“Nor can I,” said Strike. “But I’m not finished. When Lawson takes over the case he finds out that Janice lied to Talbot as well.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Turned out she didn’t actually have a car. Six weeks before Margot disappeared, Janice’s ancient Morris Minor gave up the ghost and she sold it for scrap. From that time onwards, she was making all her house calls by public transport and on foot. She hadn’t wanted to tell anyone at the practice that she was carless, in case they told her she couldn’t do her job. Her husband had walked out, leaving her with a kid. She was saving up to get a new car, but she knew it was going to take a while, so she pretended the Morris Minor was in the garage, or that it was easier to get the bus, if anyone asked.”

“But if that’s true—”

“It is. Lawson checked it all out, questioned the scrap yard and everything.”

“—then that surely puts her completely out of the frame for an abduction.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” said Strike. “She could’ve got a cab, of course, but the cabbie would’ve had to be in on the abduction, too. No, the interesting thing about Janice is that in spite of believing she was entirely innocent, Talbot interviewed her a total of seven times, more than any other witness or suspect.”

“Seven times?”

“Yep. He had a kind of excuse at first. She was a neighbor of Steve Douthwaite’s, Margot’s acutely stressed patient. Interviews two and three were all about Douthwaite, who Janice knew to say hello to. Douthwaite was Talbot’s preferred candidate for the Essex Butcher, so you can follow his thought processes—you would question neighbors if you thought someone might be butchering women at home. But Janice wasn’t able to tell Talbot anything about Douthwaite beyond what we already know, and Talbot still kept going back to her. After the third interview, he stopped asking her about Douthwaite and things got very strange indeed. Among other things, Talbot asked whether she’d ever been hypnotized, whether she’d be prepared to try it, asked her all about her dreams and urged her to keep a diary of them so he could read it, and also to make him a list of her most recent sexual partners.”

“He did what?”

“There’s a copy of a letter from the Commissioner in the file,” said Strike drily, “apologizing to Janice for Talbot’s behavior. All in all, you can see why they wanted him off the force as fast as possible.”

“Did his son tell you any of that?”

Strike remembered Gregory’s earnest, mild face, his assertion that Bill had been a good father and his embarrassment as the conversation turned to pentagrams.

“I doubt he knew about it. Janice doesn’t seem to have made a fuss.”

“Well,” said Robin, slowly. “She was a nurse. Maybe she could tell he was ill?”

She considered the matter for a few moments, then said,

“It’d be frightening, though, wouldn’t it? Having the investigating officer coming back to your house every five minutes, asking you to keep a dream diary?”

“It’d put the wind up most people. I’m assuming the explanation is the obvious one—but we should ask her about it.”

Strike glanced into the back and saw, as he’d hoped, a bag of food.

“Well, it is your birthday,” said Robin, her eyes still on the road.

“Fancy a biscuit?”

“Bit early for me. You carry on.”

As he leaned back to fetch the bag, Strike noticed that Robin smelled again of her old perfume.

20

And if that any ill she heard of any,

She would it eeke, and make much worse by telling,

And take great ioy to publish it to many,

That euery matter worse was for her melling.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Irene Hickson’s house lay in a short, curving Georgian terrace of yellow brick, with arched windows and fanlights over each black front door. It reminded Robin of the street where she’d spent the last few months of her married life, in a rented house that had been built for a sea merchant. Here, too, were traces of London’s trading past. The lettering over an arched window read Royal Circus Tea Warehouse.

“Mr. Hickson must’ve made good money,” said Strike, looking up at the beautifully proportioned frontage as he and Robin crossed the street. “This is a long way from Corporation Row.”

Robin rang the doorbell. They heard a shout of “Don’t worry, I’ll get it!” and a few seconds later, a short, silver-haired woman opened the door to them. Dressed in a navy sweater, and trousers of the kind that Robin’s mother would have called “slacks,” she had a round pink and white face. Blue eyes peeked out from beneath a blunt fringe that Robin suspected she might have cut herself.

“Mrs. Hickson?” asked Robin.

“Janice Beattie,” said the older woman. “You’re Robin, are you? An’ you’re—’

The retired nurse’s eyes swept down over Strike’s legs in what looked like professional appraisal.

“—Corm’ran, is that ’ow you say it?” she asked, looking back up into his face.

“That’s right,” said Strike. “Very good of you to see us, Mrs. Beattie.”

“Oh, no trouble at all,” she said, backing away to let them in. “Irene’ll be wiv us in a mo.”

The naturally upturned corners of the nurse’s mouth and the dimples in her full cheeks gave her a cheerful look even when she wasn’t smiling. She led them through a hall that Strike found oppressively over-decorated. Everything was dusky pink: the flowered wallpaper, the thick carpet, the dish of pot-pourri that sat on the telephone table. The distant sound of a flush told them exactly where Irene was.

The sitting room was decorated in olive green, and everything that could be swagged, flounced, fringed or padded had been. Family photographs in silver frames were crowded on side tables, the largest of which showed a heavily tanned forty-something blonde who was cheek to cheek over fruit-and-umbrella-laden cocktails with a florid gentlemen who Robin assumed was the late Mr. Hickson. He looked quite a lot older than his wife. A large collection of porcelain figurines stood upon purpose-built mahogany shelves against the shiny olive-green wallpaper. All represented young women. Some wore crinolines, others twirled parasols, still others sniffed flowers or cradled lambs in their arms.

“She collects ’em,” said Janice, smiling as she saw where Robin was looking. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

“Oh yes,” lied Robin.

Janice didn’t seem to feel she had the right to invite them to sit down without Irene present, so the three of them remained standing beside the figurines.

“Have you come far?” she asked them politely, but before they could answer, a voice that commanded attention said,

“Hello! Welcome!”

Like her sitting room, Irene Hickson presented a first impression of over-embellished, over-padded opulence. Just as blonde as she’d been at twenty-five, she was now much heavier, with an enormous bosom. She’d outlined her hooded eyes in black, penciled her sparse brows into a high, Pierrot-ish arch and painted her thin lips in scarlet. In a mustard-colored twinset, black trousers, patent heels and a large quantity of gold jewelry, which included clip-on earrings so heavy that they were stretching her already long lobes, she advanced on them in a potent cloud of amber perfume and hairspray.