealment, or the policeman’s instinct that the terrified Wilma was lying to him?

“When he interviewed me—” began Eden.

“Talbot interviewed you?” asked Strike sharply.

“Yeah, he came to Marks & Spencer unannounced, to my work,” said Eden, and Robin realized that Eden’s eyes were suddenly bright with tears. “Someone else at the practice had seen that anonymous note Bamborough got. Talbot found out Dad was inside and he’d heard Mum was cleaning for the doctor. He went to every man in our family, accusing them of writing the threatening letters, and then he came to me, asking me really strange questions about all my male relatives, wanting to know what they’d been up to on different dates, asking whether Uncle Marcus often stayed out overnight. He even asked me about Dad and Uncle Marcus’s—”

“—star signs?” asked Robin.

Eden looked astounded.

“The hell did you know that?”

“Talbot left a notebook. It’s full of occult writing. He was trying to solve the case using tarot cards and astrology.”

“Astrology?” repeated Eden. “Effing astrology?”

“Talbot shouldn’t have been interviewing you without an adult present,” Strike told Eden. “What were you, sixteen?”

Eden laughed in the detective’s face.

“That might be how it works for white girls, but we’re different, aren’t you listening? We’re hardy. We’re tough. That occult stuff,” Eden said, turning back to Robin, “yeah, that makes sense, because he asked me about obeah. You know what that is?”

Robin shook her head.

“Kind of magic they used to practice in the Caribbean. Originated in West Africa. We were all born in Southwark, but, you know, we were all black pagans to Inspector Talbot. He had me alone in the back room and he was asking me stuff about rituals using blood, about black magic. I was terrified, I didn’t know what he was on about. I thought he meant Mum and the blood on the carpet, hinting she’d done away with Dr. Bamborough.”

“He was having a psychotic breakdown,” said Robin. “That’s why they took him off the case. He thought he was hunting a devil. Your mum wasn’t the only woman he thought might have supernatural power—but he was definitely racist,” Robin added quietly. “That’s clear from his notes.”

“You never told us about the police coming to Marks & Spencer,” said Porschia. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Why would I?” said Eden, angrily blotting her damp eyes. “Mum was already ill with the stress of it all, I had Uncle Marcus shouting at me that Mum had put the police onto him and his boys, and I was really scared, if Uncle Marcus found out about the officer coming to my work, he’d report him, which was the last thing we needed. God, it was a mess,” said Eden, pressing her hands briefly against her wet eyes, “such a bloody mess.”

Porschia looked as though she’d like to say something comforting to her elder sister, but Robin had the impression that this would be such a departure from their usual relationship, she didn’t know quite how to set about it. After a moment or two, Porschia muttered,

“Need the loo,” pushed her chair away from the table and disappeared into the bathroom.

“I didn’t want Porsh to come today,” said Maya, as soon as the bathroom door swung shut behind her younger sister. She was tactfully not looking at her elder sister, who was trying to pretend she wasn’t crying, while surreptitiously wiping more tears from her eyes. “She doesn’t need this stress. She’s only just finished chemo.”

“How’s she doing?” asked Strike.

“She was given the all-clear last week, thank God. She’s talking about going back to work on reduced hours. I think it’s too early.”

“She’s a social worker, isn’t she?” asked Robin.

“Yeah,” sighed Maya. “A backlog of a hundred desperate messages every morning, and you know you’re in the firing line if anything goes wrong with a family you haven’t been able to reach. I don’t know how she does it. But she’s like Mum. Two peas in a pod. She was always Mum’s baby, and Mum was her hero.”

Eden let out a soft “huh,” which might have been agreement or disparagement. Maya ignored it. There was a short pause, in which Robin reflected on the tangled ties of family. A proxy war between Jules and Wilma Bayliss seemed still to be playing out in the next generation.

The bathroom door swung open again and Porschia reappeared. Instead of taking her seat beside Robin, she swiveled her wide hips around Strike at the end of the table, and edged in behind a startled Maya, who pulled her chair in hastily, until she reached Eden. After thrusting a handful of toilet roll into her elder sister’s hand, Porschia slid her plump arms around Eden’s neck and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“What are you doing?” said Eden huskily, reaching up to clasp her youngest sister’s arms, not to remove them, but to hold them there. Strike, Robin saw out of the corner of her eye, was pretending to examine his notebook.

“Thanking you,” said Porschia softly, dropping another kiss on the top of her eldest sister’s head before letting her go. “For agreeing to do this. I know you didn’t want to.”

Everyone sat in slightly startled silence while Porschia squeezed her way back around the table and resumed her seat next to Robin.

“Have you told them the last bit?” Porschia asked Maya, while Eden blew her nose. “About Mum and Betty Fuller?”

“No,” said Maya, who appeared shell-shocked by the act of reconciliation she’d just witnessed. “You’re the one Mum told it to, I thought you should.”

“Right,” said Porschia, turning to look at Strike and Robin. “This really is the last thing we know, and there might be nothing in it, but you might as well have it, now you know the other stuff.”

Strike waited, pen poised.

“Mum told me this not long after she retired. She shouldn’t have, really, because it was about a client, but when you hear what it was, you’ll understand.

“Mum kept working in Clerkenwell after she’d qualified as a social worker. It was where all her friends were; she didn’t want to move. So she really got to know the local community.

“One of the families she was working with lived in Skinner Street, not that far from the St. John’s practice—”

“Skinner Street?” repeated Strike. The name rang a bell, but, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t immediately remember why that was. Robin, on the other hand, knew immediately why Skinner Street sounded familiar.

“Yeah. The family was called Fuller. They had just about every problem you can think of, Mum said: addiction, domestic abuse, criminality, the lot. The sort of head of the family was a grandmother who was only in her forties, and this woman’s main source of income was prostitution. Betty was her name, and Mum said she was like a local news service, if you wanted to know about the underworld, anyway. The family had been in the area for generations.

“Anyway, one day, Betty says to Mum, bit sly, to see her reaction: ‘Marcus never sent no threatening notes to that doctor, you know.’

“Mum was gobsmacked,” said Porschia. “Her first thought was that Marcus was visiting the woman, you know, as a client—I know he wasn’t,” said Porschia quickly, holding up a hand to forestall Eden, who’d opened her mouth. “Mum and Marcus hadn’t spoken for years at this point. Anyway, it was all innocent: Betty had met Marcus because the church was doing a bit of outreach in the local area. He’d brought round some Harvest Festival stuff for the family, and tried to persuade Betty to come along to a church service.

“Betty had worked out Marcus’s connection with Mum, because Mum was still going by ‘Bayliss,’ and Betty claimed she knew who really wrote the threatening notes to Margot Bamborough, and that the person who wrote the notes was the same person who killed her. Mum said, ‘Who was it?’ And Betty said if she ever told, Margot’s killer would kill her, too.”

There was a short silence. The café clattered around them, and one of the women at the next table, who was eating a cream slice, said loudly, with unctuous pleasure,

“God that’s good.”

“Did your mother believe Betty?” asked Robin.

“She didn’t know what to think,” said Porschia. “Betty knew some very rough people, so it was possible she’d heard something on the grapevine, but who knows? People talk, don’t they, and they like making themselves important,” and Robin remembered Janice Beattie saying exactly this, as she passed on the rumor of Margot Bamborough appearing in a graveyard. “But if there was anything in it, a woman like Betty, she’d go to the moon before she went to the cops.

“She might well be dead by now,” said Porschia, “given her lifestyle, but for what it’s worth, there it is. Shouldn’t be hard to find out whether she’s still alive.”

“Thanks very much for telling us,” said Strike. “That’s definitely worth following up.”

Having told all they knew, the three sisters now lapsed into a pained silence. It wasn’t the first time that Robin had had cause to consider how much collateral damage each act of violence left in its wake. The disappearance of Margot Bamborough had evidently wreaked havoc in the lives of the Bayliss girls, and now she knew the full extent of the grief it had brought them, and the painful nature of the memories associated with it, she perfectly understood Eden’s initial refusal to talk to detectives. If anything, she had to ask herself why the sisters had changed their minds.

“Thank you so much for this,” she said sincerely. “I know Margot’s daughter will be incredibly grateful that you agreed to talk to us.”

“Oh, it’s the daughter who’s hired you, is it?” said Maya. “Well, you can tell her from me, Mum felt guilty all her life that she didn’t come clean with the police. She liked Dr. Bamborough, you know. I mean, they weren’t close friends or anything, but she thought she was a decent person.”

“It weighed on her,” said Porschia. “Right up until her death, it weighed on her. That’s why she kept that note. She’d have wanted us to do this. There’s always handwriting analysis and stuff, isn’t there?”

Strike agreed that there was. He went to pay the bill and Robin waited at the table with the sisters, who she could tell wanted the detectives gone, and as quickly as possible. They’d disclosed their personal trauma and their family’s secrets, and now a thin layer of polite small talk was too onerous to sustain, and any other form of conversation impossible. Robin was relieved when Strike re-joined her, and after brief farewells, the two of them left the café.

The moment he hit clean air, Strike paused to pull his Benson & Hedges out of his pocket and lit one.

“Needed that,” he muttered, as they walked on. “So… Skinner Street…”

“… is where Joseph Brenner was seen on the night Margot Bamborough disappeared,” said Robin.

“Ah,” muttered Strike, briefly closing his eyes. “I knew there was something.”

“I’ll look into Betty Fuller as soon as I get home,” said Robin. “What did you think of the rest of it?”

“The Bayliss family really went through it, didn’t they?” said Strike, pausing beside the Land Rover and glancing back at the café. His BMW lay another fifty yards ahead. He took another drag on his cigarette, frowning. “Y’know… it gives us another angle on Talbot’s bloody notebook,” he admitted. “Strip away all the occult shit, and he was right, wasn’t he? Wilma was hiding stuff from him. A lot of stuff, actually.”

“I thought that, too,” said Robin.

“You realize that threatening note’s the first piece of physical evidence we’ve found?”

“Yes,” said Robin, checking her watch. “What time are you heading to Truro?”

Strike didn’t answer. Looking up, Robin saw that he was staring so fixedly across the open park on the other side of the road that she turned, too, to see what had captured his attention, but saw nothing except a couple of gamboling West Highland terriers and their male owner, who was walking along, swinging a pair of leads.

“Cormoran?”

Strike appeared to recall his attention from a long way away.

“What?” he said, and then, “Yeah. No, I was just…”

He turned to look back at the café, frowning.

“Just thinking. But it’s nothing, I think I’m doing a Talbot. Seeing meaning in total coincidence.”

“What coincidence?”

But Strike didn’t answer until the café doors opened, and the three Bayliss sisters emerged in their coats.

“We should get going,” he said. “They must be sick of the sight of us by now. I’ll see you Monday. Let me know if you find out anything interesting on Betty Fuller.”

54

The train gave a lurch: the sleeping Strike’s head rolled sideways and hit the cold window. He woke, feeling drool on his chin. Wiping it on his coat sleeve, he peered around. The elderly couple opposite him were politely immersed in their reading material, but across the aisle, four teenagers were enjoying paroxysms of silent laughter, carefully not looking at him, their shoulders shaking as they feigned interest in the fields out of the window. Apparently he’d been snoring with his mouth wide open, because it was now unpleasantly dry. Checking his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep at least two hours.

Strike reached for the tartan Thermos sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d rinsed out and refilled in McDonald’s earlier, and poured himself a black coffee while the teenagers continued to gasp and snort with laughter. Doubtless they thought him comically odd and old, with his snores and his tartan Thermos, but a year of navigating swaying train carriages had taught him that his prosthetic leg appreciated as few trips to the catering car as possible. He drank a cup of plastic-tainted coffee, then re-settled himself comfortably, arms folded, looking out at the fields gliding past, bestridden with power pylons, the flat white cloud given a glaucous glow by the dust on the glass. The landscape registered only incidentally: Strike’s attention was focused inwards on the odd idea that had occurred to him after the interview with the Bayliss sisters.

Of course, the idea might be nothing but the product of an overburdened mind making spurious connections between simple coincidences. He mentally turned it this way and that, examining it from different angles, until finally, yawning, he inched sideways over into the empty seat beside him, and laboriously pulled himself up into a standing position in the aisle, so he could access the holdall in the luggage rack overhead. Beside his holdall sat a Waitrose bag, because he’d made a detour into the supermarket on the way to Paddington station, where he’d grabbed three Easter eggs for his nephews, or rather, three chocolate hedgehogs (“Woodland Friends”) because they were relatively compact. Now, groping in his holdall for The Demon of Paradise Park, he accidentally knocked over the carrier bag containing the chocolate. The uppermost hedgehog fell out: in his attempt to catch it, he accidentally batted it up into the air; the box bounced off the back of the elderly woman’s seat, causing her to squeak in surprise, and the box hit the floor.

The teenagers for whom Strike was unintentionally mounting a one-man comedy show were now openly gasping and crying with laughter. Only when Strike bent down awkwardly to pick up the now cracked chocolate hedgehog, one hand on the teenagers’ table to steady himself, did one of the young women spot the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He knew what she’d seen by the abrupt cessation of her laughter, and the frantic, whispered shushing of her friends. Panting, sweating and now aware of half the carriage’s eyes on him, he shoved the damaged hedgehog back into its bag, found The Demon of Paradise Park in his holdall and then, sweating slightly, but taking malicious pleasure in the po-faced shock of the teenagers beside him, sidled back into his window seat.

After flicking through the book in search of the part he wanted to re-read, Strike finally found the chapter two-thirds of the way through the book, entitled “Capture.”

In spite of the coffee, Strike’s eyelids began to droop again. After another couple of minutes, his head sank sideways and the book slipped out of his slack grasp.

When he woke up again, the sky outside had turned coral pink, the laughing teenagers were gone, and he found himself ten minutes from Truro station. Stiffer than ever and in no mood for the family reunion, he wished he was heading back to his attic flat for a shower and some peace. Nevertheless, his heart lifted slightly when he saw Dave Polworth waiting for him on the platform. The bag of chocolate hedgehogs rattled slightly as Strike clambered laboriously off the train. He’d have to remember to give the broken one to Luke.

“All right, Diddy?” said Polworth, as they shook hands and patted each other on the back, Strike’s Waitrose bag impeding a hug.

“Thanks for picking me up, Chum, really appreciate it.”

They drove to St. Mawes in Polworth’s Dacia Duster, discussing plans for the following day. Polworth and his family had been invited to the scattering of the ashes, along with Kerenza the Macmillan nurse.

“… except it’s not going to be a scattering,” said Polworth, driving through country lanes, as the sun turned into a burning coal on the horizon, “more like a floating.”

“How’s that?”

“Lucy’s got an urn,” said Polworth. “Water soluble, cotton and clay. She was showing me last night. It’s supposed to look like a flower. You put the ashes inside and the whole thing bobs away and dissolves.”

“Nice idea,” said Strike.

“Prevents stupid accidents,” said Polworth, pragmatically. “Remember Ian Restarick, from school? His grandad wanted his ashes thrown off Land’s End. The dozy fuckers chucked them off in a high wind and ended up with their mouths full of the old boy. Restarick told me he was blowing ash out of his nose for a week after.”

Laughing, Strike felt his phone buzz in his pocket, and pulled it out. He was hoping the text might be Robin, perhaps telling him she’d already located Betty Fuller. Instead, he saw an unknown number.

I hated you as much as I did because I loved you so much. My love never ended but yours did. It wore out. I wore it out

Polworth was still talking, but Strike was no longer listening. He read the text through several times, frowning slightly, then put the phone back in his pocket and tried to concentrate on his old friend’s anecdotes.

At Ted’s house there were cries of welcome, and hugs from his uncle, Lucy and Jack. Strike tried to look delighted to be there, in spite of his fatigue, and knowing he’d have to wait to sleep until everyone else had gone to bed. Lucy had made pasta for everyone, and when she wasn’t tending to everybody else’s needs, telling Luke off for kicking Adam or picking at her own plate, she teetered on the verge of tears.

“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” she whispered to her brother after dinner, while Greg and the boys, at Greg’s insistence, were clearing the table, “Being here without her?” And without a pause she hurried on, “We’ve decided we’re going to do the ashes in the morning, because the weather looks good, and then come back here for Easter lunch.”

“Sounds great,” said Strike.

He knew how much importance Lucy placed on arrangements and plans, on having everything done in the right way. She fetched the urn and admired the stylised white lily. Ted had already placed Joan’s ashes inside.

“That’s great. Joan would have loved it,” he said, with no idea whether that was true or not.

“And I’ve bought pink roses for all of us to throw into the water with it,” said Lucy, tears welling again.

“Nice touch,” said Strike, suppressing a yawn. He really did just want to shower, then lie down and sleep. “Thanks for sorting all this out, Luce. Oh, and I brought Easter eggs for the boys, where do you want them?”

“We can put them in the kitchen. Did you remember to get some for Roz and Mel, too?”

“Who?”

“Dave and Penny’s girls, they’ll be coming tomorrow, too.”

Fuck’s sake.

“I didn’t think—”

“Oh, Stick,” said Lucy, “aren’t you their godfather?”

“No, I’m not,” said Strike, doing his very best not to sound short tempered, “but fine, yeah, I’ll nip down the shops tomorrow morning and buy some more.”

Later, when he was at last alone in the dark sitting room, lying on the sofa with which he’d become so unwillingly familiar over the past year, his prosthetic leg propped against the coffee table, he checked his phone again. There were, he was pleased to see, no more messages from the unknown number, and, exhausted as he was, he managed to fall asleep quickly.

However, at shortly before four in the morning, the phone rang. Jerked out of a profound sleep, Strike groped for it, registered the time then raised it to his ear.

“Hello?”

There was a long silence, although he could hear breathing on the end of the line.

