Page 234 of Troubled Blood

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

The train gave a lurch: the sleeping Strike’s head rolled sideways and hit the cold window. He woke, feeling drool on his chin. Wiping it on his coat sleeve, he peered around. The elderly couple opposite him were politely immersed in their reading material, but across the aisle, four teenagers were enjoying paroxysms of silent laughter, carefully not looking at him, their shoulders shaking as they feigned interest in the fields out of the window. Apparently he’d been snoring with his mouth wide open, because it was now unpleasantly dry. Checking his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep at least two hours.

Strike reached for the tartan Thermos sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d rinsed out and refilled in McDonald’s earlier, and poured himself a black coffee while the teenagers continued to gasp and snort with laughter. Doubtless they thought him comically odd and old, with his snores and his tartan Thermos, but a year of navigating swaying train carriages had taught him that his prosthetic leg appreciated as few trips to the catering car as possible. He drank a cup of plastic-tainted coffee, then re-settled himself comfortably, arms folded, looking out at the fields gliding past, bestridden with power pylons, the flat white cloud given a glaucous glow by the dust on the glass. The landscape registered only incidentally: Strike’s attention was focused inwards on the odd idea that had occurred to him after the interview with the Bayliss sisters.

Of course, the idea might be nothing but the product of an overburdened mind making spurious connections between simple coincidences. He mentally turned it this way and that, examining it from different angles, until finally, yawning, he inched sideways over into the empty seat beside him, and laboriously pulled himself up into a standing position in the aisle, so he could access the holdall in the luggage rack overhead. Beside his holdall sat a Waitrose bag, because he’d made a detour into the supermarket on the way to Paddington station, where he’d grabbed three Easter eggs for his nephews, or rather, three chocolate hedgehogs (“Woodland Friends”) because they were relatively compact. Now, groping in his holdall for The Demon of Paradise Park, he accidentally knocked over the carrier bag containing the chocolate. The uppermost hedgehog fell out: in his attempt to catch it, he accidentally batted it up into the air; the box bounced off the back of the elderly woman’s seat, causing her to squeak in surprise, and the box hit the floor.

The teenagers for whom Strike was unintentionally mounting a one-man comedy show were now openly gasping and crying with laughter. Only when Strike bent down awkwardly to pick up the now cracked chocolate hedgehog, one hand on the teenagers’ table to steady himself, did one of the young women spot the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He knew what she’d seen by the abrupt cessation of her laughter, and the frantic, whispered shushing of her friends. Panting, sweating and now aware of half the carriage’s eyes on him, he shoved the damaged hedgehog back into its bag, found The Demon of Paradise Park in his holdall and then, sweating slightly, but taking malicious pleasure in the po-faced shock of the teenagers beside him, sidled back into his window seat.

After flicking through the book in search of the part he wanted to re-read, Strike finally found the chapter two-thirds of the way through the book, entitled “Capture.”

Thus far, Creed’s relationship with landlady Violet Cooper had been key to his continuing safety. Violet herself admits that for the first five years of his tenancy, she’d never have believed harm of “Den,” who she saw as a lonely and gentle soul, fond of their singalong evenings, and probably gay.

However, the pains he’d once taken to keep Violet happy had begun to irk Creed. Where once he’d drugged her because he was planning to pound bones to dust in the basement, or needed to load a corpse into the van by night, he now began lacing her gin-and-oranges with barbiturates purely to avoid the tedium of her company.

Creed’s manner toward Violet also changed. He became “mean” to her, “taking the Mickey when there was no need, saying nasty things, laughing at me for using the wrong words and stuff, treating me like I was stupid, which he’d never done before.

“I remember one time, I was telling him about the place my brother bought when he retired, cottage in the country, everything lovely, and I said, ‘You should’ve seen the garden, his roses and a gazebo,’ and he laughed at me, Dennis, well, jeered, really, because I’d said it wrong. Gazz ybo, I said, and I’ve never forgotten it, he said, ‘Don’t use words if you can’t say ’em, you just look thick.’

