Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Cormoran,” said Robin urgently.

  Strike looked up.

  “The heights are round the wrong way.”

  “What?”

  “In Ruby’s very first statement to Talbot,” Robin said, “she said, ‘I saw them beside a telephone box, two women sort of struggling together. The tall one in the raincoat was leaning on the short one, who was in a plastic rain hood. They both looked like women to me, but I didn’t see their faces. It looked to me like one was trying to make the other walk quicker.’”

  “Right,” said Strike, frowning slightly.

  “And that’s what Talbot wrote in his horoscope notes, too,” said Robin. “But that’s not how it should have been, if those two women were the Fleurys. Where’s that picture?”

  “Box one,” said Strike, shoving it toward Robin with his real foot.

  She crouched down beneath the desk and began searching the photocopied papers until she found the sheaf of newspaper clippings Strike had shown her, months previously, in the Three Kings.

  “There,” said Robin. “Look. There.”

  And there was the old picture, of the two women who’d come forward to say that they were Ruby’s struggling women: the tall, broad, younger woman with her cheery face, and her aged mother, who was tiny and stooped.

  “It’s the wrong way round,” repeated Robin. “If Fiona Fleury had leaned on her mother, she’d have flattened her…” Robin scanned the few lines beneath the picture. “Cormoran, it doesn’t fit. Fiona says she was wearing the rain hat, but Ruby says it was the short woman who had the rainhat on.”

  “Ruby was vague,” said Strike, but Robin could see his interest sharpening as he reached out for these pieces of paper. “She could’ve been confused…”

  “Talbot never thought the Fleurys were the people Ruby saw, and this is why!” said Robin. “The heights were reversed. It was the taller woman Ruby saw who was unsteady, not the little one…”

  “So how come she didn’t tell Lawson the Fleurys couldn’t be the people she saw?”

  “Same reason she never told anybody she’d seen Theo? Because she’d been flustered by Talbot trying to force her to bend her story to fit his theories? Because she lost confidence in herself, and didn’t know what she’d really seen? It was raining, she was lost, she was panicked… by the time it got to Lawson, maybe she just wanted to agree she’d seen the Fleurys and be left alone?”

  “Plausible,” admitted Strike.

  “How tall was Margot?”

  “Five nine,” said Strike.

  “And Creed?” said Robin.

  “Five seven.”

  “Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

  There was another minute’s silence, while Strike sat lost in thought and Robin re-read the statements laid out in front of her.

  “The phone boxes,” said Strike, at last. “Those bloody phone boxes…”

  “What about them?”

  “Talbot wanted Ruby to have seen the two struggling women beside the two boxes in Clerkenwell Green, right? So he could tie them to the van that was speeding away up Aylesbury Street, which was supposed to contain Creed.”

  “Right,” said Robin.

  “But after the Fleurys came forward, Talbot tried to get Ruby to agree she’d seen the two struggling women beside the first phone box, the one at the end of Albemarle Way.”

  “But she wouldn’t change her story,” said Robin, “because she’d seen Theo there.”

  “Precisely,” said Strike, “but that doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t—”

  “She’s driving round in an enormous circle in the rain, right, looking for this house she can’t find, right?”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, just because Ruby saw Theo get into a van by the phone box on one of her circuits doesn’t mean she can’t have seen two struggling women on her second or third circuit. We know she was hazy about landmarks, unfamiliar with the area and with no sense of direction, her daughter was very clear about that. But she had this very retentive visual memory, she’s somebody who notices clothes and hairstyles…”

  Strike looked down at the desk again, and for the second time, picked up Irene Hickson’s receipt and examined it. Then, so suddenly that Robin jumped, Strike let the receipt fall and stood up, both hands clasped over the back of his head.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit! Never trust a phone call whose provenance you haven’t checked!”

  “What phone call?” said Robin nervously, casting her mind back over any phone calls she’d taken over the course of the case.

