Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  Strike thought about Polworth later that night, as he lay in the dark on the horsehair sofa again, unable to sleep. His tiredness now had a feverishness about it, exacerbated by the aching of his body, the perpetual strain of being here, in this overcrowded house, waiting for the tiny body upstairs to give up.

  In this near fever state, a jumble of ideas circulated in Strike’s mind. He thought of categories and boundaries, of those we want to create and enforce, and those we seek to escape or destroy. He remembered the fanatic glint in Polworth’s eye as he argued for a harder boundary between his county and the rest of England. He fell asleep thinking about the spurious groupings of astrology, and dreamed of Leda, laying out her tarot cards in the Norfolk commune of long ago.

  Strike was woken at five by his own aching body. Knowing that Ted would be awake soon, he got up and dressed, ready to take over the bedside vigil while his uncle ate breakfast.

  Sure enough, hearing Strike’s footstep on the upstairs landing, Ted emerged from the bedroom in his dressing gown.

  “Just made you tea,” whispered Strike. “It’s in the pot in the kitchen. I’ll sit with her for a bit.”

  “You’re a good lad,” whispered Ted, clapping Strike on the arm. “She’s asleep now, but I had a little chat with her at four. Most she’s said for days.”

  The talk with his wife seemed to have cheered him. He set off downstairs for his tea and Strike let himself quietly into the familiar room, taking up his position on the hard-backed chair beside Joan.

  The wallpaper hadn’t been changed, so far as Strike knew, since Ted and Joan had moved into the house, their only home since he’d left the army, in the town where both had grown up. Ted and Joan seemed not to notice that the house had grown shabby over the decades: for all that Joan was meticulous about cleanliness, she’d equipped and decorated the house once and seemed never to have seen any need to do so again. The paper was decorated with small bunches of purple flowers, and Strike could remember tracing geometric shapes between them with his forefinger as a small child, when he climbed into bed with Ted and Joan early in the morning, when both were still sleepy and he wanted breakfast and a trip to the beach.

  Twenty minutes after he’d sat down, Joan opened her eyes and looked at Strike so blankly that he thought she didn’t know him.

  “It’s me, Joan,” he said quietly, moving his chair a little closer to her bed and switching on the lamp, with its fringed shade. “Corm. Ted’s having breakfast.”

  Joan smiled. Her hand was a tiny claw, now. The fingers twitched. Strike took it into his own. She said something he couldn’t hear, and he lowered his large head to her face.

  “What did you say?”

  “… you’re… good man.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” muttered Strike.

  He held her hand in a light clasp, scared of putting pressure on it. The arcus senilis outlining the irises of her pale eyes made the blue seem more faded than ever. He thought of all the times he could have visited, and hadn’t. All those missed opportunities to call. All those times he’d forgotten her birthday.

  “… helping people…”

  She peered up at him and then, making a supreme effort, she whispered,

  “I’m proud of you.”

  He wanted to speak, but something was blocking his throat. After a few seconds, he saw her eyelids drooping.

  “I love you, Joan.”

  The words came out so hoarsely they were almost inaudible, but he thought she smiled as she sank back into a sleep from which she was never to wake.

  45

  Of auncient time there was a springing well,

  From which fast trickled forth a siluer flood,

  Full of great vertues, and for med’cine good.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Robin was still at the office when Strike called that evening with the news that Joan had died.

  “I’m sorry about this, but I think I’m going to have to stay down here until we get this funeral sorted,” said Strike. “There’s a lot to do and Ted’s in pieces.”

  He’d just shared Joan’s plan for her funeral with Ted and Lucy, thereby reducing both of them to sobs at the kitchen table. Ted’s tears were for the poignancy of his wife making arrangements for his own comfort and relief, as she’d done for the fifty years of their marriage, and for the news that she’d wanted, at the end, to enter the sea and wait for him there. In Lucy’s case, the sobs were for the lost possibility of a grave she’d hoped to visit and tend. Lucy filled her days with voluntary obligations: they gave purpose and form to a life she was determined would never be like her flighty biological mother’s.

