He told her the story she already knew, about how he’d been taken to the Playboy Club by a client and seen there the leggy nineteen-year-old in her bunny ears and tail.
“And you struck up a friendship?”
“Well,” said Satchwell, “I don’t know that I’d call it that.”
With his cold eye upon Robin he said,
“We ’ad a very strong sexual connection. She was a virgin when we met, y’know.”
Robin kept smiling formally. He wasn’t going to embarrass her.
“She was nineteen. I was twen’y-five. Beau’iful girl,” he sighed. “Wish I’d kept the pictures I took of her, but after she disappeared I felt wrong about ’aving them.”
Robin heard Oonagh again. “He took pictures of her. You know.Pictures.” It must be those revealing or obscene photos Satchwell was talking about, because after all, he’d hardly have felt guilty about having a snapshot.
The waitress came back with Satchwell’s beer and Robin’s Diet Coke. They ordered food; after swiftly scanning the menu, Robin asked for a chicken and bacon salad; Satchwell ordered steak and chips. When the waitress had gone Robin asked, though she knew the answer,
“How long were you together?”
“Coupla years, all told. We broke up, then got back togevver. She didn’t like me using other models. Jealous. Not cut out for an artist’s muse, Margot. Didn’t like sitting still and not talking, haha… no, I fell hard for Margot Bamborough. Yeah, there was a damn sight more to her than being a Bunny Girl.”
Of course there was, thought Robin, though still smiling politely. She became a bloody doctor.
“Did you ever paint her?”
“Yeah,” said Satchwell. “Few times. Some sketches and one full-size picture. I sold them. Needed the cash. Wish I ’adn’t.”
He fell into a momentary abstraction, his uncovered eye surveying the pub, and Robin wondered whether old memories were genuinely resurfacing behind the heavily tanned face, which was so deeply lined and dark it might have been carved from teak, or whether he was playing the part that was expected of him when he said quietly,
“Hell of a girl, Margot Bamborough.”
He took a sip of his beer, then said,
“It’s her ’usband who’s hired you, is it?”
“No,” said Robin. “Her daughter.”
“Oh,” said Satchwell, nodding. “Yeah, of course: there was a kid. She didn’t look as though she’d ’ad a baby, when I met her after they got married. Slim as ever. Both my wives put on about a stone with each of our kids.”
“How many children have you got?” asked Robin, politely.
She wanted the food to hurry up. It was harder to walk out once food was in front of you, and some instinct told her that Paul Satchwell’s whimsical mood might not last.
“Five,” said Satchwell. “Two with me first wife, and three with me second. Didn’t mean to: we got twins on the last throw. All pretty much grown up now, thank Christ. Kids and art don’t mix. I love ’em,” he said roughly, “but Cyril Connolly had it right. The enemy of promise is the pram in the bloody ’all.”
He threw her a brief glance out of his one visible eye and said abruptly,
“So ’er ’usband still thinks I had something to do with Margot disappearing, does ’e?”
“What d’you mean by ‘still’?” inquired Robin.
“’E gave my name to the police,” said Satchwell. “The night she disappeared. Thought she might’ve run off with me. Did you know Margot and I bumped into each other a coupla weeks before she disappeared?”
“I did, yes,” said Robin.
“It put ideas into what’s-’is-name’s head,” he said. “I can’t blame him, I s’pose it did look fishy. I’d’ve probably thought the same, if my bird had met up with an old flame right before they buggered off—disappeared, I mean.”
The food arrived: Satchwell’s steak and chips looked appetizing, but Robin, who’d been too busy concentrating on her questions, hadn’t read the small print on the menu. Expecting a plate of salad, she received a wooden platter bearing various ramekins containing hot sausage slices, hummus and a sticky mess of mayonnaise-coated leaves, a challenging assortment to eat while taking notes.
“Want some chips?” offered Satchwell, pushing the small metal bucket that contained them toward her.
“No thanks,” said Robin, smiling. She took a bite of a breadstick and continued, her pen in her right hand,
“Did Margot talk about Roy, when you bumped into her?”
