“I had a quick look,” Robin admitted, “while I was printing out Two-Times’ bill last night. I didn’t read everything; didn’t have time. Just looked at a few bits and pieces.”
“Well, that isn’t the phone box,” said Strike. “The important phone box—or boxes—come later. We’ll get to them in due course. Now follow me.”
Instead of proceeding into a paved pedestrian area that Robin, from her own scant research, knew Margot must have crossed if she had been heading for the Three Kings, Strike turned left, up Clerkenwell Road.
“Why are we going this way?” asked Robin, jogging to keep up.
“Because,” said Strike, stopping again and pointing up at a top window on the building opposite, which looked like an old brick warehouse, “some time after six o’clock on the evening in question, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl called Amanda White swore she saw Margot at the top window, second from the right, banging her fists against the glass.”
“I haven’t seen that mentioned online!” said Robin.
“For the good reason that the police concluded there was nothing in it.
“Talbot, as is clear from his notes, disregarded White because her story couldn’t be fitted into his theory that Creed had abducted Margot. But Lawson went back to Amanda when he took over, and actually walked with her along this stretch of road.
“Amanda’s account had a few things going for it. For one thing, she told the police unprompted that this had happened the evening after the general election, which she remembered because she had an argument with a Tory schoolfriend. The pair of them had been kept back after school for a detention. They’d then gone for a coffee together, over which the schoolfriend went into a huff when Mandy said it was good that Wilson had won, and refused to walk home with her.
“Amanda said she was still angry about her friend getting stroppy when she looked up and saw a woman pounding on the glass with her fists. The description she gave was a good one, although by this time, a full description of Margot’s appearance and clothing had been in the press.
“Lawson contacted the business owner who worked on the top floor. It was a paper design company run by a husband and wife. They produced small runs of pamphlets, posters and invitations, that kind of stuff. No connection to Margot. Neither of them were registered with the St. John’s practice, because they lived out of the area. The wife said she sometimes had to thump the window frame to make it close. However, the wife in no way resembled Margot, being short, tubby and ginger-haired.”
“And someone would’ve noticed Margot on her way up to the third floor, surely?” said Robin, looking from the top window to the front door. She moved back from the curb: cars were splashing through the puddles in the gutter. “She’d have climbed the stairs or used the lift, and maybe rung the doorbell to get in.”
“You’d think so,” agreed Strike. “Lawson concluded that Amanda had made an innocent mistake and thought the printer’s wife was Margot.”
They returned to the point where they had deviated from what Robin thought of as “Margot’s route.” Strike paused again, pointing up the gloomy side road called Albemarle Way.
“Now, disregard the phone box, but note that Albemarle Way is the first side street since Passing Alley I think she could plausibly have entered—voluntarily or not—without necessarily being seen by fifty-odd people. Quieter, as you can see—but not that quiet,” admitted Strike, looking toward the end of Albemarle Way, where traffic was passing at a steady rate. Albemarle Way was narrower than St. John’s Lane, but similar in being bordered by tall buildings in unbroken lines, which kept it permanently in shadow. “Still a risk for an abductor,” said Strike, “but if Dennis Creed was lurking somewhere in his van, waiting for a lone woman—any woman—to walk past in the rain, this is the place I can see it happening.”
It was at this moment, as a cold breeze whistled up Albemarle Way, that Strike caught a whiff of what he had thought were the dying stargazer lilies, but now realized was coming from Robin herself. The perfume wasn’t exactly the same as the one that Lorelei had worn; his ex’s had been strangely boozy, with overtones of rum (and he’d liked it when the scent had been an accompaniment to easy affection and imaginative sex; only later had he come to associate it with passive-aggression, character assassination and pleas for a love he could not feel). Nevertheless, this scent strongly resembled Lorelei’s; he found it cloying and sickly.
