Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Some people need to be needed… and there might be a sense of obligation, if Irene was telling the truth about her and her husband helping Janice out financially when she needed it.”

  Strike spotted the pub Robin had chosen from a distance. Large and opulent-looking, with many balconies and awnings, not to mention window-baskets and coats of arms, it stood on the bank of the Thames. Robin parked and they proceeded past black iron bollards to the paved area where many wooden tables afforded a view over the river, in the midst of which a life-size black statue of the diminutive Lord Nelson faced the water.

  “See?” said Robin, “you can sit outside and smoke.”

  “Isn’t it a bit cold?” said Strike.

  “This coat’s padded. I’ll get the—”

  “No, I will,” said Strike firmly. “What d’you want?”

  “Just a lime and soda, please, as I’m driving.”

  As Strike walked into the pub, there was a sudden chorus of “Happy Birthday to You.” For a split-second, seeing helium balloons in the corner, he was horror-struck, thinking that Robin had brought him here for a surprise party; but a bare heartbeat later, it registered that he didn’t recognize a single face, and that the balloons formed the figure 80. A tiny woman with lavender hair was beaming at the top of a table full of family: flashes went off as she blew out the candles on a large chocolate cake. Applause and cheers followed, and a toddler blew a feathered whistle.

  Strike headed toward the bar, still slightly shaken, taking himself to task for having imagined, for a moment, that Robin would have arranged a surprise party for him. Even Charlotte, with whom he’d had the longest and closest relationship of his life, had never done that. Indeed, Charlotte had never allowed anything as mundane as his birthday to interfere with her own whims and moods. On Strike’s twenty-seventh, when she’d been going through one of her intermittent phases of either rampant jealousy, or rage at his refusal to give up the army (the precise causes of their many scenes and rows tended to blur in his mind), she’d thrown his wrapped gift out of a third-floor window in front of him.

  But, of course, there were other memories. His thirty-third birthday, for instance. He’d just been discharged from Selly Oak hospital, and was walking for the first time on a prosthesis, and Charlotte had taken him back to her flat in Notting Hill, cooked for him, and returned from the kitchen at the end of the meal holding two cups of coffee, stark naked and more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. He’d laughed and gasped at the same time. He hadn’t had sex for nearly two years. The night that had followed would probably never be forgotten by him, nor the way she had sobbed in his arms afterward, telling him that he was the only man for her, that she was afraid of what she felt, afraid that she was evil for not regretting his missing lower leg if it brought her back to him, if it meant that, at last, she could look after him as he had always looked after her. And close to midnight, Strike had proposed to her, and they’d made love again, and then talked through to dawn about how he was going to start his detective agency, and she’d told him she didn’t want a ring, that he was to save his money for his new career, at which he would be magnificent.

  Drinks and crisps purchased, Strike returned to Robin, who was sitting on an outside bench, hands in her pockets, looking glum.

  “Cheer up,” said Strike, speaking to himself as much as to her.

  “Sorry,” said Robin, though she didn’t really know why she was apologizing.

  He sat down beside her, rather than opposite, so both of them faced the river. There was a small shingle beach below them, and waves lapped the cold pebbles. On the opposite bank rose the steel-colored office blocks of Canary Wharf; to their left, the Shard. The river was the color of lead on this cold November day. Strike tore one of the crisp packets down the middle so that both could help themselves. Wishing she’d asked for coffee instead of a cold drink, Robin took a sip of her lime and soda, ate a couple of crisps, returned her hands to her pockets, then said,

  “I know this isn’t the attitude, but honestly… I don’t think we’re going to find out what happened to Margot Bamborough.”

  “What’s brought this on?”

  “I suppose Irene misremembering names… Janice going along with her, covering up the reason for the Christmas party row… it’s such a long time ago. People are under no obligation to tell the truth to us now, even if they can remember it. Factor in people getting wedded to old theories, like that whole thing about Gloria and the pill in Brenner’s mug, and people wanting to make themselves important, pretending to know things and… well, I’m starting to think we’re attempting the impossible here.”

