Page 89 of Troubled Blood

“Anyway, when she saw how upset I’d been, t’inking she’d gone missing, she told me the truth. She and Satchwell had started things up again. She had all the old excuses down: he swore he’d never hit her again, he’d cried his eyes out about it, it was the worst mistake of his life, and anyway, she’d provoked him. I told her, ‘If you can’t see him now for what he is, after what he did to you first time round…’ Anyway, they split again and, surprise, surprise, he not only knocked her around again, he kept her locked in his flat all day, so she couldn’t get to work. That was the first shift she’d ever missed. She nearly lost the job over it, and had to make up some cock-and-bull story.

“So then at last,” said Oonagh, “she tells me she’s learned her lesson, I was right all along, she’s never going back to him, that’s it, finito.”

“Did she get the photographs back?” asked Robin.

“First t’ing I asked, when I found out they were back together. She said he’d told her he’d destroyed them. She believed it, too.”

“You didn’t?”

“O’ course I didn’t,” said Oonagh. “I’d seen him, when she t’reatened him with his pillow dream. That was a frightened man. He’d never have destroyed anyt’ing that gave him bargaining power over her.

“Would it be all right if I get another cappuccino?” asked Oonagh apologetically. “My t’roat’s dry, all this talking.”

“Of course,” said Strike, hailing a waiter, and ordering fresh coffees all round.

Oonagh pointed at Robin’s Fortnum’s bag.

“Been stocking up for Christmas, too?”

“Oh, no, I’ve been buying a present for my new niece. She was born this morning,” said Robin, smiling.

“Congratulations,” said Strike, who was surprised Robin hadn’t already told him.

“Oh, how lovely,” said Oonagh. “My fifth grandchild arrived last month.”

The interval while waiting for the fresh coffees was filled by Oonagh showing Robin pictures of her grandchildren, and Robin showing Oonagh the two pictures she had of Annabel Marie.

“Gorgeous, isn’t she?” said Oonagh, peering through her purple reading glasses at the picture on Robin’s phone. She included Strike in the question, but, seeing only an angry-looking, bald monkey, his acquiescence was half-hearted.

When the coffees had arrived and the waiter moved away again, Robin said,

“While I remember… would you happen to know if Margot had family or friends in Leamington Spa?”

“Leamington Spa?” repeated Oonagh, frowning. “Let’s see… one of the gorls at the club was from… no, that was King’s Lynn. They’re similar sorts of names, aren’t they? I can’t remember anyone from there, no… Why?”

“We’ve heard a man claimed to have seen her there, a week after she disappeared.”

“There were a few sightings after, right enough. Nothing in any of them. None of them made sense. Leamington Spa, that’s a new one.”

She took a sip of her cappuccino. Robin asked,

“Did you still see a lot of each other, once Margot went off to medical school?”

“Oh yeah, because she was still working at the club part time. How she did it all, studying, working, supporting her family… living on nerves and chocolate, skinny as ever. And then, at the start of her second year, she met Roy.”

Oonagh sighed.

“Even the cleverest people can be bloody stupid when it comes to their love lives,” she said. “In fact, I sometimes t’ink, the cleverer they are with books, the stupider they are with sex. Margot t’ought she’d learned her lesson, that she’d grown up. She couldn’t see that it was classic rebound. He might’ve looked as different from Satchwell as you could get, but really, it was more of the same.

“Roy had the kind of background Margot would’ve loved. Books, travel, culture, you know. See, there were gaps in what Margot knew. She was insecure about not knowing about the right fork, the right words. ‘Napkin’ instead of ‘serviette.’ All that snobby English stuff.

“Roy was mad for her, mind you. It wasn’t all one way. I could see what the appeal was: she was like nothing he’d ever known before. She shocked him, but she fascinated him: the Playboy Club and her work ethic, her feminist ideas, supporting her mammy and daddy. They had arguments, intellectual arguments, you know.

“But there was something bloodless about the man. Not wet exactly, but—” Oonagh gave a sudden laugh. “‘Bloodless’—you’ll know about his bleeding problem?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Von Something Disease?”

“Dat’s the one,” said Oonagh. “He’d been cossetted and wrapped up in cotton wool all his life by his mother, who was a horror. I met her a few times. That woman gave me the respect you’d give something you’d got stuck on your shoe.