Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Read online

  Strike drank and said nothing.

  “You get on great, she says,” said Polworth, watching him.

  “Yeah, we do,” said Strike.

  Polworth waited, eyebrows raised and looking expectant.

  “It’d fuck everything up,” said Strike. “I’m not risking the agency.”

  “Right,” said Polworth. “Tempted, though?”

  There was a short pause. Strike carefully kept his gaze averted from the dark woman and her companion, who he was sure were discussing him.

  “There might’ve been moments,” he admitted, “when it crossed my mind. But she’s going through a nasty divorce, we spend half our lives together as it is and I like having her as a business partner.”

  Given their longstanding friendship, the fact that they’d already clashed over politics and that it was Polworth’s birthday, he was trying not to let any hint of resentment at this line of questioning show. Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution. The Polworths, for instance, seemed to exist in a permanent state of mutual animosity. Strike had more often heard Penny refer to her husband as “that twat” than by his name, and many was the night when Polworth had regaled his friends in happy detail of the ways in which he’d managed to pursue his own ambitions and interests at the expense of, or over the protests of, his wife. Both seemed happiest and most relaxed in the company of their own sex, and on those rare occasions when Strike had enjoyed hospitality at their home, the gatherings always seemed to follow a pattern of natural segregation, the women congregating in one area of the home, the men in another.

  “And what happens when Robin wants kids?” asked Polworth.

  “Don’t think she’s does,” said Strike. “She likes the job.”

  “They all say that,” said Polworth dismissively. “What age is she now?”

  “Ten years younger than us.”

  “She’ll want kids,” said Polworth confidently. “They all do. And it happens quicker for women. They’re up against the clock.”

  “Well, she won’t be getting kids with me. I don’t want them. Anyway, the older I get, the less I think I’m the marrying kind.”

  “Thought that myself, mate,” said Polworth. “But then I realized I’d got it all wrong. Told you how it happened, didn’t I? How I ended up proposing to Penny?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Strike.

  “I never told you about the whole Tolstoy thing?” asked Polworth, surprised at this omission.

  Strike, who’d been about to drink, lowered his glass in amazement. Since primary school, Polworth, who had a razor-sharp intelligence but despised any form of learning he couldn’t put to immediate, practical use, had shunned all printed material except technical manuals. Misinterpreting Strike’s expression, Polworth said,

  “Tolstoy. He’s a writer.”

  “Yeah,” said Strike. “Thanks. How does Tolstoy—?”

  “Telling you, aren’t I? I’d split up with Penny the second time. She’d been banging on about getting engaged, and I wasn’t feeling it. So I’m in this bar, telling my mate Chris about how I’m sick of her telling me she wants a ring—you remember Chris? Big guy with a lisp. You met him at Rozwyn’s christening.

  “Anyway, there’s this pissed older guy at the bar on his own, bit of a ponce in his corduroy jacket, wavy hair, and he’s pissing me off, to be honest, because I can tell he’s listening, and I ask him what the fuck he’s looking at and he looks me straight in the eye,” said Polworth, “and he says: ‘You can only carry a weight and use your hands, if you strap the weight to your back. Marry, and you get the use of your hands back. Don’t marry, and you’ll never have your hands free for anything else. Look at Mazankov, at Krupov. They’ve ruined their careers for the sake of women.’

  “I thought Mazankov and Krupov were mates of his. Asked him what the fuck he was telling me for. Then he says he’s quoting this writer, Tolstoy.

  “And we got talking and I tell you this, Diddy, it was a life-changing moment. The lightbulb went on,” said Polworth, pointing at the air over his balding head. “He made me see it clearly. The male predicament, mate. There I am, trying to get my hole on a Thursday night, heading home alone again, poorer, bored shitless; I thought of the money I’ve spent chasing gash, and the hassle, and whether I want to be watching porn alone at forty, and I thought, this is the whole point. What marriage is for. Am I going to do better than Penny? Am I enjoying talking shit to women in bars? Penny and me get on all right. I could do a hell of a lot worse. She’s not bad-looking. I’d have my hole already at home, waiting for me, wouldn’t I?”

