Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Yes,” said Cynthia quickly, “no, there was one boy who was really—”

  “Spiked the punch,” barked Roy. “Vodka. Someone was sick.”

  “Gloria,” said Cynthia.

  “I don’t remember all their names,” said Roy, with an impatient wave of the hand. “Sick all over the downstairs bathroom. Disgusting.”

  “This boy would’ve been Carl Oakden?” asked Strike.

  “That’s him,” said Roy. “We found the vodka bottle empty, later, hidden in a shed. He’d sneaked into the house and taken it out of the drinks cabinet.”

  “Yes,” said Cynthia, “and then he smashed—”

  “Crystal bowl of my mother’s and half a dozen glasses. Hit a cricket ball right across the barbecue area. The nurse cleaned it all up for me, because—decent of her. She knew I couldn’t—broken glass,” said Roy, with an impatient gesture.

  “On the bright side,” said Cynthia, with the ghost of a laugh, “he’d smashed the punch, so nobody else got sick.”

  “That bowl was art deco,” said Roy, unsmiling. “Bloody disaster, the whole thing. I said to Margot,” and he paused for a second after saying the name, and Robin wondered when he’d last spoken it, “‘I don’t know what you think this is going to achieve.’ Because he didn’t come, the one she was trying to conciliate—the doctor she didn’t get on with, what was his—?”

  “Joseph Brenner,” said Robin.

  “Brenner, exactly. He’d refused the invitation, so what was the point? But no, we still had to give up our Saturday to entertain this motley collection of people, and our reward was to have our drink stolen and our possessions smashed.”

  Roy’s fists lay on the arms of his chair. He uncoiled the long fingers for a moment in a movement like a hermit crab unflexing its legs, then curled them tightly in upon themselves again.

  “That same boy, Oakden, wrote a book about Margot later,” he said. “Used a photograph from that damn barbecue to add credibility to the notion that he and his mother knew all about our private lives. So, yes,” said Roy coldly, “not one of Margot’s better ideas.”

  “Well, she was trying to make the practice work better together, wasn’t she?” said Anna. “You’ve never really needed to manage different personalities at work—”

  “Oh, you know all about my work, too, do you, Anna?”

  “Well, it wasn’t the same as being a GP, was it?” said Anna. “You were lecturing, doing research, you didn’t have to manage cleaners and receptionists and a whole bunch of non-medics.”

  “They were quite badly behaved, Anna,” said Cynthia, hurrying loyally to support Roy. “No, they really were. I never told—I didn’t want to cause trouble—but one of the women sneaked upstairs into your mum and dad’s bedroom.”

  “What?” barked Roy.

  “Yes,” said Cynthia, nervously. “No, I went upstairs to change Anna’s nappy and I heard movement in there. I walked in and she was looking at Margot’s clothes in the wardrobe.”

  “Who was this?” asked Strike.

  “The blonde one. The receptionist who wasn’t Gloria.”

  “Irene,” said Strike. “Did she know you’d seen her?”

  “Oh yes. I walked in, holding Anna.”

  “What did she say when she saw you?” asked Robin.

  “Well, she was a bit embarrassed,” said Cynthia. “You would be, wouldn’t you? She laughed and said ‘just being nosy’ and walked back out past me.”

  “Good God,” said Roy Phipps, shaking his head. “Who hired these people?”

  “Was she really just looking?” Robin asked Cynthia. “Or d’you think she’d gone in there to—”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’d taken anything,” said Cynthia. “And you never—Margot never missed anything, did she?” she asked Roy.

  “No, but you should still have told me this at the time,” said Roy crossly.

  “I didn’t want to cause trouble. You were already… well, it was a stressful day, wasn’t it?”

  “About this alleged sighting,” said Strike, and he told the family the third-hand tale of Charlie Ramage, who claimed to have seen Margot wandering among graves in a churchyard in Leamington Spa.

  “… and Robin’s now spoken to Ramage’s widow, who confirmed the basic story, though she couldn’t swear to it that it was Margot he thought he’d seen, and not another missing woman. The sighting doesn’t seem to have been passed to the police, so I wanted to ask whether Margot had any connection with Leamington Spa that you know of?”

