Troubled Blood Chapters 21-27: From Paddington Bear to "Shaggable You." Plus: Narration errors in the audiobook?

Strike and Robin head to the pub to review the interview with Janice and Irene and to celebrate Strike's birthday. A few items of note:

• Brenner's sister told police the he had arrived home "at the usual time" but we are never told what time that was. Given it was a Friday night, Brenner's "usual" time home would be after his weekly meeting with Betty Fuller. 
• Strike puts his finger on the right answer for the wrong reasons when he speculates that Margot might have been drugged, but acknowledges that it would take many pills to do the job. We will later learn that Margaret was drugged, but via injected doughnut, not pills. 
• The anecdote about Uncle Ted and the "Bennies" of the Falkland Islands war always seemed weirdly out of place. It's not a particularly funny joke, and adds nothing to the story, so the only reason I can see for it to be included is to establish that Uncle Ted was in the Falklands. Assuming he was there at the time of the combat, this would be April-June 1982. This is about a year before Charlie Bristow's death on Easter 1983.* Ted must have been back by late 1983, which is the approximate time he showed up in Brixton to threaten Shumba with a bloody nose and take the kids back to St. Mawes-- the only time we have heard of Ted and Joan insisting on taking Leda's kids, rather than waiting for her to dump them. I am still wondering if, as Ted's dementia progresses, we will learn more about this period in Strike's childhood, perhaps something related to how Ted knew the children were in Brixton and to the reason Joan wanted Strike to reconcile with Rokeby. 
• I think we are supposed to see this deployment as part of Ted's army career, but the timing seems odd. Ted, we are told, is 79 in 2015, giving him a birthdate of 1936 (about 16 years older than Leda, b. 1952) and making him around 46 in 1982. Yet, later in this same book, Ted's military career is described as "that strange interlude where Ted, in revolt against his own father, had disappeared for several years into the military police." The mid-forties is an odd age to either join the service or rebel against your father, especially when it has been assumed, given that Strike does not seem to remember his Nancarrow grandparents, that they had died before Strike and Lucy began residing intermittently in St. Mawes. So what is Ted doing nipping off to the Falklands in 1982? Was he in the Red Cap version of the reserves? 
• I think there are still many interesting Nancarrow family secrets to be uncovered when the St. Mawes house is cleared out for sale. 
• Running in parallel with the them of parenting choices in this book is the theme of what happens to people, with and without children, in their old age. We have seen an ideal situation with the Gupta's: growing old together, with a comfortable income and children and grandchildren to enjoy. We see another vignette here of the 80-year-old lady celebrating her birthday, presumably with her family. The scene males Strike wonder "where he'd be if he lived to be eighty, and who'd be there with him."  We'll see much less happy outcomes later with Mucky Ricci and Betty Fuller. 

Chapter 22 is a brief interlude where we see Strike eating a solitary birthday dinner in his flat, having told Lucy he was going to Nick and Ilsa's and Nick and Ilsa he was going to Lucy's. He reflects on his growing attraction to Robin, and reads the last of The Demon of Paradise Park. He also gets the nude selfie of Charlotte which, despite his rapid deletion, comes back to haunt him in TIBH. 

Chapter 23 is also brief. Robin is awakened to a call from her brother telling her of the arrival of her first niece, Annabel Marie. Arriving at Fortnum & Mason early to ship for a baby gift, she gets a much less welcome call from the Flobberworm's presumably ex-bestie, Tom Turvey, who blames and berates Robin for the demise of his relationship with Sarah Shagsalot, a scant four weeks before their planned wedding.  Sarah sure has strung old Baldy on a long time; you'd think she'd be just a bit embarrassed to call it off this later, after so many of her wealthy friends had presumably planned their New Years holiday around attending. If it hadn't been for Strike showing up "looking tense" over the news of Joan's re-hospitalization, Robin might well have told him everything, and Tom could have joined Matthew on Strike's list of those in need of corrective procedures. As it is, I love the way she urges him to leave immediately and promises to take care of everything. 

The interview with Oonagh Kennedy (Ch. 24) is one of my favorites in the series. Robin gets her wish to talk to someone who genuinely liked Margot, and the descriptions of the beautiful store and cozy cafe put F & M on my list of places to visit in London in 2023. As much as I love Robert Glenister's narration and the way he does the vicar's Irish accent, I did catch a couple of errors in this conversation where he says a line in the wrong voice. The first is when Oonagh is explaining Margot's disagreement with Brenner and Gupta over their being unwilling to prescribe birth control pills to unmarried women.:

"Margot said, t'ank God for it, because she was sure the women coming to their clinic weren't able to get it from either of the other doctors.

"But it wasn't only them. She had trouble with the other staff. I don't t'ink the nurse liked her either."

"Janice?" said Robin.

"Was it Janice?" said Oonagh, frowning.

"Irene?" suggested Strike. 

