Page 232 of Troubled Blood

“He was having a psychotic breakdown,” said Robin. “That’s why they took him off the case. He thought he was hunting a devil. Your mum wasn’t the only woman he thought might have supernatural power—but he was definitely racist,” Robin added quietly. “That’s clear from his notes.”

“You never told us about the police coming to Marks & Spencer,” said Porschia. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Why would I?” said Eden, angrily blotting her damp eyes. “Mum was already ill with the stress of it all, I had Uncle Marcus shouting at me that Mum had put the police onto him and his boys, and I was really scared, if Uncle Marcus found out about the officer coming to my work, he’d report him, which was the last thing we needed. God, it was a mess,” said Eden, pressing her hands briefly against her wet eyes, “such a bloody mess.”

Porschia looked as though she’d like to say something comforting to her elder sister, but Robin had the impression that this would be such a departure from their usual relationship, she didn’t know quite how to set about it. After a moment or two, Porschia muttered,

“Need the loo,” pushed her chair away from the table and disappeared into the bathroom.

“I didn’t want Porsh to come today,” said Maya, as soon as the bathroom door swung shut behind her younger sister. She was tactfully not looking at her elder sister, who was trying to pretend she wasn’t crying, while surreptitiously wiping more tears from her eyes. “She doesn’t need this stress. She’s only just finished chemo.”

“How’s she doing?” asked Strike.

“She was given the all-clear last week, thank God. She’s talking about going back to work on reduced hours. I think it’s too early.”

“She’s a social worker, isn’t she?” asked Robin.

“Yeah,” sighed Maya. “A backlog of a hundred desperate messages every morning, and you know you’re in the firing line if anything goes wrong with a family you haven’t been able to reach. I don’t know how she does it. But she’s like Mum. Two peas in a pod. She was always Mum’s baby, and Mum was her hero.”

Eden let out a soft “huh,” which might have been agreement or disparagement. Maya ignored it. There was a short pause, in which Robin reflected on the tangled ties of family. A proxy war between Jules and Wilma Bayliss seemed still to be playing out in the next generation.

The bathroom door swung open again and Porschia reappeared. Instead of taking her seat beside Robin, she swiveled her wide hips around Strike at the end of the table, and edged in behind a startled Maya, who pulled her chair in hastily, until she reached Eden. After thrusting a handful of toilet roll into her elder sister’s hand, Porschia slid her plump arms around Eden’s neck and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“What are you doing?” said Eden huskily, reaching up to clasp her youngest sister’s arms, not to remove them, but to hold them there. Strike, Robin saw out of the corner of her eye, was pretending to examine his notebook.

“Thanking you,” said Porschia softly, dropping another kiss on the top of her eldest sister’s head before letting her go. “For agreeing to do this. I know you didn’t want to.”

Everyone sat in slightly startled silence while Porschia squeezed her way back around the table and resumed her seat next to Robin.

“Have you told them the last bit?” Porschia asked Maya, while Eden blew her nose. “About Mum and Betty Fuller?”

“No,” said Maya, who appeared shell-shocked by the act of reconciliation she’d just witnessed. “You’re the one Mum told it to, I thought you should.”

“Right,” said Porschia, turning to look at Strike and Robin. “This really is the last thing we know, and there might be nothing in it, but you might as well have it, now you know the other stuff.”

Strike waited, pen poised.

“Mum told me this not long after she retired. She shouldn’t have, really, because it was about a client, but when you hear what it was, you’ll understand.

“Mum kept working in Clerkenwell after she’d qualified as a social worker. It was where all her friends were; she didn’t want to move. So she really got to know the local community.

“One of the families she was working with lived in Skinner Street, not that far from the St. John’s practice—”

“Skinner Street?” repeated Strike. The name rang a bell, but, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t immediately remember why that was. Robin, on the other hand, knew immediately why Skinner Street sounded familiar.

“Yeah. The family was called Fuller. They had just about every problem you can think of, Mum said: addiction, domestic abuse, criminality, the lot. The sort of head of the family was a grandmother who was only in her forties, and this woman’s main source of income was prostitution. Betty was her name, and Mum said she was like a local news service, if you wanted to know about the underworld, anyway. The family had been in the area for generations.

“Anyway, one day, Betty says to Mum, bit sly, to see her reaction: ‘Marcus never sent no threatening notes to that doctor, you know.’

“Mum was gobsmacked,” said Porschia. “Her first thought was that Marcus was visiting the woman, you know, as a client—I know he wasn’t,” said Porschia quickly, holding up a hand to forestall Eden, who’d opened her mouth. “Mum and Marcus hadn’t spoken for years at this point. Anyway, it was all innocent: Betty had met Marcus because the church was doing a bit of outreach in the local area. He’d brought round some Harvest Festival stuff for the family, and tried to persuade Betty to come along to a church service.

“Betty had worked out Marcus’s connection with Mum, because Mum was still going by ‘Bayliss,’ and Betty claimed she knew who really wrote the threatening notes to Margot Bamborough, and that the person who wrote the notes was the same person who killed her. Mum said, ‘Who was it?’ And Betty said if she ever told, Margot’s killer would kill her, too.”

There was a short silence. The café clattered around them, and one of the women at the next table, who was eating a cream slice, said loudly, with unctuous pleasure,

“God that’s good.”

“Did your mother believe Betty?” asked Robin.