Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Read online

  DI Bill Talbot, who led the investigation into Bamborough’s disappearance, was convinced from an early stage that the young doctor had fallen victim to the serial killer known to be at large in the south east area. However, no trace of Bamborough was discovered in the basement flat where Dennis Creed imprisoned, tortured and killed seven other women.

  Creed’s trademark of beheading the corpses of his victims…

  3

  But now of Britomart it here doth neede,

  The hard aduentures and strange haps to tell

  Edmund Spenser

  The Faerie Queene

  Had her day gone as planned, Robin Ellacott would have been tucked up in bed in her rented flat in Earl’s Court at this moment, fresh from a long bath, her laundry done, reading a new novel. Instead, she was sitting in her ancient Land Rover, chilly from sheer exhaustion despite the mild night, still wearing the clothes she’d put on at four-thirty that morning, as she watched the lit window of a Pizza Express in Torquay. Her face in the wing mirror was pale, her blue eyes bloodshot, and the strawberry blonde hair currently hidden under a black beanie hat needed a wash.

  From time to time, Robin dipped her hand into a bag of almonds sitting on the passenger seat beside her. It was only too easy to fall into a diet of fast food and chocolate when you were running surveillance, to snack more often than needed out of sheer boredom. Robin was trying to eat healthily in spite of her unsociable hours, but the almonds had long since ceased to be appetizing, and she craved nothing more than a bit of the pizza she could see an overweight couple enjoying in the restaurant window. She could almost taste it, even though the air around her was tangy with sea salt and underlain by the perpetual fug of old Wellington boots and wet dog that imbued the Land Rover’s ancient fabric seats.

  The object of her surveillance, whom she and Strike had nicknamed “Tufty” for his badly fitting toupee, was currently out of view. He’d disappeared into the pizzeria an hour and a half previously with three companions, one of whom, a teenager with his arm in a cast, was visible if Robin craned her head sideways into the space above the front passenger seat. This she did every five minutes or so, to check on the progress of the foursome’s meal. The last time she had looked, ice cream was being delivered to the table. It couldn’t, surely, be much longer.

  Robin was fighting a feeling of depression which she knew was at least partly down to utter exhaustion, to the stiffness all over her body from many hours in the driving seat, and to the loss of her long-awaited day off. With Strike unavoidably absent from the agency for an entire week, she’d now worked a twenty-day stretch without breaks. Their best subcontractor, Sam Barclay, had been supposed to take over the Tufty job today in Scotland, but Tufty hadn’t flown to Glasgow as expected. Instead, he’d taken a surprise detour to Torquay, leaving Robin with no choice but to follow him.

  There were other reasons for her low spirits, of course, one of which she acknowledged to herself; the other, she felt angry with herself for dwelling on.

  The first, admissible, reason was her ongoing divorce, which was becoming more contentious by the week. Following Robin’s discovery of her estranged husband’s affair, they’d had one last cold and bitter meeting, coincidentally in a Pizza Express near Matthew’s place of work, where they’d agreed to seek a no-fault divorce following a two-year separation. Robin was too honest not to admit that she, too, bore responsibility for the failure of their relationship. Matthew might have been unfaithful, but she knew that she’d never fully committed to the marriage, that she’d prioritized her job over Matthew on almost every occasion and that, by the end, she had been waiting for a reason to leave. The affair had been a shock, but a release, too.

  However, during the twelve months that had elapsed since her pizza with Matthew, Robin had come to realize that far from seeking a “no-fault” resolution, her ex-husband saw the end of the marriage as entirely Robin’s responsibility and was determined to make her pay, both emotionally and financially, for her offense. The joint bank account, which held the proceeds of the sale of their old house, had been frozen while the lawyers wrangled over how much Robin could reasonably expect when she had been earning so much less than Matthew, and had—it had been strongly hinted in the last letter—married him purely with a view to obtaining a pecuniary advantage she could never have achieved alone.

