The surface of the sea changed from second to second, from rippling plain of sage and gray, to mesh of diamond-bright sparkles. The smell of ozone was as familiar and comforting to Strike as that of beer. He was just thinking how glad he was that Joan had chosen this, and not a grave, when he felt his phone vibrate against his chest. Unable to resist the temptation to read what he knew would be a text from Charlotte, he pulled it out and read it.
I thought you’d come back I thought you’d stop me marrying him I didn’t think you’d let me do it
He put the phone back into his pocket. Luke was watching him and Strike thought he saw the idea occur of asking why Uncle Cormoran could look at his phone, whereas he was banned from bringing his iPad, but the look his uncle gave him seemed to make him think better of the idea, and he merely stuffed more chocolate in his mouth.
A feeling of constraint seemed to fall over everyone, even Luke, as Ted turned the boat into the wind and brought the boat slowly to a halt, the sail flapping loudly in the wind, St. Mawes Castle now the size of a sandcastle in the distance. Kerenza handed around the roses, one for everyone except Ted, who took the remainder of the bouquet between the hands that were forever sunburned. Nobody spoke, and yet the moment didn’t feel anticlimactic. While the sails flapped angrily overhead, Ted bent low over the side of the boat and dropped the urn gently into the sea, murmuring his farewell, and the object Strike had imagined would look inadequate and tawdry became, precisely because of its smallness as it bobbed gallantly on the ocean, affecting, and strangely noble. Soon, the last earthly remains of Joan Nancarrow would dissolve into the sea, and only the pink roses, tossed one by one into the sea by each of them, would remain to show the place where she’d disappeared.
Strike put his arm around Lucy, who rested her head on his shoulder, as they sailed back to shore. Rozwyn, the elder of Polworth’s daughters, broke into sobs initially provoked by the sight of the urn vanishing in the distance, but sustained by her enjoyment of her own grief and the sympathy of her mother. Strike watched until he could no longer see the white dot, then turned his eyes toward shore, thinking of the leg of lamb waiting for them back at the house.
His phone vibrated yet again, minutes after he’d regained firm ground. While Polworth helped Ted tie up the boat, Strike lit a cigarette and turned away from the group to read the new text.
I want to die speaking the truth people are such liars everyone I know lies in such if them swant to stop pretending
“I’ll walk back,” he told Lucy.
“You can’t,” she said at once, “lunch’ll be ready for us—”
“I’m going to want another one of these,” Strike said firmly, holding up his cigarette in her disapproving face. “I’ll meet you up there.”
“Want company, Diddy?” asked Polworth. “Penny can take the girls back up to the house.”
“No, you’re all right, mate,” said Strike. “Need to make a work call,” he added quietly, so that Lucy couldn’t hear. As he said it, he felt his mobile vibrate again.
“Goodbye, Corm,” said Kerenza, her freckled face kindly as ever. “I’m not coming for lunch.”
“Great,” said Strike, “no, sorry, I mean—thanks for coming, Kerenza, Joan was so fond of you.”
When Kerenza had finally got into her Mini, and the family’s cars were driving away, Strike pulled out his phone again.
Never forget that I loved you goodbye blues x
Strike called the number. After a few rings, it went to voicemail.
“Charlotte, it’s me,” said Strike. “I’m going to keep ringing till you pick up.”
He hung up and dialed again. The number went to voicemail for a second time.
Strike began to walk, because his anxiety required action. The streets around the harbor weren’t busy. Most people would be sitting down to Easter lunch. Over and again he dialed Charlotte’s number, but she didn’t answer.
It was as though a wire was tightening around his skull. His neck was rigid with tension. From second to second his feelings fluctuated between rage, resentment, frustration and fear. She’d always been an expert manipulator. She’d also narrowly escaped death by her own hand, twice.
The phone might be going unanswered because she was already dead. There could be sporting guns at the Castle of Croy, where her husband’s family had lived for generations. There’d be heavy-duty medications at the clinic: she might have stockpiled them. She might even have taken a razor blade to herself, as she’d once tried to do during one of her and Strike’s more vicious rows.
