Page 42 of Troubled Blood

“You know,” said Robin, turning to look back at the Priory, “Peter Tobin, that Scottish serial killer—he attached himself to churches. He joined a religious sect at one point, under an assumed name. Then he got a job as a handyman at a church in Glasgow, where he buried that poor girl beneath the floorboards.”

“Churches are good cover for killers,” said Strike. “Sex offenders, too.”

“Priests and doctors,” said Robin thoughtfully. “It’s hardwired in most of us to trust them, don’t you think?”

“After the Catholic Church’s many scandals? After Harold Shipman?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Robin. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”

“Think you’re onto something there,” said Strike, as they entered a short pedestrian lane called Jerusalem Passage. “I told Gupta it was odd that Joseph Brenner didn’t like people. I thought that might be a basic job requirement for a doctor. He soon put me right.

“Let’s stop here a moment,” Strike said, doing so. “If Margot got this far—I’m assuming she’d’ve taken this route, because it’s the shortest and most logical way to the Three Kings—this is the first time she’d have passed residences rather than offices or public buildings.”

Robin looked at the buildings around them. Sure enough, there were a couple of doors whose multiple buzzers indicated flats above.

“Is there a chance,” said Strike, “however remote, that someone living along this lane could have persuaded or forced her inside?”

Robin looked up and down the street, the rain pattering onto her umbrella.

“Well,” she said slowly, “obviously it could have happened, but it seems unlikely. Did someone wake up that day and decide they wanted to abduct a woman, reach outside and grab one?”

“Have I taught you nothing?”

“OK, fine: means before motive. But there are problems with the means, too. This is really overlooked as well. Does nobody see or hear her being abducted? Doesn’t she scream or fight? And I assume the abductor lives alone, unless their housemates are also in on the kidnapping?”

“All valid points,” admitted Strike. “Plus, the police went door to door here. Everyone was questioned, though the flats weren’t searched.

“But let’s think this through… She’s a doctor. What if someone shoots out of a house and begs her to come inside to look at an injured person—a sick relative—and once inside, they don’t let her go? That’d be a good ploy for getting her inside, pretending there was a medical emergency.”

“OK, but that presupposes they knew she was a doctor.”

“The abductor could’ve been a patient.”

“But how did they know she’d be passing their house at that particular time? Had she alerted the whole neighborhood that she was about to go to the pub?”

“Maybe it was a random thing, they saw her passing, they knew she was a doctor, they ran out and grabbed her. Or—I dunno, let’s say there really was a sick or dying person inside, or someone’s had an accident—perhaps there’s an argument—she disagrees with the treatment or refuses to help—the fight becomes physical—she’s accidentally killed.”

There was a short silence, while they moved aside for a group of chattering French students. When these had passed, Strike said,

“It’s a stretch, I grant you.”

“We can find out how many of these buildings are occupied by the same people they were thirty-nine years ago,” said Robin, “but we’ve still got the problem of how they’ve kept her body hidden for nearly four decades. You wouldn’t dare move, would you?”

“That’s a problem, all right,” admitted Strike. “As Gupta said, it’s not like disposing of a table of equivalent weight. Blood, decomposition, infestation… plenty have tried keeping bodies on the premises. Crippen. Christie. Fred and Rose West. It’s generally considered a mistake.”

“Creed managed it for a while,” said Robin. “Boiling down severed hands in the basement. Burying heads apart from bodies. It wasn’t the corpses that got him caught.”

“Are you reading The Demon of Paradise Park?” asked Strike sharply.

“Yes,” said Robin.

“D’you want that stuff in your head?”

“If it helps us with the case,” said Robin.

“Hmm. Just thinking of my health and safety responsibilities.”

Robin said nothing. Strike gave the houses a last, sweeping look, then invited Robin to walk on, saying,