  Every letter from Matthew’s lawyer caused Robin additional stress, rage and misery. She hadn’t needed her own lawyer to point out that Matthew appeared to be trying to force her to spend money she didn’t have on legal wrangling, to run down the clock and her resources until she walked away with as close to nothing as he could manage.

  “I’ve never known a childless divorce be so contentious,” her lawyer had told her, words that brought no comfort.

  Matthew continued to occupy almost as much space in Robin’s head as when they’d been married. She thought she could read his thoughts across the miles and silence that separated them in their widely divergent new lives. He’d always been a bad loser. He had to emerge from this embarrassingly short marriage the winner, by walking away with all the money, and stigmatizing Robin as the sole reason for its failure.

  All of this was ample reason for her present mood, of course, but then there was the other reason, the one that was inadmissible, that Robin was annoyed with herself for fretting about.

  It had happened the previous day, at the office. Saul Morris, the agency’s newest subcontractor, was owed his month’s expenses, so, after seeing Tufty safely back into the marital home in Windsor, Robin had driven back to Denmark Street to pay Saul.

  Morris had been working for the agency for six weeks. He was an ex-police officer, an undeniably handsome man, with black hair and bright blue eyes, though something about him set Robin’s teeth on edge. He had a habit of softening his voice when he spoke to her; arch asides and over-personal comments peppered their most mundane interactions, and no double entendre went unmarked if Morris was in the room. Robin rued the day when he’d found out that both of them were currently going through divorces, because he seemed to think this gave him fertile new ground for assumed intimacy.

  She’d hoped to get back from Windsor before Pat Chauncey, the agency’s new office manager, left, but it was ten past six by the time Robin climbed the stairs and found Morris waiting for her outside the locked door.

  “Sorry,” Robin said, “traffic was awful.”

  She’d paid Morris back in cash from the new safe, then told him briskly she needed to get home, but he clung on like gum stuck in her hair, telling her all about his ex-wife’s latest late-night texts. Robin tried to unite politeness and coolness until the phone rang on her old desk. She’d ordinarily have let it go to voicemail, but so keen was she to curtail Morris’s conversation that she said,

  “I’ve got to get this, sorry. Have a nice evening,” and picked up the receiver.

  “Strike Detective Agency, Robin speaking.”

  “Hi, Robin,” said a slightly husky female voice. “Is the boss there?”

  Given that Robin had only spoken to Charlotte Campbell once, three years previously, it was perhaps surprising that she’d known instantly who was on the line. Robin had analyzed these few words of Charlotte’s to a perhaps ludicrous degree since. Robin had detected an undertone of laughter, as though Charlotte found Robin amusing. The easy use of Robin’s first name and the description of Strike as “the boss” had also come in for their share of rumination.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Robin had said, reaching for a pen while her heart beat a little faster. “Can I take a message?”

  “Could you ask him to call Charlotte Campbell? I’ve got something he wants. He knows my number.”

  “Will do,” said Robin.

  “Thanks very much,” Charlotte had said, still sounding amused. “Bye, then.”

  Robin had dutifully written down “Charlotte Campbell called, has something for you” and placed the message on Strike’s desk.

  Charlott
e was Strike’s ex-fiancée. Their engagement had been terminated three years previously, on the very day that Robin had come to work at the agency as a temp. Though Strike was far from communicative on the subject, Robin knew that they’d been together for sixteen years (“on and off,” as Strike tended to emphasize, because the relationship had faltered many times before its final termination), that Charlotte had become engaged to her present husband just two weeks after Strike had left her and that Charlotte was now the mother of twins.

  But this wasn’t all Robin knew, because after leaving her husband, Robin had spent five weeks living in the spare room of Nick and Ilsa Herbert, who were two of Strike’s best friends. Robin and Ilsa had struck up their own friendship during that time, and still met regularly for drinks and coffees. Ilsa made very little secret of the fact that she hoped and believed that Strike and Robin would one day, and preferably soon, realize that they were “made for each other.” Although Robin regularly asked Ilsa to desist from her broad hints, asserting that she and Strike were perfectly happy with a friendship and working relationship, Ilsa remained cheerfully unconvinced.

