“According to her daughter, Ruby kept driving around in a big circle that night, continually missing Hayward’s Place, where her daughter’s new house was. When he said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t see these two struggling women beside the other phone box, near the wedge-shaped building on the corner of Albemarle Way?’ Ruby suddenly remembered that she’d had to brake at that point in the road, because a transit van ahead of her had stopped beside the wedge-shaped building without warning. It was picking up a dark, stocky young woman who was standing in the pouring rain, beside the phone box. The woman—”
“Wait a moment,” said Robin, momentarily taking her eyes off the rainy road to glance at Strike. “‘Dark and stocky?’ It wasn’t Theo?”
“Ruby thought it was, once she compared her memory of the girl in the rain with the artist’s impressions of Margot’s last patient. Dark-skinned, solid build, thick black hair—plastered to her face because it was so wet—and wearing a pair of—”
Strike sounded the unfamiliar name out, reading from his notebook.
“—Kuchi earrings.”
“What are Kuchi earrings?”
“Romany-style, according to Ruby’s daughter, which might account for Gloria calling Theo ‘gypsyish.’ Ruby knew clothes and jewelry. It was the kind of detail she noticed.
“The transit van braked without warning to pick up the-girl-who-could-have-been-Theo, temporarily holding up traffic. Cars behind Ruby were tooting their horns. The dark girl got into the front passenger seat, the transit van moved off in the direction of St. John Street and Ruby lost sight of it.”
“And she didn’t tell Talbot?”
“Her daughter says that by the time she remembered the second incident, she was exhausted by the whole business, sick to death of being ranted at by Talbot and told she must have been mistaken in thinking the two struggling women hadn’t been Margot and Creed in drag, and regretting she’d ever come forward in the first place.
“After Lawson took over the case, she was afraid of what the police and the press would say to her if she suddenly came up with a story of seeing someone who resembled Theo. Rightly or wrongly, she thought it might look as though, having had her first sighting proven to be worthless, she wanted another shot at being important to the inquiry.”
“But her daughter felt OK about telling you all this?”
“Well, Ruby’s dead, isn’t she? It can’t hurt her now. Her daughter made it clear she doesn’t think any of this is going to amount to anything, so she might as well tell me the lot. And when all’s said and done,” said Strike, turning a page in his notebook, “we don’t know the girl was Theo… although personally, I think she was. Theo wasn’t registered with the practice, so probably wasn’t familiar with the area. That corner would make an easily identifiable place to meet the transit van after she’d seen a doctor. Plenty of space for it to pull over.”
“True,” said Robin slowly, “but if that girl really was Theo, this lets her out of any involvement with Margot’s disappearance, doesn’t it? She clearly left the surgery alone, got a lift and drove—”
“Who was driving the van?”
“I don’t know. Anyone. Parent, friend, sibling…”
“Why didn’t Theo come forward after all the police appeals?”
“Maybe she was scared. Maybe she had a medical problem she didn’t want anyone to know about. Plenty of people would rather not get mixed up with the police.”
“Yeah, you’re not wrong,” admitted Strike. “Well, I still think it’s worth knowing that one of the last people to see Margot alive might’ve left the area in a vehicle big enough to hide a woman in.
“And speaking of the last person to see Margot alive,” Strike added, “any response from Gloria Conti?”
“No,” said Robin. “If nothing’s happened by the end of next week, I’ll try and contact her through her husband.”
Strike turned a page in his notebook.
“After I spoke to Ruby’s daughter and the Fleury bloke, I called Dr. Gupta back. Dunno whether you remember, but in my summary of the horoscope notes I mentioned ‘Scorpio,’ whose death, according to Talbot, worried Margot.”
“Yes,” said Robin. “You speculated Scorpio might be Steve Douthwaite’s married friend, who killed herself.”
“Well remembered,” said Strike. “Well, Gupta can’t remember any patient dying in unexplained circumstances, or in a way that troubled Margot, although he emphasized that all this is forty years ago and he can’t swear there wasn’t such a patient.
“Then I asked him whether he knew who Joseph Brenner might have been visiting in a block of flats on Skinner Street on the evening Margot disappeared. Gupta says they had a number of patients in Skinner Street, but he can’t think of any reason why Brenner would have lied about going on a house call there.
“Lastly, and not particularly helpfully, Gupta remembers that a couple of men came to pick Gloria up at the end of the practice Christmas party. He remembers one of the men being a lot older, and says he assumed that was Gloria’s father. The name ‘Mucky Ricci’ meant nothing to him.”
Midway across Chiswick Bridge, the sun sliced suddenly through a chink in the rain clouds, dazzling their eyes. The dirty Thames beneath the bridge and the shallow puddles flashed laser bright, but, seconds later, the clouds closed again and they were driving again through rain, in the dull gray January light, along a straight dual carriageway bordered by shrubs slick with rain and naked trees.
“What about that film?” said Robin, glancing sideways at Strike. “The film that came out of Gregory Talbot’s attic? You said you’d tell me in person.”
“Ah,” said Strike. “Yeah.”
He hesitated, looking past the windscreen wipers at the long straight road ahead, glimmering beneath a diagonal curtain of rain.
