“The police searched this whole garden area with sniffer dogs. Nothing. And if an assailant dragged her onwards, through there,” Strike pointed to the road that ran parallel to St. John’s Lane, “onto St. John Street, it would’ve been well-nigh impossible to go undetected. The street’s far busier than St. John’s Lane. And that’s assuming a fit, tall twenty-nine-year-old wouldn’t have shouted and fought back.”

He turned to look at the back entrance.

“The district nurse sometimes went in the back, rather than going through the waiting room. She had a little room to the rear of the building where she kept her own stuff and sometimes saw patients. Wilma the cleaner sometimes went out the back door as well. Otherwise it was usually locked.”

“Are we interested in people being able to enter or leave the building through a second door?” asked Robin.

“Not especially, but I want to get a feel for the layout. It’s been nearly forty years: we’ve got to go back over everything.”

They walked back through Passing Alley to the front of the building.

“We’ve got one advantage over Bill Talbot,” said Strike. “We know the Essex Butcher turned out to be slim and blond, not a swarthy thickset person of gypsy-ish appearance. Theo, whoever she was, wasn’t Creed. Which doesn’t necessarily make her irrelevant, of course.

“One last thing, then we’re done with the practice itself,” said Strike, looking up at number 29. “Irene, the blonde receptionist, told the police that Margot received two threatening, anonymous notes shortly before she disappeared. They’re not in the police file, so we’ve only got Irene’s statement to go on. She claims she opened one, and that she saw another on Margot’s desk when bringing her tea. She says the one she read mentioned hellfire.”

“You’d think it was the secretary’s job to open mail,” commented Robin. “Not a receptionist’s.”

“Good point,” said Strike, pulling out his notebook and scribbling, “we’ll check that… It seems relevant to add here that Talbot thought Irene was an unreliable witness: inaccurate and prone to exaggeration. Incidentally, Gupta said Irene and Margot had what he called a ‘contretemps’ at a Christmas party. He didn’t think it was a particularly big deal, but he’d remembered it.”

“And is Talbot—?”

“Dead? Yes,” said Strike. “So’s Lawson, who took over from him. Talbot’s got a son, though, and I’m thinking of getting in touch with him. Lawson never had kids.”

“Go on, about the anonymous notes.”

“Well, Gloria, the other receptionist, said Irene showed her one of the notes, but couldn’t remember what was in it. Janice, the nurse, confirmed that Irene had told her about them at the time, but said she hadn’t personally seen them. Margot didn’t tell Gupta about them—I called him to check.

“Anyway,” said Strike, giving the street one last sweeping look through the drizzle, “assuming nobody abducted Margot right outside the practice, or that she didn’t get in a car yards from the door, she headed toward the Three Kings, which takes us this way.”

“D’you want to come under this umbrella?” Robin asked.

“No,” said Strike. His densely curling hair looked the same wet or dry: he had very little vanity.

They continued up the street and passed through St. John’s Gate, the ancient stone arch decorated with many small heraldic shields, emerging onto Clerkenwell Road, a bustling two-way street, which they crossed, arriving beside an old-fashioned scarlet phone box which stood at the mouth of Albemarle Way.

“Is that the phone box where the two women were seen struggling?” asked Robin.

Strike did a double take.

“You’ve read the case notes,” he said, almost accusingly.

“I had a quick look,” Robin admitted, “while I was printing out Two-Times’ bill last night. I didn’t read everything; didn’t have time. Just looked at a few bits and pieces.”

“Well, that isn’t the phone box,” said Strike. “The important phone box—or boxes—come later. We’ll get to them in due course. Now follow me.”

Instead of proceeding into a paved pedestrian area that Robin, from her own scant research, knew Margot must have crossed if she had been heading for the Three Kings, Strike turned left, up Clerkenwell Road.

“Why are we going this way?” asked Robin, jogging to keep up.

“Because,” said Strike, stopping again and pointing up at a top window on the building opposite, which looked like an old brick warehouse, “some time after six o’clock on the evening in question, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl called Amanda White swore she saw Margot at the top window, second from the right, banging her fists against the glass.”

“I haven’t seen that mentioned online!” said Robin.

“For the good reason that the police concluded there was nothing in it.

“Talbot, as is clear from his notes, disregarded White because her story couldn’t be fitted into his theory that Creed had abducted Margot. But Lawson went back to Amanda when he took over, and actually walked with her along this stretch of road.

“Amanda’s account had a few things going for it. For one thing, she told the police unprompted that this had happened the evening after the general election, which she remembered because she had an argument with a Tory schoolfriend. The pair of them had been kept back after school for a detention. They’d then gone for a coffee together, over which the schoolfriend went into a huff when Mandy said it was good that Wilson had won, and refused to walk home with her.

“Amanda said she was still angry about her friend getting stroppy when she looked up and saw a woman pounding on the glass with her fists. The description she gave was a good one, although by this time, a full description of Margot’s appearance and clothing had been in the press.

“Lawson contacted the business owner who worked on the top floor. It was a paper design company run by a husband and wife. They produced small runs of pamphlets, posters and invitations, that kind of stuff. No connection to Margot. Neither of them were registered with the St. John’s practice, because they lived out of the area. The wife said she sometimes had to thump the window frame to make it close. However, the wife in no way resembled Margot, being short, tubby and ginger-haired.”

“And someone would’ve noticed Margot on her way up to the third floor, surely?” said Robin, looking from the top window to the front door. She moved back from the curb: cars were splashing through the puddles in the gutter. “She’d have climbed the stairs or used the lift, and maybe rung the doorbell to get in.”

“You’d think so,” agreed Strike. “Lawson concluded that Amanda had made an innocent mistake and thought the printer’s wife was Margot.”

They returned to the point where they had deviated from what Robin thought of as “Margot’s route.” Strike paused again, pointing up the gloomy side road called Albemarle Way.

“Now, disregard the phone box, but note that Albemarle Way is the first side street since Passing Alley I think she could plausibly have entered—voluntarily or not—without necessarily being seen by fifty-odd people. Quieter, as you can see—but not that quiet,” admitted Strike, looking toward the end of Albemarle Way, where traffic was passing at a steady rate. Albemarle Way was narrower than St. John’s Lane, but similar in being bordered by tall buildings in unbroken lines, which kept it permanently in shadow. “Still a risk for an abductor,” said Strike, “but if Dennis Creed was lurking somewhere in his van, waiting for a lone woman—any woman—to walk past in the rain, this is the place I can see it happening.”