“I got really angry with my father and Cyn,” said Anna, twisting her fingers together. “Angry that they’d never told me, obviously, but I also started wondering what else they were hiding, whether they were involved in my mother disappearing, whether they’d wanted her out of the way, so they could marry. I went a bit off the rails, started playing truant… one weekend I took off and was brought home by the police. My father was livid. Of course, I look back, and after what had happened to my mother… obviously, me going missing, even for a few hours…

“I gave them hell, to tell you the truth,” said Anna shamefacedly. “But all credit to Cyn, she stuck by me. She never gave up. She and Dad had had kids together by then—I’ve got a younger brother and sister—and there was family therapy and holidays with bonding activities, all led by Cyn, because my father certainly didn’t want to do it. The subject of my mother just makes him angry and aggrieved. I remember him yelling at me, didn’t I realize how terrible it was for him to have it all dragged up again, how did I think he felt…

“When I was fifteen I tried to find my mother’s friend, Oonagh, the one she was supposed to be meeting the night she disappeared. They were Bunny Girls together,” said Anna, with a little smile, “but I didn’t know that at the time. I tracked Oonagh down in Wolverhampton, and she was quite emotional to hear from me. We had a couple of lovely phone calls. She told me things I really wanted to know, about my mother’s sense of humor, the perfume she wore—Rive Gauche, I went out and blew my birthday money on a bottle next day—how she was addicted to chocolate and was an obsessive Joni Mitchell fan. My mother came more alive to me when I was talking to Oonagh than through the photographs, or anything Dad or Cyn had told me.

“But my father found out I’d spoken to Oonagh and he was furious. He made me give him Oonagh’s number and called her and accused her of encouraging me to defy him, told her I was troubled, in therapy and what I didn’t need was people ‘stirring.’ He told me not to wear the Rive Gauche, either. He said he couldn’t stand the smell of it.

“So I never did meet Oonagh, and when I tried to reconnect with her in my twenties, I couldn’t find her. She might have passed away, for all I know.”

“I got into university, left home and started reading everything I could about Dennis Creed. The nightmares came back, but it didn’t get me any closer to finding out what really happened.

“Apparently the man in charge of the investigation into my mother’s disappearance, a detective inspector called Bill Talbot, always thought Creed took her. Talbot will be dead by now; he was coming up for retirement anyway.

“Then, a few years out of uni, I had the bright idea of starting a website,” said Anna. “My girlfriend at the time was tech-savvy. She helped me set it up. I was very naive,” she sighed. “I said who I was and begged for information about my mother.

“You can probably imagine what happened. All kinds of theories: psychics telling me where to dig, people telling me my father had obviously done it, others telling me I wasn’t really Margot’s daughter, that I was after money and publicity, and some really malicious messages as well, saying my mother had probably run off with a lover and worse. A couple of journalists got in touch, too. One of them ran an awful piece in the Daily Express about our family: they contacted my father and that was just about the final nail in the coffin for our relationship.

“It’s never really recovered,” said Anna bleakly. “When I told him I’m gay, he seemed to think I was only doing it to spite him. And Cyn’s gone over to his side a bit, these last few years. She always says, ‘I’ve got a loyalty to your dad, too, Anna.’ So,” said Anna, “that’s where we are.”

There was a brief silence.

“Dreadful for you,” said Robin.

“It is,” agreed Kim, placing her hand on Anna’s knee again, “and I’m wholly sympathetic to Anna’s desire for resolution, of course I am. But is it realistic,” she said, looking from Robin to Strike, “and I mean this with no offense to you two, to think that you’ll achieve what the police haven’t, after all this time?”

“Realistic?” said Strike. “No.”

Robin noticed Anna’s downward look and the sudden rush of tears into her large eyes. She felt desperately sorry for the older woman, but at the same time she respected Strike’s honesty, and it seemed to have impressed the skeptical Kim, too.

