“No, no, all good,” said Max vaguely, lost in recipes.
Robin headed out into the cool, damp early morning, getting all the way to the Tube before she realized that she didn’t have her purse on her.
“Shit!”
Robin was usually tidy, efficient and organized; she rarely made this kind of mistake. Hair flying, she ran back to the flat, asking herself what the hell she could have done with it, and wondering, now panicking, whether she’d dropped it in the street or had it stolen out of her bag.
Meanwhile, in Denmark Street, the groggy Strike was hopping on his one foot out of the shower, eyes puffy, and similarly exhausted. The after-effects of a week spent covering Barclay’s and Hutchins’s shifts were now catching up with him, and he slightly regretted having asked Robin to come into work so early.
However, just after pulling on his trousers, his mobile rang and with a stab of fear, he saw Ted and Joan’s number.
“Ted?”
“Hi, Corm. There’s no need to panic, now,” said Ted. “I just wanted to give you an update.”
“Go on,” said Strike, standing bare-chested and frozen in the cold gray light filtered by the too-thin curtains of his attic flat.
“She’s not looking too clever. Kerenza was talking about trying to get her to hospital, but Joanie doesn’t want to go. She’s still in bed, she—didn’t get up, yesterday,” said Ted, his voice cracking. “Couldn’t manage it.”
“Shit,” muttered Strike, sinking down onto his bed. “Right, Ted, I’m coming.”
“You can’t,” said his uncle. “We’re surrounded by flood water. It’s dangerous. Police are telling everyone to stay put, not to travel. Kerenza can… she says she can manage her pain at home. She’s got drugs they can inject… because she’s not eating a lot now. Kerenza doesn’t think it’s… you know… she thinks it’ll be…”
He began to cry in earnest.
“… not immediate, but… she says… not long.”
“I’m coming,” said Strike firmly. “Does Lucy know how bad Joan is?”
“I called you first,” said Ted.
“I’ll tell her, don’t worry about that. I’ll ring you when we’ve put a plan together, all right?”
Strike hung up and called Lucy.
“Oh God, no,” his sister gasped, when he’d given her an unemotional summary of what Ted had said. “Stick, I can’t leave right now—Greg’s stuck in Wales!”
“The hell’s Greg doing in Wales?”
“It’s for work—oh God, what are we going to do?”
“When’s Greg back?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Then we’ll go down Sunday morning.”
“How? The trains are all off, the roads are flooded—”
“I’ll hire a jeep or something. Polworth’ll meet us the other end with a boat if we have to. I’ll ring you back when I’ve got things sorted.”
Strike dressed, made himself tea and toast, carried them downstairs to the partners’ desk in the inner office and called Ted back, overriding his objections, telling him that, like it or not, he and Lucy were coming on Sunday. He could hear his uncle’s yearning for them, his desperate need for company to share the burden of dread and grief. Strike then called Dave Polworth, who thoroughly approved of the plan and promised to be ready with boat, tow ropes and scuba equipment if necessary.
“I’ve got fuck all else to do. My place of work’s underwater.”
Strike called a few car hire companies, finally finding one that had a jeep available. He was giving his credit card details when a text arrived from Robin.
Really sorry, I lost my purse, just found it, on my way now.
Strike had entirely forgotten that they were supposed to be catching up on the Bamborough case before the team meeting. Having finished hiring the jeep, he began to assemble the items he’d intended to discuss with Robin: the blood-smeared page he’d cut out of The Magus, which he’d now put into a plastic pouch, and the discovery he’d made the previous evening on his computer, which he brought up on his monitor, ready to show her.
He then opened up the rota, to check what shifts he’d have to reallocate now that he was heading back to Cornwall, and saw “Dinner with Max” written in for that evening.
“Bollocks,” he said. He didn’t suppose he could get out of it now, having agreed to it the previous day, but this was the last thing he needed.
At that very moment, Robin, who was climbing the escalator at Tottenham Court Road two steps at a time, heard her mobile ringing in her bag.
“Yes?” she gasped into the phone, as she emerged into the station, one among many bustling commuters.
