Page 207 of Troubled Blood

Strike, who’d returned to his sandwich, saw, to his surprise, Robin drawing from her bag Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which Strike had assumed was still in the locked filing cabinet in the office.

“I’ve been looking back through this.”

“Think I missed something, do you?” said Strike, through a mouthful of bread.

“No, I—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Perfectly possible. Nobody’s infallible.”

Sunshine was slowly making its way into Frith Street now, and the pages of the old notebook glowed yellow as Robin opened it.

“Well, it’s about Scorpio. You remember Scorpio?”

“The person whose death Margot might have been worried about?”

“Exactly. You thought Scorpio might be Steve Douthwaite’s married girlfriend, who killed herself.”

“I’m open to other theories,” said Strike. His sandwich finished, he brushed off his hands and took out his cigarettes. “The notes ask whether Aquarius confronted Pisces, don’t they? Which I assumed meant Margot confronted Douthwaite.”

In spite of his neutral tone, Strike resented remembering these star signs. The laborious and ultimately unrewarding task of working out which suspects and witnesses were represented by each astrological glyph had been far from his favorite bit of research.

“Well,” said Robin, taking out two folded photocopies, which she’d been keeping in the notebook, “I’ve been wondering… look at these.”

She passed the two documents to Strike, who opened them and saw copies of two birth certificates, one for Olive Satchwell, the other for Blanche Satchwell.

“Olive was Satchwell’s mother,” said Robin, as Strike, smoking, examined the documents. “And Blanche was his sister, who died aged ten—possibly with a pillow over her face.”

“If you’re expecting me to deduce their star signs from these birthdays,” said Strike, “I haven’t memorized the whole zodiac.”

“Blanche was born on the twenty-fifth of October, which makes her a Scorpio,” said Robin. “Olive was born on the twenty-ninth of March. Under the traditional system, she’d be Aries, like Satchwell…”

To Strike’s surprise, Robin now took out a copy of Astrology 14 by Steven Schmidt.

“It was quite hard to track this down. It’s been out of print for ages.”

“A masterwork like that? You amaze me,” said Strike, watching Robin turn to a page listing the dates of revised signs according to Schmidt. Robin smiled, but refusing to be deflected said,

“Look here. By Schmidt’s system, Satchwell’s mother was a Pisces.”

“We’re mixing up the two systems now, are we?” asked Strike.

“Well, Talbot did,” Robin pointed out. “He decided Irene and Roy should be given their Schmidt signs, but other people were allowed to keep the traditional ones.”

“But,” said Strike, well aware that he was trying to impose logic on what was essentially illogical, “Talbot made massive, sweeping assumptions on the basis of people’s original signs. Brenner was ruled out as a suspect solely because he was—”

“—Libra, yes,” said Robin.

“Well, what happens to Janice being psychic and the Essex Butcher being a Capricorn if all the dates start sliding around?”

“Wherever there was a discrepancy between the traditional sign and Schmidt sign, he seems to have gone with the sign he thought suited the person best.”

“Which makes a mockery of the whole business. And also,” said Strike, “calls all my identifications of signs and suspects into question.”

“I know,” said Robin. “Even Talbot seems to have got very stressed trying to work across both systems, which is when he began concentrating mainly on asteroids and the tarot.”

“OK,” said Strike, blowing smoke away from her, “go on with what you were saying—if Satchwell’s sister was a Scorpio, and her mother was Pisces… remind me,” said Strike, “exactly what that passage about Scorpio says?”

Robin flicked backward through Talbot’s notebook until she found the passage decorated with doodles of the crab, the fish, the scorpion, the fish-tailed goat and the water-bearer’s urn.

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