Troubled Blood

60

What would have happened had Sam Barclay not opened the door that evening and switched on the light was a question that preoccupied both detective partners over the weekend, each of them re-running the conversation in their head, wondering what the other was thinking, and whether too much had been said, or given away.

Sober now, Strike had to be glad he hadn’t done what whisky had been urging him to do. Had he acted on that alcohol-fueled impulse, he might now be in a state of bitter remorse, with no way back to the friendship that was unique in his life. Yet in his free moments, he wondered whether Robin had known how dangerously close he’d come to pushing the conversation into territory that had previously been fenced around with barbed wire, or that, seconds before Barclay flicked the light switch, Strike had been trying to remember when he’d last changed his sheets.

Robin, meanwhile, had woken on Sunday morning with her face aching as though it had been trodden on, a slight hangover, and a volatile mixture of pleasure and anxiety. She went back over everything she’d said to Strike, hoping she hadn’t betrayed any of those feelings she habitually denied, even to herself. The memory of him telling her she was his best friend caused a little spurt of happiness every time she returned to it, but as the day wore on, and her bruising worsened, she wished she’d been brave enough to ask him directly how he now felt about Charlotte Campbell.

An image of Charlotte hung permanently in Robin’s head these days, like a shadowy portrait she’d never wanted hung. The picture had acquired shape and form in the four years since they’d passed on the stairs in the Denmark Street office, because of the many details Ilsa had given her, and the snippets she’d read in the press. Last night, though, that image had become stark and fixed: a darkly romantic vision of a lost and dying love, breathing her final words in Strike’s ear as she lay among trees.

And this was, however you looked at it, an extraordinarily powerful image. Strike had once, when extremely drunk, told Robin that Charlotte was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and as she hovered between life and death, that beautiful woman had chosen to contact Strike, to tell him she loved him still. What did prosaic Robin Ellacott have to offer that was in any way equal to such high-stakes drama, such extremity of emotion? An up-to-date rota, nearly docketed invoices and cups of strong tea? Doubtless because of the pain in her face, Robin’s mood vacillated between diminishing cheerfulness and a tendency to brood. Finally, she gave herself a stern talking to: Strike had given her an unprecedented assurance of affection, and she’d never have to see Saul Morris again, and she should be delighted about both.

Predictably, it was Pat who took the sudden firing of Saul Morris hardest. Strike delivered the news on Monday morning, as he and the secretary narrowly missed colliding in the doorway onto Denmark Street, Strike on his way out, Pat on her way in. Both of them were preparing for the ingestion of nicotine, Pat having just taken out the electronic cigarette she used during work hours, Strike already holding the Benson & Hedges he rarely smoked in the office.

“Morning,” said Strike. “I’ve left a note on your desk, couple of things I’d like you to do while I’m out. Robin’ll be in at ten. Oh—”

He’d taken a couple of steps before turning back.

“—and can you calculate Morris’s pay up to Friday and transfer it into his account right away? He’s not coming back.”

He didn’t wait for a reaction, so it was Robin who took the brunt of their secretary’s disappointment when she arrived at ten to ten. Pat had Radio Two playing, but turned it off the moment the door handle turned.

“Morning. Why—what ’appened to you?” said Pat.

Robin’s face looked worse, two days on, than it had on Saturday. While the swelling had subsided, both eyes were ringed in dark gray tinged with red.

“It was an accident. I bumped into something,” said Robin, stripping off her coat and hanging it on a peg. “So I won’t be on surveillance this week.”

She took a book out of her handbag and crossed to the kettle, holding it. She hadn’t particularly enjoyed the covert staring on the Tube that morning, but wasn’t going to mention Strike’s elbow to Pat, because she tried, wherever possible, not to fuel Pat’s antipathy for her partner.

“Why won’t Saul be coming back?” Pat demanded.

“He didn’t work out,” said Robin, her back to Pat as she took down two mugs.

“What d’you mean?” said Pat indignantly. “He caught that man who was having it away with the nanny. He always kept his paperwork up to date, which is more’n you can say for that Scottish nutter.”

“I know,” said Robin. “But he wasn’t a great team player, Pat.”

Pat took a deep drag of nicotine vapor, frowning.

“He,” she nodded toward the empty chair where Strike usually sat, “could take a few lessons from Morris!”

Robin knew perfectly well that it wasn’t Pat’s decision who the partners hired and fired, but unlike Strike, she also thought that in such a small team, Pat deserved the truth.

“It wasn’t Cormoran who wanted him gone,” she said, turning to face the secretary, “it was me.”

“You!” said Pat, astounded. “I thought the pair of you were keen on each other!”

“No. I didn’t like him. Apart from anything else, he sent me a picture of his erect penis at Christmas.”

Pat’s deeply lined face registered an almost comical dismay.

“In… in the post?”

Robin laughed.

“What, tucked inside a Christmas card? No. By text.”

“You didn’t—?”

“Ask for it? No,” said Robin, no longer smiling. “He’s a creep, Pat.”

She turned back to the kettle. The untouched bottle of vodka was still standing beside the sink. As Robin’s eyes fell on it, she remembered the idea that had occurred to her on Saturday night, shortly before Morris’s hands closed around her waist. After giving the secretary her coffee, she carried her own into the inner office, along with the book she’d taken from her bag. Pat called after her,

“Shall I update the rota, or will you?”

“I’ll do it,” said Robin, closing the door, but instead, she called Strike.

“Morning,” he said, answering on the second ring.

“Hi. I forgot to tell you an idea I had on Saturday night.”

“Go on.”

“It’s about Gloria Conti. Why did she vomit in the bathroom at Margot’s barbecue, if Oakden didn’t spike the punch?”

“Because he’s a liar, and he did spike the punch?” suggested Strike. He was currently in the same Islington square that Robin had patrolled on Friday, but he paused now and reached for his cigarettes, eyes on the central garden, which today was deserted. Beds densely planted with purple pansies looked like velvet cloaks spread upon the glistening grass.

“Or did she throw up because she was pregnant?” said Robin.

“I thought,” said Strike, after a pause while lighting a cigarette, “that only happens in the mornings? Isn’t that why it’s called—”

On the point of saying “morning sickness,” Strike remembered the expectant wife of an old army friend, who’d been hospitalized for persistent, round-the-clock vomiting.

“My cousin threw up any time of the day when she was pregnant,” said Robin. “She couldn’t stand certain food smells. And Gloria was at a barbecue.”

“Right,” said Strike, who was suddenly remembering the odd notion that had occurred to him after talking to the Bayliss sisters. Robin’s theory struck him as stronger than his. In fact, his idea was weakened if Robin’s was true.

“So,” he said, “you’re thinking it might’ve been Gloria who—”

“—had the abortion at the Bride Street clinic? Yes,” said Robin. “And that Margot helped her arrange it. Irene mentioned Gloria being closeted in Margot’s consulting room, remember? While Irene was left on reception?”

The lilac bush in the central garden was casting out such a heavy scent that Strike could smell it even over the smoke of his cigarette.

“I think you could be on to something here,” said Strike slowly.

“I also thought this might explain—”

“Why Gloria doesn’t want to talk to us?”

“Well, yes. Apart from it being a traumatic memory, her husband might not know what happened,” said Robin. “Where are you just now?”

“Islington,” said Strike. “I’m about to have a crack at Mucky Ricci.”

“What?” said Robin, startled.

“Been thinking about it over the weekend,” said Strike, who, unlike Robin, had had no time off, but had run surveillance on Shifty and Miss Jones’s boyfriend. “We’re nearly ten months into our year, and we’ve got virtually nothing. If he’s demented, obviously it’ll be no-go, but you never know, I could be able to get something out of him. He might even,” said Strike, “get a kick out of reliving the good old days…”

“And what if his sons find out?”

“He can’t talk, or not properly. I’m banking on him being unable to tell them I’ve been in. Look,” said Strike, in no particular hurry to hang up, because he wanted to finish his cigarette, and would rather do it talking to Robin, “Betty Fuller thinks Ricci killed her, I could tell. So did Tudor Athorn; he told his nephew so, and they were the kind of people who were plugged into local gossip and knew about local low life.

“I keep going back to the thing Shanker said, when I told him about Margot vanishing without a trace. ‘Professional job.’ When you take a step back and look at it,” said Strike, now down to the last centimeter of his cigarette, “it seems borderline impossible for every trace of her to have disappeared, unless someone with plenty of practice handled it.”

“Creed had practice,” said Robin quietly.

“D’you know what I did last night?” said Strike, ignoring this interjection. “Looked up Kara Wolfson’s birth certificate online.”

“Why? Oh,” said Robin, and Strike could hear her smiling, “star sign?”

“Yeah. I know it breaks the means before motive rule,” he added, before Robin could point it out, “but it struck me that someone might’ve told Margot about Kara’s murder. Doctors know things, don’t they? In and out of people’s houses, having confidential consultations. They’re like priests. They hear secrets.”

“You were checking whether Kara was a Scorpio,” said Robin. It was a statement rather than a question.

“Exactly. And wondering whether Ricci looked into that party to show his goons which woman they were going to pick off.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Was Kara a Scorpio?”

“Oh. No. Taurus—seventeenth of May.”

Strike now heard pages turning at Robin’s end of the call.

“Which means, according to Schmidt…” said Robin, and there was a brief pause, “… she was Cetus.”

“Huh,” said Strike, who’d now finished his cigarette. “Well, wish me luck. I’m going in.”

“Good l—”

“Cormoran Strike!” said somebody gleefully, behind him.

As Strike hung up on Robin, a slender black woman in a cream coat came alongside him, beaming.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. “Selly Oak. I’m—”

“Marjorie!” said Strike, the memory coming back to him. “Marjorie the physiotherapist. How are you? What’re you—?”

“I do a few hours in the old folks’ home up the road!” said Marjorie. “And look at you, all famous…”

Fuck.

It took Strike twenty-five minutes to extricate himself from her.

“… so that’s bloody that,” he told Robin later at the office. “I pretended I was in the area to visit my accountant, but if she’s working at St. Peter’s, there’s no chance of us getting in to see Ricci.”

“No chance of you getting in there—”

“I’ve already told you,” said Strike sharply. The state of Robin’s face was a visible warning against recklessness, of the perils of failing to think through consequences. “You’re not going anywhere near him.”

“I’ve got Miss Jones on the line,” Pat called from the outer office.

“Put her through to me,” said Robin, as Strike mouthed “thanks.”

Robin talked to Miss Jones while continuing to readjust the rota on her computer, which, given Robin’s own temporary unavailability for surveillance, and Morris’s permanent absence, was like trying to balance a particularly tricky linear equation. She spent the next forty minutes making vague sounds of agreement whenever Miss Jones paused to draw breath. Their client’s objective, Robin could tell, was staying on the line long enough for Strike to come back to the office. Finally, Robin got rid of her by pretending to get a message from Pat saying Strike would be out all day.

It was her only lie of the day, Robin thought, while Strike and Pat discussed Barclay’s expenses in the outer office. Given that Strike was adept himself at avoiding pledging his own word when he didn’t want to, he really ought to have noticed that Robin had made no promises whatsoever about staying away from Mucky Ricci.

61

In the first week of June, a blind item appeared in the Metro, concerning Strike’s presence in the American Bar on the night of his father’s party.

As Hold It Back was the name of one of Jonny Rokeby’s albums, nobody could really be in much doubt which father and son were in question. A couple of journalists called Strike’s office, but as neither he nor Rokeby were disposed to comment, the story fizzled out for lack of details. “Could’ve been worse,” was Strike’s only comment. “No photos, no mention of Bamborough. Looks like Oakden’s been frightened out of the idea of selling stories about us.”

Feeling slightly guilty, Robin had already scrolled through the pictures of Jonny Rokeby’s party on her phone, while on surveillance outside Miss Jones’s boyfriend’s house. Rokeby’s guests, who included celebrities from both Hollywood and the world of rock ’n’ roll, had all attended in eighteenth-century costumes. Buried in the middle of all the famous people was a single picture of Rokeby surrounded by six of his seven adult children. Robin recognized Al, grinning from beneath a crooked powdered wig. She could no more imagine Strike there, trussed up in brocade, with patches on his face, than she could imagine him pole-vaulting.

Relieved as she was that Oakden appeared to have given up the idea of discussing the agency with the press, Robin’s anxiety mounted as June progressed. The Bamborough case, which mattered to her more than almost anything else, had come to a complete standstill. Gloria Conti had met Anna’s request for her cooperation with silence, Steve Douthwaite remained as elusive as ever, Robin had heard no news about the possibility of interviewing Dennis Creed, and Mucky Ricci remained cloistered inside his nursing home, which, owing to the agency’s reduced manpower, nobody was watching any more.

Even temporary replacements for Morris were proving impossible to find. Strike had contacted everyone he knew in the Special Investigation Branch, Hutchins had asked his Met contacts, and Robin had canvassed Vanessa, but nobody was showing any interest in joining the agency.

“Summer, isn’t it?” said Barclay, as he and Robin crossed paths in the office one Saturday afternoon. “People don’t want tae start a new job, they want a holiday. I ken how they feel.”

Both Barclay and Hutchins had booked weeks off with their wives and children months in advance, and neither partner could begrudge their subcontractors a break. The result was that by mid-July, Strike and Robin were the only two left working at the agency.

While Strike devoted himself to following Miss Jones’s boyfriend, still trying to find out anything that might prove that he was an unsuitable person to have custody of his daughter, Robin was trying to kindle an acquaintance with Shifty’s PA, which wasn’t proving easy. So far that month, wearing a different wig and colored contacts each time, Robin had tried to engage her in conversation in a bar, deliberately tripped over her in a nightclub, and followed her into the ladies in Harvey Nichols. While the PA didn’t seem to have the slightest idea that it was the same woman opportuning or inconve­niencing her, she showed no inclination to chat, let alone confess that her boss was a lech or a coke user.

Having tried and failed to sit next to the PA in a sandwich bar in Holborn one lunchtime, Robin, who today had dark hair and dark brown eyes courtesy of hair chalk and contact lenses, decided the moment had come to try and wheedle information out of a very old man, instead of a pretty young woman.

She hadn’t reached this decision lightly, nor did she approach it in any casual spirit. While Robin was vaguely fond of Strike’s old friend Shanker, she was under no illusions about how evil a person would have to be to scare a man who’d been steeped in criminal violence since the age of nine. Accordingly, she’d worked out a plan, of which the first step was to have a full and effective disguise. Today’s happened to be particularly good: she’d learned a lot about makeup since starting the job with Strike, and she’d sometimes had the satisfaction of seeing her partner double-take before he realized who she was. After checking her reflection carefully in the mirror of a McDonald’s bathroom, and reassuring herself that she not only looked utterly unlike Robin Ellacott, but that nobody would guess she’d recently had two black eyes, she set off for the Tube, and just under twenty minutes later, arrived at Angel station.

The garden where the old residents of St. Peter’s sometimes sat was empty as she passed it, in spite of the warm weather. The pansies were gone, replaced by pink asters and the broad, sunny street where the nursing home lay was almost deserted.

The quotation from St. Peter gleamed gold in the sunshine as Robin approached the front door.

… it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed… but with the precious blood of Christ…

Robin rang the bell. After a few moments, a chubby black-haired woman in the familiar blue uniform opened it.

“Afternoon,” she said, sounding Spanish.

“Hi,” said Robin, her North London accent copied from her friend Vanessa. “I’m here to visit Enid? I’m her great-granddaughter.”

She’d stored up the only first name she’d heard for any of the old ladies in the home. Her great fear had been that Enid might have died before she got to use it, or that Enid had no family.

“Oh, that’s nice,” said the nurse, smiling and gesturing toward a visitors’ book just inside the door. “Sign in, please, and don’t forget to sign out when you leave. She’s in her room. Might be asleep!”

Robin stepped into a dark, wood-paneled hall. She deliberately hadn’t asked which number Enid’s room was, because she intended to get lost finding it.

A number of walking frames and a couple of collapsible wheelchairs were lined up against the wall. The hall was dominated by an enormous crucifix facing the door, on which a pallid plaster Jesus hung, his six-pack rendered with startling precision, scarlet blood dripping from hands, feet and the punctures left by his crown of thorns. The home smelled better than Betty Fuller’s sheltered accommodation: though there was a definite undertone of old cooking smells, it mingled with that of furniture wax.

Sunlight poured through the fan window behind Robin as she bent over the visitors’ book and wrote in the date, the time she’d entered the building and the fake name she’d decided on: Vanessa Jones. Over the table where the visitors’ book lay hung a board showing the name of each resident. Beside each was a little sliding door, which could be adjusted to show whether the occupant was “in” or “out.” Niccolo Ricci was currently—and, Robin suspected, almost permanently—“in.”

There was a lift, but she chose to take the red-carpeted and wooden-banistered stairs, passing the Trinidadian nurse she’d often seen while on surveillance, who was descending. He smiled and wished her a good afternoon, his arms laden with packs of incontinence pads.

A doorway led off the first landing, a small sign beside it announc­ing that this way lay bedrooms 1 to 10. Robin set off along the corridor, reading names off doors. Unfortunately, “Mrs. Enid Billings” lived behind door number 2 and, as Robin swiftly discovered, Ricci wasn’t on her floor. Aware that this was going to make any claim of having got lost on the way to Enid’s room implausible in the extreme, Robin doubled back, and climbed up to the second floor.

A few steps along an identical corridor to the one below, she heard a woman with a strong Polish accent in the distance, and backed hastily into an alcove where a sink and cupboard had been placed.

“D’you need the bathroom? Do—you—need—the—bathroom, Mister—Ricci?”

A low moan answered.

“Yes?” said the voice. “Or no?”

There was a second, answering moan.

“No? All right then…”

Footsteps grew louder: the nurse was about to pass the alcove, so Robin stepped boldly out from it, smiling.

“Just washing my hands,” she told the approaching nurse, who was blonde and flat-footed and merely nodded as she passed, apparently preoccupied with other matters.

Once the nurse had disappeared, Robin proceeded down the corridor, until she reached the door of number 15, which bore the name “Mr. Nico Ricci.”

Unconsciously holding her breath, Robin knocked gently, and pushed. There was no lock on the inside of the door; it swung open at once.

The room inside, while small, faced south, getting plenty of sun. A great effort had been made to make the room homely: watercolor pictures hung on the walls, including one of the Bay of Naples. The mantelpiece was covered in family photographs, and a number of children’s paintings had been taped up on the wardrobe door, including one captioned “Grandpa and Me and a Kite.”

The elderly occupant was bent almost double in an armchair beside the window. In the minute that had elapsed since the nurse left him, he’d fallen fast asleep. Robin let the door close quietly behind her, crept across to Ricci and sat down on the end of his single bed, facing the one-time pimp, pornographer and orchestrator of gang-rape and murder.

There was no doubt that the staff looked after their charges well. Ricci’s dark gray hair and his fingernails were as clean as his bright white shirt collar. In spite of the warmth of the room, they’d dressed him in a pale blue sweater. On one of the veiny hands lying limp on the chair beside him glistened the gold lion’s head ring. The fingers were curled up in a way that made Robin wonder whether he could still use them. Perhaps he’d had a stroke, which would account for his inability to talk.

“Mr. Ricci?” said Robin quietly.

He made a little snorting snuffle, and slowly raised his head, his mouth hanging open. His enormous, drooping eyes, though not as filmy as Betty Fuller’s, nevertheless looked dull, and like his ears and nose seemed to have grown while the rest of him shrank, leaving loose folds of dark skin.

“I’ve come to ask you some questions,” said Robin quietly. “About a woman called Margot Bamborough.”

He gaped at her, open-mouthed. Could he hear her? Could he understand? There was no hearing aid in either of his overlarge ears. The loudest noise in the room was the thumping of Robin’s heart.

“Do you remember Margot Bamborough?” she asked.

To her surprise, Ricci made his low moan. Did that mean yes or no?

“You do?” said Robin.

He moaned again.

“She disappeared. D’you know—?”

Footsteps were coming along the corridor outside. Robin got up hastily and smoothed away the impression she’d left on the bedspread.

Please God, don’t let them be coming in here.

But God, it seemed, wasn’t listening to Robin Ellacott. The footsteps grew louder, and then the door opened to reveal a very tall man whose face was pitted with acne scars and whose knobbly bald head looked, as Barclay had said, as though something heavy had been dropped on it: Luca Ricci.

“Who’re you?” he said. His voice, which was far softer and higher than she’d imagined, made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. For a second or two, Robin’s terror threatened to derail her carefully worked out contingency plan. The very worst she’d expected to have to deal with was a nurse. None of the Riccis should have been here; it wasn’t Sunday. And of all the Riccis she would have wanted to meet, Luca was the last.

“You his relative?” Robin asked in her North London accent. “Oh, fank Gawd! He was making a weird moaning noise. I’ve just been visiting my gran, I fort he was ill or somefing.”

Still standing in the doorway, Luca looked Robin up and down.

“He doesthn’t mean anything by it,” said Luca, who had a lisp. “He moanth a bit, but it don’t mean nothing, do it, eh, Dad?” he said loudly to the old man, who merely blinked at his eldest son.

Luca laughed.

“What’th your name?” he asked Robin.

“Vanessa,” she said promptly. “Vanessa Jones.”

She took half a step forwards, hoping he’d move aside, but he remained planted exactly where he was, though smiling a little more widely. She knew he’d understood that she wanted to leave, but couldn’t tell whether his evident determination to keep her inside was done for the simple pleasure of keeping her momentarily trapped, or because he hadn’t believed her reason for being in his father’s room. Robin could feel sweat under her armpits and over her scalp, and hoped to God that her hair chalk wouldn’t come off.

“Never theen you around here before,” said Luca.

“No, it’s my first time,” said Robin, forcing herself to smile. “They look after ’em well, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Luca, “not bad. I usually come Thundayth, but we’re off to Florida tomorrow. Gonna mith hith birthday. Not that he knowth it’th hith birthday—do you, eh?” he said, addressing his father, whose mouth continued to hang open, his eyes fixed vacantly on his son.

Luca took a small wrapped package from under his jacket, leaned over to the chest of drawers and laid it on top without moving his large feet so much as an inch.

“Aw, that’s nice,” said Robin.

She could feel the sweat on her breastbone now, where it would be visible to Luca. The room was as warm as a greenhouse. Even had she not known who Luca was, she’d have known what he was. She could feel the potential for violence coming off him like radiation. It was in the greedy smile he was giving her, in the way he was now leaning up against the door jamb, reveling in the silent exercise of power.

“It’th only chocolateth,” said Luca. “Who’th your granny?”

“Great-granny, really, but I call her ‘Gran,’” Robin said, playing for time, trying to remember any of the names she’d passed on the way to Ricci’s room. “Sadie.”

“Where’th she?”

“Couple of rooms that way,” said Robin, pointing left. She hoped he couldn’t hear how dry her mouth was. “Promised my mum I’d pop in and visit her while she’s on holiday.”

“Yeah?” said Luca. “Where’th your Mum gone?”

“Florence,” Robin invented wildly. “Art galleries.”

“Yeah?” said Luca again. “Our family’th from Napleth, originally. Innit, Dad?” he called over Robin’s head at the gaping old man, before looking Robin up and down again. “Know what my old man uthed to be?”

“No,” said Robin, trying to maintain her smile.

“He owned thtrip clubth,” said Luca Ricci. “Back in the old dayth, he’d’ve had your pantieth right off you.”

She tried to laugh, but couldn’t, and saw that Luca was delighted to see her discomfort.

“Oh yeah. Girl like you? He’d’ve offered you a hothtess job. It wath good money, too, even if you did have to blow thome of Dad’th mateth, hahaha.”

His laugh was as high-pitched as a woman’s. Robin couldn’t join in. She was remembering Kara Wolfson.

“Well,” she said, feeling the sweat trickling down her neck, “I really need—”

“Don’t worry,” said Luca, smiling, still standing firmly between her and the door, “I’m not in that game.”

“What do you do?” asked Robin, who’d been on the verge of asking him to move aside, but lost her nerve.

“I’m in inthuranthe,” said Luca, smiling broadly. “What about you?”

“Nursery nurse,” said Robin, taking the idea from the children’s daubs on the wardrobe door.

“Yeah? Like kidth, do you?”

“I love them,” said Robin.

“Yeah,” said Luca. “Me too. I got thix.”

“Wow,” said Robin. “Six!”

“Yeah. And I’m not like him,” said Luca, looking over Robin’s head again, at his gaping father. “He wathn’t interethted in uth until we were grown up. I like the littl’unth.”

“Oh, me too,” said Robin fervently.

“You needed to get knocked down by a car to get hith attention, when we were kidth,” said Luca. “Happened to my brother Marco, when he wath twelve.”

“Oh no,” said Robin politely.

He was playing with her, demanding that she give him appropriate responses, while both of them were equally aware that she was too scared to ask him to move aside, afraid of what he might do. Now he smiled at her feigned concern for his brother Marco’s long-ago car accident.

“Yeah, Dad thtayed at the hothpital with Marco for three weekth tholid, till Marco wath out of danger,” said Luca. “At leatht, I think it wath Marco he wath thtaying for. Might’ve been the nurtheth. In the old dayth,” said Luca, looking Robin up and down again, “they wore black thtockingth.”

Robin could hear footsteps again, and this time she prayed, please be coming in here, and her prayer was answered. The door behind Luca opened, hitting him in the back. The flat-footed blonde nurse was back.

“Oh, sorry, Mr. Ricci,” she said, as Luca stepped aside. “Oh,” she repeated, becoming aware of Robin’s presence.

“’E was moaning,” Robin said again, pointing at Mucky, in his chair. “Sorry, I shouldn’t’ve—I fort he might be in pain or something.”

And right on cue, Mucky Ricci moaned, almost certainly to contradict her.

“Yeah, he does a bit of that, if he wants something,” said the nurse. “Probably ready for the bathroom now, are you, Mr. Ricci?”

“I’m not thtaying to watch him crap,” said Luca Ricci, with a little laugh. “I only came to drop off hith prethent for Thurthday.”

Robin was already halfway out of the door, but to her horror, she’d walked barely three steps when Luca appeared behind her, taking one stride to her every two.

“Not going to thay goodbye to Thadie?” he asked, as they passed the door of Mrs. Sadie O’Keefe.

“Oh, she fell asleep while I was in there, bless her,” said Robin. “Flat out.”

They walked down the stairs, Luca slightly behind her all the way. She could feel his eyes, like lasers, on the nape of her neck, on her legs and her backside.

After what felt like ten minutes, though it was barely three, they reached the ground floor. The almost life-size plaster Jesus looked sadly down upon the killer and the impostor as they headed toward the door. Robin had just placed her hand on the handle when Luca said,

“Hang on a moment, Vanetha.”

Robin turned, a pulse thrumming in her neck.

“You’ve got to thign out,” said Luca, holding out a pen to her.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Robin, with a breathless giggle. “I told you—it’s my first time here.”

She bent over the visitors’ book. Directly below the signature she’d written on entering the building was Luca’s.

In the space left for “Comments” he’d written,

Robin scrawled the time beside her signature, then turned back to the door. He was holding it open for her.

“Fanks very much,” she said breathlessly, sidling past him into the fresh air.

“Give you a lift anywhere?” Luca asked her, pausing at the top of the steps to the street. “My car’th round the corner. Athton Martin.”

“Oh, no, fanks very much, though,” said Robin. “I’m meeting my boyfriend.”

“Be good, then,” said Luca Ricci. “And if you can’t be good, be thafe, hahaha.”

“Yes,” said Robin, a little wildly. “Oh, and enjoy Florida!”

He raised a hand to her and began to walk away, whistling “Begin the Beguine.” Light-headed with relief, Robin walked off in the opposite direction. It took the utmost restraint to stop herself breaking into a run.

Once she’d reached the square, she slid behind the lilac bush and watched the front of the nursing home for a full half an hour. Once she was certain that Luca Ricci had genuinely left, she doubled back.

62

The row, for which Robin was braced, was one of the worst she and Strike had ever had. His fury that she’d approached Mucky Ricci, after his clear warnings and instructions not to, remained unabated even after a solid hour’s argument in the office that evening, which culminated in Robin seizing her bag and walking out while Strike was mid-sentence, leaving him facing the vibrating glass door, wishing it had shattered, so he could bill her.

A night’s sleep only slightly mitigated Strike’s anger. Yes, there were major differences between Robin’s actions this time, and those that had seen him sack her three years previously: she hadn’t, for instance, spooked a suspect into hiding. Nor was there any indication, at least in the first twenty-four hours following her visit, that either the Ricci family or the nursing home suspected “Vanessa Jones” of being anyone other than she’d claimed to be. Above all (but this fact rankled, rather than soothed), Robin was now a partner in the firm, rather than a lowly subcontractor. For the first time, Strike was brought up against the hard fact that if they ever parted ways, a legal and financial tangle would engulf him. It would, in fact, be akin to a divorce.

He didn’t want to split from Robin, but his newly awakened awareness that he’d made it very difficult to do so increased his ire. The atmosphere between them remained strained for a fortnight after her visit to St. Peter’s until, on the first morning in August, Robin received a terse text from Strike asking her to abandon her fresh attempt to befriend Shifty’s PA, and come back to the office.

When she entered the inner room, she found Strike sitting at the partners’ desk, with bits and pieces of the Bamborough police file laid out in front of him. He glanced up at her, noted that her eye and hair color were her own, then said brusquely,

“The Shifty clients have just rung up. They’ve terminated the job, for lack of results.”

“Oh no,” said Robin, sinking into the chair opposite him. “I’m sorry, I really tried with Shifty’s PA—”

“And Anna and Kim want to talk to us. I’ve set up a conference call at four o’clock.”

“They aren’t—?”

“Winding things up?” said Strike unemotionally. “Probably. Apparently they’ve had a spur-of-the-moment invitation from a friend to join them on holiday in Tuscany. They want to talk to us before they go, because they’ll still be away on the fifteenth.”

There was a long silence. Strike didn’t appear to have anything else to say, but resumed his perusal of various bits of the case file.

“Cormoran,” said Robin.

“What?”

“Can we please talk about St. Peter’s?”

“I’ve said everything I’ve got to say,” said Strike, picking up Ruby Elliot’s statement about the two women struggling together in the rain, and pretending to read it again.

“I don’t mean about me going there. I’ve already said—”

“You said you wouldn’t approach Ricci—”

“I ‘agreed’ not to go near Ricci,” said Robin, sketching quotation marks in the air, “just like you ‘agreed’ with Gregory Talbot not to tell the police where you got that roll of film.” Hyperaware of Pat typing away in the outer office, Robin was speaking quietly. “I didn’t set out to defy you; I left him up to you, remember? But it needed doing, and you couldn’t. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a damn sight better than you are at disguising my appearance.”

“That’s not in question,” said Strike, throwing aside Ruby Elliot’s statement and picking up Gloria’s description of Theo, instead. “What bugs me, as you bloody well know, is that you didn’t tell me you were going to—”

“D’you ring me every three seconds and tell me what you’re going to do next? You’re happy enough for me to work on my own initiative when it suits—”

“Luca Ricci’s done time for putting electrodes on people’s genitals, Robin!” said Strike, dropping the pretense that the description of Theo had his attention.

“How many times are we going to go over this? D’you think I was pleased when he walked in the room? I’d never have gone in there if I’d known he was about to make a surprise appearance! The fact remains—”

“—it’s not a fact—”

“—if I hadn’t—”

“—this theory—”

“It isn’t a bloody theory, Strike, it’s reality, and you’re just being pig-headed about it.” Robin pulled her mobile out of her back pocket and brought up the photo she’d taken on her second visit to the nursing home, which had lasted barely two minutes, and involved her taking a quick, unwitnessed photograph of Luca Ricci’s handwriting in the visitors’ book.

“Give me the anonymous note,” she ordered Strike, holding out her hand for the piece of crumpled blue paper they’d taken away from their meeting with the Bayliss sisters. “There.”

