“I remember, as she put her umbrella up, she slipped. Turned over on her heel. It was raining, the pavement was wet. Then she straightened up and walked out of sight.
“I started dashing round, turning off lights, locking the records up in the filing cabinets. Then I made sure the back door was locked, which it was—the police asked me about that. I closed and locked the front door, and ran straight up Passing Alley, which was right beside the surgery, to meet Luca in St. John Street.
“And that was the last time I ever saw Margot.”
Gloria reached again for her almost empty wine glass, and drained it.
“Did you have any idea what might have happened to her?” asked Strike.
“Of course,” said Gloria quietly. “I was terrified Luca had got someone to hurt her, or kidnap her. She’d become a bugbear to him. Every time I stood up for myself, he’d say horrible things about Margot influencing me. He was convinced she was trying to persuade me to leave him, which, of course, she was. My greatest fear was that he’d somehow find out what she’d helped me do… you know. In Bride Street.
“I knew he couldn’t have abducted her personally, because I met him on St. John Street, not five minutes after she left the surgery, and I know it can’t have been his father, because his brother Marco was in hospital at the time, and the parents were with him round the clock. But Luca had friends and cousins.
“I couldn’t tell the police. Luca had stopped pretending he was joking, when he threatened my grandparents. I asked him whether he was behind it, though. The anxiety was too much: I had to ask. He got really angry, called me names—dumb bitch, things like that. He said, of course he hadn’t. But he’d told me stories about his father ‘making people disappear,’ so I just didn’t know…”
“Did you ever have reason to suppose he knew…” Robin hesitated “… what happened in Bride Street?”
“I’m absolutely positive he never knew,” said Gloria. “Margot was too good for him. The wigs and using her name and giving me a plausible story for why I couldn’t have sex with him for a while… She’s the reason I got away with it. No, I don’t believe he ever knew. So, in my best moments, I thought, he didn’t really have a strong enough reason—”
The door behind Gloria opened, and in walked a handsome aquiline-nosed, gray-haired man in a striped shirt and jeans, carrying a bottle of red wine. A large German Shepherd dog followed him into the room, its tail wagging.
“Je m’excuse,” he said, smiling at Strike and Robin onscreen. “I am sorry for… Comment dit-on ‘interrompre’?” he asked his wife.
“Interrupt,” she said.
“Oui. I am sorry for interrupt.”
He refilled his wife’s glass, handed it back to her, patted her on the shoulder, then walked out again, calling the dog.
“Viens, Obélix.”
When both man and dog had disappeared, Gloria said, with a little laugh,
“That was Hugo.”
“How long did you stay at the St. John’s practice, after Margot disappeared?” asked Strike, although he knew the answer.
“Six, seven months, I think,” said Gloria. “Long enough to see the new policeman take over. We were all pleased, because the first—Talbot, wasn’t it?—was quite strange. He bullied the life out of Wilma and Janice. I think that’s what made Wilma ill, actually. She had quite enough on her plate without the police hounding her.”
“You don’t think she drank, then?” asked Robin.
“Drank? That was all Dorothy’s malice,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Dorothy was trying to pin the thefts on Wilma. Have you heard about that?”
Strike and Robin nodded.
“When she couldn’t prove that Wilma was taking money out of people’s bags, she put it about that she was drinking and the poor woman resigned. She was probably glad to leave, but it was still losing a salary, wasn’t it?
“I wanted to leave myself,” said Gloria, “but I was paralyzed. I had this really strange feeling that, if I just stayed there, the world would right itself. Margot would come back. It was only after she disappeared that I realized… what she’d been to me…
“Anyway,” sighed Gloria, “one night, months after she’d disappeared, Luca was really violent to me. I’d smiled at a man who opened a door for me as I left the pub with Luca, that’s what sparked it. He beat me like he’d never beaten me before, at his place—he had this little flat.
