“We doctors were working as usual in our respective consulting rooms. Until half past two, both girls were on reception, and after Irene left, Gloria was there alone. Dorothy was at her desk until five, which was her regular departure time. Janice was at the practice until lunchtime, but off making house calls in the afternoon, which was quite routine. I saw Margot a couple of times in the back, where we had, not exactly a kitchen, but a sort of nook where we had a kettle and a fridge. She was pleased about Wilson.”

“About who?”

“Harold Wilson,” said Gupta, smiling. “There’d been a general election the day before. Labor got back in with a majority. He’d been leading a minority government since February, you see.”

“Ah,” said Strike. “Right.”

“I left at half past five,” said Gupta. “I said goodbye to Margot, whose door was open. Brenner’s door was closed. I assumed he was with a patient.

“Obviously, I can’t speak with authority about what happened after I left,” said Gupta, “but I can tell you what the others told me.”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Strike. “I’m particularly interested in the emergency patient who kept Margot late.”

“Ah,” said Gupta, now placing his fingertips together and nodding, “you know about the mysterious dark lady. Everything I know about her came from little Gloria.

“We operated on a first-come, first-served basis at St. John’s. Registered patients came along and waited their turn, unless it was an emergency, of course. But this lady walked in off the street. She wasn’t registered with the practice, but she had severe abdominal pain. Gloria told her to wait, then went to see whether Joseph Brenner would see her, because he was free, whereas Margot was still with her last registered patient of the day.

“Brenner made heavy weather of the request. While Gloria and Brenner were talking, Margot came out of her consulting room, seeing off her last patients, a mother and child, and offered to see the emergency herself as she was going from the practice to the pub with a friend, which was just up the road. Brenner, according to Gloria, said ‘good of you’ or something like that—which was friendly, for Brenner—and he put on his coat and hat and left.

“Gloria went back into the waiting room to tell the lady Margot would see her. The lady went into the consulting room and stayed there longer than Gloria expected. Fully twenty-five, thirty minutes, which took the time to a quarter past six, and Margot was supposed to be meeting her friend at six.

“At last the patient came out of the consulting room and left. Margot came out shortly afterward in her coat. She told Gloria that she was late for the pub, and asked Gloria to lock up. She walked out into the rain… and was never seen again.”

The door of the sitting room opened and Mrs. Gupta reappeared with fresh tea. Again, Strike stood to help her, and was again shooed back into his chair. When she’d left, Strike asked,

“Why did you call the last patient ‘mysterious’? Because she was unregistered, or—?”

“Oh, you didn’t know about that business?” said Gupta. “No, no. Because there was much discussion afterward as to whether or not she was actually a lady.”

Smiling at Strike’s look of surprise, he said,

“Brenner started it. He’d walked out past her and told the investigating officer that he’d thought, on the brief impression he had of her, that she was a man and was surprised afterward to hear that she was female. Gloria said she was a thickset young lady, dark—gypsy-ish, was her word—not a very politically correct term, but that’s what Gloria said. Nobody else saw her, of course, so we couldn’t judge.

“An appeal was put out for her, but nobody came forward, and in the absence of any information to the contrary, the investigating officer put a great deal of pressure on Gloria to say that she thought the patient was really a man in disguise, or at least, that she could have been mistaken in thinking she was a lady. But Gloria insisted that she knew a lady when she saw one.”

“This officer being Bill Talbot?” asked Strike.

“Precisely,” said Gupta, reaching for his tea.

“D’you think he wanted to believe the patient was a man dressed as a woman because—”

“Because Dennis Creed sometimes cross-dressed? Yes,” said Gupta. “Although we called him the Essex Butcher back then. We didn’t know his real name until 1976. And the only physical description of the Butcher at the time said he was dark and squat—I suppose I see why Talbot was suspicious but…”

“Strange for the Essex Butcher to walk into a doctor’s surgery in drag and wait his turn?”

“Well… quite,” said Dr. Gupta.

There was a brief silence while Gupta sipped tea and Strike flicked back through his notes, checking that he had asked everything he wanted to know. It was Gupta who spoke first.

