“What?”
“She might know someone who could replace Morris… woman called Michelle Greenstreet… she wants to leave the police. She’s been in eight years,” said Robin, scrolling slowly down the email, “not enjoying response policing… she’s in Manchester… wants to relocate to London, very keen on the detective side…”
“Sounds promising,” said Strike. “Let’s schedule an interview. She’s already cleared the first hurdle with flying colors.”
“What hurdle?” said Robin, looking up.
“Doubt she’s ever sent a dick pic.”
He patted his pockets, pulled out his packet of Benson & Hedges but found it empty.
“I need more fags, let’s—”
“Wait,” said Robin, who was still staring down at her mobile. “Oh my God. Cormoran—Gloria Conti’s emailed me.”
“You’re kidding,” said Strike. Having partly risen, he now let himself fall back onto the bench.
“‘Dear Miss Ellacott,’” Robin read aloud, “‘I’m sorry I haven’t answered your emails. I wasn’t aware you were trying to contact me and have only just found out. If convenient, I’d be available to talk to you tomorrow evening at 7pm. Yours sincerely…’ and she’s given her phone number,” said Robin, looking up at Strike, astonished. “How can she only just have found out? It’s been months of me emailing her without any response… unless Anna’s prompted her?”
“Could be,” said Strike. “Which doesn’t suggest someone who wants the investigation over.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” said Robin. “But for sanity’s sake, you’d have to draw the line somewhere.”
“So what does that make us?”
Robin smiled and shook her head.
“Dedicated?”
“Conti: last person to see Margot alive. Closest person to Margot at the practice…”
“I’m thanking her,” said Robin, who was typing fast onto her mobile, “and agreeing to the call tomorrow.”
“We could do it from the office, together,” said Strike. “Maybe FaceTime her, if she’s agreeable?”
“I’ll ask,” said Robin, still typing.
They set off a few minutes later in search of cigarettes, Robin reflecting on how casually she’d just agreed to go into work on a Saturday evening, so she could conduct Gloria’s interview with Strike. There was no angry Matthew at home any more, furious about her committing herself to long hours, suspicious about what she and Strike were up to, alone in the office in the evening. And she thought back to Matthew’s refusal to look her in the eye across the table at the mediation. He’d changed his partner, and his firm; he’d soon be a father. His life had changed, but had he?
They turned the corner to find themselves facing what Strike mentally categorized as “acres of tat.” As far as the eye could see were racks of merchandise laid out on the pavement: beach balls, keyrings, cheap jewelry, sunglasses, buckets of candyfloss, fudge and plush toys.
“Look at that,” said Robin suddenly, pointing to her right. A bright yellow sign read: Your Life Within Your Hands. On the dark glass of the door below was written: Palm Reader. Clairvoyant, along with a circular chart, all twelve signs of the zodiac represented by the glyphs around a central sun.
“What?” said Strike.
“Well, you’ve had your chart done. Maybe I’d like mine.”
“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, and they walked on, Robin smiling to herself.
She waited outside, examining postcards, while Strike entered the newsagent’s to buy cigarettes.
Waiting to be served, Strike was seized by a sudden, quixotic impulse (stimulated no doubt by the gaudy color all around him, by the sunshine and sticks of rock, the rattle and clang of amusement arcades and a stomach full of some of the best fish and chips he’d ever eaten) to buy Robin a toy donkey. He came to his senses almost before the idea had formed: what was he, a kid on a daytime date with his first girlfriend? Emerging again into the sunlight as he left the shop, he noted that he couldn’t have bought a donkey if he’d wanted to. There wasn’t a single one in sight: the bins full of plushes held only unicorns.
“Back to the car, then?” said Robin.
“Yeah,” said Strike, ripping the cellophane off his cigarettes, but then he said, “we’ll go down to the sea before we head off, shall we?”
“OK,” said Robin, surprised. “Er—why?”
“Just fancy it. It’s wrong, being by the sea without actually laying eyes on it.”
“Is this a Cornish thing?” asked Robin, as they headed back to Grand Parade.
