Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel
Page 60
They drank their pints. There was a brief break in the cloud and the sea was suddenly a carpet of diamonds and the bobbing seagull, a paper-white piece of origami. Strike was wondering idly whether Polworth’s passionate devotion to Cornwall was a reaction against his absent Birmingham-born father when Polworth spoke up again:
“Speaking of fathers… Joan told me yours was looking for a reunion.”
“She did, did she?”
“Don’t be narked,” said Polworth. “You know what she was like. Wanted me to know you were going through a tough time. Nothing doing, I take it?”
“No,” said Strike. “Nothing doing.”
The brief silence was broken by the shrieks and yells of Polworth’s two daughters sprinting out of the hotel. Ignoring their father and Strike, they wriggled under the chain separating road from damp shingle and ran out to the water’s edge, pursued a moment later by Strike’s nephew Luke, who was holding a couple of cream buns in his hand and clearly intent on throwing them at the girls.
“OI,” bellowed Strike. “NO!”
Luke’s face fell.
“They started it,” he said, turning to show Strike a white smear down the back of his black suit jacket, newly purchased for his great-aunt’s funeral.
“And I’m finishing it,” said Strike, while the Polworth girls giggled, peeking out over the rim of the rowing boat behind which they had taken refuge. “Put those back where you got them.”
Glaring at his uncle, Luke took a defiant bite out of one of the buns, then turned and headed back into the hotel.
“Little shit,” muttered Strike.
Polworth watched in a detached way as his girls began to kick cold seawater and sand at each other. Only when the younger girl overbalanced and fell backward into a foot of icy sea, eliciting a scream of shock, did he react.
“Fuck’s sake… get inside. Come on—don’t bloody whine, it’s your own fault—come on, inside, now!”
The three Polworths headed back into the Ship and Castle, leaving Strike alone again.
The bobbing seagull, which was doubtless used to a tide of tourists, to the chugging and grinding of the Falmouth ferry and the fishing boats passing in and out of the bay every day, had been unfazed by the shrieks and yells of the Polworth girls. Its sharp eyes were fixed upon something Strike couldn’t see, far out at sea. Only when the clouds closed again and the sea darkened to iron, did the bird take off at last. Strike’s eyes followed it as it soared on wide, curved wings into the distance, away from the shelter of the bay for open sea, ready to resume the hard but necessary business of survival.
PART FIVE
… lusty Spring, all dight in leaues of flowres…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
49
After long storms and tempests overblown,
The sun at length his joyous face doth clear;
So whenas fortune all her spite hath shown,
Some blissful hours at last must needs appear;
Else would afflicted wights oft-times despair…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
At 8 a.m. on the morning she should have been meeting her estranged husband for mediation, Robin emerged from Tottenham Court Road station beneath a cerulean sky. The sunshine felt like a minor miracle after the long months of rain and storms and Robin, who had no surveillance to do today, had put on a dress, glad to be out of her everlasting jeans and sweatshirts.
Angry as she felt at Matthew for calling off the session with only twenty-four hours’ notice (“My client regrets that an urgent matter of a personal nature has arisen. Given my own unavailability for the latter part of March, I suggest we find a mutually convenient date in April”), suspicious as she was that Matthew was dragging out the process merely to demonstrate his power and add pressure to give up her claim on their joint account, her spirits were raised by the dusty glow of the early morning sunshine illuminating the eternal roadworks at the top of Charing Cross Road. The truth, which had been borne forcibly upon Robin during the five days off that Strike had insisted she take, was that she was happier at work. With no desire to go home to Yorkshire and face the usual barrage of questions from her mother about the divorce and her job, and insufficient funds to get out of London to take a solitary mini-break, she’d spent most of her time taking care of her backlog of chores, or working on the Bamborough case.
She had, if not precisely leads, then ideas, and was now heading into the office early in the hope of catching Strike before the business of the day took over. The pneumatic drills drowned out the shouts of workmen in the road as Robin passed, until she reached the shadowy calm of Denmark Street, where the shops hadn’t yet opened.
Almost at the top of the metal staircase, Robin heard voices emanating from behind the glass office door. In spite of the fact that it was not quite eight-fifteen, the light was already on.
“Morning,” said Strike, when she opened the door. He was standing beside the kettle and looked mildly surprised to see her so early. “I thought you weren’t going to be in until lunchtime?”
“Canceled,” said Robin.
She wondered whether Strike had forgotten what she’d had on that morning, or whether he was being discreet because Morris was sitting on the fake leather sofa. Though as handsome as ever, Morris’s bright blue eyes were bloodshot and his jaw dark with stubble.
“Hello, stranger,” he said. “Look at you. Proper advert for taking it easy.”
Robin ignored this comment, but as she hung up her jacket, she found herself wishing she hadn’t worn the dress. She greatly resented Morris making her feel self-conscious, but it would have been easier just to have worn jeans as usual.
“Morris has caught Mr. Smith at it, with the nanny,” said Strike.
“That was quick!” said Robin, trying to be generous, wishing Morris hadn’t been the one to do it.
