Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  Exactly why Morris grated on her so much, Robin was still pondering as she moved slowly around Selfridges’ great perfume hall half an hour later. She’d decided to buy herself some new perfume, because she’d been wearing the same scent for five years. Matthew had liked it, and never wanted her to change, but her last bottle was down to the dregs, and she had a sudden urge to douse herself in something that Matthew wouldn’t recognize, and possibly wouldn’t even like. The cheap little bottle of 4711 cologne she’d bought on the way to Falmouth was nowhere near distinctive enough for a new signature scent, and so she wandered through a vast maze of smoked mirrors and gilded lights, between islands of seductive bottles and illuminated pictures of celebrities, each little domain presided over by black-clad sirens offering squirts and testing strips.

  Was it pompous of her, she wondered, to think that Morris the subcontractor ought not to assume the right to kiss an agency partner? Would she mind if the generally reserved Hutchins kissed her on the cheek? No, she decided, she wouldn’t mind at all, because she’d now known Andy over a year, and in any case, Hutchins would do the polite thing and make the greeting a matter of brief proximity of two faces, not a pressing of lips into her face.

  And what about Barclay? He’d never kissed her, though he had recently called her “ya numpty” when, on surveillance, she had accidentally spilled hot coffee all over him in her excitement at seeing their target, a civil servant, leaving a known brothel at two o’clock in the morning. But she hadn’t minded Barclay calling her a numpty in the slightest. She’d been a numpty.

  Turning a corner, Robin found herself facing the Yves Saint Laurent counter, and with a sudden sharpening of interest, her eyes focused on a blue, black and silver cylinder bearing the name Rive Gauche. Robin had never knowingly smelled Margot Bamborough’s favorite perfume before.

  “It’s a classic,” said the bored-looking salesgirl, watching Robin spraying Rive Gauche onto a fresh testing strip and inhaling.

  Robin tended to rate perfumes according to how well they reproduced a familiar flower or foodstuff, but this wasn’t a smell from nature. There was a ghostly rose there, but also something strangely metallic. Robin, who was used to fragrances made friendly with fruit and candy, set down the strip with a smile and a shake of her head and walked on.

  So that was how Margot Bamborough had smelled, she thought. It was a far more sophisticated scent than the one Matthew had loved on Robin, which was a natural-smelling concoction of figs, fresh, milky and green.

  Robin turned a corner and saw, standing on a counter directly ahead of her, a faceted glass bottle full of pink liquid: Flowerbomb, Sarah Shadlock’s signature scent. Robin had seen it in Sarah and Tom’s bathroom whenever she and Matthew had gone over for dinner. Since leaving Matthew, Robin had had ample time to realize that the occasions on which he had changed the sheets mid-week, because he’d “spilled tea” or “thought I’d do it today, save you doing it tomorrow” must have been as much to wash away that loud, sweet scent, as any other, more obviously incriminating traces that might have leaked from careful condoms.

  “It’s a modern classic,” said the hopeful salesgirl, who’d noticed Robin looking at the glass hand grenade. With a perfunctory smile, Robin shook her head and turned away. Now her reflection in the smoked glass looked simply sad, as she picked up bottles and smelled strips in a joyless hunt for something to improve this lousy birthday. She suddenly wished that she were heading home, and not out for drinks.

  “What are you looking for?” said a sharp-cheekboned black girl, whom Robin passed shortly afterward.

  Five minutes later, after a brief, professional interchange, Robin was heading back toward Oxford Street with a rectangular black bottle in her bag. The salesgirl had been highly persuasive.

  “… and if you want something totally different,” she’d said, picking up a fifth bottle, spraying a little onto a strip and wafting it around, “try Fracas.”

  She’d handed the strip to Robin, whose nostrils were now burning from the rich and varied assault of the past half hour.

  “Sexy but grown-up, you know? It’s a real classic.”

  And in that moment, Robin, breathing in heady, luscious, oily tuberose, had been seduced by the idea of becoming, in her thirtieth year, a sophisticated woman utterly different from the kind of fool who was too stupid to realize that what her husband told her he loved, and what he liked taking into his bed, bore about as much resemblance as a fig to a hand grenade.

