Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “‘New, Mrs. Fuller,’” said Betty, adopting a grotesquely genteel accent, “‘new, it meks… new diff’rence to me…’ow yew ladies mek… ends meet… sex work is work’… they’ll tell yer that… patronisin’… fuckin’… but would they… want their daughters… doin’ it? Would they fuck,” said Betty Fuller, and she paid for her longest speech yet with her most severe spate of coughing.

  “Cindy does… too much coke,” Betty wheezed, her eyes watering, when she could talk again. “… keeps the weight off… Cathy, it was smack… boyfriend… workin’ for ’im… beat ’er blue… pregnant and lost it…”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Strike.

  “It’s all kids… on the street… these days,” said Betty, and a glimmer of what Strike thought was real distress showed through the determinedly tough exterior. “Firteen, fourteen… children… my day… we’d’ve marched ’em… right back ’ome… it’s all right, grown women, but kids—whatchew fucking starin’ at?” she barked to Robin.

  “Cormoran, I might—” said Robin, standing up and gesturing toward the door.

  “Yeah, off you fuck,” said Betty Fuller, watching with satisfaction as Robin left her room. “You doin’ ’er, are you?” she wheezed at Strike, once the door had clicked shut behind Robin.

  “No,” he said.

  “What the fuck’s… point, then?”

  “She’s very good at the job,” said Strike. “When she’s not up against someone like you, that is,” and Betty Fuller grinned, displaying her Cheddar-yellow teeth.

  “Hahaha… I know…’er type… knows fuckin’ nothing… ’bout real life…”

  “There was a man living in Leather Lane, back in Margot Bamborough’s day,” said Strike. “Name of Niccolo Ricci? ‘Mucky,’ they used to call him.”

  Betty Fuller said nothing, but the milky eyes narrowed.

  “What d’you know about Ricci?” asked Strike.

  “Same as… ev’ryone,” said Betty.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw Robin emerge into the daylight. She lifted her hair briefly off her neck, as though needing to remove weight from herself, then walked out of sight with her hands in her jacket pockets.

  “It warn’t Mucky… what freatened ’er,” said Betty. “’E wouldn’t… write notes. Not ’is… style.”

  “Ricci turned up at the St. John’s practice Christmas party,” said Strike. “Which seemed odd.”

  “Don’t know… nuffin’ ’bout that…”

  “Some of the people at the party assumed he was Gloria Conti’s father.”

  “Never ’eard of ’er,” wheezed Betty.

  “According to Wilma Bayliss’s daughters,” said Strike, “you told their mother you were scared of the person who wrote the notes. You said the writer of the notes killed Margot Bamborough. You told Wilma he’d kill you, too, if you said who he was.”

  Betty’s milky eyes were expressionless. Her thin chest labored to get enough oxygen into her lungs. Strike had just concluded that she definitely wasn’t going to talk, when she opened her mouth.

  “Local girl I knew,” she said, “friend o’ mine… she met Mucky… ’e come cruisin’… our corner…’e says to Jen…‘You’re better’n this… workin’ the street… body like yours… I could get you… five times what… you’re earnin’ ’ere…’ so off Jen goes,” said Betty, “up West… Soho… strippin’ for punters… sex wiv ’is mates…”

  “I met ’er… coupla years later… visitin’ ’er mum… and she tole me a story.

  “Girl at their club… gorgeous girl, Jen said… got raped… knifepoint. Cut…” said Betty Fuller, indicating her own sagging torso, “right down the ribs… by a mate… of Ricci’s…

  “Some people,” said the old woman, “fink a hooker… being raped… it just means she never… got paid…’spect your Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse,” said Betty, glancing at the window, “finks that… but it ain’t that…

  “This girl… angry… wants revenge… get back… at Ricci… so the silly bitch… turns police informer…

  “And Mucky found out,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “and ’e filmed it… as they killed ’er. My mate Jen was told… by someone… what ’ad seen… the film… Ricci kept it… in the safe… show people… if they needed… scaring…

  “Jen’s dead now,” said Betty Fuller. “Overdosed… firty-odd years ago… fort she’d be better… up West… and ’ere’s me… workin’ the streets… still alive.

