The Hallmarked Man

31

Strike doubted that MI5 would order an operative to grab Robin round the back of the neck and force a rubber gorilla on her in an attempt to make the agency back off the silver vault investigation, but the question of who was behind the assault was making Strike wonder exactly which of the hornets’ nests the agency seemed, unwittingly, to have kicked was responsible. He was particularly worried by the fact that Robin’s assailant had known exactly where to find her, and had seized the opportunity to attack where he was least likely to be seen, which suggested that he’d been tailing her for a while, without her noticing.

This thought had occurred to Robin, too. When she and Strike spoke the following morning by phone, she admitted her fear that the man had been following her for hours.

‘Anyone could miss a tail in Christmas crowds in the middle of London,’ said Strike, keen to keep on Robin’s right side, in spite of his own concern.

‘I know,’ said Robin, ‘but I still feel stupid. I won’t make that mistake again.’

‘I think we have to take that anonymous phone call to the office a bit more seriously now,’ said Strike.

‘“Leave it and you won’t get hurt?”’

‘Exactly.’

‘So “it”’s definitely the silver vault body?’

‘My gut says so.’ Strike vacillated before saying the next thing, well aware of how sensitive a subject it was, yet certain it had to be mentioned. ‘I can’t see how he knew—’

‘That I was Witness G at the rape trial?’ said Robin, who’d steeled herself to discuss this.

‘Yeah.’

‘I think I do,’ said Robin. ‘It’s online. I found out last night.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike. ‘How—?’

‘Local gossip, maybe,’ said Robin, trying to sound unconcerned, although, in fact, when she’d found her name on the website the previous evening it had made her feel physically sick. ‘People in Masham knew what had happened. Friends and family, after I left uni. Anyway, I found it in the comments under – well, it was actually in the comments of that article about you. Some anonymous person said they don’t understand how I can work with you, because I was a victim of a high-profile rapist myself.’

‘Oh Christ,’ said Strike. ‘I’m—’

‘Don’t apologise,’ said Robin flatly. ‘It’s not your fault.’

Strike was reluctant to voice his next opinion, but even if it led to a row, he decided it had to be said.

‘I’m serious about you keeping me posted on where you are. No lonely streets in the dark, on your own. Someone might’ve decided you’re the soft target.’

‘All right,’ said Robin, but Strike could tell from the tone that he’d barely got away with this. His partner never took kindly to Strike expressing concern in any manner that implied he didn’t trust her to look after herself. In truth, while he had good reason for thinking her occasionally reckless – he wouldn’t soon forget her jumping in front of a moving train to try and drag a man she definitely couldn’t have lifted to safety, nor sprinting ahead of him into a house where a known killer was waiting in the dark – he trusted her ability to assess risk more than perhaps she knew. And of all the members of the agency, her work ethic was the only one that truly matched his.

‘Did you tell Murph—?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin, with an edge to her voice, and Strike decided it was safest to drop the subject completely.

But Robin was lying. She’d said precisely nothing to Murphy about the man in Harrods, because she was damned if she was going to take security lectures from more than one man, or have to discuss the rape yet again. The small rubber gorilla was now wrapped in a freezer bag in her sock drawer at home.

Strike and Robin were due a face-to-face catch-up on December the twenty-second, which would be the last morning Robin spent at work before Christmas. Strike woke that morning with the alarm, slapped it off, tugged his vape pen loose from its charger, then took a deep drag on it, the chill December air creeping into the flat from his poorly fitted windows as he watched the vapour drifting across his shadowy ceiling.

He’d been asking himself ever since their last conversation whether today might not be as good a time as any to force the discussion with Robin for which he’d as yet found no natural opening. It wouldn’t, of course, be the way he’d planned it. He’d hoped for a far-flung pub or restaurant, where wine and laughter might have lowered her guard, but he was worried about the house-hunting, and about Christmas, with the possibility that Murphy might be about to spring a festive proposal. If Strike declared himself today, before Robin travelled north to Masham, she’d have time and space to think about what she really wanted. Perhaps this, after all, was the way: on a winter’s day, unromantically, in the office where their friendship had been forged and where Strike, most unwillingly, had fallen in love with her.

He lay, still vaping, trying to frame an opening in his head.

‘Listen, there’s something I want to say.’

‘I need you to know something.’

‘I’ve been looking for a way to tell you this.’

It now occurred to him that this would be only the second time in his life he’d made the first move on a woman. Every other time (and he could imagine the reactions of other men, should he ever be fool enough to say this out loud) the woman had been the instigator, or had signalled so very clearly that a sexual approach would be welcome that it came to the same thing. The one exception had been at that student party in Oxford, where he’d swaggered drunkenly up to Charlotte, to whom he’d never spoken before in his life. She’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, but he’d risked nothing whatsoever: at worst, he knew he’d have had a good anecdote to tell about his audacity in approaching the woman every man at the party was eyeing with equal parts of lust and awe.

This was different. If he laid everything on the line today, he needed to brace for the possible consequences: the business blown up, his most important friendship destroyed, all hope of the one relationship he really wanted, gone. The unerasable mental image of Robin’s expression as he’d moved to kiss her outside the Ritz rose in his mind’s eye as he lay in bed, listening to the window pane in the kitchen shivering in the wind. If he were to be met today with that same look…

But he had to speak. He couldn’t live with knowing that he hadn’t at least tried. Thus resolved, he sat up, swung himself off the bed and hopped, using the familiar balancing aids of chair backs and door jambs, towards the bathroom.

He’d just finished breakfast when, at nine o’clock precisely, somebody hammered on the door of his flat. Disconcerted, he opened it to find his office manager on the landing.

‘Have you read it?’ demanded Pat in her baritone.

‘Read what?’

‘You. In the paper. By that Culpepper man.’

‘What – another one?’

‘Yeah. I didn’t realise – they called yesterday, asking for a comment. I thought it was about the last thing. There’s fifteen-odd messages on the answer machine downstairs, and there’s two of ’em hanging around outside.’

Strike strode immediately to the laptop that was charging on his kitchen table, sat down and flicked it open.

‘What d’you want me to do?’ said Pat, watching him.

‘Say “no comment” to anyone who rings.’

He’d just spotted the story. As Pat closed the door behind her, Strike began to read the article.

Strike sat motionless, staring at the screen, every muscle tensed, a roaring in his ears, his guts full of lava. Culpepper had crossed over the line into pure invention; this story was entirely without foundation. Was the girl – her face was pixelated in the two pictures accompanying the story, but her body was clearly visible, in its skimpy red underwear – a chimera, too? Or had Culpepper paid some real sex worker a fee to become Candy, in print?

Strike looked away from the screen and his eyes fell on the fisherman’s priest which lay quiescent on the windowsill, a worn relic of Ted, a man of whom nobody could ever have believed this kind of sleaze. Strike then glanced down at his mobile. Nobody had texted him. Doubtless his friends and his family were wondering whether it could be true, whether this was how he conducted his professional life, whether this was his dirty little secret.

He got to his feet, feeling as though his heart was attempting to knock its way through his ribs, grabbed his keys and left the flat, slamming the door behind him.

32

Robin had seen the online article about Strike just before boarding the Tube that morning, and consequently spent most of her journey to Denmark Street staring fixedly at the passenger opposite’s feet and thinking about what she’d just read, instead of the discovery she’d made the previous evening and which she’d been looking forward to sharing with Strike.

She told herself the Candy story must be false, but could she be completely sure? Back in 2013 she and Strike had been by no means as close as they were now; there’d been pockets of his life that had remained totally mysterious to her. A voice in her head kept insisting you know he never did this, but life had taught Robin that men you might trust completely – clean-cut chartered accountants like her own unfaithful ex-husband, for instance, or serial rapists (the man who’d ended her university career, and ruined her fallopian tubes, had been cohabiting with a woman who’d stood by him throughout the trial and given him flimsy fake alibis), or the bigamists and philanderers she’d dealt with at work – were sometimes hiding huge and jagged secrets that tore apart more lives than their own when revealed. Strike’s record on openness and transparency when it came to his sex life was extremely poor. Robin wouldn’t have known about Madeline if Charlotte hadn’t told her, about Bijou if Ilsa hadn’t told her, or about Dominic Culpepper’s cousin if Kim hadn’t mentioned her.

