Page 255 of Troubled Blood

“Yeah,” said Oakden.

“D’you remember the gazebo that was under construction in the garden when the barbecue happened?”

One of Oakden’s eyelids flickered. He raised a hand quickly to his face and made a sweep of his forehead, as though he felt a hair tickling him.

“No,” he said.

“It’s in the background of one of your photos. They’d just started building the columns. I expect they’d already put down the floor.”

“I can’t remember that,” said Oakden.

“The shed where you took the vodka wasn’t near there, then?”

“Can’t’ve been,” said Oakden.

“While we’re on the subject of nicking things,” said Strike, “would you happen to have the obituary of Dr. Brenner you took from Janice Beattie’s house?”

“I never stole no obituary from her house,” said Oakden, with a display of disdain. “What would I want that for?”

“To get some information you could try and pass off as your own?”

“I don’t need to look up old Joe Brenner, I know plenty about him. He came round our house for his dinner every other Sunday. My old woman used to cook better than his sister, apparently.”

“Go on, then,” said Strike, his tone becoming combative, “amaze us.”

Oakden raised his sparse eyebrows. He chewed another bite of sandwich and swallowed it, before saying,

“Hey, this was all your idea. You don’t want the information, I’m happy to go.”

“Unless you’ve got more than you put in your book—”

“Brenner wanted Margot Bamborough struck off the bloody medical register. Come round our house one Sunday full of it. Couple of weeks before she disappeared. There,” said Oakden pugnaciously, “I kept that out of the book, because my mother didn’t want it in there.”

“Why was that?”

“Still loyal to him,” said Oakden, with a little snort of laughter. “And I wanted to keep the old dear happy at the time, because noises had been made about writing me out of the will. Old women,” said the convicted con man, “are a bit too persuadable if you don’t keep an eye on them. She’d got chummy with the local vicar by the eighties. I was worried it was all going to go to rebuild the bloody church steeple unless I kept an eye on her.”

“Why did Brenner want Bamborough struck off?”

“She examined some kid without parental permission.”

“Was this Janice’s son?” asked Robin.

“Was I talking to you?” Oakden shot at her.

“You,” growled Strike, “want to keep a civil tongue in your bloody head. Was it Janice’s son, yes or no?”

“Maybe,” said Oakden, and Robin concluded that he couldn’t remember. “Point is, that’s unethical behavior, looking at a kid without a parent there, and old Joe was all worked up about it. ‘I’ll have her struck off for this,’ he kept saying. There. Didn’t get that from no obituary, did I?”

Oakden drank the rest of his cocktail straight off, then said,

“I’ll have another one of those.”

Strike ignored this, saying,

“And this was two weeks before Bamborough disappeared?”

“About that, yeah. Never seen the old bastard so excited. He loved disciplining people, old Joe. Vicious old bastard, actually.”