She set them side by side, facing Strike. To Robin, the similarities were undeniable: the same odd mixture of capital and lower-case letters, all distinct and separate, but with odd and unnecessary little flourishes, rather like the incongruous lisp of a tall, dangerous-looking man whose skin was as pitted as a partly peeled orange.

“You can’t prove it’s the same writing from a photograph,” said Strike. He knew he was being ungracious, but his anger wasn’t yet fully spent. “Expert analysis relies on pen pressure, apart from anything else.”

“OK, fine,” said Robin, who now had a hard, angry lump in her throat. She got up and walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. Through the gap, Strike heard her talking to Pat, followed by the tinkle of mugs. Annoyed though he was, he still hoped she was going to get him a cup of tea, as well.

Frowning slightly, he pulled Robin’s mobile and the anonymous note toward him and looked again from one to the other. She was right, and he’d known, though not acknowledged it, from the moment she’d shown him the picture on her phone, on her return from St. Peter’s. Though he hadn’t told Robin so, Strike had forwarded a picture of both the anonymous note and Luca Ricci’s visitors’ book message to an expert handwriting analyst he’d reached through his police contacts. The woman had expressed caution about reaching a hard and fast conclusion without having the original samples in front of her, but said that, on the evidence, she was “seventy to eighty percent certain” that both had been written by the same person.

“Does handwriting remain that consistent, forty years apart?” Strike asked.

“Not always,” the expert replied. “You expect changes, typically. Mostly, people’s handwriting deteriorates with age because of physical factors. Mood can have an influence, too. My research tends to show that handwriting alters least in people who write infrequently, compared with those who write a lot. Occasional writers seem to stick with the style they adopted early, possibly in school. In the case of these two samples, there are certainly distinctive features that seem to have hung around from youth.”

“I think it’s fair to say this guy doesn’t write a lot in his line of work,” said Strike.

Luca’s last spell in jail, as Shanker had told him, had been for ordering and overseeing a stabbing. The victim had been knifed in the balls. By a miracle, he’d survived, “but ’e won’t be ’avin’ any more kids, poor cunt,” Shanker had informed Strike, two nights previously. “Can’t get a fuckin’ ’ard-on wivvout agony. Not worf living, is it, after that? The knife sliced straight through the right bollock, I ’eard—course, they ’ad him pinned down—”

“No need for details,” Strike had said. He’d just experienced a nasty sensation radiating out of his own balls up to his chest.

Strike had called Shanker on some slight pretext, purely to see whether any rumor had reached his old friend of Luca Ricci being concerned that a female detective had turned up in his father’s nursing home. As Shanker hadn’t mentioned anything, Strike had to conclude that no such whispers were abroad.

While this was a relief, it wasn’t really a surprise. Once he’d calmed down, Strike had been forced to admit to himself that he was sure Robin had got away with it. Everything Strike knew about Luca Ricci suggested he’d never have let her walk away unscathed if he’d believed she was there to investigate any member of his family. The kinds of people whose darkest impulses were kept in check by their own consciences, the dictates of the law, by social norms and common sense might find it hard to believe anyone would be so foolish or reckless as to hurt Robin inside a nursing home bedroom, or march her out of the building with a knife to her back. He wouldn’t do it in broad daylight, they’d say. He wouldn’t dare, with witnesses all around! But Luca’s fearsome reputation rested on his propensity for brazen violence, no matter where he was, or who was watching. He operated on an assumption of impunity, for which he had much justification. For every prison term he’d served, there’d been many incidents that should have seen him convicted, but which he’d managed to escape by intimidating witnesses, or terrifying others into taking the rap.

Robin returned to the inner office, stony-faced, but carrying two mugs of tea. She pushed the door closed with her foot, then set down the darker of the two teas in front of Strike.

“Thanks,” muttered Strike.

“You’re welcome,” she replied stiffly, checking her watch as she sat down again. They had twenty minutes to go, before the conference call with Anna and Kim.

“We can’t,” said Strike, “tell Anna we think Luca Ricci wrote the anonymous notes.”

Robin simply looked at him.

“We can’t have two nice middle-class women walking around telling people Ricci threatened Margot, and maybe killed her,” said Strike. “We’d be putting them in danger, quite apart from ourselves.”

“Can’t we at least show the samples to an expert?”

“I have,” said Strike, and he explained what the woman had said.

“Why didn’t you tell—”

“Because I was still bloody angry,” said Strike, sipping his tea. It was exactly the way he liked it, strong, sweet and the color of creosote. “Robin, the reality is, if we take the photo and the note to the police, whether or not anything comes of it, you’ll have painted a giant target on your back. Ricci’ll start digging around on who could have photographed his handwriting in that visitors’ book. It won’t take him long to find us.”

“He was twenty-two when Margot went missing,” said Robin quietly. “Old enough and big enough to abduct a woman. He had contacts to help with the disposal of a body. Betty Fuller thought the person who wrote the notes was the killer, and she’s still scared of telling us who it was. That could imply the son, just as well as the father.”

“I grant you all that,” said Strike, “but it’s time for a reality check. We haven’t got the resources to go up against organized criminals. You going to St. Peter’s was reckless enough—”

“Could you explain to me why it was reckless when I did it, but not when you were planning to do it?” said Robin.

Strike was momentarily stymied.

“Because I’m less experienced?” said Robin. “Because you think I’ll mess it up, or panic? Or that I can’t think on my feet?”

“None of those,” said Strike, though it cost him some pain to admit it.

“Well then—”

“Because my chances of surviving if Luca Ricci comes at me with a baseball bat are superior to yours, OK?”

“But Luca doesn’t come at people with baseball bats,” said Robin reasonably. “He comes at them with knives, electrodes and acid, and I don’t see how you’d withstand any of them better than I would. The truth is, you’re happy to take risks you don’t want me to take. I don’t know whether it’s lack of confidence in me, or chivalry, or one dressed up as the other—”

“Look—”

“No, you look,” said Robin. “If you’d been recognized in there, the whole agency would have paid the price. I’ve read up on Ricci, I’m not stupid. He goes for people’s families and associates and even their pets as often as he goes for them personally. Like it or not, there are places I can go more easily than you. I’m less distinctive-looking, I’m easier to disguise, and people trust women more than men, especially around kids and old people. We wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t gone to St. Peter’s—”

“We’d be better off not knowing it,” Strike snapped back. “Shanker said to me months back, ‘If Mucky’s the answer, you need to stop asking the question.’ Same goes for Luca, in spades.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Robin. “I know you don’t. You’d never choose not to know.”

She was right, but Strike didn’t want to admit it. Indeed, one of the things that had kept his anger simmering for the past two weeks was that he knew there was a fundamental lack of logic in his own position. If trying to get information on the Ricci family had been worth doing at all, it should have been done, and as Robin had proven, she’d been the best person for the job. While he resented the fact that she hadn’t warned him what she was about to do, he knew perfectly well that if she’d done so, he’d have vetoed it, out of a fundamentally indefensible desire to keep her out of harm’s way, when the logical conclusion of that line of thinking was that she oughtn’t to be doing this job at all. He wanted her to be open and direct with him, but knew that his own incoherent position on her taking physical risks was the reason she hadn’t been honest about her intentions. The long scar on her forearm reproached him every time he looked at it, even though the mistake that had led to the attack had been entirely her own. He knew too much about her past; the relationship had become too personal: he didn’t want to visit her in hospital again. He felt precisely that irksome sense of responsibility that kept him determinedly single, but without any of the compensatory pleasures. None of this was her fault, but it had taken a fortnight for him to look these facts clearly in the face.

“OK,” he muttered at last. “I wouldn’t choose not to know.” He made a supreme effort. “You did bloody well.”

“Thank you,” said Robin, as startled as she was gratified.

“Can we agree, though—please? That in future, we talk these things through?”

“If I’d asked you—”

“Yeah, I might’ve said no, and I’d’ve been wrong, and I’ll bear that in mind next time, OK? But as you keep reminding me, we’re partners, so I’d be grateful—”

“All right,” said Robin. “Yes. We’ll discuss it. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

At that moment, Pat knocked on the door and opened it a few inches.

“I’ve got a Ms. Phipps and a Ms. Sullivan on the line for you.”

“Put them through, please,” said Strike.

Feeling as though she was sitting in on the announcement of bad medical news, Robin let Strike do the talking to Anna and Kim. He took the couple systematically through every interview the agency had conducted over the past eleven and a half months, telling them the secrets he and Robin had unearthed, and the tentative conclusions they’d drawn.

He revealed that Irene Hickson had been briefly involved with Margot’s ex-boyfriend, and that both had lied about it, and explained that Satchwell might have been worried that Margot would tell the authorities about the way his sister died; that Wilma the cleaner had never set foot in Broom House, and that the story of Roy walking was almost certainly false; that the threatening notes had been real, but (with a glance at Robin) that they hadn’t managed to identify the writer; that Joseph Brenner had been a more unsavory character than anyone had realized, but that there was nothing to tie him to Margot’s disappearance; that Gloria Conti, the last person to see Margot alive, was living in France, and didn’t want to talk to them; and that Steve Douthwaite, Margot’s suspicious patient, had vanished without trace. Lastly, he told them that they believed they’d identified the van seen speeding away from Clerkenwell Green on the night that Margot disappeared, and were confident that it hadn’t been Dennis Creed’s.

The only sound to break the silence when Strike first stopped talking was the soft buzzing emitted by the speaker on his desk, which proved the line was still open. Waiting for Anna to speak, Robin suddenly realized that her eyes were full of tears. She’d so very much wanted to find out what had happened to Margot Bamborough.

“Well… we knew it would be difficult,” said Anna at last. “If not impossible.”

Robin could tell that Anna was crying, too. She felt wretched.

“I’m sorry,” said Strike formally. “Very sorry, not to have better news for you. However, Douthwaite remains of real interest, and—”

“No.”

Robin recognized Kim’s firm negative.

“No, I’m sorry,” said the psychologist. “We agreed a year.”

“We’re actually two weeks short,” said Strike, “and if—”

“Have you got any reason to believe you can find Steve Douthwaite in the next two weeks?”

Strike’s slightly bloodshot eyes met Robin’s wet ones.

“No,” he admitted.

“As I said in my email, we’re about to go on holiday,” said Kim. “In the absence of actually finding Margot’s body, there was always bound to be another angle you could try, one more person who might know something, and as I said at the start of this, we haven’t got the money, or, frankly, the emotional stamina, to keep this going forever. I think it’s better—cleaner—if we accept that you’ve done your best, and thank you for the trouble you’ve clearly taken. This has been a worthwhile exercise, even if—I mean, Anna and Roy’s relationship’s better than it’s been in years, thanks to your visit. He’ll be glad to hear that the cleaner accepted he wasn’t able to walk that day.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Strike. “I’m only sorry—”

“I knew,” said Anna, her voice wavering, “that it was going to be… almost impossible. At least I know I tried.”

After Anna had hung up, there was a silence in the room. Finally Strike said “Need a pee,” pulled himself up and left the room.

Robin got up, too, and began to gather together the photocopied pages from the police file. She couldn’t believe it was all over. Having put the records into a neat pile, she sat down and began to flick through them one more time, knowing that she was hoping to see something—anything—they’d overlooked.

From Gloria Conti’s statement to Lawson:

From Ruby Elliot’s statement to Talbot:

From Janice Beattie’s statement to Lawson:

From Irene Hickson’s second statement to Lawson:

And beneath the statement was the photocopy of Irene’s receipt: Marks & Spencer, three items, which came to a total of £4.73.

From Joseph Brenner’s statement to Talbot:

Strike re-entered the office and dropped a five-pound note onto the table in front of Robin.

“What’s that for?”

“We had a bet,” he said, “about whether they’d extend the year if we had any outstanding leads. I said they would. You said they wouldn’t.”

“I’m not taking that,” said Robin, leaving the fiver where it lay. “There are still two more weeks.”

“They’ve just—”

“They’ve paid till the end of the month. I’m not stopping.”

“Did I not make myself clear just now?” said Strike, frowning down at her. “We’re leaving Ricci.”

“I know,” said Robin.

She checked her watch again.

“I’m supposed to be taking over from Andy in an hour. I’d better go.”

After Robin had left, Strike returned the photocopied papers to the boxes of old police records that still lay underneath the desk, then went out into the office where Pat sat, electronic cigarette between her teeth as always.

“We’ve lost two clients,” he told her. “Who’s next on the waiting list?”

“That footballer,” said Pat, bringing up the encrypted file on her monitor to show Strike a well-known name. “And if you want to replace both of them, there’s that posh woman who’s got the chihuahua.”

Strike hesitated.

“We’ll just take the footballer for now. Can you ring his assistant and say I’m available to take details any time tomorrow?”

“It’s Saturday,” said Pat.

“I know,” said Strike. “I work weekends and I doubt he’ll want anyone to see him coming in here. Say I’m happy to go to his place.”

He returned to the inner office and pushed up the window, allowing the afternoon air, heavy with exhaust fumes and London’s particular smell of warm brick, soot and, today, a faint trace of leaves, trees and grass, to permeate the office. Tempted to light up, he restrained himself out of deference to Pat, because he’d asked her not to smoke in the office. Clients these days were nearly all non-smokers and he felt it gave a poor impression to have the place reeking like an ashtray. He leaned on the windowsill and watched the Friday-night drinkers and shoppers walking up and down Denmark Street, half-listening to Pat’s conversation with the Premier League footballer’s assistant, but mostly thinking about Margot Bamborough.

He’d known all along there was only the remotest chance of finding out what had happened to her, but where had fifty weeks gone? He remembered all the time spent with Joan in Cornwall, and the other clients who’d come and gone, and asked himself if they might have found out what had happened to Margot Bamborough if none of these things had got in the way. Tempting though it was to blame distractions, he believed the outcome would have been the same. Perhaps Luca Ricci was the answer they weren’t ever going to be able to admit. A plausible answer, in many ways: a professional hit, done for some inscrutable underworld reason, because Margot had got too close to a secret, or interfered in the gangsters’ business. Leave my girl alone… she’d been the type to advise a stripper, or a hooker, or a porn actress, or an addict, to choose a different life, to give evidence against men who abused her…

“Eleven tomorrow,” rasped Pat, from behind Strike. “At ’is place. I’ve left his address on the desk for you.”

“Thanks very much,” he said, turning to see her already in her coat. It was five o’clock. She looked vaguely surprised to hear his thanks, but ever since Robin had shouted at him for being rude to Pat, Strike had been consciously trying to be politer to the secretary. For a moment she hesitated, electronic cigarette between her yellow teeth, then removed it to say,

“Robin told me what that Morris did. What he sent her.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Sleazy bastard.”

“Yeah,” said Pat. She was scrutinizing him closely, as though seeing things she hadn’t ever expected to find. “’Orrible. And ’e always reminded me,” she said surprisingly, “of a young Mel Gibson.”

“Really?” said Strike.

“Funny fing, looks,” she said. “You make assumptions.”

“I s’pose,” said Strike.

“You’ve got a real look of my first ’usband,” Pat told him.

“Is that right?” said Strike, startled.

“Yeah. Well… I’ll be off. ’Ave a good weekend.”

“You too,” said Strike.

He waited until her footsteps had died away on the metal staircase, before pulling out his cigarettes, lighting one and returning to the inner office, where the window was still open. Here, he took an old ashtray out of the desk drawer and Talbot’s leather notebook out of the top drawer of the filing cabinet, and settled down in his usual chair to flick through it once more, stopping at the final page.

Strike had never given Talbot’s final jottings more than cursory attention, partly because his patience had run out by the time he got there, partly they were among the most shambolic and incoherent parts of the notes. Tonight, though, he had a melancholy reason for examining the last page of Talbot’s notebook, because Strike, too, had come to the end of the case. So he examined Talbot’s drawing of the demon he believed he’d conjured before the ambulance came to take him away: the spirit of Margot Bamborough, returned from some astral plane to haunt him in the form of Babalon, the Mother of Abominations.

There was no pressure to understand any more. Strike defocused his mind as he’d have relaxed his eyes, the better to spot one of those apparently three-dimensional images hidden in what appeared to be a flat pattern. His eyes glided over the phrases and fragments Talbot had half-remembered from Crowley’s writings, and of consultation of the Thoth tarot. As he scrutinized the picture of the heavy-breasted demon, on whose belly the penitent Talbot had subsequently inscribed a Christian cross, he remembered Robin’s words all those months previously in Hampton Court Palace, about the allure of myth and symbol, and the idea of the collective unconscious, where archetypes lurked. This demon, and the disconnected phrases that had seemed pertinent to Talbot in his psychotic state, had sprung from the policeman’s own subconscious: it was too easy, too simplistic, to blame Crowley and Lévi for what Talbot’s own mind had chosen to retain. This was what it generated, in a last spasm of madness, in a final attempt at resolution. Seven veils, seven heads, seven streams. Lust and strange drugs. Seven around her neck. The poisoned darkness of the BLACK MOON. Blood and sin. She rides upon the lion serpent.

Strike bent the lamp closer to the page, so that he could scrutinize the drawing more closely. Was he deluding himself, or did some of these crazy jottings indicate that Talbot had noticed the odd coinci­dences that Strike had, after talking to the Bayliss sisters? As his gaze moved from one fragment of mystic writing to another, Strike thought he saw, not just a penitent churchgoer trying to make amends for his descent into witchcraft, but the last desperate effort of a good detective, trying to salvage clues from chaos, sense from madness.

63

Over the next couple of weeks, Robin noticed that Astrology 14 by Steven Schmidt, the second-hand book she’d left at the office, kept changing position. One morning it was on top of the filing cabinet where she’d left it, a few days later on Strike’s half of the desk, and the following evening lying beside the kettle. Similarly, various bits of the Bamborough police records kept appearing, then disappearing again, while Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook had vanished from the filing cabinet and, she suspected, made its way upstairs to Strike’s attic flat.

The agency was once again very busy. The new client, a Premier League footballer, had sunk two million pounds into a proposed nightclub which had failed to materialize. His partner in the venture had now disappeared, along with all the money. The footballer, nicknamed Dopey by an unsympathetic Barclay, feared press exposure almost as much as not getting his cash back.

Meanwhile, Miss Jones’s boyfriend continued to live a frustratingly law-abiding life, but she appeared happy to keep paying the agency’s bills, as long as Strike endured twice-weekly phone calls with her. During these supposed catch-ups, she told Strike all her problems, and hinted broadly that a dinner invitation would be happily accepted.

In addition to these clients, and leapfrogging those on the waiting list, was Shifty’s Boss, who’d been forced into early retirement by the board. SB walked in off Denmark Street one morning looking for Barclay, who’d left his contact details with Elinor Dean. To Strike’s surprise, early retirement seemed not to have spurred SB into despair, but liberated him.

“If you can believe it, I was genuinely thinking of killing myself, just a few months back,” he told Strike. “But I’m out from under that bastard’s thumb now. Now I’ve told my wife about Elinor—”

“Told her, have you?” said Strike, surprised.

“And she’s been very understanding,” said SB. “In my previous marriage, my—well, my needs—were taken care of by my ex-wife, but since we split… anyway, Portia and I have talked it all through, and she’s perfectly happy for my arrangement with Elinor to continue, as long as there’s no infidelity.”

Strike hid his expression behind his mug. He could well imagine that Portia, with her inch-long nails and her professional blow-dries, her thrice-yearly holidays, her black American Express card and her six-bedroomed house with swimming pool in West Brompton, preferred someone else to change SB’s nappy.

“No, all I want now,” said SB, his satisfied smile replaced by a hard glare, “is to make sure that shifty bastard gets what’s coming to him. And I’m prepared to pay.”

So the agency had resumed surveillance on both Shifty and his PA.

The upshot of three demanding cases meant that most of the communication between the two partners was done by phone for the rest of the month. Their paths finally crossed one Thursday afternoon in late August, when Strike entered the office as Robin was about to leave it.

Pat, who was listening to the radio while paying a slew of bills, offered to turn it off on seeing Strike, whose attention had just been caught by the figure-hugging blue dress Robin was wearing.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “Nice to hear some music.”

“Cormoran, can I have a quick word before I go?” Robin asked, beckoning him into the inner office.

“… next up, in our hundred hits of the seventies, an oldie but goodie from one-hit-wonder Middle of the Road: ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep…’”

“Where’re you off to?” said Strike, closing the internal door on Pat. He’d spent most of the previous night on his feet, watching Shifty get drunk and coked up in a nightclub, and today driving between the various addresses Dopey’s business partner had used over the previous two years. Unshaven and aching all over, he grunted in relief as he sank into his usual chair.

“The Vintry. Wine bar in the City,” said Robin. “Gemma’s going to be there later, Andy heard her arranging it. I’m hoping she’s with girlfriends. I’m going to try and infiltrate the group somehow.”

Gemma was Shifty’s PA. Through the closed door they now heard strains of a jaunty song playing on the radio, with its incongruous lyric,

“Where’s your mamma gone?”

“You’re still working on Bamborough, aren’t you?” Robin asked.

“Just going back over a few things,” Strike admitted.

“And?”

“And nothing. It’s like a maze. Moment I start thinking I’m getting somewhere, I turn a corner and come up against a dead end. Or find myself back where I started. Why are you looking so pleased?”

“I’m just glad you haven’t given up,” said Robin.

“You won’t say that when they cart me off to the same asylum as Bill Talbot. If I never see another fucking star sign, it’ll be too soon… Where the hell is Douthwaite? What happened to him?”

“You think—?”

“I think he’s bloody fishy, I always did. His alibi amounts to fuck all. Then he changes his name. Then, as you found out, another young woman dies in his vicinity—that drowned Redcoat. Then he vanishes again.

“If I could just speak to Douthwaite,” said Strike, drumming his fingers on the desk, “I’d give it up.”

“Really?” said Robin.

He glanced at her, then, frowning, looked away. She was looking particularly sexy in that blue dress, which he’d never seen before.

“Yeah, if I could speak to Douthwaite, that’d do me.”

“Last night I heard my mamma singing a song…”

“And maybe Gloria Conti,” said Strike.

“Woke up this morning, and my mamma was gone…”

“And Creed,” said Strike. “I’d like to talk to Dennis Creed.”

Robin felt a little skip of excitement. She’d received an email earlier, telling her to expect a decision by the end of the day on whether or not Creed could be re-interviewed.

“I’d better get going,” she said. “Gemma’s supposed to be there at six. It was nice of you,” she added, as she reached for the door handle, “to let Pat keep the radio on.”

“Yeah, well,” said Strike, with a shrug. “Trying to be friendly.”

As Robin was putting on her coat in the outer office, Pat said,

“That’s a very good color on you.”

“Thanks. It’s quite old. Miracle it still fits, all the chocolate I’ve been eating lately.”

“Would he like a cuppa, d’you think?”

“I’m sure he would,” said Robin, surprised. Apparently Strike wasn’t the only one who was trying to be friendly.

“Oooh, I used to love this,” said Pat, as the opening bars of “Play That Funky Music” filled the office, and as Robin walked down the stairs, she heard Pat singing along, in her raspy baritone:

The Vintry, which Robin reached twenty minutes later, lay near Cannon Street Tube station in the heart of the financial district, and was precisely the kind of place her ex-husband had most enjoyed. Undemandingly modern in a conventional, high-spec manner, with its sleek mixture of steel beams, large windows and wooden floors, it had a hint of open-plan office about it, in spite of the long bar with padded stools. There was the odd quirky touch, such as the two stuffed rabbits on a windowsill, which carried model guns and wore shooting caps, but in the main the clientele, which consisted overwhelmingly of men in suits, were cocooned in an atmosphere of tasteful beige blandness. They stood in cliques, fresh from the day’s work, drinking, laughing together, reading newspapers or their phones, or eyeing up the few female customers—to Robin they seemed to exude not just confidence, but self-satisfaction. She received a number of appreciative looks as she sidled between stockbrokers, bankers and traders on her way to the bar.

Looking carefully around the large open-plan area, Robin gathered that Gemma hadn’t yet arrived, so she took a free bar stool, ordered a tonic water and pretended to be reading the day’s news off her phone, purely to avoid the open staring of the two young men to her right, one of whom seemed determined to make Robin look up, if only to ascertain where the annoying, braying laugh was coming from. To her left, a pair of older men were discussing the imminent Scottish independence referendum.

“Polls are looking shaky,” said the first man. “Hope Cameron knows what he’s doing.”

“They’d be bloody mad to do it. Mad.”

“There’s opportunity in madness—for a few, anyway,” said the first man. “I remember, when I was in Hong Kong—oh, I think that’s our table free…”

The two speakers departed for their dinner. Robin glanced around again, carefully avoiding meeting the eyes of the young man with the braying laugh, and a patch of scarlet at the far end of the bar caught her eye. Gemma had arrived, and was standing alone, trying to catch the barman’s eye. Robin slid off her bar stool, and carried her drink over to Gemma, whose long dark hair fell in gypsyish curls to the middle of her back.

“Hi—Linda?”

“What?” said Gemma, startled. “No, sorry.”

“Oh,” said Robin, looking crestfallen. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong bar. Has this place got other branches?”

“I’ve no idea, sorry,” said Gemma, still with her hand raised, trying to attract the barman’s attention.

“She said she’d be wearing red,” said Robin, looking around at the sea of suits.

Gemma glanced at Robin, mildly interested.

“Blind date?”

“I wish,” said Robin, rolling her eyes. “No, it’s a friend of a friend who thinks there might be an opening at Winfrey and Hughes. The woman said she’d meet me for a quick drink.”

“Winfrey and Hughes? That’s where I work.”

“You’re kidding!” said Robin, with a laugh. “Hey—you’re not really Linda, are you? And pretending to be someone different, because you don’t like the look of me or something?”

“No,” said the other woman, smiling. “I’m Gemma.”

“Oh. Are you meeting someone, or—?”

“S’posed to be,” said Gemma, “yeah.”

“D’you mind me sitting here with you? Just till they arrive? I was getting some properly lechy looks over there.”

“Tell me about it,” said Gemma, as Robin climbed up onto the barstool beside her. The barman now approached a pinstriped, gray-haired man who’d just arrived.

“Oi,” Robin called, and half a dozen businessmen’s heads turned, as well as the barman’s. “She was here first,” said Robin, pointing sideways at Gemma, who laughed again.

“Wow. You don’t mess around, do you?”

“No point, is there?” said Robin, taking a sip of her water. She’d subtly broadened her Yorkshire accent, as she often did when pretending to be a bolder, brasher character than she really felt herself to be. “Gotta take charge, or they’ll walk all bloody over you.”

“You’re not wrong there,” sighed Gemma.

“Winfrey and Hughes isn’t like that, is it?” said Robin. “Full of tossers?”

“Well…”

The barman arrived at that moment to take Gemma’s order. Once the PA had her large glass of red wine, she took a swig and said,

“It’s OK, actually. Depends which bit you’re working in. I’m PA to one of the high-ups. The work’s interesting.”

“Nice guy?” asked Robin casually.

Gemma drank several mouthfuls of wine before saying,

“He’s… all right. Devil you know, isn’t it? I like the job and the company. I’ve got a great salary and a ton of friends there… oh damn—”

Her handbag had slipped off the barstool. As Gemma bent to retrieve it, Robin, whose eyes had roamed across the vista of cream, gray and beige in front of her, suddenly spotted Saul Morris.

He’d just walked into the bar, wearing a suit, an open-necked shirt and a remarkably smug smile. He glanced around, picked out Gemma and Robin by the bright colors of their dresses, and froze. For a second or two, he and Robin simply stared at each other; then Morris turned abruptly and hurried back out of the bar.

Gemma settled herself back onto her barstool, bag safely on her lap. The mobile phone she’d left lying on the counter now lit up.

“Andy?” said Gemma, answering quickly. “Yeah… no, I’m here already…”

There was a long silence. Robin could hear Morris’s voice. He was using the same wheedling tone in which he’d tried to talk her into bed, with all those puerile jokes and have-I-upset-yous.

“Fine,” said Gemma, her expression hardening. “Fine. I just… I’m going to take your number off my phone now and I’d like you… no, actually, I… oh just fuck off!”

She hung up, flushed, her lips trembling.

“Why,” she said, “do they always want to be told they’re still nice guys, after they’ve been total shits?”

“Often wondered that meself,” said Yorkshire Robin. “Boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” said the shaken Gemma. “For six months. Then he just stands me up one night, with no explanation. Then he comes back a couple of times—booty calls, basically,” she said, taking another big swig of wine. “And finally he just ghosts me. I texted him yesterday, I said, look, I just wanna meet, just want an explanation—”

“Sounds like a right twat,” said Robin, whose heart was racing with excitement at this perfect opportunity to have a heart-to-heart. “Hey,” she called to the barman, “can we have a couple more wines and a menu, please?”

And after that, Robin found getting confidences out of Gemma as easy as shelling peas. With three large glasses of wine inside her, and her new friend from Yorkshire being so funny, supportive and understanding, a plate of chicken and polenta to eat, and a bottle of wine (“Yeah, why the hell not?”), she moved seamlessly from the misdemeanors of “Andy” to the inappropriate and unsolicited groping by her boss that had escalated until she was on the verge of quitting.

“Can’t you go to HR?” asked Robin.

“He says nobody’ll believe me because of what happened when we were on a course last year… although… To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what happened,” said Gemma, and looking away from Robin she mumbled, “I mean… we had sex… but I was so out of it… so drunk… I mean, it wasn’t, you know… it wasn’t rape… I’m not saying that…”

“Were you in a fit state to give consent?” said Robin, no longer laughing. She’d only drunk half a glass of wine.

“Well, not… but… no, I’m not putting myself through that,” said Gemma, flushed and tearful. “Not the police and everything, God no… he’s a big shot, he could afford great lawyers… an’ if I didn’t win, how’m I gonna get another job in the City?… Court, and the papers… anyway, it’s too late now… people saw me… coming out of his room. I pretended it was all OK. I had to, I was so embarrassed… rumor mill’s been in overdrive since. We both denied anything happened, so how would it look if I…

“Andy told me I shouldn’t report it,” said Gemma, pouring the last of the bottle into her glass.

“Did he?”

“Yeah… I told him about it, firs’ time we had sex… see, it was the firs’ time I’d slept with anyone since… and he said, “Yeah, you’ll want to keep that quiet… be loads of grief for you, an’ he’ll probably get off’… He was ex-police, Andy, he knew all about that kind of thing.”

You total shit, Morris.

“No, if I was going to tell about anything,” said Gemma, hazily, “it’d be the insider bloody trading… Oh yeah… nobody knows ’cept me…”

One hour later, Robin and Gemma emerged into the darkening street, Robin almost holding Gemma up, because she showed a tendency to sag if unsupported. After a ten-minute wait, she succeeded in flagging down a taxi, and loaded the very drunk Gemma into it.

“Le’s go out Saturday!” Gemma called to Robin, trying to stop her closing the door.

“Fantastic!” said Robin, who’d given the PA a fake number. “Ring me!”

“Yeah, I will… thanks so much for dinner!”

“No problem!” said Robin, and she succeeded at last in slamming the door on Gemma, who waved at her until the cab turned the corner.

Robin turned away and walked quickly back past the Vintry. A young man in a suit wolf-whistled as she passed.

“Oh bugger off,” muttered Robin, pulling out her phone to call Strike.

To her surprise, she saw she’d missed seven calls from him. She’d also received an email whose subject line read: Creed.

“Oh my God,” said Robin out loud.

She sped up, wanting to get away from the hordes of suited men still walking the streets, to be alone and able to concentrate. Retreating at last into the dark doorway of a gray stone office block, she opened the email. After reading it through three times, to make absolutely sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her, she called Strike back.

“There you are!” he said, answering on the first ring. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“I’ve found Douthwaite!”

