But Robin, who’d forever be hypersensitive to the uninvited touch, the sidelong, lecherous glance, the invasion of personal space, the testing of conventional limits, had never once experienced, with Strike, that shrinking sensation within her own skin evoked by attempts to push a relationship into a different space. A deep reserve lay over Strike’s private life, and while that sometimes frustrated her (had he, or had he not, called Charlotte Campbell back?), his love of privacy extended to a respect for other people’s boundaries. Never had there been an ostensibly helpful but unnecessary touch, no hand on the small of the back, no grasping of the arm, no look that made her skin prickle, or made her want to cover herself: the legacy of those violent encounters with men that had left her scarred in more ways than the visible.
In truth (why not admit everything to herself now, when she was so tired, her defenses lowered?) she was aware of only two moments in four years where she’d been sure that Strike had seen her as a desirable woman, not as a friend, or an apprentice, or a younger sister.
The first had been when she’d modeled that green Cavalli dress for him, in the course of their first investigation together, when he’d looked away from her as a man would if shunning too-bright light. She’d been embarrassed by her own behavior, afterward: she hadn’t meant to make him think she was trying to be seductive or provocative; all she’d been trying to do was get information out of the sales assistant. But when he’d subsequently given her the green dress, thinking he’d never see her again, she’d wondered whether part of the message Strike had been trying to convey was that he didn’t disavow that look, that she had, indeed, looked wonderful in the dress, and this suspicion hadn’t made her feel uncomfortable, but happy and flattered.
The second moment, far more painful to remember, had been when she’d stood at the top of the stairs at her wedding venue, Strike below her, and he’d turned when she called his name, and looked up at her, the new bride. He’d been injured and exhausted, and again, she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt…
Best not to think about it. Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying “come with me” and known she’d have gone if he had.
Robin swept the horoscope papers off the pub table, stuffed them back into her messenger bag and went outside, leaving half her coffee undrunk.
Trying to walk off her memories, she crossed a small stone bridge spanning the slow-flowing River Leam, which was spotted with clumps of duckweed, and passed the colonnade of the Royal Pump Rooms, where Satchwell’s exhibition would open the following day. Striding briskly, her hands in her pockets, Robin tried to focus on the Parade, where shopfronts disfigured what had once been a sweeping white Regency terrace.
But Leamington Spa did nothing to raise her spirits. On the contrary, it reminded her too much of another spa town: Bath, where Matthew had gone to university. For Robin, long, symmetrical curves of Regency buildings, with their plain, classical fa?ades, would forever conjure once-fond memories disfigured by later discoveries: visions of herself and Matthew strolling hand in hand, overlain by the knowledge that, even then, he’d been sleeping with Sarah.
“Oh, bugger everything,” Robin muttered, blinking tears out of her eyes. She turned abruptly and headed all the way back to the Land Rover.
Having parked the car closer to the hotel, she made a detour into the nearby Co-op to buy a small stash of food, then checked in at a self-service machine in her Premier Inn and headed upstairs to her single room. It was small, bare but perfectly clean and comfortable, and overlooked a spectacularly ugly town hall of red and white brick, which was over-embellished with scrolls, pediments and lions.
A couple of sandwiches, a chocolate éclair, a can of Diet Coke and an apple made Robin feel better. As the sun sank slowly behind the buildings on the Parade, she slipped off her shoes and reached into her bag for the photocopied pages of Talbot’s notebook and her pack of Thoth tarot cards, which Aleister Crowley had devised, and in which Bill Talbot had sought the solution to Margot’s disappearance. Sliding the pack out of the box into her hand, she shuffled through the cards, examining the images. Just as she’d suspected, Talbot had copied many motifs into his notebook, presumably from those cards which had come up during his frequent attempts to solve the case by consulting the tarot.
Robin now flattened a photocopy of what she thought of as the “horns page,” on which Talbot had dwelled on the three horned signs of the zodiac: Capricorn, Aries and Taurus. This page came in the last quarter of the notebook, in which quotations from Aleister Crowley, astrological symbols and strange drawings appeared far more often than concrete facts.
