“I’m very interested in your father’s theories,” said Strike. Deciding that a little duplicity was called for, or at least a little reframing of the facts, the detective added, “Most of what your father wrote in the case file is entirely sound. He was asking all the right questions and he’d noticed—”
“The speeding van,” said Gregory quickly.
“Exactly,” said Strike.
“Rainy night, exactly like when Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman were abducted.”
“Right,” said Strike, nodding.
“The two women who were struggling together,” said Gregory. “That last patient, the woman who looked like a man. I mean, you’ve got to admit, you add all that together—”
“This is what I’m talking about,” said Strike. “He might’ve been ill, but he still knew a clue when he saw one. All I want to know is whether the shorthand means anything I should know about.”
Some of Gregory’s excitement faded from his face.
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t. That’s just his illness talking.”
“You know,” said Strike slowly, “your father wasn’t the only one who saw Creed as satanic. The title of the best biography of him—”
“The Demon of Paradise Park.”
“Exactly. Creed and Baphomet have a lot in common,” said Strike.
In the pause that followed, they heard the twins running downstairs and loudly asking their foster mother whether she’d bought chocolate mousse.
“Look—I’d love you to prove it was Creed,” said Gregory at last. “Prove Dad was right all along. There’d be no shame in Creed being too clever for him. He was too clever for Lawson, as well; he’s been too clever for everyone. I know there wasn’t any sign of Margot Bamborough in Creed’s basement, but he never revealed where he’d put Andrea Hooton’s clothes and jewelry, either. He was varying the way he disposed of bodies at the end. He was unlucky with Hooton, chucking her off the cliffs; unlucky the body was found so quickly.”
“All true,” said Strike.
Strike drank his tea while Gregory absentmindedly chewed off a hangnail. A full minute passed before Strike decided that further pressure was required.
“This business about transcribing in the true book—”
He knew by Gregory’s slight start that he’d hit the bullseye.
“—I wondered whether your father kept separate records from the official file—and if so,” said Strike, when Gregory didn’t answer, “whether they’re still in existence.”
Gregory’s wandering gaze fixed itself once more on Strike.
“Yeah, all right,” he said, “Dad thought he was looking for something supernatural. We didn’t know that until near the end, until we realized how ill he was. He was sprinkling salt outside our bedroom doors every night, to keep out Baphomet. He’d made himself what Mum thought was a home office in the spare room, but he was keeping the door locked.
“The night he was sectioned,” said Gregory, looking miserable, “he came running out of it, ah, shouting. He woke us all up. My brother and I came out onto the landing. Dad had left the door to the spare room open, and we saw pentagrams all over the walls and lit candles. He’d taken up the carpet and made a magic circle on the floor to perform some kind of ritual, and he claimed… well, he thought he’d conjured some kind of demonic creature…
“Mum called 999 and an ambulance came and… well, you know the rest.”
“Must’ve been very distressing for all of you,” said Strike.
“Well, yeah. It was. While Dad was in hospital, Mum cleaned out the room, took away his tarot cards and all the occult books, and painted over the pentagrams and the magic circle. It was all the more upsetting for her, because both had been committed churchgoers before Dad had his breakdown…”
“He was clearly very ill,” said Strike, “which wasn’t his fault, but he was still a detective and he still had sound copper sense. I can see it in the official record. If there’s another set of records anywhere, especially if it contains stuff that isn’t in the official file, it’s an important document.”
Gregory chewed his nail again, looking tense. Finally, he seemed to reach a decision:
“Ever since we spoke on the phone, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should give you this,” he said, standing up and heading over to an overflowing bookcase in the corner. From the top, he took a large leather-bound notebook of old-fashioned type, which had a cord wrapped around it.
“This was the only thing that didn’t get thrown away,” said Gregory, looking down at the notebook, “because Dad wouldn’t let go of it when the ambulance arrived. He said he had to record what the, ah, spirit had looked like, the thing he’d conjured… so the notebook got taken to hospital with him. They let him draw the demon, which helped the doctors understand what had been going on in his head, because at first he didn’t want to talk to them. I found all this out afterward; they protected me and my brother from it while it was going on. After Dad got well, he kept the notebook, because he said if anything was a reminder to take his medicine, this was it. But I wanted to meet you before I made a decision.”
Resisting the urge to hold out his hand, Strike sat trying to look as sympathetic as his naturally surly features would allow. Robin was far better at conveying warmth and empathy; he’d watched her persuading recalcitrant witnesses many times since they’d gone into business together.
“You understand,” said Gregory, still clutching the notebook, and evidently determined to hammer the point home, “he’d had a complete mental breakdown.”
“Of course,” said Strike. “Who else have you shown that to?”
“Nobody,” said Gregory. “It’s been up in our attic for the last ten years. We had a couple of boxes of stuff from Mum and Dad’s old house up there. Funny, you turning up just as the loft was being mucked out… maybe this is all Dad’s doing? Maybe he’s trying to tell me it’s OK to pass this over?”
Strike made an ambiguous noise designed to convey agreement that the Talbots’ decision to clear out their loft had been somehow prompted by Gregory’s dead father, rather than the need to accommodate two extra children.