“You’ve what?” gasped Robin, attracting the startled attention of a sober-looking City gent shuffling past in the dark, holding a tightly furled umbrella. “How?”

“Names,” said Strike, who sound elated. “And Pat listening to hits of the seventies.”

“I don’t—”

“He called himself Jacks first time, right? Well, Terry Jacks had a massive hit with a song called ‘Seasons in the Sun’ in ’74. They played it this afternoon. We know Douthwaite fancied himself a singer, so I thought, bet that’s where he got the idea for ‘Jacks’…”

Robin could hear Strike pacing. He was evidently as excited as she felt.

“So then I went back to Oakden’s book. He said Douthwaite’s ‘Longfellow Serenade’ was a particular hit with the ladies. I looked it up. That was one of Neil Diamond’s. So then,” said Strike, “I start Googling Steve Diamond…

“I’m about to text you a picture,” said Strike. “Stand by.”

Robin took the phone away from her ear and waited. Within a few seconds, the text arrived, and she opened the accompanying picture.

A sweaty, red-faced, balding man in his sixties was singing into a microphone. He wore a turquoise T-shirt stretched over a sizable belly. A chain still hung around his neck, but the only other resemblance to the picture of the spiky-haired, cheeky chap in his kipper tie were the eyes, which were as dark and bright as ever.

“It’s him,” Robin said.

“That picture came off the website of a pub in Skegness,” said Strike. “He’s still a karaoke king and he co-owns and runs a bed and breakfast up there, with his wife Donna. I wonder,” said Strike, “whether she realizes his name hasn’t always been Diamond?”

“This is amazing!” said Robin, so jubilant that she began to walk down the street again, purely to use the energy now surging through her. “You’re brilliant!”

“I know,” said Strike, with a trace of smugness. “So, we’re going to Skegness. Tomorrow.”

“I’m supposed to be—”

“I’ve changed the rota,” said Strike. “Can you pick me up early? Say, eight o’clock? I’ll come out to Earl’s Court.”

“Definitely,” said Robin.

“Then I’ll see you—”

“Wait,” said Robin.

“Oh, shit, yeah,” said Strike politely. “Should’ve asked. How’d it go with Gemma?”

“Great,” said Robin. “Shifty’s insider trading, but never mind that now.”

“He’s—?”

“Strike, I don’t want to upstage you or anything,” she said, failing to suppress the note of triumph in her voice, “because finding Douthwaite’s incredible, but I think you ought to know… you’re going to be allowed to interview Dennis Creed in Broadmoor, on September the nineteenth.”

64

“Well,” said Strike, getting into the Land Rover next morning.

They beamed at each other: for a moment, Robin thought she saw the idea of hugging her cross Strike’s mind, but instead he held out his hand, and shook hers.

“My Christ, you wait a year for a breakthrough…”

Robin laughed, put the Land Rover into gear and pulled out onto the road. The day was unusually hot: she was driving in sunglasses, yet Strike noted a scarf protruding from the bag behind her seat.

“Don’t think you’re going to need that. Proper summer weather,” he said, looking out at the clear sky.

“We’ll see,” said Robin skeptically. “We used to visit Skegness when we were kids. Mum’s sister used to live in Boston, up the road. There’s usually a bracing breeze off the North Sea.”

“So, I read the email,” said Strike, referring to the message Robin had forwarded him, which laid out both the terms and conditions of him interviewing Dennis Creed, and the reasoning which had led the authorities to permit Strike to do it.

“What did you think?” Robin asked.

“Other than being bloody astounded you pulled this off—”

“It took ages.”

“I’m not surprised. Other than that, I won’t lie… I’m feeling the pressure.”

“You mean, because of the Tuckers?”

“Yeah,” said Strike, opening the window so he could light a ciga­rette. “Anna doesn’t know I’m getting this shot, so she won’t get their hopes up, but that poor bastard Tucker…”

Absolute secrecy about the interview, including signing a non-disclosure agreement that guaranteed Strike would never talk to the press about it, had been the first precondition set by the authorities.

“He really wants it to be you,” said Robin. “Tucker. He says Creed’s got a big ego and he’ll want to meet you. And the psychiatrists must agree, mustn’t they, or they wouldn’t be allowing it? Brian Tucker says Creed always saw himself as high status, and deserving of associating with famous, successful people.”

“It isn’t a psychiatrist’s job to decide whether I’ll be able to get anything out of him,” said Strike. “I’d imagine all they’ll care about is whether I’m going to rile him up. You don’t get put in Broadmoor for being mildly eccentric.”

Strike was silent for a long time, looking out of the window, and Robin too remained quiet, not wanting to interrupt his train of thought. When at last Strike spoke again, he sounded matter of fact, and focused on the plan for Skegness.

“I looked up the B&B on TripAdvisor. It’s called the Allardice, which is his wife’s maiden name. We won’t walk in there cold, because if he isn’t there and the wife smells a rat, she can call him and warn him not to come back, so we’ll park, get ourselves into a position where we can see the building, and ring him. If he’s there, we walk straight in before he’s got a chance to run—or catch him as he leaves, as the case might be. And if he isn’t in, we wait.”

“For how long?” said Robin.

“I’d like to say ‘as long as it takes,’” said Strike, “but we’re not actually being paid for this, so I’ve got to be back in town on Monday.”

“I could stay behind,” suggested Robin.

“I don’t think so,” said Strike.

“Sorry,” said Robin, immediately regretting the suggestion, afraid that Strike might think she was simply after another weekend away in a hotel. “I know we’re short-staffed—”

“It isn’t that. You were the one who pointed out women have a habit of dying or disappearing around Steve Douthwaite. Could be a case of bad luck, but on the other hand… three different surnames is a lot for a man with nothing to hide. I’m taking the lead on this one.”

They arrived in the small seaside town at eleven, leaving the Land Rover in a car park beside Skegness Bowl, an enormous red-walled seafront bowling alley. Strike could smell and taste the sea as he got out of the car, and turned instinctively toward it, but the ocean was invisible from where he stood. Instead he found himself looking at a manmade waterway of a murky green, along which a laughing young woman and her boyfriend were pedaling a dinghy-sized boat. The driver’s door slammed and Strike turned to see Robin, still in sunglasses, wrapping the scarf around her neck.

“Told you,” she said to the mystified Strike, to whom the day felt unequivocally hot. Not for the first time wondering what it was about women and their bizarre ability to feel non-existent chills, Strike lit up, waited beside the Land Rover while Robin bought a parking permit, then walked with her up to Grand Parade, a wide street that ran along the seafront.

“‘The Savoy,’” said Strike, smirking as he read the names of the larger hotels, whose upper windows could surely see the distant sea. “‘The Quorn.’ ‘The Chatsworth.’”

“Don’t jeer,” said Robin. “I used to love coming to Skegness when I was a kid.”

“The Allardice should be up there,” Strike said, as they crossed the road, pointing up broad Scarbrough Avenue. “Yeah, that’s it, the one with the blue awning.”

They paused on the corner, beside an enormous mock Tudor hotel which boasted the Jubilee Carvery and Café. Early-morning drinkers of both beer and coffee were sitting at outside tables, enjoying the sunshine.

“Perfect place to keep an eye out,” said Strike, pointing at one of these pavement tables. “I could use a cup of tea.”

“OK, I’ll order,” said Robin. “I need the loo, anyway. Are you going to call him or d’you want me to do it?”

“I will,” said Strike, already sinking onto one of the chairs, and taking out his mobile.

As Robin disappeared into the bar, Strike lit a cigarette, then keyed in the Allardice’s number, his eyes on the front of the B&B. It stood in a row of eight tall red buildings, several of which had been converted into small boarding houses and had similar scalloped PVC awnings over the entrances. Spotless white net curtains hung at almost every window.

“Morning, the Allardice,” said a Scottish woman, who sounded on the irritable side of brisk.

“Steve there?” said Strike, faking casualness and confidence.

“That you, Barry love?”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

“He’s on his way now,” she said. “We only had a small, sorry. But do me a favor, Barry, and don’t hold him up, because there are four beds to change here and he’s supposed to be getting me more milk.”

“Righto,” said Strike, and not wanting to speak another syllable that might reveal him to be anyone other than Barry, he hung up.

“Is he there?” asked Robin anxiously, dropping into the seat opposite Strike. She’d washed her hands in the bathroom, but they were still damp, because she’d been in such a hurry to get back to Strike.

“No,” said Strike, knocking his cigarette ash into the small pink metal bucket placed on the table for that purpose. “He’s delivering something to a bloke up the road and will be back shortly, bringing milk.”

“Oh,” said Robin quietly, turning to look over her shoulder at the Allardice’s royal blue awning, on which the name was inscribed in curly white lettering.

The barman brought out two metal pots and china teacups, and the detectives drank their tea in silence, Strike keeping a watchful eye on the Allardice, Robin on Grand Parade. The sea was blocked from her view by the wide, multicolored frontage of the entrance to Skegness Pier, which advertised, among other attractions, the optimistically named Hollywood Bar and Diner. Elderly people rode mobility scooters up and down Grand Parade. Families strolled past, eating ice cream. Plume-tailed Maltese, fat pugs and panting chihuahuas trotted over the hot pavements alongside their owners.

“Cormoran,” muttered Robin suddenly.

A man had just turned the corner into Scarbrough Avenue, a heavy carrier bag dangling from his hand. His gray hair was close cropped around the ears, but a few strands had been combed over a wide expanse of sweaty forehead. His round shoulders and hangdog look gave him the air of a man whom life had ground down to a sullen obedience. The same turquoise T-shirt he’d worn in the karaoke picture was stretched tightly over his beer belly. Douthwaite crossed the road, climbed the three steps leading to the Allardice’s front door and, with a flash of sun on glass, disappeared from view.

“Have you paid for this?” Strike asked, downing the rest of his tea and putting his empty cup back onto the saucer.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go,” said Strike, dropping his cigarette into the metal bucket and pulling himself to his feet, “before he can disappear upstairs and start changing beds.”

They crossed the road as fast as Strike could walk and headed up the front steps, which had been painted pale blue. Baskets of purple petunias hung beneath the ground-floor windows and an assortment of stickers adorned the glass portion of the front door, one of which announced that this was a three-star residence, another asking guests to wipe their feet.

A tinkling bell announced their arrival. The deserted hall was narrow, its stairs carpeted in dark blue and green tartan. They waited beside a table laden with leaflets about local attractions, breathing in a combination of fried food and a powerful rose-scented air-freshener.

“… and Paula’s got new tubes in her sunbeds,” said a Scottish voice, and a woman with short hair dyed canary yellow emerged through a door to the right. A deep vertical line was graven down the middle of her forehead. Barelegged, she wore an apron decorated with a Highland cow over her T-shirt and denim skirt, and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals.

“We’ve no vacancies, sorry,” she said.

“Are you Donna?” asked Strike. “We were hoping for a word with Steve.”

“What about?”

“We’re private detectives,” said Strike, pulling out his wallet to hand her a card, “and we’re investigating—”

A hugely obese old lady came into view on the landing above them. She was clad in shocking-pink leggings and a T-shirt bearing the slogan “The More People I Meet, The More I Like My Dog.” Panting audibly, she began a sideways descent, both hands clutching the banister.

“—a missing person case,” Strike finished quietly, as he handed Donna his card.

At that moment, Steve Douthwaite emerged from behind his wife, a pile of towels in his arms. Close up, his dark eyes were bloodshot and puffy. Every feature had coarsened with age and, possibly, drink. His wife’s demeanor, the card in her hand and the presence of the two strangers now looking at him brought him to a halt, the dark eyes frightened above his pile of towels.

“Cormoran Strike?” murmured Donna, reading the card. “Aren’t you the one…”

The old lady, who was barely halfway down the stairs, was now audibly wheezing.

“Get in here,” muttered Donna, pointing Strike and Robin toward the room from which she’d just emerged. “And you,” she snapped at her husband.

They entered a small public sitting room, with a wall-mounted TV, a sparsely stocked bookcase and a miserable-looking spider plant sitting in a pedestalled urn. Through an arch was a breakfast room, where five tightly packed dining tables were being wiped down by a discontented-looking young woman in glasses, who sped up appreciably when she realized Donna had returned. Robin guessed that they were mother and daughter. Though the younger woman was dark rather than blonde, life had carved an identical groove of dissatisfaction in her forehead.

“Leave that, Kirsty,” said Donna abruptly. “Take these towels upstairs, will you? And close the door.”

Kirsty relieved Douthwaite silently of his pile of towels and left the room, her slides slapping the bottoms of her sockless feet. The door clicked shut behind her.

“Sit down,” Donna instructed Strike and Robin, who did so, on a small sofa.

Douthwaite took up a standing position, arms folded, with his back to the TV. Frowning slightly, his eyes flickered over Strike and Robin and back to his wife. The sunlight filtering through the net curtains cast an unforgiving light over his hair, which looked like wispy strands of steel wool.

“He’s the one who caught that Shacklewell Ripper,” Donna said to her husband, jerking her head at Strike. “Why’s he after you?” Her voice rose in both pitch and volume. “Been dicking around with the wrong woman again, have you? Have you?”

“What?” said Douthwaite, but it was obvious this was a stalling tactic: he had understood well enough. His right forearm was tattooed with an hourglass, and around it was wrapped a ribbon with the words “Never Enough.”

“Mr. Douthwaite,” Strike began, but Douthwaite said quickly,

“Diamond! It’s Diamond!”

“Why’re you calling him Douthwaite?” asked Donna.

“I’m sorry,” said Strike insincerely. “My mistake. Your husband was born Steven Douthwaite, as I’m sure you—”

But Donna clearly hadn’t known this. She turned, astonished, from Strike to Douthwaite, who’d frozen, mouth slightly open.

“Douthwaite?” repeated Donna. She turned on her husband. “You told me your name used to be Jacks!”

“I—”

“When were you Douthwaite?”

“—ages—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I—what’s it matter?”

The bell tinkled again and a group of people was heard out in the hall. Still looking shocked and angry, Donna strode outside to see what was needed, her wooden-soled sandals banging over the tiles. The moment she’d disappeared, Douthwaite addressed Strike.

“What d’you want?”

“We’ve been hired by Dr. Margot Bamborough’s daughter, to look into her disappearance,” said Strike.

The parts of Douthwaite’s face that weren’t ruddy with broken veins blanched.

The enormous old lady who’d been descending the stairs now walked into the room, her wide, innocent face demonstrating total immunity to the atmosphere within.

“Which way’s the seal sanctuary?”

“End of the road,” said Douthwaite hoarsely. “Turn left.”

She sidled out of the room again. The bell outside tinkled.

“Listen,” said Douthwaite quickly, as the sound of his wife’s footsteps grew louder again. “You’re wasting your time. I don’t know anything about Margot Bamborough.”

“Perhaps you could have a look over your old police statement, at least,” asked Strike, taking a copy out of his inside pocket.

“What?” said Donna, now back in the room. “What police statement? Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said, as the bell tinkled again, and she clunked back out of the room and bellowed up the stairs, “Kirsty! KIRSTY!”

“That doctor,” Douthwaite said, looking at Strike through bloodshot eyes, his forehead sweaty, “it all happened forty-odd years ago, I don’t know anything about what happened, I never did.”

The harried Donna reappeared.

“Kirsty’ll mind the front door,” she said, glaring at her husband. “We’ll go upstairs. Lochnagar’s empty. We can’t go in ours,” she added to Strike and Robin, pointing toward the basement, “me grandkids are down there, playing computer games.”

Douthwaite hitched up his waistband and threw a wild look outside the net curtains, as though contemplating flight.

“Come on,” said Donna fiercely, and with a return to his hangdog look, he followed his wife out of the door.

Kirsty passed them, heading for the ground floor, as they climbed the steep tartan stairs, Strike making liberal use of the banister to haul himself up. He’d hoped Lochnagar might be on the first floor, but he was disappointed. It lay, as the name might have suggested, right at the top of the B&B, and faced out of the rear of the building.

The furniture inside was made of cheap pine. Kirsty had arranged towels in the shape of kissing swans on the maroon bedspread, which matched the patterned wallpaper of maroon and deep purple. Leads dangled from behind the wall-mounted TV. A plastic kettle sat in the corner on a low table, beside the Corby trouser press. Through the window Strike glimpsed the sea at last: a gleaming golden bar lying low between buildings, in the misty haze created by the net curtains.

Donna crossed the room and took the only chair. Her hands were gripping her own upper arms so tightly that the flesh showed white.

“You can sit down,” she told Strike and Robin.

Having nowhere else to do it, both sat down on the end of the double bed, with its slippery maroon cover. Douthwaite remained at the door, back against it, arms folded, displaying the hourglass tattoo.

“Diamond, Jacks, Douthwaite,” Donna recited. “How many other names have you had?”

“None,” said Douthwaite, trying for a laugh, but failing.

“Why’d you change your name from Douthwaite to Jacks?” she demanded. “Why were the police after you?”

“They weren’t after me,” croaked Douthwaite. “This was ages ago. I wanted a fresh start, that’s all.”

“How many fresh starts does one man need?” said Donna. “What did you do? Why’d you have to give a police statement?”

“A doctor went missing,” said Douthwaite, with a glance at Strike.

“What doctor? When?”

“Her name was Margot Bamborough.”

“Bamborough?” repeated Donna, her forehead bifurcated by that deep frown line, “But that… that was all over the news…”

“They interviewed all the patients she’d seen before she disappeared,” Douthwaite said quickly. “It was routine! They didn’t have anything on me.”

“You must think I was born bloody yesterday,” said Donna. “They,” she pointed at Strike and Robin, “haven’t tracked you down because it was routine inquiries, have they? You didn’t change your bloody name because it was routine inquiries! Screwing her, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t bloody screwing her!” said Douthwaite, with his first sign of fight.

“Mr. Douthwaite,” began Strike.

“Diamond!” said Douthwaite, more in desperation than in anger.

“I’d be grateful if you’d read through your police statement, see whether you’ve got anything to add.”

Douthwaite looked as though he’d have liked to refuse, but after a slight hesitation he took the pieces of paper and began to read. The statement was a long one, covering as it did the suicide of Joanna Hammond, his married ex-lover, the beating he’d endured at the hands of her husband, the anxiety and depression which had led to so many visits to the St. John’s surgery, his assertion that he’d felt nothing more for Margot Bamborough than mild gratitude for her clinical expertise, his denial that he’d ever brought or sent her gifts and his feeble alibi for the time of her disappearance.

“Yeah, I’ve got nothing to add to that,” Douthwaite said at last, holding the pieces of paper back out to Strike.

“I want to read it,” said Donna at once.

“It’s got nothing to do with—it’s forty years ago, it’s nothing,” said Douthwaite.

“Your real name’s Douthwaite and I never knew till five minutes ago! I’ve got a right to know who you are,” she said fiercely, “I’ve got a right to know, so I can decide whether I was a bloody mug to stay with you, after the last—”

“Fine, read it, go on,” said Douthwaite with unconvincing bravado, and Strike handed the statement over to Donna.

She’d read for barely a minute when she burst out,

“You were sleeping with a married—and she killed herself?”

“I wasn’t—we weren’t—once, it happened, once! Nobody kills themselves over that!”

“Why’d she do it, then? Why?”

“Her husband was a bastard.”

“My husband’s a bastard. I haven’t topped myself!”

“Christ’s sake, Donna—”

“What happened?”

“It was nothing!” said Douthwaite. “We used to hang out together, few of the lads at work and their wives and whatever, and one night I was out with some other mates and ran into Joanna, who was with some girlfriends and… some cunt tipped off her husband we’d left the pub together and—”

“And then this doctor disappeared and all, and the police came calling?”

Donna got to her feet, Douthwaite’s crumpled statement quivering in her hand. Still sitting on the slippery maroon coverlet, Robin remembered the day she’d found Sarah Shadlock’s diamond earring in her bed, and thought she knew a little, a very little, of what Donna was experiencing.

“I knew you were a bloody cheat and a liar, but three girlfriends dead? One’s a tragedy,” said Donna furiously, and Strike wondered whether they were about to hear a Wildean epigram, “but three? How bloody unlucky can one man get?”

“I never had anything going on with that doctor!”

“You’ll try it on with anyone!” shrieked Donna, and addressing Robin, she said, “Year before last, I catch him in a guest bedroom with one of my best friends—”

“Christ’s sake, Donna!” whimpered Douthwaite.

“—and six months ago—”

“Donna—”

“—I find out he’s been sneaking around with one of our regulars—and now—” said Donna, advancing on Douthwaite, his statements clutched in her fist. “You creepy bastard, what happened to all these women?”

“I had nothing to do with any of them dying, fuck’s sake!” said Douthwaite, trying for an incredulous laugh and merely looking terrified. “Donna, come on—you think I’m some kind of murderer?”

“You expect me to believe—”

To Strike’s surprise, Robin suddenly jumped to her feet. Taking Donna by the shoulders, she guided her back into her chair.

“Put your head down,” Robin was saying, “head down.”

When Robin moved to untie Donna’s apron, which was tight around her waist, and Strike saw that Donna’s forehead, which was all he could see now she had sunk her face into her hands, was as white as the net curtain behind her.

“Donna?” said Douthwaite feebly, but his wife whispered,

“You stay away from me, you bastard.”

“Breathe,” Robin was saying, crouching beside Donna’s chair. “Get her some water,” she told Strike, who got up and went into the tiny shower room, where a plastic beaker sat in a holder over the sink.

Almost as pale as his wife, Douthwaite watched as Robin persuaded Donna to drink.

“Stay there, now,” Robin told the landlady, one hand resting on her shoulder. “Don’t get up.”

“Did he have something to do with them dying?” Donna whispered, looking sideways at Robin, her pupils enormous with shock.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Robin murmured back.

She turned and looked meaningfully at Strike, who silently agreed that the best thing he could do for the stricken Donna was to get information out of Douthwaite.

“We’ve got a number of questions we’d like to ask you,” Strike told him. “Obviously you’re not obliged to answer them, but I’d put it to you that it would be in the best interests of everyone, yourself included, to cooperate.”

“What questions?” said Douthwaite, still flat against the door. Then, in a torrent of words, he said, “I’ve never hurt anyone, never, I’m not a violent man. Donna will tell you, I’ve never laid a finger on her in anger, that’s not who I am.”

But when Strike merely continued to look at him, Douthwaite said pleadingly,

“Look, I’ve told you—with Joanna—it was a one-night stand. I was just a kid,” he said, and in an echo of Irene Hickson, he said, “You do those kinds of things when you’re young, don’t you?”

“And when you’re old,” whispered Donna. “And all the bloody years in between…”

“Where were you,” Strike asked Douthwaite, “when Joanna killed herself?”

“In Brent,” said Douthwaite. “Miles away! And I had witnesses to prove it. We used to work in pairs, selling, each do one side of the street, and I was out with a bloke called Tadger,” and he tried to laugh again. Nobody smiled. “Tadger, you can imagine the grief he… well, he was with me all day…

“Got back to the office late in the afternoon, and there was a group of lads in there, and they told us Hammond had just got the message his wife had topped herself…

“Terrible,” said the pale and sweating Douthwaite, “but except for that one night together, I had nothing to do with it. But her old man—well, it was easier to blame me,” said Douthwaite, “wasn’t it, than think about his own bloody behavior?

“I got home a couple of nights later and he was lying in wait. Ambush. He beat the shit out of me.”

“Good!” said Donna, on a half-sob.

“And your neighbor, Janice the nurse, looked after—”

“Straight off with the neighbor, were you, Steve?” said Donna, with a hollow laugh. “Get the nurse to mop you up?”

“It wasn’t like that!” said Douthwaite with surprising vehemence.

“It’s his little trick,” the white-faced Donna told Robin, who was still kneeling by her chair. “Always got a sob story on the go. Fell for it myself. Heartbroken after the love of his life drowned… oh my God,” Donna whispered, slowly shaking her head. “And she was the third.” With a hysterical little laugh, she said, “As far as we know. Maybe there are others. Who knows?”

“Christ’s sake, Donna!” said Douthwaite, yet again. Patches of underarm sweat were visible through his thin turquoise T-shirt: Strike could literally smell his fear. “Come on, you know me, you know I’d never hurt anyone!”

“Janice says she advised you to see the doctor about your symp—”

“She never told me to go to the doctor!” snapped Douthwaite, one eye on his wife. “I didn’t need telling, I went off my own bat because I was just getting worried about the… headaches and… mostly headaches. I felt really bad.”

“You visited Margot six times in one two-week period,” said Strike.

“I felt ill, stomach pains and what have you… I mean, it obviously affected me, Joanna dying, and then people talking about me…”

“Oh, poor you, poor you,” murmured Donna. “Jesus effing Christ. You hate going to the doctor. Six times in two weeks?”

“Donna, come on,” said Douthwaite imploringly, “I was feeling like shit! And then the bloody police come and make out like I was stalking her or something. It was all my health!”

“Did you buy her—?” began Strike.

“—chocolates? No!” said Douthwaite, who suddenly seemed very agitated. “If someone sent her chocolates, maybe you should find them. But it wasn’t me! I told the police I never bought her anything, it weren’t like that—”

“Witnesses said you seemed distressed and possibly angry, the last time you left Dr. Bamborough’s surgery,” said Strike. “What happened during that last visit?”

Douthwaite’s breath was coming fast now. Suddenly, almost aggressively, he looked directly into Strike’s eyes.

Experienced in the body language of suspects who yearn for the release and relief of unburdening themselves, no matter the consequences, Strike suddenly knew that Douthwaite was teetering on the brink of a disclosure. He’d have given almost anything to spirit the man away now, to a quiet interrogation room, but exactly as he’d feared, the precious moment was snatched away by Donna.

“Turned you down, did she? What did you think, Steve—a scrubby little failed salesman had a chance with a doctor?”

“I wasn’t bloody looking for a chance!” said Douthwaite, rounding on his wife, “I was there for my health, I was in a state!”

“He’s like a bloody tomcat,” Donna told Robin, “slinking around behind everyone’s backs. He’ll use anything to get his end away, anything. His girlfriend’s topped herself and he’s using it to chat up nurses and doctors—”

“I wasn’t, I was ill!”

“That last meeting—” Strike began again.

“I don’t know what you’re on about, it was nothing,” Douthwaite said, now avoiding looking Strike in the face. “The doc was just telling me to take it easy.”

“Like you ever needed telling that, you lazy bastard,” spat Donna.

“Perhaps,” said Strike, “as you’re feeling unwell, Mrs. Diamond, I could speak to Steve somewhere sep—”

“Oh no you don’t!” said Donna. “No way! I want—”

She exploded into tears, shoulders sagging, face in her hands.

“I’m going to hear it all now… last chance…”

“Donna—” said Douthwaite plaintively.

“Don’t,” she sobbed into her fingers. “Don’t you dare.”

“Perhaps,” said Strike, hoping to return to the last visit with Margot in due course, “we could go over your alibi for the time Dr. Bamborough disappeared?”

Donna was sobbing, tears and mucus flowing freely now. Robin grabbed a paper napkin off the tray beside the kettle and handed it to her.

Cowed by his wife’s distress, Douthwaite allowed Strike to lead him back over his shaky alibi for the evening in question, sticking to the story that he’d been sitting unnoticed in a café, scanning the newspapers for flats to rent.

“I wanted to clear out, get away from all the gossip about Joanna. I just wanted to get away.”

“So the desire to move wasn’t triggered by anything that passed between you and Dr. Bamborough during your last visit?” Strike asked.

“No,” said Douthwaite, still not looking at Strike. “How could it be?”

“Given up on her?” Donna asked from behind the wet napkin with which she was blotting her eyes. “Knew he’d made a fool of himself. Same as with that young lassie from Leeds, eh, Steve?”

“Donna, for fuck’s sake—”

“He forgets,” Donna said to Robin, “he’s not that cocky little sod in his twenties any more. Deluded, b-baldy bastard,” she sobbed.

“Donna—”

“So you moved to Waltham Forest…” prompted Strike.

“Yeah. Police. Press. It was a nightmare,” said Douthwaite. “I thought of ending it, to tell you the—”

“Shame you didn’t,” said Donna savagely. “Save us all a lot of time and trouble.”

As though he hadn’t heard this, and ignoring Douthwaite’s look of outrage, Strike asked,

“What made you go to Clacton-on-Sea? Did you have family there?”

“I haven’t got family, I grew up in care—”

“Oh, someone pass him a bloody violin,” said Donna.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” said Douthwaite, displaying unvarnished anger for the first time. “And I’m allowed to tell the truth about my own bloody life, aren’t I? I just wanted to be a Redcoat, because I sing a bit and it looked like a fun way to earn a living—”

“Fun,” muttered Donna, “oh yeah, as long as you’re having fun, Steve—”

“—get away from people treating me like I’d killed someone—”

“And whoops!” said Donna. “There’s another one gone, in the pool—”

“You know bloody well I had nothing to do with Julie drowning!”

“How could I know?” said Donna, “I wasn’t there! It was before we even met!”

“I showed you the story in the paper!” said Douthwaite. “I showed you, Donna, come on!” He turned to Strike. “A bunch of us were drinking in our chalet. Me and some mates were playing poker. Julie was tired. She left before we finished our game, walked back to her chalet. She walked round the pool, slipped in the dark, knocked herself out and—”

For the first time, Douthwaite showed real distress.

“—she drowned. I won’t ever forget it. Never. I ran outside in me underpants next morning, when I heard the shouting. I saw her body when they were taking her out of the pool. You don’t forget something like that. She was a kid. Twenty-two or something. Her parents came and… it was a horrible thing. Horrible. I never… that someone can go like that. A slip and a trip…

“Yeah, so… that’s when I applied for a job at the Ingoldmells Butlin’s up the road from here. And that’s where I met Donna,” he said, with an apprehensive glance at his wife.

“So you leaving Clacton-on-Sea and changing your name again had nothing to do with a man called Oakden coming to question you about Margot Bamborough?” asked Strike.

Donna’s head jerked up.

“Oh my God,” she said, “so even the Julie bit’s a lie?”

“It’s not a lie!” said Douthwaite loudly. “I told you Julie and I had an argument a couple of days before she died, I told you that, because I felt so guilty after! This man, this—what did you say his name was? Oakden?—yeah, he turned up, saying he was writing a book about Dr. Bamborough disappearing. Went round all the other Redcoats talking to them about me, telling them all I’d been a suspect and how I’d changed my name afterward, making me sound dodgy as hell. And Julie was really pissed off with me because I hadn’t told her—”

“Well, you really learned that lesson, didn’t you, Steve?” said Donna. “Run and hide, that’s all you know, and when you’re found out, you just sneak off and find some other woman to whine to, until she finds you out, and then—”

“Mr. Douthwaite,” said Strike, cutting across Donna, “I want to thank you for your time. I know it’s been a shock, having all this raked up again.”

Robin looked up at Strike, astonished. He couldn’t be leaving the interview here, surely? The Douthwaites (or Diamonds, as they thought of themselves), looked similarly taken aback. Strike extracted a second card from his pocket and held it out to Douthwaite.

“If you remember anything,” the detective said, “you know where to find me. It’s never too late.”

The hourglass tattoo on Douthwaite’s forearm rippled as he held out his hand for the card.

“Who else’ve you talked to?” Douthwaite asked Strike.

Now that his ordeal was over, he seemed curiously averse to it ending. Perhaps, thought Robin, he feared being alone with his wife.

“Margot’s husband and family,” said Strike, watching Douthwaite’s reactions. “The co-workers who’re still alive—Dr. Gupta. One of the receptionists, Irene Hickson. Janice Beattie, the nur—”

“That’s nice,” piped up Donna, “the nurse is still available, Steve—”

“—an ex-boyfriend of Margot’s, her best friend, and a few other people.”

Douthwaite, who’d flushed at his wife’s interjection, said,

“Not Dennis Creed?”

“Not yet,” said Strike. “Well,” he looked from husband to wife, “thanks for your time. We appreciate it.”

