“Which brings us to the third, and, I’d have to say, most promising suspect—always excepting Dennis Creed. This,” said Strike, moving Satchwell’s statement from the top of a now greatly diminished pile of paper, “is Steve Douthwaite.”
If Roy Phipps would have been a lazy casting director’s idea of a sensitive poet, and Paul Satchwell the very image of a seventies rock star, Steve Douthwaite would have been hired without hesitation to play the cheeky chap, the wisecracking upstart, the working-class Jack the Lad. He had dark, beady eyes, an infectious grin and a spiky mullet that reminded Robin of the young men featured on an old Bay City Rollers LP which Robin’s mother, to her children’s hilarity, still cherished. Douthwaite was holding a pint in one hand, and his other arm was slung around the shoulder of a man whose face had been cropped from the picture, but whose suit, like Douthwaite’s, looked cheap, creased and shiny. Douthwaite had loosened his kipper tie and undone his top shirt button to reveal a neck chain.
“Ladykiller” Salesman Sought Over Missing Doctor
Police are anxious to trace the whereabouts of double-glazing salesman Steve Douthwaite, who has vanished following routine questioning over the disappearance of Dr. Margot Bamborough, 29.
Douthwaite, 28, left no forwarding address after quitting his job and his flat in Percival Street, Clerkenwell.
A former patient of the missing doctor’s, Douthwaite raised suspicion at the medical practice because of his frequent visits to see the pretty blonde doctor. Friends of the salesman describe him as “smooth talking” and do not believe Douthwaite suffered any serious health issues. Douthwaite is believed to have sent Dr. Bamborough gifts.
Douthwaite, who was raised in foster care, has had no contact with friends since February 7th. Police are believed to have searched Douthwaite’s home since he vacated it.
Tragic Affair
“He caused a lot of trouble round here, a lot of bad feeling,” said a co-worker at Diamond Double Glazing, who asked not to be named. “Real Jack the Lad. He had an affair with another guy’s wife. She ended up taking an overdose, left her kids without a mum. Nobody was sorry when Douthwaite took off, to be honest. We were happy to see the back of him. Too interested in booze and girls and not much cop at the job.”
Doctor Would Be “A Challenge”
Asked what he thought Douthwaite’s relationship with the missing doctor had been, his co-worker said,
“Chasing girls is all Steve cares about. He’d think a doctor was a challenge, knowing him.”
Police are eager to speak to Douthwaite again and appeal to any members of the public who might know his whereabouts.
When Robin had finished reading, Strike, who’d just finished his first pint, said,
“Want another drink?”
“I’ll get these,” said Robin.
She went to the bar, where she waited beneath the hanging skulls and fake cobwebs. The barman had painted his face like Frankenstein’s monster. Robin ordered drinks absentmindedly, thinking about the Douthwaite article.
When she’d returned to Strike with a fresh pint, a wine and two packets of crisps, she said,
“You know, that article isn’t fair.”
“Go on.”
“People don’t necessarily tell their co-workers about their medical problems. Maybe Douthwaite did seem fine to his mates when they were all down the pub. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have anything wrong with him. He might have been mentally ill.”
“Not for the first time,” said Strike, “you’re bang on the money.”
He searched the small number of photocopied papers remaining in his pile and extracted another handwritten document, far neater than Talbot’s and devoid of doodles and random dates. Somehow Robin knew, before Strike had said a word, that this fluid, rounded handwriting belonged to Margot Bamborough.
“Copies of Douthwaite’s medical records,” said Strike. “The police got hold of them. ‘Headaches, upset stomach, weight loss, palpitations, nausea, nightmares, trouble sleeping,’” Strike read out. “Margot’s conclusion, on visit four—see there?—is ‘personal and employment-related difficulties, under severe strain, exhibiting signs of anxiety.’”
“Well, his married girlfriend had killed herself,” said Robin. “That’d knock anyone except a psychopath for six, wouldn’t it?”
Charlotte slid like a shadow across Strike’s mind.
