Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Why was Margot auditioning?” Robin asked.

  “Because her family had nothing—and I mean, nothing, now,” Oonagh said. “Her daddy had an accident when she was four. Fell off a step-ladder, broke his back. Crippled. That’s why she had no brothers and sisters. Her mammy used to clean people’s houses. My family had more than the Bamboroughs and nobody ever got rich farming a place the size of ours. But the Bamboroughs were not-enough-to-eat poor.

  “She was such a clever girl, but the family needed help. She got herself into medical school, told the university she’d have to defer for a year, then headed straight for the Playboy Club. We took to each other straight away, in the audition, because she was so funny.”

  “Was she?” said Robin. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Strike look up from his notebook in surprise.

  “Oh, Margot Bamborough was the funniest person I ever knew in my life,” said Oonagh. “In my loife, now. We used to laugh till we cried. I’ve never laughed like that since. Proper cockney accent and she could just make you laugh until you dropped.

  “So we started work together, and they were strict, mind you,” said Oonagh, now forking cake into her mouth as she talked. “Inspected before you walked out on the floor, uniform on properly, nails done, and then there were rules like you’ve no idea. They used to put plain-clothes detectives in the club to catch us out, make sure we weren’t giving out our full names or our phone numbers.

  “If you were any good at it, you could put a tidy bit of money away. Margot graduated to cigarette girl, selling them out of a little tray. She was popular with the men because she was so funny. She hardly spent a penny on herself. She split the lot between a savings account for medical school and the rest she gave her mammy. Worked every hour they’d let her. Bunny Peggy, she called herself, because she didn’t want any of the punters to know her real name. I was Bunny Una, because nobody knew how to say ‘Oonagh.’ We got all kinds of offers—you had to say no, of course. But it was nice to be asked, right enough,” said Oonagh, and perhaps picking up on Robin’s surprise, she smiled and said,

  “Don’t think Margot and I didn’t know exactly what we were doin,” corseted up with bunny ears on our heads. What you maybe don’t realize is a woman couldn’t get a mortgage in dose days without a man co-signing the forms. Same with credit cards. I squandered my money at first, but I learned better, learned from Margot. I got smart, I started saving. I ended up buying my own flat with cash. Middle-class gorls, with their mammies and daddies paying their way, they could afford to burn their bras and have hairy armpits. Margot and I, we did what we had to.

  “Anyway, the Playboy Club was sophisticated. It wasn’t a knocking shop. It had licenses it would’ve lost if things got seedy. We had women guests, too. Men used to bring their wives, their dates. The worst we had was a bit of tail-pulling, but if a club member got really handsy, he lost his membership. You should’ve seen what I had to put up with in my job before that: hands up my skirt when I bent over a table, and worse. They looked after us at the Playboy Club. Members weren’t allowed to date Bunny Girls—well, in t’eory. It happened. It happened to Margot. I was angry at her for that, I said, you’re risking everything, you fool.”

  “Was this Paul Satchwell?” asked Robin.

  “It was indeed,” said Oonagh. “He’d come to the club as someone’s guest, he wasn’t a member, so Margot t’ought it was a gray area. I was still worried she was going to lose the job.”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “No, I didn’t like him,” said Oonagh. “T’ought he was Robert Plant, so he did, but Margot fell for him hook, line and sinker. She didn’t go out a lot, see, because she was saving. I’d been round the nightclubs in my first year in London; I’d met plenty of Satchwells. He was six years older than she was, an artist and he wore his jeans so tight you could see his cock and balls right through them.”

  Strike let out an involuntary snort of laughter. Oonagh looked at him.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “You’re, ah, not like most vicars I’ve met.”

  “I don’t t’ink the Good Lord will mind me mentioning cocks and balls,” said Oonagh airily. “He made ’em, didn’t he?”

  “So they started dating?” asked Robin.