  Robin was very fond of Ilsa, but her pleas for her new friend to forget any idea of matchmaking between herself and Strike were genuine. She was mortified by the thought that Strike might think she herself was complicit in Ilsa’s regular attempts to engineer foursomes that increasingly had the appearance of double dates. Strike had declined the last two proposed outings of this type and, while the agency’s current workload certainly made any kind of social life difficult, Robin had the uncomfortable feeling that he was well aware of Ilsa’s ulterior motive. Looking back on her own brief married life, Robin was sure she’d never been guilty of treating single people as she now found herself treated by Ilsa: with a cheerful lack of concern for their sensibilities, and sometimes ham-fisted attempts to manage their love lives.

  One of the ways in which Ilsa attempted to draw Robin out on the subject of Strike was to tell her all about Charlotte, and here, Robin felt guilty, because she rarely shut the Charlotte conversations down, even though she never left one of them without feeling as though she had just gorged on junk food: uncomfortable, and wishing she could resist the craving for more.

  She knew, for instance, about the many me-or-the-army ultimatums, two of the suicide attempts (“The one on Arran wasn’t a proper one,” said Ilsa scathingly. “Pure manipulation”) and about the ten days’ enforced stay in the psychiatric clinic. She’d heard stories that Ilsa gave titles like cheap thrillers: the Night of the Bread Knife, the Incident of the Black Lace Dress and the Blood-Stained Note. She knew that in Ilsa’s opinion, Charlotte was bad, not mad, and that the worst rows Ilsa and her husband Nick had ever had were on the subject of Charlotte, “and she’d have bloody loved knowing that, too,” Ilsa had added.

  And now Charlotte was phoning the office, asking Strike to call her back, and Robin, sitting outside the Pizza Express, hungry and exhausted, was pondering the phone call yet again, much as a tongue probes a mouth ulcer. If she was phoning the office, Charlotte clearly wasn’t aware that Strike was in Cornwall with his terminally ill aunt, which didn’t suggest regular contact between them. On the other hand, Charlotte’s slightly amused tone had seemed to hint at an alliance between herself and Strike.

  Robin’s mobile, which was lying on the passenger seat beside the bag of almonds, buzzed. Glad of any distraction, she picked it up and saw a text message from Strike.

  Are you awake?

  Robin texted back:

  No

  As she’d expected, the mobile rang immediately.

  “Well, you shouldn’t be,” said Strike, without preamble. “You must be knackered. What’s it been, three weeks straight on Tufty?”

  “I’m still on him.”

  “What?” said Strike, sounding displeased. “You’re in Glasgow? Where’s Barclay?”

  “In Glasgow. He was ready in position, but Tufty didn’t get on the plane. He drove down to Torquay instead. He’s having pizza right now. I’m outside the restaurant.”

  “The hell’s he doing in Torquay, when the mistress is in Scotland?”

  “Visiting his original family,” said Robin, wishing she could see Strike’s face as she delivered the next bit of news. “He’s a bigamist.”

  Her announcement was greeted with total silence.

  “I was outside the house in Windsor at six,” said Robin, “expecting to follow him to Stansted, see him safely onto the plane and let Barclay know he was on the way, but he didn’t go to the airport. He rushed out of the house looking panicky, drove to a lock-up, took his case inside and came out with an entirely different set of luggage and minus his toupee. Then he drove all the way down here.

  “Our client in Windsor’s about to find out she’s not legally ­married,” said Robin. “Tufty’s had this wife in Torquay for twenty years. I’ve been talking to the neighbors. I pretended I was doing a survey. One of the women along the street was at the original wedding. Tufty travels a lot for business, she said, but he’s a lovely man. Devoted to his sons.

  “There are two boys,” Robin continued, because Strike’s stunned silence continued unabated, “students, both in their late teens and both the absolute spit of him. One of them came off his motorbike yesterday—I got all this out of the neighbor—he’s got his arm in a cast and looks quite bruised and cut up. Tufty must’ve got news of the accident, so he came haring down here instead of going to Scotland.

