‘Why aren’t there seats anywhere?’ asked Robin, glaring around.
‘Welcome to my world,’ said Strike, who had withdrawn his arm from around her shoulders the instant they had stopped.
‘What d’you think’s happened?’ Robin asked, looking down at his right leg.
‘I dunno. It was all puffed up this morning. I probably shouldn’t have put the prosthesis on, but I hate using crutches.’
‘Well, you can’t go traipsing up Lillie Road in the snow like this. We’ll get a cab and you can go back to the office—’
‘No. I want to do something,’ he said angrily. ‘Anstis is convinced it’s Leonora. It isn’t.’
Everything was pared down to the essential when you were in this degree of pain.
‘All right,’ said Robin. ‘We’ll split up and you can go in a cab. OK? OK?’ she said insistently.
‘All right,’ he said, defeated. ‘You go up to Clem Attlee Court.’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Cameras. Hiding places for clothing and intestines. Kent can’t have kept them in her flat if she took them; they’d stink. Take pictures on your phone – anything that seems useful…’
It seemed pathetically little to him as he said it, but he had to do something. For some reason, he kept remembering Orlando, with her wide, vacant smile and her cuddly orang-utan.
‘And then?’ asked Robin.
‘Sussex Street,’ said Strike after a few seconds’ thought. ‘Same thing. And then give me a ring and we’ll meet up. You’d better give me the numbers of Tassel’s and Waldegrave’s houses.’
She gave him a piece of paper.
‘I’ll get you a taxi.’
Before he could thank her she had marched away onto the cold street.
26
I must look to my footing:
In such slippery ice-pavements men had need
To be frost-nail’d well, they may break their necks else…
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
It was fortunate that Strike still had the five hundred pounds in cash in his wallet that had been given him to cut up a teenage boy. He told the taxi driver to take him to Fulham Palace Road, home of Elizabeth Tassel, took note of the route as he travelled and would have arrived at her house in a mere four minutes had he not spotted a Boots. He asked the driver to pull up and wait, and re-emerged from the chemists shortly afterwards, walking much more easily with the aid of an adjustable stick.
He estimated that a fit woman might make the journey on foot in less than half an hour. Elizabeth Tassel lived further from the murder scene than Kathryn Kent but Strike, who knew the area reasonably well, was sure that she could have made her way through most residential backstreets while avoiding the attention of cameras, and that she might have avoided detection even with a car.
Her home looked drab and dingy on this bleak winter’s day. Another red brick Victorian house, but with none of the grandeur or whimsy of Talgarth Road, it stood on a corner, fronted by a dank garden overshadowed by overgrown laburnum bushes. Sleet fell again as Strike stood peering over the garden gate, trying to keep his cigarette alight by cupping it in his hand. There were gardens front and back, both well shielded from the public view by the dark bushes quivering with the weight of the icy downpour. The upper windows of the house looked out over the Fulham Palace Road Cemetery, a depressing view one month from midwinter, with bare trees reaching bony arms silhouetted into a white sky, old tombstones marching into the distance.
Could he imagine Elizabeth Tassel in her smart black suit, with her scarlet lipstick and her undisguised fury at Owen Quine, returning here under cover of darkness, stained with blood and acid, carrying a bag full of intestines?
The cold was nipping viciously at Strike’s neck and fingers. He ground out the stub of his cigarette and asked the taxi driver, who had watched with curiosity tinged with suspicion as he scrutinised Elizabeth Tassel’s house, to take him to Hazlitt Road in Kensington. Slumped in the back seat he gulped down painkillers with a bottle of water that he had bought in Boots.
The cab was stuffy and smelled of stale tobacco, ingrained dirt and ancient leather. The windscreen wipers swished like muffled metronomes, rhythmically clearing the blurry view of broad, busy Hammersmith Road, where small office blocks and short rows of terraced houses sat side by side. Strike looked out at Nazareth House Care Home: more red brick, church-like and serene, but with security gates and a lodge keeping a firm separation between those cared for and those who were not.
