Page 239 of Troubled Blood

Full many piteous stories doe remaine…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

As a noted beauty and socialite with a tantalizing number of celebrity connections and a rebellious, self-destructive past, Charlotte was an old staple of the gossip columns. Naturally, her emergency hospitalization out of a private psychiatric clinic made news.

The tabloids ran photo-heavy stories, showing Charlotte at the ages of fourteen (when she’d first run away from her private school and sparked a police hunt), eighteen (arm in arm with her well-known broadcaster father, a thrice-married heavy drinker), twenty-one (with her model-turned-socialite mother, at a cocktail party) and thirty-eight, where, as beautiful as ever, she smiled blankly alongside her white-blond husband, twin babies in her arms, an exquisite drawing room in the background. Nobody had been able to find a picture of her with Cormoran Strike, but the fact that they’d once dated, which Charlotte herself had been care­­ful to mention to the press when she got engaged to Jago, ensured that his name appeared in print alongside hers. “Emergency hospitalization,” “history of addiction issues,” “troubled past”: though the tabloids didn’t say so explicitly, only the most naive reader could be left in doubt that Charlotte had attempted to take her own life. The story gained a second wind when an unnamed “inside source” at Symonds House confided that the future Viscountess Ross had “allegedly” been found face down in a shrubbery, right behind an old summer house.

The broadsheets’ stories led with the questionable practices of the exorbitantly priced Symonds House, “which” (said the Telegraph) “has a reputation for being the last resort of the wealthy and well-connected. Controversial treatments include transcranial magnetic stimulation and the hallucinogen psilocybin (more commonly known as magic mushrooms).” They, too, used large photographs of Charlotte to embellish their stories, so Robin, who furtively read all of them and felt guilty afterward, was reminded constantly how very beautiful Strike’s ex had always been.

Strike hadn’t mentioned a word of the business to Robin, and she hadn’t asked. A moratorium had lain over Charlotte’s name ever since that night, four years previously, when Robin had still been the temp, and an extremely drunk Strike confided in her that Charlotte had lied about being pregnant with his child. All Robin knew right now was that Strike had returned from Cornwall in a particularly buttoned-up mood, and while she knew that the disposal of his aunt’s ashes must have been a sad occasion, she couldn’t help suspecting this other source for his moodiness.

Out of loyalty to Strike, she refused to gossip about his ex, even though everyone around her seemed to want to talk about it. A week after Strike returned from Cornwall, Robin entered the office, already in a bad mood because Matthew had again postponed mediation. On seeing the door open, Pat the secretary hastily tried to hide a copy of the Daily Mail she’d been poring over with Morris. On realizing that the new arrival was Robin rather than Strike, Pat had given her raven’s caw of laughter and slapped the paper back onto her desk.

“Caught red-handed,” said Morris with a wink at Robin. “Seen all this about the boss’s ex?”

He’s not my boss, he’s my partner, thought Robin, but she merely said, “Yes.”

“Talk about punching above his bloody weight,” said Morris, examining a picture of Charlotte at twenty-one in a beaded mini-dress. “The fuck did a bloke who looks like him end up with that?”

Robin wasn’t even safe from it at home. Max, whose floppy hair had been cropped short to play the ex–army officer, had begun shooting his TV series, and was more cheerful than she’d ever known him. Max was also thoroughly intrigued to know that Strike had been involved with Charlotte for sixteen years.

“I met her once,” he told Robin, who’d come upstairs after several hours in her room, combing online records for Betty Fuller. The one-time prostitute was proving harder to find than she’d anticipated.

“Really?” said Robin, who both wanted and didn’t want to hear the story.

“Yeah, I was in a play years ago with her half-brother. Simon Legard? He starred in that mini-series about the financial crash, what was it called? She came to watch our play and took us all out for dinner afterward. I liked her, actually, she was a real laugh. Some of those posh girls are a lot funnier than you’d think.”

“Mm,” said Robin noncommittally, and she returned immediately to her room with her cup of tea.

“I bet she tried to call Corm before she did it,” was Ilsa’s cool comment on the phone, two weeks after Easter, by which time Robin had succeeded, through patient cross-referencing, in identifying the woman she thought was most likely to be the Betty Fuller who’d lived in Skinner Street at the time of Margot Bamborough’s disappearance. Betty was now living in sheltered housing in Sans Walk, not far from her original flat, and Robin planned to pay her a visit the following afternoon, after the mediation with Matthew which seemed at last to be going ahead.

Ilsa had rung to wish Robin good luck. Robin had been trying not to think about having to see Matthew, telling herself that the ordeal would be over in a couple of hours, but it had become progressively harder to focus on her list of questions for Betty Fuller as the evening progressed, and she’d been glad, initially, to be interrupted by Ilsa.

“What’s Corm saying about the whole Charlotte thing?” Ilsa asked.

“Nothing,” said Robin truthfully.

“No, he never talks about her any more,” said Ilsa. “I wonder how much longer her marriage is going to last. Must be hanging by a thread. I’m quite surprised it’s limped on this long, actually. She only did it to get back at Corm.”

“Well, she’s had children with Jago,” Robin pointed out, then instantly regretted it. Ilsa had already told her that she and Nick had decided not to try a fourth round of IVF.

“She never wanted kids,” said Ilsa. “That was something she and Corm had in common. That, and having really similar mothers. Drink, drugs and a million men each, except Charlotte’s is still alive. So, you haven’t spoken to him about it all?”

“No,” said Robin, who was feeling marginally worse for this conversation, in spite of Ilsa’s kind intentions. “Ilsa, sorry, but I’d better go. I’ve got work to do for tomorrow.”

“Can’t you take the afternoon off? We could meet for a coffee, you’ll probably need some R&R afterward. Corm wouldn’t mind, would he?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” said Robin, “but we’re so busy, and I’m following up a lead. Anyway, work gives me something to think about other than Matthew. Let’s catch up at the weekend, if you’re free.”

Robin slept badly that night. It wasn’t Charlotte who wove her way in and out of her dreams, but Miss Jones, the agency’s client who, as everyone had now noticed, had taken such a shine to Strike that he’d had to ask Pat to stop putting her calls through. Robin woke before her alarm went off, glad to escape a complicated dream in which it was revealed that Miss Jones had been Matthew’s wife all along, and that Robin was defending herself against a charge of fraud at the end of a long, polished table in a dark boardroom.

Wanting to look professional and confident, she dressed in black trousers and jacket, even though Matthew knew perfectly well that she spent most of her investigative life in jeans. Casting one last look in her mirror before leaving her room, she thought she looked washed-out. Trying not to think about all those pictures of Charlotte Ross, who rarely dressed in anything but black, but whose porcelain beauty merely shone brighter in contrast, Robin grabbed her handbag and left her room.

While waiting for the Tube, Robin tried to distract herself from the squirming feeling of nerves in her stomach by checking her emails.

Dear Miss Ellacott,