Troubled Blood

Luca’s last spell in jail, as Shanker had told him, had been for ordering and overseeing a stabbing. The victim had been knifed in the balls. By a miracle, he’d survived, “but ’e won’t be ’avin’ any more kids, poor cunt,” Shanker had informed Strike, two nights previously. “Can’t get a fuckin’ ’ard-on wivvout agony. Not worf living, is it, after that? The knife sliced straight through the right bollock, I ’eard—course, they ’ad him pinned down—”

“No need for details,” Strike had said. He’d just experienced a nasty sensation radiating out of his own balls up to his chest.

Strike had called Shanker on some slight pretext, purely to see whether any rumor had reached his old friend of Luca Ricci being concerned that a female detective had turned up in his father’s nursing home. As Shanker hadn’t mentioned anything, Strike had to conclude that no such whispers were abroad.

While this was a relief, it wasn’t really a surprise. Once he’d calmed down, Strike had been forced to admit to himself that he was sure Robin had got away with it. Everything Strike knew about Luca Ricci suggested he’d never have let her walk away unscathed if he’d believed she was there to investigate any member of his family. The kinds of people whose darkest impulses were kept in check by their own consciences, the dictates of the law, by social norms and common sense might find it hard to believe anyone would be so foolish or reckless as to hurt Robin inside a nursing home bedroom, or march her out of the building with a knife to her back. He wouldn’t do it in broad daylight, they’d say. He wouldn’t dare, with witnesses all around! But Luca’s fearsome reputation rested on his propensity for brazen violence, no matter where he was, or who was watching. He operated on an assumption of impunity, for which he had much justification. For every prison term he’d served, there’d been many incidents that should have seen him convicted, but which he’d managed to escape by intimidating witnesses, or terrifying others into taking the rap.

Robin returned to the inner office, stony-faced, but carrying two mugs of tea. She pushed the door closed with her foot, then set down the darker of the two teas in front of Strike.

“Thanks,” muttered Strike.

“You’re welcome,” she replied stiffly, checking her watch as she sat down again. They had twenty minutes to go, before the conference call with Anna and Kim.

“We can’t,” said Strike, “tell Anna we think Luca Ricci wrote the anonymous notes.”

Robin simply looked at him.

“We can’t have two nice middle-class women walking around telling people Ricci threatened Margot, and maybe killed her,” said Strike. “We’d be putting them in danger, quite apart from ourselves.”

“Can’t we at least show the samples to an expert?”

“I have,” said Strike, and he explained what the woman had said.

“Why didn’t you tell—”

“Because I was still bloody angry,” said Strike, sipping his tea. It was exactly the way he liked it, strong, sweet and the color of creosote. “Robin, the reality is, if we take the photo and the note to the police, whether or not anything comes of it, you’ll have painted a giant target on your back. Ricci’ll start digging around on who could have photographed his handwriting in that visitors’ book. It won’t take him long to find us.”

“He was twenty-two when Margot went missing,” said Robin quietly. “Old enough and big enough to abduct a woman. He had contacts to help with the disposal of a body. Betty Fuller thought the person who wrote the notes was the killer, and she’s still scared of telling us who it was. That could imply the son, just as well as the father.”

“I grant you all that,” said Strike, “but it’s time for a reality check. We haven’t got the resources to go up against organized criminals. You going to St. Peter’s was reckless enough—”

“Could you explain to me why it was reckless when I did it, but not when you were planning to do it?” said Robin.

Strike was momentarily stymied.

“Because I’m less experienced?” said Robin. “Because you think I’ll mess it up, or panic? Or that I can’t think on my feet?”

“None of those,” said Strike, though it cost him some pain to admit it.

“Well then—”

“Because my chances of surviving if Luca Ricci comes at me with a baseball bat are superior to yours, OK?”

