Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  Within a few paces, the phone rang. Seeing that it was Strike, she answered the call.

  “Hi. Just seen Janice.”

  “Oh good,” said Robin, trying not to pant as she scanned her surroundings for either a Tube sign or a taxi. “Anything interesting?”

  “Plenty,” said Strike, who was strolling back along Nightingale Grove. Notwithstanding his recent exchange with the nurse, he’d just lit a Benson & Hedges. As he walked into the cool breeze, the smoke was snatched from his lips every time he exhaled. “Where are you at the moment?”

  “Tower Bridge Road,” said Robin, still running, still looking around in vain for a Tube sign.

  “Thought you were on Shifty’s Boss this morning?”

  “I was,” said Robin. It was probably best that Strike knew immediately what had just happened. “I’ve just left him on Tower Bridge with Barclay.”

  “When you say ‘with’ Barclay—”

  “They might be talking by now, I don’t know,” said Robin. Unable to talk normally while jogging, she slowed to a fast walk. “Cormoran, SB looked as though he was thinking of jumping.”

  “Off Tower Bridge?” asked Strike, surprised.

  “Why not Tower Bridge?” said Robin, as she rounded a corner onto a busy junction. “It was the nearest accessible high structure…”

  “But his office isn’t anywhere near—”

  “He got off at Monument as usual but he didn’t go into work. He looked up at the office for a bit, then walked away. I thought he was just stretching his legs, but then he headed out onto Tower Bridge and stood there, staring down at the water.”

  Robin had spent forty anxious minutes watching SB stare down at the cement-colored river below, his briefcase hanging limply by his side, while traffic rumbled along the bridge behind him. She doubted that Strike could imagine how nerve-racking she’d found the wait for Barclay to come and relieve her.

  There was still no sign of a Tube station. Robin broke into a jog again.

  “I thought of approaching him,” she said, “but I was worried I’d startle him into jumping. You know how big he is, I couldn’t have held him back.”

  “You really think he was—”

  “Yes,” said Robin, trying not to sound triumphant: she’d just caught sight of a circular red Tube sign through a break in the traffic and started running. “He looked utterly hopeless.”

  “Are you running?” asked Strike, who could now hear her feet hitting the ground even over the growl of traffic.

  “Yes,” said Robin, and then, “I’m late for a dental appointment.”

  She’d regretted not coming up with a solid reason earlier for not being able to interview Janice Beattie, and had decided on this story, should Strike ask again.

  “Ah,” said Strike. “Right.”

  “Anyway,” Robin said, weaving around passers-by, “Barclay arrived to take over—he agreed SB looked like he was thinking of jumping—and he said—”

  She was developing a stitch in her side now.

  “—said—he’d go and try—and talk to him—and that’s when I left. At least—Barclay’s big enough—to hold him back if he tries anything,” she finished breathlessly.

  “But it also means SB will recognize Barclay in future,” Strike pointed out.

  “Well, yeah, I know that,” said Robin, slowing to a walk again as she was almost at the Underground steps, and massaging the stitch in her side, “but given that we thought he might be about to kill himself—”

  “Understood,” said Strike, who had paused in the shadow of Hither Green station to finish his cigarette. “Just thinking logistics. ’Course, if we’re lucky, he might spill the beans to Barclay about what Shifty’s got on him. Desperate men are sometimes willing to—”

  “Cormoran, I’m going to have to go,” said Robin, who’d reached the Underground entrance. “I’ll see you back at the office after my appointment and you can fill me in about Janice.”

  “Right you are,” said Strike. “Hope it doesn’t hurt.”

  “What doesn’t hu—Oh, the dentist, no, it’s just a check-up,” said Robin.

  Really convincing, Robin, she thought, angry at herself, as she shoved her mobile back into her pocket and ran down the steps into the Underground.

  Once on the train, she stripped off her jacket, because she was sweating from running, and neatened her hair with the aid of her reflection in the dirty dark window opposite her. Between SB and his possibly suicidal ideation, lying to Strike, her feeble cover story and the potential risks of the meeting she was about to have, she felt jittery. There’d been another occasion, a couple of years previously, when Robin had chosen to pursue a line of inquiry while keeping it secret from Strike. It had resulted in Strike sacking her.

