Robin spent the rest of the month working without respite. She conducted a final meeting with the persecuted weatherman and his wife, in which she revealed Postcard’s identity, gave them Postcard’s real name and address, and took their final payment. She then had Pat contact their waiting list client, the commodities broker who suspected her husband of sleeping with their nanny and, next day, welcomed the woman to the office to take down her details and receive a down payment.
The commodities broker didn’t bother to hide her disappointment that she was meeting Robin instead of Strike. She was a thin, colorless blonde of forty-two, whose over-highlighted hair had the texture, close up, of fine wire. Robin found her unlikable until the end of the interview, when she talked about her husband, whose business had gone bankrupt and who now worked from home, giving him many long hours alone with the nanny.
“Fourteen years,” said the broker. “Fourteen years, three kids and now…”
She hid her eyes behind her shaking hands and Robin, who’d been with Matthew since she was at school, felt, in spite of the woman’s brittle façade, an unexpected glow of sympathy.
After the new client had left, Robin called Morris into the office and gave him the job of the first day’s surveillance of the nanny.
“Okey-doke,” he said. “Hey, what d’you say we call the client ‘RB’?”
“What does that stand for?” Robin asked.
“Rich Bitch,” said Morris, grinning. “She’s loaded.”
“No,” said Robin, unsmiling.
“Whoops,” said Morris, eyebrows raised. “Feminist alert?”
“Something like that.”
“OK, how about—?”
“We’ll call her Mrs. Smith, after the street they live on,” said Robin coldly.
Over the next few days, Robin took her turn tailing the nanny, a glossy-haired brunette who somewhat reminded her of Strike’s ex-girlfriend Lorelei. The commodities broker’s children certainly seemed to adore their nanny, and so, Robin feared, did their father. While he didn’t once touch the nanny in any amorous way, he showed every sign of a man completely smitten: mirroring her body language, laughing excessively at her jokes, and hurrying to open doors and gates for her.
A couple of nights later, Robin dozed off at the wheel for a few seconds while driving toward Elinor Dean’s house in Stoke Newington. Jerking awake, she immediately turned on the radio and opened the window, so that her eyes streamed with the cold, sooty night air, but the incident scared her. Over the next few days, she increased her caffeine consumption in an effort to keep awake. This made her slightly jittery, and she found it hard to sleep even on the rare occasions the chance presented itself.
Robin had always been as careful with the firm’s money as Strike himself, treating every penny spent as though it were to be deducted from her own take-home pay. The habit of parsimony had stayed with her, even though the agency’s survival no longer depended on extracting money from clients before the final demands came in. Robin was well aware that Strike took very little money out of the business for his own needs, preferring to plow profits back into the agency. He continued to live a Spartan existence in the two and a half rooms over the office, and there were months when she, the salaried partner, took home more pay than the senior partner and founder of the firm.
All of this added to her feeling of guilt at booking herself into a Premier Inn in Leamington Spa on the Sunday night before Satchwell’s art exhibition. The town was only a two-hour drive away; Robin knew she could have got up early on Monday morning instead of sleeping over in the town. However, she was so exhausted, she feared dozing off at the wheel again.
She justified the hotel room to herself by leaving twenty-four hours ahead of the exhibition’s opening, thus giving herself time to take a look at the church where Margot had allegedly been sighted a week after her disappearance. She also packed photocopies of all the pages of Talbot’s horoscope notes that mentioned Paul Satchwell, with the intention of studying them in the quiet of her hotel room. To these, she added a second-hand copy of Evangeline Adams’s Your Place in the Sun, a pack of unopened tarot cards and a copy of The Book of Thoth. She hadn’t told Strike she’d bought any of these items and didn’t intend claiming expenses for them.
Much as she loved London, Yorkshire-born Robin sometimes pined for trees, moors and hills. Her drive up the nondescript M40, past hamlets and villages with archaic names like Middleton Cheney, Temple Herdewyke and Bishop’s Itchington, gave her glimpses of flat green fields. The cool, damp day bore a welcome whiff of spring on the air, and in the breaks between scudding white clouds, hard, bright sunshine filled the old Land Rover with a light that made a pale gray ghost of Robin’s reflection in the dusty window beside her. She really needed to clean the car: in fact, there were sundry small, personal chores piling up while she worked nonstop for the agency, such as ringing her mother, whose calls she’d been avoiding, and her lawyer, who’d left a message about the upcoming mediation, not to mention plucking her eyebrows, buying herself a new pair of flat shoes and sorting out a bank transfer to Max, covering her half of the council tax.
As the hedgerows flashed by, Robin consciously turned her thoughts away from these depressing mundanities to Paul Satchwell. She doubted she’d find him in Leamington Spa, being