Robin got to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly to Donna. “I hope you feel better.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Donna.

As Strike and Robin reached the top of the stairs, they heard shouting break out again behind the door of Lochnagar.

“Donna, babes—”

“Don’t you dare call me babes, you fucking bastard!”

“No point carrying on,” said Strike quietly, setting off down the steep tartaned stairs as slowly as the obese old lady had moved. “He’s not going to say it with her there.”

“Say what?”

“Well, that,” said Strike, as the Douthwaites’ shouts echoed down the stairs, “is the question, isn’t it?”

65

“I’m hungry,” Strike announced, once they stepped down onto the sunny pavement outside the Allardice.

“Let’s get some fish and chips,” said Robin.

“Now you’re talking,” said Strike enthusiastically, as they headed off toward the end of Scarbrough Avenue.

“Cormoran, what makes you think Douthwaite knows something?”

“Didn’t you see the way he looked at me, when I asked him about his last appointment with Margot?”

“I must’ve been looking at Donna. I was seriously worried she was going to pass out.”

“Wish she had,” said Strike.

“Strike!”

“He was definitely thinking about telling me something, then she bloody ruined it.” As they reached the end of the road, he said, “That was a scared man, and I don’t think he’s only scared of his wife… Do we go left or right?”

“Right,” said Robin, so they headed off along Grand Parade, passing a long open-fronted building called Funland, which was full of beeping and flashing video games, claw machines and coin-operated mechanical horses for children to ride. “Are you saying Douthwaite’s guilty?”

“I think he feels it,” Strike said, as they wove their way in and out of cheerful, T-shirted families and couples. “He looked at me back there as though he was bursting to tell me something that’s weighing on him.”

“If he had actual evidence, why didn’t he tell the police? It would’ve got them off his back.”

“I can think of one reason.”

“He was scared of the person he thought had killed her?”

“Exactly.”

“So… Luca Ricci?” said Robin.

At that moment, a male voice from the depths of Funland called, “White seven and four, seventy-four.”

“Possibly,” said Strike, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Douthwaite and Ricci were living in the same area at the time. Maybe going to the same pubs. I suppose he might’ve heard a rumor about Ricci being out to get her. But that doesn’t fit with the eye-witness accounts, does it? If Douthwaite was issuing the warning, you’d think it’d be Margot looking distressed afterward, whereas we know he was the one who came running out of there looking scared and worried… but my gut feeling is that Douthwaite thinks whatever happened between them at that last appointment is relevant to her disappearance.”

The entrance to a well-maintained park on their right was ablaze with petunias. Ahead, on an island in the middle of a traffic island, stood a sixty-foot-high clock tower of brick and stone, with a faintly Gothic appearance, and faces like a miniature Big Ben.

“Exactly how many chippies has Skegness got?” Strike asked, as they came to a halt on the busy intersection beside the clock tower. They were standing right beside two establishments which had tables spilling out onto the pavement, and he could see a further two fish and chip shops on the other side of the junction.

“I never counted,” said Robin. “I was always more interested in the donkeys. Shall we try here?” she asked, pointing at the nearest free table, which was pistachio green and belonged to Tony’s Chippy (“We Sell on Quality not Price”).

“Donkeys?” repeated Strike, grinning, as he sat down on the bench.

“That’s right,” said Robin. “Cod or haddock?”

“Haddock, please,” said Strike, and Robin headed into the chip shop to order.

After a minute or so, looking forward to his chips and enjoying the feeling of sun on his back, Strike became aware that he was still watching Robin, and fixed his eyes instead on a fluttering mass just above him. Even though the top of the yellow railings separating Tony’s from Harry Ramsbottom’s had been fitted with fine spikes to stop birds landing on them, a handful of speckled starlings were doing just that, delicately poised between the needles, and balanced in the iron circles just below them, waiting for the chance to swoop on an abandoned chip.

Watching the birds, Strike wondered what the chances were of Douthwaite ringing the number on his card. He was a man with a long track record of hiding from his past, but Strike had definitely read in his face a desperation he’d only ever seen in the faces of men who could no longer bear the pressure of a terrible secret. Idly rubbing his chin, Strike decided to give the man a short period of grace, then either call him again, or even return, unannounced, to Skegness, where he might waylay Douthwaite in the street or a pub, where Donna couldn’t interfere.

Strike was still watching the starlings when Robin set down two polystyrene trays, two small wooden forks and two cans of Coke on the table.

“Mushy peas,” said Strike, looking at Robin’s tray, where a hefty dollop of what looked like green porridge sat alongside her fish and chips.

“Yorkshire caviar,” said Robin, sitting down. “I didn’t think you’d want any.”

“You were right,” said Strike, picking up a sachet of tomato sauce while watching with something like revulsion as Robin dipped a chip into the green sludge and ate it.

“Soft Southerner, you are,” she said, and Strike laughed.

“Don’t ever let Polworth hear you say that,” he said, breaking off a bit of fish with his fingers, dipping it in ketchup and eating it. He then, without warning, broke into song:

“What on earth’s that?” asked Robin, laughing.

“First verse of ‘The Song of the Western Men,’” said Strike. “The gist is that Cornishmen are the antithesis of soft bastards. Bloody hell, this is good.”

“I know. You don’t get fish and chips like this in London,” said Robin.

For a few minutes they ate in silence. The greaseproof paper in which the trays of chips were wrapped was printed with old pages of the Mirror newspaper. Paul Quits the Beatles. There were cartoons too, of the dirty postcard type: a busty blonde in bed with her elderly boss was saying “Business must be booming. You’ve never given me so much overtime.” It reminded her of Gemma the PA, who’d perhaps already called the fake number Robin had given her, and realized that it wasn’t only her ex, “Andy,” who wasn’t all he appeared to be. But Robin had a recording on her phone of everything Gemma knew about Shifty’s insider trading and Pat, at that moment, was transcribing it into a document shorn of anything that might identify the informant. Shifty, Robin hoped, would soon be jobless and, with any luck, in court.

A long stretch of fairground rides on the other side of the road hid the sea from her sight. The seats of the distant Ferris wheel were enclosed in casings shaped like pastel-colored hot-air balloons. Nearby stood a gigantic climbing frame for adults, with ropes and swinging tires, a hundred feet up in the air. Watching the harnessed people navigating the obstacles, Robin felt a strange mixture of contentment and melancholy: the possibility of an unknown development in the Bamborough case, the delicious chips and peas, the companionship of Strike and the sunshine were all cheering, but she was also remembering chasing along the out-of-sight beach as a small child, trying to outrun her brother Stephen to reach the donkeys and have first pick. Why did the memory of innocence sting so much, as you got older? Why did the memory of the child who’d thought she was invulnerable, who’d never known cruelty, give her more pain than pleasure?

Her childhood had been happy, unlike Strike’s; it ought not to hurt. Over the space of summer weekends spread years apart, Robin and her brothers had competed to ride the black donkey called Noddy, who was doubtless long gone. Was it mortality, then, which turned cheerful memories bittersweet? Maybe, Robin thought, she’d bring Annabel here when she was old enough, and treat her to her first donkey ride. It was a nice idea, but she doubted Stephen and Jenny would see Skegness as a desirable weekend destination. Annabel’s great-aunt had moved away from Boston: there was no longer any family connection to the area. Times changed, and so did childhoods.

“You all right?” said Strike, watching Robin’s face.

“Fine,” she said. “Just thinking… I’m going to be thirty in a few weeks.”

Strike snorted.

“Well, you’re getting no sympathy from me,” he said. “I’ll be forty the month after.”

He snapped open his can of Coke and drank. Robin watched a family pass, all four eating ice creams, accompanied by a waddling dachshund that was nosing the Union Jack carrier bag which swung from the father’s hand.

“D’you think Scotland’s going to leave?”

“Go for independence? Maybe,” said Strike. “The polls are close. Barclay thinks it could happen. He was telling me about some old mates of his at home. They sound just like Polworth. Same hate figures, same promises everything’ll be rainbows and unicorns if only they cut themselves free of London. Anyone pointing out pitfalls or difficulties is scaremongering. Experts don’t know anything. Facts lie. ‘Things can’t be any worse than they are.’”

Strike put several chips in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, then said,

“But life’s taught me things can always get worse than they are. I thought I had it hard, then they wheeled a bloke onto the ward who’d had both his legs and his genitals blown off.”

He’d never before talked to Robin about the aftermath of his life-changing injury. Indeed, he rarely mentioned his missing leg. A barrier had definitely fallen, Robin thought, since their whisky-fueled talk in the dark office.

“Everyone wants a single, simple solution,” he said, now finishing his last few chips. “One weird trick to lose belly fat. I’ve never clicked on it, but I understand the appeal.”

“Well, reinvention’s such an inviting idea, isn’t it?” said Robin, her eyes on the fake hot-air balloons, circling on their prescribed course. “Look at Douthwaite, changing his name and finding a new woman every few years. Reinventing a whole country would feel amazing. Being part of that.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Of course, people think if they subsume themselves in something bigger, and that changes, they’ll change too.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better, or different, is there?” asked Robin. “Nothing wrong with wanting to improve things?”

“Not at all,” said Strike. “But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”

“I don’t know… I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.

Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said,

“Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”

And before Robin had time for anything other than a slight blush, Strike said,

“Are you not finishing those chips?”

“Help yourself,” said Robin, shoving the tray toward him. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I’ll look up that one weird tip to lose belly fat.”

Strike smirked. After wiping her hands on her paper napkin, Robin checked her emails.

“Have you seen this from Vanessa Ekwensi? She’s copied you in.”

“What?”

“She might know someone who could replace Morris… woman called Michelle Greenstreet… she wants to leave the police. She’s been in eight years,” said Robin, scrolling slowly down the email, “not enjoying response policing… she’s in Manchester… wants to relocate to London, very keen on the detective side…”

“Sounds promising,” said Strike. “Let’s schedule an interview. She’s already cleared the first hurdle with flying colors.”

“What hurdle?” said Robin, looking up.

“Doubt she’s ever sent a dick pic.”

He patted his pockets, pulled out his packet of Benson & Hedges but found it empty.

“I need more fags, let’s—”

“Wait,” said Robin, who was still staring down at her mobile. “Oh my God. Cormoran—Gloria Conti’s emailed me.”

“You’re kidding,” said Strike. Having partly risen, he now let himself fall back onto the bench.

“‘Dear Miss Ellacott,’” Robin read aloud, “‘I’m sorry I haven’t answered your emails. I wasn’t aware you were trying to contact me and have only just found out. If convenient, I’d be available to talk to you tomorrow evening at 7pm. Yours sincerely…’ and she’s given her phone number,” said Robin, looking up at Strike, astonished. “How can she only just have found out? It’s been months of me emailing her without any response… unless Anna’s prompted her?”

“Could be,” said Strike. “Which doesn’t suggest someone who wants the investigation over.”

“Of course she doesn’t,” said Robin. “But for sanity’s sake, you’d have to draw the line somewhere.”

“So what does that make us?”

Robin smiled and shook her head.

“Dedicated?”

“Conti: last person to see Margot alive. Closest person to Margot at the practice…”

“I’m thanking her,” said Robin, who was typing fast onto her mobile, “and agreeing to the call tomorrow.”

“We could do it from the office, together,” said Strike. “Maybe FaceTime her, if she’s agreeable?”

“I’ll ask,” said Robin, still typing.

They set off a few minutes later in search of cigarettes, Robin reflecting on how casually she’d just agreed to go into work on a Saturday evening, so she could conduct Gloria’s interview with Strike. There was no angry Matthew at home any more, furious about her committing herself to long hours, suspicious about what she and Strike were up to, alone in the office in the evening. And she thought back to Matthew’s refusal to look her in the eye across the table at the mediation. He’d changed his partner, and his firm; he’d soon be a father. His life had changed, but had he?

They turned the corner to find themselves facing what Strike mentally categorized as “acres of tat.” As far as the eye could see were racks of merchandise laid out on the pavement: beach balls, keyrings, cheap jewelry, sunglasses, buckets of candyfloss, fudge and plush toys.

“Look at that,” said Robin suddenly, pointing to her right. A bright yellow sign read: Your Life Within Your Hands. On the dark glass of the door below was written: Palm Reader. Clairvoyant, along with a circular chart, all twelve signs of the zodiac represented by the glyphs around a central sun.

“What?” said Strike.

“Well, you’ve had your chart done. Maybe I’d like mine.”

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, and they walked on, Robin smiling to herself.

She waited outside, examining postcards, while Strike entered the newsagent’s to buy cigarettes.

Waiting to be served, Strike was seized by a sudden, quixotic impulse (stimulated no doubt by the gaudy color all around him, by the sunshine and sticks of rock, the rattle and clang of amusement arcades and a stomach full of some of the best fish and chips he’d ever eaten) to buy Robin a toy donkey. He came to his senses almost before the idea had formed: what was he, a kid on a daytime date with his first girlfriend? Emerging again into the sunlight as he left the shop, he noted that he couldn’t have bought a donkey if he’d wanted to. There wasn’t a single one in sight: the bins full of plushes held only unicorns.

“Back to the car, then?” said Robin.

“Yeah,” said Strike, ripping the cellophane off his cigarettes, but then he said, “we’ll go down to the sea before we head off, shall we?”

“OK,” said Robin, surprised. “Er—why?”

“Just fancy it. It’s wrong, being by the sea without actually laying eyes on it.”

“Is this a Cornish thing?” asked Robin, as they headed back to Grand Parade.

“Maybe,” said Strike, lighting the cigarette between his teeth. He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled then sang,

“‘The Song of the Western Men?’”

“That’s the one.”

“Why d’you think they feel the need to tell Londoners they’re just as good? Isn’t that a given?”

“Just London, isn’t it?” said Strike, as they crossed the road. “Pisses everyone off.”

“I love London.”

“Me too. But I can see why it pisses everyone off.”

They passed a fountain with a statue in the middle of the Jolly Fisherman, that rotund, bearded sailor skipping along in high wind, who’d been used on posters advertising Skegness for nearly a century, and progressed across a smooth paved area toward the beach.

At last they saw what Strike had felt the need to see: a wide expanse of flat ocean, the color of chalcedony, beneath a periwinkle sky. Far out at sea, spoiling the horizon, were an army of tall white wind turbines, and while Strike personally enjoyed the chill breeze coming off the wide ocean, he understood at last why Robin had brought a scarf.

Strike smoked in silence, the cool wind making no difference whatsoever to his curly hair. He was thinking about Joan. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that her plan for her final resting place had given them a grave to visit any time they were at the British coast. Cornish-born, Cornish-bred, Joan had known that this need to reconnect with the sea lived in all of them. Now, every time they made their way to the coast they paid her tribute, along with the obeisance due to the waves.

“They were Joan’s favorites, pink roses,” he said, after a while. “What you sent, to the funeral.”

“Oh, really?” said Robin. “I… well, I had a kind of picture in my head of Joan, from things you’d told me, and… pink roses seemed to suit her.”

“If the agency ever fails,” said Strike, as they both turned away from the sea, “you could come back to Skegness and set yourself up as a clairvoyant.”

“Bit niche,” said Robin, as they walked back toward the car park. “Guessing dead people’s favorite flowers.”

“No donkeys,” said Strike, glancing back over his shoulder at the beach.

“Never mind,” said Robin kindly. “I think you’d have been a bit heavy.”

66

The following evening, Strike and Robin sat down together on the same side of the partners’ desk. They were alone in the office for the first time since the night Strike had given her two black eyes. The lights were on this time, there were no glasses of whisky in their hands, but each of them was very conscious of what had happened on the previous occasion, and both felt a slight self-consciousness, which manifested itself, on Strike’s side, in a slightly brisker tone as they set up the computer monitor so that both could see it well, and on Robin’s, in focusing herself on all the questions she wanted to ask Gloria.

At six o’clock—which was seven o’clock, Gloria’s time—Strike dialed Gloria’s number, and after a moment’s suspense, they heard ringing, and a woman appeared onscreen, looking slightly nervous, in what looked like a book-lined study. Framed on the wall behind her was a large photograph of a family: Gloria herself, a distinguished-looking husband and three adult children, all wearing white shirts, all of them notably attractive.

Of all the people they’d met and interviewed in connection with Margot Bamborough, Gloria Conti, Robin thought, looked most like her younger self, although she hadn’t made any obvious efforts to disguise the aging process. Her hair, which was pure white, had been cut into a short and flattering bob. Although there were fine lines on her brow and around her eyes, her fair complexion seemed never to have been exposed to much sun. She was slim and high-cheekboned, so that the structure of her face was much as it had been when she was younger, and her high-necked navy shirt, small gold earrings and square-framed glasses were stylish and simple. Robin thought that Gloria looked far more like her idea of a college professor than the scion of a criminal family, but perhaps she was being influenced by the lines of books on the shelves behind her.

“Good evening,” said Gloria nervously.

“Good evening,” said Strike and Robin together.

“It’s very good of you to talk to us, Mrs. Jaubert,” said Strike. “We appreciate it.”

“Oh, not at all,” she said, politely.

Robin hadn’t imagined received pronunciation from Irene Hickson’s descriptions of a girl from a rough background, but of course, as with Paul Satchwell, Gloria had now spent longer outside the country of her birth than in it.

“We’ve been hoping to talk to you for a long time,” said Robin.

“Yes, I’m very sorry about that,” said Gloria. “My husband, Hugo, didn’t tell me about any of your messages, you see. I found your last email in the trash folder, by accident. That’s how I realized you were trying to contact me. Hugo—well, he thought he was doing the right thing.”

Robin was reminded of that occasion when Matthew had deleted a voicemail from Strike on Robin’s phone in an attempt to stop Robin going back to work at the agency. She was surprised to see Gloria didn’t seem to hold her husband’s intervention against him. Perhaps Gloria could read her mind, because she said:

“Hugo assumed I wouldn’t want to talk about what happened with strangers. He didn’t realize that, actually, you’re the only people I’d ever want to talk to, because you’re trying to find out what really happened, and if you succeed, it’ll be—well, it would lift a huge weight off me.”

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

“No, not at all,” said Gloria politely.

As Strike clicked out the nib of his pen, Gloria reached out of shot for a large glass of red wine, took a sip, appeared to brace herself and said rather quickly,

“Please—if you don’t mind—could I explain some things first? Since yesterday, I’ve been going over it, in my head, and I think if I tell you my story it will save you a lot of time. It’s key to understanding my relationship with Margot and why I behaved… as I behaved.”

“That’d be very helpful,” said Strike, pen poised. “Please, go on.”

Gloria took another sip of wine, put her glass back where they couldn’t see it, drew a deep breath and said,

“Both my parents died in a house fire when I was five.”

“How awful,” said Robin, startled. The 1961 census record had shown a complete family of four. “I’m so sorry.”

Strike gave a kind of commiserative growl.

“Thank you,” said Gloria. “I’m only telling you that to explain—you see, I survived because my father threw me out of the window into a blanket the neighbors were holding. My mother and father didn’t jump, because they were trying to reach my elder brother, who was trapped. All three of them died, so I was raised by my mother’s parents. They were adorable people. They’d have sold their own souls for me, which makes everything I’m about to say even worse…

“I was quite a shy girl. I really envied the girls at school who had parents who were—you know—with it. My poor granny didn’t really understand the sixties and seventies,” said Gloria, with a sad smile. “My clothes were always a bit old-fashioned. No mini-skirts or eye makeup, you know…

“I reacted by developing a very elaborate fantasy life. I know most teenagers are fantasists, but I was… extreme. Everything sort of spun out of control when I was sixteen, and I went to see the movie The Godfather…

“It’s ridiculous,” said Gloria soberly, “but it’s the truth. I… cleaved to that movie. I became obsessed with it. I don’t know how many times I saw it; at least twenty, I expect. I was an English schoolgirl from seventies Islington, but what I really wanted was to be Apollonia from forties Sicily, and meet a handsome American Mafioso, and not to be blown up by a car bomb, but go and live with Michael Corleone in New York and be beautiful and glamourous while my husband did glamourously violent, criminal things, all underpinned, you know, by a strict moral code.”

Strike and Robin both laughed, but Gloria didn’t smile. On the contrary, she looked sad and ashamed.

“I somehow thought all this might be achievable,” she went on, “because I had an Italian surname. I’d never really cared about that, before The Godfather. Now, out of nowhere, I asked my grandparents to take me to the Italian church on Clerkenwell Road for mass, instead of their regular church—and bless them, they did it. I wish they hadn’t. I wish they’d told me not to be so selfish, because their regular church gave them a lot of support and it was the center of their social life.

“I’d always felt entirely English, which I was on my mum’s side, but now I started trying to find out as much as I could about my dad’s family. I hoped to find out I was descended from Mafiosi. Then I could get my grandparents to give me the money to go and meet them all in Sicily and maybe marry a distant cousin. But all I found out was that my Italian grandfather immigrated to London to work in a coffee shop. I already knew my dad had worked for London Transport. Everyone I found out about, no matter how far back I went, was completely respectable and law-abiding. It was a real disappointment,” said Gloria, with a sigh.

“Then one Sunday, at St. Peter’s, somebody pointed out a man called Niccolo Ricci, sitting at the back of the Italian church. They said he was one of the very last of the Little Italy gangsters.”

Gloria paused to take another mouthful of wine, replaced the glass out of shot again, then said,

“Anyway… Ricci had sons.”

Strike now set pen to paper for the first time.

“There wasn’t much resemblance, really, between Luca Ricci and Al Pacino,” said Gloria drily, “but I managed to find one. He was four years older than I was, and everyone I asked about him said he was trouble, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. It started with a few smiles in passing…

“We went on our first date a couple of months before I was due to sit my exams. I told Granny and Gramps I was revising at a schoolfriend’s house. I’d always been such a good girl; they never dreamed I could be fibbing.

“I desperately wanted to like Luca, because this was my way into my fantasy. He had a car, and he was definitely criminal. He didn’t tell me anything about summit meetings between heads of crime families, though… mostly he talked about his Fiat, and drugs and beating people up.

“After a few dates, it was obvious Luca was quite keen on me, or… no,” said Gloria, unsmiling, “not keen, because that implies genuine affection. He really just wanted to fix me down, to keep me his. I was so stupid and lost to my fantasy, I found that quite exciting, because it seemed—you know—the proper Mafioso attitude. But I liked Luca best when I wasn’t actually with him, when I was mixing him up with Michael Corleone in my head, in my bed at night.

“I stopped studying. My fantasy life took me over completely. Gangsters’ molls didn’t need A-levels. Luca didn’t think I needed A-levels, either. I failed all of them.

“My grandparents were really disappointed, although they were so kind about it,” said Gloria. For the first time, her voice quivered slightly. “Then—I think it was the following week—they found out about me seeing Luca. They were desperately worried and upset, but by this time, I didn’t really care. I told them I’d given up on the idea of college. I wanted to go out to work.

“I only applied for the job at the St. John’s practice because it was in the heart of Little Italy, even though Little Italy didn’t really exist any more. Luca’s father was one of the very last relics. But it was all part of my fantasy: I was a Conti, I should be there, where my forefathers had been. It made it easier to see Luca, too, because he lived there.

“I should never have got that receptionist’s job. I was far too young and I had no experience. It was Margot who wanted me to have it.”

Gloria paused, and Robin was sure it was because she’d just had to say Margot’s name for the first time. Drawing another deep breath, she said,

“So, there I was, on reception with Irene all day. My grandparents weren’t registered at St. John’s, because they lived in Islington, so I got away with telling Irene a bunch of lies about my background.

“I’d created a whole persona by now. I told her the Contis were an old Sicilian family, how my grandfather and father had been part of a crime family and I don’t know what else. Sometimes I used bits and pieces Luca had told me about the Riccis. Some of it was straight out of The Godfather. Ironically,” said Gloria, with a slight eye roll, “the one authentically criminal thing I could have told her, I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut about my boyfriend. Luca had told me never to talk about him and his family to other people, so I didn’t. I took him seriously.

“I remember, a few months after I got the job, a rumor went round the local area that they’d found a body buried in concrete in one of the builder’s sites up the road. I pretended I knew all about that through my underworld contacts. I told Irene I had it on good authority that the corpse had been a member of the Sabini gang. I really was a fool,” said Gloria quietly. “A little idiot…

“But I always had the feeling Margot could see right through me. She told me not long after I started there that she’d ‘seen something’ in me, at the interview. I didn’t like that, I felt as though she was pat­ronizing me. She never treated me the way I wanted to be treated, as some street-smart Mafia girl with dark secrets, but always as though I was just a sweet young girl. Irene didn’t like Margot, either, and we used to moan about her all the time on reception. Margot had a big thing about education and keeping your career, and we used to say what a hypocrite she was, because she’d married this rich consultant. When you’re living a lie, nothing’s more threatening than people who tell the truth…

“I’m sorry,” said Gloria, with an impatient shake of the head, “this probably doesn’t seem relevant at all, but it is, if you just bear with me…”

“Take your time,” said Strike.

“Well… the day after my eighteenth birthday, Luca and I got into a row. I can’t remember what it was about, but he put his hand round my throat and pushed me up against the wall until I couldn’t breathe. I was terrified.

“He let go, but there was this horrible look in his eye. He said, ‘You’ve got only yourself to blame.’ And he said, ‘You’re starting to sound like that doctor.’

“I’d talked to him quite a lot about Margot, you see. I’d told him she was a complete killjoy, really bossy and opinionated. I kept repeating things she’d said, to denigrate them, to tell myself there was nothing in them.

“She quoted Simone de Beauvoir once, during a staff meeting. She’d sworn when she dropped her pen, and Dr. Brenner said, ‘People are always asking me what it’s like working with a lady doctor, and if I ever meet one, I’ll be able to tell them.’ Dorothy laughed—she hardly ever laughed—and Margot snapped right back at him—I know the quotation off by heart now, in French, too—‘Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female—whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.’

“Irene and I talked about it afterward. We called her a show-off for quoting some French woman, but things like that got in my head and I couldn’t get them out again. I thought I wanted to be a fifties Mafia housewife, but sometimes Margot was really funny, and I watched her never backing down to Brenner, and you couldn’t help admiring her for it…”

Gloria took yet another gulp of wine.

“Anyway, the evening Luca half-throttled me, I went home and lay awake crying half the night. The next morning, I put on a polo-neck for work to hide the bruises, and at five o’clock that afternoon, when I left work, I went straight to a call box near the surgery, rang Luca and finished with him. I told him he’d scared me and that I didn’t want to see him any more.

“He took it quite quietly. I was surprised, but so relieved… for three or four days I thought it was all over, and I felt amazing. It was like waking up, or coming up for air after being underwater. I still wanted to be a mobster’s girlfriend, but the fantasy version was fine. I’d had a little bit too much contact with reality.

“Then, at the end of our practice Christmas party, in walked Luca, with his father and one of his cousins.

“I was absolutely terrified to see them there. Luca said to me, ‘Dad just wanted to meet my girlfriend.’ And—I don’t know why, except I was petrified of there being a scene—I just said, ‘Oh, OK.’ And I grabbed my coat and left with the three of them, before anyone could talk to them.

“They walked me to my bus stop. On the way, Nico said, ‘You’re a nice girl. Luca was very upset by what you said to him on the phone. He’s very fond of you, you know. You don’t want to make him unhappy, do you?’ Then he and Luca’s cousin walked away. Luca said, ‘You didn’t mean what you said, did you?’ And I… I was so scared. Him bringing his father and cousin along… I told myself I’d be able to get out of it later. Just keep him happy for now. So I said, ‘No, I didn’t mean it. You won’t do anything like that ever again, though, will you?’ And he said, ‘Like what?’ As if he’d never pressed on my windpipe till I couldn’t breathe. As though I’d imagined it.

“So, we carried on seeing each other,” said Gloria. “Luca started talking about getting married. I kept saying I felt too young. Every time I came close to ending it, he’d accuse me of cheating on him, which was the worst crime of all, and there was no way of proving I wasn’t, except to keep going out with him.”

Now Gloria looked away from them, her eyes on something off screen.

“We were sleeping together by then. I didn’t want to. I’m not saying he forced me—not really,” said Gloria, and Robin thought of Shifty’s PA, Gemma, “but keeping him happy was the only way to keep going. Otherwise there’d be a slap or worse. One time, he made some comment about hurting my grandmother if I didn’t behave. I went crazy at him, and he laughed, and said it was an obvious joke, but he wanted to plant the idea in my mind, and he succeeded.

“And he didn’t believe in contraception. We were supposed to be using the… you know, the rhythm method,” said Gloria, reaching again for her wine. “But he was… let’s say, he was careless, and I was sure he wanted me pregnant, because then he’d have me cornered, and I’d marry him. My grandparents would probably have backed him up. They were devout people.

“So, without telling Luca, I went to Margot for the pill. She said she was happy to give it to me, but she didn’t know I had a boyfriend, even, I’d never said…

“And even though I didn’t really like her,” said Gloria, “I told her some of it. It was the only place I could drop the pretense, I suppose. I knew she couldn’t tell anyone outside her consulting room. She tried to talk sense into me. Tried to show me there were ways out of the situation, apart from just giving in to Luca all the time. I thought it was all right for her, with all her money and her big safe house…

“But she gave me a bit of hope, I suppose. Once, after he’d hit me, and told me I’d asked for it, and told me I should be grateful I had someone offering me a way out of living at home with two old people, I said, ‘There are other places I could go,’ and I think he got worried someone had offered to help me get away. I’d stopped making fun of Margot by this time, and Luca wasn’t a stupid man…

“That’s when he wrote her threatening notes. Anonymously, you know—but I knew it was him,” said Gloria. “I knew his writing. Dorothy was off one day because her son was having his tonsils out, so Irene was opening the post and she unfolded one of the notes, right at the desk beside me. She was gloating about it, and I had to pretend to find it funny, but not to recognize the handwriting.

“I confronted Luca about it. He told me not to be so stupid, of course he hadn’t written the notes, but I knew he had…

“Anyway—I think it was right after the second note—I found out what I’d been terrified about happening had happened. I was pregnant. I hadn’t realized that the pill wouldn’t work if you’d had a stomach upset, and I’d had a bug, a month before. I knew I was cornered, and it was too late, I’d have to marry Luca. The Riccis would want it, and my grandparents wouldn’t want me to be an unwed mother.

“That’s when I admitted it to myself for the first time,” said Gloria, looking directly at Strike and Robin. “I absolutely hated Luca Ricci.”

“Gloria,” said Robin quietly, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but could I ask you: when you were sick at Margot’s barbecue—?”

“You heard about that, did you? Yes, that was when I had the tummy bug. People said one of the kids had spiked the punch, but I don’t think so. Nobody else was as ill as I was.”

Out of the corner of Robin’s eye, she saw Strike writing something in his notebook.

“I went back to Margot to find out for sure whether I was pregnant,” said Gloria. “I knew I could trust her. I broke down again in her surgery, and cried my eyes out, when she confirmed it. And then… well, she was just lovely. She held my hand and talked to me for ages.

“I thought abortion was a sin,” said Gloria. “That’s the way I was raised. She didn’t think it was a sin, not Margot. She talked to me about the life I was likely to have with Luca, if I had the baby. We discussed me keeping it, alone, but we both knew Luca wouldn’t want that, that he’d be in my life forever if I had his kid. It was hard, then, being on your own with a child. I was watching Janice the nurse doing it. Always juggling her son and the job.

“I didn’t tell Luca, obviously,” said Gloria. “I knew that if I was going to—to do anything—I had to do it quickly, before he noticed my body change, but most of all, before the baby could feel it or…”

Gloria suddenly bowed her head, and covered her face with her hands.

