‘No,’ said Strike.
Only now did it occur to him that these were Reata Lindvall’s initials, but as they were millions of other people’s initials, too, he didn’t find the fact of overwhelming relevance.
‘The other thing I found out was that he’d handcuffed his briefcase to him. I thought it looked like that, when I saw the photo in the press.’
‘You think he had something valuable in there?’
‘That would seem the obvious explanation, but if so, he must’ve got hold of the valuable thing between leaving Crieff on the twenty-seventh of May and visiting a cashpoint on the fourth of June. Jade says he didn’t take anything valuable with him. Maybe some old masonic books.’
‘Well, I managed to speak to Tia Thompson, Sapphire’s friend, yesterday,’ said Robin, handing Strike back his phone and making sure their fingers didn’t touch.
‘Ah, good work,’ said Strike, trying to curry favour, but she didn’t smile. After giving Strike a concise summary of all Tia had told her, she concluded,
‘… and the last thing she told me was, this mysterious man in the music business told Sapphire she reminded him of a Swedish girl he’d once known.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Strike, choosing not to voice his opinion that ‘you look Swedish’ was a fairly easy line to toss at a young blonde Brit you were trying to flatter. Nevertheless, still trying to ingratiate himself, he said, ‘Well, we aren’t exactly swamped with candidates for Rita Linda, so we should definitely bear Lindvall in mind… speaking of schoolkids, Pat thinks she’s found Hussein Mohamed – or his daughter, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘she emailed me.’
‘With the photo of the kid that was in the paper, we could—’
‘Hang around primary schools in Forest Gate and tail her home?’ said Robin.
‘It worked with Tia Thompson.’
‘I didn’t tail her home, and Tia’s sixteen. Do you seriously think that’s the same thing as stalking a child in a wheelchair who’s just escaped a civil war?’
‘I’m not talking about stalk – OK, forget it, it was just an idea,’ said Strike.
‘We’d better pay for our coffees,’ said Robin. ‘We haven’t got long now.’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Strike, reaching for his wallet.
‘I need the bathroom,’ said Robin, standing up. ‘Er – Dilys’s house is up quite a steep road, I’ve just seen the sign. If your leg’s bad—’
‘It’s fine,’ said Strike shortly.
Sod you, then, thought Robin, walking away in search of the Ladies.
Strike asked for the bill then stared gloomily out of the window at the huge iron bridge. Suddenly, his subconscious decided to throw up the thing that had been nagging at him in the café in Moffat. The unknown Scottish woman who’d twice called the office to beg for his help, and asked him to meet her in the Golden Fleece, had said: It’s all hid under the bridge.
Meanwhile Robin, who was washing her hands at the sink, looked into the mirror over it and noticed not only how pale and exhausted she looked, but also the large black smudge of mascara under her right eye. Strike could have told her about it, she thought furiously, as she wiped it away.
66
… it was only the mistaken justice of a simple people that wanted blood for blood, and was not over-heedful as to whose blood so long as its own sense of justice was satisfied.
Robin hadn’t been lying about the steepness of New Road, which made Comrie Road in Crieff look like a gentle incline. It wound its way up the hill behind the High Street and the gradient was such that, in spite of the cold, Strike was soon sweating from pure pain, and, against his will, having to stop every few yards.
‘Listen,’ said Robin, sympathy temporarily dampening down her resentment, ‘I can easily interview Dilys alone.’
‘No,’ panted Strike, ‘I’m coming.’
A mixture of pride, stubbornness and some sad residue of his determination to spend as much time with Robin as possible forced him onwards. Murphy, he thought, while his knee screamed for mercy, would doubtless be gambolling up the hill like a fucking gazelle.
The houses on both sides of the narrow road faced the river below, so that those on the right showed their back view. All were detached and well maintained, some built of brick, others painted and cottagey, with trailing plants around the doors. Robin, who’d been trying to match her speed to Strike’s without dawdling too obviously, suddenly stopped of her own accord, staring at a circular blue plaque on a house in a short terrace.
‘Strike.’
‘What?’
She pointed. He followed her finger and read:
BILLY WRIGHT CBE
1924–1994
LEGENDARY FOOTBALL CAPTAIN
OF ENGLAND AND WOLVES
LIVED AND GREW UP HERE
‘Christ,’ muttered Strike, glad of a chance to stop walking, and trying not to look as though the stick was bearing half his weight. ‘Billy Wright… that should’ve occurred to me… never think of him as William…’
‘And Tyler’s grandmother lives just there,’ said Robin. She was pointing at a house that was rather smaller than those that flanked it, and painted a muddy shade of orange.
‘Just there’, Strike thought, was a relative term. It took him a further five minutes of agony to reach the wooden front door of Dilys Powell.
Robin knocked, then knocked again. They waited.
‘Oh no,’ said Robin. ‘She sounded pretty vague both times I spoke to her… maybe she forgot we were coming?’
Strike barely refrained from swearing. Robin peered in through the dusty window, past the plastic flowers in a jug on the window sill, to an old lady-ish room of armchairs bearing antimacassars, bits of inexpensive china and a patterned purple carpet.
‘Tyler’s parents’ house is a bit further on,’ said Robin. ‘We could try there?’
‘Fine,’ said Strike, trying to look as though this would require no effort whatsoever.
They set off again, Strike now bent sideways, trying to use the stick as a back-up leg.
At the crest of the hill stood a white house larger than Dilys’s, outside which was a For Sale sign. Robin knocked. Nobody answered. She went to peer through a window. The downstairs room was devoid of furniture.
‘Oi!’
The detectives turned. A short and extremely belligerent-looking man with longish dark hair had emerged from the back door of the house opposite. He was wearing a Steely Dan T-shirt and holding an acoustic guitar by the neck and as he hurried towards them, he did precisely what Strike had been trying to avoid for the last fifteen minutes: slipped on his back lawn and tripped. However, he recovered his balance with the aid of his guitar and, hobbling and slightly pigeon-toed, he advanced on them, shouting:
‘What d’you want? Bloody press, is it?’
‘No,’ said Strike, interested in this assumption. He pulled out his wallet and extracted a card. ‘We’re private detectives.’
Robin assumed the man was Tyler’s neighbour Ian Griffiths, because he’d just emerged from the house she knew Ian Griffiths owned. Robin had grown up in a tall family – the only person in it who was of average height was her mother, and all her brothers were around six feet tall – and she felt slightly guilty (was there such a thing as sizeism?) that the first thing she’d noticed about Ian Griffiths was that he wasn’t much over five feet tall. She had to admire his courage, though, because he was facing up to Strike as though more than willing to challenge him physically, in spite of the height difference between them of over a foot, and the fact that Strike was considerably broader. Possibly, she thought, Griffiths intended using the guitar as a weapon. He all but snatched the card out of Strike’s hand.