“This was the only thing that didn’t get thrown away,” said Gregory, looking down at the notebook, “because Dad wouldn’t let go of it when the ambulance arrived. He said he had to record what the, ah, spirit had looked like, the thing he’d conjured… so the notebook got taken to hospital with him. They let him draw the demon, which helped the doctors understand what had been going on in his head, because at first he didn’t want to talk to them. I found all this out afterward; they protected me and my brother from it while it was going on. After Dad got well, he kept the notebook, because he said if anything was a reminder to take his medicine, this was it. But I wanted to meet you before I made a decision.”
Resisting the urge to hold out his hand, Strike sat trying to look as sympathetic as his naturally surly features would allow. Robin was far better at conveying warmth and empathy; he’d watched her persuading recalcitrant witnesses many times since they’d gone into business together.
“You understand,” said Gregory, still clutching the notebook, and evidently determined to hammer the point home, “he’d had a complete mental breakdown.”
“Of course,” said Strike. “Who else have you shown that to?”
“Nobody,” said Gregory. “It’s been up in our attic for the last ten years. We had a couple of boxes of stuff from Mum and Dad’s old house up there. Funny, you turning up just as the loft was being mucked out… maybe this is all Dad’s doing? Maybe he’s trying to tell me it’s OK to pass this over?”
Strike made an ambiguous noise designed to convey agreement that the Talbots’ decision to clear out their loft had been somehow prompted by Gregory’s dead father, rather than the need to accommodate two extra children.
“Take it,” said Gregory abruptly, holding out the old notebook. Strike thought he looked relieved to see it pass into someone else’s possession.
“I appreciate your trust. If I find anything in here I think you can help with, would it be all right to contact you again?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Gregory. “You’ve got my email address… I’ll give you my mobile number…”
Five minutes later, Strike was standing in the hall, shaking hands with Mrs. Talbot as he prepared to return to his office.
“Lovely to meet you,” she said. “I’m glad he’s given you that thing. You never know, do you?”
And with the notebook in his hand, Strike agreed that you never did.
18
So the fayre Britomart hauing disclo’ste
Her clowdy care into a wrathfull stowre,
The mist of griefe dissolu’d…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Robin, who’d recently given up many weekends to cover the agency’s workload, took the following Tuesday and Wednesday off at Strike’s insistence. Her suggestion that she come into the office to look at the notebook Gregory Talbot had given Strike, and to go systematically through the last box of the police file, which neither of them had yet had time to examine, had been sternly vetoed by the senior partner. Strike knew there was no time left this year for Robin to take all the leave she was owed, but he was determined that she should take as much as she could.
However, if Strike imagined that Robin derived much pleasure from her days off, he was wrong. She spent Tuesday dealing with mundanities such as laundry and food shopping, and on Wednesday morning, set off for a twice-postponed appointment with her solicitor.
When she’d broken the news to her parents that she and Matthew were to divorce a little over a year after they’d married, her mother and father had wanted her to use a solicitor in Harrogate, who was an old family friend.
“I live in London. Why would I use a law firm in Yorkshire?”
Robin had chosen a lawyer in her late forties called Judith, whose dry humor, spiky gray hair and thick black-rimmed glasses had endeared her to Robin when first they met. Robin’s feeling of warmth had abated somewhat over the ensuing twelve months. It was hard to maintain fondness for the person whose job it was to pass on the latest intransigent and aggressive communications from Matthew’s lawyer. As the months rolled past, Robin noticed that Judith occasionally forgot or misremembered information pertinent to the divorce. Robin, who always took care to give her own clients the impression that their concerns were uppermost in her mind at all times, couldn’t help wondering whether Judith would have been more meticulous if Robin had been richer.
Like Robin’s parents, Judith had initially assumed that this divorce would be quick and easy, a matter of two signatures and a handshake. The couple had been married a little over a year and there were no children, not even a pet to argue over. Robin’s parents had gone so far as to imagine that Matthew, whom they’d known since he was a child, must feel such shame at his infidelity that he’d want to compensate Robin by being generous and reasonable over the divorce. Her mother’s growing fury toward her ex-son-in-law was starting to make Robin dread her phone calls home.
