Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “I never said—”

  “You might not, but my oldest mate does,” said Strike. “Dave Polworth.”

  “The one who gets ratty when Cornish flags aren’t on strawberries?”

  “That’s him. Committed Cornish nationalist. He gets defensive about it if you challenge him—‘I’m not saying we’re better than anyone else’—but he thinks you shouldn’t be able to buy property down there unless you can prove Cornish ethnicity. Don’t remind him he was born in Birmingham if you value your teeth.”

  Robin smiled.

  “Same kind of thing, though, isn’t it?” said Strike. “‘I’m special and different because I was born on this bit of rock.’ ‘I’m special and different because I was born on June the twelfth—’”

  “Where you’re born does influence who you are, though,” said Robin. “Cultural norms and language have an effect. And there have been studies showing people born at different times of the year are more prone to certain health conditions.”

  “So Roy Phipps bleeds a lot because he was born—? Hello there!” said Strike, breaking off suddenly, his eyes on the door.

  Robin turned and saw, to her momentary astonishment, a slender woman wearing a long green Tudor gown and headdress.

  “I’m so sorry!” said the woman, gesturing at her costume and laughing nervously as she advanced on their table. “I thought I’d have time to change! I’ve been doing a school group—we finished late—”

  Strike stood up and held out a hand to shake hers.

  “Cormoran Strike,” he said. Eyes on her reproduction pearl necklace with its suspended initial “B,” he said, “Anne Boleyn, I presume?”

  Cynthia’s laughter contained a couple of inadvertent snorts, which increased her odd resemblance, middle-aged though she was, to a gawky schoolgirl. Her movements were unsuited to the sweeping velvet gown, being rather exaggerated and ungainly.

  “Hahaha, yes, that’s me! Only my second time as Anne. You think you’ve thought of all the questions the kids might ask you, then one of them says ‘How did it feel to get your head cut off?,’ hahahaha!”

  Cynthia wasn’t at all what Robin had expected. She now realized that her imagination had sketched in a young blonde, the stereotypical idea of a Scandinavian au pair… or was that because Sarah Shadlock had almost white hair?

  “Coffee?” Strike asked Cynthia.

  “Oh—coffee, yes please, wonderful, thank you,” said Cynthia, over-enthusiastically. When Strike had left, Cynthia made a small pantomime of dithering over which seat to take until Robin, smiling, pulled out the seat beside her and offered her own hand, too.

  “Oh, yes, hello!” said Cynthia, sitting down and shaking hands. She had a thin, sallow face, currently wearing an anxious smile. The irises of her large eyes were heavily mottled, an indeterminate color between blue, green and gray, and her teeth were rather crooked.

  “So you lead the tour in character?” asked Robin.

  “Yes, exactly, as poor Anne, hahaha,” said Cynthia, with another nervous, snorting laugh. “‘I couldn’t give the King a son! They said I was a witch!’ Those are the sort of things children like to hear; I have to work quite hard to get the politics in, hahaha. Poor Anne.” Her thin hands fidgeted.

  “Oh, I’m still—I can take this off, at least, hahaha!”

  Cynthia set to work unpinning her headdress. Even though she could tell that Cynthia was very nervous, and that her constant laughter was more of a tic than genuine amusement, Robin was again reminded of Sarah Shadlock, who tended to laugh a lot, and loudly, especially in the vicinity of Matthew. Wittingly or not, Cynthia’s laughter imposed a sort of obligation: smile back or seem hostile. Robin remembered a documentary on monkeys she had watched one night when she was too tired to get up and go to bed: chimps, too, laughed back at each other to signal social cohesion.

  When Strike returned to the table with Cynthia’s coffee, he found her newly bare-headed. Her dark hair was fifty percent gray, and smoothed back into a short, thin ponytail.

  “It’s very good of you to meet us, Mrs. Phipps,” he said, sitting back down.

  “Oh, no, not at all, not at all,” said Cynthia, waving her thin hands and laughing some more. “Anything I can do to help Anna with—but Roy hasn’t been well, so I don’t want to worry him just now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear—”

  “Yes, thank you, no, it’s prostate cancer,” said Cynthia, no longer laughing. “Radiation therapy. Not feeling too chipper. Anna and Kim came over this morning to sit with him, or I wouldn’t have been able—I don’t like leaving him at the moment, but the girls are there, so I thought I’d be fine to…”

  The end of the sentence was lost as she took a sip of coffee. Her hand trembled slightly as she replaced the cup onto the saucer.