  “They did,” said Oonagh. “Mad passion, it was. You could feel the heat off the two of them. For Margot—see, before Satchwell, she’d always had tunnel vision about life, you know, eyes on the prize: become a doctor and save her family. She was cleverer than any of the boys she knew, and men don’t like that much nowadays. She was taller than half of them, as well. She told me she’d never had a man interested in her brains before Satchwell. Interested in her brains, my aunt Nelly. The girl had a body like Jane Birkin. Oh, and it wasn’t only his looks, either, she said. He’d read t’ings. He could talk about art. He could talk for the hour about art, right enough. I heard him. Well, I don’t know a Monet from a poster of Margate, so I’m no judge, but it sounded a load of old bollocks to me.

  “But he’d take Margot out to a gallery and educate her about art, then he’d take her home to bed. Sex makes fools of us all,” sighed Oonagh Kennedy. “And he was her very first and it was obvious, you know,” she nodded at Robin, “he knew what he was doing, so it was all that much more important to her. Mad in love, she was. Mad.

  “Then, one night, just a couple o’ weeks before she was supposed to be starting medical school, she turns up at my flat howling. She’d dropped in on Paul unexpected after work and there was another woman at the flat with him. Naked. Modeling, he told her. Modeling—at midnight. She turned round and ran. He went chasin’ after her, but she jumped in a taxi and came to mine.

  “Heartbroken, she was. All night, we sat up talking, me saying ‘You’re better off without him,’ which was no more than the truth. I said to her, ‘Margot, you’re about to start medical school. The place’ll be wall to wall with handsome, clever boys training to be doctors. You won’t remember Satchwell’s name after a week or two.’

  “But then, near dawn, she told me a t’ing I’ve never told anyone before.”

  Oonagh hesitated. Robin tried to look politely but warmly receptive.

  “She’d let him take pictures of her. You know. Pictures. And she was scared, she wanted them back. I said to her, why in God’s name would you let him do such a t’ing, Margot? Because it would’ve killed her mother. The pride they had in her, their only daughter, their brilliant gorl. If those photos turned up anywhere, a magazine or I don’t know what, they’d have never lived it down, boastin’ up and down their street about their Margot, the genius.

  “So I said, I’ll come with you and we’ll get them back. So we went round there early and banged on his door. The bastard—excuse me, now,” she said. “You’ll rightly say, that’s not a Christian attitude, but wait till you hear. Satchwell said to Margot, ‘I’ll speak to you, but not your nanny.’ Your nanny.

  “Well, now. I spent ten years working with domestic abuse survivors in Wolverhampton and it’s one of the hallmarks of an abuser, if their victim isn’t compliant, it’s because she’s under someone else’s control. Her nanny.

  “Before I know what’s going on, she’s inside and I’m stuck on the other side of a closed door. He’d pulled her in and slammed it in my face. I could hear them shouting at each other. Margot was giving as good as she got, God bless her.

  “And then, and this is what I really wanted to tell you,” said Oonagh, “and I want to get it right. I told that Inspector Talbot and he didn’t listen to a word I was saying, and I told the one who took over, what was his name—?”

  “Lawson?” asked Robin.

  “Lawson,” said Oonagh, nodding. “I told both of ’em: I could hear Margot and Paul screaming at each other through the door, Margot telling him to give her the pictures and the negatives—different world, you see. Negatives, you had to get, if you didn’t want more copies made. But he refused. He said they were his copyright, the dirty bastard—so then I heard Ma
rgot say, and this is the important bit, ‘If you show those pictures to anyone, if they ever turn up in print, I’ll go straight to the police and I’ll tell them all about your little pillow dream—’”

  “‘Pillow dream’?” repeated Robin.

  “That’s what she said. And he hit her. A smack loud enough to hear through solid wood, and I heard her shriek. Well, I started hammering and kicking the door. I said, unless he opened it I was going for the police right now. That put the fear o’ God into him. He opened the door and Margot comes out, hand to her face, it was bright red, you could see his finger marks, and I pulled her behind me and I said to Satchwell, ‘Don’t you ever come near her again, and you heard what she said. There’ll be trouble if those pictures turn up anywhere.’

