Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

And this was, however you looked at it, an extraordinarily powerful image. Strike had once, when extremely drunk, told Robin that Charlotte was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and as she hovered between life and death, that beautiful woman had chosen to contact Strike, to tell him she loved him still. What did prosaic Robin Ellacott have to offer that was in any way equal to such high-stakes drama, such extremity of emotion? An up-to-date rota, nearly docketed invoices and cups of strong tea? Doubtless because of the pain in her face, Robin’s mood vacillated between diminishing cheerfulness and a tendency to brood. Finally, she gave herself a stern talking to: Strike had given her an unprecedented assurance of affection, and she’d never have to see Saul Morris again, and she should be delighted about both.

  Predictably, it was Pat who took the sudden firing of Saul Morris hardest. Strike delivered the news on Monday morning, as he and the secretary narrowly missed colliding in the doorway onto Denmark Street, Strike on his way out, Pat on her way in. Both of them were preparing for the ingestion of nicotine, Pat having just taken out the electronic cigarette she used during work hours, Strike already holding the Benson & Hedges he rarely smoked in the office.

  “Morning,” said Strike. “I’ve left a note on your desk, couple of things I’d like you to do while I’m out. Robin’ll be in at ten. Oh—”

  He’d taken a couple of steps before turning back.

  “—and can you calculate Morris’s pay up to Friday and transfer it into his account right away? He’s not coming back.”

  He didn’t wait for a reaction, so it was Robin who took the brunt of their secretary’s disappointment when she arrived at ten to ten. Pat had Radio Two playing, but turned it off the moment the door handle turned.

  “Morning. Why—what ’appened to you?” said Pat.

  Robin’s face looked worse, two days on, than it had on Saturday. While the swelling had subsided, both eyes were ringed in dark gray tinged with red.

  “It was an accident. I bumped into something,” said Robin, stripping off her coat and hanging it on a peg. “So I won’t be on surveillance this week.”

  She took a book out of her handbag and crossed to the kettle, holding it. She hadn’t particularly enjoyed the covert staring on the Tube that morning, but wasn’t going to mention Strike’s elbow to Pat, because she tried, wherever possible, not to fuel Pat’s antipathy for her partner.

  “Why won’t Saul be coming back?” Pat demanded.

  “He didn’t work out,” said Robin, her back to Pat as she took down two mugs.

  “What d’you mean?” said Pat indignantly. “He caught that man who was having it away with the nanny. He always kept his paperwork up to date, which is more’n you can say for that Scottish nutter.”

  “I know,” said Robin. “But he wasn’t a great team player, Pat.”

  Pat took a deep drag of nicotine vapor, frowning.

  “He,” she nodded toward the empty chair where Strike usually sat, “could take a few lessons from Morris!”

  Robin knew perfectly well that it wasn’t Pat’s decision who the partners hired and fired, but unlike Strike, she also thought that in such a small team, Pat deserved the truth.

  “It wasn’t Cormoran who wanted him gone,” she said, turning to face the secretary, “it was me.”

  “You!” said Pat, astounded. “I thought the pair of you were keen on each other!”

  “No. I didn’t like him. Apart from anything else, he sent me a picture of his erect penis at Christmas.”

  Pat’s deeply lined face registered an almost comical dismay.

  “In… in the post?”

  Robin laughed.

  “What, tucked inside a Christmas card? No. By text.”

  “You didn’t—?”

  “Ask for it? No,” said Robin, no longer smiling. “He’s a creep, Pat.”

  She turned back to the kettle. The untouched bottle of vodka was still standing beside the sink. As Robin’s eyes fell on it, she remembered the idea that had occurred to her on Saturday night, shortly before Morris’s hands closed around her waist. After giving the secretary her coffee, she carried her own into the inner office, along with the book she’d taken from her bag. Pat called after her,

  “Shall I update the rota, or will you?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Robin, closing the door, but instead, she called Strike.

  “Morning,” he said, answering on the second ring.

