Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  When I told Agnes I’d met Dennis a mere week before visiting her in Romford, she had only one point of curiosity.

  “They say he’s very clever, is he?”

  I told her that he was, undoubtedly, very clever. It was the one point on which all his psychiatrists agreed. Warders told me he read extensively, especially books of psychology.

  “I don’t know where he got that from. Not me…

  “I read it all in the papers. I saw him on the news, heard everything he did. Terrible, just terrible. What would make a person do that?

  “After the trial was over, I thought back to him, all naked and bloody on the lino where I’d had him, with my stepfather standing over us, threatening to drown him, and I swear to you now,” said Agnes Waite, “I wish I’d let it happen.”

  Strike stubbed out his cigarette and reached for the can of Tennent’s sitting beside the ashtray. A light rain pattered against his windows as he flicked a little further on in the book, pausing midway through chapter two.

  … grandmother, Ena, was unwilling or unable to protect the youngest member of the household from her husband’s increasingly sadistic punishments.

  Awdry took a particular satisfaction in humiliating Dennis for his persistent bedwetting. His step-grandfather would pour a bucket of water over his bed, then force the boy to sleep in it. Creed recalled several occasions on which he was forced to walk to the corner shop without trousers, but still wearing sodden pajama bottoms, to buy Awdry cigarettes.

  “One took refuge in fantasy,” Creed wrote to me later. “Inside my head I was entirely free and happy. But there were, even then, props in the material world that I enjoyed incorporating into my secret life. Items that attained a totemic power in my fantasies.”

  By the age of twelve, Dennis had discovered the pleasures of voyeurism.

  “It excited me,” he wrote, after our third interview, “to watch a woman who didn’t know she was being observed. I’d do it to my sisters, but I’d creep up to lit windows as well. If I got lucky, I’d see women or girls undressing, adjusting themselves or even a glimpse of nudity. I was aroused not only by the obviously sensual aspects, but by the sense of power. I felt I stole something of their essence from them, taking that which they thought private and hidden.”

  He soon progressed to stealing women’s underwear from neighbors’ washing lines and even from his grandmother, Ena. These he enjoying wearing in secret, and masturbating in…

  Yawning, Strike flicked on, coming to rest on a passage in chapter four.

  … a quiet member of the mailroom staff at Fleetwood Electric, who astonished his colleagues when, on a works night out, he donned the coat of a female co-worker to imitate singer Kay Starr.

  “There was little Dennis, belting out ‘Wheel of Fortune’ in Jenny’s coat,” an anonymous workmate told the press after Creed’s arrest. “It made some of the older men uncomfortable. A couple of them thought he was, you know, queer, after. But the younger ones, we all cheered him like anything. He came out of his shell a bit after that.”

  But Creed’s secret fantasy life didn’t center on a life of amateur theatrics or pub singing. Unbeknownst to anyone watching the tipsy sixteen-year-old onstage, his elaborate fantasies were becoming ever more sadistic…

  Colleagues at Fleetwood Electric were appalled when “little Dennis” was arrested for the rape and torture of Sheila Gaskins, 22, a shop assistant whom he’d followed off a late night bus. Gaskins, who survived the attack only because Creed was scared away by a nightwatchman who heard sounds down an alleyway, was able to provide evidence against him.

  Convicted, he served five years in HMP Pentonville. This was the last time Creed would give way to sudden impulse.

  Strike paused to light himself a fresh cigarette, then flicked ten chapters on through the book, until a familiar name caught his eye.

  … Dr. Margot Bamborough, a Clerkenwell GP, on October 11th 1974.

  DI Bill Talbot, who headed the investigation, immediately noted suspicious similarities between the disappearance of the young GP and those of Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman.

  Both Kenny and Wrightman had been abducted on rainy nights, when the presence of umbrellas and rainwashed windscreens provided handy impediments to would-be witnesses. There was a heavy downpour on the evening Margot Bamborough disappeared.