  13

  Thence forward by that painfull way they pas,

  Forth to an hill, that was both steepe and hy;

  On top whereof a sacred chappell was,

  And eke a little hermitage thereby.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  In retrospect, Strike regretted the first gift he’d ever given Robin Ellacott. He’d bought the expensive green dress in a fit of quixotic extravagance, feeling safe in giving her something so personal only because she was engaged to another man and he was never going to see her again, or so he’d thought. She’d modeled it for Strike in the course of persuading a saleswoman into indiscretions, and that girl’s evidence, which Robin had so skillfully extracted, had helped solve the case that had made Strike’s name and saved his agency from bankruptcy. Buoyed by a tide of euphoria and gratitude, he’d returned to the shop and made the purchase as a grand farewell gesture. Nothing else had seemed to encapsulate what he wanted to tell her, which was “look what we achieved together,” “I couldn’t have done it without you” and (if he was being totally honest with himself) “you look gorgeous in this, and I’d like you to know I thought so when I saw you in it.”

  But things hadn’t panned out quite as Strike had expected, because within an hour of giving her the green dress he’d hired her as a full-time assistant. Doubtless the dress accounted for at least some of the profound mistrust Matthew, her fiancé, had henceforth felt toward the detective. Worse still, from Strike’s point of view, it had set the bar uncomfortably high for future gifts. Whether consciously or not, he’d lowered expectations considerably since, either by forgetting to buy Robin birthday and Christmas gifts, or by making them as generic as was possible.

  He purchased stargazer lilies at the first florist he could find when he got off the train from Amersham, and bore them into the office for Robin to find next day. He’d chosen them for their size and powerful fragrance. He felt he ought to spend more money than he had on the previous year’s belated bunch, and these looked impressive, as though he hadn’t skimped. Roses carried an unwelcome connotation of Valentine’s Day, and nearly everything else in the florist’s stock—admittedly depleted at half past five in the afternoon—looked a little bedraggled or underwhelming. The lilies were large and yet reas­suringly impersonal, sculptural in quality and heavy with fragrance, and there was safety in their very boldness. They came from a clinical hothouse; there was no romantic whisper of quiet woods or secret garden about them: they were flowers of which he could say robustly “nice smell,” with no further justification for his choice.

  Strike wasn’t to know that Robin’s primary association with stargazer lilies, now and for evermore, would be with Sarah Shadlock, who’d once brought an almost identical bouquet to Robin and Matthew’s housewarming party. When she walked into the office the day after her birthday and saw the flowers standing there on the partners’ desk, stuck in a vase full of water but still in their cellophane, with a large magenta bow on them and a small card that read “Happy birthday from Cormoran” (no kiss, he never put kisses), she was affected exactly the same way she’d been by the hand-grenade-shaped bottle in Selfridges. She didn’t want these flowers; they were a double irritant in reminding her of Strike’s forgetfulness and Matthew’s infidelity, and if she had to look at or smell them, she resolved, it wouldn’t be in her own home.

  So she’d left the lilies at the office, where they stubbornly refused to die, Pat conscientiously refilling their water every mornin
g and taking such good care of them that they lived for nearly two weeks. Even Strike was sick of them by the end: he kept getting wafts of something that reminded him of his ex-girlfriend Lorelei’s perfume, an unpleasant association.

  By the time the waxy pink and white petals began to shrivel and fall, the thirty-ninth anniversary of Margot Bamborough’s disappearance had passed unmarked and probably unnoticed by anyone except, perhaps, her family, Strike and Robin, who both registered the fateful date. Copies of the police records had been brought to the office as promised by George Layborn, and now lay in four cardboard boxes under the partners’ desk, which was the only place the agency had room for them. Strike, who was currently the least encumbered by the agency’s other cases, because he was holding himself in readiness to go back down to Cornwall should the need arise, set himself to work systematically through these files. Once he’d digested their contents, he intended to visit Clerkenwell with Robin, and retrace the route between the old St. John’s practice where Margot had last been seen alive, and the pub where her friend had waited for her in vain.

