Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “I know,” said Robin. “He told me how good you were to him. Buying him soup. He was really grateful.”

  Pat sniffed. Robin drank her coffee, hoping for just enough of an energy boost to get her off this sofa and onto the Tube. Then Pat said,

  “I’d’ve thought he’d’ve had somewhere to go, other than the attic.”

  “Well, he had flu really badly,” said Robin. “He didn’t want to give it to anyone else.”

  But as she washed up her mug, put on her coat, bade Pat farewell and set off downstairs, Robin found herself musing on this brief exchange. She’d often pondered the, to her, inexplicable animosity that Pat seemed to feel toward Strike. It had been clear from her tone that Pat had imagined Strike somehow immune to loneliness or vulnerability, and Robin was puzzled as to why, because Strike had never made any secret of where he was living or the fact that he slept there alone.

  Robin’s mobile rang. Seeing an unknown number, and remembering that Tom Turvey had been on the other end of the line the last time she’d answered one, she paused outside Tottenham Court Road station to answer it, with slight trepidation.

  “Is this Robin Ellacott?” said a Mancunian voice.

  “It is,” said Robin.

  “Hiya,” said the woman, a little nervously. “You wanted to talk to Dave Underwood. I’m his daughter.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Robin. “Thank you so much for getting back to me.”

  Dave Underwood was the man who’d been employed to drive a wholefoods shop van at the time that Margot Bamborough went missing. Robin, who’d found his address online and written him a letter three days previously, hadn’t expected such a quick response. She’d become inured to people ignoring her messages about Margot Bamborough.

  “It was a bit of a shock, getting your letter,” said the woman on the phone. “The thing is, Dad can’t talk to you himself. He had a tracheotomy three weeks ago.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” said Robin, one finger in the ear not pressed to the phone, to block out the rumbling traffic.

  “Yeah,” said the woman. “He’s here with me now, though, and he wants me to say… look… he’s not going to be in trouble, is he?”

  “No, of course not,” said Robin. “As I said in my letter, it really is just about eliminating the van from inquiries.”

  “All right then,” said Dave’s daughter. “Well, it was him. Amazing, you working it out, because they all swore it was a flower on the side of the van, didn’t they? He was glad at the time, because he thought he’d get in trouble, but he’s felt bad about it for years. He went the wrong way on a delivery and he was speeding through Clerkenwell Green to try and put himself right. He didn’t want to say, because the boss had had a go at him that morning for not getting deliveries out on time. He saw in the paper they were thinking maybe he’d been Dennis Creed and he just… well, you know. Nobody likes getting mixed up with stuff like that, do they? And the longer he kept quiet, the worse he thought it would look, him not coming forward straight away.”

  “I see,” said Robin. “Yes, I can understand how he felt. Well, this is very helpful. And after he’d made his delivery, did he—?”

  “Yeah, he went back to the shop and he got a right telling-off anyway, because they opened the van and saw he’d delivered the wrong order. He had to go back out again.”

  So Margot Bamborough clearly hadn’t been in the back of the wholefoods van.

  “Well, thanks very much for getting back to me,” said Robin, “and please thank your father for being honest. That’s going to be a great help.”

  “You’re welcome,” said the woman, and then, quickly, before Robin could hang up. “Are you the girl the Shacklewell Ripper stabbed?”

  For a moment, Robin considered denying it, but she’d signed the letter to Dave Underwood with her real name.

  “Yes,” she said, but with less warmth than she’d put into her thank you for the information about the van. She didn’t like being called “the girl the Shacklewell Ripper stabbed.”

  “Wow,” said the woman, “I told Dad I thought it was you. Well, at least Creed can’t get you, eh?”

  She said it almost jauntily. Robin agreed, thanked her again for her cooperation, hung up the phone and proceeded down the stairs into the Tube.

  At least Creed can’t get you, eh?

  The cheery sign-off stayed with Robin as she descended to the Tube. That flippancy belonged only to those who had never felt blind terror, or come up against brute strength and steel, who’d never heard pig-like breathing close to their ear, or seen defocused eyes through balaclava holes, or felt their own flesh split, yet barely registered pain, because death was so close you could smell its breath.

