Troubled Blood

She waited outside, examining postcards, while Strike entered the newsagent’s to buy cigarettes.

Waiting to be served, Strike was seized by a sudden, quixotic impulse (stimulated no doubt by the gaudy color all around him, by the sunshine and sticks of rock, the rattle and clang of amusement arcades and a stomach full of some of the best fish and chips he’d ever eaten) to buy Robin a toy donkey. He came to his senses almost before the idea had formed: what was he, a kid on a daytime date with his first girlfriend? Emerging again into the sunlight as he left the shop, he noted that he couldn’t have bought a donkey if he’d wanted to. There wasn’t a single one in sight: the bins full of plushes held only unicorns.

“Back to the car, then?” said Robin.

“Yeah,” said Strike, ripping the cellophane off his cigarettes, but then he said, “we’ll go down to the sea before we head off, shall we?”

“OK,” said Robin, surprised. “Er—why?”

“Just fancy it. It’s wrong, being by the sea without actually laying eyes on it.”

“Is this a Cornish thing?” asked Robin, as they headed back to Grand Parade.

“Maybe,” said Strike, lighting the cigarette between his teeth. He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled then sang,

And when we come to London Wall,

A pleasant sight to view,

Come forth! come forth! ye cowards all:

Here’s men as good as you.

“‘The Song of the Western Men?’”

“That’s the one.”

“Why d’you think they feel the need to tell Londoners they’re just as good? Isn’t that a given?”

“Just London, isn’t it?” said Strike, as they crossed the road. “Pisses everyone off.”

“I love London.”

“Me too. But I can see why it pisses everyone off.”

They passed a fountain with a statue in the middle of the Jolly Fisherman, that rotund, bearded sailor skipping along in high wind, who’d been used on posters advertising Skegness for nearly a century, and progressed across a smooth paved area toward the beach.

At last they saw what Strike had felt the need to see: a wide expanse of flat ocean, the color of chalcedony, beneath a periwinkle sky. Far out at sea, spoiling the horizon, were an army of tall white wind turbines, and while Strike personally enjoyed the chill breeze coming off the wide ocean, he understood at last why Robin had brought a scarf.

Strike smoked in silence, the cool wind making no difference whatsoever to his curly hair. He was thinking about Joan. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that her plan for her final resting place had given them a grave to visit any time they were at the British coast. Cornish-born, Cornish-bred, Joan had known that this need to reconnect with the sea lived in all of them. Now, every time they made their way to the coast they paid her tribute, along with the obeisance due to the waves.

“They were Joan’s favorites, pink roses,” he said, after a while. “What you sent, to the funeral.”

“Oh, really?” said Robin. “I… well, I had a kind of picture in my head of Joan, from things you’d told me, and… pink roses seemed to suit her.”

“If the agency ever fails,” said Strike, as they both turned away from the sea, “you could come back to Skegness and set yourself up as a clairvoyant.”

“Bit niche,” said Robin, as they walked back toward the car park. “Guessing dead people’s favorite flowers.”

“No donkeys,” said Strike, glancing back over his shoulder at the beach.

“Never mind,” said Robin kindly. “I think you’d have been a bit heavy.”



66



Speak, thou frail woman, speak with confidence.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

The following evening, Strike and Robin sat down together on the same side of the partners’ desk. They were alone in the office for the first time since the night Strike had given her two black eyes. The lights were on this time, there were no glasses of whisky in their hands, but each of them was very conscious of what had happened on the previous occasion, and both felt a slight self-consciousness, which manifested itself, on Strike’s side, in a slightly brisker tone as they set up the computer monitor so that both could see it well, and on Robin’s, in focusing herself on all the questions she wanted to ask Gloria.

At six o’clock—which was seven o’clock, Gloria’s time—Strike dialed Gloria’s number, and after a moment’s suspense, they heard ringing, and a woman appeared onscreen, looking slightly nervous, in what looked like a book-lined study. Framed on the wall behind her was a large photograph of a family: Gloria herself, a distinguished-looking husband and three adult children, all wearing white shirts, all of them notably attractive.

Of all the people they’d met and interviewed in connection with Margot Bamborough, Gloria Conti, Robin thought, looked most like her younger self, although she hadn’t made any obvious efforts to disguise the aging process. Her hair, which was pure white, had been cut into a short and flattering bob. Although there were fine lines on her brow and around her eyes, her fair complexion seemed never to have been exposed to much sun. She was slim and high-cheekboned, so that the structure of her face was much as it had been when she was younger, and her high-necked navy shirt, small gold earrings and square-framed glasses were stylish and simple. Robin thought that Gloria looked far more like her idea of a college professor than the scion of a criminal family, but perhaps she was being influenced by the lines of books on the shelves behind her.

“Good evening,” said Gloria nervously.

“Good evening,” said Strike and Robin together.

“It’s very good of you to talk to us, Mrs. Jaubert,” said Strike. “We appreciate it.”

“Oh, not at all,” she said, politely.

Robin hadn’t imagined received pronunciation from Irene Hickson’s descriptions of a girl from a rough background, but of course, as with Paul Satchwell, Gloria had now spent longer outside the country of her birth than in it.

“We’ve been hoping to talk to you for a long time,” said Robin.

“Yes, I’m very sorry about that,” said Gloria. “My husband, Hugo, didn’t tell me about any of your messages, you see. I found your last email in the trash folder, by accident. That’s how I realized you were trying to contact me. Hugo—well, he thought he was doing the right thing.”

Robin was reminded of that occasion when Matthew had deleted a voicemail from Strike on Robin’s phone in an attempt to stop Robin going back to work at the agency. She was surprised to see Gloria didn’t seem to hold her husband’s intervention against him. Perhaps Gloria could read her mind, because she said:

“Hugo assumed I wouldn’t want to talk about what happened with strangers. He didn’t realize that, actually, you’re the only people I’d ever want to talk to, because you’re trying to find out what really happened, and if you succeed, it’ll be—well, it would lift a huge weight off me.”

“D’you mind if I take notes?” Strike asked her.

“No, not at all,” said Gloria politely.

As Strike clicked out the nib of his pen, Gloria reached out of shot for a large glass of red wine, took a sip, appeared to brace herself and said rather quickly,

“Please—if you don’t mind—could I explain some things first? Since yesterday, I’ve been going over it, in my head, and I think if I tell you my story it will save you a lot of time. It’s key to understanding my relationship with Margot and why I behaved… as I behaved.”

“That’d be very helpful,” said Strike, pen poised. “Please, go on.”

Gloria took another sip of wine, put her glass back where they couldn’t see it, drew a deep breath and said,

“Both my parents died in a house fire when I was five.”

“How awful,” said Robin, startled. The 1961 census record had shown a complete family of four. “I’m so sorry.”

Strike gave a kind of commiserative growl.

“Thank you,” said Gloria. “I’m only telling you that to explain—you see, I survived because my father threw me out of the window into a blanket the neighbors were holding. My mother and father didn’t jump, because they were trying to reach my elder brother, who was trapped. All three of them died, so I was raised by my mother’s parents. They were adorable people. They’d have sold their own souls for me, which makes everything I’m about to say even worse…

“I was quite a shy girl. I really envied the girls at school who had parents who were—you know—with it. My poor granny didn’t really understand the sixties and seventies,” said Gloria, with a sad smile. “My clothes were always a bit old-fashioned. No mini-skirts or eye makeup, you know…