Page 123 of Troubled Blood

“To go back to Mucky Ricci,” Strike said, “as far as you know, your father never had direct dealings with him?”

“No,” said Gregory, “but Dad’s best mate on the force did, name of Browning. He was Vice Squad. He raided one of Mucky’s clubs, I know that. I remember Dad talking about it.”

“Where’s Browning now? Can I talk to him?”

“He’s dead,” said Gregory. “What exactly—?”

“I’d like to know where that film you passed to me came from, Gregory.”

“I’ve no idea,” said Gregory. “Dad just came home with it one day, Mum says.”

“Any idea when this was?” asked Strike, hoping not to have to find a polite way of asking whether Talbot had been quite sane at the time.

“It would’ve been while Dad was working on the Bamborough case. Why?”

Strike braced himself.

“I’m afraid we’ve had to turn the film over to the police.”

Hutchins had volunteered to take care of this, on the morning that Strike had headed down to Cornwall. As an ex-policeman who still had good contacts on the force, he knew where to take it and how to make sure it got seen by the right people. Strike had asked Hutchins not to talk to Robin about the film, or to tell her what he’d done with it. She was currently in ignorance of the contents.

“What?” said Gregory, horrified. “Why?”

“It isn’t porn,” said Strike, muttering now, in deference to the elderly couple who had just entered the Victory and stood, disorientated by the storm outside, dripping and blinking mere feet from his table. “It’s a snuff movie. Someone filmed a woman being gang-raped and stabbed.”

There was another silence on the end of the phone. Strike watched the elderly couple shuffle to the bar, the woman taking off her plastic rain hat as she went.

“Actually killed?” said Gregory, his voice rising an octave. “I mean… it’s definitely real?”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

He wasn’t about to give details. He’d seen people dying and dead: the kind of gore you saw on horror movies wasn’t the same, and even without a soundtrack, he wouldn’t quickly forget the hooded, naked woman twitching on the floor of the warehouse, while her killers watched her die.

“And I suppose you’ve told them where you got it?” said Gregory, more panicked than angry.

“I’m afraid I had to,” said Strike. “I’m sorry, but some of the men involved could still be alive, could still be charged. I can’t sit on something like that.”

“I wasn’t concealing anything, I didn’t even know it was—”

“I wasn’t meaning to suggest you knew, or you meant to hide it,” said Strike.

“If they think—we foster kids, Strike—”

“I’ve told the police you handed it over to me willingly, without knowing what was on there. I’ll stand up in court and testify that I believe you were in total ignorance of what was in your attic. Your family’s had forty-odd years to destroy it and you didn’t. Nobody’s going to blame you,” said Strike, even though he knew perfectly well that the tabloids might not take that view.

“I was afraid something like this was going to happen,” said Gregory, now sounding immensely stressed. “I’ve been worried, ever since you came round for coffee. Dragging all this stuff up again…”

“You told me your father would want to see the case solved.”

There was another silence, and then Gregory said,

“He would. But not at the cost of my mother’s peace of mind, or me and my wife having our foster kids taken off us.”

A number of rejoinders occurred to Strike, some of them unkind. It was far from the first time he’d encountered the tendency to believe the dead would have wanted whatever was most convenient to the living.

“I had a responsibility to hand that film over to the police once I’d seen what was on it. As I say, I’ll make it clear to anyone who asks that you weren’t trying to hide anything, that you handed it over willingly.”

There was little more to say. Gregory, clearly still unhappy, rang off, and Strike called Robin back.

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