Robin recalled the picture of young Roy in the press: the sensitive face, the floppy hair, the poet’s eyes. Many women found injury and illness romantic in a handsome man. Hadn’t Matthew, in his worst effusions of jealousy against Strike, invoked his amputated leg, the warrior’s wound against which he, whole-bodied and fit, felt unable to compete?
“You might not believe this, but as far as I was concerned at seventeen, the best thing about Roy was Margot! No, I thought she was marvelous, so—so fashionable and, you know, lots of opinions and things…
“She asked me over for dinner, after she heard I plowed all my exams. Well, I hero-worshipped her, so I was thrilled. I poured my heart out, told her I couldn’t face resits, I just wanted to get out in the real world and earn my own money. And she said, ‘Look, you’re wonderful with children, how about coming and looking after my baby when I go back to work? I’ll get Roy to do up the rooms over the garage for you.’
“My parents were livid,” said Cynthia, with another brave but unsuccessful stab at a laugh. “They were furious with her, and Roy, although actually, he didn’t want me there in the first place, because he wanted Margot to stay at home and look after Anna herself. Mummy and Daddy said she was just after cheap labor. These days I do see it more from their point of view. I’m not sure I’d have been delighted if a woman had persuaded one of my girls to leave school and move in with them, and look after their baby. But no, I loved Margot. I was excited.”
Cynthia fell silent for a moment, a faraway look in her doleful eyes, and Robin wondered whether she was thinking about the huge and unalterable consequences of accepting the job as nanny, which instead of being a springboard to her own independent life had placed her in a house she would never leave, led to her raising Margot’s child as her own, sleeping with Margot’s husband, forever stuck in the shadow of the doctor she claimed to have loved. What was it like to live with an absence that huge?
“My parents wanted me to go away after Margot disappeared. They didn’t like me being alone at the house with Roy, because people were starting to gossip. There were even hints in the press, but I swear to you on the lives of my children,” said Cynthia, with a kind of dull finality, “there was nothing between Roy and me, ever, before Margot disappeared, and not for a long time afterward, either. I stayed for Anna, because I couldn’t bear to leave her… she’d become my daughter!”
She hadn’t, said the implacable voice in Robin’s head. And you should have told her so.
“Roy didn’t date anyone for a long time after Margot disappeared. Then there was a colleague at work for a while,” Cynthia’s thin face flushed again, “but it only lasted a few months. Anna didn’t like her.
“I had a kind of on-off boyfriend, but he packed me in. He said it was like dating a married woman with a child, because I put Anna and Roy first, always.
“And then I suppose…” said Cynthia shakily, one hand balled in a fist, the other clutching it, “… over time… I realized I’d fallen in love with Roy. I never dreamed he’d want to be with me, though. Margot was so clever, such a—such a big personality, and he was so much older than me, so much more intelligent and sophisticated…
“One evening, after I’d put Anna to bed, I was about to go back to my rooms and he asked me what had happened with Will, my boyfriend, and I said it was over, and he asked what had happened, and we got talking, and he said… he said, ‘You’re a very special person and you deserve far better than him.’ And then… then, we had a drink…
“That was four years after she’d disappeared,” Cynthia repeated. “I was eighteen when she vanished and I was twenty-two when Roy and I… admitted we had feelings for each other. We kept it secret, obviously. It was another three years before Roy could get a death certificate for Margot.”
“That must have been very hard,” said Strike.
Cynthia looked at him for a moment, unsmiling. She seemed to have aged since arriving at the table.
“I’ve had nightmares about Margot coming back and throwing me out of the house for nearly forty years,” she said, and she tried to laugh. “I’ve never told Roy. I don’t want to know whether he dreams about her, too. We don’t talk about her. It’s the only way to cope. We’d said everything we had to say to the police, to each other, to the rest of the family. We’d raked it all over, hours and hours of talking. ‘It’s time to close the door,’ that’s how Roy put it. He said, ‘We’ve left the door open long enough. She’s not coming back.’