“Have you met Roy? Margot’s husband?”

“No,” said Strike. “I’ve been hired by her daughter. How well did you know him?”

“Only very slightly,” said Gupta.

He put the teacup down on the saucer. If ever Strike had seen a man with more to say, that man was Dinesh Gupta.

“What was your impression of him?” asked Strike, surreptitiously clicking the nib back out of his pen.

“Spoiled,” said Gupta. “Very spoiled. A handsome man, who’d been made a prince by his mother. We Indian boys know something about that, Mr. Strike. I met Roy’s mother at the barbecue I mentioned. She singled me out for conversation. A snob, I should say. She didn’t consider receptionists or secretaries worth her time. I had the strong impression that she thought her son had married beneath him. Again, this opinion is not unknown among Indian mothers. He’s a hemophiliac, isn’t he?” asked Gupta.

“Not that I’ve heard,” said Strike, surprised.

“Yes, yes,” said Gupta “I think so, I think he is. He was a hematologist by profession, and his mother told me that he had chosen the specialty because of his own condition. You see? The clever, fragile little boy and the proud, overprotective mother.

“But then the little prince chose for a wife somebody utterly unlike his mother. Margot wasn’t the kind of woman to leave her patients, or her adult learners, to rush home and cook Roy’s dinner for him. Let him get his own, would have been her attitude… or the little cousin could have cooked, of course,” Gupta went on, with something of the delicacy he had brought to the mention of “black ladies.” “The young woman they paid to look after the baby.”

“Was Cynthia at the barbecue?”

“That was her name, was it? Yes, she was. I didn’t talk to her. She was carrying Margot’s daughter around, while Margot mingled.”

“Roy was interviewed by the police, I believe,” said Strike, who in fact took this for granted rather than knowing it for certain.

“Oh yes,” said Gupta. “Now, that was a curious thing. Inspector Talbot told me at the start of my own police interview that Roy had been completely ruled out of their inquiries—which I’ve always thought was an odd thing to tell me. Don’t you find it so? This was barely a week after Margot’s disappearance. I suppose it was only just dawning on us all that there really was no mistake, no innocent explanation. We’d all had our hopeful little theories in the first couple of days. She’d maybe felt stressed, unable to cope, and gone off alone somewhere. Or perhaps there’d been an accident, and she was lying unconscious and unidentified in a hospital. But as the days went by, and the hospitals had been checked, and her photograph had been in all the papers and still there was no news, everything started to look more sinister.

“I found it most peculiar that Inspector Talbot informed me, unasked, that Roy wasn’t under suspicion, that he had a complete alibi. Talbot struck all of us as peculiar, actually. Intense. His questions jumped around a lot.

“I think he was trying to reassure me,” said Gupta, taking a third fig roll and examining it thoughtfully as he continued. “He wanted me to know that my brother doctor was in the clear, that I had nothing to fear, that he knew no doctor could have done anything so terrible as to abduct a woman, or—by then, we were all starting to fear it—to kill her…

“But Talbot thought it was Creed, of course, from the very start—and he was probably right,” sighed Gupta, sadly.

“What makes you think so?” asked Strike. He thought Gupta might mention the speeding van or the rainy night, but the answer was, he thought, a shrewd one.

“It’s very difficult to dispose of a body as completely and cleanly as Margot’s seems to have been hidden. Doctors know how death smells and we understand the legalities and procedures surrounding a dead human. The ignorant might imagine it is nothing more than disposing of a table of equivalent weight, but it is a very different thing, and a very difficult one. And even in the seventies, before DNA testing, the police did pretty well with fingerprints, blood groups and so forth.

“How has she remained hidden for so long? Somebody did the job very cleverly and if we know anything about Creed, it’s that he’s very clever, isn’t that so? It was living ladies who betrayed him in the end, not dead. He knew how to render his corpses mute.”

Gupta popped the end of the fig roll in his mouth, sighed, brushed his hands fastidiously clean of crumbs, then pointed at Strike’s legs and said,

“Which one is it?”

Strike didn’t resent the blunt question, from a doctor.