“Red-handed, ten past one this morning,” said Morris, passing Robin a night vision digital camera. “Hubby was pretending to be out with the boys. Nanny always has a night off on Tuesdays. Silly fuckers said goodbye on the doorstep. Rookie error.”
Robin scrolled slowly through the pictures. The voluptuous nanny who so resembled Strike’s ex Lorelei was standing in the doorway of a terraced house, locked in the arms of Mrs. Smith’s husband. Morris had captured not only the clinch, but the street name and door number.
“Where’s this place?” Robin asked, flicking past pictures of the clinch.
“Shoreditch. Nanny’s best mate rents it,” said Morris. “Always useful to have a friend who’ll let you use their place for a sneaky shag, eh? I’ve got her name and details, too, so she’s about to get dragged into it all, as well.”
Morris stretched luxuriously on the sofa, arms over his head, and said through a yawn,
“Not often you get the chance to make three women miserable at once, is it?”
“Not to mention the husband,” said Robin, looking at the handsome profile of the commodity broker’s husband, silhouetted against a streetlamp as he made his way back to the family car.
“Well, yeah,” said Morris, holding his stretch, “him too.”
His T-shirt had ridden up, exposing an expanse of toned abdomen, a fact of which Robin thought he was probably well aware.
“Don’t fancy a breakfast meeting, do you?” Strike asked Robin. He’d just opened the biscuit tin and found it empty. “We’re overdue a Bamborough catch-up. And I haven’t had breakfast.”
“Great,” said Robin, immediately taking down her jacket again.
“You never take me out for breakfast,” Morris told Strike, getting up off the sofa. Ignoring this comment, Strike said,
“Good going on Smith, Morris. I’ll let the wife know later. See you tomorrow.”
“Terrible, isn’t it,” said Robin, as she and Strike walked back out of the black street door onto the cool of Denmark Street, where sunlight still hadn’t penetrated, “this missing plane?”
“Nightmare for the families,” agreed Strike, as they headed out into the sun on Charing Cross Road. He paused, looking up and down the road. “I don’t want to go to Starbucks.”
So they walked to Bar Italia in Frith Street, which lay opposite Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, five minutes from the office. The small metal tables and chairs outside on the pavement were all unoccupied. In spite of its sunny promise, the March morning air still carried a chill. Every high stool at the counter inside the café bore a customer gulping down coffee before starting their working day, while reading news off their phones or else examining the shelves of produce reflected in the mirror that faced them.
“You going to be warm enough if we sit out here?” asked Strike doubtfully, looking from Robin’s dress to the counter inside. She was starting to really wish she’d worn her jeans.
“I’ll be fine,” said Robin. “And I only want a cappuccino, I already ate.”
While Strike was buying food and drink, Robin sat down on the cold metal chair, drew her jacket more tightly around her and opened her bag, with the intention of taking out Talbot’s leather notebook, but after a moment’s hesitation, she changed her mind and left it where it was. She didn’t want Strike to think that she’d been concentrating on Talbot’s astrological musings over the last few days, even though she had, in fact, spent many hours poring over the book.
“Cappuccino,” said Strike, returning to her and setting the coffee in front of her. He’d bought himself a double espresso and a mozzarella and salami roll. Sitting down next to her, he said,
“How come mediation was canceled?”
Pleased he’d remembered, Robin said:
“Matthew claims something urgent came up.”
“Believe him?”
“No. I think it’s more mind games. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but at least it would’ve been over. So,” she said, not wanting to talk about Matthew, “have you got anything new on Bamborough?”
“Not much,” said Strike, who’d been working flat out on other cases since his return from Cornwall. “We’ve got forensics back on that blood smear I found in the book in the Athorns’ flat.”
“And?”
“Type O positive.”
“And did you call Roy to find out…”
“Yeah. Margot was A positive.”
“Oh,” said Robin.
“My hopes weren’t high,” said Strike, with a shrug. “It looked like a smear from a paper cut, if anything.
“I’ve found Mucky Ricci, though. He’s in a private nursing home called St. Peter’s, in Islington. I had to do a fair bit of impersonation on the phone to get confirmation.”
“Great. D’you want me to—?”
“No. I told you, Shanker issued stern warnings about upsetting the old bastard, in case his sons got wind of it.”
“And you feel, of the two of us, I’m the one who upsets people, do you?”
Strike smirked slightly while chewing his roll.
“There’s no point rattling Luca Ricci’s cage unless we have to. Shanker told me Mucky was gaga, which I hoped meant he was a bit less sharp than he used to be. Might even have worked in our favor. Unfortunately, from what I managed to wheedle out of the nurse, he doesn’t talk any more.”
“Not at all?”
“Apparently not. She mentioned it in passing. I tried to find out whether that’s because he’s depressed, or had a stroke, or whether he’s demented, in which case questioning him is obviously pointless, but she didn’t say.
“I went to check out the home. I was hoping for some big institutional place where you might slip in and out unnoticed, but it’s more like a B&B. They’ve only got eighteen residents. I’d say the chances of getting in there undetected or passing yourself off as a distant cousin are close to zero.”
