Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel

by Galbraith, Robert

  “Yes. It doesn’t look that well mixed. Amateurish. But it’s done the job. It probably killed most of the smell.”

  “Hell of a weight on a supporting beam.”

  “Well, exactly. Where are you?”

  “Outside, about to go in. Right: call 999, then call Layborn and tell him where I am, and why. That should speed things up.”

  “OK. Good luck.”

  Strike hung up. The nondescript street of terraced houses was quiet now the train had gone, birdsong replacing its thunderous clamor. Strike, who’d been waiting where he couldn’t be seen, now walked up the street, passing three small houses, and at the fourth, turned left up a short garden path, then beat a tattoo on the dark red front door.

  The net curtains twitched, and Janice Beattie’s cross face appeared. Strike raised a hand in greeting. The curtain fell.

  After a slightly longer wait than might have been expected, given the short distance from sitting room to hall, Janice opened the door. She was dressed all in black today, with sheepskin carpet slippers on her feet. Her clear china-blue eyes, rimmed in steel, looked as kind and innocent as ever. Silver-haired, apple-cheeked, she frowned up at the detective, but didn’t speak.

  “Can I come in?” asked Strike.

  There was a long pause. The wild birds tweeted, and Strike thought fleetingly of the budgies in the Athorns’ flat, where part of his mind was dwelling on the image of a skull and a femur, poking up through concrete.

  “If you must,” said Janice slowly.

  He followed Janice into the red sitting room, with its cheap crimson Turkish rug, its dried-flower pictures and its faded photographs. The sun was making the spun-glass Cinderella carriage and its six horses twinkle on top of the fire, which Janice had on, in spite of the mildness of the September day.

  “Wanna cup of tea?” said Janice.

  “That’d be great,” said Strike, fully alive to the unreality of the situation.

  He listened to her sheepskin-muffled footsteps receding and the sound of the kitchen door opening. Taking out his mobile phone, he switched it to record and laid it on the arm of the chair in which he’d sat last time. He then pulled on a pair of latex gloves and followed Janice quietly out of the room, the worn carpet muffling his footsteps.

  At the door, he paused, listening to the soft bubbling of boiling water against a kettle lid, and the tinkle of teaspoons, and the opening of a cupboard. With one fingertip, he pushed open the kitchen door.

  Janice spun round, eyes wide. On seeing him, she grabbed one of the china mugs on the tray and raised it hurriedly to her lips, but Strike had already taken a stride toward her. Gripping the thin wrist with his latex-gloved hand, forcing the mug away from her mouth, he felt bone beneath the soft flesh and the papery skin of the elderly. With his free hand, he pulled the mug out of hers, and examined it. A good inch of viscous white liquid was swimming in the bottom of it. Still holding Janice’s wrist, he looked into the teapot, which contained more of the same, then opened the cupboard over the kettle.

  It was jammed with bottles of pills, weedkiller, bleach and jam jars full of what looked like home-dried plants, leaves and fungus: a poisoner’s storehouse, a testimony to a lifetime’s careful study of the means by which death could be delivered in the guise of healing.

  “Think I’ll skip tea,” said Strike. “Let’s have a chat, shall we?”

  She offered no resistance as he led her by the wrist back through to the sitting room and pushed her down onto the sofa.

  “A murder-suicide would be a hell of a way to go out,” said Strike, standing over her, “but I don’t much fancy being victim number… how many is it?”

  Janice said nothing. Her round blue eyes registered only shock.

  Strike looked up at the wall of old photographs. One showed a toothy, beaming brunette bride, her hair worn in ringlets, in a high-necked lace dress, a pillbox hat on top of her veil, a large mole on her left cheekbone. Just above it was a picture of a young blonde with her hair worn in a frizzy eighties perm. She was wearing a red coat. He hadn’t noticed, hadn’t seen, because he’d walked into the room with certain expectations, making assumptions no less sweeping than Talbot had, with his conviction that Cancerians were intuitive, gentle and perceptive. Nurses were angels, ministering to the vulnerable: he’d been as guilty of bias as Vi Cooper, seeing Janice through the prism of his grateful memories of the nurses in Selly Oak who’d helped him manage pain and depression, and of Kerenza down in Cornwall, bringing comfort and kindness every single day. And on top of it all, he’d been fooled by a veritable genius for lies and misdirection.

