“Shifty’s coked oot o’ his head,” said Barclay.
“Half his colleagues will be cokeheads, as well. We’re going to need something worse than that to nail the bastard for blackmailing people onto high bridges…”
“You’re goin’ soft, Strike.”
“Just try and get something on the fucker and don’t place large bets.”
“It’s no’ the gamblin’ that’ll bankrupt us,” said Barclay, “it’s the drinks.”
He hung up, and Strike wound down the window and lit a cigarette, trying to ignore the pain in his stiff neck and shoulders.
Like SB, Strike could have used a respite from life’s problems and challenges, but such outlets were currently non-existent. Over the past year, Joan’s illness had taken from him that small sliver of time that wasn’t given over to work. Since his amputation, he no longer played any kind of sport. He saw friends infrequently due to the demands of the agency, and derived many more headaches than pleasures from his relatives, who were being particularly troublesome just now.
Tomorrow was Easter Sunday, meaning that Joan’s family would be gathering together in St. Mawes to scatter her ashes at sea. Quite apart from the mournful event itself, Strike wasn’t looking forward to yet another long journey to Cornwall, or to further enforced contact with Lucy, who’d made it clear over the course of several phone calls that she was dreading this final farewell. Again and again she returned to her sadness at not having a grave to visit, and Strike detected an undertone of blame, as though she thought Strike ought to have overruled Joan’s dying wishes. Lucy had also expressed disappointment that Strike wasn’t coming down for the whole weekend, as she and Greg were, and added bluntly that he’d better remember to bring Easter eggs for all three of his nephews, not just Jack. Strike could have done without transporting three fragile chocolate eggs all the way to Truro on the train, with a holdall to manage and his leg sore from days and weeks of nonstop work.
To compound his stress, both his unknown half-sister, Prudence, and his half-brother Al had started texting him again. His half-siblings seemed to imagine that Strike, having enjoyed a moment of necessary catharsis by shouting at Rokeby over the phone, was probably regretting his outburst, and more amenable to attending his father’s party to make up. Strike hadn’t answered any of their texts, but he’d experienced them as insect bites: determined not to scratch, they were nevertheless the source of a niggling aggravation.
Overhanging every other worry was the Bamborough case which, for all the hours he and Robin were putting into it, was proving as opaque as it had when first they’d agreed to tackle the forty-year-old mystery. The year’s deadline was coming ever closer, and nothing resembling a breakthrough had yet occurred. If he was honest, Strike had low hopes of the interview with Wilma Bayliss’s daughters, which he and Robin would be conducting later that morning, before Strike boarded the train to Truro.
All in all, as he drove toward the house of the middle-aged woman for whom SB seemed to feel such an attraction, Strike had to admit he felt a glimmer of sympathy for any man in desperate search of what the detective was certain was some form of sexual release. Recently it had been brought home to Strike that the relationships he’d had since leaving Charlotte, casual though they’d been, had been his only unalloyed refuge from the job. His sex life had been moribund since Joan’s diagnosis of cancer: all those lengthy trips to Cornwall had eaten up time that might have been given to dates.
Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t had opportunities. Ever since the agency had become successful, a few of the rich and unhappy women who’d formed a staple of the agency’s work had shown a tendency to size up Strike as a potential palliative for their own emotional pain or emptiness. Strike had taken on a new client of exactly this type the previous day, Good Friday. As she’d replaced Mrs. Smith, who’d already initiated divorce proceedings against her husband on the basis of Morris’s pictures of him with their nanny, they’d nicknamed the thirty-two-year-old brunette Miss Jones.
She was undeniably beautiful, with long legs, full lips and skin of expensive smoothness. She was of interest to the gossip columns partly because she was an heiress, and partly because she was involved in a bitter custody battle with her estranged boyfriend, on whom she was seeking dirt to use in court. Miss Jones had crossed and re-crossed her long legs while she told Strike about her hypocritical ex-partner’s drug use, the fact that he was feeding stories about her to the papers, and that he had no interest in his six-month-old daughter other than as a means to make Miss Jones unhappy. While he was seeing her to the door, their interview concluded, she’d repeatedly touched his arm and laughed longer than necessary at his mild pleasantries. Trying to usher her politely out of the door under Pat’s censorious eye, Strike had had the sensation of trying to prize chewing gum off his fingers.