“I’m so sorry,” said Robin. “It must have been awful for you…”

“No—well—” said Gloria, straightening up and again pushing back her white hair, her eyes wet. “Never mind that. I’m only telling you, so you understand…

“Margot made the appointment for me. She gave the clinic her name and contact details and she bought us both wigs, because if she was recognized, someone might recognize me by association. And she came with me—it was a Saturday—to this place in Bride Street. I’ve never forgotten the name of the street, because a bride is exactly what I didn’t want to be, and that’s why I was there.

“The clinic had been using Margot’s name as the referring doctor, and I think somewhere there were crossed wires, because they thought ‘Margot Bamborough’ was the one having the procedure. Margot said, ‘It doesn’t matter, nobody’ll ever know, all these records are confidential.’ And she said, in a way it was convenient, if there was any follow-up needed, they could contact her and arrange it.

“She held my hand on the way in, and she was there when I woke up,” said Gloria, and now tears leaked from her dark eyes, and she brushed them quickly away. “When I was ready to go home, she took me to the end of my grandparents’ street in a taxi. She told me what to do afterward, how to take care of myself…

“I wasn’t like Margot,” said Gloria, her voice breaking. “I didn’t believe it was right, what I did. September the fourteenth: I don’t think that date’s come by once, since, that I haven’t remembered, and thought about that baby.

“When I went back to work after a couple of days off, she took me into her office and asked me how I was feeling, and then she said, ‘Now, Gloria, you’ve got to be brave. If you stay with Luca, this will happen again.’ She said, ‘We need to find you a job away from London, and make sure he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.’ And she said something that’s stayed with me always, ‘We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.’

“But I wasn’t like Margot,” said Gloria again. “I wasn’t brave, I couldn’t imagine leaving my grandparents. I pretended to agree, but ten days after the abortion I was sleeping with Luca again, not because I wanted to, but because there didn’t seem any other choice.

“And then,” said Gloria, “about a month after we’d been to the clinic, it happened. Margot disappeared.”

A muffled male voice was now heard at Gloria’s end of the call. She turned toward the door behind her and said,

“Non, c’est toujours en cours!”

Turning back to her computer she said,

“Pardon. I mean, sorry.”

“Mrs. Jaubert—Gloria,” said Strike, “could we please take you back through the day Margot disappeared?”

“The whole day?”

Strike nodded. Gloria took a slow inward breath, like somebody about to dive into deep water, then said,

“Well, the morning was all normal. Everyone was there except Wilma the cleaner. She didn’t come in on Fridays.

“I remember two things about the morning: meeting Janice by the kettle at the back, and her going on about the sequel to The Godfather coming out soon, and me pretending to be excited about it, and actually feeling as though I’d run a mile rather than go and see it… and Irene being quite smug and pleased because Janice had just been on a date with some man she’d been trying to set Janice up with for ages.

“Irene was funny about Janice,” said Gloria. “They were supposed to be such great friends, but she was always going on about Janice being a bit of a man-eater, which was funny if you’d known Irene. She used to say that Janice needed to learn to cut her cloth, that she was deluded, waiting for someone like James Caan to show up and sweep her off her feet, because she was a single mother and not that great a catch. Irene thought the best she could hope for was this man from Eddie’s work, who sounded a bit simple. Irene was always laughing about him getting things wrong…

“We were quite busy, as I remember it, all three doctors coming in and out of the waiting room to call for their patients. I can’t remember anything unusual about the afternoon except that Irene left early. She claimed she had toothache, but I thought it was a fib at the time. She hadn’t seemed in pain to me, when she was going on about Janice’s love life.

“I knew Margot was meeting her friend later in the pub. She told me, because she had a doughnut in cling film in the fridge, and she asked me to bring it through to her, right before she saw her last patient, to keep her going. She loved sugar. She was always in the biscuit tin at five o’clock. She had one of those metabolisms, never put on weight, full of nervous energy.

“I remember the doughnut, because when I took it in to her, I said, ‘Why didn’t you just eat those chocolates?’ She had a box she’d taken out of the bin, I think it was the day before. I mean, they were still in their cellophane when she took them out of the bin, it wasn’t unhygienic. Someone had sent them to her—”

“Someone?” repeated Strike.

“Well, we all thought it was that patient the police were so interested in, Steve Douthwaite,” said Gloria. “Dorothy thought that, anyway.”

“Wasn’t there a message attached?”

“There was a card saying ‘Thank you,’” said Gloria, “and Dorothy might’ve made the assumption it was Steve Douthwaite, because we all thought he was turning up a lot. I don’t think the card was signed, though.”

“So Margot threw the box in the bin, and then took it out again, afterward?”

“Yes, because I laughed at her about it,” said Gloria. “I said, ‘I knew you couldn’t resist,’ and she laughed, too. And next day, when I said, ‘Why don’t you eat them?’ she said, ‘I have, I’ve finished them.’”

“But she still had the box there?”

“Yes, on the shelf with her books. I went back to the front desk. Dr. Brenner’s patient left, but Brenner didn’t, because he was writing up the notes.”

“Could I ask you whether you knew about Dr. Brenner’s barbiturate addiction?” asked Strike.

“His what?” said Gloria.

“Nobody ever told you about that?”

“No,” she said, looking surprised. “I had no idea.”

“You never heard that Janice had found an Amytal capsule in the bottom of a cup of tea?”

“No… oh. Is that why Margot started making her own tea? She told me Irene made it too milky.”

“Let’s go back to the order in which everyone left.”

“OK, so, Dr. Gupta’s patient was next, and Dr. Gupta left immediately afterward. He had some family dinner he needed to attend, so off he went.

“And then, just when I was thinking we were done for the day, in walked that girl, Theo.”

“Tell us about Theo,” said Strike.

“Long black hair… dark-skinned. She looked Romanian or Turkish. Ornate earrings, you know: gypsy-ish. I actually thought she looked like a gypsy. I’d never seen her before, so I knew she wasn’t registered with us. She looked as though she was in a lot of pain, with her stomach. She came up to the desk and asked to see a doctor urgently. I asked her name, and she said Theo… something or other. I didn’t ask her again because she was obviously suffering, so I told her to wait and went to see whether a doctor was free. Margot’s door was still closed, so I asked Dr. Brenner. He didn’t want to see her. He was always like that, always difficult. I never liked him.

“Then Margot’s door opened, and the mother and child who’d been seeing her left, and she said she’d see the girl who was waiting.”

“And Theo was definitely a girl?” asked Strike.

“Without any doubt at all,” said Gloria firmly. “She was broad-shouldered, I noticed that when she came to the desk, but she was definitely a woman. Maybe it was the shoulders that made Dr. Brenner say, afterward, she looked like a man, but honestly…

“I was thinking about him last night, knowing I was going to be talking to you. Brenner was probably the biggest misogynist I ever met. He’d denigrate women for not looking feminine or talking ‘like a lady,’ but he also despised Irene, who was giggly and blonde and very feminine, you know. I suppose what he wanted was for us all to be like Dorothy, subordinate and respectful, high collars, low hemlines. Dorothy was like a really humorless nun.”

Robin thought of Betty Fuller, lying on a bed, pretending to be comatose, while Brenner poured filthy words into her ear.

“Women patients really didn’t like Brenner. We were always having them asking to switch to Margot, but we had to turn most of them down, because her list was so full. But Brenner was coming up for retirement and we were hoping we’d get someone better when he went.

“So, yes, he left, and Theo went in to see Margot. I kept checking the time, because I was supposed to be meeting Luca, and if I kept him waiting, there was always trouble. But Theo’s appointment just went on and on. At a quarter past six, Theo finally came back out of the surgery and left.

“Margot came through just a couple of minutes later. She seemed absolutely exhausted. It had been a full day. She said, ‘I’m going to write her notes up tomorrow, I’ve got to go, Oonagh’s waiting. Lock up with the spare key.’ I didn’t really answer,” said Gloria, “because I was so worried about Luca getting angry with me. So, I never said goodbye, or have a good evening, to this woman who saved my life…

“Because she did, you know. I never said it to her, but she did…”

A tear trickled down her face. Gloria paused to wipe it away, then said,

“I remember, as she put her umbrella up, she slipped. Turned over on her heel. It was raining, the pavement was wet. Then she straightened up and walked out of sight.

“I started dashing round, turning off lights, locking the records up in the filing cabinets. Then I made sure the back door was locked, which it was—the police asked me about that. I closed and locked the front door, and ran straight up Passing Alley, which was right beside the surgery, to meet Luca in St. John Street.

“And that was the last time I ever saw Margot.”

Gloria reached again for her almost empty wine glass, and drained it.

“Did you have any idea what might have happened to her?” asked Strike.

“Of course,” said Gloria quietly. “I was terrified Luca had got someone to hurt her, or kidnap her. She’d become a bugbear to him. Every time I stood up for myself, he’d say horrible things about Margot influencing me. He was convinced she was trying to persuade me to leave him, which, of course, she was. My greatest fear was that he’d somehow find out what she’d helped me do… you know. In Bride Street.

“I knew he couldn’t have abducted her personally, because I met him on St. John Street, not five minutes after she left the surgery, and I know it can’t have been his father, because his brother Marco was in hospital at the time, and the parents were with him round the clock. But Luca had friends and cousins.

“I couldn’t tell the police. Luca had stopped pretending he was joking, when he threatened my grandparents. I asked him whether he was behind it, though. The anxiety was too much: I had to ask. He got really angry, called me names—dumb bitch, things like that. He said, of course he hadn’t. But he’d told me stories about his father ‘making people disappear,’ so I just didn’t know…”

“Did you ever have reason to suppose he knew…” Robin hesitated “… what happened in Bride Street?”

“I’m absolutely positive he never knew,” said Gloria. “Margot was too good for him. The wigs and using her name and giving me a plausible story for why I couldn’t have sex with him for a while… She’s the reason I got away with it. No, I don’t believe he ever knew. So, in my best moments, I thought, he didn’t really have a strong enough reason—”

The door behind Gloria opened, and in walked a handsome aquiline-nosed, gray-haired man in a striped shirt and jeans, carrying a bottle of red wine. A large German Shepherd dog followed him into the room, its tail wagging.

“Je m’excuse,” he said, smiling at Strike and Robin onscreen. “I am sorry for… Comment dit-on ‘interrompre’?” he asked his wife.

“Interrupt,” she said.

“Oui. I am sorry for interrupt.”

He refilled his wife’s glass, handed it back to her, patted her on the shoulder, then walked out again, calling the dog.

“Viens, Obélix.”

When both man and dog had disappeared, Gloria said, with a little laugh,

“That was Hugo.”

“How long did you stay at the St. John’s practice, after Margot disappeared?” asked Strike, although he knew the answer.

“Six, seven months, I think,” said Gloria. “Long enough to see the new policeman take over. We were all pleased, because the first—Talbot, wasn’t it?—was quite strange. He bullied the life out of Wilma and Janice. I think that’s what made Wilma ill, actually. She had quite enough on her plate without the police hounding her.”

“You don’t think she drank, then?” asked Robin.

“Drank? That was all Dorothy’s malice,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Dorothy was trying to pin the thefts on Wilma. Have you heard about that?”

Strike and Robin nodded.

“When she couldn’t prove that Wilma was taking money out of people’s bags, she put it about that she was drinking and the poor woman resigned. She was probably glad to leave, but it was still losing a salary, wasn’t it?

“I wanted to leave myself,” said Gloria, “but I was paralyzed. I had this really strange feeling that, if I just stayed there, the world would right itself. Margot would come back. It was only after she disappeared that I realized… what she’d been to me…

“Anyway,” sighed Gloria, “one night, months after she’d disappeared, Luca was really violent to me. I’d smiled at a man who opened a door for me as I left the pub with Luca, that’s what sparked it. He beat me like he’d never beaten me before, at his place—he had this little flat.

“I remember saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have smiled at him.’ And all the time I was saying it, I could see—in here—” Gloria tapped her head, “Margot watching me, and even while I was begging Luca to stop, and agreeing I’d behaved like a little slut, and I shouldn’t ever smile at strange men, I was thinking, I’m going, Margot. I’m going where he’ll never find me.

“Because it had clicked in my head at last. She’d told me I needed to be brave. It was no good waiting for anyone else to save me. I had to save me.

“After he’d calmed down, he let me go home to my grandparents’ house, but he wanted to see me again later. It was always like that after he’d been really violent. He wanted extra contact.

“He hadn’t beaten me in the face. He never did, he never lost control like that, so I went back to my grandparents’ and acted as though everything was fine. Went out to meet Luca that night, and he took me out for dinner, and that was the night he proposed, with a ring and everything.

“And I said yes,” said Gloria, with a strange smile and a shrug. “I put that ring on, and I looked down at it, and I didn’t even have to act happy, because I genuinely was. I thought That’ll buy some of my plane ticket. Mind you, I’d never flown before in my life. The idea of it scared me. But all the time, I could see Margot in my head. You’ve got to be brave, Gloria.

“I had to tell my grandparents I was engaged. I couldn’t tell them what I was really planning, because I was scared they wouldn’t be able to act, or that they’d try and confront Luca or, worse, go to the police. Anyway, Luca came round to the house to meet them properly, pretending to be a nice guy, and it was awful, and I had to act as though I was thrilled about all of it.

“Every single day after that, I bought all the newspapers, and circled all of the jobs abroad that I might have a chance of getting. I had to do all of it in secret. Typed up a CV at work and got a bus to the West End to post all the applications, because I was scared someone who knew Luca would see me putting lots of envelopes in the post.

“After a few weeks, I got an interview with a French woman who was looking for an English home help, to teach her kids English. What really got me the job was being able to type. She ran her own business from home, so I could do a bit of admin for her while the kids were at nursery. The job came with room and board, and my employer would buy my plane ticket, so I didn’t have to sell Luca’s ring, and pretend I’d lost it…

“You know, the day I went into St. John’s and told them I was resigning, a funny thing happened. Nobody had mentioned Margot for weeks. Immediately after she disappeared, it was all any of us could talk about, but then it became taboo, somehow. We had a new locum doctor in her room. I can’t remember his name. A new cleaner, too. But this day, Dorothy arrived, quite flustered, and she never showed any emotion, usually…

“This local… what’s the word?” said Gloria, clicking her fingers, for the first time lost in her native language. “We’d say un dingue… oh, you know, a crazy man, a loon… harmless, but strange. Big long beard, dirty, you used to see him wandering up and down Clerkenwell Road with his son. Anyway, he’d sort of accosted Dorothy in the middle of the street, and told her he killed Margot Bamborough.

“It had shaken Dorothy up, but in an odd way… please don’t think this is awful… I hoped it was true. Because although I’d have given anything to know Margot was alive, I was sure she was dead. She wasn’t the type to run away. And my worst nightmare was that Luca was responsible, because that meant it was all my fault.”

Robin shook her head, but Gloria ignored her.

“I only told my grandparents the truth the night before I was due to leave for France. I hadn’t let them spend any money on the wedding that wasn’t going to happen, but even so, it was a huge shock to them. I sat them down, and told them everything, except for the termination.

“Of course, they were appalled. At first, they didn’t want me to leave, they wanted me to go to the police. I had to explain why that was a terrible idea, tell them about the threats Luca had made, and all of that. But they were so glad I wasn’t marrying him, they accepted it in the end. I told them it would all die down, and I’d be back soon… even though I wasn’t sure that was true, or if it would be possible.

“My grandfather took me to the airport, early next day. We’d worked out a story, for when Luca came asking where I was. They were to say I’d been having doubts, because he’d been violent, and that I’d gone over to Italy to stay with some of Dad’s relatives, to think things over. We even concocted a fake address to give him. I don’t know whether he ever wrote to it.

“And that’s everything,” said Gloria, sitting back in the desk chair. “I stayed with my first employer for seven years, and ended up with a junior position in her firm. I didn’t visit London again until I heard Luca was safely married.” She took another sip of wine from the glass her husband had refilled. “His first wife drank herself to death at the age of thirty-nine. He used to beat her badly. I found all that out later.

“And I’ve never told another lie about myself,” said Gloria, raising her chin. “Never exaggerated, never pretended, only ever told the absolute truth, except on one point. Until tonight, the only person who knew about the abortion was Hugo, but now you two know, too.

“Even if you find out Luca was behind what happened to Margot, and I have to have that on my conscience forever, I owe her the truth. That woman saved me, and I’ve never, ever forgotten her. She was one of the bravest, kindest people I’ve ever known.”

67

They thanked Gloria for her time and her honesty. Having bidden her goodbye, Strike and Robin sat at the partners’ desk, each of them sunk in thought, until Strike offered Robin one of the pots of dehydrated noodles he kept for snacks in the office. She declined, instead taking a bag of mixed nuts unenthusiastically out of her bag, and opening it. Once Strike had added boiling water to the plastic pot, he returned to the desk, stirring the noodles with a fork.

“It’s the efficiency,” he said, sitting down again. “That’s what’s bugging me. Literally no trace of her anywhere. Somebody was either extraordinarily clever, or unprecedentedly lucky. And Creed still fits that picture best, with Luca Ricci a close second.”

“Except it can’t have been Luca. He’s got an alibi: Gloria.”

“But as she says, he knew people who could take care of making someone disappear—because what are the odds, if Margot was abducted off the street, that this was a truly one-person job? Even Creed had his unwitting accomplices. The dozy landlady, giving him that safe basement, and the dry cleaner letting him have the van that day and n—”

“Don’t,” said Robin sharply.

“Don’t what?”

“Blame them.”

“I’m not blaming them, I’m—”

“Max and I were talking about this,” said Robin. “About the way people—women, usually—get blamed for not knowing, or seeing—but everyone’s guilty of that kind of bias. Everyone does it.”

“You think?” said Strike thickly, through his first mouthful of noodles.

“Yes,” said Robin. “We’ve all got a tendency to generalize from our own past experiences. Look at Violet Cooper. She thought she knew who Creed really was, because she’d met a couple of men who behaved like him, in her theater days.”

“Men who wouldn’t let anyone in their basement flats because they were boiling down skulls?”

“You know what I mean, Strike,” said Robin, refusing to be amused. “Soft-spoken, apparently gentle, slightly feminine. Creed liked putting on her feather boa, and he pretended to like show tunes, so she thought he was a gay man. But if the only gay man she’d met had been Max, my flatmate…”

“He’s gay, is he?” said Strike, whose memories of Max were indistinct.

“Yes, and he isn’t remotely camp, and hates musicals. Come to that, if she’d met a couple of Matt’s straight mates down the rugby club, who couldn’t wait to shove oranges up their T-shirts and prance around, she might’ve drawn a different conclusion, mightn’t she?”

“S’pose so,” said Strike, chewing noodles and considering this point. “And in fairness, most people don’t know any serial killers.”

“Exactly. So even if somebody’s got some unusual habits, our direct experience tends to suggest they’re just eccentric. Vi had never met a man who fetishised women’s clothing or… sorry, I’m boring you,” Robin added, because Strike’s eyes seemed to have glazed over.

“No, you aren’t,” he muttered. “You’re actually making me think… I had an idea, you know. I thought I’d spotted some coinci­dences, and it got me wondering…”

He set down the pot of noodles, reached under the desk and pulled one of the boxes of police evidence toward him, on top of which lay the pages he’d last been re-examining. He now took these bits of paper out, spread them in front of himself again, and resumed his noodle-eating.

“Are you going to tell me about the coincidences?” said Robin with a trace of impatience.

“Hang on a minute,” said Strike, looking up at her. “Why was Theo standing outside the phone box?”

“What?” said Robin, confused.

“I don’t think we can doubt, now, can we, that Ruby Elliot saw Theo by that phone box near Albemarle Way? Her description and Gloria’s tally exactly… so why was Theo standing outside the phone box?”

“She was waiting for the van to pick her up.”

“Right. But, not to state the bleeding obvious, the sides of the old red telephone boxes have windows. It was pissing down with rain. Theo didn’t have an umbrella, and Ruby said Theo’s hair was plastered down—so why didn’t she shelter in the telephone box, and keep watch for her lift? Clerkenwell Road’s long and straight. She’d’ve had a perfectly good view from that telephone box, and plenty of time to come out and show herself to the van driver. Why,” said Strike for the third time, “was she standing outside the phone box?”

“Because… there was someone in it?”

“That would seem the obvious explanation. And that phone box at the end of Albemarle Way would give you a view of the top of St. John’s Lane.”

“You think someone was lying in wait for Margot? Watching out from that phone box?”

Strike hesitated.

“Do me a favor and look up Fragile X syndrome?”

“OK… why?” said Robin, setting down her almonds and beginning to type.

“That phone box is at the end of the Athorns’ street.”

While Robin brought up the search results, Strike pulled the copy of Irene Hickson’s receipt toward him. It had the time 3:10 p.m. on it. Eating noodles, Strike was still looking at the slip of paper when Robin said, reading off her screen,

“‘First called Martin-Bell syndrome… the FMR1 gene on the X chromosome was sequenced in 1991’… Sorry, what exactly do you need?”

“What specific disabilities does it cause?”

“‘Social anxiety,’” said Robin, reading again, “‘lack of eye contact… challenges forming relationships… anxiety with unfamiliar situations and people… poor ability to recognize faces you’ve seen before,’ but ‘good long-term memory, good imitation skills and good visual learning.’ Men are more severely affected than women… good sense of humor, usually…‘can be creative, especially visually’…”

She looked around the computer monitor.

“Why d’you want to know all this?”

“Just thinking.”

“About Gwilherm?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Well, about the whole family.”

“He didn’t have Fragile X, though, did he?”

“No, I don’t know what Gwilherm’s problem was. Maybe just the Bennies.”

He didn’t smile as he said the name this time.

“Cormoran, what coincidences did you notice?”

Instead of answering, Strike pulled a couple of pages of police notes toward him and read through them again. Out of force of habit, Robin reached out for Talbot’s notebook, and turned to the first page. For a couple of minutes, there was silence in the office, and neither partner noticed any of the noises that were as familiar to them as their own breathing: the traffic rolling down Charing Cross Road, occasional shouts and snatches of music from Denmark Street below.

The very first page of Bill Talbot’s notebook began with untidy jottings of what Robin knew to be genuine evidence and observations. It was the most coherent part of the notes but the first pentagrams appeared at the very bottom of the page, as did the first astrological observation.

Robin re-read this final paragraph twice, frowning slightly. Then she set aside her bag of almonds to delve in the nearest box of police evidence. It took her five minutes to find the original police record of Ruby Elliot’s statement, and while she searched, Strike remained deeply immersed in his own portion of the notes.

Pulse now quickened, Robin set aside this piece of paper, got back onto her knees and began to search for the record of Ruby’s statement to Lawson, which took her another five minutes.

“Cormoran,” said Robin urgently.

Strike looked up.

“The heights are round the wrong way.”

“What?”

“In Ruby’s very first statement to Talbot,” Robin said, “she said, ‘I saw them beside a telephone box, two women sort of struggling together. The tall one in the raincoat was leaning on the short one, who was in a plastic rain hood. They both looked like women to me, but I didn’t see their faces. It looked to me like one was trying to make the other walk quicker.’”

“Right,” said Strike, frowning slightly.

“And that’s what Talbot wrote in his horoscope notes, too,” said Robin. “But that’s not how it should have been, if those two women were the Fleurys. Where’s that picture?”

“Box one,” said Strike, shoving it toward Robin with his real foot.

She crouched down beneath the desk and began searching the photocopied papers until she found the sheaf of newspaper clippings Strike had shown her, months previously, in the Three Kings.

“There,” said Robin. “Look. There.”

And there was the old picture, of the two women who’d come forward to say that they were Ruby’s struggling women: the tall, broad, younger woman with her cheery face, and her aged mother, who was tiny and stooped.

“It’s the wrong way round,” repeated Robin. “If Fiona Fleury had leaned on her mother, she’d have flattened her…” Robin scanned the few lines beneath the picture. “Cormoran, it doesn’t fit. Fiona says she was wearing the rain hat, but Ruby says it was the short woman who had the rainhat on.”

“Ruby was vague,” said Strike, but Robin could see his interest sharpening as he reached out for these pieces of paper. “She could’ve been confused…”

“Talbot never thought the Fleurys were the people Ruby saw, and this is why!” said Robin. “The heights were reversed. It was the taller woman Ruby saw who was unsteady, not the little one…”

“So how come she didn’t tell Lawson the Fleurys couldn’t be the people she saw?”

“Same reason she never told anybody she’d seen Theo? Because she’d been flustered by Talbot trying to force her to bend her story to fit his theories? Because she lost confidence in herself, and didn’t know what she’d really seen? It was raining, she was lost, she was panicked… by the time it got to Lawson, maybe she just wanted to agree she’d seen the Fleurys and be left alone?”

“Plausible,” admitted Strike.

“How tall was Margot?”

“Five nine,” said Strike.

“And Creed?” said Robin.

“Five seven.”

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

There was another minute’s silence, while Strike sat lost in thought and Robin re-read the statements laid out in front of her.

“The phone boxes,” said Strike, at last. “Those bloody phone boxes…”

“What about them?”

“Talbot wanted Ruby to have seen the two struggling women beside the two boxes in Clerkenwell Green, right? So he could tie them to the van that was speeding away up Aylesbury Street, which was supposed to contain Creed.”

“Right,” said Robin.

“But after the Fleurys came forward, Talbot tried to get Ruby to agree she’d seen the two struggling women beside the first phone box, the one at the end of Albemarle Way.”

“But she wouldn’t change her story,” said Robin, “because she’d seen Theo there.”

“Precisely,” said Strike, “but that doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t—”

“She’s driving round in an enormous circle in the rain, right, looking for this house she can’t find, right?”

“Yes…”

“Well, just because Ruby saw Theo get into a van by the phone box on one of her circuits doesn’t mean she can’t have seen two struggling women on her second or third circuit. We know she was hazy about landmarks, unfamiliar with the area and with no sense of direction, her daughter was very clear about that. But she had this very retentive visual memory, she’s somebody who notices clothes and hairstyles…”

Strike looked down at the desk again, and for the second time, picked up Irene Hickson’s receipt and examined it. Then, so suddenly that Robin jumped, Strike let the receipt fall and stood up, both hands clasped over the back of his head.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit! Never trust a phone call whose provenance you haven’t checked!”

“What phone call?” said Robin nervously, casting her mind back over any phone calls she’d taken over the course of the case.

“Fuck’s sake,” said Strike, walking out of the room into the outer office and then back again, still clasping the back of his head, apparently needing to pace, just as Robin had needed to walk when she’d found out Strike could interview Creed. “How did I not fucking see it?”

“Cormoran, what—?”

“Why did Margot keep an empty chocolate box?” said Strike.

“I don’t know,” said Robin, confused.

“You know what?” said Strike slowly. “I think I do.”

68

The high-security mental hospital that is Broadmoor lies slightly over an hour outside London, in the county of Berkshire. The word “Broadmoor” had long since lost all bucolic associations in the collective mind of the British public, and Strike was no exception to this rule. Far from connoting a wide stretch of grassland or heath, the name spoke to Strike only of violence, heinous crimes and two hundred of the most dangerous men in Britain, whom the tabloids called monsters. Accordingly, and in spite of the fact that Strike knew he was visiting a hospital and not a prison, he took all the common sense measures he’d have taken for a high-security jail: he wore no tie, ensured that neither he or his car was carrying anything likely to trigger a burdensome search, brought two kinds of photographic ID and a copy of his letter from the Ministry of Justice, set out early, certain, though he’d never been there before, that getting inside the facility would be time-consuming.

It was a golden September morning. Sunshine pouring down upon the road ahead from between fluffy white clouds, and as Strike drove through Berkshire in his BMW, he listened to the news on the radio, the lead item of which was that Scotland had voted, by 55 percent to 45 percent, to remain in the United Kingdom. He was wondering how Dave Polworth and Sam Barclay were taking the news, when his mobile rang.

“It’s Brian, Brian Tucker,” said the hoarse voice. “Not interrupting, am I? Wanna wish you good luck.”

“Thanks, Brian,” said Strike.

They’d finally met three days previously, at Strike’s office. Tucker had shown Strike the old letter from Creed, described the butterfly pendant taken from the killer’s basement, which he believed was his daughter’s, shared his theories and trembled with emotion and nerves at the thought of Strike coming face to face with the man he believed had murdered his eldest daughter.

“I’ll let you go, I won’t keep you,” said Tucker. “You’ll ring me when it’s over, though?”

“I will, of course,” said Strike.

It was hard to concentrate on the news now that he’d heard Tucker’s anxiety and excitement. Strike turned off the radio, and turned his thoughts instead to what lay ahead.

Gratifying though it would be to believe that he, Cormoran Strike, might trick or persuade Creed into confessing where all others had failed, Strike wasn’t that egotistical. He’d interviewed plenty of suspects in his career; the skill lay in making it easier for a suspect to disclose the truth than to continue lying. Some were worn down by patient questioning, others resistant to all but intense pressure, still others yearned to unburden themselves, and the interrogator’s methods had to change accordingly.

However, in talking to Creed, half of Strike’s interrogatory arsenal would be out of commission. For one thing, he was there at Creed’s pleasure, because the patient had had to give his consent for the interview. For another, it was hard to see how Strike could paint a frightening picture of the consequences of silence, when his interviewee was already serving life in Broadmoor. Creed’s secrets were the only power he had left, and Strike was well aware that persuading him to relinquish any of them might prove a task beyond any human investigator. Standard appeals to conscience, or to the desire to figure as a better person to the self or to others, were likewise useless. As Creed’s entire life demonstrated, his primary sources of enjoyment were inflicting pain and establishing dominance, and it was doubtful that anything else would persuade him into disclosures.

Strike’s first glimpse of the infamous hospital was of a fortress on raised ground. It had been built by the Victorians in the middle of woodland and meadows, a red-brick edifice with a clocktower the highest point in the compound. The surrounding walls were twenty feet high, and as Strike drove up to the front gates, he could see the heads of hundreds of Cyclopean security cameras on poles. As the gates opened, Strike experienced an explosion of adrenaline, and for a moment the ghostly black and white images of seven dead women, and the anxious face of Brian Tucker, seemed to swim before him.

He’d sent his car registration number in advance. Once through the first set of double gates he encountered an inner wire fence, as tall as the wall he’d just passed through. A white-shirted, black-trousered man of military bearing unlocked a second set of gates once the first had closed behind the BMW, and directed Strike to a parking space. Before leaving his car, and wanting to save time going through the security he was about to face, the detective put his phone, keys, belt, cigarettes, lighter and loose change into the glove compartment and locked it.

“Mr. Strike, is it?” said the smiling, white-shirted man, whose accent was Welsh and whose profile suggested a boxer. “Got your ID there?”

Strike showed his driver’s license, and was led inside, where he encountered a scanner of the airport security type. Good-humored, inevitable amusement ensued when the scanner announced shrill disapproval of Strike’s metal lower leg, and his trousers had to be rolled up to prove he wasn’t carrying a weapon. Having been patted down, he was free to join Dr. Ranbir Bijral, who was waiting for him on the other side of the scanners, a slight, bearded psychiatrist whose open-necked yellow shirt struck a cheerful note against the dull green-gray tiled floors, the white walls and the unfresh air of all medical institutions, part disinfectant, part fried food, with a trace of incarcerated human.

“We’ve got twenty minutes until Dennis will be ready for you,” said Dr. Bijral, leading Strike off along an eerily empty corridor, through many sets of turquoise swing doors. “We coordinate patient movements carefully and it’s always a bit of a feat moving him around. We have to make sure he never comes into contact with patients who have a particular dislike for him, you see. He’s not popular. We’ll wait in my office.”

Strike was familiar with hospitals, but had never been inside one with so little bustle or shuffle of patients in the corridors. The emptiness was slightly unnerving. They passed many locked doors. A short female nurse in navy scrubs marched past. She smiled at Strike, who smiled back.

“You’ve got women working here,” he said, slightly surprised.

“Of course,” said Dr. Bijral.

Strike had somehow imagined an all-male staff, even though he knew that male prisons had female warders. Dr. Bijral pushed open a door to a small office that had the air of a converted treatment room, with chipped paint on the walls and bars on the windows.