  “I thought,” said Strike, “I should come and tell the Athorns’ social worker in person that a body’s been found in their flat. You do a very good middle-class accent, Janice. I s’pose the phone Clare uses is round here somewhere?”

  He looked around. Possibly she’d hidden it when she’d seen who was at the door. He suddenly spotted the hairdryer, tucked away behind the sofa, but with its lead protruding. He sidled past the coffee table, bent down and pulled it out, along with a roll of cellophane, a small phial with the label pulled off, a syringe and some chocolates.

  “Leave them,” said Janice suddenly and angrily, but he laid the items on the coffee table instead.

  “How ill would I have been if I’d eaten one of those dates you were doctoring when I arrived last time?” he asked. “You use the hairdryer to fix the cellophane back round them, right?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I haven’t thanked you for those chocolates you sent Robin and me at Christmas. I had flu. Only managed to eat a couple before puking my guts up. Chucked the rest away, because they had bad associations. Lucky for me, eh?”

  Strike now sat down in the armchair, beside his mobile, which was still recording.

  “Did you kill all these people?” Strike asked, gesturing up at the wall of photographs, “Or do some of them just have recurrent bowel problems around you? No,” he said, scrutinizing the wall, “Irene’s not up there, is she?”

  She blinked at him through the lenses of her round silver glasses, which were far cleaner than Dennis Creed’s.

  A car came trundling up the road beyond the net curtains. Janice watched it pass, and Strike thought she was half expecting to see a police car. Perhaps she wasn’t going to talk at all. Sometimes, people didn’t. They preferred to leave it all up to the lawyers.

  “I spoke to your son on the phone last night,” said Strike.

  “You never!”

  The words had burst out of her, in shock.

  “I did,” said Strike. “Kevin was quite surprised to hear you’d been visiting him in Dubai, because he hasn’t seen you in nearly seven years. Why d’you pretend you’re visiting him? To get a break from Irene?”

  She pressed her lips together. One hand was playing with the worn wedding ring on the other.

  “Kevin told me he’s had barely any contact with you, since leaving home. You weren’t ever close, he said. But he paid for you to fly out there seven years ago, because he thought he should give you ‘another chance,’ as he put it… and his young daughter managed to ingest quite a lot of bleach while you were looking after her. She survived—just—and since then, he’s cut you off completely.

  “We ended up talking for nearly two hours,” said Strike, watching Janice’s color fluctuate. “It was hard for Kevin to say out loud what he’s suspected all these years. Who wants to believe their own mum’s been poisoning people? He preferred to think he was paranoid about all those ‘special drinks’ you used to give him. And apparently your first husband—”

  “He wasn’t my ’usband,” muttered Janice. “We were never married.”

  “—left because he thought you were doing things to his meals, too. Kevin used to think his father was making it all up. But after our chat last night, I think he’s seeing things very differently. He’s ready to come over and testify against you.”

  Janice gave a small convulsive jerk. For almost a minute th
ere was silence.

  “You’re recording this,” she whispered at last, looking at the mobile lying on the arm of Strike’s chair.

  “I am, yeah,” said Strike.

  “If you turn that off, I’ll talk to you.”

  “I’ll still be able to testify to whatever you tell me.”

  “I’m sure a lawyer would tell me not to let meself be recorded, though.”

  “Yeah,” Strike acknowledged, “you’re probably right.”

  He picked up the mobile, turned it to face her so she could watch, switched off the recording, then laid it down on the small coffee table beside the chocolates, the empty phial, the syringe, the cellophane and the hairdryer.

  “Why d’you do it, Janice?”

  She was still stroking the underside of her wedding ring.

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “I just… like it.”

  Her eyes wandered over the wall of photographs.

