Troubled Blood

“Anna,” whispered Cynthia, and was ignored.

“All right,” said Roy. “All right, then.” He turned back to Strike and Robin. “Early in our relationship, I saw a note of Satchwell’s Margot had kept. ‘Dear Brunhilda’ it said—it was his pet name for her. The Valkyrie, you know. Margot was tall. Fair.”

Roy paused and swallowed.

“Some three weeks before she disappeared, she came home and told me she’d run into Satchwell in the street and that they’d gone for an… innocent drink.”

He cleared his throat. Cynthia poured him more tea.

“After she—after she’d disappeared, I had to go and collect her things from the St. John’s practice. Among them I found a small—”

He held his fingers some three inches apart.

“—wooden figure, a stylized Viking which she’d been keeping on her desk. Written in ink on this figure’s base was ‘Brunhilda,’ with a small heart.”

Roy took a sip of coffee.

“I’d never seen it before. Of course, it’s possible that Satchwell was carrying it around with him for years, on the off chance that he’d one day bump into Margot in the street. However, I concluded that they’d seen each other again and that he’d given her this—this token—on a subsequent occasion. All I know is, I’d never seen it before I collected her things from her surgery.”

Robin could tell that Anna wanted to suggest an alternative explanation, but it was very difficult to find a flaw in Roy’s reasoning.

“Did you tell the police what you suspected?” Strike asked.

“Yes,” said Phipps, “and I believe Satchwell claimed that there’d been no second meeting, that he’d given the figurine to Margot years before, when they were first involved. They couldn’t prove it either way, of course. But I’d never seen it before.”

Robin wondered which would be more hurtful: finding out that a spouse had hidden a love token from a former partner, and taken to displaying it many years later, or that they’d been given it recently.

“Tell me,” Strike was saying, “did Margot ever tell you anything about a ‘pillow dream’?”

“A what?” said Roy.

“Something Satchwell had told her, concerning a pillow?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Roy, suspiciously.

“Did Inspector Talbot ever happen to mention that he believed Satchwell lied about his whereabouts on the eleventh of October?”

“No,” said Roy, now looking very surprised. “I understood the police were entirely satisfied with his alibi.”

“We’ve found out,” Strike said, addressing Anna, “that Talbot kept his own separate case notes—separate from the official police record, I mean. After appearing to rule out Aries, he went back to him and started digging for more information on him.”

“‘Aries’?” repeated Anna, confused.

“Sorry,” said Strike, irritated by his own lapse into astrological speak. “Talbot’s breakdown manifested itself as a belief he could solve the case by occult means. He started using tarot cards and looking at horoscopes. He referred to everyone connected with the case by their star signs. Satchwell was born under the sign of Aries, so that’s what he’s called in Talbot’s private notes.”

There was a brief silence, and then Kim said,

“Jesus wept.”

“Astrology?” said Roy, apparently confounded.

“You see, Dad?” said Anna, thumping her knee with her fist. “If Lawson had taken over earlier—”

“Lawson was a fool,” said Roy, who nevertheless looked shaken. “An idiot! He was more interested in proving that Talbot had been inept than in finding out what happened to Margot. He insisted on going back over everything. He wanted to personally interview the doctors who’d treated me for the bleed on my knee, even though they’d given signed statements. He went back to my bank to check my accounts, in case I’d paid someone to kill your mother. He put pressure…”

He stopped and coughed, thumping his chest. Cynthia began to rise off the sofa, but Roy indicated with an angry gesture that she should stay put.

“… put pressure on Cynthia, trying to get her to admit she’d lied about me being in bed all that day, but he never found out a shred of new information about what had happened to your mother. He was a jobsworth, a bullying, unimaginative jobsworth whose priority wasn’t finding her, it was proving that Talbot messed up. Bill Talbot may have been… he clearly was,” Roy added, with a furious glance at Strike, “unwell, but the simple fact remains: nobody’s ever found a better explanation than Creed, have they?”

