Morris, Robin thought, as she headed toward the Tube, didn’t actually like women. He desired them, but that, of course, was an entirely different matter: Robin, who was forever marked by the ineradicable memory of the man in the gorilla mask, knew better than most that desire and liking were different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, things. Morris gave himself away constantly, not only in the way he spoke to Robin, but in his desire to call Mrs. Smith “Rich Bitch,” his attribution of venal or provocative motives to every woman under surveillance, in the barely disguised disgust with which he noted that Mucky Ricci was now forced to live in a houseful of females. Christ, I hope I never end up like that.
Robin walked another few steps, and suddenly stopped dead, earning herself a curious glance from a passing traffic warden. She’d had an idea, triggered by what Morris had just said to her: or rather, the idea had slammed its way into the forefront of her mind and she knew that it had been there in her subconscious all along, waiting for her to admit it.
Moving aside so as not to get in the way of passers-by, Robin pulled out her phone and checked the list of paraphilias she’d last consulted when looking up sleeping princess syndrome.
Autonepiophilia.
“Oh God,” Robin muttered. “That’s it. That’s got to be it.”
Robin called Strike, but his number went to voicemail; he was doubtless already on the Tube, heading for the Stafford. After a moment or two’s thought, she called Barclay.
“Hiya,” said the Scot.
“Are you still outside Elinor Dean’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anyone in there with her?”
“No.”
“Sam, I think I know what she’s doing for those men.”
“Whut?”
Robin told him. The only answer was a long silence. Finally, Barclay said,
“You’re aff yer heid, Robin.”
“Maybe,” said Robin, “but the only way to know for sure is to knock on her door and ask if she’ll do it for you. Say you were recommended to her by SB.”
“Will I fuck,” said Barclay. “Does Strike know ye’re asking me tae do this?”
“Sam, we’ve got a week left before the client pulls the plug. The worst that can happen is that she denies it. We’re not going to have many more chances.”
She heard Barclay exhale, hard.
“All right, but it’s on ye if ye’re wrong.”
Robin hurried onwards toward the Tube station, second-guessing herself as she went. Would Strike think she was wrong to tell Barclay to go in, on her hunch? But they had a week left before the client withdrew funding: what was there, now, to lose?
It was Saturday evening, and Robin arrived on the crowded Tube platform to find she’d just missed a train. By the time she exited at Green Park station, she’d lost the chance of arriving at the American Bar early, which she’d hoped to do, so that she and Strike could have a few words together before Oakden arrived. Worse still, when she hurried down St. James’s Street, she saw, with a sense of déjà vu, a large crowd blocking the bottom of the road, being marshaled by police. As Robin slowed down, wondering whether she’d be able to get through the dense mass of people to the Stafford, a couple of sprinting paparazzi overtook her, in pursuit of a series of black Mercedeses. As Robin watched them pressing their lenses against windows, she became aware that the crowd in the distance was chanting “Jonn-ny! Jonn-ny!” Through the windows of one of the cars heading toward the event, Robin glimpsed a woman in a Marie Antoinette wig. Only when she was nearly knocked sideways by a sprinting pair of autograph hunters, both of them holding Deadbeats posters, did Robin realize with a thrill of shock that Strike’s father was the Jonny whose name was being chanted.
“Shit,” she said aloud, wheeling around and hurrying back up the road, pulling out her mobile as she went. She knew there was another entrance to the Stafford via Green Park. Not only was she going to be late, but a horrible suspicion had just hit her. Why had Oakden been so determined to meet on this specific evening? And why had it had to be this bar, so close to what she was afraid was an event involving Strike’s father? Did Strike know, had he realized, what was happening close by?
She called him, but he didn’t pick up. Still walking, she typed out a text:
Cormoran I don’t know whether you know this, but Jonny Rokeby’s having an event around the corner. I think it’s possible Oakden’s trying to set you up.
Breaking into a jog, because she was already five minutes late, she knew she’d just told Strike, for the very first time, that she knew who his father was.
On her arrival in Green Park, she saw from a distance a policeman at the rear entrance, who, with one of the hotel’s bowler-hatted attendants, was politely but firmly turning away two men with long-lensed cameras.
“Not this way, sorry,” said the policeman. “Only for tonight. If it’s the hotel you want, you’ll have to go round the front.”
“What’s going on?” demanded a suited man hand in hand with a beautiful Asian woman in a cheongsam. “We’ve got a dinner booking! Why can’t we go through?”
“Very sorry, sir, but there’s an event on at Spencer House,” explained the doorman, “and police want us to stop people using this as a short cut.”
The two men with cameras swore and turned away, jogging back the way Robin had come. She lowered her head as they passed her, glad that she was still wearing her unneeded glasses, because her picture had appeared in the press during a court case a couple of years back. Maybe she was being paranoid, but Robin was worried the pressmen had been trying to use the Stafford not as a short cut to Rokeby and his guests, but as a means of getting to his estranged son.
Now that the photographers had gone, the bowler-hatted attendant permitted the woman in the cheongsam and her companion to enter, and after giving Robin a shrewd up-and-down glance, evidently decided she wasn’t a photographer and allowed her to proceed through the gate into a courtyard, where well-dressed drinkers were smoking beneath exterior heaters. After checking her mobile and seeing that Strike hadn’t answered her text, she hurried up the steps into the American Bar.
