Page 135 of Troubled Blood

“The one who gets ratty when Cornish flags aren’t on strawberries?”

“That’s him. Committed Cornish nationalist. He gets defensive about it if you challenge him—‘I’m not saying we’re better than anyone else’—but he thinks you shouldn’t be able to buy property down there unless you can prove Cornish ethnicity. Don’t remind him he was born in Birmingham if you value your teeth.”

Robin smiled.

“Same kind of thing, though, isn’t it?” said Strike. “‘I’m special and different because I was born on this bit of rock.’ ‘I’m special and different because I was born on June the twelfth—’”

“Where you’re born does influence who you are, though,” said Robin. “Cultural norms and language have an effect. And there have been studies showing people born at different times of the year are more prone to certain health conditions.”

“So Roy Phipps bleeds a lot because he was born—? Hello there!” said Strike, breaking off suddenly, his eyes on the door.

Robin turned and saw, to her momentary astonishment, a slender woman wearing a long green Tudor gown and headdress.

“I’m so sorry!” said the woman, gesturing at her costume and laughing nervously as she advanced on their table. “I thought I’d have time to change! I’ve been doing a school group—we finished late—”

Strike stood up and held out a hand to shake hers.

“Cormoran Strike,” he said. Eyes on her reproduction pearl necklace with its suspended initial “B,” he said, “Anne Boleyn, I presume?”

Cynthia’s laughter contained a couple of inadvertent snorts, which increased her odd resemblance, middle-aged though she was, to a gawky schoolgirl. Her movements were unsuited to the sweeping velvet gown, being rather exaggerated and ungainly.

“Hahaha, yes, that’s me! Only my second time as Anne. You think you’ve thought of all the questions the kids might ask you, then one of them says ‘How did it feel to get your head cut off?,’ hahahaha!”

Cynthia wasn’t at all what Robin had expected. She now realized that her imagination had sketched in a young blonde, the stereotypical idea of a Scandinavian au pair… or was that because Sarah Shadlock had almost white hair?

“Coffee?” Strike asked Cynthia.

“Oh—coffee, yes please, wonderful, thank you,” said Cynthia, over-enthusiastically. When Strike had left, Cynthia made a small pantomime of dithering over which seat to take until Robin, smiling, pulled out the seat beside her and offered her own hand, too.

“Oh, yes, hello!” said Cynthia, sitting down and shaking hands. She had a thin, sallow face, currently wearing an anxious smile. The irises of her large eyes were heavily mottled, an indeterminate color between blue, green and gray, and her teeth were rather crooked.

“So you lead the tour in character?” asked Robin.

“Yes, exactly, as poor Anne, hahaha,” said Cynthia, with another nervous, snorting laugh. “‘I couldn’t give the King a son! They said I was a witch!’ Those are the sort of things children like to hear; I have to work quite hard to get the politics in, hahaha. Poor Anne.” Her thin hands fidgeted.

“Oh, I’m still—I can take this off, at least, hahaha!”

Cynthia set to work unpinning her headdress. Even though she could tell that Cynthia was very nervous, and that her constant laughter was more of a tic than genuine amusement, Robin was again reminded of Sarah Shadlock, who tended to laugh a lot, and loudly, especially in the vicinity of Matthew. Wittingly or not, Cynthia’s laughter imposed a sort of obligation: smile back or seem hostile. Robin remembered a documentary on monkeys she had watched one night when she was too tired to get up and go to bed: chimps, too, laughed back at each other to signal social cohesion.

When Strike returned to the table with Cynthia’s coffee, he found her newly bare-headed. Her dark hair was fifty percent gray, and smoothed back into a short, thin ponytail.

“It’s very good of you to meet us, Mrs. Phipps,” he said, sitting back down.

“Oh, no, not at all, not at all,” said Cynthia, waving her thin hands and laughing some more. “Anything I can do to help Anna with—but Roy hasn’t been well, so I don’t want to worry him just now.”

“I’m sorry to hear—”

“Yes, thank you, no, it’s prostate cancer,” said Cynthia, no longer laughing. “Radiation therapy. Not feeling too chipper. Anna and Kim came over this morning to sit with him, or I wouldn’t have been able—I don’t like leaving him at the moment, but the girls are there, so I thought I’d be fine to…”

The end of the sentence was lost as she took a sip of coffee. Her hand trembled slightly as she replaced the cup onto the saucer.

“Your stepdaughter’s probably told—” Strike began, but Cynthia immediately interrupted him.

“Daughter. I don’t ever call Anna my stepdaughter. Sorry, but I feel just the same about her as I do about Jeremy and Ellie. No difference at all.”

Robin wondered whether that was true. She was uncomfortably aware that part of her was standing aside, watching Cynthia with judgmental eyes. She isn’t Sarah, Robin reminded herself.

“Well, I’m sure Anna’s told you why she hired us, and so on.”