“A bit,” said Satchwell, his mouth full of steak. “She put up a good front. What you do, when you meet the ex, isn’t it? Pretend you think you did the right thing. No regrets.”
“Did you think she had regrets?” asked Robin.
“She wasn’t ’appy, I could tell. I thought, nobody’s paying you attention. She tried to put a brave face on it, but she struck me as miserable. Knackered.”
“Did you only see each other the once?”
Satchwell chewed his steak, looking at Robin thoughtfully. At last he swallowed, then said,
“Have you read my police statement?”
“Yes,” said Robin.
“Then you know perfectly well,” said Satchwell, waggling his fork at her, “that it was just the once. Don’t you?”
He was smiling, trying to pass off the implied admonition as waggish, but Robin felt the spindle-thin spike of aggression.
“So you went for a drink, and talked?” said Robin, smiling, as though she hadn’t noticed the undertone, daring him to become defensive, and he continued, in a milder tone,
“Yeah, we went to some bar in Camden, not far from my flat. She’d been on an ’ouse call to some patient.”
Robin made a note.
“And can you remember what you talked about?”
“She told me she’d met ’er husband at medical school, ’e was an ’igh-flier and all that. What was ’e?” said Satchwell, with what seemed to Robin a forced unconcern. “A cardiologist or something?”
“Hematologist,” said Robin.
“What’s that, blood? Yeah, she was always impressed by clever people, Margot. Didn’t occur to ’er that they can be shits like anyone else.”
“Did you get the impression Dr. Phipps was a shit?” asked Robin lightly.
“Not really,” said Satchwell. “But I was told ’e had a stick up his arse and was a bit of a mummy’s boy.”
“Who told you that?” asked Robin, pausing with her pen suspended over her notebook.
“Someone ’oo’d met him,” he replied with a slight shrug. “You not married?” he went on, his eyes on Robin’s bare left hand.
“Living with someone,” said Robin, with a brief smile. It was the answer she’d learned to give, to shut down flirtation from witnesses and clients, to erect barriers. Satchwell said, “Ah. I always know, if a bird’s living with a bloke without marriage, she must be really keen on him. Nothing but ’er feelings holding her, is there?”
“I suppose not,” said Robin, with a brief smile. She knew he was trying to disconcert her. “Did Margot mention anything that might be worrying her, or causing her problems? At home or at work?”
“Told you, it was all window dressing,” said Satchwell, munching on fries. “Great job, great ’usband, nice kid, nice ’ouse: she’d made it.” He swallowed. “I did the same thing back: told her I was having an exhibition, won an award for one of me paintings, in a band, serious girlfriend… which was a lie,” he added, with a slight snort. “I only remember that bird because we split up later that evening. Don’t ask me her name now. We ’adn’t been together long. She had long black hair and a massive tattoo of a spider’s web round her navel, that’s what I mainly remember—yeah, anyway, I ended it. Seeing Margot again—”
He hesitated. His uncovered eye unfocused, he said,
“I was thirty-five. It’s a funny age. It starts dawning on you forty’s really gonna happen to you, not just to other people. What are you, twe
nty-five?”
“Twenty-nine,” said Robin.
“Happens earlier for women, that worrying about getting old thing,” said Satchwell. “Got kids yet?”
“No,” said Robin, and then, “so Margot didn’t say anything to you that might suggest a reason for disappearing voluntarily?”
“Margot wouldn’t have gone away and left everyone in the lurch,” said Satchwell, as positive on the point as Oonagh. “Not Margot. Responsible was her middle name. She was a good girl, you know? School prefect sort.”
“So you didn’t make any plans to meet again?”
“No plans,” said Satchwell, munching on chips. “I mentioned to ’er my band was playing at the Dublin Castle the following week. Said, ‘drop in if you’re passing,’ but she said she wouldn’t be able to. Dublin Castle was a pub in Camden,” Satchwell added. “Might still be there.”