  “Hi. I forgot to tell you an idea I had on Saturday night.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s about Gloria Conti. Why did she vomit in the bathroom at Margot’s barbecue, if Oakden didn’t spike the punch?”

  “Because he’s a liar, and he did spike the punch?” suggested Strike. He was currently in the same Islington square that Robin had patrolled on Friday, but he paused now and reached for his cigarettes, eyes on the central garden, which today was deserted. Beds densely planted with purple pansies looked like velvet cloaks spread upon the glistening grass.

  “Or did she throw up because she was pregnant?” said Robin.

  “I thought,” said Strike, after a pause while lighting a cigarette, “that only happens in the mornings? Isn’t that why it’s called—”

  On the point of saying “morning sickness,” Strike remembered the expectant wife of an old army friend, who’d been hospitalized for persistent, round-the-clock vomiting.

  “My cousin threw up any time of the day when she was pregnant,” said Robin. “She couldn’t stand certain food smells. And Gloria was at a barbecue.”

  “Right,” said Strike, who was suddenly remembering the odd notion that had occurred to him after talking to the Bayliss sisters. Robin’s theory struck him as stronger than his. In fact, his idea was weakened if Robin’s was true.

  “So,” he said, “you’re thinking it might’ve been Gloria who—”

  “—had the abortion at the Bride Street clinic? Yes,” said Robin. “And that Margot helped her arrange it. Irene mentioned Gloria being closeted in Margot’s consulting room, remember? While Irene was left on reception?”

  The lilac bush in the central garden was casting out such a heavy scent that Strike could smell it even over the smoke of his cigarette.

  “I think you could be on to something here,” said Strike slowly.

  “I also thought this might explain—”

  “Why Gloria doesn’t want to talk to us?”

  “Well, yes. Apart from it being a traumatic memory, her husband might not know what happened,” said Robin. “Where are you just now?”

  “Islington,” said Strike. “I’m about to have a crack at Mucky Ricci.”

  “What?” said Robin, startled.

  “Been thinking about it over the weekend,” said Strike, who, unlike Robin, had had no time off, but had run surveillance on Shifty and Miss Jones’s boyfriend. “We’re nearly ten months into our year, and we’ve got virtually nothing. If he’s demented, obviously it’ll be no-go, but you never know, I could be able to get something out of him. He might even,” said Strike, “get a kick out of reliving the good old days…”

  “And what if his sons find out?”

  “He can’t talk, or not properly. I’m banking on him being unable to tell them I’ve been in. Look,” said Strike, in no particular hurry to hang up, because he wanted to finish his cigarette, and would rather do it talking to Robin, “Betty Fuller thinks Ricci killed her, I could tell. So did Tudor Athorn; he told his nephew so, and they were the kind of people who were plugged into local gossip and knew about local low life.

  “I keep going back to the thing Shanker said, when I told him about Margot vanishing without a trace. ‘Professional job.’ When you take a step back and look at it,” said Strike, now down to the last centimeter of his cigarette, “it seems borderline impossible for every trace of her to have disappeared, unless someone with plenty of practice handled it.”

  “Creed had practice,” said Robin quietly.

  “D’you know what I did last nigh
t?” said Strike, ignoring this interjection. “Looked up Kara Wolfson’s birth certificate online.”

  “Why? Oh,” said Robin, and Strike could hear her smiling, “star sign?”

  “Yeah. I know it breaks the means before motive rule,” he added, before Robin could point it out, “but it struck me that someone might’ve told Margot about Kara’s murder. Doctors know things, don’t they? In and out of people’s houses, having confidential consultations. They’re like priests. They hear secrets.”

  “You were checking whether Kara was a Scorpio,” said Robin. It was a statement rather than a question.

  “Exactly. And wondering whether Ricci looked into that party to show his goons which woman they were going to pick off.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Was Kara a Scorpio?”

  “Oh. No. Taurus—seventeenth of May.”

  Strike now heard pages turning at Robin’s end of the call.

  “Which means, according to Schmidt…” said Robin, and there was a brief pause, “… she was Cetus.”

  “Huh,” said Strike, who’d now finished his cigarette. “Well, wish me luck. I’m going in.”