Of course, many would say it was rich for him to have opinions about how women smelled, given that his signature odor was that of an old ashtray, overlain with a splash of Pour Un Homme on special occasions. Nevertheless, having spent much of his childhood in conditions of squalor, Strike found cleanliness a necessary trait in anyone he could find attractive. He’d liked Robin’s previous scent, which he’d missed when she wasn’t in the office.
“This way,” he said, and they proceeded through the rain into an irregular pedestrianized square. A few seconds later, Strike suddenly became aware that he’d left Robin behind, and walked back several paces to join her in front of St. John Priory Church, a pleasingly symmetrical building of red brick, with long windows and two white stone pillars flanking the entrance.
“Thinking about her lying in a holy place?” he asked, lighting up again while the rain beat down on him. Exhaling, he held the cigarette cupped in his hand, to prevent its extinguishment.
“No,” said Robin, a little defensively, but then, “yes, all right, maybe a bit. Look at this…”
Strike followed her through the open gates into a small garden of remembrance, open to the public and full (as Robin read off a small sign on the inner wall) of medicinal herbs, including many used in medieval times, in the Order of St. John’s hospitals. A white figure of Christ hung on the back wall, surrounded with the emblems of the four evangelists: the bull, the lion, the eagle and the angel. Fronds and leaves undulated gently beneath the rain. As Robin’s eyes swept the small, walled garden, Strike, who’d followed her, said,
“I think we can agree that if somebody buried her in here, a cleric would have noticed disturbed earth.”
“I know,” said Robin. “I’m just looking.”
As they returned to the street, she added,
“There are Maltese crosses everywhere, look. They were on that archway we just passed through, too.”
“It’s the cross of the Knights Hospitaller. Knights of St. John. Hence the street names and the emblem of St. John ambulance; they’ve got their headquarters back in St. John’s Lane. If that medium Googled the area Margot went missing, she can’t have missed Clerkenwell’s associations with the Order of St. John. I’ll bet you that’s where she got the idea for that little bit of ‘holy place’ padding. But bear it in mind, because the cross is going to come up again once we reach the pub.”
“You know,” said Robin, turning to look back at the Priory, “Peter Tobin, that Scottish serial killer—he attached himself to churches. He joined a religious sect at one point, under an assumed name. Then he got a job as a handyman at a church in Glasgow, where he buried that poor girl beneath the floorboards.”
“Churches are good cover for killers,” said Strike. “Sex offenders, too.”
“Priests and doctors,” said Robin thoughtfully. “It’s hardwired in most of us to trust them, don’t you think?”
“After the Catholic Church’s many scandals? After Harold Shipman?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Robin. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”
“Think you’re onto something there,” said Strike, as they entered a short pedestrian lane called Jerusalem Passage. “I told Gupta it was odd that Joseph Brenner didn’t like people. I thought that might be a basic job requirement for a doctor. He soon put me right.
“Let’s stop here a moment,” Strike said, doing so. “If Margot got this far—I’m assuming she’d’ve taken t
his route, because it’s the shortest and most logical way to the Three Kings—this is the first time she’d have passed residences rather than offices or public buildings.”
Robin looked at the buildings around them. Sure enough, there were a couple of doors whose multiple buzzers indicated flats above.
“Is there a chance,” said Strike, “however remote, that someone living along this lane could have persuaded or forced her inside?”
Robin looked up and down the street, the rain pattering onto her umbrella.
“Well,” she said slowly, “obviously it could have happened, but it seems unlikely. Did someone wake up that day and decide they wanted to abduct a woman, reach outside and grab one?”
“Have I taught you nothing?”
“OK, fine: means before motive. But there are problems with the means, too. This is really overlooked as well. Does nobody see or hear her being abducted? Doesn’t she scream or fight? And I assume the abductor lives alone, unless their housemates are also in on the kidnapping?”
“All valid points,” admitted Strike. “Plus, the police went door to door here. Everyone was questioned, though the flats weren’t searched.