“Take it,” said Gregory abruptly, holding out the old notebook. Strike thought he looked relieved to see it pass into someone else’s possession.
“I appreciate your trust. If I find anything in here I think you can help with, would it be all right to contact you again?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Gregory. “You’ve got my email address… I’ll give you my mobile number…”
Five minutes later, Strike was standing in the hall, shaking hands with Mrs. Talbot as he prepared to return to his office.
“Lovely to meet you,” she said. “I’m glad he’s given you that thing. You never know, do you?”
And with the notebook in his hand, Strike agreed that you never did.
18
So the fayre Britomart hauing disclo’ste
Her clowdy care into a wrathfull stowre,
The mist of griefe dissolu’d…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Robin, who’d recently given up many weekends to cover the agency’s workload, took the following Tuesday and Wednesday off at Strike’s insistence. Her suggestion that she come into the office to look at the notebook Gregory Talbot had given Strike, and to go systematically through the last box of the police file, which neither of them had yet had time to examine, had been sternly vetoed by the senior partner. Strike knew there was no time left this year for Robin to take all the leave she was owed, but he was determined that she should take as much as she could.
However, if Strike imagined that Robin derived much pleasure from her days off, he was wrong. She spent Tuesday dealing with mundanities such as laundry and food shopping, and on Wednesday morning, set off for a twice-postponed appointment with her solicitor.
When she’d broken the news to her parents that she and Matthew were to divorce a little over a year after the
y’d married, her mother and father had wanted her to use a solicitor in Harrogate, who was an old family friend.
“I live in London. Why would I use a law firm in Yorkshire?”
Robin had chosen a lawyer in her late forties called Judith, whose dry humor, spiky gray hair and thick black-rimmed glasses had endeared her to Robin when first they met. Robin’s feeling of warmth had abated somewhat over the ensuing twelve months. It was hard to maintain fondness for the person whose job it was to pass on the latest intransigent and aggressive communications from Matthew’s lawyer. As the months rolled past, Robin noticed that Judith occasionally forgot or misremembered information pertinent to the divorce. Robin, who always took care to give her own clients the impression that their concerns were uppermost in her mind at all times, couldn’t help wondering whether Judith would have been more meticulous if Robin had been richer.
Like Robin’s parents, Judith had initially assumed that this divorce would be quick and easy, a matter of two signatures and a handshake. The couple had been married a little over a year and there were no children, not even a pet to argue over. Robin’s parents had gone so far as to imagine that Matthew, whom they’d known since he was a child, must feel such shame at his infidelity that he’d want to compensate Robin by being generous and reasonable over the divorce. Her mother’s growing fury toward her ex-son-in-law was starting to make Robin dread her phone calls home.
The offices of Stirling and Cobbs were a twenty-minute walk away from Robin’s flat, on North End Road. Zipping herself into a warm coat, umbrella in hand, Robin chose to walk that morning purely for the exercise, because she’d spent so many long hours in her car of late, sitting outside the weatherman’s house, waiting for Postcard. Indeed, the last time she’d walked for a whole hour had been inside the National Portrait Gallery, a trip that had been fruitless, except for one tiny incident that Robin had discounted, because Strike had taught her to mistrust the hunches so romanticized by the non-investigative public, which, he said, were more often than not born of personal biases or wishful thinking.
Tired, dispirited and knowing full well that nothing she was about to hear from Judith was likely to cheer her up, Robin was passing a bookie’s when her mobile rang. Extracting it from her pocket took a little longer than usual, because she was wearing gloves, and she consequently sounded a little panicky when she finally managed to answer the unknown number.
“Yes, hello? Robin Ellacott speaking.”
“Oh, hi. This is Eden Richards.”
For a moment, Robin couldn’t for the life of her think who Eden Richards was. The woman on the end of the line seemed to divine her dilemma, because she continued,
“Wilma Bayliss’s daughter. You sent me and my brothers and sisters messages. You wanted to talk to us about Margot Bamborough.”
“Oh, yes, of course, thank you for calling me back!” said Robin, backing into the bookie’s doorway, her finger in the ear not pressed against the phone, to block out the sound of traffic. Eden, she now remembered, was the oldest of Wilma’s offspring, a Labor councilor from Lewisham.
“Yeah,” said Eden Richards, “well, I’m afraid we don’t want to talk to you. And I’m speaking for all of us here, OK?”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Robin, watching abstractedly as a passing Doberman Pinscher squatted and defecated on the pavement while its scowling owner waited, a plastic bag hanging from his hand. “Can I ask why—?”
“We just don’t want to,” said Eden. “OK?”
“OK,” said Robin, “but to be clear, all we’re doing is checking statements that were made around the time Margot—”
“We can’t speak for our mother,” said Eden. “She’s dead. We feel sorry for Margot’s daughter, but we don’t want to drag up stuff that—it’s something we don’t particularly want to relive, any of our family. We were young when she disappeared. It was a bad time for us. So the answer’s no, OK?”