  “Fuck’s sake,” said Strike, walking out of the room into the outer office and then back again, still clasping the back of his head, apparently needing to pace, just as Robin had needed to walk when she’d found out Strike could interview Creed. “How did I not fucking see it?”

  “Cormoran, what—?”

  “Why did Margot keep an empty chocolate box?” said Strike.

  “I don’t know,” said Robin, confused.

  “You know what?” said Strike slowly. “I think I do.”

  68

  … an Hyena was,

  That feeds on wemens flesh, as others feede on gras.

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  The high-security mental hospital that is Broadmoor lies slightly over an hour outside London, in the county of Berkshire. The word “Broadmoor” had long since lost all bucolic associations in the collective mind of the British public, and Strike was no exception to this rule. Far from connoting a wide stretch of grassland or heath, the name spoke to Strike only of violence, heinous crimes and two hundred of the most dangerous men in Britain, whom the tabloids called monsters. Accordingly, and in spite of the fact that Strike knew he was visiting a hospital and not a prison, he took all the common sense measures he’d have taken for a high-security jail: he wore no tie, ensured that neither he or his car was carrying anything likely to trigger a burdensome search, brought two kinds of photographic ID and a copy of his letter from the Ministry of Justice, set out early, certain, though he’d never been there before, that getting inside the facility would be time-consuming.

  It was a golden September morning. Sunshine pouring down upon the road ahead from between fluffy white clouds, and as Strike drove through Berkshire in his BMW, he listened to the news on the radio, the lead item of which was that Scotland had voted, by 55 percent to 45 percent, to remain in the United Kingdom. He was wondering how Dave Polworth and Sam Barclay were taking the news, when his mobile rang.

  “It’s Brian, Brian Tucker,” said the hoarse voice. “Not interrupting, am I? Wanna wish you good luck.”

  “Thanks, Brian,” said Strike.

  They’d finally met three days previously, at Strike’s office. Tucker had shown Strike the old letter from Creed, described the butterfly pendant taken from the killer’s basement, which he believed was his daughter’s, shared his theories and trembled with emotion and nerves at the thought of Strike coming face to face with the man he believed had murdered his eldest daughter.

  “I’ll let you go, I won’t keep you,” said Tucker. “You’ll ring me when it’s over, though?”

  “I will, of course,” said Strike.

  It was hard to concentrate on the news now that he’d heard Tucker’s anxiety and excitement. Strike turned off the radio, and turned his thoughts instead to what lay ahead.

  Gratifying though it would be to believe that he, Cormoran Strike, might trick or persuade Creed into confessing where all others had failed, Strike wasn’t that egotistical. He’d interviewed plenty of suspects in his career; the skill lay in making it easier for a suspect to disclose the truth than to continue lying. Some were worn down by patient questioning, others resistant to all but intense pressure, still others yearned to unburden themselves, and the interrogator’s methods had to change accordingly.

  However, in talking to Creed, half of Strike’s interrogatory arsenal would be out of commission. For one th
ing, he was there at Creed’s pleasure, because the patient had had to give his consent for the interview. For another, it was hard to see how Strike could paint a frightening picture of the consequences of silence, when his interviewee was already serving life in Broadmoor. Creed’s secrets were the only power he had left, and Strike was well aware that persuading him to relinquish any of them might prove a task beyond any human investigator. Standard appeals to conscience, or to the desire to figure as a better person to the self or to others, were likewise useless. As Creed’s entire life demonstrated, his primary sources of enjoyment were inflicting pain and establishing dominance, and it was doubtful that anything else would persuade him into disclosures.

  Strike’s first glimpse of the infamous hospital was of a fortress on raised ground. It had been built by the Victorians in the middle of woodland and meadows, a red-brick edifice with a clocktower the highest point in the compound. The surrounding walls were twenty feet high, and as Strike drove up to the front gates, he could see the heads of hundreds of Cyclopean security cameras on poles. As the gates opened, Strike experienced an explosion of adrenaline, and for a moment the ghostly black and white images of seven dead women, and the anxious face of Brian Tucker, seemed to swim before him.

