Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “I’ve been looking back through this.”

  “Think I missed something, do you?” said Strike, through a mouthful of bread.

  “No, I—”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Perfectly possible. Nobody’s infallible.”

  Sunshine was slowly making its way into Frith Street now, and the pages of the old notebook glowed yellow as Robin opened it.

  “Well, it’s about Scorpio. You remember Scorpio?”

  “The person whose death Margot might have been worried about?”

  “Exactly. You thought Scorpio might be Steve Douthwaite’s married girlfriend, who killed herself.”

  “I’m open to other theories,” said Strike. His sandwich finished, he brushed off his hands and took out his cigarettes. “The notes ask whether Aquarius confronted Pisces, don’t they? Which I assumed meant Margot confronted Douthwaite.”

  In spite of his neutral tone, Strike resented remembering these star signs. The laborious and ultimately unrewarding task of working out which suspects and witnesses were represented by each astrological glyph had been far from his favorite bit of research.

  “Well,” said Robin, taking out two folded photocopies, which she’d been keeping in the notebook, “I’ve been wondering… look at these.”

  She passed the two documents to Strike, who opened them and saw copies of two birth certificates, one for Olive Satchwell, the other for Blanche Satchwell.

  “Olive was Satchwell’s mother,” said Robin, as Strike, smoking, examined the documents. “And Blanche was his sister, who died aged ten—possibly with a pillow over her face.”

  “If you’re expecting me to deduce their star signs from these birthdays,” said Strike, “I haven’t memorized the whole zodiac.”

  “Blanche was born on the twenty-fifth of October, which makes her a Scorpio,” said Robin. “Olive was born on the twenty-ninth of March. Under the traditional system, she’d be Aries, like Satchwell…”

  To Strike’s surprise, Robin now took out a copy of Astrology 14 by Steven Schmidt.

  “It was quite hard to track this down. It’s been out of print for ages.”

  “A masterwork like that? You amaze me,” said Strike, watching Robin turn to a page listing the dates of revised signs according to Schmidt. Robin smiled, but refusing to be deflected said,

  “Look here. By Schmidt’s system, Satchwell’s mother was a Pisces.”

  “We’re mixing up the two systems now, are we?” asked Strike.

  “Well, Talbot did,” Robin pointed out. “He decided Irene and Roy should be given their Schmidt signs, but other people were allowed to keep the traditional ones.”

  “But,” said Strike, well aware that he was trying to impose logic on what was essentially illogical, “Talbot made massive, sweeping assumptions on the basis of people’s original signs. Brenner was ruled out as a suspect solely because he was—”

  “—Libra, yes,” said Robin.

  “Well, what happens to Janice being psychic and the Essex Butcher being a Capricorn if all the dates start sliding around?”

  “Wherever there was a discrepancy between the traditional sign and Schmidt sign, he seems to have gone with the sign he thought suited the person best.”

  “Which makes a mockery of the whole business. And also,” said Strike, “calls all my identifications of signs and suspects into question.”

  “I know,” said Robin. “Even Talbot seems to have got very stressed trying to work across both systems, which is when he began concentrating mainly on asteroids and the tarot.”

  “OK,” said Strike, blowing smoke away from her, “go on with what you were saying—if Satchwell’s sister was a Scorpio, and her mother was Pisces… remind me,” said Strike, “exactly what that passage about Scorpio says?”

  Robin flicked backward through Talbot’s notebook until she found the passage decorated with doodles of the crab, the fish, the scorpion, the fish-tailed goat and the water-bearer’s urn.

  “‘Aquarius worried about how Scorpio died, question mark,’” she read aloud. “And—written in capitals—‘SCHMIDT AGREES WITH ADAMS.’ Then, ‘Did Aquarius challenge Pisces about Scorpio? Was Cancer there, did Cancer witness? Cancer is kind, instinct is to protect,’ then, in capitals, ‘INTERVIEW AGAIN. Scorpio and Aquarius connected, water, water, also Cancer, and Capricorn,’ in capitals, ‘HAS A FISH’S TAIL.’”

