Page 316 of Troubled Blood

“Are you from the social work department?” asked Deborah slowly. “I phoned Clare…”

“We can help wi’ anythin’ Clare can,” said Barclay, before Robin could answer. “What’s the problem?”

“Him downstairs is a bastard,” said Samhain, who was now digging busily in the tin of chocolate biscuits, and selecting the one wrapped in gold foil. “These are the best ones, in the shiny paper, that’s how you know.”

“Is the man downstairs complaining again?” asked Robin, with a sudden upswell of excitement that bordered on panic.

“Can we have a look at whut the problem is?” asked Barclay. “Where’s he think his ceilin’s crackin’?”

Deborah pointed toward the sitting room.

“I’ll have a wee look,” said Barclay confidently, and he set off toward the sitting room.

“Don’t eat all of them, Sammy,” said Deborah, who’d returned to the methodical wiping of the kitchen sides.

“They gave them to me, you silly woman,” said Samhain, his mouth full of chocolate.

Robin followed, fighting a sense of utter unreality. Could what Strike suspected really be true?

Two budgerigars were twittering in a cage in the corner of the small sitting room, which, like the hall, was carpeted in swirls of brown and orange. A crocheted blanket had been spread over the back of the sofa. Barclay was looking down at the almost completed jigsaw of unicorns leaping over a rainbow. Robin glanced around. The place was sparsely furnished. Apart from the sofa and the budgies’ cage, there was only a small armchair, a television set on top of which stood an urn, and a small shelving unit on which sat a few old paperbacks and some cheap ornaments. Her eyes lingered on the Egyptian symbol of eternal life painted on a patch of dirty green wall.

She lies in a holy place.

“Floorboards?” she murmured to Barclay.

He shook his head, looked meaningfully down at the jigsaw of the unicorns, then pointed with his foot at the overlarge ottoman on which it lay.

“Oh God, no,” whispered Robin, before she could stop herself. “You think?”

“Otherwise the carpet would’ve had tae come up,” murmured Barclay. “Move furniture, take up floorboards… and would it make the ceilin’ crack, down below? An’ what aboot the smell?”

Samhain now came ambling into the room, eating his second foil-wrapped biscuit.

“D’you want a hot chocolate, or not?” he asked, looking at Robin’s knees.

“Um… no, thank you,” said Robin, smiling at him.

“Does he want a hot chocolate, or not?”

“No thanks, mate,” said Barclay. “Can we move this jigsaw? Need tae have a look beneath it.”

“Deborah don’t like her jigsaw touched,” said Samhain sternly.

“We need to prove the man downstairs is lying, though,” said Robin. “About his ceiling cracking.”

“Deborah,” called Samhain. “They want to move your jigsaw.”

He walked out of the room with his rocking gait, and his mother took his place at the door, eyeing Robin’s shoes as she said,

“You can’t move my unicorns.”

“We need to have a little look underneath it,” said Robin. “I promise we’ll take very good care of it, and not break it. We could move it…”

She looked around, but there was no stretch of floor big enough to accommodate it.

“In my bedroom, you can put it,” said Samhain, bobbing back into sight. “On my bed, they can put it, Deborah.”

“Excellent idea,” said Barclay heartily, bending to pick it up.

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