  “No problem,” Robin reassured him. “We’re coping fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Completely sure.”

  “There’s a backlog at the crematorium, because of the floods,” said Strike. “Funeral’s penciled in for March the third.”

  This was the day Robin was planning to spend in Leamington Spa, so she could attend the opening of Paul Satchwell’s exhibition. She didn’t tell Strike this: she could tell that he had limited mental capacity right now for anything other than Joan, and his life in Cornwall.

  “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry, Cormoran,” she added.

  “Thanks,” said Strike. “I’d forgotten what it’s like. Planning a funeral. I’ve already had to referee one argument.”

  After he’d shared Joan’s plans for her send-off, and Lucy and Ted had mopped up their tears, Ted had suggested they ask mourners for donations to the Macmillan Cancer Support in lieu of flowers.

  “… but Lucy says Joan would’ve wanted flowers,” Strike told Robin. “I’ve suggested we say either. Ted says that’ll mean people do both and they can’t afford it, but fuck it. Lucy’s right. Joan would want flowers, and as many as possible. That’s how she always judged other people’s funerals.”

  After they’d bidden each other goodbye, Robin sat for a while at the partners’ desk, wondering whether it would be appropriate for the agency to send flowers to Strike’s aunt’s funeral. She’d never met Joan: she worried that it would seem odd, or intrusive, to send condolences. She remembered how, when she’d offered to pick Strike up from Joan’s house in St. Mawes the previous summer, he’d quickly cut her off, erecting, as ever, a firm boundary between Robin and his personal life.

  Yawning, Robin shut down the computer, closed the completed file on Postcard, which she’d been updating, got to her feet and went to get her coat. At the outer door she stopped, her reflection blank-faced in the dark glass. Then, as though responding to an unheard command, she returned to the inner office, switched the computer back on and, before she could second-guess herself, ordered a sheaf of dark pink roses to be delivered to St. Mawes church on March the third, with the message “With deepest sympathy from Robin, Sam, Andy, Saul and Pat.”

  Robin spent the rest of the month working without respite. She conducted a final meeting with the persecuted weatherman and his wife, in which she revealed Postcard’s identity, gave them Postcard’s real name and address, and took their final payment. She then had Pat contact their waiting list client, the commodities broker who suspected her husband of sleeping with their nanny and, next day, welcomed the woman to the office to take down her details and receive a down payment.

  The commodities broker didn’t bother to hide her disappointment that she was meeting Robin instead of Strike. She was a thin, colorless blonde of forty-two, whose over-highlighted hair had the texture, close up, of fine wire. Robin found her unlikable until the end of the interview, when she talked about her husband, whose business had gone bankrupt and who now worked from home, giving him many long hours alone with the nanny.

  “Fourteen years,” said the broker. “Fourteen years, three kids and now…”

  She hid her eyes behind her shaking hands and Robin, who’d been with Matthew since she was at school, felt, in spite of the woman’s britt
le façade, an unexpected glow of sympathy.

  After the new client had left, Robin called Morris into the office and gave him the job of the first day’s surveillance of the nanny.

  “Okey-doke,” he said. “Hey, what d’you say we call the client ‘RB’?”

  “What does that stand for?” Robin asked.

  “Rich Bitch,” said Morris, grinning. “She’s loaded.”

  “No,” said Robin, unsmiling.

  “Whoops,” said Morris, eyebrows raised. “Feminist alert?”

  “Something like that.”

  “OK, how about—?”

  “We’ll call her Mrs. Smith, after the street they live on,” said Robin coldly.

  Over the next few days, Robin took her turn tailing the nanny, a glossy-haired brunette who somewhat reminded her of Strike’s ex-girlfriend Lorelei. The commodities broker’s children certainly seemed to adore their nanny, and so, Robin feared, did their father. While he didn’t once touch the nanny in any amorous way, he showed every sign of a man completely smitten: mirroring her body language, laughing excessively at her jokes, and hurrying to open doors and gates for her.