  “I ain’t got nuffing… to say… about no notes… it warn’t Marcus… that’s all… That’s my meals on wheels,” said Betty, her head turning, and Strike saw a man heading toward the outside door, with a pile of foil trays in his arms.

  “I’m done,” Betty said, who seemed suddenly tired and cross. “You can turn… telly back on… and move… that table over… pass me that knife and fork… in the loo…”

  She’d rinsed them off in the bathroom sink, but they were still dirty. Strike washed them again before taking them to her. After arranging the table in front of her armchair, and turning The Only Way is Essex back on, he opened the door to the meals-on-wheels man, who was gray-haired and cheery.

  “Oh hello,” said the newcomer in a loud voice. “This your son, Betty?”

  “Is he fuck,” wheezed Betty Fuller. “Whatchew got?”

  “Chicken casserole and jelly and custard, love…”

  “Thanks very much for talking to me, Mrs. Fuller,” said Strike, but Betty’s stock of goodwill had plainly been exhausted, and she was now far more interested in her food.

  Robin was leaning against a nearby wall, reading something off her phone, when Strike emerged from the building.

  “I thought it was best to clear out,” she said, in a flat voice. “How did it go?”

  “She won’t talk about the notes,” said Strike, as the pair of them headed back down Sans Walk, “and if you ask me why, I’d say it’s because she thinks Mucky Ricci wrote them. I’ve found out a bit more about that girl in the snuff movie.”

  “You’re joking?” said Robin, looking worried.

  “Apparently she was a police informer in one of Ricci’s—”

  Robin gasped.

  “Kara Wolfson!”

  “What?”

  “Kara Wolfson. One of the women they thought Creed might have killed. Kara worked at a nightclub in Soho—the owners put it about after she disappeared that she’d been a police informer!”

  “How did you know that?” asked Strike, taken aback. He couldn’t remember this information from The Demon of Paradise Park.

  Robin suddenly remembered that she’d heard this from Brian Tucker, back at the Star Café. She hadn’t yet heard back from the Ministry of Justice about the possibility of interviewing Creed, and as Strike still had no inkling what she was up to, she said,

  “Think I read it online…”

  But with a new heaviness pressing on her heart, Robin remembered that Kara’s only remaining close relative, the brother she’d raised, had drunk himself to death. Hutchins had said the police weren’t able to do anything about that film. Kara Wolfson’s body might be anywhere. Some stories didn’t have neat endings: there was nowhere to lay flowers for Kara Wolfson, unless it was on the corner near the strip joint where she’d last been seen.

  Fighting the depression now threatening to overwhelm her, Robin raised her phone to show Strike what she’d been looking up, and said in a determinedly matter-of-fact voice,

  “I was just reading about somnophilia, otherwise known as sleeping princess syndrome.”

  “Which, I take it—”

  “Was Brenner’s kink,” said Robin, and reading off her phone, she said, “‘Somnophilia is a paraphilia in which the individual is sexually aroused by someone non-responsive… some psychologists have linked somnophilia with necrophilia.’ Cormoran… you know how he had barbiturates stocked up in his office?”

  “Yeah,” said Strike slowly, as they walked back toward his car. “Well, this is going to
give us something to talk to Dorothy’s son about, isn’t it? I wonder whether she was game for playing dead? Or whether she found herself sleeping a long time, after Brenner had been round for lunch?”

  Robin gave a small shudder.

  “I know,” Strike continued, as he lit up, “I said he’d be a last resort, but we’ve only got three months left. I’m starting to think I’m going to have to pay Mucky Ricci a visit.”

  57

  But all his mind is set on mucky pelfe,

  To hoord vp heapes of euill gotten masse,

  For which he others wrongs, and wreckes himself.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Adding daytime surveillance of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Nursing Home to the rota meant that as May progressed, the agency was again struggling to cover all open cases. Strike wanted to know how many visitors were going in and out, and at what times, so that he might ascertain when he’d have the best chance of entering the building without running into one of the old gangster’s relatives.