Strike could well imagine Dave Polworth’s comments had he been privy to the scene, because Polworth had trenchant theories about the sort of women who found his oldest friend attractive, and of whom Charlotte was the purest example of the type. The women most readily drawn to Strike were, in Polworth’s view, neurotic, chaotic and occasionally dangerous, and their fondness for the bent-nosed ex-boxer indicated a subconscious desire for something rocklike to which they could attach themselves like limpets.
Driving through the deserted streets of Stoke Newington, Strike’s thoughts turned naturally to his ex-fiancée. He hadn’t responded to the desperate text messages she’d sent him from what he knew, having Googled the place, to be a private psychiatric clinic. Not only had they arrived on the eve of his departure for Joan’s deathbed, he hadn’t wanted to fuel her vain hopes that he would appear to rescue her. Was she still there? If so, it would be her longest ever period of hospitalization. Her one-year-old twins were doubtless in the care of a nanny, or the mother-in-law Charlotte had once assured him was ready and willing to take over maternal duties.
A short distance away from Elinor Dean’s street, Strike called Robin.
“Is he still inside?”
“Yes. You’ll be able to park right behind me, there’s a space. I think number 14 must’ve gone away for Easter with the kids. Both cars are gone.
“See you in five.”
When Strike turned into the street, he saw the old Land Rover parked a few houses down from Elinor’s front door, and was able to park without difficulty in the space directly behind it. As he turned off his engine, Robin jumped down out of her Land Rover, closed the door quietly, and walked around the BMW to the passenger’s side, a messenger bag over her shoulder.
“Morning,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him.
“Morning. Aren’t you keen to get away?”
As he said it, the screen of the mobile in her hand lit up: somebody had texted her. Robin didn’t even look at the message, but turned the phone over on her knee, to hide its light.
“Got a few things to tell you. I’ve spoken to C. B. Oakden.”
“Ah,” said Strike.
Given that Oakden seemed primarily interested in Strike, and that Strike suspected Oakden was recording his calls, the two detectives had agreed that it should be Robin who warned him away from the case.
“He didn’t like it,” said Robin. “There was a lot of ‘it’s a free country,’ and ‘I’m entitled to talk to anyone I like.’ I said to him, ‘Trying to get in ahead of us and talk to witnesses could hamper our investigation.’ He said, as an experienced biographer—”
“Oh, fuck off,” said Strike under his breath.
“—he knows how to question people to get information out of them, and it might be a good idea for the three of us to pool our resources.”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “That’s exactly what this agency needs, a convicted con man on the payroll. How did you leave it?”
“Well, I can tell he really wants to meet you and I think he’s determined to withhold everything he knows about Brenner until he comes face to face with you. He wants to keep Brenner as bait.”<
br />
Strike reached for another cigarette.
“I’m not sure Brenner’s worth C. B. Oakden.”
“Even after what Janice said?”
Strike took a drag on the cigarette, then blew smoke out of the window, away from Robin. “I grant you, Brenner looks a lot fishier now than he did when we started digging, but what are the odds Oakden’s actually got useful information? He was a kid when all this happened and nicking that obituary smacks of a man trying to scrape up things to say, rather than—”
He heard a rustling beside him and turned to see Robin opening her messenger bag. Slightly to his surprise, Robin was pulling out Talbot’s notebook again.
“Still carrying that around with you, are you?” said Strike, trying not to sound exasperated.
“Apparently I am,” she said, moving her mobile onto the dashboard so that she could open the book in her lap. Watching the phone, Strike saw a second text arrive, lighting up the screen, and this time, he caught sight of the name: Morris.
“What’s Morris texting you about?” Strike said, and even to his ears, the question sounded critical.
