He put the last bit of steak into his mouth, chewed it and swallowed before answering.

“Well, yeah. Obviously at first I ’oped she’d just walked out on ’er husband and was ’oled up somewhere. But then it went on and on and… yeah, everyone thought it was the Essex Butcher, including the police. Not just the nutty one, the second one, the one who took over.”

“Lawson,” said Robin.

Satchwell shrugged, as much to say as the officer’s name didn’t matter, and asked,

“Are you going to interview Creed?”

“Hopefully.”

“Why would he tell the truth, now?”

“He likes publicity,” said Robin. “He might like the idea of making a splash in the newspapers. So Margot disappearing was a shock to you?”

“Well, obviously it was,” said Satchwell, now probing his teeth with his tongue. “I’d just seen her again and… I’m not going to pretend I was still in love with her, or anything like that, but… have you ever been caught up in a police investigation?” he asked her, with a trace of aggression.

“Yes,” said Robin. “Several. It was stressful and intimidating, every time.”

“Well, there you are,” said Satchwell, mollified.

“What made you choose Greece?”

“I didn’t, really. I ’ad an inheritance off my grandmother and I thought, I’ll take some time off, do Europe, paint… went through France and Italy, and in ’76 I arrived in Kos. Worked in a bar. Painted in my free hours. Sold quite a few pictures to tourists. Met my first wife… never left,” said Satchwell, with a shrug.

“Something else I wanted to ask you,” said Robin, moving the police statements to the bottom of her small stack. “We’ve found out about a possible sighting of Margot, a week after she disappeared. A sighting that wasn’t ever reported to the police.”

“Yeah?” said Satchwell, looking interested. “Where?”

“In Leamington Spa,” said Robin, “in the graveyard of All Saints church.”

Satchwell’s thick white eyebrows rose, putting strain on the clear tape that was holding the dressing to his eye.

“In All Saints?” he repeated, apparently astonished.

“Looking at graves. Allegedly, she had her hair dyed black.”

“’Oo saw this?”

“A man visiting the area on a motorbike. Two years later, he told the St. John’s practice nurse about it.”

“He told the nurse?”

Satchwell’s jaw hardened.

“And what else has the nurse told you?” he said, searching Robin’s face. He seemed suddenly and unexpectedly angry.

“Do you know Janice?” asked Robin, wondering why he looked so angry.

“That’s her name, is it?” said Satchwell. “I couldn’t remember.”

“You do know her?”

Satchwell put more chips in his mouth. Robin could see that he was trying to decide what to tell her, and she felt that jolt of excitement that made all the long, tedious hours of the job, the sitting around, the sleeplessness, worthwhile.

“She’s shit-stirring,” said Satchwell abruptly. “She’s a shit-stirrer, that one, that nurse. She and Margot didn’t like each other. Margot told me she didn’t like her.”

“When was this?”

“When we ran into each other, like I told you, in the street—”

“I thought you said she didn’t talk about work?”

“Well, she told me that. They’d had a row or something. I don’t know. It was just something she said in passing. She told me she didn’t like the nurse,” repeated Satchwell.

It was as though a hard mask had surfaced under the leather dark skin: the slightly comical, crêpey-faced charmer had been replaced by a mean old one-eyed man. Robin remembered how Matthew’s lower face had tautened when angry, giving him the look of a muzzled dog, but she wasn’t intimidated. She sensed in Satchwell the same wily instinct for self-preservation as in her ex-husband. Whatever Satchwell might have meted out to Margot, or to the wives who’d left him, he’d think better of slapping Robin in a crowded pub, in the town where his sister still lived.

“You seem angry,” Robin said.

“Gia chári tou, of course I am—that nurse, what’s her name? Trying to implicate me, isn’t she? Making up a story to make it look like Margot ran away to be with me—”

“Janice didn’t invent the story. We checked with Mr. Ramage’s widow and she confirmed that her late husband told other people he’d met a missing woman—”

“What else has Janice told you?” he said again.