“But Luca doesn’t come at people with baseball bats,” said Robin reasonably. “He comes at them with knives, electrodes and acid, and I don’t see how you’d withstand any of them better than I would. The truth is, you’re happy to take risks you don’t want me to take. I don’t know whether it’s lack of confidence in me, or chivalry, or one dressed up as the other—”

“Look—”

“No, you look,” said Robin. “If you’d been recognized in there, the whole agency would have paid the price. I’ve read up on Ricci, I’m not stupid. He goes for people’s families and associates and even their pets as often as he goes for them personally. Like it or not, there are places I can go more easily than you. I’m less distinctive-looking, I’m easier to disguise, and people trust women more than men, especially around kids and old people. We wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t gone to St. Peter’s—”

“We’d be better off not knowing it,” Strike snapped back. “Shanker said to me months back, ‘If Mucky’s the answer, you need to stop asking the question.’ Same goes for Luca, in spades.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Robin. “I know you don’t. You’d never choose not to know.”

She was right, but Strike didn’t want to admit it. Indeed, one of the things that had kept his anger simmering for the past two weeks was that he knew there was a fundamental lack of logic in his own position. If trying to get information on the Ricci family had been worth doing at all, it should have been done, and as Robin had proven, she’d been the best person for the job. While he resented the fact that she hadn’t warned him what she was about to do, he knew perfectly well that if she’d done so, he’d have vetoed it, out of a fundamentally indefensible desire to keep her out of harm’s way, when the logical conclusion of that line of thinking was that she oughtn’t to be doing this job at all. He wanted her to be open and direct with him, but knew that his own incoherent position on her taking physical risks was the reason she hadn’t been honest about her intentions. The long scar on her forearm reproached him every time he looked at it, even though the mistake that had led to the attack had been entirely her own. He knew too much about her past; the relationship had become too personal: he didn’t want to visit her in hospital again. He felt precisely that irksome sense of responsibility that kept him determinedly single, but without any of the compensatory pleasures. None of this was her fault, but it had taken a fortnight for him to look these facts clearly in the face.

“OK,” he muttered at last. “I wouldn’t choose not to know.” He made a supreme effort. “You did bloody well.”

“Thank you,” said Robin, as startled as she was gratified.

“Can we agree, though—please? That in future, we talk these things through?”

“If I’d asked you—”

“Yeah, I might’ve said no, and I’d’ve been wrong, and I’ll bear that in mind next time, OK? But as you keep reminding me, we’re partners, so I’d be grateful—”

“All right,” said Robin. “Yes. We’ll discuss it. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

At that moment, Pat knocked on the door and opened it a few inches.

“I’ve got a Ms. Phipps and a Ms. Sullivan on the line for you.”

“Put them through, please,” said Strike.

Feeling as though she was sitting in on the announcement of bad medical news, Robin let Strike do the talking to Anna and Kim. He took the couple systematically through every interview the agency had conducted over the past eleven and a half months, telling them the secrets he and Robin had unearthed, and the tentative conclusions they’d drawn.

He revealed that Irene Hickson had been briefly involved with Margot’s ex-boyfriend, and that both had lied about it, and explained that Satchwell might have been worried that Margot would tell the authorities about the way his sister died; that Wilma the cleaner had never set foot in Broom House, and that the story of Roy walking was almost certainly false; that the threatening notes had been real, but (with a glance at Robin) that they hadn’t managed to identify the writer; that Joseph Brenner had been a more unsavory character than anyone had realized, but that there was nothing to tie him to Margot’s disappearance; that Gloria Conti, the last person to see Margot alive, was living in France, and didn’t want to talk to them; and that Steve Douthwaite, Margot’s suspicious patient, had vanished without trace. Lastly, he told them that they believed they’d identified the van seen speeding away from Clerkenwell Green on the night that Margot disappeared, and were confident that it hadn’t been Dennis Creed’s.

The only sound to break the silence when Strike first stopped talking was the soft buzzing emitted by the speaker on his desk, which proved the line was still open. Waiting for Anna to speak, Robin suddenly realized that her eyes were full of tears. She’d so very much wanted to find out what had happened to Margot Bamborough.

“Well… we knew it would be difficult,” said Anna at last. “If not impossible.”