Cowed by his wife’s distress, Douthwaite allowed Strike to lead him back over his shaky alibi for the evening in question, sticking to the story that he’d been sitting unnoticed in a café, scanning the newspapers for flats to rent.
“I wanted to clear out, get away from all the gossip about Joanna. I just wanted to get away.”
“So the desire to move wasn’t triggered by anything that passed between you and Dr. Bamborough during your last visit?” Strike asked.
“No,” said Douthwaite, still not looking at Strike. “How could it be?”
“Given up on her?” Donna asked from behind the wet napkin with which she was blotting her eyes. “Knew he’d made a fool of himself. Same as with that young lassie from Leeds, eh, Steve?”
“Donna, for fuck’s sake—”
“He forgets,” Donna said to Robin, “he’s not that cocky little sod in his twenties any more. Deluded, b—baldy bastard,” she sobbed.
“Donna—”
“So you moved to Waltham Forest…” prompted Strike.
“Yeah. Police. Press. It was a nightmare,” said Douthwaite. “I thought of ending it, to tell you the—”
“Shame you didn’t,” said Donna savagely. “Save us all a lot of time and trouble.”
As though he hadn’t heard this, and ignoring Douthwaite’s look of outrage, Strike asked,
“What made you go to Clacton-on-Sea? Did you have family there?”
“I haven’t got family, I grew up in care—”
“Oh, someone pass him a bloody violin,” said Donna.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” said Douthwaite, displaying unvarnished anger for the first time. “And I’m allowed to tell the truth about my own bloody life, aren’t I? I just wanted to be a Redcoat, because I sing a bit and it looked like a fun way to earn a living—”
“Fun,” muttered Donna, “oh yeah, as long as you’re having fun, Steve—”
“—get away from people treating me like I’d killed someone—”
“And whoops!” said Donna. “There’s another one gone, in the pool—”
“You know bloody well I had nothing to do with Julie drowning!”
“How could I know?” said Donna, “I wasn’t there! It was before we even met!”
“I showed you the story in the paper!” said Douthwaite. “I showed you, Donna, come on!” He turned to Strike. “A bunch of us were drinking in our chalet. Me and some mates were playing poker. Julie was tired. She left before we finished our game, walked back to her chalet. She walked round the pool, slipped in the dark, knocked herself out and—”
For the first time, Douthwaite showed real distress.
“—she drowned. I won’t ever forget it. Never. I ran outside in me underpants next morning, when I heard the shouting. I saw her body when they were taking her out of the pool. You don’t forget something like that. She was a kid. Twenty-two or something. Her parents came and… it was a horrible thing. Horrible. I never… that someone can go like that. A slip and a trip…
“Yeah, so… that’s when I applied for a job at the Ingoldmells Butlin’s up the road from here. And that’s where I met Donna,” he said, with an apprehensive glance at his wife.
“So you leaving Clacton-on-Sea and changing your name again had nothing to do with a man called Oakden coming to question you about Margot Bamborough?” asked Strike.
Donna’s head jerked up.
“Oh my God,” she said, “so even the Julie bit’s a lie?”
“It’s not a lie!” said Douthwaite loudly. “I told you Julie and I had an argument a couple of days before she died, I told you that, because I felt so guilty after! This man, this—what did you say his name was? Oakden?—yeah, he turned up, saying he was writing a book about Dr. Bamborough disappearing. Went round all the other Redcoats talking to them about me, telling them all I’d been a suspect and how I’d changed my name afterward, making me sound dodgy as hell. And Julie was really pissed off with me because I hadn’t told her—”
“Well, you really learned that lesson, didn’t you, Steve?” said Donna. “Run and hide, that’s all you know, and when you’re found out, you just sneak off and find some other woman to whine to, until she finds you out, and then—”
“Mr. Douthwaite,” said Strike, cutting across Donna, “I want to thank you for your time. I know it’s been a shock, having all this raked up again.”
Robin looked up at Strike, astonished. He couldn’t be leaving the interview here, surely? The Douthwaites (or Diamonds, as they thought of themselves), looked similarly taken aback. Strike extracted a second card from his pocket and held it out to Douthwaite.
“If you remember anything,” the detective said, “you know where to find me. It’s never too late.”
The hourglass tattoo on Douthwaite’s forearm rippled as he held out his hand for the card.
“Who else’ve you talked to?” Douthwaite asked Strike.
Now that his ordeal was over, he seemed curiously averse to it ending. Perhaps, thought Robin, he feared being alone with his wife.
“Margot’s husband and family,” said Strike, watching Douthwaite’s reactions. “The co-workers who’re still alive—Dr. Gupta. One of the receptionists, Irene Hickson. Janice Beattie, the nur—”
“That’s nice,” piped up Donna, “the nurse is still available, Steve—”
“—an ex-boyfriend of Margot’s, her best friend, and a few other people.”
Douthwaite, who’d flushed at his wife’s interjection, said,
“Not Dennis Creed?”
“Not yet,” said Strike. “Well,” he looked from husband to wife, “thanks for your time. We appreciate it.”
