Troubled Blood
“Skinner Street?” repeated Strike. The name rang a bell, but, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t immediately remember why that was. Robin, on the other hand, knew immediately why Skinner Street sounded familiar.
“Yeah. The family was called Fuller. They had just about every problem you can think of, Mum said: addiction, domestic abuse, criminality, the lot. The sort of head of the family was a grandmother who was only in her forties, and this woman’s main source of income was prostitution. Betty was her name, and Mum said she was like a local news service, if you wanted to know about the underworld, anyway. The family had been in the area for generations.
“Anyway, one day, Betty says to Mum, bit sly, to see her reaction: ‘Marcus never sent no threatening notes to that doctor, you know.’
“Mum was gobsmacked,” said Porschia. “Her first thought was that Marcus was visiting the woman, you know, as a client—I know he wasn’t,” said Porschia quickly, holding up a hand to forestall Eden, who’d opened her mouth. “Mum and Marcus hadn’t spoken for years at this point. Anyway, it was all innocent: Betty had met Marcus because the church was doing a bit of outreach in the local area. He’d brought round some Harvest Festival stuff for the family, and tried to persuade Betty to come along to a church service.
“Betty had worked out Marcus’s connection with Mum, because Mum was still going by ‘Bayliss,’ and Betty claimed she knew who really wrote the threatening notes to Margot Bamborough, and that the person who wrote the notes was the same person who killed her. Mum said, ‘Who was it?’ And Betty said if she ever told, Margot’s killer would kill her, too.”
There was a short silence. The café clattered around them, and one of the women at the next table, who was eating a cream slice, said loudly, with unctuous pleasure,
“God that’s good.”
“Did your mother believe Betty?” asked Robin.
“She didn’t know what to think,” said Porschia. “Betty knew some very rough people, so it was possible she’d heard something on the grapevine, but who knows? People talk, don’t they, and they like making themselves important,” and Robin remembered Janice Beattie saying exactly this, as she passed on the rumor of Margot Bamborough appearing in a graveyard. “But if there was anything in it, a woman like Betty, she’d go to the moon before she went to the cops.
“She might well be dead by now,” said Porschia, “given her lifestyle, but for what it’s worth, there it is. Shouldn’t be hard to find out whether she’s still alive.”
“Thanks very much for telling us,” said Strike. “That’s definitely worth following up.”
Having told all they knew, the three sisters now lapsed into a pained silence. It wasn’t the first time that Robin had had cause to consider how much collateral damage each act of violence left in its wake. The disappearance of Margot Bamborough had evidently wreaked havoc in the lives of the Bayliss girls, and now she knew the full extent of the grief it had brought them, and the painful nature of the memories associated with it, she perfectly understood Eden’s initial refusal to talk to detectives. If anything, she had to ask herself why the sisters had changed their minds.
“Thank you so much for this,” she said sincerely. “I know Margot’s daughter will be incredibly grateful that you agreed to talk to us.”
“Oh, it’s the daughter who’s hired you, is it?” said Maya. “Well, you can tell her from me, Mum felt guilty all her life that she didn’t come clean with the police. She liked Dr. Bamborough, you know. I mean, they weren’t close friends or anything, but she thought she was a decent person.”
“It weighed on her,” said Porschia. “Right up until her death, it weighed on her. That’s why she kept that note. She’d have wanted us to do this. There’s always handwriting analysis and stuff, isn’t there?”
Strike agreed that there was. He went to pay the bill and Robin waited at the table with the sisters, who she could tell wanted the detectives gone, and as quickly as possible. They’d disclosed their personal trauma and their family’s secrets, and now a thin layer of polite small talk was too onerous to sustain, and any other form of conversation impossible. Robin was relieved when Strike re-joined her, and after brief farewells, the two of them left the café.
The moment he hit clean air, Strike paused to pull his Benson & Hedges out of his pocket and lit one.
“Needed that,” he muttered, as they walked on. “So… Skinner Street…”
“… is where Joseph Brenner was seen on the night Margot Bamborough disappeared,” said Robin.
“Ah,” muttered Strike, briefly closing his eyes. “I knew there was something.”
“I’ll look into Betty Fuller as soon as I get home,” said Robin. “What did you think of the rest of it?”
“The Bayliss family really went through it, didn’t they?” said Strike, pausing beside the Land Rover and glancing back at the café. His BMW lay another fifty yards ahead. He took another drag on his cigarette, frowning. “Y’know… it gives us another angle on Talbot’s bloody notebook,” he admitted. “Strip away all the occult shit, and he was right, wasn’t he? Wilma was hiding stuff from him. A lot of stuff, actually.”
“I thought that, too,” said Robin.
“You realize that threatening note’s the first piece of physical evidence we’ve found?”
“Yes,” said Robin, checking her watch. “What time are you heading to Truro?”
Strike didn’t answer. Looking up, Robin saw that he was staring so fixedly across the open park on the other side of the road that she turned, too, to see what had captured his attention, but saw nothing except a couple of gamboling West Highland terriers and their male owner, who was walking along, swinging a pair of leads.
“Cormoran?”
Strike appeared to recall his attention from a long way away.
“What?” he said, and then, “Yeah. No, I was just…”
He turned to look back at the café, frowning.
“Just thinking. But it’s nothing, I think I’m doing a Talbot. Seeing meaning in total coincidence.”
“What coincidence?”
But Strike didn’t answer until the café doors opened, and the three Bayliss sisters emerged in their coats.
“We should get going,” he said. “They must be sick of the sight of us by now. I’ll see you Monday. Let me know if you find out anything interesting on Betty Fuller.”
54
But nothing new to him was that same pain;
Nor pain at all; for he so oft had tried
The power thereof, and lov’d so oft in vain.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The train gave a lurch: the sleeping Strike’s head rolled sideways and hit the cold window. He woke, feeling drool on his chin. Wiping it on his coat sleeve, he peered around. The elderly couple opposite him were politely immersed in their reading material, but across the aisle, four teenagers were enjoying paroxysms of silent laughter, carefully not looking at him, their shoulders shaking as they feigned interest in the fields out of the window. Apparently he’d been snoring with his mouth wide open, because it was now unpleasantly dry. Checking his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep at least two hours.
Strike reached for the tartan Thermos sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d rinsed out and refilled in McDonald’s earlier, and poured himself a black coffee while the teenagers continued to gasp and snort with laughter. Doubtless they thought him comically odd and old, with his snores and his tartan Thermos, but a year of navigating swaying train carriages had taught him that his prosthetic leg appreciated as few trips to the catering car as possible. He drank a cup of plastic-tainted coffee, then re-settled himself comfortably, arms folded, looking out at the fields gliding past, bestridden with power pylons, the flat white cloud given a glaucous glow by the dust on the glass. The landscape registered only incidentally: Strike’s attention was focused inwards on the odd idea that had occurred to him after the interview with the Bayliss sisters.