Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

“She did, Jan! One of her brothers was drug dealing, that sort of thing, she told me so! That Atomal capsule might not’ve come from Brenner’s store at all! She could’ve got it off one of her brothers. Gloria hated Brenner. He was a miserable old sod, all right, always having a go at us. She said to me once, ‘Imagine living with him. If I was his sister I’d poison the old bastard’s food,’ and Margot heard her, and told her off, because there were patients in the waiting room, and it wasn’t professional, saying something like that about one of the doctors.

  “Anyway, when Margot never did anything about the pill in Brenner’s mug, I thought, that’s because she knows who did it. She didn’t want her little pet in trouble. Gloria was her project, see. Gloria spent half her time in Margot’s consulting room being lectured on feminism while I was left to hold the fort on reception… she’d’ve let Gloria away with murder, Margot would. Total blind spot.”

  “Do either of you know where Gloria is now?” asked Strike.

  “No idea. She left not long after Margot disappeared,” said Irene.

  “I never saw her again after she left the practice,” said Janice, who looked uncomfortable, “but Irene, I don’t fink we should be flinging accusations—”

  “Do me a favor,” said Irene abruptly to her friend, a hand on her stomach, “and fetch that medicine off the top of the fridge for me, will you? I’m still not right. And would anyone like more tea or coffee while Jan’s there?”

  Janice got up uncomplainingly, collected empty cups, loaded the tray and set off for the kitchen. Robin got up to open the door for her, and Janice smiled at her as she passed. While Janice’s footsteps padded away down the thickly carpeted hall, Irene said, unsmiling,

  “Poor Jan. She’s had an awful life, really. Like something out of Dickens, her childhood. Eddie and I helped her out financially a few times, after Beattie left her. She calls herself ‘Beattie,’ but he never married her, you know,” said Irene. “Awful, isn’t it? And they had a kid, too. I don’t think he ever really wanted to be there, and then he walked out. Larry, though—I mean, he wasn’t the brightest tool in the box,” Irene laughed a little, “but he thought the world of her. I think she thought she could do better at first—Larry worked for Eddie, you know—not on the management side, he was just a builder, but in the end, I think she realized—well, you know, not everyone’s prepared to take on a kid…”

  “Could I ask you about the threatening notes to Margot you saw, Mrs. Hickson?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Irene, pleased. “So you believe me, do you? Because the police didn’t.”

  “There were two, you said in your statement?”

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t’ve opened the first one, only Dorothy was off, and Dr. Brenner told me to sort out the post. Dorothy was never off usually. It was because her son was having his tonsils out. Spoiled little so-and-so, he was. That was the only time I ever saw her upset, when she told me she was taking him into hospital the next day. Hard as nails, usually—but she was a widow, and he was all she had.”

  Janice reappeared with refilled teapot and cafetière. Robin got up and took the heavy teapot and cafetière off the tray for her. Janice accepted her help with a smile and a whispered “thanks,” so that she didn’t interrupt Irene.

  “What did the note say?” Strike asked.

  “Well, it’s ages ago, now,” said Irene. Janice handed her a packet of indigestion tablets, which Irene took with a brief smile, but no thanks. “But from what I remember…” she popped pills out of the blister pack, “let me see, I want to get this right… it was very rude. It called Margot the c-word, I remember that. And said hellfire waited for women like her.”

  “Was it typed? Printed?”

  “Written,” said Irene. She took a couple of tablets with a sip of tea.

  “What about the second one?” said Strike.

  “I don’t know what that said. I had to go into her consulting room to give her a message, see, and I saw it lying on her desk. Same writing, I recognized it at once. She didn’t like me seeing it, I could tell. Screwed it up and threw it in the bin.”

  Janice passed round fresh cups of tea and coffee. Irene helped herself to another chocolate biscuit.

  “I doubt you’ll know,” said Strike, “but I wondered if you ever had any reason to suspect that Margot was pregnant before she—”

  “How d’you know about that?” gasped Irene, looking thunderstruck.

  “She was?” said Robin.

