“After the Catholic Church’s many scandals? After Harold Shipman?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Robin. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”
“Think you’re onto something there,” said Strike, as they entered a short pedestrian lane called Jerusalem Passage. “I told Gupta it was odd that Joseph Brenner didn’t like people. I thought that might be a basic job requirement for a doctor. He soon put me right.
“Let’s stop here a moment,” Strike said, doing so. “If Margot got this far—I’m assuming she’d’ve taken this route, because it’s the shortest and most logical way to the Three Kings—this is the first time she’d have passed residences rather than offices or public buildings.”
Robin looked at the buildings around them. Sure enough, there were a couple of doors whose multiple buzzers indicated flats above.
“Is there a chance,” said Strike, “however remote, that someone living along this lane could have persuaded or forced her inside?”
Robin looked up and down the street, the rain pattering onto her umbrella.
“Well,” she said slowly, “obviously it could have happened, but it seems unlikely. Did someone wake up that day and decide they wanted to abduct a woman, reach outside and grab one?”
“Have I taught you nothing?”
“OK, fine: means before motive. But there are problems with the means, too. This is really overlooked as well. Does nobody see or hear her being abducted? Doesn’t she scream or fight? And I assume the abductor lives alone, unless their housemates are also in on the kidnapping?”
“All valid points,” admitted Strike. “Plus, the police went door to door here. Everyone was questioned, though the flats weren’t searched.
“But let’s think this through… She’s a doctor. What if someone shoots out of a house and begs her to come inside to look at an injured person—a sick relative—and once inside, they don’t let her go? That’d be a good ploy for getting her inside, pretending there was a medical emergency.”
“OK, but that presupposes they knew she was a doctor.”
“The abductor could’ve been a patient.”
“But how did they know she’d be passing their house at that particular time? Had she alerted the whole neighborhood that she was about to go to the pub?”
“Maybe it was a random thing, they saw her passing, they knew she was a doctor, they ran out and grabbed her. Or—I dunno, let’s say there really was a sick or dying person inside, or someone’s had an accident—perhaps there’s an argument—she disagrees with the treatment or refuses to help—the fight becomes physical—she’s accidentally killed.”
There was a short silence, while they moved aside for a group of chattering French students. When these had passed, Strike said,
“It’s a stretch, I grant you.”
“We can find out how many of these buildings are occupied by the same people they were thirty-nine years ago,” said Robin, “but we’ve still got the problem of how they’ve kept her body hidden for nearly four decades. You wouldn’t dare move, would you?”
“That’s a problem, all right,” admitted Strike. “As Gupta said, it’s not like disposing of a table of equivalent weight. Blood, decomposition, infestation… plenty have tried keeping bodies on the premises. Crippen. Christie. Fred and Rose West. It’s generally considered a mistake.”
“Creed managed it for a while,” said Robin. “Boiling down severed hands in the basement. Burying heads apart from bodies. It wasn’t the corpses that got him caught.”
“Are you reading The Demon of Paradise Park?” asked Strike sharply.
“Yes,” said Robin.
“D’you want that stuff in your head?”
“If it helps us with the case,” said Robin.
“Hmm. Just thinking of my health and safety responsibilities.”
Robin said nothing. Strike gave the houses a last, sweeping look, then invited Robin to walk on, saying,
“You’re right, I can’t see it. Freezers get opened, gas men visit and notice a smell, neighbors notice blocked drains. But in the interests of thoroughness, we should check who was living here at the time.”
They now emerged onto the busiest road they had yet seen. Aylesbury Street was a wide road, lined with more office blocks and flats.
“So,” said Strike, pausing again on the pavement, “if Margot’s still walking to the pub, she would’ve crossed here and turned left, into Clerkenwell Green. But we’re pausing to note that it was there,” Strike pointed some fifty yards to the right, “that a small white van nearly knocked down two women as it sped away from Clerkenwell Green that evening. The incident was witnessed by four or five onlookers. Nobody got the registration number—”
“But Creed was putting fake license plates on the delivery van he was using,” said Robin, “so that might not help anyway.”
“Correct. The van seen by witnesses on the eleventh of October 1974 had a design on the side. The onlookers didn’t all agree what it was, but two of them thought a large flower.”
“And we also know,” said Robin, “that Creed was using removable paint on the van to disguise its appearance.”
“Correct again. So, on the surface, this looks like our first proper hint that Creed might’ve been in the area. Talbot, of course, wanted to believe that, so he was uninterested in the opinion of one of the witnesses that the van actually belonged to a local florist. However, a junior officer, presumably one of those who’d realized that his lead investigator was going quietly off his onion, went and questioned the florist, a man called Albert Shimmings, who absolutely denied driving a speeding van in this area that night. He claimed he’d been giving his young son a lift in it, miles away.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t Shimmings,” said Robin. “He might have been worried about being done for dangerous driving. No CCTV cameras… nothing to prove it one way or the other.”
“My thoughts exactly. If Shimmings is still alive, I think we should check his story. He might’ve decided it’s worth telling the truth now a speeding charge can’t stick. In the meantime,” said Strike, “the matter of the van remains unresolved and we have to admit that one possible explanation is that Creed was driving it.”
“But where did he abduct Margot, if it was Creed in the van?” asked Robin. “It can’t’ve been back in Albemarle Way, because this isn’t how he’d have left the area.”
“True. If he’d grabbed her in Albemarle Way, he’d’ve joined Aylesbury Street much further down and he definitely wouldn’t have come via Clerkenwell Green—which leads us neatly to the Two Struggling Women by the Phoneboxes.”
They proceeded through the drizzle into Clerkenwell Green, a wide rectangular square which boasted trees, a pub and a café. Two telephone boxes stood in the middle, near parked cars and a bike stand.
“Here,” said Strike, coming to a halt between the phone boxes, “is where Talbot’s craziness really starts messing with the case. A woman called Ruby Elliot, who was unfamiliar with the area, but trying to find her daughter and son-in-law’s new house in Hayward’s Place, was driving around in circles in the rain, lost.
“She passed these phone boxes and noticed two women struggling together, one of whom seemed, in her word, ‘tottery.’ She has no particularly distinct memory of them—remember, it’s pouring with rain and she’s anxiously trying to spot street signs and house numbers, because she’s lost. All she can tell the police is that one of them was wearing a headscarf and the other a raincoat.
“The day after this detail appeared in the paper, a middle-aged woman of sound character came forward to say that the pair of women Ruby Elliot had seen had almost certainly been her and her aged mother. She told Talbot she’d been walking the old dear across Clerkenwell Green that night, taking her home after a little walk. The mother, who was infirm and senile, was wearing a rainhat, and she herself was wearing a raincoat similar to Margot’s. They didn’t have umbrellas, so she was trying to hurry her mother along. The old lady didn’t take kindly to being rushed and there was a slight altercation here, right by the phone boxes. I’ve got a picture of the two of them, incidentally: the press got hold of it—‘sighting debunked.’
“But Talbot wasn’t having it. He flat-out refused to accept that the two women hadn’t been Margot and a man dressed like a woman. The way he sees it: Margot and Creed meet here by the phone boxes, Creed wrestles her into his van, which presumably was parked there—” Strike pointed to the short line of parked cars nearby, “then Creed takes off at speed, with her screaming and banging on the sides of the van, exiting down Aylesbury Street.”