“It showed a hooded woman being gang-raped and killed.”
Robin experienced a slight prickling over her neck and scalp.
“And people get off on that,” she muttered, in disgust.
He knew from her tone that she hadn’t understood, that she thought he was describing a pornographic fiction.
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t porn. Someone filmed… the real thing.”
Robin looked around in shock, before turning quickly back to face the road. Her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Repulsive images were suddenly forcing their way into her mind. What had Strike seen, that made him look so closed up, so blank? Had the hooded woman’s body resembled Margot’s, the body Oonagh Kennedy had said was “all legs”?
“You all right?” asked Strike.
“Fine,” she almost snapped. “What—what did you see, how—?”
But Strike chose to answer a question she hadn’t asked.
“The woman had a long scar over the ribcage. There was never any mention of Margot having a scarred ribcage in press reports or police notes. I don’t think it was her.”
Robin said nothing but continued to look tense.
“There were four men, ah, involved,” Strike continued, “all Caucasian, and all with their faces hidden. There was also a fifth man looking on. His arm came briefly into shot. It could’ve been Mucky Ricci. There was an out-of-focus big gold ring.”
He was trying to reduce the account to a series of dry facts. His leg muscles had tensed up quite as much as Robin’s hands, and he was primed to grab the wheel. She’d had a panic attack once before while they were driving.
“What are the police saying?” Robin asked. “Do they know where it came from?”
“Hutchins asked around. An ex-Vice Squad guy thinks it’s part of a batch they seized in a raid made on a club in Soho in ’75. The club was owned by Ricci. They took a load of hardcore pornography out of the basement.
“One of Talbot’s best mates was also Vice Squad. The best guess is that Talbot nicked or copied it, after his mate showed it to him.”
“Why would he do that?” said Robin, a little desperately.
“I don
’t think we’re going to get a better answer than ‘because he was mentally ill,’” said Strike. “But the starting point must have been his interest in Ricci. He’d found out Ricci was registered with the St. John’s practice and attended the Christmas party. In the notes, he called Ricci—”
“—Leo three,” said Robin. “Yes, I know.”
Strike’s leg muscles relaxed very slightly. This degree of focus and recall on Robin’s part didn’t suggest somebody about to have a panic attack.
“Did you learn my email off by heart?” he asked her.
It was Robin’s turn to remember Christmas, and the brief solace it had been, to bury herself in work at her parents’ kitchen table.
“I pay attention when I’m reading, that’s all.”
“Well, I still don’t understand why Talbot didn’t chase up this Ricci lead, although judging by the horoscope notes, there was a sharp deterioration in his mental state over the six months he was in charge of the case. I’m guessing he stole that can of film not long before he got kicked off the force, hence no mention of it in the police notes.”
“And then hid it so nobody else could investigate the woman’s death,” said Robin. Her sympathy for Bill Talbot had just been, if not extinguished, severely dented. “Why the hell didn’t he take the film back to the police when he was back in his right mind?”
“I’d guess because he wanted his job back and, failing that, wanted to make sure he got his pension. Setting aside basic integrity, I can’t see that he had a great incentive to admit he’d tampered with evidence on another case. Everyone was already pissed off at him: victims’ families, press, the force, all blaming him for having fucked up the investigation. And then Lawson, a bloke he doesn’t like, takes over and tells him to stay the fuck out of it. He probably told himself the dead woman was only a prostitute or—”
“Jesus,” said Robin angrily.
“I’m not saying ‘only a prostitute,’” Strike said quickly. “I’m guessing at the mindset of a seventies policeman who’d already been publicly shamed for buggering up a high-profile case.”
Robin said nothing, but remained stony-faced for the rest of the journey, while Strike, the muscles of his one-and-a-half legs so tense they ached, tried not to make it too obvious that he was keeping a covert eye on the hands gripping the steering wheel.
35
… fayre Aurora, rysing hastily,
Doth by her blushing tell, that she did lye
All night in old Tithonus frosen bed,
Whereof she seemes ashamed inwardly.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
“Ever been here before?” Strike asked Robin, as she parked in the Hampton Court car park. She’d been silent since he’d told her about the film, and he was trying to break the tension.
“No.”
They got out of the Land Rover and set off across the car park in the chilly rain.
“Where exactly are we meeting Cynthia?”
“The Privy Kitchen Café,” said Robin. “I expect they’ll give us a map at the ticket office.”
She knew that the film hidden in Gregory Talbot’s attic wasn’t Strike’s fault. He hadn’t put it there, hadn’t hidden it for forty years, couldn’t have known, when he inserted it in the projector, that he was about to watch a woman’s last, terrified, excruciating moments. She wouldn’t have wanted him to withhold the truth about what he’d seen. Nevertheless, his dry and unemotional description had grated on Robin. Reasonably or not, she’d wanted some sign that he had been repulsed, or disgusted, or horrified.
But perhaps this was unrealistic. He’d been a military policeman long before Robin had known him, where he’d learned a detachment she sometimes envied. Beneath her determinedly calm exterior, Robin felt shaken and sick, and wanted to know that when Strike had watched the recording of the woman’s dying moments, he’d recognized her as a person as real as he was.