  “Yes!” said Irene. “See—Jan, don’t look like that, honestly—I took a call from a nursing home, while she was out on a house call! They called the practice to confirm she’d be in next day…” and she mouthed the next few words, “for an abortion!”

  “They told you what procedure she was going in for, over the phone?” asked Robin.

  For a moment, Irene looked rather confused.

  “They—well, no—actually, I—well, I’m not proud of it, but I called the clinic back. Just nosy. You do that kind of thing when you’re young, don’t you?”

  Robin hoped her reciprocal smile looked sincerer than Irene’s.

  “When was this, Mrs. Hickson, can you remember?” Strike asked.

  “Not long before she disappeared. Four weeks? Something like that?”

  “Before or after the anonymous notes?”

  “I don’t—after, I think,” said Irene. “Or was it? I can’t remember…”

  “Did you talk to anyone else about the appointment?”

  “Only Jan, and she told me off. Didn’t you, Jan?”

  “I know you didn’t mean any ’arm,” muttered Janice, “but patient confidentiality—”

  “Margot wasn’t our patient. It’s a different thing.”

  “And you didn’t tell the police about this?” Strike asked her.

  “No,” said Irene, “because I—well, I shouldn’t’ve known, should I? Anyway, how could it have anything to do with her disappearing?”

  “Apart from Mrs. Beattie, did you tell anyone else about it?”

  “No,” said Irene defensively, “because—I mean, I wouldn’t have told anyone else—you kept your mouth shut, working at a doctor’s surgery. I could’ve told all kinds of people’s secrets, couldn’t I? Being a receptionist, I saw files, but of course you didn’t say anything, I knew how to keep secrets, it was part of the job…”

  Expressionless, Strike wrote “protesting too much” in his notebook.

  “I’ve got another question, Mrs. Hickson, and it might be a sensitive one,” Strike said, looking up again. “I heard you and Margot had a disagreement at the Christmas party.”

  “Oh,” said Irene, her face falling. “That. Yes, well—”

  There was a slight pause.

  “I was cross about what she’d done to Kevin. Jan’s son. Remember, Jan?”

  Janice looked confused.

  “Come on, Jan, you do,” said Irene, tapping Janice’s arm again. “When she took him into her consulting room and blah blah blah.”

  “Oh,” said Janice. For a moment, Robin had the distinct impression that Janice was truly cross with her friend this time. “But—”

  “You remember,” said Irene, glaring at her.

  “I… yeah,” said Janice. “Yeah, I was angry about that, all right.”

  “Jan had kept him off school,” Irene told Strike. “Hadn’t you, Jan? How old was he, six? And then—”

  “What exactly happened?” Strike asked Janice.

  “Kev had a tummy ache,” said Janice. “Well, schoolitis, really. My neighbor ’oo sometimes looked after ’im wasn’t well—”

  “Basically,’ interrupted Irene, “Jan brought Kevin to work and—”

  “Could Mrs. Beattie tell the story?” Strike asked.

  “Oh—yes, of course!” said Irene. She put her hand back on her abdomen again and stroked it, with a long-suffering air.

  “Your usual childminder was ill?” Strike prompted Janice.

  “Yeah, but I was s’posed
to be at work, so I took Kev wiv me to the practice and give ’im a coloring book. Then I ’ad to change a lady’s dressing in the back room, so I put Kev in the waiting room. Irene and Gloria were keeping an eye on him for me. But then Margot—well, she took ’im into her consulting room and examined ’im, stripped ’im off to the waist and everything. She knew ’e was my son an’ she knew why ’e was there, but she took it upon herself… I was angry, I can’t lie,” said Janice quietly. ‘We ’ad words. I said, ‘All you ’ad to do was wait until I’d seen the patient and I’d’ve come in wiv ’im while you looked at him.’