The offices of Stirling and Cobbs were a twenty-minute walk away from Robin’s flat, on North End Road. Zipping herself into a warm coat, umbrella in hand, Robin chose to walk that morning purely for the exercise, because she’d spent so many long hours in her car of late, sitting outside the weatherman’s house, waiting for Postcard. Indeed, the last time she’d walked for a whole hour had been inside the National Portrait Gallery, a trip that had been fruitless, except for one tiny incident that Robin had discounted, because Strike had taught her to mistrust the hunches so romanticized by the non-investigative public, which, he said, were more often than not born of personal biases or wishful thinking.
Tired, dispirited and knowing full well that nothing she was about to hear from Judith was likely to cheer her up, Robin was passing a bookie’s when her mobile rang. Extracting it from her pocket took a little longer than usual, because she was wearing gloves, and she consequently sounded a little panicky when she finally managed to answer the unknown number.
“Yes, hello? Robin Ellacott speaking.”
“Oh, hi. This is Eden Richards.”
For a moment, Robin couldn’t for the life of her think who Eden Richards was. The woman on the end of the line seemed to divine her dilemma, because she continued,
“Wilma Bayliss’s daughter. You sent me and my brothers and sisters messages. You wanted to talk to us about Margot Bamborough.”
“Oh, yes, of course, thank you for calling me back!” said Robin, backing into the bookie’s doorway, her finger in the ear not pressed against the phone, to block out the sound of traffic. Eden, she now remembered, was the oldest of Wilma’s offspring, a Labor councilor from Lewisham.
“Yeah,” said Eden Richards, “well, I’m afraid we don’t want to talk to you. And I’m speaking for all of us here, OK?”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Robin, watching abstractedly as a passing Doberman Pinscher squatted and defecated on the pavement while its scowling owner waited, a plastic bag hanging from his hand. “Can I ask why—?”
“We just don’t want to,” said Eden. “OK?”
“OK,” said Robin, “but to be clear, all we’re doing is checking statements that were made around the time Margot—”
“We can’t speak for our mother,” said Eden. “She’s dead. We feel sorry for Margot’s daughter, but we don’t want to drag up stuff that—it’s something we don’t particularly want to relive, any of our family. We were young when she disappeared. It was a bad time for us. So the answer’s no, OK?”
“I understand,” said Robin, “but I wish you’d reconsider. We aren’t asking you to talk about anything pers—”
“You are, though,” said Eden. “Yeah, you are. And we don’t want to, OK? You aren’t police. And by the way: my youngest sister’s going through chemotherapy, so leave her alone, please. She doesn’t need the grief. I’m going to go now. The answer’s no, OK? Don’t contact any of us again, please.”
And the line went dead.
“Shit,” said Robin out loud.
The owner of the Doberman Pinscher, who was now scooping a sizable pile of that very substance off the pavement, said,
“You and me both, love.”
Robin forced a smile, stuffed her mobile back into her pocket and walked on. Shortly afterward, still wondering whether she could have handled the call with Eden better, Robin pushed open the glass door of Stirling and Cobbs, Solicitors.
“Well,” said Judith five minutes later, once Robin was sitting opposite her in the tiny office full of filing cabinets. The monosyllable was followed by silence as Judith glanced over the documents in the file in front of her, clearly reminding herself of the facts of the case while Robin sat watching. Robin would much rather have sat for another five minutes in the waiting room than witness this casual and hasty revision of what was causing her so much stress and pain.
“Umm,” said Judith, “yes… just checking that… yes, we had a response to ours on the fourteenth, as I said in my email, so you’ll be aware that Mr. Cunliffe isn’t prepared to shift his position on the joint account.”
“Yes,” said Robin.
“So, I really think it’s time to go to mediation,” said Judith Cobbs.
“And as I said in my reply to your email,” said Robin, wondering whether Judith had read it, “I can’t see mediation working.”