“So,” she said, “is that everything?”

“Almost,” said Strike, “but I’m tempted not to show you this.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think it’s going to feed your obsession with holy places.”

“I’m not—”

“OK, but before you look at it, just remember that nutters are always attracted by murders and missing person cases, all right?”

“Fine,” said Robin. “Show me.”

Strike flipped over the piece of paper. It was a photocopy of the crudest kind of anonymous note, featuring letters cut out of magazines.

“Another St. John’s Cross,” said Robin.

“Yep. That arrived at Scotland Yard in 1985, addressed to Lawson, who’d already retired. Nothing else in the envelope.”

Robin sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“Nutter, obviously,” said Strike, now tapping his photocopied art­icles and statements back into a pile and rolling them up again. “If you really knew where a body was buried, you’d include a bloody map.”

It was nearly six o’clock now, close to the hour at which a doctor had once left her practice and had never been seen again. The frosted pub windows were inky blue. Up at the bar, the blonde in the rubber uniform was giggling at something a man dressed as the Joker had told her.

“You know,” said Robin, glancing down at the papers sitting beside Strike’s pint, “she was late… it was pouring with rain…”

“Go on,” said Strike, wondering whether she was about to say exactly what he’d been thinking.

“Her friend was waiting in here, alone. Margot’s late. She would’ve wanted to get here as quickly as possible. The simplest, most plausible explanation I can think of is that somebody offered her a lift. A car pulled up—”

“Or a van,” said Strike. Robin had, indeed, reached the same conclusion he had. “Someone she knew—”

“Or someone who seemed safe. An elderly man—”

“Or what she thinks is a woman.”

“Exactly,” said Robin.

She turned a sad face to Strike.

“That’s it. She either knew the driver, or the stranger seemed safe.”

“And who’d remember that?” said Strike. “She was wearing a nondescript raincoat, carrying an umbrella. A vehicle pulls up. She bends down to the window, then gets in. No fight. No conflict. The car drives away.”

“And only the driver would know what happened next,” said Robin.

Her mobile rang: it was Pat Chauncey.

“She always does that,” said Strike. “Text her, and she doesn’t text back, she calls—”

“Does it matter?” said Robin, exasperated, and answered.

“Hi, Pat. Sorry to bother you out of hours. Did you get my text?”

“Yeah,” croaked Pat. “Where did you find that?”

“It’s in some old police notes. Can you translate it?”

“Yeah,” said Pat, “but it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Hang on, Pat, I want Cormoran to hear this,” said Robin, and she changed to speakerphone.

“Ready?” came Pat’s rasping voice.

“Yes,” said Robin. Strike pulled out a pen and flipped over his roll of paper so that he could write on the blank side.

“It says: ‘And that is the last of them, comma, the twelfth, comma, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth, comma’—and then there’s a word I can’t read, I don’t think it’s proper Pitman—and after that another word, which phonetically says Ba—fom—et, full stop. Then a new sentence, ‘Transcribe in the true book.’”

“Baphomet,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah,” said Pat.

“That’s a name,” said Strike. “Baphomet is an occult deity.”

“OK, well, that’s what it says,” said Pat, matter-of-factly.

Robin thanked her and rang off.

“‘And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book,’” Strike read back.

“How d’you know about Baphomet?” asked Robin.

“Whittaker was interested in all that shit.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

Whittaker was the last of Strike’s mother’s lovers, the man Strike believed had administered the overdose that had killed her.

“He had a copy of The Satanic Bible,” said Strike. “It had a picture of Baphomet’s head in a penta—shit,” he said, rifling back through the loose pages to find one of those on which Talbot had doodled many five-pointed stars. He frowned at it for a moment, then looked up at Robin.

“I don’t think these are stars. They’re pentagrams.”

PART THREE

… Winter, clothëd all in frieze…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

15

Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

In the second week of November, Joan’s chemotherapy caused her white blood cell count to plummet dangerously, and she was admitted to hospital. Strike left Robin in charge of the agency, Lucy left her three sons in the care of her husband, and both hurried back to Cornwall.

Strike’s fresh absence coincided with the monthly team meeting, which for the first time Robin led alone, the youngest and arguably least experienced investigator at the agency, and the only woman.

Robin wasn’t sure whether she had imagined it, but she thought Hutchins and Morris, the two ex-policemen, put up slightly more disagreement about the next month’s rota, and about the line they ought to take on Shifty, than they would have done had Strike been there. It was Robin’s opinion that Shifty’s PA, who’d now been extensively wined and dined at the agency’s expense without revealing anything about the hold her boss might have over his CEO, ought to be abandoned as a possible source. She’d decided that Morris ought to see her one last time to wrap things up, allaying any suspicion about what he’d been after, after which Robin thought it time to try and infiltrate Shifty’s social circle with a view to getting information direct from the man they were investigating. Barclay was the only subcontractor who agreed with Robin, and backed her up when she insisted that Morris was to leave Shifty’s PA well alone. Of course, as Robin was well aware, she and Barclay had once gone digging for a body together, and such things create a bond.

The memory of the team meeting was still bothering her as she sat with her legs up on the sofa in the flat in Finborough Road later, now in pajama and a dressing gown, working on her laptop. Wolfgang the dachshund was curled at her bare feet, keeping them warm.

Max was out. He’d suddenly announced the previous week­end that he feared he was in danger of passing from “introvert” to “recluse,” and had accepted an invitation to go to dinner with some actor friends, even though, in his bitter words on parting, “They’ll all be pitying me, but I suppose they’ll enjoy that.” Robin had taken Wolfgang for a quick walk around the block at eleven, but otherwise had spent her evening on the Bamborough case, for which she’d had no time while Strike had been in St. Mawes, because the other four cases on the agency’s books were absorbing all working hours.