“Box one,” said Strike, shoving it toward Robin with his real foot.
She crouched down beneath the desk and began searching the photocopied papers until she found the sheaf of newspaper clippings Strike had shown her, months previously, in the Three Kings.
“There,” said Robin. “Look. There.”
And there was the old picture, of the two women who’d come forward to say that they were Ruby’s struggling women: the tall, broad, younger woman with her cheery face, and her aged mother, who was tiny and stooped.
“It’s the wrong way round,” repeated Robin. “If Fiona Fleury had leaned on her mother, she’d have flattened her…” Robin scanned the few lines beneath the picture. “Cormoran, it doesn’t fit. Fiona says she was wearing the rain hat, but Ruby says it was the short woman who had the rainhat on.”
“Ruby was vague,” said Strike, but Robin could see his interest sharpening as he reached out for these pieces of paper. “She could’ve been confused…”
“Talbot never thought the Fleurys were the people Ruby saw, and this is why!” said Robin. “The heights were reversed. It was the taller woman Ruby saw who was unsteady, not the little one…”
“So how come she didn’t tell Lawson the Fleurys couldn’t be the people she saw?”
“Same reason she never told anybody she’d seen Theo? Because she’d been flustered by Talbot trying to force her to bend her story to fit his theories? Because she lost confidence in herself, and didn’t know what she’d really seen? It was raining, she was lost, she was panicked… by the time it got to Lawson, maybe she just wanted to agree she’d seen the Fleurys and be left alone?”
“Plausible,” admitted Strike.
“How tall was Margot?”
“Five nine,” said Strike.
“And Creed?” said Robin.
“Five seven.”
“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.
There was another minute’s silence, while Strike sat lost in thought and Robin re-read the statements laid out in front of her.
“The phone boxes,” said Strike, at last. “Those bloody phone boxes…”
“What about them?”
“Talbot wanted Ruby to have seen the two struggling women beside the two boxes in Clerkenwell Green, right? So he could tie them to the van that was speeding away up Aylesbury Street, which was supposed to contain Creed.”
“Right,” said Robin.
“But after the Fleurys came forward, Talbot tried to get Ruby to agree she’d seen the two struggling women beside the first phone box, the one at the end of Albemarle Way.”
“But she wouldn’t change her story,” said Robin, “because she’d seen Theo there.”
“Precisely,” said Strike, “but that doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t—”
“She’s driving round in an enormous circle in the rain, right, looking for this house she can’t find, right?”
“Yes…”
“Well, just because Ruby saw Theo get into a van by the phone box on one of her circuits doesn’t mean she can’t have seen two struggling women on her second or third circuit. We know she was hazy about landmarks, unfamiliar with the area and with no sense of direction, her daughter was very clear about that. But she had this very retentive visual memory, she’s somebody who notices clothes and hairstyles…”
Strike looked down at the desk again, and for the second time, picked up Irene Hickson’s receipt and examined it. Then, so suddenly that Robin jumped, Strike let the receipt fall and stood up, both hands clasped over the back of his head.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit! Never trust a phone call whose provenance you haven’t checked!”
“What phone call?” said Robin nervously, casting her mind back over any phone calls she’d taken over the course of the case.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Strike, walking out of the room into the outer office and then back again, still clasping the back of his head, apparently needing to pace, just as Robin had needed to walk when she’d found out Strike could interview Creed. “How did I not fucking see it?”
“Cormoran, what—?”
“Why did Margot keep an empty chocolate box?” said Strike.
“I don’t know,” said Robin, confused.
“You know what?” said Strike slowly. “I think I do.”
68
… an Hyena was,
That feeds on wemens flesh, as others feede on gras.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The high-security mental hospital that is Broadmoor lies slightly over an hour outside London, in the county of Berkshire. The word “Broadmoor” had long since lost all bucolic associations in the collective mind of the British public, and Strike was no exception to this rule. Far from connoting a wide stretch of grassland or heath, the name spoke to Strike only of violence, heinous crimes and two hundred of the most dangerous men in Britain, whom the tabloids called monsters. Accordingly, and in spite of the fact that Strike knew he was visiting a hospital and not a prison, he took all the common sense measures he’d have taken for a high-security jail: he wore no tie, ensured that neither he or his car was carrying anything likely to trigger a burdensome search, brought two kinds of photographic ID and a copy of his letter from the Ministry of Justice, set out early, certain, though he’d never been there before, that getting inside the facility would be time-consuming.
It was a golden September morning. Sunshine pouring down upon the road ahead from between fluffy white clouds, and as Strike drove through Berkshire in his BMW, he listened to the news on the radio, the lead item of which was that Scotland had voted, by 55 percent to 45 percent, to remain in the United Kingdom. He was wondering how Dave Polworth and Sam Barclay were taking the news, when his mobile rang.
“It’s Brian, Brian Tucker,” said the hoarse voice. “Not interrupting, am I? Wanna wish you good luck.”
“Thanks, Brian,” said Strike.
They’d finally met three days previously, at Strike’s office. Tucker had shown Strike the old letter from Creed, described the butterfly pendant taken from the killer’s basement, which he believed was his daughter’s, shared his theories and trembled with emotion and nerves at the thought of Strike coming face to face with the man he believed
