69

Beare ye the picture of that Ladies head?

Full liuely is the semblaunt, though the substance dead.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

After almost an hour’s debrief with Dr. Bijral, during which the shaken psychiatrist phoned Scotland Yard, the detective left the hospital feeling as though he’d been there twice as long as he really had. The village of Crowthorne didn’t lie on Strike’s route back to London, but he was hungry, he wanted to call Robin and he felt a powerful need to place himself among ordinary people going about their lives, to expel the memory of those empty, echoing corridors, the jangle of keys and the widely dilated pupils of Dennis Creed.

He parked outside a pub, lit himself the cigarette he’d been craving for the past two and a half hours, then turned his phone back on. He’d already missed two calls from Brian Tucker, but instead of phoning the old man back, he pressed Robin’s number. She answered on the second ring.

“What happened?”

Strike told her. When he’d finished, there was a short silence.

“Say the clue again,” said Robin, who sounded tense.

“‘You’ll find her where you find M54.’”

“Not the M54? Not the motorway?”

“He could’ve meant that, but he left out the definite article.”

“The M54’s twenty-odd miles long.”

“I know.”

Reaction was setting in: Strike should have felt triumphant, but in fact he was tired and tense. His phone beeped at him and he glanced at the screen.

“That’s Brian Tucker again, trying to ring me,” he told Robin.

“What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth,” said Strike heavily, exhaling smoke out of his open window. “Dr. Bijral’s already called Scotland Yard. Trouble is, if that clue’s meaningless, or unsolvable, it leaves Tucker knowing Creed killed his daughter, but never getting the body back. This could well be Creed’s idea of the ultimate torture.”

“It’s something to have a confession, though, isn’t it?” said Robin.

“Tucker’s been convinced Creed killed her for decades. Confession without a body just keeps the wound open. Creed’ll still have the last laugh, knowing where she is and not telling… How’ve you got on in the British Library?”

“Oh. Fine,” said Robin. “I found Joanna Hammond a couple of hours ago.”

“And?” said Strike, now alert.

“She had a large mole on her face. Left cheek. You can see it in the picture of her wedding in the local paper. I’ll text it to you now.”

“And the holy—?”

“It would’ve been on the back of her obituary. Same local paper.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Strike.

There was a longer silence. Strike’s phone beeped again, and he saw that Robin had texted him a picture.

Opening it, he saw a couple on their 1969 wedding day: a blurry black and white picture of a toothy, beaming brunette bride, her hair worn in ringlets, in a high-necked lace dress, a pillbox hat on top of her veil, a large mole on her left cheekbone. The blond husband loomed over her shoulder, unsmiling. Even minutes into married life, he had the air of a man ready to wield a baseball bat.

“She wasn’t Sagittarius under Schmidt,” said Robin, and Strike put the phone back up to his ear, “she was Scorpio—”

“—which Talbot thought fitted her better, because of the mole,” said Strike, with a sigh. “I should’ve gone back through all the identifications once you found out about Schmidt. We might’ve got here sooner.”

“What are we going to do about Douthwaite?”

“I’ll ring him,” said Strike, after a moment’s pause. “Now. Then I’ll call you back.”

His stomach rumbled as he called the Allardice boarding house in Skegness, and heard the familiar cross Scottish accent of Donna, Douthwaite’s wife.

“Oh Christ,” she said, when Strike identified himself. “What now?”

“Nothing to worry about,” lied Strike, who could hear a radio playing in the background. “Just wanted to double-check a couple of points.”

“Steve!” he heard her yell, away from the receiver. “It’s him!… What d’you mean, ‘Who?,’ who d’you bloody think?”

Strike heard footsteps and then Douthwaite, who sounded half-angry, half-scared.

“What d’you want?”

“I want to tell you what I think happened during your last appoint­ment with Margot Bamborough,” said Strike.

He spoke for two minutes, and Douthwaite didn’t interrupt, though Strike knew he was still there, because of the distant sounds of the boarding house still reaching him over the line. When Strike had finished his reconstruction of Douthwaite’s final consultation, there was silence but for the distant radio, which was playing “Blame” by Calvin Harris.

So blame it on the night… don’t blame it on me…

“Well?” said Strike.

He knew Douthwaite didn’t want to confirm it. Douthwaite was a coward, a weak man who ran away from problems. He could have prevented further deaths had he had the courage to tell what he knew, but he’d been scared for his own skin, scared he’d be seen as complicit, stupid and shabby, in the eyes of newspaper readers. And so he’d run, but that had made things worse, and nightmarish consequences had ensued, and he’d run from those, too, barely admitting to himself what he feared, distracting himself with drink, with karaoke, with women. And now Strike was presenting him with a dreadful choice that was really no choice at all. Like Violet Cooper, Steve Douthwaite was facing a lifetime of opprobrium from the censorious public, and how much better would it have been if he’d come clean to Talbot forty years previously, when Margot Bamborough’s body could have been found quickly, and a killer could have been brought to justice before others had to die.

“Am I right?” Strike said.

“Yes,” said Douthwaite, at last.

“OK, well, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go straight to your wife and tell her, before the press do it. There’s going to be no hiding from this one.”

“Shit,” said Douthwaite quietly.

“See you in court, then,” said Strike briskly, and he hung up, and called Robin straight back.

“He’s confirmed it.”

“Cormoran,” said Robin.

“I advised him to tell Donna—”

“Cormoran,” said Robin, again.

“What?”

“I think I know what M54 is.”

“Not—”

“—the motorway? No. M54 is a globular cluster—”

“A what?”

“A spherical cluster of stars.”

“Stars?” said Strike, with a sinking sensation. “Hang on—”

“Listen,” said Robin. “Creed thought he was being clever, but it only takes a Google search—”

“They haven’t got internet in there,” said Strike. “He was whining about it—”

“Well, M54 is a cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius,” said Robin.