“Who is this?” he said, suspecting the answer.

“Bluey,” came a tiny whisper. “It’s me.”

“It’s four in the morning, Charlotte.”

“I know,” she whispered, and gave what might have been a giggle or a sob. She sounded strange; possibly manic. Strike stared up at the dark ceiling, his aunt’s ashes a mere twelve feet away.

“Where are you?”

“In hell.”

“Charlotte—”

She hung up.

Strike could hear his own heart beating with ominous force, like a kettle drum deep inside a cave. Red-hot threads of panic and dread darted through him.

How many more burdens was he supposed to bear? Had he not paid enough, given enough, sacrificed enough—loved enough? Joan seemed very close just now, in the darkness of her own sitting room, with her ornamental plates and her dried flowers, closer even than her dusty remains, in that vaguely ludicrous white lily, which would look so puny and insignificant bobbing away on the wide sea, like a discarded paper plate. He seemed to hear her last words as he lay there: “You’re a good man… helping people… I’m proud of you…”

Charlotte had called him from the same unknown number she’d texted from earlier. Strike’s exhausted mind now eddied around the known facts, which were that Charlotte had suicide attempts in her past, that she was married with children, and that she’d recently been committed to a mental facility. He remembered his resolution of weeks ago, to phone her husband if she sent him any more self-destructive messages, but Jago Ross wouldn’t be at his merchant bank at 4 a.m. on an Easter weekend. He wondered whether it would be cruelty or kindness to ignore the call, and how he’d bear the knowledge that she’d overdosed, if he didn’t respond. After a very long ten minutes, during which he half expected her to call him back, Strike sat up to compose a text.

I’m in Cornwall. My aunt’s just died. I think you need help, but I’m the wrong person to give it to you. If you’re alone, you need to get hold of someone and tell them how you’re feeling.

The terrible thing was how well he and Charlotte knew each other. Strike knew just how pusillanimous, how disingenuous, Charlotte would find this bland response. She’d know that some small part of him (shrunken by determined abstinence, though never eradicated) felt a pull back toward her, especially in this extremity, not only because he’d assumed responsibility for her happiness for years, but because he could never forget that she’d come to him when he was at his lowest ebb, lying in a hospital bed with a freshly amputated leg, wondering what possible life there was for him now. He could still remember her appearing in the doorway, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and how she’d walked down the ward toward him and kissed him wordlessly on the mouth, and that moment, more than any other, had told him that life would continue, would contain glorious moments of beauty and pleasure, that he wasn’t alone any more, and that his missing leg didn’t matter to the woman he couldn’t forget.

Sitting in the darkness, atypically cold because of his exhaustion, Strike typed four more words—

It will get better

—and sent the message. Then he lay back down and waited for the phone to vibrate again, but it remained silent, and eventually he fell asleep.

He was woken, inevitably, by Luke bursting into the sitting room. While he listened to Luke clattering around the kitchen, Strike reached for his phone and looked at it. Charlotte had sent two more texts, one an hour previously, the next half an hour later.

Bluey I’m sorry about your aunt. is it the one I met?

And then, when Strike hadn’t answered:

Am I evil? Jago says I am. I used to think I couldn’t be, because you loved me

At least she wasn’t dead. With a vice-like sensation in his belly, Strike sat up, put on his prosthesis and attempted to shut Charlotte out of his mind.

Breakfast wasn’t a particularly relaxing affair. The table was so crowded with Easter eggs, it was like being in some cartoonish nest. Strike ate off a plate on his lap. Lucy had bought Strike and Ted an egg each, and the detective now gathered that he should have bought his sister one, as well. All three boys had tottering piles.

“What’s a hedgehog got to do with Easter?” Adam asked Strike, holding up his uncle’s offering.

“Eastertime’s spring, isn’t it?” said Ted, from the end of the table. “It’s when hibernating animals wake up.”

“Mine’s all broken,” said Luke, shaking the box.

“That’s a shame,” said Strike, and Lucy shot him a sharp look.

She was tense, telling off her sons for looking at their phones during the meal, glaring at Strike when he checked his own, constantly glancing out of the window, to check the state of the weather. The detective was glad of an excuse to get out of the house to buy Polworth’s daughters Easter eggs, but he’d walked barely ten yards down the sloping road, cigarette in hand, when the family pulled up in their Dacia. When Strike confided his errand in an undertone, Polworth said,

“Fuck that, they’ve got enough chocolate for a year at home. Leave it.”

At eleven o’clock, with a leg of lamb left in the oven and the timer set, after Luke had been told that no, he couldn’t take his iPad on the boat, and one false start, due to the need to return to the house for the Polworths’ younger daughter to have the pee she’d insisted she didn’t need before they left, the party made its way successfully down to the harbor, where they met Kerenza the nurse, and boarded Ted’s old sailing boat, Jowanet.

Strike, who’d once been his uncle’s proud helpmeet, no longer had the balance to work either sails or rudder. He sat with the women and children, spared the necessity of making conversation by the noise of wind against canvas. Ted shouted commands to Polworth and Jack. Luke was eating chocolate, his eyes screwed up against the cold breeze; Polworth’s daughters were huddled, shivering, beside their mother, who had her arms around them. Tears were already trickling down Lucy’s cheeks as she cradled the flat white urn in her lap. Beside her, Kerenza held a bunch of dark pink roses loosely wrapped in cellophane, and it was left to Greg and Polworth to shout at the children to watch out for the boom as they tacked around the peninsula where St. Mawes Castle stood sentinel.

The surface of the sea changed from second to second, from rippling plain of sage and gray, to mesh of diamond-bright sparkles. The smell of ozone was as familiar and comforting to Strike as that of beer. He was just thinking how glad he was that Joan had chosen this, and not a grave, when he felt his phone vibrate against his chest. Unable to resist the temptation to read what he knew would be a text from Charlotte, he pulled it out and read it.

I thought you’d come back I thought you’d stop me marrying him I didn’t think you’d let me do it

He put the phone back into his pocket. Luke was watching him and Strike thought he saw the idea occur of asking why Uncle Cormoran could look at his phone, whereas he was banned from bringing his iPad, but the look his uncle gave him seemed to make him think better of the idea, and he merely stuffed more chocolate in his mouth.

A feeling of constraint seemed to fall over everyone, even Luke, as Ted turned the boat into the wind and brought the boat slowly to a halt, the sail flapping loudly in the wind, St. Mawes Castle now the size of a sandcastle in the distance. Kerenza handed around the roses, one for everyone except Ted, who took the remainder of the bouquet between the hands that were forever sunburned. Nobody spoke, and yet the moment didn’t feel anticlimactic. While the sails flapped angrily overhead, Ted bent low over the side of the boat and dropped the urn gently into the sea, murmuring his farewell, and the object Strike had imagined would look inadequate and tawdry became, precisely because of its smallness as it bobbed gallantly on the ocean, affecting, and strangely noble. Soon, the last earthly remains of Joan Nancarrow would dissolve into the sea, and only the pink roses, tossed one by one into the sea by each of them, would remain to show the place where she’d disappeared.

Strike put his arm around Lucy, who rested her head on his shoulder, as they sailed back to shore. Rozwyn, the elder of Polworth’s daughters, broke into sobs initially provoked by the sight of the urn vanishing in the distance, but sustained by her enjoyment of her own grief and the sympathy of her mother. Strike watched until he could no longer see the white dot, then turned his eyes toward shore, thinking of the leg of lamb waiting for them back at the house.

His phone vibrated yet again, minutes after he’d regained firm ground. While Polworth helped Ted tie up the boat, Strike lit a cigarette and turned away from the group to read the new text.

I want to die speaking the truth people are such liars everyone I know lies in such if them swant to stop pretending

“I’ll walk back,” he told Lucy.

“You can’t,” she said at once, “lunch’ll be ready for us—”

“I’m going to want another one of these,” Strike said firmly, holding up his cigarette in her disapproving face. “I’ll meet you up there.”

“Want company, Diddy?” asked Polworth. “Penny can take the girls back up to the house.”

“No, you’re all right, mate,” said Strike. “Need to make a work call,” he added quietly, so that Lucy couldn’t hear. As he said it, he felt his mobile vibrate again.

“Goodbye, Corm,” said Kerenza, her freckled face kindly as ever. “I’m not coming for lunch.”

“Great,” said Strike, “no, sorry, I mean—thanks for coming, Kerenza, Joan was so fond of you.”

When Kerenza had finally got into her Mini, and the family’s cars were driving away, Strike pulled out his phone again.

Never forget that I loved you goodbye blues x

Strike called the number. After a few rings, it went to voicemail.

“Charlotte, it’s me,” said Strike. “I’m going to keep ringing till you pick up.”

He hung up and dialed again. The number went to voicemail for a second time.

Strike began to walk, because his anxiety required action. The streets around the harbor weren’t busy. Most people would be sitting down to Easter lunch. Over and again he dialed Charlotte’s number, but she didn’t answer.

It was as though a wire was tightening around his skull. His neck was rigid with tension. From second to second his feelings fluctuated between rage, resentment, frustration and fear. She’d always been an expert manipulator. She’d also narrowly escaped death by her own hand, twice.

The phone might be going unanswered because she was already dead. There could be sporting guns at the Castle of Croy, where her husband’s family had lived for generations. There’d be heavy-duty medications at the clinic: she might have stockpiled them. She might even have taken a razor blade to herself, as she’d once tried to do during one of her and Strike’s more vicious rows.

After calling the number for the tenth time, Strike came to a halt, looking out over the railings at the pitiless sea, which breathed no consolation as it rushed to and then retreated from the shore. Memories of Joan, and the way she’d clung so fiercely to life, flooded his mind: his anxiety about Charlotte was laced with fury, for throwing life away.

And then his phone rang.

“Where are you?” he almost shouted.

“Bluey?”

She sounded drunk, or very stoned.

“Where are you?”

“… told you,” she mumbled. “Bluey, d’you ’member…”

“Charlotte, WHERE ARE YOU?”

“Told you, S’monds…”

He turned and began to half-run, half-hobble back the way he’d come: there was an old-fashioned red telephone box twenty yards back, and with his free hand he was already pulling coins from his trouser pocket.

“Are you in your room? Where are you?”

The telephone box smelled urinous, of cigarette butts and dirt from a thousand silt-clogged soles.

“C’n see sky… Bluey, I’m so…”

She was still mumbling, her breathing slow.

“One one eight, one one eight?” said a cheery voice through the receiver in his left hand.

“Symonds House, it’s a residential psychiatric clinic in Kent.”

“Shall I connect—”

“Yes, connect me… Charlotte, are you still there? Talk to me. Where are you?”

But she didn’t answer. Her breathing was loud and becoming guttural.

“Symonds House,” said a bright female voice in his other ear.

“Have you got an in-patient there called Charlotte Ross?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the receptionist, “we don’t disclose—”

“She’s overdosed. She’s just called me from your facility, and she’s overdosed. You need to find her—she might be outside, have you got grounds there?”

“Sir, can I ask you—”

“Check Charlotte Ross’s whereabouts, now, I’ve got her on another line and she’s overdosed.”

He heard the woman speaking to someone away from the phone.

“… Mrs. Ross… first floor, just to make…”

The voice spoke in his ear again, still professionally bright, but anxious now.

“Sir, what number is Mrs. Ross calling from? She—in-patients don’t have their own mobiles.”

“She’s got one from somewhere,” said Strike, “as well as a shitload of drugs.”

Somewhere in the background of the call he heard shouting, then loud footsteps. He tried to insert another coin into the slot, but it fell straight through and came out at the bottom.

“Fuck—”

“Sir, I’m going to ask you not to talk to me like that—”

“No, I just—”

The line went dead. Charlotte’s breath was now barely audible.

Strike slammed as much change as he had in his pockets into the slot, then redialed telephone inquiries. Within a minute, he was again connected to the female voice at Symonds House.

“Symonds House—”

“Have you found her? I got cut off. Have you found her?”

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose—” said the harassed-sounding woman.

“She got hold of a mobile and the means to kill herself on your watch,” said Strike, “so you can bloody well disclose whether she’s dead—”

“Sir, I’d appreciate you not shouting at me—”

But then Strike heard distant male voices through the mobile clamped to his other ear. There was no point hanging up and ringing: Charlotte hadn’t heard his ten previous calls. She must have the mobile on silent.

“SHE’S HERE!” he bellowed, and the woman on the payphone line shrieked in shock. “FOLLOW MY VOICE, SHE’S HERE!”

Strike was bellowing into the phone, well aware of the almost impossible odds of searchers hearing him: he could hear swishing and cracking, and knew that Charlotte was outside, probably in undergrowth.

Then, through the mobile, he heard a man shout.

“Shit, she’s here—SHE’S HERE! Fuck… get an ambulance!”

“Sir,” said the shell-shocked woman, now that Strike had stopped yelling, “could I have your name?”

But Strike hung up. Over the sound of his change clattering into the returned coin box, he continued to listen to the two men who’d found Charlotte, one of them shouting details of her overdose to the emergency services, the other repeatedly calling Charlotte’s name, until somebody noticed that the mobile beside her was active, and turned it off.

55

As a noted beauty and socialite with a tantalizing number of celebrity connections and a rebellious, self-destructive past, Charlotte was an old staple of the gossip columns. Naturally, her emergency hospitalization out of a private psychiatric clinic made news.

The tabloids ran photo-heavy stories, showing Charlotte at the ages of fourteen (when she’d first run away from her private school and sparked a police hunt), eighteen (arm in arm with her well-known broadcaster father, a thrice-married heavy drinker), twenty-one (with her model-turned-socialite mother, at a cocktail party) and thirty-eight, where, as beautiful as ever, she smiled blankly alongside her white-blond husband, twin babies in her arms, an exquisite drawing room in the background. Nobody had been able to find a picture of her with Cormoran Strike, but the fact that they’d once dated, which Charlotte herself had been care­­ful to mention to the press when she got engaged to Jago, ensured that his name appeared in print alongside hers. “Emergency hospitalization,” “history of addiction issues,” “troubled past”: though the tabloids didn’t say so explicitly, only the most naive reader could be left in doubt that Charlotte had attempted to take her own life. The story gained a second wind when an unnamed “inside source” at Symonds House confided that the future Viscountess Ross had “allegedly” been found face down in a shrubbery, right behind an old summer house.

The broadsheets’ stories led with the questionable practices of the exorbitantly priced Symonds House, “which” (said the Telegraph) “has a reputation for being the last resort of the wealthy and well-connected. Controversial treatments include transcranial magnetic stimulation and the hallucinogen psilocybin (more commonly known as magic mushrooms).” They, too, used large photographs of Charlotte to embellish their stories, so Robin, who furtively read all of them and felt guilty afterward, was reminded constantly how very beautiful Strike’s ex had always been.

Strike hadn’t mentioned a word of the business to Robin, and she hadn’t asked. A moratorium had lain over Charlotte’s name ever since that night, four years previously, when Robin had still been the temp, and an extremely drunk Strike confided in her that Charlotte had lied about being pregnant with his child. All Robin knew right now was that Strike had returned from Cornwall in a particularly buttoned-up mood, and while she knew that the disposal of his aunt’s ashes must have been a sad occasion, she couldn’t help suspecting this other source for his moodiness.

Out of loyalty to Strike, she refused to gossip about his ex, even though everyone around her seemed to want to talk about it. A week after Strike returned from Cornwall, Robin entered the office, already in a bad mood because Matthew had again postponed mediation. On seeing the door open, Pat the secretary hastily tried to hide a copy of the Daily Mail she’d been poring over with Morris. On realizing that the new arrival was Robin rather than Strike, Pat had given her raven’s caw of laughter and slapped the paper back onto her desk.

“Caught red-handed,” said Morris with a wink at Robin. “Seen all this about the boss’s ex?”

He’s not my boss, he’s my partner, thought Robin, but she merely said, “Yes.”

“Talk about punching above his bloody weight,” said Morris, examining a picture of Charlotte at twenty-one in a beaded mini-dress. “The fuck did a bloke who looks like him end up with that?”

Robin wasn’t even safe from it at home. Max, whose floppy hair had been cropped short to play the ex-army officer, had begun shooting his TV series, and was more cheerful than she’d ever known him. Max was also thoroughly intrigued to know that Strike had been involved with Charlotte for sixteen years.

“I met her once,” he told Robin, who’d come upstairs after several hours in her room, combing online records for Betty Fuller. The one-time prostitute was proving harder to find than she’d anticipated.

“Really?” said Robin, who both wanted and didn’t want to hear the story.

“Yeah, I was in a play years ago with her half-brother. Simon Legard? He starred in that mini-series about the financial crash, what was it called? She came to watch our play and took us all out for dinner afterward. I liked her, actually, she was a real laugh. Some of those posh girls are a lot funnier than you’d think.”

“Mm,” said Robin noncommittally, and she returned immediately to her room with her cup of tea.

“I bet she tried to call Corm before she did it,” was Ilsa’s cool comment on the phone, two weeks after Easter, by which time Robin had succeeded, through patient cross-referencing, in identifying the woman she thought was most likely to be the Betty Fuller who’d lived in Skinner Street at the time of Margot Bamborough’s disappearance. Betty was now living in sheltered housing in Sans Walk, not far from her original flat, and Robin planned to pay her a visit the following afternoon, after the mediation with Matthew which seemed at last to be going ahead.

Ilsa had rung to wish Robin good luck. Robin had been trying not to think about having to see Matthew, telling herself that the ordeal would be over in a couple of hours, but it had become progressively harder to focus on her list of questions for Betty Fuller as the evening progressed, and she’d been glad, initially, to be interrupted by Ilsa.

“What’s Corm saying about the whole Charlotte thing?” Ilsa asked.

“Nothing,” said Robin truthfully.