“It hurt my feelings. I hadn’t seen that nasty side of him. I knew he was clever, he used to do the Times crossword every day. Knew all the answers on Mastermind, when we watched it together, but he’d never put me down before.

“Then, one night, he starts going on about my will. He wants to know who I’m going to leave the house to. He as good as asked me to leave it to him.

“I didn’t like that. I wasn’t an old woman, I wasn’t planning to die any time soon. I changed the subject, but he started on it again a few nights later. I said, ‘Look, how d’you think that makes me feel, Dennis, you going on like this, like I’m on my last legs? You’re making me feel like you’re going to do away with me.’

“He got uppity and said it was all right for me, but he had nothing, no security or nothing, and what if he got turfed out on the street by whoever I left the house to? And he flounced out. We made it up, later, but it left a nasty taste.”

It would seem the height of foolhardiness for Creed to persuade Violet into changing her will and then kill her. Quite apart from having an obvious motive, he’d be risking the ingression of police into the basement where he was concealing the remains and belongings of at least five women. However, Creed’s arrogance and sense of inviolability seem to have known no bounds by this time. He was also stockpiling pills in larger quantities than ever, which brought him into contact with more than one street dealer. This made him more widely recognizable.

One of his new drugs contacts was Michael Cleat, who sold barbiturates stolen from a contact at a pharmaceutical company. Cleat would later cut a deal with police in exchange for his testimony at the killer’s trial. Creed, he testified, had asked Cleat whether he or his contact could procure a doctor’s prescription pad. Police suspected that Creed was hoping to fake a prescription for Violet, to explain her possession of the means to overdose…

In spite of the coffee, Strike’s eyelids began to droop again. After another couple of minutes, his head sank sideways and the book slipped out of his slack grasp.

When he woke up again, the sky outside had turned coral pink, the laughing teenagers were gone, and he found himself ten minutes from Truro station. Stiffer than ever and in no mood for the family reunion, he wished he was heading back to his attic flat for a shower and some peace. Nevertheless, his heart lifted slightly when he saw Dave Polworth waiting for him on the platform. The bag of chocolate hedgehogs rattled slightly as Strike clambered laboriously off the train. He’d have to remember to give the broken one to Luke.

“All right, Diddy?” said Polworth, as they shook hands and patted each other on the back, Strike’s Waitrose bag impeding a hug.

“Thanks for picking me up, Chum, really appreciate it.”

They drove to St. Mawes in Polworth’s Dacia Duster, discussing plans for the following day. Polworth and his family had been invited to the scattering of the ashes, along with Kerenza the Macmillan nurse.

“… except it’s not going to be a scattering,” said Polworth, driving through country lanes, as the sun turned into a burning coal on the horizon, “more like a floating.”

“How’s that?”

“Lucy’s got an urn,” said Polworth. “Water soluble, cotton and clay. She was showing me last night. It’s supposed to look like a flower. You put the ashes inside and the whole thing bobs away and dissolves.”

“Nice idea,” said Strike.

“Prevents stupid accidents,” said Polworth, pragmatically. “Remember Ian Restarick, from school? His grandad wanted his ashes thrown off Land’s End. The dozy fuckers chucked them off in a high wind and ended up with their mouths full of the old boy. Restarick told me he was blowing ash out of his nose for a week after.”

Laughing, Strike felt his phone buzz in his pocket, and pulled it out. He was hoping the text might be Robin, perhaps telling him she’d already located Betty Fuller. Instead, he saw an unknown number.

I hated you as much as I did because I loved you so much. My love never ended but yours did. It wore out. I wore it out

Polworth was still talking, but Strike was no longer listening. He read the text through several times, frowning slightly, then put the phone back in his pocket and tried to concentrate on his old friend’s anecdotes.