  “Your stepdaughter’s probably told—” Strike began, but Cynthia immediately interrupted him.

  “Daughter. I don’t ever call Anna my stepdaughter. Sorry, but I feel just the same about her as I do about Jeremy and Ellie. No difference at all.”

  Robin wondered whether that was true. She was uncomfortably aware that part of her was standing aside, watching Cynthia with judgmental eyes. She isn’t Sarah, Robin reminded herself.

  “Well, I’m sure Anna’s told you why she hired us, and so on.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Cynthia. “No, I must admit, I’ve been expecting something like this for a while. I hope it isn’t going to make things worse for her.”

  “Er—well, we hope that, too, obviously,” said Strike, and Cynthia laughed and said, “Oh, no, of course, yes.”

  Strike took out his notebook, in which a few photocopied sheets were folded, and a pen.

  “Could we begin with the statement you gave the police?”

  “You’ve got it?” said Cynthia, looking startled. “The original?”

  “A photocopy,” he said, unfolding it.

  “How… funny. Seeing it again, after all this time. I was eighteen. Eighteen! It seems a century ago, hahaha!”

  The signature at the bottom of the uppermost page, Robin saw, was rounded and rather childish. Strike handed the photocopied pages to Cynthia, who took them looking almost frightened.

  “I’m afraid I’m awfully dyslexic,” she said. “I was forty-two before I was diagnosed. My parents thought I was bone idle, hahaha… um, so…”

  “Would you rather I read it to you?” Strike suggested. Cynthia handed it back to him at once.

  “Oh, thank you—this is how I learn all my guiding notes, by listening to audio disks, hahaha…”

  Strike flattened out the photocopied papers on the table.

  “Please interrupt if you want to add or change anything,” he told Cynthia, who nodded and said that she would.

  ““Name, Cynthia Jane Phipps… date of birth, July the twentieth 1957… address, ‘The Annexe, Broom House, Church Road’… that would be Margot’s—?”

  “I had self-contained rooms over the double garage,” said Cynthia. Robin thought she laid slight emphasis on “self-contained.”

  “‘I am employed as nanny to Dr. Phipps and Dr. Bamborough’s infant daughter, and I live in their house—’”

  “Self-contained studio,” said Cynthia. “It had its own entrance.”

  “‘My hours…’ Don’t think we need any of that,” muttered Strike. “Here we go. ‘On the morning of the eleventh of October I began work at 7 a.m. I saw Dr. Bamborough before she left for work. She seemed entirely as usual. She reminded me that she would be late home because she was meeting her friend Miss Oonagh Kennedy for drinks near her place of work. As Dr. Phipps was bedbound due to his recent accident—’”

  “Anna told you about Roy’s von Willebrand Disease?” said Cynthia anxiously.

  “Er—I don’t think she told us, but it’s mentioned in the police report.”

  “Oh, didn’t she say?” said Cynthia, who seemed unhappy to hear it. “Well, he’s a Type Three. That’s serious, as bad as hemophilia. His knee swel
led up and he was in a lot of pain, could hardly move,” said Cynthia.

  “Yes,” said Strike, “it’s all in the police—”

  “No, because he’d had an accident on the seventh,” said Cynthia, who seemed determined to say this. “It was a wet day, pouring with rain, you can check that. He was walking around a corner of the hospital, heading for the car park, and an out-patient rode right into him on a pushbike. Roy got tangled up in the front wheel, slipped, hit his knee and had a major bleed. These days he has prophylactic injections so it doesn’t happen the way it used to, but back then, if he injured himself, it could lay him up for weeks.”

  “Right,” said Strike, and judging it to be the most tactful thing to do, he made careful note of all these details, which he’d already read in Roy’s own statements and police interviews.

  “No, Anna knows her dad was ill that day. She’s always known,” Cynthia added.

