Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  … a certain weakness, an abandonment to desire…

  You’re getting like Talbot, Robin told herself crossly. Speeding up, she arrived at the Pump Rooms with time to spare.

  The building had just been opened; a young woman in black was walking away from the glass doors, holding a bunch of keys. Robin entered, to find little trace of the Regency pump rooms left inside: the floor was covered in modern gray tiles, the ceiling supported by metal columns. A café took up one wing of the open-plan space, a shop another. The gallery, Robin saw, lay across opposite, through more glass doors.

  It comprised one long room, brick-walled and wooden-floored, which had been temporarily given over to an exhibition of local artists. There were only three people inside: a stocky, gray-bobbed woman in an Alice band, a small man with a hang-dog air whom Robin suspected was her husband, and another young woman in black, who she assumed worked there. The gray-haired woman’s voice was echoing around the room as though it was a gymnasium.

  “I told Shona that Long Itchington needs an accent light! You can barely see it, this corner’s so dark!”

  Robin walked slowly around, looking at canvases and sketches. Five local artists had been given space for the temporary exhibition, but she identified Paul Satchwell’s work without difficulty: it had been given a prominent position and stood out boldly among the studies of local landmarks, portraits of pallid Britons standing at bus stops, and still lifes.

  Naked figures twisted and cavorted in scenes from Greek mythology. Persephone struggled in the arms of Hades as he carried her down into the underworld; Andromeda strained against chains binding her to rock as a dragonish creature rose from the waves to devour her; Leda lay supine in bulrushes as Zeus, in the form of a swan, impregnated her.

  Two lines of Joni Mitchell floated back to Robin as she looked at the paintings: “When I first saw your gallery, I liked the ones of ladies…”

  Except that Robin wasn’t sure she liked the paintings. The female figures were all black-haired, olive-skinned, heavy-breasted and partially or entirely naked. The paintings were accomplished, but Robin found them slightly lascivious. Each of the women wore a similar expression of vacant abandon, and Satchwell seemed to have a definite preference for those myths that featured bondage, rape or abduction.

  “Striking, aren’t they?” said the meek-faced husband of the angry painter of Long Itchington, appearing at Robin’s side to contemplate a picture of a totally naked Io, whose hair streamed behind her and whose breasts gleamed with sweat as she fled a bull with a gargantuan erection.

  “Mm,” said Robin. “I was wondering whether he was going to come to the exhibition. Paul Satchwell, I mean.”

  “I think he said he’s going to pop back in,” said the man.

  “Back—? You mean he’s here? In England?”

  “Well, yes,” said the man, looking somewhat surprised. “He was here yesterday, anyway. Came to see them hung.”

  “Visiting family, I think he said,” said the young woman in black, who seemed glad of a reason to talk to somebody other than the fuming artist in the hairband.

  “You haven’t got contact details for him, have you?” asked Robin. “Maybe the address of where he’s staying?”

  “No,” said the young woman, now looking intrigued. Evidently local artists didn’t usually engender this much excitement. “You can leave your name and address, though, if you like, and I’ll tell him you want to speak to him if he drops by?”

  So Robin accompanied the young woman back to the reception area, where she scribbled her name and phone number onto a piece of paper and then, her heart still beating fast in excitement, went to the café, bought herself a cappuccino and positioned herself beside a long window looking out onto the Pump Room Gardens, where she had a good view of people entering the building.

  Should she book back into the Premier Inn and wait here in Leamington Spa until Satchwell showed himself? Would Strike think it worth neglecting their other cases to remain here in the hope of Satchwell turning up? It was Joan’s funeral today: she couldn’t burden him with the question.

  She wondered what her partner was doing now. Perhaps already dressing for the service. Robin had only ever attended two funerals. Her maternal grandfather had died just before she dropped out of university: she’d gone home for the funeral and never gone back. She remembered very little of the occasion: it had taken everything she’d had to preserve a fragile façade of well-being, and she remembered the strange sense of disembodiment that underlay the eggshell brittleness with which she’d met the half-scared inquiries of family members who knew what had happened to her. She remembered, too, Matthew’s hand around hers. He hadn’t once dropped it, skipping lectures and an important rugby game to come and be with her.