“Have a seat,” said Dr. Bijral, waving his hand at the chair opposite his desk, and with slightly forced politeness, he asked, “Did you have a good journey? Come up from London?”

“Yeah, it was a nice drive,” said Strike.

As he sat down behind the desk, Dr. Bijral became business-like.

“All right, so: we’re going to give you forty-five minutes with Creed.”

“Forty-five minutes,” repeated Strike.

“If Dennis wants to admit to another killing, that should be ample time,” said Dr. Bijral, “but… may I be honest with you, Mr. Strike?”

“Of course.”

“If it had been down to Dennis’s treatment team, we prob­ably wouldn’t have permitted this visit. I know the MoJ feel the Bamboroughs and the Tuckers ought to be given a last chance to ask Dennis about their relatives, but—”

Dr. Bijral leaned back in his seat and sighed.

“—he’s a classic sociopath, you see, a pure example of the type. He scores very highly on the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Devious, sadistic, unrepentant and extremely egotistical.”

“Not a fan, then?” said Strike, and the doctor permitted himself a perfunctory smile.

“The problem, you see, is if he admitted to another murder under your questioning, you’d get the credit. And Dennis can’t have that, he can’t allow somebody else to come out on top. He had to give his consent to meeting you, of course, and I think he’s agreed because it feeds his ego to be questioned, especially by a man who’s been in the papers, and I think he’d like to manipulate you into being an advocate for him in some way. He’s been lobbying to get out of Broadmoor and back into prison for a long time now.”

“I thought he was desperate to get in here?”

“He was, once,” said Bijral. “High-profile sex offenders are usually under risk of attack in the prison system, as you probably know. You might have seen in the papers, one man nearly took his eye out with a sharpened spoon handle. Dennis wanted to come to Broadmoor when he was first convicted, but there were no grounds to admit him to hospital back then. Psychopathy isn’t, in itself, treatable.”

“What changed?”

“He was exceptionally difficult to manage in the prison system. He managed to talk a young offender with Asperger’s syndrome into killing himself. For that, he was put into solitary confinement. They ended up keeping him there for almost a year. By night, he took to reenacting what had happened in the basement in Liverpool Road, screaming through the night, doing his voice and the women’s. Warders couldn’t stand hearing it, let alone prisoners.

“After eleven months in solitary, he became suicidal. First he went on hunger strike. Then he began trying to bite his own wrists open, and smashing his head against the wall. He was assessed, judged psychotic and transferred here.

“Once we’d had him a couple of months, he claimed he’d been faking his mental illness, which is pure Dennis. Nobody else can be cleverer than he is. But actually, his mental health was very poor when he came to us, and it took many months of medication and therapy to stop him self-harming and trying to kill himself.”

“And now he wants to leave?”

“Once he was well enough to fully appreciate the difference between jail and hospital, I think it’s fair to say he was disappointed. He had more freedom in Belmarsh. He did a lot of writing and drawing before he got ill. I read the autobiography he’d been working on, when he was admitted. It was useful in assessing him. He writes very well for a man who had hardly any education, but…” Dr. Bijral laced his fingers together, and Strike was reminded of another doctor, who’d talked of teamwork while eating fig rolls. “You see, persuading patients to discuss their crimes is usually an important part of the therapeutic process. You’re trying to find a pathway to accountability and remorse, but Dennis feels no remorse. He’s still aroused by the thought of what he did to those women, and he enjoys talking and writing about it. He used to draw episodes from the basement, as well; essentially producing his own hardcore pornography. So when he came here, we confiscated all writing and drawing materials.

“Dennis blames us for his deteriorating mental faculties, although in fact, for a seventy-seven-year-old man, he’s remarkably sharp. Every patient is different, and we manage Dennis on a strict reward and penalty system. His chosen rewards are unusual. He enjoys chess; he taught himself in Belmarsh, so sometimes I’ll give him a game. He likes crosswords and logic puzzles, too. We allow him access to those when he’s behaving himself.

“But you mustn’t think he’s typical of our patients,” added Dr. Bijral earnestly. “The vast majority of mentally ill people pose absolutely no risk of violence, as I’m sure you know. And people do leave Broadmoor, they do get better. People’s behavior can change, if they’re motivated, if they’re given the right help. Our aim is always recovery. One can hate the crime, but feel compassion for the perpetrator. Many of the men in here had appallingly abusive childhoods. Dennis’s childhood was pure hell—though, of course, other people have upbringings as bad and never do what Dennis did. In fact, one of our former patients—”

There was a knock on the door and a cheery blonde poked her head inside.

“That’s Dennis ready in the room, Ranbir,” she said, and withdrew.

“Shall we?” said Dr. Bijral, getting to his feet. “I’ll be sitting in on the interview, and so will Dennis’s primary nurse.”

The woman who’d announced Dennis’s arrival in the meeting room walked with Strike and the psychiatrist down another couple of corridors. Now there were doors that had to be unlocked and relocked at every passage. Through the third set of locked doors, Strike saw an obese man shuffling along in Nike tracksuit bottoms, flanked by a pair of nurses, each of whom held one of the patient’s stiff arms behind his back. The patient gave Strike a glazed look as the trio passed in silence.

Finally, Strike’s party reached a deserted open-plan area, with armchairs and a switched-off TV. Strike had assumed the blonde woman was Creed’s nurse, but he was wrong: a burly man with tattoos down both arms, and a prominent, square jaw, was introduced as “Marvin, Dennis’s lead nurse,” and the blonde woman smiled at Strike, wished him luck and walked away.

“Well, shall we?” said Dr. Bijral, and Marvin opened the door onto a Spartan meeting room, with a single window and a whiteboard on the wall.

The only occupant, a small, obese, bespectacled man, wore jeans and a black sweatshirt. He had a triple chin, and his belly kept him a foot and a half away from the white Formica-topped table at which he was sitting. Transplanted to a bus stop, Dennis Creed would have been just another old man, a little unkempt, his light gray hair in need of a trim.

(He’d pressed hot-irons to the bare breasts of secretary Jackie Aylett. He’d pulled out all of hairdresser Susan Meyer’s finger and toenails. He’d dug the eyeballs out of estate agent Noreen Sturrock’s face while she was still alive and manacled to a radiator.)

“Dennis, this is Cormoran Strike,” said Dr. Bijral, as he sat down in a chair against the wall. Marvin stood, tattooed arms folded, beside him.

“Hello, Dennis,” said Strike, sitting down opposite him.

“Hello, Cormoran,” said Creed, in a flat voice which retained its working-class, East London accent.

The sunlight fell like a gleaming pane across the table between them, highlighting the smears on the lenses of Creed’s wire-rimmed glasses and the dust motes in the air. Behind the dirt, Strike saw irises of such pale gray that they faded into the sclera, so that the enormous pupils seemed surrounded by whiteness. Close to, Strike could see the jagged scar which ran from temple to nose, dragging at his left lower eyelid, a relic of the attack that had almost taken half Creed’s sight. The plump, pale hands on the table were slightly shaking and the slack mouth trembled: side-effects, Strike guessed, of Creed’s medication.

“Who’re you working for?” Creed asked.

“’Spect you’ll be able to work that out, from my questions,” said Strike.

“Why not say, then?” asked Creed, and when Strike didn’t answer, he said, “Sign of narcissism, withholding information to make yourself feel powerful, you know.”

Strike smiled.

“It’s not a question of trying to feel powerful. I’m simply familiar with the King’s Gambit.”

Creed pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up his nose.

“Told you I play chess, did they?”

“Yeah.”

“D’you play?”

“Badly.”

“So how does the King’s Gambit apply to this situation?”

“Your opening move appears to open an easy route to your king. You’re offering to jump straight into discussing the missing woman I’m investigating.”

“But you think that’s a ploy?”

“Maybe.”

There was a short pause. Then Creed said,

“I’ll tell you who I think sent you, then, shall I?”

“Go on.”

“Margot Bamborough’s daughter,” said Dennis Creed, watching carefully for Strike’s reaction. “The husband gave up on her long since, but her daughter’ll be forty-odd now and she’ll be well-heeled. Whoever hired you’s got money. You won’t come cheap. I’ve read all about you, in the paper.

“The second possibility,” said Creed, when Strike didn’t respond, “is old Brian Tucker. He pops up every few years, making a spectacle of himself. Brian’s skint, though… or did he put out the begging bowl on the internet? Get on the computer and whine out some hard-luck story, so mugs send in cash? But I think, if he’d done that, it would’ve been in the papers.”

“D’you get online much?” asked Strike.

“We’re not allowed, in here,” said Creed. “Why are you wasting time? We’ve only got forty-five minutes. Ask a question.”

“That was a question, what I just asked you.”

“Why won’t you tell me which so-called victim you’re interested in?”

“‘So-called’ victim?”

“Arbitrary labels,” said Creed. “‘Victim.’ ‘Patient.’ This one deserves pity… this one gets caged. Maybe those women I killed were the real patients, and I’m the true victim?”

“Novel point of view,” said Strike.

“Yeah, well, does people good to hear novel points of view,” said Creed, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “Wake them up, if they’re capable of it.”

“What would you say you were curing those women of?”

“The infection of life? Diagnosis: life. Terminal. ‘Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler…’”

(He’d slit open the corners of schoolgirl Geraldine Christie’s mouth, and photographed her crying and screaming, before, as he told her parents from the dock, slitting her throat because she was making so much noise.)

“‘… I am unique and conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish.’ Know who said that?”

“Aleister Crowley,” said Strike.

“Unusual reading matter,” said Creed, “for a decorated soldier in the British army.”

“Oh, we’re all satanists on the sly,” said Strike.

“You think you’re joking,” said Creed, whose expression had become intense, “but you kill and you get given a medal and called a hero. I kill and get called evil and locked up forever. Arbitrary categories. Know what’s just down the road from here?”

“Sandhurst,” said Strike.

“Sandhurst,” repeated Creed, as though Strike hadn’t spoken. “Institutions for killers, side by side, one to make them, one to break them. Explain to me why’s it more moral to murder little brown children on Tony Blair’s say-so, than to do what I did? I’m made the way I am. Brain scans will show you, they’ve studied people like me. It’s how we’re wired. Why’s it more evil to kill because you’ve got to, because it’s your nature, than to blow up poor brown people because we want oil? Properly looked at, I’m the innocent, but I get fattened up and drugged like a captive pig, and you get a state pension.”

“Interesting argument,” said Strike. “So you had no control over what you did?”

“Control,” scoffed Creed, shaking his head. “That shows how far removed—I can’t explain it in terms someone like you would understand. ‘You have your way. I have my ways. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.’ Know who said that?”

“Sounds like Nietzsche,” said Strike.

“Nietzsche,” said Creed, talking over him. “Obviously, yes. I read a lot in Belmarsh, back before I got stuffed full of so many drugs I couldn’t concentrate from one end of the sentence to another.

“I’ve got diabetes now, did you know that?” Creed continued. “Yeah. Hospital-acquired diabetes. They took a thin, fit man, and piled the weight on me, with these drugs I don’t need and the pig-swill we’re forced to eat. Eight hundred so-called healers leeching a living off us. They need us ill, because we’re their livelihoods. Morlocks. Understand that word?”

“Fictional underbeings,” said Strike, “in The Time—”

“Obviously, yes,” said Creed again, who seemed irritated that Strike understood his references. “H. G. Wells. Primitive beings preying on the highly evolved species, who don’t realize they’re being farmed to eat. Except I realize it, I know what’s going on.”

“See yourself as one of the Eloi, do you?” asked Strike.

“Interesting thing about the Eloi,” said Creed, “is their total lack of conscience. The higher race is intellectual, refined, with no so-called remorse… I was exploring all this in my book, the book I was writing before they took it off me. Wells’s thing was only a superficial allegory, but he was groping toward a truth… What I was writing, part autobiography, part scientific treatise—but it was taken away from me, they’ve confiscated my manuscript. It could be an invaluable resource, but no, because it’s mine, it’s got to be destroyed. I’ve got an IQ of 140, but they want my brain flabby like my body.”

“You seem pretty alert to me. What drugs have they got you on?”

“I shouldn’t be on any drugs at all. I should be in assertive rehab but they won’t let me out of high dependency. They let the little schizophrenics loose in the workshops with knives over there, and I can’t have a pencil. When I came here, I thought I’d meet intelligent people… any child who can memorize a seven times table could be a doctor, it’s all rote learning and dogma. The patient’s supposed to be a partner in this therapeutic process, and I say I’m well enough to go back to prison.”

“Certainly seem sane to me,” said Strike.

“Thank you,” said Creed, who’d become flushed. “Thank you. You’re an intelligent man, it appears. I thought you would be. That’s why I agreed to this.”

“But you’re still on medication—”

“I know all about their drugs, and they’re giving me too much. I could prescribe better for myself than they know how to, here.”

“How d’you know about that stuff?” asked Strike.

“Obvious, easy,” said Creed, with a grandiose gesture. “I used myself as a guinea pig, developed my own series of standardized tests. How well I could walk and talk on twenty milligrams, thirty milligrams… made notes on disorientation, drowsiness, differences in side-effects…”

“What kinds of drugs were these?” asked Strike.

“Amobarbital, pentobarbital, phenobarbital,” rattled off Creed: the names of barbiturates of the early seventies, mostly replaced, now, by other drugs.

“Easy to buy on the street?”

“I only bought off the street occasionally, I had other channels, that were never widely known…”

And Creed launched into a meandering speech that couldn’t properly be called a story, because the narrative was disjointed and full of mysterious hints and oblique allusions, but the gist seemed to be that Creed had been associating with many unnamed but powerful people in the sixties and seventies, and that a steady supply of prescription drugs had been an incidental perk, either of working for gangsters, or spying on them for the authorities. He hinted at having been recruited by the security services, spoke of flights to America there was no evidence he’d ever taken, of barbiturate-addicted politicians and celebrities, and the dangerous desire of humans from all walks of life to dope themselves to cope with the cruel realities of the world, a tendency and temptation which Dennis Creed deplored and had always resisted.

Strike surmised that these fake reminiscences were designed to feed Creed’s overweening craving for status. No doubt his decades in high-security prisons and mental hospitals had taught him that rape and torture were considered almost as contemptible there as they’d been on the outside. He might continue to derive sexual pleasure from reliving his crimes, but in others, they elicited only contempt. Without a fantasy career in which he was part-spy, part-gangster, the man with the 140 IQ was merely a dry-cleaning delivery man, a sexual deviant buying handfuls of downers from street dealers who’d exploited, then betrayed him.

“… see all that security all round me, at the trial? There were other forces at play, that’s all I’ll say…”

There’d been a solid cordon of police around Creed on his way in and out of court because the crowd had wanted to tear him apart. The details of his torture chamber had leaked: police had found the hot-irons and the pliers, the ball gags and the whips, the photographs Creed had taken of his victims, alive and dead, and the decomposing head and hands of Andrea Hooton, sitting in his bathroom sink. But the image of himself Creed now presented Strike turned murder into something incidental to a much more prestigious criminal life, a hobby that for some reason the public continued to harp on, when there was so much more to tell, and admire.

“… because they like salivating over dirty little things that excite them, as an outlet for their own unacceptable urges,” said Creed. “I could’ve been a doctor, probably should have been, actually…”

(He’d poured cooking oil over dinner lady Vera Kenny’s head, then set her hair on fire and photographed her while it burned, a ball gag in her mouth. He’d cut out unemployed Gail Wrightman’s tongue. He’d murdered hairdresser Susan Meyer by stamping repeatedly on her head.)

“Never killed anyone by overdose, did you?” said Strike.

“It takes far more skill to disorientate them but keep them on their feet. Any fool can shove an overdose down someone’s throat. The other takes knowledge and experience. That’s how I know they’re using too much on me in here, because I understand side-effects.”

“What were you giving the women in the basement?”

“I never drugged a woman, once I had her at home. Once she was inside, I had other ways of keeping her quiet.”

Andrea Hooton’s mouth had been sewn shut by Creed while she was still alive: the traces of thread had still been present on the rotting head.

The psychiatrist glanced at his watch.

“What if a woman was already drunk?” asked Strike. “Gail Wrightman: you picked her up in a bar, right? Wasn’t there a danger of overdose, if you drugged her on top of the drink?”

“Intelligent question,” said Creed, drinking Strike in with his enormous pupils. “I can usually tell what a woman’s had to the exact unit. Gail was on her own, sulking. Some man had stood her up…”

Creed was giving nothing away: these weren’t secrets. He’d admitted to it all already, in the dock, where he’d enjoyed relaying the facts, watching the reaction of the victims’ relatives. The photographs hidden under the floorboards, of Gail and Andrea, Susan and Vera, Noreen, Jackie and Geraldine, bound, burned and stabbed, alive and maimed, their mutilated and sometimes headless corpses posed in pornographic attitudes, had damned him before he opened his mouth, but he’d insisted on a full trial, pleading guilty by reason of insanity.

“… in a wig, bit of lipstick… they think you’re harmless, odd… maybe queer. Talked to her for a minute or two, little dark corner. You act concerned…

“Bit of Nembutal in her drink… tiny amount, tiny,” said Creed, holding his trembling fingers millimeters apart. “Nembutal and alcohol, potentially dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I did, obviously…

“So I say, ‘Well, I got to go now, sweetheart, you be careful.’ ‘Be careful!’ It always worked.” Creed affected squeaky tones to imitate Gail, “‘Aw, don’t go, have a drink!’ ‘No, darling, I need my beauty sleep.’ That’s when you prove you’re not a threat. You make as if you want to leave, or actually walk away. Then, when they call you back, or run into you ten minutes later, when they’re starting to feel like shit, they’re relieved, because you’re the nice man who’s safe…

“It was all in my book, the different ways I got them. Instructive for women who want to keep out of trouble, you’d think, to read how a highly efficient killer works, but the authorities won’t let it be published, which makes you question, are they happy for slags to be picked off on the streets? Maybe they are.

“Why’re there people like me at all, Cormoran? Why’s evolution let it happen? Because humans are so highly developed, we can only thin ourselves out with intraspecies predators. Pick off the weak, the morally depraved. It’s a good thing that degenerate, drunk women don’t breed. That’s just a fact, it’s a fact,” said Dennis Creed.

“I’d wind down my window. ‘Want a lift, love?’ Swaying all over the place. Glad to see me. Got in the van, no trouble, grateful to sit down…

“I used to say to Gail, once I had her in the basement: ‘Should’ve gone to the bathroom instead, you dirty little bitch, shouldn’t you? I bet you’re the type to piss in the street. Filthy, that is, filthy’… Why’re you so interested in drugging?”

The flow of talk had suddenly dried up. Creed’s blank gray and black eyes darted left and right between each of Strike’s.

“You think Dr. Bamborough would be too clever to get herself drugged by the likes of me, do you?”

“Doctors can make mistakes, like anyone else,” said Strike. “You met Noreen Sturrock on a bus, right?”

Creed considered Strike for several seconds, as though trying to work something out.

“Busses, now, is it? How often did Margot Bamborough take the bus?”

“Frequently, I’d imagine,” said Strike.

“Would she’ve taken a can of Coke from a stranger?”

“That’s what you offered Noreen, right? And the Coke was full of phenobarbital?”

“Yeah. She was almost asleep by the time we came to my stop. I said, ‘You’ve missed yours, darling. Come on, I’ll take you to a taxi rank.’ Walked her straight off the bus, arm round her. She wasn’t a big girl, Noreen. That was one of the easiest.”

“Did you adjust dosage for weight?”

There was another slight pause.

“Busses and cans of pop, and adjusting drugs for weight?… You know what, Cormoran? I think my second guess was right. You’re here for little Louise Tucker.”

“No,” said Strike with a sigh, settling back in his chair. “As it happens, you were spot on first time round. I was hired by Margot Bamborough’s daughter.”

There was a longer silence now, and the psychiatrist again checked his watch. Strike knew that his time was nearly up, and he thought Creed knew it, too.

“I want to go back to Belmarsh, Cormoran,” said Creed, leaning in now that Strike had leaned back. “I want to finish my book. I’m sane, you know it, too, you just said it. I’m not ill. It’s costing the taxpayer five times as much to keep me in here as it would in jail. Where would the British public say I should be, eh?”

“Oh, they’d want you back in prison,” said Strike.

“Well, I agree with them,” said Creed. “I agree.”

He looked sideways at Dr. Bijral, who had the look of a man about to call a halt.

“I’m sane and if I’m treated like it, I’ll act like it,” said Creed.

He leaned further forwards.

“I killed Louise Tucker,” said Creed in a soft voice, and in Strike’s peripheral vision the psychiatrist and the nurse both froze, astonished. “Picked her up off a street corner in my van, November 1972. Freezing cold that night. She wanted to go home and she had no money. I couldn’t resist, Cormoran,” said Creed, those big black pupils boring into Strike’s. “Little girl in her school uniform. No man could resist. Did it on impulse… no planning… no wig, no drugged Coke, nothing…”

“Why wasn’t there any trace of her in the basement?” said Strike.

“There was. I had her necklace. But I never had her in the basement, see? You want proof, I’ll give you proof: she called her stepmother ‘Claws.’ Tell Tucker she told me that, all right? Yeah, we had a five-minute chat about how pissed off she was at home, before she realized we were going the wrong way. Then she starts screaming and banging on the windows.

“I turned into a dark car park,” said Creed quietly, “put my hand over her mouth, dragged her into the back of the van, fucked her and throttled her. I’d’ve liked to keep her longer, but she was loud, too loud.

“Dumb thing to do, but I couldn’t resist, Cormoran. No planning—school uniform! But I had work next day, I needed the van empty. I wanted to take the body back to the basement, but old Vi Cooper was wide awake when I drove back up Liverpool Road. She was looking down at me out the top window when I drove past, so I didn’t stop. Told her later she’d imagined it was me. The old bitch used to sit up to see what time I came in. I usually drugged her if I was off on the prowl, but this was a spur-of-the-moment treat…”

“What did you do with the body?” said Strike.

“Ah,” said Creed, sitting back in his seat. The wet lips slid over each other, and the wide pupils gaped. “I think I’m going to need a transfer back to Belmarsh before I tell anyone that. You go and tell the newspapers I’ve decided to confess to killing Louise, and that I’m sane, and I should be in Belmarsh, and if I’m transferred, I’ll tell old Brian Tucker where I put his little girl. You go tell the authorities, that’s my offer…

“You never know, I might even feel up to talking about Margot Bamborough when I’m out of here. Let’s get these drugs out of my system, and maybe I’ll remember better.”

“You’re full of shit,” said Strike, getting to his feet, looking angry. “I’m not passing this on.”

“Don’t be like that, because it’s not the one you came for,” said Creed, with a slow smile. “You’re coming across like a proper narcissist, Cormoran.”

“I’m ready to go,” Strike told Dr. Bijral.

“Don’t be like that,” said Creed. “Oi!”

Strike turned back.

“All right… I’ll give you a little clue about where I put Louise’s body, and we’ll see whether you’re as clever as you think you are, all right? We’ll see whether you or the police work it out first. If they find the body, they’ll know I’m sane, and I’m ready to talk about Margot Bamborough, as long as I get moved where I want to go. And if nobody can figure out the clue, someone’ll have to come back and talk to me, won’t they? Maybe even you. We could play chess for more clues, Cormoran.”

Strike could tell that Creed was imagining weeks of front pages, as he laid a trail for investigators to follow. Psychological torture for the Tuckers, manipulation of public opinion, Strike, perhaps, at his beck and call: it was a sadist’s wet dream.

“Go on then,” said Strike, looking down at him. “What’s the clue?”

“You’ll find Louise Tucker’s body where you find M54,” said Creed, and Strike knew Creed had thought out the clue well ahead of time, and was certain that it would have been a clue about Margot, had Strike said he’d been hired by the Tuckers. Creed needed to believe he hadn’t given Strike what he really wanted. He had to come out on top.

“Right,” said Strike. He turned to Dr. Bijral. “Shall we?”

“M54, all right, Cormoran?” called Creed.

“I heard you,” said Strike.

“Sorry not to be able to help with Dr. Bamborough!” called Creed, and Strike could hear his pleasure at the idea that he’d thwarted the detective.

Strike turned back one last time, and now he stopped pretending to be angry, and grinned, too.

“I was here for Louise, you silly fucker. I know you never met Margot Bamborough. She was murdered by a far more skillful killer than you ever were. And just so you know,” Strike added, as the nurse’s keys jangled, and Creed’s slack, fat face registered dismay, “I think you’re a fucking lunatic, and if anyone asks me, I’ll say you should be in Broadmoor till you rot.”

69

After almost an hour’s debrief with Dr. Bijral, during which the shaken psychiatrist phoned Scotland Yard, the detective left the hospital feeling as though he’d been there twice as long as he really had. The village of Crowthorne didn’t lie on Strike’s route back to London, but he was hungry, he wanted to call Robin and he felt a powerful need to place himself among ordinary people going about their lives, to expel the memory of those empty, echoing corridors, the jangle of keys and the widely dilated pupils of Dennis Creed.

He parked outside a pub, lit himself the cigarette he’d been craving for the past two and a half hours, then turned his phone back on. He’d already missed two calls from Brian Tucker, but instead of phoning the old man back, he pressed Robin’s number. She answered on the second ring.

“What happened?”

Strike told her. When he’d finished, there was a short silence.

“Say the clue again,” said Robin, who sounded tense.

“‘You’ll find her where you find M54.’”

“Not the M54? Not the motorway?”

“He could’ve meant that, but he left out the definite article.”

“The M54’s twenty-odd miles long.”

“I know.”

Reaction was setting in: Strike should have felt triumphant, but in fact he was tired and tense. His phone beeped at him and he glanced at the screen.

“That’s Brian Tucker again, trying to ring me,” he told Robin.

“What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth,” said Strike heavily, exhaling smoke out of his open window. “Dr. Bijral’s already called Scotland Yard. Trouble is, if that clue’s meaningless, or unsolvable, it leaves Tucker knowing Creed killed his daughter, but never getting the body back. This could well be Creed’s idea of the ultimate torture.”

“It’s something to have a confession, though, isn’t it?” said Robin.

“Tucker’s been convinced Creed killed her for decades. Confession without a body just keeps the wound open. Creed’ll still have the last laugh, knowing where she is and not telling… How’ve you got on in the British Library?”

“Oh. Fine,” said Robin. “I found Joanna Hammond a couple of hours ago.”

“And?” said Strike, now alert.

“She had a large mole on her face. Left cheek. You can see it in the picture of her wedding in the local paper. I’ll text it to you now.”

“And the holy—?”

“It would’ve been on the back of her obituary. Same local paper.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Strike.

There was a longer silence. Strike’s phone beeped again, and he saw that Robin had texted him a picture.

Opening it, he saw a couple on their 1969 wedding day: a blurry black and white picture of a toothy, beaming brunette bride, her hair worn in ringlets, in a high-necked lace dress, a pillbox hat on top of her veil, a large mole on her left cheekbone. The blond husband loomed over her shoulder, unsmiling. Even minutes into married life, he had the air of a man ready to wield a baseball bat.

“She wasn’t Sagittarius under Schmidt,” said Robin, and Strike put the phone back up to his ear, “she was Scorpio—”

“—which Talbot thought fitted her better, because of the mole,” said Strike, with a sigh. “I should’ve gone back through all the identifications once you found out about Schmidt. We might’ve got here sooner.”

“What are we going to do about Douthwaite?”

“I’ll ring him,” said Strike, after a moment’s pause. “Now. Then I’ll call you back.”

His stomach rumbled as he called the Allardice boarding house in Skegness, and heard the familiar cross Scottish accent of Donna, Douthwaite’s wife.

“Oh Christ,” she said, when Strike identified himself. “What now?”

“Nothing to worry about,” lied Strike, who could hear a radio playing in the background. “Just wanted to double-check a couple of points.”

“Steve!” he heard her yell, away from the receiver. “It’s him!… What d’you mean, ‘Who?,’ who d’you bloody think?”

Strike heard footsteps and then Douthwaite, who sounded half-angry, half-scared.

“What d’you want?”

“I want to tell you what I think happened during your last appoint­ment with Margot Bamborough,” said Strike.

He spoke for two minutes, and Douthwaite didn’t interrupt, though Strike knew he was still there, because of the distant sounds of the boarding house still reaching him over the line. When Strike had finished his reconstruction of Douthwaite’s final consultation, there was silence but for the distant radio, which was playing “Blame” by Calvin Harris.

So blame it on the night… don’t blame it on me…

“Well?” said Strike.

He knew Douthwaite didn’t want to confirm it. Douthwaite was a coward, a weak man who ran away from problems. He could have prevented further deaths had he had the courage to tell what he knew, but he’d been scared for his own skin, scared he’d be seen as complicit, stupid and shabby, in the eyes of newspaper readers. And so he’d run, but that had made things worse, and nightmarish consequences had ensued, and he’d run from those, too, barely admitting to himself what he feared, distracting himself with drink, with karaoke, with women. And now Strike was presenting him with a dreadful choice that was really no choice at all. Like Violet Cooper, Steve Douthwaite was facing a lifetime of opprobrium from the censorious public, and how much better would it have been if he’d come clean to Talbot forty years previously, when Margot Bamborough’s body could have been found quickly, and a killer could have been brought to justice before others had to die.

“Am I right?” Strike said.

“Yes,” said Douthwaite, at last.

“OK, well, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go straight to your wife and tell her, before the press do it. There’s going to be no hiding from this one.”

“Shit,” said Douthwaite quietly.

“See you in court, then,” said Strike briskly, and he hung up, and called Robin straight back.

“He’s confirmed it.”

“Cormoran,” said Robin.

“I advised him to tell Donna—”

“Cormoran,” said Robin, again.

“What?”

“I think I know what M54 is.”

“Not—”

“—the motorway? No. M54 is a globular cluster—”

“A what?”

“A spherical cluster of stars.”

“Stars?” said Strike, with a sinking sensation. “Hang on—”

“Listen,” said Robin. “Creed thought he was being clever, but it only takes a Google search—”

“They haven’t got internet in there,” said Strike. “He was whining about it—”

“Well, M54 is a cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius,” said Robin.

“Not astrology again,” said Strike, closing his eyes. “Robin—”

“Listen to me. He said ‘You’ll find her where you find M54,’ right?”

“Yeah—”

“The constellation Sagittarius is also known as the Archer.”

“So?”

“Brian showed us the map, Strike! Dennis Creed was a regular visitor to the Archer Hotel in Islington in the early seventies, when he was delivering their dry cleaning. There was a well on the property, in the back garden. Boarded up, and now covered over with a conservatory.”

A pair of jolly men with matching beer bellies walked into the pub across the road. Strike barely registered them. He’d even forgotten to take drags of the cigarette burning between his fingers.

“Think this through,” said Robin in his ear. “Creed’s got a body he didn’t expect in the van, but he can’t take it to Epping Forest, because there was still an active crime scene there. They’d just found the remains of Vera Kenny. I don’t know why he didn’t take the body to the basement—”

“I do,” said Strike. “He’s just told me. He drove past the house and Vi Cooper was awake and at the window.”

“OK—right—so he’s got to empty the van before work. He knows his way around the Archer garden, and he knows there’s a back gate. He’s got tools in the back of the van, he could prize those boards up easily. Cormoran, I’m sure she’s in the old Archer well.”

There was a brief pause, then hot ash fell into Strike’s lap from his neglected cigarette.

“Bollocks—”

He flicked the end out of the window, earning himself a look of disapproval from a passing old woman pulling a tartan shopping trolley.

“All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” he told Robin. “I’ll phone Tucker and tell him what’s just happened, including your deduction. You call George Layborn and tell him about the well at the Archer. The quicker the police search it, the better for the Tuckers, especially if the news leaks that Creed’s confessed.”