  A wave of tiredness had swept over Robin while sitting in the cold, waiting for Strike, and in its wake had come hopelessness.

  “Pull yourself together,” said Strike bracingly. “We’ve already found out two big things the police never knew.” He pulled out his cigarettes, lit one, then said, “Firstly: there was a big stock of barbiturates on the premises where Margot worked. Secondly: Margot Bamborough might well have had an abortion.

  “Taking the barbiturates first,” he said, “are we overlooking something very obvious, which is that there were means on the premises to put someone to sleep?”

  “Margot wasn’t put to sleep,” said Robin, gloomily munching crisps. “She walked out of there.”

  “Only if we assume—”

  “—Gloria wasn’t lying. I know,” said Robin. “But how do she and Theo—because Theo’s still got to be in on it, hasn’t she? How did Gloria and Theo administer enough barbiturates to render Margot unconscious? Don’t forget, if Irene’s telling the truth, Margot wasn’t letting anyone else make her drinks at that point. And from what Janice said about dosage, you’d need a lot of pills to make someone actually unconscious.”

  “Well reasoned. So, going back to that little story about the pill in the tea—”

  “Didn’t you believe it?”

  “I did,” said Strike, “because it seems a totally pointless lie. It’s not interesting enough to make an exciting anecdote, is it, a single pill? It does reopen the question of whether Margot knew about or suspected Brenner’s addiction, though. She might’ve noticed him being odd in his manner. Downers would make him drowsy. Perhaps she’d seen he was slow on the uptake. Everything we’ve found out about Margot suggests that if she thought Brenner was behaving unprofessionally, or might be dangerous to patients, she’d have waded straight in and confronted him. And we’ve just heard a lot of interesting background on Brenner, who sounds like a traumatized, unhappy and lonely man. What if Margot threatened him with being struck off? Loss of status and prestige, to a man who has virtually nothing else in his life? People have killed for less.”

  “He left the surgery before she did, that night.”

  “What if he waited for her? Offered her a lift?”

  “If he did, I think she’d have been suspicious,” said Robin. “Not that he wanted to hurt her, but that he was going to shout at her, which would’ve been in character, from what we know of him. I’d rather have walked in the rain, personally. And she was a lot younger than him, and tall and fit. I can’t remember now where he lived…”

  “With his unmarried sister, about twenty minutes’ drive from the practice. The sister said he’d arrived home at the usual time. A dog-walking neighbor confirmed they’d seen him through the window round about eleven…

  “But I can think of one other possibility regarding those barbitu­rates,” Strike went on. “As Janice pointed out, they had street value, and by the sounds of it, Brenner had amassed a big stock of them. We’ve got to consider the possibility that some outsider knew there were valuable drugs on the premises, set out to nick them, and Margot got in the way.”

  “Which takes us back to Margot dying on the premises, which means—”

  “Gloria and Theo come back into the frame. Gloria and Theo might have planned to take the drugs themselves. And we’ve just heard—”

  “—abou
t the drug-dealing brother,” said Robin.

  “Why the skeptical tone?”

  “Irene was determined to have a go at Gloria, wasn’t she?”

  “She was, yeah, but the fact that Gloria had a drug-dealing brother is information worth knowing, as is the fact that there were a stack of drugs on the premises that were ripe for nicking. Brenner wouldn’t have wanted to admit he had them in the first place, so probably wouldn’t have reported the theft, which makes for a situation open to exploitation.”

  “A criminal brother doesn’t make a person criminal in themselves.”

  “Agreed, but it makes me even keener to find Gloria. The term ‘person of interest’ fits her pretty accurately…

  “And then there’s the abortion,” said Strike. “If Irene’s telling the truth about the nursing home calling to confirm the appointment—”

  “If,” said Robin.