  “Pity she can’t hear this,” said Strike. “She’d fall in love with you all over again.”

  “I shook that poncey bloke’s hand,” said Polworth, ignoring Strike’s sarcasm. “Made him write me down the name of the book and all. Went straight out that bar, got a taxi to Penny’s flat, banged on the door, woke her up. She was fucking livid. Thought I’d come round because I was pissed, couldn’t get anything better and wanted a shag. I said, ‘No, you dozy cow, I’m here because I wanna marry you.’”

  “And I’ll tell you the name of the book,” said Polworth. “Anna Karenina.” He drained his pint. “It’s shit.”

  Strike laughed.

  Polworth belched loudly, then checked his watch. He was a man who knew a good exit line and had no more time for prolonged leave-taking than for Russian literature.

  “Gonna get going, Diddy,” he said, getting to his feet. “If I’m back before half eleven, I’m on for a birthday blowie—which is the whole point I’m making, mate. Whole point.”

  Grinning, Strike accepted Polworth’s handshake. Polworth told Strike to convey his love to Joan and to call him next time he was down, then squeezed his way out of the pub, and disappeared from view.

  2

  Heart, that is inly hurt, is greatly eas’d

  With hope of thing, that may allay his Smart…

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Still grinning at Polworth’s story, Strike now realized that the dark woman at the bar was showing signs of wanting to approach him. Her spectacled blonde companion appeared to be advising against it. Strike finished his pint, gathered up his wallet, checked his cigarettes were still in his pocket and, with the assistance of the wall beside him, stood up, making sure his balance was everything it should be before trying to walk. His prosthetic leg was occasionally uncooperative after four pints. Having assured himself that he could balance perfectly well, he set off toward the exit, giving unsmiling nods to those few locals whom he could not ignore without causing offense, and reached the warm darkness outside without being importuned.

  The wide, uneven stone steps that led down toward the bay were still crowded with drinkers and smokers. Strike wove his way between them, pulling out his cigarettes as he went.

  It was a balmy August night and tourists were still strolling around the picturesque seafront. Strike was facing a fifteen-minute walk, part of it up a steep slope, back to his aunt and uncle’s house. On a whim he turned right, crossed the street and headed for the high stone wall separating the car park and ferry point from the sea. Leaning against it, he lit a cigarette and stared out over the smoke gray and silver ocean, becoming just one more tourist in the darkness, free to smoke quietly without having to answer questions about cancer, deliberately postponing the moment when he’d have to return to the uncomfortable sofa that had been his bed for the past six nights.

  On arrival, Strike had been told that he, the childless single man and ex-soldier, wouldn’t mind sleeping in the sitting room “because you’ll sleep anywhere.” She’d been determined to shut down the possibility, mooted by Strike on the phone, that he might check into a bed and breakfast rather than stretch the house to capacity. Strike’s visits were rare, especially in conjunction with his sister and nephews, and Joan wanted to enjoy his presence t
o the full, wanted to feel that she was, once again, the provider and nurturer, currently weakened by her first round of chemotherapy though she might be.

  So the tall and heavy Strike, who’d have been far happier on a camp bed, had lain down uncomplainingly every night on the slippery, unyielding mass of satin-covered horsehair, to be woken each morning by his young nephews, who routinely forgot that they had been asked to wait until eight o’clock before barging into the sitting room. At least Jack had the decency to whisper apologies every time he realized that he’d woken his uncle. The eldest, Luke, clattered and shouted his way down the narrow stairs every morning and merely sniggered as he dashed past Strike on his way to the kitchen.

