Meanwhile, Joan told Strike every morning, “you slept well,” without a hint of inquiry. Joan had a lifelong habit of subtly pressurizing the family into telling her what she wanted to hear. In the days when Strike was sleeping in his office and facing imminent insolvency (facts that he had admittedly not shared with his aunt and uncle), Joan had told him happily “you’re doing awfully well” over the phone, and it had felt, as it always did, unnecessarily combative to challenge her optimistic declaration. After his lower leg had been blown off in Iraq, a tearful Joan had stood at his hospital bed as he tried to focus through a fog of morphine, and told him “You feel comfortable, though. You aren’t in pain.” He loved his aunt, who’d raised him for significant chunks of his childhood, but extended periods in her company made him feel stifled and suffocated. Her insistence on the smooth passing of counterfeit social coin from hand to hand, while uncomfortable truths were ignored and denied, wore him out.
Something gleamed in the water—sleek silver and a pair of soot-black eyes: a seal was turning lazily just below Strike. He watched its revolutions in the water, wondering whether it could see him and, for reasons he couldn’t have explained, his thoughts slid toward his partner in the detective agency.
He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.
He checked his watch. She was having a day off, but there was an outside chance she’d still be awake and he had a decent pretext for texting: Saul Morris, their newest subcontractor, was owed his month’s expenses, and Strike had left no instructions for sorting this out. If he texted about Morris, there was a good chance that Robin would call him back to find out how Joan was.
“Excuse me?” a woman said nervously, from behind him.
Strike knew without turning that it was the dark woman from the pub. She had a Home Counties accent and her tone contained that precise mixture of apology and excitement that he usually encountered in those who wanted to talk about his detective triumphs.
“Yes?” he said, turning to face the speaker.
Her blonde friend had come with her: or perhaps, thought Strike, they were more than friends. An indefinable sense of closeness seemed to bind the two women, whom he judged to be around forty. They wore jeans and shirts and the blonde in particular had the slightly weather-beaten leanness that suggests weekends spent hill walking or cycling. She was what some would call a “handsome” woman, by which they meant that she was bare faced. High-cheekboned, bespectacled, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she also looked stern.
The dark woman was slighter in build. Her large gray eyes shone palely in her long face. She had an air of intensity, even of fanaticism, about her in the half-light, like a medieval martyr.
“Are you… are you Cormoran Strike?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, his tone uninviting.
“Oh,” she breathed, with an agitated little hand gesture. “This is—this is so strange. I know you probably don’t want to be—I’m sorry to bother you, I know you’re off duty,” she gave a nervous laugh, “but—my name’s Anna, by the way—I wondered,” she took a deep breath, “whether I could come—whether I could come and talk to you about my mother.”
Strike said nothing.
“She disappeared,” Anna went on. “Margot Bamborough’s her name. She was a GP. She finished work one evening, walked out of her practice and nobody’s seen her since.”
“Have you contacted the police?” asked Strike.
Anna gave an odd little laugh.
“Oh yes—I mean, they knew—they investigated. But they never found anything. She disappeared,” said Anna, “in 1974.”
The dark water lapped the stone and Strike thought he could hear the seal clearing its damp nostrils. Three drunk youths went weaving past, on their way to the ferry point. Strike wondered whether they knew the last ferry had been and gone at six.
“I just,” said the woman in a rush, “you see—last week—I went to see a medium.”
Fuck, thought Strike.
He’d occasionally bumped up against the purveyors of paranormal insights during his detective career and felt nothing but contempt for them: leeches, or so he saw them, of money from the pockets of the deluded and the desperate.
A motorboat came chugging across the water, its engine grinding the night’s stillness to pieces. Apparently this was the lift the three drunk boys were waiting for. They now began laughing and elbowing each other at the prospect of imminent seasickness.
“The medium told me I’d get a ‘leading,’” Anna pressed on. “She told me, ‘You’re going to find out what happened to your mother. You’ll get a leading and you must follow it. The way will become clear very soon.’ So when I saw you just now in the pub —Cormoran Strike, in the Victory—it just seemed such an incredible coincidence and I thought—I had to speak to you.”
A soft breeze ruffled Anna’s dark, silver-streaked hair. The blonde said crisply,
“Come on, Anna, we should get going.”
She put an arm around the other’s shoulders. Strike saw a wedding ring shining there.
“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she told Strike.
With gentle pressure, the blonde attempted to turn Anna away. The latter sniffed and muttered,
“Sorry. I… probably had too much wine.”
“Hang on.”
Strike often resented his own incurable urge to know,
