“It showed a hooded woman being gang-raped and killed.”

Robin experienced a slight prickling over her neck and scalp.

“And people get off on that,” she muttered, in disgust.

He knew from her tone that she hadn’t understood, that she thought he was describing a pornographic fiction.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t porn. Someone filmed… the real thing.”

Robin looked around in shock, before turning quickly back to face the road. Her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Repulsive images were suddenly forcing their way into her mind. What had Strike seen, that made him look so closed up, so blank? Had the hooded woman’s body resembled Margot’s, the body Oonagh Kennedy had said was “all legs”?

“You all right?” asked Strike.

“Fine,” she almost snapped. “What—what did you see, how—?”

But Strike chose to answer a question she hadn’t asked.

“The woman had a long scar over the ribcage. There was never any mention of Margot having a scarred ribcage in press reports or police notes. I don’t think it was her.”

Robin said nothing but continued to look tense.

“There were four men, ah, involved,” Strike continued, “all Caucasian, and all with their faces hidden. There was also a fifth man looking on. His arm came briefly into shot. It could’ve been Mucky Ricci. There was an out-of-focus big gold ring.”

He was trying to reduce the account to a series of dry facts. His leg muscles had tensed up quite as much as Robin’s hands, and he was primed to grab the wheel. She’d had a panic attack once before while they were driving.

“What are the police saying?” Robin asked. “Do they know where it came from?”

“Hutchins asked around. An ex-Vice Squad guy thinks it’s part of a batch they seized in a raid made on a club in Soho in ’75. The club was owned by Ricci. They took a load of hardcore pornography out of the basement.

“One of Talbot’s best mates was also Vice Squad. The best guess is that Talbot nicked or copied it, after his mate showed it to him.”

“Why would he do that?” said Robin, a little desperately.

“I don’t think we’re going to get a better answer than ‘because he was mentally ill,’” said Strike. “But the starting point must have been his interest in Ricci. He’d found out Ricci was registered with the St. John’s practice and attended the Christmas party. In the notes, he called Ricci—”

“—Leo three,” said Robin. “Yes, I know.”

Strike’s leg muscles relaxed very slightly. This degree of focus and recall on Robin’s part didn’t suggest somebody about to have a panic attack.

“Did you learn my email off by heart?” he asked her.

It was Robin’s turn to remember Christmas, and the brief solace it had been, to bury herself in work at her parents’ kitchen table.

“I pay attention when I’m reading, that’s all.”

“Well, I still don’t understand why Talbot didn’t chase up this Ricci lead, although judging by the horoscope notes, there was a sharp deterioration in his mental state over the six months he was in charge of the case. I’m guessing he stole that can of film not long before he got kicked off the force, hence no mention of it in the police notes.”

“And then hid it so nobody else could investigate the woman’s death,” said Robin. Her sympathy for Bill Talbot had just been, if not extinguished, severely dented. “Why the hell didn’t he take the film back to the police when he was back in his right mind?”

“I’d guess because he wanted his job back and, failing that, wanted to make sure he got his pension. Setting aside basic integrity, I can’t see that he had a great incentive to admit he’d tampered with evidence on another case. Everyone was already pissed off at him: victims’ families, press, the force, all blaming him for having fucked up the investigation. And then Lawson, a bloke he doesn’t like, takes over and tells him to stay the fuck out of it. He probably told himself the dead woman was only a prostitute or—”

“Jesus,” said Robin angrily.

“I’m not saying ‘only a prostitute,’” Strike said quickly. “I’m guessing at the mindset of a seventies policeman who’d already been publicly shamed for buggering up a high-profile case.”

Robin said nothing, but remained stony-faced for the rest of the journey, while Strike, the muscles of his one-and-a-half legs so tense they ached, tried not to make it too obvious that he was keeping a covert eye on the hands gripping the steering wheel.

35

… fayre Aurora, rysing hastily,

Doth by her blushing tell, that she did lye

All night in old Tithonus frosen bed,

Whereof she seemes ashamed inwardly.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

“Ever been here before?” Strike asked Robin, as she parked in the Hampton Court car park. She’d been silent since he’d told her about the film, and he was trying to break the tension.

“No.”

They got out of the Land Rover and set off across the car park in the chilly rain.

“Where exactly are we meeting Cynthia?”

“The Privy Kitchen Café,” said Robin. “I expect they’ll give us a map at the ticket office.”

She knew that the film hidden in Gregory Talbot’s attic wasn’t Strike’s fault. He hadn’t put it there, hadn’t hidden it for forty years, couldn’t have known, when he inserted it in the projector, that he was about to watch a woman’s last, terrified, excruciating moments. She wouldn’t have wanted him to withhold the truth about what he’d seen. Nevertheless, his dry and unemotional description had grated on Robin. Reasonably or not, she’d wanted some sign that he had been repulsed, or disgusted, or horrified.

But perhaps this was unrealistic. He’d been a military policeman long before Robin had known him, where he’d learned a detachment she sometimes envied. Beneath her determinedly calm exterior, Robin felt shaken and sick, and wanted to know that when Strike had watched the recording of the woman’s dying moments, he’d recognized her as a person as real as he was.

Only a prostitute.

Their footsteps rang out on the wet tarmac as the great red-brick palace rose up before them, and Robin, who wanted to drive dreadful images out of her mind, tried to remember everything she knew about Henry VIII, that cruel and corpulent Tudor king who’d beheaded two of his six wives, but somehow found herself thinking about Matthew, instead.

When Robin had been brutally raped by a man in a gorilla mask who’d been lurking beneath the stairs of her hall of residence, Matthew had been kind, patient and understanding. Robin’s lawyer might be mystified by the source of Matthew’s vindictiveness over what should have been a straightforward divorce, but Robin had come to believe that the end of the marriage had been a profound shock to Matthew, because he thought he was owed infinite credit for having helped her through the worst period of her life. Matthew, Robin felt sure, thought she was forever in his debt.

Tears prickled in Robin’s eyes. Angling her umbrella so that Strike couldn’t see her face, she blinked hard until her eyes were clear again.