Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 8

  “Give it back!” said Mrs. Tufty, wild-eyed and ready to fight. “The bastard… the bastard… I want to talk to him… give it back!”

  “Bad idea,” said Strike, putting coffee and brandy in front of her. “He’s already proven he’s adept at hiding money and assets from you. You need a shit-hot lawyer.”

  They remained with the client until her brother, a suited HR executive, arrived. He was annoyed that he’d been asked to leave work early, and so slow at grasping what he was being told that Strike became almost irate and Robin felt it necessary to intervene to stop a row.

  “Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, as they drove back toward London. “He was already married to someone else when he married your sister. How hard is that to grasp?”

  “Very hard,” said Robin, an edge to her voice. “People don’t expect to find themselves in these kinds of situations.”

  “D’you think they heard me when I asked them not to tell the press we were involved?”

  “No,” said Robin.

  She was right. A fortnight after they’d visited Windsor, they woke to find several tabloids carrying front-page exposés of Tufty and his three women, a picture of Strike in all the inside pages and his name in one of the headlines. He was news in his own right now, and the juxtaposition of famous detective and squat, balding, wealthy man who’d managed to run two families and a mistress was irresistible.

  Strike had only ever given evidence at noteworthy court cases while sporting the full beard that grew conveniently fast when he needed it, and the picture the press used most often was an old one that showed him in uniform. Nevertheless, it was an ongoing battle to remain as inconspicuous as his chosen profession demanded, and being badgered for comment at his offices was an inconvenience he could do without. The storm of publicity was prolonged when both Mrs. Tuftys formed an offensive alliance against their estranged husband. Showing an unforeseen taste for publicity, they not only granted a women’s magazine a joint interview, but appeared on several daytime television programs together to discuss their long deception, their shock, their newfound friendship, their intention to make Tufty rue the day he’d met either of them and to issue a thinly veiled warning to the pregnant mistress in Glasgow (who, astonishingly, seemed disposed to stand by Tufty) that she had another think coming if she imagined he’d have two farthings to rub together once his wives had finished with him.

  September proceeded, cool and unsettled. Strike called Lucy to say sorry for being rude about her sons, but she remained cold even after the apology, doubtless because he’d merely expressed regret for voicing his opinion out loud, and hadn’t retracted it. Strike was relieved to discover that her boys had weekend sporting fixtures now that school had started again, which meant he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa on the next visit to St. Mawes, and could devote himself to Ted and Joan without the distraction of Lucy’s tense, accusatory presence.

  Though as desperate to cook for him as ever, his aunt was already enfeebled by the chemotherapy. It was painful to watch her dragging herself around the kitchen, but she wouldn’t sit down, even when Ted implored her to do so. On Saturday night, his uncle broke down after Joan had gone to bed, and sobbed into Strike’s shoulder. Ted had once seemed an unperturbable, invulnerable bastion of strength to his nephew, and Strike, who could normally sleep under almost any conditions, lay awake past two in the morning, staring into the darkness that was deeper by far than a London night, wondering whether he should stay longer, and despising himself for deciding that it was right that he should return to London.

  In truth, the agency was so busy that he felt guilty about the burden it was placing on Robin and his subcontractors by taking a long weekend in Cornwall. In addition to the five open cases still on the agency’s books, he and Robin were juggling increased management demands made by the expanded workforce, and negotiating a year’s extension on the office lease with the developer who’d bought their building. They were also trying, though so far without luck, to persuade one of the agency’s police contacts to find and hand over the forty-year-old file on Margot Bamborough’s disappearance. Morris was ex-Met, as was Andy Hutchins, their most longstanding subcontractor, a quiet, saturnine man whose MS was thankfully in remission, and both had tried to call in favors from former col­leagues as well, but so far, responses to the agency’s requests had ranged from “mice have probably had it” to “fuck off, Strike, I’m busy.”