  “None,” said Roy, and Cynthia shook her head.

  Strike made a note.

  “Thank you. While we’re on the subject of sightings,” said Strike, “I wonder whether we could run through the rest of the list?”

  Robin thought she knew what Strike was up to. However uncomfortable the idea that Margot was still alive might be for the people in this room, Strike wanted to start the interview from a standpoint that didn’t presume murder.

  “The woman at the service station in Birmingham, the mother in Brighton, the dog walker down in Eastbourne,” Roy rattled off, before Strike could speak. “Why would she have been out and about, driving cars and walking dogs? If she’d disappeared voluntarily, she clearly didn’t want to be found. The same goes for wandering around graveyards.”

  “True,” said Strike. “But there was one sighting—”

  “Warwick,” said Roy. “Yes.”

  A look passed between husband and wife. Strike waited. Roy set down his cup and saucer on the table in front of him and looked up at his daughter.

  “You’re quite sure you want to do this, Anna, are you?” he asked, looking at his silent daughter. “Quite, quite sure?”

  “What d’you mean?” she snapped back. “What d’you think I hired detectives for? Fun?”

  “All right, then,” said Roy, “all right. That sighting caught… caught my attention, because my wife’s ex-boyfriend, a man called Paul Satchwell, hailed originally from Warwick. This was a man she’d… reconnected with, before she disappeared.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” said Anna, with a tight little laugh, “did you honestly think I don’t know about Paul Satchwell? Of course I do!” Kim reached out and put a hand on her wife’s leg, whether in comfort or warning, it was hard to tell. “Have you never heard of the internet, Dad, or press archives? I’ve seen Satchwell’s ridiculous photograph, with all his chest hair and his medallions, and I know my mother went for a drink with him three weeks before she vanished! But it was only one drink—”

  “Oh, was it?” said Roy nastily. “Thanks for your reassurance, Anna. Thanks for your expert knowledge. How marvelous to be all-knowing—”

  “Roy,” whispered Cynthia.

  “What are you saying, that it was more than a drink?” said Anna, looking shaken. “No, it wasn’t, that’s a horrible thing to say! Oonagh says—”

  “Oh, right, yes, I see!” said Roy loudly, his sunken cheeks turning purple as his hands gripped the arms of his chair, “Oonagh says, does she? Everything is explained!”

  “What’s explained?” demanded Anna.

  “This!” he shouted, pointing a trembling, rope-veined, swollen-knuckled hand at Strike and Robin. “Oonagh Kennedy’s behind it all, is she? I should have known I hadn’t heard the last of her!”

  “For God’s sake, Roy,” said Kim loudly, “that’s a preposterous—”

  “Oonagh Kennedy wanted me arrested!”

  “Dad, that’s simply not true!” said Anna, forcibly removing Kim’s restraining hand from her leg. “You’ve got a morbid fixation about Oonagh—”

  “Badgering me to complain about Talbot—”

  “Well, why the bloody hell didn’t you?” said Anna loudly. “The man was in the middle of a fully fledged breakdown!”

  “Roy!” whimpered Cynthia again, as Roy leaned forwards to face his daughter across the too-small circular table, with its precariously balanced cake. Gesticulating wildly, his face purple, he shouted,
/>
  “Police swarming all over the house going through your mother’s things—sniffer dogs out in the garden—they were looking for any reason to arrest me, and I should lodge a formal complaint against the man in charge? How would that have looked?”

  “He was incompetent!”

  “Were you there, Miss Omniscient? Did you know him?”

  “Why did they replace him? Why does everything written about the case say he was incompetent? The truth is,” said Anna, stabbing the air between her and her father with a forefinger, “you and Cyn loved Bill Talbot because he thought you were innocent from the off and—”

  “Thought I was innocent?” bellowed Roy. “Well, thank you, it’s good to know that nothing’s changed since you were thirteen years old—”

  “Roy!” said Cynthia and Kim together.

  “—and accused me of building the koi pond over the place I’d buried her!”

  Anna burst into tears and fled the room, almost tripping over Strike’s legs as she went. Suspecting there was about to be a mass exodus, he retracted his feet.