  Luke had broken Strike’s brand-new headphones, which the detective had felt obliged to pretend didn’t matter in the slightest. His eldest nephew had also thought it amusing to run off into the garden with Strike’s prosthetic leg one morning, and to stand waving it at his uncle through the window. When Luke finally brought it back, Strike, whose bladder had been very full and who was incapable of hopping up the steep stairs to the only toilet, had delivered Luke a quiet telling-off that had left the boy unusually subdued for most of the morning.

  Meanwhile, Joan told Strike every morning, “you slept well,” without a hint of inquiry. Joan had a lifelong habit of subtly pressurizing the family into telling her what she wanted to hear. In the days when Strike was sleeping in his office and facing imminent insolvency (facts that he had admittedly not shared with his aunt and uncle), Joan had told him happily “you’re doing awfully well” over the phone, and it had felt, as it always did, unnecessarily combative to challenge her optimistic declaration. After his lower leg had been blown off in Iraq, a tearful Joan had stood at his hospital bed as he tried to focus through a fog of morphine, and told him “You feel comfortable, though. You aren’t in pain.” He loved his aunt, who’d raised him for significant chunks of his childhood, but extended periods in her company made him feel stifled and suffocated. Her insistence on the smooth passing of counterfeit social coin from hand to hand, while uncomfortable truths were ignored and denied, wore him out.

  Something gleamed in the water—sleek silver and a pair of soot-black eyes: a seal was turning lazily just below Strike. He watched its revolutions in the water, wondering whether it could see him and, for reasons he couldn’t have explained, his thoughts slid toward his partner in the detective agency.

  He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.

  He checked his watch. She was having a day off, but there was an outside chance she’d still be awake and he had a decent pretext for texting: Saul Morris, their newest subcontractor, was owed his month’s expenses, and Strike had left no instructions for sorting this out. If he texted about Morris, there was a good chance that Robin would call him back to find out how Joan was.

  “Excuse me?” a woman said nervously, from behind him.

  Strike knew without turning that it was the dark woman from the pub. She had a Home Counties accent and her tone contained that precise mixture of apology and excitement that he usually encountered in those who wanted to talk about his detective triumphs.

  “Yes?” he said, turning to face the speaker.

  Her blonde friend had come with her: or perhaps, thought Strike, they were more than friends. An indefinable sense of closeness seemed to bind the two women, whom he judged to be around forty. They wore jeans and shirts and the blonde in particular had the slightly weather-beaten leanness that suggests weekends spent hill walking or cycling. She was what some would call a “handsome” woman, by which they meant that she was bare faced. High-cheekboned, bespectacled, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she also looked stern.

  The dark woman was slighter in build. Her large gray eyes shone palely in her long face. She had an air of intensity, even of fanaticism, about her in the half-light, like a medieval martyr.

  “Are you… are you Cormoran Strike?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, his tone uninviting.

  “Oh,” she breathed, with an agitated little hand gesture. “This is—this is so strange. I know you probably don’t want to be—I’m sorry to bother you, I know you’re off duty,” she gave a nervous laugh, “but—my name’s Anna, by the way—I wondered,” she took a deep breath, “whether I could come—whether I could come and talk to you about my mother.”

  Strike said nothing.

  “She disappeared,” Anna went on. “Margot Bamborough’s her name. She was a GP. She finished work one evening, walked out of her practice and nobody’s seen her since.”

  “Have you contacted the police?” asked Strike.

  Anna gave an odd little laugh.

  “Oh yes—I mean, they knew—they investigated. But they never found anything. She disappeared,” said Anna, “in 1974.”

  The dark water lapped the stone and Strike thought he could hear the seal clearing its damp nostrils. Three drunk youths went weaving past, on their way to the ferry point. Strike wondered whether they knew the last ferry had been and gone at six.

  “I just,” said the woman in a rush, “you see—last week—I went to see a medium.”

  Fuck, thought Strike.

  He’d occasionally bumped up against the purveyors of paranormal insights during his detective career and felt nothing but contempt for them: leeches, or so he saw them, of money from the pockets of the deluded and the desperate.