  “I like seeing what ’appens to them, if they take poison or too many drugs. Sometimes I like ’elping ’em and ’aving them be grateful, and sometimes I like watching ’em suffer, and sometimes I like watching ’em go…” A prickle ran up the back of Strike’s neck. “I don’t know why,” she said again. “I sometimes fink it’s because I ’ad a bang on the ’ead, when I was ten. My dad knocked me downstairs. I was out for fifteen minutes. Ever since then, I’ve ’ad ’eadaches…’Ead trauma can do fings to you, you know. So maybe it’s not my fault, but… I dunno…

  “Wiv me granddaughter,” said Janice, frowning slightly, “I just wanted ’er gone, honestly… spoiled and whiny… I don’t like kids,” she said, looking directly back at Strike. “I’ve never liked kids. I never wanted ’em, never wanted Kev, but I fort if I ’ad it, ’is dad might marry me… but ’e never, ’e wouldn’t…

  “It was ’aving a baby what killed my mum,” said Janice. “I was eight. She ’ad it at ’ome. Placenta previa, it was. Blood everywhere, me trying to ’elp, no doctor, my father drunk, screaming at everyone…

  “I took this,” said Janice quietly, showing Strike the wedding ring on her finger, “off Mum’s dead ’and. I knew my father would sell it for drink. I took it and ’id it so ’e couldn’t get it. It’s all I got of ’er. I loved my mum,” said Janice Beattie, stroking the wedding ring, and Strike wondered whether it was true, whether head trauma and early abuse had made Janice what she was, and whether Janice had the capacity to love at all.

  “Is that really your little sister, Clare?” Strike asked, pointing at the double frame beside Janice, where the sleepy-eyed, overweight man with smoker’s teeth faced the heavy but pretty blonde.

  “No,” said Janice, looking at the picture. After a short pause, she said, “She was Larry’s mistress. I killed both of ’em. I’m not sorry. They deserved it. ’E was wiv me, ’e wasn’t much of a catch, but ’e was wiv me, the pair of ’em carryin’ on be’ind my back. Bitch,” said Janice quietly, looking at the picture of the plump blonde.

  “I assume you kept the obituaries?”

  She got slowly up from the sofa, and Strike heard her knees click as she walked toward the china cabinet in the corner which housed most of her cheap spun-glass ornaments, and knelt down, again steadying herself with one hand on the mantelpiece. But now, instead of one folder, she tugged two out of the drawer in the base of the cabinet, and Strike remembered how she’d shifted things around in the drawer last time, doubtless removing those things she didn’t want him to see.

  “That one,” she said, showing him the fatter of the two folders, “is all the stuff about Margot. I cut out everyfing I could find. Needed a second folder for all ’er clippings…”

  She opened the thinner folder, which was the one Strike had seen before, and extracted an old work newsletter headed Hickson & Co. The blonde’s color photograph featured prominently at the top.

  “Clare Martin,” said Janice. “’Eavy drinker, she was. ‘Accidental overdose’… liver failure. I knew she was taking too many paracetamol for ’er endometriosis, I watched ’er doing it. Me and Larry ’ad a bunch of people over to the ’ouse. They fort I was stupid. Eye contact between ’em all night long. Thick as mince, the pair of ’em. I was mixing drinks. Every cocktail I gave ’er was ’alf liquid paracetamol. She died eight days later…

  “And there’s Larry’s,” she said indifferently, holding up a second newsletter from Hickson & Co.

  “I waited six, seven monfs. That was easy. ’E was a walkin’ timebomb, Larry, the doctors ’ad warned ’im, ’is ’eart was wrecked. Pseudoephedrine, that was. They never even checked ’im for drugs in ’is system. They knew what it was: smoking and eating like a pig. Nobody looked further than ’is dodgy ticker…”

  Strike detected not the slightest sign of remorse as she shuffled the obituaries of her victims as though they were so many knitting patterns. Her fingers trembled, but Strike thought that was down to shock, not shame. Mere minutes ago she’d thought of suicide. Perhaps that cool and clever brain was working very hard beneath the apparently frank surface, and Strike suddenly reached out and removed the drugged chocolates from the table beside Janice, and put them down on the floor beside his chair. Her eyes followed them, and he was sure he’d been right to suspect she was thinking of eating them. Now he leaned forwards again and picked up the old yellow clipping he’d examined last time, showing little Johnny Marks from Bethnal Green.

  “He was your first, was he?”

  Janice took a deep breath and exhaled. A couple of the cuttings fluttered.

  “Yeah,” she said heavily. “Pesticide. You could get all sorts in them days, buy it over the counter. Organophosphates. I fancied ’im something rotten, Johnny Marks, but ’e made fun of me. Yeah, so they fort it was peritonitis and ’e died. It’s true the doctor didn’t turn up, mind. People didn’t care, when it was kids from a slum… That was a bad death, ’e ’ad. I was allowed to go in and look at ’im, after ’e died. I give ’im a little kiss on the cheek,” said Janice. “’E couldn’t stop me then, could ’e? Shouldn’t of made fun of me.”

