Page 80 of Troubled Blood

“It means nothing, it’s all bollocks.”

Robin could tell that he didn’t want to admit that he’d remembered, which made her laugh some more. Half-annoyed, half-amused, he muttered,

“Independent. Leadership.”

“Well—”

“It’s all bollocks, and we’ve got enough mystic crap swimming round this case without adding star signs. The medium and the holy place, Talbot and Baphomet—”

“—Irene and her broken Margot Fonteyn,” said Robin.

“Irene and her broken fucking Margot Fonteyn,” Strike muttered, rolling his eyes.

A fine shower of icy rain began to fall, speckling the table top and over Talbot’s notebook, which Strike closed before the ink could run. In unspoken agreement, both got up and headed back toward the Land Rover.

The lavender-haired old lady who shared Strike’s birthday was now being helped into a nearby Toyota by what looked like two daughters. All around her car stood family, smiling and talking under umbrellas. Just for a moment, as he pulled himself back inside the Land Rover, Strike wondered where he’d be if he lived to eighty, and who’d be there with him.

22

And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show.

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene

That nothing is but that which he hath seene?

What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare,

What if in euery other starre vnseene

Of other worldes he happily should heare?

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Strike got himself a takeaway that night, to eat alone in his attic flat. As he upended the Singapore noodles onto his plate, he inwardly acknowledged the irony that, had Ilsa not been so keen to act as midwife to a romantic relationship between himself and Robin, he might now have been sitting in Nick and Ilsa’s flat in Octavia Road, enjoying a laugh with two of his old friends and indeed with Robin herself, whose company had never yet palled on him, through the many long hours they had worked together.

Strike’s thoughts lingered on his partner while he ate, on the kiss on the well-chosen card, on the headphones and the fact that she was now calling him Strike in moments of annoyance, or when the two of them were joking, all of them clear signs of increasing intimacy. However stressful the divorce proceedings, of which she’d shared few details, however little she might consciously be seeking romance, she was nevertheless a free agent.

Not for the first time, Strike wondered exactly how egotistical it was to suspect that Robin’s feelings toward him might be warmer than those of pure friendship. He got on with her better than he’d ever got on with any woman. Their mutual liking had survived all the stresses of running a business together, the personal trials each had endured since they had met, even the major disagreement thathad once seen him sack her. She’d hurried to the hospital when he had found himself alone with a critically ill nephew, brooking, he had no doubt, the displeasure of the ex-husband Strike never forgot to call “that arsehole” inside his own head.

Nor was Strike unconscious of Robin’s good looks: indeed, he’d been fully aware of them ever since she’d taken off her coat in his office for the first time. But her physical appeal was less of a threat to his peace of mind than the deep, guilty liking for being, currently, the main man in her life. Now that the possibility of something more lay in front of him, now that her husband was gone, and she was single, he found himself seriously wondering what would happen, should they act upon what he was beginning to suspect was a mutual attraction. Could the agency, for which they’d both sacrificed so much, which for Strike represented the culmination of all his ambitions, survive the partners falling into bed together? However he reframed this question, the answer always came back “no,” because he was certain, for reasons that had to do with past trauma, not from any particularly puritanical streak, that what Robin sought, ultimately, was the security and permanence of marriage.

And he wasn’t the marrying kind. No matter the inconveniences, what he craved at the end of a working day was his private space, clean and ordered, organized exactly as he liked it, free of emotional storms, from guilt and recriminations, from demands to service Hallmark’s idea of romance, from a life where someone else’s happiness was his responsibility. The truth was that he’d always been responsible for some woman: for Lucy, as they grew up together in squalor and chaos; for Leda, who lurched from lover to lover, and whom he had sometimes had to physically protect as a teenager; for Charlotte, whose volatility and self-destructive tendencies had been given many different names by therapists and psychiatrists, but whom he had loved in spite of it all. He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he’d had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He’d sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.

Except that, almost against his will, he did care about Robin. He felt familiar stirrings of a desire to make her happy that irked him far more than the habit he’d developed of looking determinedly away when she bent over a desk. They were friends, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and he suspected the best way to guarantee that was never see each other naked.

When he’d washed up his plate, Strike opened the window to admit the cold night air, reminding himself that every woman he knew would have been complaining immediately about the draft. He then lit a cigarette, opened the laptop he’d brought upstairs and drafted a letter to the Ministry of Justice, explaining that he’d been hired by Anna Phipps, setting out his proven credentials as an investigator both within the army and outside it, and requesting permission to visit and question Dennis Creed in Broadmoor.

Once finished, he yawned, lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day and went to lie down on his bed, as usual undoing his trousers first. Picking up The Demon of Paradise Park, he turned to the final chapter.

The question that haunts the officers who entered Creed’s basement in 1976 and saw for themselves the combination of jail and torture chamber that he’d constructed there, is whether the 12 women he is known to have assaulted, raped and/or killed represent the total tally of his victims.

In our final interview, Creed, who that morning had been deprived of privileges following an aggressive outburst against a prison officer, was at his least communicative and most cryptic.

Q: People suspect there may have been more victims.

A: Is that right?