  The only other funeral she’d attended had been four years previously, when she and Strike had attended the cremation of a murdered girl in the course of their first murder investigation, standing together at the back of the sparsely populated, impersonal crematorium. That had been before Strike had agreed to take her on permanently, when she’d been nothing but a temp whom Strike had allowed to inveigle her way into his investigation. Thinking back to Rochelle Onifade’s funeral, Robin realized that even then, the ties binding her to Matthew had been loosening. Robin hadn’t yet realized it, but she’d found something she wanted more than she’d wanted to be Matthew’s wife.

  Her coffee finished, Robin made a quick trip to the bathroom, then returned to the gallery in the hope that Satchwell might have entered it while she wasn’t watching, but there was no sign of him. A few people had drifted in to wander around the temporary exhibition. Satchwell’s paintings were attracting the most interest. Having walked the room once more, Robin pretended an interest in an old water fountain in the corner. Covered in swags and lion’s heads with gaping mouths, it had once dispensed the health-giving spa waters.

  Beyond the font lay another a room, which presented a total contrast to the clean, modern space behind her. It was octagonal and made of brick, with a very high ceiling and windows of Bristol blue glass. Robin stepped inside: it was, or had once been, a Turkish hammam or steam room, and had the appearance of a small temple. At the highest point of the vaulted ceiling was a cupola decorated with an eight-pointed star in glass, with a lantern hanging from it.

  “Nice to see a bit of pagan influence, innit?”

  The voice was a combination of self-conscious cockney, overlain with the merest whiff of a Greek accent. Robin spun around and there, planted firmly in the middle of the hammam, in jeans and an old denim shirt, was an elderly man with his left eye covered in a surgical dressing, which stood out, stark white against skin as brown as old terra-cotta. His straggly white hair fell to his stooping shoulders; white chest hair grew in the space left by his undone buttons, a silver chain hung around his crêpe-skinned throat, and silver and turquoise rings decorated his fingers.

  “You the young lady ’oo wanted to talk to me?” asked Paul Satchwell, revealing yellow-brown teeth as he smiled.

  “Yes,” said Robin, “I am. Robin Ellacott,” she added, holding out her hand.

  His uncovered eye swept Robin’s face and figure with unconcealed appreciation. He held her hand a little too long after shaking it but Robin continued to smile as she withdrew it, and delved in her handbag for a card, which she gave him.

  “Private detective?” said Satchwell, his smile fading a little as he read the card, one-eyed. “The ’ell’s all this?”

  Robin explained.

  “Margot?” said Satchwell, looking shocked. “Christ almighty, that’s, what… forty years ago?”

  “Nearly,” said Robin, moving aside to let some tourists claim her spot in the middle of the hammam, and read its history off the sign on the wall. “I’ve come up from London in hopes of talking to you about her. It’d mean a lot to the family if you could tell me whatever you remember.”

  “Éla ré, what d’you expect me to remember after all this time?” said
Satchwell.

  But Robin was confident he was going to accept. She’d discovered that people generally wanted to know what you already knew, why you’d come to find them, whether they had any reason to worry. And sometimes they wanted to talk, because they were lonely or felt neglected, and it was flattering to have somebody hang on your words, and sometimes, as now (elderly as he was, the single eye, which was a cold, pale blue, swept her body and back to her face) they wanted to spend more time with a young woman they found attractive.

  “All right, then,” said Satchwell slowly, “I don’t know what I can tell you, but I’m hungry. Let me take you to lunch.”

  “That’d be great, but I’ll be taking you,” said Robin, smiling. “You’re doing me the favor.”

