“And now,” said Strike, “we’ve earned a pint.”
14
In which there written was with cyphres old…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
On the opposite side of the road from the church hung the sign of the Three Kings. The pub’s curved, tiled exterior wall mirrored the bend in the road.
As she followed Strike inside, Robin had the strange sensation of walking back in time. Most of the walls were papered in pages from old music papers dating back to the seventies: a jumble of reviews, adverts for old stereo systems and pictures of pop and rock stars. Hallowe’en decorations hung over the bar, Bowie and Bob Marley looking down from framed prints, and Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix looked back at them from the opposite wall. As Robin sat down at a free table for two and Strike headed to the bar, she spotted a newspaper picture of Jonny Rokeby in tight leather trousers in the collage around the mirror. The pub looked as though it hadn’t changed in many years; it might even have had these same frosted windows, these mismatched wooden tables, bare floorboards, round glass wall lamps and candles in bottles back when Margot’s friend sat waiting for her in 1974.
For the first time, looking around this quirky, characterful pub, Robin found herself wondering exactly what Margot Bamborough had been like. It was odd how professional people’s jobs defined them in the imagination. “Doctor” felt, in many ways, like a complete identity. Waiting for her companion to buy the drinks, her eyes drifting from the skulls hanging from the bar to the pictures of dead rock stars, Robin was struck by the odd idea of a reverse nativity. The three Magi had journeyed toward a birth; Margot had set out for the Three Kings and, Robin feared, met death along the way.
Strike set Robin’s wine in front of her, took a satisfying mouthful of Sussex Best, sat down and then reached inside his overcoat and pulled out a roll of papers. Robin noticed photocopied newspaper reports among the typed and handwritten pages.
“You’ve been to the British Library.”
“I was there all day yesterday.”
He took the top photocopy and showed it to Robin. It showed a small clipping from the Daily Mail, featuring a picture of Fiona Fleury and her aged mother beneath the caption: Essex Butcher Sighting “Was Really Us.” Neither woman would have been easy to mistake for Margot Bamborough: Fiona was a tall, broad woman with a cheery face and no waist; her mother was shriveled with age and stooped.
“This is the first inkling that the press were losing confidence in Bill Talbot,” said Strike. “A few weeks after this appeared, they were baying for his blood, which probably didn’t help his mental health… Anyway,” he said, his large, hairy-backed hand lying flat on the rest of the photocopied paper. “Let’s go back to the one, incontrovertible fact we’ve got, which is that Margot Bamborough was still alive and inside the practice at a quarter to six that night.”
“At a quarter past six, you mean,” said Robin.
“No, I don’t,” said Strike. “The sequence of departures goes: ten past five, Dorothy. Half past five, Dinesh Gupta, who catches sight of Margot inside her consulting room before he leaves, and walks out past Gloria and Theo.
“Gloria goes to ask Brenner if he’ll see Theo. He refuses. Margot comes out of her consulting room and her last scheduled patients, a mother and child, come out at the same time and leave, also walking out past Theo in the waiting room. Margot tells Gloria she’s happy to see Theo. Brenner says ‘good of you’ and leaves, at a quarter to six.
“From then on, we’ve only got Gloria’s uncorroborated word for anything that happened. She’s the only person claiming Theo and Margot left the surgery alive.”
Robin paused in the act of taking a sip of wine.
“Come on. You aren’t suggesting they never left? That Margot’s still there, buried under the floorboards?”
“No, because sniffer dogs went all over the building, as well as the garden behind it,” said Strike. “But how’s this for a theory? The reason Gloria was so insistent that Theo was a woman, not a man, was because he was her accomplice in the murder or abduction of Margot.”
“Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to write down a girl’s name instead of ‘Theo’ if she wanted to hide a man’s identity? And why would she ask Dr. Brenner if he could see Theo, if she and Theo were planning to kill Margot?”
“Both good points,” admitted Strike, “but maybe she knew perfectly well Brenner would refuse, because he was a cantankerous old bastard, and was trying to make the thing look natural to Margot. Humor me for a moment.
