Troubled Blood

“No, but you need to know about him to understand the next bit. I assume you know about the Falklands War.”

“I’m younger than you, Strike. I’m not pig-ignorant.”

“OK, right. So, the British troops who went over there—Ted was there, 1982—nicknamed the locals ‘Bennies,’ after the character on Crossroads. Command gets wind of this, and the order comes down the line, ‘Stop calling these people we’ve just liberated Bennies.’ So,” said Strike, grinning, “They started calling them ‘Stills.’”

“‘Stills’? What does ‘Stills’ mean?”

“‘Still Bennies,’” said Strike, and he let out a great roar of laughter. Robin laughed, too, but mostly at Strike’s amusement. When his guffaws had subsided, both watched the river for a few seconds, drinking and, in Strike’s case, smoking, until he said,

“I’m going to write to the Ministry of Justice. Apply for permission to visit Creed.”

“Seriously?”

“We’ve got to try. The authorities always thought Creed assaulted or killed more women than he was done for. There was jewelry in his house and bits of clothing nobody ever identified. Just because everyone thinks it’s Creed—”

“—doesn’t mean it isn’t,” agreed Robin, who followed the tortured logic perfectly.

Strike sighed, rubbed his face, cigarette still poking out of his mouth, then said,

“Want to see exactly how crazy Talbot was?”

“Go on.”

Strike pulled the leather-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. Robin opened it and turned the pages in silence.

They were covered in strange drawings and diagrams. The writing was small, meticulously neat but cramped. There was much underlining and circling of phrases and symbols. The pentagram recurred. The pages were littered with names, but none connected with the case: Crowley, Lévi, Adams and Schmidt.

“Huh,” she said quietly, stopping on a particularly heavily embellished page on which a goat’s head with a third eye looked balefully up at her. “Look at this…”

She bent closer.

“He’s using astrological symbols.”

“He’s what?” said Strike, frowning down at the page she was perusing.

“That’s Libra,” said Robin, pointing at a symbol toward the bottom of the page. “It’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.”

“He’s using bloody star signs?” said Strike, pulling the book back toward him, looking so disgusted that Robin started to laugh again.

Strike scanned the page. Robin was right. The circles drawn around the goat’s head told him something else, too.

“He’s calculated the full horoscope for the moment he thought she was abducted,” he said. “Look at the date there. The eleventh of October 1974. Half past six in the evening… fuck’s sake. Astrology… he was out of his tree.”

“What’s your sign?” asked Robin, trying to work it out.

“No idea.”

“Oh sod off,” said Robin.

He looked at her, taken aback.

“You’re being affected!” she said. “Everyone knows their star sign. Don’t pretend to be above it.”

Strike grinned reluctantly, took a large drag on his cigarette, exhaled, then said,

“Sagittarius, Scorpio rising, with the sun in the first house.”



“You’re—” Robin began to laugh. “Did you just pull that out of your backside, or is it real?”

“Of course, it’s not fucking real,” said Strike. “None of it’s real, is it? But yeah. That’s what my natal horoscope says. Stop bloody laughing. Remember who my mother was. She loved all that shit. One of her best mates did my full horoscope for her when I was born. I should have recognized that straight off,” he said, pointing at the goat drawing. “But I haven’t been through this properly yet, haven’t had time.”

“So what does having the sun in the first house mean?”

“It means nothing, it’s all bollocks.”

Robin could tell that he didn’t want to admit that he’d remembered, which made her laugh some more. Half-annoyed, half-amused, he muttered, “Independent. Leadership.”

“Well—”

“It’s all bollocks, and we’ve got enough mystic crap swimming round this case without adding star signs. The medium and the holy place, Talbot and Baphomet—”

“—Irene and her broken Margot Fonteyn,” said Robin.

“Irene and her broken fucking Margot Fonteyn,” Strike muttered, rolling his eyes.

A fine shower of icy rain began to fall, speckling the table top and over Talbot’s notebook, which Strike closed before the ink could run. In unspoken agreement, both got up and headed back toward the Land Rover.

The lavender-haired old lady who shared Strike’s birthday was now being helped into a nearby Toyota by what looked like two daughters. All around her car stood family, smiling and talking under umbrellas. Just for a moment, as he pulled himself back inside the Land Rover, Strike wondered where he’d be if he lived to eighty, and who’d be there with him.



22



And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show.

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene

That nothing is but that which he hath seene?

What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,

What if in euery other starre vnseene

Of other worldes he happily should heare?

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Strike got himself a takeaway that night, to eat alone in his attic flat. As he upended the Singapore noodles onto his plate, he inwardly acknowledged the irony that, had Ilsa not been so keen to act as midwife to a romantic relationship between himself and Robin, he might now have been sitting in Nick and Ilsa’s flat in Octavia Road, enjoying a laugh with two of his old friends and indeed with Robin herself, whose company had never yet palled on him, through the many long hours they had worked together.

Strike’s thoughts lingered on his partner while he ate, on the kiss on the well-chosen card, on the headphones and the fact that she was now calling him Strike in moments of annoyance, or when the two of them were joking, all of them clear signs of increasing intimacy. However stressful the divorce proceedings, of which she’d shared few details, however little she might consciously be seeking romance, she was nevertheless a free agent.

Not for the first time, Strike wondered exactly how egotistical it was to suspect that Robin’s feelings toward him might be warmer than those of pure friendship. He got on with her better than he’d ever got on with any woman. Their mutual liking had survived all the stresses of running a business together, the personal trials each had endured since they had met, even the major disagreement that had once seen him sack her. She’d hurried to the hospital when he had found himself alone with a critically ill nephew, brooking, he had no doubt, the displeasure of the ex-husband Strike never forgot to call “that arsehole” inside his own head.

Nor was Strike unconscious of Robin’s good looks: indeed, he’d been fully aware of them ever since she’d taken off her coat in his office for the first time. But her physical appeal was less of a threat to his peace of mind than the deep, guilty liking for being, currently, the main man in her life. Now that the possibility of something more lay in front of him, now that her husband was gone, and she was single, he found himself seriously wondering what would happen, should they act upon what he was beginning to suspect was a mutual attraction. Could the agency, for which they’d both sacrificed so much, which for Strike represented the culmination of all his ambitions, survive the partners falling into bed together? However he reframed this question, the answer always came back “no,” because he was certain, for reasons that had to do with past trauma, not from any particularly puritanical streak, that what Robin sought, ultimately, was the security and permanence of marriage.

And he wasn’t the marrying kind. No matter the inconveniences, what he craved at the end of a working day was his private space, clean and ordered, organized exactly as he liked it, free of emotional storms, from guilt and recriminations, from demands to service Hallmark’s idea of romance, from a life where someone else’s happiness was his responsibility. The truth was that he’d always been responsible for some woman: for Lucy, as they grew up together in squalor and chaos; for Leda, who lurched from lover to lover, and whom he had sometimes had to physically protect as a teenager; for Charlotte, whose volatility and self-destructive tendencies had been given many different names by therapists and psychiatrists, but whom he had loved in spite of it all. He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he’d had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He’d sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.