“‘At 8 p.m. in the evening I was watching television in the sitting room downstairs when I heard the phone ring in the hall. I would usually only ever answer the phone if both Dr. Phipps and Dr. Bamborough were out. As Dr. Phipps was in, and could answer the phone from the extension beside his bed, I didn’t answer.

“‘About five minutes later, I heard the gong that Mrs. Evelyn Phipps had placed beside Dr. Phipps’s bed, in case of emergency. I went upstairs. Dr. Phipps was still in bed. He told me that it had been Miss Kennedy on the phone. Dr. Bamborough hadn’t turned up at the pub. Dr. Phipps said he thought she must have been delayed at work or forgotten. He asked me to tell Dr. Bamborough to go up to their bedroom as soon as she came in.

“‘I went back downstairs. About an hour later, I heard the gong again and went upstairs and found Dr. Phipps now quite worried about his wife. He asked me whether she’d come in yet. I said that she hadn’t. He asked me to stay in the room while he phoned Miss Kennedy at home. Miss Kennedy still hadn’t seen or heard from Dr. Bamborough. Dr. Phipps hung up and asked me what Dr. Bamborough had been carrying when she left the house that morning. I told him just a handbag and her doctor’s bag. He asked me whether Dr. Bamborough had said anything about visiting her parents. I said she hadn’t. He asked me to stay while he called Dr. Bamborough’s mother.

“‘Mrs. Bamborough hadn’t heard from her daughter or seen her. Dr. Phipps was now quite worried and asked me to go downstairs and look in the drawer in the base of the clock on the mantelpiece in the sitting room and see whether there was anything in there. I went and looked. There was nothing there. I went back upstairs and told Dr. Phipps that the clock drawer was empty. Dr. Phipps explained that this was a place he and his wife sometimes left each other private notes. I hadn’t known about this previously.

“‘He asked me to stay with him while he called his mother, because he might have something else for me to do. He spoke to his mother and asked her advice. It was a brief conversation. When he hung up, Dr. Phipps asked me whether I thought he ought to call the police. I said I thought he should. He said he was going to. He told me to go downstairs and let the police in when they arrived and show them up to his bedroom. The police arrived about half an hour later and I showed them up to Dr. Phipps’s bedroom.

“‘I didn’t find Dr. Bamborough to be unusual in her manner when she left the house that morning. Relations between Dr. Phipps and Dr. Bamborough seemed completely happy. I’m very surprised at her disappearance, which is out of character. She is very attached to her daughter and I cannot imagine her ever leaving the baby, or going away without telling her husband or me where she was going.

“‘Signed and dated Cynthia Phipps, 12 October 1974.’”

“Yes, no, that’s… I haven’t got anything to add to that,” said Cynthia. “Odd to hear it back!” she said, with another little snorting laugh, but Robin thought her eyes were frightened.

“This is obviously, ah, sensitive, but if we could go back to your statement that relations between Roy and Margot—”

“Yes, sorry, no, I’m not going to talk about their marriage,” said Cynthia. Her sallow cheeks became stained with a purplish blush. “Everyone rows, everyone has ups and downs, but it’s not up to me to talk about their marriage.”

“We understand that your husband couldn’t have—” began Robin.

“Margot’s husband,” said Cynthia. “No, you see, they’re two completely different people. Inside my head.”

Convenient, said a voice inside Robin’s.

“We’re simply exploring the possibility that she went away,” said Strike, “maybe to think or—”

“No, Margot wouldn’t have just walked out without saying anything. That wouldn’t have been like her.”

“Anna told us her grandmother—” said Robin.

“Evelyn had early onset Alzheimer’s and you couldn’t take what she said seriously,” said Cynthia, her tone higher and more brittle. “I’ve always told Anna that, I’ve always told her that Margot would never have left her. I’ve always told her that,” she repeated.

Except, continued the voice inside Robin’s head, when you were pretending to be her real mother, and hiding Margot’s existence from her.

“Moving on,” said Strike, “you received a phone call on Anna’s second birthday, from a woman purporting to be Margot?”

“Um, yes, no, that’s right,” said Cynthia. She took another shaky sip of coffee. “I was icing the birthday cake in the kitchen when the phone rang, so not in any danger of forgetting what day it was, hahaha. When I picked up, the woman said, ‘Is that you, Cynthia?’ I said ‘Yes,’ and she said ‘It’s Margot here. Wish little Annie a happy birthday from her mummy. And make sure you look after her.’ And the line went dead.

“I just stood there,” she mimed holding an invisible implement in her hand, and tried to laugh again, but no sound came out, “holding the spatula. I didn’t know what to do. Anna was playing in the sitting room. I was… I decided I’d better ring Roy at work. He told me to call the police, so I did.”

“Did you think it was Margot?” asked Strike.

“No. It wasn’t—well, it sounded like her, but I don’t think it was her.”

“You think somebody was imitating it?”

“Putting it on, yes. The accent. Cockney, but… no, I didn’t get that feeling you get when you just know who it is…”

“You’re sure it was a woman?” said Strike. “It couldn’t have been a man imitating a woman?”

“I don’t think so,” said Cynthia.

“Did Margot ever call Anna ‘little Annie’?” asked Robin.

“She called her all kinds of pet names,” said Cynthia, looking glum. “Annie Fandango, Annabella, Angel Face… somebody could have guessed, or maybe they’d just got the name wrong… But the timing was… they’d just found bits of Creed’s last victim. The one he threw off Beachy Head—”

“Andrea Hooton,” said Robin. Cynthia looked slightly startled that she had the name on the tip of her tongue.

“Yes, the hairdresser.”

“No,” said Robin. “That was Susan Meyer. Andrea was the PhD student.”

“Oh, yes,” said Cynthia. “Of course… I’m so bad with names… Well, Roy had just been through the whole identification business with, um, you know, the bits of the body that washed up, so we’d had our hopes—not our hopes!” said Cynthia, looking terrified at the word that had escaped her, “I don’t mean that! No, we were obviously relieved it wasn’t Margot, but you think, you know, maybe you’re going to get an answer…”

Strike thought of his own guilty wish that Joan’s slow and protracted dying would be over soon. A corpse, however unwelcome, meant anguish could find both expression and sublimation among flowers, speeches and ritual, consolation drawn from God, alcohol and fellow mourners; an apotheosis reached, a first step taken toward grasping the awful fact that life was extinct, and life must go on.