“Inert bodies are heavy, hard to move and difficult to hide. A living, fighting woman is even harder. I’ve seen press photographs of Gloria and she was what my aunt would call a ‘slip of a girl,’ whereas Margot was a tall woman. I doubt Gloria could have killed Margot without help, and she definitely couldn’t have lifted her.”
“Didn’t Dr. Gupta say Margot and Gloria were close?”
“Means before motive. The closeness could’ve been a front,” said Strike. “Maybe Gloria didn’t like being ‘improved’ after all, and only acted the grateful pupil to allay Margot’s suspicions.
“Be that as it may, the last time there are multiple witnesses to Margot’s whereabouts was half an hour before she supposedly left the building. After that, we’ve only got Gloria’s word for what happened.”
“OK, objection sustained,” said Robin.
“So,” said Strike, as he took his hand off the pile of paper, “having granted me that, forget for a moment any alleged sightings of her at windows or walking into churches. Forget the speeding van. It’s entirely possible that none of that had anything to do with Margot.
“Go back to the one thing we know for certain: Margot Bamborough was still alive at a quarter to six.
“So now we turn to three men the police considered plausible suspects at the time and ask ourselves where they were at a quarter to six on the eleventh of October 1974.”
“There you go,” he said, passing Robin a photocopy of a tabloid news story dated 24 October 1974. “That’s Roy Phipps, otherwise known as Margot’s husband and Anna’s dad.”
The photograph showed a handsome man of around thirty, who strongly resembled his daughter. Robin thought that if she had been looking to cast a poet in a cheesy movie, she’d have put Roy Phipps’s headshot to the top of the pile. This was where Anna had got her long, pale face, her high forehead and her large, beautiful eyes. Phipps had worn his dark hair down to his long-lapelled collar in 1974, and he stared up out of this old newsprint harrowed, facing the camera, looking up from the card in his hand. The caption read: Dr. Roy Phipps, appealing to the public for help.
“Don’t bother reading it,” said Strike, already placing a second news story over the first. “There’s nothing in there you don’t already know, but this one will give you a few tidbits you don’t.”
Robin bent obediently over the second news story, of which Strike had photocopied only half.
her husband, Dr. Roy Phipps, who suffers from von Willebrand Disease, was ill at home and confined to bed at the marital home in Ham on the 11th October.
“Following several inaccurate and irresponsible press reports, we would like to state clearly that we are satisfied that Dr. Roy Phipps had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance,” DI Bill Talbot, the detective in charge of the investigation, told newsmen. “His own doctors have confirmed that walking and driving would both have been beyond Dr. Phipps on the day in question and both Dr. Phipps’ nanny and his cleaner have given sworn statements confirming that Dr. Phipps did not leave the house on the day of his wife’s disappearance.”
“What’s von Willebrand Disease?” asked Robin.
“A bleeding disorder. I looked it up. You don’t clot properly. Gupta remembered that wrong; he thought Roy was a hemophiliac.
“There are three kinds of von Willebrand Disease,” said Strike. “Type One just means you’d take a bit longer than normal to clot, but it shouldn’t leave
you bedbound, or unable to drive. I’m assuming Roy Phipps is Type Three, which can be as serious as hemophilia, and could lay him up for a while. But we’ll need to check that.
“Anyway,” said Strike, turning over the next page. “This is Talbot’s record of his interview with Roy Phipps.”
“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.
The page was covered in small, slanting writing, but the most distinctive feature of the record were the stars Talbot had drawn all over it.
“See there?” said Strike, running a forefinger down a list of dates that were just discernible amid the scrawls. “Those are the dates of the Essex Butcher abductions and attempted abductions.
“Talbot loses interest halfway down the list, look. On the twenty-sixth of August 1971, which is when Creed tried to abduct Peggy Hiskett, Roy was able to prove that he and Margot were on holiday in France.
