“But fine, she wants me to buy the other two presents,” and he framed a square in mid-air with his hands. “‘Try Not Being a Little Shit.’ I’ll get that made up as a plaque for Luke’s bedroom wall.”
They bought a bag of snacks, then resumed their drive. As they turned out onto the road again, Strike expressed his guilt that he couldn’t share the driving, because the old Land Rover was too much of a challenge with his false leg.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Robin. “I don’t mind. What’s funny?” she added, seeing Strike smirking at something he had found in their bag of food.
“English strawberries,” he said.
“And that’s comical, why?”
He explained about Dave Polworth’s fury that goods of Cornish origin weren’t labeled as such, and his commensurate glee that more and more locals were putting their Cornish identity above English on forms.
“Social identity theory’s very interesting,” said Robin. “That and self-categorization theory. I studied them at uni. There are implications for businesses as well as society, you know…”
She talked happily for a couple of minutes before realizing, on glancing sideways, that Strike had fallen fast asleep. Choosing not to take offense, because he looked gray with tiredness, Robin fell silent, and other than the occasional grunting snore, there was no more communication to be had from Strike until, on the outskirts of Swindon, he suddenly jerked awake again.
“Shit,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “sorry. How long was I asleep?”
“About three hours,” said Robin.
“Shit,” he said again, “sorry,” and immediately reached for a cigarette. “I’ve been kipping on the world’s most uncomfortable sofa and the kids have woken me up at the crack of fucking dawn every day. Want anything from the food bag?”
“Yes,” said Robin, throwing the diet to the winds. She was in urgent need of a pick-me-up. “Chocolate. English or Cornish, I don’t mind.”
“Sorry,” Strike said for a third time. “You were telling me about a social theory or something.”
Robin grinned.
“You fell asleep around the time I was telling you my fascinating application of social identity theory to detective practice.”
“Which is?” he said, trying to make up in politeness now what he had lost earlier.
Robin, who knew perfectly well that this was why he had asked the question, said,
“In essence, we tend to sort each other and ourselves into groupings, and that usually leads to an overestimation of similarities between members of a group, and an underestimation of the similarities between insiders and outsiders.”
“So you’re saying all Cornishmen aren’t rugged salt-of-the-earthers and all Englishmen aren’t pompous arseholes?”
Strike unwrapped a Yorkie and put it into her hand.
“Sounds unlikely, but I’ll run it past Polworth next time we meet.”
Ignoring the strawberries, which had been Robin’s purchase, Strike opened a can of Coke and drank it while smoking and watching the sky turn bloody as they drew nearer to London.
“Dennis Creed’s still alive, you know,” said Strike, watching trees blur out of the window. “I was reading about him online this morning.”
“Where is he?” asked Robin.
“Broadmoor,” said Strike. “He went to Wakefield initially, then Belmarsh, and was transferred to Broadmoor in ’95.”
“What was the psychiatric diagnosis?”
“Controversial. Psychiatrists disagreed about whether or not he was sane at his trial. Very high IQ. In the end the jury decided he was capable of knowing what he was doing was wrong, hence prison, not hospital. But he must’ve developed symptoms since that to justify medical treatment.
“On a very small amount of reading,” Strike went on, “I can see why the lead investigator thought Margot Bamborough might have been one of Creed’s victims. Allegedly, there was a small van seen speeding dangerously in the area, around the time she should have been walking toward the Three Kings. Creed used a van,” Strike elucidated, in response to Robin’s questioning look, “in some of the other known abductions.”
The lamps along the motorway had been lit before Robin, having finished her Yorkie, quoted:
“‘She lies in a holy place.’”
Still smoking, Strike snorted.
“Typical medium bollocks.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I bloody think,” said Strike. “Very convenient, the way people can only speak in crossword clues from the afterlife. Come off it.”
“All right, calm down. I was only thinking out loud.”
“You could spin almost anywhere as ‘a holy place’ if you wanted. Clerkenwell, where she disappeared—that whole area’s got some kind of religious connection. Monks or something. Know where Dennis Creed was living in 1974?”
“Go on.”
“Paradise Park, Islington,” said Strike.
“Oh,” said Robin. “So you think the medium did know who Anna’s mother was?”
“If I was in the medium game, I’d sure as hell Google clients’ names before they showed up. But it could’ve been a fancy touch designed to sound comforting, like Anna said. Hints at a decent burial. However bad her end was, it’s purified by where her remains are. Creed admitted to scattering bone fragments in Paradise Park, by the way. Stamped them into the flower-beds.”
Although the car was still stuffy, Robin felt a small, involuntary shudder run through her.
“Fucking ghouls,” said Strike.
“Who?”
“Mediums, psychics, all those shysters… preying on people.”
“You don’t think some of them believe in what they’re doing? Think they really are getting messages from the beyond?”
“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”
The mobile rang in Strike’s pocket. He pulled it out.
“Cormoran Strike.”
“Yes, hello—it’s Anna Phipps. I’ve got Kim here, too.”
Strike turned the mobile to speakerphone.
“Hope you can hear us all right,” he said, over the rumble and rattle of the Land Rover. “We’re still in the car.”
“Yes, it is noisy,” said Anna.
“I’ll pull over,” said Robin, and she did so, turning smoothly onto the hard shoulder.
“Oh, that’s better,” said Anna, as Robin turned off the engine. “Well, Kim and I have talked it over, and we’ve decided: we would like to hire you.”
Robin felt a jolt of excitement.
“Great,” said Strike. “We’re very keen to help, if we can.”
“But,” said Kim, “we feel that, for psychological and—well, candidly, financial—reasons we’d like to set a term on the investigation, because if the police haven’t solved this case in nigh on forty years—I mean, you could be looking for the next forty and find nothing.”
“That’s true,” said Strike. “So—”