“Hey, Robs,” said her younger brother.
“Hi,” she said, using her Oyster card at the barrier. “Everything OK?”
“Yeah, fine,” said Jonathan, though he didn’t sound quite as cheerful as the last time they’d spoken. “Listen, is it all right if I bring another guy with me to crash at yours?”
“What?” said Robin, as she emerged into the blustery rain and controlled chaos of the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road, at which there had now been building works for three and a half years. She hoped she’d misheard what Jonathan had said.
“Another guy,” he repeated. “Is that OK? He’ll sleep anywhere.”
“Oh Jon,” Robin moaned, half-jogging along Charing Cross Road now, “we’ve only got one sofa bed.”
“Kyle’ll sleep on the floor, he doesn’t care,” said Jonathan. “It’s not that big a deal is it? One more person?”
“OK, fine,” sighed Robin. “You’re still planning on getting here at ten, though?”
“I’m not sure. We might get an earlier train, we’re thinking of skipping lectures.”
“Yeah, but the thing is,” said Robin, “Cormoran’s coming over to dinner to talk to Max—”
“Oh great!” said Jonathan, sounding slightly more enthusiastic. “Courtney’d love to meet him, she’s obsessed with crime!”
“No—Jon, I’m trying to tell you, Max needs to interview Cormoran about a part he’s playing. I don’t think there’ll be enough food for another three—”
“Don’t worry about that, if we get there earlier, we’ll just order ourselves a takeaway.”
How was she supposed to say, “Please don’t come during dinner”? After he’d hung up, Robin broke into a jog, hoping that Jonathan’s time management, which she knew from experience could use improvement, might see him miss enough trains south to delay his arrival.
Taking the corner into Denmark Street at a run, she saw, with a sinking feeling, Saul Morris ahead of her, walking toward the office and carrying a small, wrapped bunch of pink gerberas.
They’d better not be for me.
“Hey, Robs,” he said, turning as she ran up behind him. “Oh dear,” he added, grinning, “someone overslept. Pillow face,” he said, pointing at the spot on his cheek where, Robin surmised, her own still bore a faint crease from the way she’d slept, face down and unmoving, because she was so tired. “For Pat,” he added, displaying his straight white teeth along with the gerberas. “Says her husband never gets her anything on Valentine’s.”
God, you’re smarmy, Robin thought, as she unlocked the door. She noticed that he was calling her “Robs” again, yet another sign that his discomfort in her presence post-Christmas had evaporated over the succeeding seven weeks. She wished she could as easily shrug off the lingering, unreasonable but no less potent sense of shame she felt, forever having seen his erection on her phone.
Upstairs, the harassed Strike was checking his watch when his mobile rang. It was unusually early for his old friend Nick Herbert to be calling him, and Strike, now sensitized to expect bad news, picked up with a sense of foreboding.
“All right, Oggy?”
Nick sounded hoarse, as though he’d been shouting.
“I’m fine,” said Strike, who thought he could hear footsteps and voices on the metal stairs outside
. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” said Nick. “Wondered whether you fancied a pint tonight. Just you and me.”
“Can’t,” said Strike, very much regretting that this was so. “Sorry, I’ve got something on.”
“Ah,” said Nick. “OK. What about lunchtime, you free then?”
“Yeah, why not?” said Strike, after a slight hesitation. God knew he could use a pint away from work, from family, from his hundred other problems.
Through the open door he saw Robin enter the outer office, followed by Saul Morris, who was holding a bunch of flowers. He closed the dividing door on them, then his tired brain processed the flowers and the date.
“Hang on. Aren’t you busy with Valentine’s shit?” he asked Nick.
“Not this year,” said Nick.
There was a short silence. Strike had always considered Nick and Ilsa, a gastroenterologist and a lawyer respectively, the happiest couple he knew. Their house on Octavia Street had often been a place of refuge to him.
“I’ll explain over a pint,” said Nick. “I need one. I’ll come to you.”
