“Why would he do that?” said Robin, a little desperately.

“I don’t think we’re going to get a better answer than ‘because he was mentally ill,’” said Strike. “But the starting point must have been his interest in Ricci. He’d found out Ricci was registered with the St. John’s practice and attended the Christmas party. In the notes, he called Ricci—”

“—Leo three,” said Robin. “Yes, I know.”

Strike’s leg muscles relaxed very slightly. This degree of focus and recall on Robin’s part didn’t suggest somebody about to have a panic attack.

“Did you learn my email off by heart?” he asked her.

It was Robin’s turn to remember Christmas, and the brief solace it had been, to bury herself in work at her parents’ kitchen table.

“I pay attention when I’m reading, that’s all.”

“Well, I still don’t understand why Talbot didn’t chase up this Ricci lead, although judging by the horoscope notes, there was a sharp deterioration in his mental state over the six months he was in charge of the case. I’m guessing he stole that can of film not long before he got kicked off the force, hence no mention of it in the police notes.”

“And then hid it so nobody else could investigate the woman’s death,” said Robin. Her sympathy for Bill Talbot had just been, if not extinguished, severely dented. “Why the hell didn’t he take the film back to the police when he was back in his right mind?”

“I’d guess because he wanted his job back and, failing that, wanted to make sure he got his pension. Setting aside basic integrity, I can’t see that he had a great incentive to admit he’d tampered with evidence on another case. Everyone was already pissed off at him: victims’ families, press, the force, all blaming him for having fucked up the investigation. And then Lawson, a bloke he doesn’t like, takes over and tells him to stay the fuck out of it. He probably told himself the dead woman was only a prostitute or—”

“Jesus,” said Robin angrily.

“I’m not saying ‘only a prostitute,’” Strike said quickly. “I’m guessing at the mindset of a seventies policeman who’d already been publicly shamed for buggering up a high-profile case.”

Robin said nothing, but remained stony-faced for the rest of the journey, while Strike, the muscles of his one-and-a-half legs so tense they ached, tried not to make it too obvious that he was keeping a covert eye on the hands gripping the steering wheel.

35

… fayre Aurora, rysing hastily,

Doth by her blushing tell, that she did lye

All night in old Tithonus frosen bed,

Whereof she seemes ashamed inwardly.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

“Ever been here before?” Strike asked Robin, as she parked in the Hampton Court car park. She’d been silent since he’d told her about the film, and he was trying to break the tension.

“No.”

They got out of the Land Rover and set off across the car park in the chilly rain.

“Where exactly are we meeting Cynthia?”

“The Privy Kitchen Café,” said Robin. “I expect they’ll give us a map at the ticket office.”

She knew that the film hidden in Gregory Talbot’s attic wasn’t Strike’s fault. He hadn’t put it there, hadn’t hidden it for forty years, couldn’t have known, when he inserted it in the projector, that he was about to watch a woman’s last, terrified, excruciating moments. She wouldn’t have wanted him to withhold the truth about what he’d seen. Nevertheless, his dry and unemotional description had grated on Robin. Reasonably or not, she’d wanted some sign that he had been repulsed, or disgusted, or horrified.

But perhaps this was unrealistic. He’d been a military policeman long before Robin had known him, where he’d learned a detachment she sometimes envied. Beneath her determinedly calm exterior, Robin felt shaken and sick, and wanted to know that when Strike had watched the recording of the woman’s dying moments, he’d recognized her as a person as real as he was.

Only a prostitute.

Their footsteps rang out on the wet tarmac as the great red-brick palace rose up before them, and Robin, who wanted to drive dreadful images out of her mind, tried to remember everything she knew about Henry VIII, that cruel and corpulent Tudor king who’d beheaded two of his six wives, but somehow found herself thinking about Matthew, instead.

When Robin had been brutally raped by a man in a gorilla mask who’d been lurking beneath the stairs of her hall of residence, Matthew had been kind, patient and understanding. Robin’s lawyer might be mystified by the source of Matthew’s vindictiveness over what should have been a straightforward divorce, but Robin had come to believe that the end of the marriage had been a profound shock to Matthew, because he thought he was owed infinite credit for having helped her through the worst period of her life. Matthew, Robin felt sure, thought she was forever in his debt.

Tears prickled in Robin’s eyes. Angling her umbrella so that Strike couldn’t see her face, she blinked hard until her eyes were clear again.

They walked across a cobbled courtyard in silence until Robin came to a sudden halt. Strike, who never enjoyed navigating uneven surfaces with his prosthesis, wasn’t sorry to pause, but he was slightly worried that he was about to be on the receiving end of an outburst.

“Look at that,” Robin said, pointing down at a shining cobblestone.

Strike looked closer and saw, to his surprise, a small cross of St. John engraved upon a small square brick.

“Coincidence,” he said.

They walked on, Robin looking around, forcing herself to take in her surroundings. They passed into a second courtyard, where a school party in hooded raincoats was being addressed by a guide in a medieval jester’s costume.

“Oh wow,” said Robin quietly, looking over her shoulder and then walking backward for a few paces, the better to see the object set high in the wall above the archway. “Look at that!”

Strike did as he was bidden and saw an enormous, ornate, sixteenth-century astronomical clock of blue and gold. The signs of the zodiac were marked on the perimeter, both with the glyphs with which Strike had become unwillingly familiar, and with pictures representing each sign. Robin smiled at Strike’s expression of mingled surprise and annoyance.

“What?” he said, catching her look of amusement.

“You,” she said, turning to walk on. “Furious at the zodiac.”

“If you’d spent three weeks wading through all Talbot’s bollocks, you wouldn’t be keen on the zodiac, either,” said Strike.

He stood back to allow Robin to enter the palace first. Following the map Strike had been given, they headed along a flagged, covered walkway toward the Privy Kitchen Café.

“Well, I think there’s a kind of poetry to astrology,” said Robin, who was consciously trying to keep her mind off Talbot’s old can of film, and her ex-husband. “I’m not saying it works, but there’s a kind of—of symmetry to it, an order…”

Through a door to the right, a small Tudor garden came into view. Brightly colored heraldic beasts stood sentinel over square beds full of sixteenth-century herbs. The sudden appearance of the spotted leopard, the white hart and the red dragon seemed to Robin to cheer her on, asserting the potency and allure of symbol and myth.

“It makes a kind of—not literal sense,” Robin said, as the whimsically strange creatures passed out of sight, “but it’s survived for a reason.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “People will believe any old shit.”

Slightly to his relief, Robin smiled. They entered the white-walled café, which had small leaded windows and dark oak furniture,

“Find us a discreet table, I’ll get the drinks in. What d’you want, coffee?”

Choosing a deserted side room, Robin sat down at a table beneath one of the leaded windows and glanced through the potted history of the palace they’d received with their tickets. She learned that the Knights of St. John had once owned the land on which the palace stood, which explained the cross on the cobblestone, and that Cardinal Wolsey had given Henry VIII the palace in a futile bid to stave off his own decline in influence. However, when she read that the ghost of nineteen-year-old Catherine Howard was supposed to run, screaming, along the Haunted Gallery, eternally begging her fifty-year-old husband, the King, not to have her beheaded, Robin closed the pamphlet without reading the rest. Strike arrived with the coffees to find her with her arms folded, staring into space.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just thinking about star signs.”

“Still?” said Strike, with a slight eye roll.

“Jung says it was man’s first attempt at psychology, did you know that?”