Robin suddenly wondered whether Morris had slept with the girl. Strike had been quite clear that that wasn’t to happen. She sank back down on the sofa. Her copy of The Demon of Paradise Park was warm, she noticed, from the dachshund lying on it. The displaced Wolfgang was now gazing at Robin from under the dining table, with the sad, reproachful eyes of an old man.
“Saul, I really think it’s time for Hutchins to take over, to see what he can do with Shifty himself,” said Robin.
“OK, but before we make that decision, let me ring Strike and—”
“You’re not ringing Strike,” said Robin, her temper rising. “His aunt’s—he’s got enough on his plate in Cornwall.”
“You’re so sweet,” said Morris, with a little laugh, “but I promise you, Strike would want a say in this—”
“He left me in charge,” said Robin, anger rising now, “and I’m telling you, you’ve taken it as far as you can with that girl. She doesn’t know anything useful and trying to push her further could backfire badly on this agency. I’m asking you to give it up now, please. You can take over on Postcard tomorrow night, and I’ll tell Andy to get to work on Shifty.”
There was a pause.
“I’ve upset you, haven’t I?” said Morris.
“No, you haven’t upset me,” said Robin. After all, “upset” wasn’t quite the same as “enrage.”
“I didn’t want to—”
“You haven’t, Saul, I’m only reminding you what we agreed at the meeting.”
“OK,” he said. “All right. Hey—listen. Did you hear about the boss who told his secretary the company was in trouble?”
“No,” said Robin, through clenched teeth.
“He said, ‘I’m going to have to lay you or Jack off.’ She said, ‘Well, you’ll have to jack off, because I’ve got a headache.’”
“Ha ha,” said Robin. “Night, Saul.”
“Why did I say ‘ha ha’?” she asked herself furiously, as she set down her mobile. Why didn’t I just say, “Stop telling me crap jokes?” Or say nothing! And why did I say sorry when I was asking him to do what we all agreed at the meeting? Why am I cossetting him?
She thought of all those times she’d pretended with Matthew. Faking orgasms had been nothing compared to pretending to find him funny and interesting through all those twice-told tales of rugby club jokes, through every anecdote designed to show him as the cleverest or the funniest man in the room. Why do we do it? she asked herself, picking up The Demon of Paradise Park without considering what she was doing. Why do we work so hard to keep the peace, to keep them happy?
Because, suggested the seven ghostly black and white faces behind Dennis Creed’s, they can turn nasty, Robin. You know just how nasty they can turn, with your scar up your arm and your memory of that gorilla mask.
But she knew that wasn’t why she’d humored Morris, not really. She didn’t expect him to become abusive or violent if she refused to laugh at his stupid jokes. No, this was something else. The only girl in a family of boys, Robin had been raised, she knew, to keep everyone happy, in spite of the fact that her own mother had been quite the women’s libber. Nobody had meant to do it, but she’d realized during the therapy she’d undertaken after the attack that had left her forearm forever scarred, that her family role had been that of “easy child,” the non-complainer, the conciliator. She’d been born just a year before Martin, who had been the Ellacotts’ “problem child”: the most scattered and impetuous, the least academic and conscientious, the son who still lived at home at twenty-eight and the brother with whom she had least in common. (Though Martin had punched Matthew on the nose on her wedding day, and the last time she’d been home she’d found herself hugging him when he offered, on hearing how difficult Matthew was being about the divorce, to do it again.)
Wintry specks of rain were dotting the window behind the dining table. Wolfgang was fast asleep again. Robin couldn’t face perusing the social media accounts of another fifty Amanda Whites tonight. As she picked up The Demon of Paradise Park, she hesitated. She’d made a rule for herself (because it had been a long, hard journey to reach the place where she was now, and she didn’t want to lose her current good state of mental health) not to read this book after dark, or right before bed. After all, the information it contained could be found summarized online: there was no need to hear in his own words what Creed had done to each of the women he’d tortured and killed.
Nevertheless, she picked up her hot chocolate, opened the book to the page she had marked with a Tesco receipt, and began to read at the point she’d left off three days previously.
