“No, that’ll be fine,” said Strike. “I’ll see you at twelve, then.”

“Thank you so much!” said Anna.

Kim reached for Anna’s hand and the two women walked away. Strike watched them pass under a street light before turning back toward the sea. The motorboat carrying the young drinkers had now chugged away again. It already looked tiny, dwarfed by the wide bay, the roar of its engine gradually deadened into a distant buzz.

Forgetting momentarily about texting Robin, Strike lit a second cigarette, took out his mobile and Googled Margot Bamborough.

Two different photographs appeared. The first was a grainy head-and-shoulders shot of an attractive, even-featured face with wide-set eyes, her wavy, dark blonde hair center-parted. She was wearing a long-lapelled blouse over what appeared to be a knitted tank top.

The second picture showed the same woman looking younger and wearing the famous black corset of a Playboy Bunny, accessorized with black ears, black stockings and white tail. She was holding a tray of what looked like cigarettes, and smiling at the camera. Another young woman, identically dressed, stood beaming behind her, slightly bucktoothed and curvier than her willowy friend.

Strike scrolled down until he read a famous name in conjunction with Margot’s.

… young doctor and mother, Margaret “Margot” Bamborough, whose disappearance on 11 October 1974 shared certain features with Creed’s abductions of Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman.

Bamborough, who worked at the St. John’s Medical Practice in Clerkenwell, had arranged to meet a female friend in the local Three Kings pub at six o’clock. She never arrived.

Several witnesses saw a small white van driving at speed in the area around the time that Bamborough would have been heading for her rendezvous.

DI Bill Talbot, who led the investigation into Bamborough’s disappearance, was convinced from an early stage that the young doctor had fallen victim to the serial killer known to be at large in the south east area. However, no trace of Bamborough was discovered in the basement flat where Dennis Creed imprisoned, tortured and killed seven other women.

Creed’s trademark of beheading the corpses of his victims…

3

But now of Britomart it here doth neede,

The hard aduentures and strange haps to tell

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Had her day gone as planned, Robin Ellacott would have been tucked up in bed in her rented flat in Earl’s Court at this moment, fresh from a long bath, her laundry done, reading a new novel. Instead, she was sitting in her ancient Land Rover, chilly from sheer exhaustion despite the mild night, still wearing the clothes she’d put on at four-thirty that morning, as she watched the lit window of a Pizza Express in Torquay. Her face in the wing mirror was pale, her blue eyes bloodshot, and the strawberry blonde hair currently hidden under a black beanie hat needed a wash.

From time to time, Robin dipped her hand into a bag of almonds sitting on the passenger seat beside her. It was only too easy to fall into a diet of fast food and chocolate when you were running surveillance, to snack more often than needed out of sheer boredom. Robin was trying to eat healthily in spite of her unsociable hours, but the almonds had long since ceased to be appetizing, and she craved nothing more than a bit of the pizza she could see an overweight couple enjoying in the restaurant window. She could almost taste it, even though the air around her was tangy with sea salt and underlain by the perpetual fug of old Wellington boots and wet dog that imbued the Land Rover’s ancient fabric seats.

The object of her surveillance, whom she and Strike had nicknamed “Tufty” for his badly fitting toupee, was currently out of view. He’d disappeared into the pizzeria an hour and a half previously with three companions, one of whom, a teenager with his arm in a cast, was visible if Robin craned her head sideways into the space above the front passenger seat. This she did every five minutes or so, to check on the progress of the foursome’s meal. The last time she had looked, ice cream was being delivered to the table. It couldn’t, surely, be much longer.

Robin was fighting a feeling of depression which she knew was at least partly down to utter exhaustion, to the stiffness all over her body from many hours in the driving seat, and to the loss of her long-awaited day off. With Strike unavoidably absent from the agency for an entire week, she’d now worked a twenty-day stretch without breaks. Their best subcontractor, Sam Barclay, had been supposed to take over the Tufty job today in Scotland, but Tufty hadn’t flown to Glasgow as expected. Instead, he’d taken a surprise detour to Torquay, leaving Robin with no choice but to follow him.

There were other reasons for her low spirits, of course, one of which she acknowledged to herself; the other, she felt angry with herself for dwelling on.

The first, admissible, reason was her ongoing divorce, which was becoming more contentious by the week. Following Robin’s discovery of her estranged husband’s affair, they’d had one last cold and bitter meeting, coincidentally in a Pizza Express near Matthew’s place of work, where they’d agreed to seek a no-fault divorce following a two-year separation. Robin was too honest not to admit that she, too, bore responsibility for the failure of their relationship. Matthew might have been unfaithful, but she knew that she’d never fully committed to the marriage, that she’d prioritized her job over Matthew on almost every occasion and that, by the end, she had been waiting for a reason to leave. The affair had been a shock, but a release, too.

However, during the twelve months that had elapsed since her pizza with Matthew, Robin had come to realize that far from seeking a “no-fault” resolution, her ex-husband saw the end of the marriage as entirely Robin’s responsibility and was determined to make her pay, both emotionally and financially, for her offense. The joint bank account, which held the proceeds of the sale of their old house, had been frozen while the lawyers wrangled over how much Robin could reasonably expect when she had been earning so much less than Matthew, and had—it had been strongly hinted in the last letter—married him purely with a view to obtaining a pecuniary advantage she could never have achieved alone.

Every letter from Matthew’s lawyer caused Robin additional stress, rage and misery. She hadn’t needed her own lawyer to point out that Matthew appeared to be trying to force her to spend money she didn’t have on legal wrangling, to run down the clock and her resources until she walked away with as close to nothing as he could manage.

“I’ve never known a childless divorce be so contentious,” her lawyer had told her, words that brought no comfort.

Matthew continued to occupy almost as much space in Robin’s head as when they’d been married. She thought she could read his thoughts across the miles and silence that separated them in their widely divergent new lives. He’d always been a bad loser. He had to emerge from this embarrassingly short marriage the winner, by walking away with all the money, and stigmatizing Robin as the sole reason for its failure.

All of this was ample reason for her present mood, of course, but then there was the other reason, the one that was inadmissible, that Robin was annoyed with herself for fretting about.

It had happened the previous day, at the office. Saul Morris, the agency’s newest subcontractor, was owed his month’s expenses, so, after seeing Tufty safely back into the marital home in Windsor, Robin had driven back to Denmark Street to pay Saul.