Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  The only occupant, a small, obese, bespectacled man, wore jeans and a black sweatshirt. He had a triple chin, and his belly kept him a foot and a half away from the white Formica-topped table at which he was sitting. Transplanted to a bus stop, Dennis Creed would have been just another old man, a little unkempt, his light gray hair in need of a trim.

  (He’d pressed hot-irons to the bare breasts of secretary Jackie Aylett. He’d pulled out all of hairdresser Susan Meyer’s finger and toenails. He’d dug the eyeballs out of estate agent Noreen Sturrock’s face while she was still alive and manacled to a radiator.)

  “Dennis, this is Cormoran Strike,” said Dr. Bijral, as he sat down in a chair against the wall. Marvin stood, tattooed arms folded, beside him.

  “Hello, Dennis,” said Strike, sitting down opposite him.

  “Hello, Cormoran,” said Creed, in a flat voice which retained its working-class, East London accent.

  The sunlight fell like a gleaming pane across the table between them, highlighting the smears on the lenses of Creed’s wire-rimmed glasses and the dust motes in the air. Behind the dirt, Strike saw irises of such pale gray that they faded into the sclera, so that the enormous pupils seemed surrounded by whiteness. Close to, Strike could see the jagged scar which ran from temple to nose, dragging at his left lower eyelid, a relic of the attack that had almost taken half Creed’s sight. The plump, pale hands on the table were slightly shaking and the slack mouth trembled: side-effects, Strike guessed, of Creed’s medication.

  “Who’re you working for?” Creed asked.

  “’Spect you’ll be able to work that out, from my questions,” said Strike.

  “Why not say, then?” asked Creed, and when Strike didn’t answer, he said, “Sign of narcissism, withholding information to make yourself feel powerful, you know.”

  Strike smiled.

  “It’s not a question of trying to feel powerful. I’m simply familiar with the King’s Gambit.”

  Creed pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up his nose.

  “Told you I play chess, did they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “D’you play?”

  “Badly.”

  “So how does the King’s Gambit apply to this situation?”

  “Your opening move appears to open an easy route to your king. You’re offering to jump straight into discussing the missing woman I’m investigating.”

  “But you think that’s a ploy?”

  “Maybe.”

  There was a short pause. Then Creed said,

  “I’ll tell you who I think sent you, then, shall I?”

  “Go on.”

  “Margot Bamborough’s daughter,” said Dennis Creed, watching carefully for Strike’s reaction. “The husband gave up on her long since, but her daughter’ll be forty-odd now and she’ll be well-heeled. Whoever hired you’s got money. You won’t come cheap. I’ve read all about you, in the paper.

  “The second possibility,” said Creed, when Strike didn’t respond, “is old Brian Tucker. He pops up every few years, making a spectacle of himself. Brian’s skint, though… or did he put out the begging bowl on the internet? Get on the computer and whine out some hard-luck story, so mugs send in cash? But I think, if he’d done that, it would’ve been in the papers.”

  “D’you get online much?” asked Strike.

  “We’re not allowed, in here,” said Creed. “Why are you wasting time? We’ve only got forty-five minutes. Ask a question.”

  “That was a question, what I just asked you.”

  “Why won’t you tell me which so-called victim you’re interested in?”

  “‘So-called’ victim?”

  “Arbitrary labels,” said Creed. “‘Victim.’ ‘Patient.’ This one deserves pity… this one gets caged. Maybe those women I killed were the real patients, and I’m the true victim?”

  “Novel point of view,” said Strike.

  “Yeah, well, does people good to hear novel points of view,” said Creed, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “Wake them up, if they’re capable of it.”

  “What would you say you were curing those women of?”

  “The infection of life? Diagnosis: life. Terminal. ‘Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler…’”

  (He’d slit open the corners of schoolgirl Geraldine Christie’s mouth, and photographed her crying and screaming, before, as he told her parents from the dock, slitting her throat because she was making so much noise.)

  “‘… I am unique and conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish.’ Know who said that?”

  “Aleister Crowley,” said Strike.

