Feeling slightly more cheerful as she settled into a corner of the train, Robin took The Demon of Paradise Park from her bag and opened it to the page she had last reached.
The coincidence of the first line caused her an odd inward tremor.
Chapter 5
Little though he realized it, Dennis Creed was released from prison on his true 29th birthday, 19th November, 1966. His grandmother, Ena, had died while he was in Brixton and there was no question of him returning to live with his step-grandfather. He had no close friends to call on, and anyone who might have been well disposed to him prior to his second rape conviction was, unsurprisingly, in no rush to meet or help him. Creed spent his first night as a free man in a hostel near King’s Cross.
After a week sleeping in hostels or on park benches, Creed managed to find himself a single room in a boarding house. For the next four years, Creed would move between a series of rundown rooms and short-term, cash-in-hand jobs, interspersed with periods of rough living. He admitted to me later that he frequented prostitutes a good deal at this time, but in 1968 he killed his first victim.
Schoolgirl Geraldine Christie was walking home—
Robin skipped the next page and a half. She had no particular desire to read the particulars of the harm Creed had visited upon Geraldine Christie.
… until finally, in 1970, Creed secured himself a permanent home in the basement rooms of the boarding house run by Violet Cooper, a fifty-year-old ex-theater dresser who, like his grandmother, was an incipient alcoholic. This now demolished house would, in time, become infamous as Creed’s “torture chamber.” A tall, narrow building of grubby brick, it lay in Liverpool Road, close to Paradise Park.
Creed presented Cooper with forged references, which she didn’t bother to follow up, and claimed he’d recently been dismissed from a bar job, but that a friend had promised him employment in a nearby restaurant. Asked by defending counsel at his trial why she’d been happy to rent a room to an unemployed man of no fixed abode, Cooper replied that she was “tender-hearted” and that Creed seemed “a sweet boy, bit lost and lonely.”
Her decision to rent, first a room, then the entire basement, to Dennis Creed, would cost Violet Cooper dearly. In spite of her insistence during the trial that she had no idea what was happening in the basement of her boarding house, suspicion and opprobrium have been attached to the name Violet Cooper ever since. She has now adopted a new identity, which I agreed not to disclose.
“I thought he was a pansy,” Cooper says today. “I’d seen a bit of it in the theater. I felt sorry for him, that’s the truth.”
A plump woman whose face has been ravaged by both time and drink, she admits that she and Creed quickly struck up a close friendship. At times during our conversation she seemed to forget that young “Den” who spent many evenings with her upstairs in her private sitting room, both of them tipsy and singing along to her collection of records, was the serial killer who dwelled in her basement.
“I wrote to him, you know,” she says. “After he was convicted. I said, ‘If you ever felt anything for me, if any of it was real, tell me whether you did any of them other women. You’ve got nothing to lose now, Den,’ I says, ‘and you could put people’s minds at rest.’”
But the letter Creed wrote back admitted nothing.
“Sick, he is. I realized it, then. He’d just copied out the lyrics from an old Rosemary Clooney song we used to sing together, ‘Come On-A My House.’ You know the one…‘Come on-a my house, my house, I’m-a gonna give you candy…’ I knew then he hated me as much as he hated all them other women. Taunting me, he was.”
However, back in 1970, when Creed first moved into her basement, he’d been keen to ingratiate himself with his landlady, who admits he swiftly became a combination of son and confidant. Violet persuaded her friend Beryl Gould, who owned a dry-cleaner’s, to give young Den a job as a delivery man, and this gave him access to the small van that would soon become notorious in the press…
Twenty minutes after boarding the train, Robin got out at Leicester Square. As she emerged into daylight, her mobile phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw a text from Strike. Drawing aside from the crowd emerging from the station, she opened it.
News: I’ve found Dr. Dinesh Gupta, GP who worked with Margot at the Clerkenwell Practice in 1974. He’s 80-odd but sounds completely compos mentis and is happy to meet me this afternoon at his house in Amersham. Currently watching Twinkletoes having breakfast in Soho. I’ll get Barclay to take over from me at lunchtime and go straight to Gupta’s. Any chance you could put off your meeting with Weatherman and come along?