“So that was that, as far as Talbot was concerned. If Roy hadn’t tried to abduct Peggy Hiskett, he wasn’t the Essex Butcher, and if he wasn’t the Essex Butcher, he couldn’t have had anything to do with Margot’s disappearance.
“But there’s a funny thing at the bottom of Talbot’s list of dates. All refer to Creed’s activities except that last one. He’s circled December twenty-seventh, with no year. No idea why he was interested in December twenty-seventh.”
“Or, presumably, why he went Vincent van Gogh all over his report?”
“The stars? Yeah, they’re a feature on all Talbot’s notes. Very strange. Now,” said Strike, “let’s see how a statement should be taken.”
He turned the page and there was a neatly typewritten, double-spaced statement, four pages long, which DI Lawson had taken from Roy Phipps, and which had been duly signed on the final page by the hematologist.
“You needn’t read the whole thing now,” said Strike. “Bottom line is, he stuck to it that he’d been laid up in bed all day, as the cleaner and his nanny would testify.
“But now we go to Wilma Bayliss, the Phippses’ cleaner. She also happened to be the St. John’s practice’s cleaner. The rest of the practice didn’t know at the time that she’d been doing some private work for Margot and Roy. Gupta told me that he thought Margot might’ve been encouraging Wilma to leave her husband, and giving her a bit of extra work might’ve been part of that scheme.”
“Why did she want Wilma to leave her husband?”
“I’m glad you asked that,” said Strike, and he turned over another piece of paper to show a tiny photocopied news clipping, which was dated in Strike’s spiky and hard-to-read handwriting: 6 November 1972.
Rapist Jailed
Jules Bayliss, 36, of Leather Lane, Clerkenwell was today sentenced at the Inner London Crown Court to 5 years’ jail for 2 counts of rape. Bayliss, who previously served two years in Brixton for aggravated assault, pleaded Not Guilty.
“Ah,” said Robin. “I see.”
She took another slug of wine.
“Funnily enough,” she added, though she didn’t sound amused, “Creed got five years for his second rape as well. After they let him out, he started killing women as well as raping them.”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “I know.”
For the second time, he considered questioning the advisability of Robin reading The Demon of Paradise Park, but decided against.
“I haven’t yet managed to find out what became of Jules Bayliss,” he said, “and the police notes regarding him are incomplete, so I can’t be sure whether he was still in the nick when Margot was abducted.
“What’s relevant to us is that Wilma told a different story to Lawson to the one she told Talbot—although Wilma claimed she had, in fact, told Talbot, and that he didn’t record it, which is possible, because, as you can see, his note-taking left a lot to be desired.
“Anyway, one of the things she told Lawson was that she’d sponged blood off the spare-room carpet the day Margot disappeared. The other was that she’d seen Roy walking through the garden on the day he was supposedly laid up in bed. She also admitted to Lawson that she hadn’t actually seen Roy in bed, but she’d heard him talking from the master bedroom that day.”
“Those are… pretty major changes of story.”
“Well, as I say, Wilma’s position was that she wasn’t changing her story, Talbot simply hadn’t recorded it properly. But Lawson seems to have given Wilma a very hard time about it, and he re-interviewed Roy on the strength of what she’d said, too. However, Roy still had Cynthia the nanny as his alibi, who was prepared to swear to the fact that he’d been laid up all day, because she was bringing him regular cups of tea in the master bedroom.
“I know,” he said, in response to Robin’s raised eyebrows. “Lawson seems to have had the same kind of dirty mind as us. He questioned Phipps on the precise nature of his relationship with Cynthia, which led to an angry outburst from Phipps, who said she was twelve years younger than he was and a cousin to boot.”
It flitted across both Strike’s and Robin’s minds at this point that there were ten years separating them in age. Both suppressed this unbidden and irrelevant thought.
“According to Roy, the age difference and the blood relationship ought to have constituted a total prohibition on the relationship in the minds of all decent people. But as we know, he managed to overcome those qualms seven years later.
