She and Strike had now divided between them the people they wished to trace and re-interview in the Bamborough case. Unfortunately, Robin now knew that at least four of her allocated people had passed beyond the reach of questioning.
After careful cross-referencing of old records, Robin had managed to identify the Willy Lomax who’d been the long-serving handyman of St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell. He’d died in 1989 and Robin had so far been unable to find a single confirmed relative.
Albert Shimmings, the florist and possible driver of the speeding van seen on the night of Margot’s disappearance, had also passed away, but Robin had emailed two men she believed to be his sons. She sincerely hoped she’d correctly identified them, otherwise an insurance agent and a driving instructor were both about to get truly mystifying messages. Neither had yet responded to her request to talk to them.
Wilma Bayliss, the ex-practice cleaner, had died in 2003. A mother of two sons and three daughters, she’d divorced Jules Bayliss in 1975. By the time she died, Wilma hadn’t been a cleaner, but a social worker, and she’d raised a high-achieving family, including an architect, a paramedic, a teacher, another social worker and a Labor councilor. One of the sons now lived in Germany, but Robin nevertheless included him in the emails and Facebook messages she sent out to all five siblings. There’d been no response so far.
Dorothy Oakden, the practice secretary, had been ninety-one when she died in a North London nursing home. Robin hadn’t yet managed to trace Carl, her only child.
Meanwhile, Margot’s ex-boyfriend, Paul Satchwell, and the receptionist, Gloria Conti, were proving strangely and similarly elusive. At first Robin had been relieved when she’d failed to find a death certificate for either of them, but after combing telephone directories, census records, county court judgments, marriage and divorce certificates, press archives, social media and lists of company staff, she’d come up with nothing. The only possible explanations Robin could think of were changes of name (in Gloria’s case, possibly by marriage) and emigration.
As for Mandy White, the schoolgirl who’d claimed to have seen Margot at a rainy window, there were so many Amanda Whites of approximately the right age to be found online that Robin was starting to despair of ever finding the right one. Robin found this line of inquiry particularly frustrating, firstly because there was a good chance that White was no longer Mandy’s surname, and secondly because, like the police before her, Robin thought it highly unlikely that Mandy had actually seen Margot at the window that night.
Having examined and discounted the Facebook accounts of another six Amanda Whites, Robin yawned, stretched and decided she was owed a break. Setting her laptop down on a side table, she swung her legs carefully off the sofa so as not to disturb Wolfgang, and crossed the open-plan area that combined kitchen, dining and living rooms, to make herself one of the low-calorie hot chocolates she was trying to convince herself was a treat, because she was still, in the middle of this long, sedentary stretch of surveillance, trying to keep an eye on her waistline.
As she stirred the unappetizing powder into boiling water, a whiff of tuberose mingled with the scent of synthetic caramel. In spite of her bath, Fracas still lingered in her hair and on her pajama. This perfume, she’d finally decided, had been a costly mistake. Living in a dense cloud of tuberose made her feel not only perpetually on the verge of a headache, but also as though she were wearing fur and pearls in broad daylight.
Robin’s mobile, which was lying on the sofa beside Wolfgang, rang as she picked up her laptop again. Startled from his sleep, the disgruntled dog rose on arthritic legs. Robin lifted him to safety before picking up her phone and seeing, to her disappointment, that it wasn’t Strike, but Morris.
“Hi, Saul.”
Ever since the birthday kiss, Robin had tried to keep her manner on the colder side of professional when dealing with Morris.
“Hey, Robs. You said to call if I had anything, even if it was late.”
“Yes, of course.” I never said you could call me “Robs,” though. “What’s happened?” asked Robin, looking around for a pen.
“I got Gemma drunk tonight. Shifty’s PA, you know. Under the influence, she told me she thinks Shifty’s got something on his boss.”
Well, that’s hardly news, thought Robin, abandoning the fruitless search for a writing implement.