“OK, I’ll get on to that right—”

“Hang on, I haven’t finished,” said Strike. He’d closed his eyes now, and he was rubbing his temples as he thought through everything the agency needed to do, and quickly. “When you’ve spoken to Layborn, I want you to ring Barclay and tell him he’s going on a job with you, tomorrow morning. He can forget Miss Jones’s boyfriend for a few hours. Or, most probably, all day, if what I think’s going to happen happens.”

“What job are Barclay and I doing?” asked Robin.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Strike, opening his eyes again. “We’re up against the clock if Douthwaite talks to anyone.”

“So Barclay and I are…?”

“Finding Margot’s body,” said Strike. “Yes.”

There was a long silence. Strike’s stomach rumbled again. Now a pair of young women entered the pub, giggling at something one had shown the other on her phone.

“You really think she’s there?” said Robin, a little shaken.

“I’m sure of it,” said Strike.

“And you’re—?”

“I’m going to call Brian Tucker, eat some chips, make that long-distance phone call—I think they’re three hours ahead of us, so that should work fine—then drive back to the office. I’ll be back late afternoon and we can talk it all over properly.”

“Right,” said Robin, “good luck.”

She rang off. Strike hesitated for a moment before calling Brian Tucker: he’d have liked to do it with a pint in his hand, but he still needed to drive back to London, and being arrested for drink driving on the eve of catching Margot Bamborough’s killer was a complication he really didn’t want to risk. Instead, he lit himself a second cigarette, and prepared to tell a grieving father that after a forty-two year wait, he might soon be in a position to bury his daughter.

70

The morning was so mild it might have been summer, but the leaves of the plane trees beside the telephone box at the mouth of Albemarle Way were starting to turn yellow. A patchwork blue and white sky gave and withdrew warmth as the sun slid in and out behind clouds, and Robin felt shivery in spite of the sweater she was wearing beneath her raincoat, as though a cold wind was blowing up Albemarle Way, the short side street whose tall, unbroken buildings kept it forever in shadow.

She was standing beside the telephone box where once, nearly forty years previously, the killer of Margot Bamborough had waited and watched, feeling, Robin imagined, much as she did now. There must have been fear, and nervousness, and doubt that the plan could possibly work, and terror of the consequences of failure. But this sense of kinship didn’t make Robin feel any more kindly to the killer. Looking across the road at the ancient arch of St. John’s Gate, she could imagine Margot Bamborough walking through it on a rainy evening forty years previously, or perhaps weaving, feeling strangely groggy and not knowing why… or had she realized? Possibly. Margot was a clever woman, and that was why she’d had to die…

Clerkenwell Road was busy with traffic and pedestrians. Robin felt entirely isolated from all of them. Nobody passing Robin could have the slightest idea of what she was about to try and do. How bizarre they’d think her morning’s plans, how macabre… a trickle of panic ran down Robin’s spine…

Think about something else.

There’d been a picture in the Metro that morning of Charlotte Ross wearing sunglasses and a long dark coat, walking along a street in Mayfair with her sister, Amelia. There had been no sign of Charlotte’s husband or young twins, and the short non-story beneath the picture had told Robin nothing she wanted to know.

Think about something else, Robin told herself, and consciously groped around for another subject.

It was September the twentieth. A person born today would be born under the sign of Virgo. Robin wondered how long it was going to take to rid herself of the mental tic of tying dates to star signs. She thought of Matthew, who was the Virgoan she knew best. The sign was supposed to be clever, and organized, and nervous. He was certainly organized, and bright in a book-smart way… she remembered Oonagh Kennedy saying, “I sometimes t’ink, the cleverer they are with books, the stupider they are with sex,” and wondered whether he was now happy about the pregnancy he’d said was accidental…

Think about something else.

She checked her watch. Where was Barclay? True, Robin had arrived very early, and technically Barclay wasn’t late, but she didn’t like standing here alone, trying to distract herself from thoughts of what they were about to do.

Theo had once stood almost exactly where Robin now was, watching the traffic roll up and down Clerkenwell Road, dark-haired Theo of the Kuchi earrings and the painful abdomen, waiting for the silver van that would take her away. Why Theo had never come forward afterward, why she’d never felt enough gratitude to the woman who’d seen her at short notice, at least to rule herself out of suspicion and stop Talbot haring after a delusion, remained a minor mystery. But of course, that assumed that Theo felt grateful. Nobody ever really knew what happened between a doctor and patient: it was the secular equivalent of the confession box. Robin’s thoughts had moved to Douthwaite when, at last, she spotted Barclay, who was approaching, carrying a holdall. When he got close enough, Robin heard the tools inside it clinking.

“Havin’ a wee bit o’ déjà vu, here,” he said, coming to halt beside her. “Didn’t we once go diggin’ fer a body before?”

“I don’t think this qualifies as digging,” said Robin.

“What’s the latest?”

“He’s gone out,” said Robin. “Strike says we’ve got to wait until he comes back.”

“What’s in there?” asked Barclay, nodding at the carrier bag in Robin’s hand.

“Chocolate biscuits,” said Robin.

“Bribe?”

“Basically.”

“And has Strike—?”

“Not yet. He’s in position. He wants us to…”

Robin waited for a group of what looked like students to walk out of earshot.

“… do our bit, first. Were you pleased,” Robin continued, still trying not to think about what they were about to do until it was absolutely necessary, “about the referendum result?”

“Aye, but don’t kid yerself oan’, said Barclay darkly, “this isn’t finished. That stupid fucker Cameron’s playing right into the nats’ hands. ‘English votes for English laws,’ the day after Scotland decides to stay? You don’t fight fuckin’ nationalism with more fuckin’ nationalism. He wants tae get his head out of Farage’s arse—is this oor wee fella now?”

Robin looked around. Silhouetted against the end of Albemarle Way was a man walking along with a strange, rolling gait, who was carrying two full carrier bags. He stopped at a door, set down his shopping, put his key in the lock, picked up his shopping bags, stepped over the threshold and vanished from sight.

“That’s him,” said Robin, as her insides seemed to wobble. “Let’s go.”

They walked side by side down the street to the dark blue front door.

“He’s left the key in the lock,” said Barclay, pointing.

Robin was about to the ring the bell when the door opened, and Samhain Athorn reappeared. Pale, big-eared and mousy-haired, he gaped slightly. He was wearing a Batman sweatshirt. Disconcerted to find two people on his doorstep, he blinked, then addressed Robin’s left shoulder.

“I left the key.”

He reached around to pull it out of the lock. As he made to close the door, Barclay dextrously inserted a foot.

“You’re Samhain, aren’t you?” said Robin, smiling at him, while Samhain gaped. “We’re friends of Cormoran Strike’s. You were very helpful to him, a few months ago.”

“I need to put the shopping away,” said Samhain. He tried to close the front door, but Barclay’s foot was in the way.

“Could we come in?” asked Robin. “Just for a little while? We’d like to talk to you and your mum. You were so helpful, before, telling Cormoran about your Uncle Tudor—”

“My Uncle Tudor’s dead,” said Samhain.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“He died in the hospital,” said Samhain.

“Really?” said Robin.

“My-Dad-Gwilherm died under the bridge,” said Samhain.

“That’s so sad,” said Robin. “Could we come in, please, just for a moment? Cormoran wanted me to bring you these,” she added, pulling the tin of chocolate biscuits out of her bag. “As a thank you.”

“What’s them?” asked Samhain, looking at the tin out of the corner of his eye.

“Chocolate biscuits.”

He took the tin out of her hand.

“Yeah. You can come in,” he said, and turning his back, he marched up the dark interior stairs.

With a glance at Barclay, Robin led the way inside. She heard her companion close the door behind her, and the clinking of the tools in his holdall. The staircase was steep, narrow and dark after daylight, the lightbulb overhead dead. When Robin reached the landing she saw, through the open door, a white-haired woman with big ears like Samhain’s, wiping the surfaces of a brown-tiled kitchen while Samhain, who had his back to her, eagerly peeled the plastic wrapper off the tin of chocolate biscuits.

Deborah turned, her neat white plait sliding over her shoulder, to fix her dark eyes on the two strangers.

“Hello, Mrs. Athorn,” said Robin, coming to a halt in the hall.

“Are you from the social work department?” asked Deborah slowly. “I phoned Clare…”

“We can help wi’ anythin’ Clare can,” said Barclay, before Robin could answer. “What’s the problem?”

“Him downstairs is a bastard,” said Samhain, who was now digging busily in the tin of chocolate biscuits, and selecting the one wrapped in gold foil. “These are the best ones, in the shiny paper, that’s how you know.”

“Is the man downstairs complaining again?” asked Robin, with a sudden upswell of excitement that bordered on panic.

“Can we have a look at whut the problem is?” asked Barclay. “Where’s he think his ceilin’s crackin’?”

Deborah pointed toward the sitting room.

“I’ll have a wee look,” said Barclay confidently, and he set off toward the sitting room.

“Don’t eat all of them, Sammy,” said Deborah, who’d returned to the methodical wiping of the kitchen sides.

“They gave them to me, you silly woman,” said Samhain, his mouth full of chocolate.

Robin followed, fighting a sense of utter unreality. Could what Strike suspected really be true?

Two budgerigars were twittering in a cage in the corner of the small sitting room, which, like the hall, was carpeted in swirls of brown and orange. A crocheted blanket had been spread over the back of the sofa. Barclay was looking down at the almost completed jigsaw of unicorns leaping over a rainbow. Robin glanced around. The place was sparsely furnished. Apart from the sofa and the budgies’ cage, there was only a small armchair, a television set on top of which stood an urn, and a small shelving unit on which sat a few old paperbacks and some cheap ornaments. Her eyes lingered on the Egyptian symbol of eternal life painted on a patch of dirty green wall.

She lies in a holy place.

“Floorboards?” she murmured to Barclay.

He shook his head, looked meaningfully down at the jigsaw of the unicorns, then pointed with his foot at the overlarge ottoman on which it lay.

“Oh God, no,” whispered Robin, before she could stop herself. “You think?”

“Otherwise the carpet would’ve had tae come up,” murmured Barclay. “Move furniture, take up floorboards… and would it make the ceilin’ crack, down below? An’ what aboot the smell?”

Samhain now came ambling into the room, eating his second foil-wrapped biscuit.

“D’you want a hot chocolate, or not?” he asked, looking at Robin’s knees.

“Um… no, thank you,” said Robin, smiling at him.

“Does he want a hot chocolate, or not?”

“No thanks, mate,” said Barclay. “Can we move this jigsaw? Need tae have a look beneath it.”

“Deborah don’t like her jigsaw touched,” said Samhain sternly.

“We need to prove the man downstairs is lying, though,” said Robin. “About his ceiling cracking.”

“Deborah,” called Samhain. “They want to move your jigsaw.”

He walked out of the room with his rocking gait, and his mother took his place at the door, eyeing Robin’s shoes as she said,

“You can’t move my unicorns.”

“We need to have a little look underneath it,” said Robin. “I promise we’ll take very good care of it, and not break it. We could move it…”

She looked around, but there was no stretch of floor big enough to accommodate it.

“In my bedroom, you can put it,” said Samhain, bobbing back into sight. “On my bed, they can put it, Deborah.”

“Excellent idea,” said Barclay heartily, bending to pick it up.

“Close it up first,” said Robin hastily, and she folded the wings of the jigsaw mat over the puzzle, containing all the pieces.

“Good job,” said Barclay, and he carried the jigsaw mat carefully out through the sitting-room door, followed by Deborah, who looked both anxious and alarmed, and by the self-important Samhain, who seemed proud to have had his plan adopted by this new man in the flat.

For a few seconds, Robin stood alone in the sitting room, looking down at the ottoman that was far too big for this small room. It had been covered with a cloth that Robin suspected dated from the sixties, being of thin, faded purple cotton, and carrying the design of a mandala. If a tall woman curled herself up, she might fit inside that ottoman, as long as she was thin, of course.

I don’t want to look, Robin thought suddenly, panic rising again. I don’t want to see…

But she had to look. She had to see. That was what she was there for.

Barclay returned, followed by both an interested-looking Samhain and a troubled Deborah.

“That doesn’t open,” said Deborah, pointing at the exposed ottoman. “You can’t open that. You leave that alone.”

“I had my toys in there,” said Samhain. “Didn’t I, Deborah? Once I did. But My-Dad-Gwilherm didn’t want me to keep them there no more.”

“You can’t open that,” repeated Deborah, now distressed. “Leave it, don’t touch that.”

“Deborah,” said Robin quietly, walking toward the older woman, “we’ve got to find out why the ceiling downstairs is cracking. You know how the man downstairs is always complaining, and saying he’d like you and Samhain to move out?”

“I don’t want to go,” said Deborah at once, and for a split-second her dark eyes almost met Robin’s, before darting back to the swirly carpet. “I don’t want to move. I’m going to ring Clare.”

“No,” said Robin, moving quickly around Deborah and blocking her way back to the kitchen, with its old wall-mounted phone beside the fridge. She hoped Deborah hadn’t heard her panic. “We’re here instead of Clare, you see? To help you with the man downstairs. But we think—Sam and I—”

“My-Dad-Gwilherm called me Sam,” said Samhain. “Didn’t he, Deborah?”

“That’s nice,” said Robin, and she pointed at Barclay. “This man’s called Sam, too.”

“Is his name Sam, is it?” said Samhain gleefully, and boldly he raised his eyes to Barclay’s face before looking away again, grinning. “Two Sams. Deborah! Two Sams!”

Robin addressed the perplexed Deborah, who was now shifting from foot to foot in a manner reminiscent of her son’s rolling walk.

“Sam and I want to sort this out, Deborah, so you don’t have any more trouble with the man downstairs.”

“Gwilherm didn’t want that opened,” said Deborah, reaching nervously for the end of her white plait. “He didn’t want that opened, he wanted that kept shut.”

“Gwilherm would want you and Samhain to be allowed to stay here, though, wouldn’t he?”

Deborah put the end of her plait in her mouth and sucked at it, as though it was an ice lolly. Her dark eyes wandered as though in search of help.

“I think,” said Robin gently, “it would be good if you and Samhain wait in his bedroom while we have a look at the ottoman.”

“Knotty man,” said Samhain, and he cackled again. “Sam! Hey—Sam! Knotty man!”

“Good one,” said Barclay, grinning.

“Come on,” said Robin, sliding an arm around Deborah. “You wait in the bedroom with Samhain. You haven’t done anything wrong, we know that. Everything’s going to be fine.”

As she led Deborah slowly across the landing, she heard Samhain say cheerily,

“I’m staying here, though.”

“No, mate,” Barclay replied, as Robin and Deborah entered Samhain’s tiny bedroom. Every inch of wall was covered in pictures of superheroes and gaming characters. Deborah’s gigantic jigsaw took up most of the bed. The floor around the PlayStation was littered with chocolate wrappers.

“Look after yer mam and, after, I’ll teach ye a magic trick,” Barclay was saying.

“My-Dad-Gwilherm could do magic!”

“Aye, I know, I heard. That make it easy fer you tae do magic, if yer dad could do it, eh?”

“We won’t be long,” Robin told Samhain’s frightened mother. “Just stay in here for now, all right? Please, Deborah?”

Deborah simply blinked at her. Robin was particularly afraid of the woman trying to reach the phone on the kitchen wall, because she didn’t want to have to physically restrain her. Returning to the sitting room, she found Barclay still bargaining with Samhain.

“Do it now,” Samhain was saying, grinning, looking from Barclay’s hands to his chin to his ear. “Go on, show me now.”

“Sam can only do magic after we’ve done our job,” said Robin. “Samhain, will you wait in the bedroom with your mum, please?”

“Go on, mate,” said Barclay. “Just fer a bit. Then I’ll teach ye the trick.”

The smile faded off Samhain’s face.

“Silly woman,” he said sulkily to Robin. “Stupid woman.”

He walked out of the room, but instead of going into his bedroom, he made for the kitchen.

“Shit,” Robin muttered, “don’t do anything yet, Sam—”

Samhain reappeared, holding the tin of chocolate biscuits, walked into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

“Now,” said Robin.

“Stay by the door,” said Sam, “keep an eye on them.”

Robin closed the sitting-room door, leaving a tiny crack through which she could spy on Samhain’s bedroom, and gave Barclay the thumbs up.

He pulled the mandala covering off the ottoman, bent down, gripped the edge of the lid and heaved. The lid wouldn’t budge. He put all his strength into it, but still it didn’t shift. From Samhain’s room came the sound of raised voices. Deborah was telling Samhain not to eat any more chocolate biscuits.

“It’s like—it’s locked—on the inside,” said Barclay, panting and letting go.

He unzipped his holdall and, after some rummaging, pulled out a crowbar, which he wedged the end of into the crack separating the lid from the body of the ottoman. “Come—oan—you—fucker,” he gasped, as the end of the crowbar lost its grip and nearly hit Barclay in the face. “Somethin’s stickin’ it doon.”

Robin peeked back at Samhain’s bedroom door. It remained closed. Mother and son were still arguing about the chocolate biscuits. The budgerigars chirruped. Beyond the window, Robin could see an airplane trail, a fuzzy white pipe cleaner stretched across the sky. Everyday things became so strange, when you were waiting for something dreadful to happen. Her heart was pounding fast.

“Help me,” said Barclay through gritted teeth. He’d managed to get the end of the crowbar deeper into the crack in the ottoman. “It’s gonnae take two.”

After another glance at Samhain’s closed door, Robin hurried over to Barclay and gripped the crowbar alongside him. Using all their weight and force, both pushed the handle toward the floor.

“Jesus,” panted Robin. “What’s holding it?”

“Where’s—Strike—when you need—”

There was a loud crunching, cracking noise. The crowbar suddenly gave way as the lid of the ottoman opened. Robin turned and saw a cloud of dust rising into the air. Barclay pushed the lid up.

The ottoman had been filled with concrete, which had stuck the lid down upon itself. The gray matter was lumpy and looked as though it might have been badly mixed. In two places, something smooth broke through the uneven, ashen surface: one resembling a few inches of walrus tusk, the other, a curved surface that hinted at a dark ivory globe. Then Robin saw, stuck to a bit of the concrete that had adhered to the lid of the ottoman, a few fair hairs.

They heard footsteps on the landing. Barclay slammed the lid of the ottoman down as Samhain opened the door. He was followed by Deborah.

“I’ll teach you that magic trick now,” said Barclay, walking toward Samhain. “Come in the kitchen, we’ll do it there.”

The two men left. Deborah shuffled into the room, and picked up the faded purple throw that Robin had cast aside.

“Did you open it?” she mumbled, eyes on the old carpet.

“Yes,” said Robin, far more calmly than she felt. She sat down on the ottoman, even though she felt sacrilegious doing it. I’m sorry, Margot. I’m so sorry.

“I need to make a phone call now, Deborah. Then I think we should all have some hot chocolate.”

71

A train came roaring and rattling along the Southeastern railway line. Strike, who was standing on the opposite side of the road, felt his mobile vibrate in his pocket and pulled it out, but for a few seconds the din was such that he couldn’t immediately hear Robin.

“… found her.”

“Say that again?” he shouted, as the train rumbled away.

“We’ve—found—her. Inside the ottoman inside the sitting room. Concrete was poured in all around her, but we can see a bit of her skull and maybe a femur.”

“Shit.”

Strike had expected the presence of the body in the Athorns’ flat, but there was nothing routine, ever, about finding a dead human. “Concrete?” he repeated.

“Yes. It doesn’t look that well mixed. Amateurish. But it’s done the job. It probably killed most of the smell.”

“Hell of a weight on a supporting beam.”

“Well, exactly. Where are you?”

“Outside, about to go in. Right: call 999, then call Layborn and tell him where I am, and why. That should speed things up.”

“OK. Good luck.”

Strike hung up. The nondescript street of terraced houses was quiet now the train had gone, birdsong replacing its thunderous clamor. Strike, who’d been waiting where he couldn’t be seen, now walked up the street, passing three small houses, and at the fourth, turned left up a short garden path, then beat a tattoo on the dark red front door.

The net curtains twitched, and Janice Beattie’s cross face appeared. Strike raised a hand in greeting. The curtain fell.

After a slightly longer wait than might have been expected, given the short distance from sitting room to hall, Janice opened the door. She was dressed all in black today, with sheepskin carpet slippers on her feet. Her clear china-blue eyes, rimmed in steel, looked as kind and innocent as ever. Silver-haired, apple-cheeked, she frowned up at the detective, but didn’t speak.

“Can I come in?” asked Strike.

There was a long pause. The wild birds tweeted, and Strike thought fleetingly of the budgies in the Athorns’ flat, where part of his mind was dwelling on the image of a skull and a femur, poking up through concrete.

“If you must,” said Janice slowly.

He followed Janice into the red sitting room, with its cheap crimson Turkish rug, its dried-flower pictures and its faded photographs. The sun was making the spun-glass Cinderella carriage and its six horses twinkle on top of the fire, which Janice had on, in spite of the mildness of the September day.

“Wanna cup of tea?” said Janice.

“That’d be great,” said Strike, fully alive to the unreality of the situation.

He listened to her sheepskin-muffled footsteps receding and the sound of the kitchen door opening. Taking out his mobile phone, he switched it to record and laid it on the arm of the chair in which he’d sat last time. He then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and followed Janice quietly out of the room, the worn carpet muffling his footsteps.

At the door, he paused, listening to the soft bubbling of boiling water against a kettle lid, and the tinkle of teaspoons, and the opening of a cupboard. With one fingertip, he pushed open the kitchen door.

Janice spun round, eyes wide. On seeing him, she grabbed one of the china mugs on the tray and raised it hurriedly to her lips, but Strike had already taken a stride toward her. Gripping the thin wrist with his latex-gloved hand, forcing the mug away from her mouth, he felt bone beneath the soft flesh and the papery skin of the elderly. With his free hand, he pulled the mug out of hers, and examined it. A good inch of viscous white liquid was swimming in the bottom of it. Still holding Janice’s wrist, he looked into the teapot, which contained more of the same, then opened the cupboard over the kettle.

It was jammed with bottles of pills, weedkiller, bleach and jam jars full of what looked like home-dried plants, leaves and fungus: a poisoner’s storehouse, a testimony to a lifetime’s careful study of the means by which death could be delivered in the guise of healing.

“Think I’ll skip tea,” said Strike. “Let’s have a chat, shall we?”

She offered no resistance as he led her by the wrist back through to the sitting room and pushed her down onto the sofa.

“A murder-suicide would be a hell of a way to go out,” said Strike, standing over her, “but I don’t much fancy being victim number… how many is it?”

Janice said nothing. Her round blue eyes registered only shock.

Strike looked up at the wall of old photographs. One showed a toothy, beaming brunette bride, her hair worn in ringlets, in a high-necked lace dress, a pillbox hat on top of her veil, a large mole on her left cheekbone. Just above it was a picture of a young blonde with her hair worn in a frizzy eighties perm. She was wearing a red coat. He hadn’t noticed, hadn’t seen, because he’d walked into the room with certain expectations, making assumptions no less sweeping than Talbot had, with his conviction that Cancerians were intuitive, gentle and perceptive. Nurses were angels, ministering to the vulnerable: he’d been as guilty of bias as Vi Cooper, seeing Janice through the prism of his grateful memories of the nurses in Selly Oak who’d helped him manage pain and depression, and of Kerenza down in Cornwall, bringing comfort and kindness every single day. And on top of it all, he’d been fooled by a veritable genius for lies and misdirection.

“I thought,” said Strike, “I should come and tell the Athorns’ social worker in person that a body’s been found in their flat. You do a very good middle-class accent, Janice. I s’pose the phone Clare uses is round here somewhere?”

He looked around. Possibly she’d hidden it when she’d seen who was at the door. He suddenly spotted the hairdryer, tucked away behind the sofa, but with its lead protruding. He sidled past the coffee table, bent down and pulled it out, along with a roll of cellophane, a small phial with the label pulled off, a syringe and some chocolates.

“Leave them,” said Janice suddenly and angrily, but he laid the items on the coffee table instead.

“How ill would I have been if I’d eaten one of those dates you were doctoring when I arrived last time?” he asked. “You use the hairdryer to fix the cellophane back round them, right?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I haven’t thanked you for those chocolates you sent Robin and me at Christmas. I had flu. Only managed to eat a couple before puking my guts up. Chucked the rest away, because they had bad associations. Lucky for me, eh?”

Strike now sat down in the armchair, beside his mobile, which was still recording.

“Did you kill all these people?” Strike asked, gesturing up at the wall of photographs, “Or do some of them just have recurrent bowel problems around you? No,” he said, scrutinizing the wall, “Irene’s not up there, is she?”

She blinked at him through the lenses of her round silver glasses, which were far cleaner than Dennis Creed’s.

A car came trundling up the road beyond the net curtains. Janice watched it pass, and Strike thought she was half expecting to see a police car. Perhaps she wasn’t going to talk at all. Sometimes, people didn’t. They preferred to leave it all up to the lawyers.

“I spoke to your son on the phone last night,” said Strike.

“You never!”

The words had burst out of her, in shock.

“I did,” said Strike. “Kevin was quite surprised to hear you’d been visiting him in Dubai, because he hasn’t seen you in nearly seven years. Why d’you pretend you’re visiting him? To get a break from Irene?”

She pressed her lips together. One hand was playing with the worn wedding ring on the other.

“Kevin told me he’s had barely any contact with you, since leaving home. You weren’t ever close, he said. But he paid for you to fly out there seven years ago, because he thought he should give you ‘another chance,’ as he put it… and his young daughter managed to ingest quite a lot of bleach while you were looking after her. She survived—just—and since then, he’s cut you off completely.

“We ended up talking for nearly two hours,” said Strike, watching Janice’s color fluctuate. “It was hard for Kevin to say out loud what he’s suspected all these years. Who wants to believe their own mum’s been poisoning people? He preferred to think he was paranoid about all those ‘special drinks’ you used to give him. And apparently your first husband—”

“He wasn’t my ’usband,” muttered Janice. “We were never married.”

“—left because he thought you were doing things to his meals, too. Kevin used to think his father was making it all up. But after our chat last night, I think he’s seeing things very differently. He’s ready to come over and testify against you.”

Janice gave a small convulsive jerk. For almost a minute there was silence.

“You’re recording this,” she whispered at last, looking at the mobile lying on the arm of Strike’s chair.

“I am, yeah,” said Strike.

“If you turn that off, I’ll talk to you.”

“I’ll still be able to testify to whatever you tell me.”

“I’m sure a lawyer would tell me not to let meself be recorded, though.”

“Yeah,” Strike acknowledged, “you’re probably right.”

He picked up the mobile, turned it to face her so she could watch, switched off the recording, then laid it down on the small coffee table beside the chocolates, the empty phial, the syringe, the cellophane and the hairdryer.

“Why d’you do it, Janice?”

She was still stroking the underside of her wedding ring.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I just… like it.”

Her eyes wandered over the wall of photographs.

“I like seeing what ’appens to them, if they take poison or too many drugs. Sometimes I like ’elping ’em and ’aving them be grateful, and sometimes I like watching ’em suffer, and sometimes I like watching ’em go…” A prickle ran up the back of Strike’s neck. “I don’t know why,” she said again. “I sometimes fink it’s because I ’ad a bang on the ’ead, when I was ten. My dad knocked me downstairs. I was out for fifteen minutes. Ever since then, I’ve ’ad ’eadaches…’Ead trauma can do fings to you, you know. So maybe it’s not my fault, but… I dunno…

“Wiv me granddaughter,” said Janice, frowning slightly, “I just wanted ’er gone, honestly… spoiled and whiny… I don’t like kids,” she said, looking directly back at Strike. “I’ve never liked kids. I never wanted ’em, never wanted Kev, but I fort if I ’ad it, ’is dad might marry me… but ’e never, ’e wouldn’t…

“It was ’aving a baby what killed my mum,” said Janice. “I was eight. She ’ad it at ’ome. Placenta previa, it was. Blood everywhere, me trying to ’elp, no doctor, my father drunk, screaming at everyone…

“I took this,” said Janice quietly, showing Strike the wedding ring on her finger, “off Mum’s dead ’and. I knew my father would sell it for drink. I took it and ’id it so ’e couldn’t get it. It’s all I got of ’er. I loved my mum,” said Janice Beattie, stroking the wedding ring, and Strike wondered whether it was true, whether head trauma and early abuse had made Janice what she was, and whether Janice had the capacity to love at all.

“Is that really your little sister, Clare?” Strike asked, pointing at the double frame beside Janice, where the sleepy-eyed, overweight man with smoker’s teeth faced the heavy but pretty blonde.

“No,” said Janice, looking at the picture. After a short pause, she said, “She was Larry’s mistress. I killed both of ’em. I’m not sorry. They deserved it. ’E was wiv me, ’e wasn’t much of a catch, but ’e was wiv me, the pair of ’em carryin’ on be’ind my back. Bitch,” said Janice quietly, looking at the picture of the plump blonde.

“I assume you kept the obituaries?”

She got slowly up from the sofa, and Strike heard her knees click as she walked toward the china cabinet in the corner which housed most of her cheap spun-glass ornaments, and knelt down, again steadying herself with one hand on the mantelpiece. But now, instead of one folder, she tugged two out of the drawer in the base of the cabinet, and Strike remembered how she’d shifted things around in the drawer last time, doubtless removing those things she didn’t want him to see.

“That one,” she said, showing him the fatter of the two folders, “is all the stuff about Margot. I cut out everyfing I could find. Needed a second folder for all ’er clippings…”

She opened the thinner folder, which was the one Strike had seen before, and extracted an old work newsletter headed Hickson & Co. The blonde’s color photograph featured prominently at the top.

“Clare Martin,” said Janice. “’Eavy drinker, she was. ‘Accidental overdose’… liver failure. I knew she was taking too many paracetamol for ’er endometriosis, I watched ’er doing it. Me and Larry ’ad a bunch of people over to the ’ouse. They fort I was stupid. Eye contact between ’em all night long. Thick as mince, the pair of ’em. I was mixing drinks. Every cocktail I gave ’er was ’alf liquid paracetamol. She died eight days later…

“And there’s Larry’s,” she said indifferently, holding up a second newsletter from Hickson & Co.

“I waited six, seven monfs. That was easy. ’E was a walkin’ timebomb, Larry, the doctors ’ad warned ’im, ’is ’eart was wrecked. Pseudoephedrine, that was. They never even checked ’im for drugs in ’is system. They knew what it was: smoking and eating like a pig. Nobody looked further than ’is dodgy ticker…”

Strike detected not the slightest sign of remorse as she shuffled the obituaries of her victims as though they were so many knitting patterns. Her fingers trembled, but Strike thought that was down to shock, not shame. Mere minutes ago she’d thought of suicide. Perhaps that cool and clever brain was working very hard beneath the apparently frank surface, and Strike suddenly reached out and removed the drugged chocolates from the table beside Janice, and put them down on the floor beside his chair. Her eyes followed them, and he was sure he’d been right to suspect she was thinking of eating them. Now he leaned forwards again and picked up the old yellow clipping he’d examined last time, showing little Johnny Marks from Bethnal Green.

“He was your first, was he?”

Janice took a deep breath and exhaled. A couple of the cuttings fluttered.

“Yeah,” she said heavily. “Pesticide. You could get all sorts in them days, buy it over the counter. Organophosphates. I fancied ’im something rotten, Johnny Marks, but ’e made fun of me. Yeah, so they fort it was peritonitis and ’e died. It’s true the doctor didn’t turn up, mind. People didn’t care, when it was kids from a slum… That was a bad death, ’e ’ad. I was allowed to go in and look at ’im, after ’e died. I give ’im a little kiss on the cheek,” said Janice. “’E couldn’t stop me then, could ’e? Shouldn’t of made fun of me.”

“Marks,” said Strike, examining the clipping, “gave you the idea for Spencer, right? It was the name that first connected her with you, but I should’ve twigged when Clare phoned me back so promptly. Social workers never do that. Too overworked.”

