Troubled Blood, Part Six: Top Ten Take-Aways for Chapters Sixty to Seventy One

As explained on the day of Troubled Blood’s publication, I have been reading and writing about one of the seven Parts of the just published Troubled Blood every day until finished. For Part One’s seven chapters, go here. Part Two’s seven chapters and my Top Ten Take-Aways can be found here. Part Three’s epic post? It’s right here. And here is Part Four, the longest part of Troubled Blood and the longest HogwartsProfessor post ever. Part Five, too! The murderer is confronted and apprehended in Part Six so feel free to discuss the ending (to include Part Seven) in the comment thread below.

What a wild ride! I am simultaneously delighted and disappointed by the Big Twist and Great Reveal in Troubled Blood‘s concluding Parts — delighted by Rowling-Galbraith’s brilliant concealment in plain sight of Whodunnit and frustrated that I was not able to guess it even after the deep dives into Talbot’s tarot card spreads. As Strike told Robin, the future or reality the cards predicted is only visible after the present shows itself — which will be fun to go back to now that we have our answers!

My efforts today will be charting Part Six’s chapters to see if they work as a ring, trying to identify the woman in Talbot’s vision, the spirit who appeared to him in his invocational magic ceremony that finally broke his grip on sanity, and an interpretation of Robin’s final Thoth deck three card spread. Join me after the jump for a close-up look at Troubled Blood, Part Six, and conversation in the comment thread about the wonderful ending! I hope we can agree this was Rowling-Galbraith’s best ever? 

(1) The Latch

Chapter 60 is the first chapter and chapter 71 is the last of Troubled Blood’s Part Six. The first chapter is seven pages long, only chapter 69 is shorter at six pages, and the last chapter is the longest by quite a bit at twenty-four pages. The opening chapter in its brevity — it’s largely a placeholder chapter that could have been folded into the following one in which Robin goes to the St Peter Nursing Home — transitions from the earth-shaking events at the end of Part Five (“You are my best mate”) to Strike’s aborted attempt at St Peter’s. It has a phone call between Robin and Cormoran with only one other subject: Gloria Conti’s throwing up at the Phipps’ barbecue (746-747). The last of the twelve chapters is Strike’s confrontation of Janice Beattie in the poisoner’s den, in which epic conversation she admits that, yes, she put ipecac syrup in the punch which made Gloria sick. Not much, but, as we’ll see, it’s enough for the latch.

(2) The Turn

The story-turn is complicated (again) because Part Six has twelve chapters, an even number, so there isn’t one which has the same number of chapters before and after it. Instead of a single chapter that acts as a pivot for the set, though, there are four chapters which mirror each other like a turtle-back line and which also echo and point to the story latch’s beginning and end.

In brief, chapter 64 is Robin and Cormoran’s trip to Skegness for their interview with Steve Diamond, nee Douthwaite, and chapter 65 their follow-up conversation over Fish and Chips. It is reflected in chapters 66 and 67’s FaceTime interview with Gloria Conti and their subsequent conversation. The two pairs are complementary mirror images of one another.

They echo the latch’s beginning and end in their Gloria Conti content. Robin finally hears from Gloria while they are in Skegness and they learn that, indeed, as Robin guessed in Part Six’s opening chapter, she was pregnant (though not at the barbeque) and she was helped by Margot in murdering the child of Luca Ricci she was carrying. In chapter 67, Robin has her epiphany about the struggling pair at the telephone boxes not being daughter with elder mother and Strike claims to have solved the case. Story turn and turtle-back four chapter package…

(3) The Transverse Ring Lines

In between the latch and the involved story-turn there are three chapter sets that act as front-and-back pairs, the turtle-back lines of the Part Six ring composition:

• Chapters 61 and 70 are Robin adventures out-of-bounds and in disguise. In the opener she is at St Peter’s home against Strike’s wishes and without his knowledge; she meets Luca Ricci in his father’s room and discovers that he was the person writing threatening notes to Margot. On the far side, Robin and Sam Barclay visit the Athorns’ apartment in the hope of finding Margot; Robin deceives Deborah into thinking they are social workers or building inspectors.
• Chapters 63 and 68 are the Creed interview pair. In the first, Robin solves the Shifty case by talking up Gemma the PA while Strike finds Douthwaite; the thrill and finish of the chapter is Robin’s revelation that Strike will be allowed to interview Dennis Creed. The backside chapter is the Strike-Creed chess match at Broadmoor.
• And chapters 62 and 69? We get our last look at a True Book page in the first, the image Talbot drew of the nightmare spirit he invoked by spellwork inside a magic circle. In chapter 69, Douthwaite confirms Strike’s suspicions about what Margot told him in their last meeting (not to mention Robin solving the M54 clue Creed has given Strike — “The Archer”! — with the best guesses that Brian Tucker had shared with her in their secret interview in Part Three). The Talbot picture tells the careful reader who killed Margot Bamborough (see Take Away #5 below) and, though we are not told what Dr Bamborough shared with Douthwaite, we learn very soon after that this information reveals the killer as well.