“What makes her think so?”
“Apparently he’s said stuff to her like, ‘Oh, he’ll always take my calls, don’t worry,’ and ‘I know where all the bodies are buried.’”
An image of a cross of St. John slid across Robin’s mind and was dismissed.
“As a joke,” Morris added. “He passed it off like he was joking, but it made Gemma think.”
“But she doesn’t know any details?”
“No, but listen, seriously, give me a bit more time and I reckon I’ll be able to persuade her to wear a wire for us. Not to blow my own horn here—can’t reach, for one thing—no, seriously,” he said, although Robin hadn’t laughed, “I’ve got her properly softened up. Just give me a bit more time—”
“Look, I’m sorry, Saul, but we went over this at the meeting,” Robin reminded Morris, suppressing a yawn, which made her eyes water. “The client doesn’t want us to tell any of the employees we’re investigating this, so we can’t tell her who you are. Pressuring her to investigate her own boss is asking her to risk her job. It also risks blowing the whole case if she decides to tell him what’s going on.”
“But again, not to toot—”
“Saul, it’s one thing her confiding in you when she’s drunk,” said Robin (why wasn’t he listening? They’d been through this endlessly at the team meeting). “It’s another asking a girl with no investigative training to work for us.”
“She’s all over me, Robin,” said Morris earnestly. “It’d be crazy not to use her.”
Robin suddenly wondered whether Morris had slept with the girl. Strike had been quite clear that that wasn’t to happen. She sank back down on the sofa. Her copy of The Demon of Paradise Park was warm, she noticed, from the dachshund lying on it. The displaced Wolfgang was now gazing at Robin from under the dining table, with the sad, reproachful eyes of an old man.
“Saul, I really think it’s time for Hutchins to take over, to see what he can do with Shifty himself,” said Robin.
“OK, but before we make that decision, let me ring Strike and—”
“You’re not ringing Strike,” said Robin, her temper rising. “His aunt’s—he’s got enough on his plate in Cornwall.”
“You’re so sweet,” said Morris, with a little laugh, “but I promise you, Strike would want a say in this—”
“He left me in charge,” said Robin, anger rising now, “and I’m telling you, you’ve taken it as far as you can with that girl. She doesn’t know anything useful and trying to push her further could backfire badly on this agency. I’m asking you to give it up now, please. You can take over on Postcard tomorrow night, and I’ll tell Andy to get to work on Shifty.”
There was a pause.
“I’ve upset you, haven’t I?” said Morris.
“No, you haven’t upset me,” said Robin. After all, “upset” wasn’t quite the same as “enrage.”
“I didn’t want to—”
“You haven’t, Saul, I’m only reminding you what we agreed at the meeting.”
“OK,” he said. “All right. Hey—listen. Did you hear about the boss who told his secretary the company was in trouble?”
“No,” said Robin, through clenched teeth.
“He said, ‘I’m going to have to lay you or Jack off.’ She said, ‘Well, you’ll have to jack off, because I’ve got a headache.’”
“Ha ha,” said Robin. “Night, Saul.”
“Why did I say ‘ha ha’?” she asked herself furiously, as she set down her mobile. Why didn’t I just say, “Stop telling me crap jokes?” Or say nothing! And why did I say sorry when I was asking him to do what we all agreed at the me
eting? Why am I cossetting him?
She thought of all those times she’d pretended with Matthew. Faking orgasms had been nothing compared to pretending to find him funny and interesting through all those twice-told tales of rugby club jokes, through every anecdote designed to show him as the cleverest or the funniest man in the room. Why do we do it? she asked herself, picking up The Demon of Paradise Park without considering what she was doing. Why do we work so hard to keep the peace, to keep them happy?
Because, suggested the seven ghostly black and white faces behind Dennis Creed’s, they can turn nasty, Robin. You know just how nasty they can turn, with your scar up your arm and your memory of that gorilla mask.