No, Strike wouldn’t be the first man to have done something nobody around him believed him capable of, and the pit of Robin’s stomach felt as though it was teeming with wriggling maggots, and she just wanted to get to the office and have the thing out with him, believing (but could she count even on that?) that if she could look him in the eye, she’d know the truth.

Robin had just left Tottenham Court Road when her mobile rang.

‘There are journalists outside the office, he wanted you to know,’ said Pat.

‘How many?’ said Robin.

‘Two.’

‘What’s going on there?’

‘I think he’s going to do something silly,’ said Pat.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘He’s trying to get hold of that journalist who wrote the thing.’

‘I’ll be there in five,’ said Robin, speeding up.

As she rounded the corner into Denmark Street she heard a man calling her name. She bowed her head and kept walking; there didn’t seem to be a photographer, thank God—

‘Miss Ellacott? Miss Ellacott? Anything to say about Lord Branfoot’s comments? Anything to say about Candy, Miss Ellacott?’

‘No comment,’ said Robin coldly, refusing to look the young man in the face, but here came an older man, his phone recording in his hand.

‘Did you know about Candy, Miss Ellacott? Did you meet her?’

‘No comment,’ repeated Robin; she was at the door, had opened it, and slammed it in the reporters’ faces.

Up the two flights of metal stairs she ran, her operation site aching, until she reached the glass door. The first thing she saw on entering was Pat’s alarmed face; then she heard her detective partner’s voice as, probably, could the entire street.

‘YEAH, I’LL LEAVE A FUCKING MESSAGE! YOU TELL THAT CUNT I’M COMING FOR HIM, ALL RIGHT?’

‘Oh, for God’s—’

Robin ran through the dividing doorway into the inner office.

‘IF HE THINKS THE ONLY THING I CAN GET ON HIM IS THAT HIS WIFE—’

Strike’s first clue that his partner had arrived was his phone being wrenched out of his hand.

‘The fuck—?’

Robin stabbed at the screen to end the call.

‘You can’t go to war with Culpepper,’ she said fiercely, backing away from Strike while keeping a tight, two-handed grip on his phone. ‘You can’t! He’s got a national newspaper on his side!’

Strike looked at her, his expression thunderous.

‘So you’ve seen it. Obviously.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen it.’

‘He’s not fucking doing this to me. He’s not fucking doing it. I’ll fucking destroy that fucker, I’ll make him wish—’

‘Strike—’

‘They’ve paid some fucking – they’ve dragged up some—’

‘I know what they’ve done! We need to talk!’ said Robin, slamming the dividing door on the staring Pat.

Strike was pacing in his shirt sleeves.

‘What?’ he threw furiously at Robin, who was watching him. ‘You need me to say it, do you? Fine, I’ll fucking say it: I’ve never hired a sex worker – I’ve never hired one, full fucking stop, but I’ve sure as fuck never done it to entrap anyone.’

‘I know,’ said Robin (did she know? God, she hoped she did), ‘but this isn’t the way to deal with it, you’re just giving Culpepper more to print, threatening him!’

Robin wished her voice wasn’t shaking, but she had to ask the next question; matters had gone too far for polite avoidance of the subject.

‘Who was the woman in the first article?’

Strike now knew the fury of a cornered predator. His business under attack, his relationship with Robin threatened; he knew he owed her an explanation, and that it was crucial she heard the truth from him, and that he made it sound as unsordid as possible, but all he really wanted to do was start punching out windows.

‘Her name’s Nina Lascelles,’ he said. ‘The Honourable Nina Lascelles, if you want the full fucking – and she’s how I got hold of the manuscript of fucking Bombyx Mori,’ he said, referring to a book the agency had been keen to get its hands on. ‘Culpepper told me his cousin worked at the publishers, and gave me her contact details. We met, we went to the Roper Chard party together, she ran me off a copy of the manuscript. There was no seduction, no promise of anything. She enjoyed the adventure.’

‘And?’ said Robin, who was still holding Strike’s mobile tightly in both hands.

‘And I invited her to dinner with me at Lucy’s the next night. As a thank you.’

Robin, who’d never been invited to Lucy’s for dinner, couldn’t understand why Strike, most private of men, would have mixed business and family in this way.

‘And then—?’

‘I slept with her,’ said Strike aggressively, ‘yeah. Twice. And then I never called her again. But there was no fucking coercion, no quid pro quos, nothing.’

‘Right,’ said Robin.

‘It was – one of those things. I didn’t particularly—’

He had just enough sense to bite off the end of that sentence, but Robin had heard it, anyway. Didn’t particularly fancy her.

But you slept with her anyway, thought Robin, because of course you did. And now look.

‘She wanted a relationship,’ said Strike, who thought this was a point in his favour. ‘She wanted to keep it going. That’s why – I could tell she was carrying a grudge, the night I saw her at the Dorchester. She claims I fucked up one of her best friend’s lives, too.’

‘Whose?’ said Robin in alarm, visualising fresh vistas of fertile scandals for the tabloids to explore.

‘No fucking idea. Probably some cheating wife we investigated. But she guessed I was there on a job, at the Dorchester, so when Mr A told his ex he knew what she was up to—’

‘Well, going forwards,’ said Robin (Strike would have said exactly the same, she knew, had it been a question of another employee), ‘maybe you shouldn’t be doing the kind of jobs where you might bump into former girlfriends.’

‘There aren’t that fucking many of them!’

‘But a lot of them come from that kind of social circle, don’t they?’ said Robin, who was determined to have her say; not to punish him, but because the agency meant more to her than coddling Strike’s feelings. ‘It’s a miracle this has never happened before. You’re the most recognisable member of the agency, as well. We just need to bear that in mind from now on.’

After fuming in silence for a few seconds, Strike bellowed ‘FUCK’S SAKE’ at no one in particular, though it made Robin jump.

‘You know what you need to do?’ Robin said, forcing herself to speak calmly. ‘Call Fergus Robertson.’

Strike glared at her, then said,

‘I thought of that, but I’m not—’

‘This won’t go away with “no comment”. Talk to Robertson, tell him the truth. You’ve always played fair with him.’

‘I didn’t want to have to—’

‘It’s too late for what you “didn’t want to have to do”,’ said Robin angrily. This was her agency as well, and she wasn’t going to stand by and watch it get trashed. ‘You need to give Robertson the facts. You’ve got to push back.’

‘It won’t be enough. I need to stop this at the source.’

‘What are you going to do, track this girl down and threaten her into recanting?’ said Robin, now losing patience. ‘How d’you think that’ll play out? “Cormoran Strike in further threats to sex worker”? Or are you planning to lay about Dominic Culpepper with a baseball bat? Because that—’

‘Give me my phone.’

‘You can’t threaten Culpepper, Strike! You can’t!’

‘I’m not going to. I’ll call Robertson and see if I can do some damage control.’

Robin gave the phone back but stood watching him.

‘I’d rather you didn’t listen,’ he told her.

‘Fine,’ said Robin coldly, and she left the room.

Strike waited until the door had closed before sitting down and pressing Robertson’s number.

‘’Ello, ’ello,’ said an amused voice on the end of the line. ‘Just thinking of calling you, seeing as you’re not returning any of my colleagues’ calls. Why’s Mr Culpepper so keen to get you, all of a sudden?’

‘Might be prepared to tell you that,’ said Strike, ‘as long as I’m guaranteed an accurate quote or two.’

‘Who’s giving the quotes?’

‘Me,’ said Strike.

‘Fire away,’ said Robertson, and Strike heard the turning of a page.

‘I’ve never hired any woman – emphasis on “any” – sex worker or otherwise, to entrap or lure an investigative target or witness,’ said Strike, and he heard Robertson’s shorthand moving rapidly across paper, ‘nor have I ever attempted to get sex by offering money, withholding payment, or by any other kind of threat. I have never met, spoken to or otherwise interacted with the woman calling herself Candy and her claims, for which she’s offered no proof, are completely without foundation.’

‘Gonna take legal action?’ asked Robertson, who was still audibly scribbling.

‘On the record, yeah, I’m speaking to lawyers. Off the record, I haven’t got the money to sue, as Culpepper fucking well knows.’

‘Right,’ said Robertson. ‘This all seems to have got very personal, very fast.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ said Strike, ‘and I might be prepared to give you some pointers on where to dig, as long as you can guarantee I’m going to be accurately quoted…’

33

Robin was in the bathroom on the landing. She’d retreated there because she didn’t want to answer Pat’s questions and now, for the second time in three weeks, she was sitting on a toilet with her head in her hands, infuriated and enraged by Cormoran Strike.