Part Seven only has two chapters so I won’t bother to chart them as rings per se. Please note, though, that this Part Six ring means that, as I’ve suspected since reading Part One, Rowling-Galbraith has written Troubled Blood not only as a ring novel, i.e., its seven parts acting as a ring, within a series that so far is acting like a seven book ring, but that each of its first six Parts’ chapters work as rings as well. Egad. Who knew?

(4) The Part Two Parallels

Part Six will have to resonate with Part Two if the novel is a ring composition apart from its chapter sets, and, as you’d expect at this point I hope, it does.

Part Two is the in depth introduction to the Margot Bamborough missing person case, in which Strike speaks with Dr Gupta about all the players and their roles on the day of disappearance, Robin and Strike both read The Demon of Paradise Park about Creed the serial killer, he walks the Clerkenwell streets with Robin to share with her all he has learned from the police file Layborn has given him, and, at the close, we get the first mention of the Talbot’s True Book and his occult fixation in Pitman shorthand (149).

In Part Six, we get the last image of the True Book, Strike speaks with Dr Bijral at Broadmoor, Creed appears in the flesh and confesses to a crime alluded to in Demon, and all the questions raised in the police files, Gupta interview, and crime scene survey of Part Two are answered in the Athorn apartment and the Janice Beattie interview. Parts Two and Six are question and answer, first and last, mirror-image reflections.

And Devon! Remember Robin was in Devon at the beginning of Part Two? She was solving the mysterious case of Tufty Campion, the serial bigamist and adulterer. We get another mention of Devon in Part Six; Janice Beattie tells Cormoran it is where Dr Brenner died. So what? See Take Away #7 below!

(5) The ‘True Book’ Page Embedded Text: “Janice Did It, Talbot! Go Get Her!”

I have already started writing a post in which I will argue that each of the True Book pages and references we get in Troubled Blood reveals that Janice Beattie killed Margot Bamborough. Here, though, I’ll just share what Strike says about the drawing Talbot makes of the woman-demon he invoked inside a pentagram magic circle and contrast that with what the actual page says. Here is Strike’s summary:

Strike had never given Talbot’s final jottings more than cursory attention, partly because his patience had run out by the time he got there, partly they were among the most shambolic and incoherent parts of the notes. Tonight, though, he had a melancholy reason for examining the last page of Talbot’s notebook, because Strike, too, had come to the end of the case. Se he examined Talbot’s drawing of the demon he believed he’d conjured before the ambulance came to take him away: the spirit of Margot Bamborough, returned from some astral plane to haunt him in the form of Babalon, the Mother of Abominations.

There was no pressure to understand any more. Strike defocused his mind as he’d have relaxed his eyes, the better to spot one of those apparently three-dimensional images hidden in what appeared to be a flat pattern. His eyes glided over the phrases and fragments Talbot had half-remembered from Crowley’s writings, and of consultation of the Thoth tarot. As he scrutinized the picture of the heavy-breasted demon, on whose belly the penitent Talbot had subsequently inscribed a Christian cross, he remembered Robin’s words all those months previously in Hampton Court Palace, about the allure of myth and symbol, and the idea of the collective unconscious, where archetypes lurked. This demon, and the disconnected phrases that had seemed pertinent to Talbot in his psychotic state, had sprung from the policeman’s own subconscious: it was too easy, too simplistic, to blame Crowley and Levi for what Talbot’s own mind had chosen to retain. This was what it generated, in a last spasm of madness, in a final attempt at resolution. Seven veils, seven heads, seven streams. Lust and strange drugs. Seven around her neck. the poisoned darkness of the BLACK MOON. Blood and sin. She rides upon the lion serpent.