Robin’s heart sank. She’d already had to change the time of the weatherman’s catch-up meeting once and felt it unfair to do so a second time, especially at such short notice. However, she’d have liked to meet Dr. Dinesh Gupta.
I can’t mess him around again, she typed back. Let me know how it goes.
Right you are, replied Strike.
Robin watched her mobile screen for a few more seconds. Strike had forgotten her birthday last year, realizing his omission a week late and buying her flowers. Given that he’d seemed to feel guilty about the oversight, she’d imagined that he might make a note of the date and perhaps set an alert on his mobile this year. However, no “Happy birthday, by the way!” appeared, so she put her mobile back in her pocket and, unsmiling, walked on toward the office.
10
And if by lookes one may the mind aread,
He seemd to be a sage and sober syre…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
“You are thinking,” said the small, spectacled, elderly doctor, who was dwarfed by both his suit and his upright armchair, “that I look like Gandhi.”
Strike, who’d been thinking exactly that, was surprised into a laugh.
The eighty-one-year-old doctor appeared to have shrunk inside his suit; the collar and cuffs of his shirt gaped and his ankles were skinny in their black silk socks. Tufts of white hair appeared both in and over his ears, and he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. The strongest features in his genial brown face were the aquiline nose and dark eyes, which alone appeared to have escaped the aging process, and were as bright and knowing as a wren’s.
No speck of dust marred the highly polished coffee table between them, in what bore the appearance of a seldom-used, special occasion room. The deep gold of wallpaper, sofa and chairs glowed, pristine, in the autumn sunshine diffused by the net curtains. Four gilt-framed photographs hung in pairs on the wall on either side of the fringed drapes. Each picture showed a different dark-haired young woman, all wearing mortarboards and gowns, and holding degree certificates.
Mrs. Gupta, a tiny, slightly deaf, gray-haired woman, had already told Strike what degrees each of her daughters had taken—two medicine, one modern languages and one computing—and how well each was doing in her chosen career. She’d also shown him pictures of the six grandchildren she and her husband had been blessed with so far. Only the youngest girl remained childless, “but she will have them,” said Mrs. Gupta, with a Joan-ish certainty. “She’ll never be happy without.”
Having provided Strike and her husband with tea served in china cups, and a plate of fig rolls, Mrs. Gupta retreated to the kitchen, where Escape to the Country was playing with the sound turned up high.
“As it happens, my father met Gandhi as a young man when Gandhi visited London in 1931,” said Dr. Gupta, selecting a fig roll. “He, too, had studied law in London, you see, but a while after Gandhi. But ours was a wealthier family. Unlike Gandhi, my father could afford to bring his wife to England with him. My parents decided to remain in the UK after Daddy qualified as a barrister.
“So my immediate family missed partition. Very fortunate for us. My grandparents and two of my aunts were killed as they attempted to leave East Bengal. Massacred,” said Dr. Gupta, “and both my aunts were raped before being killed.”
“I’m sorry,” said Strike, who
, not having anticipated the turn the conversation had taken, had frozen in the act of opening his notebook and now sat feeling slightly foolish, his pen poised.
“My father,” said Dr. Gupta, nodding gently as he munched his fig roll, “carried the guilt with him to his grave. He thought he should have been there to protect them all, or to have died alongside them.
“Now, Margot didn’t like hearing the truth about partition,” said Dr. Gupta. “We all wanted independence, naturally, but the transition was handled very badly, very badly indeed. Nearly three million went missing. Rapes. Mutilation. Families torn asunder. Dreadful mistakes made. Appalling acts committed.
“Margot and I had an argument about it. A friendly argument, of course,” he added, smiling. “But Margot romanticized uprisings of people in distant lands. She didn’t judge brown rapists and torturers by the same standards she would have applied to white men who drowned children for being the wrong religion. She believed, I think, like Suhrawardy, that ‘bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.’”
