Troubled Blood

There was a long silence, although he could hear breathing on the end of the line.



“Who is this?” he said, suspecting the answer.

“Bluey,” came a tiny whisper. “It’s me.”

“It’s four in the morning, Charlotte.”

“I know,” she whispered, and gave what might have been a giggle or a sob. She sounded strange; possibly manic. Strike stared up at the dark ceiling, his aunt’s ashes a mere twelve feet away.

“Where are you?”

“In hell.”

“Charlotte—”

She hung up.

Strike could hear his own heart beating with ominous force, like a kettle drum deep inside a cave. Red-hot threads of panic and dread darted through him.

How many more burdens was he supposed to bear? Had he not paid enough, given enough, sacrificed enough—loved enough? Joan seemed very close just now, in the darkness of her own sitting room, with her ornamental plates and her dried flowers, closer even than her dusty remains, in that vaguely ludicrous white lily, which would look so puny and insignificant bobbing away on the wide sea, like a discarded paper plate. He seemed to hear her last words as he lay there: “You’re a good man… helping people… I’m proud of you…”

Charlotte had called him from the same unknown number she’d texted from earlier. Strike’s exhausted mind now eddied around the known facts, which were that Charlotte had suicide attempts in her past, that she was married with children, and that she’d recently been committed to a mental facility. He remembered his resolution of weeks ago, to phone her husband if she sent him any more self-destructive messages, but Jago Ross wouldn’t be at his merchant bank at 4 a.m. on an Easter weekend. He wondered whether it would be cruelty or kindness to ignore the call, and how he’d bear the knowledge that she’d overdosed, if he didn’t respond. After a very long ten minutes, during which he half expected her to call him back, Strike sat up to compose a text.



I’m in Cornwall. My aunt’s just died. I think you need help, but I’m the wrong person to give it to you. If you’re alone, you need to get hold of someone and tell them how you’re feeling.

The terrible thing was how well he and Charlotte knew each other. Strike knew just how pusillanimous, how disingenuous, Charlotte would find this bland response. She’d know that some small part of him (shrunken by determined abstinence, though never eradicated) felt a pull back toward her, especially in this extremity, not only because he’d assumed responsibility for her happiness for years, but because he could never forget that she’d come to him when he was at his lowest ebb, lying in a hospital bed with a freshly amputated leg, wondering what possible life there was for him now. He could still remember her appearing in the doorway, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and how she’d walked down the ward toward him and kissed him wordlessly on the mouth, and that moment, more than any other, had told him that life would continue, would contain glorious moments of beauty and pleasure, that he wasn’t alone any more, and that his missing leg didn’t matter to the woman he couldn’t forget.

Sitting in the darkness, atypically cold because of his exhaustion, Strike typed four more words—



It will get better

—and sent the message. Then he lay back down and waited for the phone to vibrate again, but it remained silent, and eventually he fell asleep.

He was woken, inevitably, by Luke bursting into the sitting room. While he listened to Luke clattering around the kitchen, Strike reached for his phone and looked at it. Charlotte had sent two more texts, one an hour previously, the next half an hour later.



Bluey I’m sorry about your aunt. is it the one I met?

And then, when Strike hadn’t answered:



Am I evil? Jago says I am. I used to think I couldn’t be, because you loved me

At least she wasn’t dead. With a vice-like sensation in his belly, Strike sat up, put on his prosthesis and attempted to shut Charlotte out of his mind.

Breakfast wasn’t a particularly relaxing affair. The table was so crowded with Easter eggs, it was like being in some cartoonish nest. Strike ate off a plate on his lap. Lucy had bought Strike and Ted an egg each, and the detective now gathered that he should have bought his sister one, as well. All three boys had tottering piles.

“What’s a hedgehog got to do with Easter?” Adam asked Strike, holding up his uncle’s offering.

“Eastertime’s spring, isn’t it?” said Ted, from the end of the table. “It’s when hibernating animals wake up.”