  So, on the last day of October, Robin left the office at one o’clock and hurried, beneath a threatening sky and with her umbrella ready in her hand, onto the Tube. She was quietly excited by the prospect of this afternoon, the first she and Strike would spend working the Bamborough case together.

  It was already drizzling slightly when Robin caught sight of Strike, standing smoking as he surveyed the frontage of a building halfway down St. John’s Lane. He turned at the sound of her heels on the wet pavement.

  “Am I late?” she called, as she approached.

  “No,” said Strike, “I was early.”

  She joined him, still holding her umbrella, and looked up at the tall, multi-story building of brown brick, with large, metal-framed windows. It appeared to house offices, but there was no indication of what kind of businesses were operating inside.

  “It was right here,” said Strike, pointing at the door numbered 29. “The old St. John’s Medical Practice. They’ve remodeled the front of the building, obviously. There used to be a back entrance,” he said. “We’ll go round and have a shufti in a minute.”

  Robin turned to look up and down St. John’s Lane, which was a long, narrow one-way street, bordered on either side by tall, multi-windowed buildings.

  “Very overlooked,” commented Robin.

  “Yep,” said Strike. “So, let’s begin with what Margot was wearing when she disappeared.”

  “I already know,” said Robin. “Brown corduroy skirt, red shirt, knitted tank top, beige Burberry raincoat, silver necklace and earrings, gold wedding ring. Carrying a leather shoulder bag and a black umbrella.”

  “You should take up detection,” said Strike, mildly impressed. “Ready for the police records?”

  “Go on.”

  “At a quarter to six on the eleventh of October 1974 only three people are known to have been inside this building: Margot, who was dressed exactly as you describe, but hadn’t yet put on her raincoat; Gloria Conti, who was the younger of the two receptionists; and an emergency patient with abdominal pain, who’d walked in off the street. The patient, according to the hasty note Gloria took, was called ‘Theo question mark.’ In spite of the male name, and Dr. Joseph Brenner’s assertion that he thought the patient looked like a man, and Talbot trying hard to persuade her that Theo was a man dressed as a woman, Gloria never wavered in her assertion that ‘Theo’ was a woman.

  “All the other employees had left before a quarter to six, except Wilma the cleaner, who hadn’t been there at all that day, because she didn’t work Fridays. More of Wilma later.

  “Janice, the nurse, was here until midday, then making house visits the rest of the afternoon and didn’t return. Irene, the receptionist, left at half past two for a dental appointment and didn’t come back. According to their statements, each of which were corroborated by some other witness, the secretary, Dorothy, left at ten past five, Dr. Gupta at half past and Dr. Brenner at a quarter to six. Police were happy with the alibis all three gave for the rest of the evening: Dorothy went home to her son and spent the evening watching TV with him. Dr. Gupta attended a large family dinner to celebrate his mother’s birthday and Dr. Brenner was with the spinster sister he shared his house with. Both Brenners were seen through the sitting-room window later that evening, by a dog walker.

  “The last registered patients, a mother and child, were Margot’s, and they left the practice shortly before Brenner did. The patients testified that Margot was fine when they saw her.

  “From that point on, Gloria is the only witness. According to Gloria, Theo went into Margot’s consulting room and stayed there longer than expected. At a quarter past six, Theo left, never to be seen at the practice again. A police appeal was subsequently put out for her, but nobody came forward.

  “Margot left no notes about Theo. The assumption is that she intended to write up the consultation the following day, because her friend had now been waiting for her in the pub for a quarter of an hour and she didn’t want to make herself even later.

  “Shortly after Theo left, Margot came hurrying out of her consulting room, put on her raincoat, told Gloria to lock up with the emergency key, walked out into the rain, put up her umbrella, turned right and disappeared from Gloria’s sight.”

  Strike turned and pointed up the road toward a yellow stone arch of ancient appearance, which lay directly ahead of them.

