Why had Roy never made a clean sweep and redecorated, Robin wondered. Reverence for his parents? Lack of imagination? Or had the sickly little boy, housebound no doubt for much of his childhood, developed an attachment to these objects that he couldn’t put aside? He and Cynthia seemed to have made little impression on the room other than in adding a few family pictures to faded black and white photos featuring Roy’s parents and Roy as a child. The only one to hold Robin’s interest was a family group that looked as though it had been taken in the early nineties, when Roy had still had all his hair, and Cynthia’s had been thick and wavy. Their two biological children, a boy and a girl, looked like Anna. Nobody would have guessed that she’d had a different mother.
Robin moved to the window. The surface of the long, formal koi pond outside, with its stone pavilion at the end, was now so densely rain-pocked that the vivid red, white and black shapes moving beneath the surface were barely discernible as fish. There was one particularly big creature, pearl white and black, that looked as though it might be over two feet long. The miniature pavilion would normally be reflected in the pond’s smooth surface, but today it merely added an extra layer of diffuse gray to the far end of the pond. It had a strangely familiar design on the floor.
“Cormoran,” Robin said, at the exact moment Strike said,
“Look at this.”
Both turned. Strike, who’d finished his cake, was now standing beside one of Roy’s father’s statuettes, which Robin had overlooked. It was a foot-high bronze of a naked man with a cloth around his shoulders, holding a snake. Momentarily puzzled, Robin realized after a second or two why Strike was pointing at it.
“Oh… the snaky invented sign Talbot gave Roy?”
“Precisely. This is Asclepius,” said Strike. “Greek god of medicine. What’ve you found?”
“Look on the floor of the gazebo thing. Inlaid in the stone.”
He joined her at the window.
“Ah,” he said. “You can see the beginnings of that in one of the photographs of Margot’s barbecue. It was under construction.”
A cross of St. John lay on the floor of the gazebo, inlaid in darker granite. “Interesting choice of design,” said Strike.
“You know,” said Robin, turning to look at the room, “people who’re manic often think they’re receiving supernatural messages. Things the sane would call coincidences.”
“I was thinking exactly that,” said Strike, turning to look at the figure of Pallas Athena, on top of the ugly mantel clock. “To a man in Talbot’s state of mental confusion, I’m guessing this room would’ve seemed crammed with astrological—”
Roy’s voice sounded in the hall outside.
“—then don’t blame me—”
The door opened and the family filed back inside.
“—if she hears things she doesn’t like!” Roy finished, addressing Cynthia, who was immediately behind him, and looked scared. Roy’s face was an unhealthy purple again, though the skin around his eyes remained a jaundiced yellow.
He seemed startled to see Strike and Robin standing at the window.
“Admiring your garden,” said Strike, as he and Robin returned to their sofa.
Roy grunted and took his seat again. He was breathing heavily.
“Apologies,” he said, after a moment or two. “You aren’t seeing the family at its best.”
“Very stressful for everyone,” said Strike, as Anna and Kim re-entered the room and resumed their seats on the sofa, where they sat holding hands. Cynthia perched herself beside them, watching Roy anxiously.
“I want to say something,” Roy told Strike. “I want to make it perfectly clear—”
“Oh for God’s sake, I’ve had one phone call with her!” said Anna.
“I’d appreciate it, Anna,” said Roy, his chest laboring, “if I could finish.”
Addressing Strike, he said,
“Oonagh Kennedy disliked me from the moment Margot and I first met. She was possessive toward Margot, and she also happened to have left the church, and she was one of those who had to make an enemy of everyone still in it. Moreover—”
“Dr. Phipps,” interrupted Strike, who could foresee the afternoon degenerating into a long row about Oonagh Kennedy. “I think you should know that when we interviewed Oonagh, she made it quite clear that the person she thought we should be concentrating our energies on is Paul Satchwell.”
For a second or two, Roy appeared unable to fully grasp what had just been said to him.
“See?” said Anna furiously. “You just implied that there was more between my mother and Satchwell than one drink. What did you mean? Or were you,” she said, and Robin heard the underlying hope, “just angry and lashing out?”
“People who insist on opening cans of worms, Anna,” said Roy, “shouldn’t complain when they get covered in slime.”
“Well, go on then,” said Anna, “spill your slime.”
“Anna,” whispered Cynthia, and was ignored.
“All right,” said Roy. “All right, then.” He turned back to Strike and Robin. “Early in our relationship, I saw a note of Satchwell’s Margot had kept. ‘Dear Brunhilda’ it said—it was his pet name for her. The Valkyrie, you know. Margot was tall. Fair.”
Roy paused and swallowed.
“Some three weeks before she disappeared, she came home and told me she’d run into Satchwell in the street and that they’d gone for an… innocent drink.”
He cleared his throat. Cynthia poured him more tea.
“After she—after she’d disappeared, I had to go and collect her things from the St. John’s practice. Among them I found a small—”
He held his fingers some three inches apart.
“—wooden figure, a stylized Viking which she’d been keeping on her desk. Written in ink on this figure’s base was ‘Brunhilda,’ with a small heart.”
Roy took a sip of coffee.
“I’d never seen it before. Of course, it’s possible that Satchwell was carrying it around with him for years, on the off chance that he’d one day bump into Margot