Dr. Gupta swallowed his biscuit and added,
“It was Suhrawardy, of course, who incited the Great Calcutta Killings. Four thousand dead in a single day.”
Strike allowed a respectful pause to fill the room, broken only by the distant sound of Escape to the Country. When no further mention of bloodshed and terror was forthcoming, he took the opening that had been offered to him.
“Did you like Margot?”
“Oh yes,” said Dinesh Gupta, still smiling. “Although I found some of her beliefs and her attitudes shocking. I was born into a traditional, though Westernized, family. Before Margot and I went into practice together, I had never been in daily proximity to a self-proclaimed liberated lady. My friends at medical school, and the partners in my previous practice, had all been men.”
“A feminist, was she?”
“Oh, very much so,” said Gupta, smiling. “She would tease me about what she thought were my regressive attitudes. She was a great improver of people, Margot—whether they wished to be improved or not,” said Gupta, with a little laugh. “She volunteered at the WEA, too. The Workers’ Educational Association, you know? She’d come from a poor family, and she was a great proponent of adult education, especially for women.
“She would certainly have approved of my girls,” said Dinesh Gupta, turning in his armchair to point at the four graduation photographs behind him. “Jheel still laments that we had no son, but I have no complaints. No complaints,” he repeated, turning back to face Strike.
“I understand from the General Medical Council records,” said Strike, “that there was a third GP at the St. John’s practice, a Dr. Joseph Brenner. Is that right?”
“Dr. Brenner, yes, quite right,” said Gupta. “I doubt he’s still alive, poor fellow. He’d be over a hundred now. He’d worked alone in the area for many years before he came in with us at the new practice. He brought with him Dorothy Oakden, who’d done his typing for twenty-odd years. She became our practice secretary. An older lady—or so she seemed to me at the time,” said Gupta, with another small chuckle. “I don’t suppose she was more than fifty. Married late and widowed not long afterward. I have no idea what became of her.”
“Who else worked at the practice?”
“Well, let’s see… there was Janice Beattie, the district nurse, who was the best nurse I ever worked with. An Eastender by birth. Like Margot, she understood the privations of poverty from personal experience. Clerkenwell at that time was by no means as smart as it’s become since. I still receive Christmas cards from Janice.”
“I don’t suppose you have her address?” asked Strike.
“It’s possible,” said Dr. Gupta. “I’ll ask Jheel.”
He made to get up.
“Later, after we’ve talked, will be fine,” said Strike, afraid to break the chain of reminiscence. “Please, go on. Who else worked at St. John’s?”
“Let’s see, let’s see,” said Dr. Gupta again, sinking slowly back into his chair. “We had two receptionists, young women, but I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with both of them… now, what were their names…”
“Would that be Gloria Conti and Irene Bull?” asked Strike, who’d found both names in old press reports. A blurry photograph of both young women had shown a slight, dark girl and what he thought was probably a peroxide blonde, both of them looking distressed to be photographed as they entered the practice. The accompanying article in the Daily Express quoted “Irene Bull, receptionist, aged 25,” as saying “It’s terrible. We don’t know anything. We’re still hoping she’ll come back. Maybe she’s lost her memory or something.” Gloria was mentioned in every press report he’d read, because she’d been the last known person to see Margot alive. “She just said ‘Night, Gloria, see you tomorrow.’ She seemed normal, well, a bit tired, it was the end of the day and we’d had an emergency patient who’d kept her longer than she expected. She was a bit late to meet her friend. She put up her umbrella in the doorway and left.”
“Gloria and Irene,” said Dr. Gupta, nodding. “Yes, that’s right. They were both young, so they should still be with us, but I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea where they are now.”
“Is that everyone?” asked Strike.
“Yes, I think so. No, wait,” said Gupta, holding up a hand. “There was the cleaner. A West Indian lady. What was her name, now?”