“There were a couple of spiteful things said in the press, you know, when we got married. ‘Husband of vanished doctor marries young nanny.’ It’s always going to sound sordid, isn’t it? Roy said not to mind them. My parents were appalled by the whole thing. It was only when I had Jeremy that they came around.
“We never meant to mislead Anna. We were waiting… I don’t know… trying to find the right moment, to explain… but how are you supposed to do it? She used to call me ‘Mummy,’” whispered Cynthia, “she was h- happy, she was a completely happy little girl, but then those children at school told her about Margot and it ruined every—”
From somewhere close by came a loud synthesizer version of “Greensleeves.” All three of them looked startled until Cynthia, laughing her snorting laugh, said, “It’s my phone!” She pulled the mobile from a deep pocket in her dress and answered it.
“Roy?” she said.
Robin could hear Roy talking angrily from where she sat. Cynthia looked suddenly alarmed. She tried to get up, but stepped on the hem of her dress and tripped forwards. Trying to disentangle herself, she said,
“No, I’m—oh, she hasn’t. Oh, God—Roy, I didn’t want to tell you because—no—yes, I’m still with them!”
Finally managing to free herself from both dress and table, Cynthia staggered away and out of the room. The headdress she’d been wearing slid limply off her seat. Robin stooped to pick it up, put it back on the seat of Cynthia’s chair and looked up to see Strike watching her.
“What?” asked Robin.
He was about to answer when Cynthia reappeared. She looked stricken.
“Roy knows—Anna’s told him. He wants you to come back to Broom House.”
36
He oft finds med’cine who his grief imparts;
But double griefs afflict concealing hearts,
As raging flames who striveth to suppress.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Cynthia hurried away to change out of her Anne Boleyn costume and reappeared ten minutes later in a pair of poorly fitting jeans, a gray sweater and trainers. She appeared extremely anxious as they walked together back through the palace, setting a fast pace that Strike found challenging on cobblestones still slippery with the rain which had temporarily ceased, but the heavy gray clouds, gilt-edged though they were, promised an imminent return. Glancing upward as they passed back through the gatehouse of the inner court, Robin’s eye was caught by the gleaming gold accents on the astronomical clock, and noticed that the sun was in Margot’s sign of Aquarius.
“I’ll see you there,” said Cynthia breathlessly, as they approached the car park, and without waiting for an answer she half-ran toward a blue Mazda3 in the distance.
“This is going to be interesting,” said Robin.
“Certainly is,” said Strike.
“Grab the map,” said Robin, once both were back in the car. The old Land Rover didn’t have a functioning radio, let alone satnav. “You’ll have to navigate.”
“What d’you think of her?” asked Strike, while he looked up Church Road in Ham.
“She seems all right.”
Robin became aware that Strike was looking at her, as he had in the café, a slightly quizzical expression on his face.
“What?” she said again.
“I had the impression you weren’t keen.”
“No,” said Robin, with a trace of defensiveness, “she’s fine.”
She reversed out of the parking space, rem
embering Cynthia’s snorting laughter and her habit of jumbling affirmatives and negatives together.
“Well—”
“Thought so,” said Strike, smugly.
“Given what might’ve happened to Margot, I wouldn’t have kicked off the conversation with cheery decapitation jokes.”
“She’s lived with it for forty years,” said Strike. “People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”
It started to rain again as they left the car park: a fine veil laying itself swiftly over the windscreen.
“OK, I’m prejudiced,” Robin admitted, switching on the wipers. “Feeling a bit sensitive about second wives right now.”
She drove on for a few moments before becoming aware that Strike was looking at her again.
“What?” she asked, for a third time.
“Why’re you sensitive about second wives?”
“Because—oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I told Morris.” She’d tried not to think, since, about her drunken Boxing Day spent texting, of the small amount of comfort she had derived from it, or the immense load of discomfort. “Matthew and Sarah Shadlock are together officially now. She left her fiancé for him.”