Strike bent the lamp closer to the page, so that he could scrutinize the drawing more closely. Was he deluding himself, or did some of these crazy jottings indicate that Talbot had noticed the odd coincidences that Strike had, after talking to the Bayliss sisters? As his gaze moved from one fragment of mystic writing to another, Strike thought he saw, not just a penitent churchgoer trying to make amends for his descent into witchcraft, but the last desperate effort of a good detective, trying to salvage clues from chaos, sense from madness. (pp 773, 775; emphasis mine).

All that, frankly, is a neon flashing pointer for the serious reader to look very hard at the picture. If you ignore the “fragment(s) of mystic writing” that Rowling-Galbraith chose to have Strike mention or check to see what is left out, you’ll note, first, that Strike does not mention that “SEVEN veils, SEVEN heads, SEVEN streams” is followed by “SEVEN letters in her name, SEVEN times.” ‘Babalon,’ of course, has seven letters, but what is there behind the phrase “SEVEN times“?

The only suspect who was interviewed “seven times” was Janice Beattie, whose surname has seven letters. She killed her victims with poison and her motive was her desire, call it “lust,” for Steve Douthwaite. Hence, “lust and strange drugs,” “POISONED DARKNESS in the MAGICK CUP, blood and bitterness.”

After Strike catches Janice trying to poison the tea for a murder-suicide in her apartment, he says, “I don’t much fancy being victim number… how many is it?” (879) Taking that as an invitation to count how many murders Janice committed, I tallied them: Larry, his mistress Clare Martin, Johnny Marks, Joanna Hammond, Julie Wilkes, Margot Bamborough, and Gwilherm Athorn. Which of course comes to — SEVEN.

[To the objection that at the time that Talbot “performed the ritual of the mark of the BEAST” to conjure Margot’s spirit from the psychic realm, Janice had not yet killed seven people — Margot may have been only her third victim, after Johnny Marks and Joanna Hammond — I’ll respond that time is not past-present-future sequential in eternity but simultaneous. Margot’s spirit would know the total was SEVEN. A better objection is that this is not a reveal of whodunnit because we couldn’t have linked the seven murders with the nurse until Janice Beattie’s tell-all conversation with Strike reveals the deaths of Johnny Marks and Clare Martin.]

(6) The Embedded Thoth Tarot Card Reading

There is an embedded tarot spread here in the Naked Margot/Lust Major Trump ‘True Book’ page, too, just as there were in the Horn Page (537) and the Death tarot card page (632) discussed in the Parts Four and Five Take-Away posts. The three cards on the Part Six page are The Moon, major trump XVIII (“The moon has no air“), Lust, major trump XI (“she rides upon the lion serpent” inscribed three times on page, LUST once, circled and crossed out after Talbot’s medical treatment), and “Nine of Swords / cruelty, a cathedral of the DAMNED blood and POISON drip.”

I’ll go into this spread at greater length when I lay out how all the True Book pages reveal Janice as the killer but will note here that:

• We have seen The Moon and Lust cards previously;
• the Lust trump card features a naked full breasted woman, almost certainly the inspiration for Talbot’s vision figure, one who on the tarot card is riding a lion serpent, a lion with seven faces, and 
• the Nine of Swords is to be interpreted, according to the booklet that comes with the Thoth tarot card deck, as “Cruelty… intellect is replaced by heartless passion” (30), “mind dominated by insatiable desires” (47).

The nature of the problem, the cause of the problem, and the solution, right? If The Moon, Lust, and the Nine of Swords are the answers, now that we know Janice Beattie is the killer, we should be able to figure out the question. I’ll return to this in the longer True Book analysis post I’m working on; for those working at home, find a copy of Crowley’s Book of Thoth and check out these three cards and what I wrote about them in previous posts.

(7) Predictive Hits and Misses: Christie!

In Rowling-Galbraith’s interview with Val McDermid she said about Agatha Christie:

Christie who was someone who interested me a great deal because she was writing much of her career to outrun the tax man. Hence her incredibly patchy output. But she could shuffle those cards and fool you, couldn’t she, again and again and again. Sometimes very plausibly, sometimes not so plausibly. But she had that almost mathematical ability to fool you. And that’s something not many could do as well as she did it.

Those of you who read my attempts in the five previous Top Ten Take Away posts know that I tried very hard to see where she was headed and not to be taken in. But I was fooled and tricked mightily. 

