Troubled Blood
Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t had opportunities. Ever since the agency had become successful, a few of the rich and unhappy women who’d formed a staple of the agency’s work had shown a tendency to size up Strike as a potential palliative for their own emotional pain or emptiness. Strike had taken on a new client of exactly this type the previous day, Good Friday. As she’d replaced Mrs. Smith, who’d already initiated divorce proceedings against her husband on the basis of Morris’s pictures of him with their nanny, they’d nicknamed the thirty-two-year-old brunette Miss Jones.
She was undeniably beautiful, with long legs, full lips and skin of expensive smoothness. She was of interest to the gossip columns partly because she was an heiress, and partly because she was involved in a bitter custody battle with her estranged boyfriend, on whom she was seeking dirt to use in court. Miss Jones had crossed and re-crossed her long legs while she told Strike about her hypocritical ex-partner’s drug use, the fact that he was feeding stories about her to the papers, and that he had no interest in his six-month-old daughter other than as a means to make Miss Jones unhappy. While he was seeing her to the door, their interview concluded, she’d repeatedly touched his arm and laughed longer than necessary at his mild pleasantries. Trying to usher her politely out of the door under Pat’s censorious eye, Strike had had the sensation of trying to prize chewing gum off his fingers.
Strike could well imagine Dave Polworth’s comments had he been privy to the scene, because Polworth had trenchant theories about the sort of women who found his oldest friend attractive, and of whom Charlotte was the purest example of the type. The women most readily drawn to Strike were, in Polworth’s view, neurotic, chaotic and occasionally dangerous, and their fondness for the bent-nosed ex-boxer indicated a subconscious desire for something rocklike to which they could attach themselves like limpets.
Driving through the deserted streets of Stoke Newington, Strike’s thoughts turned naturally to his ex-fiancée. He hadn’t responded to the desperate text messages she’d sent him from what he knew, having Googled the place, to be a private psychiatric clinic. Not only had they arrived on the eve of his departure for Joan’s deathbed, he hadn’t wanted to fuel her vain hopes that he would appear to rescue her. Was she still there? If so, it would be her longest ever period of hospitalization. Her one-year-old twins were doubtless in the care of a nanny, or the mother-in-law Charlotte had once assured him was ready and willing to take over maternal duties.
A short distance away from Elinor Dean’s street, Strike called Robin.
“Is he still inside?”
“Yes. You’ll be able to park right behind me, there’s a space. I think number 14 must’ve gone away for Easter with the kids. Both cars are gone.
“See you in five.”
When Strike turned into the street, he saw the old Land Rover parked a few houses down from Elinor’s front door, and was able to park without difficulty in the space directly behind it. As he turned off his engine, Robin jumped down out of her Land Rover, closed the door quietly, and walked around the BMW to the passenger’s side, a messenger bag over her shoulder.
“Morning,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him.
“Morning. Aren’t you keen to get away?”
As he said it, the screen of the mobile in her hand lit up: somebody had texted her. Robin didn’t even look at the message, but turned the phone over on her knee, to hide its light.
“Got a few things to tell you. I’ve spoken to C. B. Oakden.”
“Ah,” said Strike.
Given that Oakden seemed primarily interested in Strike, and that Strike suspected Oakden was recording his calls, the two detectives had agreed that it should be Robin who warned him away from the case.
“He didn’t like it,” said Robin. “There was a lot of ‘it’s a free country,’ and ‘I’m entitled to talk to anyone I like.’ I said to him, ‘Trying to get in ahead of us and talk to witnesses could hamper our investigation.’ He said, as an experienced biographer—”
“Oh, fuck off,” said Strike under his breath.
“—he knows how to question people to get information out of them, and it might be a good idea for the three of us to pool our resources.”
“Yeah,” said Strike. “That’s exactly what this agency needs, a convicted con man on the payroll. How did you leave it?”
“Well, I can tell he really wants to meet you and I think he’s determined to withhold everything he knows about Brenner until he comes face to face with you. He wants to keep Brenner as bait.”
Strike reached for another cigarette.