And with the mention of Creed, faces of the three women on the sofa fell. His very name seemed to conjure a kind of black hole in the room, into which living women had disappeared, never to be seen again; a manifestation of almost supernatural evil. There was a finality in the very mention of him: the monster, now locked away for life, untouchable, unreachable, like the women locked up and tortured in his basement. And Robin’s thoughts darted guiltily to the email she had now written, and sent, without telling Strike what she’d done, because she was afraid he might not approve.

“Do any of you know,” Roy asked abruptly, “who Kara Wolfson and Louise Tucker were?”

“Yes,” said Robin, before Strike could answer. “Louise was a teenage runaway and Kara was a nightclub hostess. Creed was suspected of killing both of them, but there was no proof.”

“Exactly,” said Roy, throwing her the kind of look he might once have given a medical student who had made a correct diagnosis. “Well, in 1978 I met up with Kara’s brother and Louise’s father.”

“I never knew you did that!” said Anna, looking shocked.

“Of course not. You were five years old,” snapped Roy. He turned back to Strike and Robin. “Louise’s father had made his own study of Creed’s life. He’d gone to every place Creed had ever lived or worked and interviewed as many people who’d admit to knowing him. He was petitioning Merlyn-Rees, the then Home Secretary, to let him go and dig in as many of these places as possible.

“The man was half-insane,” said Roy. “I saw then what living with something like this could do to you. The obsession had taken over his entire life. He wanted buildings dismantled, walls taken down, foundations exposed. Fields where Creed might once have walked, dug up. Streams dragged, which some schoolboy friend said Creed might have once gone fishing in. Tucker was shaking as he talked, trying to get me and Wolfson, who was a lorry driver, to join him in a TV campaign. We were to chain ourselves to the railings outside Downing Street, get ourselves on the news… Tucker’s marriage had split up. He seemed on bad terms with his living children. Creed had become his whole life.”

“And you didn’t want to help?” asked Anna.

“If,” said Roy quietly, “he’d had actual evidence—any solid clue that linked Margot and Creed—”

“I’ve read you thought one of the necklaces in the basement might’ve been—”

“If you will get your information from sensationalist books, Anna—”

“Because you’ve always made it so easy for me to talk to you about my mother,” said Anna. “Haven’t you?”

“Anna,” whispered Cynthia again.

“The locket they found in Creed’s basement wasn’t Margot’s, and I should know, because I gave it to her,” said Roy. His lips trembled, and he pressed them together.

“Just a couple more questions, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Strike, before Anna could say anything else. He was determined to avert further conflict if he could. “Could we talk for a moment about Wilma, the cleaner who worked at the practice and did housework for you here, as well?”

“It was all Margot’s idea, hiring her, but she wasn’t very good,” said Roy. “The woman was having some personal difficulties and Margot thought the solution was more money. After Margot disappeared, she walked out. Never turned up again. No loss. I heard afterward she’d been sacked from the practice. Pilfering, I heard.”

“Wilma told police—”

“That there was blood on the carpet upstairs, the day Margot went missing,” interrupted Roy. From Anna and Kim’s startled expressions, Robin deduced that this was entirely new information to them.

“Yes,” said Strike.

“It was menstrual,” said Roy coldly. “Margot’s period had started overnight. There were sanitary wrappers in the bathroom, my mother told me. Wilma sponged the carpet clean. This was in the spare room, at the opposite end of the house to the marital bedroom. Margot and I were sleeping apart at that time, because of,” there was a slight hesitation, “my injury.”

“Wilma also said that she thought she’d seen you—”

“Walking across the garden,” said Roy. “It was a lie. If she saw anyone, it would have been one of the stonemasons. We were finishing the gazebo at that time,” he said, pointing toward the stone folly at the end of the fishpond.

Strike made a note and turned over a page in his notebook.

“Can either of you remember Margot talking about a man called Niccolo Ricci? He was a patient at the St. John’s practice.”