It was a comfortable, elegant space of dark wood and leather, with pennants and baseball caps from many American states and universities hanging from the ceiling. Robin immediately spotted Strike standing in a suit at the bar, his surly expression lit by the rows of illuminated bottles on the wall.
“Cormoran, I just—”
“If you’re about to tell me my father’s just round the corner,” said Strike tersely, “I know. This arsehole doesn’t realize I’m wise to his attempted set-up, yet.”
Robin glanced into the far corner. Carl Oakden was sitting there, legs spread wide, an arm along the back of the leather bench. He was wearing a suit, but no tie, and his attitude was clearly meant to suggest a man at ease in these cosmopolitan surroundings. With his slightly too-close-together eyes and his narrow forehead, he still resembled the boy who’d smashed Roy’s mother’s crystal bowl all those years ago.
“Go and talk to him. He wants some food, I’m getting menus,” muttered Strike. “We’d just got started on Steve Douthwaite. Apparently, Dorothy always thought the bloke was suspicious.”
Heading toward Oakden, Robin prayed that Strike was going to keep his temper. She’d only once seen him lose his cool with a witness, and had no desire to see it happen again.
“Mr. Oakden?” she said, smiling as she reached him and extending her hand. “I’m Robin Ellacott, we’ve emailed—”
“I know,” said Oakden, turning his head slowly to look her up and down with a smirk. He ignored her outstretched hand and Robin could tell he did so deliberately. Refusing to show that she realized that he was trying to be offensive, she shrugged off her raincoat.
“Nice bar,” she said pleasantly, sitting down opposite him. “I’ve never been here before.”
“Normally takes you cheaper places, does he?” asked Oakden.
“Cormoran was just telli
ng me you remember your mother talking about Steve Douth—”
“Love,” said Oakden, legs still wide apart, arm along the back of the leather bench, “I told you all along, I’m not interested in being palmed off with assistants or secretaries. I’ll talk to him, or nobody.”
“I’m actually Cormoran’s—”
“I’ll bet you are,” said Oakden, with a snigger. “Don’t suppose he can get rid of you now, can he?”
“Sorry?”
“Not now you’ve been knifed, trying to do a man’s job,” said Oakden, with a glance toward her forearm as he raised his cocktail to his lips. “You’d probably sue the shit out of him, if he tried.”
Oakden, who’d evidently done his homework on the detectives, was clearly reveling in his rudeness. Robin could only suppose that the con man assumed she was too desperate for his information to take offense at his manner. He seemed determined to derive maximum pleasure from this encounter: to enjoy free alcohol and food, and bait a woman who was unlikely to walk away. Robin wondered which paper or picture agency he’d contacted, to propose luring Strike within a few hundred yards of his father’s party, and how much Oakden stood to gain, if they could get a picture of Strike apparently publicly snubbing his father, or catch the detective on record saying something angry and quotable.
“There you go,” said Strike, throwing a couple of leather-bound menus onto the table and sitting down. He hadn’t thought to bring Robin anything to drink. Oakden picked up a menu and perused it slowly, and he seemed to enjoy keeping them waiting.
“I’ll have the club sandwich,” he said at last, and Strike hailed a waiter. The order given, Strike turned back to Oakden and said,
“Yeah, so you were saying, your mother found Douthwaite—”
“Oh, she definitely thought he was a charmer,” said Oakden. His eyes, Robin noted, kept moving to the entrance of the bar, and she was sure Oakden was waiting for photographers to burst in. “Wide boy, you know the type. Chatting up the slags on reception. The old woman said he tried it on with everyone. The nurse got all giggly when he was around and all.”
Robin remembered the gamboling black skeleton of Talbot’s notebook, and the words written beside Crowley’s figure of death: Fortuna says Pallas Athena, Ceres, Vesta and Cetus are SCARLET WOMEN who RIDE UPON THE BEAST…
“And did your mother think he fancied Dr. Bamborough?”
Oakden took a sip of his cocktail and smacked his lips.
“Well, I mean, Margot,” he said, with a small snort of laughter, and Robin found herself irrationally resentful of Oakden using the missing doctor’s first name, “you know, she was the classic wanted-it-all-ways, wasn’t she?”
“What ways were those?” said Strike.
“Bunny Girl,” said Oakden, taking another sip of his drink, “legs out, tits out. Then, quick, get the white coat on—”
“Don’t think GPs wear white coats,” said Strike.
“I’m talking metaphorically,” said Oakden airily. “Child of her time, wasn’t she?”
“How’s that?”
“The rise of gynocentric society,” said Oakden, with a slight bow toward Robin, who suddenly thought his narrow head resembled a stoat’s. “Late sixties, early seventies, it’s when it all started changing, isn’t it? You’ve got the pill: consequence-free fucking. Looks like it benefits the male, but by enabling women to avoid or subvert the reproductive function, you’re repressing natural and healthy patterns of sex behavior. You’ve got a gynocentric court system, which favors the female even if she didn’t want the kids in the first place. You’ve got misandrist authoritarianism masquerading as a campaign for equal rights, policing men’s thoughts and speech and natural behavior. And you’ve got widespread sexual exploitation of men. Playboy Club, that’s all bullshit. Look, but don’t touch. It’s the old courtly love lie. The woman’s there to be worshipped, the man’s there to spew cash, but never get satisfaction. Suckers, the men who hang round those places.