  A small van with what were suspected to be fake number plates had been seen in both Kenny’s and Wrightman’s vicinities shortly before they vanished. Three separate witnesses came forward to say that a small white van of similar appearance had been seen speeding away from the vicinity of Margot Bamborough’s practice that night.

  Still more suggestive was the eyewitness account of a driver who saw two women in the street, one of whom seemed to be infirm or faint, the other supporting her. Talbot at once made the connection both with the drunk Vera Kenny, who’d been seen getting into a van with what appeared to be another woman, and the testimony of Peggy Hiskett, who’d reported the man dressed as a woman at a lonely bus stop, who’d tried to persuade her to drink a bottle of beer with him, becoming aggressive before, fortunately, she managed to attract the attention of a passing car.

  Convinced that Bamborough had fallen victim to the serial killer now dubbed the Essex Butcher, Talbot—

  Strike’s mobile rang. Trying not to lose his page, Strike groped for it and answered it without looking at the caller’s identity.

  “Strike.”

  “Hello, Bluey,” said a woman, softly.

  Strike set the book on the bed, pages down. There was a pause, in which he could hear Charlotte breathing.

  “What d’you want?”

  “To talk to you,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know,” she half-laughed. “You choose.”

  Strike knew this mood. She was halfway into a bottle of wine or had perhaps enjoyed a couple of whiskies. There was a moment of drunkenness—not even of drunkenness, of alcohol-induced softening—where a Charlotte emerged who was endearing, even amusing, but not yet combative or maudlin. He’d asked himself once, toward the end of their engagement, when his own innate honesty was forcing him to face facts and ask hard questions, how realistic or healthy it was to wish for a wife forever very slightly drunk.

  “You didn’t call me back,” said Charlotte. “I left a message with your Robin. Didn’t she give it to you?”

  “Yeah, she gave it to me.”

  “But you didn’t call.”

  “What d’you want, Charlotte?”

  The sane part of his brain was telling him to end the call, but still he held the phone to his ear, listening, waiting. She’d been like a drug to him for a long time: a drug, or a disease.

  “Interesting,” said Charlotte dreamily. “I thought she might have decided not to pass on the message.”

  He said nothing.

  “Are the two of you together yet? She’s quite good-looking. And always there. On tap. So conven—”

  “Why are you calling?”

  “I’ve told you, I wanted to talk to you… d’you know what day it is today? The twins’ first birthday. The entire famille Ross has turned up to fawn over them. This is the first moment I’ve had to myself all day.”

  He knew, of course, that she’d had twins. There’d been an announcement in The Times, because she’d married into an aristocratic family that routinely announced births, marriages and deaths in its columns, although Strike had not, in fact, read the news there. It was Ilsa who’d passed the information on, and Strike had immediately remembered the words Charlotte had said to him, over a restaurant table she had tricked him into sharing with her, more than a year previously.

  All that’s kept me going through this pregnancy is the thought that once I’ve had them, I can leave.

  But the babies had been born prematurely and Charlotte had not left them.

  Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is.

  There’d been two previous tipsy pho
ne calls to Strike like this one in the past year, both made late at night. He’d ended the first one mere seconds in, because Robin was trying to reach him. Charlotte had hung up abruptly a few minutes into the second.

  “Nobody thought they’d live, did you know that?” Charlotte said now. “It’s,” she whispered, “a miracle.”

  “If it’s your kids’ birthday, I should let you go,” said Strike. “Goodnight, Char—”

  “Don’t go,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Don’t go, please don’t.”

  Hang up, said the voice in his head. He didn’t.

  “They’re asleep, fast asleep. They don’t know it’s their birthday, the whole thing’s a joke. Commemorating the anniversary of that fucking nightmare. It was hideous, they cut me open—”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  “Please,” she almost wailed. “Bluey, I’m so unhappy, you don’t know, I’m so fucking miserable—”

  “You’re a married mother of two,” he said brutally, “and I’m not an agony aunt. There are anonymous services you can call if you need them. Goodnight, Charlotte.”