  “And I swear to you, he looked murderous. He stepped right up to me, the way a man will when he wants to remind you what he could do, if he wanted. Almost standing on my toes, he was. I didn’t shift,” said Oonagh Kennedy. “I stood my ground, but I was scared, I won’t deny it. And he said to Margot, ‘Have you told her?’ And Margot says, ‘She doesn’t know anything. Yet.’ And he says, ‘Well, you know what’ll happen if I find out you’ve talked.’ And he mimed—well, never mind. It was an—an obscene pose, I suppose you’d say. One of the pictures he’d taken. And he walked back into his flat and slammed the door.”

  “Did Margot ever tell you what she meant by the ‘pillow dream’?” asked Robin.

  “She wouldn’t. You might t’ink she was scared, but… you know, I t’ink it’s just women,” sighed Oonagh. “We’re socialized that way, but maybe Mother Nature’s got a hand in it. How many kids would survive to their first birthday if their mammies couldn’t forgive ’em?

  “Even that day, with his handprint across her face, she didn’t want to tell me, because there was a bit of her that didn’t want to hurt him. I saw it all the bloody time with my domestic abuse survivors. Women still protecting them. Still worrying about them! Love dies hard in some women.”

  “Did she see Satchwell after that?”

  “I wish to God I could say she didn’t,” said Oonagh, shaking her head, “but yes, she did. They couldn’t stay away from each other.

  “She started her degree course, but she was that popular at the club, they let her go part time, so I was still seeing a lot of her. One day, her mammy called the club because her daddy had taken sick, but Margot hadn’t come in. I was terrified: where was Margot, what had happened to her, why wasn’t she there? I’ve often t’ought back to that moment, you know, because when it happened for real, I was so sure at first she’d turn up, like she had the first time.

  “Anyway, when she saw how upset I’d been, t’inking she’d gone missing, she told me the truth. She and Satchwell had started things up again. She had all the old excuses down: he swore he’d never hit her again, he’d cried his eyes out about it, it was the worst mistake of his life, and anyway, she’d provoked him. I told her, ‘If you can’t see him now for what he is, after what he did to you first time round…’ Anyway, they split again and, surprise, surprise, he not only knocked her around again, he kept her locked in his flat all day, so she couldn’t get to work. That was the first shift she’d ever missed. She nearly lost the job over it, and had to make up some cock-and-bull story.

  “So then at last,” said Oonagh, “she tells me she’s learned her lesson, I was right all along, she’s never going back to him, that’s it, finito.”

  “Did she get the photographs back?” asked Robin.

  “First t’ing I asked, when I found out they were back together. She said he’d told her he’d destroyed them. She believed it, too.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “O’ course I didn’t,” said Oonagh. “I’d seen him, when she t’reatened him with his pillow dream. That was a frightened man. He’d never have destroyed anyt’ing that gave him bargaining power over her.

  “Would it be all right if I get another cappuccino?” asked Oonagh apologetically. “My t’roat’s dry, all this talking.”

  “Of course,” said Strike, hailing a waiter, and ordering fresh coffees all round.

  Oonagh pointed at Robin’s Fortnum’s bag.

  “Been stocking up for Christmas, too?”

  “Oh, no, I’ve been buying a present for my new niece. She was born this morning,” said Robin, smiling.

  “Congratulations,” said Strike, who was surprised Robin hadn’t already told him.

  “Oh, how lovely,” said Oonagh. “My fifth grandchild arrived last month.”

  The interval while waiting for the fresh coffees was filled by Oonagh showing Robin pictures of her grandchildren, and Robin showing Oonagh the two pictures she had of Annabel Marie.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t she?” said Oonagh, peering through her purple reading glasses at the picture on Robin’s phone. She included Strike in the question, but, seeing only an angry-looking, bald monkey, his acquiescence was half-hearted.

  When the coffees had arrived and the waiter moved away again, Robin said,

  “While I remember… would you happen to know if Margot had family or friends in Leamington Spa?”

  “Leamington Spa?” repeated Oonagh, frowning. “Let’s see… one of the gorls at the club was from… no, that was King’s Lynn. They’re similar sorts of names, aren’t they? I can’t remember anyone from there, no… Why?”

  “We’ve heard a man claimed to have seen her there, a week after she disappeared.”

  “There were a few sightings after, right enough. Nothing in any of them. None of them made sense. Leamington Spa, that’s a new one.”