“Huh,” said Janice, and she almost smiled. “Yeah. That’s where I got the name: Clare Martin and Johnny Marks.”

“You didn’t keep Brenner’s obituary, did you?”

“No,” said Janice.

“Because you didn’t kill him?”

“No. ’E died of old age somewhere in Devon. I never even read ’is obituary, but I ’ad to come up wiv somefing, didn’t I, when you asked for it? So I said Oakden took it.”

She was probably the most accomplished liar Strike had ever met. Her ability to come up with falsehoods at a moment’s notice, and the way she interwove her plausible lies with truth, never attempting too much, and delivering everything with such an air of authenticity and honesty, placed her in a class apart.

“Was Brenner really addicted to barbiturates?”

“No,” said Janice.

She was shuffling the obituaries back into their folder now, and Strike spotted the clipping about holy basil, on the reverse of which was Joanna Hammond’s death notice.

“No,” she repeated, as she put the obituaries back into her bottom drawer and closed it, as though it mattered any more whether she tidied these things away, as though they wouldn’t soon be used in evidence against her. Knees clicking, she got slowly to her feet again, and returned to the sofa.

“I was getting Brenner to sign for drugs for me,” she said. “’E fort I was selling them on the street, dopey old sod.”

“How did you persuade him to over-order drugs? Blackmail?”

“S’pose you’d call it that, yeah,” she said. “I found out ’e was going to see a prostitute locally. One of ’er kids told me Brenner was visiting ’er once a week. I fort, right, I’ll get you, you dirty old bastard. ’E was coming up for retirement. I knew ’e didn’t want to end ’is career in disgrace. I went in to see ’im one day in his consulting room and told ’im I knew. ’E nearly ’ad an ’eart attack,” said Janice, with a malicious smile. “I told ’im I knew ’ow to keep me mouf shut, and then I asked ’im to get me some drugs. ’E signed like a lamb. I was using stuff Brenner got me for years, after.”

“The prostitute was Betty Fuller, right?

“Yeah,” said Janice. “I fort you’d find that out.”

“Did Brenner really assault Deborah Athorn?”

“No. ’E checked ’er stitches after she had Samhain, that’s all.”

“Why did Clare Spencer tell me that story? Just blowing a bit more smoke around?”

Janice shrugged.

“I dunno. I fort maybe you’d fink Brenner was a sex pest and Margot found out ’e was fiddling with patients.”

“Was there ever really an Amytal capsule in Brenner’s mug?”

“No,” said Janice. “It was in Irene’s mug… that was stupid,” she said, her pink and white brow furrowed. The wide blue eyes drifted over her wall of victims’ photographs, to the window and back to Strike. “I shouldn’t of done that. Sometimes I sailed a bit close to the wind. Took silly risks. Irene was pissing me off one day on reception, flirting wiv—just flirting,” said Janice, “so I took ’er a mug of tea wiv a couple of capsules in it. She talks till you could throttle ’er, I just wanted ’er to shut the hell up for a bit. But she let it go cold…

“I was sort of glad, after I’d calmed down. I got the mug and took it out the back to wash up, but Margot come creepin’ up behind me in ’er flat shoes. I tried to ’ide it, but she saw.

“I fort she’d go tellin’ tales, so I ’ad to get in first. I went straight to Dr. Gupta and said I’d found a capsule in Dr. Brenner’s tea, and told ’im I fort ’e was over-ordering drugs and was addicted. What else could I do? Gupta was a nice man but he was a coward. Bit scared of Brenner. I fort ’e probably wouldn’t confront ’im, and ’e didn’t, but honestly, I knew even if ’e ’ad, Brenner would rather pretend to be an addict than risk me tellin’ anyone about a ’is dirty little fing wiv Betty Fuller.”

“And was Margot really worried about how Dorothy Oakden’s mother died?”

“No,” said Janice again. “But I ’ad to tell you somefing, didn’t I?”

“You’re a genius of misdirection,” said Strike, and Janice turned slightly pink.

“I’ve always been clever,” she mumbled, “but that don’t ’elp a woman. It’s better to be pretty. You ’ave a better life if you’re good-looking. Men always went for Irene, not me. She talked shit all night long, but they liked ’er better. I wasn’t bad-looking… I just didn’t ’ave what men liked.”

“When we first met the two of you,” said Strike, ignoring this, “I thought Irene might’ve wanted you interviewed together to make sure you didn’t spill her secrets, but it was the other way round, wasn’t it? You wanted to be there to control what she said.”

“Yeah, well,” said Janice, with another sigh, “I didn’t do that well, did I? She was blabbing left, right and center.”

“Tell me, did Charlie Ramage really see a missing woman in Leamington Spa?”

“No. I just needed to give you somefing to fink about instead of Margot prodding Kev in the tummy. Charlie Ramage told me ’e saw Mary Flanagan in a country churchyard in… Worcestershire somewhere, I fink it was. I knew nobody could say no diff’rent, I knew ’e was dead and I knew ’e talked such bollocks, nobody round ’im would remember one more tall story.”

“Was the mention of Leamington Spa supposed to nudge me toward Irene and Satchwell?”

“Yeah,” said Janice.

“Did you put drugs in Wilma Bayliss’s Thermos? Is that why she seemed drunk to people at the surgery?”

“I did, yeah.”

“Why?”

“I already told you,” said Janice restlessly, “I don’t know why I do it, I just do… I wanted to see what would ’appen to ’er. I like knowing why fings are ’appening, when nobody else does…

“’Ow did you work all this out?” she demanded. “Talbot and Lawson never suspected.”

“Lawson might not have done,” said Strike, “but I think Talbot did.”

“’E never,” said Janice, at once. “I ’ad ’im eating out me ’and.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Strike. “He left a strange set of notes, and all through them he kept circling back to the death of Scorpio, or Juno, which are the names he gave Joanna Hammond. Seven interviews, Janice. I think he subconsciously knew there was something off about you. He mentions poison a lot, which I think had stuck in his mind because of the way Joanna died. At one point—I was reading the notes again, last night—he copies out a long description of the tarot card the Queen of Cups. Words to the effect that she reflects the observer back at themselves. ‘To see the truth of her is almost impossible.’ And on the night they hauled him off to hospital, he hallucinated a female demon with a cup in her hand and a seven hanging round her neck. He was too ill to string his suspicions together, but his subconscious kept trying to tell him you weren’t all you seemed. At one point, he wrote: ‘Is Cetus right?’—he called Irene Cetus—and eventually I asked myself what she could’ve been right about. Then I remembered that the first time we met the pair of you, she told us she thought you were ‘sweet on’ Douthwaite.”

At the sound of Douthwaite’s name, Janice winced slightly.

“Oakden said you got giggly around Douthwaite, too,” Strike continued, watching her closely. “And Dorothy bracketed you with Irene and Gloria as some kind of scarlet woman, which implies you’d done some flirting in front of her.”

“Is that all you went on: me flirting once, and being the Queen of Cups?” said Janice, managing to get a note of scorn into her voice, though he thought she seemed shaken.

“No,” said Strike, “there were plenty of other things. Strange anomalies and coincidences. People kept telling me Margot didn’t like ‘the nurse,’ but they got you confused with Irene a lot, so it took me a while to twig that they really did mean you.

“Then there was Fragile X. When I saw you that first time, with Irene, you claimed you’d only been to visit the Athorns once, but the second time I met you, you seemed to know a hell of a lot about them. Fragile X was called Martin-Bell syndrome back in the early seventies. If you’d only seen them that one time, it seemed odd you knew exactly what was wrong with them, and used the modern term…

“And then I started noticing how many people were getting stomach upsets or acting drugged. Did you put something in the punch at Margot and Roy’s barbecue?”

“I did, yeah,” she said. “Ipecac syrup, that was. I fort it would be funny if they all thought they’d got food poisoning from the barbe­cue, but then Carl broke the bowl, and I was glad, really… I just wanted to see ’em all ill, and maybe look after ’em all, and ruin ’er party, but it was stupid, wasn’t it?… That’s what I mean, I sailed close to the wind sometimes, they were doctors, what if they’d known?… It was only Gloria who ’ad a big glassful and was sick. Margot’s ’usband didn’t like that… ruined their smart house…”

And Strike saw the almost indiscriminate desire for disruption that lay behind the meek exterior.

“Gloria throwing up at the barbecue,” said Strike. “Irene and her irritable bowel syndrome—Kevin and his constant stomach aches—Wilma swaying on her feet and vomiting while she was working at St. John’s—me, puking up my Christmas chocolates—and, of course, Steve Douthwaite and his vision problems, his headaches and his churning guts… I’m assuming it was Douthwaite Irene was flirting with, the day you put Amytal capsules in her tea?”

Janice pressed her lips together, eyes narrowed.

“I suppose you told her he was gay to try and get her to back off?”

“She already ’ad Eddie gagging to marry ’er,” Janice burst out. “She ’ad all these blokes down the pub flirting with ’er. If I’d told ’er ’ow much I liked Steve, she’d’ve taken ’im for the fun of it, that’s what she was. So yeah, I told ’er ’e was queer.”

“What are you drugging her with, these days?”

“It varies,” said Janice quietly. “Depends ’ow much she’s pissing me off.”

“So tell me about Steve Douthwaite.”

Suddenly, Janice was breathing deeply. Her face was flushed again: she looked emotional.

“’E was… such a beautiful man.”

The passionate throb in her voice took Strike aback, almost more than the full stock of poisons she was keeping in her kitchen. He thought of the cheeky chap in his kipper tie, who’d become the puffy, bloodshot-eyed proprietor of the Allardice in Skegness, with his strands of graying hair stuck to his sweating forehead, and not for the first time, Strike had reason to reflect on the extraordinarily unpredictable nature of human love.

“I’ve always been one to fall ’ead over ’eels,” said Janice, and Strike thought of Johnny Marks dying in agony, and Janice kissing him farewell on his cold dead cheek. “Oh, Steve could make you laugh. I love a man what can make you laugh. Really ’andsome. I used to walk past ’is flat ten times a day just to get an ’ello… we got friendly…

“’E started dropping in, telling me all ’is problems… and ’e tells me ’ow ’e’s mad about this married woman. Fallen for ’is mate’s wife. On and on and on about ’ow ’ard ’er life is, and there’s me sitting there wiv a kid on me own. What about my ’ard life? She ’ad an ’usband, didn’t she? But no, I could tell I wasn’t gonna get nowhere wiv ’im unless she was out the way, so I fort, right, well, she’ll ’ave to go…

“She was no better lookin’ than I was,” muttered Janice, pointing at the picture of Joanna Hammond on the wall. “State of that fing on ’er face…

“So I looked ’er up in the phone book and I just went round ’er ’ouse when I knew ’er ’usband was at work. I used to ’ave this wig I wore to parties. Put that on, and me uniform, and a pair of glasses I used to ’ave, but I didn’t need. Rang the doorbell, told ’er I’d ’ad a tip-off about ’er domestic situation.

“People will always let a nurse in,” said Janice. “She was desperate to talk to someone. I got ’er good and emotional, cryin’ and all that. She told me about sleeping with Steve, and ’ow she fort she was in love wiv ’im…

“I made ’er a drink wiv latex gloves on. ’Alf of it was weedkiller. She knew, the moment she tasted it, but I grabbed ’er ’air from be’ind,” Janice mimed the motion in mid-air, “pulled ’er ’ead back, forced it down ’er fuckin’ throat. Oh yeah. Once she was on the floor, chokin’, I poured some more down, neat.

“’Ad to stay a while, to make sure she didn’t try an’ phone anyone. Once I knew she was too far gone to recover, I took off me uniform an’ left.

“It takes nerve,” said Janice Beattie, her color high and her eyes bright, “but act normal and people don’t see nothing strange… you just got to ’old your nerve. And maybe I wasn’t showy-looking when I was young, but that ’elped. I wasn’t the kind people remembered…

“Next day, near enough, I ’ad Steve crying ’is eyes out round my place. It was all going great,” said the woman who’d poured neat weedkiller down her rival’s throat, “I saw ’im loads after that, ’e was round my place all the time. There was somefing there between us, I could feel it.

“I never drugged ’im a lot,” said Janice, as though this was true evidence of affection. “Only enough to stop ’im going out, make ’im feel ’e needed me. I used to look after ’im really well. Once, ’e slept on my sofa, and I wiped ’is face for ’im, while ’e was asleep,” she said, and again, Strike thought of the kiss she’d given the dead Johnny Marks.

“But sometimes,” said Janice, with bitterness, “men fort I was the mumsy type and didn’t see me as anyfing else. I could tell Steve liked me, but I fort ’e might not be seeing me the right way, you know, wiv bein’ a nurse, and Kev always dragging round after me. One evening, Steve come over, and Kev was ’aving a tantrum, and Steve said, he thought ’e’d be off, let me look after Kev… and I could tell, I fort, you’re not gonna want me wiv a kid. So I fort, Kev needs to go.”

She said it as though talking about taking out the bins.

“But you gotta be careful when it’s your own kid,” said Janice. “I needed to get an ’istory going. ’E couldn’t just die, not after being perfectly ’ealthy. I started experimenting wiv stuff, I was finking, maybe a salt overdose, claim ’e did it on a dare or somefing. I started putting stuff in ’is food ’ere and there. Get ’im complaining to teachers about stomach aches an’ that, and then I’d say, “Oh, I know, I think it’s a bit of schoolitis’…”

“But then Margot examined him,” said Strike.

“But then,” repeated Janice slowly, nodding, “that hoity-toity bitch takes ’im into ’er surgery and examines ’im. And I knew she was suspicious. She asked me after, what drinks it was I’d given ’im, because the little bastard ’ad told ’er Mummy was givin’ ’im special drinks…

“Not a week later,” said Janice, twisting the old wedding ring on her finger, “I realize Steve’s going to see ’er about ’is ’ealf, instead of coming to see me. Next fing I know, Margot’s asking me all about Joanna’s death, out the back by the kettle, and Dorothy and Gloria were listening in. I said, ‘ ’Ow the ’ell should I know what ’appened?’ but I was worried. I fort, what’s Steve been telling ’er? ’As ’e said ’e finks there was somefing wrong wiv it? ’As someone said they saw a nurse leaving the ’ouse?

“I was getting worried. I sent ’er chocolates full of phenobarbital. Irene ’ad told me Margot ’ad ’ad freatening notes, and I’m not surprised, interfering bitch, she was… I fort, they’ll fink it’s ’ooever sent them notes, sent the chocolates…

“But she never ate ’em. She frew ’em in the bin in front of me, but after, I ’eard she’d taken ’em out the bin and kept ’em. And that’s when I knew, I really knew. I fort, she’s gonna get ’em tested…”

“And that’s when you finally agreed to go on a date with simple old Larry,” said Strike.

“’Oo says ’e was simple?” said Janice, firing up.

“Irene,” said Strike. “You needed access to concrete, didn’t you? Didn’t want to be seen buying it, I’d imagine. What did you do, tell Larry to take some and not mention it to anyone?”

She simply looked at him out of those round blue eyes that nobody who hadn’t heard this conversation could possibly mistrust.

“What gave you the idea of concrete?” Strike asked. “That rumor of the body in the foundations?”

“Yeah,” said Janice, finally. “It seemed like the way to stop the body smelling. I needed ’er to disappear. It was too near ’ome, what wiv ’er examining Kev, and asking me about Joanna, and keeping those chocolates. I wanted people to fink maybe the Essex Butcher got ’er, or the bloke ’oo sent the threatening notes.”

“How many times had you visited the Athorns before you killed Margot?”

“A few.”

“Because they needed a nurse? Or for some other reason?”

The longest pause yet ensued, long enough for the sun to slide out from a cloud, and the glass Cinderella coach to burn briefly like white fire, and then turn back into the tawdry gewgaw it really was.

“I sort of fort of killing them,” said Janice slowly. “I don’t know why, really. Just from the time I met ’em… they were odd and nobody ever went there. Those cousins of theirs visited once every ten years. I met ’em back in January, those cousins, when the flat needed cleaning out, to stop that man downstairs going to court… they stayed an hour and let ‘Clare’ do all the rest…

“Yeah, I just fort I might kill the Athorns one day,” she said, with a shrug. “That’s why I kept visiting. I liked the idea of watching an ’ole family die togevver, and waiting to see when people realized, and then it’d be on the news, probably, and I’d know what ’appened when everyone was gossiping, local…

“I did a bit of experimenting on ’em. Vitamin injections, I told them it was. Special treatments. And I used to hold their noses while they were asleep. Used to pull up their eyelids and look at their eyes, while they were unconscious. Nurses don’t never give anesthetics, see, but Dr. Brenner was letting me ’ave all sorts, and the Athorns just let me do stuff to ’em, even Gwilherm. ’E loved me coming over. ’E’d spend days on benzedrine and then ’e’d get sedatives off me. Proper junkie.

“I used to say to ’im, now, don’t you go telling anyone what we’re doing. These are expensive treatments. It’s only because I like your family.

“Some days, I used to fink, I’ll kill the kid and then give evidence against Gwilherm. That was one idea I ’ad. I fort, I’ll get in the papers, all dressed up, give evidence against ’im, you know. My picture on the front page… and I fort that’d be somefing interesting to talk to Steve about, when ’e seen my picture in the paper. Men love nurses. That was the on’y fing I ’ad going for me when I was out wiv Irene, and then the bitch starts pretending she’s a nurse an’ all…

“Only fank Gawd I never did any of that, fank Gawd I saved the Athorns, because what would I ’ave done wiv Margot if I ’adn’t ’ad them up the road? I’d nicked their spare key by then. They never noticed.

“I never fort it would work,” said Janice, “’cause I ’ad to frow the plan togevver in about five minutes. I knew she was onto me, when she saved the chocolates, and I was up all night, finking, worrying… and it was the next day, or maybe the day after, Steve went charging out of her surgery that last time. I was scared she’d warned ’im about me, because when I went round that night, ’e made some excuse not to let me in… I mean, ’e never went to the police, so now I know I was being paranoid, but at the time—”

“You weren’t being paranoid,” said Strike. “I spoke to him yesterday. Margot told him he ought to stop eating anything you prepared him. Just that. He understood what she was saying, though.”

Janice’s face grew redder.

“That bitch,” she said venomously. “What did she do that for? She ’ad a rich ’usband and a lover wanting her back, why’s she got to take Steve off me?”

“Go on,” said Strike, “about how you did it.”

A subtle change now came over Janice. Previously, she’d seemed diffident, matter-of-fact, or even ashamed of her own impetuousness, but now, for the first time, she seemed to enjoy what she was saying, as though she killed Margot Bamborough all over again, in the telling.

“Went out wiv Larry. Told ’im some bullshit about this poor family what needed to concrete over somefing on their roof terrace. Said they were dirt-poor. ’E was so keen to impress me, silly sod, ’e wanted to go do the building work for ’em.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I ’ad to give ’im all this crap about ’ow that would made the dad feel inadequate… I said just nicking a few bags of concrete mix off the building site’d be enough.

“Larry drove it to Albemarle Way for me and carried it up to their landing. I wouldn’t let ’im come any further, said it would be uneffical for ’im to see patients. ’E was silly, Larry, you could tell ’im anyfing… But he wouldn’t marry me,” said Janice suddenly. “Why is that? Why wouldn’t anyone marry me? What ’aven’t I got, that ovver women ’ave?” asked the nurse who’d pulled back the eyelids from her drugged victims to stare into their unseeing eyes. “Nobody ever wanted to marry me… never… I wanted to be in the paper in a white dress. I wanted my day in church and I never got it. Never…”

“You needed an alibi as well as concrete, presumably?” said Strike, ignoring her question. “I assume you chose the demented old lady in Gopsall Street because she couldn’t say one way or another whether you’d been with her when Margot disappeared?”

“Yeah,” said Janice, returning to her story, “I went to see ’er late morning and I left drugs there and a note, to prove I’d been in. I knew she’d agree I was there early evening. She didn’t ’ave no family, she’d agree with anyfing you said to ’er…

“I went from ’er place to buy a cinema ticket for the late-night show, and I called up my babysitter and told ’er I’d be later than I fort because we were getting the last viewing. I knew Irene wouldn’t wanna go wiv me. She’d been makin’ noises about not feelin’ up to it all morning. I knew she didn’t ’ave no bad toof, but I pretended to go along wiv it. Irene never wanted to go anywhere we weren’t gonna meet men.”

“So, you went back to the surgery that afternoon—in through the back door, I suppose?”

“Yeah,” said Janice, her eyes slightly unfocused now. “Nobody saw me. I knew Margot ’ad a doughnut in the fridge, because I’d been in there that morning and seen it, but there was people around all the time, so I couldn’t do nuffing. I injected it wiv Nembutal sodium solution, froo the cellophane.”

“You must’ve been well practiced by now? You knew how much to give her, so she could still walk up the road?”

“Nuffing’s certain,” said the nurse. Unlike Creed, she didn’t pretend omnipotence, but then, she’d also been, however reluctantly, in the business of healing as well as killing. “I ’ad a good feeling for dosages, but you can’t never be an ’undred percent sure. I’d ’eard she was going to meet some friend in a pub up the road, and she usually ate somefing before she went, but I couldn’t be sure she’d eat it, or still be able to walk up the road after, or when it would really hit ’er…

“All the time I was doing it, getting the concrete and drugging the doughnut, I was finking, this won’t work, it can’t work. You’re gonna go to prison, Janice… And you know somefing?” said the nurse, now pink cheeked and fierce, “By then, I didn’t even care. Not if she’d told Steve about me. I fort, I’ll go on trial and I’ll tell ’em ’ow ’e treated me like a mum and a nurse and took advantage, round my flat all hours. ’E’ll ’ave to bloody notice me and ’ear me then, won’t ’e? I didn’t care. I just fort, I want you dead, lady. I want you dead, you wiv your ’usband and your boyfriend on the side, and my man coming to see you three times a week…

“Eivver she dies, I fort, and I get away wiv it, or I’ll be famous, I’ll be in the papers… and I liked the idea, then.”

She looked around her small sitting room, and Strike was certain that she wondered what her cell would be like.

“I left the surgery and went round the long way to the Athorns’, but when I let myself in, Gwilherm wasn’t there. I fort, OK, that’s a problem. Where is ’e?

“And then Deborah and Samhain started moaning. They didn’t want their vitamin injections. I ’ad to get strict wiv ’em. I said to Deborah, it’s these injections what’s keeping you well. You don’t take ’em, I’ll have to ring an ambulance and get ’em to take you into ’ospital for an assessment… You could scare ’er into anyfing if you told ’er she’d ’ave to go outside. I give Deborah and Samhain their ‘vitamin injections,’ lying side by side in the double bedroom. Rolled ’em onto their sides. They were out for the count.

“So then I goes outside, and I waits in the phone box, pretending to be on the phone, keepin’ watch.

“It didn’t feel real, none of it. I didn’t fink it’d work. Probably I’d go into work next day and ’ear Margot passed out in the street, and then she’d start yelling the place down saying she was drugged, and I knew she’d point the finger at me…

“She didn’t come for ages. I fort, it’s over. She’s eaten the doughnut and got ill in the surgery. She’s called an ambulance. She’s guessed, she’s got sick. There was this girl, standing in front of the phone box, and I’m trying to see round ’er, trying to see…

“And then I saw Margot coming up the road. I fort, well, this is it. It was raining hard. People weren’t watchin’. It was all umbrellas and cars splashing. She crossed the road and I could see she was in a bad way. Wobbling all over the place. She got to my side of the road and leaned up against the wall. ’Er legs were about to go. I come out the phone box and I says, “Come on, love, you need to sit down.” Kept my face down. She come wiv me, a few steps, then she realized it was me. We ’ad a bit of a struggle. I got ’er a few more feet, just inside Albemarle Way, but she was a tall girl… and I fort, this is where it ends…

“And then I seen Gwilherm coming up the other way. It was me only chance. I called ’im to ’elp me. ’E fort ’e was ’elping ’er. ’E ’elped me drag ’er up the stairs. There wasn’t much fight in ’er by then. I told Gwilherm some rubbish to stop ’im phoning the ambulance. Said I could treat ’er myself… said ’e didn’t want no police coming up, looking round the flat…’E was a very paranoid man about the auforities, so that worked…

“I says, you go and see if Deborah and Samhain are still asleep. They’ve both been very worried about where you’ve been, and I ’ad to give ’em a little sedative.

“I suffocated ’er while ’e was out of the room. It didn’t take much. ’Eld ’er nose, kept ’er mouth shut. Did to Margot what I’d been planning to do to the Athorns.

“When I knew she was dead,” said Janice, “I left ’er sitting on the sofa and I went into the barfroom. I sat on the bog, looking at the flamingos on the wallpaper and I fort, now what? Gwilherm’s here. ’E’s seen ’er… and the on’y fing I could fink of was, let ’im fink ’e’s done it. ’E’s crazy enough. I fort, I’ll probably ’ave to kill ’im, too, in the end, but I’ll worry about that later…

“So I waited in the bog and let ’im go in the room and find ’er.

“I give ’im five minutes alone wiv the body, then I walk back in, talkin’ to Margot, like I left ’er alive. “You feeling all right now, Margot, love?” And then I says, “What’ve you done, Gwilherm? What’ve you done?”

“And he says, ‘Nuffing, nuffing, I ain’t done nuffing,’ and I’m saying, ‘You told me you can kill people with your powers. P’rhaps we better call the police,’ and ’e’s begging me not to, ’e didn’t mean to, it was all a mistake. So in the end I says, all right, I won’t give you away. I’ll make it disappear. I’ll take care of it.

“’E was crying like a baby and he asked me for one of my sedatives. ’E asked me to put ’im out, can you believe that? I give ’im some downers. Left ’im curled up asleep on Samhain’s bed.

“It was really ’ard, putting her in that big box fing all on me own. I ’ad to take out all the crap they kept in there. Folded ’er up. Once I ’ad ’er in there, I checked on all the Athorns. Made sure the airways weren’t obstructed. Then I ran back outside to the phone box. I says to Irene, are we still on for the cinema? And she says no, like I fort she would, fank Gawd.

“So I go back inside. I was there till midnight, near enough. I ’ad to mix the concrete bit by bit, by ’and, in a bucket. It took ages. Margot filled up most of that box fing, but it took a long time to get all the concrete round her. Then I closed the lid. It stuck to the concrete. I couldn’t get it up again, so that was good.

“When they was all awake, I told Gwilherm I’d taken care of it. I said to ’im quietly, the lid on that box thing ’as jammed. Best find somewhere else to put Samhain’s toys.

“’E knew, obviously. I fink ’e pretended to ’imself ’e didn’t, but ’e did. I was there free times a week, afterward. I ’ad to be. Keeping ’im happy. One time I went round and ’e’d painted all those symbols on the walls, like it was some sort of pagan temple or something.

“Weeks after, monfs after, I was worried sick. I knew ’e was tellin’ people ’e’d killed ’er. Luckily, everyone fort ’e was a nutcase, local. But it got bad, toward the end. ’E ’ad to go. I still can’t believe I waited a year to get rid of ’im…”

“And around the time you killed him, you phoned Cynthia Phipps and pretended to be Margot, didn’t you? To give the police another lead to hare after, and distract from Gwilherm, in case anyone had taken him seriously?”

“Yeah. That’s right,” mumbled Janice, twisting the old wedding ring.

“And you kept visiting Deborah and Samhain as Clare Spencer?”

“Well, yeah,” said Janice. “I ’ad to. They needed watching. Last fing I wanted was real social workers fiddling around in there.”

“And Deborah and Samhain never realized Clare was the same as Janice the nurse?”

“People with Fragile X don’t recognize faces easy,” said Janice. “I changed me ’air color and used me glasses. I done a lot to keep ’em ’ealfy, you know. Vitamin D for Deborah, cause she never goes outside. She’s younger’n me… I fort, I might well be dead before anyone finds the body. Longer it went on, less likely it was anyone would ever know I ’ad anyfing to do wiv it…”

“And what about Douthwaite?”

“’E scarpered,” said Janice, her smile fading. “That near enough broke my ’eart. There was me ’aving to go out on foursomes wiv Irene and Eddie, and act like I was ’appy wiv Larry, and the love of my life’s disappeared. I asked ev’ryone where Steve ’ad gone, and no one knew.”

“So why’s Julie Wilkes on your wall?” asked Strike.

“’Oo?” said Janice, lost in her self-pitying reverie.

“The Redcoat who worked at Clacton-on-Sea,” said Strike, pointing at the young blonde with her frizzy hair, who was framed on Janice’s wall.

“Oh…’er,” said Janice, with a sigh. “Yeah… I ran into someone ’oo knew someone ’oo’d met Steve at Butlin’s, few years later… oh, I was excited. Gawd, I was bored wiv Larry by then. I really wanted to see Steve again. I love a man ’oo can make me laugh,” repeated the woman who’d planned the murder of a family, for the pleasure of watching them die. “I knew there’d been somefing there between us, I knew we coulda bin a couple. So I booked me and Larry an ’oliday at Butlin’s. Kev didn’t wanna come—suited me. I got meself a perm and I went on a diet. Couldn’t wait. You build things up in your mind, don’t you?

“And we went to the club night and there ’e was,” said Janice quietly. “Oh, ’e looked gorgeous. ‘Longfellow Serenade.’ All the girls went crazy for ’im when ’e finished singing. There’s Larry boozing… After Larry went to bed in the chalet I went back out again. Couldn’t find ’im.

“Took me free days to get a word wiv ’im. I said, ‘Steve, it’s me. Janice. Your neighbor. The nurse!’”

She turned slowly redder than she’d been all interview. Her eyes watered with the intensity of her blush.

“He goes ‘Oh yeah. All right, Janice?’ And ’e walks away. And I seen ’im,” said Janice, and her jaw quivered, “kiss that girl, that Julie, and look back at me, like ’e wanted me to see…

“And I fort, no. After all what I’ve done for you, Steve? No.

“I did it on the last night but one of our ’oliday. Larry snoring ’is ’ead off as usual. ’E never noticed I wasn’t in bed.

“They all used to go to Steve’s chalet after work, I found that out, following ’em. She come out on ’er own. Pissed. Two in the morning.

“It wasn’t ’ard. There wasn’t anyone round. They didn’t ’ave cameras around like they do nowadays. I pushed ’er, and I jumped in after ’er, and I ’eld ’er under. It was the surprise what killed ’er. She took in a load of water on the way down. That was the only one I ever did wivvout drugs, but I was angry, see…

“Got out, toweled meself off. Mopped up all the footprints, but it was a warm night, you couldn’t see nuffing by morning.

“Next day, I seen ’im. I says, ‘Terrible fing, that girl, Steve. You look awful. Wanna get a drink?’

’E went white as a sheet, but I fort, well, you used me, Steve, and then you left me high and dry, didn’t you?”

A police siren sounded somewhere in the distance, and Strike, glancing at his watch, thought it was likely to be heading here, for Nightingale Grove.

“You took my sympafy and my kindness and you let me cook for you,” said Janice, still addressing an imaginary Steve Douthwaite. “I was even ready to kill my kid for you! And then you go off messing around wiv ovver women? No. Actions ’ave consequences,” said Janice, her cheeks still burning. “Men need to learn that, and take some responsibility. Women ’ave to,” she said, as the police siren grew ever louder. “Well, I’ll see ’im again in court, won’t I? You know, I’m quite looking forward to it, now I’m finking about it,” said Janice. “It’s not fun, living ’ere all on me own. It’ll be funny seeing Irene’s face. I’ll be all over the papers, won’t I? And maybe some men will read about why I done it, and realize they want to be careful ’oo they lead on. Useful lesson for men everywhere, if you ask me. Actions,” repeated Janice Beattie, as the police car drew to a halt outside her front door, and she squared her shoulders, ready to accept her fate, “’ave consequences.”