Blythe House came into view through the misty windows, a grand palace-like structure with white cupolas, looking like a large pinkish cake in the grey sleet. Strike had a vague notion that it was used as a store for one of the big museums these days. The taxi turned right into Hazlitt Road.
‘What number?’ asked the driver.
‘I’ll get out here,’ said Strike, who did not wish to descend directly in front of the house, and had not forgotten that he still had to pay back the money he was squandering. Leaning heavily on the stick and grateful for its rubber-coated end, which gripped the slippery pavement well, he paid the driver and walked along the street to take a closer look at the Waldegrave residence.
These were real townhouses, four storeys high including the basements, golden brick with classical white pediments, carved wreaths beneath the upper windows and wrought-iron balustrades. Most of them had been converted into flats. There were no front gardens, only steps descending to the basements.
A faintly ramshackle flavour had permeated the street, a gentle middle-class dottiness that expressed itself in the random collections of pot plants on one balcony, a bicycle on another and, on a third, limp, wet and possibly soon-to-be-frozen washing forgotten in the sleet.
The house that Waldegrave shared with his wife was one of the very few that had not been converted into flats. As he stared up at it, Strike wondered how much a top editor earned and remembered Nina’s statement that Waldegrave’s wife ‘came from money’. The Waldegraves’ first-floor balcony (he had to cross the street to see it clearly) sported two sodden deckchairs printed with the covers of old Penguin paperbacks, flanking a tiny iron table of the kind found in Parisian bistros.
He lit another cigarette and re-crossed the road to peer down at the basement flat where Waldegrave’s daughter lived, considering as he did so whether Quine might have discussed the contents of Bombyx Mori with his editor before delivering the manuscript. Could he have confided to Waldegrave how he envisaged the final scene of Bombyx Mori? And could that amiable man in horn-rimmed glasses have nodded enthusiastically and helped hone the scene in all its ludicrous gore, knowing that he would one day enact it?
There were black bin bags heaped around the front door of the basement flat. It looked as though Joanna Waldegrave had been having a comprehensive clear-out. Strike turned his back and contemplated the fifty windows, at a conservative estimate, that overlooked the Waldegrave family’s two front doors. Waldegrave would have had to have been very lucky not to be seen coming and going out of this heavily overlooked house.
But the trouble was, Strike reflected gloomily, that even if Jerry Waldegrave had been spotted sneaking into his house at two in the morning with a suspicious, bulging bag under his arm, a jury might take some persuading that Owen Quine had not been alive and well at the time. There was too much doubt about the time of death. The murderer had now had as long as nineteen days in which to dispose of evidence, a long and useful period.
Where could Owen Quine’s guts have gone? What, Strike asked himself, did you do with pounds and pounds of freshly severed human intestine and stomach? Bury them? Dump them in a river? Throw them in a communal bin? They would surely not burn well…
The front door of the Waldegraves’ house opened and a woman with black hair and heavy frown lines walked down the three front steps. She was wearing a short scarlet coat and looked angry.
‘I’ve been watching you out of the window,’ she called to Strike as
she approached and he recognised Waldegrave’s wife, Fenella. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Why are you so interested in my house?’
‘I’m waiting for the agent,’ Strike lied at once, showing no sign of embarrassment. ‘This is the basement flat for rent, right?’
‘Oh,’ she said, taken aback. ‘No – that’s three down,’ she said, pointing.
He could tell that she teetered on the verge of an apology but decided not to bother. Instead she clattered past him on patent stilettos ill suited to the snowy conditions towards a Volvo parked a short way away. Her black hair revealed grey roots and their brief proximity had brought with it a whiff of bad breath stained with alcohol. Mindful that she could see him in her rear-view mirror, he hobbled in the direction she had indicated, waited until she had pulled away – very narrowly missing the Citroën in front of her – then walked carefully to the end of the road and down a side street, where he was able to peer over a wall into a long row of small private back gardens.