  One rainy afternoon, while tailing Shifty through the City, trying not to limp too obviously and inwardly cursing the second pavement seller of cheap umbrellas who’d got in his way, Strike’s mobile rang. Expecting to be given another problem to sort out, he was caught off guard when the caller said,

  “Hi, Strike. George Layborn here. Heard you’re looking at the Bamborough case again?”

  Strike had only met DI Layborn once before, and while it had been in the context of a case where Strike and Robin had given material assistance to the Met, he hadn’t considered their association close enough to ask Layborn for help on getting the Bamborough file.

  “Hi, George. Yeah, you heard right,” said Strike, watching Shifty turn into a wine bar.

  “Well, I could meet you tomorrow evening, if you fancy it. Feathers, six o’clock?” said Layborn.

  So Strike asked Barclay to swap jobs, and headed to the pub near Scotland Yard the following evening, where he found Layborn already at the bar, waiting for him. A paunchy, gray-haired, middle-aged man, Layborn bought both of them pints of London Pride, and they removed themselves to a corner table.

  “My old man worked the Bamborough case, under Bill Talbot,” Layborn told Strike. “He told me all about it. What’ve you got so far?”

  “Nothing. I’ve been looking back at old press reports, and I’m trying to trace people who worked at the practice she disappeared from. Not much else I can do until I see the police file, but nobody’s been able to help with that so far.”

  Layborn, who had demonstrated a fondness for colorfully obscene turns of phrase on their only previous encounter, seemed oddly subdued tonight.

  “It was a fucking mess, the Bamborough investigation,” he said quietly. “Anyone told you about Talbot yet?”

  “Go on.”

  “He went off his rocker,” said Layborn. “Proper mental breakdown. He’d been going funny before he took on the case, but you know, it was the seventies—looking after the workforce’s mental health was for poofs. He’d been a good officer in his day, mind you. A couple of junior officers noticed he was acting odd, but when they raised it, they were told to eff off.

  “He’d been heading up the Bamborough case six months before his wife called an ambulance in the middle of the night and got him sectioned. He got his pension, but it was too late for the case. He died a good ten years ago, but I heard he never got over fucking up the investigation. Once he recovered he was mortified about how he’d behaved.”

  “How was that?”

  “Putting too much stock in his own intuitions, didn’t take evidence properly, had no interest in talking to witnesses if they didn’t fit his theory—”

  “Which was that Creed abducted her, right?”

  “Exactly,” said Layborn. “Although Creed was still called the Essex Butcher back then, because he dumped the first couple of bodies in Epping Forest and Chigwell.” Layborn took a long pull on his pint. “They found most of Jackie Aylett in an industrial bin. He’s an animal, that one. Animal.”

  “Who took over the case after Talbot?”

  “Bloke called Lawson, Ken Lawson,” said Layborn, “but he’d lost six months, the trail had gone cold and he’d inherited a right balls-up. Added to which, she was unlucky in her timing, Margot Bamborough,” Layborn continued. “You know what happened a month after she vanished?”

  “What?”

  “Lord Lucan disappeared,” said Layborn. “You try and keep a missing GP on the front pages after a peer of the realm’s nanny gets bludgeoned to death and he goes on the run. They’d al
ready used the Bunny Girl pictures—did you know Bamborough was a Bunny Girl?”

  “Yeah,” said Strike.

  “Helped fund her medical degree,” said Layborn, “but according to my old man, the family didn’t like that being dragged up. Put their backs right up, even though those pictures definitely got the case a bit more coverage. Way of the world,” he said, “isn’t it?”

  “What did your dad think happened to her?” asked Strike.

  “Well, to be honest,” sighed Layborn, “he thought Talbot was prob­ably right: Creed had taken her. There were no signs she meant to disappear—passport was still in the house, no case packed, no clothes missing, stable job, no money worries, young child.”

  “Hard to drag a fit, healthy twenty-nine-year-old woman off a busy street without someone noticing,” said Strike.

