Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  Even after being plied with gin by Hutchins, who’d succeeded in befriending him at the rifle club, Shifty had remained as close lipped as ever about the hold he had over his boss, so it was time, Strike had decided, to start tailing SB himself. It was just possible that the CEO, a rotund, pinstriped man with a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, was still indulging in the blackmailable behavior that Shifty had uncovered and that had leveraged him into a promotion that neither Shifty’s CV, nor his personality, justified.

  Strike was sure Shifty wasn’t exploiting a simple case of infidelity. SB’s current wife had the immaculate, plastic sheen of a doll newly removed from cellophane and Strike suspected it would take more than her husband having an affair to make her relinquish her taloned grip on a black American Express card, especially as she’d been married barely two years and had no children to guarantee a generous settlement.

  Christmas tree lights twinkled in almost every window surrounding Strike. The roof of the house beside him had been hung with brilliant blue-white icicles that burned the retina if looked at too long. Wreaths on doors, glass panels decorated with fake snow and the sparkle of orange, red and green reflected in the dirty puddles all reminded Strike that he really did need to start buying Christmas gifts to take to Cornwall.

  Joan had been released from hospital that morning, her drugs adjusted, and determined to get home and start preparing for the family festivities. Strike would need to buy presents not only for Joan and Ted but for his sister, brother-in-law and nephews. This was an irksome extra chore, given the amount of work the agency currently had on its books. Then he reminded himself that he had to buy something for Robin, too, something better than flowers. Strike, who disliked shopping in general, and buying gifts in particular, reached for his cigarettes to ward off a dim sense of persecution.

  Having lit up, Strike took from his pocket the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? which Robin had given him, but which he hadn’t yet had time to read. Small tags marked the places Robin thought might be of some interest to the investigation.

  With a quick glance at the still-closed front door of the house he was watching, Strike opened the book and skim-read a couple of pages, looking up at regular intervals to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged.

  The first chapter, which Robin hadn’t marked, but which Strike flicked through anyway, dealt summarily with Margot’s childhood and adolescence. Unable to gain access to anybody with particularly clear memories of his subject, Oakden had to fall back on generalities, supposition and a good deal of padding. Thus Strike learned that Margot Bamborough “would have dreamed of leaving poverty behind,” “would have been caught up in the giddy atmosphere of the 1960s” and “would have been aware of the possibilities for consequence-free sex offered by the contraceptive pill.” Word count was boosted by the information that the mini-skirt had been popularized by Mary Quant, that London was the heart of a thriving music scene and that the Beatles had appeared on America’s Ed Sullivan Show around the time of Margot’s nineteenth birthday. “Margot would have been excited by the possibilities offered to the working classes in this new, egalitarian era,” C. B. Oakden informed his readers.

  Chapter two ushered in Margot’s arrival at the Playboy Club, and here, the sense of strain that had suffused the previous chapter vanished. C. B. Oakden evidently found Playboy Bunny Margot a far more inspiring subject than child Margot, and he devoted many paragraphs to the sense of freedom and liberation she would have felt on lacing herself tightly into her Bunny costume, putting on false ears and judiciously padding the cups of her costume to ensure that her breasts appeared of sufficient fullness to satisfy her employer’s stringent demands. Writing eleven years after her disappearance, Oakden had managed to track down a couple of Bunny Girls who remembered Margot. Bunny Lisa, who was now married with two children, reminisced about having “a good laugh” with her, and being “devastated” by her disappearance. Bunny Rita, who ran her own marketing business, said that she was “really bright, obviously going places,” and thought “it must’ve been dreadful for her poor family.”

  Strike glanced up again at the front of the house into which SB had disappeared. Still no sign of him. Turning back to C. B. Oakden, the bored Strike skipped ahead to the first place Robin had marked as of interest.

  After her successful stint at the Playboy Club, the playful and flirtatious Margot found it hard to adapt to the life of a general practitioner. At least one employee at the St. John’s practice says her manner was out of place in the setting of a consulting room.

