Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Bloody good work,” said Strike. “You know, I’m not sure she isn’t even more interesting than Satchwell or Douthwaite. Last to see Margot alive. Close to her. The only living person to have seen Theo, as well.”

  Strike’s enthusiasm did much to allay Robin’s suspicion that he’d added himself to her action points because he thought she wasn’t up to the job.

  “I’ve tried to ‘friend’ her on Facebook,” Robin continued, “but had no response yet. If she doesn’t answer, I know the company her husband works for, and I thought I might email him to get a message to her. I thought it was more tactful to try the private route first, though.”

  “I agree,” said Strike. He took a sip of Doom Bar. It was immensely consoling to be in the warm, dry pub, and to be talking to Robin.

  “And there’s one more thing,” said Robin. “I think I might have found out which van was seen speeding away from Clerkenwell Green the evening Margot disappeared.”

  “What? How?” said Strike, stunned.

  “It occurred to me over Christmas that what people thought might’ve been a flower painted on the side could have been a sun,” she said. “You know. The planet.”

  “It’s technically a st—”

  “Sod off, I know it’s a star.”

  The hooded blonde, as Robin had suspected, was heading into Tesco. Robin followed, enjoying the warm blast of heat as she entered the shop, though the floor underfoot was slippery and dirty.

  “There was a wholefoods shop in Clerkenwell in 1974 whose logo was a sun. I found an ad for it in the British Library newspaper archive, I checked with Companies House and I’ve managed to talk to the director, who’s still alive. I know I couldn’t talk to him if he weren’t,” she added, forestalling any more pedantry.

  “Bloody hell, Robin,” said Strike, as the rain battered the window behind him. Good news and Doom Bar were certainly helping his mood. “This is excellent work.”

  “Thank you,” said Robin. “And get this: he sacked the bloke he had making deliveries, he thinks in mid-1975, because the guy got done for speeding while driving the van. He remembered his name—Dave Underwood—but I haven’t had time to—”

  Elinor turned abruptly, midway up the aisle of tinned foods, and walked back toward her. Robin pretended to be absorbed in choos­ing a packet of rice. Letting her quarry pass, she finished her sentence.

  “—haven’t had time to look for him yet.”

  “Well, you’re putting me to shame,” admitted Strike, rubbing his tired eyes. Though he now had a spare bedroom to himself rather than the sofa, the old mattress was only a small step up in terms of comfort, its broken springs jabbing him in the back and squealing every time he turned over. “The best I’ve done is to find Ruby Elliot’s daughter.”

  “Ruby-who-saw-the-two-women-struggling-by-the-phone-boxes?” Robin recited, watching her blonde target consulting a shopping list before disappearing down a new aisle.

  “That’s the one. Her daughter emailed to say she’s happy to have a chat, but we haven’t fixed up a time yet. And I called Janice,” said Strike, “mainly because I couldn’t face Irene, to see whether she can remember the so-called Applethorpe’s real name, but she’s in Dubai, visiting her son for six weeks. Her answer machine message literally says ‘Hi, I’m in Dubai, visiting Kevin for six weeks.’ Might drop her a line advising her it’s not smart to advertise to random callers that you’ve left your house empty.”

  “So did you call Irene?” Robin asked. Elinor, she saw, was now looking at baby food.

  “Not yet,” said Strike. “But I have—”

  At that very moment, a bleeping on his phone told him that someone else was trying to reach him.

  “Robin, that might be him. I’ll call you back.”

  Strike switched lines.

  “Cormoran Strike.”

  “Yes, hello,” said Gregory Talbot. “It’s me—Greg Talbot. You asked me to call.”

  Gregory sounded worried. Strike couldn’t blame him. He’d hoped to divest himself of a problem by handing the can of old film to Strike.

  “Yeah, Gregory, thanks very much for calling me back. I had a couple more questions, hope that’s OK.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve been through your father’s notebook and I wanted to ask whether your father happened to know, or mention, a man called Niccolo Ricci? Nicknamed ‘Mucky’?”

