A tear trickled down her face. Gloria paused to wipe it away, then said,

“I remember, as she put her umbrella up, she slipped. Turned over on her heel. It was raining, the pavement was wet. Then she straightened up and walked out of sight.

“I started dashing round, turning off lights, locking the records up in the filing cabinets. Then I made sure the back door was locked, which it was—the police asked me about that. I closed and locked the front door, and ran straight up Passing Alley, which was right beside the surgery, to meet Luca in St. John Street.

“And that was the last time I ever saw Margot.”

Gloria reached again for her almost empty wine glass, and drained it.

“Did you have any idea what might have happened to her?” asked Strike.

“Of course,” said Gloria quietly. “I was terrified Luca had got someone to hurt her, or kidnap her. She’d become a bugbear to him. Every time I stood up for myself, he’d say horrible things about Margot influencing me. He was convinced she was trying to persuade me to leave him, which, of course, she was. My greatest fear was that he’d somehow find out what she’d helped me do… you know. In Bride Street.

“I knew he couldn’t have abducted her personally, because I met him on St. John Street, not five minutes after she left the surgery, and I know it can’t have been his father, because his brother Marco was in hospital at the time, and the parents were with him round the clock. But Luca had friends and cousins.

“I couldn’t tell the police. Luca had stopped pretending he was joking, when he threatened my grandparents. I asked him whether he was behind it, though. The anxiety was too much: I had to ask. He got really angry, called me names—dumb bitch, things like that. He said, of course he hadn’t. But he’d told me stories about his father ‘making people disappear,’ so I just didn’t know…”

“Did you ever have reason to suppose he knew…” Robin hesitated “… what happened in Bride Street?”

“I’m absolutely positive he never knew,” said Gloria. “Margot was too good for him. The wigs and using her name and giving me a plausible story for why I couldn’t have sex with him for a while… She’s the reason I got away with it. No, I don’t believe he ever knew. So, in my best moments, I thought, he didn’t really have a strong enough reason—”

The door behind Gloria opened, and in walked a handsome aquiline-nosed, gray-haired man in a striped shirt and jeans, carrying a bottle of red wine. A large German Shepherd dog followed him into the room, its tail wagging.

“Je m’excuse,” he said, smiling at Strike and Robin onscreen. “I am sorry for… Comment dit-on ‘interrompre’?” he asked his wife.

“Interrupt,” she said.

“Oui. I am sorry for interrupt.”

He refilled his wife’s glass, handed it back to her, patted her on the shoulder, then walked out again, calling the dog.

“Viens, Obélix.”

When both man and dog had disappeared, Gloria said, with a little laugh,

“That was Hugo.”

“How long did you stay at the St. John’s practice, after Margot disappeared?” asked Strike, although he knew the answer.

“Six, seven months, I think,” said Gloria. “Long enough to see the new policeman take over. We were all pleased, because the first—Talbot, wasn’t it?—was quite strange. He bullied the life out of Wilma and Janice. I think that’s what made Wilma ill, actually. She had quite enough on her plate without the police hounding her.”

“You don’t think she drank, then?” asked Robin.

“Drank? That was all Dorothy’s malice,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Dorothy was trying to pin the thefts on Wilma. Have you heard about that?”

Strike and Robin nodded.

“When she couldn’t prove that Wilma was taking money out of people’s bags, she put it about that she was drinking and the poor woman resigned. She was probably glad to leave, but it was still losing a salary, wasn’t it?

“I wanted to leave myself,” said Gloria, “but I was paralyzed. I had this really strange feeling that, if I just stayed there, the world would right itself. Margot would come back. It was only after she disappeared that I realized… what she’d been to me…

“Anyway,” sighed Gloria, “one night, months after she’d disappeared, Luca was really violent to me. I’d smiled at a man who opened a door for me as I left the pub with Luca, that’s what sparked it. He beat me like he’d never beaten me before, at his place—he had this little flat.

“I remember saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have smiled at him.’ And all the time I was saying it, I could see—in here –” Gloria tapped her head, “Margot watching me, and even while I was begging Luca to stop, and agreeing I’d behaved like a little slut, and I shouldn’t ever smile at strange men, I was thinking, I’m going, Margot. I’m going where he’ll never find me.

“Because it had clicked in my head at last. She’d told me I needed to be brave. It was no good waiting for anyone else to save me. I had to save me.

“After he’d calmed down, he let me go home to my grandparents” house, but he wanted to see me again later. It was always like that after he’d been really violent. He wanted extra contact.

“He hadn’t beaten me in the face. He never did, he never lost control like that, so I went back to my grandparents” and acted as though everything was fine. Went out to meet Luca that night, and he took me out for dinner, and that was the night he proposed, with a ring and everything.

“And I said yes,” said Gloria, with a strange smile and a shrug. “I put that ring on, and I looked down at it, and I didn’t even have to act happy, because I genuinely was. I thought That’ll buy some of my plane ticket. Mind you, I’d never flown before in my life. The idea of it scared me. But all the time, I could see Margot in my head. You’ve got to be brave, Gloria.

“I had to tell my grandparents I was engaged. I couldn’t tell them what I was really planning, because I was scared they wouldn’t be able to act, or that they’d try and confront Luca or, worse, go to the police. Anyway, Luca came round to the house to meet them properly, pretending to be a nice guy, and it was awful, and I had to act as though I was thrilled about all of it.

“Every single day after that, I bought all the newspapers, and circled all of the jobs abroad that I might have a chance of getting. I had to do all of it in secret. Typed up a CV at work and got a bus to the West End to post all the applications, because I was scared someone who knew Luca would see me putting lots of envelopes in the post.

“After a few weeks, I got an interview with a French woman who was looking for an English home help, to teach her kids English. What really got me the job was being able to type. She ran her own business from home, so I could do a bit of admin for her while the kids were at nursery. The job came with room and board, and my employer would buy my plane ticket, so I didn’t have to sell Luca’s ring, and pretend I’d lost it…

“You know, the day I went into St. John’s and told them I was resigning, a funny thing happened. Nobody had mentioned Margot for weeks. Immediately after she disappeared, it was all any of us could talk about, but then it became taboo, somehow. We had a new locum doctor in her room. I can’t remember his name. A new cleaner, too. But this day, Dorothy arrived, quite flustered, and she never showed any emotion, usually…