  “Good l—”

  “Cormoran Strike!” said somebody gleefully, behind him.

  As Strike hung up on Robin, a slender black woman in a cream coat came alongside him, beaming.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. “Selly Oak. I’m—”

  “Marjorie!” said Strike, the memory coming back to him. “Marjorie the physiotherapist. How are you? What’re you—?”

  “I do a few hours in the old folks’ home up the road!” said Marjorie. “And look at you, all famous…”

  Fuck.

  It took Strike twenty-five minutes to extricate himself from her.

  “… so that’s bloody that,” he told Robin later at the office. “I pretended I was in the area to visit my accountant, but if she’s working at St. Peter’s, there’s no chance of us getting in to see Ricci.”

  “No chance of you getting in there—”

  “I’ve already told you,” said Strike sharply. The state of Robin’s face was a visible warning against recklessness, of the perils of failing to think through consequences. “You’re not going anywhere near him.”

  “I’ve got Miss Jones on the line,” Pat called from the outer office.

  “Put her through to me,” said Robin, as Strike mouthed “thanks.”

  Robin talked to Miss Jones while continuing to readjust the rota on her computer, which, given Robin’s own temporary unavailability for surveillance, and Morris’s permanent absence, was like trying to balance a particularly tricky linear equation. She spent the next forty minutes making vague sounds of agreement whenever Miss Jones paused to draw breath. Their client’s objective, Robin could tell, was staying on the line long enough for Strike to come back to the office. Finally, Robin got rid of her by pretending to get a message from Pat saying Strike would be out all day.

  It was her only lie of the day, Robin thought, while Strike and Pat discussed Barclay’s expenses in the outer office. Given that Strike was adept himself at avoiding pledging his own word when he didn’t want to, he really ought to have noticed that Robin had made no promises whatsoever about staying away from Mucky Ricci.

  61

  Then when the second watch was almost past,

  That brasen dore flew open, and in went Bold Britomart…

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  In the first week of June, a blind item appeared in the Metro, concerning Strike’s presence in the American Bar on the night of his father’s party.

  Which famous son of a famous father preferred to spend the night of his old man’s celebrations brawling in a bar five hundred yards from the party, rather than hobnobbing with his family? Our spies tell us a punch was thrown, and his faithful assistant was unable to Hold It Back. A father-son competition for publicity? Dad definitely won this round.

  As Hold It Back was the name of one of Jonny Rokeby’s albums, nobody could really be in much doubt which father and son were in question. A couple of journalists called Strike’s office, but as neither he nor Rokeby were disposed to comment, the story fizzled out for lack of details. “Could’ve been worse,” was Strike’s only comment. “No photos, no mention of Bamborough. Looks like Oakden’s been frightened out of the idea of selling stories about us.”

  Feeling slightly guilty, Robin had already scrolled through the pictures of Jonny Rokeby’s party on her phone, while on surveillance outside Miss Jones’s boyfriend’s house. Rokeby’s guests, who included celebrities from both Hollywood and the world of rock ’n’ roll, had all attended in eighteenth-century costumes. Buried in the middle of all the famous people was a single picture of Rokeby surrounded by six of his seven adult children. Robin recognized Al, grinning from beneath a crooked powdered wig. She could no more imagine Strike there, trussed up in brocade, with patches on his face, than she could imagine him pole-vaulting.

  Relieved as she was that Oakden appeared to have given up the idea of discussing the agency with the press, Robin’s anxiety mounted as June progressed. The Bamborough case, which mattered to her more than almost anything else, had come to a complete standstill. Gloria Conti had met Anna’s request for her cooperation with silence, Steve Douthwaite remained as elusive as ever, Robin had heard no news about the possibility of interviewing Dennis Creed, and Mucky Ricci remained cloistered inside his nursing home, which, owing to the agency’s reduced manpower, nobody was watching any more.

  Even temporary replacements for Morris were proving impossible to find. Strike had contacted everyone he knew in the Special Investigation Branch, Hutchins had asked his Met contacts, and Robin had canvassed Vanessa, but nobody was showing any interest in joining the agency.

