“Yeah, that’s the bloke,” said Strike. “Well, it looks as though Mucky Ricci was hanging around Margot Bamborough’s practice, and your father seems to have known about it.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” said Strike, “and it seems odd that information never made it into the official records.”
“Well, Dad was ill,” said Gregory defensively. “You’ve seen the notebook. He didn’t know what he was up to, half the time.”
“I appreciate that,” said Strike, “but once he’d recovered, what was his attitude to the evidence he’d collected while on the case?”
“What d’you mean?”
Gregory sounded suspicious now, as though he feared Strike was leading him somewhere he might not want to go.
“Well, did he think it was all worthless, or—?”
“He’d been ruling out suspects on the basis of their star signs,” said Gregory quietly. “He thought he saw a demon in the spare room. What d’you think he thought? He was… he was ashamed. It wasn’t his fault, but he never got over it. He wanted to go back and make it right, but they wouldn’t let him, they forced him out. The Bamborough case tainted everything for him, all his memories of the force. His mates were all coppers and he wouldn’t see them any more.”
“He felt resentful at the way he was treated, did he?”
“I wouldn’t say—I mean, he was justified, I’d say, to feel they hadn’t treated him right,” said Gregory.
“Did he ever look over his notes, afterward, to make sure he’d put everything in there in the official record?”
“I don’t know,” said Gregory, a little testy now. “I think his attitude was, they’ve got rid of me, they think I’m a big problem, so let Lawson deal with it.”
“How did your father get on with Lawson?”
“Look, what’s all this about?” Before Strike could answer, Gregory said, “Lawson made it quite clear to my father that his day was done. He didn’t want him hanging around, didn’t want him anywhere near the case. Lawson did his best to completely discredit my father, I don’t mean just because of his illness. I mean, as a man, and as the officer he’d been before he got ill. He told everyone on the case they were to stay away from my father, even out of working hours. So if information didn’t get passed on, it’s down to Lawson as much as him. Dad might’ve tried and been rebuffed, for all I know.”
“I can certainly see it from your father’s point of view,” said Strike. “Very difficult situation.”
“Well, exactly,” said Gregory, slightly placated, as Strike had intended.
“To go back to Mucky Ricci,” Strike said, “as far as you know, your father never had direct dealings with him?”
“No,” said Gregory, “but Dad’s best mate on the force did, name of Browning. He was Vice Squad. He raided one of Mucky’s clubs, I know that. I remember Dad talking about it.”
“Where’s Browning now? Can I talk to him?”
“He’s dead,” said Gregory. “What exactly—?”
“I’d like to know where that film you passed to me came from, Gregory.”
“I’ve no idea,” said Gregory. “Dad just came home with it one day, Mum says.”
“Any idea when this was?” asked Strike, hoping not to have to find a polite way of asking whether Talbot had been quite sane at the time.
“It would’ve been while Dad was working on the Bamborough case. Why?”
Strike braced himself.
“I’m afraid we’ve had to turn the film over to the police.”
Hutchins had volunteered to take care of this, on the morning that Strike had headed down to Cornwall. As an ex-policeman who still had good contacts on the force, he knew where to take it and how to make sure it got seen by the right people. Strike had asked Hutchins not to talk to Robin about the film, or to tell her what he’d done with it. She was currently in ignorance of the contents.
“What?” said Gregory, horrified. “Why?”
“It isn’t porn,” said Strike, muttering now, in deference to the elderly couple who had just entered the Victory and stood, disorientated by the storm outside, dripping and blinking mere feet from his table. “It’s a snuff movie. Someone filmed a woman being gang-raped and stabbed.”
There was another silence on the end of the phone. Strike watched the elderly couple shuffle to the bar, the woman taking off her plastic rain hat as she went.
“Actually killed?” said Gregory, his voice rising an octave. “I mean… it’s definitely real?”
“Yeah,” said Strike.
He wasn’t about to give details. He’d seen people dying and dead: the kind of gore you saw on horror movies wasn’t the same, and even without a soundtrack, he wouldn’t quickly forget the hooded, naked woman twitching on the floor of the warehouse, while her killers watched her die.
“And I suppose you’ve told them where you got it?” said Gregory, more panicked than angry.
“I’m afraid I had to,” said Strike. “I’m sorry, but some of the men involved could still be alive, could still be charged. I can’t sit on something like that.”
“I wasn’t concealing anything, I didn’t even know it was—”
“I wasn’t meaning to suggest you knew, or you meant to hide it,” said Strike.
“If they think—we foster kids, Strike—”
“I’ve told the police you handed it over to me willingly, without knowing what was on there. I’ll stand up in court and testify that I believe you were in total ignorance of what was in your attic. Your family’s had forty-odd years to destroy it and you didn’t. Nobody’s going