  “Unusual reading matter,” said Creed, “for a decorated soldier in the British army.”

  “Oh, we’re all satanists on the sly,” said Strike.

  “You think you’re joking,” said Creed, whose expression had become intense, “but you kill and you get given a medal and called a hero. I kill and get called evil and locked up forever. Arbitrary categories. Know what’s just down the road from here?”

  “Sandhurst,” said Strike.

  “Sandhurst,” repeated Creed, as though Strike hadn’t spoken. “Institutions for killers, side by side, one to make them, one to break them. Explain to me why’s it more moral to murder little brown children on Tony Blair’s say-so, than to do what I did? I’m made the way I am. Brain scans will show you, they’ve studied people like me. It’s how we’re wired. Why’s it more evil to kill because you’ve got to, because it’s your nature, than to blow up poor brown people because we want oil? Properly looked at, I’m the innocent, but I get fattened up and drugged like a captive pig, and you get a state pension.”

  “Interesting argument,” said Strike. “So you had no control over what you did?”

  “Control,” scoffed Creed, shaking his head. “That shows how far removed—I can’t explain it in terms someone like you would understand. ‘You have your way. I have my ways. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.’ Know who said that?”

  “Sounds like Nietzsche,” said Strike.

  “Nietzsche,” said Creed, talking over him. “Obviously, yes. I read a lot in Belmarsh, back before I got stuffed full of so many drugs I couldn’t concentrate from one end of the sentence to another.

  “I’ve got diabetes now, did you know that?” Creed continued. “Yeah. Hospital-acquired diabetes. They took a thin, fit man, and piled the weight on me, with these drugs I don’t need and the pig-swill we’re forced to eat. Eight hundred so-called healers leeching a living off us. They need us ill, because we’re their livelihoods. Morlocks. Understand that word?”

  “Fictional underbeings,” said Strike, “in The Time—”

  “Obviously, yes,” said Creed again, who seemed irritated that Strike understood his references. “H. G. Wells. Primitive beings preying on the highly evolved species, who don’t realize they’re being farmed to eat. Except I realize it, I know what’s going on.”

  “See yourself as one of the Eloi, do you?” asked Strike.

  “Interesting thing about the Eloi,” said Creed, “is their total lack of conscience. The higher race is intellectual, refined, with no so-called remorse… I was exploring all this in my book, the book I was writing before they took it off me. Wells’s thing was only a superficial allegory, but he was groping toward a truth… What I was writing, part autobiography, part scientific treatise—but it was taken away from me, they’ve confiscated my manuscript. It could be an invaluable resource, but no, because it’s mine, it’s got to be destroyed. I’ve got an IQ of 140, but they want my brain flabby like my body.”

  “You seem pretty alert to me. What drugs have they got you on?”

  “I shouldn’t be on any drugs at all. I should be in assertive rehab but they won’t let me out of high dependency. They let the little schizophrenics loose in the workshops with knives over there, and I can’t have a pencil. When I came here, I thought
I’d meet intelligent people… any child who can memorize a seven times table could be a doctor, it’s all rote learning and dogma. The patient’s supposed to be a partner in this therapeutic process, and I say I’m well enough to go back to prison.”

  “Certainly seem sane to me,” said Strike.

  “Thank you,” said Creed, who’d become flushed. “Thank you. You’re an intelligent man, it appears. I thought you would be. That’s why I agreed to this.”

  “But you’re still on medication—”

  “I know all about their drugs, and they’re giving me too much. I could prescribe better for myself than they know how to, here.”

  “How d’you know about that stuff?” asked Strike.

  “Obvious, easy,” said Creed, with a grandiose gesture. “I used myself as a guinea pig, developed my own series of standardized tests. How well I could walk and talk on twenty milligrams, thirty milligrams… made notes on disorientation, drowsiness, differences in side-effects…”

  “What kinds of drugs were these?” asked Strike.

  “Amobarbital, pentobarbital, phenobarbital,” rattled off Creed: the names of barbiturates of the early seventies, mostly replaced, now, by other drugs.