“Lawson also interrogated Roy about the fact that Margot had met an old flame for a drink three weeks before she died. In his rush to exonerate Roy, Talbot hadn’t paid too much attention to the account of Oonagh Kennedy—”
“The friend Margot was supposed to be meeting in here?” said Robin.
“Exactly. Oonagh told both Talbot and Lawson that when Roy found out Margot had been for a drink with this old boyfriend, he’d been furious, and that he and Margot weren’t talking to each other when she disappeared.
“According to Lawson’s notes, Roy didn’t like any of this being brought up—”
“Hardly surprising—”
“—and got quite aggressive. However, after speaking to Roy’s doctors, Lawson was satisfied that Roy had indeed had a serious episode of bleeding after a fall in a hospital car park, and would have found it well nigh impossible to drive to Clerkenwell that evening, let alone kill or kidnap his wife.”
“He could have hired someone,” suggested Robin.
“They checked his bank accounts and couldn’t find any suspicious payments, but that obviously doesn’t mean he didn’t find a way. He’s a hematologist; he won’t be lacking in brains.”
Strike took a further swig of beer.
“So that’s the husband,” he said, flipping over the four pages of Roy’s statement. “Now for the old flame.”
“God above,” said Robin, looking down at another press photograph.
The man’s thick, wavy hair reached well past his shoulders. He stood, unsmiling, with his hands on his narrow hips beside a painting of what appeared to be two writhing lovers. His shirt was open almost to his navel and his jeans were skin tight at the crotch and extremely wide at the ankle.
“I thought you’d enjoy that,” said Strike, grinning at Robin’s reaction. “He’s Paul Satchwell, an artist—though not a very highbrow one, by the sounds of it. When the press got onto him, he was designing a mural for a nightclub. He’s Margot’s ex.”
“She’s just gone right down in my estimation,” muttered Robin.
“Don’t judge her too harshly. She met him when she was a Bunny Girl, so she was only nineteen or twenty. He was six years older than her and probably seemed like the height of sophistication.”
“In that shirt?”
“That’s a publicity photo for his art show,” said Strike. “It says so below. Possibly he didn’t show as much chest hair in day-to-day life. The press got quite excited at the thought an ex-lover might be involved, and let’s face it, a bloke who looked like that was a gift to the tabloids.”
Strike turned to another example of Talbot’s chaotic note-taking, which like the first was
covered in five-pointed stars and had the same list of dates, with scribbled annotations beside them.
“As you can see, Talbot didn’t start with anything as mundane as ‘Where were you at a quarter to six on the night Margot disappeared?’ He goes straight into the Essex Butcher dates, and when Satchwell told him he was celebrating a friend’s thirtieth birthday on September the eleventh, which was when Susan Meyer was abducted, Talbot basically stopped asking him questions. But once again, we’ve got a date unconnected with Creed heavily circled at the bottom, with a gigantic cross beside it. April the sixteenth this time.”
“Where was Satchwell living when Margot disappeared?”
“Camden,” said Strike, turning the page to reveal, again, a conventional typewritten statement. “There you go, look, it’s in his statement to Lawson. Not all that far from Clerkenwell.
“To Lawson, Satchwell explained that after a gap of eight years, he and Margot met by chance in the street and decided to go for a catch-up drink. He was quite open with Lawson about this, presumably because he knew Oonagh or Roy would already have told them about it. He even told Lawson he’d have been keen to resume an affair with Margot, which seems a bit too helpful, although it was probably meant to prove he had nothing to hide. He said he and Margot had a volatile relationship for a couple of years when she was much younger, and that Margot finally ended it for good when she met Roy.
“Satchwell’s alibi checked out. He told Lawson he was alone in his studio, which was also in Camden, for most of the afternoon on the day Margot disappeared, but took a phone call there round about five. Landlines—far harder to monkey about with than mobiles when you’re trying to set up an alibi. Satchwell ate in a local café, where he was known, at half past six, and witnesses agreed they’d seen him. He then went home to change before meeting some friends in a bar around eight. The people he claimed to have been with confirmed it all and Lawson was satisfied that Satchwell was in the clear.
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 15