  Robin glanced over her shoulder on the escalator, because the careless commuter behind her kept touching the backs of her upper thighs with his briefcase. Sometimes she found casual physical contact with men almost unbearable. Reaching the bottom of the escalator she moved off fast to remove herself from the commuter’s vicinity. At least Creed can’t get you, eh? As though being “got” was nothing more than a game of tag.

  Or was it being in the newspaper had somehow made Robin seem less human to the woman on the end of the phone? As Robin settled herself into a seat between two women on the Tube, her thoughts returned to Pat, and to the secretary’s surprise that Strike had nowhere to go when he was ill, and nobody to look after him. Was that at the root of her antipathy? An assumption that newsworthiness meant invulnerability?

  When Robin let herself into the flat forty minutes later, carrying a bag of groceries and looking forward to an early night, she found the place empty except for Wolfgang, who greeted her exuberantly, then whined in a way that indicated a full bladder. With a sigh, Robin found his lead and took him downstairs for a quick walk around the block. After that, too tired to cook a proper meal, she scrambled herself some eggs and ate them with toast while watching the news on TV.

  She was running herself a bath when her mobile rang again. Her heart sank a little when she saw that it was her brother Jonathan, who was in his final year of university in Manchester. She thought she knew what he was calling about.

  “Hi, Jon,” she said.

  “Hey, Robs. You didn’t answer my text.”

  She knew perfectly well that she hadn’t. He’d sent it that morning, while she’d been watching Two-Times’ girlfriend having a blameless coffee, alone with a Stieg Larsson novel. Jon wanted to know whether he and a female friend could come and stay at her flat on the weekend of the fourteenth and fifteenth of February.

  “Sorry,” said Robin, “I know I didn’t, it’s been a busy day. I’m not sure, to be honest, Jon. I don’t know what Max’s plans—”

  “He wouldn’t mind us crashing in your room, would he? Courtney’s never been to London. There’s a comedy show we want to see on Saturday. At the Bloomsbury Theatre.”

  “Is Courtney your girlfriend?” asked Robin, smiling now. Jonathan had always been quite cagey with the family about his love life.

  “Is she my girlfriend,” repeated Jonathan mockingly, but Robin had an idea that he was quite pleased with the question really, and surmised that the answer was “yes.”

  “I’ll check with Max, OK? And I’ll ring you back tomorrow,” said Robin.

  Once she’d disposed of Jonathan, she finished running the bath and headed into her bedroom to fetch pajamas, dressing gown and something to read. The Demon of Paradise Park lay horizontally across the top of her neat shelf of novels. After hesitating for a moment, she picked it up and took it back to the bathroom with her, trying as she did so to imagine getting ready for bed with her brother and an unknown girl in the room, as well. Was she prudish, stuffy and old before her time? She’d never finished her university degree: “crashing” on floors in the houses of strangers had never been part of her life, and in the wake of the rape that had occurred in her halls of residence, she’d never had any desire to sleep anywhere except in an environment over which she
had total control.

  Sliding into the hot bubble bath, Robin let out a great sigh of pleasure. It had been a long week, sitting in the car for hours or else trudging through the rainy streets after Shifty or Elinor Dean. Eyes closed, enjoying the heat and the synthetic jasmine of her cheap bubble bath, her thoughts drifted back to Dave Underwood’s daughter.

  At least Creed can’t get you, eh? Setting aside the offensively jocular tone, it struck her as significant that a woman who’d known for years that Creed hadn’t been driving the sun-emblazoned van was nevertheless certain that he’d abducted Margot.

  Because, of course, Creed hadn’t always used a van. He’d killed two women before he ever got the job at the dry cleaner’s, and managed to persuade women to walk into his basement flat even after he’d acquired the vehicle.

  Robin opened her eyes, reached for The Demon of Paradise Park and turned to the page where she had last left it. Holding the book clear of the hot, foamy water, she continued to read.

