Page 28 of Troubled Blood

“Interesting,” said Charlotte dreamily. “I thought she might have decided not to pass on the message.”

He said nothing.

“Are the two of you together yet? She’s quite good-looking. And always there. On tap. So conven—”

“Why are you calling?”

“I’ve told you, I wanted to talk to you… d’you know what day it is today? The twins’ first birthday. The entire famille Ross has turned up to fawn over them. This is the first moment I’ve had to myself all day.”

He knew, of course, that she’d had twins. There’d been an announcement in The Times, because she’d married into an aristocratic family that routinely announced births, marriages and deaths in its columns, although Strike had not, in fact, read the news there. It was Ilsa who’d passed the information on, and Strike had immediately remembered the words Charlotte had said to him, over a restaurant table she had tricked him into sharing with her, more than a year previously.

All that’s kept me going through this pregnancy is the thought that once I’ve had them, I can leave.

But the babies had been born prematurely and Charlotte had not left them.

Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is.

There’d been two previous tipsy phone calls to Strike like this one in the past year, both made late at night. He’d ended the first one mere seconds in, because Robin was trying to reach him. Charlotte had hung up abruptly a few minutes into the second.

“Nobody thought they’d live, did you know that?” Charlotte said now. “It’s,” she whispered, “a miracle.”

“If it’s your kids’ birthday, I should let you go,” said Strike. “Goodnight, Char—”

“Don’t go,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Don’t go, please don’t.”

Hang up, said the voice in his head. He didn’t.

“They’re asleep, fast asleep. They don’t know it’s their birthday, the whole thing’s a joke. Commemorating the anniversary of that fucking nightmare. It was hideous, they cut me open—”

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’m busy.”

“Please,” she almost wailed. “Bluey, I’m so unhappy, you don’t know, I’m so fucking miserable—”

“You’re a married mother of two,” he said brutally, “and I’m not an agony aunt. There are anonymous services you can call if you need them. Goodnight, Charlotte.”

He cut the call.

The rain was coming down harder. It drummed on his dark windows. Dennis Creed’s face was now the wrong way up on the cast-aside book. His light-lashed eyes seemed reversed in the upside-down face. The effect was unsettling, as though the eyes were alive in the photograph.

Strike opened the book again and continued to read.

9

Faire Sir, of friendship let me now you pray,

That as I late aduentured for your sake,

The hurts whereof me now from battell stay,

Ye will me now with like good turne repay.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

George Layborn still hadn’t managed to lay hands on the Bamborough file when Robin’s birthday arrived.

For the first time in her life, she woke on the morning of October the ninth, remembered what day it was and experienced no twinge of excitement, but a lowering sensation. She was twenty-nine years old today, and twenty-nine had an odd ring to it. The number seemed to signify not a landmark, but a staging post: “Next stop: THIRTY.” Lying alone for a few moments in her double bed in her rented bedroom, she remembered what her favorite cousin, Katie, had said during Robin’s last trip home, while Robin had been helping Katie’s two-year-old son make Play-Doh monsters to ride in his Tonka truck.

---