Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

“You can’t be serious,” said Robin.

  “I’m completely serious. It was really useful for building my character. He’s got some proper big man, take-no-bullshit energy about him, hasn’t he?”

  “You mean he acts like a dick?”

  Max laughed and shrugged.

  “Is he very different sober?”

  “Yes,” said Robin, “well—I don’t know. Less of a dick.” And before Max could ask anything else about her partner, she said quickly, “He’s right about your cooking, anyway. That was fantastic. Thanks so much, I really needed that.”

  Having cleared up, Robin returned downstairs, where she showered before changing for the night’s surveillance. With an hour to go before she needed to take over from Hutchins, she sat back down on her bed and idly typed variations on the name Paul Satchwell into Google. Paul L Satchwell. LP Satchwell. Paul Leonard Satchwell. Leo Paul Satchwell.

  Her mobile rang. She glanced down. It was Strike. After a moment or two, she picked it up, but said nothing.

  “Robin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you OK to talk?”

  “Yes,” she said again, her heart beating faster than usual as she frowned up at the ceiling.

  “Calling to apologize.”

  Robin was so astonished, she said nothing for several seconds. Then she cleared her throat and said,

  “Can you even remember what you’re apologizing for?”

  “Er… yeah, I think so,” said Strike. “I… didn’t mean that to get dragged up. Should’ve realized it wasn’t a subject you’d want discussed over dinner. Didn’t think.”

  Tears started in Robin’s eyes at last.

  “OK,” she said, trying to sound casual.

  “And I’m sorry for being rude to your brother and his friends.”

  “Thank you,” said Robin.

  There was a silence. The rain still fell outside. Then Strike said,

  “Have you heard from Ilsa?”

  “No,” said Robin. “Have you heard from Nick?”

  “No,” said Strike.

  There was another silence.

  “So, we’re OK, yeah?” said Strike.

  “Yes,” said Robin, wondering whether it was true.

  “If I’ve taken you for granted,” said Strike, “I’m sorry. You’re the best I’ve got.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Strike,” said Robin, abandoning the pretense that she wasn’t crying as she snorted back tears.

  “What?”

  “You just… you’re bloody infuriating.”

  “Why?”

  “Saying that. Now.”

  “That’s not the first time I’ve said it.”

  “It is, actually.”

  “I’ve told other people.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Robin, now laughing and crying simultaneously as she reached for tissues, “you see how that isn’t the same thing as telling me?”

  “Yeah, I s’pose,” said Strike. “Now you mention it.”

  He was smoking at his small Formica kitchen table while the eternal rain fell outside his attic window. Somehow, the texts from Charlotte had made him realize he had to call Robin, had to make things right with her before he set off for Cornwall and Joan. Now the sound of her voice, and her laughter, acted on him as it usually did, by making everything seem fractionally less awful.

  “When are you leaving?” Robin asked, drying her eyes.

  “Tomorrow at eight. Lucy’s meeting me at the car hire. We’ve got a jeep.”

  “Well, be careful,” said Robin. She’d heard on the news that day about the three people who’d died, trying to travel through the wind and the floods.

  “Yeah. Can’t pretend I don’t wish you were driving. Lucy’s bloody terrible behind the wheel.”

  “You can stop flattering me now. I’ve forgiven you.”

  “I’m serious,” said Strike, his eyes on the relentless rain. “You and your advanced driving course. You’re the only person who doesn’t scare the shit out of me behind the wheel.”

  “D’you think you’ll make it?”

  “Possibly not all the way in the jeep. But Polworth’s standing by to rescue us. He’s got access to dinghies. We’ve got to do it. Joan might only have days.”

  “Well, I’ll be thinking about you,” said Robin. “Keeping everything crossed.”

  “Cheers, Robin. Keep in touch.”

  After Strike had hung up, Robin sat for a while, savoring the sudden feeling of lightness that had filled her. Then she pulled her laptop toward her, ready to shut it down before she left for her night’s surveillance in the Land Rover. Casually, as she might have thrown the dice one last time before turning away from the craps table, she typed “Paul Satchwell artist” into Google.

