“Following several inaccurate and irresponsible press reports, we would like to state clearly that we are satisfied that Dr. Roy Phipps had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance,” DI Bill Talbot, the detective in charge of the investigation, told newsmen. “His own doctors have confirmed that walking and driving would both have been beyond Dr. Phipps on the day in question and both Dr. Phipps’ nanny and his cleaner have given sworn statements confirming that Dr. Phipps did not leave the house on the day of his wife’s disappearance.”

“What’s von Willebrand Disease?” asked Robin.

“A bleeding disorder. I looked it up. You don’t clot properly. Gupta remembered that wrong; he thought Roy was a hemophiliac.

“There are three kinds of von Willebrand Disease,” said Strike. “Type One just means you’d take a bit longer than normal to clot, but it shouldn’t leave you bedbound, or unable to drive. I’m assuming Roy Phipps is Type Three, which can be as serious as hemophilia, and could lay him up for a while. But we’ll need to check that.

“Anyway,” said Strike, turning over the next page. “This is Talbot’s record of his interview with Roy Phipps.”

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

The page was covered in small, slanting writing, but the most distinctive feature of the record were the stars Talbot had drawn all over it.

“See there?” said Strike, running a forefinger down a list of dates that were just discernible amid the scrawls. “Those are the dates of the Essex Butcher abductions and attempted abductions.

“Talbot loses interest halfway down the list, look. On the twenty-sixth of August 1971, which is when Creed tried to abduct Peggy Hiskett, Roy was able to prove that he and Margot were on holiday in France.

“So that was that, as far as Talbot was concerned. If Roy hadn’t tried to abduct Peggy Hiskett, he wasn’t the Essex Butcher, and if he wasn’t the Essex Butcher, he couldn’t have had anything to do with Margot’s disappearance.

“But there’s a funny thing at the bottom of Talbot’s list of dates. All refer to Creed’s activities except that last one. He’s circled December twenty-seventh, with no year. No idea why he was interested in December twenty-seventh.”

“Or, presumably, why he went Vincent van Gogh all over his report?”

“The stars? Yeah, they’re a feature on all Talbot’s notes. Very strange. Now,” said Strike, “let’s see how a statement should be taken.”

He turned the page and there was a neatly typewritten, double-spaced statement, four pages long, which DI Lawson had taken from Roy Phipps, and which had been duly signed on the final page by the hematologist.

“You needn’t read the whole thing now,” said Strike. “Bottom line is, he stuck to it that he’d been laid up in bed all day, as the cleaner and his nanny would testify.

“But now we go to Wilma Bayliss, the Phippses’ cleaner. She also happened to be the St. John’s practice’s cleaner. The rest of the practice didn’t know at the time that she’d been doing some private work for Margot and Roy. Gupta told me that he thought Margot might’ve been encouraging Wilma to leave her husband, and giving her a bit of extra work might’ve been part of that scheme.”

“Why did she want Wilma to leave her husband?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” said Strike, and he turned over another piece of paper to show a tiny photocopied news clipping, which was dated in Strike’s spiky and hard-to-read handwriting: 6 November 1972.

Rapist Jailed

Jules Bayliss, 36, of Leather Lane, Clerkenwell was today sentenced at the Inner London Crown Court to 5 years’ jail for 2 counts of rape. Bayliss, who previously served two years in Brixton for aggravated assault, pleaded Not Guilty.

“Ah,” said Robin. “I see.”

She took another slug of wine.

“Funnily enough,” she added, though she didn’t sound amused, “Creed got five years for his second rape as well. After they let him out, he started killing women as well as raping them.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I know.”

For the second time, he considered questioning the advisability of Robin reading The Demon of Paradise Park, but decided against.

“I haven’t yet managed to find out what became of Jules Bayliss,” he said, “and the police notes regarding him are incomplete, so I can’t be sure whether he was still in the nick when Margot was abducted.

“What’s relevant to us is that Wilma told a different story to Lawson to the one she told Talbot—although Wilma claimed she had, in fact, told Talbot, and that he didn’t record it, which is possible, because, as you can see, his note-taking left a lot to be desired.

“Anyway, one of the things she told Lawson was that she’d sponged blood off the spare-room carpet the day Margot disappeared. The other was that she’d seen Roy walking through the garden on the day he was supposedly laid up in bed. She also admitted to Lawson that she hadn’t actually seen Roy in bed, but she’d heard him talking from the master bedroom that day.”

“Those are… pretty major changes of story.”

“Well, as I say, Wilma’s position was that she wasn’t changing her story, Talbot simply hadn’t recorded it properly. But Lawson seems to have given Wilma a very hard time about it, and he re-interviewed Roy on the strength of what she’d said, too. However, Roy still had Cynthia the nanny as his alibi, who was prepared to swear to the fact that he’d been laid up all day, because she was bringing him regular cups of tea in the master bedroom.

“I know,” he said, in response to Robin’s raised eyebrows. “Lawson seems to have had the same kind of dirty mind as us. He questioned Phipps on the precise nature of his relationship with Cynthia, which led to an angry outburst from Phipps, who said she was twelve years younger than he was and a cousin to boot.”

It flitted across both Strike’s and Robin’s minds at this point that there were ten years separating them in age. Both suppressed this unbidden and irrelevant thought.

“According to Roy, the age difference and the blood relationship ought to have constituted a total prohibition on the relationship in the minds of all decent people. But as we know, he managed to overcome those qualms seven years later.

“Lawson also interrogated Roy about the fact that Margot had met an old flame for a drink three weeks before she died. In his rush to exonerate Roy, Talbot hadn’t paid too much attention to the account of Oonagh Kennedy—”

“The friend Margot was supposed to be meeting in here?” said Robin.

“Exactly. Oonagh told both Talbot and Lawson that when Roy found out Margot had been for a drink with this old boyfriend, he’d been furious, and that he and Margot weren’t talking to each other when she disappeared.

“According to Lawson’s notes, Roy didn’t like any of this being brought up—”

“Hardly surprising—”

“—and got quite aggressive. However, after speaking to Roy’s doctors, Lawson was satisfied that Roy had indeed had a serious episode of bleeding after a fall in a hospital car park, and would have found it well nigh impossible to drive to Clerkenwell that evening, let alone kill or kidnap his wife.”