“You been on a diet?” asked Polworth, looking Strike up and down.
“Flu and food poisoning.”
“Oh, yeah, Lucy said you’d been ill.” Polworth jerked his head in the direction of Joan’s window. “How is she?”
“Not great,” said Strike.
“How long you down for?”
“Depends on the weather. Listen, seriously, I really appreciate everything you’ve been—”
“Shut up, you ponce.”
“Can I ask another favor?”
“Go on.”
“Persuade Ted to get a pint with you this lunchtime. He needs to get out of this house for a bit. He’ll do it if he knows I’m with her, but otherwise he won’t leave.”
“Consider it done,” said Polworth.
“You’re—”
“—a prince among men, yeah, I know I am. Arsenal through to the knockout stages, then?”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “Bayern Munich next, though.”
He’d missed watching his team qualify before Christmas, because he’d been tailing Shifty through the West End. The Champions League, which should have been a pleasure and a distraction, was failing to grip him as it usually did.
“Robin running things in London while you’re down here?”
“Yeah,” said Strike.
She’d texted him earlier, asking for a brief chat about the Bamborough case. He’d replied that he’d call her when he had a moment. He, too, had news on the case, but Margot Bamborough had been missing for nearly forty years and, like Kerenza the nurse, Strike was currently prioritizing the living.
When he’d finished his cigarette, they returned to the house to find Ted and Kerenza in conversation in the kitchen.
“She’d rather talk to you than to me today,” said Kerenza, smiling at Strike as she shrugged on her raincoat. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning, Ted.”
As she moved toward the back door, Polworth said,
“Ted, come and have a pint.”
“Oh, no, thanks, lad,” said Ted. “I’ll bide here just now.”
Kerenza stopped with her hand on the door knob.
“That’s a very good idea. Get a bit of fresh air, Ted—fresh water, today, I should say,” she added, as the rain clattered on the roof. “Bye-bye, now.”
She left. Ted required a little more persuasion, but finally agreed that he’d join Polworth for a sandwich at the Victory. Once they’d gone, Strike took the local paper off the table and carried it back into the sitting room.
He and Joan discussed the flooding, but the pictures of waves battering Mevagissey meant far less to her than they would have a couple of months ago. Strike could tell that Joan’s mind was on the personal, not the general.
“What does my horoscope say?” she asked, as he turned the page of the paper.
“I didn’t know you believed in that stuff, Joan.”
“Don’t know whether I do or not,” said Joan. “I always look, though.”
“You’re…” he said, trying to remember her birthday. He knew it was in the summer.
“Cancer,” she said, and then she gave a little laugh. “In more ways than one.”
Strike didn’t smile.
“‘Good time for shaking up your routine,’” he informed her, scanning her horoscope so he could censor out anything depressing, “‘so don’t dismiss new ideas out of hand. Jupiter retrograde encourages spiritual growth.’”
“Huh,” said Joan. After a short pause, she said, “I don’t think I’ll be here for my next birthday, Corm.”
The words hit him like a punch in the diaphragm.
“Don’t say that.”
“If I can’t say it to you, who can I say it to?”
Her eyes, which had always been a pale forget-me-not blue, were faded now. She’d never spoken to him like this before, as an equal. Always, she’d sought to stand slightly above him, so that from her perspective the six-foot-three soldier might still be her little boy.
“I can’t say it to Ted or Lucy, can I?” she said. “You know what they’re like.”
“Yeah,” he said, with difficulty.
“Afterward… you’ll look after Ted, won’t you? Make sure you see him. He does love you so much.”
Fuck.
For so long, she’d demanded a kind of falseness from all around her, a rose-tinted view of everything, and now at last she offered simple honesty and plain-speaking and he wished more than anything that he could be simply nodding along to news of some neighborhood scandal. Why hadn’t he visited them more often?
“I will, of course,” he said.