  … artist Paul Satchwell has spent most of his career on the Greek island of…

  “What?” said Robin aloud, as though the laptop had spoken to her. She clicked on the result, and the website of the Leamington Spa Museum and Art Gallery filled the screen. She hadn’t once seen it, in all her hours of searching for Satchwell. This page had either just been created or amended.

  Temporary Exhibition March 3rd—7th 2014

  Local Artists

  The Leamington Spa Museum and Art Gallery will be hosting a temporary exhibition of artists from the Warwickshire area. Entrance free.

  Robin scrolled down the page past sundry artists’ photos until she saw him.

  It was, without a doubt, the same man. His face might be leathery and cracked, his teeth might have yellowed, his thick, curly hair turned whiter and thinner, but it still hung to his shoulders, while his open shirt showed thick white chest hair.

  Born in Leamington Spa and raised in Warwick, artist Paul Satchwell has spent most of his career on the Greek island of Kos. Working mainly in oils, Paul’s Hellenic-influenced exploration of myths challenge the viewer to face primal fears and examine preconceptions through sensual use of line and color…

  44

  Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,

  Wherein my feeble barke is tossed long,

  Far from the hoped hauen of reliefe,

  Why doe thy cruel billowes beat so strong,

  And thy moyst mountaines each on others throng,

  Threatning to swallow vp my fearefull lyfe?

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  The storm water, rain and gales they faced were real enough, yet Strike and Lucy’s battle to reach St. Mawes had a strange, dreamlike quality. Both knew death lay at the end; both were resolved that if they managed to reach Joan alive, they would stay with her until she died.

  Trees swayed and creaked as they sped along the motorway. They had to divert around great wide lakes where lately there had been fields, forcing them miles out of their way. Twice they were halted at roadblocks and told, by irate police, to turn back. They pressed on, at one point driving fifty miles to progress fifteen, listening to every weather update on the radio and becoming progressively more certain that there would come a point where they had to abandon the jeep. Rain lashed the car, high winds lifted the windscreen wipers from the glass, and brother and sister took it in turns to drive, bound by a single objective, and temporarily freed from all other concerns.

  To Strike’s grateful surprise, the crisis had revealed a different Lucy, just as illness had uncovered a different Joan. His sister was focused entirely on what needed to be done. Even her driving was different, without three noisy sons in the back seat, squabbling and thumping each other if the journey lasted longer than twenty minutes. He’d forgotten how efficient and practical Lucy could be, how patient, how resolute. Her calm determination only broke when they reached an impasse thirty miles from St. Mawes, where flooding and fallen trees had rendered the road impassable.

  While Lucy sat slumped at the steering wheel, sobbing with her face in her arms, Strike left the jeep to stand outside under a tree, where, sheltering from the perennial rain and taking the opportunity to smoke, he
called Dave Polworth, who was holding himself ready to assist them.

  “Yeah, we thought that’s where you’d have to stop,” said Polworth, when Strike had given him their position.

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Well, I can’t fucking do this alone, can I, Diddy? Should be with you in an hour. Stay in the car.”

  And an hour later, true to his word, Dave Polworth and five other men, two of them members of the local lifeguard, three old schoolfriends of Strike’s, emerged out of the gathering gloom. Dressed in waterproofs, and carrying waders ready for the worst passages, the men took charge of Strike and Lucy’s bags. Leaving the jeep parked up a side street, the party set off on foot.

  The end of Strike’s stump began to chafe long before they had walked for two hours solid over boggy ground and slippery tarmac. Soon, he had to abandon pride and allow two of his old schoolfriends to support him on either side. Darkness fell before they reached a couple of dinghies that Polworth had arranged to carry them over flooded fields. Using oars to alternately row and punt themselves along, they navigated with the aid of torches and compasses.

  Polworth had called on every friend and acquaintance he knew to arrange Strike and Lucy’s passage across the storm-ravaged peninsula. They covered several miles by tractor pulling a trailer, but at some passages were forced to wade through feet of icy flood water, the diminutive Lucy accepting a piggyback from the largest lifeboat man.

  Four hours after they’d abandoned the jeep, they reached St. Mawes. At the gate of Ted and Joan’s house, brother and sister hugged each of their escorts goodbye.

