Page 96 of Troubled Blood

“No. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s a relative. She patted him on the head as he left.”

“Dominatrix?” suggested Robin.

There wasn’t much she hadn’t learned about the kinks of powerful men since joining the agency.

“It occurred to me, but the way he said goodbye… they looked… cozy. But he hasn’t got a sister and she looked younger than him. Would cousins pat each other on the head?”

“Well, Sunday night’s all wrong for a normal counselor or a therapist, but patting’s quasi-parental… life coach? Psychic?”

“That’s a thought,” said Strike, stroking his chin. “Stockholders wouldn’t be impressed if he’s making business decisions based on what his fortune teller in Stoke Newington’s telling him. I was going to put Morris on to the woman over Christmas, but he’s out of action, Hutchins is on Two-Times’ girl and I’m supposed to be leaving for Cornwall day after tomorrow. You’re off to Masham when—Tuesday?”

“No,” said Robin, looking anxious. “Tomorrow—Saturday. We did discuss this back in September, remember? I swapped with Morris so I could—”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” lied Strike. His head was starting to throb, and the tea wasn’t making his throat feel much more comfortable. “No problem.”

But this, of course, meant that if he was going to give Robin a Christmas present, he’d have to buy it and get it to her by the end of the day.

“I’d try and get a later train,” said Robin, “but obviously, with it being Christmas—”

“No, you’re owed time off,” he said brusquely. “You shouldn’t be working just because those careless bastards got flu.”

Robin, who had a strong suspicion that Barclay and Morris weren’t the only people at the agency with flu, said,

“D’you want more tea?”

“What? No,” said Strike, feeling unreasonably resentful at her for, as he saw it, forcing him to go shopping. “And Postcard’s a washout, we’ve got literally noth—”

“I might —might—have something on Postcard.”

“What?” said Strike, surprised.

“Our weatherman got another postcard yesterday, sent to the television studio. It’s the fourth one bought in the National Portrait Gallery shop, and it’s got an odd message on it.”

She pulled the postcard from her bag and handed it over the desk to Strike. The picture on the front reproduced a self-portrait of Joshua Reynolds, his hand shading his eyes in the stereotypical pose of one staring at something indistinct. On the back was written:

I hope I’m wrong, but I think you sent someone to my work, holding some of my letters. Have you let someone else see them? I really hope you haven’t. Were you trying to scare me? You act like you’re so kind and down-to-earth, no airs and graces. I’d have thought you’d have the decency to come yourself if you’ve got something to say to me. If you don’t understand this, ignore.

Strike looked up at Robin.

“Does this mean…?”

Robin explained that she’d bought the same three postcards that Postcard had previously sent from the gallery shop, then roamed the gallery’s many rooms, holding the postcards so that they were visible to all the guides she passed, until an owlish woman in thick-lensed glasses had appeared to react at the sight of them, and disappeared through a door marked “Staff Only.”

“I didn’t tell you at the time,” Robin said, “because I thought I might’ve imagined it, and she also looked exactly like the kind of person I’d imagined Postcard to be, so I was worried I was doing a Talbot, chasing my own mad hunches.”

“But you’re not off your rocker, are you? That was a bloody good idea, going to the shop, and this,” he brandished the postcard of the Reynolds, “suggests you hit the bullseye first throw.”

“I didn’t manage to get a picture of her,” said Robin, trying not to show how much pleasure Strike’s praise had given her, “but she was in Room 8 and I can describe her. Big glasses, shorter than me, thick brown hair, bobbed, probably fortyish.”

Strike made a note of the description.

“Might nip along there myself before I head for Cornwall,” he said. “Right, let’s get on with Bamborough.”

But before either could say another word, the phone rang in the outer office. Glad to have something to complain about, Strike glanced at his watch, heaved himself to his feet and said,

“It’s nine o’clock, Pat should—”

But even as he said it, they both heard the glass door open, Pat’s unhurried tread and then, in her usual rasping baritone,