  47

  … the sacred Oxe, that carelesse stands,

  With gilden hornes, and flowry girlonds crownd…

  All suddeinly with mortall stroke astownd,

  Doth groueling fall…

  The martiall Mayd stayd not him to lament,

  But forward rode, and kept her ready way…

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Satchwell bade the attendant in the art gallery farewell by clasping her hands in a double handshake and assuring her he’d look in later in the week. He even took fulsome leave of the disgruntled painter of Long Itchington, who scowled after him as he left.

  “Provincial galleries,” he said, chuckling, as he and Robin headed out of the Pump Rooms. “Funny, seeing my stuff next to that old bat’s postcard pictures, though, wasn’t it? And a bit of a kick to be exhibited where you were born. I haven’t been back here in, Christ, must be fifty-odd years. You got a car? Good. We’ll get out of here, go froo to Warwick. It’s just up the road.”

  Satchwell kept up a steady stream of talk as they walked toward the Land Rover.

  “Never liked Leamington.” With only one eye at his service, he had to turn his head in exaggerated fashion to look around. “Too genteel for the likes of me…”

  Robin learned that he’d lived in the spa town only until he was six, at which point he and his single mother had moved to Warwick. He had a younger half-sister, the result of his mother’s second marriage, with whom he was currently staying, and had decided to have his cataract removed while in England.

  “Still a British citizen, I’m entitled. So when they asked me,” he said, with a grand wave backward at the Royal Pump Rooms, “if I’d contribute some paintings, I thought, why not? Brought them over with me.”

  “They’re wonderful,” said Robin insincerely. “Have you got just the one sister?” She had no aim other than making polite conversation, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw Satchwell’s head turn so that his unbandaged eye could look at her.

  “No,” he said, after a moment or two. “It was… I ’ad an older sister, too, but she died when we were kids.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Robin.

  “One of those things,” said Satchwell. “Severely disabled. Had fits and stuff. She was older than me. I can’t remember much about it. Hit my mum hard, obviously.”

  “I can imagine,” said Robin.

  They had reached the Land Rover. Robin, who’d already mentally calculated the risk to herself, should Satchwell prove to be dangerous, was confident that she’d be safe by daylight, and given that she had control of the car. She unlocked the doors and climbed into the driver’s seat, and Satchwell succeeded in hoisting himself into the passenger seat on his second attempt.

  “Yeah, we moved froo to Warwick from ’ere after Blanche died,” he said, buckling up his seatbelt. “Just me and my mum. Not that Warwick’s much better, but it’s aufentic. Aufentic medieval buildings, you know?”

  Given that he was Midlands born and raised, Robin thought his cockney accent must be a longstanding affectation. It came and went, mingled with an intonation that was slightly foreign after so many years in Greece.

  “Whereas this place… the Victorians ’ad their wicked way with it,” he said, and as Robin reversed out her parking space he said, looking up at the moss-covered face of a stone Queen Victoria, “there she is, look, miserable old cow,” and laughed. “State of that building,” he added, as they passed the town hall. “That’s somefing me and Crowley had in common, for sure. Born ’ere, hated it ’ere.”

  Robin thought she must have misheard.

  “You and…”

  “Aleister Crowley.”

  “Crowley?” she repeated, as they drove up the Parade. “The occult writer?”

  “Yeah. ’E was born here,” said Satchwell. “You don’t see that in many of the guidebooks, because they don’t like it. ’Ere, turn left. Go on, it’s on our way.”

  Minutes later, he directed her into Clarendon Square, where tall white terraced houses, though now subdivided into flats, retained a vestige of their old grandeur.

  “That’s it, where he was born,” said Satchwell with satisfaction, pointing up at number 30. “No plaque or nothing. They don’t like talking about him, the good people of Leamington Spa. I had a bit of a Crowley phase in my youth,” said Satchwell, as Robin looked up at the large, square windows. “You know he tortured a cat to death when he was a boy, just to see whether it had nine lives?”

  “I didn’t,” said Robin, putting the car into reverse.

  “Probably ’appened in there,” said Satchwell with morbid satisfaction.