They agreed a pub and a time and rang off. Strike checked his watch again: he and Robin had fifteen minutes left of what he’d hoped would be an hour on Bamborough. Opening the door, he said,
“Ready? We haven’t got long.”
“Sorry,” said Robin, hurrying inside. “You got my text, didn’t you? About the purse?”
“Yeah,” said Strike, closing the door on Morris and pointing at the page from The Magus, which he’d laid in front of Robin’s seat. “That’s the page from the book in the Athorns’ house.”
He’d called Robin about finding the Athorns straight after leaving the ironmonger, and she’d responded with excitement and congratulations. His present grumpiness aggravated her. Presumably it was due to her lateness, but was she not allowed a little human fallibility, after all the extra hours she’d put in lately, covering her own work and Strike’s, managing the subcontractors, trying as hard as she could not to put extra stress on him when his aunt was dying? However, outside she could hear Barclay and Hutchins entering the outer office, which reminded her that not so very long ago, she’d been the temp, that Strike had laid down his expectations of a partner in uncompromising terms at the start of their professional relationship. There were three men outside who undoubtedly considered themselves better qualified for her position than she was. So, Robin simply sat down, picked up the page and read the passage beneath the smear.
“The writing mentions blood.”
“I know.”
“How fresh does blood have to be, to analyze?”
“The oldest sample I’ve heard of that was successfully analyzed was twenty-something years old,” said Strike. “If this is blood, and it dates from when Gwilherm Athorn was alive, it’s a good decade older. On the other hand, it’s been kept away from light and damp, inside that book, which might help. Anyway, I’m going to call Roy Phipps and ask him what Margot’s blood group was and then I’ll try and find someone to analyze it for us. Might try that bloke your friend Vanessa used to date in forensics, what was his name?”
“Oliver,” said Robin, “and he’s now her fiancé.”
“Well, him, yeah. One other interesting thing came out of my conversation with Samhain…”
He told her about Uncle Tudor’s belief that “Nico and his boys” had killed Margot Bamborough.
“‘Nico’—d’you think—?”
“Niccolo ‘Mucky’ Ricci? Odds on,” said Strike. “He wasn’t living far away and he must’ve been a local personality, although no one from the practice seems to have realized who’d walked into their Christmas party.
“I’ve left a message with the Athorns’ social worker, because I want to know how much store we can put in Deborah and Samhain’s memories. Shanker’s supposed to be digging around on Ricci for me, but I’ve heard sod all from him. Might give him a prod.”
He held out his hand and Robin passed the blood-smeared page back.
“Anyway, the only other development is that I’ve found C. B. Oakden,” said Strike.
“What? How?”
“Last night,” said Strike. “I was thinking about names. Irene getting them wrong—Douthwaite and Duckworth, Athorn and Applethorpe. Then I started thinking about how people often don’t stray too far from their original name if they change it.”
He swung his computer monitor around to face her, and Robin saw a picture of a man in early middle age. He was slightly freckled, his eyes fractionally too close together and his hair thinning, though he still had enough to sweep across his narrow forehead. He was still just recognizable as the boy screwing up his face at the camera, at Margot Bamborough’s barbecue.
The story below read:
SERIAL SWINDLER GETS JAIL SENTENCE
“Despicable Betrayal of Trust”
A serial fraudster who conned over £75,000 from elderly widows over a two-year period has been jailed for four years, nine months.
Brice Noakes, 49, of Fortune Street, Clerkenwell, who was born Carl Oaken, persuaded a total of nine “vulnerable and trusting women” to part with jewelry and cash, which in one case amounted to £30,000 of life savings.
Noakes was described by Lord Justice McCrieff as “a cunning and unscrupulous man who capitalized shamelessly on his victims’ vulnerability.”
Smartly dressed and well-spoken Noakes targeted widows living alone, usually offering valuations on jewelry. Noakes persuaded his victims to allow him to remove valuable items from their houses, promising to return with an expert assessment.
On other occasions he posed as a representative from the council, who claimed that the householder was in arrears with council tax and about to be prosecuted.