  “And I’ve got to say, when I put it to her straight, she backed down right away and apologized. No,” Janice said, because Irene had puffed herself up, “she did, Irene, she apologized, said I was quite right, she shouldn’t have seen him without me, but ’e’d been holding his tummy and she acted on instinct. It wasn’t badly intentioned. She just, sometimes—”

  “—put people’s backs up, that’s what I’m saying,” said Irene. “Thought she was above everyone else, she knew best—”

  “—rushed in, I was going to say. But she were a good doctor,” said Janice, with quiet firmness. “You ’ear it all, when you’re in people’s ’ouses, you ’ear what the patients think of them, and Margot was well liked. She took time. She was kind—she was, Irene, I know she got on your wick, but that’s what the patients—”

  “Oh, well, maybe,” said Irene, with an if-you-say-so inflection. “But she didn’t have much competition at St. John’s, did she?”

  “Were Dr. Gupta and Dr. Brenner unpopular?” Strike asked.

  “Dr. Gupta was lovely,” said Janice. “A very good doctor, although some patients didn’t want to see a brown man, and that’s the truth. But Brenner was an ’ard man to like. It was only after he died that I understood why he might’ve—”

  Irene gave a huge gasp and then began, unexpectedly, to laugh.

  “Tell them what you collect, Janice. Go on!” She turned to Strike and Robin. “If this isn’t the creepiest, most morbid—”

  “I don’t collect ’em,” said Janice, who had turned pink. “They’re just something I like to save—”

  “Obituaries! What d’you think of that? The rest of us collect china or snow globes, blah blah blah, but Janice collects—”

  “It isn’t a collection,” repeated Janice, still pink-faced. “All it is—” She addressed Robin with a trace of appeal. “My mum couldn’t read—”

  “Imagine,” said Irene complacently, stroking her stomach. Janice faltered for a moment, then said,

  “—yeah, so… Dad wasn’t bothered about books, but ’e used to bring the paper ’ome, and that’s ’ow I learned to read. I used to cut out the best stories. ’Uman interest, I s’pose you’d call them. I’ve never been that interested in fiction. I can’t see the point, things somebody’s made up.”

  “Oh, I love a good novel,” breathed Irene, still rubbing her stomach.

  “Anyway… I dunno… when you read an obituary, you find out ’oo people’ve really been, don’t you? If it’s someone I know, or I nursed, I keep ’em because, I dunno, I felt like somebody should. You get your life written up in the paper—it’s an achievement, isn’t it?”

  “Not if you’re Dennis Creed, it isn’t,” said Irene. Looking as though she’d said something very clever she reached forwards to take another biscuit, and a deafening fart ripped through the room.

  Irene turned scarlet. Robin thought for one horrible moment that Strike was going to laugh, so she said loudly to Janice,

  “Did you keep Dr. Brenner’s obituary?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Janice, who seemed completely unperturbed by the loud noise that had just emanated from Irene. Perhaps she was used to far worse, as a nurse. “An’ it explained a lot.”

  “In what way?” asked Robin, determinedly not looking at either Strike or Irene.

  “’E’d been into Bergen-Belsen, one of the first medical men in there.”

  “God,” said Robin, shocked.

  “I know,” said Janice. “’E never talked about it. I’d never ’ave known, if I ’adn’t read it in the paper. What ’e must have seen… mounds of bodies, dead kids… I read a library book about it. Dreadful. Maybe that’s why ’e was the way ’e was, I dunno. I felt sorry, when I read it. I ’adn’t seen ’im in years by the time ’e died. Someone showed me the obituary, knowing I’d been at St. John’s, and I kept it as a record of him. You could forgive Brenner a lot, once you saw what ’e’d witnessed, what ’e’d been through… but that’s true of everyone, really, innit? Once you know, ev’rything’s explained. It’s a shame you often don’t know until it’s too late to—you all right, love?” she said to Irene.

  In the wake of the fart, Robin suspected that Irene had decided the only dignified cover-up was to emphasize that she was unwell.

  “D’you know, I think it’s stress,” she said, her hand down the waist­band of her trousers. “It always flares up when I’m… sorry,” she said with dignity to Strike and Robin, “but I’m afraid I don’t think I…”

  “Of course,” said Strike, closing his notebook. “I think we’ve asked everything we came for, anyway. Unless there’s anything else,” he asked the two women, “that you’ve remembered that seems odd, in retrospect, or out of place?”

  “We’ve fort, ’aven’t we?” Janice asked Irene. “All these years… we’ve talked about it, obviously.”

