The women at the table behind theirs were now flirting with the young waiter, wondering whether it was too early for a cream cake, giggling about breaking their diets.
“Mum didn’t feel she could refuse,” said Maya. “But what with the costs of getting all the way out to Ham, and the time it would take her to get out there, when she already had two other jobs and exams coming up…”
“Your Aunt Carmen agreed to do the cleaning for her,” guessed Robin, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Strike glance at her.
“Yeah,” said Maya, eyes widening in surprise. “Exactly. It seemed like a good solution. Auntie Carmen was a housewife and Uncle Marcus and Dr. Bamborough were both out at work all day, so Mum thought neither of them would ever know the wrong woman was turning up.”
“There was one sticky moment,” said Porschia, “remember, M? When Dr. Bamborough asked us all over to a barbecue at her house?” She turned to Robin. “We couldn’t go, because Dr. Bamborough’s nanny would’ve realized Mum wasn’t the woman turning up once a week to clean. My Auntie Carmen didn’t like that nanny,” Porschia added. “Didn’t like her at all.”
“Why was that?” asked Strike.
“She thought the girl was after Dr. Bamborough’s husband. Went red every time she said his name, apparently.”
The door of the café opened and Eden walked back inside. As she sat down, Robin caught a whiff of smoke mingling with her perfume.
“Where’ve you got to?” she asked, looking cold.
“Auntie Carmen cleaning instead of Mum,” said Maya.
Eden re-folded her arms, ignoring her coffee.
“So the statement your mother gave the police, about the blood and Dr. Phipps walking across the garden—” said Strike.
“—was really her telling him everything Carmen had told her, yeah,” said Maya, feeling again for the cross around her neck. “She couldn’t own up that her sister had been going there instead of her, because my Uncle Marcus would’ve gone crazy if he’d found out. Auntie Carmen begged Mum not to tell the police and Mum agreed.
“So she had to pretend she was the one who’d seen the blood on the carpet and Dr. Phipps walking across the lawn.”
“Only,” interrupted Porschia, with a humorless laugh, “Carmen changed her mind about Dr. Phipps, after. Mum went back to her after her first police interview and said, ‘They’re asking whether I couldn’t have got confused and mistaken one of the workmen for Dr. Phipps.’ Carmen said, ‘Oh. Yeah. I forgot there were workmen round the back. Maybe I did.’”
Porschia let out a short laugh, but Robin knew she wasn’t truly amused. It was the same kind of laughter Robin had taken refuge in, the night she’d discussed rape with Max over the kitchen table.
“I know it isn’t funny,” said Porschia, catching Maya’s eye, “but come on. Carmen was always ditzy as hell, but you’d think she might’ve made sure of her facts then, wouldn’t you? Mum was literally sick with stress, like, retching if she ate anything. And then that old bitch of a secretary at work found her having a dizzy spell…”
“Yeah,” said Eden, suddenly coming to life. “Next thing was, Mum was accused of being a thief and a drunk and the practice fired her. The old secretary claimed she’d had a secret sniff of Mum’s Thermos and smelled booze in it. Total fabrication.”
“That was a few months after Margot Bamborough disappeared, wasn’t it?” asked Strike, his pen poised over his notebook.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Eden said with icy sarcasm, “did I go off topic? Back to the missing white lady, everyone. Never mind what the black woman went through, who gives a shit?”
“Sorry, I didn’t—” began Strike.
“D’you know who Tiana Medaini is?” Eden shot at him.
“No,” he admitted.
“No,” said Eden, “of course you bloody don’t. Forty years after Margot Bamborough went missing, here we all are, fussing over her and where she went. Tiana Medaini’s a black teenager from Lewisham. She went missing last year. How many front pages has Tiana been on? Why wasn’t she top of the news, like Bamborough was? Because we’re not worth the same, are we, to the press or to the bloody police?”