“Using plausible but entirely fraudulent paperwork, you pressured and bullied vulnerable women into transferring money into an account set up for your own benefit,” said Lord Justice McCrieff, while sentencing.
“Some of the women concerned were initially too embarrassed to tell their families that they’d let this individual into their homes,” said Chief Inspector Grant. “We believe there may be many more victims who are too ashamed to admit that they’ve been defrauded, and we would urge them, if they recognize Noakes’ picture, to contact us.”
“The paper’s misspelled his real name,” said Robin. “They’ve printed ‘Oaken,’ not Oakden.”
“Which is why he wouldn’t have shown up on a basic Google search,” said Strike.
Feeling subtly criticized, because she was the one who was supposed to be looking for Oakden, Robin glanced at the date on the news story, which was five years old.
“He’ll be out of jail by now.”
“He is,” said Strike, turning the monitor back toward himself, typing another couple of words and turning it to face Robin again. “I did a bit more searching on variations of his name, and…”
She saw an author page of the Amazon website, listing the books written by an author called Carl O. Brice. The photograph showed the same man from the newspaper, a little older, a little balder, a little more creased around the eyes. His thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets, he wore a black T-shirt with a white logo on it: a clenched fist inside the Mars symbol.
Carl O. Brice
Carl O. Brice is a life coach, entrepreneur and award-winning writer on men’s issues including masculism, fathers’ rights, gynocentrism, men’s mental health, female privilege and toxic feminism. Carl’s personal experience of the gynocentric family court system, cultural misandry and male exploitation give him the tools and skills to guide men from all walks of life to healthier, happier lives. In his award-winning book series, Carl examines the catastrophic impact that modern feminism has had on freedom of speech, the workplace, men’s rights and the nuclear family.
Robin glanced down the list of books beneath the author biography. The covers were cheap and amateurish. All featured pictures of women in various slightly pornified costumes and poses. A scanti
ly dressed blonde wearing a crown was sitting on a throne for From Courtly Love to Family Courts, A History of Gynocentrism, whereas a brunette dressed in a rubber stormtrooper outfit pointed at the camera for Shamed: The Modern War on Masculinity.
“He’s got his own website,” said Strike, turning the monitor back to himself. “He self-publishes books, offers to coach men on how to get access to their kids, and flogs protein shakes and vitamins. I don’t think he’ll pass up the chance to talk to us. He seems the type to come running at the sniff of notoriety or money.
“Speaking of which,” said Strike, “how’re you getting on with that woman who thinks she saw Margot at the window on—?”
“Amanda Laws,” said Robin. “Well, I went back to her offering her expenses if she’ll come into the office, and she hasn’t answered yet.”
“Well, chase her,” said Strike. “You realize we’re now six months in—?”
“Yes, I do realize that,” said Robin, unable to help herself. “I learned counting at school.”
Strike raised his eyebrows.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I’m just tired.”
“Well, so am I, but I’m also mindful of the fact we still haven’t traced some fairly important people yet. Satchwell, for instance.”
“I’m working on him,” said Robin, glancing at her watch and getting to her feet. “I think they’re all out there, waiting for us.”
“Why’s Morris brought flowers?” said Strike.
“They’re for Pat. For Valentine’s Day.”
“Why the hell?”
Robin paused at the door, looking back at Strike.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
She let herself out of the room, leaving Strike to frown after her, wondering what was obvious. He could imagine only two reasons to buy a woman flowers: because you were hoping to sleep with her, or to avoid being criticized for not buying flowers on a day when flowers might be expected. Neither seemed to apply in this case.
The team was sitting in a cramped circle outside, Hutchins and Barclay on the fake leather sofa, Morris on one of the fold-up plastic chairs that had been bought when the team outgrew the existing seats, and Pat on her own wheeled desk chair, which left another two uncomfortable plastic chairs for the partners. Robin noticed how all three men stopped talking when Strike emerged from the inner office: when she’d led the meeting alone, she’d had to wait until Hutchins and Morris finished discussing a mutual police acquaintance who’d been caught taking bribes.
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 49