“She never mentioned you,” said Robin, now immensely curious. “We had no idea you knew each other.”

“But she claims Margot was seen in Leamington Spa after she disappeared? No, she knows exactly what she’s bloody doing.”

Satchwell took another chip, ate it, then suddenly got to his feet and walked past Robin, who looked over her shoulder to see him striding into the gents. His back view was older than his front: she could see the pink scalp through the thin white hair and there was no backside filling out his jeans.

Robin guessed he considered the interview finished. However, she had something else up her sleeve: a dangerous something, perhaps, but she’d use it rather than let the interview end here, with more questions raised than answered.

It was fully five minutes before he reappeared and she could tell that he’d worked himself up in his absence. Rather than sitting back down, he stood over her as he said,

“I don’t think you’re a fucking detective. I think you’re press.”

Seen from below, the tortoise’s neck was particularly striking. The chain, the turquoise and silver rings and the long hair now seemed like fancy dress.

“You can call Anna Phipps and check if you like,” said Robin. “I’ve got her number here. Why d’you think the press would be interested in you?”

“I had enough of them last time. I’m off. I don’t need this. I’m supposed to be recuperating.”

“One last thing,” said Robin, “and you’re going to want to hear it.”

She’d learned the trick from Strike. Stay calm, but assertive. Make them worry what else you’ve got.

Satchwell turned back, his one uncovered eye hard as flint. No trace of flirtation remained, no attempt to patronize her. She was an equal now; an adversary.

“Why don’t you sit down?” said Robin. “This won’t take long.”

After a slight hesitation, Satchwell eased himself back into his seat. His hoary head now blocked the stuffed deer head that hung on the brick wall behind him. From Robin’s point of view, the horns appeared to rise directly out of the white hair that fell in limp curls to his shoulders.

“Margot Bamborough knew something about you that you didn’t want to get out,” said Robin. “Didn’t she?”

He glared at her.

“The pillow dream?” said Robin.

Every line of his face hardened, turning him vulpine. The sunburned chest, wrinkled beneath its white hair, caved as he exhaled.

“Told someone, did she? Who?” Before Robin could answer, he said, “’Er husband, I suppose? Or that fucking Irish girl, was it?”

His jaws worked, chewing nothing.

“I should never ’ave told her,” he said. “That’s what you do when you’re drunk and you’re in love, or whatever the fuck we were. Then I ’ad it playing on my mind for years that she was gonna…”

The sentence ended in silence.

“Did she mention it, when you met again?” asked Robin, feeling her way, pretending she knew more than she did.

“She asked after my poor mother,” said Satchwell. “I fort at the time, are you ’aving a go? But I don’t think she was. Maybe she’d learned better, being a doctor, maybe she’d changed her views. She’ll have seen people like Blanche. A life not worth living.

“Anyway,” he said, leaning forwards slightly, “I still think it was a dream. All right? I was six years old. I dreamed it. And even if it wasn’t a dream, they’re both dead and gone now and nobody can say no different. My old mum died in ’89. You can’t get ’er for anything now, poor cow. Single mother, trying to cope with us all on ’er own. It’s merciful,” said Satchwell, “putting someone out of their misery. A mercy.”

He got up, drained beneath his tan, his face sagging, turned and walked away, but at the moment he was about to disappear he suddenly turned and tottered back to her, his jaw working.

“I think,” he said, with as much malevolence as he could muster, “you’re a nasty little bitch.”

He left for good this time.

Robin’s heart rate was barely raised. Her dominant emotion was elation. Pushing her unappetizing ramekins aside, she pulled the little metal bucket he’d left behind toward her, and finished the artist’s chips.

48

Sir Artegall, long hauing since,

Taken in hand th’exploit…

To him assynd, her high beheast to doo,

To the sea shore he gan his way apply…

Edmund Spenser