Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “What coincidence?”

  But Strike didn’t answer until the café doors opened, and the three Bayliss sisters emerged in their coats.

  “We should get going,” he said. “They must be sick of the sight of us by now. I’ll see you Monday. Let me know if you find out anything interesting on Betty Fuller.”

  54

  But nothing new to him was that same pain;

  Nor pain at all; for he so oft had tried

  The power thereof, and lov’d so oft in vain.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  The train gave a lurch: the sleeping Strike’s head rolled sideways and hit the cold window. He woke, feeling drool on his chin. Wiping it on his coat sleeve, he peered around. The elderly couple opposite him were politely immersed in their reading material, but across the aisle, four teenagers were enjoying paroxysms of silent laughter, carefully not looking at him, their shoulders shaking as they feigned interest in the fields out of the window. Apparently he’d been snoring with his mouth wide open, because it was now unpleasantly dry. Checking his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep at least two hours.

  Strike reached for the tartan Thermos sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d rinsed out and refilled in McDonald’s earlier, and poured himself a black coffee while the teenagers continued to gasp and snort with laughter. Doubtless they thought him comically odd and old, with his snores and his tartan Thermos, but a year of navigating swaying train carriages had taught him that his prosthetic leg appreciated as few trips to the catering car as possible. He drank a cup of plastic-tainted coffee, then re-settled himself comfortably, arms folded, looking out at the fields gliding past, bestridden with power pylons, the flat white cloud given a glaucous glow by the dust on the glass. The landscape registered only incidentally: Strike’s attention was focused inwards on the odd idea that had occurred to him after the interview with the Bayliss sisters.

  Of course, the idea might be nothing but the product of an overburdened mind making spurious connections between simple coincidences. He mentally turned it this way and that, examining it from different angles, until finally, yawning, he inched sideways over into the empty seat beside him, and laboriously pulled himself up into a standing position in the aisle, so he could access the holdall in the luggage rack overhead. Beside his holdall sat a Waitrose bag, because he’d made a detour into the supermarket on the way to Paddington station, where he’d grabbed three Easter eggs for his nephews, or rather, three chocolate hedgehogs (“Woodland Friends”) because they were relatively compact. Now, groping in his holdall for The Demon of Paradise Park, he accidentally knocked over the carrier bag containing the chocolate. The uppermost hedgehog fell out: in his attempt to catch it, he accidentally batted it up into the air; the box bounced off the back of the elderly woman’s seat, causing her to squeak in surprise, and the box hit the floor.

  The teenagers for whom Strike was unintentionally mounting a one-man comedy show were now openly gasping and crying with laughter. Only when Strike bent down awkwardly to pick up the now cracked chocolate hedgehog, one hand on the teenagers’ table to steady himself, did one of the young women spot the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He knew what she’d seen by the abrupt cessation of her laughter, and the frantic, whispered shushing of her friends. Panting, sweating and now aware of half the carriage’s eyes on him, he shoved the damaged hedgehog back into its bag, found The Demon of Paradise Park in his holdall and then, sweating slightly, but taking malicious pleasure in the po-faced shock of the teenagers beside him, sidled back into his window seat.

  After flicking through the book in search of the part he wanted to re-read, Strike finally found the chapter two-thirds of the way through the book, entitled “Capture.”

  Thus far, Creed’s relationship with landlady Violet Cooper had been key to his continuing safety. Violet herself admits that for the first five years of his tenancy, she’d never have believed harm of “Den,” who she saw as a lonely and gentle soul, fond of their singalong evenings, and probably gay.

  However, the pains he’d once taken to keep Violet happy had begun to irk Creed. Where once he’d drugged her because he was planning to pound bones to dust in the basement, or needed to load a corpse into the van by night, he now began lacing her gin-and-oranges with barbiturates purely to avoid the tedium of her company.

  Creed’s manner toward Violet also changed. He became “mean” to her, “taking the Mickey when there was no need, saying nasty things, laughing at me for using the wrong words and stuff, treating me like I was stupid, which he’d never done before.