  A couple of nights later, Robin dozed off at the wheel for a few seconds while driving toward Elinor Dean’s house in Stoke Newington. Jerking awake, she immediately turned on the radio and opened the window, so that her eyes streamed with the cold, sooty night air, but the incident scared her. Over the next few days, she increased her caffeine consumption in an effort to keep awake. This made her slightly jittery, and she found it hard to sleep even on the rare occasions the chance presented itself.

  Robin had always been as careful with the firm’s money as Strike himself, treating every penny spent as though it were to be deducted from her own take-home pay. The habit of parsimony had stayed with her, even though the agency’s survival no longer depended on extracting money from clients before the final demands came in. Robin was well aware that Strike took very little money out of the business for his own needs, preferring to plow profits back into the agency. He continued to live a Spartan existence in the two and a half rooms over the office, and there were months when she, the salaried partner, took home more pay than the senior partner and founder of the firm.

  All of this added to her feeling of guilt at booking herself into a Premier Inn in Leamington Spa on the Sunday night before Satchwell’s art exhibition. The town was only a two-hour drive away; Robin knew she could have got up early on Monday morning instead of sleeping over in the town. However, she was so exhausted, she feared dozing off at the wheel again.

  She justified the hotel room to herself by leaving twenty-four hours ahead of the exhibition’s opening, thus giving herself time to take a look at the church where Margot had allegedly been sighted a week after her disappearance. She also packed photocopies of all the pages of Talbot’s horoscope notes that mentioned Paul Satchwell, with the intention of studying them in the quiet of her hotel room. To these, she added a second-hand copy of Evangeline Adams’s Your Place in the Sun, a pack of unopened tarot cards and a copy of The Book of Thoth. She hadn’t told Strike she’d bought any of these items and didn’t intend claiming expenses for them.

  Much as she loved London, Yorkshire-born Robin sometimes pined for trees, moors and hills. Her drive up the nondescript M40, past hamlets and villages with archaic names like Middleton Cheney, Temple Herdewyke and Bishop’s Itchington, gave her glimpses of flat green fields. The cool, damp day bore a welcome whiff of spring on the air, and in the breaks between scudding white clouds, hard, bright sunshine filled the old Land Rover with a light that made a pale gray ghost of Robin’s reflection in the dusty window beside her. She really needed to clean the car: in fact, there were sundry small, personal chores piling up while she worked nonstop for the agency, such as ringing her mother, whose calls she’d been avoiding, and her lawyer, who’d left a message about the upcoming mediation, not to mention plucking her eyebrows, buying herself a new pair of flat shoes and sorting out a bank transfer to Max, covering her half of the council tax.

  As the hedgerows flashed by, Robin consciously turned her thoughts away from these depressing mundanities to Paul Satchwell. She doubted she’d find him in Leamington Spa, being unable to imagine why the seventy-five-year-old would want to leave his home on Kos merely to visit the provincial art gallery. Satchwell had probably sent his paintings over from Greece, or else given permission for them to be exhibited. Why would he leave what Robin imagined as a dazzling white-walled villa, an artist’s studio set among olive groves? Her plan was to pretend an interest in buying or commissioning one of his paintings, so as to get his home address. For a moment or two, she indulged herself in a little fantasy of flying out to Greece with Strike, to interrogate the old artist. She imagined the oven-blast of heat that would hit them on leaving the plane in Athens, and saw herself in a dress and sandals, heading up a dusty track to Satchwell’s front door. But when her imagination showed her Strike in shorts, with the metal rod of his prosthetic leg on display, she felt suddenly embarrassed by her own imaginings, and closed the little fantasy down before it took her to the beach, or the hotel.

  On the outskirts of Leamington Spa, Robin followed the sign to All Saints church, which she knew from her research was the only possible candidate for the place where Charlie Ramage had seen Margot. Janice had mentioned a “big church”; All Saints was a tourist attraction due to its size. None of the other churches in Leamington Spa had graveyards attached to them. Moreover, All Saints was situated directly on the route of anyone traveling north from London. Although Robin found it hard to understand why Margot would have been browsing headstones in Leamington Spa, while her husband begged for information of her whereabouts in the national press and her Leamington-born lover remained in London, she had a strange feeling that seeing the church for herself would give her a better idea as to whether Margot had ever been there. The missing doctor was becoming very real to Robin.