  He cut the call.

  The rain was coming down harder. It drummed on his dark windows. Dennis Creed’s face was now the wrong way up on the cast-aside book. His light-lashed eyes seemed reversed in the upside-down face. The effect was unsettling, as though the eyes were alive in the photograph.

  Strike opened the book again and continued to read.

  9

  Faire Sir, of friendship let me now you pray,

  That as I late aduentured for your sake,

  The hurts whereof me now from battell stay,

  Ye will me now with like good turne repay.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  George Layborn still hadn’t managed to lay hands on the Bamborough file when Robin’s birthday arrived.

  For the first time in her life, she woke on the morning of October the ninth, remembered what day it was and experienced no twinge of excitement, but a lowering sensation. She was twenty-nine years old today, and twenty-nine had an odd ring to it. The number seemed to signify not a landmark, but a staging post: “Next stop: THIRTY.” Lying alone for a few moments in her double bed in her rented bedroom, she remembered what her favorite cousin, Katie, had said during Robin’s last trip home, while Robin had been helping Katie’s two-year-old son make Play-Doh monsters to ride in his Tonka truck.

  “It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us.”

  Then, seeing something in Robin’s face that made her regret her words, Katie had hastily added,

  “I don’t mean it in a bad way! You seem really happy. Free, I mean! Honestly,” Katie had said, with hollow insincerity, “I really envy you sometimes.”

  Robin hadn’t known a second’s regret for the termination of a marriage that, in its final phase, had made her deeply unhappy. She could still conjure up the mood, mercifully not experienced since, in which all color seemed drained from her surroundings—and they had been pretty surroundings, too: she knew that the sea captain’s house in Deptford where she and Matthew had finally parted had been a most attractive place, yet it was strange how few details she could remember about it now. All she could recall with any clarity was the deadened mood she’d suffered within those walls, the perpetual feelings of guilt and dread, and the dawning horror which accompanied the realization that she had shackled herself to somebody whom she didn’t like, and with whom she had next to nothing in common.

  Nevertheless, Katie’s blithe description of Robin’s current life as “happy” and “free” wasn’t entirely accurate. For several years now, Robin had watched Strike prioritize his working life over everything else—in fact, Joan’s diagnosis had been the first occasion she’d known him to reallocate his jobs, and make something other than detection his top concern—and these days Robin, too, felt herself becoming taken over by the job, which she found satisfying to the point that it became almost all-consuming. Finally living what she’d wanted ever since she first walked through the glass door of Strike’s office, she now understood the potential for loneliness that came with a single, driving passion.

  Having sole possession of her bed had been a great pleasure at first: nobody sulking with their back to her, nobody complaining that she wasn’t pulling her weight financially, or droning on about his promotion prospects; nobody demanding sex that had become a chore rather than a pleasure. Nevertheless, while she missed Matthew not at all, she could envisage a time (if she was honest, was perhaps already living it) when the lack of physical contact, of affection and even of sex—which for Robin was a more complicated prospect than for many women—would become, not a boon, but a serious absence in her life.

  And then what? Would she become like Strike, with a succession of lovers relegated firmly to second place, after the job? No sooner had she thought this than she found herself wondering, as she’d done almost daily since, whether her partner had called Charlotte Campbell back. Impatient with herself, she threw back the covers and, ignoring the packages lying on top of her chest of drawers, went to take a shower.

  Her new home in Finborough Road occupied the top two floors of a terraced house. The bedrooms and bathroom were on the third floor, the public rooms on the fourth. A small terraced area lay off the sitting room, where the owner’s elderly rough-coated dachshund, Wolfgang, liked to lie outside on sunny days.