I did get that Janice was a principal figure and that her relationship with Douthewait was the cause of the problem (the Snitch with snake that was the embedded card in the Death card True Book page is from ‘Love,’ the major trump card and ’cause of the problem’ that is Janice, the Princess/Queen of Cups). I was convinced, though, that she was a good guy for all the reasons Cormoran and Robin give for their not getting it sooner. Rowling sets us up to love nurses in Troubled Blood, between the woman who gives hospice care to Joan Nancarrow to Strike’s Selly Oak physiotherapist and the nurses at St Peter’s, so of course I gave Janice a pass.

Strike tells Janice “You’re a genius of misdirection” (886) and later says to Anna, Kim, and company “Janice Beattie’s probably the best liar I’ve ever met and a hell of an actress.” I’ll leave it at what I’ve said before, Rowling’s signature virtue may be her narrative misdirection, all while playing fair. The clues were there, I found many of the ones I think it’s fair to say most missed, at least on the True Book pages, and I still thought the murderer was not the killer-in-fact.

But there is one clue I was delighted to find at the beginning of Part Two that I’m kicking myself now for having forgotten about or just not given enough attention. Because if I’d just taken it more seriously than as a hat tip or literary allusion, the “coincidences” that Strike finally notes would have been enormous red flags from the start.

The clue I’m thinking of is Robin’s first appearance in the novel being in Torquay, Devon. I wrote about this in the discussion about chapter 3, released the week before the book’s publication:

That [Robin] is in Torquay, the birthplace and childhood home of Agatha Christie, and investigating a faithless Campion, the surname of Margery Allingham’s detective, are both heavy markers beyond hat-tipping that the Affair in Devon is a big clue to coming events.

You’d think, as much attention as I paid to the center of the book because Strike’s killers turn up there as a rule, that I’d remember a proper ring latches, so the end is evident in some way at the beginning. We begin with Polworth at The Victory quoting a passage from Anna Karenina and Strike recalls that passage and its meaning in Troubled Blood’s last paragraph. Robin starts out at the birthplace and longtime home of the ‘Queen of Crime’ — whose books as often as not featured murder by poison.

From Dame Agatha’s wikipedia page: “Professor of Pharmacology Michael C. Gerald noted that ‘in over half her novels, one or more victims are poisoned, albeit not always to the full satisfaction of the perpetrator’.” At agathachristie.com, we learn in their review of A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie that:

In A is for Arsenic Kathryn Harkup explores the poisons used by Agatha Christie in her novels. Christie used poison to kill her characters more often than any other crime fiction writer. … Agatha Christie revelled in the use of poison to kill off unfortunate victims in her books; indeed, she employed it more than any other murder method, with the poison itself often being a central part of the novel. Her choice of deadly substances was far from random – the characteristics of each often provide vital clues to the discovery of the murderer. 

I knew that, as will any halfway serious fan of Christie; she was an apothecary at hospitals in both World Wars and doctors have testified that they saved lives of patients who had been poisoned because they had read a Poirot or Marple mystery in which the effects of that drug had been accurately described. So how did I miss that the Christie clue in chapter 3 meant the Troubled Blood killer would be adept with poisons? Just slow, I guess; maybe a self-esteem issue?

(8) The Other (Face Palm) Clue Missed: ‘The Moon’ Tarot Card Scarab Beetle

How about one more near-miss clue discovered but neglected?

In Part Five, page 632, we were shown the True Book page featuring a dancing black skeleton. In my discussion of the page I noted that there was an embedded three card tarot spread on the page and identified the third card in this disguised spread as The Moon, major trump card XVIII.

Talbot made this discovery pretty straight forward; he put a picture of scarab beetle with a sun orb in its front pincers at the upper right corner of the page, the exact image at the bottom center of The Moon card as drawn by Lady Frieda Harris according to Crowley’s notes or instructions. I wrote about this card (Part Six, Take-Away 5):

Crowley’s Book of Thoth is the reference text we know Talbot is using, Robin, though, only has the booklet that came with her Thoth tarot card deck. In it, The Moon is the card of nightmares. In one spot Crowley-Harris writes “This card represents the state of impure horror, hidden darkness which must be passed through before light can be reborn.” “At the bottom of the card moves the Sacred Beetle, bearing the Sun through the darkness of night” (25).

As noted above, I had figured out that Talbot’s question was ‘Where is or What Happened Margot Bamborough?’ in that three card spread. The first card or ‘nature of the problem’ is about Janice Beattie, the second, the cause of the problem, about her love for Douthwaite, and the solution is The Moon — a horror, “hidden darkness.” I totally misunderstood the last and my predictions are almost the opposite of what really happened; again, more on these embedded spreads in a coming post.