  Strike continued reading the statement aloud. It was a retelling of facts Strike and Robin already knew. Cynthia had been in charge of baby Anna at home. Roy’s mother had come over during the day. Wilma Bayliss had cleaned for three hours and left. Cynthia had taken occasional cups of tea to the invalid and his mother. At 6 p.m., Evelyn Phipps had gone home to her bungalow to play bridge with friends, leaving a tray of food for her son.

  “‘At 8 p.m. in the evening I was watching television in the sitting room downstairs when I heard the phone ring in the hall. I would usually only ever answer the phone if both Dr. Phipps and Dr. Bamborough were out. As Dr. Phipps was in, and could answer the phone from the extension beside his bed, I didn’t answer.

  “‘About five minutes later, I heard the gong that Mrs. Evelyn Phipps had placed beside Dr. Phipps’s bed, in case of emergency. I went upstairs. Dr. Phipps was still in bed. He told me that it had been Miss Kennedy on the phone. Dr. Bamborough hadn’t turned up at the pub. Dr. Phipps said he thought she must have been delayed at work or forgotten. He asked me to tell Dr. Bamborough to go up to their bedroom as soon as she came in.

  “‘I went back downstairs. About an hour later, I heard the gong again and went upstairs and found Dr. Phipps now quite worried about his wife. He asked me whether she’d come in yet. I said that she hadn’t. He asked me to stay in the room while he phoned Miss Kennedy at home. Miss Kennedy still hadn’t seen or heard from Dr. Bamborough. Dr. Phipps hung up and asked me what Dr. Bamborough had been carrying when she left the house that morning. I told him just a handbag and her doctor’s bag. He asked me whether Dr. Bamborough had said anything about visiting her parents. I said she hadn’t. He asked me to stay while he called Dr. Bamborough’s mother.

  “‘Mrs. Bamborough hadn’t heard from her daughter or seen her. Dr. Phipps was now quite worried and asked me to go downstairs and look in the drawer in the base of the clock on the mantelpiece in the sitting room and see whether there was anything in there. I went and looked. There was nothing there. I went back upstairs and told Dr. Phipps that the clock drawer was empty. Dr. Phipps explained that this was a place he and his wife sometimes left each other private notes. I hadn’t known about this previously.

  “‘He asked me to stay with him while he called his mother, because he might have something else for me to do. He spoke to his mother and asked her advice. It was a brief conversation. When he hung up, Dr. Phipps asked me whether I thought he ought to call the police. I said I thought he should. He said he was going to. He told me to go downstairs and let the police in when they arrived and show them up to his bedroom. The police arrived about half an hour later and I showed them up to Dr. Phipps’s bedroom.

  “‘I didn’t find Dr. Bamborough to be unusual in her manner when she left the house that morning. Relations between Dr. Phipps and Dr. Bamborough seemed completely happy. I’m very surprised at her disappearance, which is out of character. She is very attached to her daughter and I cannot imagine her ever leaving the baby, or going away without telling her husband or me where she was going.

  “‘Signed and dated Cynthia Phipps, 12 October 1974.’”

  “Yes, no, that’s… I haven’t got anything to add to that,” said Cynthia. “Odd to hear it back!” she said, with another little snorting laugh, but Robin thought her eyes were frightened.

  “This is obviously, ah, sensitive, but if we could go back to your statement that relations between Roy and Margot—”

  “Yes, sorry, no, I’m not going to talk about their marriage,” said Cynthia. Her sallow cheeks became stained with a purplish blush. “Everyone rows, everyone has ups and downs, but it’s not up to me to talk about their marriage.”

  “We understand that your husband couldn’t have—” began Robin.

  “Margot’s husband,” said Cynthia. “No, you see, they’re two completely different people. Inside my head.”

  Convenient, said a voice inside Robin’s.

  “We’re simply exploring the possibility that she went away,” said Strike, “maybe to think or—”

  “No, Margot wouldn’t have just walked out without saying anything. That wouldn’t have been like her.”

  “Anna told us her grandmother—” said Robin.

  “Evelyn had early onset Alzheimer’s and you couldn’t take what she said seriously,” said Cynthia, her tone higher and more brittle. “I’ve always told Anna that, I’ve always told her that Margot would never have left her. I’ve always told her that,” she repeated.

