Except that, almost against his will, he did care about Robin. He felt familiar stirrings of a desire to make her happy that irked him far more than the habit he’d developed of looking determinedly away when she bent over a desk. They were friends, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and he suspected the best way to guarantee that was never see each other naked.
When he’d washed up his plate, Strike opened the window to admit the cold night air, reminding himself that every woman he knew would have been complaining immediately about the draft. He then lit a cigarette, opened the laptop he’d brought upstairs and drafted a letter to the Ministry of Justice, explaining that he’d been hired by Anna Phipps, setting out his proven credentials as an investigator both within the army and outside it, and requesting permission to visit and question Dennis Creed in Broadmoor.
Once finished, he yawned, lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day and went to lie down on his bed, as usual undoing his trousers first. Picking up The Demon of Paradise Park, he turned to the final chapter.
The question that haunts the officers who entered Creed’s basement in 1976 and saw for themselves the combination of jail and torture chamber that he’d constructed there, is whether the 12 women he is known to have assaulted, raped and/or killed represent the total tally of his victims.
In our final interview, Creed, who that morning had been deprived of privileges following an aggressive outburst against a prison officer, was at his least communicative and most cryptic.
Q: People suspect there may have been more victims.
A: Is that right?
Q: Louise Tucker. She was sixteen, she’d run away— A: You journalists love putting ages on people, don’t you? Why is that?
Q: Because it paints a picture. It’s a detail we can all identify with. D’you know anything about Louise Tucker?
A: Yeah. She was sixteen.
Q: There was unclaimed jewelry in your basement. Unclaimed pieces of clothing.
A:…
Q: You don’t want to talk about the unclaimed jewelry?
A:…
Q: Why don’t you want to talk about those unclaimed items?
A:…
Q: Does any part of you think, “I’ve got nothing to lose, now. I could put people’s minds at rest. Stop families wondering”?
A:…
Q: You don’t think, it would be a kind of reparation? I could repair something of my reputation?
A: [laughs] “Reputation”… you think I spend my days worrying about my reputation? You people really don’t [indistinguishable]
Q: What about Kara Wolfson? Disappeared in ’73.
A: How old was she?
Q: Twenty-six. Club hostess in Soho.
A: I don’t like whores.
Q: Why’s that?
A: Filthy.
Q: You frequented prostitutes.
A: When there was nothing else on offer.
Q: You tried—Helen Wardrop was a prostitute. And she got away from you. Gave a description to the police.
A:…
Q: You tried to abduct Helen in the same area Kara was last seen.
A:…
Q: What about Margot Bamborough?
A:…
Q: A van resembling your van was seen speeding in the area she disappeared.
A:…
Q: If you abducted Bamborough, she’d have been in your basement at the same time as Susan Meyer, wouldn’t she?
A:… Nice for her.
Q: Was it nice for her?
A: Someone to talk to.
Q: Are you saying you were holding both Bamborough and Meyer at the same time?
A: [smiles]
Q: What about Andrea Hooton? Was Bamborough dead when you abducted Andrea?
A:…
Q: You threw Andrea’s body off cliffs. That was a change in your m.o. Was she the first body you threw off there?
A:…
Q: You don’t want to confirm whether you abducted Margot Bamborough?
A: [smiles]
Strike put down the book and lay for a while, smoking and thinking. Then he reached for Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which he’d earlier thrown onto his bed when taking off his coat.
Flicking through the densely packed pages, looking for something comprehensible, something he could connect with a solid fact or reference point, he suddenly placed a thick finger in the book to stop the pages turning, his attention caught by a sentence written mostly in English that seemed familiar.
It was an effort to get up and fetch his own notebook, but this he did. Slumping back onto his bed, he found the sentence that Pat had translated for him from Pitman shorthand: And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book
The unknown word, Strike realized, was the same symbol that followed the word “Killer” in Talbot’s notebook.
With a feeling of both exasperation and curiosity, Strike picked up his phone and Googled “astrological symbols.”