“I remember saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have smiled at him.’ And all the time I was saying it, I could see—in here –” Gloria tapped her head, “Margot watching me, and even while I was begging Luca to stop, and agreeing I’d behaved like a little slut, and I shouldn’t ever smile at strange men, I was thinking, I’m going, Margot. I’m going where he’ll never find me.
“Because it had clicked in my head at last. She’d told me I needed to be brave. It was no good waiting for anyone else to save me. I had to save me.
“After he’d calmed down, he let me go home to my grandparents” house, but he wanted to see me again later. It was always like that after he’d been really violent. He wanted extra contact.
“He hadn’t beaten me in the face. He never did, he never lost control like that, so I went back to my grandparents” and acted as though everything was fine. Went out to meet Luca that night, and he took me out for dinner, and that was the night he proposed, with a ring and everything.
“And I said yes,” said Gloria, with a strange smile and a shrug. “I put that ring on, and I looked down at it, and I didn’t even have to act happy, because I genuinely was. I thought That’ll buy some of my plane ticket. Mind you, I’d never flown before in my life. The idea of it scared me. But all the time, I could see Margot in my head. You’ve got to be brave, Gloria.
“I had to tell my grandparents I was engaged. I couldn’t tell them what I was really planning, because I was scared they wouldn’t be able to act, or that they’d try and confront Luca or, worse, go to the police. Anyway, Luca came round to the house to meet them properly, pretending to be a nice guy, and it was awful, and I had to act as though I was thrilled about all of it.
“Every single day after that, I bought all the newspapers, and circled all of the jobs abroad that I might have a chance of getting. I had to do all of it in secret. Typed up a CV at work and got a bus to the West End to post all the applications, because I was scared someone who knew Luca would see me putting lots of envelopes in the post.
“After a few weeks, I got an interview with a French woman who was looking for an English home help, to teach her kids English. What really got me the job was being able to type. She ran her own business from home, so I could do a bit of admin for her while the kids were at nursery. The job came with room and board, and my employer would buy my plane ticket, so I didn’t have to sell Luca’s ring, and pretend I’d lost it…
“You know, the day I went into St. John’s and told them I was resigning, a funny thing happened. Nobody had mentioned Margot for weeks. Immediately after she disappeared, it was all any of us could talk about, but then it became taboo, somehow. We had a new locum doctor in her room. I can’t remember his name. A new cleaner, too. But this day, Dorothy arrived, quite flustered, and she never showed any emotion, usually…
“This local… what’s the word?” said Gloria, clicking her fingers, for the first time lost in her native language. “We’d say un dingue… oh, you know, a crazy man, a loon… harmless, but strange. Big long beard, dirty, you used to see him wandering up and down Clerkenwell Road with his son. Anyway, he’d sort of accosted Dorothy in the middle of the street, and told her he killed Margot Bamborough.
“It had shaken Dorothy up, but in an odd way… please don’t think this is awful… I hoped it was true. Because although I’d have given anything to know Margot was alive, I was sure she was dead. She wasn’t the type to run away. And my worst nightmare was that Luca was responsible, because that meant it was all my fault.”
Robin shoo
k her head, but Gloria ignored her.
“I only told my grandparents the truth the night before I was due to leave for France. I hadn’t let them spend any money on the wedding that wasn’t going to happen, but even so, it was a huge shock to them. I sat them down, and told them everything, except for the termination.
“Of course, they were appalled. At first, they didn’t want me to leave, they wanted me to go to the police. I had to explain why that was a terrible idea, tell them about the threats Luca had made, and all of that. But they were so glad I wasn’t marrying him, they accepted it in the end. I told them it would all die down, and I’d be back soon… even though I wasn’t sure that was true, or if it would be possible.
“My grandfather took me to the airport, early next day. We’d worked out a story, for when Luca came asking where I was. They were to say I’d been having doubts, because he’d been violent, and that I’d gone over to Italy to stay with some of Dad’s relatives, to think things over. We even concocted a fake address to give him. I don’t know whether he ever wrote to it.
