Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Why did Brenner want Bamborough struck off?”

  “She examined some kid without parental permission.”

  “Was this Janice’s son?” asked Robin.

  “Was I talking to you?” Oakden shot at her.

  “You,” growled Strike, “want to keep a civil tongue in your bloody head. Was it Janice’s son, yes or no?”

  “Maybe,” said Oakden, and Robin concluded that he couldn’t remember. “Point is, that’s unethical behavior, looking at a kid without a parent there, and old Joe was all worked up about it. ‘I’ll have her struck off for this,’ he kept saying. There. Didn’t get that from no obituary, did I?”

  Oakden drank the rest of his cocktail straight off, then said,

  “I’ll have another one of those.”

  Strike ignored this, saying,

  “And this was two weeks before Bamborough disappeared?”

  “About that, yeah. Never seen the old bastard so excited. He loved disciplining people, old Joe. Vicious old bastard, actually.”

  “In what way?”

  “Told my old woman in front of me she wasn’t hitting me enough,” said Oakden. “She bloody listened, too. Tried to lay about me with a slipper a couple of days later, silly cow. She learned not to do that again.”

  “Yeah? Hit her back, did you?”

  Oakden’s too-close-together eyes raked Strike, as though trying to ascertain whether he was worth educating.

  “If my father had lived, he’d’ve had the right to punish me, but her trying to humiliate me because Brenner told her to? I wasn’t taking that.”

  “Exactly how close were your mother and Brenner?”

  Oakden’s thin brows contracted.

  “Doctor and secretary, that’s all. There wasn’t anything else between them, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “They didn’t have a little lie down after lunch, then?” said Strike. “She didn’t come over sleepy, after Brenner had come over?”

  “You don’t want to judge everyone’s mother by yours,” said Oakden.

  Strike acknowledged the jibe with a dark smile and said,

  “Did your mother ask Brenner to sign the death certificate for your grandmother?”

  “The hell’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Did she?”

  “I dunno,” said Oakden, his eyes darting once again toward the bar’s entrance. “Where did you get that idea? What’re you even asking that for?”

  “Your grandmother’s doctor was Margot Bamborough, right?”

  “I dunno,” said Oakden.

  “You can remember every word your mother told you about Steve Douthwaite, right down to him flirting with receptionists and looking tearful the last time he left the surgery, but you can’t remember details of your own grandmother falling downstairs and killing herself?”

  “I wasn’t there,” said Oakden. “I was out at a mate’s house when it happened. Come home and seen the ambulance.”

  “Just your mother at home, then?”

  “The hell’s this relevant to—”

  “What’s the name of the mate whose house you were at?” asked Strike, for the first time taking out his notebook.

  “What’re you doing?” said Oakden, with an attempt at a laugh, dropping the last portion of his sandwich on his plate. “What are you fucking implying?”

  “You don’t want to give us his name?”

  “Why the fuck should—he was a schoolmate—”

  “Convenient for you and your mother, old Maud falling downstairs,” said Strike. “My information is she shouldn’t have been trying to navigate stairs alone, in her condition. Inherited the house, didn’t you?”

  Oakden began to shake his head very slowly, as though marveling at the unexpected stupidity of Cormoran Strike.

  “Seriously? You’re trying to… wow. Wow.”

  “Not going to tell me the name of your schoolfriend, then?”

  “Wow,” said Oakden, attempting a laugh. “You think you can—”

  “—drop a word in a friendly journalist’s ear, to the effect that your long career of screwing over old ladies started with a good hard push in the small of your grandmother’s back? Oh yeah, I definitely can.”

  “Now you wait a fucking—”

  “I know you think it’s me being set up tonight,” said Strike, leaning in. His body language was unmistakeably menacing, and out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw the black-haired woman in the cheongsam and her partner watching warily, both with their drinks at their lips. “But the police have still got a note written to them in 1985, telling them to dig beneath the cross of St. John. DNA techniques have moved on a lot since then. I expect they’ll be able to get a good match from the saliva under the envelope flap.”

