“True,” said Strike. “But there was one sighting—”
“Warwick,” said Roy. “Yes.”
A look passed between husband and wife. Strike waited. Roy set down his cup and saucer on the table in front of him and looked up at his daughter.
“You’re quite sure you want to do this, Anna, are you?” he asked, looking at his silent daughter. “Quite, quite sure?”
“What d’you mean?” she snapped back. “What d’you think I hired detectives for? Fun?”
“All right, then,” said Roy, “all right. That sighting caught… caught my attention, because my wife’s ex-boyfriend, a man called Paul Satchwell, hailed originally from Warwick. This was a man she’d… reconnected with, before she disappeared.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Anna, with a tight little laugh, “did you honestly think I don’t know about Paul Satchwell? Of course I do!” Kim reached out and put a hand on her wife’s leg, whether in comfort or warning, it was hard to tell. “Have you never heard of the internet, Dad, or press archives? I’ve seen Satchwell’s ridiculous photograph, with all his chest hair and his medallions, and I know my mother went for a drink with him three weeks before she vanished! But it was only one drink—”
“Oh, was it?” said Roy nastily. “Thanks for your reassurance, Anna. Thanks for your expert knowledge. How marvelous to be all-knowing—”
“Roy,” whispered Cynthia.
“What are you saying, that it was more than a drink?” said Anna, looking shaken. “No, it wasn’t, that’s a horrible thing to say! Oonagh says—”
“Oh, right, yes, I see!” said Roy loudly, his sunken cheeks turning purple as his hands gripped the arms of his chair, “Oonagh says, does she? Everything is explained!”
“What’s explained?” demanded Anna.
“This!” he shouted, pointing a trembling, rope-veined, swollen-knuckled hand at Strike and Robin. “Oonagh Kennedy’s behind it all, is she? I should have known I hadn’t heard the last of her!”
“For God’s sake, Roy,” said Kim loudly, “that’s a preposterous—”
“Oonagh Kennedy wanted me arrested!”
“Dad, that’s simply not true!” said Anna, forcibly removing Kim’s restraining hand from her leg. “You’ve got a morbid fixation about Oonagh—”
“Badgering me to complain about Talbot—”
“Well, why the bloody hell didn’t you?” said Anna loudly. “The man was in the middle of a fully fledged breakdown!”
“Roy!” whimpered Cynthia again, as Roy leaned forwards to face his daughter across the too-small circular table, with its precariously balanced cake. Gesticulating wildly, his face purple, he shouted,
“Police swarming all over the house going through your mother’s things—sniffer dogs out in the garden—they were looking for any reason to arrest me, and I should lodge a formal complaint against the man in charge? How would that have looked?”
“He was incompetent!”
“Were you there, Miss Omniscient? Did you know him?”
“Why did they replace him? Why does everything written about the case say he was incompetent? The truth is,” said Anna, stabbing the air between her and her father with a forefinger, “you and Cyn loved Bill Talbot because he thought you were innocent from the off and—”
“Thought I was innocent?” bellowed Roy. “Well, thank you, it’s good to know that nothing’s changed since you were thirteen years old—”
“Roy!” said Cynthia and Kim together.
“—and accused me of building the koi pond over the place I’d buried her!”
Anna burst into tears and fled the room, almost tripping over Strike’s legs as she went. Suspecting there was about to be a mass exodus, he retracted his feet.
“When,” Kim said coldly to her father-in-law, “is Anna going to be forgiven for things she said when she was a confused child, going through a dreadful time?”
“And my dreadful time is nothing, of course? Nothing!” shouted Roy, and as Strike expected, he, too, left the room at the fastest pace he could manage, which was a speedy hobble.
“Christ’s sake,” muttered Kim, striding after Roy and Anna and almost colliding at the door with Cynthia, who’d jumped up to follow Roy.
The door swung shut. The rain pattered on the pond outside. Strike blew out his cheeks, exchanged looks with Robin, then picked up his plate and continued eating his cake.
“Starving,” he said thickly, in response to Robin’s look. “No lunch. And it’s good cake.”
Distantly they heard shouting, and the slamming of another door.
“D’you think the interview’s over?” muttered Robin.
“No,” said Strike, still eating. “They’ll be back.”
“Remind me about the sighting in Warwick,” said Robin.
She’d merely skimmed the list of sightings that Strike had emailed her. There hadn’t seemed anything very interesting there.
“A woman asked for change in a pub, and the landlady thought she was Margot. A mature student came forward two days later to identify herself, but the landlady wasn’t convinced that was who she’d seen. The police were, though.”
Strike took another large mouthful of cake before saying,
“I don’t think there’s anything in it. Well…” he swallowed and shot a meaningful look at the sitting room door, “there’s a bit more now.”
Strike continued to eat cake, while Robin’s eyes roamed the room and landed on an ormolu mantel clock of exceptional ugliness. With a glance at the door, she got up to examine it. A gilded classical goddess wearing a helmet sat on top of the ornate, heavy case.
“Pallas Athena,” said Strike, watching her, pointing his fork at the figure.
In the base of the clock was a drawer with a small brass handle. Remembering Cynthia’s statement about Roy and Margot leaving notes for each other here, she pulled the drawer open. It was lined in red felt and empty.
“D’you think it’s valuable?” she asked Strike, sliding the drawer shut.
“Dunno. Why?”
“Because why else would you keep it? It’s horrible.”
There were two distinct kinds of taste on view in this room and they didn’t harmonize, Robin thought, as she looked around, all the time listening for the return of the family. The leather-bound copies of Ovid and Pliny, and the Victorian reproductions of classical statues, among them a pair of miniature Medici lions, a