  She managed to secure a parking space in Priory Terrace, right beside the church, and set off on foot around the perimeter, marveling at the sheer scale of the place. It was a staggering size for a relatively small town; in fact, it looked more like a cathedral, with its long, arched windows. Turning right into Church Street, she noted the further coincidence of the street name being so similar to Margot’s home address. On the right, a low wall topped with railings provided an ideal spot for a motorbike rider to park, and enjoy a cup of tea from his Thermos, looking at the graveyard.

  Except that there was no graveyard. Robin came to an abrupt standstill. She could only see two tombs, raised stone caskets whose inscriptions had been eroded. Otherwise, there was simply a wide stretch of grass intersected with two footpaths.

  “Bomb fell on it.”

  A cheery-looking mother was walking toward Robin, pushing a double pushchair containing sleeping boy twins. She’d correctly interpreted Robin’s sudden halt.

  “Really?” said Robin.

  “Yeah, in 1940,” said the woman, slowing down. “Luftwaffe.”

  “Wow. Awful,” said Robin, imagining the smashed earth, the broken tombstones and, perhaps, fragments of coffin and bone.

  “Yeah—but they missed them two,” said the woman, pointing at the aged tombs standing in the shadow of a yew tree. One of the twin toddlers gave a little stretch in his sleep and his eyelids flickered. With a comical grimace at Robin, the mother took off again at a brisk walk.

  Robin walked into the enclosed area that had once been a graveyard, looking around and wondering what to make of Ramage’s story, now. There hadn’t been a graveyard here in 1974, when he claimed to have seen Margot browsing among tombstones. Or had an intact cemetery been assumed by Janice Beattie, when she heard that Margot was looking at graves? Robin turned to look at the two surviving tombs. Certainly, if Margot had been examining these, she’d have been brought within feet of a motorcyclist parked beside the church.

  Robin placed her hands on the cold black bars that kept the curious from
actually touching the old tombs, and examined them. What could have drawn Margot to them? The inscriptions etched on the mossy stone were almost illegible. Robin tilted her head, trying to make them out.

  Was she seeing things? Did one of the words say “Virgo,” or had she spent too much time dwelling on Talbot’s horoscope notes? Yet the more she studied it, the more like “Virgo” the name looked.

  Robin associated that star sign with two people, these days: her estranged husband, Matthew, and Dorothy Oakden, the widowed practice secretary at Margot’s old place of work. Robin had become so adept at reading Talbot’s horoscope notes, that she routinely heard “Dorothy” in her head when looking at the glyph for Virgo. Now she took out her phone, looked up the tomb and felt mildly reassured to discover that she wasn’t seeing things: this was the last resting place of one James Virgo Dunn.

  But why should it have been of interest to Margot? Robin scrolled down a genealogy page for the Virgos and the Dunns and learned that the man whose bones now lay in dust a few feet from her had been born in Jamaica, where he’d been the owner of forty-six slaves.

  “No need to feel sorry for you, then,” Robin muttered, returning her phone to her pocket, and she walked on around the perimeter to the front of the church, until she reached the great oak and iron double front doors. As she headed up the stone steps toward them, she heard the low hum of a hymn. Of course: it was Sunday morning.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Robin opened the door as quietly as possible and peered inside. An immense, somber space was revealed: chilly parabolas of gray stone, a hundred feet of cold air between congregation and ceiling. Doubtless a church of this gigantic size had been deemed necessary back in Regency times, when people had flocked to the spa town to drink its waters, but the modern congregation didn’t come close to filling it. A black-robed verger looked around at her; Robin smiled apologetically, quietly closed the door and returned to the pavement, where a large modern steel sculpture, part squiggle, part coil, was evidently supposed to represent the medicinal spring around which the town had been built.