  Oakden’s eyelid twitched again.

  “You thought you were going to stir up a bit of press interest in the Bamborough case, to get people interested in your shitty book, didn’t you?”

  “I never—”

  “I’m warning you. You go talking to the papers about me and my father, or about me working the Bamborough case, and I’ll make sure you get nailed for that note. And if by chance that doesn’t work, I’ll put my whole agency onto turning over every part of your miserable fucking life, until I’ve got something else on you to take to the police. Understand?”

  Oakden, who looked momentarily unnerved, recovered himself quickly. He even managed another little laugh.

  “You can’t stop me writing about whatever I want. That’s freedom of—”

  “I’m warning you,” repeated Strike, a little more loudly, “what’ll happen if you get in the way of this case. And you can pay for your own fucking sandwich.”

  Strike stood up and Robin, caught off guard, hastened to grab her raincoat and get up, too.

  “Cormoran, let’s go out the back,” she said, thinking of the two photographers lurking at the front of the building, but they hadn’t gone more than two steps when they heard Oakden call after them.

  “You think I’m scared of your fucking agency? Some fucking detective you are!” he said, and now most of the heads in their vicinity turned. Glancing back, Robin saw that Oakden had got up, too: he’d come out from behind the table and was planted in the middle of the bar, clearly set on making a scene.

  “Strike, please, let’s just go,” said Robin, who now had a presentiment of real trouble. Oakden was clearly determined to come out of the encounter with something sellable, or at the very least, a narrative in which he’d come out on top. But Strike had already turned back toward their interviewee.

  “You didn’t even know your own fucking father’s having a party round the corner,” said Oakden loudly, pointing in the direction of Spencer House. “Not going to pop in, thank him for fucking your mother on a pile of beanbags while fifty people watched?”

  Robin watched what she had dreaded unfold in apparent slow motion: Strike lunged for Oakden. She made a grab for the arm Strike had drawn back for a punch, but too late: his elbow slammed into Robin’s forehead, breaking her glasses in two. Dark spots popped in front of Robin’s eyes and the next thing she knew, she’d fallen backward onto the floor.

  Robin’s attempted intervention had given the con man a few seconds in which to dodge, and instead of receiving what might have been a knockout punch, he suffered no worse than a glancing blow to the ear. Meanwhile the enraged Strike, who’d barely registered his arm being impeded, realized what he’d done only when he saw drinkers all over the bar jumping to their feet, their eyes on the floor behind him. Turning, he saw Robin lying there, her hands over her face, a trickle of blood issuing from her nose.

  “Shit!” Strike bellowed.

  The young barman had run out from behind the bar. Oakden was shouting something about assault. Still slightly dizzy, tears of pain streaming from her eyes, the humiliated Robin was assisted back onto her feet by a couple of affluent-looking gray-haired Americans, who were fussing about getting her a doctor.

&
nbsp; “I’m absolutely fine,” she heard herself saying. She’d taken the full force of Strike’s elbow between her eyebrows, and she realized her nose was bleeding only when she accidentally sprayed blood onto the kind American’s white shirt front.

  “Robin, shit—” Strike was saying.

  “Sir, I’m going to have to—”

  “Yes, we’re absolutely going to leave,” Robin told the waiter, absurdly polite, while her eyes watered and she tried to stem the bleeding from her nostrils. “I just need—oh, thank you so much,” she said to the American woman, who’d handed Robin her raincoat.

  “Call the police!” Oakden was shouting. Thanks to Robin’s intervention, he was entirely unmarked. “Someone call the bloody police!”

  “I won’t be pressing charges,” Robin said to nobody in particular.

  “Robin—I’m so—”

  Grabbing a handful of Strike’s sleeve, warm blood still trickling down onto her chin, Robin muttered,

  “Let’s just go.”