  “True,” said Layborn. “Creed usually picked them off when they were drunk. Having said that, it was a dark evening and rainy. He’d pulled that trick before. And he was good at lulling women’s suspicions and getting their sympathy. A couple of them walked into his flat of their own accord.”

  “There was a van like Creed’s seen speeding in the area, wasn’t there?”

  “Yeah,” said Layborn, “and from what Dad told me it was never checked out properly. Talbot didn’t want to hear that it might have been someone trying to get home for their tea, see. Routine work just wasn’t done. For instance, I heard there was an old boyfriend of Bamborough’s hanging around. I’m not saying the boyfriend killed her, but Dad told me Talbot spent half the interview trying to find out where this boyfriend had been on the night Helen Wardrop got attacked.”

  “Who?”

  “Prostitute. Creed tried to abduct her in ’73. He had his failures, you know. Peggy Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at a bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was off Paradise Park. He got careless toward the end. Arrogance did for him.”

  “You know a lot about this, George.”

  “Yeah, well, Dad was one of the first into Creed’s basement after they arrested him. He wouldn’t ever talk about what he saw in there, and he’d seen gangland killings, you name it… Creed’s never admitted to Bamborough, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. That cunt will keep people guessing till he’s dead. Evil fucking bastard. He’s played with the families of his known victims for years. Likes hinting he did more women, without giving any details. Some journalist interviewed him in the early eighties, but that was the last time they let anyone talk to him. The Ministry of Justice clamped down. Creed uses publicity as a chance to torment the families. It’s the only power he’s got left.”

  Layborn drained the last of his pint and checked his watch.

  “I’ll do what I can for you with the file. My old man would’ve wanted me to help. It never sat right with him, what happened with that case.”

  The wind was picking up by the time Strike returned to his attic flat. His rain-speckled windows rattled in their loose frames as he sorted carefully through the receipts in his wallet for those he needed to submit to the accountant.

  At nine o’clock, after eating dinner cooked on his single-ringed hob, he lay down on his bed and picked up the second-hand biography of Dennis Creed, The Demon of Paradise Park, which he’d ordered a month ago and which had so far lain unopened on his bedside table. Having undone the button on his trousers to better accommodate the large amount of spaghetti he’d just consumed, he emitted a loud and satisfying belch, lit a cigarette, laid back against his pillows and opened the book to the beginning, where a timeline laid out the bare bones of Creed’s long career of rape and murder.

  1937: Born in Greenwell Terrace, Mile End.

  1954: April: began National Service.

  November: raped schoolgirl Vicky Hornchurch, 15.

  Sentenced to 2 years, Feltham Borstal.

  1955–61: Worked in a variety of short-lived manual and office jobs. Frequented prostitutes.

  1961: July: raped and tortured shop assistant Sheila Gaskins, 22.

  Sentenced to 5 years HMP Pentonville.

  1968: April: abducted, raped, tortured and murdered schoolgirl Geraldine Christie, 16.

  1969: September: abducted, raped, tortured and murdered secretary and mother of one Jackie Aylett, 29.

  Killer dubbed “The Essex Butcher” by press.

  1970: January: moved to Vi Hooper’s basement in Liverpool Road, near Paradise Park.

  Gained job as dry-cleaning delivery man.

  February: abducted dinner lady and mother of three Vera Kenny, 31. Kept in basement for three weeks. Raped, tortured and murdered.

  November: abducted estate agent Noreen Sturrock, 28. Kept in basement for four weeks. Raped, tortured and murdered.

  1971: August: failed to abduct pharmacist Peggy Hiskett, 34.

  1972: September: abducted unemployed Gail Wrightman, 30. Kept imprisoned in basement. Raped and tortured.

  1973: January: murdered Wrightman.

  December: failed to abduct prostitute and mother of one Helen Wardrop, 32.

  1974: September: abducted hairdresser Susan Meyer, 27. Kept imprisoned in basement. Raped and tortured.

  1975: February: abducted PhD student Andrea Hooton, 23. Hooton and Meyer were held concurrently in basement for 4 weeks.