  One night in September 1972, Dennis Creed’s landlady spotted him bringing a woman back to the basement flat for the first time. She testified at Creed’s trial that she heard the front gate “squeak” at close to midnight, glanced down from her bedroom window at the steps into the basement and saw Creed and a woman who “seemed a bit drunk but was walking OK,” heading into the house.

  When she asked Dennis who the woman was, he told her the implausible story that she was a regular client of the dry cleaner’s. He claimed he’d met the drunk woman by chance in the street, and that she had begged him to let her come into his flat to phone a taxi.

  In reality, the woman Violet had seen Dennis steering into the flat was the unemployed Gail Wrightman, who’d been stood up that evening by a boyfriend. Wrightman left the Grasshopper, a bar in Shoreditch, at half past ten in the evening, after consuming several strong cocktails. A woman matching Wrightman’s description was seen getting into a white van at a short distance from the bar. Barring Cooper’s glimpse of a brunette in a light-colored coat entering Creed’s flat that night, there were no further sightings of Gail Wrightman after she left the Grasshopper.

  By now, Creed had perfected a façade of vulnerability that appealed particularly to older women like his landlady, and a convivial, sexually ambiguous persona that worked well with the drunk and lonely. Creed subsequently admitted to meeting Wrightman in the Grasshopper, adding Nembutal to her drink and lying in wait outside the bar where, confused and unsteady on her feet, she was grateful for his offer of a lift home.

  Cooper accepted his explanation of the dry-cleaning client who’d wanted to call a taxi “because I had no reason to doubt it.”

  In reality, Gail Wrightman was now gagged and chained to a radiator in Creed’s bedroom, where she would remain until Creed killed her by strangulation in January 1973. This was the longest period he kept a victim alive, and demonstrates the degree of confidence he had that his basement flat was now a place of safety, where he could rape and torture without fear of discovery.

  However, shortly before Christmas that year, his landlady visited him on some trivial pretext, and she recalled in the witness box that “he wanted to get rid of me, I could tell. I thought there was a nasty smell about the place, but we’d had problems with next door’s drains before. He told me he couldn’t chat because he was waiting for a phone call.

  “I know it was Christmastime when I went down there, because I remember asking him why he hadn’t put any cards up. I knew he didn’t have many friends but I thought someone must have remembered him and I thought it was a shame. The radio was playing ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool,’ and it was loud, I remember that, but that wasn’t anything unusual. Dennis liked music.”

  Cooper’s surprise visit to the basement almost certainly sealed Wrightman’s death warrant. Creed later told a psychiatrist that he’d been toying with the idea of simply keeping Wrightman “as a pet” for the foreseeable future, to spare himself the risks that further abductions would entail, but that he reconsidered and decided to “put her out of her misery.”

  Creed murdered Wrightman on the night of January 9th, 1973, a date chosen to coincide with a three-day absence of Vi Cooper to visit a sick relative. Creed cut off Wrightman’s head and hands in the bath before driving the rest of the corpse in his van to Epping Forest by night, wrapped in tarpaulin, and burying it in a shallow grave. Back at home, he boiled the flesh off Wrightman’s head and hands and smashed up the bones, as he’d done to the corpses of both Vera Kenny and Nora Sturrock, adding the powdered bone to the inlaid ebony box he kept under his bed.

  On her return to Liverpool Road, Violet Cooper noted that the “bad smell” had gone from the basement flat and concluded that the drains had been sorted out.

  Landlady and lodger resumed their convivial evenings, drinking and singing along to records. It’s likely that Creed experimented with drugging Vi at this time. She later testified that she often slept so soundly on nights that Dennis joined her for a nightcap that she found herself still groggy the next morning.

  Wrightman’s grave remained undisturbed for nearly four months, until discovered by a dog walker whose terrier dug and retrieved a thigh bone. Decomposition, the absence of head and hands or any clothing rendered identification almost impossible given the difficulties of tissue typing in such circumstances. Only after Creed’s arrest, when Wrightman’s underwear, pantyhose and an opal ring her family identified as having belonged to her were found under the floorboards of Creed’s sitting room, were detectives able to add Wrightman’s murder to the list of charges against him.

