“I don’t think the people around him realized how ill he was until it got too obvious to ignore,” said Robin, now pulling a few tagged sheets of paper out of her bag: photocopies of Satchwell’s statements to both Talbot and Lawson.

“What’s all that?” he said sharply.

“Your statements to the police,” said Robin.

“Why are there—what are they, stars?—all over—”

“They’re pentagrams,” said Robin. “This is the statement Talbot took from you. It’s just routine,” she added, because Satchwell was now looking wary. “We’ve done it with everyone the police interviewed. I know your statements were double-checked at the time, but I wondered if I could run over them again, in case you remember anything useful?”

Taking his silence for consent, she continued:

“You were alone in your studio on the afternoon of the eleventh of October, but you took a call there at five from a Mr.… Hendricks?”

“Hendricks, yeah,” said Satchwell. “He was my agent at the time.”

“You went out to eat at a local café around half past six, where you had a conversation with the woman behind the till, which she remembered. Then you went back home to change, and out again to meet a few friends in a bar called Joe Bloggs around eight o’clock. All three friends you were drinking with confirmed your story… nothing to add to any of that?”

“No,” said Satchwell, and Robin thought she detected a slight sense of relief. “That all sounds right.”

“Was it one of those friends who’d met Roy Phipps?” Robin asked casually.

“No,” said Satchwell, unsmiling, and then, changing the subject, he said, “Margot’s daughter must be knocking on forty now, is she?”

“Forty last year,” said Robin.

“Éla,” said Satchwell, shaking his head. “Time just—”

One of the mahogany brown hands, wrinkled and embellished with heavy silver and turquoise rings, made a smooth motion, as of a paper airplane in flight.

“—and then one day you’re old and you never saw it sneaking up on you.”

“When did you move abroad?”

“I didn’t mean to move, not at first. Went traveling, late ’75,” said Satchwell. He’d nearly finished his steak, now.

“What made you—?”

“I’d been thinking of traveling for a bit,” said Satchwell. “But after Creed killed Margot—it was such a bloody ’orrible thing—such a shock—I dunno, I wanted a change of scene.”

“That’s what you think happened to her, do you? Creed killed her?”

He put the last bit of steak into his mouth, chewed it and swallowed before answering.

“Well, yeah. Obviously at first I ’oped she’d just walked out on ’er husband and was ’oled up somewhere. But then it went on and on and… yeah, everyone thought it was the Essex Butcher, including the police. Not just the nutty one, the second one, the one who took over.”

“Lawson,” said Robin.

Satchwell shrugged, as much to say as the officer’s name didn’t matter, and asked,

“Are you going to interview Creed?”

“Hopefully.”

“Why would he tell the truth, now?”

“He likes publicity,” said Robin. “He might like the idea of making a splash in the newspapers. So Margot disappearing was a shock to you?”

“Well, obviously it was,” said Satchwell, now probing his teeth with his tongue. “I’d just seen her again and… I’m not going to pretend I was still in love with her, or anything like that, but… have you ever been caught up in a police investigation?” he asked her, with a trace of aggression.

“Yes,” said Robin. “Several. It was stressful and intimidating, every time.”

“Well, there you are,” said Satchwell, mollified.

“What made you choose Greece?”

“I didn’t, really. I ’ad an inheritance off my grandmother and I thought, I’ll take some time off, do Europe, paint… went through France and Italy, and in ’76 I arrived in Kos. Worked in a bar. Painted in my free hours. Sold quite a few pictures to tourists. Met my first wife… never left,” said Satchwell, with a shrug.

“Something else I wanted to ask you,” said Robin, moving the police statements to the bottom of her small stack. “We’ve found out about a possible sighting of Margot, a week after she disappeared. A sighting that wasn’t ever reported to the police.”

“Yeah?” said Satchwell, looking interested. “Where?”

“In Leamington Spa,” said Robin, “in the graveyard of All Saints church.”

Satchwell’s thick white eyebrows rose, putting strain on the clear tape that was holding the dressing to his eye.

“In All Saints?” he repeated, apparently astonished.

“Looking at graves. Allegedly, she had her hair dyed black.”

“’Oo saw this?”

“A man visiting the area on a motorbike. Two years later, he told the St. John’s practice nurse about it.”

“He told the nurse?”

Satchwell’s jaw hardened.

“And what else has the nurse told you?” he said, searching Robin’s face. He seemed suddenly and unexpectedly angry.

“Do you know Janice?” asked Robin, wondering why he looked so angry.

“That’s her name, is it?” said Satchwell. “I couldn’t remember.”

“You do know her?”

Satchwell put more chips in his mouth. Robin could see that he was trying to decide what to tell her, and she felt that jolt of excitement that made all the long, tedious hours of the job, the sitting around, the sleeplessness, worthwhile.

“She’s shit-stirring,” said Satchwell abruptly. “She’s a shit-stirrer, that one, that nurse. She and Margot didn’t like each other. Margot told me she didn’t like her.”

“When was this?”

“When we ran into each other, like I told you, in the street—”

“I thought you said she didn’t talk about work?”

“Well, she told me that. They’d had a row or something. I don’t know. It was just something she said in passing. She told me she didn’t like the nurse,” repeated Satchwell.

It was as though a hard mask had surfaced under the leather dark skin: the slightly comical, crêpey-faced charmer had been replaced by a mean old one-eyed man. Robin remembered how Matthew’s lower face had tautened when angry, giving him the look of a muzzled dog, but she wasn’t intimidated. She sensed in Satchwell the same wily instinct for self-preservation as in her ex-husband. Whatever Satchwell might have meted out to Margot, or to the wives who’d left him, he’d think better of slapping Robin in a crowded pub, in the town where his sister still lived.

“You seem angry,” Robin said.

“Gia chári tou, of course I am—that nurse, what’s her name? Trying to implicate me, isn’t she? Making up a story to make it look like Margot ran away to be with me—”

“Janice didn’t invent the story. We checked with Mr. Ramage’s widow and she confirmed that her late husband told other people he’d met a missing woman—”