Troubled Blood

“I know it isn’t funny,” said Porschia, catching Maya’s eye, “but come on. Carmen was always ditzy as hell, but you’d think she might’ve made sure of her facts then, wouldn’t you? Mum was liter-ally sick with stress, like, retching if she ate anything. And then that old bitch of a secretary at work found her having a dizzy spell…”

“Yeah,” said Eden, suddenly coming to life. “Next thing was, Mum was accused of being a thief and a drunk and the practice fired her. The old secretary claimed she’d had a secret sniff of Mum’s Thermos and smelled booze in it. Total fabrication.”

“That was a few months after Margot Bamborough disappeared, wasn’t it?” asked Strike, his pen poised over his notebook.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Eden said with icy sarcasm, “did I go off topic? Back to the missing white lady, everyone. Never mind what the black woman went through, who gives a shit?”

“Sorry, I didn’t—” began Strike.

“D’you know who Tiana Medaini is?” Eden shot at him.

“No,” he admitted.

“No,” said Eden, “of course you bloody don’t. Forty years after Margot Bamborough went missing, here we all are, fussing over her and where she went. Tiana Medaini’s a black teenager from Lewisham. She went missing last year. How many front pages has Tiana been on? Why wasn’t she top of the news, like Bamborough was? Because we’re not worth the same, are we, to the press or to the bloody police?”

Strike appeared unable to find an adequate response; doubtless, Robin thought, because Eden’s point was unarguable. The picture of Dennis Creed’s only black victim, Jackie Aylett, a secretary and mother of one, was the smallest and the least distinct of the ghostly black and white images of Creed’s victims on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. Jackie’s dark skin showed up worst on the gloomy cover. The greatest prominence had been given to sixteen-year-old Geraldine Christie and twenty-seven-year-old Susan Meyer, both of them pale and blonde.

“When Margot Bamborough went missing,” Eden said fiercely, “the white women at her practice were treated like bone china by the police, OK? Practically mopping their bloody tears for them—but not our mum. They treated her like a hardened con. That policeman in charge, what was his name—”

“Talbot?” suggested Robin.

“‘What are you hiding? Come on, I know you’re hiding something.’”

The mysterious figure of the Hierophant rose up in Robin’s mind. The keeper of secrets and mysteries in the Thoth tarot wore saffron robes and sat upon a bull (“the card is referred to Taurus”) and in front of him, half his size, stood a black priestess, her hair braided like Maya’s (“Before him is the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman…”). Which had come first, the laying out of tarot cards signifying secrecy and concealment, or the policeman’s instinct that the terrified Wilma was lying to him?

“When he interviewed me—” began Eden.

“Talbot interviewed you?” asked Strike sharply.

“Yeah, he came to Marks & Spencer unannounced, to my work,” said Eden, and Robin realized that Eden’s eyes were suddenly bright with tears. “Someone else at the practice had seen that anonymous note Bamborough got. Talbot found out Dad was inside and he’d heard Mum was cleaning for the doctor. He went to every man in our family, accusing them of writing the threatening letters, and then he came to me, asking me really strange questions about all my male relatives, wanting to know what they’d been up to on different dates, asking whether Uncle Marcus often stayed out overnight. He even asked me about Dad and Uncle Marcus’s—”

“—star signs?” asked Robin.

Eden looked astounded.

“The hell did you know that?”

“Talbot left a notebook. It’s full of occult writing. He was trying to solve the case using tarot cards and astrology.”

“Astrology?” repeated Eden. “Effing astrology?”

“Talbot shouldn’t have been interviewing you without an adult present,” Strike told Eden. “What were you, sixteen?”

Eden laughed in the detective’s face.

“That might be how it works for white girls, but we’re different, aren’t you listening? We’re hardy. We’re tough. That occult stuff,” Eden said, turning back to Robin, “yeah, that makes sense, because he asked me about obeah. You know what that is?”

Robin shook her head.