  Brow furrowed, Strike said:

  “We’re assuming Cancer still means Janice, right?”

  “Well, Janice and Cynthia are the only two Cancerians connected with the case, and Janice seems to fit this better,” said Robin. “Let’s say Margot decided she was going to act on her suspicion that Satchwell’s mother killed his sister. If she phoned Olive from the surgery, Janice might have overheard a phone call, mightn’t she? And if Janice knew the Satchwell family, or was involved with them in some way we don’t know about, she mightn’t have wanted to tell the police what she’d overheard, for fear of incriminating Olive.”

  “Why would Margot have waited years to check out her suspicions about the pillow dream?” asked Strike, but before Robin could supply an answer, he did it himself. “Of course, people do sometimes take years to decide what action to take on something like that. Or to muster up the courage to do it.”

  He handed Robin back the two photocopies.

  “Well, if that’s the story behind the Scorpio business, Satchwell’s still a prime suspect.”

  “I never got his address in Greece,” said Robin guiltily.

  “We’ll get at him through his surviving sister if we have to.”

  Strike took a swig of coffee then, slightly against his better judgment, asked,

  “What did you say about asteroids?”

  Robin flicked further on through the notebook, to show Strike the page she’d pored over in Leamington Spa, which she thought of as the “horns page.”

  “As the case went on, he seemed to give up on normal astrology. I think Schmidt had confused him so much he couldn’t work it any more, so he starts inventing his own system. He’s calculated the asteroids’ positions for the evening Margot disappeared. See here—”

  Robin was pointing to the symbol …

  “That symbol stands for the asteroid Pallas Athena—remember that ugly clock at the Phippses’ house?—and he’s using it to mean Margot. The asteroid Pallas Athena was in the tenth house of the zodiac on the night Margot disappeared, and the tenth house is ruled by Capricorn. It’s also supposed to govern businesses, upper classes and upper floors.”

  “You think Margot’s still in someone’s attic?”

  Robin smiled, but refused to be deflected.

  “And see here…” She angled the notebook toward him, “assuming the other asteroids also refer to living people, we’ve got Ceres, Juno and Vesta.

  “I think he’s using Vesta, ‘keeper of the hearth,’ to represent Cynthia. Vesta was in the seventh house, which is the house of marriage. Talbot’s written ‘FITS’—so I think he’s saying Cynthia was in Margot’s marital home, Broom House.

  “I think ‘nurturing, protective Ceres’ sounds like Janice again. She’s in the twelfth house, and so’s Juno, who’s associated with ‘wives and infidelity,’ which might take us back to Joanna Hammond, Douthwaite’s married girlfriend…”

  “What’s the twelfth house represent?”

  “Enemies, secrets, sorrows and undoing.”

  Strike looked at her, eyebrows raised. He’d indulged Robin because it was sunny, and he was enjoying her company, but his tolerance for astrology was now wearing very thin.

  “It’s also Pisces’ house,” said Robin, “which is Douthwaite’s sign, so maybe—”

  “You think Janice and Joanna Hammond were both in Douthwaite’s flat when Margot was abducted, do you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Because that’d be tricky, given that Joanna Hammond died weeks before Margot disappeared. Or are you suggesting her ghost was haunting Douthwaite?”

/>   “All right, I know it might mean nothing,” said Robin, half-laughing as she plowed on, “but Talbot’s written something else here: ‘Ceres denies contact with Juno. Could Cetus be right?’”

  She was pointing at the whale symbol representing Irene.

  “I find it hard to imagine Irene Hickson being right about very much,” said Strike. He pulled the leather notebook toward him to look more closely at Talbot’s small, obsessive writing, then pushed the notes away again with a slightly impatient shrug. “Look, it’s easy to get sucked into this stuff. When I was going through the notes I started making connections while I was trying to follow his train of thought, but he was ill, wasn’t he? Nothing leads anywhere concrete.”