“Mine’s all broken,” said Luke, shaking the box.

“That’s a shame,” said Strike, and Lucy shot him a sharp look.

She was tense, telling off her sons for looking at their phones during the meal, glaring at Strike when he checked his own, constantly glancing out of the window, to check the state of the weather. The detective was glad of an excuse to get out of the house to buy Polworth’s daughters Easter eggs, but he’d walked barely ten yards down the sloping road, cigarette in hand, when the family pulled up in their Dacia. When Strike confided his errand in an undertone, Polworth said,

“Fuck that, they’ve got enough chocolate for a year at home. Leave it.”

At eleven o’clock, with a leg of lamb left in the oven and the timer set, after Luke had been told that no, he couldn’t take his iPad on the boat, and one false start, due to the need to return to the house for the Polworths’ younger daughter to have the pee she’d insisted she didn’t need before they left, the party made its way successfully down to the harbor, where they met Kerenza the nurse, and boarded Ted’s old sailing boat, Jowanet.

Strike, who’d once been his uncle’s proud helpmeet, no longer had the balance to work either sails or rudder. He sat with the women and children, spared the necessity of making conversation by the noise of wind against canvas. Ted shouted commands to Polworth and Jack. Luke was eating chocolate, his eyes screwed up against the cold breeze; Polworth’s daughters were huddled, shivering, beside their mother, who had her arms around them. Tears were already trickling down Lucy’s cheeks as she cradled the flat white urn in her lap. Beside her, Kerenza held a bunch of dark pink roses loosely wrapped in cellophane, and it was left to Greg and Polworth to shout at the children to watch out for the boom as they tacked around the peninsula where St. Mawes Castle stood sentinel.

The surface of the sea changed from second to second, from rippling plain of sage and gray, to mesh of diamond-bright sparkles. The smell of ozone was as familiar and comforting to Strike as that of beer. He was just thinking how glad he was that Joan had chosen this, and not a grave, when he felt his phone vibrate against his chest. Unable to resist the temptation to read what he knew would be a text from Charlotte, he pulled it out and read it.



I thought you’d come back I thought you’d stop me marrying him I didn’t think you’d let me do it

He put the phone back into his pocket. Luke was watching him and Strike thought he saw the idea occur of asking why Uncle Cormoran could look at his phone, whereas he was banned from bringing his iPad, but the look his uncle gave him seemed to make him think better of the idea, and he merely stuffed more chocolate in his mouth.

A feeling of constraint seemed to fall over everyone, even Luke, as Ted turned the boat into the wind and brought the boat slowly to a halt, the sail flapping loudly in the wind, St. Mawes Castle now the size of a sandcastle in the distance. Kerenza handed around the roses, one for everyone except Ted, who took the remainder of the bouquet between the hands that were forever sunburned. Nobody spoke, and yet the moment didn’t feel anticlimactic. While the sails flapped angrily overhead, Ted bent low over the side of the boat and dropped the urn gently into the sea, murmuring his farewell, and the object Strike had imagined would look inadequate and tawdry became, precisely because of its smallness as it bobbed gallantly on the ocean, affecting, and strangely noble. Soon, the last earthly remains of Joan Nancarrow would dissolve into the sea, and only the pink roses, tossed one by one into the sea by each of them, would remain to show the place where she’d disappeared.

Strike put his arm around Lucy, who rested her head on his shoulder, as they sailed back to shore. Rozwyn, the elder of Polworth’s daughters, broke into sobs initially provoked by the sight of the urn vanishing in the distance, but sustained by her enjoyment of her own grief and the sympathy of her mother. Strike watched until he could no longer see the white dot, then turned his eyes toward shore, thinking of the leg of lamb waiting for them back at the house.

His phone vibrated yet again, minutes after he’d regained firm ground. While Polworth helped Ted tie up the boat, Strike lit a cigarette and turned away from the group to read the new text.



I want to die speaking the truth people are such liars everyone I know lies in such if them swant to stop pretending