Fuck, thought Strike.
He’d occasionally bumped up against the purveyors of paranormal insights during his detective career and felt nothing but contempt for them: leeches, or so he saw them, of money from the pockets of the deluded and the desperate.
A motorboat came chugging across the water, its engine grinding the night’s stillness to pieces. Apparently this was the lift the three drunk boys were waiting for. They now began laughing and elbowing each other at the prospect of imminent seasickness.
“The medium told me I’d get a ‘leading,’” Anna pressed on. “She told me, ‘You’re going to find out what happened to your mother. You’ll get a leading and you must follow it. The way will become clear very soon.’ So when I saw you just now in the pub —Cormoran Strike, in the Victory—it just seemed such an incredible coincidence and I thought—I had to speak to you.”
A soft breeze ruffled Anna’s dark, silver-streaked hair. The blonde said crisply,
“Come on, Anna, we should get going.”
She put an arm around the other’s shoulders. Strike saw a wedding ring shining there.
“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she told Strike.
With gentle pressure, the blonde attempted to turn Anna away. The latter sniffed and muttered,
“Sorry. I… probably had too much wine.”
“Hang on.”
Strike often resented his own incurable urge to know, his inability to leave an itch unscratched, especially when he was as tired and aggravated as he was tonight. But 1974 was the year of his own birth. Margot Bamborough had been missing as long as he’d been alive. He couldn’t help it: he wanted to know more.
“Are you on holiday here?”
“Yes.” It was the blonde who had spoken. “Well, we’ve got a second home in Falmouth. Our permanent base is in London.”
“I’m heading back there tomorrow,” said Strike (What the fuck are you doing? asked a voice in his head), “but I could probably swing by and see you tomorrow morning in Falmouth, if you’re free.”
“Really?” gasped Anna. He hadn’t seen her eyes fill with tears, but he knew they must have done, because she now wiped them. “Oh, that’d be great. Thank you. Thank you! I’ll give you the address.”
The blonde showed no enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing Strike again. However, when Anna started fumbling through her handbag, she said, “It’s all right, I’ve got a card,” pulled a wallet out of her back pocket, and handed Strike a business card bearing the name “Dr. Kim Sullivan, BPS Registered Psychologist,” with an address in Falmouth printed below it.
“Great,” said Strike, inserting it into his own wallet. “Well, I’ll see you both tomorrow morning, then.”
“I’ve actually got a work conference call in the morning,” said Kim. “I’ll be free by twelve. Will that be too late for you?”
The implication was clear: you’re not speaking to Anna without me present.
“No, that’ll be fine,” said Strike. “I’ll see you at twelve, then.”
“Thank you so much!” said Anna.
Kim reached for Anna’s hand and the two women walked away. Strike watched them pass under a street light before turning back toward the sea. The motorboat carrying the young drinkers had now chugged away again. It already looked tiny, dwarfed by the wide bay, the roar of its engine gradually deadened into a distant buzz.
Forgetting momentarily about texting Robin, Strike lit a second cigarette, took out his mobile and Googled Margot Bamborough.
Two different photographs appeared. The first was a grainy head-and-shoulders shot of an attractive, even-featured face with wide-set eyes, her wavy, dark blonde hair center-parted. She was wearing a long-lapelled blouse over what appeared to be a knitted tank top.
The second picture showed the same woman looking younger and wearing the famous black corset of a Playboy Bunny, accessorized with black ears, black stockings and white tail. She was holding a tray of what looked like cigarettes, and smiling at the camera. Another young woman, identically dressed, stood beaming behind her, slightly bucktoothed and curvier than her willowy friend.
Strike scrolled down until he read a famous name in conjunction with Margot’s.
… young doctor and mother, Margaret “Margot” Bamborough, whose disappearance on 11 October 1974 shared certain features with Creed’s abductions of Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman.
Bamborough, who worked at the St. John’s Medical Practice in Clerkenwell, had arranged to meet a female friend in the local Three Kings pub at six o’clock. She never arrived.
Several witnesses saw a small white van driving at speed in the area around the time that Bamborough would have been heading for her rendezvous.
DI Bill Talbot, who led the investigation into Bamborough’s disappearance, was convinced from an early stage that the young doctor had fallen victim to the serial killer known to be at large in the south east area. However, no trace of Bamborough was discovered in the basement flat where Dennis Creed imprisoned, tortured and killed seven other women.
Creed’s trademark of beheading the corpses of his victims…
3
But now of Britomart it here doth neede,
The hard aduentures and strange haps to tell
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Had her day gone as planned, Robin Ellacott would have been tucked up in bed in her rented flat in Earl’s Court at this moment, fresh from a long bath, her laundry done, reading a new novel. Instead, she was sitting in her ancient Land Rover, chilly from sheer exhaustion despite the mild night, still wearing the clothes she’d put on at four-thirty that morning, as she watched the lit window of a Pizza Express in Torquay. Her face in the wing mirror was pale, her blue eyes bloodshot, and the strawberry blonde hair currently hidden under a black beanie hat needed a wash.
From time to time, Robin dipped her hand into a bag of almonds sitting on the passenger seat beside her. It was only too easy to fall into a diet of fast food and chocolate when you were running surveillance, to snack more often than needed out of sheer boredom. Robin was trying to eat healthily in spite of her unsociable hours, but the almonds had long since ceased to be appetizing, and she craved nothing more than a bit of the pizza she could see an overweight couple enjoying in the restaurant window. She could almost taste it, even though the air around her was tangy with sea salt and underlain by the perpetual fug of old Wellington boots and wet dog that imbued the Land Rover’s ancient fabric seats.
The object of her surveillance, whom she and Strike had nicknamed “Tufty” for his badly fitting toupee, was currently out of view. He’d disappeared into the pizzeria an hour and a half previously with three companions, one of whom, a teenager with his arm in a cast, was visible if Robin craned her head sideways into the space above the front passenger seat. This she did every five minutes or so, to check on the progress of the foursome’s meal. The last time she had looked, ice cream was being delivered to the table. It couldn’t, surely, be much longer.
Robin was fighting a feeling of depression which she knew was at least partly down to utter exhaustion, to the stiffness all over her body from many hours in the driving seat, and to the loss of her long-awaited day off. With Strike unavoidably absent from the agency for an entire week, she’d now worked a twenty-day stretch without breaks. Their best subcontractor, Sam Barclay, had been supposed to take over the Tufty job today in Scotland, but Tufty hadn’t flown to Glasgow as expected. Instead, he’d taken a surprise detour to Torquay, leaving Robin with no choice but to follow him.
There were other reasons for her low spirits, of course, one of which she acknowledged to herself; the other, she felt angry with herself for dwelling on.