I do want to note, though, that Talbot was either inspired or clairovoyant in his doodling because he gives the solution to the Bamborough missing person case in his illustration of the tarot card’s Scarab Beetle. He adds an Ankh, the occult Egyptian cross, next to the Beetle on the True Book page, a feature not on the tarot card. And the only other place an Ankh appears in the novel? That’s right, there is a tall blue Ankh painted on the wall of the room where Margot Bamborough is buried in concrete. So close — and no cigar!

(9) The Song of the Western Men — Trelawny!

I’ve written at some length about the song Cormoran sings to Robin in Skegness: ‘Cormoran’s Song: Twenty Thousand Cornish Lads Will Know the Reason Why.’ A hat-tip to Beatrice Groves for having predicted the appearance of this song pre-publication (!) and to Evan Willis for being the first reader of Troubled Blood to note that it is in parallel with Trelawny’s prophecy at the end of Order of the Phoenix. In the post linked above, I try to explain the song along those lines, that is, as a marker of the alchemical nigredo or stage of dissolution, reduction to prime matter, that takes place in Troubled Blood. Definitely an important take-away from Part Six!

(10) Best Rowling Book Ever? I Think So

The mystery is all over at the end of Part Six except for the mopping up in the Part Seven two chapter epilogue-cum-denouement. By the last chapter of the sixth Part Cormoran and Robin have solved the missing person case and helped resolve the nightmare questions of a parent whose child may or may not have been murdered by Dennis Creed. I will offer Take-Aways from Part Seven, but I think we can begin the conversation here about whether this is Rowling’s best book to date.

I’ll start with a ‘yes’ and a ‘no.’

For ‘no,’ The Silkworm is a better stand-alone book and in a way more powerful because of its relative compactness and focus. As I’ve written elsewhere, Troubled Blood has a flood of characters — the Agency office and its cases, the Margot Bamborough missing person case clients, suspects, and various players, the standard cast of Robin and Cormoran’s lives, from Shanker and Dave Polworth to the family in Massham, the Cornwall crew and Strike’s family there and Rokeby siblings, not to mention the old love interests, Matthew and Charlotte. It would be very hard to enjoy this book as your first Strike novel, as you can The Silkworm; really, Troubled Blood works only as your fifth Strike adventure.

I think, however, that Troubled Blood is the best thing Rowling-Galbraith has yet written, with the possible exception of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the summit of the Hogwarts Saga, because she does all the things that are her signatures — the ring writing, the alchemy, the literary allusion, the misdirection towards defamiliarization, and the otherworldly resonances — in new, exciting, and challenging fashion. I look forward to writing about all that and hearing your thoughts on same in the coming weeks! Until then, let me know what you think in about these Top Ten Take-Aways from Part Six in the comment boxes below. Thanks for reading, and, in advance, for writing.

• Day One, Part One: Charting the First Seven Chapters of Troubled Blood
• Day Two, Part Two: Top Ten Take Aways for Chapters Eight to Fourteen of Troubled Blood
• Day Three, Part Three: Top Ten Take-Aways for Chapters Fifteen to Thirty of Troubled Blood
• Day Four, Part Four: Top Ten Take-Aways for Chapters Thirty One to Forty Eight of Troubled Blood
• Day Five Part Five: Top Ten Take-Aways for Chapters Forty Nine to Fifty Nine of Troubled Blood
• Part Six: Top Ten Take-Aways for Chapters Sixty to Seventy One of Troubled Blood

 

• Day One, Part One: The Spenserian Epigraphs of the Pre-Released Troubled Blood Chapters
• Day Two, Part Two: The Spenserian Epigraphs of  Troubled Blood Chapters Eight to Fourteen
• Day Three, Part Three: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Fifteen to Thirty
• Day Four, Part Four: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Thirty One to Forty Eight
• Day Five, Part Five: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Forty Nine to Fifty Nine
• Part Six: The Spenserian Epigraphs of Troubled Blood Chapters Sixty to Seventy One

 

• Parallels Between Troubled Blood and Career of Evil
• Parallels Between Troubled Blood and Other Strike Novels, Especially Cuckoo’s Calling
• Parallels Between Troubled Blood and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Parallels Between Troubled Blood and Other Potter Novels, Especially Philosopher’s Stone
• Flints, Errors, and Head-Scratchers in Troubled Blood