“Here’s the truth,” Strike said, tactfully looking at his notes until Anna had finished drying her eyes with the back of her hand. “I think we’d have a reasonable chance of getting hold of the old police file, because we’ve got decent contacts at the Met. We can sift right through the evidence again, revisit witnesses as far as that’s possible, basically make sure every stone’s been turned over twice.

“But it’s odds on that after all this time, we wouldn’t find any more than the police did, and we’d be facing two major obstacles.

“Firstly, zero forensic evidence. From what I understand, literally no trace of your mother was ever found, is that right? No items of clothing, bus pass—nothing.”

“True,” mumbled Anna.

“Secondly, as you’ve just pointed out, a lot of the people connected with her or who witnessed anything that night are likely to have died.”

“I know,” said Anna, and a tear trickled, sparkling, down her nose onto the Perspex table. Kim reached out and put an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe it’s turning forty,” said Anna, with a sob, “but I can’t stand the idea that I’ll go to my grave never knowing what happened.”

“I understand that,” said Strike, “but I don’t want to promise what I’m unlikely to be able to deliver.”

“Have there,” asked Robin, “been any new leads or developments over the years?”

Kim answered. She seemed a little shaken by Anna’s naked distress, and kept her arm around her shoulders.

“Not as far as we know, do we, Annie? But any information of that kind would probably have gone to Roy—Anna’s father. And he might not have told us.”

“He acts as though none of it ever happened; it’s how he copes,” said Anna, wiping her tears away. “He pretends my mother never existed—except for the inconvenient fact that if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “it’s the possibility that she just went away of her own accord and never came back, never wanted to see how I was doing, or let us know where she was, that really haunts me. That’s the thing I can’t bear to contemplate. My grandmother on my father’s side, who I never loved—she was one of the meanest women I’ve ever met—took it upon herself to tell me that it had always been her private belief that my mother had simply run away. That she didn’t like being a wife and a mother. That hurt me more than I can tell you, the thought that my mother would let everyone go through the horror of wondering what had happened to her, and never check that her daughter was all right…

“Even if Dennis Creed killed her,” said Anna, “it would be terri-ble—awful—but it would be over. I could mourn rather than live with the possibility that she’s out there somewhere, living under a different name, not caring what happened to us all.”

There was a brief silence, in which both Strike and Robin drank coffee, Anna sniffed, and Kim left the sofa area to tear off kitchen roll, which she handed to her wife.

A second ragdoll cat entered the room. She subjected the four humans to a supercilious glare before lying down and stretching in a patch of sunlight.

“That’s Lacey,” said Kim, while Anna mopped her face. “She doesn’t really like anyone, even us.”

Strike and Robin laughed politely again.

“How would this work?” asked Kim abruptly. “How d’you charge?”

“By the hour,” said Strike. “You’d get an itemized monthly bill. I can email you our rates,” he offered, “but I’d imagine you two will want to talk this over properly before coming to a decision.”

“Yes, definitely,” said Kim, but as she gave Strike her email address she looked with concern again at Anna, who was sitting with head bowed, still pressing kitchen roll to her eyes at regular intervals.

Strike’s stump protested at being asked to support his weight again so soon after sitting down, but there seemed little more to discuss, especially as Anna had regressed into a tearful silence. Slightly regretting the untouched plate of biscuits, the detective shook Anna’s cool hand.

“Thanks, anyway,” she said, and he had the feeling that he had disappointed her, that she’d hoped he would make her a promise of the truth, that he would swear upon his honor to do what everyone else had failed to do.

Kim showed them out of the house.

“We’ll call you later,” she said. “This afternoon. Will that be all right?”

“Great, we’ll wait to hear from you,” said Strike.

Robin glanced back as she and Strike headed down the sunlit garden steps toward the street, and caught Kim giving them a strange look, as though she’d found something in the pair of visitors that she hadn’t expected. Catching Robin’s eye, she smiled reflexively, and closed the blue door behind them.

7

Long they thus traueiled in friendly wise,

Through countreyes waste, and eke well edifyde…

Edmund Spenser