But she knew that wasn’t why she’d humored Morris, not really. She didn’t expect him to become abusive or violent if she refused to laugh at his stupid jokes. No, this was something else. The only girl in a family of boys, Robin had been raised, she knew, to keep everyone happy, in spite of the fact that her own mother had been quite the women’s libber. Nobody had meant to do it, but she’d realized during the therapy she’d undertaken after the attack that had left her forearm forever scarred, that her family role had been that of “easy child,” the non-complainer, the conciliator. She’d been born just a year before Martin, who had been the Ellacotts’ “problem child”: the most scattered and impetuous, the least academic and conscientious, the son who still lived at home at twenty-eight and the brother with whom she had least in common. (Though Martin had punched Matthew on the nose on her wedding day, and the last time she’d been home she’d found herself hugging him when he offered, on hearing how difficult Matthew was being about the divorce, to do it again.)
Wintry specks of rain were dotting the window behind the dining table. Wolfgang was fast asleep again. Robin couldn’t face perusing the social media accounts of another fifty Amanda Whites tonight. As she picked up The Demon of Paradise Park, she hesitated. She’d made a rule for herself (because it had been a long, hard journey to reach the place where she was now, and she didn’t want to lose her current good state of mental health) not to read this book after dark, or right before bed. After all, the information it contained could be found summarized online: there was no need to hear in his own words what Creed had done to each of the women he’d tortured and killed.
Nevertheless, she picked up her hot chocolate, opened the book to the page she had marked with a Tesco receipt, and began to read at the point she’d left off three days previously.
Convinced that Bamborough had fallen victim to the serial killer now dubbed the Essex Butcher, Talbot made enemies among his colleagues with what they felt was his obsessive focus on one theory.
“They called it early retirement,” said a colleague, “but it was basically dismissal. They said he wasn’t interested in anything other than the Butcher, but here we are, 9 years on, and no-one’s ever found a better explanation, have they?”
Margot Bamborough’s family failed to positively identify any of the unclaimed jewelry and underwear found in Creed’s basement flat when he was arrested in 1976, although Bamborough’s husband, Dr. Roy Phipps, thought a tarnished silver locket which had been crushed, possibly by blunt force, might have resembled one that the doctor was believed to have been wearing when she disappeared.
However, a recently published account of Bamborough’s life, Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough?[4] written by the son of a close friend of the doctor, contains revelations about the doctor’s private life which suggest a new line of inquiry—and a possible connection with Creed. Shortly before her disappearance, Margot Bamborough booked herself into the Bride Street Nursing Home in Islington, a private facility which in 1974 provided discreet abortions.
16
Behold the man, and tell me Britomart,
If ay more goodly creature thou didst see;
How like a Gyaunt in each manly part
Beares he himselfe with portly maiestee…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Four days later, at a quarter past five in the morning, the “Night Riviera” sleeper train pulled into Paddington station. Strike, who’d slept poorly, had spent long stretches of the night watching the ghostly gray blur of the so-called English Riviera slide past his compartment window. Having slept on top of the covers with his prosthesis still attached, he turned down the proffered breakfast on its plastic tray, and was among the first passengers to disembark into the station, kit bag over his shoulder.
There was a nip of frost in the early morning air and Strike’s breath rose in a cloud before him as he walked down the platform, Brunel’s steel arches curving above him like the ribs of a blue whale’s skeleton, cold dark sky visible through the glass ceiling. Unshaven and slightly uncomfortable on the stump that had missed its usual nightly application of soothing cream, Strike headed for a bench, sat down, lit a much-needed cigarette, pulled out his mobile and phoned Robin.