“Maybe,” said Strike, lighting the cigarette between his teeth. He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled then sang,
And when we come to London Wall,
A pleasant sight to view,
Come forth! come forth! ye cowards all:
Here’s men as good as you.
“‘The Song of the Western Men?’”
“That’s the one.”
“Why d’you think they feel the need to tell Londoners they’re just as good? Isn’t that a given?”
“Just London, isn’t it?” said Strike, as they crossed the road. “Pisses everyone off.”
“I love London.”
“Me too. But I can see why it pisses everyone off.”
They passed a fountain with a statue in the middle of the Jolly Fisherman, that rotund, bearded sailor skipping along in high wind, who’d been used on posters advertising Skegness for nearly a century, and progressed across a smooth paved area toward the beach.
At last they saw what Strike had felt the need to see: a wide expanse of flat ocean, the color of chalcedony, beneath a periwinkle sky. Far out at sea, spoiling the horizon, were an army of tall white wind turbines, and while Strike personally enjoyed the chill breeze coming off the wide ocean, he understood at last why Robin had brought a scarf.
Strike smoked in silence, the cool wind making no difference whatsoever to his curly hair. He was thinking about Joan. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that her plan for her final resting place had given them a grave to visit any time they were at the British coast. Cornish-born, Cornish-bred, Joan had known that this need to reconnect with the sea lived in all of them. Now, every time they made their way to the coast they paid her tribute, along with the obeisance due to the waves.
“They were Joan’s favorites, pink roses,” he said, after a while. “What you sent, to the funeral.”
“Oh, really?” said Robin. “I… well, I had a kind of picture in my head of Joan, from things you’d told me, and… pink roses seemed to suit her.”
“If the agency ever fails,” said Strike, as they both turned away from the sea, “you could come back to Skegness and set yourself up as a clairvoyant.”
“Bit niche,” said Robin, as they walked back toward the car park. “Guessing dead people’s favorite flowers.”
“No donkeys,” said Strike, glancing back over his shoulder at the beach.
“Never mind,” said Robin kindly. “I think you’d have been a bit heavy.”
66
Speak, thou frail woman, speak with confidence.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The following evening, Strike and Robin sat down together on the same side of the partners’ desk. They were alone in the office for the first time since the night Strike had given her two black eyes. The lights were on this time, there were no glasses of whisky in their hands, but each of them was very conscious of what had happened on the previous occasion, and both felt a slight self-consciousness, which manifested itself, on Strike’s side, in a slightly brisker tone as they set up the computer monitor so that both could see it well, and on Robin’s, in focusing herself on all the questions she wanted to ask Gloria.
At six o’clock—which was seven o’clock, Gloria’s time—Strike dialed Gloria’s number, and after a moment’s suspense, they heard ringing, and a woman appeared onscreen, looking slightly nervous, in what looked li
ke a book-lined study. Framed on the wall behind her was a large photograph of a family: Gloria herself, a distinguished-looking husband and three adult children, all wearing white shirts, all of them notably attractive.
Of all the people they’d met and interviewed in connection with Margot Bamborough, Gloria Conti, Robin thought, looked most like her younger self, although she hadn’t made any obvious efforts to disguise the aging process. Her hair, which was pure white, had been cut into a short and flattering bob. Although there were fine lines on her brow and around her eyes, her fair complexion seemed never to have been exposed to much sun. She was slim and high-cheekboned, so that the structure of her face was much as it had been when she was younger, and her high-necked navy shirt, small gold earrings and square-framed glasses were stylish and simple. Robin thought that Gloria looked far more like her idea of a college professor than the scion of a criminal family, but perhaps she was being influenced by the lines of books on the shelves behind her.
“Good evening,” said Gloria nervously.
“Good evening,” said Strike and Robin together.
“It’s very good of you to talk to us, Mrs. Jaubert,” said Strike. “We appreciate it.”
“Oh, not at all,” she said, politely.