“I want the funeral at St. Mawes church,” she said quietly, “where I was christened. But I don’t want to be buried, because it’d have to be in the cemetery all the way up in Truro. Ted’ll wear himself out, traveling up and down, taking me flowers. I know him.
“We always said we wanted to be together, afterward, but we never made a plan and he won’t talk to me about it now. So, I’ve thought about it, Corm, and I want to be cremated. You’ll make sure this happens, won’t you? Because Ted starts crying every time I try and talk about it and Lucy just won’t listen.”
Strike nodded and tried to smile.
“I don’t want the family at the cremation. I hate cremations, the curtains and the conveyor belt. You say goodbye to me at the church, then take Ted to the pub and let the undertakers deal with the crematorium bit, all right? Then, after, you can pick up my ashes, take me out on Ted’s boat and scatter me in the sea. And when his turn comes, you can do the same for Ted, and we’ll be together. You and Lucy won’t want to be worrying about looking after graves all the way from London. All right?”
The plan had so much of the Joan he knew in it: it was full of practical kindness and forethought, but he hadn’t expected the final touch of the ashes floating away on the tide, no tombstone, no neat dates, instead a melding with the element that had dominated her and Ted’s lives, perched on their seaside town, in thrall to the ocean, except during that strange interlude where Ted, in revolt against his own father, had disappeared for several years into the military police.
“All right,” he said, with difficulty.
She sank back a little in her chair with an air of relief at having got this off her chest, and smiled at him.
“It’s so lovely, having you here.”
Over the past few days he’d become used to her short reveries and her non-sequiturs, so it was less of a surprise than it might have been to hear her say, a minute later,
“I wish I’d met your Robin.”
Strike, whose mind’s eye was still following Joan’s ashes into the sunset, pulled himself together.
“I think you’d like her,” he said. “I’m sure she’d like you.”
“Lucy says she’s pretty.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“Poor girl,” murmured Joan. He wondered why. Of course, the knife attack had been reported in the press, when Robin had given evidence against the Shacklewell Ripper.
“Funny, you talking about horoscopes,” Strike said, trying to ease Joan off Robin, and funerals, and death. “We’re investigating an old disappearance just now. The bloke who was in charge of the case…”
He’d never before shared details of an investigation with Joan, and he wondered why not, now he saw her rapt attention.
“But I remember that doctor!” she said, more animated than he had seen her in days. “Margot Bamborough, yes! She had a baby at home…”
“Well, that baby’s our client,” said Strike. “Her name’s Anna. She and her partner have got a holiday home in Falmouth.”
“That poor family,” said Joan. “Never knowing… and so the officer thought the answer was in the stars?”
“Yep,” said Strike. “Convinced the killer was a Capricorn.”
“Ted’s a Capricorn.”
“Thanks for the tip-off,” said Strike seriously, and she gave a little laugh. “D’you want more tea?”
W
hile the kettle boiled, Strike checked his texts. Barclay had sent an update on Two-Times’ girlfriend, but the most recent message was from an unknown number, and he opened it first.
Hi Cormoran, it’s your half-sister, Prudence Donleavy, here. Al gave me your number. I do hope you’ll take this in the spirit it’s meant. Let me firstly say that I absolutely understand and sympathize with your reasons for not wanting to join us for the Deadbeats anniversary/album party. You may or may not know that my own journey to a relationship with Dad has been in many ways a difficult one, but ultimately I feel that connecting with him—and, yes, forgiving him—has been an enriching experience. We all hope very much that you’ll reconsider—
“What’s the matter?” said Joan.
She’d followed him into the kitchen, shuffling, slightly stooped.
“What are you doing? I can fetch anything you want—”
“I was going to show you where I hide the chocolate biscuits. If Ted knows, he scoffs the lot, and the doctor’s worried about his blood pressure. What were you reading? I know that look. You were angry.”
He didn’t know whether her new appreciation for honesty would stretch as far as his father, but somehow, with the wind and rain whipping around them, an air of the confessional had descended upon the house. He told her about the text.