“Yes,” said Robin, “it is.”
“I told the investigating officer I’d mentioned the gig to her. Told ’im I’d’ve been up for seeing her again, if she’d wanted it. I ’ad nothing to hide.”
Robin remembered Strike’s opinion that Satchwell volunteering this information seemed almost too helpful, and, trying to dissemble her sudden suspicion, asked:
“Did anyone spot Margot at the pub, the night you were playing?”
Satchwell took his time before swallowing, then said,
“Not as far as I know.”
“The little wooden Viking you gave her,” said Robin, watching him carefully, “the one with ‘Brunhilda’ written on the foot—”
“The one she had on her desk at work?” he said, with what Robin thought might have been a whiff of gratified vanity. “Yeah, I gave her that in the old days, when we were dating.”
Could it be true, Robin wondered. After the acrimonious way Margot and Satchwell had broken up, after he’d locked her in his flat so she couldn’t get out to work, after he’d hit her, after she’d married another man, would Margot really have kept Satchwell’s silly little gift? Didn’t private jokes and nicknames become dead and rotten things after a painful breakup, when the thought of them became almost worse than memories of rows and insults? Robin had given most of Matthew’s gifts to charity after she’d found out about his infidelity, including the plush elephant that had been his first Valentine’s present and the jewelry box he’d given her for her twenty-first. However, Robin could tell Satchwell was going to stick to his story, so she moved to the next question in her notebook.
“There was a printers on Clerkenwell Road I think you had an association with.”
“Come again?” said Satchwell, frowning. “A printers?”
“A schoolgirl called Amanda White claims she saw Margot in an upper window belonging to this printers on the night—”
“Really?” said Satchwell. “I never ’ad no association with no printers. ’Oo says I did?”
“There was a book written in the eighties about Margot’s disappearance—”
“Yeah? I missed that.”
“—it said the printers produced flyers for a nightclub you’d painted a mural for.”
“For crying out loud,” said Satchwell, half-amused, half-exasperated. “That’s not an association. It’d be a stretch to call it a coincidence. I’ve never heard of the bloody place.”
Robin made a note and moved to her next question.
“What did you think of Bill Talbot?”
“Who?”
“The investigating officer. The first one,” said Robin.
“Oh yeah,” said Satchwell, nodding. “Very odd bloke. When I ’eard afterward he’d had a breakdown or whatever, I wasn’t surprised. Kept asking me what I was doing on random dates. Afterward, I worked out ’e was trying to decide wevver I was the Essex Butcher. He wanted to know my time of birth, as well, and what the hell that had to do with anything…”
“He was trying to draw up your horoscope,” said Robin, and she explained Talbot’s preoccupation with astrology.
“Dén tó pistévo!” said Satchwell, looking annoyed. “Astrology? That’s not funny. He was in charge of the case—how long?”
“Six months,” said Robin.
“Jesus,” said Satchwell, scowling so that the clear tape holding the dressing over his eye crinkled.
“I don’t think the people around him realized how ill he was until it got too obvious to ignore,” said Robin, now pulling a few tagged sheets of paper out of her bag: photocopies of Satchwell’s statements to both Talbot and Lawson.
“What’s all that?” he said sharply.
“Your statements to the police,” said Robin.
“Why are there—what are they, stars?—all over—”
“They’re pentagrams,” said Robin. “This is the statement Talbot took from you. It’s just routine,” she added, because Satchwell was now looking wary. “We’ve done it with everyone the police interviewed. I know your statements were double-checked at the time, but I wondered if I could run over them again, in case you remember anything useful?”
Taking his silence for consent, she continued:
“You were alone in your studio on the afternoon of the eleventh of October, but you took a call there at five from a Mr.… Hendricks?”
“Hendricks, yeah,” said Satchwell. “He was my agent at the time.”
“You went out to eat at a local café around half past six, where you had a conversation with the woman behind the till, which she remembered. Then you went back home to change, and out again to meet a few friends in a bar called Joe Bloggs around eight o’clock. All three friends you were drinking with confirmed your story… nothing to add to any of that?”
