Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  Tucker faltered. Lauren put a plump hand over her grandfather’s, which had swollen, purple joints.

  “—add all that time together,” Tucker croaked, his eyes filmy with tears, “and that’s what I owe her, to find out what happened to her. That’s all I’m doing. Giving her her due.”

  Robin felt tears prickle behind her own eyelids.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, well,” said Tucker, wiping his eyes and nose roughly on the sleeve of his windcheater. He now took the top sheet of writing and thrust it at Robin. “There you are. That shows you what we’re up against.”

  Robin took the paper, on which was written two short paragraphs in clear, slanting writing, every letter separate and distinct, and began to read.

  She attempts to control through words and sometimes with flattery. Tells me how clever I am, then talks about “treatment.” The strategy is laughably transparent. Her “qualifications” and her “training” are, compared to my self-knowledge, my self-awareness, the flicker of a damp match beside the light of the sun.

  She promises a diagnosis of madness will mean gentler treatment for me. This she tells me between screams, as I whip her face and breasts. Bleeding, she begs me to see that she could be of use to me. Would testify for me. Her arrogance and her thirst for dominance have been fanned by the societal approval she gained from the position of “doctor.” Even chained, she believes herself superior. This belief will be corrected.

  “You see?” said Tucker in a fierce whisper. “He had Margot Bam­borough chained in his basement. He’s enjoying writing about it, reliving it. But the psychiatrists didn’t think it was an admis­sion, they reckoned Creed was just churning out these bits of writing to try and draw more attention to himself. They said it was all a game to try and get more interviews, because he liked pitting his wits against the police, and reading about himself in the press, seeing himself on the news. They said that was just a bit of fantasy, and that taking it serious would give Creed what he wanted, because talking about it would turn him on.”

  “Gross,” said Lauren, under her breath.

  “But my warder mate said—because you know, there was three women they thought Creed had done whose bodies were never found: my Lou, Kara Wolfson and Margot Bamborough—and my warder mate said, it was the doctor he really liked being asked about. Creed likes high-status people, see. He thinks he could’ve been the boss of some multinational, or some professor or something, if he hadn’t of turned to killing. My mate told me all this. He said, Creed sees himself on that sort of level, you know, just in a different field.”

  Robin said nothing. The impact of what she’d just read wasn’t easily dispelled. Margot Bamborough had become real to Robin, and she’d just been forced to imagine her, brutalized and bleeding, attempting to persuade a psychopath to spare her life.

  “Creed got transferred to Belmarsh in ’83,” Tucker continued, patting the papers still laid in front of him, and Robin forced herself to concentrate, “and they started drugging him so he couldn’t get a—you know, couldn’t maintain…

  “And that’s when I got permission to write to him, and have him write back to me. Ever since he was convicted, I’d been lobbying the authorities to let me question him directly, and let him write back. I wore them down in the end. I had to swear I’d never publicize what he wrote me, or give the letter to the press, but I’m the only member of a victim’s family he’s ever been allowed direct contact with… and there,” he said, turning the next two sheets of paper toward Robin. “That’s what I got back.”

  The letter was written on prison writing paper. There was no “Dear Mr. Tucker.”

  Your letter reached me three weeks ago, but I was placed in solitary confinement shortly afterward and deprived of writing materials, so have been unable to answer. Ordinarily I’m not permitted to respond to inquiries like yours, but I gather your persistence has worn the authorities down. Unlikely as it may seem, I admire you for this, Mr. Tucker. Resilience in the face of adversity is one of my own defining characteristics.

  During my three weeks of enforced solitude, I’ve wondered how I could possibly explain to you what not one man in ten thousand might hope to understand. Although you think I must be able to recall the names, faces and personalities of my various “victims,” my memory shows me only the many-limbed, many-breasted monster with whom I cavorted, a foul-smelling thing that gave tongue to pain and misery. Ultimately, my monster was never much of a companion, though there was fascination in its contortions. Given sufficient stimulus, it could be raised to an ecstasy of pain, and then it knew it lived, and stood tremulously on the edge of the abyss, begging, screaming, pleading for mercy.

  How many times did the monster die, then live again? Too few to satisfy me. Even though its face and voice mutated, its reactions never varied. Richard Merridan, my old psychiatrist, gave what possessed me other names, but the truth is that I was in the grip of a divine frenzy.

  Colleagues of Merridan’s disputed his conclusion that I’m sane. Regrettably, their opinions were dismissed by the judge. In conclusion: I might have killed your daughter, or I might not. Either I did so in the grip of some madness which still occludes my memory, and which a more skillful doctor might yet penetrate, or I never met her, and little Louise is out there somewhere, laughing at her daddy’s attempts to find her, or perhaps enduring a different hell to the one in which my monster lived.

  Doubtless the additional psychiatric support available at Broadmoor would help me recover as much memory as possible. For their own inscrutable reasons, however, the authorities prefer to keep me here at Belmarsh. Only this morning I was threatened under the noses of warders. Regardless of the obvious fact that a cachet attaches to anyone who attacks me, I’m exposed, daily, to intimidation and physical danger. How anyone expects me to regain sufficient mental health to assist police further is a mystery.