  “I remember one time, I was telling him about the place my brother bought when he retired, cottage in the country, everything lovely, and I said, ‘You should’ve seen the garden, his roses and a gazebo,’ and he laughed at me, Dennis, well, jeered, really, because I’d said it wrong. Gazz ybo, I said, and I’ve never forgotten it, he said, ‘Don’t use words if you can’t say ’em, you just look thick.’

  “It hurt my feelings. I hadn’t seen that nasty side of him. I knew he was clever, he used to do the Times crossword every day. Knew all the answers on Mastermind, when we watched it together, but he’d never put me down before.

  “Then, one night, he starts going on about my will. He wants to know who I’m going to leave the house to. He as good as asked me to leave it to him.

  “I didn’t like that. I wasn’t an old woman, I wasn’t planning to die any time soon. I changed the subject, but he started on it again a few nights later. I said, ‘Look, how d’you think that makes me feel, Dennis, you going on like this, like I’m on my last legs? You’re making me feel like you’re going to do away with me.’

  “He got uppity and said it was all right for me, but he had nothing, no security or nothing, and what if he got turfed out on the street by whoever I left the house to? And he flounced out. We made it up, later, but it left a nasty taste.”

  It would seem the height of foolhardiness for Creed to persuade Violet into changing her will and then kill her. Quite apart from having an obvious motive, he’d be risking the ingression of police into the basement where he was concealing the remains and belongings of at least five women. However, Creed’s arrogance and sense of inviolability seem to have known no bounds by this time. He was also stockpiling pills in larger quantities than ever, which brought him into contact with more than one street dealer. This made him more widely recognizable.

  One of his new drugs contacts was Michael Cleat, who sold barbiturates stolen from a contact at a pharmaceutical company. Cleat would later cut a deal with police in exchange for his testimony at the killer’s trial. Creed, he testified, had asked Cleat whether he or his contact could procure a doctor’s prescription pad. Police suspected that Creed was hoping to fake a prescription for Violet, to explain her possession of the means to overdose…

  In spite of the coffee, Strike’s eyelids began to droop again. After another couple of minutes, his head sank sideways and the book slipped out of his slack grasp.

  When he woke up again, the sky outside had turned coral pink, the laughing teenagers were gone, and he found himself ten minutes from Truro station. Stiffer than ever and in no mood for the family reunion, he wished he was heading back to his attic flat for a shower and some peace. Nevertheless, his heart lifted slightly when he saw Dave Polworth waiting for him on the platform. The bag of chocolate hedgehogs rattled slightly as Strike clambered laboriously off the train. He’d have to remember to give the broken one to Luke.

  “All right, Diddy?” said Polworth, as they shook hands and patted each other on the back, Strike’s Waitrose bag impeding a hug.

  “Thanks for picking me up, Chum, really appreciate it.”

  They drove to St. Mawes in Polworth’s Dacia Duster, discussing plans for the following day. Polworth and his family had been invited to the scattering of the ashes, along with Kerenza the Macmillan nurse.

  “… except it’s not going to be a scattering,
” said Polworth, driving through country lanes, as the sun turned into a burning coal on the horizon, “more like a floating.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Lucy’s got an urn,” said Polworth. “Water soluble, cotton and clay. She was showing me last night. It’s supposed to look like a flower. You put the ashes inside and the whole thing bobs away and dissolves.”

  “Nice idea,” said Strike.

  “Prevents stupid accidents,” said Polworth, pragmatically. “Remember Ian Restarick, from school? His grandad wanted his ashes thrown off Land’s End. The dozy fuckers chucked them off in a high wind and ended up with their mouths full of the old boy. Restarick told me he was blowing ash out of his nose for a week after.”

  Laughing, Strike felt his phone buzz in his pocket, and pulled it out. He was hoping the text might be Robin, perhaps telling him she’d already located Betty Fuller. Instead, he saw an unknown number.