“Yeah, you’d think. Also, look there. He’d been the victim of an assault shortly before his first visit to Margot. ‘Contusions, cracked rib.’ I smell angry, bereaved and betrayed husband.”
“But the paper makes it sound as though he was stalking Margot.”
“Well,” said Strike, tapping the photocopy of Douthwaite’s medical notes, “there are a hell of a lot of visits here. He saw her three times in one week. He’s anxious, guilty, feeling unpopular, probably didn’t expect his bit of fun to end in the woman’s death. And there’s a good-looking doctor offering no judgment, but kindness and support. I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility to think he might have developed feelings for her.
“And look at this,” Strike went on, turning over the medical records to show Robin more typed statements. “These are from Dorothy and Gloria, who both said Douthwaite came out of her room the last time he saw Margot, looking—well, this is Dorothy,” he said, and he read aloud, “‘I observed Mr. Douthwaite leaving Dr. Bamborough’s surgery and noticed that he looked as though he had had a shock. I thought he also looked angry and distressed. As he walked out, he tripped over the toy truck of a boy in the waiting room and swore loudly. He seemed distracted and unaware of his surroundings.’ And Gloria,” said Strike, turning over the page, “says: ‘I remember Mr. Douthwaite leaving because he swore at a little boy. He looked as though he had just been given bad news. I thought he seemed scared and angry.’
“Now, Margot’s notes of her last consultation with Douthwaite don’t mention anything but the same old stress-related symptoms,” Strike went on, turning back to the medical records, “so she definitely hadn’t just diagnosed him with anything life-threatening. Lawson speculated that she might’ve felt he was getting over-attached, and told him he had to stop taking up valuable time that could be given to other patients, which Douthwaite didn’t like hearing. Maybe he’d convinced himself his feelings were reciprocated. All the evidence suggests he was in a fragile mental state at the time.
“Anyway, four days after Douthwaite’s last appointment, Margot vanishes. Tipped off by the surgery that there was a patient who seemed a bit over-fond of her, Talbot called him in for questioning. Here we go.”
Once again, Strike extracted a star-strewn scrawl from amid the typewritten pages.
“As usual, Talbot starts the interrogation by running through the list of Creed dates. Trouble is, Douthwaite doesn’t seem to remember what he was doing on any of them.”
“If he was already ill with stress—” began Robin.
“Well, exactly,” said Strike. “Being interrogated by a police officer who thinks you might be the Essex Butcher wouldn’t help your anxiety, would it?
“And look at this, Talbot adds a random date again: twenty-first February. But he also does something else. Can you make anything of that?”
Robin took the page from Strike and examined the last three lines of writing.
“Pitman shorthand,” said Robin.
“Can you read it?”
“No. I know a bit of Teeline; I never learned Pitman. Pat can do it, though.”
“You’re saying she might be useful for once?”
“Oh sod off, Strike,” said Robin, crossly. “You want to go back to temps, fine, but I like getting accurate messages and knowing the filing’s up to date.”
She took a photograph on her phone and texted it to Pat, along with a request to translate it. Strike, meanwhile, was reflecting that Robin had never before called him “Strike” when annoyed. Perversely, it had sounded more intimate than the use of his first name.
He’d quite enjoyed it.
“Sorry for impugning Pat,” he said.
“I just told you to sod off,” said Robin, failing to suppress a smile. “What did Lawson make of Douthwaite?”
“Well, unsurprisingly, when he tried to interview him and found out he’d left his flat and job, leaving no forwarding address, he got quite interested in him. Hence the tip-off to the papers. They were trying to flush him out.”
“And did it work?” asked Robin, now eating crisps.
“It did. Douthwaite turned up at a police station in Waltham Forest the day after the ‘Ladykiller’ article appeared, probably terrified he’d soon have Fleet Street and Scotland Yard on his doorstep. He told them he was unemployed and living in a bedsit. Local police called Lawson, who went straight over there to interview him.