Convinced that Bamborough had fallen victim to the serial killer now dubbed the Essex Butcher, Talbot made enemies among his colleagues with what they felt was his obsessive focus on one theory.
“They called it early retirement,” said a colleague, “but it was basically dismissal. They said he wasn’t interested in anything other than the Butcher, but here we are, 9 years on, and no-one’s ever found a better explanation, have they?”
Margot Bamborough’s family failed to positively identify any of the unclaimed jewelry and underwear found in Creed’s basement flat when he was arrested in 1976, although Bamborough’s husband, Dr. Roy Phipps, thought a tarnished silver locket which had been crushed, possibly by blunt force, might have resembled one that the doctor was believed to have been wearing when she disappeared.
However, a recently published account of Bamborough’s life, Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough?[4] written by the son of a close friend of the doctor, contains revelations about the doctor’s private life which suggest a new line of inquiry—and a possible connection with Creed. Shortly before her disappearance, Margot Bamborough booked herself into the Bride Street Nursing Home in Islington, a private facility which in 1974 provided discreet abortions.
16
Behold the man, and tell me Britomart,
If ay more goodly creature thou didst see;
How like a Gyaunt in each manly part
Beares he himselfe with portly maiestee…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Four days later, at a quarter past five in the morning, the “Night Riviera” sleeper train pulled into Paddington station. Strike, who’d slept poorly, had spent long stretches of the night watching the ghostly gray blur of the so-called English Riviera slide past his compartment window. Having slept on top of the covers with his prosthesis still attached, he turned down the proffered breakfast on its plastic tray, and was among the first passengers to disembark into the station, kit bag over his shoulder.
There was a nip of frost in the early morning air and Strike’s breath rose in a cloud before him as he walked down the platform, Brunel’s steel arches curving above him like the ribs of a blue whale’s skeleton, cold dark sky visible through the glass ceiling. Unshaven and slightly uncomfortable on the stump that had missed its usual nightly application of soothing cream, Strike headed for a bench, sat down, lit a much-needed cigarette, pulled out his mobile and phoned Robin.
He knew she’d be awake, because she’d just spent the night parked in Strike’s BMW outside the house of the weatherman, watching for Postcard. They’d communicated mostly by text while he’d been in Cornwall, while he divided his time between the hospital in Truro and the house in St. Mawes, taking it in turns with Lucy to sit with Joan, whose hair had now fallen out and whose immune system appeared to have collapsed under the weight of the chemotherapy, and to minister to Ted, who was barely eating. Before returning to London, Strike had cooked a large batch of curry, which he left in the freezer, alongside shepherd’s pies made by Lucy. When he raised his cigarette to his mouth he could still smell a trace of cumin on his fingers, and if he concentrated, he could conjure up the deadly smell of hospital disinfectant underlain with a trace of urine, instead of cold iron, diesel and the distant waftings of coffee from a nearby Starbucks.
“Hi,” said Robin, and at the sound of her voice Strike felt, as he had known he would, a slight easing of the knot of tension in his stomach. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” he said, slightly surprised, before he recollected that it was half past five in the morning. “Oh—yeah, sorry, this isn’t an emergency call, I’ve just got off the sleeper. Wondered whether you fancied getting breakfast before you head home to bed.”
“Oh, that’d be wonderful,” said Robin, with such genuine pleasure that Strike felt a little less tired, “because I’ve got Bamborough news.”
“Great,” said Strike, “so’ve I. Be good to have a catch-up.”
“How’s Joan?”
“Not great. They let her go home yesterday. They’ve assigned her a Macmillan nurse. Ted’s really low. Lucy’s still down there.”
“You could’ve stayed,” said Robin. “We can cope.”
“It’s fine,” he said, screwing his eyes up against his own smoke. A shaft of wintry sunlight burst through a break in the clouds and illuminated the fag butts on the tiled floor. “I’ve told them I’ll go back for Christmas. Where d’you want to meet?”
“Well, I was planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery before I went home, so—”