“He still thinks he’s gonnae win over the PA. Robin told him it wus time tae let it go, time tae put Hutchins in. She’s found oot—”
“That Shifty belongs to Hendon Rifle Club, yeah, she emailed me. And she wants to get Hutchins in there, to try and befriend him. Smart plan. Shifty fancies himself a bit of a macho man, from all we know about him.”
“But Morris wants tae do it his way. He said tae her face he was happy wi’ the new plan, but—”
“You think he’s still seeing the PA?”
“‘Seein’ ’ might be a polite way o’ puttin’ it,” said Barclay.
So Strike had called Morris into the office and laid it down in plain language that he was to leave Shifty’s PA alone, and concentrate for the next week on Two-Times’ girlfriend. Morris had raised no objections: indeed, his capitulation had been tinged with obsequiousness. The encounter had left a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. Morris was, in nearly all respects, a desirable hire, with many good contacts in the force, but there had been something in his manner as he hurried to agree that denoted a slipperiness Strike couldn’t like. Later that night, while Strike was following the taxi containing Twinkletoes and his girlfriend through the West End, he remembered Dr. Gupta’s interlaced fingers, and the old doctor’s verdict that what made a successful business was the smooth functioning of a team.
Entering West Wickham, he found rows of suburban houses with bay windows, broad drives and private garages. The Avenue, where Gregory Talbot lived, was lined with solid family residences that spoke of conscientious middle-class owners who mowed their lawns and remembered bin day. The houses weren’t as palatial as the detached houses on Dr. Gupta’s street, but were many times more spacious than Strike’s attic flat over the office.
Turning into Talbot’s drive, Strike parked his BMW behind a skip that blocked the front of the garage. As he switched off his engine, a pale, entirely bald man with large ears and steel-rimmed glasses opened his door looking cautiously excited. Strike knew from his online research that Gregory Talbot was a hospital administrator.
“Mr. Strike?” he called, while the detective was getting carefully out of the BMW (the drive was slick with rain and the memory of tripping on the Falmouth ferry, still fresh).
“That’s me,” said Strike, closing his car door and holding out his hand as Talbot came walking toward him. Talbot was shorter than Strike by a good six inches.
“Sorry about the skip,” he said. “We’re doing a loft conversion.”
As they approached the front door, a pair of twin girls Strike guessed to be around ten years old came bursting outside, almost knocking Gregory aside.
“Stay in the garden, girls,” called Gregory, though Strike thought the more pressing problem was surely that they had bare feet, and that the ground was cold and wet.
“Thtay in the garden, girlth,” imitated one of the twins. Gregory looked mildly over the top of his glasses at the twins.
“Rudeness isn’t funny.”
“It bloody is,” said the first twin, to the raucous laughter of the second.
“Swear at me again, and there’ll be no chocolate pudding for you tonight, Jayda,” said Gregory. “Nor will you borrow my iPad.”
Jayda pulled a grotesque face but did not, in fact, swear again.
“We foster,” Gregory told Strike as they stepped inside. “Our own kids have left home. Through to the right and have a seat.”
To Strike, who lived in a slightly Spartan minimalism by choice, the cluttered and very untidy room was unappealing. He wanted to accept Gregory’s invitation to sit down, but there was nowhere he could do so without having to first shift a large quantity of objects, which felt rude. Oblivious to Strike’s plight, Gregory glanced through the window at the twins. They were already running back indoors, shivering.
“They learn,” he said, as the front door slammed and the twins ran upstairs. Turning back to face the room, he became aware that none of the seats were currently usable.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” he said, though with none of the embarrassment that Strike’s Aunt Joan would have displayed had a casual visitor found her house in this state of disorder. “The girls were in here this morning.”
Gregory swiftly cleared a leaking bubble-gun, two naked Barbie dolls, a child’s sock, a number of small bits of brightly colored plastic and half a satsuma off the seat of an armchair to allow Strike to sit down. He dumped the homeless objects onto a wooden coffee table that was already piled high with magazines, a jumble of remote controls, several letters and empty envelopes and further small plastic toys, including a good deal of Lego.
“Tea?” he offered. “Coffee? My wife’s taken the boys swimming.”
“Oh, there are boys, too?”
“Hence the loft conversion,” said Gregory. “Darren’s been with us nearly five years.”
While Gregory fetched hot drinks, Strike picked up the official sticker album of this year’s Champions League, which he’d spotted lying on the floor beneath the coffee table. He turned the pages with a feeling of nostalgia for the days when he, too, had collected football stickers. He was idly pondering Arsenal’s chances of winning the cup when a series of crashes directly overhead, which made the pendant light sway very slightly, made him look up. It sounded as though the twins were jumping on and off their bed. Setting the sticker book down, he pondered, without finding an answer, the question of what could have motivated Talbot and his wife to bring into their home children with whom they had no biological relationship. By the time Gregory reappeared with a tray, Strike’s thoughts had traveled to Charlotte, who had always declared herself entirely unmaternal, and whose premature twins she’d vowed, while pregnant, to abandon to the care of her mother-in-law.
“Would you mind shifting—?” Gregory asked, eyes on the coffee table.
Strike hastened to move handfuls of objects off it, onto the sofa.
“Cheers,” said Gregory, setting down the tray. He scooped yet another mound of objects off the second armchair, dumped them, too, onto the now considerable pile on the sofa, picked up his mug, sat down and said,
“Help yourself,” indicating a slightly sticky sugar bowl and an unopened packet of biscuits.
“Thanks very much,” said Strike, spooning sugar into his tea.
“So,” said Gregory, looking mildly excited. “You’re trying to prove Creed killed Margot Bamborough.”
“Well,” said Strike, “I’m trying to find out what happened to her and one possibility, obviously, is Creed.”
“Did you see, in the paper last weekend? One of Creed’s drawings, selling for over a grand?”
“Missed that,” said Strike.
“Yeah, it was in the Observer. Self-portrait in pencil, done when he was in Belmarsh. Sold on a website where you can buy serial-killer art. Crazy world.”
“It is,” agreed Strike. “Well, as I said on the phone, what I’d really like to talk to you about is your father.”
“Yes,” said Gregory, and some of his jauntiness left him. “I, er, I don’t know how much you know.”
“That he took early retirement, following a breakdown.”
“Well, yes, that’s it in a nutshell,” said Gregory. “His thyroid was at the bottom of it. Overactive and undiagnosed, for ages. He was losing weight, not sleeping… There was a lot of pressure on him, you know. Not just from the force; the press, as well. People were very upset. Well, you know—a missing doctor—Mum put him acting a bit oddly down to stress.”
“In what way was he acting oddly?”
“Well, he took over the spare room and wouldn’t let anyone in there,” said Gregory, and before Strike could ask for more details, he continued: “After they found out about his thyroid and got him on the right drugs, he went back to normal, but it was too late for his career. He got his pension, but he felt guilty about the Bamborough case for years. He blamed himself, you know, thinking that if he hadn’t been so ill, he might’ve got him.
“Because Margot Bamborough wasn’t the last woman Creed took—I suppose you’ll know all about that? He abducted Andrea Hooton after he took Bamborough. When they arrested him and went into the house and saw what was in the basement—the torture equipment and the photos he’d taken of the women—he admitted he’d kept some of them alive for months before he killed them.
“Dad was really upset when he heard that. He kept going back over it in his head, thinking if he’d caught him earlier, Bamborough and Hooton might’ve still been alive. He beat himself up for getting fixated—”
Gregory cut himself off.
“—distracted, you know.”
“So, even once your father had recovered, he still thought Creed had taken Margot?”