There was nothing of note in the Waldegraves’ except an old shed. The lawn was scuffed and scrubby and a set of rustic furniture sat sadly at its far end with a look of having been abandoned long ago. Staring at the untidy plot, Strike reflected gloomily on the possibility of lock-ups, allotments and garages he might not know about.
With an inward groan at the thought of the long, cold, wet walk ahead, he debated his options. He was nearest to Kensington Olympia, but it only opened the District line he needed at weekends. As an overground station, Hammersmith would be easier to navigate than Baron’s Court, so he decided on the longer journey.
He had just passed into Blythe Road, wincing with every step on his right leg, when his mobile rang: Anstis.
‘What are you playing at, Bob?’
‘Meaning?’ asked Strike, limping along, a stabbing in his knee.
‘You’ve been hanging around the crime scene.’
‘Went back for a look. Public right of way. Nothing actionable.’
‘You were trying to interview a neighbour—’
‘He wasn’t supposed to open his front door,’ said Strike. ‘I didn’t say a word about Quine.’
‘Look, Strike—’
The detective noticed the reversion to his actual name without regret. He had never been fond of the nickname Anstis had given him.
‘I told you, you’ve got to keep out of our way.’
‘Can’t, Anstis,’ said Strike matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve got a client—’
‘Forget your client,’ said Anstis. ‘She’s looking more and more like a killer with every bit of information we get. My advice is, cut your losses because you’re making yourself a lot of enemies. I warned you—’
‘You did,’ said Strike. ‘You couldn’t have been clearer. Nobody’s going to be able to blame you, Anstis.’
‘I’m not warning you off because I’m trying to cover my arse,’ snapped Anstis.
Strike kept walking in silence, the mobile pressed awkwardly to his ear. After a short pause Anstis said:
‘We’ve got the pharmacological report back. Small amount of blood alcohol, nothing else.’
‘OK.’
‘And we’re sending dogs out to Mucking Marshes this afternoon. Trying to keep ahead of the weather. They say there’s heavy snow on the way.’
Mucking Marshes, Strike knew, was the UK’s biggest landfill site; it serviced London, the municipal and commercial waste of which was floated down the Thames in ugly barges.
‘You think the guts were dumped in a dustbin, do you?’
‘A skip. There’s a house renovation going on round the corner from Talgarth Road; they had two parked out front until the eighth. In this cold the guts might not have attracted flies. We’ve checked and that’s where everything the builders take away ends up: Mucking Marshes.’
‘Well, good luck with that,’ said Strike.
‘I’m trying to save you time and energy, mate.’
‘Yeah. Very grateful.’
And after insincere thanks for Anstis’s hospitality of the previous evening Strike rang off. He then paused, leaning against a wall, the better to dial a new number. A tiny Asian woman with a pushchair, whom he had not heard walking behind him, had to swerve to avoid him, but unlike the man on the West Brompton bridge she did not swear at him. The walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status; she gave him a small smile as she passed.
Leonora Quine answered within three rings.
‘Bloody police are back,’ was her greeting.
‘What do they want?’
‘They’re asking to look all over the house and garden now,’ she said. ‘Do I have to let ’em?’
Strike hesitated.
‘I think it’s sensible to let them do whatever they want. Listen, Leonora,’ he felt no compunction about reverting to a military peremptoriness, ‘have you got a lawyer?’
‘No, why? I ain’t under arrest. Not yet.’
‘I think you need one.’
There was a pause.
‘D’you know any good ones?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Strike. ‘Call Ilsa Herbert. I’ll send you her number now.’
‘Orlando don’t like the police poking—’
‘I’m going to text you this number, and I want you to call Ilsa immediately. All right? Immediately.’
‘All right,’ she said grumpily.
He rang off, found his old school friend’s number on his mobile and sent it to Leonora. He then called Ilsa and explained, with apologies, what he had just done.
‘I don’t know why you’re saying sorry,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We love people who are in trouble with the police, it’s our bread and butter.’
