Page 143 of Troubled Blood

Robin thought she knew what Strike was up to. However uncomfortable the idea that Margot was still alive might be for the people in this room, Strike wanted to start the interview from a standpoint that didn’t presume murder.

“The woman at the service station in Birmingham, the mother in Brighton, the dog walker down in Eastbourne,” Roy rattled off, before Strike could speak. “Why would she have been out and about, driving cars and walking dogs? If she’d disappeared voluntarily, she clearly didn’t want to be found. The same goes for wandering around graveyards.”

“True,” said Strike. “But there was one sighting—”

“Warwick,” said Roy. “Yes.”

A look passed between husband and wife. Strike waited. Roy set down his cup and saucer on the table in front of him and looked up at his daughter.

“You’re quite sure you want to do this, Anna, are you?” he asked, looking at his silent daughter. “Quite, quite sure?”

“What d’you mean?” she snapped back. “What d’you think I hired detectives for? Fun?”

“All right, then,” said Roy, “all right. That sighting caught… caught my attention, because my wife’s ex-boyfriend, a man called Paul Satchwell, hailed originally from Warwick. This was a man she’d… reconnected with, before she disappeared.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Anna, with a tight little laugh, “did you honestly think I don’t know about Paul Satchwell? Of course I do!” Kim reached out and put a hand on her wife’s leg, whether in comfort or warning, it was hard to tell. “Have you never heard of the internet, Dad, or press archives? I’ve seen Satchwell’s ridiculous photograph, with all his chest hair and his medallions, and I know my mother went for a drink with him three weeks before she vanished! But it was only one drink—”

“Oh, was it?” said Roy nastily. “Thanks for your reassurance, Anna. Thanks for your expert knowledge. How marvelous to be all-knowing—”

“Roy,” whispered Cynthia.

“What are you saying, that it was more than a drink?” said Anna, looking shaken. “No, it wasn’t, that’s a horrible thing to say! Oonagh says—”

“Oh, right, yes, I see!” said Roy loudly, his sunken cheeks turning purple as his hands gripped the arms of his chair, “Oonagh says, does she? Everything is explained!”

“What’s explained?” demanded Anna.

“This!” he shouted, pointing a trembling, rope-veined, swollen-knuckled hand at Strike and Robin. “Oonagh Kennedy’s behind it all, is she? I should have known I hadn’t heard the last of her!”

“For God’s sake, Roy,” said Kim loudly, “that’s a preposterous—”

“Oonagh Kennedy wanted me arrested!”

“Dad, that’s simply not true!” said Anna, forcibly removing Kim’s restraining hand from her leg. “You’ve got a morbid fixation about Oonagh—”

“Badgering me to complain about Talbot—”

“Well, why the bloody hell didn’t you?” said Anna loudly. “The man was in the middle of a fully fledged breakdown!”

“Roy!” whimpered Cynthia again, as Roy leaned forwards to face his daughter across the too-small circular table, with its precariously balanced cake. Gesticulating wildly, his face purple, he shouted,

“Police swarming all over the house going through your mother’s things—sniffer dogs out in the garden—they were looking for any reason to arrest me, and I should lodge a formal complaint against the man in charge? How would that have looked?”

“He was incompetent!”

“Were you there, Miss Omniscient? Did you know him?”

“Why did they replace him? Why does everything written about the case say he was incompetent? The truth is,” said Anna, stabbing the air between her and her father with a forefinger, “you and Cyn loved Bill Talbot because he thought you were innocent from the off and—”

“Thought I was innocent?” bellowed Roy. “Well, thank you, it’s good to know that nothing’s changed since you were thirteen years old—”

“Roy!” said Cynthia and Kim together.

“—and accused me of building the koi pond over the place I’d buried her!”

Anna burst into tears and fled the room, almost tripping over Strike’s legs as she went. Suspecting there was about to be a mass exodus, he retracted his feet.

“When,” Kim said coldly to her father-in-law, “is Anna going to be forgiven for things she said when she was a confused child, going through a dreadful time?”