“Interesting,” agreed Strike, scratching his unshaven chin. “Why isn’t Gloria emailing back herself? Too afflicted?”
“I wonder why she’s so affli—upset, I mean? Maybe,” Robin said, answering her own question, “because I contacted her through her husband’s office? But I tried through Facebook and she wouldn’t answer.”
“You know, I think it might be worth getting Anna to contact Gloria. Margot’s daughter might tug at her heartstrings better than we can. Why don’t you draft another request and send it over to Anna, see whether she’d be comfortable letting you put her name to it?”
“Good thinking,” said Robin, and he heard her scribbling a note. “Anyway, in better news, when you called me just now, I was talking to Wilma Bayliss’s second-oldest daughter, Maya. She’s the deputy headmistress. I think I’m close to persuading her to talk to us. She’s worried about her older sister’s reaction, but I’m hopeful.”
“Great,” said Strike, “I’d like to hear more about Wilma.”
“And there’s one other thing,” said Robin. “Only, you might think this is a bit of a long shot.”
“I’ve just told you I’m about to go door to door asking about a dead nutter who definitely wasn’t called Applethorpe,” said Strike, and Robin laughed.
“OK, well, I was back online last night, having another look for Steve Douthwaite, and I found this old ‘Memories of Butlin’s’ website, where ex-Redcoats chat to each other and reminisce and organize reunions and stuff—you know the kind of thing. Anyway, I couldn’t find any mention of Douthwaite, or Jacks, as he was call-ing himself in Clacton-on-Sea, but I did find—I know it’s probably totally irrelevant,” she said, “and I don’t know whether you remember, but a girl called Julie Wilkes was quoted in Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? She said she was shocked that Stevie Jacks hadn’t told his friends that he’d been caught up in a missing woman case.”
“Yeah, I remember,” said Strike.
“Well… that girl drowned,” said Robin. “Drowned at the holiday camp at the end of the 1985 holiday season. Her body was found one morning in the camp swimming pool. A group of them were discussing her death on the message boards on the website. They think she got drunk, slipped, hit her head and slid into the pool.
“Maybe it’s horrible luck,” said Robin, “but women do have a habit of dying in Douthwaite’s vicinity, don’t they? His married girlfriend kills herself, his doctor goes missing, and then there’s this co-worker who drowns… Everywhere he goes, unnatural death follows… it’s just odd.”
“Yeah, it is,” said Strike, frowning out at the rain. He was about to wonder aloud where Douthwaite had hidden himself, when Robin said in a slight rush,
“Listen, there’s something else I wanted to ask you, but it’s absolutely fine if the answer’s no. My flatmate Max—you know he’s an actor? Well, he’s just been cast in a TV thing as an ex-soldier and he doesn’t know anyone else to ask. He wondered whether you’d come over to dinner so he can ask you some questions.”
“Oh,” said Strike, surprised but not displeased. “… yeah, OK. When?”
“I know it’s short notice, but would tomorrow suit you? He really needs it soon.”
“Yeah, that should be all right,” said Strike. He was holding himself ready to travel down to St. Mawes as soon as it became practicable, but the sea wall looked unlikely to be repaired by the following day.
When Robin had hung up, Strike ordered a third mug of tea. He was procrastinating, and he knew why. If he was genuinely going to have a poke around Clerkenwell for anyone who remembered the dead man who claimed to have killed Margot Bamborough, it would help if he knew the man’s real name, and as Janice Beattie was still in Dubai, his only recourse was Irene Hickson.
The rain was as heavy as ever. Minute to minute, he postponed the call to Irene, watching traffic moving through the rippling sheets of rain, pedestrians navigating the puddle-pocked street, and thinking about the long-ago death of a young Redcoat, who’d slipped, knocked her head and drowned in a swimming pool.
Water everywhere, Bill Talbot had written in his astrological notebook. It had taken Strike some effort to decipher that particular passage. He’d concluded that Talbot was referring to a cluster of water signs apparently connected with the death of the unknown Scorpio. Why, Strike asked himself now, sipping his tea, was Scorpio a water sign? Scorpions lived on land, in heat; could they even swim? He remembered the large fish sign Talbot had used in the notebook for Irene, which at one point he’d described as “Cetus.” Picking up his mobile, Strike Googled the word.