  “I was just intrigued by that ‘Could Cetus be right?’ because Talbot mistrusted Irene from the start, didn’t he? Then he starts wondering whether she could have been right about… about something connected to enemies, secrets and undoing…”

  “If we ever find out what happened to Margot Bamborough,” said Strike, “I’ll bet you a hundred quid you’ll be able to make equally strong cases for Talbot’s occult stuff being bang on the money, and completely off beam. You can always stretch this symbolic stuff to fit the facts. One of my mother’s friends used to guess everyone’s star signs and she was right every single time.”

  “She was?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Strike. “Because even when she was wrong, she was right. Turned out they had a load of planets in that sign or, I dunno, the midwife who delivered them was that sign. Or their dog.”

  “All right,” said Robin, equably. She’d expected Strike’s skepticism, after all, and now put both the leather-bound notebook and Astrology 14 back into her bag. “I know it might mean nothing at all, I’m only—”

  “If you want to go and see Irene Hickson again, be my guest. Tell her Talbot thought she might’ve had profound insight into something connected to asteroids and—I dunno—cheese—”

  “The twelfth house doesn’t govern cheese,” said Robin, trying to look severe.

  “What number’s the house of dairy?”

  “Oh, bugger off,” she said, laughing against her will.

  Robin’s mobile vibrated in her pocket, and she pulled it out. A text had just arrived.

  Hi Robin, if you want I can talk now? I’ve just agreed to work a later shift, so I’m not needed at work for a few hours. Otherwise it’ll have to be after 8 tonight—Amanda

  “Amanda White,” she told Strike. “She wants to talk now.”

  “Works for me,” said Strike, relieved to be back on firm investigative ground. Liar or not, Amanda White would at least be talking about an actual woman at a real window.

  Robin pressed Amanda’s number, switched the mobile to speaker­phone and laid it on the table between her and Strike.

  “Hi,” said a confident female voice, with a hint of North London. “Is that Robin?”

  “Yes,” said Robin, “and I’m with Cormoran.”

  “Morning,” said Strike.

  “Oh, it’s you, is it?” said Amanda, sounding delighted. “I am honored. I’ve been dealing with your assistant.”

  “She’s actually my partner,” said Strike.

  “Really? Business, or the other?” said Amanda.

  “Business,” said Strike, not looking at Robin. “I understand Robin’s been talking to you about what you saw on the night Margot Bamborough disappeared?”

  “That’s right,” said Amanda.

  “Would you mind if we take a recording of this interview?”

  “No, I s’pose not,” said Amanda. “I mean, I want to do the right thing, although I won’t pretend it hasn’t been a bit of a dilemma, because it was really stressful, last time. Journalists, two police interviews, and I was only fourteen. But I’ve always been a stubborn girl, haha, and I stuck to my guns…”

  So Amanda told the story with which Strike and Robin were already familiar: of the rain, and the angry schoolfriend, and the upper window, and the retrospective recognition of Margot, when Amanda saw her picture in the paper. Strike asked a couple of questions, but he could tell that nothing would ever change Amanda’s story. Whether she truly believed she’d seen Margot Bamborough at the window that night or not, she was evidently determined never to relinquish her association with the forty-year-old mystery.

  “… and I suppose I’ve been haunted ever since by the idea that I didn’t do anything, but I was fourteen and it only hit me later, I could’ve been the one to save her,” she ended the story.

  “Well,” said Robin, as Strike nodded at her, signaling he had everything he wanted, “thank you so much for talking to us, Amanda. I really—”

  “There’s something else, before you go,” said Amanda. “Wait until you hear this. It’s just an amazing coincidence, and I don’t think even the police know about this, because they’re both dead.”

  “Who’re dead?” asked Robin, while Strike lit himself another cigarette.

  “Well,” said Amanda, “how’s this for strange? My last job, this young girl at the office’s great-aunt—”

  Strike rolled his eyes.

  “—was in a hospice with, guess who?”

  “I don’t know,” said Robin politely.

  “Violet Cooper,” said Amanda. “You probably don’t—”

  “Dennis Creed’s landlady,” said Robin.

