Troubled Blood

“Roy!” whimpered Cynthia again, as Roy leaned forwards to face his daughter across the too-small circular table, with its precariously balanced cake. Gesticulating wildly, his face purple, he shouted,

“Police swarming all over the house going through your mother’s things—sniffer dogs out in the garden—they were looking for any reason to arrest me, and I should lodge a formal complaint against the man in charge? How would that have looked?”

“He was incompetent!”

“Were you there, Miss Omniscient? Did you know him?”

“Why did they replace him? Why does everything written about the case say he was incompetent? The truth is,” said Anna, stabbing the air between her and her father with a forefinger, “you and Cyn loved Bill Talbot because he thought you were innocent from the off and—”

“Thought I was innocent?” bellowed Roy. “Well, thank you, it’s good to know that nothing’s changed since you were thirteen years old—”

“Roy!” said Cynthia and Kim together.

“—and accused me of building the koi pond over the place I’d buried her!”

Anna burst into tears and fled the room, almost tripping over Strike’s legs as she went. Suspecting there was about to be a mass exodus, he retracted his feet.

“When,” Kim said coldly to her father-in-law, “is Anna going to be forgiven for things she said when she was a confused child, going through a dreadful time?”

“And my dreadful time is nothing, of course? Nothing!” shouted Roy, and as Strike expected, he, too, left the room at the fastest pace he could manage, which was a speedy hobble.

“Christ’s sake,” muttered Kim, striding after Roy and Anna and almost colliding at the door with Cynthia, who’d jumped up to follow Roy.

The door swung shut. The rain pattered on the pond outside. Strike blew out his cheeks, exchanged looks with Robin, then picked up his plate and continued eating his cake.

“Starving,” he said thickly, in response to Robin’s look. “No lunch. And it’s good cake.”

Distantly they heard shouting, and the slamming of another door.

“D’you think the interview’s over?” muttered Robin.

“No,” said Strike, still eating. “They’ll be back.”

“Remind me about the sighting in Warwick,” said Robin.

She’d merely skimmed the list of sightings that Strike had emailed her. There hadn’t seemed anything very interesting there.

“A woman asked for change in a pub, and the landlady thought she was Margot. A mature student came forward two days later to identify herself, but the landlady wasn’t convinced that was who she’d seen. The police were, though.”

Strike took another large mouthful of cake before saying,

“I don’t think there’s anything in it. Well…” he swallowed and shot a meaningful look at the sitting room door, “there’s a bit more now.”

Strike continued to eat cake, while Robin’s eyes roamed the room and landed on an ormolu mantel clock of exceptional ugliness. With a glance at the door, she got up to examine it. A gilded classical goddess wearing a helmet sat on top of the ornate, heavy case.

“Pallas Athena,” said Strike, watching her, pointing his fork at the figure.

In the base of the clock was a drawer with a small brass handle. Remembering Cynthia’s statement about Roy and Margot leaving notes for each other here, she pulled the drawer open. It was lined in red felt and empty.

“D’you think it’s valuable?” she asked Strike, sliding the drawer shut.

“Dunno. Why?”

“Because why else would you keep it? It’s horrible.”

There were two distinct kinds of taste on view in this room and they didn’t harmonize, Robin thought, as she looked around, all the time listening for the return of the family. The leather-bound copies of Ovid and Pliny, and the Victorian reproductions of classical statues, among them a pair of miniature Medici lions, a reproduction Vestal virgin and a Hermes poised on tiptoe on his heavy bronze base, presumably represented Roy’s father’s taste, whereas she suspected that his mother had chosen the insipid watercolor landscapes and botanical subjects, the dainty antique furniture and the chintz curtains.