  The nursing home lay in a quiet Georgian street on the very edge of Clerkenwell, in a quiet, leafy enclave where dun-colored brick houses sported neo-classical pediments and glossy black front doors. A dark wood plaque on the exterior wall of the nursing home was embellished with a cross, and a biblical quotation, in gold:

  For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

  Peter 1:18–19

  “Nice sentiment,” as Strike commented to Robin, on one of their handovers, “but nobody’s getting in there without a good bit of cash.”

  The private nursing home was small and clearly expensive. The staff, all of whom the agency quickly grew to know by sight, wore dark blue scrubs and hailed mostly from abroad. There was a black male nurse who sounded as though he’d come from Trinidad, and two blondes who talked Polish to each other every morning as they passed whichever agency member happened to be loitering in the area at the time, feigning a call on their mobile, reading a newspaper or appearing to wait, slightly impatiently, for a friend who never showed up.

  A podiatrist and a hairdresser went regularly in and out of the home, but after two weeks’ daytime surveillance, the agency tentatively concluded that Ricci only received visits on Sundays, when his two sons appeared, wearing the resigned looks of people for whom this was an unwelcome chore. It was easy to identify which brother was which from pictures that had appeared in the press. Luca looked, in Barclay’s phrase, “like a piano fell oan his heid,” having a bald, flat, noticeably scarred skull. Marco was smaller, slighter and hairier, but gave off an air of barely contained violence, slamming his hand repeatedly on the nursing home’s doorbell if the door wasn’t opened immediately, and slapping a grandson around the back of the head for dropping a chocolate bar on the pavement. Both the brothers’ wives had a hard-boiled look about them, and none of the family had the good looks Robin associated with Italians. The great-grandfather sitting mutely behind the doors of the nursing home might have been a true Latin, but his descendants were disappointingly pallid and Saxon in appearance, right down to the little ginger-haired boy who dropped his chocolate.

  It was Robin who first laid eyes on Ricci himself, on the third Saturday the agency was watching the home. Beneath her raincoat, Robin was wearing a dress, because she was meeting Strike later at the Stafford hotel in Mayfair, to interview C. B. Oakden. Robin, who’d never been to the hotel, had looked it up and learned that the five-star establishment, with its bowler-hatted doormen, was one of the oldest and smartest hotels in London, hence her atypical choice of surveillance wear. As she’d previously disguised herself while lurking outside St. Peter’s (alternately beanie hat, hair up, dark contact lenses and sunglasses), she felt safe to look like herself for once as she strolled up and down the street, pretending to talk on the phone, although she’d added clear-lensed glasses she’d remove for the Stafford.

  The elderly residents of St. Peter’s were occasionally escorted or wheeled down the street in the afternoon to the nearby square, which had a central private garden enclosed by railings, open only to keyholders, there to doze or enjoy the lilac and pansies while well wrapped up against the cold. Hitherto, the agency had seen only elderly women taken on the outings, but today, for the first time, an old man was among the group coming down a ramp at the side of the building.

  Robin recognized Ricci instantly, not by his lion ring, which, if he was wearing it, was well hidden beneath a tartan rug, but by the profile that time might have exaggerated, but could not disguise. His thick black hair was now dark gray and his nose and earlobes enormous. The large eyes that reminded Strike of a Basset hound had an even more pronounced droop these days. Ricci’s mouth hung slightly open as one of the Polish nurses pushed him toward the square, talking to him brightly, but receiving no response.

  “You all right, Enid, love?” the black male nurse called ahead to a frail-looking old lady wearing a sheepskin hat, and she laughed and nodded.

  Robin gave the group a head start, then followed, watching as one of the nurses unlocked the gate to the garden, and the party disappeared inside. Walking around the square with her phone clamped to her ear, pretending to be in conversation, Robin thought how typical it was that today, of all days, she’d worn heels, never imagining that there might have been a possibility of approaching Ricci and chatting to him.

  The group from the nursing home had come to a halt beside flower-beds of purple and yellow, Ricci parked in his wheelchair beside an empty park bench. The nurses chatted amongst themselves, and to those old ladies capable of doing so, while the old man stared vacantly across the lawns.

