Imagine aborting your husband’s child, she thought. Could Margot really have done that, when she already had that child’s sister at home? What had been going through her mind, a month before she disappeared? Perhaps she’d been quietly breaking down, like Talbot? The past few years had taught Robin how very mysterious human beings were, even to those who thought they knew them best. Infidelity and bigamy, kinks and fetishes, theft and fraud, stalking and harassment: she’d now delved into so many secret lives she’d lost count. Nor did she hold herself superior to any of the deceived and duped who came to the agency, craving truth. Hadn’t she thought she knew her own husband back to front? How many hundreds of nights had they lain entwined like Siamese twins, whispering confidences and sharing laughter in the dark? She’d spent nearly half her life with Matthew, and not until a hard, bright diamond ear stud had appeared in their bed had she realized that he was living a life apart, and was not, and perhaps never had been, the man she thought she knew.
“You don’t want to think she had an abortion,” said Strike, correctly deducing at least part of the reason for Robin’s silence. She didn’t answer, instead asking,
“You haven’t heard back from her friend Oonagh, have you?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” said Strike. “Yeah, I got an email yesterday. She is a retired vicar, and she’d be delighted to meet us when she comes down to London to do some Christmas shopping. Date to be confirmed.”
“That’s good,” said Robin. “You know, I’d like to talk to someone who actually liked Margot.”
“Gupta liked her,” said Strike. “And Janice, she’s just said so.”
Robin ripped open the second bag of crisps.
“Which is what you’d expect, isn’t it?” she said. “That people would at least pretend they liked Margot, after what happened. But Irene didn’t. Don’t you find it a bit… excessive… to be holding on to that much resentment, forty years later? She really put the boot in. Wouldn’t you think it was… I don’t know, more politic…”
“To claim to be friends?”
“Yes… but maybe Irene knew there were far too many witnesses to the fact that they weren’t friends. What did you think of the anonymous notes? True or false?”
“Good question,” said Strike, scratching his chin. “Irene really enjoyed telling us Margot had been called ‘the c-word,’ but ‘hellfire’ doesn’t sound like the kind of thing she’d invent. I’d have expected something more in the ‘uppity bitch’ line.”
He drew out his notebook again, and scanned the notes he’d made of the interview.
“Well, we still need to check these leads out, for what they’re worth. Why don’t you follow up Charlie Ramage and Leamington Spa, and I’ll look into the Bennie-abusing Applethorpe?”
“You just did it again,” said Robin.
“Did what?”
“Smirked when you said ‘Bennies.’ What’s so funny about benzedrine?”
“Oh—” Strike chuckled. “I was just reminded of something my Uncle Ted told me. Did you ever watch Crossroads?”
“What’s Crossroads?”
“I always forget how much younger you are,” Strike said. “It was a daytime soap opera and it had a character in it called Benny. He was—well, these days you’d call him special needs. Simple. He wore a wooly hat. Iconic character, in his way.”
“You were thinking of him?” said Robin. It didn’t seem particularly amusing.
“No, but you need to know about him to understand the next bit. I assume you know about the Falklands War.”
“I’m younger than you, Strike. I’m not pig-ignorant.”
“OK, right. So, the British troops who went over there—Ted was there, 1982—nicknamed the locals ‘Bennies,’ after the character on Crossroads. Command gets wind of this, and the order comes down the line, ‘Stop calling these people we’ve just liberated Bennies.’ So,” said Strike, grinning, “They started calling them ‘Stills.’”
“‘Stills’? What does ‘Stills’ mean?”
“‘Still Bennies,’” said Strike, and he let out a great roar of laughter. Robin laughed, too, but mostly at Strike’s amusement. When his guffaws had subsided, both watched the river for a few seconds, drinking and, in Strike’s case, smoking, until he said,
“I’m going to write to the Ministry of Justice. Apply for permission to visit Creed.”
“Seriously?”
“We’ve got to try. The authorities always thought Creed assaulted or killed more women than he was done for. There was jewelry in his house and bits of clothing nobody ever identified. Just because everyone thinks it’s Creed—”
“—doesn’t mean it isn’t,” agreed Robin, who followed the tortured logic perfectly.
Strike sighed, rubbed his face, cigarette still poking out of his mouth, then said,
“Want to see exactly how crazy Talbot was?”
“Go on.”
Strike pulled the leather-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat and handed it to her. Robin opened it and turned the pages in silence.
They were covered in strange drawings and diagrams. The writing was small, meticulously neat but cramped. There was much underlining and circling of phrases and symbols. The pentagram recurred. The pages were littered with names, but none connected with the case: Crowley, Lévi, Adams and Schmidt.
“Huh,” she said quietly, stopping on a particularly heavily embellished page on which a goat’s head with a third eye looked balefully up at her. “Look at this…”
She bent closer.
“He’s using astrological symbols.”
“He’s what?” said Strike, frowning down at the page she was perusing.
“That’s Libra,” said Robin, pointing at a symbol toward the bottom of the page. “It’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.”
“He’s using bloody star signs?” said Strike, pulling the book back toward him, looking so disgusted that Robin started to laugh again.
Strike scanned the page. Robin was right. The circles drawn around the goat’s head told him something else, too.
“He’s calculated the full horoscope for the moment he thought she was abducted,” he said. “Look at the date there. The eleventh of October 1974. Half past six in the evening… fuck’s sake. Astrology… he was out of his tree.”
“What’s your sign?” asked Robin, trying to work