Had she thought him some kind of Sir Galahad? No, never; she knew him too well, but like millions of women before her, Robin would rather have thought the man of whom she was so fond was better than this. She believed he’d never met Candy the sex worker, but the fact remained that if Strike could have just resisted having sex with a woman he’d inveigled into helping him on a job, Culpepper wouldn’t have had a peg on which to hang his scurrilous story.

Five minutes later, Robin returned to the office, to find Strike still shut up inside the inner office, and Pat with the telephone receiver clamped to her ear, listening to someone. Robin was hanging up her coat when Pat said,

‘I’m just going to put you on hold, Mr Rokeby.’

So fraught had the events of the morning been so far that Robin didn’t immediately register the name. Only on turning to face the office manager, and seeing Pat’s expression of mingled amazement and fear, did the import of what she’d just heard hit her.

‘It’s his father,’ Pat breathed.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Robin. Of all the things that she thought might tip Strike completely over the edge this morning, his father was foremost. ‘What does he want?’

‘To speak to him,’ mouthed Pat, with a jerk of the head towards the out of sight Strike. ‘He says he can’t call him on his mobile, because he’s got him blocked. And he said, if he wasn’t available, he’d like to speak to you.’

Robin could hear Strike’s muffled voice, still talking to Fergus Robertson in the inner office. The call might end at any moment.

‘Tell him both of us are busy but that you can take a message and one of us will get back to him. And then text me the message, don’t send—’

The door to the inner office opened.

‘We going to have this catch-up, then?’ said Strike, scowling.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin, trying her best to sound matter of fact.

She walked past him into the inner office, and he closed the door on Pat, who still had the receiver pressed to her chest.

‘Robertson’s going to write it up, with a complete denial from me,’ said Strike, who was breathing as though he’d just done what he really wanted to do, which was to beat Culpepper into a purée. ‘Says he’ll put in a bit of “the Cormoran Strike I know”, mention the UHC, the Shacklewell Ripper, public service, grateful clients…’

‘Great,’ said Robin.

Neither was looking the other in the eye. Robin could hear Pat’s voice rising and falling in the outer office again. Strike moved to the window and looked down through the Venetian blinds into Denmark Street.

‘And he said he was going to call off – yeah, he has.’

Down in the street, the older journalist had just taken a phone call, presumably from Robertson. He then moved to tell the younger man that there was no point hanging around, because Strike had made the only comment he was prepared to give, to their colleague.

‘Right,’ said Strike, not looking at Robin as he sat down, but pulling his notes on the silver vault case towards him, ‘I’ve got news on Larry McGee. I spoke to his daughter last night.’

His adrenaline levels were refusing to drop; vivid mental images of punching Dominic Culpepper so hard his teeth splintered kept recurring. The idea of telling Robin how he felt about her had, naturally, fled: there were imperfect moments for such a declaration, and then there were times when speaking would be outright lunacy, and Strike would have been hard-pressed to imagine a less auspicious occasion than having just been forced to explain how badly he’d treated another woman, then taken Robin’s advice on how best to fight an accusation of harassment of a sex worker.

‘So,’ he said, trying to focus on the notes he’d taken while speaking to McGee’s daughter, ‘there was nothing fishy about the death. Post-mortem revealed myocardial infarction related to poorly managed diabetes. Basically, the security guy at Gibsons was right: he really let himself go after being sacked.’

‘Was McGee on good terms with his daughter?’ asked Robin, who was also attempting to sound businesslike.

‘She hadn’t seen him for nearly ten years. First she knew he was dead was the police knocking on her door. From what she told me, he wasn’t a loveable guy; walked out on her mother when she was six, always looking to make a bit of easy money, creepy around women, got sacked from a previous job for allegedly feeling up a co-worker. I asked if she knew why he’d think he was coming into money and she had no idea, said nobody in the family had much to leave, especially to him. I asked if she thought he’d ever have nicked stuff from work, or colluded in a robbery, and she said she’d easily believe it of him. They cremated him and left the ashes at the crematorium,’ Strike added. ‘Said nobody in the family wanted to handle them. Anyway’ – he flicked back in his notes – ‘did you read my email about Jim Todd?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘You think he might’ve known McGee outside work?’

‘I’m not convinced his “who was he?” was a slip of the tongue, nor am I convinced Todd wasn’t the one who accessed “Abused and Accused” at work,’ said Strike. ‘He got antsy when I mentioned it and given how slack they are in that shop generally, I’m not taking Todd’s word for it that he couldn’t get online in there. From what he told me about his living arrangements, I doubt he’s got a computer at home. Calling Wright a “silly tit” for looking stuff like that up at work could’ve been self-recrimination. People slip up that way. So, what d’you think about putting some surveillance on him?’

‘I agree in principle,’ said Robin, ‘but we haven’t really got the manpower, have we?’

‘Well, we need to try and make it work, because I want him checked out. It’ll have occurred to you, I’m sure, that given the state of Pamela’s eyesight, the identification of Wright as Knowles rests largely on Jim Todd.’

‘It had occurred to me, yes,’ said Robin, who didn’t much appreciate the roughness of her partner’s tone. It wasn’t her fault that he’d slept with a journalist’s cousin.

‘Anyway,’ Strike said, ‘I read your notes on Albie Simpson-White. You think he knows more than he’s admitting.’

‘I do,’ said Robin. ‘That thing about Rupert having no choice but to leave Decima and “sometimes you’re better off not knowing things” – I want to know what that meant.’

‘That Fleetwood’s got another girlfriend pregnant?’ suggested Strike dismissively.

Robin was further annoyed by this reaction. She’d listened politely to Strike’s speculation about Jim Todd, after all.

‘But he said Rupert really loved Decima, and made him sound quite responsible and level-headed in general—’

‘If “responsible” and “level-headed” means knocking up your girlfriend, nicking a massive bit of silver from her father, then scarpering, Simpson-White needs a new fucking dictionary,’ said Strike, and Robin surmised, correctly, that in Strike’s current mood there was little point in trying to persuade him to take a kinder view of Rupert Fleetwood, so instead she said,

‘Well, if we had enough subcontractors, I’d suggest putting surveillance on Albie, too, because I think there’s an outside chance he’d lead us straight to Rupert. I know Decima doesn’t want us to find him alive, but—’

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘She doesn’t. I called her yesterday because I wanted to check with her about what we found out about Wright in St George’s Avenue, and she made it good and clear the only thing she wants to hear is that he’s dead.’

He brought the notes of his conversation with Decima to the top of the pile in front of him and redoubled his effort to concentrate.

‘I asked if Rupert ever did weights, and Decima said he looks after himself, likes the gym, and she could imagine him doing weights if he didn’t have access to a cross-trainer. As far as she’s aware, he’s never done jujitsu, but he did a bit of wrestling at school. She never saw him smoke dope but knows he has, in the past. I asked whether he knew how to handle a gun and she said, yes, a rifle, because his expensive Swiss boarding school had a shooting club, and then I asked whether he knew or had ever mentioned a woman called Rita or Rita Linda. Also no. Then I asked her whether he was ambidextrous.’

‘What?’ said Robin blankly. ‘Why?’

‘Because before phoning her, I went back through everything we’ve got so far, including the footage you got from Bullen & Co.’

‘But it’s useless,’ said Robin, who’d already looked at the three minutes of film. ‘Wright’s obscured nearly all the time he’s in there.’

‘Yeah, but on a second watch, I noticed something. Come here and I’ll show you.’

So Robin wheeled her chair round to Strike’s side of the partners’ desk. As she did so, Robin felt the mobile in her pocket vibrate, and suspected Pat had just sent her Jonny Rokeby’s message. Now feeling as though she was concealing a small but powerful explosive device on her person, she watched Strike bring up the clip of black and white film, which was far clearer and sharper than that from Ramsay Silver. The wide-angled camera looked down on the whole of Bullen & Co, which had a very large crate sitting close to the entrance and a couple of browsers. A man in a cravat, who Robin took to be Pamela’s husband, was scribbling at the desk.

‘Here he comes,’ said Strike.

Short and powerful-looking, wearing his full beard and glasses, Wright appeared temporarily unobscured, though unfortunately scratching the side of his face, before the largest of the browsing customers blocked him. He was holding a black and silver bag in one hand. Pamela’s husband picked up the bit of paper on which he’d been writing and advanced on Wright.