“I’m not sure Brenner’s worth C. B. Oakden.”
“Even after what Janice said?”
Strike took a drag on the cigarette, then blew smoke out of the window, away from Robin. “I grant you, Brenner looks a lot fishier now than he did when we started digging, but what are the odds Oakden’s actually got useful information? He was a kid when all this happened and nicking that obituary smacks of a man trying to scrape up things to say, rather than—”
He heard a rustling beside him and turned to see Robin opening her messenger bag. Slightly to his surprise, Robin was pulling out Talbot’s notebook again.
“Still carrying that around with you, are you?” said Strike, trying not to sound exasperated.
“Apparently I am,” she said, moving her mobile onto the dashboard so that she could open the book in her lap. Watching the phone, Strike saw a second text arrive, lighting up the screen, and this time, he caught sight of the name: Morris.
“What’s Morris texting you about?” Strike said, and even to his ears, the question sounded critical.
“Nothing. He’s just bored, sitting outside Miss Jones’s boyfriend’s house,” said Robin, who was flicking through Talbot’s notebook. “I want to show you something. There, look at that.”
She passed him the book, open to a page Strike remembered from his own perusal of the notes. It was close to the end of the notebook, where the pages were most heavily embellished with strange drawings. In the middle of this page danced a black skeleton holding a scythe.
“Ignore all the weird tarot drawings,” said Robin. “Look there, though. That sentence between the skeleton’s legs. The little symbol, the circle with the cross in it, stands for the Part of Fortune…”
“What’s that?” asked Strike.
“It’s a point in the horoscope that’s supposed to be about worldly success. ‘Part of Fortune in Second, MONEY AND POSSESSIONS.’ And ‘Mother’s House,’ underlined. The Oakdens lived on Fortune Street, remember? And the Part of Fortune was in the house of money and possessions when Margot disappeared, and he’s connecting that with the fact that Dorothy inherited her mother’s house, and saying that wasn’t a tragedy, but a stroke of luck for Dorothy.”
“You think?” said Strike, rubbing his tired eyes.
“Yes, because look, he then starts rambling about Virgo—which is Dorothy’s sign under both systems—being petty and having an ax to grind, which from what we know about her fits. Anyway,” said Robin, “I’ve been looking at dates of birth, and guess what? Under both the traditional and Schmidt’s systems, Dorothy’s mother was a Scorpio.”
“Christ’s sake, how many more Scorpios are we going to find?”
“I know what you mean,” said Robin, unfazed, “but from what I’ve read, Scorpio’s one of the most common birth signs. Anyway, this is the important bit: Carl Oakden was born on the sixth of April. That means he’s Aries under the traditional system, but Pisces under Schmidt’s.”
A short silence followed.
“How old was Oakden when his grandmother fell downstairs?” asked Strike.
“Fourteen,” said Robin.
Strike turned his face away from Robin to blow smoke out of the window again.
“You think he pushed his grandmother, do you?”
“It might not have been deliberate,” said Robin. “He could’ve pushed past her and she lost her balance.”
“‘Margot confronted Pisces.’ It’d be a hell of a thing to accuse a child of—”
“Maybe she never confronted him at all. The confrontation might have been something Talbot suspected, or imagined. Either way—”
“—it’s suggestive, yeah. It is suggestive…” Strike let out a slight groan. “We’re going to have to interview bloody Oakden, aren’t we? There’s a bit of a hotspot developing around that little grouping, isn’t there? Brenner and the Oakdens, outward respectability—”
“—inward poison. Remember? That’s what Oonagh Kennedy said about Dorothy.”
The detectives sat for a moment or two, watching Elinor Dean’s front door, which remained closed, her dark garden silent and still.
“How many murders,” Robin asked, “d’you think go undetected?”
“Clue’s in the question, isn’t it? ‘Undetected’—impossible to know. But yeah, it’s those quiet, domestic deaths you wonder about. Vulnerable people picked off by their own families, and everyone thinking it was ill health—”
“—or a mercy that they’ve gone,” said Robin.