With a quick glance at the still-closed front door of the house he was watching, Strike opened the book and skim-read a couple of pages, looking up at regular intervals to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged.
The first chapter, which Robin hadn’t marked, but which Strike flicked through anyway, dealt summarily with Margot’s childhood and adolescence. Unable to gain access to anybody with particularly clear memories of his subject, Oakden had to fall back on generalities, supposition and a good deal of padding. Thus Strike learned that Margot Bamborough “would have dreamed of leaving poverty behind,” “would have been caught up in the giddy atmosphere of the 1960s” and “would have been aware of the possibilities for consequence-free sex offered by the contraceptive pill.” Word count was boosted by the information that the mini-skirt had been popularized by Mary Quant, that London was the heart of a thriving music scene and that the Beatles had appeared on America’s Ed Sullivan Show around the time of Margot’s nineteenth birthday. “Margot would have been excited by the possibilities offered to the working classes in this new, egalitarian era,” C. B. Oakden informed his readers.
Chapter two ushered in Margot’s arrival at the Playboy Club, and here, the sense of strain that had suffused the previous chapter vanished. C. B. Oakden evidently found Playboy Bunny Margot a far more inspiring subject than child Margot, and he devoted many paragraphs to the sense of freedom and liberation she would have felt on lacing herself tightly into her Bunny costume, putting on false ears and judiciously padding the cups of her costume to ensure that her breasts appeared of sufficient fullness to satisfy her employer’s stringent demands. Writing eleven years after her disappearance, Oakden had managed to track down a couple of Bunny Girls who remembered Margot. Bunny Lisa, who was now married with two children, reminisced about having “a good laugh” with her, and being “devastated” by her disappearance. Bunny Rita, who ran her own marketing business, said that she was “really bright, obviously going places,” and thought “it must’ve been dreadful for her poor family.”
Strike glanced up again at the front of the house into which SB had disappeared. Still no sign of him. Turning back to C. B. Oakden, the bored Strike skipped ahead to the first place Robin had marked as of interest.
After her successful stint at the Playboy Club, the playful and flirtatious Margot found it hard to adapt to the life of a general practitioner. At least one employee at the St. John’s practice says her manner was out of place in the setting of a consulting room.
“She didn’t keep them at a proper distance, that was the trouble. She wasn’t from a background that had a lot of professional people. A doctor’s got to hold himself above the patients.
“She recommended that book The Joy of Sex, to a woman who went to see her. I heard people in the waiting room talking about it, after. Giggling, you know. A doctor shouldn’t be telling people to read things like that. It reflects poorly on the whole practice. I was embarrassed for her.
“The one who was keen on her, the young fellow who kept coming back to see her, buying her chocolates and what have you—if she was telling people about different sex positions, you can see how men got the wrong idea, can’t you?”
There followed several paragraphs that had clearly been cribbed from the press, covering the suicide of Steve Douthwaite’s married ex-girlfriend, his sudden flight from his job and the fact that Lawson had re-interviewed him several times. Making the most of his scant material, Oakden managed to suggest that Douthwaite had been at best disreputable, at worst, dangerous: a feckless drifter and an unprincipled lady’s man, in whose vicinity women had a habit of dying or disappearing. It was with a slight snort of sudden amusement, therefore, that Strike read the words,
Now calling himself Stevie Jacks, Douthwaite currently works at Butlin’s holiday camp in Clacton-on-Sea—
After glancing up again to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged, Strike read on:
where he runs events for the campers by day and performs in the cabaret by night. His “Longfellow Serenade” is a particular hit with the ladies. Dark-haired Douthwaite/Jacks remains a handsome man, and clearly popular with female campers.
“I’ve always liked singing,” he tells me in the bar after the show. “I was in a band when I was younger but it broke up. I came to Butlin’s once when I was a kid, with my foster family. I always thought it looked a laugh, being a Redcoat. Plenty of big-time entertainers got their start here, you know.”
When talk turns to Margot Bamborough, however, a very different side to this cheeky cabaret singer appears.
“The press wrote a load of balls. I never bought her chocolates or anything else, that was just made up to make me look like some kind of creep. I had a stomach ulcer and headaches. I’d been through a bad time.”
After refusing to explain why he’d changed his name, Douthwaite left the bar.
His colleagues at the holiday camp expressed their shock that “Stevie” had been questioned by the police over the disappearance of the young doctor.
“He never told us anything about it,” said Julie Wilkes, 22. “I’m quite shocked, actually. You’d think he’d have told us. He never said ‘Jacks’ wasn’t his real name, either.”
Oakden treated his readers to a brief history of Butlin’s, and ended the chapter with a paragraph of speculation on the opportunities a predatory man might find at a holiday camp.
Strike lit another cigarette, then flicked ahead to the second of Robin’s markers, where a short passage dealt with Jules Bayliss, husband of the office-cleaner-turned-social-worker, Wilma. The only piece of new information here was that convicted rapist Bayliss had been released on bail in January 1975, a full three months after Margot went missing. Nevertheless, Oakden asserted that Bayliss “would have got wind” of the fact that Margot was trying to persuade his wife to leave him, “would have been angry that the doctor was pressurizing his wife to break up the family” and “would have had many criminal associations in his own community.” The police, Oakden informed his readers, “would have looked carefully into the movements of any of Bayliss’s friends or relatives on the eleventh of October, so we must conclude,” he finished, anticlimactically, “that no suspicious activity was uncovered.”
Robin’s third tab marked the pages dealing with the abortion at Bride Street Nursing Home. Oakden ushered in this part of his story with considerable fanfare, informing his readers that he was about to reveal facts that had never before been made public.
What followed was interesting to Strike only in as far as it proved that an abortion had definitely taken place on the fourteenth of September 1974, and that the name given by the patient had been Margot Bamborough. As proof, Oakden reprinted photographs of the Bride Street medical records that had been provided by an unidentified employee of the nursing home, which had closed down in 1978. Strike supposed the unnamed employee would no longer have been fearful for their job when Oakden had come offering money for information in the eighties. The unnamed employee also told Oakden that the woman who had had the procedure didn’t resemble the picture of Margot that had subsequently appeared in the papers.
Oakden then posed a series of rhetorical questions that he and his foolhardy publishers appeared to think circumvented libel laws. Was it possible that the woman who had the abortion had used Margot’s name with her support and consent? In which case, who might Margot have been most eager to assist? Was it not most likely that a Roman Catholic would be particularly worried about anyone finding out she had had an abortion? Was it not also the case that complications could arise from such a procedure? Might Margot have returned to the vicinity of the Bride Street Nursing Home on the eleventh of October to visit somebody who had been readmitted to the clinic? Or to ask advice on behalf of that person? Could Margot possibly have been abducted, not from Clerkenwell, but from a street or two away from Dennis Creed’s basement?