  “She didn’t keep them at a proper distance, that was the trouble. She wasn’t from a background that had a lot of professional people. A doctor’s got to hold himself above the patients.

  “She recommended that book The Joy of Sex, to a woman who went to see her. I heard people in the waiting room talking about it, after. Giggling, you know. A doctor shouldn’t be telling people to read things like that. It reflects poorly on the whole practice. I was embarrassed for her.

  “The one who was keen on her, the young fellow who kept coming back to see her, buying her chocolates and what have you—if she was telling people about different sex positions, you can see how men got the wrong idea, can’t you?”

  There followed several paragraphs that had clearly been cribbed from the press, covering the suicide of Steve Douthwaite’s married ex-girlfriend, his sudden flight from his job and the fact that Lawson had re-interviewed him several times. Making the most of his scant material, Oakden managed to suggest that Douthwaite had been at best disreputable, at worst, dangerous: a feckless drifter and an unprincipled lady’s man, in whose vicinity women had a habit of dying or disappearing. It was with a slight snort of sudden amusement, therefore, that Strike read the words,

  Now calling himself Stevie Jacks, Douthwaite currently works at Butlin’s holiday camp in Clacton-on-Sea—

  After glancing up again to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged, Strike read on:

  where he runs events for the campers by day and performs in the cabaret by night. His “Longfellow Serenade” is a particular hit with the ladies. Dark-haired Douthwaite/Jacks remains a handsome man, and clearly popular with female campers.

  “I’ve always liked singing,” he tells me in the bar after the show. “I was in a band when I was younger but it broke up. I came to Butlin’s once when I was a kid, with my foster family. I always thought it looked a laugh, being a Redcoat. Plenty of big-time entertainers got their start here, you know.”

  When talk turns to Margot Bamborough, however, a very different side to this cheeky cabaret singer appears.

  “The press wrote a load of balls. I never bought her chocolates or anything else, that was just made up to make me look like some kind of creep. I had a stomach ulcer and headaches. I’d been through a bad time.”

  After refusing to explain why he’d changed his name, Douthwaite left the bar.

  His colleagues at the holiday camp expressed their shock that “Stevie” had been questioned by the police over the disappearance of the young doctor.

  “He never told us anything about it,” said Julie Wilkes, 22. “I’m quite shocked, actually. You’d think he’d have told us. He never said ‘Jacks’ wasn’t his real name, either.”

  Oakden treated his readers to a brief history of Butlin’s, and ended the chapter with a paragraph of speculation on the opportunities a predatory man might find at a holiday camp.

  Strike lit another cigarette, then flicked ahead to the second of Robin’s markers, where a short passage dealt with Jules Bayliss, husband of the office-cleaner-turned-social-worker, Wilma. The only piece of new information here was that convicted rapist Bayliss had been released on bail in January 1975, a full three months after Margot went missing. Nevertheless, Oakden asserted that Bayliss “would have got wind” of the fact that Margot was trying to persuade his wife to leave him, “would have been angry that the doctor was pressurizing his wife to break up the family” and “would have
had many criminal associations in his own community.” The police, Oakden informed his readers, “would have looked carefully into the movements of any of Bayliss’s friends or relatives on the eleventh of October, so we must conclude,” he finished, anticlimactically, “that no suspicious activity was uncovered.”

  Robin’s third tab marked the pages dealing with the abortion at Bride Street Nursing Home. Oakden ushered in this part of his story with considerable fanfare, informing his readers that he was about to reveal facts that had never before been made public.

  What followed was interesting to Strike only in as far as it proved that an abortion had definitely taken place on the fourteenth of September 1974, and that the name given by the patient had been Margot Bamborough. As proof, Oakden reprinted photographs of the Bride Street medical records that had been provided by an unidentified employee of the nursing home, which had closed down in 1978. Strike supposed the unnamed employee would no longer have been fearful for their job when Oakden had come offering money for information in the eighties. The unnamed employee also told Oakden that the woman who had had the procedure didn’t resemble the picture of Margot that had subsequently appeared in the papers.