  Same as AC. Same as AC. Another moment of enlightenment had hit Robin. Talbot had gone looking for identical components between Satchwell’s horoscope and Crowley’s, the self-proclaimed Beast, Baphomet, the wickedest man in the West. LS connection. Of course: Leamington Spa.

  Why had Talbot decided, months into the investigation, that Satchwell deserved a full horoscope, the only one of the suspects to be so honored? His alibi appeared watertight, after all. Had the return of suspicion been a symptom of Talbot’s illness, triggered by the coincidence of Satchwell and Crowley’s place of birth, or had he uncovered some unrecorded weakness in Satchwell’s alibi? Satchwell continued to talk about his life in Greece, his painting and about his disappointment in how old England was faring, and Robin made appropriate noises at regular intervals while mentally reviewing those features of Satchwell’s horoscope that Talbot had found so intriguing.

  Mars in Capricorn: strong-willed, determined, but prone to accidents.

  Moon in Pisces: neuroses/personality disorders/dishonesty

  Leo rising: no sense of moderation. Resents demands on them.

  They reached Warwick within half an hour and, as Satchwell had promised, found themselves in a town that could hardly have presented a greater contrast to the wide, sweeping white-faced crescents of Leamington. An ancient stone arch reminded Robin of Clerkenwell. They passed timber and beam houses, cobbles, steep sloping streets and narrow alleyways.

  “We’ll go to the Roebuck,” said Satchwell, when Robin had parked in the market square. “It’s been there forever. Oldest pub in town.”

  “Wherever you like,” said Robin, smiling as she checked that she had her notebook in her handbag.

  They walked together through the heart of Warwick, Satchwell pointing out such landmarks as he deemed worth looking at. He was one of those men who felt a need to touch, tapping Robin unnecessarily upon the arm to draw her attention, grasping her elbow as they crossed a street, and generally assuming a proprietorial air over her as they wove their way toward Smith Street.

  “D’you mind?” asked Satchwell, as they drew level with Picturesque Art Supplies, and without waiting for an answer he led her into the shop where, as he selected brushes and oils, he talked with airy self-importance of modern trends in art and the stupidity of critics. Oh, Margot, Robin thought, but then she imagined the Margot Bamborough she carried with her in her head judging her, in turn, by Matthew, with his endless store of anecdotes of his own sporting achievements, and his increasingly pompous talk of pay rises and bonuses, and felt humbled and apologetic.

 
At last, they made it into the Roebuck Inn, a low-beamed pub with a sign of a deer’s head hanging outside, and secured a table for two toward the rear of the pub. Robin couldn’t help but notice the coincidence: the wall behind Satchwell was dotted with horned animal heads, including a stuffed deer and bronze-colored models of an antelope and a ram. Even the menus had silhouettes of antlered stag heads upon them. Robin asked the waitress for a Diet Coke, all the while trying to repress thoughts of the horned signs of the zodiac.

  “Would it be all right,” she asked, smiling, when the waitress had departed for the bar, “if I ask a few questions about Margot now?”

  “Yeah, of course,” said Satchwell, with a smile that revealed his stained teeth again, but he immediately picked up the menu card and studied it.

  “And d’you mind if I take notes?” Robin asked, pulling out her notebook.

  “Go ahead,” he said, still smiling, watching her over the top of his menu with his uncovered eye, which followed her movements as she opened the book and clicked out the nib of her pen.

  “So, I apologize if any of these questions—”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a proper drink?” asked Satchwell, who had ordered a beer. “I ’ate drinking on me own.”

  “Well, I’m driving, you see,” said Robin.

  “You could stay over. Not with me, don’t worry,” he said quickly, with a grin that on a man so elderly, resembled a satyr’s leer, “I mean, go to an ’otel, file expenses. I s’pect you’re taking a good chunk of money from Margot’s family for this, are you?”

  Robin merely smiled, and said,

  “I need to get back to London. We’re quite busy. It would be really useful to get some background on Margot,” she continued. “How did you meet?”