“Remember that statue of the man holding the serpent, at Margot’s old house?” said Robin, falling back on her pillows among the scattered tarot cards.

“Asclepius,” said Strike. “Ophiuchus was the Roman form. God of healing.”

“Well, this explains all the changing dates, doesn’t it?” said Robin, “and why poor Talbot got so confused! He was trying to put everyone into Schmidt’s adjusted dates, but they didn’t seem to fit. And all the other astrologers he was consulting were still using the twelve-sign system, so—”

“Yeah,” said Strike, talking over her, “that’d make a crazy man crazier, all right.”

His tone said, “This is interesting, but not important.” Robin removed the Three of Disks from beneath her and examined it absentmindedly. Robin was now so well-versed in astrological symbols that she didn’t need to look up the glyphs to know that it also represented Mars in Capricorn.

“How are things with you?” she asked.

“Well, the church isn’t going to hold everyone who’s coming tomorrow, which Joan would’ve been thrilled about. I just wanted to let you know I’ll be heading back up the road again on Tuesday.”

“Are you sure you don’t need to stay longer?”

“The neighbors are all promising they’re going to look after Ted. Lucy’s trying to get him to come up to London for a bit afterward. Any other news your end?”

“Er… let’s see… I wrapped up Postcard,” said Robin. “I think our weatherman was quite disappointed when he saw who his stalker was. His wife cheered up no end, though.”

Strike gave a grunt of laughter.

“So, we’ve taken on the commodities broker,” Robin continued. “We haven’t got pictures of anything incriminating between the husband and nanny yet, but I don’t think it’s going to be long.”

“You’re owed a long stretch off for all this, Robin,” said Strike gruffly. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

They hung up shortly afterward.

Robin’s room seemed to have become suddenly much darker. The sun had gone down; in silhouette, the town hall resembled a monstrous Gothic palace. She turned on her bedside lamp and looked around at the bed strewn with astrological notes and tarot cards. Seen in the light of Strike’s lack of enthusiasm, Talbot’s doodles looked like the determinedly weird drawings in the back of a teenager’s jotter, leading nowhere, done purely for the love of strangeness.

Yawning, she refolded the photocopied notes and put them back in her bag, went for a shower, returned in her pajamas to the bed and gathered up the tarot cards, putting them in order as she did so, to make sure none of them were missing. She didn’t particularly want the cleaner to think of her as the kind of person who left tarot cards strewn in her wake.

On the point of replacing the deck in its box, Robin suddenly sat down on the bed and began to shuffle it instead. She was too tired to attempt the fifteen-card layout advocated in the little booklet that accompanied the tarot, but she knew from her exhaustive examination of his notes that Talbot had sometimes tried to see his way through the investigation by laying out just three cards: the first representing “the nature of the problem,” the second, “the cause,” and the third, “the solution.”

After a minute’s shuffling, Robin turned over the top card and laid it down in the pool of light cast by her bedside lamp: the Prince of Cups. A naked blueish-green man rode an eagle, which was diving toward water. He held a goblet containing a snake in one hand and a lotus flower in the other. Robin pulled The Book of Thoth out of her bag and looked up the meaning.

The moral characteristics of the person pictured in this card are subtlety, secret violence, and craft. He is intensely secret, an artist in all his ways.

She thought immediately of Dennis Creed. A master of murder, in his way.

She turned over the next card: the Four of Cups, or Luxury. Another lotus was pouring water over four more goblets, golden this time. Robin turned to the book.

The card refers to the Moon in Cancer, which is her own house; but Cancer itself is so placed that this implies a certain weakness, an abandonment to desire.

Was the tarot criticizing her for soft living? Robin glanced around her little box of a room, then turned over the last card.

More cups and yet more lotuses, and two entwined fish, pouring out water into two more golden chalices which stood on a green lake.

Love… The card also refers to Venus in Cancer. It shows the harmony of the male and the female: interpreted in the largest sense. It is perfect and placid harmony…

Robin inspected the card for a few more seconds, before laying it down beside the other two. They were all cups. As she knew from her study of the Thoth tarot, cups meant water. Well, here she was in a spa town…

Robin shook her head, though nobody was there to see her do it, returned the tarot cards to their box, climbed into bed, set her alarm and turned out the light.

46

Whereas that Pagan proud him selfe did rest,

In secret shadow by a fountaine side:

Euen he it was, that earst would haue supprest

Faire Vna…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Robin’s night was punctuated with sudden wakings from a succession of anxious dreams: that she’d fallen asleep at the wheel again, or had overslept and arrived at the gallery to find Satchwell’s exhibition gone. When the alarm on her mobile rang at 7 a.m., she forced herself immediately out of bed, showered, dressed and, glad to leave the impersonal bedroom, headed downstairs with her packed holdall to eat muesli and drink coffee in the dining room, which was painted an oppressive sludge green.

The day outside was fresh but overcast, a cold silver sun trying to penetrate the cloud. Having returned her holdall to the parked Land Rover, she headed on foot toward the Royal Pump Rooms, which housed the gallery where Satchwell’s exhibition was about to open. To her left lay the ornamental Jephson Gardens, and a fountain of pinkish stone that might have been the model for one of Crowley’s tarot cards. Four scallop-patterned basins sat at the top.

… a certain weakness, an abandonment to desire…

You’re getting like Talbot, Robin told herself crossly. Speeding up, she arrived at the Pump Rooms with time to spare.

The building had just been opened; a young woman in black was walking away from the glass doors, holding a bunch of keys. Robin entered, to find little trace of the Regency pump rooms left inside: the floor was covered in modern gray tiles, the ceiling supported by metal columns. A café took up one wing of the open-plan space, a shop another. The gallery, Robin saw, lay across opposite, through more glass doors.

It comprised one long room, brick-walled and wooden-floored, which had been temporarily given over to an exhibition of local artists. There were only three people inside: a stocky, gray-bobbed woman in an Alice band, a small man with a hang-dog air whom Robin suspected was her husband, and another young woman in black, who she assumed worked there. The gray-haired woman’s voice was echoing around the room as though it was a gymnasium.