  Except, continued the voice inside Robin’s head, when you were pretending to be her real mother, and hiding Margot’s existence from her.

  “Moving on,” said Strike, “you received a phone call on Anna’s second birthday, from a woman purporting to be Margot?”

  “Um, yes, no, that’s right,” said Cynthia. She took another shaky sip of coffee. “I was icing the birthday cake in the kitchen when the phone rang, so not in any danger of forgetting what day it was, hahaha. When I picked up, the woman said, ‘Is that you, Cynthia?’ I said ‘Yes,’ and she said ‘It’s Margot here. Wish little Annie a happy birthday from her mummy. And make sure you look after her.’ And the line went dead.

  “I just stood there,” she mimed holding an invisible implement in her hand, and tried to laugh again, but no sound came out, “holding the spatula. I didn’t know what to do. Anna was playing in the sitting room. I was… I decided I’d better ring Roy at work. He told me to call the police, so I did.”

  “Did you think it was Margot?” asked Strike.

  “No. It wasn’t—well, it sounded like her, but I don’t think it was her.”

  “You think somebody was imitating it?”

  “Putting it on, yes. The accent. Cockney, but… no, I didn’t get that feeling you get when you just know who it is…”

  “You’re sure it was a woman?” said Strike. “It couldn’t have been a man imitating a woman?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Cynthia.

  “Did Margot ever call Anna ‘little Annie’?” asked Robin.

  “She called her all kinds of pet names,” said Cynthia, looking glum. “Annie Fandango, Annabella, Angel Face… somebody could have guessed, or maybe they’d just got the name wrong… But the timing was… they’d just found bits of Creed’s last victim. The one he threw off Beachy Head—”

  “Andrea Hooton,” said Robin. Cynthia looked slightly startled that she had the name on the tip of her tongue.

  “Yes, the hairdresser.”

  “No,” said Robin. “That was Susan Meyer. Andrea was the PhD student.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Cynthia. “Of course… I’m so bad with names… Well, Roy had just been through the whole identification business with, um, you know, the bits of the body that washed up, so we’d had our hopes—not our hopes!” said Cynthia, looking terrified at the word that had escaped her, “I don’t mean that! No, we were obviously relieved it wasn’t Margot, but you think, you know, maybe you’re going to get an answer…”

  Strike thought of his own guilty wish that Joan’s slow and protracted dying would be
over soon. A corpse, however unwelcome, meant anguish could find both expression and sublimation among flowers, speeches and ritual, consolation drawn from God, alcohol and fellow mourners; an apotheosis reached, a first step taken toward grasping the awful fact that life was extinct, and life must go on.

  “We’d already been through it once when they found the other body, the one in Alexandra Lake,” said Cynthia.

  “Susan Meyer,” muttered Robin.

  “Roy was shown pictures, both times… And then this phone call, coming right after he’d had to… for the second time… it was…”

  Cynthia was suddenly crying, not like Oonagh Kennedy, with her head up and tears sparkling on her cheeks, but hunched over the table, hiding her face, her shaking hands supporting her forehead.

  “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I knew this would be awful… we never talk about her any—any more… I’m sorry…”

  She sobbed for a few more seconds, then forced herself to look up again, her large eyes now pink and wet.

  “Roy wanted to believe it had been Margot on the phone. He kept saying ‘Are you sure, are you sure, it didn’t sound like her?’ He was on tenterhooks while the police traced the call…

  “You’re being very polite,” she said, and her laugh this time was slightly hysterical, “but I know what you want to know, and what Anna wants to know, too, even though I’ve told her and told her… There was nothing going on between me and Roy before Margot disappeared, and not for four years afterward… Did she tell you that Roy and I are related?”

  She said it as though forcing herself to say it, although a third cousin was not, after all, a very close relationship. But Robin, thinking of Roy’s bleeding disorder, wondered whether the Phippses, like the Romanovs, mightn’t be well advised not to marry their cousins.

  “Yes, she did,” said Strike.

  “I was sick of the sound of his name before I went to work for them, actually. It was all, ‘Just look at Cousin Roy, with all his health problems, getting into Imperial College and studying medicine. If you’d only work harder, Cynthia…’ I used to hate the very idea of him, hahaha!”