  “Tufty goes by the name of Edward Campion down here, not John—turns out John’s his middle name, I’ve been searching the online records. He and the first wife and sons live in a really nice villa, view of the sea, massive garden.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Strike. “So our pregnant friend in Glasgow—”

  “—is the least of Mrs.-Campion-in-Windsor’s worries,” said Robin. “He’s leading a triple life. Two wives and a mistress.”

  “And he looks like a balding baboon. There’s hope for all of us. Did you say he’s having dinner right now?”

  “Pizza with the wife and kids. I’m parked outside. I didn’t manage to get pictures of him with the sons earlier, and I want to, because they’re a total giveaway. Mini-Tuftys, just like the two in Windsor. Where d’you think he’s been pretending to have been?”

  “Oil rig?” suggested Strike. “Abroad? Middle East? Maybe that’s why he’s so keen on keeping his tan topped up.”

  Robin sighed.

  “The client’s going to be shattered.”

  “So’s the mistress in Scotland,” said Strike. “That baby’s due any minute.”

  “His taste’s amazingly consistent,” said Robin. “If you lined them up side by side, the Torquay wife, the Windsor wife and the mistress in Glasgow, they’d look like the same woman at twenty-year intervals.”

  “Where are you planning to sleep?”

  “Travelodge or a B&B,” said Robin, yawning again, “if I can find anything vacant at the height of the holiday season. I’d drive straight back to London overnight, but I’m exhausted. I’ve been awake since four, and that’s on top of a ten-hour day yesterday.”

  “No driving and no sleeping in the car,” said Strike. “Get a room.”

  “How’s Joan?” asked Robin. “We can handle the workload if you want to stay in Cornwall a bit longer.”

  “She won’t sit still while we’re all there. Ted agrees she needs some quiet. I’ll come back down in a couple of weeks.”

  “So, were you calling for an update on Tufty?”

  “Actually, I was calling about something that just happened. I’ve just left the pub…”

  In a few succinct sentences, Strike described the encounter with Margot Bamborough’s daughter.

  “I’ve just looked her up,” he said. “Margot Bamborough, twenty-nine-year-old doctor, married, one-year-old daughter. Walked out of her GP practice in Clerkenwell at the end of a day’s work, said she was going to have a quick drink with a female friend before heading home. The pub
was only five minutes’ walk away. The friend waited, but Margot never arrived and was never seen again.”

  There was a pause. Robin, whose eyes were still fixed on the window of the pizza restaurant, said,

  “And her daughter thinks you’re going to find out what happened, nearly four decades later?”

  “She seemed to be putting a lot of store on the coincidence of spotting me in the boozer right after the medium told her she’d get a ‘leading.’”

  “Hmm,” said Robin. “And what do you think the chances are of finding out what happened after this length of time?”

  “Slim to non-existent,” admitted Strike. “On the other hand, the truth’s out there. People don’t just vaporize.”

  Robin could hear a familiar note in his voice that indicated rumination on questions and possibilities.

  “So you’re meeting the daughter again tomorrow?”

  “Can’t hurt, can it?” said Strike.

  Robin didn’t answer.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, with a trace of defensive­ness. “Emotionally overwrought client—medium—situation ripe for exploitation.”

  “I’m not suggesting you’d exploit it—”

  “Might as well hear her out, then, mightn’t I? Unlike a lot of people, I wouldn’t take her money for nothing. And once I’d exhausted all avenues—”

  “I know you,” said Robin. “The less you found out, the more interested you’d get.”

  “Think I’d have her wife to deal with unless I got results within a reasonable period. They’re a gay couple,” he elaborated. “The wife’s a psychol—”

  “Cormoran, I’ll call you back,” said Robin, and without waiting for his answer, she cut the call and dropped the mobile back onto the passenger seat.

  Tufty had just ambled out of the restaurant, followed by his wife and sons. Smiling and talking, they turned their steps toward their car, which lay five behind where Robin sat in the Land Rover. Raising her camera, she took a burst of pictures as the family drew nearer.