Troubled Blood

“Cormoran,” Robin said.

He looked round. A waiter had arrived at the table. When both had ordered coffee, and Robin some toast, each relapsed into silence. Robin was looking away from the window toward the shoppers stocking up on fancy groceries for Christmas down on the shop floor and re-running Tom Turvey’s outburst in her head. The aftershocks were still hitting her. Four weeks before my fucking wedding. It must have been called off. Sarah had left Tom for Matthew, the man she’d wanted all along, and Robin was sure she wouldn’t have left Tom unless Matthew had shown himself ready to offer her what Tom had: diamonds and a change of name. I’m the only one of us who hasn’t been fucking around. Everyone had been unfaithful, in Tom’s opinion, except poor Tom… so Matthew must have told his old friend that she, Robin, had been sleeping with someone else (which meant Strike, of course, of whom Matthew had been perennially jealous and suspicious from the moment Robin had gone to work for him). And even now that Tom knew about Matthew and Sarah, after his old friend’s duplicity and treachery had been revealed, Tom still believed the lie about Robin and Strike. Doubtless he thought his current misery was all Robin’s fault, that if she hadn’t succumbed to Strike, the domino effect of infidelity would never have been started.

“You sure you’re all right?”

Robin started and looked around. Strike had come out of his own reverie and was looking at her over his coffee cup.

“Fine,” she said. “Just knackered. Did you get my email?”

“Email?” said Strike, reaching for the phone in his pocket. “Yeah, but I haven’t read it, sorry. Dealing with other—”

“Don’t bother now,” said Robin hastily, inwardly cringing at the thought of that accidental kiss, even in the midst of her new troubles. “It isn’t particularly important, it’ll keep. I did find this, though.”

She took the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? out of her bag and passed it over the table, but before Strike could express his surprise, she muttered,

“Give it back, give it back now,” tugged it back out of his hand and stuffed it into her bag.

A stout woman was heading toward them across the café. Two bulging bags of Christmas fare were dangling from her hands. She had the full cheeks and large square front teeth of a cheerful-looking chipmunk, an aspect that in her youthful photos had added a certain cheeky charm to her prettiness. The hair that once had been long, dark and glossy was now chin-length and white, except at the front, where a dashing bright purple streak had been added. A large silver and amethyst cross bounced on her purple sweater.

“Oonagh?” said Robin.

“Dat’s me,” she panted. She seemed nervous. “The queues! Well, what do I expect, Fortnum’s at Christmas? But fair play, dey do a lovely mustard.”

Robin smiled. Strike drew out the chair beside him.

“T’anks very much,” said Oonagh, sitting down.

Her Irish accent was attractive, and barely eroded by what Robin knew had been a longer residence in England than in the country of her birth.

Both detectives introduced themselves.

“Very nice to meet you,” Oonagh said, shaking hands before clearing her throat nervously. “Excuse me. I was made up to get yer message,” she told Strike. “Years and years I’ve spent, wondering why Roy never hired someone, because he’s got the money to do it and the police never got anywhere. So little Anna called you in, did she? God bless that gorl, what she must’ve gone through… Oh, hello,” she said to the waiter, “could I have a cappuccino and a bit of that carrot cake? T’ank you.”

When the waiter had gone, Oonagh took a deep breath and said,

“I know I’m rattlin’ on. I’m nervous, that’s the truth.”

“There’s nothing to be—” began Strike.

“Oh, there is,” Oonagh contradicted him, looking sober. “Whatever happened to Margot, it can’t be anything good, can it? Nigh on forty years I’ve prayed for that girl, prayed for the truth and prayed God would look after her, alive or dead. She was the best friend I ever had and—sorry. I knew this would happen. Knew it.”

She picked up her unused cloth napkin and mopped her eyes.

“Ask me a question,” she said, half-laughing. “Save me from meself.”

Robin glanced at Strike, who handed the interview to her with a look as he pulled out his notebook.

“Well, perhaps we can start with how you and Margot met?” Robin suggested.

“We can, o’ course,” said Oonagh. “That would’ve been ’66. We were both auditioning to be Bunny Girls. You’ll know all about that?”

Robin nodded.

“I had a decent figure then, believe it or not,” said Oonagh, smiling as she gestured down at her tubby torso, although she seemed to feel little regret for the loss of her waist.

Robin hoped Strike wasn’t going to take her to task later for not organizing her questions according to the usual categories of people, places and things, but she judged it better to make this feel more like a normal conversation, at least at first, because Oonagh was still visibly nervous.

“Did you come over from Ireland, to try and get the job?” asked Robin.

“Oh no,” said Oonagh. “I was already in London. I kinda run away from home, truth be told. You’re lookin’ at a convent gorl with a mammy as strict as a prison warder. I had a week’s wages from a clothes shop in Derry in my pocket, and my mammy gave me one row too many. I walked out, got on the ferry, came to London and sent a postcard home to tell ’em I was alive and not to worry. My mammy didn’t speak to me for t’irty years.

“I was waitressing when I heard they were opening a Playboy Club in Mayfair. Well, the money was crazy good compared to what you could earn in a normal place. T’irty-five pounds a week, we started on. That’s near enough six hundred a week, nowadays. There was nowhere else in London was going to pay a working-class gorl that. It was more than most of our daddies earned.”

“And you met Margot at the club?”

“I met her at the audition. Knew she’d get hired the moment I looked at her. She had the figure of a model: all legs, and the girl lived on sugar. She was t’ree years younger than me, and she lied about her age so they’d take—oh, t’ank you very much,” said Oonagh, as the waiter placed her cappuccino and carrot cake in front of her.

“Why was Margot auditioning?” Robin asked.

“Because her family had nothing—and I mean, nothing, now,” Oonagh said. “Her daddy had an accident when she was four. Fell off a step-ladder, broke his back. Crippled. That’s why she had no brothers and sisters. Her mammy used to clean people’s houses. My family had more than the Bamboroughs and nobody ever got rich farming a place the size of ours. But the Bamboroughs were not-enough-to-eat poor.

“She was such a clever girl, but the family needed help. She got herself into medical school, told the university she’d have to defer for a year, then headed straight for the Playboy Club. We took to each other straight away, in the audition, because she was so funny.”

“Was she?” said Robin. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Strike look up from his notebook in surprise.

“Oh, Margot Bamborough was the funniest person I ever knew in my life,” said Oonagh. “In my loife, now. We used to laugh till we cried. I’ve never laughed like that since. Proper cockney accent and she could just make you laugh until you dropped.

“So we started work together, and they were strict, mind you,” said Oonagh, now forking cake into her mouth as she talked. “Inspected before you walked out on the floor, uniform on properly, nails done, and then there were rules like you’ve no idea. They used to put plain-clothes detectives in the club to catch us out, make sure we weren’t giving out our full names or our phone numbers.

“If you were any good at it, you could put a tidy bit of money away. Margot graduated to cigarette girl, selling them out of a little tray. She was popular with the men because she was so funny. She hardly spent a penny on herself. She split the lot between a savings account for medical school and the rest she gave her mammy. Worked every hour they’d let her. Bunny Peggy, she called herself, because she didn’t want any of the punters to know her real name. I was Bunny Una, because nobody knew how to say ‘Oonagh.’ We got all kinds of offers—you had to say no, of course. But it was nice to be asked, right enough,” said Oonagh, and perhaps picking up on Robin’s surprise, she smiled and said,