Irrationally, now that Ricci seemed unreachable, Robin, who hadn’t been more interested in him than in any of the other suspects, immediately felt as though something crucial to the investigation had been lost.
“I’m not saying I won’t take a bash at him, eventually,” said Strike. “But right now, the possible gains don’t justify making a bunch of professional gangsters angry at us. On the other hand, if we’ve got nothing else come August, I might have to see whether I can get a word or two out of Ricci.”
From his tone, Robin guessed that Strike, too, was well aware that more than half their allotted year on the Bamborough case had already elapsed.
“I’ve also,” he continued, “made contact with Margot’s biographer, C. B. Oakden, who’s playing hard to get. He seems to think he’s far more important to the investigation than I do.”
“Is he after money?”
“I’d say he’s after anything he can get,” said Strike. “He seemed as interested in interviewing me as letting me interview him.”
“Maybe,” suggested Robin, “he’s thinking of writing a book about you, like the one he did on Margot?”
Strike didn’t smile.
“He comes across as equal parts wily and stupid. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that I must know a lot about his dodgy past, given that I managed to track him down after multiple name changes. But I can see how he conned all those old women. He puts up a good show over the phone of knowing and remembering everyone around Margot. There was a real fluency to it: ‘Yes, Dr. Gupta, lovely man,’ ‘Oh yes, Irene, bit of a handful.’ It’s convincing until you remember he was fourteen when Margot disappeared, and probably met them all a couple of times, tops.
“But he wouldn’t tell me anything about Brenner, which is who I’m really interested in. ‘I’ll need to think about that,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I want to go into that.’ I’ve called him twice so far. Both times he tried to divert the conversation back onto me, I dragged it back to Brenner, and he cut the call short, pretending he had something urgent to take care of. Both times, he promised to phone me back but didn’t.”
“You don’t think he’s recording the calls, do you?” asked Robin. “Trying to get stuff about you he can sell to the papers?”
“It occurred to me,” Strike admitted, tipping sugar into his coffee.
“Maybe I should talk to him next time?”
“Might not be a bad idea,” said Strike. “Anyway,” he took a gulp of coffee, “that’s all I’ve done on Bamborough since I got back. But I’m planning to drop in on Nurse Janice the moment I’ve got a couple of clear hours. She’ll be back from Dubai by now, and I want to know why she never mentioned she knew Paul Satchwell. Don’t think I’ll warn her I’m coming, this time. There’s something to be said for catching people unawares. So, what’s new your end?”
“Well,” said Robin, “Gloria Conti, or Jaubert, as she is these days, hasn’t answered Anna’s email.”
“Pity,” said Strike, frowning. “I thought she’d be more likely to talk to us if Anna asked.”
“So did I. I think it’s worth giving it another week, then getting Anna to prod her. The worst that can happen is another definite ‘no.’ In slightly better news, I’m supposed to be speaking to Amanda White, who’s now Amanda Laws, later today.”
“How much is that costing us?”
“Nothing. I appealed to her better nature,” said Robin, “and she pretended to be persuaded, but I can tell she’s quite enamored of the idea of publicity, and she likes the idea of you, and of getting her name in the papers again as the plucky schoolgirl who stuck to her woman-in-the-window story even when the
police didn’t believe her. That’s in spite of the fact that her whole shtick, when I first contacted her, was that she didn’t want to go through all the stress of press interest again unless she got money out of it.”
“She still married?” asked Strike, taking his cigarettes out of his pocket. “Because she and Oakden sound like a good match. Mightn’t be a bad sideline for us, setting grifters up with each other.”
Robin laughed.
“So they can have dodgy children together, thus keeping us in business forever?”
Strike lit his cigarette, exhaled and then said,
“Not a perfect business plan. There’s no guarantee breeding two shits together will produce a third shit. I’ve known decent people who were raised by complete bastards, and vice versa.”
“You’re nature over nurture, are you?” asked Robin.
“Maybe,” said Strike. “My three nephews were all raised the same, weren’t they? And—”
“—one’s lovely, one’s a prick and one’s an arsehole,” said Robin.
Strike’s loud burst of laughter seemed to offend the harried-looking suited man who was hurrying past with a mobile pressed to his ear.
“Well remembered,” Strike said, still grinning as he watched the scowling man march out of sight. Lately he, too, had had moods where the sound of other people’s cheerfulness grated, but at this moment, with the sunshine, the good coffee and Robin beside him, he suddenly realized he was happier than he’d been in months.
“People are never raised the same way, though,” said Robin, “not even in the same house, with the same parents. Birth order matters, and all kinds of other things. Speaking of which, Wilma Bayliss’s daughter Maya has definitely agreed to talk to us. We’re trying to find a convenient date. I think I told you, the youngest sister is recovering from breast cancer, so I don’t want to hassle them.
“And there’s something else,” said Robin, feeling self-conscious.
Strike, who’d returned to his sandwich, saw, to his surprise, Robin drawing from her bag Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which Strike had assumed was still in the locked filing cabinet in the office.