Water everywhere.
The astrological notes were starting to tangle themselves around his thought processes, like an old net snagged in a propeller. A pernicious mixture of sense and nonsense, they mirrored, in Strike’s opinion, the appeal of astrology itself, with its flattering, comforting promise that your petty concerns were of interest to the wide universe, and that the stars or the spirit world would guide you where your own hard work and reason couldn’t.
Enough, he told himself sternly. Pressing Irene’s number on his mobile, he waited, listening to her phone ringing and visualizing it beside the bowl of pot-pourri, in the over-decorated hall, with the pink flowered wallpaper and the thick pink carpet. At exactly the point where he’d decided, with a mixture of relief and regret, that she wasn’t in, she answered.
“Double four five nine,” she trilled, making it into a kind of jingle. Joan, too, always answered her landline by telling the caller the number they’d just dialed.
“Is that Mrs. Hickson?”
“Speaking.”
“It’s Cormoran Strike here, the—”
“Oh, hello!” she yelped, sounding startled.
“I wondered whether you might be able to help me,” said Strike, taking out his notebook and opening it. “When we last met, you mentioned a patient of the St. John’s practice who you thought might’ve been called Apton or Applethorpe—”
“Oh, yes?”
“—who claimed to have—”
“—killed Margot, yes,” she interrupted him. “He stopped Dorothy in broad daylight—”
“Yes—”
“—but she thought it was a load of rubbish. I said to her, ‘What if he really did, Dorothy—?’”
“I haven’t been able to find anyone of that name who lived in the area in 1974,” said Strike loudly, “so I wondered whether you might’ve misremembered his na—”
“Possibly, yes, I might have done,” said Irene. “Well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Have you tried directory inquiries? Not directory inquiries,” she corrected herself immediately. “Online records and things.”
“It’s difficult to do a search with the wrong name,” said Strike, just managing to keep his tone free of exasperation or sarcasm. “I’m right by Clerkenwell Road at the moment. I think you said he lived there?”
“Well, he was always hanging around there, so I assumed so.”
“He was registered with your practice, wasn’t he? D’you remember his first—?”
“Um, let me think… It was something like… Gilbert, or—no, I can’t remember, I’m afraid. Applethorpe? Appleton? Apton? Everyone knew him locally by sight because he looked so peculiar: long beard, filthy, blah blah blah. And sometimes he had his kid with him,” said Irene, warming up, “really funny-looking kid—”
“Yes, you said—”
“—with massive ears. He might still be alive, the son, but he’s probably —you know…”
Strike waited, but apparently he was supposed to infer the end of the sentence by Irene’s silence.
“Probably—?” he prompted.
“Oh, you know. In a place.”
“In—?”
“A home or something!” she said, a little impatiently, as though Strike were being obtuse. “He was never going to be right, was he?—with a druggie father and a retarded mother, I don’t care what Jan says. Jan hasn’t got the same—well, it’s not her fault—her family was—different standards. And she likes to look—in front of strangers—well, we all do—but after all, you’re after the truth, aren’t you?”
Strike noted the fine needle of malice directed at her friend, glinting among the disconnected phrases.
“Have you found Duckworth?” Irene asked, jumping subject.
“Douthwaite?”
“Oh, what am I like, I keep doing that, hahaha.” However little pleased she’d been to hear from him, he was at least someone to talk to. “I’d love to know what happened to him, I really would, he was a fishy character if ever there was one. Jan played it down with you, but she was a bit disappointed when he turned out to be gay, you know. She had a soft spot for him. Well, she was very lonely when I first knew her. We used to try and set her up, Eddie and I—”
“Yes, you said—”
“—but men didn’t want to take on a kid and Jan was a bit you know, when a woman’s been alone, I don’t mean desperate, but clingy—Larry didn’t mind, but Larry wasn’t exactly—”
“I had one other thing I wanted to ask—”
“—only he wouldn’t marry her, either. He’d been through a bad divorce—”
“It’s about Leamington Spa—”
“You’ll have checked Bognor Regis?”
“Excuse me?” said Strike.
“For Douthwaite? Because he went to Bognor Regis, didn’t he? To a holiday camp?”
“Clacton-on-Sea,” said Strike. “Unless he went to Bognor Regis as well?”
“As well as what?”
Jesus fucking Christ.
“What makes you think Douthwaite was ever in Bognor Regis?” Strike asked, slowly and clearly, rubbing his forehead.
“I thought—wasn’t he there, at some point?”
“Not as far as I’m aware, but we know he worked in Clacton-on-Sea in the mid-eighties.”
“Oh, it must’ve been that—yes, someone must’ve told me that, they’re all—old-fashioned seaside —you know.”
Strike seemed to remember he’d asked both Irene and Janice whether they had any idea where Douthwaite had gone after he left Clerkenwell, and that both had said they didn’t know.
“How did you know he went to work in Clacton-on-Sea?” he asked.
“Jan told me,” said Irene, after a tiny pause. “Yes, Jan would’ve told me. She was his neighbor, you know, she was the one who knew him. Yes, I think she tried to find out where he’d gone after he left Percival Road, because she was worried about him.”
“But this was eleven years later,” said Strike.
“What was?”
“He didn’t go to Clacton-on-Sea until eleven years after he left Percival Road,” said Strike. “When I asked you both if you knew where he’d gone—”
“Well, you meant now, didn’t you?” said Irene, “where he is now? I’ve no idea. Have you looked into that Leamington Spa business, by the way?” Then she laughed, and said, “All these seaside places! No, wait—it isn’t seaside, is it, not Leamington Spa? But you know what I mean —water—I do love water, it’s—Greenwich, Eddie knew I’d love
