Troubled Blood

Robin turned into Kyrle Road. There was no sign of press, so she parked outside a Victorian terraced house divided into two flats.

When Strike rang the bell labeled “Phipps/Sullivan,” they heard footsteps on stairs through the door, which opened to reveal Anna Phipps, who was wearing the same baggy blue cotton jumpsuit and white canvas shoes as the first time they’d met her, in Falmouth.

“Come in,” she said, smiling as she retreated so that they could enter a small square of space at the bottom of the staircase. The walls were painted white: a series of abstract, monochrome prints covered the walls, and the fanned window over the door cast pools of light onto the uncarpeted stairs, reminding Robin of the St. Peter’s nursing home, and the life-size Jesus watching over the entrance.

“I’m going to try not to cry,” said Anna quietly, as though scared of being overheard, but in spite of her resolution, her eyes were already full of tears. “I’m sorry, but I—I’d really like to hug you,” she said, and she promptly did so, embracing first Robin, then Strike. Stepping back, she shook her head, half-laughing, and wiped her eyes.

“I can’t ever express to you how grateful… how grateful I am. What you’ve given me…” She made an ineffable gesture and shook her head. “It’s just so… so strange. I’m incredibly happy and relieved, but at the same time, I’m grieving… Does that make sense?”

“Totally,” said Robin. Strike grunted.

“Everyone’s here,” said Anna, gesturing upstairs. “Kim, Dad, Cyn, and Oonagh, too. I invited her down for a few days. We’re planning the funeral, you see—Dad and Cyn are really leaving it up to me—anyway… come up, everyone wants to thank you…”

As they followed Anna up the steep stairs, Strike using the banister to heave himself along, he remembered the tangle of emotions that had hit him when he’d received the phone call telling him of his own mother’s death. Amid the engulfing wave of grief had been a slight pinprick of relief, which had shocked and shamed him, and which had taken a long time to process. Over time, he’d come to understand that in some dark corner of his mind, he’d been -dreading and half-expecting the news. The ax had fallen at last, suspense was forever over: Leda’s appalling taste in men had culminated in a sordid death on a dirty mattress, and while he’d missed her ever since, he’d be a liar if he claimed to miss the toxic mixture of anxiety, guilt and dread he’d endured over her last couple of years of life.

He could only imagine the mixture of emotions currently possessing Margot’s husband, or the nanny who’d taken Margot’s place in the family. As he reached the upper landing, he glimpsed Roy Phipps sitting in an armchair in the sitting room. Their eyes met briefly, before Kim came out of the room, blocking Strike’s view of the hematologist. The blonde psychologist was smiling broadly: she, at least, seemed to feel unalloyed pleasure.

“Well,” she said, shaking first Strike’s hand, then Robin’s, “what can we say, really? Come through…”

Strike and Robin followed Anna and Kim into the sitting room, which was as large and airy as their Falmouth holiday home, with long gauze curtains at the windows, stripped floorboards, a large white rug and pale gray walls. The books had been arranged by color. Everything was simple and well designed; very different from the house in which Anna had grown up, with its ugly Victorian bronzes and chintz-covered chairs. The only art on the walls was over the fireplace: a black and white photograph of sea and sky.

Rain was beating on the large bay window behind Roy, who was already on his feet. He wiped his hand nervously on his trousers before holding it out to Strike.

“How are you?” he asked jerkily.

“Very well, thanks,” said Strike.

“Miss Ellacott,” said Roy, holding out his hand to Robin in turn. “I understand you actually…?”

The unspoken words found her seemed to ring around the room.

“Yes,” said Robin, and Roy nodded and pursed his lips, his large eyes leaving her to focus on one of the ragdoll cats, which had just prowled into the room, its aquamarine eyes shrewd.

“Sit down, Dad,” said Anna gently, and Roy did as he was told.

“I’ll just go and see whether Oonagh’s found everything; she’s making tea,” said Kim cheerfully, and left.

“Please, have a seat,” said Anna to Strike and Robin, who sat down side by side on the sofa. The moment Strike was settled, the ragdoll cat leapt up lightly beside him and stepped into his lap. Robin, meanwhile, had noticed the ottoman that stood in place of a coffee table. It was upholstered in gray and white striped canvas, and far smaller than the one in the Athorns’ flat, too small for a woman to curl up in, but even so, it was a piece of furniture Robin doubted she’d ever own, no matter how useful they might be. She’d never forget the dusty mass of hardened concrete, and the skull of Margot Bamborough curving up out of it.

“Where’s Cyn?” Anna asked her father.

“Bathroom,” said Roy, a little hoarsely. He threw a nervous glance at the empty landing beyond the door, before addressing the detective:

“I—I have to tell you how ashamed I am that I never hired anybody myself. Believe me, the thought that we could have known all this ten, twenty years ago…”

“Well, that’s not very good for our egos, Roy,” said Strike, stroking the purring cat. “Implying that anyone could have done what we did.”

Roy and Anna both laughed harder than the comment deserved, but Strike understood the need for the release of jokes, after a profound shock. Mere days after he’d been airlifted out of the bloody crater where he’d lain after his leg had been blown off, fading in and out of consciousness with Gary Topley’s torso beside him, he seemed to remember Richard Anstis, the other survivor, whose face had been mangled in the explosion, making a stupid joke about the savings Gary could have made on trousers, had he lived. Strike could still remember laughing at the idiotic, tasteless joke, and enjoying a few seconds’ relief from shock, grief and agony.

Women’s voices now came across the landing: Kim had returned with a tea tray, followed by Oonagh Kennedy, who was bearing a large chocolate cake. She was beaming from beneath her purple-streaked fringe, her amethyst cross bouncing on her chest as before, and when she’d put down the cake, she said,

“Here dey are, then, the heroes of the hour! I’m going to hug the pair of you!”

Robin stood to receive her tribute, but Strike, not wanting to disarrange the cat, received his hug awkwardly while sitting.

“And here I go again!” said Oonagh, laughing as she straightened up, and wiping her eyes. “I swear to God, it’s loike being on a roller-coaster. Up one minute, down the next—”

“I did the same, when I saw them,” said Anna, laughing at Oonagh. Roy’s smile, Robin noticed, was nervous and a little fixed. What did it feel like, she wondered, to be face to face with his dead wife’s best friend, after all these years? Did the physical changes in Oonagh make him wonder what Margot would have looked like, had she lived to the age of seventy? Or was he wondering anew, as he must have done over all the intervening years, whether his marriage would have survived the long stretch of icy silence that had followed her drink with Paul Satchwell, whether the strains and tensions in the relationship could have been overcome, or whether Margot would have taken Oonagh up on her offer of refuge in her flat?

They’d have divorced, Robin thought, with absolute certainty, but then she wondered whether she wasn’t tangling up Margot with herself, as she’d tended to do all through the case.

“Oh, hello,” said a breathless voice, from the doorway, and everyone looked around to see Cynthia, on whose thin, sallow face was a smile that didn’t quite reach her anxious, mottled eyes. She was wearing a black dress, and Robin wondered whether she’d consciously put it on to suggest mourning. “Sorry, I was—how are you both?”

“Fine,” said Robin.

“Great,” said Strike.

Cynthia let out one of her nervous, breathless laughs, and said,

“Yes, no—so wonderful—”