‘Now,’ said Strike, and he slowed the footage, ‘I know you can’t see him clearly, because of the bloke standing in front of him, but watch: Driscoll takes the bag and Wright bends over the crate to sign what I assume is a handwritten chit to show he took receipt of the centrepiece. Watch his elbow.’

‘Oh God, how did I miss that?’ gasped Robin. ‘He signs with his right hand!’

‘Exactly,’ said Strike, pausing the film. ‘So, there are three possibilities: one, he’s ambidextrous, two, for some reason he didn’t want the signature he gave at Bullen & Co to look like his own, or, three, he was faking being left-handed at Ramsays, and he forgot the pretence when he had to sign something unexpectedly.’

As Robin wheeled her chair back to the other side of the desk, she heard a high, clear voice she recognised as Kim Cochran’s in the outer office. Then there was a knock on the dividing door, which opened before either partner could say ‘come in’.

‘Oh,’ said Kim, seeing Robin first, ‘if it’s a bad time—’

‘No,’ said Strike, because he didn’t want to give Robin the impression he wasn’t happy for her to hear anything Kim had to say. ‘What’s up?’

Kim entered the room in another skin-tight dress, knee-length and black, with high-heeled boots. Her make-up, Robin noticed, was immaculate. Kim gave a little laugh and gestured down at her outfit in poorly feigned bashfulness, as though she’d only just remembered she was wearing it.

‘Sorry about this, it’s my last afternoon off before Christmas, I’m having lunch with my sister. Anyway, I’ve managed to get details of the getaway car they think the silver vault killers used.’

‘Really?’ said Strike.

‘Yes,’ said Kim. ‘OK if I sit down?’

She went to fetch a third chair without waiting for an answer. Though irritated by the intrusion, Robin took advantage of the distraction to pull her mobile out of her pocket and read the texts Pat had sent her.

Rokeby says he saw the thing in the paper and wanted to offer his own lawyers, says he’ll pay. Said he knows Cormoran never did it and that Culpepper’s a shit. Says he feels bad the illegitimate stuff keeps being dragged up.

Pat had then sent a second text.

He was very nice.

‘Love the goldfish, by the way,’ said the beaming Kim, who’d returned with one of the fold-up chairs. She sat down and crossed her legs, which made the clinging black dress ride halfway up her thighs.

‘So,’ she said, ‘none of my contacts can tell me why they didn’t give out details of the getaway car to the press. Like I said before, there seems to be something really weird going on around this case, everyone’s being super cagey, but anyway: it was a light-coloured Peugeot 208 with fake plates. It arrived at the end of Wild Court with one person in it, but after leaving Wild Court there were two, though no clear view of either of them. It headed west along the A40 then disappeared into a residential area, where they think it might have changed plates again. That’s as much as I’ve got so far, but I’ll keep trying.’

‘That’s very helpful, thanks,’ said Strike, once again injecting a note of finality into his voice, but this time Kim ignored it.

‘I’ve got news on Plug, too.’

‘Really?’ said Strike.

‘Yes. Whatever was in that shed has been moved. I followed Plug and his son to the allotment just after midnight. They were in there ten minutes, then took something out wrapped in a sack. It was big; it took two of them to carry it, and it was either dead or drugged.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike. ‘I called the bloody RSPCA, as well.’

‘Maybe that’s why they got rid of whatever it was,’ suggested Robin. ‘An inspector visited the shed and Plug heard about it.’

‘Then,’ said Kim, as though Robin hadn’t spoken, ‘they slung it in the back of Plug’s van and drove it all the way to Haringey, where they took it into a shitty house on Carnival Street.’

‘Plug and his son used to live in Haringey,’ said Robin. ‘Maybe a friend’s agreed to look after whatever it is?’

‘And after that,’ said Kim, still without acknowledging Robin in any way, ‘they came out and went back to Plug’s mum’s place.’

‘Get the number of the house in Carnival Street?’ asked Strike.

‘Yeah, number fifteen,’ said Kim.

‘OK, good work,’ said Strike, ‘write it up for the file. Might be worth keeping an eye on that house, as well.’

As she stood up and picked up her chair, Kim said to Strike,

‘D’you want coffee? I’m making some.’

‘Oh – yeah, that’d be great, thanks,’ said Strike.

‘Robin?’

‘No thanks,’ said Robin automatically, although in fact she’d have liked one, too.

Kim smiled and left, leaving the door open.

‘What were we just saying?’ asked Strike, running a hand over his face.

‘We were talking about Wright’s left-handedness,’ said Robin. ‘I take it you told Decima about it?’

‘Yeah. We took the case on the basis we wouldn’t string her along, right?’

‘Of course,’ said Robin.

‘So I told her the truth: we haven’t yet found any evidence to suggest Fleetwood was Wright, and it’s looking even less likely than it did at the start – at which she burst into tears, begged me to keep investigating and told me she’s left another load of messages for Sacha Legard to try and make him talk to me, seeing as he’s ignoring my emails.’

Kim reappeared with a mug of coffee.

‘Cheers,’ said Strike, noting her warm smile as she set it down and half wishing he hadn’t accepted it. Kim left, closing the door behind her.

She’s going to hang around until we come out, thought Robin. She’s not going to let that dress go to waste.

‘I’d imagine the reason the Met didn’t publicise that Peugeot 208,’ said Strike, lowering his voice, ‘is that someone in Lynden Knowles’ circle drives one.’

‘Probably,’ agreed Robin.

‘Moving on,’ said Strike, turning to yet another page of notes, ‘Pat’s found ninety-two married Hussein Mohameds so far, so we’re a while away from finding the one who lived upstairs from William Wright, but when I’ve got time I’ll comb through them and see if any of them look likely.

‘I’ve also done a bit of research on our porn friend, Dangerous Dick. He’s registered with what looks like London’s premier adult entertainment agency, Triple XR – or he was. I called there – fake name, obviously – and asked to be put in touch with him. He’s no longer on their books.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

‘Obviously, that doesn’t mean he’s been bumped off, but it’s interesting, all the same. I asked for contact details and they sounded suspicious and said I could leave a message for him. I asked him to call, but he hasn’t. I’d imagine they get a fair few nutters trying to contact them, porn stars, so I think you might have to make the next approach. New voice, and I’d imagine a woman will seem less fishy, but I can’t think of any cover other than pretending you’re casting a porn shoot.’

‘Right,’ said Robin, privately wondering how many more unforeseen dilemmas she was going to have to face today. Exactly how you went about convincing an adult actors’ agency you were a bona fide porn producer, she had no idea at all.

‘We’ll workshop it,’ said Strike, ‘after Christmas. In the meantime, I’ll have a bash at identifying the woman who delivered that cipher note. If she’s in the same line of work, she’s bound to have an online presence. Anyway, what’ve you got?’

‘Well, I’ve hit a complete dead end on Sapphire, the girl who messaged Osgood and Oz. I called the missing persons’ charity,’ Robin added. ‘Apparently she disappeared from a foster home. She’d only been there a month and hadn’t told the foster parents anything about meeting a man, or mentioned anyone called Oz. She’s got quite a bit of form for running away, though, so maybe there’s nothing in that at all, but,’ Robin went on tentatively, ‘I’ve actually found something else. It might be completely irrelevant, but for what it’s worth…’

She typed a few words into her own keyboard then turned the computer monitor so that Strike could see a news story dating from June.

Two pictures of the same beautiful young woman, who had waist-length black hair and olive skin, stared out of the screen. In one, the girl was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. In the other, she was pouting in black lingerie.

Robin had thought she might need to explain to Strike why she was showing him the article, but when he’d finished reading, he said,

‘Yeah, I remember seeing that. You think she might’ve been the light-skinned Asian woman who took stuff out of William Wright’s flat, before he was murdered?’

‘Well, she’s obviously not Asian, but that hall’s dark and Mandy only saw the couple briefly. I know it’s a very long shot, but she does match the basic description of the woman – light brown skin, long black hair, didn’t sound English – and she was murdered just twenty-four hours after Wright.’ Robin could hear how thin her theory sounded when spoken aloud, yet still felt compelled to lay it all out. ‘I was struck by Sofia telling her flatmate she’d be away all weekend, but not giving details of what she was supposed to be doing.’