“Oh,” said Joan. She pointed at a Tupperware box on a top shelf. “The biscuits are in there.”
They returned to the sitting room with the biscuits, which she’d insisted he put on a plate. Some things never changed.
“You’ve never met Prudence, have you?” asked Joan, when she was resettled in her chair.
“Haven’t met Prudence, or the eldest, Maimie, or the youngest, Ed,” said Strike, trying to sound matter of fact.
Joan said nothing for a minute or so, then a great sigh inflated, then collapsed, her thin chest, and she said,
“I think you should go to your father’s party, Corm.”
“Why?” said Strike. The monosyllable rang in his ears with an adolescent, self-righteous fury. To his slight surprise, she smiled at him.
“I know what went on,” she said. “He behaved very badly, but he’s still your father.”
“No, he isn’t,” said Strike. “Ted’s my dad.”
He’d never said it out loud before. Tears filled Joan’s eyes.
“He’d love to hear you say that,” she said softly. “Funny, isn’t it… years ago, years and years, I was just a girl, and I went to see a proper gypsy fortune teller. They used to camp up the road. I thought she’d tell me lots of nice things. You expect them to, don’t you? You’ve paid your money. D’you know what she said?”
Strike shook his head.
“‘You’ll never have children.’ Just like that. Straight out.”
“Well, she got that wrong, didn’t she?” said Strike.
Tears started again in Joan’s bleached eyes. Why had he never said these things before, Strike asked himself. It would have been so easy to give her pleasure, and instead he’d held tightly to his divided loyalties, angry that he had to choose, to label, and in doing so, to betray. He reached for her hand and she squeezed it surprisingly tightly.
“You should go to that party, Corm. I think your father’s at the heart of… of a lot of things. I wish,” she added, after a short pause, “you had someone to look after you.”
“Doesn’t work that way these days, Joan. Men are supposed to be able to look after themselves—in more ways than one,” he added, smiling.
“Pretending you don’t need things… it’s just silly,” she said quietly. “What does your horoscope say?”
He picked up the paper again and cleared his throat.
“‘Sagittarius: with your ruler retrograde, you may find you aren’t your usual happy-go-lucky self…’”
32
Where euer yet I be, my secrete aide
Shall follow you.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Robin, who was sitting in her Land Rover close to the nondescript house in Stoke Newington that Strike had watched before Christmas, had seen nothing of interest since arriving in the street at nine o’clock that morning. As rain drizzled down her windscreen she half-wished she smoked, just for something to do.
She’d identified the blonde owner-occupier of the house online. Her name was Elinor Dean, and she was a divorcée who lived alone. Elinor was definitely home, because Robin had seen her pass in front of a window two hours previously, but the squally weather seemed to be keeping her inside. Nobody had visited the house all day, least of all Shifty’s Boss. Perhaps they were relatives, after all, and his pre-Christmas visit was simply one of those things you did in the festive season: pay social debts, give presents, check in. The patting on the head might have been a private joke. It certainly didn’t seem to suggest anything sexual, criminal or deviant, which was what they were looking for.
Robin’s mobile rang.
“Hi.”
“Can you talk?” asked Strike.
He was walking down the steeply sloping street where Ted and Joan’s house lay, leaning on the collapsible walking stick he’d brought with him, knowing that the roads would be wet and possibly slippery. Ted was back in the house; they’d just helped Joan upstairs for a nap, and Strike, who wanted to smoke and didn’t much fancy the shed again, had decided to go for a short walk in the relentless rain.
“Yes,” said Robin. “How’s Joan?”
“Same,” said Strike. He didn’t feel like talking about it. “You said you wanted a Bamborough chat.”
“Yeah,” said Robin. “I’ve got good news, no news and bad news.”
“Bad first,” said Strike.
The sea was still turbulent, spray exploding into the air above the wall of the dock. Turning right, he headed into the town.
“The Ministry of Justice isn’t going to let you interview Creed. The letter arrived this morning.”