After calling the number for the tenth time, Strike came to a halt, looking out over the railings at the pitiless sea, which breathed no consolation as it rushed to and then retreated from the shore. Memories of Joan, and the way she’d clung so fiercely to life, flooded his mind: his anxiety about Charlotte was laced with fury, for throwing life away.
And then his phone rang.
“Where are you?” he almost shouted.
“Bluey?”
She sounded drunk, or very stoned.
“Where are you?”
“… told you,” she mumbled. “Bluey, d’you ’member…”
“Charlotte, WHERE ARE YOU?”
“Told you, S’monds…”
He turned and began to half-run, half-hobble back the way he’d come: there was an old-fashioned red telephone box twenty yards back, and with his free hand he was already pulling coins from his trouser pocket.
“Are you in your room? Where are you?”
The telephone box smelled urinous, of cigarette butts and dirt from a thousand silt-clogged soles.
“C’n see sky… Bluey, I’m so…”
She was still mumbling, her breathing slow.
“One one eight, one one eight?” said a cheery voice through the receiver in his left hand.
“Symonds House, it’s a residential psychiatric clinic in Kent.”
“Shall I connect—”
“Yes, connect me… Charlotte, are you still there? Talk to me. Where are you?”
But she didn’t answer. Her breathing was loud and becoming guttural.
“Symonds House,” said a bright female voice in his other ear.
“Have you got an in-patient there called Charlotte Ross?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the receptionist, “we don’t disclose—”
“She’s overdosed. She’s just called me from your facility, and she’s overdosed. You need to find her—she might be outside, have you got grounds there?”
“Sir, can I ask you—”
“Check Charlotte Ross’s whereabouts, now, I’ve got her on another line and she’s overdosed.”
He heard the woman speaking to someone away from the phone.
“… Mrs. Ross… first floor, just to make…”
The voice spoke in his ear again, still professionally bright, but anxious now.
“Sir, what number is Mrs. Ross calling from? She—in-patients don’t have their own mobiles.”
“She’s got one from somewhere,” said Strike, “as well as a shitload of drugs.”
Somewhere in the background of the call he heard shouting, then loud footsteps. He tried to insert another coin into the slot, but it fell straight through and came out at the bottom.
“Fuck—”
“Sir, I’m going to ask you not to talk to me like that—”
“No, I just—”
The line went dead. Charlotte’s breath was now barely audible.
Strike slammed as much change as he had in his pockets into the slot, then redialed telephone inquiries. Within a minute, he was again connected to the female voice at Symonds House.
“Symonds House—”
“Have you found her? I got cut off. Have you found her?”
“I’m afraid I can’t disclose—” said the harassed-sounding woman.
“She got hold of a mobile and the means to kill herself on your watch,” said Strike, “so you can bloody well disclose whether she’s dead�
�”
“Sir, I’d appreciate you not shouting at me—”
But then Strike heard distant male voices through the mobile clamped to his other ear. There was no point hanging up and ringing: Charlotte hadn’t heard his ten previous calls. She must have the mobile on silent.
“SHE’S HERE!” he bellowed, and the woman on the payphone line shrieked in shock. “FOLLOW MY VOICE, SHE’S HERE!”
Strike was bellowing into the phone, well aware of the almost impossible odds of searchers hearing him: he could hear swishing and cracking, and knew that Charlotte was outside, probably in undergrowth.
Then, through the mobile, he heard a man shout.
“Shit, she’s here—SHE’S HERE! Fuck… get an ambulance!”
“Sir,” said the shell-shocked woman, now that Strike had stopped yelling, “could I have your name?”
But Strike hung up. Over the sound of his change clattering into the returned coin box, he continued to listen to the two men who’d found Charlotte, one of them shouting details of her overdose to the emergency services, the other repeatedly calling Charlotte’s name, until somebody noticed that the mobile beside her was active, and turned it off.
