Strike agreed that there was. He went to pay the bill and Robin waited at the table with the sisters, who she could tell wanted the detectives gone, and as quickly as possible. They’d disclosed their personal trauma and their family’s secrets, and now a thin layer of polite small talk was too onerous to sustain, and any other form of conversation impossible. Robin was relieved when Strike re-joined her, and after brief farewells, the two of them left the café.

The moment he hit clean air, Strike paused to pull his Benson & Hedges out of his pocket and lit one.

“Needed that,” he muttered, as they walked on. “So… Skinner Street…”

“… is where Joseph Brenner was seen on the night Margot Bamborough disappeared,” said Robin.

“Ah,” muttered Strike, briefly closing his eyes. “I knew there was something.”

“I’ll look into Betty Fuller as soon as I get home,” said Robin. “What did you think of the rest of it?”

“The Bayliss family really went through it, didn’t they?” said Strike, pausing beside the Land Rover and glancing back at the café. His BMW lay another fifty yards ahead. He took another drag on his cigarette, frowning. “Y’know… it gives us another angle on Talbot’s bloody notebook,” he admitted. “Strip away all the occult shit, and he was right, wasn’t he? Wilma was hiding stuff from him. A lot of stuff, actually.”

“I thought that, too,” said Robin.

“You realize that threatening note’s the first piece of physical evidence we’ve found?”

“Yes,” said Robin, checking her watch. “What time are you heading to Truro?”

Strike didn’t answer. Looking up, Robin saw that he was staring so fixedly across the open park on the other side of the road that she turned, too, to see what had captured his attention, but saw nothing except a couple of gamboling West Highland terriers and their male owner, who was walking along, swinging a pair of leads.

“Cormoran?”

Strike appeared to recall his attention from a long way away.

“What?” he said, and then, “Yeah. No, I was just…”

He turned to look back at the café, frowning.

“Just thinking. But it’s nothing, I think I’m doing a Talbot. Seeing meaning in total coincidence.”

“What coincidence?”

But Strike didn’t answer until the café doors opened, and the three Bayliss sisters emerged in their coats.

“We should get going,” he said. “They must be sick of the sight of us by now. I’ll see you Monday. Let me know if you find out anything interesting on Betty Fuller.”

54

But nothing new to him was that same pain;

Nor pain at all; for he so oft had tried

The power thereof, and lov’d so oft in vain.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

The train gave a lurch: the sleeping Strike’s head rolled sideways and hit the cold window. He woke, feeling drool on his chin. Wiping it on his coat sleeve, he peered around. The elderly couple opposite him were politely immersed in their reading material, but across the aisle, four teenagers were enjoying paroxysms of silent laughter, carefully not looking at him, their shoulders shaking as they feigned interest in the fields out of the window. Apparently he’d been snoring with his mouth wide open, because it was now unpleasantly dry. Checking his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep at least two hours.

Strike reached for the tartan Thermos sitting on the table in front of him, which he’d rinsed out and refilled in McDonald’s earlier, and poured himself a black coffee while the teenagers continued to gasp and snort with laughter. Doubtless they thought him comically odd and old, with his snores and his tartan Thermos, but a year of navigating swaying train carriages had taught him that his prosthetic leg appreciated as few trips to the catering car as possible. He drank a cup of plastic-tainted coffee, then re-settled himself comfortably, arms folded, looking out at the fields gliding past, bestridden with power pylons, the flat white cloud given a glaucous glow by the dust on the glass. The landscape registered only incidentally: Strike’s attention was focused inwards on the odd idea that had occurred to him after the interview with the Bayliss sisters.

Of course, the idea might be nothing but the product of an overburdened mind making spurious connections between simple coincidences. He mentally turned it this way and that, examining it from different angles, until finally, yawning, he inched sideways over into the empty seat beside him, and laboriously pulled himself up into a standing position in the aisle, so he could access the holdall in the luggage rack overhead. Beside his holdall sat a Waitrose bag, because he’d made a detour into the supermarket on the way to Paddington station, where he’d grabbed three Easter eggs for his nephews, or rather, three chocolate hedgehogs (“Woodland Friends”) because they were relatively compact. Now, groping in his holdall for The Demon of Paradise Park, he accidentally knocked over the carrier bag containing the chocolate. The uppermost hedgehog fell out: in his attempt to catch it, he accidentally batted it up into the air; the box bounced off the back of the elderly woman’s seat, causing her to squeak in surprise, and the box hit the floor.

The teenagers for whom Strike was unintentionally mounting a one-man comedy show were now openly gasping and crying with laughter. Only when Strike bent down awkwardly to pick up the now cracked chocolate hedgehog, one hand on the teenagers’ table to steady himself, did one of the young women spot the metal rod that served as his right ankle. He knew what she’d seen by the abrupt cessation of her laughter, and the frantic, whispered shushing of her friends. Panting, sweating and now aware of half the carriage’s eyes on him, he shoved the damaged hedgehog back into its bag, found The Demon of Paradise Park in his holdall and then, sweating slightly, but taking malicious pleasure in the po-faced shock of the teenagers beside him, sidled back into his window seat.

After flicking through the book in search of the part he wanted to re-read, Strike finally found the chapter two-thirds of the way through the book, entitled “Capture.”

Thus far, Creed’s relationship with landlady Violet Cooper had been key to his continuing safety. Violet herself admits that for the first five years of his tenancy, she’d never have believed harm of “Den,” who she saw as a lonely and gentle soul, fond of their singalong evenings, and probably gay.

However, the pains he’d once taken to keep Violet happy had begun to irk Creed. Where once he’d drugged her because he was planning to pound bones to dust in the basement, or needed to load a corpse into the van by night, he now began lacing her gin-and-oranges with barbiturates purely to avoid the tedium of her company.

Creed’s manner toward Violet also changed. He became “mean” to her, “taking the Mickey when there was no need, saying nasty things, laughing at me for using the wrong words and stuff, treating me like I was stupid, which he’d never done before.

“I remember one time, I was telling him about the place my brother bought when he retired, cottage in the country, everything lovely, and I said, ‘You should’ve seen the garden, his roses and a gazebo,’ and he laughed at me, Dennis, well, jeered, really, because I’d said it wrong. Gazz ybo, I said, and I’ve never forgotten it, he said, ‘Don’t use words if you can’t say ’em, you just look thick.’