Robin got to her feet.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly to Donna. “I hope you feel better.”
“Thanks,” mumbled Donna.
As Strike and Robin reached the top of the stairs, they heard shouting break out again behind the door of Lochnagar.
“Donna, babes—”
“Don’t you dare call me babes, you fucking bastard!”
“No point carrying on,” said Strike quietly, setting off down the steep tartaned stairs as slowly as the obese old lady had moved. “He’s not going to say it with her there.”
“Say what?”
“Well, that,” said Strike, as the Douthwaites’ shouts echoed down the stairs, “is the question, isn’t it?”
65
Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde
Directs her course vnto one certaine cost,
Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,
With which her winged speed is let and crost,
And she her selfe in stormie surges tost;
Yet making many a borde, and many a bay,
Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:
Right so it fares with me in this long way,
Whose course is often stayd, yet neuer is astray.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
“I’m hungry,” Strike announced, once they stepped down onto the sunny pavement outside the Allardice.
“Let’s get some fish and chips,” said Robin.
“Now you’re talking,” said Strike enthusiastically, as they headed off toward the end of Scarbrough Avenue.
“Cormoran, what makes you think Douthwaite knows something?”
“Didn’t you see the way he looked at me, when I asked him about his last appointment with Margot?”
“I must’ve been looking at Donna. I was seriously worried she was going to pass out.”
“Wish she had,” said Strike.
“Strike!”
“He was definitely thinking about telling me something, then she bloody ruined it.” As they reached the end of the road, he said, “That was a scared man, and I don’t think he’s only scared of his wife… Do we go left or right?”
“Right,” said Robin, so they headed off along Grand Parade, passing a long open-fronted building called Funland, which was full of beeping a
nd flashing video games, claw machines and coin-operated mechanical horses for children to ride. “Are you saying Douthwaite’s guilty?”
“I think he feels it,” Strike said, as they wove their way in and out of cheerful, T-shirted families and couples. “He looked at me back there as though he was bursting to tell me something that’s weighing on him.”
“If he had actual evidence, why didn’t he tell the police? It would’ve got them off his back.”
“I can think of one reason.”
“He was scared of the person he thought had killed her?”
“Exactly.”
“So… Luca Ricci?” said Robin.
At that moment, a male voice from the depths of Funland called, “White seven and four, seventy-four.”
“Possibly,” said Strike, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Douthwaite and Ricci were living in the same area at the time. Maybe going to the same pubs. I suppose he might’ve heard a rumor about Ricci being out to get her. But that doesn’t fit with the eye-witness accounts, does it? If Douthwaite was issuing the warning, you’d think it’d be Margot looking distressed afterward, whereas we know he was the one who came running out of there looking scared and worried… but my gut feeling is that Douthwaite thinks whatever happened between them at that last appointment is relevant to her disappearance.”
The entrance to a well-maintained park on their right was ablaze with petunias. Ahead, on an island in the middle of a traffic island, stood a sixty-foot-high clock tower of brick and stone, with a faintly Gothic appearance, and faces like a miniature Big Ben.
“Exactly how many chippies has Skegness got?” Strike asked, as they came to a halt on the busy intersection beside the clock tower. They were standing right beside two establishments which had tables spilling out onto the pavement, and he could see a further two fish and chip shops on the other side of the junction.
“I never counted,” said Robin. “I was always more interested in the donkeys. Shall we try here?” she asked, pointing at the nearest free table, which was pistachio green and belonged to Tony’s Chippy (“We Sell on Quality not Price”).
“Donkeys?” repeated Strike, grinning, as he sat down on the bench.
“That’s right,” said Robin. “Cod or haddock?”
“Haddock, please,” said Strike, and Robin headed into the chip shop to order.
After a minute or so, looking forward to his chips and enjoying the feeling of sun on his back, Strike became aware that he was still watching Robin, and fixed his eyes instead on a fluttering mass just above him. Even though the top of the yellow railings separating Tony’s from Harry Ramsbottom’s had been fitted with fine spikes to stop birds landing on them, a handful of speckled starlings were doing just that, delicately poised between the needles, and balanced in the iron circles just below them, waiting for the chance to swoop on an abandoned chip.
Watching the birds, Strike wondered what the chances were of Douthwaite ringing the number on his card. He was a man with a long track record of hiding from his past, but Strike had definitely read in his face a desperation he’d only ever seen in the faces of men who could no longer bear the pressure of a terrible secret. Idly rubbing his chin, Strike decided to give the man a short period of grace, then either call him again, or even return, unannounced, to Skegness, where he might waylay Douthwaite in the street or a pub, where Donna couldn’t interfere.
Strike was still watching the starlings when Robin set down two polystyrene trays, two small wooden forks and two cans of Coke on the table.
“Mushy peas,” said Strike, looking at Robin’s tray, where a hefty dollop of what looked like green porridge sat alongside her fish and chips.
“Yorkshire caviar,” said Robin, sitting down. “I didn’t think you’d want any.”
“You were right,” said Strike, picking up a sachet of tomato sauce while watching with something like revulsion as Robin dipped a chip into the green sludge and ate it.