“No, he never talks about her any more,” said Ilsa. “I wonder how much longer her marriage is going to last. Must be hanging by a thread. I’m quite surprised it’s limped on this long, actually. She only did it to get back at Corm.”

“Well, she’s had children with Jago,” Robin pointed out, then instantly regretted it. Ilsa had already told her that she and Nick had decided not to try a fourth round of IVF.

“She never wanted kids,” said Ilsa. “That was something she and Corm had in common. That, and having really similar mothers. Drink, drugs and a million men each, except Charlotte’s is still alive. So, you haven’t spoken to him about it all?”

“No,” said Robin, who was feeling marginally worse for this conversation, in spite of Ilsa’s kind intentions. “Ilsa, sorry, but I’d better go. I’ve got work to do for tomorrow.”

“Can’t you take the afternoon off? We could meet for a coffee, you’ll probably need some R&R afterward. Corm wouldn’t mind, would he?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” said Robin, “but we’re so busy, and I’m following up a lead. Anyway, work gives me something to think about other than Matthew. Let’s catch up at the weekend, if you’re free.”

Robin slept badly that night. It wasn’t Charlotte who wove her way in and out of her dreams, but Miss Jones, the agency’s client who, as everyone had now noticed, had taken such a shine to Strike that he’d had to ask Pat to stop putting her calls through. Robin woke before her alarm went off, glad to escape a complicated dream in which it was revealed that Miss Jones had been Matthew’s wife all along, and that Robin was defending herself against a charge of fraud at the end of a long, polished table in a dark boardroom.

Wanting to look professional and confident, she dressed in black trousers and jacket, even though Matthew knew perfectly well that she spent most of her investigative life in jeans. Casting one last look in her mirror before leaving her room, she thought she looked washed-out. Trying not to think about all those pictures of Charlotte Ross, who rarely dressed in anything but black, but whose porcelain beauty merely shone brighter in contrast, Robin grabbed her handbag and left her room.

While waiting for the Tube, Robin tried to distract herself from the squirming feeling of nerves in her stomach by checking her emails.

Twenty minutes later, when she’d emerged from Holborn Tube station and had reception again, Robin forwarded this message to Strike. She had a comfortable quarter of an hour to spare before her appointment and there were plenty of places to grab a coffee in her vicinity, but before she could do so, her mobile rang: it was Pat, at the office.

“Robin?” said the familiar croaking voice. “D’you know where Cormoran is? I’ve tried his phone but he’s not picking up. I’ve got his brother Al here in the office, wanting to see him.”

“Really?” said Robin, startled. She’d met Al a couple of years previously, but knew that he and Strike weren’t close. “No, I don’t know where he is, Pat. Have you left a message? He’s probably somewhere he can’t pick up.”

“Yeah, I’ve left a voicemail,” said Pat. “All right, I’ll keep trying him. Bye.”

Robin walked on, her desire for a coffee forgotten in her curiosity about Al turning up at the office. She’d quite liked Al when she’d met him; he seemed in slight awe of his older half-brother, which Robin had found endearing. Al didn’t look much like Strike, being shorter, with straight hair, a narrow jaw and the slight divergent squint he’d inherited from their famous father.

Thinking about Strike’s family, she turned the corner and saw, with a thrill of dread that brought her to a halt, Matthew climbing out of a taxi, wearing an unfamiliar dark overcoat over his suit. His head turned, and for a moment they were looking at each other, fifty yards apart like gunslingers ready to fire. Then Robin’s mobile rang; she reached for it automatically, and when she’d put it to her ear and looked up, Matthew had disappeared into the building.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” said Strike, “just got the email from Oakden. ‘Out of the country,’ my arse.”

Robin glanced at her watch. She still had five minutes, and her lawyer, Judith, was nowhere in sight. She drew back against the cold stone wall and said,

“Yeah, I thought that, too. Have you rung Pat back?”

“No, why?”

“Al’s at the office.”

“Al who?”

“Your brother, Al,” said Robin.

There was a brief pause.

“Fuck’s sake,” said Strike under his breath.

“Where are you?” asked Robin.

“At a B&Q in Chingford. Our blonde friend in Stoke Newington’s shopping.”

“What for?”

“Rubber foam and MDF, for starters,” said Strike. “That bloke from Shifty’s gym’s helping her. Where are you?”

“Waiting outside Matthew’s lawyers. It’s mediation morning,” said Robin.

“Shit,” said Strike, “I forgot. Best of luck. Listen—take the rest of the day off, if you’d—”

“I don’t want time off,” said Robin. She’d just spotted Judith in the distance, walking briskly toward her in a red coat. “I’m planning to go and see Betty Fuller afterward. I’d better go, Cormoran. Speak later.”

She hung up and walked forwards to meet Judith, who smiled broadly.

“All right?” she asked, patting Robin on the arm with the hand not holding her briefcase. “Should be fine. You let me do the talking.”

“Right,” said Robin, smiling back with as much warmth as she could muster.

They walked up the steps together into a small lobby area, where a stocky, suited man with a haircut like Caesar’s came forward with a perfunctory smile, his hand outstretched to Judith.

“Ms. Cobbs? Andrew Shenstone. Ms. Ellacott? How d’you do?”

His handshake left Robin’s hand throbbing. He and Judith walked ahead of Robin through double doors, chatting about London traffic, and Robin followed, dry-mouthed and feeling like a child trailing its parents. After a short walk up a dark corridor, they turned left into a small meeting room with an oval table and a shabby blue carpet. Matthew was sitting there alone, still wearing his overcoat. He readjusted himself in his chair when they entered. Robin looked directly into his face as she sat down, diagonally opposite him. To her surprise, Matthew looked instantly away. She’d imagined him glaring across the table, with that strange muzzle-like whitening around his mouth he’d worn during arguments toward the end of their marriage.

“Right then,” said Andrew Shenstone, with another smile, as Judith Cobbs opened the file she’d brought with her. He had a leather document holder sitting, closed, in front of him. “Your client’s position remains as stated in your letter of the fourteenth, Judith, is that correct?”

“That’s right,” said Judith, her thick black glasses perched on the end of her nose as she scanned a copy of said letter. “Ms. Ellacott’s perfectly happy to forgo any claim on your client, except in respect of the proceeds from the sale of the flat in—um—”

Hastings Road, thought Robin. She remembered moving into the cramped conversion with Matthew, excitedly carrying boxes of pot plants and books up the short path, Matthew plugging in the coffee machine that had been one of their first joint purchases, the fluffy elephant he’d given her so long ago, sitting on the bed.

“—Hastings Road, yes,” said Judith, scanning her letter, “from which she’d like the ten thousand pounds her parents contributed to the deposit, upon purchase.”

“Ten thousand,” repeated Andrew Shenstone. He and Matthew looked at each other. “In that case, we’re agreeable.”

“You’re… agreeable?” said Judith Cobbs, as surprised as Robin herself.

“My client’s circumstances have changed,” said Shenstone. “His priority now is securing the divorce as speedily as possible, which I think your client has indicated is also preferable to her, except­ing the ten thousand pounds? Of course,” added Shenstone, “we’re almost at the requisite two years, so…”

Judith looked at Robin, who nodded, her mouth still dry.

“Then I think we can conclude things today. Very good indeed,” said Andrew Shenstone complacently, and it was impossible to escape the suspicion that he was addressing himself. “I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up…”

He opened his document holder, spun it around on the polished table top and pushed it toward Judith, who read the document inside carefully.

“Yes,” she said finally, sliding the document sideways to Robin, who learned that Matthew was promising to transfer the money to Robin’s account within seven days of signature. “Happy?” Judith added in an undertone to Robin.

“Yes,” said Robin, slightly dazed.

What, she wondered, had been the point of dragging her here? Had it been one last demonstration of power, or had Matthew only decided that morning to give in? She reached into her handbag, but Judith was already holding out her own fountain pen, so Robin took it and signed. Judith passed the document back to Andrew Shenstone, who slid it over to Matthew, who scrawled a hasty signature. He glanced up at Robin when he’d done so, then looked quickly away again, and in that moment, Robin knew what had happened, and why he’d given her what she wanted.

“Very good,” said Andrew Shenstone again, and he slapped the table with his thick hand and laughed. “Well, short and sweet, eh? I think we’re…?”

“Yes,” said Judith, with a little laugh, “I think we are!”

Matthew and Robin rose and watched their lawyers gathering up their things and, in Judith’s case, pulling her coat back on. Disorientated by what had just happened, Robin again had the sensation of being a child with its parents, unsure how to quit the situation, waiting for the lawyers to release her.

Andrew Shenstone held the door open for Robin and she passed back into the corridor, heading toward the lobby. Behind her, the lawyers were talking about traffic again. When they paused in the lobby to take leave of each other, Matthew, after a brief word of thanks to Shenstone, walked straight out past Robin, into the street.

Robin waited for Andrew Shenstone to disappear inside the building again before addressing Judith.

“Thanks so much,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t really do much, did I?” said Judith, laughing. “But mediation often brings people to their senses, I’ve seen it happen before. Much harder to justify yourself in a room with objective observers.”

They shook hands, and Robin headed out into a spring breeze that blew her hair into her mouth. She felt slightly unsettled. Ten thousand pounds. She’d offered to give it back to her parents, knowing that they’d struggled to match Matthew’s parents’ contribution, but they’d told her to keep it. She’d have to settle her bill with Judith, of course, but the remainder would give her a buffer, maybe even help her back toward her own place.

She turned a corner and there, right in front of her, standing at the curb, his arm raised in his attempt to hail a taxi, was Matthew.

Catching sight of her, he stood frozen for a moment, his hand still raised, and the taxi he’d been trying to hail slowed ten yards away, and picked up a couple instead.

“Sarah’s pregnant, isn’t she?” said Robin.

He looked down at her, not quite as tall as Strike, but as good-looking as he’d been at seventeen, on the day he’d asked her out.

“Yeah.” He hesitated. “It was an accident.”

Was it hell, thought Robin. Sarah had always known how to get what she wanted. Robin realized at last how long a game Sarah had played: always present, giggling, flirting, prepared to settle for Matthew’s best friend to keep him close. Then, as her clutch tightened, but Matthew threatened to slip through it, there’d been the diamond earring she’d left in Robin’s bed and now, still more valuable, a pregnancy to make sure of him, before he could enter a dangerous state of singledom. Robin had a strong suspicion that this was what had lain behind the two postponements of mediation. Had a newly hormonal and insecure Sarah made scenes, frightened of Matthew coming face to face with Robin while he hadn’t yet decided whether he wanted either the baby or its mother?

“And she wants to be married before she has it?”

“Yeah,” said Matthew. “Well, so do I.”

Did the image of their own wedding flash across his mind, as it flashed across Robin’s? The church in Masham that both of them had attended since primary school, the reception in that beautiful hotel, with the swans in the lake that refused to swim together, and the disastrous reception, during which Robin had known, for a few terrifying seconds, that if Strike had asked her to leave with him, she’d have gone.

“How’re things with you?”

“Great,” said Robin.

She put up a good front. What you do, when you meet the ex, isn’t it? Pretend you think you did the right thing. No regrets.

“Well,” he said, as the traffic rolled past, “I need to…”

He began to walk away.

“Matt.”

He turned back.

“What?”

“I’ll never forget… how you were, when I really needed you. Whatever else… I’ll never forget that part.”

For a fraction of a second, his face worked slightly, like a small boy’s. Then he walked back to her, bent down, and before she knew what was happening, he’d hugged her quickly, then let go as though she was red hot.

“G’luck, Robs,” he said thickly, and walked away for good.

56

At the precise moment Matthew turned to walk away from Robin in Holborn, Strike, who was sitting in his parked car three miles away, outside the familiar terraced house in Stoke Newington, decided to call his brother, lest Al sit in wait for him at the office all day. The detective’s anger was shot through with other, less easily identifiable feelings, of which the least painful to acknowledge was grudging admiration for Al’s persistence. Strike didn’t doubt that Al had come to the office for a last-ditch attempt to persuade Strike into some form of reconciliation with his father, preferably before or during the party to celebrate his father’s new album. Having always considered Al a fairly weak and sybaritic character, Strike had to admit he was showing guts, risking his older brother’s fury.

Strike waited until Elinor Dean had unloaded the foam and the cheap wood from her car and carried it all inside with the aid of her friend from Shifty’s gym, watched the front door close, then called Al’s number.

“Hi,” said Al, picking up after a single ring.

“Why are you in my office?” asked Strike.

“Wanted to see you, bruv. Talk face to face.”

“Well, I won’t be back there today,” lied Strike. “So I suggest you say whatever it is you’ve got to say now.”

“Bruv—”

“Who’s there with you?”

“Er—your secretary—Pat, is it?” Strike heard Al turn away from his mobile to check, and heard Pat’s caw of agreement, “and a bloke called—”

“Barclay,” said the Scot loudly, in the background.

“Right, well, go into my office for some privacy,” said Strike. He listened while Al told Pat what Strike had asked him to do, heard the familiar sound of his own office door closing, then said,

“If this is about what I think it’s about—”

“Cormoran, we didn’t want to tell you this, but Dad’s got cancer.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Strike leaned forwards momentarily and rested his forehead on the steering wheel of his car, before he sat up again.

“Prostate,” Al continued. “They reckon they’ve caught it early. But we thought you should know, because this party isn’t just about celebrating the band’s anniversary, and the new album. It’s about giving him something to look forward to.”

There was a silence.

“We thought you should know,” Al repeated.

Why should I fucking know? thought Strike, eyes on the closed door of Elinor Dean’s house. He had no relationship with Rokeby. Did Al expect him to weep, to rush to Rokeby’s side, to express compassion or pity? Rokeby was a multimillionaire. Doubtless he’d enjoy the very best treatment. The memory of Joan’s lily urn bobbing away on the sea recurred as Strike said,

“OK, well, I don’t really know how to respond to that. I’m sure it’s a bugger for everyone who cares about him.”

Another long silence followed.

“We thought this might make a difference,” said Al quietly.

“To what?”

“To your attitude.”

“As long as they’ve caught it early, he’ll be fine,” said Strike bracingly. “Probably live to father another couple of kids he never sees.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Al, really angry now. “You might not give a shit, but he happens to be my dad—”

“I give a shit about people who’ve ever given a shit about me,” said Strike, “and keep your fucking voice down, those are my employees you’re airing my private business in front of.”

“That’s your priority?”

Strike thought of Charlotte who, according to the papers, remained in hospital, and of Lucy, who was agitating to know whether Strike would be able to take the weekend off, to join Ted at her house in Bromley for the weekend. He thought of the clients in the Shifty case, who were hinting they’d terminate payment in a week’s time unless the agency found out what hold Shifty had on his boss. He thought of Margot Bamborough, and the rapidly vanishing year they’d been allotted to find out what had happened to her. Inexplicably, he thought of Robin, and the fact that he’d forgotten that today was her mediation session with Matthew.

“I’ve got a life,” said Strike, keeping a curb on his temper only by exercising maximum self-control, “which is hard and complicated, just like everyone else’s. Rokeby’s got a wife and half a dozen kids and I’m at maximum capacity for people who need me. I’m not coming to his fucking party, I’m not interested in hearing from him, I don’t want a relationship with him. I don’t know how much clearer I can make this, Al, but I’m—”

The line went dead. Without regretting anything he’d said, but nevertheless breathing heavily, Strike threw his mobile onto the passenger seat, lit a cigarette and watched Elinor Dean’s front door for another fifteen minutes until, on a sudden whim, he snatched up the phone from beside him again, and called Barclay.

“What are you doing right now?”

“Filin’ my expenses,” said the Scot laconically. “That casino cost ye a fortune.”

“Is my brother still there?”

“No, he left.”

“Good. I need you to come and take over in Stoke Newington.”

“I havenae got my car wi’ me.”

“OK, well, fuck it, then,” said Strike angrily.

“I’m sorry, Strike,” said Barclay, “but I’m s’posed tae have this afternoon off—”

“No, I’m sorry,” said Strike, closing his eyes. He had the same sensation of a wire tightening around his forehead that he’d experienced in St. Mawes. “Getting frustrated. Enjoy your afternoon off. Seriously,” he added, in case Barclay thought he was being sarcastic.

Having hung up on Barclay, Strike rang Robin.

“How did mediation go?”

“Fine,” said Robin, though she sounded strangely flat. “We’ve settled.”

“Great!”

“Yeah. It’s a relief.”

“Did you say you’re going to Betty Fuller’s?”

“Yes, I was just about to head into the Tube.”

“Remind me where she lives?”

“Sheltered housing on Sans Walk in Clerkenwell.”

“OK, I’ll meet you there,” said Strike.

“Really? I’m fine to—”

“I know, but I want to be there,” Strike cut across her.

He pulled away from Elinor Dean’s house knowing that he’d just been abrasive toward his two favorite colleagues. If he was going to vent his temper, it could at least have been at Pat and Morris’s expense.

Twenty minutes later, Strike entered Clerkenwell via Percival Street. To his right were the nondescript red-brick flats where Janice Beattie and Steve Douthwaite had once lived, and he wondered yet again what had become of Margot’s one-time patient, whose whereabouts, in spite of his and Robin’s best efforts, remained unknown.

Sans Walk was a narrow pedestrianized one-way street. Strike parked his BMW as close to it as possible. The day was surprisingly warm, in spite of a good amount of cloud. As he approached Sans Walk, he saw Robin waiting for him at the entrance.

“Hi,” she said. “It’s up the other end, that red-brick modern building with the circular tower thing on top.”

“Great,” said Strike, as they set off together. “Sorry for earlier, I—”

“No, it’s fine,” said Robin, “I know we really need results soon.”

But Strike thought he detected a slight coolness.

“Al pissed me off,” he explained. “So I might’ve been a bit—”

“Cormoran, it’s fine,” repeated Robin, but with a smile that reassured Strike.