‘Maybe they’d fallen out. Or maybe they weren’t friends, just people who rented a flat together.’

‘I know it could just be that,’ said Robin, ‘but look at this.’

She typed in another search term, then said,

‘This is the description they gave out of the body, before it was identified as Sofia. “Latina or South Asian, 162 cm, wearing jeans, trainers and a pink T-shirt with a peony design.”’ She looked up at Strike. ‘Mandy said the girl who went in and out of Wright’s flat was wearing a pink top with flowers on it.’

She could tell by Strike’s expression that he was now interested, so she continued,

‘The last known sighting of Sofia alive was on the Thursday afternoon, so the day before the Murdoch silver arrived at Ramsay Silver. On Friday afternoon, a girl matching Sofia’s description and wearing a very similar or identical outfit drives to St George’s Avenue in a silver car, lets herself into Wright’s room, removes things in a suitcase and leaves the house. A silver car – possibly the same silver car – turns up early next morning, a curly-haired man goes into the house and comes out with more stuff in a suitcase. Somebody else is driving. The following day, Sofia’s murdered in the middle of nowhere, near an old abandoned van.’

‘A van,’ repeated Strike.

‘I know it’d fit better if it had been an abandoned Peugeot 208—’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Strike. ‘A man emailed Calvin Osgood, thinking he was Oz, and asking whether he was still interested in buying his van, remember?’

‘Oh God, of course!’

Strike stroked his chin, eyes narrowed.

‘You know, women can be useful in certain situations.’

‘Thanks,’ said Robin.

Strike almost smiled for the first time since waking.

‘I mean, the presence of a woman usually makes everything seem more innocuous. Rightly or wrongly, people see a man and a woman and they think “couple going about their ordinary business”, not “off to commit theft and murder”.’

Strike took a pull on his vape pen. He really needed to increase the concentration of nicotine, because it wasn’t satisfying him nearly as much as a Benson & Hedges would have done.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘for the sake of argument, let’s say Sofia Medina hooked up with one of the guys who bumped off Wright. Let’s push it a bit further and say that man was our curly haired friend Oz. She tells her flatmate she’s going to be away all weekend because she knows she’ll be assisting Oz in nicking the Murdoch silver and murdering William Wright.’

‘When you put it like that,’ said Robin, ‘it starts sounding less credible. She was a student. She had prospects. Why on earth would she agree to get involved in murder?’

‘He could’ve been coercing her.’

‘How?’

‘Young women whose families don’t know they’ve got OnlyFans accounts can be vulnerable to blackmail.’

‘But what was he blackmailing her to do? She can’t have killed Wright and she wouldn’t have been much use carrying the Oriental Centrepiece, either.’

‘Well, with a girl who looks like that, the obvious answer would be acting as bait.’

Both of them immediately thought of the pixelated Candy, posing in her red underwear in the paper.

‘Wright told his neighbours a girlfriend would be coming to live with him,’ said Robin. ‘Could that have been Sofia Medina? Could she have been the one who persuaded him to go and work at Ramsay Silver?’

‘It’s a theory,’ said Strike, who was thinking the thing out. ‘Maybe Wright thought he and Medina would be doing a Bonnie and Clyde, not realising there were people behind her who were going to gouge out his eyes and cut off his dick?’

‘Maybe there’s no connection,’ Robin said, losing confidence again.

‘’Course, Medina might not have realised the job was going to involve murder and mutilation,’ said Strike. ‘Oz might’ve kidded her that it was only burglary, maybe spun her some yarn about how he had a right to the silver, that she was helping him get back what was rightfully his. He could’ve claimed Ramsay had done him wrong in some way, and this was revenge. Or – hang on.’

Strike got to his feet and went to consult the card on the noticeboard where he’d written everything they’d found out so far about Oz.

‘The real Osgood got another email meant for Oz,’ said Strike, reading the card. ‘A girl wrote to him in bad English, wanting to know about a prank Oz played on her cousin…’

‘Bad English,’ repeated Robin. ‘You think the girl was Spanish?’

‘Could well be,’ said Strike. ‘Shame the dozy prick deleted the emails.’

‘But what kind of “prank” would involve Oz entering the shop under cover of darkness and coming out covered in bloodstains?’

‘She might not’ve noticed the bloodstains if he was staggering under the weight of the Oriental Centrepiece,’ said Strike.

‘But how did he explain away coming back out of the shop with a full set of men’s clothes? Because Wright had been stripped, remember.’

‘Yeah, good point,’ said Strike, frowning. ‘Might call Wardle back and point out the coincidence of Sofia Medina’s appearance and clothing matching the description of the woman who visited Wright’s house in the early hours of the morning, though.’

Strike was still standing with his back to Robin, scanning the increasingly full noticeboard. While he did so, Robin agonised over what she ought to do about Jonny Rokeby’s message. She’d have quite liked to withhold it, because unless there’d been communication between them of which she was unaware, the last words her partner had spoken to his father were ‘go fuck yourself’. However, it would definitely be wrong not to pass on the offer of legal assistance.

Unaware of what was going on behind his back, Strike, who was looking at a new piece of paper pinned beneath the picture of Tyler Powell, said,

‘You found “Griff”.’

‘What?’ said Robin.

‘“Man Tyler Powell confided in, instead of his grandmother”, it says here.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Robin. ‘Dilys said “he told Griff where he was going, not me”. I think that’s his address. Dilys said Griff lives “up the road” and an Ian Griffiths lives right opposite Tyler’s parents. He might be worth talking to, as well as Dilys.’

‘And Dilys could meet us any time in January?’ said Strike, still reading Robin’s note.

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘I’ve been putting more pressure on Jade Semple and she seems to be wavering. I’ve reassured her I’m not working for the press, although I can’t see why she’s so worried about that. If she genuinely wants to find her husband, a bit more coverage might help. Anyway, if I can get her to agree, we’ll try and book those interviews around the same time, pick them off together.’

‘OK,’ said Robin, still trying to decide how best to broach the subject of Rokeby.

Strike turned away from the board, and was about to embark on a discussion of the best way for them to travel from London to Ironbridge, when Robin said,

‘Listen, I’ve got something to tell you,’ (and for a second, Strike remembered that it was he who’d planned to say those words, or something very like them, this morning) ‘but please – please don’t fly off the handle. Promise me you won’t do anything rash.’

‘All right,’ said Strike, wondering what on earth was coming. She wouldn’t preface an announcement of her engagement with these words, would she?

‘Your father just called the office. He saw that article and he’s offering help – legal help. He says he’ll pay for his own lawyers to take action.’

Strike simply stared at her. On the other side of the door, Robin could hear Kim laughing.

‘He phoned while you were talking to Robertson,’ said Robin. ‘I told Pat to take a message, and – well, that’s it. He said he felt bad that – that he’d been dragged up in the story, so he wanted to help. Pat says he was nice… Don’t go ballistic. Please.’

‘I’m not going to,’ said Strike, with difficulty.

Not with you here, anyway.

Robin checked the time on her phone.

‘I’d better get going,’ she said, getting to her feet.

‘You driving to Yorkshire this afternoon?’

‘This evening,’ said Robin, ‘but I need to pack and sort a few things out.’

In fact, she had an appointment with her GP that afternoon. It had been difficult to get one before Christmas and she didn’t want to miss it.

‘I’ve got your present here,’ said Robin, now reaching into her bag and pulling out what looked like a card. ‘I know it doesn’t look like much, but you’ll understand when you open it.’

‘Thanks,’ said Strike, taking it automatically. ‘I left yours upstairs. Hang on.’

Robin followed him into the outer office, where Kim was leaning up against the sink, coffee in hand. As Strike headed for the glass door, Kim said,

‘Thanks for the gift token, Cormoran.’

‘Thank Robin, it was her idea,’ said Strike. He left for his flat. As soon as the glass door had closed, Pat said to Robin in the growl that passed for her whisper,

‘Did you tell him?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘What’s he going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Robin.

Kim’s bird-bright eyes were moving from one to the other; Robin could almost see her nose quivering with curiosity.

Strike was back within a few minutes, holding a small, flat square box wrapped in Christmas paper, and a card.

‘Happy Christmas,’ he said, handing it to Robin.

‘Th—’

The phone on Pat’s desk rang and Robin felt her stomach clench.

Please God, not Rokeby again.

‘Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency… who?’

