Page 48 of Troubled Blood

“And look at this, Talbot adds a random date again: twenty-first February. But he also does something else. Can you make anything of that?”

Robin took the page from Strike and examined the last three lines of writing.

“Pitman shorthand,” said Robin.

“Can you read it?”

“No. I know a bit of Teeline; I never learned Pitman. Pat can do it, though.”

“You’re saying she might be useful for once?”

“Oh sod off, Strike,” said Robin, crossly. “You want to go back to temps, fine, but I like getting accurate messages and knowing the filing’s up to date.”

She took a photograph on her phone and texted it to Pat, along with a request to translate it. Strike, meanwhile, was reflecting that Robin had never before called him “Strike” when annoyed. Perversely, it had sounded more intimate than the use of his first name. He’d quite enjoyed it.

“Sorry for impugning Pat,” he said.

“I just told you to sod off,” said Robin, failing to suppress a smile. “What did Lawson make of Douthwaite?”

“Well, unsurprisingly, when he tried to interview him and found out he’d left his flat and job, leaving no forwarding address, he got quite interested in him. Hence the tip-off to the papers. They were trying to flush him out.”

“And did it work?” asked Robin, now eating crisps.

“It did. Douthwaite turned up at a police station in Waltham Forest the day after the ‘Ladykiller’ article appeared, probably terrified he’d soon have Fleet Street and Scotland Yard on his doorstep. He told them he was unemployed and living in a bedsit. Local police called Lawson, who went straight over there to interview him.

“There’s a full account here,” said Strike, pushing some of the last pages of the roll he had brought with him toward Robin. “All written by Lawson: ‘appears scared’—‘evasive’—‘nervous’—‘sweating’—and the alibi’s not good. Douthwaite says that on the afternoon of Margot’s disappearance he was out looking for a new flat.”

“He claims he was already looking for a new place when she disappeared?”

“Coincidence, eh? Except that upon closer questioning he couldn’t say which flats he’d seen and couldn’t come up with the name of anyone who’d remember seeing him. In the end he said his flat-hunting had involved sitting in a local café and circling ads in the paper. Trouble was, nobody in the café remembered him being there.

“He said he’d moved to Waltham Forest because he had bad associations with Clerkenwell after being interviewed by Talbot and made to feel as though he was under suspicion, and that, in any case, things hadn’t been good for him at work since his affair with the co-worker’s suicidal wife.”

“Well, that’s credible enough,” said Robin.

“Lawson interviewed him twice more, but got nothing else out of him. Douthwaite came lawyered up to interview three. At that point, Lawson backed off. After all, they had nothing on Douthwaite, even if he was the fishiest person they interviewed. And it was—just—credible that the reason nobody had noticed him in the café was because it was a busy place.”

A group of drinkers in Hallowe’en costumes now entered the pub, giggling and clearly already full of alcohol. Robin noticed Strike casting an automatic eye over a young blonde in a rubber nurse’s uniform.

“So,” she said, “is that everything?”

“Almost,” said Strike, “but I’m tempted not to show you this.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think it’s going to feed your obsession with holy places.”

“I’m not—”

“OK, but before you look at it, just remember that nutters are always attracted by murders and missing person cases, all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin. “Show me.”

Strike flipped over the piece of paper. It was a photocopy of the crudest kind of anonymous note, featuring letters cut out of magazines.

“Another St. John’s Cross,” said Robin.

“Yep. That arrived at Scotland Yard in 1985, addressed to Lawson, who’d already retired. Nothing else in the envelope.”