Page 93 of Troubled Blood

“Roy called at nine to see whether I’d had any contact. That’s when I started to get really worried. He said he was going to call the police.

“You’ll know the rest,” said Oonagh quietly. “It was like a nightmare. You put all your hopes on t’ings that are less and less likely. Amnesia. Knocked down by a car and unconscious somewhere. She’s run away somewhere to t’ink.

“But I knew, really. She’d never’ve left her baby girl, and she’d never have left without telling me. I knew she was dead. I could tell the police t’ought it was the Essex Butcher, but me…”

“But you?” prompted Robin gently.

“Well, I kept t’inking, t’ree weeks after Paul Satchwell comes back into her life, she vanishes forever. I know he had his little alibi, all his arty friends backing him up. I said to Talbot and Lawson: ask him about the pillow dream. Ask him what that means, the pillow dream he was so frightened Margot would tell people about.

“Is that in the police notes?” she asked Strike, turning to look at him. “Did either of them ask Satchwell about the pillow dream?”

“No,” said Strike slowly. “I don’t think they did.”

25

All those were idle thoughtes and fantasies,

Deuices, dreames, opinions vnsound,

Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies;

And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Three evenings later, Strike was to be found sitting in his BMW outside a nondescript terraced house in Stoke Newington. The Shifty investigation, now in its fifth month, had so far yielded no results. The restive trustees who suspected that their CEO was being blackmailed by the ambitious Shifty were making ominous noises of discontent, and were clearly considering taking their business elsewhere.

Even after being plied with gin by Hutchins, who’d succeeded in befriending him at the rifle club, Shifty had remained as close lipped as ever about the hold he had over his boss, so it was time, Strike had decided, to start tailing SB himself. It was just possible that the CEO, a rotund, pinstriped man with a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, was still indulging in the blackmailable behavior that Shifty had uncovered and that had leveraged him into a promotion that neither Shifty’s CV, nor his personality, justified.

Strike was sure Shifty wasn’t exploiting a simple case of infidelity. SB’s current wife had the immaculate, plastic sheen of a doll newly removed from cellophane and Strike suspected it would take more than her husband having an affair to make her relinquish her taloned grip on a black American Express card, especially as she’d been married barely two years and had no children to guarantee a generous settlement.

Christmas tree lights twinkled in almost every window surrounding Strike. The roof of the house beside him had been hung with brilliant blue-white icicles that burned the retina if looked at too long. Wreaths on doors, glass panels decorated with fake snow and the sparkle of orange, red and green reflected in the dirty puddles all reminded Strike that he really did need to start buying Christmas gifts to take to Cornwall.

Joan had been released from hospital that morning, her drugs adjusted, and determined to get home and start preparing for the family festivities. Strike would need to buy presents not only for Joan and Ted but for his sister, brother-in-law and nephews. This was an irksome extra chore, given the amount of work the agency currently had on its books. Then he reminded himself that he had to buy something for Robin, too, something better than flowers. Strike, who disliked shopping in general, and buying gifts in particular, reached for his cigarettes to ward off a dim sense of persecution.

Having lit up, Strike took from his pocket the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? which Robin had given him, but which he hadn’t yet had time to read. Small tags marked the places Robin thought might be of some interest to the investigation.

With a quick glance at the still-closed front door of the house he was watching, Strike opened the book and skim-read a couple of pages, looking up at regular intervals to check that SB hadn’t yet emerged.

The first chapter, which Robin hadn’t marked, but which Strike flicked through anyway, dealt summarily with Margot’s childhood and adolescence. Unable to gain access to anybody with particularly clear memories of his subject, Oakden had to fall back on generalities, supposition and a good deal of padding. Thus Strike learned that Margot Bamborough “would have dreamed of leaving poverty behind,” “would have been caught up in the giddy atmosphere of the 1960s” and “would have been aware of the possibilities for consequence-free sex offered by the contraceptive pill.” Word count was boosted by the information that the mini-skirt had been popularized by Mary Quant, that London was the heart of a thriving music scene and that the Beatles had appeared on America’s Ed Sullivan Show around the time of Margot’s nineteenth birthday. “Margot would have been excited by the possibilities offered to the working classes in this new, egalitarian era,” C. B. Oakden informed his readers.

Chapter two ushered in Margot’s arrival at the Playboy Club, and here, the sense of strain that had suffused the previous chapter vanished. C. B. Oakden evidently found Playboy Bunny Margot a far more inspiring subject than child Margot, and he devoted many paragraphs to the sense of freedom and liberation she would have felt on lacing herself tightly into her Bunny costume, putting on false ears and judiciously padding the cups of her costume to ensure that her breasts appeared of sufficient fullness to satisfy her employer’s stringent demands. Writing eleven years after her disappearance, Oakden had managed to track down a couple of Bunny Girls who remembered Margot. Bunny Lisa, who was now married with two children, reminisced about having “a good laugh” with her, and being “devastated” by her disappearance. Bunny Rita, who ran her own marketing business, said that she was “really bright, obviously going places,” and thought “it must’ve been dreadful for her poor family.”

Strike glanced up again at the front of the house into which SB had disappeared. Still no sign of him. Turning back to C. B. Oakden, the bored Strike skipped ahead to the first place Robin had marked as of interest.

After her successful stint at the Playboy Club, the playful and flirtatious Margot found it hard to adapt to the life of a general practitioner. At least one employee at the St. John’s practice says her manner was out of place in the setting of a consulting room.

“She didn’t keep them at a proper distance, that was the trouble. She wasn’t from a background that had a lot of professional people. A doctor’s got to hold himself above the patients.

“She recommended that book The Joy of Sex, to a woman who went to see her. I heard people in the waiting room talking about it, after. Giggling, you know. A doctor shouldn’t be telling people to read things like that. It reflects poorly on the whole practice. I was embarrassed for her.

“The one who was keen on her, the young fellow who kept coming back to see her, buying her chocolates and what have you—if she was telling people about different sex positions, you can see how men got the wrong idea, can’t you?”

There followed several paragraphs that had clearly been cribbed from the press, covering the suicide of Steve Douthwaite’s married ex-girlfriend, his sudden flight from his job and the fact that Lawson had re-interviewed him several times. Making the most of his scant material, Oakden managed to suggest that Douthwaite had been at best disreputable, at worst, dangerous: a feckless drifter and an unprincipled lady’s man, in whose vicinity women had a habit of dying or disappearing. It was with a slight snort of sudden amusement, therefore, that Strike read the words,

Now calling himself Stevie Jacks, Douthwaite currently works at Butlin’s holiday camp in Clacton-on-Sea—