  Robin, who was under no illusions about property available in London for single women on an average wage, especially one with legal bills to pay, considered herself immensely fortunate to be living in a clean, well-maintained and tastefully decorated flat, with a double room to herself and a flatmate she liked. Her live-in landlord was a forty-two-year-old actor called Max Priestwood, who couldn’t afford to run the place without a tenant. Max, who was gay, was what Robin’s mother would have called ruggedly handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of thick, dark blond hair and a perpetually weary look about his gray eyes. He was also an old friend of Ilsa’s, who’d been at university with his younger brother.

  In spite of Ilsa’s assurances that “Max is absolutely lovely,” Robin had spent the first few months of her tenancy wondering whether she’d made a huge mistake in moving in with him, because he seemed sunk in what seemed perpetual gloom. Robin tried her very best to be a good flatmate: she was naturally tidy, she never played music loudly or cooked anything very smelly; she made a fuss of Wolfgang and remembered to feed him if Max was out; she was punctilious when it came to replacing washing-up liquid and toilet roll; and she made a point of being polite and cheery whenever they came into contact, yet Max rarely if ever smiled, and when she first arrived, he’d seemed to find it an immense effort to talk to her. Feeling paranoid, Robin had wondered at first whether Ilsa had strong-armed Max into accepting her as a tenant.

  Conversation had become slightly easier between them over the months of her tenancy, yet Max was never loquacious. Sometimes Robin was grateful for this monosyllabic tendency, because when she came in after working a twelve-hour stretch of surveillance, stiff and tired, her mind fizzing with work concerns, the last thing she wanted was small talk. At other times, when she might have preferred to go upstairs to the open-plan living area, she kept to her room rather than feel she was intruding upon Max’s private space.

  She suspected the main reason for Max’s perennially low mood was his state of persistent unemployment. Since the West End play in which he had had a small part had ended four months ago, he hadn’t managed to get another job. She’d learned quickly not to ask him whether he had any auditions lined up. Sometimes, even saying “How was your day?” sounded unnecessarily judgmental. She knew he’d previously shared his flat with a long-term boyfriend, who by coincidence was also called Matthew. Robin knew nothing about Max’s break-up except that his Matthew had signed over his half of the flat to Max voluntarily, which to Robin seemed remarkably generous compared with the behav
ior of her own ex-husband.

  Having showered, Robin pulled on a dressing gown and returned to her bedroom to open the packages that had arrived in the post over the past few days, and which she’d saved for this morning. She suspected her mother had bought the aromatherapy bath oils that were ostensibly from her brother Martin, that her veterinarian sister-in-law (who was currently pregnant with Robin’s first niece or nephew) had chosen the homespun sweater, which was very much Jenny’s own style, and that her brother Jonathan had a new girlfriend, who’d probably chosen the dangly earrings. Feeling slightly more depressed than she had before she’d opened the presents, Robin dressed herself all in black, which could take her through a day of paperwork at the office, a catch-up meeting with the weatherman whom Postcard was persecuting, all the way to birthday drinks that evening with Ilsa and Vanessa, her policewoman friend. Ilsa had suggested inviting Strike, and Robin had said that she would prefer it to be girls only, because she was trying to avoid any further occasions on which Ilsa might try and matchmake.

  On the point of leaving her room, Robin’s eye fell on a copy of The Demon of Paradise Park which she, like Strike, had bought online. Her copy was slightly more battered than his and had taken longer to arrive. She hadn’t yet read much of it, partly because she was generally too tired of an evening to do anything other than fall into bed, but partly because what she had read had already caused a slight recurrence of the psychological symptoms she had carried with her ever since her forearm had been sliced open one dark night. Today, however, she stuffed it into her bag to read on the Tube.

  A text from her mother arrived while Robin was walking to the station, wishing her a happy birthday and telling her to check her email account. This she did, and saw that her parents had sent her a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound voucher for Selfridges. This was a most welcome gift, because Robin had virtually no disposable income left, once her legal bills, rent and other living expenses had been paid, to spend on anything that might be considered self-indulgent.