  Oakden then posed a series of rhetorical questions that he and his foolhardy publishers appeared to think circumvented libel laws. Was it possible that the woman who had the abortion had used Margot’s name with her support and consent? In which case, who might Margot have been most eager to assist? Was it not most likely that a Roman Catholic would be particularly worried about anyone finding out she had had an abortion? Was it not also the case that complications could arise from such a procedure? Might Margot have returned to the vicinity of the Bride Street Nursing Home on the eleventh of October to visit somebody who had been readmitted to the clinic? Or to ask advice on behalf of that person? Could Margot possibly have been abducted, not from Clerkenwell, but from a street or two away from Dennis Creed’s basement?

  To which Strike answered mentally, no, and you deserved to have your book pulped, pal. The string of events suggested by Oakden had clearly been put together in a determined attempt to place Margot in the vicinity of Creed’s basement on the night she disappeared. “Complications” were necessary to explain Margot returning to the nursing home a month after the abortion, but they couldn’t be Margot’s own, given that she was fit, well and working at the St. John’s practice all the way up to her disappearance. Once attributed to a best friend, however, undefined “complications” could serve two purposes: to give Margot a reason to head back to the clinic to visit Oonagh, and Oonagh a reason to lie about both women’s whereabouts that night. All in all, Strike considered Oakden lucky not to have been sued, and surmised that fear of the resultant publicity was all that had held Roy and Oonagh back.

  He flicked forward to Robin’s fourth tab and, after checking again that the front door of the house he was watching remained closed, read the next marked passage.

  “I saw her as clearly as I can see you now. She was standing at that window, pounding on it, as if she wanted to attract attention. I especially remember, because I was reading The Other Side of Midnight at the time and just thinking about women and what they go through, you know, and I looked up and I saw her.

  “If I close my eyes, she’s there, it’s like a snapshot in my head and it’s haunted me ever since, to be honest. People have said to me since, ‘you’re making it up’ or ‘you need to let it go,’ but I’m not changing my story just because other people don’t believe it. What would that make me?”

  The small printers who then occupied the top floor of the building was run by husband and wife team Arnold and Rachel Sawyer. Police accepted their assurance that Margot Bamborough had never set foot on the premises, and that the woman seen by Mandy that night was probably Mrs. Sawyer herself, who claimed one of the windows needed to be hit to close properly.

  However, an odd connection between A&R Printing and Margot Bamborough went unnoticed by police. A&R’s first major printing job was for the now-closed nightclub Drudge—the very nightclub for which Paul Satchwell, Margot’s lover, had designed a risqué mural. Satchwell’s designs subsequently featured on flyers printed by A&R Printing, so it is likely that he and the Sawyers would have been in touch with each other.

  Might this suggest…

  “Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, turning the page and dropping his eyes to a brief paragraph Robin had marked with a thick black line.

  However, ex-neighbor Wayne Truelove thinks that Paul Satchwell subsequently went abroad.

  “He talked to me about going traveling. I don’t think he was making a lot of money from his art and after the police questioned him, he told me he was thinking of clearing out for a bit. Probably smart, going away.”

  Robin’s fifth and final tab came toward the end of the book, and after again checking that SB’s car was parked where he had left it, and that the front door of the house had not opened, Strike read:

  A month after Margot’s disappearance, her husband Roy visited the St. John’s practice. Roy, who had been unable to conceal his bad temper at the practice barbecue that summer, was unsurprisingly subdued on this visit.

  Dorothy remembers: “He wanted to speak to us all, to thank us for cooperating with the police. He looked ill. Hardly surprising.