Pat’s eyes widened.

‘Just going to put you on hold.’

She pressed a button and looked round at Strike.

‘He says he’s Sacha Legard.’

‘What?’ said Kim, eyes widening. ‘The actor?’

‘I’d better get going,’ said Robin, who was holding her present. ‘Merry Christmas, everyone.’

Had Kim and Pat not been there, and Legard not waiting on hold, she might have said more to Strike, might have reiterated her plea for him not to blow up at his father, for his own sake rather than Rokeby’s, but as it was, she just smiled at him, turned and left.

‘OK,’ Strike said dourly to Pat (fuck Rokeby, fuck Christmas, fuck fucking Culpepper, fuck fucking everything), ‘put Legard through to me in here.’

He retreated to the inner office again. The phone on his desk rang.

‘Strike.’

‘Cormoran,’ said Sacha Legard’s beautifully modulated voice. ‘Long time no speak.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike.

‘I didn’t realise you’d been trying to contact me.’

The fuck you didn’t.

‘I’ve had a call from Dessie Longcaster – Mullins, I mean – sounding pretty upset,’ said Legard.

‘Did she tell you what this is about?’ asked Strike.

‘Yeah, my cousin Rupert,’ said Legard, with a tinge of humorous exasperation.

‘Decima’s very worried about him. Could we meet to talk?’

‘Honestly, I think this is all a bit of a storm in a teacup,’ said Legard.

Interviewers, as Strike knew, generally concurred that Sacha Legard was not only an outstanding talent, but a man of uncommon sweetness and generosity of spirit. Strike, who knew better, had avoided reading their fawning comments for years; he ate quite enough fried food, and didn’t need the increase in blood pressure. Strike now let his silence speak for him. Did Legard want to puncture his charming public image by figuring as a man unwilling to help a distressed woman? Did he really want to seem indifferent to the whereabouts of his young cousin?

‘Well, if it’ll help put Dessie’s mind at ease,’ said Legard finally, ‘of course.’

‘Great,’ said Strike. ‘Tomorrow suit you? I’m free all day.’

‘Sure. Come to the National Theatre at three. It’s our last night of—’

‘Fine, I’ll see you then,’ said Strike, and he achieved some small sublimation of his continuing urge to punch someone by hanging up before Sacha Legard could tell him which undoubtedly well-reviewed play he was currently starring in.

34

Robin’s trip to the GP was difficult in ways she hadn’t anticipated. All she’d really wanted was to find out whether the sharp pains in her lower right side were anything to be concerned about, and the short answer to that, according to the blunt young male locum she was forced to see, instead of the female doctor she’d requested, was ‘no’. Having asked her whether she’d had symptoms of an infection, such as a raised temperature, and whether the incision site had healed well (she’d declined his offer to have a look at it), he said,

‘You’ve had an operation,’ as though she hadn’t realised, as though she’d slept through the shock and the pain and the morphine, ‘you’re still healing. Have you been very physically active since you left hospital?’

‘Reasonably,’ said Robin, remembering the dash along the pavement to Plug’s shed, and today’s sprint up the agency’s stairs.

‘Well, there you are,’ said the doctor.

‘Right,’ said Robin, bending to pick up her bag to leave, but the doctor was still talking.

‘I see they discussed IVF with you, at the hospital,’ he said, eyes on his computer monitor.

‘Yes, but—’

‘You’re thirty-two, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘While you’re still under thirty-five, you’ve got around a fifty-five per cent chance of a live birth via IVF,’ he said, ‘but the odds are lower with a first implantation. Wait until forty, and your odds drop to ten per cent.’

‘OK,’ said Robin, ‘well, thank—’

‘Women often think IVF’s a safety net. There are no guarantees. If that’s what you want, you need to be thinking about it—’

‘Sooner rather than later,’ said Robin. ‘Yes, the surgeon said.’

She didn’t mean to be rude, but she’d already had more than enough of the GP, his statistics, his monobrow and his air of patronage. Maybe she’d imagined the air of judgement when he’d read ‘chlamydia’ aloud, off his screen, but she was damned if she was going to tell him how her fallopian tubes had come to be ruined.

Robin spent most of the four-hour drive to Masham feigning a cheerfulness she didn’t feel. Murphy, who’d had the tact not to mention the article about Strike and Candy, was in high spirits because, at last, he and his team had secured three arrests in the case of the shot brothers: that of the man who’d fired the gun, the driver of the car from which he’d done so, and the girlfriend of the latter, who’d given both men a fake alibi. Sincerely pleased for him, and for the mother of the boys, Robin was full of congratulations, and told herself it was the wrong moment to tell him about her visit to the GP.

When, exactly, would be the right moment to discuss that, Robin didn’t know. She had a horrible feeling that if she told Murphy what the odds of a successful birth were via IVF he’d suggest they start trying for a child immediately, that his previous ‘you’re only thirty-two’ would turn rapidly into ‘you’re already thirty-two’. Robin thought again of all the women in the world who’d be delighted that their boyfriend wanted to have children with them, and she asked herself what was wrong with her, that she felt panicked and stifled at the thought of what she’d once thought she wanted, before she’d been sent to a rundown office in Denmark Street as a temporary secretary, and everything had changed: the part of her she’d thought the rapist had taken away for ever had proven to be not dead, but dormant, just waiting for its chance, while something she’d taken for granted – that she could have children as and when she wished – was gone for ever, although she hadn’t then known it.

Don’t cry, Robin told herself, as the dark M11 slipped past the car windows, the Christmas songs played on the radio, and Murphy talked in detail about how he’d personally ground down the driver’s girlfriend, catching the woman out in contradictions in her story.

‘She’s a spice addict,’ he told Robin.

‘A what addict?’

‘Spice. Synthetic cannabis. It’s bloody everywhere. She was sweating like she was in a sauna. Spoke about three words a minute. Nearly five hours it took, to break her.’

Murphy took a swig of water, as though the memory of it made him hoarse.

‘Christ, I’m looking forward to this. I need a break.’

‘Me too,’ said Robin untruthfully. In fact, she’d have given almost anything to be driving in the opposite direction, back to her solitary flat and work, even if that was where the man who’d seized the back of her neck was. It’ll ’appen again unless you fuckin’ give this up.

They arrived at last, by darkness, at the old stone house in Masham where Robin had grown up. Her father had strung white lights in the old lilac tree in the front garden. When Robin pressed the doorbell there was a rush of welcome during which Betty the new puppy dashed outside and had to be rescued from the middle of the road by Murphy. Here was Stephen, Robin’s eldest brother, and Jenny, his tall wife, in such an advanced state of pregnancy it took her three goes to get up out of her armchair to greet the newcomers, and Jonathan, Robin’s youngest brother, who’d now graduated from university and was working for a brand management consultancy in Manchester; Robin’s dark-haired father, in his horn-rimmed spectacles, and her mother, Linda, whose affection for Murphy meant he received just as warm a hug as Robin did. The family had delayed dinner so Robin and her boyfriend could join them. They all settled around the scrubbed kitchen table, on a floor covered in sheets of newspaper due to the presence of the so far un-housetrained Betty, whose tail caused her entire body to undulate as she wagged it non-stop. With a slight raising of her spirits, Robin drank wine and ate the chicken and mushroom casserole her mother had cooked, and the news that her ex-husband, Matthew, was also in town for Christmas, with his second wife and son, caused her barely a tremor of emotion.

‘She’s pregnant again,’ Linda informed the family, ‘that Sarah. I saw her in the Co-op.’

‘Well, good luck to her,’ said Robin, determinedly offhand.

‘When are you due?’ Murphy asked Jenny.

‘Third of January,’ said Jenny, ‘but honestly, he can come tonight if he wants. I’m sick of the bloody heartburn.’

‘It’s a boy?’ said Robin, who hadn’t known this.

‘Yeah, and they reckon he’s going to be well over nine pounds,’ said Stephen.

‘I’m glad one of us is happy about that,’ said Jenny.

‘We’ve been worried,’ said Linda, mock-reproving, as she looked down the table at her daughter-in-law. ‘She was still working until a month ago,’ Linda told Robin.

‘Only the small stuff, Linda,’ said Jenny, who was a vet. ‘No horses or cattle.’

‘I thought Martin would be here,’ said Robin.

Martin was the third of the Ellacotts’ four children, who, until very recently, had lived with his parents, although he’d now moved in with his pregnant girlfriend in nearby Ripon.