“But let’s think this through… She’s a doctor. What if someone shoots out of a house and begs her to come inside to look at an injured person—a sick relative—and once inside, they don’t let her go? That’d be a good ploy for getting her inside, pretending there was a medical emergency.”
“OK, but that presupposes they knew she was a doctor.”
“The abductor could’ve been a patient.”
“But how did they know she’d be passing their house at that particular time? Had she alerted the whole neighborhood that she was about to go to the pub?”
“Maybe it was a random thing, they saw her passing, they knew she was a doctor, they ran out and grabbed her. Or—I dunno, let’s say there really was a sick or dying person inside, or someone’s had an accident—perhaps there’s an argument—she disagrees with the treatment or refuses to help—the fight becomes physical—she’s accidentally killed.”
There was a short silence, while they moved aside for a group of chattering French students. When these had passed, Strike said,
“It’s a stretch, I grant you.”
“We can find out how many of these buildings are occupied by the same people they were thirty-nine years ago,” said Robin, “but we’ve still got the problem of how they’ve kept her body hidden for nearly four decades. You wouldn’t dare move, would you?”
“That’s a problem, all right,” admitted Strike. “As Gupta said, it’s not like disposing of a table of equivalent weight. Blood, decomposition, infestation… plenty have tried keeping bodies on the premises. Crippen. Christie. Fred and Rose West. It’s generally considered a mistake.”
“Creed managed it for a while,” said Robin. “Boiling down severed hands in the basement. Burying heads apart from bodies. It wasn’t the corpses that got him caught.”
“Are you reading The Demon of Paradise Park?” asked Strike sharply.
“Yes,” said Robin.
“D’you want that stuff in your head?”
“If it helps us with the case,” said Robin.
“Hmm. Just thinking of my health and safety responsibilities.”
Robin said nothing. Strike gave the houses a last, sweeping look, then invited Robin to walk on, saying,
“You’re right, I can’t see it. Freezers get opened, gas men visit and notice a smell, neighbors notice blocked drains. But in the interests of thoroughness, we should check who was living here at the time.”
They now emerged onto the busiest road they had yet seen. Aylesbury Street was a wide road, lined with more office blocks and flats.
“So,” said Strike, pausing again on the pavement, “if Margot’s still walking to the pub, she would’ve crossed here and turned left, into Clerkenwell Green. But we’re pausing to note that it was there,” Strike pointed some fifty yards to the right, “that a small white van nearly knocked down two women as it sped away from Clerkenwell Green that evening. The incident was witnessed by four or five onlookers. Nobody got the registration number—”
“But Creed was putting fake license plates on the delivery van he was using,” said Robin, “so that might not help anyway.”
“Correct. The van seen by witnesses on the eleventh of October 1974 had a design on the side. The onlookers didn’t all agree what it was, but two of them thought a large flower.”
“And we also know,” said Robin, “that Creed was using removable paint on the van to disguise its appearance.”
“Correct again. So, on the surface, this looks like our first proper hint that Creed might’ve been in the area. Talbot, of course, wanted to believe that, so he was uninterested in the opinion of one of the witnesses that the van actually belonged to a local florist. However, a junior officer, presumably one of those who’d realized that his lead investigator was going quietly off his onion, went and questioned the florist, a man called Albert Shimmings, who absolutely denied driving a speeding van in this area that night. He claimed he’d been giving his young son a lift in it, miles away.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t Shimmings,” said Robin. “He might have been worried about being done for dangerous driving. No CCTV cameras… nothing to prove it one way or the other.”
“My thoughts exactly. If Shimmings is still alive, I think we should check his story. He might’ve decided it’s worth telling the truth now a speeding charge can’t stick. In the meantime,” said Strike, “the matter of the van remains unresolved and we have to admit that one possible explanation is that Creed was driving it.”
“But where did he abduct Margot, if it was Creed in the van?” asked Robin. “It can’t’ve been back in Albemarle Way, because this isn’t how he’d have left the area.”