  Exceptional people ought to be studied only by those who can appreciate them. Rudimentary analysis, such as I’ve been subjected to thus far, merely entrenches my inability to recollect all that I did. Maybe you, Mr. Tucker, can help me. Until I’m in a hospital environment where I can be given the assistance I require, what incentive do I have to dredge my fragmented memory for details that may help you discover what happened to your daughter? My safety is being compromised on a daily basis. My mental faculties are being degraded.

  You will naturally be disappointed not to receive confirmation of what happened to Louise. Be assured that, when the frenzy is not upon me, I am not devoid of human sympathy. Even my worst critics concede that I actually understand others much more easily than they understand me! For instance, I can appreciate what it would mean to you to recover Louise’s body and give her the funeral you so desire. On the other hand, my small store of human empathy is being rapidly depleted by the conditions in which I am currently living. Recovery from the last attack upon me, which nearly removed my eye, was delayed due to the refusal of the authorities to let me attend a civilian hospital. “Evil men forfeit the right to fair treatment!” Such seems to be the public’s view. However, brutality breeds brutality. Even the most dim-witted psychiatrists agree, there.

  Do you have a merciful soul, Mr. Tucker? If so, the first letter you’ll write upon receiving this will be to the authorities, requesting that the remainder of my sentence will be served in Broadmoor, where the secrets my unruly memory still holds may be coaxed to the surface at last.

  Ever yours,

  Dennis

  Robin finished reading, and looked up.

  “You can’t see it, can you?” said Tucker, with an oddly hungry expression. “No, of course you can’t. It isn’t obvious. I didn’t see it myself, at first. Nor did the prison authorities. They were too busy warning me they weren’t going to transfer him to Broadmoor, so I needn’t ask.”

  He jabbed the bottom of the letter with a yellow-nailed finger.

  “The clue’s there. Last line. First letter. My sentence
. Put together the first letter of every sentence, and see what you get.”

  Robin did as she was bidden.

  “Y—O—U—R—D—A—U—G—H—T—E—R…” Robin read out loud, until, fearing where the message was going to end, she fell silent, until she reached the last sentence, when the taste of milky coffee seemed to turn rancid in her mouth, and she said, “Oh God.”

  “What’s it say?” asked Lauren, frowning and straining to see.

  “Never you mind,” said Tucker shortly, taking the letter back. “There you are,” he told Robin, folding up the papers and shoving them back into his inside pocket. “Now you see what he is. He killed Lou like he killed your doctor and he’s gloating about it.”

  Before Robin could say anything, Tucker spun his next bit of paper to face her, and she saw a photocopied map of Islington, with a circle inked around what looked like a large house.

  “Now,” he said, “there are two places nobody’s ever looked, where I think he might’ve hid bodies. I’ve been back over everywhere what had a connection with him, kid or adult. Police checked all the obvious, flats he’d lived and that, but never bothered with these.

  “When Lou disappeared in November ’72, he wouldn’t’ve been able to bury her in Epping Forest, because—”

  “They’d just found Vera Kenny’s body there,” said Robin.

  Tucker looked grudgingly impressed.

  “You do your homework at that agency, don’t you? Yeah, exactly. There was still a police presence in the forest at the time.

  “But see that, there?” said Tucker, tapping on the marked building. “That’s a private house, now, but in the seventies it was the Archer Hotel, and guess who used to do their laundry? Creed’s dry cleaner’s. He used to pick up stuff from them once a week in his van, and bring it back again, sheets and bedspreads and what have you…

  “Anyway, after he was arrested, the woman who owned the Archer Hotel gave a quote to the Mail, saying he always seemed so nice and polite, always chatty when he saw her…

  “That isn’t marked on modern maps,” said Tucker, now moving his finger to a cross marked in the grounds of the property, “but it’s on the old deeds. There’s a well out the back of that property. Just a shaft into the ground that collects rainwater. Predated the current building.

  “I tracked the owner down in ’89, after she’d sold up. She told me the well was boarded up in her time, and she planted bushes round it, because she didn’t want no kid going down it accidental. But Creed used to go through that garden to deliver laundry, right past the place where the well was. He’ll have known it was there. She couldn’t remember telling him,” said Tucker quickly, forestalling Robin’s question, “but that’s neither here nor there, is it? She wasn’t going to remember every word they said to her, was she, after all that time?

  “Dead of night, Creed could’ve pulled up a van by the rear entrance, gone in through the back gate… but by the time I realized all this,” said Tucker, gritting his brown teeth in frustration, “the Archer’d gone back to being a private property, and now there’s been a bloody conservatory built over the old well.”

  “Don’t you think,” said Robin cautiously, “when they built over it, they might have noticed—”

  “Why would they?” said Tucker aggressively. “I never knew a builder who went looking for work when he could just slap concrete over it. Anyway, Creed’s not stupid. He’d’ve thrown rubbish down there on top of the body, wouldn’t he? Cover it up. So that’s a possibility,” he said firmly. “And then you’ve got this.”

  Tucker’s last piece of paper was a second map.