  If she’d been wearing her usual trainers, Robin thought, she might possibly have been able to scale the railings and get into the garden unseen: there was a clump of trees that would provide cover from the nurses, and she could have sidled over to Ricci and found out, at the very least, whether he had dementia. Unfortunately, she had absolutely no chance of managing that feat in her dress and high heels.

  As she completed her walk around the square, Robin spotted Saul Morris walking toward her. Morris was early, as he always tended to be, whenever it was Robin from whom he was taking over.

  He’s going to mention either the glasses or the heels first, Robin thought.

  “High heels,” said Morris, as soon as he was within earshot, his bright blue eyes sweeping over her. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you in heels before. Funny, I never think of you as tall, but you are, aren’t you? Sexy specs, too.”

  Before Robin could stop him, he’d stooped and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I’m the guy you’re meeting on a blind date,” he told her, straightening up again and winking.

  “How do we account for the fact that I’m about to leave you standing here?” Robin asked, unsmiling, and Morris laughed too hard, just as he did at Strike’s mildest jokes.

  “Dunno—what would it take to make you walk out on a blind date?” asked Morris.

  You turning up, thought Robin, but ignoring the question she checked her watch and said,

  “If you’re OK to take over now, I’ll head—”

  “Here they come,” said Morris quietly. “Oh, the old fella’s outside this time, is he? I wondered why you’d abandoned the front door.”

  The comment aggravated Robin almost as much as his flirtatious manner. Why did he think she’d leave the front door, unless the target had moved? Nevertheless, she waited beside him while the small group of nurses and residents, having decided that twenty minutes was enough fresh air, passed them on the other side of the street, heading back to the home.

  “My kids were taken out like that at nursery,” said Morris quietly, watching the group pass. “All bundled up in pushchairs, the helpers wheeling them out. Some of that lot are probably wearing nappies, too,” he sa
id, his bright blue eyes following the St. Peter’s party. “Christ, I hope I never end up like that. Ricci’s the only man, too, poor sod.”

  “I think they’re very well looked after,” Robin said, as the Trinidadian nurse shouted,

  “Up we go, Enid!”

  “Like being a kid again, though, isn’t it?” said Morris, as they watched the wheelchairs rolling along in procession. “But with none of the perks.”

  “S’pose so,” said Robin. “I’ll head off, then, if you’re ready to take over.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” said Morris, but he immediately added, “where’re you going, all dressed up like that?”

  “I’m meeting Strike.”

  “Oh,” said Morris, eyebrows raised, “I see—”

  “No,” said Robin, “you don’t. We’re interviewing someone at a really smart hotel.”

  “Ah,” said Morris. “Sorry.”

  But there was a strange complacency, bordering on complicity, about the way Morris bade her goodbye, and it wasn’t until Robin had reached the end of the street that the unwelcome thought occurred to her that Morris had entirely misread the sharpness of her denial that she was going on a date with Strike; that he might, in fact, have interpreted it as Robin wanting to make it quite clear that her affections weren’t engaged elsewhere.

  Was Morris—could he be—so deluded as to think that Robin was secretly hoping that his unsubtle flirtation might lead to something happening between them? Even after what had happened on Boxing Day, when she’d shouted at him for sending her that dick pic? Little though she wanted to believe it, she was afraid that the answer was “yes.” Morris had been extremely drunk when she’d shouted at him, and possibly incapable of judging just how truly angry and disgusted she’d been. He’d seemed sincerely ashamed of himself in the immediate aftermath, so she’d forced herself to be friendlier than she wanted to be, purely out of a desire to foster team cohesion. The result had been that Morris had returned to his pre–dick pic ways. She only answered his late-night texts, mostly containing jokes and attempts at banter, to stop him pestering her with “have I offended you?” follow-ups. Now it occurred to her that what she considered professionalism Morris took as encouragement. Everything he said to her about work suggested that he saw her as less able and less experienced than the rest of the agency: perhaps he also thought her naive enough to be flattered by the attentions of a man she actually found condescending and slimy.