“True. If he’d grabbed her in Albemarle Way, he’d’ve joined Aylesbury Street much further down and he definitely wouldn’t have come via Clerkenwell Green—which leads us neatly to the Two Struggling Women by the Phoneboxes.”
They proceeded through the drizzle into Clerkenwell Green, a wide rectangular square which boasted trees, a pub and a café. Two telephone boxes stood in the middle, near parked cars and a bike stand.
“Here,” said Strike, coming to a halt between the phone boxes, “is where Talbot’s craziness really starts messing with the case. A woman called Ruby Elliot, who was unfamiliar with the area, but trying to find her daughter and son-in-law’s new house in Hayward’s Place, was driving around in circles in the rain, lost.
“She passed these phone boxes and noticed two women struggling together, one of whom seemed, in her word, ‘tottery.’ She has no particularly distinct memory of them—remember, it’s pouring with rain and she’s anxiously trying to spot street signs and house numbers, because she’s lost. All she can tell the police is that one of them was wearing a headscarf and the other a raincoat.
“The day after this detail appeared in the paper, a middle-aged woman of sound character came forward to say that the pair of women Ruby Elliot had seen had almost certainly been her and her aged mother. She told Talbot she’d been walking the old dear across Clerkenwell Green that night, taking her home after a little walk. The mother, who was infirm and senile, was wearing a rainhat, and she herself was wearing a raincoat similar to Margot’s. They didn’t have umbrellas, so she was trying to hurry her mother along. The old lady didn’t take kindly to being rushed and there was a slight altercation here, right by the phone boxes. I’ve got a picture of the two of them, incidentally: the press got hold of it—‘sighting debunked.’
“But Talbot wasn’t having it. He flat-out refused to accept that the two women hadn’t been Margot and a man dressed like a woman. The way he sees it: Margot and Creed meet here by the phone boxes, Creed wrestles her into his van, which presumably was parked there—” Strike pointed to the short line of parked cars nearby, “then Creed takes off at speed, with he
r screaming and banging on the sides of the van, exiting down Aylesbury Street.”
“But,” said Robin, “Talbot thought Theo was Creed. Why would Creed come to Margot’s surgery dressed as a woman, then walk out, leaving her unharmed, walk to Clerkenwell Green and grab her here, in the middle of the most public, overlooked place we’ve seen?”
“There’s no point trying to make sense of it, because there isn’t any. When Lawson took over the case, he went back to Fiona Fleury, which was the respectable middle-aged woman’s name, questioned her again and came away completely satisfied that she and her mother had been the women Ruby Elliot saw. Again, the general election was useful, because Fiona Fleury remembered being tired and not particularly patient with her difficult mother, because she’d sat up late the night before, watching election coverage. Lawson concluded—and I’m inclined to agree with him—that the matter of the two struggling women had been resolved.”
The drizzle had thickened: raindrops were pounding on Robin’s umbrella and rendering the hems of her trousers sodden. They now turned up Clerkenwell Close, a curving street that rose toward a large and impressive church with a high, pointed steeple, set on higher ground.
“Margot can’t have got this far,” said Robin.
“You say that,” said Strike, and to her surprise he paused again, looking ahead at the church, “but we now reach one last alleged sighting.
“A church handyman—yeah, I know,” he added, in response to Robin’s startled look, “called Willy Lomax claims he saw a woman in a Burberry raincoat walking up the steps to St. James-on-the-Green that evening, around the time Margot should’ve been arriving at the pub. He saw her from behind. These were the days, of course, when churches weren’t locked up all the time.
“Talbot, of course, disregarded Lomax’s evidence, because if Margot was alive and walking into churches, she couldn’t have been speeding away in the Essex Butcher’s van. Lawson couldn’t make much of Lomax’s evidence. The bloke stuck fast to his story: he’d seen a woman matching Margot’s description go inside but, being a man of limited curiosity, didn’t follow her, didn’t ask her what she was up to and didn’t watch to see whether she ever came out of the church again.
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