Page 161 of Troubled Blood

“Er—can I use your bathroom?”

“The bog?” said Samhain, with his mouth full of chocolate.

“Yes. The bog,” said Strike.

Like the rest of the flat, the bathroom was old but perfectly clean. It was papered in green, with a pattern of pink flamingos on it, which doubtless dated from the seventies and now, forty years later, was fashionably kitsch. Strike opened the bathroom cabinet, found a pack of razor blades, extracted one and cut the blood-stained page of The Magus out with one smooth stroke, then folded it and slipped it in his pocket.

Out on the landing, he handed Samhain the book back.

“You left it on the floor.”

“Oh,” said Samhain. “Ta.”

“You won’t do anything to the budgies if I leave, will you?”

Samhain looked up at the ceiling, grinning slightly.

“Will you?” asked Strike.

“No,” sighed Samhain at last.

Strike returned to the doorway of the sitting room.

“I’ll be off now, Mrs. Athorn,” he said. “Thanks very much for talking to me.”

“Goodbye,” said Deborah, without looking at him.

Strike headed downstairs, and let himself back onto the street. Once outside, he stood for a moment in the rain, thinking hard. So unusually still was he, that a passing woman turned to stare back at him.

Reaching a decision, Strike turned left, and entered the iron­monger’s which lay directly below the Athorns’ flat.

A sullen, grizzled and aproned man behind the counter looked up at Strike’s entrance. One of his eyes was larger than the other, which gave him an oddly malevolent appearance.

“Morning,” said Strike briskly. “I’ve just come from the Athorns, upstairs. I gather you want to talk to Clare Spencer?”

“Who’re you?” asked the ironmonger, with a mixture of surprise and aggression.

“Friend of the family,” said Strike. “Can I ask why you’re putting letters to their social worker through their front door?”

“Because they don’t pick up their phones at the bloody social work department,” snarled the ironmonger. “And there’s no point talking to them, is there?” he added, pointing his finger at the ceiling.

“Is there a problem I can help with?”

“I doubt it,” said the ironmonger shortly. “You’re probably feeling pretty bloody pleased with the situation, are you, if you’re a friend of the family? Nobody has to put their hand in their pocket except me, eh? Quick bit of a cover-up and let someone else foot the bill, eh?”

“What cover-up would this be?” asked Strike.

The ironmonger was only too willing to explain. The flat upstairs, he told Strike, had long been a health risk, crammed with the hoarded belongings of many years and a magnet for vermin, and in a just world, it ought not to be he who was bearing the costs of living beneath a pair of actual morons—

“You’re talking about friends of mine,” said Strike.

“You do it, then,” snarled the ironmonger. “You pay a bleeding fortune to keep the rats down. My ceiling’s sagging under the weight of their filth—”

“I’ve just been upstairs and it’s perfectly—”

“Because they mucked it out last month, when I said I was going to bloody court!” snarled the ironmonger. “Cousins come down from Leeds when I threaten legal action—nobody give a shit until then—and I come back Monday morning and they’ve cleaned it all up. Sneaky bastards!”

“Didn’t you want the flat cleaned?”

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