  “I don’t think that was a lie,” said Strike. “For the opposite reason to the pill in Brenner’s cup. That lie’s too big. People don’t make things like that up. Anyway, she told Janice about it at the time, and their little row about patient confidentiality rings true. And C. B. Oakden must’ve based the story on something. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that tip-off came from Irene. She doesn’t strike me as a woman who’d turn down a chance to speculate or gossip.”

  Robin said nothing. She’d only once in her life had to face the possibility that she might be pregnant, and could still remember the relief that had flooded her when it became clear that she wasn’t, and wouldn’t have to face still more contact with strangers, and another intimate procedure, more blood, more pain.

  Imagine aborting your husband’s child, she thought. Could Margot really have done that, when she already had that child’s sister at home? What had been going through her mind, a month before she disappeared? Perhaps she’d been quietly breaking down, like Talbot? The past few years had taught Robin how very mysterious human beings were, even to those who thought they knew them best. Infidelity and bigamy, kinks and fetishes, theft and fraud, stalking and harassment: she’d now delved into so many secret lives she’d lost count. Nor did she hold herself superior to any of the deceived and duped who came to the agency, craving truth. Hadn’t she thought she knew her own husband back to front? How many hundreds of nights had they lain entwined like Siamese twins, whispering confidences and sharing laughter in the dark? She’d spent nearly half her life with Matthew, and not until a hard, bright diamond ear stud had appeared in their bed had she realized that he was living a life apart, and was not, and perhaps never had been, the man she thought she knew.

  “You don’t want to think she had an abortion,” said Strike, correctly deducing at least part of the reason for Robin’s silence. She didn’t answer, instead asking,

  “You haven’t heard back from her friend Oonagh, have you?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said Strike. “Yeah, I got an email yesterday. She is a retired vicar, and she’d be delighted to meet us when she comes down to London to do some Christmas shopping. Date to be confirmed.”

  “That’s good,” said Robin. “You know, I’d like to talk to someone who actually liked Margot.”

  “Gupta liked her,” said Strike. “And Janice, she’s just said so.”

  Robin ripped open the second bag of crisps.

  “Which is what you’d expect, isn’t it?” she said. “That people would at least pretend they liked Margot, after what happened. But Irene didn’t. Don’t you find it a bit… excessive… to be holding on to that much resentment, forty years later? She really put the boot in. Wouldn’t you think it was… I don’t know, more politic…”

  “To claim to be friends?”

  “Yes… but maybe Irene knew there were far too many witnesses to the fact that they weren’t friends. What did you think of the anonymous notes? True or false?”

  “Good question,” said Strike, scratching his chin. “Irene really enjoyed telling us Margot had been called ‘the c-word,’ but ‘hell­fire’ doesn’t sound like the kind of thing she’d invent. I’d have expected something more in the ‘uppity bitch’ line.”

  He drew out his notebook again, and scanned the notes he’d made of the interview.

  “Well, we still need to check these leads out, for what they’re worth. Why don’t you follow up Charlie Ramage and Leamington Spa, and I’ll look into the Bennie-abusing Applethorpe?”

  “You just did it again,” said Robin.

  “Did what?”

  “Smirked when you said ‘Bennies.’ What’s so funny about benzedrine?”

  “Oh—” Strike chuckled. “I was just reminded of something my Uncle Ted told me. Did you ever watch Crossroads?”

  “What’s Crossroads?”

  “I always forget how much younger you are,” Strike said. “It was a daytime soap opera and it had a character in it called Benny. He was—well, these days you’d call him special needs. Simple. He wore a wooly hat. Iconic character, in his way.”

  “You were thinking of him?” said Robin. It didn’t seem particularly amusing.

  “No, but you need to know about him to understand the next bit. I assume you know about the Falklands War.”

  “I’m younger than you, Strike. I’m not pig-ignorant.”

  “OK, right. So, the British troops who went over there—Ted was there, 1982—nicknamed the locals ‘Bennies,’ after the character on Crossroads. Command gets wind of this, and the order comes down the line, ‘Stop calling these people we’ve just liberated Bennies.’ So,” said Strike, grinning, “They started calling them ‘Stills.’”