Why had Roy never made a clean sweep and redecorated, Robin wondered. Reverence for his parents? Lack of imagination? Or had the sickly little boy, housebound no doubt for much of his childhood, developed an attachment to these objects that he couldn’t put aside? He and Cynthia seemed to have made little impression on the room other than in adding a few family pictures to faded black and white photos featuring Roy’s parents and Roy as a child. The only one to hold Robin’s interest was a family group that looked as though it had been taken in the early nineties, when Roy had still had all his hair, and Cynthia’s had been thick and wavy. Their two biological children, a boy and a girl, looked like Anna. Nobody would have guessed that she’d had a different mother.

Robin moved to the window. The surface of the long, formal koi pond outside, with its stone pavilion at the end, was now so densely rain-pocked that the vivid red, white and black shapes moving beneath the surface were barely discernible as fish. There was one particularly big creature, pearl white and black, that looked as though it might be over two feet long. The miniature pavilion would normally be reflected in the pond’s smooth surface, but today it merely added an extra layer of diffuse gray to the far end of the pond. It had a strangely familiar design on the floor.

“Cormoran,” Robin said, at the exact moment Strike said,

“Look at this.”

Both turned. Strike, who’d finished his cake, was now standing beside one of Roy’s father’s statuettes, which Robin had overlooked. It was a foot-high bronze of a naked man with a cloth around his shoulders, holding a snake. Momentarily puzzled, Robin realized after a second or two why Strike was pointing at it.

“Oh… the snaky invented sign Talbot gave Roy?”

“Precisely. This is Asclepius,” said Strike. “Greek god of medicine. What’ve you found?”

“Look on the floor of the gazebo thing. Inlaid in the stone.”

He joined her at the window.

“Ah,” he said. “You can see the beginnings of that in one of the photographs of Margot’s barbecue. It was under construction.”

A cross of St. John lay on the floor of the gazebo, inlaid in darker granite. “Interesting choice of design,” said Strike.

“You know,” said Robin, turning to look at the room, “people who’re manic often think they’re receiving supernatural messages. Things the sane would call coincidences.”

“I was thinking exactly that,” said Strike, turning to look at the figure of Pallas Athena, on top of the ugly mantel clock. “To a man in Talbot’s state of mental confusion, I’m guessing this room would’ve seemed crammed with astrological—”

Roy’s voice sounded in the hall outside.

“—then don’t blame me—”

The door opened and the family filed back inside.

“—if she hears things she doesn’t like!” Roy finished, addressing Cynthia, who was immediately behind him, and looked scared. Roy’s face was an unhealthy purple again, though the skin around his eyes remained a jaundiced yellow.

He seemed startled to see Strike and Robin standing at the window.

“Admiring your garden,” said Strike, as he and Robin returned to their sofa.

Roy grunted and took his seat again. He was breathing heavily.

“Apologies,” he said, after a moment or two. “You aren’t seeing the family at its best.”

“Very stressful for everyone,” said Strike, as Anna and Kim re-entered the room and resumed their seats on the sofa, where they sat holding hands. Cynthia perched herself beside them, watching Roy anxiously.

“I want to say something,” Roy told Strike. “I want to make it perfectly clear—”

“Oh for God’s sake, I’ve had one phone call with her!” said Anna.

“I’d appreciate it, Anna,” said Roy, his chest laboring, “if I could finish.”

Addressing Strike, he said,

“Oonagh Kennedy disliked me from the moment Margot and I first met. She was possessive toward Margot, and she also happened to have left the church, and she was one of those who had to make an enemy of everyone still in it. Moreover—”

“Dr. Phipps,” interrupted Strike, who could foresee the afternoon degenerating into a long row about Oonagh Kennedy. “I think you should know that when we interviewed Oonagh, she made it quite clear that the person she thought we should be concentrating our energies on is Paul Satchwell.”

For a second or two, Roy appeared unable to fully grasp what had just been said to him.

“See?” said Anna furiously. “You just implied that there was more between my mother and Satchwell than one drink. What did you mean? Or were you,” she said, and Robin heard the underlying hope, “just angry and lashing out?”

“People who insist on opening cans of worms, Anna,” said Roy, “shouldn’t complain when they get covered in slime.”

“Well, go on then,” said Anna, “spill your slime.”