“But then the little prince chose for a wife somebody utterly unlike his mother. Margot wasn’t the kind of woman to leave her patients, or her adult learners, to rush home and cook Roy’s dinner for him. Let him get his own, would have been her attitude… or the little cousin could have cooked, of course,” Gupta went on, with something of the delicacy he had brought to the mention of “black ladies.” “The young woman they paid to look after the baby.”

“Was Cynthia at the barbecue?”

“That was her name, was it? Yes, she was. I didn’t talk to her. She was carrying Margot’s daughter around, while Margot mingled.”

“Roy was interviewed by the police, I believe,” said Strike, who in fact took this for granted rather than knowing it for certain.

“Oh yes,” said Gupta. “Now, that was a curious thing. Inspector Talbot told me at the start of my own police interview that Roy had been completely ruled out of their inquiries—which I’ve always thought was an odd thing to tell me. Don’t you find it so? This was barely a week after Margot’s disappearance. I suppose it was only just dawning on us all that there really was no mistake, no innocent explanation. We’d all had our hopeful little theories in the first couple of days. She’d maybe felt stressed, unable to cope, and gone off alone somewhere. Or perhaps there’d been an accident, and she was lying unconscious and unidentified in a hospital. But as the days went by, and the hospitals had been checked, and her photograph had been in all the papers and still there was no news, everything started to look more sinister.

“I found it most peculiar that Inspector Talbot informed me, unasked, that Roy wasn’t under suspicion, that he had a complete alibi. Talbot struck all of us as peculiar, actually. Intense. His questions jumped around a lot.

“I think he was trying to reassure me,” said Gupta, taking a third fig roll and examining it thoughtfully as he continued. “He wanted me to know that my brother doctor was in the clear, that I had nothing to fear, that he knew no doctor could have done anything so terrible as to abduct a woman, or—by then, we were all starting to fear it—to kill her…

“But Talbot thought it was Creed, of course, from the very start—and he was probably right,” sighed Gupta, sadly.

“What makes you think so?” asked Strike. He thought Gupta might mention the speeding van or the rainy night, but the answer was, he thought, a shrewd one.

“It’s very difficult to dispose of a body as completely and cleanly as Margot’s seems to have been hidden. Doctors know how death smells and we understand the legalities and procedures surrounding a dead human. The ignorant might imagine it is nothing more than disposing of a table of equivalent weight, but it is a very different thing, and a very difficult one. And even in the seventies, before DNA testing, the police did pretty well with fingerprints, blood groups and so forth.

“How has she remained hidden for so long? Somebody did the job very cleverly and if we know anything about Creed, it’s that he’s very clever, isn’t that so? It was living ladies who betrayed him in the end, not dead. He knew how to render his corpses mute.”

Gupta popped the end of the fig roll in his mouth, sighed, brushed his hands fastidiously clean of crumbs, then pointed at Strike’s legs and said,

“Which one is it?”

Strike didn’t resent the blunt question, from a doctor.

“This one,” he said, shifting his right leg.

“You walk very naturally,” said Gupta, “for a big man. I might not have known, if I hadn’t read about you in the press. The prosthetics were not nearly as good in the old days. Wonderful, what you can buy now. Hydraulics reproducing natural joint action! Marvelous.”

“The NHS can’t afford those fancy prosthetics,” said Strike, slipping his notebook back into his pocket. “Mine’s pretty basic. If it’s not too much trouble,” he continued, “could I ask you for the practice nurse’s current address?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Gupta. He succeeded in rising from his armchair on the third attempt.

It took the Guptas half an hour to find, in an old address book, the last address they had for Janice Beattie.

“I can’t swear it’s current,” said Gupta, handing the slip of paper to Strike in the hall.

“It’ll give me a head start on finding her, especially if she’s got a different married name now,” said Strike. “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Gupta. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Gupta, considering Strike with his shrewd, bright brown eyes, “it would be a miracle if you found her, after all this time. But I’m glad somebody’s looking again. Yes, I’m very glad somebody’s looking.”

11

It fortuned forth faring on his way,

He saw from far, or seemed for to see

Some troublous vprore or contentious fray

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Strike walked back toward Amersham station, past the box hedges and twin garages of the professional middle classes, thinking about Margot Bamborough. She’d emerged from the old doctor’s reminiscences as a vivid and forceful personality and, irrationally, this had been a surprise. In vanishing, Margot Bamborough had assumed in Strike’s mind the insubstantiality of a wraith, as though it had always been predestined that she would one day disperse into the rainy dusk, never to return.

He remembered the seven women depicted on the front cover of The Demon of Paradise Park. They lived on in ghostly black and white, sporting the hairstyles that had become gradually more unfashionable with every day they’d been absent from their families and their lives, but each of those negative images represented a human whose heart had once beaten, whose ambitions and opinions, triumphs and disappointments had been as real as Margot Bamborough’s, before they ran into the man who was paid the compliment of full color in the cover photograph of the dreadful story of their deaths. Strike still hadn’t finished the book, but knew that Creed had been responsible for the deaths of a diverse array of victims, including a schoolgirl, an estate agent and a pharmacist. That had been part of the terror of the Essex Butcher, according to the contemporary press: he wasn’t confining his attacks to prostitutes who, it was implied, were a killer’s natural prey. In fact, the only working girl who was known to have been attacked by him had survived.

Helen Wardrop, the woman in question, had told her story in a television documentary about Creed, which Strike had watched on YouTube a few nights previously while eating a Chinese takeaway. The program had been salacious and melodramatic, with many poorly acted reconstructions and music lifted from a seventies horror movie. At the time of filming, Helen Wardrop had been a slack-faced, slow-spoken woman with dyed red hair and badly applied fake eyelashes, whose glazed affect and monotone suggested either tranquilizers or neurological damage. Creed had struck the drunk and screaming Helen what might have been a fatal blow to the head with a hammer in the course of trying to force her into the back of his van. She turned her head obligingly for the interviewer, to show the viewers a still-depressed area of skull. The interviewer told her she must feel very lucky to have survived. There was a tiny hesitation before she agreed with him.