22
And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show.
Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is but that which he hath seene?
What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,
What if in euery other starre vnseene
Of other worldes he happily should heare?
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Strike got himself a takeaway that night, to eat alone in his attic flat. As he upended the Singapore noodles onto his plate, he inwardly acknowledged the irony that, had Ilsa not been so keen to act as midwife to a romantic relationship between himself and Robin, he might now have been sitting in Nick and Ilsa’s flat in Octavia Road, enjoying a laugh with two of his old friends and indeed with Robin herself, whose company had never yet palled on him, through the many long hours they had worked together.
Strike’s thoughts lingered on his partner while he ate, on the kiss on the well-chosen card, on the headphones and the fact that she was now calling him Strike in moments of annoyance, or when the two of them were joking, all of them clear signs of increasing intimacy. However stressful the divorce proceedings, of which she’d shared few details, however little she might consciously be seeking romance, she was nevertheless a free agent.
Not for the first time, Strike wondered exactly how egotistical it was to suspect that Robin’s feelings toward him might be warmer than those of pure friendship. He got on with her better than he’d ever got on with any woman. Their mutual liking had survived all the stresses of running a business together, the personal trials each had endured since they had met, even the major disagreement that had once seen him sack her. She’d hurried to the hospital when he had found himself alone with a critically ill nephew, brooking, he had no doubt, the displeasure of the ex-husband Strike never forgot to call “that arsehole” inside his own head.
Nor was Strike unconscious of Robin’s good looks: indeed, he’d been fully aware of them ever since she’d taken off her coat in his office for the first time. But her physical appeal was less of a threat to his peace of mind than the deep, guilty liking for being, currently, the main man in her life. Now that the possibility of something more lay in front of him, now that her husband was gone, and she was single, he found himself seriously wondering what would happen, should they act upon what he was beginning to suspect was a mutual attraction. Could the agency, for which they’d both sacrificed so much, which for Strike represented the culmination of all his ambitions, survive the partners falling into bed together? However he reframed this question, the answer always came back “no,” because he was certain, for reasons that had to do with past trauma, not from any particularly puritanical streak, that what Robin sought, ultimately, was the security and permanence of marriage.
And he wasn’t the marrying kind. No matter the inconveniences, what he craved at the end of a working day was his private space, clean and ordered, organized exactly as he liked it, free of emotional storms, from guilt and recriminations, from demands to service Hallmark’s idea of romance, from a life where someone else’s happiness was his responsibility. The truth was that he’d always been responsible for some woman: for Lucy, as they grew up together in squalor and chaos; for Leda, who lurched from lover to lover, and whom he had sometimes had to physically protect as a teenager; for Charlotte, whose volatility and self-destructive tendencies had been given many different names by therapists and psychiatrists, but whom he had loved in spite of it all. He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he’d had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He’d sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.
Except that, almost against his will, he did care about Robin. He felt familiar stirrings of a desire to make her happy that irked him far more than the habit he’d developed of looking determinedly away when she bent over a desk. They were friends, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and he suspected the best way to guarantee that was never see each other naked.
When he’d washed up his plate, Strike opened the window to admit the cold night air, reminding himself that every woman he knew would have been complaining immediately about the draft. He then lit a cigarette, opened the laptop he’d brought upstairs and drafted a letter to the Ministry of Justice, explaining that he’d been hired by Anna Phipps, setting out his proven credentials as an investigator both within the army and outside it, and requesting permission to visit and question Dennis Creed in Broadmoor.
Once finished, he yawned, lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day and went to lie down on his bed, as usual undoing his trousers first. Picking up The Demon of Paradise Park, he turned to the final chapter.
The question that haunts the officers who entered Creed’s basement in 1976 and saw for themselves the combination of jail and torture chamber that he’d constructed there, is whether the 12 women he is known to have assaulted, raped and/or killed represent the total tally of his victims.
In our final interview, Creed, who that morning had been deprived of privileges following an aggressive outburst against a prison officer, was at his least communicative and most cryptic.
Q: People suspect there may have been more victims.
A: Is that right?
Q: Louise Tucker. She was sixteen, she’d run away—
A: You journalists love putting ages on people, don’t you? Why is that?
Q: Because it paints a picture. It’s a detail we can all identify with. D’you know anything about Louise Tucker?
A: Yeah. She was sixteen.
Q: There was unclaimed jewelry in your basement. Unclaimed pieces of clothing.
A:…
Q: You don’t want to talk about the unclaimed jewelry?
A:…
Q: Why don’t you want to talk about those unclaimed items?
A:…
Q: Does any part of you think, “I’ve got nothing to lose, now. I could put people’s minds at rest. Stop families wondering”?
A:…
Q: You don’t think, it would be a kind of reparation? I could
repair something of my reputation?
A: [laughs] “Reputation”… you think I spend my days worrying about my reputation? You people really don’t [indistinguishable]
Q: What about Kara Wolfson? Disappeared in ’73.