  She took a sip of her cappuccino. Robin asked,

  “Did you still see a lot of each other, once Margot went off to medical school?”

  “Oh yeah, because she was still working at the club part time. How she did it all, studying, working, supporting her family… living on nerves and chocolate, skinny as ever. And then, at the start of her second year, she met Roy.”

  Oonagh sighed.

  “Even the cleverest people can be bloody stupid when it comes to their love lives,” she said. “In fact, I sometimes t’ink, the cleverer they are with books, the stupider they are with sex. Margot t’ought she’d learned her lesson, that she’d grown up. She couldn’t see that it was classic rebound. He might’ve looked as different from Satchwell as you could get, but really, it was more of the same.

  “Roy had the kind of background Margot would’ve loved. Books, travel, culture, you know. See, there were gaps in what Margot knew. She was insecure about not knowing about the right fork, the right words. ‘Napkin’ instead of ‘serviette.’ All that snobby English stuff.

  “Roy was mad for her, mind you. It wasn’t all one way. I could see what the appeal was: she was like nothing he’d ever known before. She shocked him, but she fascinated him: the Playboy Club and her work ethic, her feminist ideas, supporting her mammy and daddy. They had arguments, intellectual arguments, you know.

  “But there was something bloodless about the man. Not wet exactly, but—” Oonagh gave a sudden laugh. “‘Bloodless’—you’ll know about his bleeding problem?”

  “Yes,” said Robin. “Von Something Disease?”

  “Dat’s the one,” said Oonagh. “He’d been cossetted and wrapped up in cotton wool all his life by his mother, who was a horror. I met her a few times. That woman gave me the respect you’d give something you’d got stuck on your shoe.

  “And Roy was… still waters run deep, I suppose sums it up. He didn’t show a lot of emotion. Their flirtation wasn’t all sex, it really was ideas with them. Not that he wasn’t good-looking. He was handsome, in a kind of… limp way. As different from Satchwell as you could imagine. Pretty boy, all eyes and floppy hair.

  “But he was a manipulator. A little bit of disapproval here, a cold look there. He loved how different Margot was, but it still made him uncomfortable. He wanted a woman the exact opposite to his mother, but he wanted Mammy to approve. So the fault lines were dere
from the beginning.

  “And he could sulk,” said Oonagh. “I hate a sulker, now. My mother was the same. T’irty years she wouldn’t talk to me, because I moved to London. She finally gave in so she could meet her grandchildren, but then my sister got tipsy at Christmas and let it slip I’d left the church and joined the Anglicans, we were finished forever. Playboy, she could forgive. Proddy, never.

  “Even when they were dating, Roy would stop talking to Margot for days at a time. She told me once he cut her off for a week. She lost patience, she said, ‘I’m off.’ That brought him round sharp enough. I said, what was he sulking about? And it was the club. He hated her working there. I said, ‘Is he offering to support your family, while you study?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t like the idea of other men ogling me,’ she says. Girls like that idea, that little bit of possessiveness. They t’ink it means he only wants her, when o’ course, it’s the other way round. He only wants her available to him. He’s still free to look at other girls, and Roy had other people interested in him, girls from his own background. He was a pretty boy with a lot of family money. Well,” said Oonagh, “look at little cousin Cynthia, lurking in the wings.”

  “Did you know Cynthia?” asked Robin.

  “Met her once or twice, at their house. Mousy little thing. She never spoke more than two words to me,” said Oonagh. “But she made Roy feel good about himself. Laughing loike a drain at all his jokes. Such as they were.”

  “Margot and Roy must have married right after medical school, did they?”

  “Dat’s right. I was a bridesmaid. She went into general practice. Roy was a high-flier, he went into one of the big teaching hospitals, I can’t remember which.

  “Roy’s parents had this very nice big house with huge lawns and all the rest of it. After his father died, which was just before they had Anna, the mother made it over to Roy. Margot’s name wasn’t on the deeds, I remember her telling me dat. But Roy loved the idea of bringing up his family in the same house he’d grown up in, and it was beautiful, right enough, out near Hampton Court. So the mother-in-law moved out and Roy and Margot moved in.