“There’s a full account here,” said Strike, pushing some of the last pages of the roll he had brought with him toward Robin. “All written by Lawson: ‘appears scared’—‘evasive’—‘nervous’—‘sweating’—and the alibi’s not good. Douthwaite says that on the afternoon of Margot’s disappearance he was out looking for a new flat.”
“He claims he was already looking for a new place when she disappeared?”
“Coincidence, eh? Except that upon closer questioning he couldn’t say which flats he’d seen and couldn’t come up with the name of anyone who’d remember seeing him. In the end he said his flat-hunting had involved sitting in a local café and circling ads in the paper. Trouble was, nobody in the café remembered him being there.
“He said he’d moved to Waltham Forest because he had bad associations with Clerkenwell after being interviewed by Talbot and made to feel as though he was under suspicion, and that, in any case, things hadn’t been good for him at work since his affair with the co-worker’s suicidal wife.”
“Well, that’s credible enough,” said Robin.
“Lawson interviewed him twice more, but got nothing else out of him. Douthwaite came lawyered up to interview three. At that point, Lawson backed off. After all, they had nothing on Douthwaite, even if he was the fishiest person they interviewed. And it was—just—credible that the reason nobody had noticed him in the café was because it was a busy place.”
A group of drinkers in Hallowe’en costumes now entered the pub, giggling and clearly already full of alcohol. Robin noticed Strike casting an automatic eye over a young blonde in a rubber nurse’s uniform.
“So,” she said, “is that everything?”
“Almost,” said Strike, “but I’m tempted not to show you this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think it’s going to feed your obsession with holy places.”
“I’m not—”
“OK, but before you look at it, just remember that nutters are always attracted by murders and missing person cases, all right?”
“Fine,” said Robin. “Show me.”
Strike flipped over the piece of paper. It was a photocopy of the crudest kind of anonymous note, featuring letters cut out of magazines.
“Another St. John’s Cross,” said Robin.
“Yep. That arrived at Scotland Yard in 1985, addressed to Lawson, who’d already retired. Nothing else in the envelope.”
Robin sighed and leaned back in her chair.
“Nutter, obviously,” said Strike, now tapping his photocopied articles and statements back into a pile and rolling them up again. “If you really knew where a body was buried, you’d include a bloody map.”
It was nearly six o’clock now, close to the hour at which a doctor had once left her practice and had never been seen again. The frosted pub windows were inky blue. Up at the bar, the blonde in the rubber uniform was giggling at something a man dressed as the Joker had told her.
“You know,” said Robin, glancing down at the papers sitting beside Strike’s pint, “she was late… it was pouring with rain…”
“Go on,” said Strike, wondering whether she was about to say exactly what he’d been thinking.
“Her friend was waiting in here, alone. Margot’s late. She would’ve wanted to get here as quickly as possible. The simplest, most plausible explanation I can think of is that somebody offered her a lift. A car pulled up—”
“Or a van,” said Strike. Robin had, indeed, reached the same conclusion he had. “Someone she knew—”
“Or someone who seemed safe. An elderly man—”
“Or what she thinks is a woman.”
“Exactly,” said Robin.
She turned a sad face to Strike.
“That’s it. She either knew the driver, or the stranger seemed safe.”
“And who’d remember that?” said Strike. “She was wearing a nondescript raincoat, carrying an umbrella. A vehicle pulls up. She bends down to the window, then gets in. No fight. No conflict. The car drives away.”
“And only the driver would know what happened next,” said Robin.
Her mobile rang: it was Pat Chauncey.
“She always does that,” said Strike. “Text her, and she doesn’t text back, she calls—”
“Does it matter?” said Robin, exasperated, and answered.
“Hi, Pat. Sorry to bother you out of hours. Did you get my text?”
“Yeah,” croaked Pat. “Where did you find that?”
“It’s in some old police notes. Can you translate it?”
“Yeah,” said Pat, “but it doesn’t make much sense.”