A: How old was she?
Q: Twenty-six. Club hostess in Soho.
A: I don’t like whores.
Q: Why’s that?
A: Filthy.
Q: You frequented prostitutes.
A: When there was nothing else on offer.
Q: You tried—Helen Wardrop was a prostitute. And she got away from you. Gave a description to the police.
A:…
Q: You tried to abduct Helen in the same area Kara was last seen.
A:…
Q: What about Margot Bamborough?
A:…
Q: A van resembling your van was seen speeding in the area she disappeared.
A:…
Q: If you abducted Bamborough, she’d have been in your basement at the same time as Susan Meyer, wouldn’t she?
A:… Nice for her.
Q: Was it nice for her?
A: Someone to talk to.
Q: Are you saying you were holding both Bamborough and Meyer at the same time?
A: [smiles]
Q: What about Andrea Hooton? Was Bamborough dead when you abducted Andrea?
A:…
Q: You threw Andrea’s body off cliffs. That was a change in your m.o. Was she the first body you threw off there?
A:…
Q: You don’t want to confirm whether you abducted Margot Bamborough?
A: [smiles]
Strike put down the book and lay for a while, smoking and thinking. Then he reached for Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which he’d earlier thrown onto his bed when taking off his coat.
Flicking th
rough the densely packed pages, looking for something comprehensible, something he could connect with a solid fact or reference point, he suddenly placed a thick finger in the book to stop the pages turning, his attention caught by a sentence written mostly in English that seemed familiar.
It was an effort to get up and fetch his own notebook, but this he did. Slumping back onto his bed, he found the sentence that Pat had translated for him from Pitman shorthand:
And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book
The unknown word, Strike realized, was the same symbol that followed the word “Killer” in Talbot’s notebook.
With a feeling of both exasperation and curiosity, Strike picked up his phone and Googled “astrological symbols.”
A few minutes later, having read a couple of astrological web pages with an expression of mild distaste, he’d successfully interpreted Talbot’s sentence. It read: “Twelfth (Pisces) found. Therefore AS EXPECTED killer is Capricorn.”
Pisces was the twelfth sign of the zodiac, Capricorn the tenth. Capricorn was also the sign of the goat, which Talbot, in his manic state, appeared to have connected with Baphomet, the goat-headed deity.
“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, turning to a fresh page in his notebook and writing something.
An idea now occurred to him: those strange, unexplained dates with crosses beside them on all the male witnesses’ statements. He wondered whether he could be bothered to get up and go downstairs to fetch the relevant pages from the boxes of police records. With a sigh, he decided that the answer was yes. He did up his flies, heaved himself to his feet, and fetched the office keys from their hook by the door.
Ten minutes later, Strike returned to his bedroom with both his laptop and a fresh notebook. As he settled down on top of the duvet again, he noticed that the screen of his mobile, which was lying on the duvet, was now lit up. Somebody had tried to call him while he’d been downstairs. Expecting it to be Lucy, he picked up the phone and looked at it.
He’d just missed a call from Charlotte. Strike lay the phone back down again and opened his laptop. Slowly and painstakingly, he set to work matching the unexplained dates on each male suspect’s witness statements with the relevant sign of the zodiac. If his hunch that Talbot had been checking the men’s star signs was correct, Steven Douthwaite was a Pisces, Paul Satchwell was an Aries and Roy Phipps, who’d been born on the twenty-seventh of December… was a Capricorn. Yet Talbot had cleared Roy Phipps of involvement early in the case.
“So that makes no fucking sense,” muttered Strike to the empty room.
He put down his laptop and picked up Talbot’s notebook again, reading on from the assertion that Margot’s killer must be Capricorn.
“Christ almighty,” Strike muttered, trying, but not entirely succeeding, to find sense among the mass of esoteric ramblings with the aid of his astrological websites. As far as he could tell, Talbot appeared to have absolved Roy Phipps from suspicion on the grounds that he wasn’t really a Capricorn, but some sign that Strike couldn’t make head nor tail of, and which he suspected Talbot might have invented.
Returning to the notebook, Strike recognized the Celtic cross layout of tarot cards from his youth. Leda fancied herself a reader of tarot; many times had he seen her lay out the cards in the very formation Talbot had sketched in the middle of the page. He had never, however, seen the cards given astrological meanings before, and wondered whether this, too, had been Talbot’s own invention.
His mobile buzzed again. He picked it up.
Charlotte had sent him a photograph. A naked photograph, of herself holding two coffees. The accompanying message said 6 years ago tonight. I wish it was happening again. Happy Birthday, Bluey x
Against his will, Strike stared at the body no sentient heterosexual man could fail to desire, and at the face Venus would envy. Then he noticed the blurring along her lower stomach, where she’d airbrushed out her Cesarean scar. This took care of his burgeoning erection. Like an alcoholic pushing away brandy, he deleted the picture and returned to Talbot’s notebook.
