Page 82 of Troubled Blood

A:…

Q: If you abducted Bamborough, she’d have been in your basement at the same time as Susan Meyer, wouldn’t she?

A:… Nice for her.

Q: Was it nice for her?

A: Someone to talk to.

Q: Are you saying you were holding both Bamborough and Meyer at the same time?

A: [smiles]

Q: What about Andrea Hooton? Was Bamborough dead when you abducted Andrea?

A:…

Q: You threw Andrea’s body off cliffs. That was a change in your m.o. Was she the first body you threw off there?

A:…

Q: You don’t want to confirm whether you abducted Margot Bamborough?

A: [smiles]

Strike put down the book and lay for a while, smoking and thinking. Then he reached for Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which he’d earlier thrown onto his bed when taking off his coat.

Flicking through the densely packed pages, looking for something comprehensible, something he could connect with a solid fact or reference point, he suddenly placed a thick finger in the book to stop the pages turning, his attention caught by a sentence written mostly in English that seemed familiar.

It was an effort to get up and fetch his own notebook, but this he did. Slumping back onto his bed, he found the sentence that Pat had translated for him from Pitman shorthand:

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

The unknown word, Strike realized, was the same symbol that followed the word “Killer” in Talbot’s notebook.

With a feeling of both exasperation and curiosity, Strike picked up his phone and Googled “astrological symbols.”

A few minutes later, having read a couple of astrological web pages with an expression of mild distaste, he’d successfully interpreted Talbot’s sentence. It read: “Twelfth (Pisces) found. Therefore AS EXPECTED killer is Capricorn.”

Pisces was the twelfth sign of the zodiac, Capricorn the tenth. Capricorn was also the sign of the goat, which Talbot, in his manic state, appeared to have connected with Baphomet, the goat-headed deity.

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Strike, turning to a fresh page in his notebook and writing something.

An idea now occurred to him: those strange, unexplained dates with crosses beside them on all the male witnesses’ statements. He wondered whether he could be bothered to get up and go downstairs to fetch the relevant pages from the boxes of police records. With a sigh, he decided that the answer was yes. He did up his flies, heaved himself to his feet, and fetched the office keys from their hook by the door.

Ten minutes later, Strike returned to his bedroom with both his laptop and a fresh notebook. As he settled down on top of the duvet again, he noticed that the screen of his mobile, which was lying on the duvet, was now lit up. Somebody had tried to call him while he’d been downstairs. Expecting it to be Lucy, he picked up the phone and looked at it.

He’d just missed a call from Charlotte. Strike lay the phone back down again and opened his laptop. Slowly and painstakingly, he set to work matching the unexplained dates on each male suspect’s witness statements with the relevant sign of the zodiac. If his hunch that Talbot had been checking the men’s star signs was correct, Steven Douthwaite was a Pisces, Paul Satchwell was an Aries and Roy Phipps, who’d been born on the twenty-seventh of December… was a Capricorn. Yet Talbot had cleared Roy Phipps of involvement early in the case.

“So that makes no fucking sense,” muttered Strike to the empty room.

He put down his laptop and picked up Talbot’s notebook again, reading on from the assertion that Margot’s killer must be Capricorn.

“Christ almighty,” Strike muttered, trying, but not entirely succeeding, to find sense among the mass of esoteric ramblings with the aid of his astrological websites. As far as he could tell, Talbot appeared to have absolved Roy Phipps from suspicion on the grounds that he wasn’t really a Capricorn, but some sign that Strike couldn’t make head nor tail of, and which he suspected Talbot might have invented.

Returning to the notebook, Strike recognized the Celtic cross layout of tarot cards from his youth. Leda fancied herself a reader of tarot; many times had he seen her lay out the cards in the very formation Talbot had sketched in the middle of the page. He had never, however, seen the cards given astrological meanings before, and wondered whether this, too, had been Talbot’s own invention.

His mobile buzzed again. He picked it up.