“Kind of magic they used to practice in the Caribbean. Originated in West Africa. We were all born in Southwark, but, you know, we were all black pagans to Inspector Talbot. He had me alone in the back room and he was asking me stuff about rituals using blood, about black magic. I was terrified, I didn’t know what he was on about. I thought he meant Mum and the blood on the carpet, hinting she’d done away with Dr. Bamborough.”

“He was having a psychotic breakdown,” said Robin. “That’s why they took him off the case. He thought he was hunting a devil. Your mum wasn’t the only woman he thought might have supernatural power—but he was definitely racist,” Robin added quietly. “That’s clear from his notes.”

“You never told us about the police coming to Marks & Spencer,” said Porschia. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Why would I?” said Eden, angrily blotting her damp eyes. “Mum was already ill with the stress of it all, I had Uncle Marcus shouting at me that Mum had put the police onto him and his boys, and I was really scared, if Uncle Marcus found out about the officer coming to my work, he’d report him, which was the last thing we needed. God, it was a mess,” said Eden, pressing her hands briefly against her wet eyes, “such a bloody mess.”

Porschia looked as though she’d like to say something comforting to her elder sister, but Robin had the impression that this would be such a departure from their usual relationship, she didn’t know quite how to set about it. After a moment or two, Porschia muttered,

“Need the loo,” pushed her chair away from the table and disappeared into the bathroom.

“I didn’t want Porsh to come today,” said Maya, as soon as the bathroom door swung shut behind her younger sister. She was tactfully not looking at her elder sister, who was trying to pretend she wasn’t crying, while surreptitiously wiping more tears from her eyes. “She doesn’t need this stress. She’s only just finished chemo.”

“How’s she doing?” asked Strike.

“She was given the all-clear last week, thank God. She’s talking about going back to work on reduced hours. I think it’s too early.”

“She’s a social worker, isn’t she?” asked Robin.

“Yeah,” sighed Maya. “A backlog of a hundred desperate messages every morning, and you know you’re in the firing line if anything goes wrong with a family you haven’t been able to reach. I don’t know how she does it. But she’s like Mum. Two peas in a pod. She was always Mum’s baby, and Mum was her hero.”

Eden let out a soft “huh,” which might have been agreement or disparagement. Maya ignored it. There was a short pause, in which Robin reflected on the tangled ties of family. A proxy war between Jules and Wilma Bayliss seemed still to be playing out in the next generation.

The bathroom door swung open again and Porschia reappeared. Instead of taking her seat beside Robin, she swiveled her wide hips around Strike at the end of the table, and edged in behind a startled Maya, who pulled her chair in hastily, until she reached Eden. After thrusting a handful of toilet roll into her elder sister’s hand, Porschia slid her plump arms around Eden’s neck and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“What are you doing?” said Eden huskily, reaching up to clasp her youngest sister’s arms, not to remove them, but to hold them there. Strike, Robin saw out of the corner of her eye, was pretending to examine his notebook.

“Thanking you,” said Porschia softly, dropping another kiss on the top of her eldest sister’s head before letting her go. “For agreeing to do this. I know you didn’t want to.”

Everyone sat in slightly startled silence while Porschia squeezed her way back around the table and resumed her seat next to Robin.

“Have you told them the last bit?” Porschia asked Maya, while Eden blew her nose. “About Mum and Betty Fuller?”

“No,” said Maya, who appeared shell-shocked by the act of reconciliation she’d just witnessed. “You’re the one Mum told it to, I thought you should.”

“Right,” said Porschia, turning to look at Strike and Robin. “This really is the last thing we know, and there might be nothing in it, but you might as well have it, now you know the other stuff.”

Strike waited, pen poised.

“Mum told me this not long after she retired. She shouldn’t have, really, because it was about a client, but when you hear what it was, you’ll understand.

“Mum kept working in Clerkenwell after she’d qualified as a social worker. It was where all her friends were; she didn’t want to move. So she really got to know the local community.

“One of the families she was working with lived in Skinner Street, not that far from the St. John’s practice—”