“Hey, this was all your idea. You don’t want the information, I’m happy to go.”
“Unless you’ve got more than you put in your book—”
“Brenner wanted Margot Bamborough struck off the bloody medical register. Come round our house one Sunday full of it. Couple of weeks before she disappeared. There,” said Oakden pugnaciously, “I kept that out of the book, because my mother didn’t want it in there.”
“Why was that?”
“Still loyal to him,” said Oakden, with a little snort of laughter. “And I wanted to keep the old dear happy at the time, because noises had been made about writing me out of the will. Old women,” said the convicted con man, “are a bit too persuadable if you don’t keep an eye on them. She’d got chummy with the local vicar by the eighties. I was worried it was all going to go to rebuild the bloody church steeple unless I kept an eye on her.”
“Why did Brenner want Bamborough struck off?”
“She examined some kid without parental permission.”
“Was this Janice’s son?” asked Robin.
“Was I talking to you?” Oakden shot at her.
“You,” growled Strike, “want to keep a civil tongue in your bloody head. Was it Janice’s son, yes or no?”
“Maybe,” said Oakden, and Robin concluded that he couldn’t remember. “Point is, that’s unethical behavior, looking at a kid without a parent there, and old Joe was all worked up about it. ‘I’ll have her struck off for this,’ he kept saying. There. Didn’t get that from no obituary, did I?”
Oakden drank the rest of his cocktail straight off, then said,
“I’ll have another one of those.”
Strike ignored this, saying,
“And this was two weeks before Bamborough disappeared?”
“About that, yeah. Never seen the old bastard so excited. He loved disciplining people, old Joe. Vicious old bastard, actually.”
“In what way?”
“Told my old woman in front of me she wasn’t hitting me enough,” said Oakden. “She bloody listened, too. Tried to lay about me with a slipper a couple of days later, silly cow. She learned not to do that again.”
“Yeah? Hit her back, did you?”
Oakden’s too-close-together eyes raked Strike, as though trying to ascertain whether he was worth educating.
“If my father had lived, he’d’ve had the right to punish me, but her trying to humiliate me because Brenner told her to? I wasn’t taking that.”
“Exactly how close were your mother and Brenner?”
Oakden’s thin brows contracted.
“Doctor and secretary, that’s all. There wasn’t anything else between them, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“They didn’t have a little lie down after lunch, then?” said Strike. “She didn’t come over sleepy, after Brenner had come over?”
“You don’t want to judge everyone’s mother by yours,” said Oakden.
Strike acknowledged the jibe with a dark smile and said,
“Did your mother ask Brenner to sign the death certificate for your grandmother?”
“The hell’s that got to do with anything?”
“Did she?”
“I dunno,” said Oakden, his eyes darting once again toward the bar’s entrance. “Where did you get that idea? What’re you even asking that for?”
“Your grandmother’s doctor was Margot Bamborough, right?”
“I dunno,” said Oakden.
“You can remember every word your mother told you about Steve Douthwaite, right down to him flirting with receptionists and looking tearful the last time he left the surgery, but you can’t remember details of your own grandmother falling downstairs and killing herself?”
“I wasn’t there,” said Oakden. “I was out at a mate’s house when it happened. Come home and seen the ambulance.”
“Just your mother at home, then?”
“The hell’s this relevant to—”
“What’s the name of the mate whose house you were at?” asked Strike, for the first time taking out his notebook.
“What’re you doing?” said Oakden, with an attempt at a laugh, dropping the last portion of his sandwich on his plate. “What are you fucking implying?”
“You don’t want to give us his name?”
“Why the fuck should—he was a schoolmate—”
“Convenient for you and your mother, old Maud falling downstairs,” said Strike. “My information is she shouldn’t have been trying to navigate stairs alone, in her condition. Inherited the house, didn’t you?”
Oakden began to shake his head very slowly, as though marveling at the unexpected stupidity of Cormoran Strike.
“Seriously? You’re trying to… wow. Wow.”
“Not going to tell me the name of your schoolfriend, then?”
“Wow,” said Oakden, attempting a laugh. “You think you can—”
“—drop a word in a friendly journalist’s ear, to the effect that your long career of screwing over old ladies started with a good hard push in the small of your grandmother’s back? Oh yeah, I definitely can.”
“Now you wait a fucking—”
“I know you think it’s me being set up tonight,” said Strike, leaning in. His body language was unmistakeably menacing, and out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw the black-haired woman in the cheongsam and her partner watching warily, both with their drinks at their lips. “But the police have still got a note written to them in 1985, telling them to dig beneath the cross of St. John. DNA techniques have moved on a lot since then. I expect they’ll be able to get a good match from the saliva under the envelope flap.”
Oakden’s eyelid twitched again.
“You thought you were going to stir up a bit of press interest in the Bamborough case, to get people interested in your shitty book, didn’t you?”
“I never—”
“I’m warning you. You go talking to the papers about me and my father, or about me working the Bamborough case, and I’ll make sure you get nailed for that note. And if by chance that doesn’t work, I’ll put my whole agency onto turning over every part of your miserable fucking life, until I’ve got something else on you to take to the police. Understand?”
Oakden, who looked momentarily unnerved, recovered himself quickly. He even managed another little laugh.
“You can’t stop me writing about whatever I want. That’s freedom of—”
“I’m warning you,” repeated Strike, a little more loudly, “what’ll happen if you get in the way of this case. And you can pay for your own fucking sandwich.”
Strike stood up and Robin, caught off guard, hastened to grab her raincoat and