The constellation Cetus, he read, known also as the whale, was named for a sea monster slain by Perseus when saving Andromeda from the sea god Poseidon. It resided in a region of the sky known as “The Sea,” due to the presence there of many other water-associated constellations, including Pisces, Aquarius the water bearer, and Capricorn, the fish-tailed goat.
Water everywhere.
The astrological notes were starting to tangle themselves around his thought processes, like an old net snagged in a propeller. A pernicious mixture of sense and nonsense, they mirrored, in Strike’s opinion, the appeal of astrology itself, with its flattering, comforting promise that your petty concerns were of interest to the wide universe, and that the stars or the spirit world would guide you where your own hard work and reason couldn’t.
Enough, he told himself sternly. Pressing Irene’s number on his mobile, he waited, listening to her phone ringing and visualizing it beside the bowl of pot-pourri, in the over-decorated hall, with the pink flowered wallpaper and the thick pink carpet. At exactly the point where he’d decided, with a mixture of relief and regret, that she wasn’t in, she answered.
“Double four five nine,” she trilled, making it into a kind of jingle. Joan, too, always answered her landline by telling the caller the number they’d just dialed.
“Is that Mrs. Hickson?”
“Speaking.”
“It’s Cormoran Strike here, the—”
“Oh, hello!” she yelped, sounding startled.
“I wondered whether you might be able to help me,” said Strike, taking out his notebook and opening it. “When we last met, you mentioned a patient of the St. John’s practice who you thought might’ve been called Apton or Applethorpe—”
“Oh, yes?”
“—who claimed to have—”
“—killed Margot, yes,” she interrupted him. “He stopped Dorothy in broad daylight—”
“Yes—”
“—but she thought it was a load of rubbish. I said to her, ‘What if he really did, Dorothy—?’”
“I haven’t been able to find anyone of that name who lived in the area in 1974,” said Strike loudly, “so I wondered whether you might’ve misremembered his na—”
“Possibly, yes, I might have done,” said Irene. “Well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Have you tried directory inquiries? Not directory inquiries,” she corrected herself immediately. “Online records and things.”
“It’s difficult to do a search with the wrong name,” said Strike, just managing to keep his tone free of exasperation or sarcasm. “I’m right by Clerkenwell Road at the moment. I think you said he lived there?”
“Well, he was always hanging around there, so I assumed so.”
“He was registered with your practice, wasn’t he? D’you remember his first—?”
“Um, let me think… It was something like… Gilbert, or—no, I can’t remember, I’m afraid. Applethorpe? Appleton? Apton? Everyone knew him locally by sight because he looked so peculiar: long beard, filthy, blah blah blah. And sometimes he had his kid with him,” said Irene, warming up, “really funny-looking kid—”
“Yes, you said—”
“—with massive ears. He might still be alive, the son, but he’s probably —you know…”
Strike waited, but apparently he was supposed to infer the end of the sentence by Irene’s silence.
“Probably—?” he prompted.
“Oh, you know. In a place.”
“In—?”
“A home or something!” she said, a little impatiently, as though Strike were being obtuse. “He was never going to be right, was he?—with a druggie father and a retarded mother, I don’t care what Jan says. Jan hasn’t got the same—well, it’s not her fault—her family was—different standards. And she likes to look—in front of strangers—well, we all do—but after all, you’re after the truth, aren’t you?”
Strike noted the fine needle of malice directed at her friend, glinting among the disconnected phrases.
“Have you found Duckworth?” Irene asked, jumping subject.
“Douthwaite?”
“Oh, what am I like, I keep doing that, hahaha.” However little pleased she’d been to hear from him, he was at least someone to talk to. “I’d love to know what happened to him, I really would, he was a fishy character if ever there was one. Jan played it down with you, but she was a bit disappointed when he turned out to be gay, you know. She had a soft spot for him. Well, she was very lonely when I first knew her. We used to try and set her up, Eddie and I—”