Page 278 of Troubled Blood

He returned to the inner office and pushed up the window, allowing the afternoon air, heavy with exhaust fumes and London’s particular smell of warm brick, soot and, today, a faint trace of leaves, trees and grass, to permeate the office. Tempted to light up, he restrained himself out of deference to Pat, because he’d asked her not to smoke in the office. Clients these days were nearly all non-smokers and he felt it gave a poor impression to have the place reeking like an ashtray. He leaned on the windowsill and watched the Friday-night drinkers and shoppers walking up and down Denmark Street, half-listening to Pat’s conversation with the Premier League footballer’s assistant, but mostly thinking about Margot Bamborough.

He’d known all along there was only the remotest chance of finding out what had happened to her, but where had fifty weeks gone? He remembered all the time spent with Joan in Cornwall, and the other clients who’d come and gone, and asked himself if they might have found out what had happened to Margot Bamborough if none of these things had got in the way. Tempting though it was to blame distractions, he believed the outcome would have been the same. Perhaps Luca Ricci was the answer they weren’t ever going to be able to admit. A plausible answer, in many ways: a professional hit, done for some inscrutable underworld reason, because Margot had got too close to a secret, or interfered in the gangsters’ business. Leave my girl alone… she’d been the type to advise a stripper, or a hooker, or a porn actress, or an addict, to choose a different life, to give evidence against men who abused her…

“Eleven tomorrow,” rasped Pat, from behind Strike. “At ’is place. I’ve left his address on the desk for you.”

“Thanks very much,” he said, turning to see her already in her coat. It was five o’clock. She looked vaguely surprised to hear his thanks, but ever since Robin had shouted at him for being rude to Pat, Strike had been consciously trying to be politer to the secretary. For a moment she hesitated, electronic cigarette between her yellow teeth, then removed it to say,

“Robin told me what that Morris did. What he sent her.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Sleazy bastard.”

“Yeah,” said Pat. She was scrutinizing him closely, as though seeing things she hadn’t ever expected to find. “’Orrible. And ’e always reminded me,” she said surprisingly, “of a young Mel Gibson.”

“Really?” said Strike.

“Funny fing, looks,” she said. “You make assumptions.”

“I s’pose,” said Strike.

“You’ve got a real look of my first ’usband,” Pat told him.

“Is that right?” said Strike, startled.

“Yeah. Well… I’ll be off. ’Ave a good weekend.”

“You too,” said Strike.

He waited until her footsteps had died away on the metal staircase, before pulling out his cigarettes, lighting one and returning to the inner office, where the window was still open. Here, he took an old ashtray out of the desk drawer and Talbot’s leather notebook out of the top drawer of the filing cabinet, and settled down in his usual chair to flick through it once more, stopping at the final page.

Strike had never given Talbot’s final jottings more than cursory attention, partly because his patience had run out by the time he got there, partly they were among the most shambolic and incoherent parts of the notes. Tonight, though, he had a melancholy reason for examining the last page of Talbot’s notebook, because Strike, too, had come to the end of the case. So he examined Talbot’s drawing of the demon he believed he’d conjured before the ambulance came to take him away: the spirit of Margot Bamborough, returned from some astral plane to haunt him in the form of Babalon, the Mother of Abominations.

There was no pressure to understand any more. Strike defocused his mind as he’d have relaxed his eyes, the better to spot one of those apparently three-dimensional images hidden in what appeared to be a flat pattern. His eyes glided over the phrases and fragments Talbot had half-remembered from Crowley’s writings, and of consultation of the Thoth tarot. As he scrutinized the picture of the heavy-breasted demon, on whose belly the penitent Talbot had subsequently inscribed a Christian cross, he remembered Robin’s words all those months previously in Hampton Court Palace, about the allure of myth and symbol, and the idea of the collective unconscious, where archetypes lurked. This demon, and the disconnected phrases that had seemed pertinent to Talbot in his psychotic state, had sprung from the policeman’s own subconscious: it was too easy, too simplistic, to blame Crowley and Lévi for what Talbot’s own mind had chosen to retain. This was what it generated, in a last spasm of madness, in a final attempt at resolution. Seven veils, seven heads, seven streams. Lust and strange drugs. Seven around her neck. The poisoned darkness of the BLACK MOON. Blood and sin. She rides upon the lion serpent.

Strike bent the lamp closer to the page, so that he could scrutinize the drawing more closely. Was he deluding himself, or did some of these crazy jottings indicate that Talbot had noticed the odd coinci­dences that Strike had, after talking to the Bayliss sisters? As his gaze moved from one fragment of mystic writing to another, Strike thought he saw, not just a penitent churchgoer trying to make amends for his descent into witchcraft, but the last desperate effort of a good detective, trying to salvage clues from chaos, sense from madness.

63

At last resoluing forward still to fare,

Till that some end they finde or in or out,

That path they take, that beaten seemd most bare,

And like to lead the labyrinth about…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Over the next couple of weeks, Robin noticed that Astrology 14 by Steven Schmidt, the second-hand book she’d left at the office, kept changing position. One morning it was on top of the filing cabinet where she’d left it, a few days later on Strike’s half of the desk, and the following evening lying beside the kettle. Similarly, various bits of the Bamborough police records kept appearing, then disappearing again, while Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook had vanished from the filing cabinet and, she suspected, made its way upstairs to Strike’s attic flat.

The agency was once again very busy. The new client, a Premier League footballer, had sunk two million pounds into a proposed nightclub which had failed to materialize. His partner in the venture had now disappeared, along with all the money. The footballer, nicknamed Dopey by an unsympathetic Barclay, feared press exposure almost as much as not getting his cash back.

Meanwhile, Miss Jones’s boyfriend continued to live a frustratingly law-abiding life, but she appeared happy to keep paying the agency’s bills, as long as Strike endured twice-weekly phone calls with her. During these supposed catch-ups, she told Strike all her problems, and hinted broadly that a dinner invitation would be happily accepted.

In addition to these clients, and leapfrogging those on the waiting list, was Shifty’s Boss, who’d been forced into early retirement by the board. SB walked in off Denmark Street one morning looking for Barclay, who’d left his contact details with Elinor Dean. To Strike’s surprise, early retirement seemed not to have spurred SB into despair, but liberated him.

“If you can believe it, I was genuinely thinking of killing myself, just a few months back,” he told Strike. “But I’m out from under that bastard’s thumb now. Now I’ve told my wife about Elinor—”