Page 50 of Troubled Blood

“‘And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book,’” Strike read back.

“How d’you know about Baphomet?” asked Robin.

“Whittaker was interested in all that shit.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

Whittaker was the last of Strike’s mother’s lovers, the man Strike believed had administered the overdose that had killed her.

“He had a copy of The Satanic Bible,” said Strike. “It had a picture of Baphomet’s head in a penta—shit,” he said, rifling back through the loose pages to find one of those on which Talbot had doodled many five-pointed stars. He frowned at it for a moment, then looked up at Robin.

“I don’t think these are stars. They’re pentagrams.”

PART THREE

… Winter, clothëd all in frieze…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

15

Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

In the second week of November, Joan’s chemotherapy caused her white blood cell count to plummet dangerously, and she was admitted to hospital. Strike left Robin in charge of the agency, Lucy left her three sons in the care of her husband, and both hurried back to Cornwall.

Strike’s fresh absence coincided with the monthly team meeting, which for the first time Robin led alone, the youngest and arguably least experienced investigator at the agency, and the only woman.

Robin wasn’t sure whether she had imagined it, but she thought Hutchins and Morris, the two ex-policemen, put up slightly more disagreement about the next month’s rota, and about the line they ought to take on Shifty, than they would have done had Strike been there. It was Robin’s opinion that Shifty’s PA, who’d now been extensively wined and dined at the agency’s expense without revealing anything about the hold her boss might have over his CEO, ought to be abandoned as a possible source. She’d decided that Morris ought to see her one last time to wrap things up, allaying any suspicion about what he’d been after, after which Robin thought it time to try and infiltrate Shifty’s social circle with a view to getting information direct from the man they were investigating. Barclay was the only subcontractor who agreed with Robin, and backed her up when she insisted that Morris was to leave Shifty’s PA well alone. Of course, as Robin was well aware, she and Barclay had once gone digging for a body together, and such things create a bond.

The memory of the team meeting was still bothering her as she sat with her legs up on the sofa in the flat in Finborough Road later, now in pajama and a dressing gown, working on her laptop. Wolfgang the dachshund was curled at her bare feet, keeping them warm.

Max was out. He’d suddenly announced the previous week­end that he feared he was in danger of passing from “introvert” to “recluse,” and had accepted an invitation to go to dinner with some actor friends, even though, in his bitter words on parting, “They’ll all be pitying me, but I suppose they’ll enjoy that.” Robin had taken Wolfgang for a quick walk around the block at eleven, but otherwise had spent her evening on the Bamborough case, for which she’d had no time while Strike had been in St. Mawes, because the other four cases on the agency’s books were absorbing all working hours.

Robin hadn’t been out since her birthday drinks with Ilsa and Vanessa, which hadn’t been as enjoyable as she’d hoped. The conversation had revolved entirely around relationships, because Vanessa had arrived with a brand-new engagement ring on her finger. Since then, Robin had used pressure of work during Strike’s absence to avoid nights out with either of her friends. Her cousin Katie’s words, it’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us, were hard to forget, but the truth was that Robin didn’t want to stand in a bar while Ilsa and Vanessa encouraged her to respond to the advances of some overfamiliar, Morris-like man with a line in easy patter and bad jokes.

She and Strike had now divided between them the people they wished to trace and re-interview in the Bamborough case. Unfortunately, Robin now knew that at least four of her allocated people had passed beyond the reach of questioning.

After careful cross-referencing of old records, Robin had managed to identify the Willy Lomax who’d been the long-serving handyman of St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell. He’d died in 1989 and Robin had so far been unable to find a single confirmed relative.

Albert Shimmings, the florist and possible driver of the speeding van seen on the night of Margot’s disappearance, had also passed away, but Robin had emailed two men she believed to be his sons. She sincerely hoped she’d correctly identified them, otherwise an insurance agent and a driving instructor were both about to get truly mystifying messages. Neither had yet responded to her request to talk to them.

Wilma Bayliss, the ex-practice cleaner, had died in 2003. A mother of two sons and three daughters, she’d divorced Jules Bayliss in 1975. By the time she died, Wilma hadn’t been a cleaner, but a social worker, and she’d raised a high-achieving family, including an architect, a paramedic, a teacher, another social worker and a Labor councilor. One of the sons now lived in Germany, but Robin nevertheless included him in the emails and Facebook messages she sent out to all five siblings. There’d been no response so far.

Dorothy Oakden, the practice secretary, had been ninety-one when she died in a North London nursing home. Robin hadn’t yet managed to trace Carl, her only child.

Meanwhile, Margot’s ex-boyfriend, Paul Satchwell, and the receptionist, Gloria Conti, were proving strangely and similarly elusive. At first Robin had been relieved when she’d failed to find a death certificate for either of them, but after combing telephone directories, census records, county court judgments, marriage and divorce certificates, press archives, social media and lists of company staff, she’d come up with nothing. The only possible explanations Robin could think of were changes of name (in Gloria’s case, possibly by marriage) and emigration.

As for Mandy White, the schoolgirl who’d claimed to have seen Margot at a rainy window, there were so many Amanda Whites of approximately the right age to be found online that Robin was starting to despair of ever finding the right one. Robin found this line of inquiry particularly frustrating, firstly because there was a good chance that White was no longer Mandy’s surname, and secondly because, like the police before her, Robin thought it highly unlikely that Mandy had actually seen Margot at the window that night.

Having examined and discounted the Facebook accounts of another six Amanda Whites, Robin yawned, stretched and decided she was owed a break. Setting her laptop down on a side table, she swung her legs carefully off the sofa so as not to disturb Wolfgang, and crossed the open-plan area that combined kitchen, dining and living rooms, to make herself one of the low-calorie hot chocolates she was trying to convince herself was a treat, because she was still, in the middle of this long, sedentary stretch of surveillance, trying to keep an eye on her waistline.

As she stirred the unappetizing powder into boiling water, a whiff of tuberose mingled with the scent of synthetic caramel. In spite of her bath, Fracas still lingered in her hair and on her pajama. This perfume, she’d finally decided, had been a costly mistake. Living in a dense cloud of tuberose made her feel not only perpetually on the verge of a headache, but also as though she were wearing fur and pearls in broad daylight.