Glenister reads the italicized line in Strike's voice, when it clearly it is supposed to be Oonagh continuing to speak.. Note the lack of closing quotation marks after "other doctors" and the dropped h in "t'hink." Beyond that, it makes no sense for either Strike or Robin to suggest that "the nurse" or "Janice" didn't like Margot; they made it clear in their pub discussion that they currently believe that  Janice, like Gupta, liked Margot, and they certainly knew she was the nurse. Oonagh is the one who, after forty years, is fuzzy in her recollections of the St. John's personnel names and roles. 

While it is not as clear-cut, I think there is a similar error near the end of the conversation.

"She said, 'I need to ask your advice about something. I might be going mad. I shouldn't really talk about it, but I t'ink you're the only one I can trust.'"

Strike and Robin looked at each other. 

"Was that not written down anywhere?"

"No," said Strike.

"No," said Oonagh, and for the first time she looked angry. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised." 

Glenister says the italicized line in Robin's voice; to me, it makes much more sense coming from Oonagh. Robin has a lot more knowledge of what was written down in the police notes than Oonagh, and would know that, if Strike had read something like that, he'd have made a point to ask about it. 

Note: This is not the first narration error in the series. I wrote a blog post years ago saying that the "I'm going through a lot of Annabel's" line that Glenister attributed to Robin should have been said by Strike.

There are two other "leapfrog" connections to TRG that I noticed this time around. First, Oonagh relates that, on their final pub visit, Margot joked that she was "still living in a silent order" because Roy was giving her the silent treatment over her wish to redecorate. In TRG, Robin jokes that the reticent Clive Littlejohn would be perfect for the Chapman Farm mission "if it were a silent order." Second, Strike has a strong, "almost embarrassed" reaction to Oonagh's statement that she went into St. John's Priory Church because God was "calling her back." In one of the most touching and pivotal scenes of TRG, Strike himself is "called" into the church of St. John the Baptist, and finds comfort over Charlotte's suicide. 

Chapter 25 finds Strike tailing SB to his lady friend's house while reading through Carl Oakden's Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough?, in which Oakden challenges Kathryn Kent for the Most Pig-Ignorant and Self-Deluded Writer in London Award. My favorite line?

Oakden then posted a series of rhetorical questions that he and his foolhardy publishers appeared to think circumvented libel laws. 

As pathetic as the volume is, it provides a couple of pieces of information that prove crucial, such as the picture of mysterious visitors at the Christmas party and Steve Daouthwaite's first pseudonym. Strike makes particular notice of the ringleader's ring, and then makes a mysterious call to Shanker. 

In Chapter 26, flu strikes the agency and denial strikes Strike. The team meeting is cancelled, and turns into a catch-up between Robin and Strike. She is able to share the good news that her postcard trick in the National Portrait Gallery appears to have flushed out a Postcard candidate. Pat arrives in time to take the call from Gregory Talbot and his mother about the film they found in the attic, and Shanker returns Strike's call and agrees to meet at while out Christmas shopping, something Strike also needs to do. He also has to get Robin's present to her before she leaves for Masham, so he asks her to come back to the office at four, by which time he hopes to have both the film and a projector with which to view it. 

Chapter 27:  Trying to ignore his increasingly obvious flu symptoms, Strike heads out to the fancy shops of the Regent Street area, including the famous toy store, Hamleys. Strike chooses Nerf-blasters for his nephews because he "would have loved one when he was eleven."  Of course, the nephew who is eleven is Jack. The Arsehole and the Whiny Little Prick can just suck it up and enjoy whatever Jack gets. 

This chapter is best known for Strike's disastrous trip to the Liberty perfume counter, where he seeks a thoughtful gift for Robin, per Ilsa's advice, but is met by a series of "Shaggable You" scents and decides on salted caramel chocolates, instead. So, now he's two for two, selecting birthday flowers that reminded Robin of Sarah Shadlock, and Christmas chocolates that will remind her of Saul Morris. 

Thus armed, Strike heads for the Shakespeare's Head to meet Shanker, arriving too sick to enjoy a beer, which, for Strike, means "near death." As sick as he is, Strike is still able to recall a delivery he drove Shanker to some ten years previously, during which one of the criminal associates Shanker was meeting was wearing the very ring that was visible in Carl Oakden's badly taken Christmas party picture. Shanker is about to identify the man as Mucky Ricci. Mucky is elderly and demented, but he has two equally criminal sons. Shanker warns Strike to stay well away from them, for his own safety as well as Robin's.

"If Mucky Ricci's the answer, you need to stop askin' the question."

Tune in Monday for the Christmases from Hell.  

*At one time, I would have said that this was likely just after Leda took them away from the Forgeman Farm commune which, in CC, was said to happen when Lucy and Strike were "six and eight respectively."  Strike would have turned eight in November 1982. But, the family's stay in the commune was changed to "six months in 1985" in TRG, making Strike ten or eleven at that time.