  This is different, she tried to reassure herself, smoothing sweaty strands of hair off her forehead. He won’t mind, as long as it works. It’s what he wants, too.

  She emerged at Tottenham Court Road station twenty minutes later and hurried with her jacket over her shoulder into the heart of Soho.

  Only when she was approaching the Star café, and saw the sign over the door, did she register the coincidence of the name. Trying not to think about asteroids, horoscopes or omens, Robin entered the café, where round wooden tables stood on a red-brick floor. The walls were decorated with old-fashioned tin signs, one of which was advertising ROBIN CIGARETTES. Directly beneath this, perhaps deliberately, sat an old man wearing a black windcheater, his face ruddy with broken veins and his thick gray hair oiled into a quiff that had the appearance of not having changed since the fifties. A walking stick was propped against the wall beside him. On his other side sat a teenage girl with long neon-yellow hair, who was texting on her phone and didn’t look up until Robin had approached their table.

  “Mr. Tucker?” said Robin.

  “Yeah,” said the man hoarsely, revealing crooked brown teeth. “Miss Ellacott?”

  “Robin,” she said, smiling as they shook hands.

  “This is my granddaughter, Lauren,” said Tucker.

  “Hiya,” said Lauren, glancing up from her phone, then back down again.

  “I’ll just get myself a coffee,” said Robin. “Can I buy either of you anything?”

  They declined. While Robin bought herself a flat white, she sensed the eyes of the old man on her. During their only previous conversation, which had been by phone, Brian Tucker had talked for a quarter of an hour, without pause, about the disappearance of his eldest daughter, Louise, in 1972, and his lifelong quest to prove that Dennis Creed had murdered her. Roy Phipps had called Tucker “half-insane.” While Robin wouldn’t have gone that far on the evidence to date, there was no doubt that he seemed utterly consumed by Creed, and with his quest for justice.

  When Robin returned to the Tuckers’ table and sat down with her coffee, Lauren put her phone away. Her long neon extensions, the unicorn tattoo on her forearm, her blatantly false eyelashes and her chipped nail varnish all stood in contrast to the innocent, dimpled face just discernible beneath her aggressively applied contouring.

  “I came to help Grandad,” she told Robin. “He doesn’t walk so well these days.”

  “She’s a good girl,” said Tucker. “Very good girl.”

  “Well, thanks very much for meeting me,” Robin told both of them. “I really appreciate it.”

  Close to, Tucker’s swollen nose had a strawberry-like appearance, flecked as it was with blackheads.

  “No, I appreciate it, Miss Ellacott,” he said in his low, hoarse voice. “I think they’re really going to let it happen this time, I do. And like I said on the phone, if they don’t, I’m ready to break into the television studio—”

  “Well,” said Robin, “hopefully we won’t need to do anything that dras—”

  “—and I’ve told them that, and it’s shaken them up. Well, that, and your contact nudging the Ministry of Justice,” he conceded, gazing at Robin through small, bloodshot eyes. “Mind you, I’m starting to thin
k I should’ve threatened them with the press years ago. You don’t get anywhere with these people playing by the rules, they just fob you off with their bureaucracy and their so-called expert opinions.”

  “I can only imagine how difficult it’s been for you,” said Robin, “but given that we might be in with a chance to interview him, we don’t want to do anything—”

  “I’ll have justice for Louise if it kills me,” said Tucker. “Let them arrest me. It’ll just mean more publicity.”

  “But we wouldn’t want—”

  “She don’t want you to do nothing silly, Grandad,” said Lauren. “She don’t want you to mess things up.”

  “No, I won’t, I won’t,” said Tucker. His eyes were small, flecked and almost colorless, set in pouches of purple. “But this might be our one and only chance, so it must be done in the right way and by the right interrogator.”

  “Is he not coming?” said Lauren. “Cormoran Strike? Grandad said he might be coming.”

  “No,” said Robin, and seeing the Tuckers’ faces fall, she added quickly, “He’s on another case just now, but anything you’d say to Cormoran, you can say to me, as his part—”

  “It’s got to be him who interviews Creed,” Tucker said. “Not you.”