  She trod on the cracked lens of her glasses as they headed out of the silent bar, the drinkers staring after them.

  58

  His louely words her seemd due recompence

  Of all her passed paines: one louing howre

  For many yeares of sorrow can dispence:

  A dram of sweete is worth a pound of sowre:

  Shee has forgott, how many, a woeful stowre

  For him she late endurd; she speakes no more

  Of past…

  Before her stands her knight, for whom she toyld so sore.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  “Robin—”

  “Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have tried to stop you,” she said through gritted teeth, as they hurried through the outside courtyard. Her vision was blurred with tears of pain. Smokers turned to gape as she passed, trying to staunch her bleeding nose. “If that punch had connected, we’d be back there waiting for the police.”

  To Robin’s relief, there were no paparazzi waiting for them as they headed into Green Park, but she was scared that it wouldn’t take long, after the scene Strike had just made, for them to come hunting again.

  “We’ll get a cab,” said Strike, who was currently consumed with a mixture of total mortification and rage against Oakden, his father, the press and himself. “Listen, you’re right—”

  “I know I’m right, thanks!” she said, a little wildly.

  Not only was her face throbbing, she was now wondering why Strike hadn’t warned her about Rokeby’s party; why, in fact, he’d let himself get lured there by a second-rate chancer like Oakden, careless of consequences for their case and for the agency.

  “TAXI!” bellowed Strike, so loudly that Robin jumped. Somewhere nearby, she heard running footsteps.

  A black cab pulled up and Strike pushed Robin inside.

  “Denmark Street,” he yelled at the cabbie, and Robin heard the shouts of photographers as the taxi sped up again.

  “It’s all right,” said Strike, twisting to look out of the back window, “they’re on foot. Robin… I’m so fucking sorry.”

  She’d pulled a mirror out of her bag to try and clean up her smarting face, wiping blood from her upper lip and chin. It looked as though she was going to have two black eyes: both were rapidly swelling.

  “D’you want me to take you home?” said Strike.

  Furious at him, fighting the urge to cry out of pain, Robin imagined Max’s surprise and curiosity at seeing her in this state; imagined having to make light, again, of the injuries she’d sustained while working for the agency. She also remembered that she hadn’t gone food shopping in days.

  “No, I want you to give me something to eat and a strong drink.”

  “You’ve got it,” said Strike, glad to have a chance to make repa­rations. “Will a takeaway do?”

  “No,” said Robin sarcastically, pointing at her rapidly blackening eyes, “I’d like to go to the Ritz, please.”

  Strike started to laugh but cut himself off, appalled at the state of her face.

  “Maybe we should go to casualty.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Robin—”

  “You’re sorry. I know. You said.”

  Strike’s phone rang. He glanced down: Barclay could wait, he decided, and muted it.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, the taxi dropped them at the end of Denmark Street, with a takeaway curry and a couple of clinking bottles. Once upstairs, Robin repaired to the toilet on the landing, where she washed dried blood from her nostrils and chin with a wad of wet toilet paper. Two increasingly swollen, red-purplish mounds containing her eyes looked back at her out of the cracked mirror. A blue bruise was spreading over her forehead.

  Inside the office, Strike, who’d normally have eaten the curry straight out of the foil tray it had come in, had brought out mis-matched plates, knives and forks, then, because Robin wanted a strong drink, went upstairs to his flat where he had a bottle of his favorite whisky. There was a small freezer compartment in his fridge, where he kept ice packs for his stump in addition to an ice tray. The cubes within this had been there for over a year, because although Strike enjoyed the odd drink of spirits, he generally preferred beer. About to leave the flat with the ice tray, he had second thoughts, and doubled back for one of the ice packs, as well.

  “Thank you,” muttered Robin, when Strike reappeared, accepting the proffered ice pack. She was sitting in Pat’s seat, behind the desk where she’d once answered the phone, where Strike had laid out the curry and plates. “And you’d better re-do next week’s rota,” she added, applying the ice pack gingerly to her left eye first, “because there isn’t a concealer in the world that’s going to cover up this mess. I’m not going to have much chance of going unnoticed on surveillance with two black eyes.”