‘She might qualify for legal aid.’
‘Hardly anyone does these days,’ said Ilsa. ‘Let’s just hope she’s poor enough.’
Strike’s hands were numb and he was very hungry. He slid the mobile back into his coat pocket and limped on to Hammersmith Road. There on the opposite pavement was a snug-looking pub, black painted, the round metal sign depicting a galleon in full sail. He headed straight for it, noting how much more patient waiting drivers were when you were using a stick.
Two pubs in two days… but the weather was bad and his knee excruciating; Strike could not muster any guilt. The Albion’s interior was as cosy as its exterior suggested. Long and narrow, an open fire burned at the far end; there was an upper gallery with a balustrade and much polished wood. Beneath a black iron spiral staircase to the first floor were two amps and a microphone stand. Black-and-white photographs of celebrated musicians were hung along one cream wall.
The seats by the fire were taken. Strike bought himself a pint, picked up a bar menu and headed to the tall table surrounded by barstools next to the window onto the street. As he sat down he noticed, sandwiched between pictures of Duke Ellington and Robert Plant, his own long-haired father, sweaty post-performance, apparently sharing a joke with the bass player whom he had once, according to Strike’s mother, tried to strangle.
(‘Jonny was never good on speed,’ Leda had confided to her uncomprehending nine-year-old son.)
His mobile rang again. With his eyes on his father’s picture, he answered.
‘Hi,’ said Robin. ‘I’m back at the office. Where are you?’
‘The Albion on Hammersmith Road.’
‘You’ve had an odd call. I found the message when I got back.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s Daniel Chard,’ said Robin. ‘He wants to meet you.’
Frowning, Strike turned his eyes away from his father’s leather jumpsuit to gaze down the pub at the flickering fire. ‘Daniel Chard wants to meet me? How does Daniel Chard even know I exist?’
‘For God’s sake, you found the body! It’s been all over the news.’
‘Oh yeah – there’s that. Did he say why?’
‘He says he’s got a proposition.’
A vivid mental image of a naked, bald man with an erect, suppurating penis
flashed in Strike’s mind like a projector slide and was instantly dismissed.
‘I thought he was holed up in Devon because he’d broken his leg.’
‘He is. He wonders whether you’d mind travelling down to see him.’
‘Oh, does he?’
Strike pondered the suggestion, thinking of his workload, the meetings he had during the rest of the week. Finally, he said:
‘I could do it Friday if I put off Burnett. What the hell does he want? I’ll need to hire a car. An automatic,’ he added, his leg throbbing painfully under the table. ‘Could you do that for me?’
‘No problem,’ said Robin. He could hear her scribbling.
‘I’ve got a lot to tell you,’ he said. ‘D’you want to join me for lunch? They’ve got a decent menu. Shouldn’t take you more than twenty minutes if you grab a cab.’
‘Two days running? We can’t keep getting taxis and buying lunch out,’ said Robin, even though she sounded pleased at the idea.
‘That’s OK. Burnett loves spending her ex’s money. I’ll charge it to her account.’
Strike hung up, decided on a steak and ale pie and limped to the bar to order.
When he resumed his seat his eyes drifted absently back to his father in skin-tight leathers, with his hair plastered around his narrow, laughing face.
The Wife knows about me and pretends not to… she won’t let him go even if it’s the best thing for everyone…
I know where you’re off to, Owen!
Strike’s gaze slid along the row of black-and-white megastars on the wall facing him.
Am I deluded? he asked John Lennon silently, who looked down at him through round glasses, sardonic, pinch-nosed.
Why did he not believe, even in the face of what he had to admit were suggestive signs to the contrary, that Leonora had murdered her husband? Why did he remain convinced that she had come to his office not as a cover but because she was genuinely angry that Quine had run away like a sulky child? He would have sworn on oath that it had never crossed her mind that her husband might be dead… Lost in thought, he had finished his pint before he knew it.