“Great news about the mediation,” he said.

“Yes,” said Robin, though she didn’t look particularly pleased. “So, what d’you think’s the best tack to take with Betty Fuller?”

“Be honest and direct about who we are and what we’re investigating,” said Strike, “and then play it by ear, I think. And hope to Christ she’s not demented…”

Priory House was a modern, multi-level building with a shared garden at the back. As they approached the front doors, a middle-aged couple came out; they had the relieved look of people who’d just done their duty, and, smiling at Strike and Robin, they held open the door to let them walk inside.

“Thanks very much,” said Robin, smiling at them, and as the couple walked on, she heard the woman say,

“At least she remembered who we are, this time…”

Had it not been for the mobility scooters, the place would have resembled a hall of residence, with its hardy dark gray carpet underfoot, its bulletin board bristling with pamphlets and a depressing smell of communal cooking hanging in the air.

“She’s on the ground floor,” said Robin, pointing toward a corridor. “I checked the names on the buzzer.”

They passed a number of identical pine doors until they reached the one with “Elizabeth Fuller” printed on a card in a metal holder. Through the wood came the muffled sounds of voices. Just as it had been when he’d visited Janice Beattie, the TV was turned up very high inside. Strike rapped hard on the door.

After a lengthy wait, the door opened very slowly to reveal a panting old lady wearing a nasal cannula, who’d pulled her oxygen tank to the door with her. Over her shoulder, Strike saw a TV blaring the reality show The Only Way is Essex.

“I’m fine. You just upset me, Arg,” a heavily made-up girl in bright blue was saying onscreen.

Betty Fuller looked as though she’d been subject to heavier gravity than the rest of humankind. Everything about her had sagged and drooped: the corners of her lipless mouth, her papery eyelids, her loose jowls, the tip of her thin nose. It appeared that the flesh had been sucked down out of her upper body into her lower: Betty had almost no bust, but her hips were broad and her poor bare legs were immensely swollen, both ankles thicker than her neck. She wore what looked like a pair of men’s slippers and a dark green knitted dress on which there were several stains. A yellowish scalp was clearly visible through the sparse gray hair slicked back off her face and a hearing aid was prominent in her left ear.

“Who’re you?” she wheezed, looking from Robin to Strike.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Fuller,” said Strike loudly and clearly, “my name’s Cormoran Strike and this is Robin Ellacott.”

He pulled his driver’s license out of his pocket and showed it to her, with his card. She made an impatient gesture, to show she couldn’t read them; her eyes were milky with glaucoma.

“We’re private detectives,” said Strike, voice still raised over the arguing pair on-screen (“At the end of the day, Lucy, she slept, on a one-night stand, wiv a boy—” “Arg—Arg—Arg—this is irrelevant—”).

“We’ve been hired to try and find out what happened to Margot Bamborough. She was a doctor who—”

“’Oo?”

“Dr. Margot Bamborough,” Strike repeated, still more loudly. “She went missing from Clerkenwell in 1974. We heard you—”

“Oh yeah…” said Betty Fuller, who appeared to need to draw breath every few words. “Dr. Bamborough… yeah.”

“Well, we wondered whether we could talk to you about her?”

Betty Fuller stood there for what seemed a very long twenty seconds, thinking this over, while onscreen a young man in a maroon suit said to the over-made-up girl, “I didn’t wanna bring it up but you come over to me—”

Betty Fuller made an impatient gesture, turned and shuffled back inside. Strike and Robin glanced at each other.

“Is it all right to come in, Mrs. Fuller?” asked Strike loudly.

She nodded. Having carefully positioned her oxygen tank, she fell back into her armchair, then tugged the knitted dress in an effort to make it cover her knees. Strike and Robin entered the room and Strike closed the door. Watching the old lady struggle to pull her dress down, Robin had an urge to take a blanket off the unmade bed, and place it decorously over her lap.

Robin had discovered during her research that Betty was eighty-four. The old lady’s physical state shocked her. The small room smelled of BO and urine. A door showed a small toilet leading off the single bedroom. Through the open wardrobe door, Robin saw crumpled clothes which had been thrown there, and two empty wine bottles, half hidden in underwear. There was nothing on the walls except a cat calendar: the month of May showed a pair of ginger kittens peeking out from between pink geranium blossoms.

“Would it be all right to turn this down?” Strike shouted over the TV, where the couple onscreen continued to argue, the woman’s eyelashes as thick as wooly bear caterpillars.

“Turn it… off,” said Betty Fuller. “’S a recording.”

The Essex voices were suddenly extinguished. The two detectives looked around. There were only two choices for seats: the unmade bed and a hard, upright chair, so Robin took the former, Strike the latter. Removing his notebook from his pocket, Strike said,

“We’ve been hired by Dr. Bamborough’s daughter, Mrs. Fuller, to try and find out what happened to her.”

Betty Fuller made a noise like “hurhm,” which sounded disparaging, although Strike thought it might also have been an attempt to clear phlegm out of her throat. She rocked slightly to one side in her chair and pulled ineffectually at the back of her dress. Her swollen lower legs were knotted with varicose veins.

“So, you remember Dr. Bamborough disappearing, do you, Mrs. Fuller?”

“…’es,” she grunted, still breathing heavily. In spite of her incapacity and unpromising manner, Strike had the impression of somebody both more alert than they might appear at first glance, and happier to have company and attention than the unprepossessing exterior might suggest.

“You were living in Skinner Street then, weren’t you?”

She coughed, which seemed to clear her lungs, and in a slightly steadier voice, she said,

“Was there till… last year. Michael Cliffe…’Ouse. Top floor. Couldn’t manage, no more.”

Strike glanced at Robin; he’d expected her to lead the interrogation, assumed Betty would respond better to a woman, but Robin seemed oddly passive, sitting on the bed, her gaze wandering over the small room.

“Were you one of Dr. Bamborough’s patients?” Strike asked Betty.

“Yeah,” wheezed Betty. “I was.”

Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?

Next Christmas, no doubt, she’d run into Matthew, Sarah and their new baby in Masham. She could just imagine Sarah’s proud strut through the streets, pushing a top-of-the-range pushchair, Matthew beside her, and a baby with Sarah’s white-blonde hair peeking over the top of the blankets. Now, when Jenny and Stephen ran into them, there’d be common ground, the shared language of parenthood. Robin decided there and then, sitting on Betty Fuller’s bed, to make sure she didn’t go home next Christmas. She’d offer to work through it, if necessary.

“Did you like Dr. Bamborough?” Strike was asking Betty.

“She were… all right,” said Betty.

“Did you ever meet any of the other doctors at the practice?” asked Strike.

Betty Fuller’s chest rose and fell with her labored breathing. Though it was hard to tell with the nasal cannula in the way, Strike thought he saw a thin smile.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Which ones?”

“Brenner,” she said hoarsely, and coughed again. “Needed an ’ouse call…’mergency… she weren’t available.”

“So Dr. Brenner came out to see you?”

“Hurhm,” said Betty Fuller. “Yeah.”

There were a few small, cheaply framed photographs on the windowsill, Robin noticed. Two of them showed a fat tabby cat, presumably a lamented pet, but there were also a couple showing toddlers, and one of two big-haired teenaged girls, wearing puff-sleeved dresses from the eighties. So you could end up alone, in near squalor, even if you had children? Was it solely money, then, that made the difference? She thought of the ten thousand pounds she’d be receiving into her bank account later that week, which would be reduced immediately by legal bills and council tax. She’d need to be careful not to fritter it away. She really needed to start saving, to start paying into a pension.

“You must have been seriously unwell, were you?” Strike was asking Betty. “To need a house call?”

He had no particular reason for asking, except to establish a friendly conversational atmosphere. In his experience of old ladies, there was little they enjoyed more than discussing their health.

Betty Fuller suddenly grinned at him, showing chipped yellow teeth.

“You ever taken it… up the shitter… with a nine-inch cock?”

Only by exercising the utmost restraint did Robin prevent herself letting out a shocked laugh. She had to hand it to Strike: he didn’t so much as grin as he said,

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “you can… take it from me… fuckin’… agony… geezer went at me… like a fucking power drill… split my arsehole open.”

She gasped for air, half-laughing.

“My Cindy ’ears me moanin’… blood… says ‘Mum, you gotta… get that seen to…’ called… doctor.”

“Cindy’s your—”

“Daughter,” said Betty Fuller. “Yeah… got two. Cindy and Cathy…”

“And Dr. Brenner came out to see you, did he?” asked Strike, trying not to dwell on the mental image Betty had conjured.

“Yeah… takes a look… sends me to A&E, yeah… nineteen stitches,” said Betty Fuller. “And I sat on… an ice pack… for a week… and no fuckin’ money… comin’ in… After that,” she panted, “no anal… unless they was… payin’ double and nuthin’ over… six inches… neither.”

She let out a cackle of laughter, which ended in coughs. Strike and Robin were carefully avoiding looking at each other.

“Was that the only time you met Dr. Brenner?” asked Strike, when the coughing had subsided.

“No,” croaked Betty Fuller, thumping her chest. “I seen ’im regular… ev’ry Friday night… for monfs… after.”

She didn’t seem to feel any qualms about telling Strike this. On the contrary, Strike thought she seemed to be enjoying herself.

“When did that arrangement start?” asked Strike.

“Couple o’ weeks… after ’e seen me… for me arse,” said Betty Fuller. “Knocked on me door… wiv ’is doctor’s bag… pre­tendin’ ’e’d… come to check… then ’e says… wants a regular ’pointment. Friday night…’alf past six… tell the neighbors… medical… if they ask…”

Betty paused to cough noisily. When she’d quelled her rattling chest, she went on,

“… and if I told anyone…’e’d go to the cops… say I was… extorting ’im…”

“Threatened you, did he?”

“Yeah,” panted Betty Fuller, though without rancor, “but ’e wasn’t… try’na get it… free… so I kep’… me mouf shut.”

“You never told Dr. Bamborough what was going on?” asked Robin.

Betty looked sideways at Robin who, in Strike’s view, had rarely looked as out of place as she did sitting on Betty’s bed: young, clean and healthy, and perhaps Betty’s drooping, occluded eyes saw his partner the same way, because she seemed to resent both question and questioner.

“’Course I fuckin’… didn’t. She tried ta get me to… stop working… Brenner… easiest job of the week.”

“Why was that?” asked Strike.

Betty laughed wheezily again.

“’E liked me… lyin’ still, like I was… coma… playin’ dead. ’E fucked me… sayin’ ’is dirty words… I pretended… couldn’t ’ear… except once,” said Betty, with a half-chuckle, half-cough, “the bleedin’ fire alarm… went off ’alfway… I said… in ’is ear… ‘I’m not stayin’ dead… if we’re on fuckin’ fire… I’ve got kids… next room…’ ’E was livid… turned out it was… false alarm…”

She cackled, then coughed again.

“D’you think Dr. Bamborough suspected Dr. Brenner of visiting you?” asked Robin.

“No,” said Betty, testily, with another sideways glance. “’Course she fuckin’ didn’t… was eivver of us gonna tell ’er?”

“Was Brenner with you,” asked Strike, “the night she went missing?”

“Yeah,” said Betty Fuller indifferently.

“He arrived and left at the usual times?”

“Yeah,” said Betty again.

“Did he keep visiting you, after Dr. Bamborough disappeared?”

“No,” said Betty. “Police… all over the surgery… no, ’e stopped comin’… I ’eard…’e retired, not long after… Dead now, I s’pose?”

“Yes,” said Strike, “he is.”

The ruined face bore witness to past violence. Strike, whose own nose had been broken, was sure Betty’s hadn’t originally been the shape it was now, with its crooked tip.

“Was Brenner ever violent to you?”

“Never.”

“While your—arrangement was going on,” said Strike, “did you ever mention it to anyone?”

“Nope,” said Betty.

“What about after Brenner retired?” asked Strike. “Did you happen to tell a man called Tudor Athorn?”

“Clever, aincha?” said Betty, with a cackle of mild surprise. “Yeah, I told Tudor…’e’s long gawn, ’s well… used to drink… wiv Tudor. ’Is nephew’s… still round ’ere… grown up… I seen ’im… about. Retarded,” said Betty Fuller.

“In your opinion,” said Strike, “given what you know about Brenner, d’you think he’d have taken advantage of a patient?”

There was a pause. Betty’s milky eyes surveyed Strike.

“On’y… if she was out cold.”

“Not otherwise?” said Strike.

Taking a deep breath of oxygen through her crooked nose, Betty said,

“Man like that… when there’s one fing… what really… gets ’im off… that’s all ’e wants…”

“Did he ever want to drug you?” asked Strike.

“No,” said Betty, “didn’t need to…”

“D’you remember,” asked Strike, turning a page in his notebook, “a social worker called Wilma Bayliss?”

“Colored girl?” said Betty. “Yeah… you smoke, dontcha?” she added. “Can smell it… give us one,” she said, and out of the wrecked old body came a whiff of flirtatiousness.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Strike, smiling. “Seeing as you’re on oxygen.”

“Oh fuck off, then,” said Betty.

“Did you like Wilma?”

“’Oo?”

“Wilma Bayliss, your social worker.”

“She were… like they all are,” said Betty, with a shrug.

“We spoke to Mrs. Bayliss’s daughters recently,” said Strike. “They were telling us about the threatening notes that were sent to Dr. Bamborough, before she disappeared.”

Betty breathed in and out, her collapsed chest doing its valiant best for her, and a small squeak issued from her ruined lungs.

“Do you know anything about those notes?”

“No,” said Betty. “I ’eard… they’d bin sent. Everyone ’eard, round ’ere.”

“Who did they hear it from?”

“Probably that Irene Bull…”

“You remember Irene, do you?”

With many more pauses to catch her breath, Betty Fuller explained that her youngest sister had been in the same year as Irene at school. Irene’s family had lived in a road off Skinner Street: Corporation Row.

“Thought…’er shit… smelled of roses… that one,” said Betty. She laughed, but then broke yet again into a volley of hoarse coughs. When she’d recovered, she said, “The police… asked ’em all… not to talk… but the mouth on… that girl… everyone knew… there’d been threats made.”

“According to Wilma’s daughters,” said Strike, watching for Betty’s reaction, “you knew who sent those notes.”

“No, I never,” said Betty Fuller, no longer smiling.

“You were sure Marcus Bayliss hadn’t sent them, though?”

“Marcus never…’e was a lovely… y’know, I always liked… a darkie, me,” said Betty Fuller, and Robin, hoping Betty hadn’t seen her wince, looked down at her hands. “Very ’andsome… I’d’ve given it…’im for free… hahaha… big, tall man,” said Betty wistfully, “… kind man… no, ’e never freatened no doctor.”

“So who d’you think—”

“My second girl… my Cathy…” continued Betty, “determinedly deaf, ’er dad was a darkie… dunno ’oo ’e was… condom split… I kept ’er ’cause… I like kids, but… she don’t give a shit… about me. Smackhead!” said Betty fiercely. “I never touched it… seen too many… go that way… stole from me… I told ’er… keep the fuck… my ’ouse…”

“Cindy’s good,” gasped Betty. She was fighting her breathlessness now, though still relishing Strike’s captive attention. “Cindy… drops by. Earning… decent money…”

“Really?” said Strike, playing along, waiting for his opportunity. “What does Cindy do?”

“Escort,” wheezed Betty. “Lovely figure… up West… makin’ more’n I ever… Arabs an’ whatnot… but she says…‘Ma, you wouldn’t… like it these days… all they want… is anal.’” Betty cackled, coughed and then, without warning, turned her head to look at Robin perched on the bed and said with vitriol: “She don’t find it… funny, this one… do you?” she demanded of Robin, who was taken aback. “’S’pect… you give it away… for meals an’ jewelry… an’ fink it’s… fink it’s free… look at ’er face,” wheezed Betty, eyeing Robin with dislike, “you’re the same as…? the sniffy fuckin’… social worker… we ’ad round… when I… minding Cathy’s kids… gorn now,” said Betty, angrily. “Took into care…

“‘New, Mrs. Fuller,’” said Betty, adopting a grotesquely genteel accent, “‘new, it meks… new diff’rence to me…’ow yew ladies mek… ends meet… sex work is work’… they’ll tell yer that… patronisin’… fuckin’… but would they… want their daughters… doin’ it? Would they fuck,” said Betty Fuller, and she paid for her longest speech yet with her most severe spate of coughing.

“Cindy does… too much coke,” Betty wheezed, her eyes watering, when she could talk again. “… keeps the weight off… Cathy, it was smack… boyfriend… workin’ for ’im… beat ’er blue… pregnant and lost it…”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike.

“It’s all kids… on the street… these days,” said Betty, and a glimmer of what Strike thought was real distress showed through the determinedly tough exterior. “Firteen, fourteen… children… my day… we’d’ve marched ’em… right back ’ome… it’s all right, grown women, but kids—whatchew fucking starin’ at?” she barked to Robin.

“Cormoran, I might—” said Robin, standing up and gesturing toward the door.

“Yeah, off you fuck,” said Betty Fuller, watching with satisfaction as Robin left her room. “You doin’ ’er, are you?” she wheezed at Strike, once the door had clicked shut behind Robin.

“No,” he said.

“What the fuck’s… point, then?”

“She’s very good at the job,” said Strike. “When she’s not up against someone like you, that is,” and Betty Fuller grinned, displaying her Cheddar-yellow teeth.

“Hahaha… I know…’er type… knows fuckin’ nothing… ’bout real life…”

“There was a man living in Leather Lane, back in Margot Bamborough’s day,” said Strike. “Name of Niccolo Ricci? ‘Mucky,’ they used to call him.”

Betty Fuller said nothing, but the milky eyes narrowed.