  “Robin,” said Strike yet again, “I’m so fucking sorry. I was a tit, I just… What d’you want, vodka, whisky—?”

  “Whisky,” she said. “On the rocks.”

  Strike poured both of them a triple measure.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, yet again, while Robin took a welcome gulp of Scotch, then began helping herself to curry. Strike sat down on the fake leather sofa opposite the desk. “Hurting you’s the last thing—there’s no excuse for—I saw red, I lost it. My father’s other kids have been pestering me for months to go to that fucking party,” said Strike, running his hand through the thick, curly hair that never looked disarranged. He felt she was owed the whole story now: the reason, if not the excuse, that he’d fucked up so badly. “They wanted us to get a group photo taken together for a present. Then Al tells me Rokeby’s got prostate cancer—which doesn’t seem to have prevented him having four hundred mates over for a good old knees-up… I ripped up the invitation without registering where the thing was being held. I should’ve realized Oakden was up to something, I took my eye off the ball, and—”

  He downed half his drink in one.

  “There’s no excuse for trying to punch him, but everything—these last few months—Rokeby rang me in February. First time ever. Tried to bribe me into meeting him.”

  “He tried to bribe you?” said Robin, pressing the ice pack to her other eye, remembering the shouted “go fuck yourself” from the inner office, on Valentine’s Day.

  “As good as,” said Strike. “He said he was open to suggestions for helping me out… well, it’s forty years too fucking late for that.”

  Strike downed the rest of his whisky, reached for the bottle and poured the same again into his glass.

  “When did you last see him?” Robin asked.

  “When I was eighteen. I’ve met him twice,” Strike said. “First time was when I was a kid. My mother tried to ambush him with me, outside a recording studio.”

  He’d only ever told Charlotte this. Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might’ve been epoch defining—“it was a month before Da
ddy torched Mummy’s portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows”—but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.

  “I thought he wanted to see me,” said Strike. The shock of what he’d done to Robin, and the whisky scorching his throat, had liberated memories he usually kept locked up tight inside him. “I was seven. I was so fucking excited. I wanted to look smart, so he’d be—so he’d be proud of me. Told my mum to put me in my best trousers. We got outside this studio—my mother had music industry contacts, someone had tipped her off he was going to be there—and they wouldn’t let us in. I thought there’d been some mistake. The bloke on the door obviously didn’t realize my dad wanted to see me.”

  Strike drank again. The curry lay cooling between them.

  “My mother kicked off. They were threatening her when the band’s manager got out of his car behind us. He knew who my mother was and he didn’t want a public scene. He took us inside, into a room away from the studio.

  “The manager tried to tell her it was a dumb move, turning up. If she wanted more money, she should go through lawyers. That’s when I realized my father hadn’t invited us at all. She was just trying to force her way in. I started crying,” said Strike roughly. “Just wanted to go…

  “And then, while my mother and Rokeby’s manager are going at it hammer and tongs, Rokeby walks in. He heard shouting on the way back from the bathroom. Probably just done a line; I realized that later. He was already wound up when he came in the room.

  “And I tried to smile,” said Strike. “Snot all over my face. I didn’t want him to think I was a whiner. I’d been imagining a hug. ‘There you are, at last.’ But he looked at me like I was nothing. Some fan’s kid, in too-short trousers. My trousers were always too fucking short… I grew too fast…

  “Then he clocked my mother, and he twigged. They started rowing. I can’t remember everything they said. I was a kid. The gist was how dare she butt in, she had his lawyer’s contact details, he was paying enough, it was her problem if she pissed it all away, and then he said, ‘This was a fucking accident.’ I thought he meant, he’d come to the studio accidentally or something. But then he looked at me, and I realized, he meant me. I was the accident.”