“And that’s everything,” said Gloria, sitting back in the desk chair. “I stayed with my first employer for seven years, and ended up with a junior position in her firm. I didn’t visit London again until I heard Luca was safely married.” She took another sip of wine from the glass her husband had refilled. “His first wife drank herself to death at the age of thirty-nine. He used to beat her badly. I found all that out later.
“And I’ve never told another lie about myself,” said Gloria, raising her chin. “Never exaggerated, never pretended, only ever told the absolute truth, except on one point. Until tonight, the only person who knew about the abortion was Hugo, but now you two know, too.
“Even if you find out Luca was behind what happened to Margot, and I have to have that on my conscience forever, I owe her the truth. That woman saved me, and I’ve never, ever forgotten her. She was one of the bravest, kindest people I’ve ever known.”
67
There by th’vncertaine glims of starry night,
And by the twinkling of their sacred fire,
He mote perceiue a litle dawning sight…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
They thanked Gloria for her time and her honesty. Having bidden her goodbye, Strike and Robin sat at the partners’ desk, each of them sunk in thought, until Strike offered Robin one of the pots of dehydrated noodles he kept for snacks in the office. She declined, instead taking a bag of mixed nuts unenthusiastically out of her bag, and opening it. Once Strike had added boiling water to the plastic pot, he returned to the desk, stirring the noodles with a fork.
“It’s the efficiency,” he said, sitting down again. “That’s what’s bugging me. Literally no trace of her anywhere. Somebody was either extraordinarily clever, or unprecedentedly lucky. And Creed still fits that picture best, with Luca Ricci a close second.”
“Except it can’t have been Luca. He’s got an alibi: Gloria.”
“But as she says, he knew people who could take care of making someone disappear—because what are the odds, if Margot was abducted off the street, that this was a truly one-person job? Even Creed had his unwitting accomplices. The dozy landlady, giving him that safe basement, and the dry cleaner letting him have the van that day and n—”
“Don’t,” said Robin sharply.
“Don’t what?”
“Blame them.”
“I’m not blaming them, I’m—”
“Max and I were talking about this,” said Robin. “About the way people—women, usually—get blamed for not knowing, or seeing—but everyone’s guilty of that kind of bias. Everyone does it.”
“You think?” said Strike thickly, through his first mouthful of noodles.
“Yes,” said Robin. “We’ve all got a tendency to generalize from our own past experiences. Look at Violet Cooper. She thought she knew who Creed really was, because she’d met a couple of men who behaved like him, in her theater days.”
“Men who wouldn’t let anyone in their basement flats because they were boiling down skulls?”
“You know what I mean, Strike,” said Robin, refusing to be amused. “Soft-spoken, apparently gentle, slightly feminine. Creed liked putting on her feather boa, and he pretended to like show tunes, so she thought he was a gay man. But if the only gay man she’d met had been Max, my flatmate…”
“He’s gay, is he?” said Strike, whose memories of Max were indistinct.
“Yes, and he isn’t remotely camp, and hates musicals. Come to that, if she’d met a couple of Matt’s straight mates down the rugby club, who couldn’t wait to shove oranges up their T-shirts and prance around, she might’ve drawn a different conclusion, mightn’t she?”
“S’pose so,” said Strike, chewing noodles and considering this point. “And in fairness, most people don’t know any serial killers.”
“Exactly. So even if somebody’s got some unusual habits, our direct experience tends to suggest they’re just eccentric. Vi had never met a man who fetishised women’s clothing or… sorry, I’m boring you,” Robin added, because Strike’s eyes seemed to have glazed over.
“No, you aren’t,” he muttered. “You’re actually making me think… I had an idea, you know. I thought I’d spotted some coincidences, and it got me wondering…”
He set down the pot of noodles, reached under the desk and pulled one of the boxes of police evidence toward him, on top of which lay the pages he’d last been re-examining. He now took these bits of paper out, spread them in front of himself again, and resumed his noodle-eating.