“What d’you know about Ricci?” asked Strike.

“Same as… ev’ryone,” said Betty.

Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw Robin emerge into the daylight. She lifted her hair briefly off her neck, as though needing to remove weight from herself, then walked out of sight with her hands in her jacket pockets.

“It warn’t Mucky… what freatened ’er,” said Betty. “’E wouldn’t… write notes. Not ’is… style.”

“Ricci turned up at the St. John’s practice Christmas party,” said Strike. “Which seemed odd.”

“Don’t know… nuffin’ ’bout that…”

“Some of the people at the party assumed he was Gloria Conti’s father.”

“Never ’eard of ’er,” wheezed Betty.

“According to Wilma Bayliss’s daughters,” said Strike, “you told their mother you were scared of the person who wrote the notes. You said the writer of the notes killed Margot Bamborough. You told Wilma he’d kill you, too, if you said who he was.”

Betty’s milky eyes were expressionless. Her thin chest labored to get enough oxygen into her lungs. Strike had just concluded that she definitely wasn’t going to talk, when she opened her mouth.

“Local girl I knew,” she said, “friend o’ mine… she met Mucky… ’e come cruisin’… our corner…’e says to Jen…‘You’re better’n this… workin’ the street… body like yours… I could get you… five times what… you’re earnin’ ’ere…’ so off Jen goes,” said Betty, “up West… Soho… strippin’ for punters… sex wiv ’is mates…”

“I met ’er… coupla years later… visitin’ ’er mum… and she tole me a story.

“Girl at their club… gorgeous girl, Jen said… got raped… knifepoint. Cut…” said Betty Fuller, indicating her own sagging torso, “right down the ribs… by a mate… of Ricci’s…

“Some people,” said the old woman, “fink a hooker… being raped… it just means she never… got paid…’spect your Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse,” said Betty, glancing at the window, “finks that… but it ain’t that…

“This girl… angry… wants revenge… get back… at Ricci… so the silly bitch… turns police informer…

“And Mucky found out,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “and ’e filmed it… as they killed ’er. My mate Jen was told… by someone… what ’ad seen… the film… Ricci kept it… in the safe… show people… if they needed… scaring…

“Jen’s dead now,” said Betty Fuller. “Overdosed… firty-odd years ago… fort she’d be better… up West… and ’ere’s me… workin’ the streets… still alive.

“I ain’t got nuffing… to say… about no notes… it warn’t Marcus… that’s all… That’s my meals on wheels,” said Betty, her head turning, and Strike saw a man heading toward the outside door, with a pile of foil trays in his arms.

“I’m done,” Betty said, who seemed suddenly tired and cross. “You can turn… telly back on… and move… that table over… pass me that knife and fork… in the loo…”

She’d rinsed them off in the bathroom sink, but they were still dirty. Strike washed them again before taking them to her. After arranging the table in front of her armchair, and turning The Only Way is Essex back on, he opened the door to the meals-on-wheels man, who was gray-haired and cheery.

“Oh hello,” said the newcomer in a loud voice. “This your son, Betty?”

“Is he fuck,” wheezed Betty Fuller. “Whatchew got?”

“Chicken casserole and jelly and custard, love…”

“Thanks very much for talking to me, Mrs. Fuller,” said Strike, but Betty’s stock of goodwill had plainly been exhausted, and she was now far more interested in her food.

Robin was leaning against a nearby wall, reading something off her phone, when Strike emerged from the building.

“I thought it was best to clear out,” she said, in a flat voice. “How did it go?”

“She won’t talk about the notes,” said Strike, as the pair of them headed back down Sans Walk, “and if you ask me why, I’d say it’s because she thinks Mucky Ricci wrote them. I’ve found out a bit more about that girl in the snuff movie.”

“You’re joking?” said Robin, looking worried.

“Apparently she was a police informer in one of Ricci’s—”

Robin gasped.

“Kara Wolfson!”

“What?”

“Kara Wolfson. One of the women they thought Creed might have killed. Kara worked at a nightclub in Soho—the owners put it about after she disappeared that she’d been a police informer!”

“How did you know that?” asked Strike, taken aback. He couldn’t remember this information from The Demon of Paradise Park.

Robin suddenly remembered that she’d heard this from Brian Tucker, back at the Star Café. She hadn’t yet heard back from the Ministry of Justice about the possibility of interviewing Creed, and as Strike still had no inkling what she was up to, she said,

“Think I read it online…”

But with a new heaviness pressing on her heart, Robin remembered that Kara’s only remaining close relative, the brother she’d raised, had drunk himself to death. Hutchins had said the police weren’t able to do anything about that film. Kara Wolfson’s body might be anywhere. Some stories didn’t have neat endings: there was nowhere to lay flowers for Kara Wolfson, unless it was on the corner near the strip joint where she’d last been seen.

Fighting the depression now threatening to overwhelm her, Robin raised her phone to show Strike what she’d been looking up, and said in a determinedly matter-of-fact voice,

“I was just reading about somnophilia, otherwise known as sleeping princess syndrome.”

“Which, I take it—”

“Was Brenner’s kink,” said Robin, and reading off her phone, she said, “‘Somnophilia is a paraphilia in which the individual is sexually aroused by someone non-responsive… some psychologists have linked somnophilia with necrophilia.’ Cormoran… you know how he had barbiturates stocked up in his office?”

“Yeah,” said Strike slowly, as they walked back toward his car. “Well, this is going to give us something to talk to Dorothy’s son about, isn’t it? I wonder whether she was game for playing dead? Or whether she found herself sleeping a long time, after Brenner had been round for lunch?”

Robin gave a small shudder.

“I know,” Strike continued, as he lit up, “I said he’d be a last resort, but we’ve only got three months left. I’m starting to think I’m going to have to pay Mucky Ricci a visit.”

57

Adding daytime surveillance of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Nursing Home to the rota meant that as May progressed, the agency was again struggling to cover all open cases. Strike wanted to know how many visitors were going in and out, and at what times, so that he might ascertain when he’d have the best chance of entering the building without running into one of the old gangster’s relatives.

The nursing home lay in a quiet Georgian street on the very edge of Clerkenwell, in a quiet, leafy enclave where dun-colored brick houses sported neo-classical pediments and glossy black front doors. A dark wood plaque on the exterior wall of the nursing home was embellished with a cross, and a biblical quotation, in gold:

“Nice sentiment,” as Strike commented to Robin, on one of their handovers, “but nobody’s getting in there without a good bit of cash.”

The private nursing home was small and clearly expensive. The staff, all of whom the agency quickly grew to know by sight, wore dark blue scrubs and hailed mostly from abroad. There was a black male nurse who sounded as though he’d come from Trinidad, and two blondes who talked Polish to each other every morning as they passed whichever agency member happened to be loitering in the area at the time, feigning a call on their mobile, reading a newspaper or appearing to wait, slightly impatiently, for a friend who never showed up.

A podiatrist and a hairdresser went regularly in and out of the home, but after two weeks’ daytime surveillance, the agency tentatively concluded that Ricci only received visits on Sundays, when his two sons appeared, wearing the resigned looks of people for whom this was an unwelcome chore. It was easy to identify which brother was which from pictures that had appeared in the press. Luca looked, in Barclay’s phrase, “like a piano fell oan his heid,” having a bald, flat, noticeably scarred skull. Marco was smaller, slighter and hairier, but gave off an air of barely contained violence, slamming his hand repeatedly on the nursing home’s doorbell if the door wasn’t opened immediately, and slapping a grandson around the back of the head for dropping a chocolate bar on the pavement. Both the brothers’ wives had a hard-boiled look about them, and none of the family had the good looks Robin associated with Italians. The great-grandfather sitting mutely behind the doors of the nursing home might have been a true Latin, but his descendants were disappointingly pallid and Saxon in appearance, right down to the little ginger-haired boy who dropped his chocolate.

It was Robin who first laid eyes on Ricci himself, on the third Saturday the agency was watching the home. Beneath her raincoat, Robin was wearing a dress, because she was meeting Strike later at the Stafford hotel in Mayfair, to interview C. B. Oakden. Robin, who’d never been to the hotel, had looked it up and learned that the five-star establishment, with its bowler-hatted doormen, was one of the oldest and smartest hotels in London, hence her atypical choice of surveillance wear. As she’d previously disguised herself while lurking outside St. Peter’s (alternately beanie hat, hair up, dark contact lenses and sunglasses), she felt safe to look like herself for once as she strolled up and down the street, pretending to talk on the phone, although she’d added clear-lensed glasses she’d remove for the Stafford.

The elderly residents of St. Peter’s were occasionally escorted or wheeled down the street in the afternoon to the nearby square, which had a central private garden enclosed by railings, open only to keyholders, there to doze or enjoy the lilac and pansies while well wrapped up against the cold. Hitherto, the agency had seen only elderly women taken on the outings, but today, for the first time, an old man was among the group coming down a ramp at the side of the building.

Robin recognized Ricci instantly, not by his lion ring, which, if he was wearing it, was well hidden beneath a tartan rug, but by the profile that time might have exaggerated, but could not disguise. His thick black hair was now dark gray and his nose and earlobes enormous. The large eyes that reminded Strike of a Basset hound had an even more pronounced droop these days. Ricci’s mouth hung slightly open as one of the Polish nurses pushed him toward the square, talking to him brightly, but receiving no response.

“You all right, Enid, love?” the black male nurse called ahead to a frail-looking old lady wearing a sheepskin hat, and she laughed and nodded.

Robin gave the group a head start, then followed, watching as one of the nurses unlocked the gate to the garden, and the party disappeared inside. Walking around the square with her phone clamped to her ear, pretending to be in conversation, Robin thought how typical it was that today, of all days, she’d worn heels, never imagining that there might have been a possibility of approaching Ricci and chatting to him.

The group from the nursing home had come to a halt beside flower-beds of purple and yellow, Ricci parked in his wheelchair beside an empty park bench. The nurses chatted amongst themselves, and to those old ladies capable of doing so, while the old man stared vacantly across the lawns.

If she’d been wearing her usual trainers, Robin thought, she might possibly have been able to scale the railings and get into the garden unseen: there was a clump of trees that would provide cover from the nurses, and she could have sidled over to Ricci and found out, at the very least, whether he had dementia. Unfortunately, she had absolutely no chance of managing that feat in her dress and high heels.

As she completed her walk around the square, Robin spotted Saul Morris walking toward her. Morris was early, as he always tended to be, whenever it was Robin from whom he was taking over.

He’s going to mention either the glasses or the heels first, Robin thought.

“High heels,” said Morris, as soon as he was within earshot, his bright blue eyes sweeping over her. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you in heels before. Funny, I never think of you as tall, but you are, aren’t you? Sexy specs, too.”

Before Robin could stop him, he’d stooped and kissed her on the cheek.

“I’m the guy you’re meeting on a blind date,” he told her, straightening up again and winking.

“How do we account for the fact that I’m about to leave you standing here?” Robin asked, unsmiling, and Morris laughed too hard, just as he did at Strike’s mildest jokes.

“Dunno—what would it take to make you walk out on a blind date?” asked Morris.

You turning up, thought Robin, but ignoring the question she checked her watch and said,

“If you’re OK to take over now, I’ll head—”

“Here they come,” said Morris quietly. “Oh, the old fella’s outside this time, is he? I wondered why you’d abandoned the front door.”

The comment aggravated Robin almost as much as his flirtatious manner. Why did he think she’d leave the front door, unless the target had moved? Nevertheless, she waited beside him while the small group of nurses and residents, having decided that twenty minutes was enough fresh air, passed them on the other side of the street, heading back to the home.

“My kids were taken out like that at nursery,” said Morris quietly, watching the group pass. “All bundled up in pushchairs, the helpers wheeling them out. Some of that lot are probably wearing nappies, too,” he said, his bright blue eyes following the St. Peter’s party. “Christ, I hope I never end up like that. Ricci’s the only man, too, poor sod.”

“I think they’re very well looked after,” Robin said, as the Trinidadian nurse shouted,

“Up we go, Enid!”

“Like being a kid again, though, isn’t it?” said Morris, as they watched the wheelchairs rolling along in procession. “But with none of the perks.”

“S’pose so,” said Robin. “I’ll head off, then, if you’re ready to take over.”

“Yeah, no problem,” said Morris, but he immediately added, “where’re you going, all dressed up like that?”

“I’m meeting Strike.”

“Oh,” said Morris, eyebrows raised, “I see—”

“No,” said Robin, “you don’t. We’re interviewing someone at a really smart hotel.”

“Ah,” said Morris. “Sorry.”

But there was a strange complacency, bordering on complicity, about the way Morris bade her goodbye, and it wasn’t until Robin had reached the end of the street that the unwelcome thought occurred to her that Morris had entirely misread the sharpness of her denial that she was going on a date with Strike; that he might, in fact, have interpreted it as Robin wanting to make it quite clear that her affections weren’t engaged elsewhere.

Was Morris—could he be—so deluded as to think that Robin was secretly hoping that his unsubtle flirtation might lead to something happening between them? Even after what had happened on Boxing Day, when she’d shouted at him for sending her that dick pic? Little though she wanted to believe it, she was afraid that the answer was “yes.” Morris had been extremely drunk when she’d shouted at him, and possibly incapable of judging just how truly angry and disgusted she’d been. He’d seemed sincerely ashamed of himself in the immediate aftermath, so she’d forced herself to be friendlier than she wanted to be, purely out of a desire to foster team cohesion. The result had been that Morris had returned to his pre-dick pic ways. She only answered his late-night texts, mostly containing jokes and attempts at banter, to stop him pestering her with “have I offended you?” follow-ups. Now it occurred to her that what she considered professionalism Morris took as encouragement. Everything he said to her about work suggested that he saw her as less able and less experienced than the rest of the agency: perhaps he also thought her naive enough to be flattered by the attentions of a man she actually found condescending and slimy.

Morris, Robin thought, as she headed toward the Tube, didn’t actually like women. He desired them, but that, of course, was an entirely different matter: Robin, who was forever marked by the ineradicable memory of the man in the gorilla mask, knew better than most that desire and liking were different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, things. Morris gave himself away constantly, not only in the way he spoke to Robin, but in his desire to call Mrs. Smith “Rich Bitch,” his attribution of venal or provocative motives to every woman under surveillance, in the barely disguised disgust with which he noted that Mucky Ricci was now forced to live in a houseful of females. Christ, I hope I never end up like that.

Robin walked another few steps, and suddenly stopped dead, earning herself a curious glance from a passing traffic warden. She’d had an idea, triggered by what Morris had just said to her: or rather, the idea had slammed its way into the forefront of her mind and she knew that it had been there in her subconscious all along, waiting for her to admit it.

Moving aside so as not to get in the way of passers-by, Robin pulled out her phone and checked the list of paraphilias she’d last consulted when looking up sleeping princess syndrome.

Autonepiophilia.

“Oh God,” Robin muttered. “That’s it. That’s got to be it.”

Robin called Strike, but his number went to voicemail; he was doubtless already on the Tube, heading for the Stafford. After a moment or two’s thought, she called Barclay.

“Hiya,” said the Scot.

“Are you still outside Elinor Dean’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anyone in there with her?”

“No.”

“Sam, I think I know what she’s doing for those men.”

“Whut?”

Robin told him. The only answer was a long silence. Finally, Barclay said,

“You’re aff yer heid, Robin.”

“Maybe,” said Robin, “but the only way to know for sure is to knock on her door and ask if she’ll do it for you. Say you were recommended to her by SB.”

“Will I fuck,” said Barclay. “Does Strike know ye’re asking me tae do this?”

“Sam, we’ve got a week left before the client pulls the plug. The worst that can happen is that she denies it. We’re not going to have many more chances.”

She heard Barclay exhale, hard.

“All right, but it’s on ye if ye’re wrong.”

Robin hurried onwards toward the Tube station, second-guessing herself as she went. Would Strike think she was wrong to tell Barclay to go in, on her hunch? But they had a week left before the client withdrew funding: what was there, now, to lose?

It was Saturday evening, and Robin arrived on the crowded Tube platform to find she’d just missed a train. By the time she exited at Green Park station, she’d lost the chance of arriving at the American Bar early, which she’d hoped to do, so that she and Strike could have a few words together before Oakden arrived. Worse still, when she hurried down St. James’s Street, she saw, with a sense of déjà vu, a large crowd blocking the bottom of the road, being marshaled by police. As Robin slowed down, wondering whether she’d be able to get through the dense mass of people to the Stafford, a couple of sprinting paparazzi overtook her, in pursuit of a series of black Mercedeses. As Robin watched them pressing their lenses against windows, she became aware that the crowd in the distance was chanting “Jonn-ny! Jonn-ny!” Through the windows of one of the cars heading toward the event, Robin glimpsed a woman in a Marie Antoinette wig. Only when she was nearly knocked sideways by a sprinting pair of autograph hunters, both of them holding Deadbeats posters, did Robin realize with a thrill of shock that Strike’s father was the Jonny whose name was being chanted.

“Shit,” she said aloud, wheeling around and hurrying back up the road, pulling out her mobile as she went. She knew there was another entrance to the Stafford via Green Park. Not only was she going to be late, but a horrible suspicion had just hit her. Why had Oakden been so determined to meet on this specific evening? And why had it had to be this bar, so close to what she was afraid was an event involving Strike’s father? Did Strike know, had he realized, what was happening close by?

She called him, but he didn’t pick up. Still walking, she typed out a text:

Cormoran I don’t know whether you know this, but Jonny Rokeby’s having an event around the corner. I think it’s possible Oakden’s trying to set you up.

Breaking into a jog, because she was already five minutes late, she knew she’d just told Strike, for the very first time, that she knew who his father was.

