SPOILERS!!!
Cormoran and Robin go to talk to Cynthia Phipps, Anna’s stepmother. The woman is a temorary tour guide in Hampton Court, and it is there where they meet her. Cynthia is nervous and laughs a lot, and after reading her original statement, she says that she doesn’t have anything to admit. What she wants to say is that there was nothing between her and Roy when Margot was alive. Actually, she admired and loved Margot. Back then she was seventeen and after failing her exams, Margot hired her to look after Anna, which didn’t sit well with Cynthia’s parents. After Margot disappeared, it was four years later that she and Roy got together, and three years after that they married.
While Robin and Cormoran are with Cynthia, Roy phones after Anna has told him who Cynthia was talking to. Roy demands to see the detectives, and Robin and Cormoran follow Cynthia and arrive in the middle of a terrible row between Anna and her father. Roy is kind to Cormoran and Robin but it is clear tht he is very upset. As Cormoran asks him question, he grows angrier and angrier, and the confrotnation with Anna becomes so heated that both of them end up leaving the room, followed by Cynthia and Kim. Apparently, when Anna was 13, she accused her father of building the koy pond and gazebo to hide her mother’s body, and this is something he hasn’t been able to erase.
When the family returns to the house, Cormoran asks him a few other questions. Roy says that the blood Wilma said she found on the carpet was menstrual blood, and it is untrue that she saw him walking outside. Then Roy breaks down and starts sobbing, saying that he failed Margot. He was angry because she had a drink with Satchwaite, and the day before her disappearance, she left him a note to talk, but he didn’t try to talk to her. Roy cries that he knows what happened: Margot went for a walk, to consider whether to leave him, and then Creed found her and killed her.
As Roy breaks down, Anna comes to her father and comforts him. Cormoran and Robin think it is time to go, so Kim walks them to the door, and she tells them that even though they might not discover much, what has happened there today is a real development, something that will help the family.
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