Robin hadn’t imagined received pronunciation from Irene Hickson’s descriptions of a girl from a rough background, but of course, as with Paul Satchwell, Gloria had now spent longer outside the country of her birth than in it.
“We’ve been hoping to talk to you for a long time,” said Robin.
“Yes, I’m very sorry about that,” said Gloria. “My husband, Hugo, didn’t tell me about any of your messages, you see. I found your last email in the trash folder, by accident. That’s how I realized you were trying to contact me. Hugo—well, he thought he was doing the right thing.”
Robin was reminded of that occasion when Matthew had deleted a voicemail from Strike on Robin’s phone in an attempt to stop Robin going back to work at the agency. She was surprised to see Gloria didn’t seem to hold her husband’s intervention against him. Perhaps Gloria could read her mind, because she said:
“Hugo assumed I wouldn’t want to talk about what happened with strangers. He didn’t realize that, actually, you’re the only people I’d ever want to talk to, because you’re trying to find out what really happened, and if you succeed, it’ll be—well, it would lift a huge weight off me.”
“D’you mind if I take notes?” Strike asked her.
“No, not at all,” said Gloria politely.
As Strike clicked out the nib of his pen, Gloria reached out of shot for a large glass of red wine, took a sip, appeared to brace herself and said rather quickly,
“Please—if you don’t mind—could I explain some things first? Since yesterday, I’ve been going over it, in my head, and I think if I tell you my story it will save you a lot of time. It’s key to understanding my relationship with Margot and why I behaved… as I behaved.”
“That’d be very helpful,” said Strike, pen poised. “Please, go on.”
Gloria took another sip of wine, put her glass back where they couldn’t see it, drew a deep breath and said,
“Both my parents died in a house fire when I was five.”
“How awful,” said Robin, startled. The 1961 census record had shown a complete family of four. “I’m so sorry.”
Strike gave a kind of commiserative growl.
“Thank you,” said Gloria. “I’m only telling you that to explain—you see, I survived because my father threw me out of the window into a blanket the neighbors were holding. My mother and father didn’t jump, because they were trying to reach my elder brother, who was trapped. All three of them died, so I was raised by my mother’s parents. They were adorable people. They’d have sold their own souls for me, which makes everything I’m about to say even worse…
“I was quite a shy girl. I really envied the girls at school who had parents who were—you know—with it. My poor granny didn’t really understand the sixties and seventies,” said Gloria, with a sad smile. “My clothes were always a bit old-fashioned. No mini-skirts or eye makeup, you know…
“I reacted by developing a very elaborate fantasy life. I know most teenagers are fantasists, but I was… extreme. Everything sort of spun out of control when I was sixteen, and I went to see the movie The Godfather…
“It’s ridiculous,” said Gloria soberly, “but it’s the truth. I… cleaved to that movie. I became obsessed with it. I don’t know how many times I saw it; at least twenty, I expect. I was an English schoolgirl from seventies Islington, but what I really wanted was to be Apollonia from forties Sicily, and meet a handsome American Mafioso, and not to be blown up by a car bomb, but go and live with Michael Corleone in New York and be beautiful and glamourous while my husband did glamourously violent, criminal things, all underpinned, you know, by a strict moral code.”
Strike and Robin both laughed, but Gloria didn’t smile. On the contrary, she looked sad and ashamed.
“I somehow thought all this might be achievable,” she went on, “because I had an Italian surname. I’d never really cared about that, before The Godfather. Now, out of nowhere, I asked my grandparents to take me to the Italian church on Clerkenwell Road for mass, instead of their regular church—and bless them, they did it. I wish they hadn’t. I wish they’d told me not to be so selfish, because their regular church gave them a lot of support and it was the center of their social life.
“I’d always felt entirely English, which I was on my mum’s side, but now I started trying to find out as much as I could about my dad’s family. I hoped to find out I was descended from Mafiosi. Then I could get my grandparents to give me the money to go and meet them all in Sicily and maybe marry a distant cousin. But all I found out was that my Italian grandfather immigrated to London to work in a coffee shop. I already knew my dad had worked for London Transport. Everyone I found out about, no matter how far back I went, was completely respectable and law-abiding. It was a real disappointment,” said Gloria, with a sigh.