On her arrival in Green Park, she saw from a distance a policeman at the rear entrance, who, with one of the hotel’s bowler-hatted attendants, was politely but firmly turning away two men with long-lensed cameras.

“Not this way, sorry,” said the policeman. “Only for tonight. If it’s the hotel you want, you’ll have to go round the front.”

“What’s going on?” demanded a suited man hand in hand with a beautiful Asian woman in a cheongsam. “We’ve got a dinner booking! Why can’t we go through?”

“Very sorry, sir, but there’s an event on at Spencer House,” explained the doorman, “and police want us to stop people using this as a short cut.”

The two men with cameras swore and turned away, jogging back the way Robin had come. She lowered her head as they passed her, glad that she was still wearing her unneeded glasses, because her picture had appeared in the press during a court case a couple of years back. Maybe she was being paranoid, but Robin was worried the pressmen had been trying to use the Stafford not as a short cut to Rokeby and his guests, but as a means of getting to his estranged son.

Now that the photographers had gone, the bowler-hatted attendant permitted the woman in the cheongsam and her companion to enter, and after giving Robin a shrewd up-and-down glance, evidently decided she wasn’t a photographer and allowed her to proceed through the gate into a courtyard, where well-dressed drinkers were smoking beneath exterior heaters. After checking her mobile and seeing that Strike hadn’t answered her text, she hurried up the steps into the American Bar.

It was a comfortable, elegant space of dark wood and leather, with pennants and baseball caps from many American states and universities hanging from the ceiling. Robin immediately spotted Strike standing in a suit at the bar, his surly expression lit by the rows of illuminated bottles on the wall.

“Cormoran, I just—”

“If you’re about to tell me my father’s just round the corner,” said Strike tersely, “I know. This arsehole doesn’t realize I’m wise to his attempted set-up, yet.”

Robin glanced into the far corner. Carl Oakden was sitting there, legs spread wide, an arm along the back of the leather bench. He was wearing a suit, but no tie, and his attitude was clearly meant to suggest a man at ease in these cosmopolitan surroundings. With his slightly too-close-together eyes and his narrow forehead, he still resembled the boy who’d smashed Roy’s mother’s crystal bowl all those years ago.

“Go and talk to him. He wants some food, I’m getting menus,” muttered Strike. “We’d just got started on Steve Douthwaite. Apparently, Dorothy always thought the bloke was suspicious.”

Heading toward Oakden, Robin prayed that Strike was going to keep his temper. She’d only once seen him lose his cool with a witness, and had no desire to see it happen again.

“Mr. Oakden?” she said, smiling as she reached him and extending her hand. “I’m Robin Ellacott, we’ve emailed—”

“I know,” said Oakden, turning his head slowly to look her up and down with a smirk. He ignored her outstretched hand and Robin could tell he did so deliberately. Refusing to show that she realized that he was trying to be offensive, she shrugged off her raincoat.

“Nice bar,” she said pleasantly, sitting down opposite him. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Normally takes you cheaper places, does he?” asked Oakden.

“Cormoran was just telling me you remember your mother talking about Steve Douth—”

“Love,” said Oakden, legs still wide apart, arm along the back of the leather bench, “I told you all along, I’m not interested in being palmed off with assistants or secretaries. I’ll talk to him, or nobody.”

“I’m actually Cormoran’s—”

“I’ll bet you are,” said Oakden, with a snigger. “Don’t suppose he can get rid of you now, can he?”

“Sorry?”

“Not now you’ve been knifed, trying to do a man’s job,” said Oakden, with a glance toward her forearm as he raised his cocktail to his lips. “You’d probably sue the shit out of him, if he tried.”

Oakden, who’d evidently done his homework on the detectives, was clearly reveling in his rudeness. Robin could only suppose that the con man assumed she was too desperate for his information to take offense at his manner. He seemed determined to derive maximum pleasure from this encounter: to enjoy free alcohol and food, and bait a woman who was unlikely to walk away. Robin wondered which paper or picture agency he’d contacted, to propose luring Strike within a few hundred yards of his father’s party, and how much Oakden stood to gain, if they could get a picture of Strike apparently publicly snubbing his father, or catch the detective on record saying something angry and quotable.

“There you go,” said Strike, throwing a couple of leather-bound menus onto the table and sitting down. He hadn’t thought to bring Robin anything to drink. Oakden picked up a menu and perused it slowly, and he seemed to enjoy keeping them waiting.

“I’ll have the club sandwich,” he said at last, and Strike hailed a waiter. The order given, Strike turned back to Oakden and said,

“Yeah, so you were saying, your mother found Douthwaite—”

“Oh, she definitely thought he was a charmer,” said Oakden. His eyes, Robin noted, kept moving to the entrance of the bar, and she was sure Oakden was waiting for photographers to burst in. “Wide boy, you know the type. Chatting up the slags on reception. The old woman said he tried it on with everyone. The nurse got all giggly when he was around and all.”

Robin remembered the gamboling black skeleton of Talbot’s notebook, and the words written beside Crowley’s figure of death: Fortuna says Pallas Athena, Ceres, Vesta and Cetus are SCARLET WOMEN who RIDE UPON THE BEAST…

“And did your mother think he fancied Dr. Bamborough?”

Oakden took a sip of his cocktail and smacked his lips.

“Well, I mean, Margot,” he said, with a small snort of laughter, and Robin found herself irrationally resentful of Oakden using the missing doctor’s first name, “you know, she was the classic wanted-it-all-ways, wasn’t she?”

“What ways were those?” said Strike.

“Bunny Girl,” said Oakden, taking another sip of his drink, “legs out, tits out. Then, quick, get the white coat on—”

“Don’t think GPs wear white coats,” said Strike.

“I’m talking metaphorically,” said Oakden airily. “Child of her time, wasn’t she?”

“How’s that?”

“The rise of gynocentric society,” said Oakden, with a slight bow toward Robin, who suddenly thought his narrow head resembled a stoat’s. “Late sixties, early seventies, it’s when it all started changing, isn’t it? You’ve got the pill: consequence-free fucking. Looks like it benefits the male, but by enabling women to avoid or subvert the reproductive function, you’re repressing natural and healthy patterns of sex behavior. You’ve got a gynocentric court system, which favors the female even if she didn’t want the kids in the first place. You’ve got misandrist authoritarianism masquerading as a campaign for equal rights, policing men’s thoughts and speech and natural behavior. And you’ve got widespread sexual exploitation of men. Playboy Club, that’s all bullshit. Look, but don’t touch. It’s the old courtly love lie. The woman’s there to be worshipped, the man’s there to spew cash, but never get satisfaction. Suckers, the men who hang round those places.

“Bamborough didn’t look after her own kid,” said Oakden, his eyes again darting to the entrance and back to Strike, “didn’t fuck her own husband, from what I heard, he was nearly always too ill to perform. He had plenty of cash though, so she gets a nanny and goes lording it over men at work.”

“Who, specifically, did she lord it over?” asked Strike.

“Well, Douthwaite ran out of there practically crying last time he saw her, my old woman said. But that’s been our culture since the sixties, hasn’t it? Male suffering, nobody gives a shit. People whine when men break, when they can’t handle it any more, when they lash out. If Douthwaite did her in—I don’t personally think he did,” said Oakden with an expansive gesture, and Robin reminded herself that Carl Oakden had almost certainly never laid eyes on Steven Douthwaite, and that he’d been fourteen years old when Margot disappeared, “but if he did, I’d lay odds it’s because she kicked his pain back in his teeth. Only women bleed,” said Oakden, with a contemptuous little laugh, “isn’t that right?” he shot at Robin. “Ah, there’s my sandwich.”

While the waiter served him, Robin got up and headed to the bar, where the beautiful woman in the cheongsam, whose hair hung like black silk in the light of the banked bottles of spirits, was standing with her partner. Both were ordering cocktails and looked delighted to be in each other’s company. For a few seconds Robin suddenly wondered whether she’d ever again feel as they did. Her job reminded her almost daily of the many ways in which men and women could hurt each other.

As she ordered herself a tonic water, Robin’s phone rang. Hoping it was Barclay, she instead saw her mother’s name. Perhaps Linda had got wind of Sarah’s pregnancy. Matthew might have taken his wife-to-be back to Masham by now, to share the good news. Robin muted the phone, paid for her drink, wishing it was alcoholic, and carried it back to the table in time to hear Oakden say to Strike,

“No, that didn’t happen.”

“You didn’t add vodka to the punch at Dr. Bamborough’s barbecue?”

Oakden took a large bite of his free sandwich, and chewed it insolently. In spite of his thin hair and the many wrinkles around his eyes, Robin could clearly see the spoiled teenager inside the fifty-four-year-old.

“Nicked some,” said Oakden thickly, “then drank it in the shed. Surprised they missed it, but the rich are tight. How they stay minted, isn’t it?”

“We heard the punch made someone sick.”

“Not my fault,” said Oakden.

“Dr. Phipps was pretty annoyed, I hear.”

“Him,” said Oakden, with a smirk. “Things worked out all right for old Phipps, didn’t they?”

“In what way?” asked Strike.

“Wife out the way, marrying the nanny. All very convenient.”

“Didn’t like Phipps, did you?” said Strike. “That came across in your book.”

“You’ve read it?” said Oakden, momentarily startled. “How come?”

“Managed to track down an advance copy,” said Strike. “It should’ve come out in ’85, right?”

“Yeah,” said Oakden.

“D’you remember the gazebo that was under construction in the garden when the barbecue happened?”

One of Oakden’s eyelids flickered. He raised a hand quickly to his face and made a sweep of his forehead, as though he felt a hair tickling him.

“No,” he said.

“It’s in the background of one of your photos. They’d just started building the columns. I expect they’d already put down the floor.”

“I can’t remember that,” said Oakden.

“The shed where you took the vodka wasn’t near there, then?”

“Can’t’ve been,” said Oakden.

“While we’re on the subject of nicking things,” said Strike, “would you happen to have the obituary of Dr. Brenner you took from Janice Beattie’s house?”

“I never stole no obituary from her house,” said Oakden, with a display of disdain. “What would I want that for?”

“To get some information you could try and pass off as your own?”

“I don’t need to look up old Joe Brenner, I know plenty about him. He came round our house for his dinner every other Sunday. My old woman used to cook better than his sister, apparently.”

“Go on, then,” said Strike, his tone becoming combative, “amaze us.”

Oakden raised his sparse eyebrows. He chewed another bite of sandwich and swallowed it, before saying,

“Hey, this was all your idea. You don’t want the information, I’m happy to go.”

“Unless you’ve got more than you put in your book—”

“Brenner wanted Margot Bamborough struck off the bloody medical register. Come round our house one Sunday full of it. Couple of weeks before she disappeared. There,” said Oakden pugnaciously, “I kept that out of the book, because my mother didn’t want it in there.”

“Why was that?”

“Still loyal to him,” said Oakden, with a little snort of laughter. “And I wanted to keep the old dear happy at the time, because noises had been made about writing me out of the will. Old women,” said the convicted con man, “are a bit too persuadable if you don’t keep an eye on them. She’d got chummy with the local vicar by the eighties. I was worried it was all going to go to rebuild the bloody church steeple unless I kept an eye on her.”

“Why did Brenner want Bamborough struck off?”

“She examined some kid without parental permission.”

“Was this Janice’s son?” asked Robin.

“Was I talking to you?” Oakden shot at her.

“You,” growled Strike, “want to keep a civil tongue in your bloody head. Was it Janice’s son, yes or no?”

“Maybe,” said Oakden, and Robin concluded that he couldn’t remember. “Point is, that’s unethical behavior, looking at a kid without a parent there, and old Joe was all worked up about it. ‘I’ll have her struck off for this,’ he kept saying. There. Didn’t get that from no obituary, did I?”

Oakden drank the rest of his cocktail straight off, then said,

“I’ll have another one of those.”

Strike ignored this, saying,

“And this was two weeks before Bamborough disappeared?”

“About that, yeah. Never seen the old bastard so excited. He loved disciplining people, old Joe. Vicious old bastard, actually.”

“In what way?”

“Told my old woman in front of me she wasn’t hitting me enough,” said Oakden. “She bloody listened, too. Tried to lay about me with a slipper a couple of days later, silly cow. She learned not to do that again.”

“Yeah? Hit her back, did you?”

Oakden’s too-close-together eyes raked Strike, as though trying to ascertain whether he was worth educating.

“If my father had lived, he’d’ve had the right to punish me, but her trying to humiliate me because Brenner told her to? I wasn’t taking that.”

“Exactly how close were your mother and Brenner?”

Oakden’s thin brows contracted.

“Doctor and secretary, that’s all. There wasn’t anything else between them, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“They didn’t have a little lie down after lunch, then?” said Strike. “She didn’t come over sleepy, after Brenner had come over?”

“You don’t want to judge everyone’s mother by yours,” said Oakden.

Strike acknowledged the jibe with a dark smile and said,

“Did your mother ask Brenner to sign the death certificate for your grandmother?”

“The hell’s that got to do with anything?”

“Did she?”

“I dunno,” said Oakden, his eyes darting once again toward the bar’s entrance. “Where did you get that idea? What’re you even asking that for?”

“Your grandmother’s doctor was Margot Bamborough, right?”

“I dunno,” said Oakden.

“You can remember every word your mother told you about Steve Douthwaite, right down to him flirting with receptionists and looking tearful the last time he left the surgery, but you can’t remember details of your own grandmother falling downstairs and killing herself?”

“I wasn’t there,” said Oakden. “I was out at a mate’s house when it happened. Come home and seen the ambulance.”

“Just your mother at home, then?”

“The hell’s this relevant to—”

“What’s the name of the mate whose house you were at?” asked Strike, for the first time taking out his notebook.

“What’re you doing?” said Oakden, with an attempt at a laugh, dropping the last portion of his sandwich on his plate. “What are you fucking implying?”

“You don’t want to give us his name?”

“Why the fuck should—he was a schoolmate—”

“Convenient for you and your mother, old Maud falling downstairs,” said Strike. “My information is she shouldn’t have been trying to navigate stairs alone, in her condition. Inherited the house, didn’t you?”

Oakden began to shake his head very slowly, as though marveling at the unexpected stupidity of Cormoran Strike.

“Seriously? You’re trying to… wow. Wow.”

“Not going to tell me the name of your schoolfriend, then?”

“Wow,” said Oakden, attempting a laugh. “You think you can—”

“—drop a word in a friendly journalist’s ear, to the effect that your long career of screwing over old ladies started with a good hard push in the small of your grandmother’s back? Oh yeah, I definitely can.”

“Now you wait a fucking—”

“I know you think it’s me being set up tonight,” said Strike, leaning in. His body language was unmistakeably menacing, and out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw the black-haired woman in the cheongsam and her partner watching warily, both with their drinks at their lips. “But the police have still got a note written to them in 1985, telling them to dig beneath the cross of St. John. DNA techniques have moved on a lot since then. I expect they’ll be able to get a good match from the saliva under the envelope flap.”

Oakden’s eyelid twitched again.

“You thought you were going to stir up a bit of press interest in the Bamborough case, to get people interested in your shitty book, didn’t you?”

“I never—”

“I’m warning you. You go talking to the papers about me and my father, or about me working the Bamborough case, and I’ll make sure you get nailed for that note. And if by chance that doesn’t work, I’ll put my whole agency onto turning over every part of your miserable fucking life, until I’ve got something else on you to take to the police. Understand?”

Oakden, who looked momentarily unnerved, recovered himself quickly. He even managed another little laugh.

“You can’t stop me writing about whatever I want. That’s freedom of—”

“I’m warning you,” repeated Strike, a little more loudly, “what’ll happen if you get in the way of this case. And you can pay for your own fucking sandwich.”

Strike stood up and Robin, caught off guard, hastened to grab her raincoat and get up, too.

“Cormoran, let’s go out the back,” she said, thinking of the two photographers lurking at the front of the building, but they hadn’t gone more than two steps when they heard Oakden call after them.

“You think I’m scared of your fucking agency? Some fucking detective you are!” he said, and now most of the heads in their vicinity turned. Glancing back, Robin saw that Oakden had got up, too: he’d come out from behind the table and was planted in the middle of the bar, clearly set on making a scene.

“Strike, please, let’s just go,” said Robin, who now had a presentiment of real trouble. Oakden was clearly determined to come out of the encounter with something sellable, or at the very least, a narrative in which he’d come out on top. But Strike had already turned back toward their interviewee.

“You didn’t even know your own fucking father’s having a party round the corner,” said Oakden loudly, pointing in the direction of Spencer House. “Not going to pop in, thank him for fucking your mother on a pile of beanbags while fifty people watched?”

Robin watched what she had dreaded unfold in apparent slow motion: Strike lunged for Oakden. She made a grab for the arm Strike had drawn back for a punch, but too late: his elbow slammed into Robin’s forehead, breaking her glasses in two. Dark spots popped in front of Robin’s eyes and the next thing she knew, she’d fallen backward onto the floor.

Robin’s attempted intervention had given the con man a few seconds in which to dodge, and instead of receiving what might have been a knockout punch, he suffered no worse than a glancing blow to the ear. Meanwhile the enraged Strike, who’d barely registered his arm being impeded, realized what he’d done only when he saw drinkers all over the bar jumping to their feet, their eyes on the floor behind him. Turning, he saw Robin lying there, her hands over her face, a trickle of blood issuing from her nose.

“Shit!” Strike bellowed.

The young barman had run out from behind the bar. Oakden was shouting something about assault. Still slightly dizzy, tears of pain streaming from her eyes, the humiliated Robin was assisted back onto her feet by a couple of affluent-looking gray-haired Americans, who were fussing about getting her a doctor.

“I’m absolutely fine,” she heard herself saying. She’d taken the full force of Strike’s elbow between her eyebrows, and she realized her nose was bleeding only when she accidentally sprayed blood onto the kind American’s white shirt front.