“Shit,” said Strike, still watching her profile. “No, you didn’t tell me.”
But he mentally docketed the fact that she’d told Morris, which didn’t fit with the idea that he’d formed of Robin and Morris’s relationship. From what Barclay had told him about Morris’s challenges to Robin’s authority, and from Robin’s generally lukewarm comments on his new hire, he’d assumed that Morris’s undoubted sexual interest in Robin had fizzled out for lack of a return. And yet she’d told Morris this painful bit of personal information, and not told him.
As they drove in silence toward Church Road, he wondered what had been going on in London while he had been in Cornwall. Morris was a good-looking man and he, like Robin, was divorcing. Strike wondered why he hadn’t previously considered the implications of this obvious piece of symmetry. Comparing notes on lawyers, on difficult exes, on the mechanics of splitting two lives: they’d have plenty to talk about, plenty of opportunities for mutual sympathy.
“Straight up here,” he said, and they drove in silence across the Royal Paddocks, between high, straight red walls.
“Nice street,” commented Robin, twenty minutes after they’d left Hampton Court Palace, as she turned the Land Rover into a road that might have been deep in countryside. To their left was dense woodland, to the right, several large, detached houses that stood back from the road behind high hedges.
“It’s that one,” said Strike, pointing at a particularly sprawling house with many pointed, half-timbered gables. The double gates stood open, as did the front door. They turned into the drive and parked behind the blue Mazda3.
As soon as Robin switched off the engine, they heard shouting coming from inside the house: a male voice, intemperate and high pitched. Anna Phipps’s wife, Kim, tall, blonde and wearing jeans and a shirt as before, came striding out of the house toward them, her expression tense.
“Big scenes,” she said, as Strike and Robin got out of the car into the mist of rain.
“Would you like us to wait—?” Robin began.
“No,” Kim said, “he’s determined to see you. Come in.”
They walked across the gravel and entered Broom House. Somewhere inside, male and female voices continued to shout.
Every house has its own deep ingrained smell, and this one was redolent of sandalwood and a not entirely unpleasant fustiness. Kim led them through a long, large-windowed hall that seemed frozen in the mid-twentieth century. There were brass light fittings, watercolors and an old rug on polished floorboards. With a sudden frisson, Robin thought that Margot Bamborough had once walked this very floor, her metallic rose perfume mingling with the scents of polish and old carpet.
As they approached the door of the drawing room, the argument taking place inside became suddenly comprehensible.
“—and if I’m to be talked about,” a man was shouting, “I should have right of reply—my family deciding to investigate me behind my back, charming, charming, it really is—”
“Nobody’s investigating you, for God’s sake!” they heard Anna say. “Bill Talbot was incompetent—”
“Oh, was he really? Were you there? Did you know him?”
“I didn’t have to be there, Dad—”
Kim opened the door. Strike and Robin followed Kim inside.
It was like coming upon a tableau. The three people standing inside froze at their entrance. Cynthia’s thin fingers were pressed to her mouth. Anna stood facing her father across a small antique table.
The romantic-looking poet of 1974 was no more. Roy Phipps’s remaining hair was short, gray and clung only around his ears and the back of his head. In his knitted sweater vest, with his high, domed, shining pate and his wild eyes, slightly sunken in a blotchy face, he’d now be better suited to the role of mad scientist.
So furious did Roy Phipps look, that Robin quite expected him to start shouting at the newcomers, too. However, the hematologist’s demeanor changed when his eyes met Strike’s. Whether this was a tribute to the detective’s bulk, or to the aura of gravity and calm he managed to project in highly charged situations, Robin couldn’t tell, but she thought she saw Roy decide against yelling. After a brief hesitation, the doctor accepted Strike’s proffered hand, and as the two men shook, Robin wondered how aware men were of the power dynamics that played out between them, while women stood watching.
“Dr. Phipps,” said Strike.
Roy appeared to have found the gear change between intemperate rage and polite greeting a difficult one, and his immediate response was slightly incoherent.