  “‘Stills’? What does ‘Stills’ mean?”

  “‘Still Bennies,’” said Strike, and he let out a great roar of laughter. Robin laughed, too, but mostly at Strike’s amusement. When his guffaws had subsided, both watched the river for a few seconds, drinking and, in Strike’s case, smoking, until he said,

  “I’m going to write to the Ministry of Justice. Apply for permission to visit Creed.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We’ve got to try. The authorities always thought Creed assaulted or killed more women than he was done for. There was jewelry in his house and bits of clothing nobody ever identified. Just because everyone thinks it’s Creed—”

  “—doesn’t mean it isn’t,” agreed Robin, who followed the tortured logic perfectly.

  Strike sighed, rubbed his face, cigarette still poking out of his mouth, then said,

  “Want to see exactly how crazy Talbot was?”

  “Go on.”

  Strike pulled the leather-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. Robin opened it and turned the pages in silence.

  They were covered in strange drawings and diagrams. The writing was small, meticulously neat but cramped. There was much underlining and circling of phrases and symbols. The pentagram recurred. The pages were littered with names, but none connected with the case: Crowley, Lévi, Adams and Schmidt.

  “Huh,” she said quietly, stopping on a particularly heavily embellished page on which a goat’s head with a third eye looked balefully up at her. “Look at this…”

  She bent closer.

  “He’s using astrological symbols.”

  “He’s what?” said Strike, frowning down at the page she was perusing.

  “That’s Libra,” said Robin, pointing at a symbol toward the bottom of the page. “It’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.”

  “He’s using bloody star signs?” said Strike, pulling the book back toward him, looking so disgusted that Robin started to laugh again.

  Strike scanned the page. Robin was right. The circles drawn around the goat’s head told him something else, too.

  “He’s calculated the full horoscope for the moment he thought she was abducted,” he said. “Look at the date there. The eleventh of October 1974. Half past six in the evening… fuck’s sake. Astrology… he was out of his tree.”

  “What’s
your sign?” asked Robin, trying to work it out.

  “No idea.”

  “Oh sod off,” said Robin.

  He looked at her, taken aback.

  “You’re being affected!” she said. “Everyone knows their star sign. Don’t pretend to be above it.”

  Strike grinned reluctantly, took a large drag on his cigarette, exhaled, then said,

  “Sagittarius, Scorpio rising, with the sun in the first house.”

  “You’re—” Robin began to laugh. “Did you just pull that out of your backside, or is it real?”

  “Of course, it’s not fucking real,” said Strike. “None of it’s real, is it? But yeah. That’s what my natal horoscope says. Stop bloody laughing. Remember who my mother was. She loved all that shit. One of her best mates did my full horoscope for her when I was born. I should have recognized that straight off,” he said, pointing at the goat drawing. “But I haven’t been through this properly yet, haven’t had time.”

  “So what does having the sun in the first house mean?”

  “It means nothing, it’s all bollocks.”

  Robin could tell that he didn’t want to admit that he’d remembered, which made her laugh some more. Half-annoyed, half-amused, he muttered,

  “Independent. Leadership.”

  “Well—”

  “It’s all bollocks, and we’ve got enough mystic crap swimming round this case without adding star signs. The medium and the holy place, Talbot and Baphomet—”

  “—Irene and her broken Margot Fonteyn,” said Robin.

  “Irene and her broken fucking Margot Fonteyn,” Strike muttered, rolling his eyes.

  A fine shower of icy rain began to fall, speckling the table top and over Talbot’s notebook, which Strike closed before the ink could run. In unspoken agreement, both got up and headed back toward the Land Rover.

  The lavender-haired old lady who shared Strike’s birthday was now being helped into a nearby Toyota by what looked like two daughters. All around her car stood family, smiling and talking under umbrellas. Just for a moment, as he pulled himself back inside the Land Rover, Strike wondered where he’d be if he lived to eighty, and who’d be there with him.