  “Mucky Ricci?” said Gregory. “No, he didn’t really know him. I remember Dad talking about him, though. Big in the Soho sex shop scene, if that’s the one I’m thinking of?”

  It sounded as though talking about the gangster gave Gregory a small frisson of pleasure. Strike had met this attitude before, and not just in members of the fascinated public. Even police and lawyers were not immune to the thrill of coming within the orbit of criminals who had money and power to rival their own. He’d known senior officers talk with something close to admiration of the orga­nized crime they were attempting to prevent, and barristers whose delight at drinking with high-profile clients went far beyond the hope of an anecdote to tell at a dinner party. Strike suspected that to Gregory Talbot, Mucky Ricci was a name from a fondly remembered childhood, a romantic figure belonging to a lost era, when his father was a sane copper and a happy family man.

  “Yeah, that’s the bloke,” said Strike. “Well, it looks as though Mucky Ricci was hanging around Margot Bamborough’s practice, and your father seems to have known about it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Strike, “and it seems odd that information never made it into the official records.”

  “Well, Dad was ill,” said Gregory defensively. “You’ve seen the notebook. He didn’t know what he was up to, half the time.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Strike, “but once he’d recovered, what was his attitude to the evidence he’d collected while on the case?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  Gregory sounded suspicious now, as though he feared Strike was leading him somewhere he might not want to go.

  “Well, did he think it was all worthless, or—?”

  “He’d been ruling out suspects on the basis of their star signs,” said Gregory quietly. “He thought he saw a demon in the spare room. What d’you think he thought? He was… he was ashamed. It wasn’t his fault, but he never got over it. He wanted to go back and make it right, but they wouldn’t let him, they forced him out. The Bamborough case tainted everything for him, all his memories of the force. His mates were all coppers and he wouldn’t see them any more.”

  “He felt resentful at the way he was treated, did he?”

  “I wouldn’t say—I mean, he was justified, I’d say, to feel they hadn’t treated him right,” said Gregory.

  “Did he ever look over his notes, afterward, to make sure he’d put everything in there in the official record?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gregory, a little testy now. “I think his attitude was, they’ve got rid of me, they think I’m a big problem, so let Lawson deal with it.”

  “How did your father get on with Lawson?”

  “Look, what’s all this about?” Before Strike could answer, Gregory said, “Lawson made it quite clear to my father that his day was done. He didn’t want him hanging around, didn’t want him anywhere near the case. Lawson did his best to completely discredit my father, I don’t mean just because of his illness. I mean, as a man, and as the officer he’d been before he got ill. He told everyone on the case they were to stay away from my father, even out of working hours. So if information didn’t get passed on, it’s down to Lawson as much as him. Dad might’ve tried and been rebuffed, for all I know.”

  “I can certainly see it from your father’s point of view,” said Strike. “Very difficult situation.”

  “Well, exactly,” said Gregory, slightly placated, as Strike had intended.

  “To go back to Mucky Ricci,” Strike said, “as far as you know, your father never had direct dealings with him?”

>   “No,” said Gregory, “but Dad’s best mate on the force did, name of Browning. He was Vice Squad. He raided one of Mucky’s clubs, I know that. I remember Dad talking about it.”

  “Where’s Browning now? Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s dead,” said Gregory. “What exactly—?”

  “I’d like to know where that film you passed to me came from, Gregory.”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Gregory. “Dad just came home with it one day, Mum says.”

  “Any idea when this was?” asked Strike, hoping not to have to find a polite way of asking whether Talbot had been quite sane at the time.

  “It would’ve been while Dad was working on the Bamborough case. Why?”

  Strike braced himself.

  “I’m afraid we’ve had to turn the film over to the police.”

  Hutchins had volunteered to take care of this, on the morning that Strike had headed down to Cornwall. As an ex-policeman who still had good contacts on the force, he knew where to take it and how to make sure it got seen by the right people. Strike had asked Hutchins not to talk to Robin about the film, or to tell her what he’d done with it. She was currently in ignorance of the contents.