‘No, they’re coming tomorrow,’ said Linda, with just that shade of reserve that told Robin there was a story that her mother didn’t want to share in front of company.

Robin was glad to get to bed in her old room. Murphy fell asleep almost as soon as he lay down. Robin listened to the sounds of the others going in and out of the bathroom, of Annabel’s parents checking on her in Martin’s old room, of Jonathan moving around in the attic conversion where, as the last-born, he’d had to sleep when young. She wondered for a few minutes what was in the flat, square box Strike had given her for Christmas, which she’d left at the bottom of her holdall when unpacking, rather than taking it downstairs and putting it beneath the Christmas tree, as she and Murphy had done with the presents they’d bought the family, and each other. Strike’s box had the size and weight appropriate to a piece of jewellery, but she could think of nothing less likely than her detective partner giving her something so personal, not when he’d been scared out of buying her perfume one year because the names had seemed too intimate. The memory of Strike telling her he’d panicked at the idea of giving her a bottle labelled something like ‘Shaggable You’ made her smile in the dark.

It’ll be fine, she told herself, listening to Murphy’s slow breathing. It’s only four days.

35

Strike considered self-pity an unjustifiable waste of time, yet the dejection gripping him the following morning refused to lift. Whatever Robin had said previously about the strains of a family Christmas, who was to say she wouldn’t be softened by the festive atmosphere once she got to Masham? There’d be kids and carol services, and maybe mulled bloody wine, and everyone charmed by her immensely eligible CID officer… Strike had only ever visited Masham once before, to gatecrash Robin’s wedding. Well, he was fucked if he’d do that a second time.

He was currently sitting in his BMW, keeping watch over a builders’ warehouse to which he’d tailed the unemployed Plug. While watching the warehouse doors for Plug’s reappearance, Strike exacerbated his own despondency by pondering the many other dilemmas facing him.

Fergus Robertson’s article had appeared in the Telegraph that morning. As the detective supposed he should have foreseen, some tattered code of honour among hacks had prevented Robertson from telling the world the real reason that Dominic Culpepper was currently determined to trash Strike’s reputation, but he’d intimated that Strike had made many enemies during his investigative career and quoted Strike in full as regarded his denial of everything pertaining to Candy, and his empty threat of legal action. Perhaps, Strike thought, eyes on the warehouse, he really should hire a lawyer. The costs would be exorbitant, but he had a nasty feeling his rebuttal wouldn’t be sufficient to make the Candy story disappear for good.

He had no intention of accepting his father’s offer of financial help, which he was certain stemmed from a desire on Rokeby’s part to bolster his own public image. Strike considered that Rokeby had violated a territorial boundary by calling his office in Denmark Street and speaking to one of Strike’s employees. Yes, Robin was probably right: the wisest course was to ignore his father, but if she returned from Masham engaged, Strike would consider all previous pledges cancelled.

Meanwhile, Jade, the abandoned wife of Niall Semple, had texted him the previous evening.

look theres no point you coming to see me because I don’t think Niall was the man in that shop any more

This was bad news, because in the event that Robin returned from Masham ringless, a trip to Scotland would give Strike an excellent opportunity to declare himself, whereas if they were only travelling as far as Ironbridge, it would be difficult to justify an overnight stay in a hotel. He’d typed back:

What changed your mind?

Her answer was,

I think he’s with another woman

Strike had replied asking whether it wouldn’t put her mind at rest to make sure her husband hadn’t been in the vault, but there’d been no response.

As if all this wasn’t enough to be dealing with, Strike had received an anonymous call to his mobile, forwarded from the office phone, shortly after leaving Denmark Street that morning. After some guttural breathing, a rasping voice had said,

‘Leave it. We’ve got gow-too on our side. Leave it.’

‘The fuck’s “gow-too”?’ Strike had said, at which the caller had hung up.

Gow-too. Since the unknown man had threatened Robin in Harrods, Strike was no longer disposed to dismiss the anonymous caller as a joker amusing himself at the agency’s expense. That said, as Robin was currently safe in Yorkshire, he was simply riled that another irritant had been added to his already tottering pile.

There was nothing in Strike’s immediate future likely to cheer him up. He’d gladly have slept through the next three days, but he wasn’t even allowed that. The following day was Christmas Eve, which meant having to attend Lucy’s party for the neighbours, followed by a night in the spare room and the enforced jollity of Christmas Day, with his brother-in-law Greg making the usual barbed comments about Strike’s life choices. The detective usually ignored these for his sister’s sake, though it occurred to him, as he sat in his car watching the warehouse where Plug was shopping, that punching Greg might be almost as satisfying as battering Dominic Culpepper, and he indulged himself for a few seconds by imagining knocking Greg out over the turkey. However, before he got anywhere near Christmas lunch, he had to meet Sacha Legard at the National Theatre, a prospect that was dredging up memories of Strike’s late fiancée which, in his weakened emotional state, he was finding impossible to fend off.

Charlotte’s attitude towards her half-brother Sacha, and indeed her entire family, had always swung between two polar extremes. She’d spent much of her life damning them all to hell and declaring that she hated and dreaded Heberley House, the stately home in which she’d spent most of her childhood, and where her mother and stepfather had thrown extravagant, druggy parties, at one of which Charlotte, aged ten, had accidentally ingested LSD. She’d insisted that she despised the conventions of her class, blamed her boarding schools and relatives for her unhappiness, and claimed that all she wanted out of life now that she was free of them were simple pleasures and genuine human connection. This had been the part of Charlotte that Strike had both loved and pitied, and which, in the earliest days of their affair, he’d allowed himself to believe was the ‘real’ Charlotte.

However, with age and experience had come the unwilling realisation that the woman he loved was chameleon-like, multifaceted and often manipulative, containing many other selves which were just as real as his favourite one. Shifts between these different aspects of her personality would come without warning; suddenly, she’d find the amusements Strike could afford on a military policeman’s salary dull and restrictive, and she’d announce a desire for an expensive day out at the races with champagne and heavy betting, or a drop-of-the-hat trip to Marrakesh with high society friends, including ‘Sachy’ and ‘Val’, because ‘come on, darling, it’ll be fun’, and then she’d mock Strike for his reluctance and for his bourgeois obsession with solvency and sincerity.

‘Oh, of course Sachy’s a massive hypocrite,’ Charlotte had once said, laughing, when Strike had laid this charge against her half-brother, after a dinner party during which Sacha and another wealthy actor had talked socialism through three courses. ‘We all know he votes Tory and there’s not a tax dodge he isn’t wise to. Lighten up, darling, you take these things way too seriously.’

In the manic episodes that seized Charlotte at regular intervals, she’d ask why Strike cared that the public face didn’t match the private mores, as long as the person concerned was entertaining and stylish. Why did Strike have to bore and embarrass everyone with quibbles rooted in actual experience of poverty and squalor? And arguments would ensue, in which she’d accuse Strike of parsimony and joylessness, and if he reminded Charlotte of things she’d said, days or even hours previously, about her hatred of double standards, falseness and materialism, there’d be a sudden eruption of rage, in which she’d throw wild accusations at him: that he hated and despised her, and thought her worthless and shallow, and then would come either self-destructive drinking or flung missiles, and often both.

The one family member towards whom Charlotte had never, under any circumstances, expressed love, was her mother. Charlotte had been regarded as surplus to requirements by both her parents, who’d been hoping for a son after her elder sister. Charlotte had only ever known disdain and unkindness from Tara, which Strike had always believed was rooted in their close physical resemblance, the narcissistic Tara hating to see her own lost youthful beauty blinking at her across the breakfast table. Never, before or since, had he known a parent and child hate each other as Tara and Charlotte had, and he ascribed most of Charlotte’s mental instability to a childhood of neglect that had amounted, at times, to outright abuse.

Tara’s latent maternal instinct had finally awoken with the arrival of Sacha, who was the product of her third marriage. Tara had doted on her only son, perfectly content to see her own features in masculine form, and he’d become the only person the hedonistic, profoundly self-centred Tara cared about as much as herself. In consequence, Sacha was the only person in Charlotte’s drink- and drug-riven family who could sincerely say that he’d had an entirely happy upbringing.