“Bamborough didn’t look after her own kid,” said Oakden, his eyes again darting to the entrance and back to Strike, “didn’t fuck her own husband, from what I heard, he was nearly always too ill to perform. He had plenty of cash though, so she gets a nanny and goes lording it over men at work.”
“Who, specifically, did she lord it over?” asked Strike.
“Well, Douthwaite ran out of there practically crying last time he saw her, my old woman said. But that’s been our culture since the sixties, hasn’t it? Male suffering, nobody gives a shit. People whine when men break, when they can’t handle it any more, when they lash out. If Douthwaite did her in—I don’t personally think he did,” said Oakden with an expansive gesture, and Robin reminded herself that Carl Oakden had almost certainly never laid eyes on Steven Douthwaite, and that he’d been fourteen years old when Margot disappeared, “but if he did, I’d lay odds it’s because she kicked his pain back in his teeth. Only women bleed,” said Oakden, with a contemptuous little laugh, “isn’t that right?” he shot at Robin. “Ah, there’s my sandwich.”
While the waiter served him, Robin got up and headed to the bar, where the beautiful woman in the cheongsam, whose hair hung like black silk in the light of the banked bottles of spirits, was standing with her partner. Both were ordering cocktails and looked delighted to be in each other’s company. For a few seconds Robin suddenly wondered whether she’d ever again feel as they did. Her job reminded her almost daily of the many ways in which men and women could hurt each other.
As she ordered herself a tonic water, Robin’s phone rang. Hoping it was Barclay, she instead saw her mother’s name. Perhaps Linda had got wind of Sarah’s pregnancy. Matthew might have taken his wife-to-be back to Masham by now, to share the good news. Robin muted the phone, paid for her drink, wishing it was alcoholic, and carried it back to the table in time to hear Oakden say to Strike,
“No, that didn’t happen.”
“You didn’t add vodka to the punch at Dr. Bamborough’s barbecue?”
Oakden took a large bite of his free sandwich, and chewed it insolently. In spite of his thin hair and the many wrinkles around his eyes, Robin could clearly see the spoiled teenager inside the fifty-four-year-old.
“Nicked some,” said Oakden thickly, “then drank it in the shed. Surprised they missed it, but the rich are tight. How they stay minted, isn’t it?”
“We heard the punch made someone sick.”
“Not my fault,” said Oakden.
“Dr. Phipps was pretty annoyed, I hear.”
“Him,” said Oakden, with a smirk. “Things worked out all right for old Phipps, didn’t they?”
“In what way?” asked Strike.
“Wife out the way, marrying the nanny. All very convenient.”
“Didn’t like Phipps, did you?” said Strike. “That came across in your book.”
“You’ve read it?” said Oakden, momentarily startled. “How come?”
“Managed to track down an advance copy,” said Strike. “It should’ve come out in ’85, right?”
“Yeah,” said Oakden.
“D’you remember the gazebo that was under construction in the garden when the barbecue happened?”
One of Oakden’s eyelids flickered. He raised a hand quickly to his face and made a sweep of his forehead, as though he felt a hair tickling him.
“No,” he said.
“It’s in the background of one of your photos. They’d just started building the columns. I expect they’d already put down the floor.”
“I can’t remember that,” said Oakden.
“The shed where you took the vodka wasn’t near there, then?”
“Can’t’ve been,” said Oakden.
“While we’re on the subject of nicking things,” said Strike, “would you happen to have the obituary of Dr. Brenner you took from Janice Beattie’s house?”
“I never stole no obituary from her house,” said Oakden, with a display of disdain. “What would I want that for?”
“To get some information you could try and pass off as your own?”
“I don’t need to look up old Joe Brenner, I know plenty about him. He came round our house for his dinner every other Sunday. My old woman used to cook better than his sister, apparently.”
“Go on, then,” said Strike, his tone becoming combative, “amaze us.”
Oakden raised his sparse eyebrows. He chewed another bite of sandwich and swallowed it, before saying,
“Hey, this was all your idea. You don’t want the information, I’m happy to go.”
“Unless you’ve got more than you put in your book—”
“Brenner wanted Margot Bamborough struck off the bloody medical register. Come round our house one Sunday full of it. Couple of weeks before she disappeared. There,” said Oakden pugnaciously, “I kept that out of the book, because my mother didn’t want it in there.”
“Why was that?”
“Still loyal to him,” said Oakden, with a little snort of laughter. “And I wanted to keep the old dear happy at the time, because noises had been made about writing me out of the will. Old women,” said the convicted con man, “are a bit too persuadable if you don’t keep an eye on them. She’d got chummy with the local vicar by the eighties. I was worried it was all going to go to rebuild the bloody church steeple unless I kept an eye on her.”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 74
