“This one,” he said, shifting his right leg.

“You walk very naturally,” said Gupta, “for a big man. I might not have known, if I hadn’t read about you in the press. The prosthetics were not nearly as good in the old days. Wonderful, what you can buy now. Hydraulics reproducing natural joint action! Marvelous.”

“The NHS can’t afford those fancy prosthetics,” said Strike, slipping his notebook back into his pocket. “Mine’s pretty basic. If it’s not too much trouble,” he continued, “could I ask you for the practice nurse’s current address?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Gupta. He succeeded in rising from his armchair on the third attempt.

It took the Guptas half an hour to find, in an old address book, the last address they had for Janice Beattie.

“I can’t swear it’s current,” said Gupta, handing the slip of paper to Strike in the hall.

“It’ll give me a head start on finding her, especially if she’s got a different married name now,” said Strike. “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Gupta. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Gupta, considering Strike with his shrewd, bright brown eyes, “it would be a miracle if you found her, after all this time. But I’m glad somebody’s looking again. Yes, I’m very glad somebody’s looking.”

11

It fortuned forth faring on his way,

He saw from far, or seemed for to see

Some troublous vprore or contentious fray

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Strike walked back toward Amersham station, past the box hedges and twin garages of the professional middle classes, thinking about Margot Bamborough. She’d emerged from the old doctor’s reminiscences as a vivid and forceful personality and, irrationally, this had been a surprise. In vanishing, Margot Bamborough had assumed in Strike’s mind the insubstantiality of a wraith, as though it had always been predestined that she would one day disperse into the rainy dusk, never to return.

He remembered the seven women depicted on the front cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. They lived on in ghostly black and white, sporting the hairstyles that had become gradually more unfashionable with every day they’d been absent from their families and their lives, but each of those negative images represented a human whose heart had once beaten, whose ambitions and opinions, triumphs and disappointments had been as real as Margot Bamborough’s, before they ran into the man who was paid the compliment of full color in the cover photograph of the dreadful story of their deaths. Strike still hadn’t finished the book, but knew that Creed had been responsible for the deaths of a diverse array of victims, including a schoolgirl, an estate agent and a pharmacist. That had been part of the terror of the Essex Butcher, according to the contemporary press: he wasn’t confining his attacks to prostitutes who, it was implied, were a killer’s natural prey. In fact, the only working girl who was known to have been attacked by him had survived.

Helen Wardrop, the woman in question, had told her story in a television documentary about Creed, which Strike had watched on YouTube a few nights previously while eating a Chinese takeaway. The program had been salacious and melodramatic, with many poorly acted reconstructions and music lifted from a seventies horror movie. At the time of filming, Helen Wardrop had been a slack-faced, slow-spoken woman with dyed red hair and badly applied fake eyelashes, whose glazed affect and monotone suggested either tranquilizers or neurological damage. Creed had struck the drunk and screaming Helen what might have been a fatal blow to the head with a hammer in the course of trying to force her into the back of his van. She turned her head obligingly for the interviewer, to show the viewers a still-depressed area of skull. The interviewer told her she must feel very lucky to have survived. There was a tiny hesitation before she agreed with him.

Strike had turned off the documentary at that point, frustrated by the banality of the questioning. He, too, had once been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and bore the lifelong consequences, so he perfectly understood Helen Wardrop’s hesitation. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion that had taken Strike’s foot and shin, not to mention the lower half of Sergeant Gary Topley’s body and a chunk of Richard Anstis’s face, Strike had felt a variety of emotions which included guilt, gratitude, confusion, fear, rage, resentment and loneliness, but he couldn’t remember feeling lucky. “Lucky” would have been the bomb not detonating. “Lucky” would have meant still having both his legs. “Lucky” was what people who couldn’t bear to contemplate horrors needed to hear maimed and terrorized survivors call themselves. He recalled his aunt’s tearful assertion that he wasn’t in pain as he lay in his hospital bed, groggy with morphine, her words standing in stark contrast to the first Polworth had spoken to him, when he visited Strike in Selly Oak Hospital.

“Bit of a fucker, this, Diddy.”

“It is, a bit,” Strike had said, his amputated leg stretched in front of him, nerve endings insisting that the calf and foot were still there.

Strike arrived at Amersham station to discover he’d just missed a train back to London. He therefore sat down on a bench outside in the feeble autumn sunshine of late afternoon, took out his cigarettes, lit one, then examined his phone. Two texts and a missed call had come in while he’d been interviewing Gupta, his mobile on mute.

The texts were from his half-brother Al and his friend Ilsa, and could therefore wait, whereas the missed call was from George Layborn, whom he immediately phoned back.

“That you, Strike?”

“Yeah. You just phoned me.”

“I did. I’ve got it for you. Copy of the Bamborough file.”

“You’re kidding!” said Strike, exhaling on a rush of exhilaration. “George, that’s phenomenal, I owe you big time for this.”

“Buy me a pint and mention me to the press if you ever find out who did it. ‘Valuable assistance.’ ‘Couldn’t have done it without him.’ We can decide the wording after. Might remind this lot I deserve promotion. Listen,” added Layborn, more seriously, “it’s a mess. The file. Real mess.”

“In what way?”

“Old. Bits missing, from what I’ve seen, though they might just be in the wrong order—I haven’t had time to go systematically through the whole thing, there’s four boxes’ worth here—but Talbot’s record-keeping was all over the place and Lawson coming in and trying to make sense of it hasn’t really helped. Anyway, for what it’s worth, it’s yours. I’ll be over your way tomorrow and drop it in at the office, shall I?”

“Can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, George.”

“My old man would’ve been dead happy to know someone was going to take another look,” said Layborn. “He’d’ve loved to see Creed nailed for another one.”

Layborn rang off and Strike immediately lit a cigarette and called Robin to give her the good news, but his call went straight to voicemail. Then he remembered that she was in a meeting with the persecuted weatherman, so he turned his attention to the text from Al.

Hey bruv, it began, chummily.

Al was the only sibling on his father’s side with whom Strike maintained any kind of ongoing relationship, spasmodic and one-sided though it was, Al making all the running. Strike had a total of six Rokeby half-siblings, three of whom he’d never even met, a situation which he felt no need to remedy, finding the stresses of his known relatives quite sufficient to be going on with.

As you know, the Deadbeats are celebrating 50 years together next year—

Strike hadn’t known this. He’d met his father, Jonny Rokeby, who was lead singer of the Deadbeats, exactly twice in his life and most of the information he had about his rock-star father had come either from his mother Leda, the woman with whom he had carelessly fathered a child in the semi-public corner of a party in New York, or from the press.

As you know, the Deadbeats are celebrating 50 years together next year and (super confidential) they’re going to drop a surprise new album on 24th May. We (families) are throwing them a big London bash that night at Spencer House to celebrate the launch. Bruv, it would mean the world to all of us, especially Dad, if you came. Gaby’s had the idea of getting a picture taken of all the kids together, to give him as a present on the night. First ever. Getting it framed, as a surprise. Everyone’s in. We just need you. Think about it, bruv.

Strike read this text through twice, then closed it without replying and opened Ilsa’s, which was far shorter.

It’s Robin’s birthday, you total dickhead.

12

With flattering wordes he sweetly wooed her,

And offered faire guiftes, t’allure her sight,

But she both offers and the offerer

Despysde, and all the fawning of the flatterer.

Edmund Spenser