55
Of louers sad calamities of old,
Full many piteous stories doe remaine…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
As a noted beauty and socialite with a tantalizing number of celebrity connections and a rebellious, self-destructive past, Charlotte was an old staple of the gossip columns. Naturally, her emergency hospitalization out of a private psychiatric clinic made news.
The tabloids ran photo-heavy stories, showing Charlotte at the ages of fourteen (when she’d first run away from her private school and sparked a police hunt), eighteen (arm in arm with her well-known broadcaster father, a thrice-married heavy drinker), twenty-one (with her model-turned-socialite mother, at a cocktail party) and thirty-eight, where, as beautiful as ever, she smiled blankly alongside her white-blond husband, twin babies in her arms, an exquisite drawing room in the background. Nobody had been able to find a picture of her with Cormoran Strike, but the fact that they’d once dated, which Charlotte herself had been careful to mention to the press when she got engaged to Jago, ensured that his name appeared in print alongside hers. “Emergency hospitalization,” “history of addiction issues,” “troubled past”: though the tabloids didn’t say so explicitly, only the most naive reader could be left in doubt that Charlotte had attempted to take her own life. The story gained a second wind when an unnamed “inside source” at Symonds House confided that the future Viscountess Ross had “allegedly” been found face down in a shrubbery, right behind an old summer house.
The broadsheets’ stories led with the questionable practices of the exorbitantly priced Symonds House, “which” (said the Telegraph) “has a reputation for being the last resort of the wealthy and well-connected. Controversial treatments include transcranial magnetic stimulation and the hallucinogen psilocybin (more commonly known as magic mushrooms).” They, too, used large photographs of Charlotte to embellish their stories, so Robin, who furtively read all of them and felt guilty afterward, was reminded constantly how very beautiful Strike’s ex had always been.
Strike hadn’t mentioned a word of the business to Robin, and she hadn’t asked. A moratorium had lain over Charlotte’s name ever since that night, four years previously, when Robin had still been the temp, and an extremely drunk Strike confided in her that Charlotte had lied about being pregnant with his child. All Robin knew right now was that Strike had returned from Cornwall in a particularly buttoned-up mood, and while she knew that the disposal of his aunt’s ashes must have been a sad occasion, she couldn’t help suspecting this other source for his moodiness.
Out of loyalty to Strike, she refused to gossip about his ex, even though everyone around her seemed to want to talk about it. A week after Strike returned from Cornwall, Robin entered the office, already in a bad mood because Matthew had again postponed mediation. On seeing the door open, Pat the secretary hastily tried to hide a copy of the Daily Mail she’d been poring over with Morris. On realizing that the new arrival was Robin rather than Strike, Pat had given her raven’s caw of laughter and slapped the paper back onto her desk.
“Caught red-handed,” said Morris with a wink at Robin. “Seen all this about the boss’s ex?”
He’s not my boss, he’s my partner, thought Robin, but she merely said, “Yes.”
“Talk about punching above his bloody weight,” said Morris, examining a picture of Charlotte at twenty-one in a beaded mini-dress. “The fuck did a bloke who looks like him end up with that?”
Robin wasn’t even safe from it at home. Max, whose floppy hair had been cropped short to play the ex–army officer, had begun shooting his TV series, and was more cheerful than she’d ever known him. Max was also thoroughly intrigued to know that Strike had been involved with Charlotte for sixteen years.
“I met her once,” he told Robin, who’d come upstairs after several hours in her room, combing online records for Betty Fuller. The one-time prostitute was proving harder to find than she’d anticipated.
“Really?” said Robin, who both wanted and didn’t want to hear the story.
“Yeah, I was in a play years ago with her half-brother. Simon Legard? He starred in that mini-series about the financial crash, what was it called? She came to watch our play and took us all out for dinner afterward. I liked her, actually, she was a real laugh. Some of those posh girls are a lot funnier than you’d think.”
“Mm,” said Robin noncommittally, and she returned immediately to her room with her cup of tea.