  “I under—”

  “No, love, you don’t,” said Tucker firmly. “This has been my whole life. I understand Creed better than any of the morons who’ve written books about him. I’ve studied him. He’s been cut off from any kind of attention for years, now. Your boss is a famous man. Creed’ll want to meet him. Creed’ll think he’s cleverer, of course he will. He’ll want to beat your boss, want to come out of it on top, but the temptation of seeing his name in the papers again? He’s always thrived on the publicity. I think he’ll be ready to talk, as long as your boss can make him believe it’s worth his while… he’s kosher, your boss, is he?”

  Under almost any other circumstances, Robin would have said “he’s actually my partner,” but today, understanding what she was being asked, she said,

  “Yes, he’s kosher.”

  “Yeah, I thought he seemed it, I thought so,” said Brian Tucker. “When your contact got in touch, I went online, I looked it all up. Impressive, what he’s done. He doesn’t give interviews, does he?”

  “No,” said Robin.

  “I like that,” said Tucker, nodding. “In it for the right reasons. But the name’s known, now, and that’ll appeal to Creed, and so will the fact your boss has had contact with famous people. Creed likes all that. I’ve told the Ministry of Justice and I told your contact, I want this Strike to do it, I don’t want the police interviewing him. They’ve had their go and we all know how well that went. And no more bloody psychiatrists, thinking they’re so smart and they can’t even agree on whether the bastard’s sane or not.

  “I know Creed. I understand Creed. I’ve made a lifelong study of his psychology. I was there every day in court, during the trial. They didn’t ask him about Lou in court, not by name, but he made eye contact with me plenty of times. He’ll have recognized me, he’ll have known who I was, because Lou was my spitting image.

  “When they asked him in court about the jewelry—you know about the pendant, Lou’s pendant?”

  “Yes,” said Robin.

  “She got it a couple of days before she disappeared. Showed it to her sister Liz, Lauren’s mother—didn’t she?” he asked Lauren, who nodded. “A butterfly on a chain, nothing expensive, and because it was mass-produced, the police said it could have been anyone’s. Liz remembered the pendant differently—that’s what threw the police off, she wasn’t sure at first that it was Lou’s—but she admitted she only saw it briefly. And when they mentioned the jewelry, Creed looked straight at me. He knew who I was. Lou was my spit image,” repeated Tucker. “You know his explanation for having a stash of jewelry under the floorboards?”

  “Yes,” said Robin, “he said he’d bought it because he liked to cross-dress—”

  “That he’d bought it,” said Tucker, talking over Robin, “to dress up in.”

  “Mr. Tucker, you said on the phone—”

  “Lou nicked it from that shop they all used to go to, what was it—”

  “Biba,” said Lauren.

  “Biba,” said Tucker. “Two days before she disappeared, she played truant and that evening she showed Lauren’s mum, Liz, what she’d stolen. She was a handful, Lou. Didn’t get on with my second wife. The girls’ mum died when Lou was ten. It affected Lou the worst, more than the other two. She never liked my second wife.”

  He’d told Robin all of this on the phone, but still, she nodded sympathetically.

  “My wife had a row with Lou the morning before she disappeared, and Lou bunked off school again. We didn’t realize until she didn’t come home that night. Rang round all her friends, none of them had seen her, so we called the cops. We found out later, one of her friends had lied. She’d smuggled Lou upstairs and not told her parents.

  “Lou was spotted three times next day, still in her school uniform. Last known sighting was outside a launderette in Kentish Town. She asked some geezer for a light. We knew she’d started smoking. That was partly what she rowed with my wife about.

  “Creed picked up Vera Kenny in Kentish Town, too,” said Tucker, hoarsely. “In 1970, right after he’d moved into the place by Paradise Park. Vera was the first woman he took back to that basement. He chained them up, you know, and kept them alive while he—”

  “Grandad,” said Lauren plaintively, “don’t.”

  “No,” Tucker muttered, dipping his head, “sorry, love.”

  “Mr. Tucker,” said Robin, seizing her chance, “you said on the phone you had information about Margot Bamborough nobody else knows.”

  “Yeah,” said Tucker, groping inside his windcheater for a wad of folded papers, which he unfolded with shaking hands. “This top one, I got through a warder at Wakefield, back in ’79. I used to hang round there every weekend in the late seventies, watch them all coming in and out. Found out where they liked to drink and everything.