“Robin, shit—” Strike was saying.

“Sir, I’m going to have to—”

“Yes, we’re absolutely going to leave,” Robin told the waiter, absurdly polite, while her eyes watered and she tried to stem the bleeding from her nostrils. “I just need—oh, thank you so much,” she said to the American woman, who’d handed Robin her raincoat.

“Call the police!” Oakden was shouting. Thanks to Robin’s intervention, he was entirely unmarked. “Someone call the bloody police!”

“I won’t be pressing charges,” Robin said to nobody in particular.

“Robin—I’m so—”

Grabbing a handful of Strike’s sleeve, warm blood still trickling down onto her chin, Robin muttered,

“Let’s just go.”

She trod on the cracked lens of her glasses as they headed out of the silent bar, the drinkers staring after them.

58

“Robin—”

“Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have tried to stop you,” she said through gritted teeth, as they hurried through the outside courtyard. Her vision was blurred with tears of pain. Smokers turned to gape as she passed, trying to staunch her bleeding nose. “If that punch had connected, we’d be back there waiting for the police.”

To Robin’s relief, there were no paparazzi waiting for them as they headed into Green Park, but she was scared that it wouldn’t take long, after the scene Strike had just made, for them to come hunting again.

“We’ll get a cab,” said Strike, who was currently consumed with a mixture of total mortification and rage against Oakden, his father, the press and himself. “Listen, you’re right—”

“I know I’m right, thanks!” she said, a little wildly.

Not only was her face throbbing, she was now wondering why Strike hadn’t warned her about Rokeby’s party; why, in fact, he’d let himself get lured there by a second-rate chancer like Oakden, careless of consequences for their case and for the agency.

“TAXI!” bellowed Strike, so loudly that Robin jumped. Somewhere nearby, she heard running footsteps.

A black cab pulled up and Strike pushed Robin inside.

“Denmark Street,” he yelled at the cabbie, and Robin heard the shouts of photographers as the taxi sped up again.

“It’s all right,” said Strike, twisting to look out of the back window, “they’re on foot. Robin… I’m so fucking sorry.”

She’d pulled a mirror out of her bag to try and clean up her smarting face, wiping blood from her upper lip and chin. It looked as though she was going to have two black eyes: both were rapidly swelling.

“D’you want me to take you home?” said Strike.

Furious at him, fighting the urge to cry out of pain, Robin imagined Max’s surprise and curiosity at seeing her in this state; imagined having to make light, again, of the injuries she’d sustained while working for the agency. She also remembered that she hadn’t gone food shopping in days.

“No, I want you to give me something to eat and a strong drink.”

“You’ve got it,” said Strike, glad to have a chance to make repa­rations. “Will a takeaway do?”

“No,” said Robin sarcastically, pointing at her rapidly blackening eyes, “I’d like to go to the Ritz, please.”

Strike started to laugh but cut himself off, appalled at the state of her face.

“Maybe we should go to casualty.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Robin—”

“You’re sorry. I know. You said.”

Strike’s phone rang. He glanced down: Barclay could wait, he decided, and muted it.

Three-quarters of an hour later, the taxi dropped them at the end of Denmark Street, with a takeaway curry and a couple of clinking bottles. Once upstairs, Robin repaired to the toilet on the landing, where she washed dried blood from her nostrils and chin with a wad of wet toilet paper. Two increasingly swollen, red-purplish mounds containing her eyes looked back at her out of the cracked mirror. A blue bruise was spreading over her forehead.

Inside the office, Strike, who’d normally have eaten the curry straight out of the foil tray it had come in, had brought out mis-matched plates, knives and forks, then, because Robin wanted a strong drink, went upstairs to his flat where he had a bottle of his favorite whisky. There was a small freezer compartment in his fridge, where he kept ice packs for his stump in addition to an ice tray. The cubes within this had been there for over a year, because although Strike enjoyed the odd drink of spirits, he generally preferred beer. About to leave the flat with the ice tray, he had second thoughts, and doubled back for one of the ice packs, as well.

“Thank you,” muttered Robin, when Strike reappeared, accepting the proffered ice pack. She was sitting in Pat’s seat, behind the desk where she’d once answered the phone, where Strike had laid out the curry and plates. “And you’d better re-do next week’s rota,” she added, applying the ice pack gingerly to her left eye first, “because there isn’t a concealer in the world that’s going to cover up this mess. I’m not going to have much chance of going unnoticed on surveillance with two black eyes.”

“Robin,” said Strike yet again, “I’m so fucking sorry. I was a tit, I just… What d’you want, vodka, whisky—?”

“Whisky,” she said. “On the rocks.”

Strike poured both of them a triple measure.

“I’m sorry,” he said, yet again, while Robin took a welcome gulp of Scotch, then began helping herself to curry. Strike sat down on the fake leather sofa opposite the desk. “Hurting you’s the last thing—there’s no excuse for—I saw red, I lost it. My father’s other kids have been pestering me for months to go to that fucking party,” said Strike, running his hand through the thick, curly hair that never looked disarranged. He felt she was owed the whole story now: the reason, if not the excuse, that he’d fucked up so badly. “They wanted us to get a group photo taken together for a present. Then Al tells me Rokeby’s got prostate cancer—which doesn’t seem to have prevented him having four hundred mates over for a good old knees-up… I ripped up the invitation without registering where the thing was being held. I should’ve realized Oakden was up to something, I took my eye off the ball, and—”

He downed half his drink in one.

“There’s no excuse for trying to punch him, but everything—these last few months—Rokeby rang me in February. First time ever. Tried to bribe me into meeting him.”

“He tried to bribe you?” said Robin, pressing the ice pack to her other eye, remembering the shouted “go fuck yourself” from the inner office, on Valentine’s Day.

“As good as,” said Strike. “He said he was open to suggestions for helping me out… well, it’s forty years too fucking late for that.”

Strike downed the rest of his whisky, reached for the bottle and poured the same again into his glass.

“When did you last see him?” Robin asked.

“When I was eighteen. I’ve met him twice,” Strike said. “First time was when I was a kid. My mother tried to ambush him with me, outside a recording studio.”

He’d only ever told Charlotte this. Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might’ve been epoch defining—“it was a month before Daddy torched Mummy’s portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows”—but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.

“I thought he wanted to see me,” said Strike. The shock of what he’d done to Robin, and the whisky scorching his throat, had liberated memories he usually kept locked up tight inside him. “I was seven. I was so fucking excited. I wanted to look smart, so he’d be—so he’d be proud of me. Told my mum to put me in my best trousers. We got outside this studio—my mother had music industry contacts, someone had tipped her off he was going to be there—and they wouldn’t let us in. I thought there’d been some mistake. The bloke on the door obviously didn’t realize my dad wanted to see me.”

Strike drank again. The curry lay cooling between them.

“My mother kicked off. They were threatening her when the band’s manager got out of his car behind us. He knew who my mother was and he didn’t want a public scene. He took us inside, into a room away from the studio.

“The manager tried to tell her it was a dumb move, turning up. If she wanted more money, she should go through lawyers. That’s when I realized my father hadn’t invited us at all. She was just trying to force her way in. I started crying,” said Strike roughly. “Just wanted to go…

“And then, while my mother and Rokeby’s manager are going at it hammer and tongs, Rokeby walks in. He heard shouting on the way back from the bathroom. Probably just done a line; I realized that later. He was already wound up when he came in the room.

“And I tried to smile,” said Strike. “Snot all over my face. I didn’t want him to think I was a whiner. I’d been imagining a hug. ‘There you are, at last.’ But he looked at me like I was nothing. Some fan’s kid, in too-short trousers. My trousers were always too fucking short… I grew too fast…

“Then he clocked my mother, and he twigged. They started rowing. I can’t remember everything they said. I was a kid. The gist was how dare she butt in, she had his lawyer’s contact details, he was paying enough, it was her problem if she pissed it all away, and then he said, ‘This was a fucking accident.’ I thought he meant, he’d come to the studio accidentally or something. But then he looked at me, and I realized, he meant me. I was the accident.”

“Oh God, Cormoran,” said Robin quietly.

“Well,” said Strike, “you’ve got to give him points for honesty. He walked out. We went home.

“For a while afterward, I held out a bit of hope he’d regretted what he’d said. It was hard to let go of the idea he wanted to see me, deep down. But nothing.”

While the sun was far from setting, the room was becoming steadily darker. The high buildings of Denmark Street cast the outer office into shadow at this time of the evening, and neither detective had turned on the interior lights.

“Second time we met,” said Strike, “I made an appointment with his management. I was eighteen. Just got into Oxford. We hadn’t touched any of Rokeby’s money for years. They’d been back to court to put restrictions on what my mother could do with it, because she was a nightmare with cash, just threw it away. Anyway, unbeknownst to me, my aunt and uncle had informed Rokeby I’d got into Oxford. My mother got a letter saying he had no obligations to me now I’d turned eighteen, but reminding her I could use the money that had been accumulating in the bank account.

“I arranged to see him at his manager’s office. He was there with his long-time lawyer, Peter Gillespie. Got a smile off Rokeby this time. Well, I was off his hands financially now, but old enough to talk to the press. Oxford had clearly been a bit of a shock to him. He’d probably hoped, with a background like mine, I’d slide quietly out of sight forever.

“He congratulated me on getting into Oxford and said I had a nice little nest egg all built up now, because my mother hadn’t spent any of it for six, seven years.

“I told him,” said Strike, “to stick his fucking money up his arse and set fire to it. Then I walked out.

“Self-righteous little prick, I was. Didn’t occur to me that Ted and Joan were going to have to stump up if Rokeby didn’t, which is what they did… I only realized that later. But I didn’t take their money long. After my mother died, midway through my second year, I left Oxford and enlisted.”

“Didn’t he contact you after your mum died?” asked Robin quietly.

“No,” said Strike, “or if he did, I never got it. He sent me a note when my leg got blown off. I’ll bet that put the fear of God into him, hearing I’d been blown up. Probably worried sick about what the press might make of it all.

“Once I was out of Selly Oak, he tried to give me the money again. He’d found out I was trying to start the agency. Charlotte’s friends knew a couple of his kids, which is how he got wind of it.”

Robin felt something flip in her stomach at the sound of Charlotte’s name. Strike so rarely acknowledged her existence.

“I said no, at first. I didn’t want to take the money, but no other fucker wanted to lend a one-legged ex-soldier without a house or any savings enough money to set up a detective agency. I told his prick of a lawyer I’d take just enough money to start the agency and pay it back in installments. Which I did.”

“That money was yours all along?” said Robin, who could remember Gillespie pressing Strike for repayment every few weeks, when she’d first joined the agency.

“Yeah, but I didn’t want it. Resented even having to borrow a bit of it.”

“Gillespie acted as though—”

“You get people like Gillespie round the rich and famous,” said Strike. “His whole ego was invested in being my father’s enforcer. The bastard was half in love with my old man, or with his fame, I dunno. I was pretty blunt on the phone about what I thought about Rokeby, and Gillespie couldn’t forgive it. I’d insisted on a loan agreement between us, and Gillespie was going to hold me to it, to punish me for telling him exactly what I thought of the pair of them.”

Strike pushed himself off the sofa, which made its usual farting noises as he did so, and began helping himself to curry. When they both had full plates, he went to fetch two glasses of water. He’d already got through a third of the whisky.

“Cormoran,” said Robin, once he was settled back on the sofa and had started eating. “You do realize, I’m never going to gossip about your father to other people? I’m not going to talk to you about him if you don’t want to, but… we’re partners. You could have told me he was hassling you, and let off steam that way, instead of punching a witness.”

Strike chewed some of his chicken jalfrezi, swallowed, then said quietly,

“Yeah, I know.”

Robin ate a bit of naan. Her bruised face was aching less now: the ice pack and the whisky had both numbed her, in different ways. Nevertheless, it took a minute to marshal the courage to say,

“I saw Charlotte’s been hospitalized.”

Strike looked up at her. He knew, of course, that Robin was well aware who Charlotte was. Four years previously, he’d got almost too drunk to walk, and told her a lot more than he’d ever meant to, about the alleged pregnancy Charlotte had insisted was his, which had broken them apart forever.

“Yeah,” said Strike.

And he told Robin the story of the farewell text messages, and his dash to the public payphone, and how he’d listened until they’d found Charlotte lying in undergrowth in the grounds of her expensive clinic.

“Oh my Christ,” said Robin, setting down her fork. “When did you know she was alive?”

“Knew for sure two days later, when the press reported it,” said Strike. He heaved himself back out of his chair, topped up Robin’s whisky, then poured himself more before sitting back down again. “But I’d concluded she must be alive before that. Bad news travels faster than good.”

There was a long silence, in which Robin hoped to hear more about how being drawn into Charlotte’s suicide attempt, and by the sounds of it, saving her life, had made him feel, but Strike said nothing, merely eating his curry.

“Well,” said Robin at last, “again, in future, maybe we could try that talking thing, before you die of a stress-induced heart attack or, you know, end up killing someone we need to question?”

Strike grinned ruefully.

“Yeah. We could try that, I s’pose…”

Silence closed around them again, a silence that seemed to the slightly drunk Strike to thicken like honey, comforting and sweet, but slightly dangerous if you sank too far into it. Full of whisky, contrition and a powerful feeling he preferred at all times not to dwell upon, he wanted to make some kind of statement about Robin’s kindness and her tact, but all the words that occurred to him seemed clumsy and unserviceable: he wanted to express something of the truth, but the truth was dangerous.

How could he say, look, I’ve tried not to fancy you since you first took off your coat in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it’s too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.

But I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility’s there, for us to, maybe…

Except it’ll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I’d already be married. And when it goes wrong, I’ll lose you for good, and this thing we’ve built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won’t find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.

If only she could come inside his head and see what was there, Strike thought, she’d understand that she occupied a unique place in his thoughts and in his affections. He felt he owed her that information, but was afraid that saying it might move this conversation into territory from which it would be difficult to retreat.

But, from second to second, sitting here, now with more than half a bottle of neat whisky inside him, a different spirit seemed to move inside him, asking himself for the first time whether determined solitude was what he really wanted, for evermore.

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

All or nothing. See what happens. Except that the stakes involved in making any kind of move would be the highest of his life; higher by far than when he’d staggered across a student party to chat up Charlotte Campbell, when, however much agony he’d endured for her later, he’d risked nothing more than minor humiliation, and a good story to tell.

Robin, who’d eaten as much curry as she could handle, had now resigned herself to not hearing what Strike felt for Charlotte. She supposed it had been a forlorn hope, but it was something she was very keen to know. The neat whisky she’d drunk had given the night a slight fuzziness, like a rain haze, and she felt slightly wistful. She knew that if it hadn’t been for the alcohol, she might feel simply unhappy.

“I suppose,” said Strike, with the fatalistic daring of a trapeze artist, swinging out into the spotlight, only black air beneath him, “Ilsa’s been trying to matchmake, your end, as well?”

Across the room, sitting in shadow, Robin experienced something like an electric shock through her body. That Strike would even allude to a third party’s idea of them being romantically involved was unprecedented. Didn’t they always act as though nothing of the sort could be further from anyone’s mind? Hadn’t they always pretended certain dangerous moments had never happened, such as when she’d modeled that green dress for him, and hugged him while wearing her wedding dress, and felt the idea of running away together pass through his mind, as well as hers?

“Yes,” she said, at last. “I’ve been worried… well, embarrassed about it, because I haven’t…”

“No,” said Strike quickly, “I never thought you were…”

She waited for him to say something else, suddenly acutely aware, as she’d never been before, that a bed lay directly above them, barely two minutes from where they sat. And, like Strike, she thought, everything I’ve worked and sacrificed for is in jeopardy if I take this conversation to the wrong place. Our relationship will be forever marred by awkwardness and embarrassment.

But worse than that, by far: she was scared of giving herself away. The feelings she’d been denying to Matthew, to her mother, to Ilsa and to herself must remain hidden.

“Well, sorry,” said Strike.

What did that mean, Robin wondered, her heart thumping very hard: she took another large gulp of whisky before she said,

“Why are you apologizing? You’re not—”

“She’s my friend.”

“She’s mine, too, now,” said Robin. “I… don’t think she can help herself. She sees two friends of the opposite sex getting on…”

“Yeah,” said Strike, all antennae now: was that all they were? Friends of the opposite sex? Not wanting to leave the subject of men and women, he said,

“You never told me how mediation went. How come he settled, after dragging it out all this time?”

“Sarah’s pregnant. They want to get married before she has it… or before she gets too big for a designer dress, knowing Sarah.”

“Shit,” said Strike quietly, wondering how upset she was. He couldn’t read her tone or see her clearly: the office was now full of shadow, but he didn’t want to turn on the lights. “Is he—did you expect that?”

“S’pose I should have,” said Robin, with a smile Strike couldn’t see, but which hurt her bruised face. “She was probably getting annoyed with the way he was dragging out our divorce. When he was about to end their affair, she left an earring in our bed for me to find. Probably getting worried he wasn’t going to propose, so she forgot to take her pill. It’s the one way women can control men, isn’t it?” she said, momentarily forgetting Charlotte, and the baby she claimed to have lost. “I’ve got a feeling she’d just told him she was pregnant when he canceled mediation the first time. Matthew said it was an accident… maybe he didn’t want to have it, when she first told him…”

“Do you want kids?” Strike asked Robin.

“I used to think so,” said Robin slowly. “Back when I thought Matthew and I were… you know. Forever.”

As she said it, memories of old imaginings came to her: of a family group that had never existed, but which had once seemed quite vivid to her. The night that Matthew had proposed, she’d formed a clear mental picture of the pair of them with three children (a compromise between his family, where there had been two children, and her own, which had had four). She’d seen it all quite clearly: Matthew cheering on a young son who was learning to play rugby, as he’d done himself; Matthew watching his own little girl onstage, playing Mary in the school nativity play. It struck her now how very conventional her imaginings had been, and how much Matthew’s expectations had become her own.