“Then one Sunday, at St. Peter’s, somebody pointed out a man called Niccolo Ricci, sitting at the back of the Italian church. They said he was one of the very last of the Little Italy gangsters.”
Gloria paused to take another mouthful of wine, replaced the glass out of shot again, then said,
“Anyway… Ricci had sons.”
Strike now set pen to paper for the first time.
“There wasn’t much resemblance, really, between Luca Ricci and Al Pacino,” said Gloria drily, “but I managed to find one. He was four years older than I was, and everyone I asked about him said he was trouble, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. It started with a few smiles in passing…
“We went on our first date a couple of months before I was due to sit my exams. I told Granny and Gramps I was revising at a schoolfriend’s house. I’d always been such a good girl; they never dreamed I could be fibbing.
“I desperately wanted to like Luca, because this was my way into my fantasy. He had a car, and he was definitely criminal. He didn’t tell me anything about summit meetings between heads of crime families, though… mostly he talked about his Fiat, and drugs and beating people up.
“After a few dates, it was obvious Luca was quite keen on me, or… no,” said Gloria, unsmiling, “not keen, because that implies genuine affection. He really just wanted to fix me down, to keep me his. I was so stupid and lost to my fantasy, I found that quite exciting, because it seemed—you know—the proper Mafioso attitude. But I liked Luca best when I wasn’t actually with him, when I was mixing him up with Michael Corleone in my head, in my bed at night.
“I stopped studying. My fantasy life took me over completely. Gangsters” molls didn’t need A-levels. Luca didn’t think I needed A-levels, either. I failed all of them.
“My grandparents were really disappointed, although they were so kind about it,” said Gloria. For the first time, her voice quivered slightly. “Then�
�I think it was the following week—they found out about me seeing Luca. They were desperately worried and upset, but by this time, I didn’t really care. I told them I’d given up on the idea of college. I wanted to go out to work.
“I only applied for the job at the St. John’s practice because it was in the heart of Little Italy, even though Little Italy didn’t really exist any more. Luca’s father was one of the very last relics. But it was all part of my fantasy: I was a Conti, I should be there, where my forefathers had been. It made it easier to see Luca, too, because he lived there.
“I should never have got that receptionist’s job. I was far too young and I had no experience. It was Margot who wanted me to have it.”
Gloria paused, and Robin was sure it was because she’d just had to say Margot’s name for the first time. Drawing another deep breath, she said,
“So, there I was, on reception with Irene all day. My grandparents weren’t registered at St. John’s, because they lived in Islington, so I got away with telling Irene a bunch of lies about my background.
“I’d created a whole persona by now. I told her the Contis were an old Sicilian family, how my grandfather and father had been part of a crime family and I don’t know what else. Sometimes I used bits and pieces Luca had told me about the Riccis. Some of it was straight out of The Godfather. Ironically,” said Gloria, with a slight eye roll, “the one authentically criminal thing I could have told her, I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut about my boyfriend. Luca had told me never to talk about him and his family to other people, so I didn’t. I took him seriously.
“I remember, a few months after I got the job, a rumor went round the local area that they’d found a body buried in concrete in one of the builder’s sites up the road. I pretended I knew all about that through my underworld contacts. I told Irene I had it on good authority that the corpse had been a member of the Sabini gang. I really was a fool,” said Gloria quietly. “A little idiot…
“But I always had the feeling Margot could see right through me. She told me not long after I started there that she’d ‘seen something’ in me, at the interview. I didn’t like that, I felt as though she was patronizing me. She never treated me the way I wanted to be treated, as some street-smart Mafia girl with dark secrets, but always as though I was just a sweet young girl. Irene didn’t like Margot, either, and we used to moan about her all the time on reception. Margot had a big thing about education and keeping your career, and we used to say what a hypocrite she was, because she’d married this rich consultant. When you’re living a lie, nothing’s more threatening than people who tell the truth…
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 85