“Ah,” said Strike. The teeming rain ripped through the bluish haze of his cigarette smoke, destroying it. “Well, can’t say I’m surprised. What’s it say?”
“I’ve left it back at the office,” said Robin, “but the gist is that his psychiatrists agree non-cooperation isn’t going to change at this stage.”
“Right,” said Strike. “Well, it was always a long shot.”
But Robin could hear his disappointment, and empathized. They were five months into the case, they had no new leads worth the name, and now that the possibility of interviewing Creed had vanished, she somehow felt that she and Strike were pointlessly searching rockpools, while yards away the great white slid away, untouchable, into dark water.
“And I went back to Amanda White, who’s now Amanda Laws, who thought she saw Margot at the printers’ window. She wanted money to talk, remember? I offered her expenses if she wants to come to the office—she’s in London, it wouldn’t be much—and she’s thinking it over.”
“Big of her,” grunted Strike. “What’s the good news?” he asked.
“Anna’s persuaded her stepmother to speak to us. Cynthia.”
“Really?”
“Yes, but alone. Roy still doesn’t know anything about us,” said Robin. “Cynthia’s meeting us behind his back.”
“Well, Cynthia’s something,” said Strike. “A lot, actually,” he added, after a moment’s reflection.
His feet were taking him automatically toward the pub, his wet trouser leg chilly on his remaining ankle.
“Where are we going to meet her?”
“It can’t be at their house, because Roy doesn’t know. She’s suggesting Hampton Court, because she works part time as a guide there.”
“A guide, eh? Reminds me: any news of Postcard?”
“Barclay’s at the gallery today,” said Robin. “He’s going to try and get pictures of her.”
“And what’re Morris and Hutchins up to?” Strike asked, now walking carefully up the wide, slippery ste
ps that led to the pub.
“Morris is on Two-Times’ girl, who hasn’t put a foot wrong—Two-Times really is out of luck this time—and Hutchins is on Twinkletoes. Speaking of which, you’re scheduled to submit a final report on Twinkletoes next Friday. I’ll see the client for you, shall I?”
“That’d be great, thanks,” said Strike, stepping inside the Victory with a sense of relief. The rain dripped off him as he removed his coat. “I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to get back. You probably saw, the trains have been suspended.”
“Don’t worry about the agency. We’ve got everything covered. Anyway, I haven’t finished giving you the Bamborough—oh, hang on,” said Robin.
“D’you need to go?”
“No, it’s fine,” said Robin.
She’d just seen Elinor Dean’s front door open. The plump blonde emerged wearing a hooded coat which, conveniently, circumscribed her field of vision. Robin slid out of the Land Rover, closed the door and set off in pursuit, still speaking on her mobile.
“Our blonde friend’s on the move,” she said quietly.
“Did you just say you’ve got more good news on Bamborough?” asked Strike.
He’d reached the bar, and by simply pointing, was able to secure himself a pint, which he paid for, then carried to the corner table at which he’d sat with Polworth in the summer.
“I have,” said Robin, turning the corner at the end of the road, the oblivious blonde walking ahead of her. “Wish I could say I’d found Douthwaite or Satchwell, but the last person to see Margot alive is something, right?”
“You’ve found Gloria Conti?” said Strike sharply.
“Don’t get too excited,” said Robin, still trudging along in the rain. Elinor seemed to be heading for the shops. Robin could see a Tesco in the distance. “I haven’t managed to speak to her yet, but I’m almost sure it’s her. I found the family in the 1961 census: mother, father, one older son and a daughter, Gloria, middle name Mary. By the looks of things, Gloria’s now in France, Nîmes, to be precise, and married to a Frenchman. She’s dropped the ‘Gloria,’ and she’s now going by Mary Jaubert. She’s got a Facebook page, but it’s private. I found her through a genealogical website. One of her English cousins is trying to put together a family tree. Right date of birth and everything.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 37