  “When,” Kim said coldly to her father-in-law, “is Anna going to be forgiven for things she said when she was a confused child, going through a dreadful time?”

  “And my dreadful time is nothing, of course? Nothing!” shouted Roy, and as Strike expected, he, too, left the room at the fastest pace he could manage, which was a speedy hobble.

  “Christ’s sake,” muttered Kim, striding after Roy and Anna and almost colliding at the door with Cynthia, who’d jumped up to follow Roy.

  The door swung shut. The rain pattered on the pond outside. Strike blew out his cheeks, exchanged looks with Robin, then picked up his plate and continued eating his cake.

  “Starving,” he said thickly, in response to Robin’s look. “No lunch. And it’s good cake.”

  Distantly they heard shouting, and the slamming of another door.

  “D’you think the interview’s over?” muttered Robin.

  “No,” said Strike, still eating. “They’ll be back.”

  “Remind me about the sighting in Warwick,” said Robin.

  She’d merely skimmed the list of sightings that Strike had emailed her. There hadn’t seemed anything very interesting there.

  “A woman asked for change in a pub, and the landlady thought she was Margot. A mature student came forward two days later to identify herself, but the landlady wasn’t convinced that was who she’d seen. The police were, though.”

  Strike took another large mouthful of cake before saying,

  “I don’t think there’s anything in it. Well…” he swallowed and shot a meaningful look at the sitting room door, “there’s a bit more now.”

  Strike continued to eat cake, while Robin’s eyes roamed the room and landed on an ormolu mantel clock of exceptional ugliness. With a glance at the door, she got up to examine it. A gilded classical goddess wearing a helmet sat on top of the ornate, heavy case.

  “Pallas Athena,” said Strike, watching her, pointing his fork at the figure.

  In the base of the clock was a drawer with a small brass handle. Remembering Cynthia’s statement about Roy and Margot leaving notes for each other here, she pulled the drawer open. It was lined in red felt and empty.

  “D’you think it’s valuable?” she asked Strike, sliding the drawer shut.

  “Dunno. Why?”

  “Because why else would you keep it? It’s horrible.”

  There were two distinct kinds of taste on view in this room and they didn’t harmonize, Robin thought, as she looked around, all the time listening for the return of the family. The leather-bound copies of Ovid and Pliny, and the Victorian reproductions of classical statues, among them a pair of miniature Medici lions, a reproduction Vestal virgin and a Hermes poised on tiptoe on his heavy bronze base, presumably represented Roy’s father’s taste, whereas she suspected that his mother had chosen the insipid watercolor landscapes and botanical subjects, the dainty antique furniture and the chintz curtains.

  Why had Roy never made a clean sweep and redecorated, Robin wondered. Reverence for his parents? Lack of imagination? Or had the sickly little boy, housebound no doubt for much of his childhood, developed an attachment to these objects that he couldn’t put aside? He and Cynthia seemed to have made little impression on the room other than in adding a few family pictures to faded black and white photos featuring Roy’s parents and Roy as a child. The only one to hold Robin’s interest was a family group that looked as though it had been taken in the early nineties, when Roy had still had all his hair, and Cynthia’s had been thick and wavy. Their two biological children, a boy and a girl, looked like Anna. Nobody would have guessed that she’d had a different mother.

  Robin moved to the window. The surface of the long, formal koi pond outside, with its stone pavilion at the end, was now so densely rain-pocked that the vivid red, white and black shapes moving beneath the surface were barely discernible as fish. There was one particularly big creature, pearl white and black, that looked as though it might be over two feet long. The miniature pavilion would normally be reflected in the pond’s smooth surface, but today it merely added an extra layer of diffuse gray to the far end of the pond. It had a strangely familiar design on the floor.

  “Cormoran,” Robin said, at the exact moment Strike said,

  “Look at this.”

  Both turned. Strike, who’d finished his cake, was now standing beside one of Roy’s father’s statuettes, which Robin had overlooked. It was a foot-high bronze of a naked man with a cloth around his shoulders, holding a snake. Momentarily puzzled, Robin realized after a second or two why Strike was pointing at it.