  “What?” said Gregory, horrified. “Why?”

  “It isn’t porn,” said Strike, muttering now, in deference to the elderly couple who had just entered the Victory and stood, disorientated by the storm outside, dripping and blinking mere feet from his table. “It’s a snuff movie. Someone filmed a woman being gang-raped and stabbed.”

  There was another silence on the end of the phone. Strike watched the elderly couple shuffle to the bar, the woman taking off her plastic rain hat as she went.

  “Actually killed?” said Gregory, his voice rising an octave. “I mean… it’s definitely real?”

  “Yeah,” said Strike.

  He wasn’t about to give details. He’d seen people dying and dead: the kind of gore you saw on horror movies wasn’t the same, and even without a soundtrack, he wouldn’t quickly forget the hooded, naked woman twitching on the floor of the warehouse, while her killers watched her die.

  “And I suppose you’ve told them where you got it?” said Gregory, more panicked than angry.

  “I’m afraid I had to,” said Strike. “I’m sorry, but some of the men involved could still be alive, could still be charged. I can’t sit on something like that.”

  “I wasn’t concealing anything, I didn’t even know it was—”

  “I wasn’t meaning to suggest you knew, or you meant to hide it,” said Strike.

  “If they think—we foster kids, Strike—”

  “I’ve told the police you handed it over to me willingly, without knowing what was on there. I’ll stand up in court and testify that I believe you were in total ignorance of what was in your attic. Your family’s had forty-odd years to destroy it and you didn’t. Nobody’s going to blame you,” said Strike, even though he knew perfectly well that the tabloids might not take that view.

  “I was afraid something like this was going to happen,” said Gregory, now sounding immensely stressed. “I’ve been worried, ever since you came round for coffee. Dragging all this stuff up again…”

  “You told me your father would want to see the case solved.”

  There was another silence, and then Gregory said,

  “He would. But not at the cost of my mother’s peace of mind, or me and my wife having our foster kids taken off us.”

  A number of rejoinders occurred to Strike, some of them unkind. It was far from the first time he’d encountered the tendency to believe the dead would have wanted whatever was most convenient to the living.

  “I had a responsibility to hand that film over to the police once I’d seen what was on it. As I say, I’ll make it clear to anyone who asks that you weren’t trying to hide anything, that you handed it over willingly.”

  There was little more to say. Gregory, clearly still unhappy, rang off, and Strike called Robin back.

  She was still in Tesco, now buying a packet of nuts and raisins, chewing gum and some shampoo for herself while, two tills away, the object of her surveillance bought baby powder, baby food and dummies along with a range of groceries.

  “Hi,” Robin said into her mobile, turning to look out of the shopfront window while the blonde walked past her.

  “Hi,” said Strike. “That was Gregory Talbot.”

  “What did he—? Oh yes,” said Robin with sudden interest, turning to follow the blonde out of the store, “what was on that can of film? I never asked. Did you get the projector working?”

  “I did,” said Strike. “I’ll tell you about the film when I see you. Listen, there’s something else I wanted to say. Leave Mucky Ricci to me, all right? I’ve got Shanker putting out a few feelers. I don’t want you looking for him, or making inquiries.”

  “Couldn’t I—?”

  “Did you not hear me?”

  “All right, calm down!” said Robin, surprised. “Surely Ricci must be ninety-odd by—?”

  “He’s got sons,” said Strike. “Sons Shanker’s scared of.”

  “Oh,” said Robin, who fully appreciated the implication.

  “Exactly. So we’re agreed?”

  “We are,” Robin assured him.

  After Strike had hung up, Robin followed Elinor back out into the rain, and back to her terraced house. When the front door had closed again, Robin got back into her Land Rover and ate her packet of dried fruit and nuts, watching the front door.