He knew she’d be awake, because she’d just spent the night parked in Strike’s BMW outside the house of the weatherman, watching for Postcard. They’d communicated mostly by text while he’d been in Cornwall, while he divided his time between the hospital in Truro and the house in St. Mawes, taking it in turns with Lucy to sit with Joan, whose hair had now fallen out and whose immune system appeared to have collapsed under the weight of the chemotherapy, and to minister to Ted, who was barely eating. Before returning to London, Strike had cooked a large batch of curry, which he left in the freezer, alongside shepherd’s pies made by Lucy. When he raised his cigarette to his mouth he could still smell a trace of cumin on his fingers, and if he concentrated, he could conjure up the deadly smell of hospital disinfectant underlain with a trace of urine, instead of cold iron, diesel and the distant waftings of coffee from a nearby Starbucks.
“Hi,” said Robin, and at the sound of her voice Strike felt, as he had known he would, a slight easing of the knot of tension in his stomach. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” he said, slightly surprised, before he recollected that it was half past five in the morning. “Oh—yeah, sorry, this isn’t an emergency call, I’ve just got off the sleeper. Wondered whether you fancied getting breakfast before you head home to bed.”
“Oh, that’d be wonderful,” said Robin, with such genuine pleasure that Strike felt a little less tired, “because I’ve got Bamborough news.”
“Great,” said Strike, “so’ve I. Be good to have a catch-up.”
“How’s Joan?”
“Not great. They let her go home yesterday. They’ve assigned her a Macmillan nurse. Ted’s really low. Lucy’s still down there.”
“You could’ve stayed,” said Robin. “We can cope.”
“It’s fine,” he said, screwing his eyes up against his own smoke. A shaft of wintry sunlight burst through a break in the clouds and illuminated the fag butts on the tiled floor. “I’ve told them I’ll go back for Christmas. Where d’you want to meet?”
“Well, I was planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery before I went home, so—”
“You were what?” said Strike.
“Planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery. I’ll explain when I see you. Would you mind if we meet somewhere near there?”
“I can get anywhere,” said Strike, “I’m right by the Tube. I’ll head that way and whoever finds a café first can text the other.”
Forty-five minutes later, Robin entered Notes café, which lay on St. Martin’s Lane and was already crowded, though it was so early in the morning. Wooden tables, some of them as large as the one in her parents’ kitchen in Yorkshire, were crammed with young people with laptops and businessmen grabbing breakfast before work. As she queued at the long counter, she tried to ignore the various pastries and cakes spread out beneath it: she’d taken sandwiches with her to her overnight surveillance of the weatherman’s house, and those, she told herself sternly, ought to suffice.
Having ordered a cappuccino, she headed for the back of the café, wh
ere Strike sat reading The Times beneath an iron chandelier that resembled a large spider. She seemed to have forgotten over the previous six days how large he was. Hunched over the newspaper, he reminded her of a black bear, stubble thick on his face, tucking into a bacon and egg ciabatta roll, and Robin felt a wave of liking simply for the way he looked. Or perhaps, she thought, she was merely reacting against clean-jawed, slim and conventionally handsome men who, like tuberose perfumes, seemed attractive until prolonged exposure made you crave escape.
“Hi,” she said, sliding into the seat opposite him.
Strike looked up, and in that moment, her long shining hair and her aura of good health acted upon him like an antidote to the fug of clinical decay in which he had spent the past five days.
“You don’t look knackered enough to have been up all night.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment and not as an accusation,” said Robin, eyebrows raised. “I was up all night and Postcard still hasn’t shown herself—or himself—but another card came yesterday, addressed to the television studio. It said Postcard loved the way he smiled at the end of Tuesday’s weather report.”
Strike grunted.
Robin said, “D’you want to go first on Bamborough, or shall I?”
“You first,” said Strike, still chewing, “I’m starving.”
“OK,” said Robin. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad. The bad news is nearly everyone I’ve been trying to trace is dead, and the rest might as well be.”
She filled Strike in on the deceased status of Willy Lomax, Albert Shimmings, Wilma Bayliss and Dorothy Oakden, and on the steps she’d taken, so far, to contact their relatives.
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 17