  “Don’t start,” said Polworth, as the weary and sore Strike tried to put into words what he felt to be incommunicable. “Get inside, or what the fuck was it all for?”

  Ted, whom they’d updated regularly through their journey, greeted them in pajamas at the back door, tears running down the deep folds in his craggy face.

  “I never thought you’d get here,” he kept saying, as he made them tea. “Never thought you’d make it.”

  “How is she?” asked the shivering Lucy, as the three of them sat in the kitchen, their hands around mugs of tea, eating toast.

  “She managed a bit of soup today,” said Ted. “She’s still… she sleeps a lot. But when she’s awake, she likes to talk. Oh, she’ll be over the moon to have you two here…”

  And so began days that had the same strange, outside-time quality of their journey. Initially Strike, the end of whose stump was rubbed raw after the painful exigencies of their journey, abandoned his prosthesis and navigated the small house by hopping and holding onto chair backs and walls. He read and responded to Robin’s emails about the agency’s work, but her news seemed to come from a place far more remote than London.

  Joan was now bird-like in her frailty, her bones visible through the translucent skin. She’d made it clear that she wished to die at home, not in the hospital in Truro, so she lay, tiny and shrunken, in the large double bed that dominated the bedroom, a bed that had been purchased to accommodate Ted’s bulk back when he’d been a tall, fit and muscular man, late of the Royal Military Police and subsequently a stalwart member of the local lifeguard.

  By day, Strike, Ted and Lucy took it in turns to sit beside Joan’s bed, because awake or asleep, she liked to know that one of them was nearby. Kerenza came morning and afternoon, and these were the only times when her family left the room. Joan was no longer able to swallow medication, so Kerenza began injecting the morphine through a syringe driver. Strike knew that she washed his aunt, and helped her perform still more private functions: the long convalescence after his amputation had left him under no illusion about what nurses dealt with. Kind, efficient and humane, Kerenza was one of the few people Strike welcomed gladly into the drafty kitchen.

  And still Joan clung on. Three days after their arrival, four: she slept almost constantly, but still she clung to life.

  “It’s you two,” said Ted. “She doesn’t want to go while you two are here.”

  Strike was coming to dread silences too large for human voices to fill. His nerves were stretched by the constant clinking of teaspoons in hot drinks made for something to do, by the tears shed by Uncle Ted when he thought nobody was looking, by the hushed inquiries of well-meaning neighbors.

  On the fifth day, Lucy’s husband Greg arrived with their three boys. Husband and wife had debated how sensible it was to take the boys out of school, and risk a journey that remained tricky, though the storms had at last subsided, but Lucy could bear their absence no longer. When Greg arrived, the boys came running out of the car toward their mother and the whole family clung to each other, while Strike and Ted looked on, united in their aloneness, unmarried man and soon-to-be widower. The boys were led up to Joan’s bedroom to see her, and she managed smiles for all of them. Even Luke was subdued afterward, and Jack cried.

  Both spare rooms were now needed to accommodate the new arrivals, so Strike returned, uncomplaining, to sleep on the sofa.

  “You look like shit,” Polworth informed him bluntly on day six, and indeed Strike, who’d woken every hour on the horsehair sofa, felt it. “Let’s get a pint.”

  “Can I come?” asked Jack hopefully. He was showing a tendency to hang around Strike rather than his father, while Lucy sat upstairs with Joan.

  “You can if your dad says it’s OK,” said Strike.

  Greg, who was currently walking around the garden with his phone clamped to his ear, trying to contribute to a conference call with his London office while Luke and Adam played football around him, agreed with a thumbs up.

  So Strike, Polworth and Jack walked down into St. Mawes together. Though the sky was dark and the roads still wet, the winds had at last dropped. As they reached the seafront, Strike’s mobile rang. He answered it, still walking.

  “Strike.”

  “It’s Shanker. Got your message.”

  “I left that ten days ago,” said Strike.

  “I’ve been busy, you ungrateful piece of shit.”

  “Sorry,” said Strike.