  “Easy to buy on the street?”

  “I only bought off the street occasionally, I had other channels, that were never widely known…”

  And Creed launched into a meandering speech that couldn’t properly be called a story, because the narrative was disjointed and full of mysterious hints and oblique allusions, but the gist seemed to be that Creed had been associating with many unnamed but powerful people in the sixties and seventies, and that a steady supply of prescription drugs had been an incidental perk, either of working for gangsters, or spying on them for the authorities. He hinted at having been recruited by the security services, spoke of flights to America there was no evidence he’d ever taken, of barbiturate-addicted politicians and celebrities, and the dangerous desire of humans from all walks of life to dope themselves to cope with the cruel realities of the world, a tendency and temptation which Dennis Creed deplored and had always resisted.

  Strike surmised that these fake reminiscences were designed to feed Creed’s overweening craving for status. No doubt his decades in high-security prisons and mental hospitals had taught him that rape and torture were considered almost as contemptible there as they’d been on the outside. He might continue to derive sexual pleasure from reliving his crimes, but in others, they elicited only contempt. Without a fantasy career in which he was part-spy, part-gangster, the man with the 140 IQ was merely a dry-cleaning delivery man, a sexual deviant buying handfuls of downers from street dealers who’d exploited, then betrayed him.

  “… see all that security all round me, at the trial? There were other forces at play, that’s all I’ll say…”

  There’d been a solid cordon of police around Creed on his way in and out of court because the crowd had wanted to tear him apart. The details of his torture chamber had leaked: police had found the hot-irons and the pliers, the ball gags and the whips, the photographs Creed had taken of his victims, alive and dead, and the decomposing head and hands of Andrea Hooton, sitting in his bathroom sink. But the image of himself Creed now presented Strike turned murder into something incidental to a much more prestigious criminal life, a hobby that for some reason the public continued to harp on, when there was so much more to tell, and admire.

  “… because they like salivating over dirty little things that excite them, as an outlet for their own unacceptable urges,” said Creed. “I could’ve been a doctor, probably should have been, actually…”

  (He’d poured cooking oil over dinner lady Vera Kenny’s head, then set her hair on fire and photographed her while it burned, a ball gag in her mouth. He’d cut out unemployed Gail Wrightman’s tongue. He’d murdered hairdresser Susan Meyer by stamping repeatedly on her head.)

  “Never killed anyone by overdose, did you?” said Strike.

  “It takes far more skill to disorientate them but keep them on their feet. Any fool can shove an overdose down someone’s throat. The other takes knowledge and experience. That’s how I know they’re using too much on me in here, because I understand side-effects.”

  “What were you giving the women in the basement?”

  “I never drugged a woman, once I had her at home. Once she was inside, I had other ways of keeping her quiet.”

  Andrea Hooton’s mouth had been sewn shut by Creed while she was still alive: the traces of thread had still been present on the rotting head.

  The psychiatrist glanced at his watch.

  “What if a woman was already drunk?” asked Strike. “Gail Wrightman: you picked her up in a bar, right? Wasn’t there a danger of overdose, if you drugged her on top of the drink?”

  “Intelligent question,” said Creed, drinking Strike in with his enormous pupils. “I can usually tell what a woman’s had to the exact unit. Gail was on her own, sulking. Some man had stood her up…”

  Creed was giving nothing away: these weren’t secrets. He’d admitted to it all already, in the dock, where he’d enjoyed relaying the facts, watching the reaction of the victims’ relatives. The photographs hidden under the floorboards, of Gail and Andrea, Susan and Vera, Noreen, Jackie and Geraldine, bound, burned and stabbed, alive and maimed, their mutilated and sometimes headless corpses posed in pornographic attitudes, had damned him before he opened his mouth, but he’d insisted on a full trial, pleading guilty by reason of insanity.