A few minutes later, having read a couple of astrological web pages with an expression of mild distaste, he’d successfully interpreted Talbot’s sentence. It read: “Twelfth (Pisces) found. Therefore AS EXPECTED killer is Capricorn.”
Pisces was the twelfth sign of the zodiac, Capricorn the tenth. Capricorn was also the sign of the goat, which Talbot, in his manic state, appeared to have connected with Baphomet, the goat-headed deity.
“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, turning to a fresh page in his notebook and writing something.
An idea now occurred to him: those strange, unexplained dates with crosses beside them on all the male witnesses’ statements. He wondered whether he could be bothered to get up and go downstairs to fetch the relevant pages from the boxes of police records. With a sigh, he decided that the answer was yes. He did up his flies, heaved himself to his feet, and fetched the office keys from their hook by the door.
Ten minutes later, Strike returned to his bedroom with both his laptop and a fresh notebook. As he settled down on top of the duvet again, he noticed that the screen of his mobile, which was lying on the duvet, was now lit up. Somebody had tried to call him while he’d been downstairs. Expecting it to be Lucy, he picked up the phone and looked at it.
He’d just missed a call from Charlotte. Strike lay the phone back down again and opened his laptop. Slowly and painstakingly, he set to work matching the unexplained dates on each male suspect’s witness statements with the relevant sign of the zodiac. If his hunch that Talbot had been checking the men’s star signs was correct, Steven Douthwaite was a Pisces, Paul Satchwell was an Aries and Roy Phipps, who’d been born on the twenty-seventh of December… was a Capricorn. Yet Talbot had cleared Roy Phipps of involvement early in the case.
“So that makes no fucking sense,” muttered Strike to the empty room.
He put down his laptop and picked up Talbot’s notebook again, reading on from the assertion that Margot’s killer must be Capricorn.
“Christ almighty,” Strike muttered, trying, but not entirely succeeding, to find sense among the mass of esoteric ramblings with the aid of his astrological websites. As far as he could tell, Talbot appeared to have absolved Roy Phipps from suspicion on the grounds that he wasn’t really a Capricorn, but some sign that Strike couldn’t make head nor tail of, and which he suspected Talbot might have invented.
Returning to the notebook, Strike recognized the Celtic cross layout of tarot cards from his youth. Leda fancied herself a reader of tarot; many times had he seen her lay out the cards in the very formation Talbot had sketched in the middle of the page. He had never, however, seen the cards given astrological meanings before, and wondered whether this, too, had been Talbot’s own invention.
His mobile buzzed again. He picked it up.
Charlotte had sent him a photograph. A naked photograph, of herself holding two coffees. The accompanying message said 6 years ago tonight. I wish it was happening again. Happy Birthday, Bluey x
Against his will, Strike stared at the body no sentient heterosexual man could fail to desire, and at the face Venus would envy. Then he noticed the blurring along her lower stomach, where she’d airbrushed out her Cesarean scar. This took care of his burgeoning erection. Like an alcoholic pushing away brandy, he deleted the picture and returned to Talbot’s notebook.
23
It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore:
For some, that hath abundance at his will,
Hath not enough, but wants in greatest store;
And other, that hath litle, askes no more,
But in that litle is both rich and wise.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Eleven days later, Robin was woken at 8 a.m. by her mobile ringing, after barely an hour’s sleep. She’d spent the night on another pointless vigil outside the house of the persecuted weatherman, and had returned to her flat in Earl’s Court to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before hurrying out again to interview Oonagh Kennedy with Strike, in the café at Fortnum & Mason. Completely disorientated, she knocked a couple of items off the bedside table as she groped in the dark for her phone.
“’Lo?”
“Robin?” said a happy shout in her ear. “You’re an aunt!”
“I’m what, sorry?” she muttered.
Wisps of her dreams still clung about her: Pat Chauncey had been asking her out to dinner, and had been deeply hurt that she didn’t want to go.