“Yes,” said Robin. “You speculated Scorpio might be Steve Douthwaite’s married friend, who killed herself.”
“Well remembered,” said Strike. “Well, Gupta can’t remember any patient dying in unexplained circumstances, or in a way that troubled Margot, although he emphasized that all this is forty years ago and he can’t swear there wasn’t such a patient.
“Then I asked him whether he knew who Joseph Brenner might have been visiting in a block of flats on Skinner Street on the evening Margot disappeared. Gupta says they had a number of patients in Skinner Street, but he can’t think of any reason why Brenner would have lied about going on a house call there.
“Lastly, and not particularly helpfully, Gupta remembers that a couple of men came to pick Gloria up at the end of the practice Christmas party. He remembers one of the men being a lot older, and says he assumed that was Gloria’s father. The name ‘Mucky Ricci’ meant nothing to him.”
Midway across Chiswick Bridge, the sun sliced suddenly through a chink in the rain clouds, dazzling their eyes. The dirty Thames beneath the bridge and the shallow puddles flashed laser bright, but, seconds later, the clouds closed again and they were driving again through rain, in the dull gray January light, along a straight dual carriageway bordered by shrubs slick with rain and naked trees.
“What about that film?” said Robin, glancing sideways at Strike. “The film that came out of Gregory Talbot’s attic? You said you’d tell me in person.”
“Ah,” said Strike. “Yeah.”
He hesitated, looking past the windscreen wipers at the long straight road ahead, glimmering beneath a diagonal curtain of rain.
“It showed a hooded woman being gang-raped and killed.”
Robin experienced a slight prickling over her neck and scalp.
“And people get off on that,” she muttered, in disgust.
He knew from her tone that she hadn’t understood, that she thought he was describing a pornographic fiction.
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t porn. Someone filmed… the real thing.”
Robin looked around in shock, before turning quickly back to face the road. Her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Repulsive images were suddenly forcing their way into her mind. What had Strike seen, that made him look so closed up, so blank? Had the hooded woman’s body resembled Margot’s, the body Oonagh Kennedy had said was “all legs”?
“You all right?” asked Strike.
“Fine,” she almost snapped. “What—what did you see, how—?”
But Strike chose to answer a question she hadn’t asked.
“The woman had a long scar over the ribcage. There was never any mention of Margot having a scarred ribcage in press reports or police notes. I don’t think it was her.”
Robin said nothing but continued to look tense.
“There were four men, ah, involved,” Strike continued, “all Caucasian, and all with their faces hidden. There was also a fifth man looking on. His arm came briefly into shot. It could’ve been Mucky Ricci. There was an out-of-focus big gold ring.”
He was trying to reduce the account to a series of dry facts. His leg muscles had tensed up quite as much as Robin’s hands, and he was primed to grab the wheel. She’d had a panic attack once before while they were driving.
“What are the police saying?” Robin asked. “Do they know where it came from?”
“Hutchins asked around. An ex-Vice Squad guy thinks it’s part of a batch they seized in a raid made on a club in Soho in ’75. The club was owned by Ricci. They took a load of hardcore pornography out of the basement.
“One of Talbot’s best mates was also Vice Squad. The best guess is that Talbot nicked or copied it, after his mate showed it to him.”
“Why would he do that?” said Robin, a little desperately.
“I don’t think we’re going to get a better answer than ‘because he was mentally ill,’” said Strike. “But the starting point must have been his interest in Ricci. He’d found out Ricci was registered with the St. John’s practice and attended the Christmas party. In the notes, he called Ricci—”
“—Leo three,” said Robin. “Yes, I know.”
Strike’s leg muscles relaxed very slightly. This degree of focus and recall on Robin’s part didn’t suggest somebody about to have a panic attack.
“Did you learn my email off by heart?” he asked her.
It was Robin’s turn to remember Christmas, and the brief solace it had been, to bury herself in work at her parents’ kitchen table.
“I pay attention when I’m reading, that’s all.”
“Well, I still don’t understand why Talbot didn’t chase up this Ricci lead, although judging by the horoscope notes, there was a sharp deterioration in his mental state over the six months he was in charge of the case. I’m guessing he stole that can of film not long before he got kicked off the force, hence no mention of it in the police notes.”
“And then hid it so nobody else could investigate the woman’s death,” said Robin. Her sympathy for Bill Talbot had just been, if not extinguished, severely dented. “Why the hell didn’t he take the film back to the police when he was back in his right mind?”
“I’d guess because he wanted his job back and, failing that, wanted to make sure he got his pension. Setting aside basic integrity, I can’t see that he had a great incentive to admit he’d tampered with evidence on another case. Everyone was already pissed off at him: victims’ families, press, the force, all blaming him for having fucked up the investigation. And then Lawson, a bloke he doesn’t like, takes over and tells him to stay the fuck out of it. He probably told himself the dead woman was only a prostitute or—”
“Jesus,” said Robin angrily.
“I’m not saying ‘only a prostitute,’” Strike said quickly. “I’m guessing at the mindset of a seventies policeman who’d already been publicly shamed for buggering up a high-profile case.”
Robin said nothing, but remained stony-faced for
