Page 189 of Troubled Blood

Robin associated that star sign with two people, these days: her estranged husband, Matthew, and Dorothy Oakden, the widowed practice secretary at Margot’s old place of work. Robin had become so adept at reading Talbot’s horoscope notes, that she routinely heard “Dorothy” in her head when looking at the glyph for Virgo. Now she took out her phone, looked up the tomb and felt mildly reassured to discover that she wasn’t seeing things: this was the last resting place of one James Virgo Dunn.

But why should it have been of interest to Margot? Robin scrolled down a genealogy page for the Virgos and the Dunns and learned that the man whose bones now lay in dust a few feet from her had been born in Jamaica, where he’d been the owner of forty-six slaves.

“No need to feel sorry for you, then,” Robin muttered, returning her phone to her pocket, and she walked on around the perimeter to the front of the church, until she reached the great oak and iron double front doors. As she headed up the stone steps toward them, she heard the low hum of a hymn. Of course: it was Sunday morning.

After a moment’s hesitation, Robin opened the door as quietly as possible and peered inside. An immense, somber space was revealed: chilly parabolas of gray stone, a hundred feet of cold air between congregation and ceiling. Doubtless a church of this gigantic size had been deemed necessary back in Regency times, when people had flocked to the spa town to drink its waters, but the modern congregation didn’t come close to filling it. A black-robed verger looked around at her; Robin smiled apologetically, quietly closed the door and returned to the pavement, where a large modern steel sculpture, part squiggle, part coil, was evidently supposed to represent the medicinal spring around which the town had been built.

A pub nearby was just opening its doors and Robin fancied a coffee, so she crossed the road and entered the Old Library.

The interior was large but hardly less gloomy than the church, the décor mostly shades of brown. Robin bought herself a coffee, settled herself in a tucked-away corner where she couldn’t be observed, and sank into abstraction. Her glimpse of the church’s interior had told her nothing. Margot had been an atheist, but churches were some of the few places a person could sit and think, undisturbed. Might Margot have been drawn to All Saints out of that unfocused, inchoate need that had once driven Robin herself into an unknown graveyard, there to sit on a wooden bench and contemplate the parlous state of her marriage?

Robin set down her coffee cup, opened the messenger bag she’d brought with her and took out the wad of photocopies, of those pages of Talbot’s notebook that mentioned Paul Satchwell. Smoothing them flat, she glanced up casually at the two men who’d just sat down at a nearby table. The one with his back to her was tall and broad, with dark, curly hair, and before she could remind herself that he couldn’t be Strike, because her partner was in St. Mawes, a thrill of excitement and happiness passed through her.

The stranger seemed to have felt Robin looking at him, because he turned before she could avert her eyes. She caught a glimpse of eyes as blue as Morris’s, a weak chin and a short neck before she bowed her head to examine the horoscope notes, feeling herself turning red and suddenly unable to take in the mass of drawings and symbols in front of her.

Waves of shame were crashing over her, entirely disproportionate to catching a stranger’s eye. In the pit of her stomach, the last sparks of the excitement she’d felt on thinking that she was looking at Strike glimmered and died.

It was a momentary error of perception, she told herself. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Calm down.

But instead of reading the notes, Robin put her face in her hands. In this strange bar, her resistance lowered by exhaustion, Robin knew she’d been avoiding the question of what she really felt about Strike for the past year. Busy trying to disentangle herself from Matthew, familiarizing herself with a new flat and a new flatmate, managing and deflecting her parents’ anxiety and judgment, fending off Morris’s constant badgering, dodging Ilsa’s infuriating determination to matchmake and working twice as hard as ever before, it had been easy not to think about anything else, even a question as fraught as what she really felt for Cormoran Strike.

Now, in the corner of this dingy brown pub, with nothing else to distract her, Robin found herself thinking back to those honeymoon nights spent pacing the fine white sand after Matthew had gone to bed, when Robin had interrogated herself about whether she was in love with the man who’d then been her boss, not her partner. She’d worn a deep channel on the beach as she walked up and down in the dark, finally deciding that the answer was “no,” that what she felt was a mixture of friendship, admiration and gratitude for the opportunity he’d given her to embark on a once-dreamed-of career, which she’d thought was closed to her forever. She liked her partner; she admired him; she was grateful to him. That was it. That was all.

Except… she remembered how much pleasure it had given her to see him sitting in Notes Café, after a week’s absence, and how happy she was, no matter the circumstances, to see Strike’s name light up her phone.

Almost scared now, she forced herself to think about how bloody aggravating Strike could be: grumpy, taciturn and ungrateful, and nowhere near as handsome, with his broken nose and hair he himself described as “pube-like,” as Matthew, or even Morris…

But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so. She could just imagine him lumbering away from her like a startled bison at such a naked statement of affection, redoubling the barriers he liked to erect if ever they got too close to each other. Nevertheless, there was a kind of relief in admitting the painful truth: she cared deeply for her partner. She trusted him on the big things: to do the right thing for the right reasons. She admired his brains and appreciated his doggedness, not to mention the self-discipline all the more admirable because many whole-bodied men had never mastered it. She was often astonished by his almost total lack of self-pity. She loved the drive for justice that she shared, that unbreakable determination to settle and to solve.

