Page 197 of Troubled Blood

“Not as far as I know.”

“The little wooden Viking you gave her,” said Robin, watching him carefully, “the one with ‘Brunhilda’ written on the foot—”

“The one she had on her desk at work?” he said, with what Robin thought might have been a whiff of gratified vanity. “Yeah, I gave her that in the old days, when we were dating.”

Could it be true, Robin wondered. After the acrimonious way Margot and Satchwell had broken up, after he’d locked her in his flat so she couldn’t get out to work, after he’d hit her, after she’d married another man, would Margot really have kept Satchwell’s silly little gift? Didn’t private jokes and nicknames become dead and rotten things after a painful breakup, when the thought of them became almost worse than memories of rows and insults? Robin had given most of Matthew’s gifts to charity after she’d found out about his infidelity, including the plush elephant that had been his first Valentine’s present and the jewelry box he’d given her for her twenty-first. However, Robin could tell Satchwell was going to stick to his story, so she moved to the next question in her notebook.

“There was a printers on Clerkenwell Road I think you had an association with.”

“Come again?” said Satchwell, frowning. “A printers?”

“A schoolgirl called Amanda White claims she saw Margot in an upper window belonging to this printers on the night—”

“Really?” said Satchwell. “I never ’ad no association with no printers. ’Oo says I did?”

“There was a book written in the eighties about Margot’s disappearance—”

“Yeah? I missed that.”

“—it said the printers produced flyers for a nightclub you’d painted a mural for.”

“For crying out loud,” said Satchwell, half-amused, half-exasperated. “That’s not an association. It’d be a stretch to call it a coincidence. I’ve never heard of the bloody place.”

Robin made a note and moved to her next question.

“What did you think of Bill Talbot?”

“Who?”

“The investigating officer. The first one,” said Robin.

“Oh yeah,” said Satchwell, nodding. “Very odd bloke. When I ’eard afterward he’d had a breakdown or whatever, I wasn’t surprised. Kept asking me what I was doing on random dates. Afterward, I worked out ’e was trying to decide wevver I was the Essex Butcher. He wanted to know my time of birth, as well, and what the hell that had to do with anything…”

“He was trying to draw up your horoscope,” said Robin, and she explained Talbot’s preoccupation with astrology.

“Dén tó pistévo!” said Satchwell, looking annoyed. “Astrology? That’s not funny. He was in charge of the case—how long?”

“Six months,” said Robin.

“Jesus,” said Satchwell, scowling so that the clear tape holding the dressing over his eye crinkled.

“I don’t think the people around him realized how ill he was until it got too obvious to ignore,” said Robin, now pulling a few tagged sheets of paper out of her bag: photocopies of Satchwell’s statements to both Talbot and Lawson.

“What’s all that?” he said sharply.

“Your statements to the police,” said Robin.

“Why are there—what are they, stars?—all over—”

“They’re pentagrams,” said Robin. “This is the statement Talbot took from you. It’s just routine,” she added, because Satchwell was now looking wary. “We’ve done it with everyone the police interviewed. I know your statements were double-checked at the time, but I wondered if I could run over them again, in case you remember anything useful?”

Taking his silence for consent, she continued:

“You were alone in your studio on the afternoon of the eleventh of October, but you took a call there at five from a Mr.… Hendricks?”

“Hendricks, yeah,” said Satchwell. “He was my agent at the time.”

“You went out to eat at a local café around half past six, where you had a conversation with the woman behind the till, which she remembered. Then you went back home to change, and out again to meet a few friends in a bar called Joe Bloggs around eight o’clock. All three friends you were drinking with confirmed your story… nothing to add to any of that?”

---