Strike appeared unable to find an adequate response; doubtless, Robin thought, because Eden’s point was unarguable. The picture of Dennis Creed’s only black victim, Jackie Aylett, a secretary and mother of one, was the smallest and the least distinct of the ghostly black and white images of Creed’s victims on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. Jackie’s dark skin showed up worst on the gloomy cover. The greatest prominence had been given to sixteen-year-old Geraldine Christie and twenty-seven-year-old Susan Meyer, both of them pale and blonde.
“When Margot Bamborough went missing,” Eden said fiercely, “the white women at her practice were treated like bone china by the police, OK? Practically mopping their bloody tears for them—but not our mum. They treated her like a hardened con. That policeman in charge, what was his name—”
“Talbot?” suggested Robin.
“‘What are you hiding? Come on, I know you’re hiding something.’”
The mysterious figure of the Hierophant rose up in Robin’s mind. The keeper of secrets and mysteries in the Thoth tarot wore saffron robes and sat upon a bull (“the card is referred to Taurus”) and in front of him, half his size, stood a black priestess, her hair braided like Maya’s (“Before him is the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman…”). Which had come first, the laying out of tarot cards signifying secrecy and concealment, or the policeman’s instinct that the terrified Wilma was lying to him?
“When he interviewed me—” began Eden.
“Talbot interviewed you?” asked Strike sharply.
“Yeah, he came to Marks & Spencer unannounced, to my work,” said Eden, and Robin realized that Eden’s eyes were suddenly bright with tears. “Someone else at the practice had seen that anonymous note Bamborough got. Talbot found out Dad was inside and he’d heard Mum was cleaning for the doctor. He went to every man in our family, accusing them of writing the threatening letters, and then he came to me, asking me really strange questions about all my male relatives, wanting to know what they’d been up to on different dates, asking whether Uncle Marcus often stayed out overnight. He even asked me about Dad and Uncle Marcus’s—”
“—star signs?” asked Robin.
Eden looked astounded.
“The hell did you know that?”
“Talbot left a notebook. It’s full of occult writing. He was trying to solve the case using tarot cards and astrology.”
“Astrology?” repeated Eden. “Effing astrology?”
“Talbot shouldn’t have been interviewing you without an adult present,” Strike told Eden. “What were you, sixteen?”
Eden laughed in the detective’s face.
“That might be how it works for white girls, but we’re different, aren’t you listening? We’re hardy. We’re tough. That occult stuff,” Eden said, turning back to Robin, “yeah, that makes sense, because he asked me about obeah. You know what that is?”
Robin shook her head.
“Kind of magic they used to practice in the Caribbean. Originated in West Africa. We were all born in Southwark, but, you know, we were all black pagans to Inspector Talbot. He had me alone in the back room and he was asking me stuff about rituals using blood, about black magic. I was terrified, I didn’t know what he was on about. I thought he meant Mum and the blood on the carpet, hinting she’d done away with Dr. Bamborough.”
“He was having a psychotic breakdown,” said Robin. “That’s why they took him off the case. He thought he was hunting a devil. Your mum wasn’t the only woman he thought might have supernatural power—but he was definitely racist,” Robin added quietly. “That’s clear from his notes.”
“You never told us about the police coming to Marks & Spencer,” said Porschia. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Why would I?” said Eden, angrily blotting her damp eyes. �
�Mum was already ill with the stress of it all, I had Uncle Marcus shouting at me that Mum had put the police onto him and his boys, and I was really scared, if Uncle Marcus found out about the officer coming to my work, he’d report him, which was the last thing we needed. God, it was a mess,” said Eden, pressing her hands briefly against her wet eyes, “such a bloody mess.”
Porschia looked as though she’d like to say something comforting to her elder sister, but Robin had the impression that this would be such a departure from their usual relationship, she didn’t know quite how to set about it. After a moment or two, Porschia muttered,
“Need the loo,” pushed her chair away from the table and disappeared into the bathroom.