And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he’d never made her feel it, as so many men did, not even in an attempt to intimidate, but because they enjoy the Parade, as a peacock spreads its tail. Matthew hadn’t been able to get past the idea of them together all the time, in a small office space, hadn’t been able to believe that Strike wasn’t capitalizing on the situation to make advances, however subtle.

But Robin, who’d forever be hypersensitive to the uninvited touch, the sidelong, lecherous glance, the invasion of personal space, the testing of conventional limits, had never once experienced, with Strike, that shrinking sensation within her own skin evoked by attempts to push a relationship into a different space. A deep reserve lay over Strike’s private life, and while that sometimes frustrated her (had he, or had he not, called Charlotte Campbell back?), his love of privacy extended to a respect for other people’s boundaries. Never had there been an ostensibly helpful but unnecessary touch, no hand on the small of the back, no grasping of the arm, no look that made her skin prickle, or made her want to cover herself: the legacy of those violent encounters with men that had left her scarred in more ways than the visible.

In truth (why not admit everything to herself now, when she was so tired, her defenses lowered?) she was aware of only two moments in four years where she’d been sure that Strike had seen her as a desirable woman, not as a friend, or an apprentice, or a younger sister.

The first had been when she’d modeled that green Cavalli dress for him, in the course of their first investigation together, when he’d looked away from her as a man would if shunning too-bright light. She’d been embarrassed by her own behavior, afterward: she hadn’t meant to make him think she was trying to be seductive or provocative; all she’d been trying to do was get information out of the sales assistant. But when he’d subsequently given her the green dress, thinking he’d never see her again, she’d wondered whether part of the message Strike had been trying to convey was that he didn’t disavow that look, that she had, indeed, looked wonderful in the dress, and this suspicion hadn’t made her feel uncomfortable, but happy and flattered.

The second moment, far more painful to remember, had been when she’d stood at the top of the stairs at her wedding venue, Strike below her, and he’d turned when she called his name, and looked up at her, the new bride. He’d been injured and exhausted, and again, she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt…

Best not to think about it. Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying “come with me” and known she’d have gone if he had.

Robin swept the horoscope papers off the pub table, stuffed them back into her messenger bag and went outside, leaving half her coffee undrunk.

Trying to walk off her memories, she crossed a small stone bridge spanning the slow-flowing River Leam, which was spotted with clumps of duckweed, and passed the colonnade of the Royal Pump Rooms, where Satchwell’s exhibition would open the following day. Striding briskly, her hands in her pockets, Robin tried to focus on the Parade, where shopfronts disfigured what had once been a sweeping white Regency terrace.

But Leamington Spa did nothing to raise her spirits. On the contrary, it reminded her too much of another spa town: Bath, where Matthew had gone to university. For Robin, long, symmetrical curves of Regency buildings, with their plain, classical façades, would forever conjure once-fond memories disfigured by later discoveries: visions of herself and Matthew strolling hand in hand, overlain by the knowledge that, even then, he’d been sleeping with Sarah.

“Oh, bugger everything,” Robin muttered, blinking tears out of her eyes. She turned abruptly and headed all the way back to the Land Rover.

Having parked the car closer to the hotel, she made a detour into the nearby Co-op to buy a small stash of food, then checked in at a self-service machine in her Premier Inn and headed upstairs to her single room. It was small, bare but perfectly clean and comfortable, and overlooked a spectacularly ugly town hall of red and white brick, which was over-embellished with scrolls, pediments and lions.

A couple of sandwiches, a chocolate éclair, a can of Diet Coke and an apple made Robin feel better. As the sun sank slowly behind the buildings on the Parade, she slipped off her shoes and reached into her bag for the photocopied pages of Talbot’s notebook and her pack of Thoth tarot cards, which Aleister Crowley had devised, and in which Bill Talbot had sought the solution to Margot’s disappearance. Sliding the pack out of the box into her hand, she shuffled through the cards, examining the images. Just as she’d suspected, Talbot had copied many motifs into his notebook, presumably from those cards which had come up during his frequent attempts to solve the case by consulting the tarot.

Robin now flattened a photocopy of what she thought of as the “horns page,” on which Talbot had dwelled on the three horned signs of the zodiac: Capricorn, Aries and Taurus. This page came in the last quarter of the notebook, in which quotations from Aleister Crowley, astrological symbols and strange drawings appeared far more often than concrete facts.

Here on the horns page was evidence of Talbot’s renewed interest in Satchwell, whom he’d first ruled out on the basis that he was an Aries rather than a Capricorn. Talbot had evidently calculated Satchwell’s whole birth horoscope and taken the trouble to note various aspects, which he noticed were same as AC. Same as AC. AND DON’T FORGET LS connection.

To add to the confusion, the mysterious Schmidt kept correcting signs, although he’d allowed Satchwell to keep his original sign of Aries.

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