Page 219 of Troubled Blood

“Understood,” said Strike, who had paused in the shadow of Hither Green station to finish his cigarette. “Just thinking logistics. ’Course, if we’re lucky, he might spill the beans to Barclay about what Shifty’s got on him. Desperate men are sometimes willing to—”

“Cormoran, I’m going to have to go,” said Robin, who’d reached the Underground entrance. “I’ll see you back at the office after my appointment and you can fill me in about Janice.”

“Right you are,” said Strike. “Hope it doesn’t hurt.”

“What doesn’t hu—Oh, the dentist, no, it’s just a check-up,” said Robin.

Really convincing, Robin, she thought, angry at herself, as she shoved her mobile back into her pocket and ran down the steps into the Underground.

Once on the train, she stripped off her jacket, because she was sweating from running, and neatened her hair with the aid of her reflection in the dirty dark window opposite her. Between SB and his possibly suicidal ideation, lying to Strike, her feeble cover story and the potential risks of the meeting she was about to have, she felt jittery. There’d been another occasion, a couple of years previously, when Robin had chosen to pursue a line of inquiry while keeping it secret from Strike. It had resulted in Strike sacking her.

This is different, she tried to reassure herself, smoothing sweaty strands of hair off her forehead. He won’t mind, as long as it works. It’s what he wants, too.

She emerged at Tottenham Court Road station twenty minutes later and hurried with her jacket over her shoulder into the heart of Soho.

Only when she was approaching the Star café, and saw the sign over the door, did she register the coincidence of the name. Trying not to think about asteroids, horoscopes or omens, Robin entered the café, where round wooden tables stood on a red-brick floor. The walls were decorated with old-fashioned tin signs, one of which was advertising ROBIN CIGARETTES. Directly beneath this, perhaps deliberately, sat an old man wearing a black windcheater, his face ruddy with broken veins and his thick gray hair oiled into a quiff that had the appearance of not having changed since the fifties. A walking stick was propped against the wall beside him. On his other side sat a teenage girl with long neon-yellow hair, who was texting on her phone and didn’t look up until Robin had approached their table.

“Mr. Tucker?” said Robin.

“Yeah,” said the man hoarsely, revealing crooked brown teeth. “Miss Ellacott?”

“Robin,” she said, smiling as they shook hands.

“This is my granddaughter, Lauren,” said Tucker.

“Hiya,” said Lauren, glancing up from her phone, then back down again.

“I’ll just get myself a coffee,” said Robin. “Can I buy either of you anything?”

They declined. While Robin bought herself a flat white, she sensed the eyes of the old man on her. During their only previous conversation, which had been by phone, Brian Tucker had talked for a quarter of an hour, without pause, about the disappearance of his eldest daughter, Louise, in 1972, and his lifelong quest to prove that Dennis Creed had murdered her. Roy Phipps had called Tucker “half-insane.” While Robin wouldn’t have gone that far on the evidence to date, there was no doubt that he seemed utterly consumed by Creed, and with his quest for justice.

When Robin returned to the Tuckers’ table and sat down with her coffee, Lauren put her phone away. Her long neon extensions, the unicorn tattoo on her forearm, her blatantly false eyelashes and her chipped nail varnish all stood in contrast to the innocent, dimpled face just discernible beneath her aggressively applied contouring.

“I came to help Grandad,” she told Robin. “He doesn’t walk so well these days.”

“She’s a good girl,” said Tucker. “Very good girl.”

“Well, thanks very much for meeting me,” Robin told both of them. “I really appreciate it.”

Close to, Tucker’s swollen nose had a strawberry-like appearance, flecked as it was with blackheads.

“No, I appreciate it, Miss Ellacott,” he said in his low, hoarse voice. “I think they’re really going to let it happen this time, I do. And like I said on the phone, if they don’t, I’m ready to break into the television studio—”

“Well,” said Robin, “hopefully we won’t need to do anything that dras—”

“—and I’ve told them that, and it’s shaken them up. Well, that, and your contact nudging the Ministry of Justice,” he conceded, gazing at Robin through small, bloodshot eyes. “Mind you, I’m starting to think I should’ve threatened them with the press years ago. You don’t get anywhere with these people playing by the rules, they just fob you off with their bureaucracy and their so-called expert opinions.”

“I can only imagine how difficult it’s been for you,” said Robin, “but given that we might be in with a chance to interview him, we don’t want to do anything—”

“I’ll have justice for Louise if it kills me,” said Tucker. “Let them arrest me. It’ll just mean more publicity.”

“But we wouldn’t want—”

“She don’t want you to do nothing silly, Grandad,” said Lauren. “She don’t want you to mess things up.”

“No, I won’t, I won’t,” said Tucker. His eyes were small, flecked and almost colorless, set in pouches of purple. “But this might be our one and only chance, so it must be done in the right way and by the right interrogator.”

“Is he not coming?” said Lauren. “Cormoran Strike? Grandad said he might be coming.”