“So you’re—you’re the detective, are you?” he said. Bluish-red blotches lingered in his pale cheeks.
“Cormoran Strike—and this is my partner, Robin Ellacott.”
Robin stepped forwards.
“How d’you do?” Roy said stiffly, shaking her hand, too. His was hot and dry.
“Shall I make coffee?” said Cynthia, in a half-whisper.
“Yes—no, why not,” said Roy, his ill-temper clearly jockeying with the nervousness that seemed to increase while Strike stood, large and unmoving, watching him. “Sit, sit,” he said, pointing Strike to a sofa, at right angles to another.
Cynthia hurried out of the room to make coffee, and Strike and Robin sat where they’d been instructed.
“Going to help Cyn,” muttered Anna and she hurried out of the room, and Kim, after a moment’s hesitation, followed her, leaving Strike and Robin alone with Roy. The doctor settled himself into a high-backed velvet armchair and glared around him. He didn’t look well. The flush of temper receded, leaving him looking wan. His socks had bunched up around his skinny ankles.
There ensued one of the most uncomfortable silences Robin had ever endured. Mainly to avoid looking at Roy, she allowed her eyes to roam around the large room, which was as old fashioned as the hall. A grand piano stood in the corner. More large windows looked out onto an enormous garden, where a long rectangular fish pond lay just beyond a paved area, at the far end of which lay a covered, temple-like stone structure where people could either sit and watch the koi carp, now barely visible beneath the rain-flecked surface of the water, or look out over the sweeping lawn, with its mature trees and well-tended flower-beds.
An abundance of leather-bound books and bronzes of antique subjects filled bookcases and cabinets. A tambour frame stood between the sofas, on which a very beautiful piece of embroidery was being worked in silks. The design was Japanese influenced, of two koi swimming in opposite directions. Robin was debating whether to pass polite comment on it, and to ask whether Cynthia was responsible, when Strike spoke.
“Who was the classicist?”
“What?” said Roy. “Oh. My father.”
His crazy-look
ing eyes roamed over the various small bronzes and marbles dotted around the room. “Took a first in Classics at Cambridge.”
“Ah,” said Strike, and the glacial silence resumed.
A squall of wind threw more rain at the window. Robin was relieved to hear the tinkling of teaspoons and the footsteps of the three returning women.
Cynthia, who re-entered the room first, set a tea tray down on the antique table standing between the sofas. It rocked a little with the weight. Anna added a large cake on a stand.
Anna and Kim sat down side by side on the free sofa, and when Cynthia had drawn up spindly side tables to hold everyone’s tea, and cut slices of cake for those who wanted some, she sat herself down beside her stepdaughter-in-law, looking scared.
“Well,” said Roy at last, addressing Strike. “I’d be interested to hear what you think your chances are of finding out what the Metropolitan Police has been unable to discover in four decades.”
Robin was sure Roy had been planning this aggressive opening during the long and painful silence.
“Fairly small,” said Strike matter-of-factly, once he’d swallowed a large piece of the cake Cynthia had given him, “though we’ve got a new alleged sighting of your first wife I wanted to discuss with you.”
Roy looked taken aback.
“Alleged sighting,” Strike emphasized, setting down his plate and reaching inside his jacket for his notebook. “But obviously… Excellent cake, Mrs. Phipps,” he told Cynthia.
“Oh, thank you,” she said in a small voice. “Coffee and walnut was Anna’s favorite when she was little—wasn’t it, love?” she said, but Anna’s only response was a tense smile.
“We heard about it from one of your wife’s ex-colleagues, Janice Beattie.”
Roy shook his head and shrugged impatiently, to convey non-recognition of the names.
“She was the practice nurse at the St. John’s surgery,” said Strike.
“Oh,” said Roy. “Yes. I think she came here once, for a barbecue. She seemed quite a decent woman… Disaster, that afternoon. Bloody disaster. Those children were atrocious—d’you remember?” he shot at Cynthia.
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