  He waved the other two on and paused again at the harbor wall, looking out at the green-gray sea and the hazy horizon.

  “I’ve nosed around a bit,” said Shanker, “and you’re not gonna find out ’oo that bint was, Bunsen. The one on the film. Nobody knows. She’ll ’ave done somethin’ fucking serious to get that, though.”

  “Deserved it, you reckon,” said Strike, as he surveyed the flat sea. It didn’t look capable, now, of the violence it had inflicted upon the town.

  “I’m not saying she deserved—I’m sayin’ even Mucky Ricci didn’t make ’an ’abit of that,” said Shanker impatiently. “Are you in solitary?”

  “What?”

  “Where the fuck are you? There’s no noise.”

  “In Cornwall.”

  For a moment, Strike expected Shanker to ask where that was. Shanker was almost impressively ignorant of the country that lay beyond London.

  “The fuck are you doin’ in Cornwall?”

  “My aunt’s dying.”

  “Oh shit,” said Shanker. “Sorry.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “’Oo?”

  “Ricci.”

  “’E’s in an ’ome. I told you.”

  “All right. Thanks for trying, Shanker. Appreciate it.”

  For perhaps the first time ever, it was Shanker who shouted at Strike to stop him hanging up.

  “Oi—oi!”

  “What?” said Strike, raising the mobile to his ear again.

  “Why d’you wanna know where ’e is? You ain’t gonna go talkin’ to Ricci. You’re done.”

  “I’m not done,” said Strike, eyes screwed up against the sea breeze. “I haven’t found out what happened to the doctor, yet.”

  “Fuck’s sake. D’you wanna get shot through the fuckin’ ’ead?”

  “See you, Shanker,” said Strike, and before his old friend could say anything else, he cut the call and muted his phone.


  Polworth was already at a table with Jack when Strike reached the Victory, two pints and a Coke on the table.

  “Just been telling Jack,” Polworth told Strike, as the detective sat down. “Haven’t I, eh?” he asked Jack, who nodded, beaming. “For when he’s older. This is his local.”

  “A pub three hundred miles from where he lives?”

  “He was born in Cornwall. He was just telling me.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Strike. “I forgot about that.”

  The family had been staying with Ted and Joan when Lucy went into labor a month early. Jack had been born in the same Truro hospital as Strike himself.

  “And you’re a Nancarrow on your mum’s side,” Polworth told Jack, who was greatly enjoying Polworth’s approval. “So that makes you a Cornishman, born and bred.”

  Polworth turned to Strike.

  “Who was the pearly king on the phone there? We could hear his cockney a mile off.”

  “Guy called Shanker,” said Strike. “I’ve told you about him. My mum scraped him off the street one night when he’d been stabbed. He adopted us.”

  Strike sipped his pint, wondering how Polworth and Shanker would get on, in the unlikely event of them ever meeting. He fancied they might end up punching each other. They seemed to Strike like pieces from entirely different jigsaw puzzles: no point of connection. At the mention of stabbing, Polworth had glanced at Jack, but lowering his pint Strike said,

  “Don’t worry about him. He wants to be a Red Cap, like me and Ted.”

  Jack beamed some more. He was having a great time.

  “Can I try some of that beer?” he asked his uncle.

  “Don’t push it,” said Strike.

  “Look at this,” said Polworth, pointing at a page in the newspaper he’d picked up. “Westminster trying to bully the Scots, the bast—”

  Strike cleared his throat. Jack giggled.

  “Sorry,” said Polworth. “But come on. Telling them they can’t keep the pound if they vote for independence? ’Course they’ll keep the pound. It’s in everyone’s interests…”

  He talked on for the next ten minutes about small nationalism, the obvious arguments for both Scottish and Cornish independence and the idiocy of those who opposed them, until Jack looked glazed and Strike, as a last resort, dragged the conversation back to football. Arsenal, as he’d foreseen, had lost to defending champions Bayern Munich, and he didn’t doubt the second leg would see them knocked out. He and Ted had watched the game together and done a good job of pretending they cared about the result. Strike permitted Polworth to pass censorious comment on the foul that had seen Szcz˛esny sent off, and politics was mercifully dropped.