“I bet she tried to call Corm before she did it,” was Ilsa’s cool comment on the phone, two weeks after Easter, by which time Robin had succeeded, through patient cross-referencing, in identifying the woman she thought was most likely to be the Betty Fuller who’d lived in Skinner Street at the time of Margot Bamborough’s disappearance. Betty was now living in sheltered housing in Sans Walk, not far from her original flat, and Robin planned to pay her a visit the following afternoon, after the mediation with Matthew which seemed at last to be going ahead.
Ilsa had rung to wish Robin good luck. Robin had been trying not to think about having to see Matthew, telling herself that the ordeal would be over in a couple of hours, but it had become progressively harder to focus on her list of questions for Betty Fuller as the evening progressed, and she’d been glad, initially, to be interrupted by Ilsa.
“What’s Corm saying about the whole Charlotte thing?” Ilsa asked.
“Nothing,” said Robin truthfully.
“No, he never talks about her any more,” said Ilsa. “I wonder how much longer her marriage is going to last. Must be hanging by a thread. I’m quite surprised it’s limped on this long, actually. She only did it to get back at Corm.”
“Well, she’s had children with Jago,” Robin pointed out, then instantly regretted it. Ilsa had already told her that she and Nick had decided not to try a fourth round of IVF.
“She never wanted kids,” said Ilsa. “That was something she and Corm had in common. That, and having really similar mothers. Drink, drugs and a million men each, except Charlotte’s is still alive. So, you haven’t spoken to him about it all?”
“No,” said Robin, who was feeling marginally worse for this conversation, in spite of Ilsa’s kind intentions. “Ilsa, sorry, but I’d better go. I’ve got work to do for tomorrow.”
“Can’t you take the afternoon off? We could meet for a coffee, you’ll probably need some R&R afterward. Corm wouldn’t mind, would he?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” said Robin, “but we’re so busy, and I’m following up a lead. Anyway, work gives me something to think about other than Matthew. Let’s catch up at the weekend, if you’re free.”
Robin slept badly that night. It wasn’t Charlotte who wove her way in and out of her dreams, but Miss Jones, the agency’s client who, as ever
yone had now noticed, had taken such a shine to Strike that he’d had to ask Pat to stop putting her calls through. Robin woke before her alarm went off, glad to escape a complicated dream in which it was revealed that Miss Jones had been Matthew’s wife all along, and that Robin was defending herself against a charge of fraud at the end of a long, polished table in a dark boardroom.
Wanting to look professional and confident, she dressed in black trousers and jacket, even though Matthew knew perfectly well that she spent most of her investigative life in jeans. Casting one last look in her mirror before leaving her room, she thought she looked washed-out. Trying not to think about all those pictures of Charlotte Ross, who rarely dressed in anything but black, but whose porcelain beauty merely shone brighter in contrast, Robin grabbed her handbag and left her room.
While waiting for the Tube, Robin tried to distract herself from the squirming feeling of nerves in her stomach by checking her emails.
Dear Miss Ellacott,
As previously stated I’m not prepared to talk to anyone except Mr. Strike. This is not intended as any slight on you but I would feel more comfortable speaking man to man. Unfortunately, I will be unavailable from the end of next week due to work commitments which will be taking me out of the country. However I can make space on the evening of the 24th. If this is agreeable to Mr. Strike, I suggest the American Bar in the Stafford hotel as a discreet meeting place. Kindly let me know if this is acceptable.
Sincerely,
CB Oakden
Twenty minutes later, when she’d emerged from Holborn Tube station and had reception again, Robin forwarded this message to Strike. She had a comfortable quarter of an hour to spare before her appointment and there were plenty of places to grab a coffee in her vicinity, but before she could do so, her mobile rang: it was Pat, at the office.
“Robin?” said the familiar croaking voice. “D’you know where Cormoran is? I’ve tried his phone but he’s not picking up. I’ve got his brother Al here in the office, wanting to see him.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 70