“I didn’t want Porsh to come today,” said Maya, as soon as the bathroom door swung shut behind her younger sister. She was tactfully not looking at her elder sister, who was trying to pretend she wasn’t crying, while surreptitiously wiping more tears from her eyes. “She doesn’t need this stress. She’s only just finished chemo.”
“How’s she doing?” asked Strike.
“She was given the all-clear last week, thank God. She’s talking about going back to work on reduced hours. I think it’s too early.”
“She’s a social worker, isn’t she?” asked Robin.
“Yeah,” sighed Maya. “A backlog of a hundred desperate messages every morning, and you know you’re in the firing line if anything goes wrong with a family you haven’t been able to reach. I don’t know how she does it. But she’s like Mum. Two peas in a pod. She was always Mum’s baby, and Mum was her hero.”
Eden let out a soft “huh,” which might have been agreement or disparagement. Maya ignored it. There was a short pause, in which Robin reflected on the tangled ties of family. A proxy war between Jules and Wilma Bayliss seemed still to be playing out in the next generation.
The bathroom door swung open again and Porschia reappeared. Instead of taking her seat beside Robin, she swiveled her wide hips around Strike at the end of the table, and edged in behind a startled Maya, who pulled her chair in hastily, until she reached Eden. After thrusting a handful of toilet roll into her elder sister’s hand, Porschia slid her plump arms around Eden’s neck and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
“What are you doing?” said Eden huskily, reaching up to clasp her youngest sister’s arms, not to remove them, but to hold them there. Strike, Robin saw out of the corner of her eye, was pretending to examine his notebook.
“Thanking you,” said Porschia softly, dropping another kiss on the top of her eldest sister’s head before letting her go. “For agreeing to do this. I know you didn’t want to.”
Everyone sat in slightly startled silence while Porschia squeezed her way back around the table and resumed her seat next to Robin.
“Have you told them the last bit?” Porschia asked Maya, while Eden blew her nose. “About Mum and Betty Fuller?”
“No,” said Maya, who appeared shell-shocked by the act of reconciliation she’d just witnessed. “You’re the one Mum told it to, I thought you should.”
“Right,” said Porschia, turning to look at Strike and Robin. “This really is the last thing we know, and there might be nothing in it, but you might as well have it, now you know the other stuff.”
Strike waited, pen poised.
“Mum told me this not long after she retired. She shouldn’t have, really, because it was about a client, but when you hear what it was, you’ll understand.
“Mum kept working in Clerkenwell after she’d qualified as a social worker. It was where all her friends were; she didn’t want to move. So she really got to know the local community.
“One of the families she was working with lived in Skinner Street, not that far from the St. John’s practice—”
“Skinner Street?” repeated Strike. The name rang a bell, but, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t immediately remember why that was. Robin, on the other hand, knew immediately why Skinner Street sounded familiar.
“Yeah. The family was called Fuller. They had just about every problem you can think of, Mum said: addiction, domestic abuse, criminality, the lot. The sort of head of the family was a grandmother who was only in her forties, and this woman’s main source of income was prostitution. Betty was her name, and Mum said she was like a local news service, if you wanted to know about the underworld, anyway. The family had been in the area for generations.
“Anyway, one day, Betty says to Mum, bit sly, to see her reaction: ‘Marcus never sent no threatening notes to that doctor, you know.’
“Mum was gobsmacked,” said Porschia. “Her first thought was that Marcus was visiting the woman, you know, as a client—I know he wasn’t,” said Porschia quickly, holding up a hand to forestall Eden, who’d opened her mouth. “Mum and Marcus hadn’t spoken for years at this point. Anyway, it was all innocent: Betty had met Marcus because the church was doing a bit of outreach in the local area. He’d brought round some Harvest Festival stuff for the family, and tried to persuade Betty to come along to a church service.
“Betty had worked out Marcus’s connection with Mum, because Mum was still going by ‘Bayliss,’ and Betty claimed she knew who really wrote the threatening notes to Margot Bamborough, and that the person who wrote the notes was the same person who killed her. Mum said, ‘Who was it?’ And Betty said if she ever told, Margot’s killer would kill her, too.”