  “It must’ve been Creed, mustn’t it?” said Irene, with finality. “What other explanation is there? Where else could she have gone? Do you think they’ll let you in to see him?” she asked Strike again, with a last flicker of curiosity.

  “No idea,” he said, getting to his feet. “Thanks very much for your hospitality, anyway, and for answering our questions…”

  Janice saw them out. Irene waved wordlessly as they left the room. Robin could tell that the interview had fallen short of her expectation of enjoyment. Awkward and uncomfortable admissions had been forced from her; the picture she’d painted of her young self had not been, perhaps, everything she would have wished—and nobody, Robin thought, shaking hands with Janice at the door, would particularly enjoy farting loudly in front of strangers.

  21

  Well then, sayd Artegall, let it be tride.

  First in one ballance set the true aside.

  He did so first; and then the false he layd

  In th’other scale…

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  “Well, I’m no doctor,” said Strike, as they crossed the road back to the Land Rover, “but I blame the curry.”

  “Don’t,” said Robin, laughing against her will. She couldn’t help but feel a certain vicarious embarrassment.

  “You weren’t sitting as near her as I was,” said Strike, as he got back into the car. “I’m guessing lamb bhuna—”

  “Seriously,” said Robin, half-laughing, half-disgusted, “stop.”

  As he drew his seatbelt back over himself, Strike said,

  “I need a proper drink.”

  “There’s a decent pub not far from here,” said Robin. “I looked it up. The Trafalgar Tavern.”

  Looking up the pub was doubtless yet another Nice Thing that Robin had chosen to do for his birthday, and Strike wondered whether it was her intention to make him feel guilty. Probably not, he thought, but that, nevertheless, was the effect, so he passed no comment other than to ask,

  “What did you think of all that?”

  “Well, there were a few cross-currents, weren’t there?” said Robin, steering out of the parking space. “And I think we were told a couple of lies.”

  “Me too,” said Strike. “Which ones did you spot?”

  “Irene and Janice’s row at the Christmas party, for starters,” said Robin, turning out of Circus Street. “I don’t think it was really about Margot examining Janice’s son—although I do think Margot examined Kevin without permission.”

  “So do I,
” said Strike. “But I agree: I don’t think that’s what the row was about. Irene forced Janice to tell that story, because she didn’t want to admit the truth. Which makes me wonder… Irene getting Janice to come to her house, so we can interview them both together: was that so Irene could make sure Janice didn’t tell us anything she wouldn’t want told? That’s the trouble with friends you’ve had for decades, isn’t it? They know too much.”

  Robin, who was busy trying to remember the route to the Trafalgar she’d memorized that morning, thought at once about all those stories Ilsa had told her about Strike and Charlotte’s relationship. Ilsa had told her Strike had refused an invitation to go over to their house that evening for dinner, claiming that he had a prior arrangement with his sister. Robin found it hard to believe this, given Strike’s and Lucy’s recent row. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but she’d also wondered whether Strike wasn’t avoiding being in her company outside work hours.

  “You don’t suspect Irene, do you?”

  “Only of being a liar, a gossip and a compulsive attention-seeker,” said Strike. “I don’t think she’s bright enough to have abducted Margot Bamborough and not given herself away in forty years. On the other hand, lies are always interesting. Anything else catch your interest?”

  “Yes. There was something funny about that Leamington Spa story, or rather, Irene’s reaction when she heard Janice talking about it… I think Leamington Spa meant something to her. And it was odd that Janice hadn’t told her what that patient said. You’d think she definitely would have done, given that they’re best friends, and they both knew Margot, and they’ve stayed in touch all these years. Even if Janice thought that man Ramage was making it all up, why wouldn’t she tell Irene?”

  “Another good point,” said Strike, looking thoughtfully at the neo-classical façade of the National Maritime Museum as they drove past wide stretches of beautifully manicured emerald lawn. “What did you think of Janice?”

  “Well, when we were allowed to hear her speak, she seemed quite decent,” said Robin cautiously. “She seemed fair-minded about Margot and Douthwaite. Why she puts up with being treated as Irene’s skivvy, though…”