“There were a couple of spiteful things said in the press, you know, when we got married. ‘Husband of vanished doctor marries young nanny.’ It’s always going to sound sordid, isn’t it? Roy said not to mind them. My parents were appalled by the whole thing. It was only when I had Jeremy that they came around.
“We never meant to mislead Anna. We were waiting… I don’t know… trying to find the right moment, to explain… but how are you supposed to do it? She used to call me ‘Mummy,’” whispered Cynthia, “she was h- happy, she was a completely happy little girl, but then those children at school told her about Margot and it ruined every—”
From somewhere close by came a loud synthesizer version of “Greensleeves.” All three of them looked startled until Cynthia, laughing her snorting laugh, said, “It’s my phone!” She pulled the mobile from a deep pocket in her dress and answered it.
“Roy?” she said.
Robin could hear Roy talking angrily from where she sat. Cynthia looked suddenly alarmed. She tried to get up, but stepped on the hem of her dress and tripped forwards. Trying to disentangle herself, she said,
“No, I’m—oh, she hasn’t. Oh, God—Roy, I didn’t want to tell you because—no—yes, I’m still with them!”
Finally managing to free herself from both dress and table, Cynthia staggered away and out of the room. The headdress she’d been wearing slid limply off her seat. Robin stooped to pick it up, put it back on the seat of Cynthia’s chair and looked up to see Strike watching her.
“What?” asked Robin.
He was about to answer when Cynthia reappeared. She looked stricken.
“Roy knows—Anna’s told him. He wants you to come back to Broom House.”
36
He oft finds med’cine who his grief imparts;
But double griefs afflict concealing hearts,
As raging flames who striveth to suppress.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
Cynthia hurried away to change out of her Anne Boleyn costume and reappeared ten minutes later in a pair of poorly fitting jeans, a gray sweater and trainers. She appeared extremely anxious as they walked together back through the palace, setting a fast pace that Strike found challenging on cobblestones still slippery with the rain which had temporarily ceased, but the heavy gray clouds, gilt-edged though they were, promised an imminent return. Glancing upward as they passed back through the gatehouse of the inner court, Robin’s eye was caught by the gleaming gold accents on the astronomical clock, and noticed that the sun was in Margot’s sign of Aquarius.
“I’ll see you there,” said Cynthia breathlessly, as they approached the car park, and without waiting for an answer she half-ran toward a blue Mazda3 in the distance.
“This is going to be interesting,” said Robin.
“Certainly is,” said Strike.
“Grab the map,” said Robin, once both were back in the car. The old Land Rover didn’t have a functioning radio, let alone satnav. “You’ll have to navigate.”
“What d’you think of her?” asked Strike, while he looked up Church Road in Ham.
“She seems all right.”
Robin became aware that Strike was looking at her, as he had in the café, a slightly quizzical expression on his face.
“What?” she said again.
“I had the impression you weren’t keen.”
“No,” said Robin, with a trace of defensiveness, “she’s fine.”
She reversed out of the parking space, remembering Cynthia’s snorting laughter and her habit of jumbling affirmatives and negatives together.
“Well—”
“Thought so,” said Strike, smugly.
“Given what might’ve happened to Margot, I wouldn’t have kicked off the conversation with cheery decapitation jokes.”
“She’s lived with it for forty years,” said Strike. “People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”
It started to rain again as they left the car park: a fine veil laying itself swiftly over the windscreen.
“OK, I’m prejudiced,” Robin admitted, switching on the wipers. “Feeling a bit sensitive about second wives right now.”
She drove on for a few moments before becoming aware that Strike was looking at her again.
“What?” she asked, for a third time.
“Why’re you sensitive about second wives?”
“Because—oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I told Morris.” She’d tried not to think, since, about her drunken Boxing Day spent texting, of the small amount of comfort she had derived from it, or the immense load of discomfort. “Matthew and Sarah Shadlock are together officially now. She left her fiancé for him.”
“Shit,” said Strike, still watching her profile. “No, you didn’t tell me.”
But he mentally docketed the fact that she’d told Morris, which didn’t fit with the idea that he’d formed of Robin and Morris’s relationship. From what Barclay had told him about Morris’s challenges to Robin’s authority, and from Robin’s generally lukewarm comments on his new hire, he’d assumed that Morris’s undoubted sexual interest in Robin had fizzled out for lack of a return. And yet she’d told Morris this painful bit of personal information, and not told him.
As they drove in silence toward Church Road, he wondered what had been going on in London while he had been in Cornwall. Morris was a good-looking man and he, like Robin, was divorcing. Strike wondered why he hadn’t previously considered the implications of this obvious piece of symmetry. Comparing notes on lawyers, on difficult exes, on the mechanics of splitting two lives: they’d have plenty to talk about, plenty of opportunities for mutual sympathy.
“Straight up here,” he said, and they drove in silence across the Royal Paddocks, between high, straight red walls.
“Nice street,” commented Robin, twenty minutes after they’d left Hampton Court Palace, as she turned