  “Anyway, this particular warder, I won’t say his name, but we got chummy. Creed was on a high-security wing, in a single cell, because all the other cons wanted to take a pop at him. One geezer nearly took out Creed’s eye in ’82, stole a spoon from the canteen and sharpened the handle to a point in his cell. Tried to stab Creed through the eyeball. Just missed, because Creed dodged. My mate told me he screamed like a little girl,” said Tucker, with relish.

  “Anyway, I said to my mate, I said, anything you can find out, anything you can tell me. Things Creed’s saying, hints he gives, you know. I paid him for it. He could’ve lost his job if anyone had found out. And my mate got hold of this and smuggled it out to me. I’ve never been able to admit to having it, because both of us would be in trouble if it got out, but I called up Margot Bamborough’s husband, what was his name—”

  “Roy Phipps.”

  “Roy Phipps, yeah. I said, ‘I’ve got a bit of Creed’s writing here you’re going to want to see. It proves he killed your wife.’”

  A contemptuous smile revealed Tucker’s toffee-brown teeth again.

  “But he didn’t want to know,” said Tucker. “Phipps thought I was a crank. A year after I called him, I read in the paper he’d married the nanny. Creed did Dr. Phipps a good turn, it seems.”

  “Grandad!” said Lauren, shocked.

  “All right, all right,” muttered Tucker. “I never liked that doctor. He could’ve done us a lot of good, if he’d wanted to. Hospital consultant, he was the kind of man the Home Secretary would’ve listened to. We could’ve kept up the pressure if he’d helped us, but he wasn’t interested, and when I saw he was off with the nanny I thought, ah, right, everything’s explained.”

  “Could I—” Robin began, gesturing toward the paper Tucker was still holding flat to the table, but he ignored her.

  “So it was just me and Jerry for years,” said Tucker. “Jerry Wolfson, Kara’s broth
er. You know who that is?” he shot at Robin.

  “Yes, the nightclub hostess—”

  “Nightclub hostess, hooker on the side, and a drug habit as well. Jerry had no illusions about her, he wasn’t naive, but it was still his sister. She raised him, after their mother left. Kara was all the family he had.

  “February 1973, three months after my Lou, Kara disappeared as well. Left her club in Soho in the early hours of the morning. Another girl left at exactly the same time. It wasn’t far from here, as a matter of fact,” said Tucker, pointing out of the door. “The two girls go different ways up the street. The friend looks back and sees Kara bending down and talking to a van driver at the end of the road. The friend assumed that Kara knew the driver. She walks off. Kara’s never seen again.

  “Jerry spoke to all Kara’s friends at the club, after, but nobody knew anything. There was a rumor going round, after Kara disappeared, that she’d been a police informer. That club was run by a couple of gangland figures. Suited them, to say she was an informer, see? Scare the other girls into keeping shtum about anything they’d seen or heard in the club.

  “But Jerry never believed Kara was a snitch. He thought it was the Essex Butcher from the start—the van was the giveaway. So we joined forces.

  “He tried to get permission to visit Creed, same as me, but the authorities wouldn’t let us. Jerry gave up, in the end. Drank himself to death. Something like this happens to someone you love, it marks you. You can’t get out from under it. The weight of it crushes some people.

  “My marriage broke up. My other two daughters didn’t speak to me for years. Wanted me to stop going on about Lou, stop talking about Creed, pretend it never—”

  “That’s not fair, Grandad,” said Lauren, sternly.

  “Yeah, all right,” mumbled Tucker. “All right, I grant you, Lauren’s mum, she’s come round lately. I said to Liz, ‘Think of all the time I should’ve spent with Lou, like I’ve spent with you and Lisa. Add it all up. Family meals and holidays. Helping her with her homework. Telling her to clean her room. Arguing with her—’ My God, she could be bolshie. Watching her graduate, I expect, because she was clever, Lou, even if she did get in trouble at school with all the bunking off. I said to Liz, ‘I never got to walk her up the aisle, did I? Never got to visit her in hospital when her kids were born. Add up all the time I would’ve given her if she’d lived—’”