Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

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

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

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

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

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

  11

  It fortuned forth faring on his way,

  He saw from far, or seemed for to see

  Some troublous vprore or contentious fray

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

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

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

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

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

  “Bit of a fucker, this, Diddy.”

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

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

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

  “That you, Strike?”

  “Yeah. You just phoned me.”

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

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

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

  “In what way?”

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

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

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

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

  Hey bruv, it began, chummily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  12

/>   With flattering wordes he sweetly wooed her,

  And offered faire guiftes, t’allure her sight,

  But she both offers and the offerer

  Despysde, and all the fawning of the flatterer.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

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

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

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

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

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

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

  HE ALWAYS REMINDS ME OF YOU.

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

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

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

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

  “Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “In what way?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  As both women pulled on their coats, Pat asked,

  “Going anywhere nice tonight?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, very nice,” said Pat approvingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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