“No,” said Satchwell, and Robin thought she detected a slight sense of relief. “That all sounds right.”
“Was it one of those friends who’d met Roy Phipps?” Robin asked casually.
“No,” said Satchwell, unsmiling, and then, changing the subject, he said, “Margot’s daughter must be knocking on forty now, is she?”
“Forty last year,” said Robin.
“Éla,” said Satchwell, shaking his head. “Time just—”
One of the mahogany brown hands, wrinkled and embellished with heavy silver and turquoise rings, made a smooth motion, as of a paper airplane in flight.
“—and then one day you’re old and you never saw it sneaking up on you.”
“When did you move abroad?”
“I didn’t mean to move, not at first. Went traveling, late ’75,” said Satchwell. He’d nearly finished his steak, now.
“What made you—?”
“I’d been thinking of traveling for a bit,” said Satchwell. “But after Creed killed Margot—it was such a bloody ’orrible thing—such a shock—I dunno, I wanted a change of scene.”
“That’s what you think happened to her, do you? Creed killed her?”
He put the last bit of steak into his mouth, chewed it and swallowed before answering.
“Well, yeah. Obviously at first I ’oped she’d just walked out on ’er husband and was ’oled up somewhere. But then it went on and on and… yeah, everyone thought it was the Essex Butcher, including the police. Not just the nutty one, the second one, the one who took over.”
“Lawson,” said Robin.
Satchwell shrugged, as much to say as the officer’s name didn’t matter, and asked,
“Are you going to interview Creed?”
“Hopefully.”
“Why would he tell the truth, now?”
“He likes publicity,” said Robin. “He might like the idea of making a splash in the newspapers. So Margot disappearing was a shock to you?”
“Well, obviously it was,” said Satchwell, now probing his teeth with his tongue. “I’d just seen her again and… I’m not going to pretend I was still in love with her, or anything like that, but… have you ever been caught up in a police investigation?” he asked her, with a trace of aggression.
“Yes,” said Robin. “Several. It was stressful and
intimidating, every time.”
“Well, there you are,” said Satchwell, mollified.
“What made you choose Greece?”
“I didn’t, really. I ’ad an inheritance off my grandmother and I thought, I’ll take some time off, do Europe, paint… went through France and Italy, and in ’76 I arrived in Kos. Worked in a bar. Painted in my free hours. Sold quite a few pictures to tourists. Met my first wife… never left,” said Satchwell, with a shrug.
“Something else I wanted to ask you,” said Robin, moving the police statements to the bottom of her small stack. “We’ve found out about a possible sighting of Margot, a week after she disappeared. A sighting that wasn’t ever reported to the police.”
“Yeah?” said Satchwell, looking interested. “Where?”
“In Leamington Spa,” said Robin, “in the graveyard of All Saints church.”
Satchwell’s thick white eyebrows rose, putting strain on the clear tape that was holding the dressing to his eye.
“In All Saints?” he repeated, apparently astonished.
“Looking at graves. Allegedly, she had her hair dyed black.”
“’Oo saw this?”
“A man visiting the area on a motorbike. Two years later, he told the St. John’s practice nurse about it.”
“He told the nurse?”
Satchwell’s jaw hardened.
“And what else has the nurse told you?” he said, searching Robin’s face. He seemed suddenly and unexpectedly angry.
“Do you know Janice?” asked Robin, wondering why he looked so angry.
“That’s her name, is it?” said Satchwell. “I couldn’t remember.”
“You do know her?”
Satchwell put more chips in his mouth. Robin could see that he was trying to decide what to tell her, and she felt that jolt of excitement that made all the long, tedious hours of the job, the sitting around, the sleeplessness, worthwhile.
“She’s shit-stirring,” said Satchwell abruptly. “She’s a shit-stirrer, that one, that nurse. She and Margot didn’t like each other. Margot told me she didn’t like her.”
“When was this?”
“When we ran into each other, like I told you, in the street—”
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