There was a short silence. The café clattered around them, and one of the women at the next table, who was eating a cream slice, said loudly, with unctuous pleasure,
“God that’s good.”
“Did your mother believe Betty?” asked Robin.
“She didn’t know what to think,” said Porschia. “Betty knew some very rough people, so it was possible she’d heard something on the grapevine, but who knows? People talk, don’t they, and they like making themselves important,” and Robin remembered Janice Beattie saying exactly this, as she passed on the rumor of Margot Bamborough appearing in a graveyard. “But if there was anything in it, a woman like Betty, she’d go to the moon before she went to the cops.
“She might well be dead by now,” said Porschia, “given her lifestyle, but for what it’s worth, there it is. Shouldn’t be hard to find out whether she’s still alive.”
“Thanks very much for telling us,” said Strike. “That’s definitely worth following up.”
Having told all they knew, the three sisters now lapsed into a pained silence. It wasn’t the first time that Robin had had cause to consider how much collateral damage each act of violence left in its wake. The disappearance of Margot Bamborough had evidently wreaked havoc in the lives of the Bayliss girls, and now she knew the full extent of the grief it had brought them, and the painful nature of the memories associated with it, she perfectly understood Eden’s initial refusal to talk to detectives. If anything, she had to ask herself why the sisters had changed their minds.
“Thank you so much for this,” she said sincerely. “I know Margot’s daughter will be incredibly grateful that you agreed to talk to us.”
“Oh, it’s the daughter who’s hired you, is it?” said Maya. “Well, you can tell her from me, Mum felt guilty all her life that she didn’t come clean with the police. She liked Dr. Bamborough, you know. I mean, they weren’t close friends or anything, but she thought she was a decent person.”
“It weighed on her,” said Porschia. “Right up until her death, it weighed on her. That’s why she kept that note. She’d have wanted us to do this. There’s always handwriting analysis and stuff, isn’t there?”
Strike agreed that there was. He went to pay the bill and Robin waited at the table with the sisters, who she could tell wanted the detectives gone, and as quickly as possible. They’d disclosed their personal trauma and their family’s secrets, and now a thin layer of polite small talk was too onerous to sustain, and any other form of conversation impossible. Robin was relieved when Strike re-joined her, and after brief farewells, the two of them left the
café.
The moment he hit clean air, Strike paused to pull his Benson & Hedges out of his pocket and lit one.
“Needed that,” he muttered, as they walked on. “So… Skinner Street…”
“… is where Joseph Brenner was seen on the night Margot Bamborough disappeared,” said Robin.
“Ah,” muttered Strike, briefly closing his eyes. “I knew there was something.”
“I’ll look into Betty Fuller as soon as I get home,” said Robin. “What did you think of the rest of it?”
“The Bayliss family really went through it, didn’t they?” said Strike, pausing beside the Land Rover and glancing back at the café. His BMW lay another fifty yards ahead. He took another drag on his cigarette, frowning. “Y’know… it gives us another angle on Talbot’s bloody notebook,” he admitted. “Strip away all the occult shit, and he was right, wasn’t he? Wilma was hiding stuff from him. A lot of stuff, actually.”
“I thought that, too,” said Robin.
“You realize that threatening note’s the first piece of physical evidence we’ve found?”
“Yes,” said Robin, checking her watch. “What time are you heading to Truro?”
Strike didn’t answer. Looking up, Robin saw that he was staring so fixedly across the open park on the other side of the road that she turned, too, to see what had captured his attention, but saw nothing except a couple of gamboling West Highland terriers and their male owner, who was walking along, swinging a pair of leads.
“Cormoran?”
Strike appeared to recall his attention from a long way away.
“What?” he said, and then, “Yeah. No, I was just…”
He turned to look back at the café, frowning.
“Just thinking. But it’s nothing, I think I’m doing a Talbot. Seeing meaning in total coincidence.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 68
