“Even after what Janice said?”
Strike took a drag on the cigarette, then blew smoke out of the window, away from Robin. “I grant you, Brenner looks a lot fishier now than he did when we started digging, but what are the odds Oakden’s actually got useful information? He was a kid when all this happened and nicking that obituary smacks of a man trying to scrape up things to say, rather than—”
He heard a rustling beside him and turned to see Robin opening her messenger bag. Slightly to his surprise, Robin was pulling out Talbot’s notebook again.
“Still carrying that around with you, are you?” said Strike, trying not to sound exasperated.
“Apparently I am,” she said, moving her mobile onto the dashboard so that she could open the book in her lap. Watching the phone, Strike saw a second text arrive, lighting up the screen, and this time, he caught sight of the name: Morris.
“What’s Morris texting you about?” Strike said, and even to his ears, the question sounded critical.
“Nothing. He’s just bored, sitting outside Miss Jones’s boyfriend’s house,” said Robin, who was flicking through Talbot’s notebook. “I want to show you something. There, look at that.”
She passed him the book, open to a page Strike remembered from his own perusal of the notes. It was close to the end of the notebook, where the pages were most heavily embellished with strange drawings. In the middle of this page danced a black skeleton holding a scythe.
“Ignore all the weird tarot drawings,” said Robin. “Look there, though. That sentence between the skeleton’s legs. The little symbol, the circle with the cross in it, stands for the Part of Fortune…”
“What’s that?” asked Strike.
“It’s a point in the horoscope that’s supposed to be about worldly success. ‘Part of Fortune in Second, MONEY AND POSSESSIONS.’ And ‘Mother’s House,’ underlined. The Oakdens lived on Fortune Street, remember? And the Part of Fortune was in the house of money and possessions when Margot disappeared, and he’s connecting that with the fact that Dorothy inherited her mother’s house, and saying that wasn’t a tragedy, but a stroke of luck for Dorothy.”
“You think?” said Strike, rubbing his tired eyes.
“Yes, because look, he then starts rambling about Virgo—which is Dorothy’s sign under both systems—being petty and having an ax to grind, which from what we know about her fits. Anyway,” said Robin, “I’ve been looking at dates of birth, and guess what? Under both the traditional and Schmidt’s systems, Dorothy’s mother was a Scorpio.”
“Christ’s sake, how many more Scorpios are we going to find?”
“I know what you mean,” said Robin, unfazed, “but from what I’ve read, Scorpio’s one of the most common birth signs. Anyway, this is the important bit: Carl Oakden was born on the sixth of April. That means he’s Aries under the traditional system, but Pisces under Schmidt’s.”
A short silence followed.
“How old was Oakden when his grandmother fell downstairs?” asked Strike.
“Fourteen,” said Robin.
Strike turned his face away from Robin to blow smoke out of the window again.
“You think he pushed his grandmother, do you?”
“It might not have been deliberate,” said Robin. “He could’ve pushed past her and she lost her balance.”
“‘Margot confronted Pisces.’ It’d be a hell of a thing to accuse a child of—”
“Maybe she never confronted him at all. The confrontation might have been something Talbot suspected, or imagined. Either way—”
“—it’s suggestive, yeah. It is suggestive…” Strike let out a slight groan. “We’re going to have to interview bloody Oakden, aren’t we? There’s a bit of a hotspot developing around that little grouping, isn’t there? Brenner and the Oakdens, outward respectability—”
“—inward poison. Remember? That’s what Oonagh Kennedy said about Dorothy.”
The detectives sat for a moment or two, watching Elinor Dean’s front door, which remained closed, her dark garden silent and still.
“How many murders,” Robin asked, “d’you think go undetected?”
“Clue’s in the question, isn’t it? ‘Undetected’—impossible to know. But yeah, it’s those quiet, domestic deaths you wonder about. Vulnerable people picked off by their own families, and everyone thinking it was ill health—”
“—or a mercy that they’ve gone,” said Robin.
“Some deaths are a mercy,” said Strike.
And with these words, in both of their mind’s eyes rose an image of horror. Strike was remembering the corpse of Sergeant Gary Topley, lying on the dusty road in Afghanistan, eyes wide open, his body missing from the waist down. The vision had recurred in Strike’s nightmares ever since he’d seen it, and occasionally, in these dreams, Gary talked to him, lying in the dust. It was always a comfort to remember, on waking, that Gary’s consciousness had been snuffed out instantly, that his wide-open eyes and puzzled expression showed that death had claimed him before his brain could register agony or terror.
But in Robin’s mind there was a picture of something she wasn’t sure had ever happened. She was imagining Margot Bamborough chained to a radiator (I whip her face and breasts), pleading for her life (the strategy is laughably transparent), and suffering torments (it could be raised to an ecstasy of pain, and then it knew it lived, and stood tremulously on the edge of the abyss, begging, screaming, begging for mercy).
“You know,” said Robin, talking partly to break the silence and dispel that mental image, “I’d quite like to find a picture of Dorothy’s mother, Maud.”
“Why?”
“For confirmation, because—I don’t think I told you, look…”
She flicked backward in the notebook to the page littered with water signs. In small writing beneath a picture of a scorpion were the words “MOLE (Adams).”
“Is that a new sign?” asked Strike. “The Mole?”
“No,” said Robin, smiling, “Talbot’s alluding to the fact that the astrologer Evangeline Adams said the true Scorpio often has a birthmark, or a prominent mole. I’ve read her book, got it second hand.”
There was a pause.
“What?” said Strike, because Robin was looking at him expectantly.
“I was waiting for you to jeer.”
“I lost the will to jeer some way back,” said Strike. “You realize we’re supposed to have solved this case in approximately