“Nothing. He’s just bored, sitting outside Miss Jones’s boyfriend’s house,” said Robin, who was flicking through Talbot’s notebook. “I want to show you something. There, look at that.”
She passed him the book, open to a page Strike remembered from his own perusal of the notes. It was close to the end of the notebook, where the pages were most heavily embellished with strange drawings. In the middle of this page danced a black skeleton holding a scythe.
“Ignore all the weird tarot drawings,” said Robin. “Look there, though. That sentence between the skeleton’s legs. The little symbol, the circle with the cross in it, stands for the Part of Fortune…”
“What’s that?” asked Strike.
“It’s a point in the horoscope that’s supposed to be about worldly success. ‘Part of Fortune in Second, MONEY AND POSSESSIONS.’ And ‘Mother’s House,’ underlined. The Oakdens lived on Fortune Street, remember? And the Part of Fortune was in the house of money and possessions when Margot disappeared, and he’s connecting that with the fact that Dorothy inherited her mother’s house, and saying that wasn’t a tragedy, but a stroke of luck for Dorothy.”
“You think?” said Strike, rubbing his tired eyes.
“Yes, because look, he then starts rambling about Virgo—which is Dorothy’s sign under both systems—being petty and having an ax to grind, which from what we know about her fits. Anyway,” said Robin, “I’ve been looking at dates of birth, and guess what? Under both the traditional and Schmidt’s systems, Dorothy’s mother was a Scorpio.”
“Christ’s sake, how many more Scorpios are we going to find?”
“I know what you mean,” said Robin, unfazed, “but from what I’ve read, Scorpio’s one of the most common birth signs. Anyway, this is the important bit: Carl Oakden was born on the sixth of April. That means he’s Aries under the traditional system, but Pisces under Schmidt’s.”
A short silence followed.
“How old was Oakden when his grandmother fell downstairs?” asked Strike.
“Fourteen,” said Robin.
Strike turned his face away from Robin to blow smoke out of the window again.
“You think he pushed his grandmother, do you?”
“It might not have been deliberate,” said Robin. “He could’ve pushed past her and she lost her balance.”
“‘Margot confronted Pisces.’ It’d be a hell of a thing to accuse a child of—”
“Maybe she never confronted him at all. The confrontation might have been something Talbot suspected, or imagined. Either way—”
“—it’s suggestive, yeah. It is suggestive…” Strike let out a slight groan. “We’re going to have to interview bloody Oakden, aren’t we? There’s a bit of a hotspot developing around that little grouping, isn’t there? Brenner and the Oakdens, outward respectability—”
“—inward poison. Remember? That’s what Oonagh Kennedy said about Dorothy.”
The detectives sat for a moment or two, watching Elinor Dean’s front door, which remained closed, her dark garden silent and still.
“How many murders,” Robin asked, “d’you think go undetected?”
“Clue’s in the question, isn’t it? ‘Undetected’—impossible to know. But yeah, it’s those quiet, domestic deaths you wonder about. Vulnerable people picked off by their own families, and everyone thinking it was ill health—”
“—or a mercy that they’ve gone,” said Robin.
“Some deaths are a mercy,” said Strike.
And with these words, in both of their mind’s eyes rose an image of horror. Strike was remembering the corpse of Sergeant Gary Topley, lying on the dusty road in Afghanistan, eyes wide open, his body missing from the waist down. The vision had recurred in Strike’s nightmares ever since he’d seen it, and occasionally, in these dreams, Gary talked to him, lying in the dust. It was always a comfort to remember, on waking, that Gary’s consciousness had been snuffed out instantly, that his wide-open eyes and puzzled expression showed that death had claimed him before his brain could register agony or terror.
But in Robin’s mind there was a picture of something she wasn’t sure had ever happened. She was imagining Margot Bamborough chained to a radiator (I whip her face and breasts), pleading for her life (the strategy is laughably transparent), and suffering torments (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, begging for mercy).