  “Oh… the snaky invented sign Talbot gave Roy?”

  “Precisely. This is Asclepius,” said Strike. “Greek god of medicine. What’ve you found?”

  “Look on the floor of the gazebo thing. Inlaid in the stone.”

  He joined her at the window.

  “Ah,” he said. “You can see the beginnings of that in one of the photographs of Margot’s barbecue. It was under construction.”

  A cross of St. John lay on the floor of the gazebo, inlaid in darker granite. “Interesting choice of design,” said Strike.

  “You know,” said Robin, turning to look at the room, “people who’re manic often think they’re receiving supernatural messages. Things the sane would call coincidences.”

  “I was thinking exactly that,” said Strike, turning to look at the figure of Pallas Athena, on top of the ugly mantel clock. “To a man in Talbot’s state of mental confusion, I’m guessing this room would’ve seemed crammed with astrological—”

  Roy’s voice sounded in the hall outside.

  “—then don’t blame me—”

  The door opened and the family filed back inside.

  “—if she hears things she doesn’t like!” Roy finished, addressing Cynthia, who was immediately behind him, and looked scared. Roy’s face was an unhealthy purple again, though the skin around his eyes remained a jaundiced yellow.

  He seemed startled to see Strike and Robin standing at the window.

  “Admiring your garden,” said Strike, as he and Robin returned to their sofa.

  Roy grunted and took his seat again. He was breathing heavily.

  “Apologies,” he said, after a moment or two. “You aren’t seeing the family at its best.”

  “Very stressful for everyone,” said Strike, as Anna and Kim re-entered the room and resumed their seats on the sofa, where they sat holding hands. Cynthia perched herself beside them, watching Roy anxiously.

  “I want to say something,” Roy told Strike. “I want to make it perfectly clear—”

  “Oh for God’s sake, I’ve had one phone call with her!” said Anna.

  “I’d appreciate it, Anna,” said Roy, his chest laboring, “if I could finish.”

  Addressing Strike, he said,

  “Oonagh Kennedy disliked me from the moment Margot and I first met. She was possessive towar
d Margot, and she also happened to have left the church, and she was one of those who had to make an enemy of everyone still in it. Moreover—”

  “Dr. Phipps,” interrupted Strike, who could foresee the afternoon degenerating into a long row about Oonagh Kennedy. “I think you should know that when we interviewed Oonagh, she made it quite clear that the person she thought we should be concentrating our energies on is Paul Satchwell.”

  For a second or two, Roy appeared unable to fully grasp what had just been said to him.

  “See?” said Anna furiously. “You just implied that there was more between my mother and Satchwell than one drink. What did you mean? Or were you,” she said, and Robin heard the underlying hope, “just angry and lashing out?”

  “People who insist on opening cans of worms, Anna,” said Roy, “shouldn’t complain when they get covered in slime.”

  “Well, go on then,” said Anna, “spill your slime.”

  “Anna,” whispered Cynthia, and was ignored.

  “All right,” said Roy. “All right, then.” He turned back to Strike and Robin. “Early in our relationship, I saw a note of Satchwell’s Margot had kept. ‘Dear Brunhilda’ it said—it was his pet name for her. The Valkyrie, you know. Margot was tall. Fair.”

  Roy paused and swallowed.

  “Some three weeks before she disappeared, she came home and told me she’d run into Satchwell in the street and that they’d gone for an… innocent drink.”

  He cleared his throat. Cynthia poured him more tea.

  “After she—after she’d disappeared, I had to go and collect her things from the St. John’s practice. Among them I found a small—”

  He held his fingers some three inches apart.

  “—wooden figure, a stylized Viking which she’d been keeping on her desk. Written in ink on this figure’s base was ‘Brunhilda,’ with a small heart.”

  Roy took a sip of coffee.

  “I’d never seen it before. Of course, it’s possible that Satchwell was carrying it around with him for years, on the off chance that he’d one day bump into Margot in the street. However, I concluded that they’d seen each other again and that he’d given her this—this token—on a subsequent occasion. All I know is, I’d never seen it before I collected her things from her surgery.”