Sitting here in the darkness with Strike, Robin thought that Matthew would, in fact, be a very good father to the kind of child he’d be expecting: in other words, a little boy who wanted to play rugby, or a little girl who wanted to dance in a tutu. He’d carry their pictures around in his wallet, he’d get involved at their schools, he’d hug them when they needed it, he’d care about their homework. He wasn’t devoid of kindness: he felt guilty when he did wrong. It was simply that what Matthew considered right was so heavily colored by what other people did, what other people considered acceptable and desirable.

“But I don’t know, any more,” said Robin, after a short pause. “I can’t see myself having kids while doing this job. I think I’d be torn… and I don’t ever want to be torn again. Matthew was always trying to guilt me out of this career: I didn’t earn enough, I worked too many hours, I took too many risks… but I love it,” said Robin, with a trace of fierceness, “and I don’t want to apologize for that any more…

“What about you?” she asked Strike. “Do you want children?”

“No,” said Strike.

Robin laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“I give a whole soul-searching speech on the subject and you’re just: no.”

“I shouldn’t be here, should I?” said Strike, out of the darkness. “I’m an accident. I’m not inclined to perpetuate the mistake.”

There was a pause, then Robin said, with asperity,

“Strike, that’s just bloody self-indulgent.”

“Why?” said Strike, startled into a laugh. When he’d said the same to Charlotte, she’d both understood and agreed with him. Early in her teens, her drunken mother had told Charlotte she’d considered aborting her.

“Because… for God’s sake, you can’t let your whole life be colored by the circumstances of your conception! If everyone who was conceived accidentally stopped having kids—”

“We’d all be better off, wouldn’t we?” said Strike robustly. “The world’s overpopulated as it is. Anyway, none of the kids I know make me particularly keen to have my own.”

“You like Jack.”

“I do, but that’s one kid out of God knows how many. Dave Polworth’s kids—you know who Polworth is?”

“Your best mate,” said Robin.

“He’s my oldest mate,” Strike corrected her. “My best mate…”

For a split-second he wondered whether he was going to say it, but the whisky had lifted the guard he usually kept upon himself: why not say it, why not let go?

“… is you.”

Robin was so amazed, she couldn’t speak. Never, in four years, had Strike come close to telling her what she was to him. Fondness had had to be deduced from offhand comments, small kindnesses, awkward silences or gestures forced from him under stress. She’d only once before felt as she did now, and the unexpected gift that had engendered the feeling had been a sapphire and diamond ring, which she’d left behind when she walked out on the man who’d given it to her.

She wanted to make some kind of return, but for a moment or two, her throat felt too constricted.

“I… well, the feeling’s mutual,” she said, trying not to sound too happy.

Over on the sofa, Strike dimly registered that somebody was on the metal staircase below their floor. Sometimes the graphic designer in the office beneath worked late. Mostly Strike was savoring the pleasure it had given him to hear Robin return his declaration of affection.

And now, full of whisky, he remembered holding her on the stairs at her wedding. This was the closest they’d come to that moment in nearly two years, and the air seemed thick with unspoken things, and again, he felt as though he stood on a small platform, ready to swing out into the unknown. Leave it there, said the surly self that coveted a solitary attic space, and freedom, and peace. Now, breathed the flickering demon the whisky had unleashed, and like Robin a few minutes previously, Strike was conscious that they were sitting mere feet from a double bed.

Footsteps reached the landing outside the glass outer door. Before either Strike or Robin could react, it had opened.

“Is the power oot?” said Barclay, and he flicked on the light. After a moment in which the three blinked at each other in surprise, Barclay said,

“You’re a friggin’ genius, R—the fuck happened tae yer face?”

59

Blinking in the bright light, Robin reached again for the ice pack.

“Strike hit me. Accidentally.”

“Jesus,” said Barclay. “Wouldnae wanna see what he can do deliberately. How’d that happen?”

“My face got in the way of his elbow,” said Robin.

“Huh,” said Barclay, hungrily eyeing the almost empty curry cartons, “what wus that? Compensation?”

“Exactly,” said Robin.

“Tha’ why neither of yiz have been answerin’ yer phones fer the last three hours?”

“Shit, sorry, Sam,” said Robin, pulling out her mobile and looking at it. She’d had fifteen missed calls from Barclay since muting her mother in the American Bar. She was also pleased to see that she’d missed a couple of texts from Morris, one of which seemed to have a picture attached.

“Beyond the call of duty to come in person,” said the slightly drunk Strike. He wasn’t sure whether he was more glad or annoyed that Barclay had interrupted, but on balance, he thought annoyance was uppermost.

“The wife’s at her mother’s wi’ the bairn overnight,” said Barclay. “So I thought I’d come deliver the good news in person.”

He helped himself to a poppadum and sat down on the arm of the sofa at the other end to Strike.

“I’ve found oot what SB gets up tae in Stoke Newington. All down tae Robin. You ready for this?”

“What?” said Strike, looking between Barclay and Robin. “When—?”

“Earlier,” said Robin, “before I met you.”

“Rang the doorbell,” said Barclay, “said I’d bin recommended by SB, wondered whether she could help me oot. She didnae believe me. I had to get a foot in the door to stop her slammin’ it on me. Then she says SB told her a Scottish guy talked him doon off Tower Bridge the other day.

“So I decide it’s cut our losses time,” said Barclay. “I said, yeah, that wuz me. I’m a friend. We know what ye’re up to in here. You’re gonnae wanna talk to me, if ye care aboot your client.

“So she let me in.”

Barclay ate a bit of poppadum.

“Sorry, starvin’. Anyway, she takes me in the back room, and there it all is.”

“There what all is?”

“Giant playpen she’s knocked up, out o’ some foam an’ MDF,” said Barclay, grinning. “Big old changin’ mat. Stack of adult nappies. Johnson’s baby powder.”

Strike appeared to have been struck momentarily speechless. Robin began to laugh, but stopped quickly, because it made her face hurt.

“Poor old SB gets aff on bein’ a baby. She’s only got one other client, that guy at the gym. Doesnae need any more, because SB pays her so much. She dresses ’em up. Changes ’em. Powders their fucking arses—”

“You’re having a laugh,” said Strike. “This can’t be real.”

“It is real,” said Robin, with the ice pack pressed to her face. “It’s called… hang on…”

She brought up the list of paraphilias on her phone again.

“Autonepiophilia. ‘Being aroused by the thought of oneself as an infant.’”

“How the hell did you—?”

“I was watching the old people being wheeled out of the nursing home,” said Robin. “Morris said they were like kids, that some of them were probably wearing nappies and it just… clicked. I saw her buying a ton of baby powder and dummies in the supermarket, but we’ve never once seen a child go in or out of that house. Then there was that patting on the head business, like the men were little kids…”

Strike remembered following the gym manager home, the man’s hand over his lower face as he left Elinor Dean’s house, as though he’d had something protruding from his mouth that he wanted to conceal.

“… and big boxes being delivered, of something really light,” Robin was saying.

“That’ll be the adult nappies,” said Barclay. “Anyway… she’s no’ a bad woman. Made me a cup of tea. She kens aboot the blackmail, but here’s something interestin’: she and SB don’t think Shifty knows what’s really goin’ on inside that hoose.”

“How come?”

“The gym manager let it slip tae Shifty he knew a big man at Shifty’s company. SB and the gym guy sometimes go in the playpen together, see. Like it’s a nurs—like it’s a nurser—”

Barclay suddenly broke into peals of laughter and Strike followed suit. Robin pressed the ice pack to her face and joined in. For a minute, all three of them roared with laughter at the mental image of the two men in nappies, sitting in their MDF playpen.

“—like it’s a nursery,” said Barclay in a falsetto, wiping tears out of his eyes. “Fuck me, it takes all sorts, eh? Anyway, the tit at the gym lets this slip, an’ Shifty, knowin’ old SB never went tae a gym in his life, an’ that he lives on the other side o’ London, probes a wee bit, and notices the other guy gettin’ uncomfortable. So Shifty follows SB. Watches him going in and oot Elinor’s place. Draws the obvious conclusion: she’s a hooker.

“Shifty then walks intae SB’s office, closes the door, gives him Elinor’s address, and says he kens what’s goin’ on in there. SB was shittin’ himself, but he’s no fool. He reckons Shifty thinks it’s just straight sex, but he’s worried Shifty might do more diggin’. See, SB found Elinor online, advertisin’ her services in some dark corner o’ the net. SB’s scared Shifty’ll go looking for whut she really does if he denies it’s sex, an’ if anyone finds oot whut really goes on in there, SB’s gonna be straight back up Tower Bridge.

“So, that bit’s no’ so funny,” said Barclay, more soberly. “The guy at the gym only came clean tae SB and Elinor a coupla months ago, about talking tae Shifty. He’s aboot ready tae kill himself, for what he’s done. Elinor’s taken her ad down, but the internet never forgets, so that’s no bloody use…

“The worst thing, Elinor says, is Shifty himself is a right cock. SB’s told her all aboot him. Apparently Shifty takes his coke habit tae work and he’s always feelin’ up his PA, but SB cannae do anything about it, for fear of retribution. So,” said Barclay, “what are we gonnae do, eh? Tell the board SB’s suit troosers dinnae fit him properly because he’s wearin’ a nappy underneath?”

Strike didn’t smile. The amount of whisky he’d consumed didn’t particularly help his mental processes. It was Robin who spoke first.

“Well, we can tell the board everything, and accept that’s going to ruin a few lives… or we can let them terminate our contract without telling them what’s going on, and accept that Shifty’s going to keep blackmailing SB… or…”

“Yeah,” said Strike heavily, “that’s the question, isn’t it? Where’s the third option, where Shifty gets his comeuppance and SB doesn’t end up in the Thames?”

“It sounds,” said Robin to Barclay, “as though Elinor would back SB up, if he claimed it was just an affair? Of course, SB’s wife mightn’t be happy.”

“Aye, Elinor’d back him up,” said Barclay. “It’s in her interests.”

“I’d like to nail Shifty,” said Strike. “That’d please the client no end, if we helped them get rid of Shifty without the company’s name getting splashed all over the papers… which it definitely will if it gets out their CEO likes having his arse powdered…

“If that PA’s being sexually harassed,” Strike said, “and watching him do coke at work, why isn’t she complaining?”

“Fear of not being believed?” Robin suggested. “Of losing her job?”

“Could you,” Strike said to Robin, “ring Morris for me? He’ll still have the girl’s contact details. And, Barclay,” Strike added, getting up from the sofa on the third attempt, and heading for the inner office, “come in here, we’re going to have to change next week’s rota. Robin can’t follow people looking like she just did three rounds with Tyson Fury.”

The other two went into Strike’s office. Robin stayed sitting at Pat’s desk for a moment, thinking not about what Barclay had just told them, but about the moments before he’d arrived, when she and Strike had been sitting in semi-darkness. The memory of Strike telling her she was his best friend made her heart feel immeasurably lightened, as though something she hadn’t realized was weighing on it had been removed forever.

After a moment’s pleasurable savoring of this feeling, she pulled out her mobile, and opened the texts Morris had sent her earlier. The first, which had the picture attached, said “lol.” The image was of a sign reading: “Viagra Shipment Stolen. Cops Looking For Gang of Hardened Criminals.” The second text said, “Not funny?”

“No,” Robin muttered. “Not funny.”

Getting to her feet, she pressed Morris’s number, and began to clear up the curry one-handed, while she held the phone to her ear.

“Evening,” said Morris, after a couple of rings. “Calling to tell me you’ve found a hardened criminal?”

“Are you driving?” asked Robin, ignoring the witticism.

“On foot. Just seen the old folks’ home locked up for the night. I’m actually right by the office, I’m on my way to relieve Hutchins. He’s outside the Ivy, keeping an eye on Miss Jones’s boyfriend.”

“Well, we need the details of Shifty’s PA,” said Robin.

“What? Why?”

“We’ve found out what he’s blackmailing SB about, but,” she hesitated, imagining the jokes she’d have to hear at SB’s expense, if she told Morris what Elinor Dean was doing for him, “it’s nothing illegal and he’s not hurting anyone. We want to talk to Shifty’s PA again, so we need her contact details.”

“No, I don’t think we should go back to her,” said Morris. “Bad idea.”

“Why?” Robin asked, as she dropped the foil tins into the pedal bin, suppressing her frown because it made her bruised face ache.

“Because… fuck’s sake,” said Morris, who usually avoided swearing to Robin. “You were the one who said we shouldn’t use her.”

Behind Robin, in the inner office, Barclay laughed at something Strike had said. For the third time that evening, Robin had a feeling of impending trouble.

“Saul,” she said, “you aren’t still seeing her, are you?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Robin picked up the plates from the desk and put them in the sink, waiting for his answer.

“No, of course I’m not,” he said, with an attempt at a laugh. “I just think this is a bad idea. You were the one who said, before, that she had too much to lose—”

“But we wouldn’t be asking her to entrap him or set him up this time—”

“I’ll need to think about this,” said Morris.

Robin put the knives and forks into the sink, too.

“Saul, this isn’t up for debate. We need her contact details.”

“I don’t know whether I kept them,” said Morris, and Robin knew he was lying. “Where’s Strike right now?”

“Denmark Street,” said Robin. Not wanting another sly joke about her and Strike being together after dark, she purposely didn’t say she was there, too.

“OK, I’ll ring him,” said Morris, and before Robin could say anything else, he’d hung up.

The whisky she’d drunk was still having a slightly anesthetic effect. Robin knew that if she were entirely sober, she’d be feeling still more incensed at yet another example of Morris treating her not as a partner in the firm, but as Strike’s secretary.

Turning on the taps in the cramped kitchen area, she began rinsing off the plates and forks, and as curry sauce dripped down the drain, her thoughts drifted again to those moments before Barclay had arrived, while she and Strike had still been sitting in semi-darkness.

Out on Charing Cross Road, a car passed, blaring Rita Ora’s “I Will Never Let You Down,” and softly, under her breath, Robin sang along:

“Tell me baby what we gonna do

Putting the plug into the sink, she began to fill it, squirting washing-up liquid on top of the cutlery. Singing, her eyes fell on the unopened vodka Strike had bought, but which neither of them had touched. She thought of Oakden stealing vodka at Margot’s barbecue…

… and claiming that he hadn’t spiked the punch. Yet Gloria had vomited… At the very moment Robin drew breath into her lungs to call to Strike, and tell him her new idea, two hands closed on her waist.

Twice in Robin’s life, a man had attacked her from behind: without conscious thought, she simultaneously stamped down hard with her high heel on the foot of the man behind her, threw back her head, smashing it into his face, grabbed a knife in the sink and spun around as the grip at her waist disappeared.

“FUCK!” bellowed Morris.

She hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs over the noise of water splashing into the sink and her own singing. Morris was now doubled up, hands clamped over his nose.

“FUCK!” he shouted again, taking his hands away from his face, to reveal that his nose was bleeding. He hopped backward, the imprint of her stiletto imprinted in his shoe, and collapsed onto the sofa.

“What’s going on?” said Strike, emerging at speed from the inner office and looking from Morris on the sofa to Robin, who was still holding the knife. She turned off the taps, breathing hard.

“He grabbed me,” she said, as Barclay emerged from the inner room behind Strike. “I didn’t hear him coming.”

“It—was—a—fucking—joke,” said Morris, examining the blood smeared on his hands. “I only meant to make you jump—fuck’s sake—”

But adrenaline and whisky had suddenly unleashed an anger in Robin such as she hadn’t felt since the night she’d left Matthew. Light-headed, she advanced on Morris.

“Would you sneak up on Strike and grab him round the waist? D’you creep up on Barclay and hug him? D’you send either of them pictures of your dick?”

There was a silence.

“You bitch,” said Morris, the back of his hand pressed to his nostrils. “You said you wouldn’t—”

“He did what?” said Strike.

“Sent me a dick pic,” snapped the furious Robin, and turning back to Morris, she said, “I’m not some sixteen-year-old work experience girl who’s scared of telling you to stop. I don’t want your hands on me, OK? I don’t want you kissing me—”

“He sent you—?” began Strike.

“I didn’t tell you because you were so stressed,” said Robin. “Joan was dying, you were up and down to Cornwall, you didn’t need the grief, but I’m done. I’m not working with him any more. I want him gone.”

“Christ’s sake,” said Morris again, dabbing at his nose, “it was a joke—”

“Ye need tae learn tae read the fuckin’ room, mate,” said Barclay, who was standing against the wall, arms folded, and seemed to be enjoying himself.

“You can’t fucking fire me over—”

“You’re a subcontractor,” said Strike. “We’re not renewing your contract. Your non-disclosure agreement remains in operation. One word of anything you’ve found out working here, and I’ll make sure you never get another detective job. Now get the fuck out of this office.”

Wild-eyed, Morris stood up, still bleeding from his left nostril.

“Fine. You want to keep her on because you’ve got a hard-on for her, fine.”

Strike took a step forwards; Morris nearly fell over the sofa, backing away.

“Fine,” he said again.

He turned and walked straight out of the office, slamming the glass door behind him. While the door vibrated, and Morris’s footsteps clanged away down the metal stairs, Barclay pushed himself off the wall, plucked the knife Robin was still holding out of her hand and went to drop it into the sink with the dirty crockery.

“Never liked that tosser,” he said.

Strike and Robin looked at each other, then at the worn carpet, where a couple of drops of Morris’s blood still glistened.

“One all, then,” said Strike, clapping his hands together. “What say, first to break Barclay’s nose wins the night?”