Page 5 of Troubled Blood

“Oh,” she breathed, with an agitated little hand gesture. “This is—this is so strange. I know you probably don’t want to be—I’m sorry to bother you, I know you’re off duty,” she gave a nervous laugh, “but—my name’s Anna, by the way—I wondered,” she took a deep breath, “whether I could come—whether I could come and talk to you about my mother.”

Strike said nothing.

“She disappeared,” Anna went on. “Margot Bamborough’s her name. She was a GP. She finished work one evening, walked out of her practice and nobody’s seen her since.”

“Have you contacted the police?” asked Strike.

Anna gave an odd little laugh.

“Oh yes—I mean, they knew—they investigated. But they never found anything. She disappeared,” said Anna, “in 1974.”

The dark water lapped the stone and Strike thought he could hear the seal clearing its damp nostrils. Three drunk youths went weaving past, on their way to the ferry point. Strike wondered whether they knew the last ferry had been and gone at six.

“I just,” said the woman in a rush, “you see—last week—I went to see a medium.”

Fuck, thought Strike.

He’d occasionally bumped up against the purveyors of paranormal insights during his detective career and felt nothing but contempt for them: leeches, or so he saw them, of money from the pockets of the deluded and the desperate.

A motorboat came chugging across the water, its engine grinding the night’s stillness to pieces. Apparently this was the lift the three drunk boys were waiting for. They now began laughing and elbowing each other at the prospect of imminent seasickness.

“The medium told me I’d get a ‘leading,’” Anna pressed on. “She told me, ‘You’re going to find out what happened to your mother. You’ll get a leading and you must follow it. The way will become clear very soon.’ So when I saw you just now in the pub —Cormoran Strike, in the Victory—it just seemed such an incredible coincidence and I thought—I had to speak to you.”

A soft breeze ruffled Anna’s dark, silver-streaked hair. The blonde said crisply,

“Come on, Anna, we should get going.”

She put an arm around the other’s shoulders. Strike saw a wedding ring shining there.

“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she told Strike.

With gentle pressure, the blonde attempted to turn Anna away. The latter sniffed and muttered,

“Sorry. I… probably had too much wine.”

“Hang on.”

Strike often resented his own incurable urge to know, his inability to leave an itch unscratched, especially when he was as tired and aggravated as he was tonight. But 1974 was the year of his own birth. Margot Bamborough had been missing as long as he’d been alive. He couldn’t help it: he wanted to know more.

“Are you on holiday here?”

“Yes.” It was the blonde who had spoken. “Well, we’ve got a second home in Falmouth. Our permanent base is in London.”

“I’m heading back there tomorrow,” said Strike (What the fuck are you doing? asked a voice in his head), “but I could probably swing by and see you tomorrow morning in Falmouth, if you’re free.”

“Really?” gasped Anna. He hadn’t seen her eyes fill with tears, but he knew they must have done, because she now wiped them. “Oh, that’d be great. Thank you. Thank you! I’ll give you the address.”

The blonde showed no enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing Strike again. However, when Anna started fumbling through her handbag, she said, “It’s all right, I’ve got a card,” pulled a wallet out of her back pocket, and handed Strike a business card bearing the name “Dr. Kim Sullivan, BPS Registered Psychologist,” with an address in Falmouth printed below it.

“Great,” said Strike, inserting it into his own wallet. “Well, I’ll see you both tomorrow morning, then.”

“I’ve actually got a work conference call in the morning,” said Kim. “I’ll be free by twelve. Will that be too late for you?”

The implication was clear: you’re not speaking to Anna without me present.

“No, that’ll be fine,” said Strike. “I’ll see you at twelve, then.”

“Thank you so much!” said Anna.