Only a prostitute.
Their footsteps rang out on the wet tarmac as the great red-brick palace rose up before them, and Robin, who wanted to drive dreadful images out of her mind, tried to remember everything she knew about Henry VIII, that cruel and corpulent Tudor king who’d beheaded two of his six wives, but somehow found herself thinking about Matthew, instead.
When Robin had been brutally raped by a man in a gorilla mask who’d been lurking beneath the stairs of her hall of residence, Matthew had been kind, patient and understanding. Robin’s lawyer might be mystified by the source of Matthew’s vindictiveness over what should have been a straightforward divorce, but Robin had come to believe that the end of the marriage had been a profound shock to Matthew, because he thought he was owed infinite credit for having helped her through the worst period of her life. Matthew, Robin felt sure, thought she was forever in his debt.
Tears prickled in Robin’s eyes. Angling her umbrella so that Strike couldn’t see her face, she blinked hard until her eyes were clear again.
They walked across a cobbled courtyard in silence until Robin came to a sudden halt. Strike, who never enjoyed navigating uneven surfaces with his prosthesis, wasn’t sorry to pause, but he was slightly worried that he was about to be on the receiving end of an outburst.
“Look at that,” Robin said, pointing down at a shining cobblestone.
Strike looked closer and saw, to his surprise, a small cross of St. John engraved upon a small square brick.
“Coincidence,” he said.
They walked on, Robin looking around, forcing herself to take in her surroundings. They passed into a second courtyard, where a school party in hooded raincoats was being addressed by a guide in a medieval jester’s costume.
“Oh wow,” said Robin quietly, looking over her shoulder and then walking backward for a few paces, the better to see the object set high in the wall above the archway. “Look at that!”
Strike did as he was bidden and saw an enormous, ornate, sixteenth-century astronomical clock of blue and gold. The signs of the zodiac were marked on the perimeter, both with the glyphs with which Strike had become unwillingly familiar, and with pictures representing each sign. Robin smiled at Strike’s expression of mingled surprise and annoyance.
“What?” he said, catching her look of amusement.
“You,” she said, turning to walk on. “Furious at the zodiac.”
“If you’d spent three weeks wading through all Talbot’s bollocks, you wouldn’t be keen on the zodiac, either,” said Strike.
He stood back to allow Robin to enter the palace first. Following the map Strike had been given, they headed along a flagged, covered walkway toward the Privy Kitchen Café.
“Well, I think there’s a kind of poetry to astrology,” said Robin, who was consciously trying to keep her mind off Talbot’s old can of film, and her ex-husband. “I’m not saying it works, but there’s a kind of—of symmetry to it, an order…”
Through a door to the right, a small Tudor garden came into view. Brightly colored heraldic beasts stood sentinel over square beds full of sixteenth-century herbs. The sudden appearance of the spotted leopard, the white hart and the red dragon seemed to Robin to cheer her on, asserting the potency and allure of symbol and myth.
“It makes a kind of—not literal sense,” Robin said, as the whimsically strange creatures passed out of sight, “but it’s survived for a reason.”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “People will believe any old shit.”
Slightly to his relief, Robin smiled. They entered the white-walled café, which had small leaded windows and dark oak furniture,
“Find us a discreet table, I’ll get the drinks in. What d’you want, coffee?”
Choosing a deserted side room, Robin sat down at a table beneath one of the leaded windows and glanced through the potted history of the palace they’d received with their tickets. She learned that the Knights of St. John had once owned the land on which the palace stood, which explained the cross on the cobblestone, and that Cardinal Wolsey had given Henry
VIII the palace in a futile bid to stave off his own decline in influence. However, when she read that the ghost of nineteen-year-old Catherine Howard was supposed to run, screaming, along the Haunted Gallery, eternally begging her fifty-year-old husband, the King, not to have her beheaded, Robin closed the pamphlet without reading the rest. Strike arrived with the coffees to find her with her arms folded, staring into space.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just thinking about star signs.”
“Still?” said Strike, with a slight eye roll.
“Jung says it was man’s first attempt at psychology, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” said Strike, sitting down opposite her. Robin, as he knew, had been studying psychology at university before she dropped out. “But there’s no excuse to keep using it now we’ve got actual psychology, is there?”
“Folklore and superstition haven’t gone away. They’ll never go away. People need them,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “I think a purely scientific world would be a cold place. Jung also talked about the collective unconscious, you know. The archetypes lurking in all of us.”
But Strike, whose mother had ensured that he’d spent a large portion of his childhood in a fug of incense, dirt and mysticism, said shortly,
“Yeah, well. I’m Team Rational.”
“People like feeling connected to something bigger,” said Robin, looking up at the rainy sky outside. “I think it makes you feel less lonely. Astrology connects you to the universe, doesn’t it? And to ancient myths and ideas—”
“—and incidentally feeds your ego,” said Strike. “Makes you feel less insignificant. ‘Look how special the universe is telling me I am.’ I don’t buy the idea that I’ve got anything more in common with other people born on November the twenty-third than I think being born in Cornwall makes me a person better than someone born in Manchester.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 41