  He’d sent his car registration number in advance. Once through the first set of double gates he encountered an inner wire fence, as tall as the wall he’d just passed through. A white-shirted, black-trousered man of military bearing unlocked a second set of gates once the first had closed behind the BMW, and directed Strike to a parking space. Before leaving his car, and wanting to save time going through the security he was about to face, the detective put his phone, keys, belt, cigarettes, lighter and loose change into the glove compartment and locked it.

  “Mr. Strike, is it?” said the smiling, white-shirted man, whose accent was Welsh and whose profile suggested a boxer. “Got your ID there?”

  Strike showed his driver’s license, and was led inside, where he encountered a scanner of the airport security type. Good-humored, inevitable amusement ensued when the scanner announced shrill disapproval of Strike’s metal lower leg, and his trousers had to be rolled up to prove he wasn’t carrying a weapon. Having been patted down, he was free to join Dr. Ranbir Bijral, who was waiting for him on the other side of the scanners, a slight, bearded psychiatrist whose open-necked yellow shirt struck a cheerful note against the dull green-gray tiled floors, the white walls and the unfresh air of all medical institutions, part disinfectant, part fried food, with a trace of incarcerated human.

  “We’ve got twenty minutes until Dennis will be ready for you,” said Dr. Bijral, leading Strike off along an eerily empty corridor, through many sets of turquoise swing doors. “We coordinate patient movements carefully and it’s always a bit of a feat moving him around. We have to make sure he never comes into contact with patients who have a particular dislike for him, you see. He’s not popular. We’ll wait in my office.”

  Strike was familiar with hospitals, but had never been inside one with so little bustle or shuffle of patients in the corridors. The emptiness was slightly unnerving. They passed many locked doors. A short female nurse in navy scrubs marched past. She smiled at Strike, who smiled back.

  “You’ve got women working here,” he said, slightly surprised.

  “Of course,” said Dr. Bijral.

  Strike had somehow imagined an all-male staff, even though he knew that male prisons had female warders. Dr. Bijral pushed open a door to a small office that had the air of a converted treatment room, with chipped paint on the walls and bars on the windows.

  “Have a seat,” said Dr. Bijral, waving his hand at the chair opposite his desk, and with slightly forced politeness, he asked, “Did you have a good journey? Come up from London?”

  “Yeah, it was a nice drive,” said Strike.

  As he sat down behind the desk, Dr. Bijral became business-like.

  “All right, so: we’re going to give you forty-five minutes with Creed.”

  “Forty-five minutes,” repeated Strike.

  “If Dennis wants to admit to another killing, that should be ample time,” said Dr. Bijral, “but… may I be honest with you, Mr. Strike?”

  “Of course.”

  “If it had been down to Dennis’s treatment team, we prob­ably wouldn’t have permitted this visit. I know the MoJ feel the Bamboroughs and the Tuckers ought to be given a last chance to ask Dennis about their relatives, but—”

  Dr. Bijral leaned back in his seat and sighed.

  “—he’s a classic sociopath, you see, a pure example of the type. He scores very highly on the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Devious, sadistic, unrepentant and extremely egotistical.”

  “Not a fan, then?” said Strike, and the doctor permitted himself a perfunctory smile.

  “The problem, you see, is if he admitted to another murder under your questioning, you’d get the credit. And Dennis can’t have that, he can’t allow somebody else to come out on top. He had to give his consent to meeting you, of course, and I think he’s agreed because it feeds his ego to be questioned, especially by a man who’s been in the papers, and I think he’d like to manipulate you into being an advocate for him in some way. He’s been lobbying to get out of Broadmoor and back into prison for a long time now.”

  “I thought he was desperate to get in here?”

  “He was, once,” said Bijral. “High-profile sex offenders are usually under risk of attack in the prison system, as you probably know. You might have seen in the papers, one man nearly took his eye out with a sharpened spoon handle. Dennis wanted to come to Broadmoor when he was first convicted, but there were no grounds to admit him to hospital back then. Psychopathy isn’t, in itself, treatable.”