  I hated you as much as I did because I loved you so much. My love never ended but yours did. It wore out. I wore it out

  Polworth was still talking, but Strike was no longer listening. He read the text through several times, frowning slightly, then put the phone back in his pocket and tried to concentrate on his old friend’s anecdotes.

  At Ted’s house there were cries of welcome, and hugs from his uncle, Lucy and Jack. Strike tried to look delighted to be there, in spite of his fatigue, and knowing he’d have to wait to sleep until everyone else had gone to bed. Lucy had made pasta for everyone, and when she wasn’t tending to everybody else’s needs, telling Luke off for kicking Adam or picking at her own plate, she teetered on the verge of tears.

  “It’s so strange, isn’t it?” she whispered to her brother after dinner, while Greg and the boys, at Greg’s insistence, were clearing the table, “Being here without her?” And without a pause she hurried on, “We’ve decided we’re going to do the ashes in the morning, because the weather looks good, and then come back here for Easter lunch.”

  “Sounds great,” said Strike.

  He knew how much importance Lucy placed on arrangements and plans, on having everything done in the right way. She fetched the urn and admired the stylised white lily. Ted had already placed Joan’s ashes inside.

  “That’s great. Joan would have loved it,” he said, with no idea whether that was true or not.

  “And I’ve bought pink roses for all of us to throw into the water with it,” said Lucy, tears welling again.

  “Nice touch,” said Strike, suppressing a yawn. He really did just want to shower, then lie down and sleep. “Thanks for sorting all this out, Luce. Oh, and I brought Easter eggs for the boys, where do you want them?”

  “We can put them in the kitchen. Did you remember to get some for Roz and Mel, too?”

  “Who?”

  “Dave and Penny’s girls, they’ll be coming tomorrow, too.”

  Fuck’s sake.

  “I didn’t think—”

  “Oh, Stick,” said Lucy, “aren’t you their godfather?”

  “No, I’m not,” said Strike, doing his very best not to sound short tempered, “but fine, yeah, I’ll nip down the shops tomorrow morning and buy some more.”

  Later, when he was at last alone in the dark sitting room, lying on the sofa with which he’d become so unwillingly familiar over the past year, his prosthetic leg propped against the coffee table, he checked his phone again. There were, he was pleased to see, no more messages from the unknown number, and, exhausted as he was, he managed to fall asleep quickly.

  However, at shortly before four in the morning, the phone rang. Jerked out of a profound sleep, Strike groped for it, registered the time then raised it to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  There was a long silence, although he could hear breathing on the end of the line.

  “Who is this?” he said, suspecting the answer.

  “Bluey,” came a tiny whisper. “It’s me.”

  “It’s four in the morning, Charlotte.”

  “I know,” she whispered, and gave what might have been a giggle or a sob. She sounded strange; possibly manic. Strike stared up at the dark ceiling, his aunt’s ashes a mere twelve feet away.

  “Where are you?”

  “In hell.”

  “Charlotte—”

  She hung up.

  Strike could hear his own heart beating with ominous force, like a kettle drum deep inside a cave. Red-hot threads of panic and dread darted through him.

  How many more burdens was he supposed to bear? Had he not paid enough, given enough, sacrificed enough—loved enough? Joan seemed very close just now, in the darkness of her own sitting room, with her ornamental plates and her dried flowers, closer even than her dusty remains, in that vaguely ludicrous white lily, which would look so puny and insignificant bobbing away on the wide sea, like a discarded paper plate. He seemed to hear her last words as he lay there: “You’re a good man… helping people… I’m proud of you…”

  Charlotte had called him from the same unknown number she’d texted from earlier. Strike’s exhausted mind now eddied around the known facts, which were that Charlotte had suicide attempts in her past, that she was married with children, and that she’d recently been committed to a mental facility. He remembered his resolution of weeks ago, to phone her husband if she sent him any more self-destructive messages, but Jago Ross wouldn’t be at his merchant bank at 4 a.m. on an Easter weekend. He wondered whether it would be cruelty or kindness to ignore the call, and how he’d bear the knowledge that she’d overdosed, if he didn’t respond. After a very long ten minutes, during which he half expected her to call him back, Strike sat up to compose a text.