“Are you going to tell me about the coincidences?” said Robin with a trace of impatience.
“Hang on a minute,” said Strike, looking up at her. “Why was Theo standing outside the phone box?”
“What?” said Robin, confused.
“I don’t think we can doubt, now, can we, that Ruby Elliot saw Theo by that phone box near Albemarle Way? Her description and Gloria’s tally exactly… so why was Theo standing outside the phone box?”
“She was waiting for the van to pick her up.”
“Right. But, not to state the bleeding obvious, the sides of the old red telephone boxes have windows. It was pissing down with rain. Theo didn’t have an umbrella, and Ruby said Theo’s hair was plastered down—so why didn’t she shelter in the telephone box, and keep watch for her lift? Clerkenwell Road’s long and straight. She’d’ve had a perfectly good view from that telephone box, and plenty of time to come out and show herself to the van driver. Why,” said Strike for the third time, “was she standing outside the phone box?”
“Because… there was someone in it?”
“That would seem the obvious explanation. And that phone box at the end of Albemarle Way would give you a view of the top of St. John’s Lane.”
“You think someone was lying in wait for Margot? Watching out from that phone box?”
Strike hesitated.
“Do me a favor and look up Fragile X syndrome?”
“OK… why?” said Robin, setting down her almonds and beginning to type.
“That phone box is at the end of the Athorns’ street.”
While Robin brought up the search results, Strike pulled the copy of Irene Hickson’s receipt toward him. It had the time 3:10 p.m. on it. Eating noodles, Strike was still looking at the slip of paper when Robin said, reading off her screen,
“‘First called Martin-Bell syndrome… the FMR1 gene on the X chromosome was sequenced in 1991’… Sorry, what exactly do you need?”
“What specific disabilities does it cause?”
“‘Social anxiety,’” said Robin, reading again, “‘lack of eye contact… challenges forming relationships… anxiety with unfamiliar situations and people… poor ability to recognize faces you’ve seen before,’ but ‘good long-term memory, good imitation skills and good visual learning.’ Men are more severely affected than women… good sense of humor, usually…‘can be creative, espe
cially visually’…”
She looked around the computer monitor.
“Why d’you want to know all this?”
“Just thinking.”
“About Gwilherm?”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “Well, about the whole family.”
“He didn’t have Fragile X, though, did he?”
“No, I don’t know what Gwilherm’s problem was. Maybe just the Bennies.”
He didn’t smile as he said the name this time.
“Cormoran, what coincidences did you notice?”
Instead of answering, Strike pulled a couple of pages of police notes toward him and read through them again. Out of force of habit, Robin reached out for Talbot’s notebook, and turned to the first page. For a couple of minutes, there was silence in the office, and neither partner noticed any of the noises that were as familiar to them as their own breathing: the traffic rolling down Charing Cross Road, occasional shouts and snatches of music from Denmark Street below.
The very first page of Bill Talbot’s notebook began with untidy jottings of what Robin knew to be genuine evidence and observations. It was the most coherent part of the notes but the first pentagrams appeared at the very bottom of the page, as did the first astrological observation.
Robin re-read this final paragraph twice, frowning slightly. Then she set aside her bag of almonds to delve in the nearest box of police evidence. It took her five minutes to find the original police record of Ruby Elliot’s statement, and while she searched, Strike remained deeply immersed in his own portion of the notes.
I saw them beside a telephone box, two women sort of struggling together. The tall one in the raincoat was leaning on the short one, who was in a plastic rain hood. They both looked like women to me, but I didn’t see their faces. It looked to me like one was trying to make the other walk quicker.
Pulse now quickened, Robin set aside this piece of paper, got back onto her knees and began to search for the record of Ruby’s statement to Lawson, which took her another five minutes.
I saw them beside the two telephone boxes in Clerkenwell Green, two women struggling with each together. The tall one in the raincoat was trying to make the little one in the rain hood walk faster.
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 87