Page 229 of Troubled Blood

There was an infinitesimal pause in which Robin could almost feel Strike’s interest sharpening, along with her own.

“Depends what that information is,” Strike answered slowly. “It might be possible not to divulge where we got it, but if the source is important to getting a conviction…”

There was a long pause. The air between the sisters seemed charged with silent communications.

“Well?” said Porschia at last, on an interrogative note.

“We did decide to,” Maya mumbled to Eden, who continued to sit in silence, arms folded.

“OK, fine,” said Eden, with a don’t-blame-me-later inflection.

The deputy headmistress reached absently for the little silver cross around her neck, and held it as she began to talk.

“I need to explain a bit of background, first,” she said. “When we were kids—Eden and I were already teenagers, but Porschia was only nine—”

“Eight,” Porschia corrected her.

“Eight,” Maya said obediently, “our dad was convicted of—of rape and sent to prison.”

“He didn’t do it, though,” said Eden.

Robin reached automatically for her coffee cup and took a sip, so as to hide her face.

“He didn’t, OK?” said Eden, watching Robin. “He had a white girlfriend for a couple of months. The whole of Clerkenwell knew. They’d been seen together in bars all over the place. He tried to end it, and she cried rape.”

Robin’s stomach lurched as though the floor had tilted. She very much wanted this story to be untrue. The idea of any woman lying about rape was repugnant to her. She’d had to talk through every moment of her own assault in court. Her soft-spoken fifty-three-year-old rapist and would-be murderer had taken the stand afterward to explain to the jury how the twenty-year-old Robin had invited him into the stairwell of her hall of residence for sex. In his account, everything had been consensual: she’d whispered that she liked it rough, which had accounted for the heavy bruising around her neck, she’d enjoyed it so much she’d asked him back the following night, and yes (with a little laugh in the dock), of course he’d been surprised, nicely spoken young girl like her, coming on to him like that, out of nowhere…

“Easy thing for a white woman to do to a black man,” said Eden, “’specially in 1972. Dad already had a record, because he’d got into a fight a few years before that. He went down for five years.”

“Must’ve been hard on the family,” said Strike, not looking at Robin.

“It was,” said Maya. “Very hard. The other kids at school… well, you know what kids are like…”

“Dad had been bringing in most of the money,” said Porschia. “There were five of us, and Mum had never had much schooling. Before Dad got arrested, she’d been studying, trying to pass some exams, better herself. We were just about making ends meet while Dad was bringing in a wage, but once he was gone, we struggled.”

“Our mum and her sister married two brothers,” said Maya. “Nine children between them. The families were really close, right up until Dad got arrested—but then everything changed. My Uncle Marcus went to court every day while Dad was on trial, but Mum wouldn’t go and Uncle Marcus was really angry at her.”

“Well, he knew it would’ve made a big difference, if the judge had seen Dad had the family united behind him,” snapped Eden. “I went. I bunked off school to go. I knew he was innocent.”

“Well, good for you,” said Porschia, though her tone was far from congratulatory, “but Mum didn’t want to sit in open court listening to her husband talk about how often he had sex with his girlfriend—”

“That woman was trash,” said Eden curtly.

“Dirty water does cool hot iron,” said Porschia, with a Bajan inflection. “His choice.”

“So, anyway,” said Maya hastily, “the judge believed the woman, and Dad got put away. Mum never went to visit him inside, and she wouldn’t take me or Porschia or our brothers, either.”

“I went,” piped up Eden again. “I got Uncle Marcus to take me. He was still our dad. Mum had no right to stop us seeing him.”

“Yeah, so,” continued Maya, before Porschia could say anything, “Mum wanted a divorce, but she had no money for legal advice. So Dr. Bamborough put her in touch with this feminist lawyer, who’d give legal help to women in difficult circumstances, for a reduced fee. When Uncle Marcus told Dad that Mum had managed to get herself a lawyer, Dad wrote to her from prison, begging her to change her mind. He said he’d found God, that he loved her and he’d learned his lesson and all he wanted was his family.”

Maya took a sip of her coffee.

“About a week after Mum got Dad’s letter, she was cleaning Dr. Bamborough’s consulting room one evening after everyone had left, and she noticed something in the bin.”

Maya unfastened the handbag she’d been holding on her lap, and took out a pale blue piece of heavily creased paper, which had clearly been crumpled up into a ball at some point in the past. She held it out to Robin, who laid it flat on the table so that Strike could read it, too.

The faded handwriting was a distinctive mix of capitals and lower-case letters.

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