  “Which means she was heading in that direction, toward the Three Kings.”

  For a moment, both of them looked toward the old arch that spanned the road, as though some shadow of Margot might materialize. Then Strike ground out his cigarette underfoot and said,

  “Follow me.”

  He walked the length of number 28, then paused to point up a dark passageway the width of a door, called Passing Alley.

  “Good hiding place,” said Robin, pausing to look up and down the dark, vaulted corridor through the buildings.

  “Certainly is,” said Strike. “If somebody wanted to lie in wait for her, this is tailor made. Catch her by surprise, drag her up here—but after that, it’d get problematic.”

  They walked along the short passage and emerged into a sunken garden area of concrete and shrubs that lay between two parallel streets.

  “The police searched this whole garden area with sniffer dogs. Nothing. And if an assailant dragged her onwards, through there,” Strike pointed to the road that ran parallel to St. John’s Lane, “onto St. John Street, it would’ve been well-nigh impossible to go undetected. The street’s far busier than St. John’s Lane. And that’s assuming a fit, tall twenty-nine-year-old wouldn’t have shouted and fought back.”

  He turned to look at the back entrance.

  “The district nurse sometimes went in the back, rather than going through the waiting room. She had a little room to the rear of the building where she kept her own stuff and sometimes saw patients. Wilma the cleaner sometimes went out the back door as well. Otherwise it was usually locked.”

  “Are we interested in people being able to enter or leave the building through a second door?” asked Robin.

  “Not especially, but I want to get a feel for the layout. It’s been nearly forty years: we’ve got to go back over everything.”

  They walked back through Passing Alley to the front of the building.

  “We’ve got one advantage over Bill Talbot,” said Strike. “We know the Essex Butcher turned out to be slim and blond, not a swarthy thickset person of gypsy-ish appearance. Theo, whoever she was, wasn’t Creed. Which doesn’t necessarily make her irrelevant, of course.

  “One last thing, then we’re done with the practice itself,” said Strike, looking up at number 29. “Irene, the blonde receptionist, told the police that Margot received two threatening, anonymous notes shortly before she disappeared. They’re not in the police file, so we’ve only got Irene’s statement to go on. She claims she opened one, and that she saw another on Mar
got’s desk when bringing her tea. She says the one she read mentioned hellfire.”

  “You’d think it was the secretary’s job to open mail,” commented Robin. “Not a receptionist’s.”

  “Good point,” said Strike, pulling out his notebook and scribbling, “we’ll check that… It seems relevant to add here that Talbot thought Irene was an unreliable witness: inaccurate and prone to exaggeration. Incidentally, Gupta said Irene and Margot had what he called a ‘contretemps’ at a Christmas party. He didn’t think it was a particularly big deal, but he’d remembered it.”

  “And is Talbot—?”

  “Dead? Yes,” said Strike. “So’s Lawson, who took over from him. Talbot’s got a son, though, and I’m thinking of getting in touch with him. Lawson never had kids.”

  “Go on, about the anonymous notes.”

  “Well, Gloria, the other receptionist, said Irene showed her one of the notes, but couldn’t remember what was in it. Janice, the nurse, confirmed that Irene had told her about them at the time, but said she hadn’t personally seen them. Margot didn’t tell Gupta about them—I called him to check.

  “Anyway,” said Strike, giving the street one last sweeping look through the drizzle, “assuming nobody abducted Margot right outside the practice, or that she didn’t get in a car yards from the door, she headed toward the Three Kings, which takes us this way.”

  “D’you want to come under this umbrella?” Robin asked.

  “No,” said Strike. His densely curling hair looked the same wet or dry: he had very little vanity.

  They continued up the street and passed through St. John’s Gate, the ancient stone arch decorated with many small heraldic shields, emerging onto Clerkenwell Road, a bustling two-way street, which they crossed, arriving beside an old-fashioned scarlet phone box which stood at the mouth of Albemarle Way.

  “Is that the phone box where the two women were seen struggling?” asked Robin.

  Strike did a double take.

  “You’ve read the case notes,” he said, almost accusingly.