He screwed up his face.
“I’m afraid I can’t remember.”
The existence of a practice cleaner was new information to Strike. His own office had always been cleaned by him or by Robin, although lately, Pat had pitched in. He wrote down “Cleaner, West Indian.”
“How old was she, can you remember?”
“I really couldn’t tell you,” said Gupta. He added delicately, “Black ladies—they are much harder to age, aren’t they? They look younger for longer. But I think she had several children, so not very young. Mid-thirties?” he suggested hopefully.
“So, three doctors, a secretary, two receptionists, a practice nurse and a cleaner?” Strike summarized.
“That’s right. We had,” said Dr. Gupta, “all the ingredients of a successful business—but it was an unhappy practice, I’m afraid. Unhappy from the start.”
“Really?” said Strike, interested. “Why was that?”
“Personal chemistry,” said Gupta promptly. “The older I’ve grown, the more I’ve realized that the team is everything. Qualifications and experience are important, but if the team doesn’t gel…” He interlocked his bony fingers, “… forget it! You’ll never achieve what you should. And so it was at St. John’s.
“Which was a pity, a very great pity, because we had potential. The practice was popular with ladies, who usually prefer consulting members of their own sex. Margot and Janice were both well liked.
“But there were internal divisions from the beginning. Dr. Brenner joined us for the conveniences of a newer practice building, but he never acted as though he was part of the team. In fact, over time he became openly hostile to some of us.”
“Specifically, who was he hostile to?” asked Strike, guessing the answer.
“I’m afraid,” said Dr. Gupta, sadly, “he didn’t like Margot. To be quite frank, I don’t think Joseph Brenner liked ladies. He was rude to the girls on reception, as well. Of course, they were easier to bully than Margot. I think he respected Janice—she was very efficient, you know, and less combative than Margot—and he was always polite to Dorothy, who was fiercely loyal to him. But he took against Margot from the start.”
“Why was that, do you think?”
“Oh,” said Dr. Gupta, raising his hands and letting them fall in a gesture of hopelessness, “the truth is that Margot—now, I liked her, you understand, our discussions were always good-humored—but she was a Marmite sort of person. Dr. Brenner was no feminist. He thought a woman’s place was at home with her children, and Margot leaving a baby at h
ome and coming back out to work full time, he disapproved of that. Team meetings were very uncomfortable. He’d wait for Margot to start talking and then talk over her, very loudly.
“He was something of a bully, Brenner. He thought our receptionists were no better than they should be. Complained about their skirt lengths, their hairstyles.
“But actually, although he was especially rude to ladies, it’s my opinion that he didn’t really like people.”
“Odd,” said Strike. “For a doctor.”
“Oh,” said Gupta, with a chuckle, “that’s by no means as unusual as you might think, Mr. Strike. We doctors are like everybody else. It is a popular myth that all of us must love humanity in the round. The irony is that our biggest liability as a practice was Brenner himself. He was an addict!”
“Really?”
“Barbiturates,” said Gupta. “Barbiturates, yes. A doctor couldn’t get away with it these days, but he over-ordered them in massive quantities. Kept them in a locked cupboard in his consulting room. He was a very difficult man. Emotionally shut down. Unmarried. And this secret addiction.”
“Did you talk to him about it?” asked Strike.
“No,” said Gupta sadly. “I put off doing so. I wanted to be sure of my ground before I broached the subject. From quiet inquiries I made, I suspected that he was still using his old practice address in addition to ours, doubling his order and using multiple pharmacies. It was going to be tricky to prove what he was up to.
“I might never have realized if Janice hadn’t come to me and said she’d happened to walk in on him when his cupboard was open, and seen the quantities he’d amassed. She then admitted that she’d found him slumped at his desk in a groggy state one evening after the last patient had left. I don’t think it ever affected his judgment, though. Not really. I’d noticed that at the end of the day he might have been a little glazed, and so on, but he was nearing retirement. I assumed he was tired.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 10