  “That there,” he said, tapping his swollen-knuckled finger on another circled building, “is Dennis Creed’s great-grandmother’s house. It’s mentioned in The Demon of Paradise Park. Creed said, in one of his interviews, the only time he ever saw countryside when he was a kid was when he got taken there.

  “And look here,” said Tucker, pointing on a large patch of green. “The house backs right onto Great Church Wood. Acres of woodland, acres and acres. Creed knew the way there. He had a van. He’d played in those woods as a child.

  “We know he chose Epping Forest for most of the bodies, because he had no known connection with the place, but by ’75, police were regularly checking Epping Forest by night, weren’t they? But here’s a different wood he knows, and it’s not so far away from London, and Creed’s got his van and his spades ready in the back.

  “My best guess,” said Tucker, “is my Lou and your doc are in the well or in the woods. And they’ve got different technology now to what they had in the seventies. Ground-penetrating radar and what have you. It wouldn’t be difficult to see if there was a body in either of those places, not if the will was there.

  “But,” said Tucker, sweeping the two maps off the table and folding them up with his shaking hands, “there’s no will, or there hasn’t been, not for years. Nobody in authority cares. They think it’s all over, they think Creed’ll never talk. So that’s why it’s got to be your boss who interviews him. I wish it could be me,” said Tucker, “but you’ve seen what Creed thought I was worth…”

  As Tucker slid his papers back inside his windcheater, Robin became aware that the café around them had filled up during their conversation. At the nearest table sat three young men, all with amusingly Edwardian beards. So long attuned only to Tucker’s low, hoarse voice, Robin’s ears seemed suddenly full of noise. She felt as though she’d suddenly been transported from the distant past into a brash and indifferent present. What would Margot Bamborough, Louise Tucker and Kara Wolfson make of the mobile phones in almost every hand, or the sound of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” now playing somewhere nearby, or the young woman carrying a coffee back from the counter, her hair in high bunches, wearing a T-shirt that read GO F#CK YOUR #SELFIE?

  “Don’t cry, Grandad,” said yellow-haired Lauren softly, putting her arm around her grandfather as a fat tear rolled down his swollen nose and fell upon the wooden table. Now that he’d stopped talking about Louise and Creed, he seemed to have become smaller.

  “It’s affected our whole family,” Lauren told Robin. “Mum and Auntie Lisa are always scared if me and my cousins go out after dark—”

  “Quite right!” said Tucker, who was now mopping his eyes on his sleeve again.

  “—and all us grew up knowing it’s something that can really happen, you know?” said the innocent-faced Lauren. “People really do disappear. They really do get murdered.”

  “Yes,” said Robin. “I know.”

  She reached across the table and briefly gripped the old man’s forearm.

  “We’ll do everything we can, Mr. Tucker, I promise. I’ll be in touch.”

  As she left the café, Robin was aware that she’d just spoken for Strike, who knew absolutely nothing of the plan to interview Creed, let alone to try and find out what had happened to Louise Tucker, but she had no energy left to worry about that just now. Robin drew her jacket more closely around her and walked back to the office, her thoughts consumed by the terrible vacuum left in the wake of the vanished.

  52

  Oft Fire is without Smoke.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  It was one o’clock in the morning, and Strike was driving toward Stoke Newington to relieve Robin, who was currently keeping watch over the terraced house that Shifty’s Boss was again visiting, and where he was almost certainly indulging in another bout of the blackmailable behavior Shifty had somehow found out about. Even though Shifty’s hold on his boss had driven the latter onto Tower Bridge, SB didn’t appear able or willing to give up whatever it was he was doing inside the house of Elinor Dean.

  The night was crisp and clear, although the stars overhead were only dimly visible from brightly lit Essex Road, and Barclay’s voice was currently issuing from the speaker of the BMW. A week had passed since the Scot had managed to persuade SB to leave Tower Bridge and get a coffee with him.

&n
bsp; “He cannae help himself, the poor bastard.”

  “Clearly,” said Strike. “This is his third visit in ten days.”

  “He said to me, ‘Ah cannae stop.’ Says it relieves his stress.”

  “How does he square that with the fact he’s suicidal?”

  “It’s the blackmail that’s makin’ him suicidal, Strike, no’ whatever he gets up tae in Stoke Newington.”

  “And he didn’t give any indication what he does in there?”

  “I told ye, he said he doesnae shag her, but that his wife’ll leave him if it gets oot. Could be rubber,” added Barclay, thoughtfully.

  “What?”

  “Rubber,” repeated Barclay. “Like that guy we had who liked wearin’ latex to work under his suit.”

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

  The various sexual predilections of their clients often blurred in Strike’s memory. He could hear the hum of the casino in the background. Shifty had been in there for hours and Barclay had been keeping him company, unnoticed, from across the floor.

  “Anyway,” said Barclay, “ye want me tae stay in here, do ye? Because it’s costin’ a small fortune and ye said the client’s gettin’ pissy aboot how much we’re chargin’. I could watch when the slimy bastard leaves, from ootside on the street.”

  “No, stay on him, keep photographing him, and try and get something incriminating,” said Strike.