  “We’d boxed up her personal effects because we had a locum working out of her room. The police had already searched it. We put her personal effects together. There was hand cream and her framed degree certificate and a photo of him, Roy, holding their daughter. He looked through the box and got a bit emotional, but then he picked up this thing that she’d had on her desk. It was one of those little wooden figures, like a Viking. He said “Where did this come from? Where did she get this?” None of us knew, but I thought he seemed upset by it.

  “He probably thought a man had given it her. Of course, the police were looking into her love life by then. Awful thing, not to be able to trust your wife.”

  Strike glanced up yet again at the house, saw no change, and flicked to the end of the book, which concluded in a final burst of speculation, supposition and half-baked theory. On the one hand, Oakden implied that Margot had brought tragedy on herself, that fate had punished her for being too sexual and too bold, for cramming herself into a corset and bunny ears, for hoisting herself hubristically out of the class into which she had been born. On the other hand, she seemed to have lived her life surrounded by would-be killers. No man associated with Margot escaped Oakden’s suspicion, whether it was “charming but feckless Stevie Douthwaite-turned-Jacks,” “domineering blood specialist Roy Phipps,” “resentful rapist Jules Bayliss,” “hot-tempered womanizer Paul Satchwell” or “notorious sex monster Dennis Creed.”

  Strike was on the point of closing the book when he noticed a line of darker page edges in the middle, suggesting photographs, and opened it again.

  Other than the familiar press headshot and the picture of Margot and Oonagh in their Bunny Girl costumes—Oonagh curvaceous and grinning broadly, Margot statuesque, with a cloud of fair hair—there were only three photos. All were of poor quality and featured Margot only incidentally.

  The first was captioned: “The author, his mother and Margot.” Square-jawed, iron-gray-haired, and wearing winged glasses, Dorothy Oakden stood facing the camera with her arm around a skinny freckle-faced boy with a pageboy haircut, who had screwed up his face into a grimace that distorted his features. Strike was reminded of Luke, his eldest nephew. Behind the Oakdens was a long expanse of striped lawn and, in the distance, a sprawling house with many pointed gables. Objects appeared to be protruding out of the lawn close to the house: upon closer examination, Strike concluded that they were the beginnings of walls or columns: it looked as though a summerhouse was under construction.

  Walking across the lawn behind Dorothy and Carl, unaware that she was being photographed, was Margot Bamborough, barefooted, wearing denim shorts and a T-shirt, carrying a plate and smiling at somebody out of
shot. Strike deduced that this picture had been taken at the staff barbecue Margot had organized. The Phipps house was certainly grander than he’d imagined.

  After looking up once more to check that SB’s car remained parked where he’d left it, Strike turned to the last two pictures, both of which featured the St. John’s practice Christmas party.

  Tinsel had been draped over the reception desk and the waiting room cleared of chairs, which had been stacked in corners. Strike searched for Margot in both pictures and found her, baby Anna in her arms, talking to a tall black woman he assumed was Wilma Bayliss. In the corner of the picture was a slim, round-eyed woman with feathered brown hair, who Strike thought might be a young Janice.

  In the second picture, all heads were turned away from the camera or partially obscured, except one. A gaunt, unsmiling older man in a suit, with his hair slicked back, was the only person who seemed to have been given notice that the picture was about to be taken. The flash had turned his eyes red. The picture was captioned “Margot and Dr. Joseph Brenner,” though only the back of Margot’s head was visible.

  In the corner of this picture were three men who, judging from their coats and jackets, had just arrived at the party. The darkness of their clothing made a solid block of black on the right-hand side of the photo. All had their backs to the camera, but the largest, whose face was slightly turned to the left, displayed one long black sideburn, a large ear, the tip of a fleshy nose and a drooping eye. His left hand was raised in the act of scratching his face. He was wearing a large gold ring featuring a lion’s head.

  Strike examined this picture until noises out on the street made him look up. SB had just emerged from the house. A plump blonde in carpet slippers was standing on her doormat. She raised a hand and patted SB gently on the top of the head, as you would pet a child or a dog. Smiling, SB bade her farewell, then turned and walked back toward his Mercedes.