Page 49 of Troubled Blood

Robin sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“Nutter, obviously,” said Strike, now tapping his photocopied art­icles and statements back into a pile and rolling them up again. “If you really knew where a body was buried, you’d include a bloody map.”

It was nearly six o’clock now, close to the hour at which a doctor had once left her practice and had never been seen again. The frosted pub windows were inky blue. Up at the bar, the blonde in the rubber uniform was giggling at something a man dressed as the Joker had told her.

“You know,” said Robin, glancing down at the papers sitting beside Strike’s pint, “she was late… it was pouring with rain…”

“Go on,” said Strike, wondering whether she was about to say exactly what he’d been thinking.

“Her friend was waiting in here, alone. Margot’s late. She would’ve wanted to get here as quickly as possible. The simplest, most plausible explanation I can think of is that somebody offered her a lift. A car pulled up—”

“Or a van,” said Strike. Robin had, indeed, reached the same conclusion he had. “Someone she knew—”

“Or someone who seemed safe. An elderly man—”

“Or what she thinks is a woman.”

“Exactly,” said Robin.

She turned a sad face to Strike.

“That’s it. She either knew the driver, or the stranger seemed safe.”

“And who’d remember that?” said Strike. “She was wearing a nondescript raincoat, carrying an umbrella. A vehicle pulls up. She bends down to the window, then gets in. No fight. No conflict. The car drives away.”

“And only the driver would know what happened next,” said Robin.

Her mobile rang: it was Pat Chauncey.

“She always does that,” said Strike. “Text her, and she doesn’t text back, she calls—”

“Does it matter?” said Robin, exasperated, and answered.

“Hi, Pat. Sorry to bother you out of hours. Did you get my text?”

“Yeah,” croaked Pat. “Where did you find that?”

“It’s in some old police notes. Can you translate it?”

“Yeah,” said Pat, “but it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Hang on, Pat, I want Cormoran to hear this,” said Robin, and she changed to speakerphone.

“Ready?” came Pat’s rasping voice.

“Yes,” said Robin. Strike pulled out a pen and flipped over his roll of paper so that he could write on the blank side.

“It says: ‘And that is the last of them, comma, the twelfth, comma, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth, comma’—and then there’s a word I can’t read, I don’t think it’s proper Pitman—and after that another word, which phonetically says Ba—fom—et, full stop. Then a new sentence, ‘Transcribe in the true book.’”

“Baphomet,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah,” said Pat.

“That’s a name,” said Strike. “Baphomet is an occult deity.”

“OK, well, that’s what it says,” said Pat, matter-of-factly.

Robin thanked her and rang off.

---