  “Summer, isn’t it?” said Barclay, as he and Robin crossed paths in the office one Saturday afternoon. “People don’t want tae start a new job, they want a holiday. I ken how they feel.”

  Both Barclay and Hutchins had booked weeks off with their wives and children months in advance, and neither partner could begrudge their subcontractors a break. The result was that by mid-July, Strike and Robin were the only two left working at the agency.

  While Strike devoted himself to following Miss Jones’s boyfriend, still trying to find out anything that might prove that he was an unsuitable person to have custody of his daughter, Robin was trying to kindle an acquaintance with Shifty’s PA, which wasn’t proving easy. So far that month, wearing a different wig and colored contacts each time, Robin had tried to engage her in conversation in a bar, deliberately tripped over her in a nightclub, and followed her into the ladies in Harvey Nichols. While the PA didn’t seem to have the slightest idea that it was the same woman opportuning or inconve­niencing her, she showed no inclination to chat, let alone confess that her boss was a lech or a coke user.

  Having tried and failed to sit next to the PA in a sandwich bar in Holborn one lunchtime, Robin, who today had dark hair and dark brown eyes courtesy of hair chalk and contact lenses, decided the moment had come to try and wheedle information out of a very old man, instead of a pretty young woman.

  She hadn’t reached this decision lightly, nor did she approach it in any casual spirit. While Robin was vaguely fond of Strike’s old friend Shanker, she was under no illusions about how evil a person would have to be to scare a man who’d been steeped in criminal violence since the age of nine. Accordingly, she’d worked out a plan, of which the first step was to have a full and effective disguise. Today’s happened to be particularly good: she’d learned a lot about makeup since starting the job with Strike, and she’d sometimes had the satisfaction of seeing her partner double-take before he realized who she was. After checking her reflection carefully in the mirror of a McDonald’s bathroom, and reassuring herself that she not only looked utterly unlike Robin Ellacott, but that nobody would guess she’d recently had two black eyes, she
set off for the Tube, and just under twenty minutes later, arrived at Angel station.

  The garden where the old residents of St. Peter’s sometimes sat was empty as she passed it, in spite of the warm weather. The pansies were gone, replaced by pink asters and the broad, sunny street where the nursing home lay was almost deserted.

  The quotation from St. Peter gleamed gold in the sunshine as Robin approached the front door.

  … it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed… but with the precious blood of Christ…

  Robin rang the bell. After a few moments, a chubby black-haired woman in the familiar blue uniform opened it.

  “Afternoon,” she said, sounding Spanish.

  “Hi,” said Robin, her North London accent copied from her friend Vanessa. “I’m here to visit Enid? I’m her great-granddaughter.”

  She’d stored up the only first name she’d heard for any of the old ladies in the home. Her great fear had been that Enid might have died before she got to use it, or that Enid had no family.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” said the nurse, smiling and gesturing toward a visitors’ book just inside the door. “Sign in, please, and don’t forget to sign out when you leave. She’s in her room. Might be asleep!”

  Robin stepped into a dark, wood-paneled hall. She deliberately hadn’t asked which number Enid’s room was, because she intended to get lost finding it.

  A number of walking frames and a couple of collapsible wheelchairs were lined up against the wall. The hall was dominated by an enormous crucifix facing the door, on which a pallid plaster Jesus hung, his six-pack rendered with startling precision, scarlet blood dripping from hands, feet and the punctures left by his crown of thorns. The home smelled better than Betty Fuller’s sheltered accommodation: though there was a definite undertone of old cooking smells, it mingled with that of furniture wax.

  Sunlight poured through the fan window behind Robin as she bent over the visitors’ book and wrote in the date, the time she’d entered the building and the fake name she’d decided on: Vanessa Jones. Over the table where the visitors’ book lay hung a board showing the name of each resident. Beside each was a little sliding door, which could be adjusted to show whether the occupant was “in” or “out.” Niccolo Ricci was currently—and, Robin suspected, almost permanently—“in.”