  “… in a wig, bit of lipstick… they think you’re harmless, odd… maybe queer. Talked to her for a minute or two, little dark corner. You act concerned…

  “Bit of Nembutal in her drink… tiny amount, tiny,” said Creed, holding his trembling fingers millimeters apart. “Nembutal and alcohol, potentially dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I did, obviously…

  “So I say, ‘Well, I got to go now, sweetheart, you be careful.’ ‘Be careful!’ It always worked.” Creed affected squeaky tones to imitate Gail, “‘Aw, don’t go, have a drink!’ ‘No, darling, I need my beauty sleep.’ That’s when you prove you’re not a threat. You make as if you want to leave, or actually walk away. Then, when they call you back, or run into you ten minutes later, when they’re starting to feel like shit, they’re relieved, because you’re the nice man who’s safe…

  “It was all in my book, the different ways I got them. Instructive for women who want to keep out of trouble, you’d think, to read how a highly efficient killer works, but the authorities won’t let it be published, which makes you question, are they happy for slags to be picked off on the streets? Maybe they are.

  “Why’re there people like me at all, Cormoran? Why’s evolution let it happen? Because humans are so highly developed, we can only thin ourselves out with intraspecies predators. Pick off the weak, the morally depraved. It’s a good thing that degenerate, drunk women don’t breed. That’s just a fact, it’s a fact,” said Dennis Creed.

  “I’d wind down my window. ‘Want a lift, love?’ Swaying all over the place. Glad to see me. Got in the van, no trouble, grateful to sit down…

  “I used to say to Gail, once I had her in the basement: ‘Should’ve gone to the bathroom instead, you dirty little bitch, shouldn’t you? I bet you’re the type to piss in the street. Filthy, that is, filthy’… Why’re you so interested in drugging?”

  The flow of talk had suddenly dried up. Creed’s blank gray and black eyes darted left and right between each of Strike’s.

  “You think Dr. Bamborough would be too clever to get herself drugged by the likes of me, do you?”

  “Doctors can make mistakes, like anyone else,” said Strike. “You met Noreen Sturrock on a bus, right?”

  Creed considered Strike for several seconds, as though trying to work something out.

  “Busses, now, is it? How often did Margot Bamborough take the bus?”

  “Frequently, I’d imagine,” said Strike.

  “Would she
’ve taken a can of Coke from a stranger?”

  “That’s what you offered Noreen, right? And the Coke was full of phenobarbital?”

  “Yeah. She was almost asleep by the time we came to my stop. I said, ‘You’ve missed yours, darling. Come on, I’ll take you to a taxi rank.’ Walked her straight off the bus, arm round her. She wasn’t a big girl, Noreen. That was one of the easiest.”

  “Did you adjust dosage for weight?”

  There was another slight pause.

  “Busses and cans of pop, and adjusting drugs for weight?… You know what, Cormoran? I think my second guess was right. You’re here for little Louise Tucker.”

  “No,” said Strike with a sigh, settling back in his chair. “As it happens, you were spot on first time round. I was hired by Margot Bamborough’s daughter.”

  There was a longer silence now, and the psychiatrist again checked his watch. Strike knew that his time was nearly up, and he thought Creed knew it, too.

  “I want to go back to Belmarsh, Cormoran,” said Creed, leaning in now that Strike had leaned back. “I want to finish my book. I’m sane, you know it, too, you just said it. I’m not ill. It’s costing the taxpayer five times as much to keep me in here as it would in jail. Where would the British public say I should be, eh?”

  “Oh, they’d want you back in prison,” said Strike.

  “Well, I agree with them,” said Creed. “I agree.”

  He looked sideways at Dr. Bijral, who had the look of a man about to call a halt.

  “I’m sane and if I’m treated like it, I’ll act like it,” said Creed.

  He leaned further forwards.

  “I killed Louise Tucker,” said Creed in a soft voice, and in Strike’s peripheral vision the psychiatrist and the nurse both froze, astonished. “Picked her up off a street corner in my van, November 1972. Freezing cold that night. She wanted to go home and she had no money. I couldn’t resist, Cormoran,” said Creed, those big black pupils boring into Strike’s. “Little girl in her school uniform. No man could resist. Did it on impulse… no planning… no wig, no drugged Coke, nothing…”