“Hang on, Pat, I want Cormoran to hear this,” said Robin, and she changed to speakerphone.
“Ready?” came Pat’s rasping voice.
“Yes,” said Robin. Strike pulled out a pen and flipped over his roll of paper so that he could write on the blank side.
“It says: ‘And that is the last of them, comma, the twelfth, comma, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth, comma’—and then there’s a word I can’t read, I don’t think it’s proper Pitman—and after that another word, which phonetically says Ba—fom—et, full stop. Then a new sentence, ‘Transcribe in the true book.’”
“Baphomet,” repeated Strike.
“Yeah,” said Pat.
“That’s a name,” said Strike. “Baphomet is an occult deity.”
“OK, well, that’s what it says,” said Pat, matter-of-factly.
Robin thanked her and rang off.
“‘And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book,’” Strike read back.
“How d’you know about Baphomet?” asked Robin.
“Whittaker was interested in all that shit.”
“Oh,” said Robin.
Whittaker was the last of Strike’s mother’s lovers, the man Strike believed had administered the overdose that had killed her.
“He had a copy of The Satanic Bible,” said Strike. “It had a picture of Baphomet’s head in a penta—shit,” he said, rifling back through the loose pages to find one of those on which Talbot had doodled many five-pointed stars. He frowned at it for a moment, then looked up at Robin.
“I don’t think these are stars. They’re pentagrams.”
PART THREE
… Winter, clothëd all in frieze…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
15
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
In the second week of November, Joan’s chemotherapy caused her white blood cell count to plummet dangerously, and she was admitted to hospital. Strike left Robin in charge of the agency, Lucy left her three sons in the care of her husband, and both hurried back to Cornwall.
Strike’s fresh absence coincided with the monthly team meeting, which for the first time Robin led alone, the youngest and arguably least experienced investigator at the agency, and the only woman.
Robin wasn’t sure whether she had imagined it, but she thought Hutchins and Morris, th
e two ex-policemen, put up slightly more disagreement about the next month’s rota, and about the line they ought to take on Shifty, than they would have done had Strike been there. It was Robin’s opinion that Shifty’s PA, who’d now been extensively wined and dined at the agency’s expense without revealing anything about the hold her boss might have over his CEO, ought to be abandoned as a possible source. She’d decided that Morris ought to see her one last time to wrap things up, allaying any suspicion about what he’d been after, after which Robin thought it time to try and infiltrate Shifty’s social circle with a view to getting information direct from the man they were investigating. Barclay was the only subcontractor who agreed with Robin, and backed her up when she insisted that Morris was to leave Shifty’s PA well alone. Of course, as Robin was well aware, she and Barclay had once gone digging for a body together, and such things create a bond.
The memory of the team meeting was still bothering her as she sat with her legs up on the sofa in the flat in Finborough Road later, now in pajama and a dressing gown, working on her laptop. Wolfgang the dachshund was curled at her bare feet, keeping them warm.
Max was out. He’d suddenly announced the previous weekend that he feared he was in danger of passing from “introvert” to “recluse,” and had accepted an invitation to go to dinner with some actor friends, even though, in his bitter words on parting, “They’ll all be pitying me, but I suppose they’ll enjoy that.” Robin had taken Wolfgang for a quick walk around the block at eleven, but otherwise had spent her evening on the Bamborough case, for which she’d had no time while Strike had been in St. Mawes, because the other four cases on the agency’s books were absorbing all working hours.
Robin hadn’t been out since her birthday drinks with Ilsa and Vanessa, which hadn’t been as enjoyable as she’d hoped. The conversation had revolved entirely around relationships, because Vanessa had arrived with a brand-new engagement ring on her finger. Since then, Robin had used pressure of work during Strike’s absence to avoid nights out with either of her friends. Her cousin Katie’s words, it’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us, were hard to forget, but the truth was that Robin didn’t want to stand in a bar while Ilsa and Vanessa encouraged her to respond to the advances of some overfamiliar, Morris-like man with a line in easy patter and bad jokes.
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