  March: murdered Susan.

  April: murdered Andrea.

  1976: January 25th: attempted to abduct nightclub singer Melody Bower, 26.

  January 31st: landlady Vi Hooper recognizes Creed from description and photofit.

  February 2nd: Creed arrested.

  Strike turned over the page and skim-read the introduction, which featured the only interview ever granted by Creed’s mother, Agnes Waite.

  … She began by telling me that the date given on Creed’s birth certificate was false.

  “It says he was born December 20th, doesn’t it?” she asked me. “That’s not right. It was the night of November 19th. He lied about it when he registered the birth, because we were outside the time you were supposed to do it.”

  “‘He’ was Agnes’s stepfather, William Awdry, a man notorious in the local area for his violent temper…

  “He took the baby out of my arms as soon as I’d had it and said he was going to kill it. Drown it in the outside toilet. I begged him not to. I pleaded with him to let the baby live. I hadn’t known till then whether I wanted it to live or die, but once you’ve seen them, held them… and he was strong, Dennis, he wanted to live, you could tell.

  “It went on for weeks, the threats, Awdry threatening to kill him. But by then the neighbors had heard the baby crying and probably heard what [Awdry] was threatening, as well. He knew there was no hiding it; he’d waited too long. So he registered the birth, but lied about the date, so nobody would ask why he’d done it so late. There wasn’t nobody to say it had happened earlier, not anybody who’d count. They never got me a midwife or a nurse or anything…”

  Creed often wrote me fuller answers than we’d had time for during face-to-face interviews. Months later he sent me the following, concerning his own suspicions about his paternity:

  “I saw my supposed step-grandfather looking at me out of the mirror. The resemblance grew stronger as I got older. I had his eyes, the same shaped ears, his sallow complexion, his long neck. He was a bigger man than I was, a more masculine-looking man, and I think part of his great dislike of me came from the fact that he hated to see his own features in a weak and girlish form. He despised vulnerability…”

  “Yeah, of course Dennis was his,” Agnes told me. “He [Awdry] started on me when I was thirteen. I was never allowed
out, never had a boyfriend. When my mother realized I was expecting, Awdry told her I’d been sneaking out to meet someone. What else was he going to say? And Mum believed him. Or she pretended to.”

  Agnes fled her stepfather’s overcrowded house shortly before Dennis’s second birthday, when she was sixteen-and-a-half.

  “I wanted to take Dennis with me, but I left in the middle of the night and I couldn’t afford to make noise. I had nowhere to go, no job, no money. Just a boyfriend who said he’d look after me. So I went.”

  She was to see her firstborn only twice more. When she found out William Awdry was serving nine months in jail for assault, she returned to her mother’s house in hopes of snatching Dennis away.

  “I was going to tell Bert [her first husband] he was my nephew, because Bert didn’t know anything about that whole mess. But Dennis didn’t remember me, I don’t think. He wouldn’t let go of my mum, wouldn’t talk to me, and my mum told me it was too late now and I shouldn’t have left him if I wanted him so bad. So I went away without him.”

  The last time Agnes saw her son in the flesh was when she made a trip to his primary school and called him over to the fence to speak to her. Though he was barely five, Creed claimed in our second interview to remember this final meeting.

  “She was a thin, plain little woman, dressed like a tart,” he told me. “She didn’t look like the other boys’ mothers. You could tell she wasn’t a respectable person. I didn’t want the other children to see me talking to her. She said she was my mother and I told her it wasn’t true, but I knew it was, really. I ran away from her.”

  “He didn’t want nothing to do with me,” said Agnes. “I gave up after that. I wasn’t going to go to the house if Awdry was there. Dennis was in school, at least. He looked clean…

  “I used to wonder about him, how he was and that,” Agnes said. “Obviously, you do. Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is. Yeah, I used to wonder, but I moved north with Bert when he got the job with the GPO and I never went back to London, not even when my mum died, because Awdry had put it about that if I turned up he’d kick off.”