  “What changed?”

  “He was exceptionally difficult to manage in the prison system. He managed to talk a young offender with Asperger’s syndrome into killing himself. For that, he was put into solitary confinement. They ended up keeping him there for almost a year. By night, he took to reenacting what had happened in the basement in Liverpool Road, screaming through the night, doing his voice and the women’s. Warders couldn’t stand hearing it, let alone prisoners.

  “After eleven months in solitary, he became suicidal. First he went on hunger strike. Then he began trying to bite his own wrists open, and smashing his head against the wall. He was assessed, judged psychotic and transferred here.

  “Once we’d had him a couple of months, he claimed he’d been faking his mental illness, which is pure Dennis. Nobody else can be cleverer than he is. But actually, his mental health was very poor when he came to us, and it took many months of medication and therapy to stop him self-harming and trying to kill himself.”

  “And now he wants to leave?”

  “Once he was well enough to fully appreciate the difference between jail and hospital, I think it’s fair to say he was disappointed. He had more freedom in Belmarsh. He did a lot of writing and drawing before he got ill. I read the autobiography he’d been working on, when he was admitted. It was useful in assessing him. He writes very well for a man who had hardly any education, but…” Dr. Bijral laced his fingers together, and Strike was reminded of another doctor, who’d talked of teamwork while eating fig rolls. “You see, persuading patients to discuss their crimes is usually an important part of the therapeutic process. You’re trying to find a pathway to accountability and remorse, but Dennis feels no remorse. He’s still aroused by the thought of what he did to those women, and he enjoys talking and writing about it. He used to draw episodes from the basement, as well; essentially producing his own hardcore pornography. So when he came here, we confiscated all writing and drawing materials.

  “Dennis blames us for his deteriorating mental faculties, although in fact, for a seventy-seven-year-old man, he’s remarkably sharp. Every patient is different, and we manage Dennis on a strict reward and penalty system. His chosen rewards are unusual. He enjoys chess; he taught
himself in Belmarsh, so sometimes I’ll give him a game. He likes crosswords and logic puzzles, too. We allow him access to those when he’s behaving himself.

  “But you mustn’t think he’s typical of our patients,” added Dr. Bijral earnestly. “The vast majority of mentally ill people pose absolutely no risk of violence, as I’m sure you know. And people do leave Broadmoor, they do get better. People’s behavior can change, if they’re motivated, if they’re given the right help. Our aim is always recovery. One can hate the crime, but feel compassion for the perpetrator. Many of the men in here had appallingly abusive childhoods. Dennis’s childhood was pure hell—though, of course, other people have upbringings as bad and never do what Dennis did. In fact, one of our former patients—”

  There was a knock on the door and a cheery blonde poked her head inside.

  “That’s Dennis ready in the room, Ranbir,” she said, and withdrew.

  “Shall we?” said Dr. Bijral, getting to his feet. “I’ll be sitting in on the interview, and so will Dennis’s primary nurse.”

  The woman who’d announced Dennis’s arrival in the meeting room walked with Strike and the psychiatrist down another couple of corridors. Now there were doors that had to be unlocked and relocked at every passage. Through the third set of locked doors, Strike saw an obese man shuffling along in Nike tracksuit bottoms, flanked by a pair of nurses, each of whom held one of the patient’s stiff arms behind his back. The patient gave Strike a glazed look as the trio passed in silence.

  Finally, Strike’s party reached a deserted open-plan area, with armchairs and a switched-off TV. Strike had assumed the blonde woman was Creed’s nurse, but he was wrong: a burly man with tattoos down both arms, and a prominent, square jaw, was introduced as “Marvin, Dennis’s lead nurse,” and the blonde woman smiled at Strike, wished him luck and walked away.

  “Well, shall we?” said Dr. Bijral, and Marvin opened the door onto a Spartan meeting room, with a single window and a whiteboard on the wall.