  A motorboat came chugging across the water, its engine grinding the night’s stillness to pieces. Apparently this was the lift the three drunk boys were waiting for. They now began laughing and elbowing each other at the prospect of imminent seasickness.

  “The medium told me I’d get a ‘leading,’” Anna pressed on. “She told me, ‘You’re going to find out what happened to your mother. You’ll get a leading and you must follow it. The way will become clear very soon.’ So when I saw you just now in the pub —Cormoran Strike, in the Victory—it just seemed such an incredible coincidence and I thought—I had to speak to you.”

  A soft breeze ruffled Anna’s dark, silver-streaked hair. The blonde said crisply,

  “Come on, Anna, we should get going.”

  She put an arm around the other’s shoulders. Strike saw a wedding ring shining there.

  “We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she told Strike.

  With gentle pressure, the blonde attempted to turn Anna away. The latter sniffed and muttered,

  “Sorry. I… probably had too much wine.”

  “Hang on.”

  Strike often resented his own incurable urge to know, his inability to leave an itch unscratched, especially when he was as tired and aggravated as he was tonight. But 1974 was the year of his own birth. Margot Bamborough had been missing as long as he’d been alive. He couldn’t help it: he wanted to know more.

  “Are you on holiday here?”

  “Yes.” It was the blonde who had spoken. “Well, we’ve got a second home in Falmouth. Our permanent base is in London.”

  “I’m heading back there tomorrow,” said Strike (What the fuck are you doing? asked a voice in his head), “but I could probably swing by and see you tomorrow morning in Falmouth, if you’re free.”

  “Really?” gasped Anna. He hadn’t seen her eyes fill with tears, but he knew they must have done, because she now wiped them. “Oh, that’d be great. Thank you. Thank you! I’ll give you the address.”

  The blonde showed no enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing Strike again. However, when Anna started fumbling through her handbag, she said, “It’s all right, I’ve got a card,” pulled a wallet out of her back pocket, and handed Strike a business card bearing the name “Dr. Kim Sullivan, BPS Registered Psychologist,” with an address in Falmo
uth printed below it.

  “Great,” said Strike, inserting it into his own wallet. “Well, I’ll see you both tomorrow morning, then.”

  “I’ve actually got a work conference call in the morning,” said Kim. “I’ll be free by twelve. Will that be too late for you?”

  The implication was clear: you’re not speaking to Anna without me present.

  “No, that’ll be fine,” said Strike. “I’ll see you at twelve, then.”

  “Thank you so much!” said Anna.

  Kim reached for Anna’s hand and the two women walked away. Strike watched them pass under a street light before turning back toward the sea. The motorboat carrying the young drinkers had now chugged away again. It already looked tiny, dwarfed by the wide bay, the roar of its engine gradually deadened into a distant buzz.

  Forgetting momentarily about texting Robin, Strike lit a second cigarette, took out his mobile and Googled Margot Bamborough.

  Two different photographs appeared. The first was a grainy head-and-shoulders shot of an attractive, even-featured face with wide-set eyes, her wavy, dark blonde hair center-parted. She was wearing a long-lapelled blouse over what appeared to be a knitted tank top.

  The second picture showed the same woman looking younger and wearing the famous black corset of a Playboy Bunny, accessorized with black ears, black stockings and white tail. She was holding a tray of what looked like cigarettes, and smiling at the camera. Another young woman, identically dressed, stood beaming behind her, slightly bucktoothed and curvier than her willowy friend.

  Strike scrolled down until he read a famous name in conjunction with Margot’s.

  … young doctor and mother, Margaret “Margot” Bamborough, whose disappearance on 11 October 1974 shared certain features with Creed’s abductions of Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman.

  Bamborough, who worked at the St. John’s Medical Practice in Clerkenwell, had arranged to meet a female friend in the local Three Kings pub at six o’clock. She never arrived.

  Several witnesses saw a small white van driving at speed in the area around the time that Bamborough would have been heading for her rendezvous.