23
It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore:
For some, that hath abundance at his will,
Hath not enough, but wants in greatest store;
And other, that hath litle, askes no more,
But in that litle is both rich and wise.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Eleven days later, Robin was woken at 8 a.m. by her mobile ringing, after barely an hour’s sleep. She’d spent the night on another pointless vigil outside the house of the persecuted weatherman, and had returned to her flat in Earl’s Court to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before hurrying out again to interview Oonagh Kennedy with Strike, in the café at Fortnum & Mason. Completely disorientated, she knocked a couple of items off the bedside table as she groped in the dark for her phone.
“’Lo?”
“Robin?” said a happy shout in her ear. “You’re an aunt!”
“I’m what, sorry?” she muttered.
Wisps of her dreams still clung about her: Pat Chauncey had been asking her out to dinner, and had been deeply hurt that she didn’t want to go.
“You’re an aunt! Jenny’s just had the baby!”
“Oh,” said Robin, and very slowly her brain computed that this was Stephen, her elder brother, on the line. “Oh, that’s wonderful… what—?”
“A girl!” said Stephen jubilantly. “Annabel Marie. Eight pounds eight ounces!”
“Wow,” said Robin, “that’s—is that big? It seems—”
“I’m sending you a picture now!” said Stephen. “Got it?”
“No—hang on,” said Robin, sitting up. Bleary-eyed, she switched to speakerphone to check her messages. The picture arrived as she was peering at the screen: a wrinkled, bald red baby swaddled in a hospital robe, fists balled up, looking furious to have been forced from a place of quiet, padded darkness into the brightness of a hospital ward.
“Just got it. Oh, Stephen, she’s… she’s beautiful.”
It was a lie, but nevertheless, tears prickled in the exhausted Robin’s eyes.
“My God, Button,” she said quietly; it was Stephen’s childhood nickname. “You’re a dad!”
“I know!” he said. “Insane, isn’t it? When are you coming home to see her?”
“Soon,” Robin promised. “I’m back for Christmas. Give Jenny all my love, won’t you?”
“I will, yeah. Gonna call Jon now. See you soon, Robs.”
The call was cut. Robin lay in darkness, staring at the brightly lit picture of the crumpled baby, whose puffy eyes were screwed up against a world she seemed to have decided already was not much of a place. It was quite extraordinary to think of her brother Stephen as a father, and that the family now had one more member.
Robin seemed to hear her cousin Katie’s words again: It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us. In the old days with Matthew, before she’d started work at the agency, she’d expected to have children with him. Robin had no strong feelings against having children, it was simply that she knew, now, that the job she loved would be impossible if she were a mother, or at least, that it would stop being the job she loved. Motherhood, from her limited observation of those her age who were doing it, seemed to demand as much from a woman as she could possibly give. Katie had talked of the perennial tug on her heart when she wasn’t with her son, and Robin had tried to imagine an emotional tether even stronger than the guilt and anger with which Matthew had tried to retain her. The problem wasn’t that Robin didn’t think she’d love her child. On the contrary, she thought it likely that she would love that child to the extent that this job, for which she had voluntarily sacrificed a marriage, her safety, her sleep and her financial security, would have to be sacrificed in return. And how would she f
eel, afterward, about the person who’d made that sacrifice necessary?
Robin turned on the light and bent to pick up the things she had knocked off her bedside table: an empty glass, thankfully unbroken, and the thin, flimsy paperback entitled Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? by C. B. Oakden, which Robin had received in the post the previous morning, and which she’d already read.
Strike didn’t yet know that she had managed to get hold of a copy of Oakden’s book and Robin had been looking forward to showing him. She had a couple more fragments of Bamborough news, too, but now, perhaps because of her sheer exhaustion, the feeling of anticipation at sharing them had disappeared. Deciding that she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, she got out of bed.
As she showered, Robin realized, to her surprise, that she was crying.
This is ridiculous. You don’t even want a baby. Get a grip of yourself.
When Robin arrived upstairs, dressed, with her hair blow-dried and concealer applied to the shadows under her eyes, she found Max eating toast in the kitchen.
“Morning,” he said, looking up from a perusal of the day’s news on his phone. “You all right?”
“Fine,” said Robin, with forced brightness. “Just found out I’m an aunt. My brother Stephen’s wife gave birth this morning.”
“Oh. Congratulations,” said Max, politely interested. “Um… boy or girl?”
“Girl,” said Robin, turning on the coffee machine.
“I’ve got about eight godchildren,” said Max gloomily. “Parents love giving the job to childless people. They think we’ll put more effort in, having no kids of our own.”
“True,” said Robin, trying to maintain her cheery tone. She’d been made godmother to Katie’s son. The christening had been the first time she’d been in the church in Masham since her wedding to Matthew.
She took a mug of black coffee back to her bedroom, where she opened up her laptop and decided to set down her new information on the Bamborough case in an email to Strike before they met. They might not have much time together before Oonagh Kennedy’s interview, so this would expedite discussion.
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 26
