Troubled Blood

Andrea Hooton was the last woman Creed was known to have killed, and he’d varied the pattern when it came to disposing of her body, driving eighty miles from his house in Liverpool Road to throw the corpse off Beachy Head. Both Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats had become too heavily patrolled by then, and in spite of Creed’s evident wish to make sure the Essex Butcher was credited with every kill, as evidenced by the secret store of press clippings he kept beneath the floorboards in his basement flat, he’d never wanted to be caught.

Robin checked her watch: it was time to head to the interview with the Bayliss sisters. Walking back to the Land Rover, she pondered the divide between normalcy and insanity. On the surface, Creed had been far saner than Bill Talbot. Creed had left no half-crazed scribblings behind him to explain his thought processes; he’d never plotted the course of asteroids to guide him: his interviews with psychiatrists and police had been entirely lucid. Not for Creed the belief in signs and symbols, a secret language decipherable only by initiates, a refuge in mystery or magic. Dennis Creed had been a meticulous planner, a genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth.

When Robin arrived in the street where the café stood, she spotted Strike getting out of his BMW a short distance away from the entrance. Noticing the Land Rover in turn, Strike raised a hand in greeting and headed up the street toward her, while finishing what looked like a bacon and egg McMuffin, his chin stubbly, the shadows beneath his eyes purple.

“Have I got time for a fag?” were the first words he spoke, checking his watch as Robin got down out of the car and slammed the door. “No,” he answered himself, with a sigh. “Ah well…”

“You can take the lead on this interview,” he told Robin, as they headed together toward the café. “You’ve done all the legwork. I’ll take notes. Remind me what their names are?”

“Eden’s the eldest. She’s a Labor councilor from Lewisham. Maya’s the middle one, and she’s deputy headmistress of a primary school. The youngest is Porschia Dagley, and she’s a social worker—”

“—like her mother—”

“Exactly, and she lives just up the road from here. I think we’ve come to her neck of the woods because she’s been ill, so the others didn’t want her to have to travel.”

Robin pushed open the door of the café and led the way inside. The interior was sleekly modern, with a curved counter, a wooden floor and a bright orange feature wall. Close to the door at a table for six sat three black women. Robin found it easy to identify which sister was which, because of the photographs she’d seen on the family’s Facebook pages, and on the Lewisham Council website.

Eden, the councilor, sat with her arms folded, a wavy bob casting a shadow over most of her face, so that only a carefully lipsticked, unsmiling plum mouth was clearly visible. She wore a well-tailored black jacket and her demeanor was suggestive of a businesswoman who’d been interrupted during an important meeting.

Maya, the deputy headmistress, wore a cornflower blue sweater and jeans. A small silver cross hung around her neck. She was smaller in build than Eden, the darkest skinned and, in Robin’s opinion, the prettiest of the sisters. Her long, braided hair was tied back in a thick ponytail, she wore square-framed glasses over her large, wide-set eyes and her full mouth, with its naturally up-tilted corners, conveyed warmth. A leather handbag sat in Maya’s lap, and she was gripping it with both hands as though afraid it might otherwise escape.

Porschia, the youngest sister and the social worker, was also the heaviest. Her hair had been cropped almost to her skull, doubtless because of her recent chemotherapy. She’d penciled in the eyebrows that were just beginning to grow back; they arched over hazel eyes that shone gold against her skin. Porschia was wearing a purple smock top with jeans and long beaded earrings, which swung like miniature chandeliers as she looked around at Strike and Robin. As they approached the table Robin spotted a small tattoo on the back of Porschia’s neck: the trident from the Barbadian flag. Robin knew that Eden and Maya were both well into their fifties, and that Porschia was forty-nine, but all three sisters could have passed for at least ten years younger than their real ages.

Robin introduced herself and Strike. Hands were shaken, Eden unsmiling throughout, and the detectives sat down, Strike at the head of the table, Robin between him and Porschia, facing Maya and Eden. Everyone but Eden made labored small talk about the local area and the weather, until the waiter came to take their order. Once he’d left, Robin said,

“Thanks very much for meeting us, we really do appreciate it. Would you mind if Cormoran takes notes?”

Maya and Porschia shook their heads. Strike tugged his notebook out of his coat pocket and opened it.

“As I said on the phone,” Robin began, “we’re really after background, building up a complete picture of Margot Bamborough’s life in the months—”

“Could I ask a couple of questions?” interrupted Eden.

“Of course,” said Robin politely, though expecting trouble.

Eden swept her hair back out of her face, revealing ebony-dark eyes.

“Did you two know there’s a guy phoning around everyone who was connected to St. John’s, saying he’s going to write a book about you investigating Bamborough’s disappearance?”

Shit, thought Robin.

“Would this be a man called Oakden?” asked Strike.

“No, Carl Brice.”

“It’s the same bloke,” said Strike.

“Are you connected to him or—”

“No,” said Strike, “and I’d strongly advise you not to talk to him.”

“Yeah, we worked that out for ourselves,” said Eden, coolly. “But this means there’ll be publicity, won’t there?”

Robin looked at Strike, who said,

“If we solve the case, there’ll be publicity even without Oakden—or Brice, or whatever he’s calling himself these days—but that’s a big ‘if.’ To be frank, the odds are we’re not going to solve it, in which case I think Oakden’s going to find it very hard to sell any books, and whatever you tell us will never go any further.”

“What if we know something that might help you solve the case, though?” asked Porschia, leaning forwards, so that she could look past Robin at Strike.

There was an infinitesimal pause in which Robin could almost feel Strike’s interest sharpening, along with her own.

“Depends what that information is,” Strike answered slowly. “It might be possible not to divulge where we got it, but if the source is important to getting a conviction…”

There was a long pause. The air between the sisters seemed charged with silent communications.

“Well?” said Porschia at last, on an interrogative note.

“We did decide to,” Maya mumbled to Eden, who continued to sit in silence, arms folded.

“OK, fine,” said Eden, with a don’t-blame-me-later inflection.

The deputy headmistress reached absently for the little silver cross around her neck, and held it as she began to talk.

“I need to explain a bit of background, first,” she said. “When we were kids—Eden and I were already teenagers, but Porschia was only nine—”

“Eight,” Porschia corrected her.

“Eight,” Maya said obediently, “our dad was convicted of—of rape and sent to prison.”

“He didn’t do it, though,” said Eden.

Robin reached automatically for her coffee cup and took a sip, so as to hide her face.

“He didn’t, OK?” said Eden, watching Robin. “He had a white girlfriend for a couple of months. The whole of Clerkenwell knew. They’d been seen together in bars all over the place. He tried to end it, and she cried rape.”

Robin’s stomach lurched as though the floor had tilted. She very much wanted this story to be untrue. The idea of any woman lying about rape was repugnant to her. She’d had to talk through every moment of her own assault in court. Her soft-spoken fifty-three-year-old rapist and would-be murderer had taken the stand afterward to explain to the jury how the twenty-year-old Robin had invited him into the stairwell of her hall of residence for sex. In his account, everything had been consensual: she’d whispered that she liked it rough, which had accounted for the heavy bruising around her neck, she’d enjoyed it so much she’d asked him back the following night, and yes (with a little laugh in the dock), of course he’d been surprised, nicely spoken young girl like her, coming on to him like that, out of nowhere…

“Easy thing for a white woman to do to a black man,” said Eden, “’specially in 1972. Dad already had a record, because he’d got into a fight a few years before that. He went down for five years.”

“Must’ve been hard on the family,” said Strike, not looking at Robin.

“It was,” said Maya. “Very hard. The other kids at school… well, you know what kids are like…”