“Soft Southerner, you are,” she said, and Strike laughed.
“Don’t ever let Polworth hear you say that,” he said, breaking off a bit of fish with his fingers, dipping it in ketchup and eating it. He then, without warning, broke into song:
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A merry heart and true!
King James’s men shall understand,
What Cornish lads can do.
“What on earth’s that?” asked Robin, laughing.
“First verse of ‘The Song of the Western Men,’” said Strike. “The gist is that Cornishmen are the antithesis of soft bastards. Bloody hell, this is good.”
“I know. You don’t get fish and chips like this in London,” said Robin.
For a few minutes they ate in silence. The greaseproof paper in which the trays of chips were wrapped was printed with old pages of the Mirror newspaper. Paul Quits the Beatles. There were cartoons too, of the dirty postcard type: a busty blonde in bed with her elderly boss was saying “Business must be booming. You’ve never given me so much overtime.” It reminded her of Gemma the PA, who’d perhaps already called the fake number Robin had given her, and realized that it wasn’t only her ex, “Andy,” who wasn’t all he appeared to be. But Robin had a recording on her phone of everything Gemma knew about Shifty’s insider trading and Pat, at that moment, was transcribing it into a document shorn of anything that might identify the informant. Shifty, Robin hoped, would soon be jobless and, with any luck, in court.
A long stretch of fairground rides on the other side of the road hid the sea from her sight. The seats of the distant Ferris wheel were enclosed in casings shaped like pastel-colored hot-air balloons. Nearby stood a gigantic climbing frame for adults, with ropes and swinging tires, a hundred feet up in the air. Watching the harnessed people navigating the obstacles, Robin felt a strange mixture of contentment and melancholy: the possibility of an unknown development in the Bamborough case, the delicious chips and peas, the companionship of Strike and the sunshine were all cheering, but she was also remembering chasing along the out-of-sight beach as a small child, trying to outrun her brother Stephen to reach the donkeys and have first pick. Why did the memory of innocence sting so much, as you got older? Why did the memory of the child who’d thought she was invulnerable, who’d never known cruelty, give her more pain than pleasure?
Her childhood had been happy, unlike Strike’s; it ought not to hurt. Over the space of summer weekends spread years apart, Robin and her brothers had competed to ride the black donkey called Noddy, who was doubtless long gone. Was it mortality, then, which turned cheerful memories bittersweet? Maybe, Robin thought, she’d bring Annabel here when she was old enough, and treat her to her first donkey ride. It was a nice idea, but she doubted Stephen and Jenny would see Skegness as a desirable weekend destination. Annabel’s great-aunt had moved away from Boston: there was no longer any family connection to the area. Times changed, and so did childhoods.
“You all right?” said Strike, watching Robin’s face.
“Fine,” she said. “Just thinking… I’m going to be thirty in a few weeks.”
Strike snorted.
“Well, you’re getting no sympathy from me,” he said. “I’ll be forty the month after.”
He snapped open his can of Coke and drank. Robin watched a family pass, all four eating ice creams, accompanied by a waddling dachshund that was nosing the Union Jack carrier bag which swung from the father’s hand.
“D’you think Scotland’s going to leave?”
“Go for independence? Maybe,” said Strike. “The polls are close. Barclay thinks it could happen. He was telling me about some old mates of his at home. They sound just like Polworth. Same hate figures, same promises everything’ll be rainbows and unicorns if only they cut themselves free of London. Anyone pointing out pitfalls or difficulties is scaremongering. Experts don’t know anything. Facts lie. ‘Things can’t be any worse than they are.’”
Strike put several chips in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, t
hen said,
“But life’s taught me things can always get worse than they are. I thought I had it hard, then they wheeled a bloke onto the ward who’d had both his legs and his genitals blown off.”
He’d never before talked to Robin about the aftermath of his life-changing injury. Indeed, he rarely mentioned his missing leg. A barrier had definitely fallen, Robin thought, since their whisky-fueled talk in the dark office.
“Everyone wants a single, simple solution,” he said, now finishing his last few chips. “One weird trick to lose belly fat. I’ve never clicked on it, but I understand the appeal.”
“Well, reinvention’s such an inviting idea, isn’t it?” said Robin, her eyes on the fake hot-air balloons, circling on their prescribed course. “Look at Douthwaite, changing his name and finding a new woman every few years. Reinventing a whole country would feel amazing. Being part of that.”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “Of course, people think if they subsume themselves in something bigger, and that changes, they’ll change too.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better, or different, is there?” asked Robin. “Nothing wrong with wanting to improve things?”
“Not at all,” said Strike. “But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”
“I don’t know… I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.
Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said,
“Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”
And before Robin had time for anything other than a slight blush, Strike said,
“Are you not finishing those chips?”
“Help yourself,” said Robin, shoving the tray toward him. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I’ll look up that one weird tip to lose belly fat.”
Strike smirked. After wiping her hands on her paper napkin, Robin checked her emails.
“Have you seen this from Vanessa Ekwensi? She’s copied you in.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 84