“You know,” said Robin, talking partly to break the silence and dispel that mental image, “I’d quite like to find a picture of Dorothy’s mother, Maud.”
“Why?”
“For confirmation, because—I don’t think I told you, look…”
She flicked backward in the notebook to the page littered with water signs. In small writing beneath a picture of a scorpion were the words “MOLE (Adams).”
“Is that a new sign?” asked Strike. “The Mole?”
“No,” said Robin, smiling, “Talbot’s alluding to the fact that the astrologer Evangeline Adams said the true Scorpio often has a birthmark, or a prominent mole. I’ve read her book, got it second hand.”
There was a pause.
“What?” said Strike, because Robin was looking at him expectantly.
“I was waiting for you to jeer.”
“I lost the will to jeer some way back,” said Strike. “You realize we’re supposed to have solved this case in approximately fourteen weeks’ time?”
“I know,” sighed Robin. She picked up her mobile to check the time, and out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw yet another text from Morris. “Well, we’re meeting the Bayliss sisters later. Maybe they’ll have something useful to tell us… are you sure you want to interview them with me? I’d be fine to do it alone. You’re going to be really tired after sitting here all night.”
“I’ll sleep on the train to Truro afterward,” said Strike. “You got any plans for Easter Sunday?”
“No,” said Robin. “Mum wanted me to go home but…”
Strike wondered what the silent sequel to the sentence was, and whether she’d made plans with someone else, and didn’t want to tell him about it. Morris, for instance.
“OK, I swear this is the last thing I’m going to bring up from Talbot’s notebook,” Robin said, “but I want to flag something up before we meet the Baylisses.”
“Go on.”
“You said yourself, he seemed racist, from his notes.”
“‘Black phantom,’” Strike quoted, “yeah.”
“And ‘Black Moon Lilith—’”
“—and wondering whether she was a witch.”
“Exactly. I think he really harassed her, and probably the family, too,” Robin said. “The language he uses for Wilma—‘crude,’ ‘dishonest’…” Robin flicked back to the page featuring the three horned signs, “and ‘woman as s
he is now in this eon… armed and militant.’”
“A radical feminist witch.”
“Which sounds quite cool when you say it,” said Robin, “but I don’t think Talbot meant it that way.”
“You think this is why the daughters didn’t want to talk to us?”
“Maybe,” said Robin. “So I think we need to be… you know. Sensitive to what might have gone on. Definitely not go in there looking as though we suspect Wilma of anything.”
“Point well made, and taken,” said Strike.
“Right then,” said Robin with a sigh, as she put the notebook back into her messenger bag. “I’d better get going… What is he doing in there?” Robin asked quietly, looking at Elinor Dean’s front door.
“Barclay thinks it might be a rubber fetish.”
“He’d need a lot of talcum powder to wriggle himself into anything made of rubber, the size of that belly.”
Strike laughed.
“Well, I’ll see you in…” Robin checked the time on her mobile, “seven hours, forty-five minutes.”
“Sleep well,” said Strike.
As she walked away from the BMW, Strike saw her looking at her mobile again, doubtless reading Morris’s texts. He watched as she got into the ancient Land Rover, then turned the tank-like vehicle in a three-point turn, raising a hand in farewell as she passed him, heading back to Earl’s Court.
As Strike reached for the Thermos of tea under his seat, he remembered the supposed dental appointment of the other day, about which Robin had sounded strangely flustered, and which had taken place (though Strike hadn’t previously made the connection) on Morris’s afternoon off. A most unwelcome possibility crossed his mind: had Robin lied, like Irene Hickson, and for the same reason? His mind darted to what Robin had said a few months previously, when she’d mentioned her ex-husband having a new partner: “Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I told Morris.”
As he unscrewed his Thermos, Strike mentally reviewed Robin’s behavior around Morris in the last few months. She’d never seemed to particularly like him, but might that have been an act, designed to deflect attention? Were his partner and his subcontractor actually in a relationship which he, busy with his own troubles, had failed to spot?
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