  Gail’s younger sister had never lost hope that Gail was still alive. “I couldn’t believe it until I saw the ring with my own eyes. Until that moment, I honestly thought there’d been a mistake. I kept telling Mum and Dad she’d come back. I couldn’t believe there was wickedness like that in the world, and that my sister could have met it.

  “He isn’t human. He played with us, with the families, during the trial. Smiling and waving at us every morning. Looking at the parents or the brother or whoever, whenever their relative was mentioned. Then, afterward, after he was convicted, he keeps telling a bit more, and a bit more, and we’ve had to live with that hanging over us for years, what Gail said, or how she begged him. I’d murder him with my own bare hands if I could, but I could never make him suffer the way he made Gail suffer. He isn’t capable of human feeling, is he? It makes you—”

  There was a loud bang from the hall and Robin jumped so severely that water slopped over the edge of the bath.

  “Just me!” called Max, who sounded uncharacteristically cheerful, and she heard him greeting Wolfgang. “Hello, you. Yes, hello, hello…”

  “Hi,” called Robin. “I took him out earlier!”

  “Thanks very much,” said Max, “Come join me, I’m celebrating!”

  She heard Max climbing the stairs. Pulling out the plug, she continued to sit in the bath as the water ebbed away, crisp bubbles still clinging to her as she finished the chapter.

  “It makes you pray there’s a hell.”

  In 1976, Creed told prison psychiatrist Richard Merridan that he tried to “lie low” following the discovery of Wrightman’s remains. Creed admitted to Merriman that he felt a simultaneous desire for notoriety and a fear of capture.

  “I liked reading about the Butcher in the papers. I buried her in Epping Forest like the others because I wanted people to know that the same person had done them all, but I knew I was risking everything, not varying the pattern. After that, after Vi had seen me with her, and come in the flat with her there, I thought I’d better just do whores for a bit, lie low.”

  But the choice to “do whores” would lead, just a few months later, to Creed’s closest brush with capture yet.

  The chapter ended here. Robin got out of the bath, mopped up the spilled water, dressed in pajamas and dressing gown, then headed upstairs to the living area where Max sat watching television, looking positively beatific. Wolfgang
seemed to have been infected by his owner’s good mood: he greeted Robin as though she’d been away on a long journey and set to work licking the bath oil off her ankles until she asked him kindly to desist.

  “I’ve got a job,” Max told Robin, muting the TV. Two champagne glasses and a bottle were sitting on the coffee table in front of him. “Second lead, new drama, BBC One. Have a drink.”

  “Max, that’s fantastic!” said Robin, thrilled for him.

  “Yeah,” he said, beaming. “Listen. D’you think your Strike would come over for dinner? I’m playing a veteran. It’d be good to speak to someone who’s actually ex-army.”

  “I’m sure he would,” said Robin, hoping she was right. Strike and Max had never met. She accepted a glass of champagne, sat down and held up her glass in a toast. “Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” he said, clinking his glass against hers. “I’ll cook, if Strike comes over. It’ll be good, actually. I need to meet more people. I’m turning into one of those ‘he always kept himself to himself’ blokes you see on the news.”

  “And I’ll be the dumb flatmate,” said Robin, her thoughts still with Vi Cooper, “who thought you were lovely and never questioned why I kept coming across you hammering the floorboards back down.”

  Max laughed.

  “And they’ll blame you more than me,” said Max, “because they always do. The women who didn’t realize… mind you, some of them… who was that guy in America who made his wife call him on an intercom before he’d let her into the garage?”

  “Jerry Brudos,” said Robin. Brudos had been mentioned in The Demon of Paradise Park. Like Creed, Brudos had been wearing women’s clothing when he abducted one of his victims.

  “I need to get a bloody social life going again,” said Max, more expansive than Robin had ever known him under the influence of alcohol and good news. “I’ve been feeling like hell ever since Matthew left. Kept wondering whether I shouldn’t just sell this place and move on.”

  Robin thought her slight feeling of panic might have shown in her face, because Max said,