“Very stressful for everyone,” said Strike, as Anna and Kim re-entered the room and resumed their seats on the sofa, where they sat holding hands. Cynthia perched herself beside them, watching Roy anxiously.

“I want to say something,” Roy told Strike. “I want to make it perfectly clear—”

“Oh for God’s sake, I’ve had one phone call with her!” said Anna.

“I’d appreciate it, Anna,” said Roy, his chest laboring, “if I could finish.”

Addressing Strike, he said,

“Oonagh Kennedy disliked me from the moment Margot and I first met. She was possessive toward Margot, and she also happened to have left the church, and she was one of those who had to make an enemy of everyone still in it. Moreover—”

“Dr. Phipps,” interrupted Strike, who could foresee the afternoon degenerating into a long row about Oonagh Kennedy. “I think you should know that when we interviewed Oonagh, she made it quite clear that the person she thought we should be concentrating our energies on is Paul Satchwell.”

For a second or two, Roy appeared unable to fully grasp what had just been said to him.

“See?” said Anna furiously. “You just implied that there was more between my mother and Satchwell than one drink. What did you mean? Or were you,” she said, and Robin heard the underlying hope, “just angry and lashing out?”

“People who insist on opening cans of worms, Anna,” said Roy, “shouldn’t complain when they get covered in slime.”

“Well, go on then,” said Anna, “spill your slime.”

“Anna,” whispered Cynthia, and was ignored.

“All right,” said Roy. “All right, then.” He turned back to Strike and Robin. “Early in our relationship, I saw a note of Satchwell’s Margot had kept. ‘Dear Brunhilda’ it said—it was his pet name for her. The Valkyrie, you know. Margot was tall. Fair.”

Roy paused and swallowed.

“Some three weeks before she disappeared, she came home and told me she’d run into Satchwell in the street and that they’d gone for an… innocent drink.”

He cleared his throat. Cynthia poured him more tea.

“After she—after she’d disappeared, I had to go and collect her things from the St. John’s practice. Among them I found a small—”

He held his fingers some three inches apart.

“—wooden figure, a stylized Viking which she’d been keeping on her desk. Written in ink on this figure’s base was ‘Brunhilda,’ with a small heart.”

Roy took a sip of coffee.

“I’d never seen it before. Of course, it’s possible that Satchwell was carrying it around with him for years, on the off chance that he’d one day bump into Margot in the street. However, I concluded that they’d seen each other again and that he’d given her this—this token—on a subsequent occasion. All I know is, I’d never seen it before I collected her things from her surgery.”

Robin could tell that Anna wanted to suggest an alternative explanation, but it was very difficult to find a flaw in Roy’s reasoning.

“Did you tell the police what you suspected?” Strike asked.

“Yes,” said Phipps, “and I believe Satchwell claimed that there’d been no second meeting, that he’d given the figurine to Margot years before, when they were first involved. They couldn’t prove it either way, of course. But I’d never seen it before.”

Robin wondered which would be more hurtful: finding out that a spouse had hidden a love token from a former partner, and taken to displaying it many years later, or that they’d been given it recently.

“Tell me,” Strike was saying, “did Margot ever tell you anything about a ‘pillow dream’?”

“A what?” said Roy.

“Something Satchwell had told her, concerning a pillow?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Roy, suspiciously.

“Did Inspector Talbot ever happen to mention that he believed Satchwell lied about his whereabouts on the eleventh of October?”

“No,” said Roy, now looking very surprised. “I understood the police were entirely satisfied with his alibi.”

“We’ve found out,” Strike said, addressing Anna, “that Talbot kept his own separate case notes—separate from the official police record, I mean. After appearing to rule out Aries, he went back to him and started digging for more information on him.”

“‘Aries’?” repeated Anna, confused.

“Sorry,” said Strike, irritated by his own lapse into astrological speak. “Talbot’s breakdown manifested itself as a belief he could solve the case by occult means. He started using tarot cards and looking at horoscopes. He referred to everyone connected with the case by their star signs. Satchwell was born under the sign of Aries, so that’s what he’s called in Talbot’s private notes.”

There was a brief silence, and then Kim said,

“Jesus wept.”

“Astrology?” said Roy, apparently confounded.

“You see, Dad?” said Anna, thumping her knee with her fist. “If Lawson had taken over earlier—”

“Lawson was a fool,” said Roy, who nevertheless looked shaken. “An idiot! He was more interested in proving that Talbot had been inept than in finding out what happened to Margot. He insisted on going back over everything. He wanted to personally interview the doctors who’d treated me for the bleed on my knee, even though they’d given signed statements. He went back to my bank to check my accounts, in case I’d paid someone to kill your mother. He put pressure…”

He stopped and coughed, thumping his chest. Cynthia began to rise off the sofa, but Roy indicated with an angry gesture that she should stay put.

“… put pressure on Cynthia, trying to get her to admit she’d lied about me being in bed all that day, but he never found out a shred of new information about what had happened to your mother. He was a jobsworth, a bullying, unimaginative jobsworth whose priority wasn’t finding her, it was proving that Talbot messed up. Bill Talbot may have been… he clearly was,” Roy added, with a furious glance at Strike, “unwell, but the simple fact remains: nobody’s ever found a better explanation than Creed, have they?”

And with the mention of Creed, faces of the three women on the sofa fell. His very name seemed to conjure a kind of black hole in the room, into which living women had disappeared, never to be seen again; a manifestation of almost supernatural evil. There was a finality in the very mention of him: the monster, now locked away for life, untouchable, unreachable, like the women locked up and tortured in his basement. And Robin’s thoughts darted guiltily to the email she had now written, and sent, without telling Strike what she’d done, because she was afraid he might not approve.

“Do any of you know,” Roy asked abruptly, “who Kara Wolfson and Louise Tucker were?”

“Yes,” said Robin, before Strike could answer. “Louise was a teenage runaway and Kara was a nightclub hostess. Creed was suspected of killing both of them, but there was no proof.”

“Exactly,” said Roy, throwing her the kind of look he might once have given a medical student who had made a correct diagnosis. “Well, in 1978 I met up with Kara’s brother and Louise’s father.”