  It had occurred to her in Tesco that Elinor might be a childminder, given the nature of her purchases, but as the afternoon shaded into evening, no parents came to drop off their charges, and no baby’s wail was heard on the silent street.

  33

  For he the tyrant, which her hath in ward

  By strong enchauntments and blacke Magicke leare,

  Hath in a dungeon deepe her close embard…

  There he tormenteth her most terribly,

  And day and night afflicts with mortall paine…

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Now that the blonde in Stoke Newington had also become a person of interest, the Shifty case became a two-to-three-person job. The agency was watching Elinor Dean’s house in addition to tracking the movements of Shifty’s Boss and Shifty himself, who continued to go about his business, enjoying the fat salary to which nobody felt he was entitled, but remaining tight-lipped about the hold he had over his boss. Meanwhile, Two-Times was continuing to pay for surveillance on his girlfriend more, it seemed, out of desperation than hope, and Postcard had gone suspiciously quiet. Their only suspect, the owlish guide at the National Portrait Gallery, had vanished from her place of work.

  “I hope to God it’s flu, and she hasn’t killed herself,” Robin said to Barclay on Friday afternoon, when their paths crossed at the office. Strike was still stuck in Cornwall and she’d just seen the Twinkletoes client out of the office. He’d paid his sizable final bill grudgingly, having found out only that the West End dancer with whom his feckless daughter was besotted was a clean-living, monogamous and apparently heterosexual young man.

  Barclay, who was submitting his week’s receipts to Pat before heading out to take over surveillance of Shifty overnight, looked surprised.

  “The fuck would she’ve killed herself?”

  “I don’t know,” said Robin. “That last message she wrote sounded a bit panicky. Maybe she thought I’d come to confront her, holding the postcards she’d sent.”

  “You need tae get some sleep,” Barclay advised her.

  Robin moved toward the kettle.

  “No fer me,” Barclay told her, “I’ve gottae take over from Andy in thirty. We’re back in Pimlico, watchin’ Two-Times’ bird never cop off wi’ any fucker.”

  Pat counted out tenners for Barclay, toward whom her attitude was tolerant rather than warm. Pat’s favorite member of the agency, apart from Robin, remained Morris, whom Robin had met only three times s
ince New Year: twice when swapping over at the end of a surveillance shift and once when he’d come into the office to leave his week’s report. He’d found it difficult to meet her eye and talked about nothing but work, a change she hoped would be permanent.

  “Who’s next on the client waiting list, Pat?” she asked, while making coffee.

  “We havenae got the manpower for another case the noo,” said Barclay flatly, pocketing his cash. “Not wi’ Strike off.”

  “He’ll be back on Sunday, as long as the trains are running,” said Robin, putting Pat’s coffee down beside her. They’d arranged to meet Cynthia Phipps the following Monday, at Hampton Court Palace.

  “I need a weekend back home, end o’ the month,” Barclay told Pat, who in Strike’s absence was in charge of the rota. As she opened it up on her computer, Barclay added, “Migh’ as well make the most of it, while I dinnae need a passport.”

  “What d’you mean?” asked the exhausted Robin, sitting down on the sofa in the outer office with her coffee. She was, technically, off duty at the moment, but couldn’t muster the energy to go home.

  “Scottish independence, Robin,” said Barclay, looking at her from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “I ken you English’ve barely noticed, but the union’s about tae break up.”

  “It won’t really, will it?” said Robin.

  “Every fucker I know’s gonna vote Yes in September. One o’ me mates from school called me an Uncle Tam last time I wus home. Arsehole won’t be doin’ that again,” growled Barclay.

  When Barclay had left, Pat asked Robin,

  “How’s his aunt?”

  Robin knew Pat was referring to Strike, because she never referred to her boss by name if she could help it.

  “Very ill,” said Robin. “Not fit for more chemotherapy.”

  Pat jammed her electronic cigarette between her teeth and kept typing. After a while, she said,

  “He was on his own at Christmas, upstairs.”