“I understand,” said Robin, “but I wish you’d reconsider. We aren’t asking you to talk about anything pers—”
“You are, though,” said Eden. “Yeah, you are. And we don’t want to, OK? You aren’t police. And by the way: my youngest sister’s going through chemotherapy, so leave her alone, please. She doesn’t need the grief. I’m going to go now. The answer’s no, OK? Don’t contact any of us again, please.”
And the line went dead.
“Shit,” said Robin out loud.
The owner of the Doberman Pinscher, who was now scooping a sizable pile of that very substance off the pavement, said,
“You and me both, love.”
Robin forced a smile, stuffed her mobile back into her pocket and walked on. Shortly afterward, still wondering whether she could have handled the call with Eden better, Robin pushed open the glass door of Stirling and Cobbs, Solicitors.
“Well,” said Judith five minutes later, once Robin was sitting opposite her in the tiny office full of filing cabinets. The monosyllable was followed by silence as Judith glanced over the documents in the file in front of her, clearly reminding herself of the facts of the case while Robin sat watching. Robin would much rather have sat for another five minutes in the waiting room than witness this casual and hasty revision of what was causing her so much stress and pain.
“Umm,” said Judith, “yes… just checking that… yes, we had a response to ours on the fourteenth, as I said in my email, so you’ll be aware that Mr. Cunliffe isn’t prepared to shift his position on the joint account.”
“Yes,” said Robin.
“So, I really think it’s time to go to mediation,” said Judith Cobbs.
“And as I said in my reply to your email,” said Robin, wondering whether Judith had read it, “I can’t see mediation working.”
“Which is why I wanted to speak to you face to face,” said Judith, smiling. “We often find that when the two parties have to sit down in the same room, and answer for themselves, especially with impartial witnesses present—I’d be with you, obviously—they become far less intransigent than they are by letter.”
“You said yourself,” Robin replied (blood was thumping in her ears: the sensation of not being heard was becoming increasingly common during these interactions), “the last time we met—you agreed that Matthew seems to be trying to force this into court. He isn’t really interested in the joint account. He can outspend me ten times over. He just wants to beat me. He wants a judge to agree that I married him for his bank account. He’ll think it money well spent if he can point to some ruling that says the divorce was all my fault.”
“It’s easy,” said Judith, still smiling, “to attribute the worst possible motives to ex-partners, but he’s clearly an intelligent—”
“Intelligent people can be as spiteful as anyone else.”
“True,” said Judith, still with an air of humoring Robin, “but refusing to even try mediation is a bad move for both of you. No judge will look kindly on anyone who refuses to at least try and settle matters without recourse to the courts.”
The truth, as perhaps Judith and Robin both equally knew, was that Robin dreaded having to sit face to face with Matthew and the lawyer who had authored all those cold, threatening letters.
“I’ve told him I don’t want the inheritance he got from his mother,” said Robin. “All I want back out of that joint account is the money my parents put into our first property.”
“Yes,” said Judith, with a hint of boredom: Robin knew that she’d said exactly this, every time they’d met each other. “But as you’re aware, his position—”
“Is that I contributed virtually nothing to our finances, so he ought to keep the whole lot, because he went into the marriage out of love and I’m some kind of gold-digger.”
“This is obviously upsetting you,” said Judith, no longer smiling.
“We were together ten years,” said Robin, trying, with little success, to remain calm. “When he was a student and I was working, I paid for everything. Should I have kept the
receipts?”
“We can certainly make that point in mediation—”
“That’ll just infuriate him,” said Robin.
She raised a hand to her face purely for the purpose of hiding it. She felt suddenly and perilously close to tears.
“OK, fine. We can try mediation.”
“I think that’s the sensible thing to do,” said Judith Cobbs, smiling again. “So, I’ll contact Brophy, Shenston and—”
“I suppose I’ll get a chance to tell Matthew he’s a total shit, at least,” said Robin, on a sudden wave of fury.
Judith gave a small laugh.
“Oh, I wouldn’t advise that,” she said.
Oh, wouldn’t you really? thought Robin, as she hitched on another fake smile, and got up to leave.
A blustery, damp wind was blowing when she left the solicitor’s. Robin trudged back toward Finborough Road, until finally, her face numb, her hair whipping into her eyes, she turned into a small café where, in defiance of her own healthy eating rules, she bought a large latte and a chocolate brownie. She sat and stared out at the rainswept street, enjoying the comfort of cake and coffee, until her mobile rang again.
It was Strike.
“Hi,” she said, through a mouthful of brownie. “Sorry. Eating.”
“Wish I was,” he said. “I’m outside the bloody theater again. I think Barclay’s right: we’re not going to get anything on Twinkletoes. I’ve got Bamborough news.”
“So’ve I,” said Robin, who had managed to swallow the mouthful of brownie, “but it isn’t good news. Wilma Bayliss’s children don’t want to talk to us.”
“The cleaner’s kids? Why not?”
“Wilma wasn’t a cleaner by the time she died,” Robin reminded him. “She was a social worker.”
Even as she said it, Robin wondered why she felt the need to correct him. Perhaps it was simply that if Wilma Bayliss was to be forever referred to as a cleaner, she, Robin, might as well be forever called “the temp.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 20