Here on the horns page was evidence of Talbot’s renewed interest in Satchwell, whom he’d first ruled out on the basis that he was an Aries rather than a Capricorn. Talbot had evidently calculated Satchwell’s whole birth horoscope and taken the trouble to note various aspects, which he noticed were same as AC. Same as AC. AND DON’T FORGET LS connection.
To add to the confusion, the mysterious Schmidt kept correcting signs, although he’d allowed Satchwell to keep his original sign of Aries.
And then an odd idea came to Robin: the notion of a fourteen-sign zodiac was clearly ludicrous (but why was it more ludicrous than a twelve-sign zodiac? asked a voice in her head, which sounded remarkably like Strike’s), but certainly if you were going to squeeze in an extra two signs, dates would have to shift, wouldn’t they?
She picked up her mobile and Googled “fourteen-sign zodiac Schmidt.”
“Oh my God,” said Robin aloud, into her still hotel room.
Before she could fully process what she’d read, the mobile in her hand rang. It was Strike.
“Hi,” said Robin, hastily turning him to speakerphone so she could continue reading what she’d just found. “How are you?”
“Knackered,” said Strike, who sounded it. “What’s happened?”
“What d’you mean?” asked Robin, her eyes rapidly scanning lines of text.
“You sound like you do when you’ve found something out.”
Robin laughed.
“OK, you won’t believe this, but I’ve just found Schmidt.”
“You’ve what?”
“Schmidt, first name, Steven. He’s a real person! He wrote a book in 1970 called Astrology 14, proposing the inclusion of two extra signs in the zodiac, Ophiuchus the Serpent-Bearer, and Cetus the Whale!”
There was a brief silence, then Strike muttered,
“How the hell did I miss that?”
“Remember that statue of the man holding the serpent, at Margot’s old house?” said Robin, falling back on her pillows among the scattered tarot cards.
“Asclepius,” said Strike. “Ophiuchus was the Roman form. God of healing.”
“Well, this explains all the changing dates, doesn’t it?” said Robin, “and why poor Talbot got so confused! He was trying to put everyone into Schmidt’s adjusted dates, but they didn’t seem to fit. And all the other astrologers he was consulting were still using the twelve-sign system, so—”
“Yeah,” said Strike, talking over her, “that’d make a crazy man crazier, all right.”
His tone said, “This is interesting, but not important.” Robin removed the Three of Disks from beneath her and examined it absentmindedly. Robin was now so well-versed in astrological symbols that she didn’t need to look up the glyphs to know that it also represented Mars in Capricorn.
“How are things with you?” she asked.
“Well, the church isn’t going to hold everyone who’s coming tomorrow, which Joan would’ve been thrilled about. I just wanted to let you know I’ll be heading back up the road again on Tuesday.”
“Are you sure you don’t need to stay longer?”
“The neighbors are all promising they’re going to look after Ted. Lucy’s trying to get him to come up to London for a bit afterward. Any other news your end?”
“Er… let’s see… I wrapped up Postcard,” said Robin. “I think our weatherman was quite disappointed when he saw who his stalker was. His wife cheered up no end, though.”
Strike gave a grunt of laughter.
“So, we’ve taken on the commodities broker,” Robin continued. “We haven’t got pictures of anything incriminating between the husband and nanny yet, but I don’t think it’s going to be long.”
“You’re owed a long stretch off for all this, Robin,” said Strike gruffly. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
They hung up shortly afterward.
Robin’s room seemed to have become suddenly much darker. The sun had gone down; in silhouette, the town hall resembled a monstrous Gothic palace. She turned on her bedside lamp and looked around at the bed strewn with astrological notes and tarot cards. Seen in the light of Strike’s lack of enthusiasm, Talbot’s doodles looked like the determinedly weird drawings in the back of a teenager’s jotter, leading nowhere, done purely for the love of strangeness.