  “Exactly!” said Amanda, sounding pleased that Robin appreciated the significance of her story. “So, anyway, isn’t that just weird, that I saw Margot at that window, and then, all those years later, I work with someone whose relative met Vi Cooper? Only she was calling herself something different by then, because people hated her.”

  “That is a coincidence,” said Robin, making sure not to look at Strike. “Well, thank—”

  “That’s not all!” said Amanda, laughing. “No, there’s more to it than that! So, this girl’s great-aunt said Vi told her she wrote to Creed, once, asking if he’d killed Margot Bamborough.”

  Amanda paused, clearly wanting a response, so Robin, who’d already read about this in The Demon of Paradise Park, said,

  “Wow.”

  “I know,” said Amanda. “And apparently, Vi said—this is on her deathbed, so you know, she was telling the truth, because you would, wouldn’t you?—Vi said the letter she got back, said he had killed her.”

  “Really?” said Robin. “I thought the letter—”

  “No, but this is direct from Violet,” Amanda said, while Strike rolled his eyes again, “and she said, he definitely did, he as good as told her so. He said it in a way only she’d understand, but she knew exactly what he meant.

  “Crazy, though, isn’t it? I see Margot at the window, and then, years later—”

  “Amazing,” said Robin. “Well, thanks very much for your time, Amanda, this has been really… er…”

  It took Robin another couple of minutes, and much more insincere gratitude, to get Amanda off the line.

  “What d’you think?” Robin asked Strike, when at last she’d succeeded in getting rid of Amanda.

  He pointed a finger at the sky.

  “What?” said Robin, looking up into the blue haze.

  “If you look carefully,” said Strike, “you might just see an asteroid passing through the house of bollocks.”

  50

  Aye me (said she) where am I, or with whom?

  Emong the liuing, or emong the dead?

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Agency work unconnected with the Bamborough case consumed Strike for the next few days. His first attempt to surprise Nurse Janice Beattie at home was fruitless. He left Nightingale Grove, a nondescript street that lay hard against the Southeastern railway line, without receiving any answer to his knock.

  His second attempt, on the following Wednesday, was made on a breezy afternoon that kept threatening showers. Strike approached Janice’s house from Hither Green station, along a pavement bordered to the right with railings an
d hedge, separating the road from the rail tracks. He was thinking about Robin as he trudged along, smoking, because she’d just turned down the opportunity of joining him to interview Janice, saying that there was “something else” she needed to do, but not specifying what that something was. Strike thought he’d detected a trace of caginess, almost amounting to defensiveness, in Robin’s response to the suggestion of a joint interview, where usually there’d have been only disappointment.

  Since she’d left Matthew, Strike had become used to more ease and openness between him and Robin, so this refusal, coupled with her tone and lack of an explanation, made him curious. While there were naturally matters he might not have expected her to tell him about—trips to the gynecologist sprang to mind—he would have expected her to say “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” at least.

  The sky darkened as Strike approached Janice’s house, which was considerably smaller than Irene Hickson’s. It stood in a terrace. Net curtains hung at all the windows, and the front door was dark red. Strike didn’t immediately register the fact that a light was shining from behind the net curtains at the sitting-room window until he was halfway across the road. When he realized that his quarry must be in, however, he successfully pushed all thoughts about his business partner out of his mind, crossed the road at a quicker pace and knocked firmly on the front door. As he stood waiting, he heard the muffled sounds of a TV on high volume through the glass of the downstairs window. He was just considering knocking again, in case Janice hadn’t heard the first time, when the door opened.

  In contrast to the last time they’d met, the nurse, who was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, looked shocked and none too pleased to see Strike. From behind her, two female American voices rang out from the out-of-sight TV: “So you love the bling?” “I love the bling!”

  “Er—’ave I missed a message, or—?”

  “Sorry for the lack of warning,” said Strike insincerely, “but as I was in the area, I wondered whether you could give me a couple of minutes?”

  Janice glanced back over her shoulder. A camp male voice was now saying, “The dress that Kelly is in love with is a one-of-a-kind runway sample…”