  “Marks,” said Strike, examining the clipping, “gave you the idea for Spencer, right? It was the name that first connected her with you, but I should’ve twigged when Clare phoned me back so promptly. Social workers never do that. Too overworked.”

  “Huh,” said Janice, and she almost smiled. “Yeah. That’s where I got the name: Clare Martin and Johnny Marks.”

  “You didn’t keep Brenner’s obituary, did you?”

  “No,” said Janice.

  “Because you didn’t kill him?”

  “No. ’E died of old age somewhere in Devon. I never even read ’is obituary, but I ’ad to come up wiv somefing, didn’t I, when you asked for it? So I said Oakden took it.”

  She was probably the most accomplished liar Strike had ever met. Her ability to come up with falsehoods at a moment’s notice, and the way she interwove her plausible lies with truth, never attempting too much, and delivering everything with such an air of authenticity and honesty, placed her in a class apart.

  “Was Brenner really addicted to barbiturates?”

  “No,” said Janice.

  She was shuffling the obituaries back into their folder now, and Strike spotted the clipping about holy basil, on the reverse of which was Joanna Hammond’s death notice.

  “No,” she repeated, as she put the obituaries back into her bottom drawer and closed it, as though it mattered any more whether she tidied these things away, as though they wouldn’t soon be used in evidence against her. Knees clicking, she got slowly to her feet again, and returned to the sofa.

  “I was getting Brenner to sign for drugs for me,” she said. “’E fort I was selling them on the street, dopey old sod.”

  “How did you persuade him to over-order drugs? Blackmail?”

  “S’pose you’d call it that, yeah,” she said. “I found out ’e was going to see a prostitute locally. One of ’er kids told me Brenner was visiting ’er once a week. I fort, right,
I’ll get you, you dirty old bastard. ’E was coming up for retirement. I knew ’e didn’t want to end ’is career in disgrace. I went in to see ’im one day in his consulting room and told ’im I knew. ’E nearly ’ad an ’eart attack,” said Janice, with a malicious smile. “I told ’im I knew ’ow to keep me mouf shut, and then I asked ’im to get me some drugs. ’E signed like a lamb. I was using stuff Brenner got me for years, after.”

  “The prostitute was Betty Fuller, right?

  “Yeah,” said Janice. “I fort you’d find that out.”

  “Did Brenner really assault Deborah Athorn?”

  “No. ’E checked ’er stitches after she had Samhain, that’s all.”

  “Why did Clare Spencer tell me that story? Just blowing a bit more smoke around?”

  Janice shrugged.

  “I dunno. I fort maybe you’d fink Brenner was a sex pest and Margot found out ’e was fiddling with patients.”

  “Was there ever really an Amytal capsule in Brenner’s mug?”

  “No,” said Janice. “It was in Irene’s mug… that was stupid,” she said, her pink and white brow furrowed. The wide blue eyes drifted over her wall of victims’ photographs, to the window and back to Strike. “I shouldn’t of done that. Sometimes I sailed a bit close to the wind. Took silly risks. Irene was pissing me off one day on reception, flirting wiv—just flirting,” said Janice, “so I took ’er a mug of tea wiv a couple of capsules in it. She talks till you could throttle ’er, I just wanted ’er to shut the hell up for a bit. But she let it go cold…

  “I was sort of glad, after I’d calmed down. I got the mug and took it out the back to wash up, but Margot come creepin’ up behind me in ’er flat shoes. I tried to ’ide it, but she saw.

  “I fort she’d go tellin’ tales, so I ’ad to get in first. I went straight to Dr. Gupta and said I’d found a capsule in Dr. Brenner’s tea, and told ’im I fort ’e was over-ordering drugs and was addicted. What else could I do? Gupta was a nice man but he was a coward. Bit scared of Brenner. I fort ’e probably wouldn’t confront ’im, and ’e didn’t, but honestly, I knew even if ’e ’ad, Brenner would rather pretend to be an addict than risk me tellin’ anyone about a ’is dirty little fing wiv Betty Fuller.”