  I’m in Cornwall. My aunt’s just died. I think you need help, but I’m the wrong person to give it to you. If you’re alone, you need to get hold of someone and tell them how you’re feeling.

  The terrible thing was how well he and Charlotte knew each other. Strike knew just how pusillanimous, how disingenuous, Charlotte would find this bland response. She’d know that some small part of him (shrunken by determined abstinence, though never eradicated) felt a pull back toward her, especially in this extremity, not only because he’d assumed responsibility for her happiness for years, but because he could never forget that she’d come to him when he was at his lowest ebb, lying in a hospital bed with a freshly amputated leg, wondering what possible life there was for him now. He could still remember her appearing in the doorway, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and how she’d walked down the ward toward him and kissed him wordlessly on the mouth, and that moment, more than any other, had told him that life would continue, would contain glorious moments of beauty and pleasure, that he wasn’t alone any more, and that his missing leg didn’t matter to the woman he couldn’t forget.

  Sitting in the darkness, atypically cold because of his exhaustion, Strike typed four more words—

  It will get better

  —and sent the message. Then he lay back down and waited for the phone to vibrate again, but it remained silent, and eventually he fell asleep.

  He was woken, inevitably, by Luke bursting into the sitting room. While he listened to Luke clattering around the kitchen, Strike reached for his phone and looked at it. Charlotte had sent two more texts, one an hour previously, the next half an hour later.

  Bluey I’m sorry about your aunt. is it the one I met?

  And then, when Strike hadn’t answered:

  Am I evil? Jago says I am. I used to think I couldn’t be, because you loved me

  At least she wasn’t dead. With a vice-like sensation in his belly, Strike sat up, put on his prosthesis and attempted to shut Charlotte out of his mind.

  Breakfast wasn’t a particularly relaxing affair. The table was so crowded with Easter eggs, it was like being in some cartoonish nest. Strike ate off a plate on his lap. Lucy had bought Strike and Ted an egg each, and the detective now gathered that he should have bought his sister one, as well. All three boys had tottering piles.

>   “What’s a hedgehog got to do with Easter?” Adam asked Strike, holding up his uncle’s offering.

  “Eastertime’s spring, isn’t it?” said Ted, from the end of the table. “It’s when hibernating animals wake up.”

  “Mine’s all broken,” said Luke, shaking the box.

  “That’s a shame,” said Strike, and Lucy shot him a sharp look.

  She was tense, telling off her sons for looking at their phones during the meal, glaring at Strike when he checked his own, constantly glancing out of the window, to check the state of the weather. The detective was glad of an excuse to get out of the house to buy Polworth’s daughters Easter eggs, but he’d walked barely ten yards down the sloping road, cigarette in hand, when the family pulled up in their Dacia. When Strike confided his errand in an undertone, Polworth said,

  “Fuck that, they’ve got enough chocolate for a year at home. Leave it.”

  At eleven o’clock, with a leg of lamb left in the oven and the timer set, after Luke had been told that no, he couldn’t take his iPad on the boat, and one false start, due to the need to return to the house for the Polworths’ younger daughter to have the pee she’d insisted she didn’t need before they left, the party made its way successfully down to the harbor, where they met Kerenza the nurse, and boarded Ted’s old sailing boat, Jowanet.

  Strike, who’d once been his uncle’s proud helpmeet, no longer had the balance to work either sails or rudder. He sat with the women and children, spared the necessity of making conversation by the noise of wind against canvas. Ted shouted commands to Polworth and Jack. Luke was eating chocolate, his eyes screwed up against the cold breeze; Polworth’s daughters were huddled, shivering, beside their mother, who had her arms around them. Tears were already trickling down Lucy’s cheeks as she cradled the flat white urn in her lap. Beside her, Kerenza held a bunch of dark pink roses loosely wrapped in cellophane, and it was left to Greg and Polworth to shout at the children to watch out for the boom as they tacked around the peninsula where St. Mawes Castle stood sentinel.