Page 250 of Troubled Blood

“I’m done,” Betty said, who seemed suddenly tired and cross. “You can turn… telly back on… and move… that table over… pass me that knife and fork… in the loo…”

She’d rinsed them off in the bathroom sink, but they were still dirty. Strike washed them again before taking them to her. After arranging the table in front of her armchair, and turning The Only Way is Essex back on, he opened the door to the meals-on-wheels man, who was gray-haired and cheery.

“Oh hello,” said the newcomer in a loud voice. “This your son, Betty?”

“Is he fuck,” wheezed Betty Fuller. “Whatchew got?”

“Chicken casserole and jelly and custard, love…”

“Thanks very much for talking to me, Mrs. Fuller,” said Strike, but Betty’s stock of goodwill had plainly been exhausted, and she was now far more interested in her food.

Robin was leaning against a nearby wall, reading something off her phone, when Strike emerged from the building.

“I thought it was best to clear out,” she said, in a flat voice. “How did it go?”

“She won’t talk about the notes,” said Strike, as the pair of them headed back down Sans Walk, “and if you ask me why, I’d say it’s because she thinks Mucky Ricci wrote them. I’ve found out a bit more about that girl in the snuff movie.”

“You’re joking?” said Robin, looking worried.

“Apparently she was a police informer in one of Ricci’s—”

Robin gasped.

“Kara Wolfson!”

“What?”

“Kara Wolfson. One of the women they thought Creed might have killed. Kara worked at a nightclub in Soho—the owners put it about after she disappeared that she’d been a police informer!”

“How did you know that?” asked Strike, taken aback. He couldn’t remember this information from The Demon of Paradise Park.

Robin suddenly remembered that she’d heard this from Brian Tucker, back at the Star Café. She hadn’t yet heard back from the Ministry of Justice about the possibility of interviewing Creed, and as Strike still had no inkling what she was up to, she said,

“Think I read it online…”

But with a new heaviness pressing on her heart, Robin remembered that Kara’s only remaining close relative, the brother she’d raised, had drunk himself to death. Hutchins had said the police weren’t able to do anything about that film. Kara Wolfson’s body might be anywhere. Some stories didn’t have neat endings: there was nowhere to lay flowers for Kara Wolfson, unless it was on the corner near the strip joint where she’d last been seen.

Fighting the depression now threatening to overwhelm her, Robin raised her phone to show Strike what she’d been looking up, and said in a determinedly matter-of-fact voice,

“I was just reading about somnophilia, otherwise known as sleeping princess syndrome.”

“Which, I take it—”

“Was Brenner’s kink,” said Robin, and reading off her phone, she said, “‘Somnophilia is a paraphilia in which the individual is sexually aroused by someone non-responsive… some psychologists have linked somnophilia with necrophilia.’ Cormoran… you know how he had barbiturates stocked up in his office?”

“Yeah,” said Strike slowly, as they walked back toward his car. “Well, this is going to give us something to talk to Dorothy’s son about, isn’t it? I wonder whether she was game for playing dead? Or whether she found herself sleeping a long time, after Brenner had been round for lunch?”

Robin gave a small shudder.

“I know,” Strike continued, as he lit up, “I said he’d be a last resort, but we’ve only got three months left. I’m starting to think I’m going to have to pay Mucky Ricci a visit.”

57

But all his mind is set on mucky pelfe,

To hoord vp heapes of euill gotten masse,

For which he others wrongs, and wreckes himself.

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