“Some deaths are a mercy,” said Strike.

And with these words, in both of their mind’s eyes rose an image of horror. Strike was remembering the corpse of Sergeant Gary Topley, lying on the dusty road in Afghanistan, eyes wide open, his body missing from the waist down. The vision had recurred in Strike’s nightmares ever since he’d seen it, and occasionally, in these dreams, Gary talked to him, lying in the dust. It was always a comfort to remember, on waking, that Gary’s consciousness had been snuffed out instantly, that his wide-open eyes and puzzled expression showed that death had claimed him before his brain could register agony or terror.

But in Robin’s mind there was a picture of something she wasn’t sure had ever happened. She was imagining Margot Bamborough chained to a radiator (I whip her face and breasts), pleading for her life (the strategy is laughably transparent), and suffering torments (it could be raised to an ecstasy of pain, and then it knew it lived, and stood tremulously on the edge of the abyss, begging, screaming, begging for mercy).

“You know,” said Robin, talking partly to break the silence and dispel that mental image, “I’d quite like to find a picture of Dorothy’s mother, Maud.”

“Why?”

“For confirmation, because—I don’t think I told you, look…”

She flicked backward in the notebook to the page littered with water signs. In small writing beneath a picture of a scorpion were the words “MOLE (Adams).”

“Is that a new sign?” asked Strike. “The Mole?”

“No,” said Robin, smiling, “Talbot’s alluding to the fact that the astrologer Evangeline Adams said the true Scorpio often has a birthmark, or a prominent mole. I’ve read her book, got it second hand.”

There was a pause.

“What?” said Strike, because Robin was looking at him expectantly.

“I was waiting for you to jeer.”

“I lost the will to jeer some way back,” said Strike. “You realize we’re supposed to have solved this case in approximately fourteen weeks’ time?”

“I know,” sighed Robin. She picked up her mobile to check the time, and out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw yet another text from Morris. “Well, we’re meeting the Bayliss sisters later. Maybe they’ll have something useful to tell us… are you sure you want to interview them with me? I’d be fine to do it alone. You’re going to be really tired after sitting here all night.”

“I’ll sleep on the train to Truro afterward,” said Strike. “You got any plans for Easter Sunday?”

“No,” said Robin. “Mum wanted me to go home but…”

Strike wondered what the silent sequel to the sentence was, and whether she’d made plans with someone else, and didn’t want to tell him about it. Morris, for instance.

“OK, I swear this is the last thing I’m going to bring up from Talbot’s notebook,” Robin said, “but I want to flag something up before we meet the Baylisses.”

“Go on.”

“You said yourself, he seemed racist, from his notes.”

“‘Black phantom,’” Strike quoted, “yeah.”

“And ‘Black Moon Lilith—’”

“—and wondering whether she was a witch.”

“Exactly. I think he really harassed her, and probably the family, too,” Robin said. “The language he uses for Wilma—‘crude,’ ‘dis-honest’…” Robin flicked back to the page featuring the three horned signs, “and ‘woman as she is now in this eon… armed and militant.’”

“A radical feminist witch.”

“Which sounds quite cool when you say it,” said Robin, “but I don’t think Talbot meant it that way.”

“You think this is why the daughters didn’t want to talk to us?”

“Maybe,” said Robin. “So I think we need to be… you know. Sensitive to what might have gone on. Definitely not go in there looking as though we suspect Wilma of anything.”

“Point well made, and taken,” said Strike.

“Right then,” said Robin with a sigh, as she put the notebook back into her messenger bag. “I’d better get going… What is he doing in there?” Robin asked quietly, looking at Elinor Dean’s front door.

“Barclay thinks it might be a rubber fetish.”

“He’d need a lot of talcum powder to wriggle himself into anything made of rubber, the size of that belly.”

Strike laughed.

“Well, I’ll see you in…” Robin checked the time on her mobile, “seven hours, forty-five minutes.”

“Sleep well,” said Strike.

As she walked away from the BMW, Strike saw her looking at her mobile again, doubtless reading Morris’s texts. He watched as she got into the ancient Land Rover, then turned the tank-like vehicle in a three-point turn, raising a hand in farewell as she passed him, heading back to Earl’s Court.

As Strike reached for the Thermos of tea under his seat, he remembered the supposed dental appointment of the other day, about which Robin had sounded strangely flustered, and which had taken place (though Strike hadn’t previously made the connection) on Morris’s afternoon off. A most unwelcome possibility crossed his mind: had Robin lied, like Irene Hickson, and for the same reason? His mind darted to what Robin had said a few months previously, when she’d mentioned her ex-husband having a new partner: “Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I told Morris.”

As he unscrewed his Thermos, Strike mentally reviewed Robin’s behavior around Morris in the last few months. She’d never seemed to particularly like him, but might that have been an act, designed to deflect attention? Were his partner and his subcontractor actually in a relationship which he, busy with his own troubles, had failed to spot?

Strike poured himself tea, settled back in his seat, and glowered at Elinor Dean’s closed door through the steam rising from plastic-tasting tea the color of mud. He was angry, he told himself, because he should have established a work rule that partners weren’t allowed to date subcontractors, and for another reason which he preferred not to examine, because he knew perfectly well what it was, and no good could come of brooding upon it.

53

Like three faire branches budding farre and wide,

That from one roote deriu’d their vitall sap:

And like that roote that doth her life diuide,

Their mother was…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Seven hours later, in the cool, flat daylight of an overcast morning, Robin, who was back in her Land Rover, took a detour on her way to the café where she and Strike would be meeting the three Bayliss sisters.

When Maya, the middle sister, had suggested meeting in Belgique in Wanstead, Robin had realized how close she’d have to drive to the Flats where Dennis Creed had disposed of his second-to-last known victim, twenty-seven-year-old hairdresser Susan Meyer.

Half an hour ahead of the planned interview, Robin parked the Land Rover beside a stretch of shops on Aldersbrook Road, then crossed the street and headed up a short footpath, which led her to the reedy bank of the man-made Alexandra Lake, a wide stretch of water on which various wildfowl were bobbing. A couple of ducks came paddling hopefully toward Robin, but when she failed to produce bread or other treats, they glided away again, compact, self-sufficient, their onyx eyes scanning both water and bank for other possibilities.

Thirty-nine years ago, Dennis Creed had driven to this lake under cover of night, and rolled the headless, handless corpse of Susan Meyer into it, bound up in black plastic and rope. Susan Meyer’s distinctive wedge cut and shy smile had earned her a prominent place on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park.

The milky sky looked as opaque as the shallow lake, which resembled jade silk in which the gliding wildfowl made rippling creases. Hands in her pockets, Robin looked out over the water and the rustling weeds, trying to imagine the scene when a park worker had spotted the black object in the water, which he’d assumed initially was a tarpaulin swollen with air, until he hooked it with a long pole, felt the grisly weight and made an instant connection (or so he told the television crew who arrived shortly after the police and ambulance) with the bodies that kept turning up in Epping Forest, barely ten miles away.

Creed had abducted Susan exactly a month before Margot disappeared. Had they overlapped in Creed’s basement? If so, Creed had, for a brief period, held three women there simultaneously. Robin preferred not to think about what Andrea, or Margot, if she’d been there, must have felt on being dragged into Creed’s basement, seeing a fellow woman chained there, and knowing that she, too, would be reduced to that emaciated and broken-boned state before she died.