Once again, Strike extracted a star-strewn scrawl from amid the typewritten pages.

“As usual, Talbot starts the interrogation by running through the list of Creed dates. Trouble is, Douthwaite doesn’t seem to remember what he was doing on any of them.”

“If he was already ill with stress—” began Robin.

“Well, exactly,” said Strike. “Being interrogated by a police officer who thinks you might be the Essex Butcher wouldn’t help your anxiety, would it?

“And look at this, Talbot adds a random date again: twenty-first February. But he also does something else. Can you make anything of that?”

Robin took the page from Strike and examined the last three lines of writing.

“Pitman shorthand,” said Robin.

“Can you read it?”

“No. I know a bit of Teeline; I never learned Pitman. Pat can do it, though.”

“You’re saying she might be useful for once?”

“Oh sod off, Strike,” said Robin, crossly. “You want to go back to temps, fine, but I like getting accurate messages and knowing the filing’s up to date.”

She took a photograph on her phone and texted it to Pat, along with a request to translate it. Strike, meanwhile, was reflecting that Robin had never before called him “Strike” when annoyed. Perversely, it had sounded more intimate than the use of his first name. He’d quite enjoyed it.

“Sorry for impugning Pat,” he said.

“I just told you to sod off,” said Robin, failing to suppress a smile. “What did Lawson make of Douthwaite?”

“Well, unsurprisingly, when he tried to interview him and found out he’d left his flat and job, leaving no forwarding address, he got quite interested in him. Hence the tip-off to the papers. They were trying to flush him out.”

“And did it work?” asked Robin, now eating crisps.

“It did. Douthwaite turned up at a police station in Waltham Forest the day after the ‘Ladykiller’ article appeared, probably terrified he’d soon have Fleet Street and Scotland Yard on his doorstep. He told them he was unemployed and living in a bedsit. Local police called Lawson, who went straight over there to interview him.

“There’s a full account here,” said Strike, pushing some of the last pages of the roll he had brought with him toward Robin. “All written by Lawson: ‘appears scared’—‘evasive’—‘nervous’—‘sweating’—and the alibi’s not good. Douthwaite says that on the afternoon of Margot’s disappearance he was out looking for a new flat.”

“He claims he was already looking for a new place when she disappeared?”

“Coincidence, eh? Except that upon closer questioning he couldn’t say which flats he’d seen and couldn’t come up with the name of anyone who’d remember seeing him. In the end he said his flat-hunting had involved sitting in a local café and circling ads in the paper. Trouble was, nobody in the café remembered him being there.

“He said he’d moved to Waltham Forest because he had bad associations with Clerkenwell after being interviewed by Talbot and made to feel as though he was under suspicion, and that, in any case, things hadn’t been good for him at work since his affair with the co-worker’s suicidal wife.”

“Well, that’s credible enough,” said Robin.

“Lawson interviewed him twice more, but got nothing else out of him. Douthwaite came lawyered up to interview three. At that point, Lawson backed off. After all, they had nothing on Douthwaite, even if he was the fishiest person they interviewed. And it was—just—credible that the reason nobody had noticed him in the café was because it was a busy place.”

A group of drinkers in Hallowe’en costumes now entered the pub, giggling and clearly already full of alcohol. Robin noticed Strike casting an automatic eye over a young blonde in a rubber nurse’s uniform.

“So,” she said, “is that everything?”

“Almost,” said Strike, “but I’m tempted not to show you this.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think it’s going to feed your obsession with holy places.”

“I’m not—”

“OK, but before you look at it, just remember that nutters are always attracted by murders and missing person cases, all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin. “Show me.”

Strike flipped over the piece of paper. It was a photocopy of the crudest kind of anonymous note, featuring letters cut out of magazines.

“Another St. John’s Cross,” said Robin.

“Yep. That arrived at Scotland Yard in 1985, addressed to Lawson, who’d already retired. Nothing else in the envelope.”

Robin sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“Nutter, obviously,” said Strike, now tapping his photocopied art-icles and statements back into a pile and rolling them up again. “If you really knew where a body was buried, you’d include a bloody map.”

It was nearly six o’clock now, close to the hour at which a doctor had once left her practice and had never been seen again. The frosted pub windows were inky blue. Up at the bar, the blonde in the rubber uniform was giggling at something a man dressed as the Joker had told her.

“You know,” said Robin, glancing down at the papers sitting beside Strike’s pint, “she was late… it was pouring with rain…”

“Go on,” said Strike, wondering whether she was about to say exactly what he’d been thinking.

“Her friend was waiting in here, alone. Margot’s late. She would’ve wanted to get here as quickly as possible. The simplest, most plausible explanation I can think of is that somebody offered her a lift. A car pulled up—”

“Or a van,” said Strike. Robin had, indeed, reached the same conclusion he had. “Someone she knew—”

“Or someone who seemed safe. An elderly man—”

“Or what she thinks is a woman.”

“Exactly,” said Robin.

She turned a sad face to Strike.

“That’s it. She either knew the driver, or the stranger seemed safe.”

“And who’d remember that?” said Strike. “She was wearing a nondescript raincoat, carrying an umbrella. A vehicle pulls up. She bends down to the window, then gets in. No fight. No conflict. The car drives away.”

“And only the driver would know what happened next,” said Robin.

Her mobile rang: it was Pat Chauncey.

“She always does that,” said Strike. “Text her, and she doesn’t text back, she calls—”

“Does it matter?” said Robin, exasperated, and answered.

“Hi, Pat. Sorry to bother you out of hours. Did you get my text?”

“Yeah,” croaked Pat. “Where did you find that?”

“It’s in some old police notes. Can you translate it?”

“Yeah,” said Pat, “but it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Hang on, Pat, I want Cormoran to hear this,” said Robin, and she changed to speakerphone.

“Ready?” came Pat’s rasping voice.

“Yes,” said Robin. Strike pulled out a pen and flipped over his roll of paper so that he could write on the blank side.

“It says: ‘And that is the last of them, comma, the twelfth, comma, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth, comma’—and then there’s a word I can’t read, I don’t think it’s proper Pitman—and after that another word, which phonetically says Ba—fom—et, full stop. Then a new sentence, ‘Transcribe in the true book.’”

“Baphomet,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah,” said Pat.

“That’s a name,” said Strike. “Baphomet is an occult deity.”

“OK, well, that’s what it says,” said Pat, matter-of-factly.

Robin thanked her and rang off.

“‘And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book,’” Strike read back.

“How d’you know about Baphomet?” asked Robin.

“Whittaker was interested in all that shit.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

Whittaker was the last of Strike’s mother’s lovers, the man Strike believed had administered the overdose that had killed her.

“He had a copy of The Satanic Bible,” said Strike. “It had a picture of Baphomet’s head in a penta—shit,” he said, rifling back through the loose pages to find one of those on which Talbot had doodled many five-pointed stars. He frowned at it for a moment, then looked up at Robin.

“I don’t think these are stars. They’re pentagrams.”

PART THREE

… Winter, cloth?d all in frieze…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

15

Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

In the second week of November, Joan’s chemotherapy caused her white blood cell count to plummet dangerously, and she was admitted to hospital. Strike left Robin in charge of the agency, Lucy left her three sons in the care of her husband, and both hurried back to Cornwall.