This wasn’t, of course, Sacha’s fault and Strike didn’t blame him for it. His grudge sprang from the way Sacha had behaved once he was old enough to notice Tara’s callousness towards his sister. Sacha was the only living soul who might have been able to intervene to some effect, yet Charlotte’s suicide attempts and spells in mental health facilities had always gone unacknowledged by her half-brother, who’d never visited her, never called, and never referred to any of them after they’d passed. When Charlotte was well, Sacha was delighted to socialise with her, because she was a witty and ornamental asset to any gathering. Otherwise, as far as Sacha was concerned, Charlotte might as well not have existed.

There’d been one occasion, and one only, on which Strike had appealed to the younger man for assistance. Notwithstanding her frequent diatribes against the place, Charlotte had been determined to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with a large party at Heberley House. Strike had foreseen myriad possibilities for drama and conflict in trying to stage the event at Heberley, and had tried to persuade Charlotte that a party in London, or even a weekend away with him, would be preferable, but to no avail. Charlotte wanted champagne and canapés, two hundred people in black tie crammed into the ballroom, pictures taken on the sweeping staircase and lanterns hung in the trees of the deer park, and Strike’s lack of enthusiasm for the plan was taken, inevitably, as a drag and a slight. Maybe some remnant of the neglected, unloved child Charlotte had once been was trying to prove to herself that she had worth in the eyes of her family, or perhaps she was deliberately setting up a situation in which an implosion would occur. Strike had become familiar, by then, with the dangerous part of Charlotte that sometimes sought to wound herself as deeply, and on as grand a scale, as possible.

Two months of entirely predictable conflict with Tara prior to the party had culminated in Tara countermanding half of the arrangements and announcing that she’d be spending the day of the event in St Moritz with her son. Unaware that Tara had dropped this bombshell by voicemail, Strike, who’d been on leave from the army at the time, had returned to Charlotte’s flat after a pint with his old friend Nick to find no sign of his girlfriend, but the black lace dress she’d been planning to wear to her Heberley party lying in shreds on the bedroom floor, and smears of blood in the bathroom sink. She wasn’t answering her phone, nor did she return that night. The following morning, unable to reach any other family member, he’d called Sacha.

When he answered his mobile, Sacha was in a first-class lounge at Heathrow, among the jet set crowd with whom Tara ran. The information that his sister had gone missing, leaving bloodstains and a ripped-up dress behind her, hadn’t made the slightest dent in Sacha’s good humour. Though speaking to a man ten years older than himself and with far broader life experience, the twenty-year-old Sacha had adopted a world-weary tone as he told Strike that Tara’s therapist had advised her that a little tough love was in order where his sister was concerned. The best thing Strike could do, Sacha had said, while the laughter of Tara and friends rang in the background, was to ignore this obvious bid for attention, and before Strike could tell Sacha exactly what he thought of him and his mother, the young man had hung up.

It had taken Strike a further forty-eight hours to track Charlotte down to a hospital. She’d swallowed a handful of anti-depressants with as much whisky as she could stomach in the middle of a Soho bar. When she’d slipped sideways off her chair, the manager had gone to her assistance, only to be roundly insulted and told to keep his fucking hands off her. Incredibly, she’d still been able to walk, because she then staggered out onto the pavement and blundered into traffic, where she’d been clipped by a passing bus. When Strike finally found her, a day after his own thirtieth birthday, which he’d spent making fruitless calls to more relatives and ringing hospitals, she was lying in a surgical ward after having her stomach pumped, with self-harm marks up her arms and a fractured shoulder. His reward for three days of dread and non-stop attempts to interest her relatives in her fate had been to be told what a complete fucking bastard he was for having gone out for a pint with Nick, just when she most needed him. She’d then presented him with one of her regular me-or-the-army ultimatums and Strike had, as usual, chosen the military, and returned to Germany, where he was then stationed, a temporarily free man.

When Charlotte had been found dead in a blood-filled bath by the police, Sacha had had the perfect, poignant statement ready for the papers: ‘I’m just one of the heartbroken people who loved her, struggling to comprehend the fact that we’ll never hear her laugh again. “Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”’

Sitting in his chilly BMW, unwillingly remembering all of this, Strike asked himself yet again what the hell he’d been playing at, all those times he’d agreed to take Charlotte back. He prized truth; she’d been an incorrigible liar. He’d insisted that you could, with work, rise above your genetic inheritance, whereas Charlotte had had a fatalistic belief that she was inescapably damned by a family plagued with addiction. Yet they’d known each other so well that each had been able to predict with almost frightening accuracy what the other was thinking and feeling. While enmeshed in the relationship, Strike had never been able to imagine loving another woman as deeply, but since it had ended, he thought of it in terms of a protracted infection he’d finally succeeded in throwing off.

It occurred to him now, as he sat staring at the builders’ warehouse, that Robin, who seemed so much less complicated than his dead ex-fiancée, was far more of a mystery to him than Charlotte had ever been. He didn’t know what Robin was thinking and feeling, and falling in love with her, which had happened entirely against his will, didn’t resemble an infection, but the recognition of a deficiency he’d never known he had, but which had become gradually and painfully symptomatic. And now – every thought led back there, no matter how seemingly unrelated – she was in Masham with Murphy, and he was alone and miserable, and he had nobody to blame but himself.

36

Strike had few strong opinions on architecture, but he’d always considered the brutalist building that housed the National Theatre, which resembled a cross between a multi-storey car park and a power station, one of London’s worst eyesores. Walking towards it at ten to three that afternoon, with the dull grey Thames glimmering in the middle distance, Strike thought it compared unfavourably with the builders’ warehouse where he’d just handed over surveillance to Midge. A banner hanging close to the door announced that Sacha’s play was called Death Is No Punishment, and featured a headshot of Sacha looking serious and resolute in what appeared to be striped pyjamas.

A timid-looking, bushy-haired young woman in glasses was hovering beside the entrance, a lanyard around her neck.

‘Mr Strike?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I’m Grace. Sacha asked me to take you up to him. It’s a bit of a confusing building, if you don’t know it.’

‘OK,’ said Strike.

She held the door open for him, and, as they walked together across the vast, brown-carpeted foyer, with its high ceiling patterned like a gigantic concrete waffle, his guide asked Strike whether he’d seen Sacha’s play.

‘No,’ said Strike.

‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ she said breathlessly, and she spoke for several minutes about the piece, in which Sacha played the real life Dr Walter Loebner, who’d survived Gestapo torture, escaped from a camp and lived to testify against his tormentors.

Strike resisted the temptation to snort. There was, of course, no law decreeing that only courageous men should impersonate those who’d survived unspeakable atrocities before effecting death-defying escapes, but he happened to find it supremely incongruous that Sacha Legard should be doing so. Charlotte and Strike, both of whom possessed physical courage aplenty, had often laughed together about how successfully Tara had inculcated in her adored son her own horror of blemishing nature’s finest handiwork. Strike knew very well that Sacha fretted about the safety of flying harnesses and the likelihood of sustaining injury during well-rehearsed sword fights, had never progressed past the nursery slopes when skiing, and preferred his stunt doubles to do anything in the nature of diving, horseback riding or jumping off high ledges. None of this was widely known, of course, because Sacha made such a convincing on-screen daredevil.

‘… go to Broadway, but I don’t think they can imagine anyone except Sacha as Walter, and he’s committed to a film next year…’

Strike and his guide ascended in a lift to the upper floors, and the young woman continued to rhapsodise about Sacha until Strike’s bored expression intimidated her into silence. She led him at last into a small bar reserved for the cast on the third floor, and there sat Sacha, alone except for the barman.

The actor was wearing jeans and a dark blue shirt, and even in the bar’s unflattering lighting looked astoundingly handsome. Like many of his fellow thespians, he was far slighter in person than he appeared on stage or screen.

‘Cormoran,’ he said warmly, getting to his feet. ‘Last time we saw each other must’ve been at Dad’s funeral.’

‘Must’ve been, yeah,’ said Strike, shaking Sacha’s proffered hand.

‘Thanks, Your Grace,’ said Sacha, smiling at the bespectacled young woman, who turned pink with pleasure at what was evidently a standing joke, and responded with,

‘You’re welcome, My Lord. Shall I get—?’

‘What are you drinking?’ Sacha asked Strike.

‘Coffee, if there is any,’ said the detective, and Grace bustled to fetch it.

‘You’ve done bloody well for yourself since we last met,’ said Sacha heartily.

‘As have you,’ said Strike, with an effort.

‘Ha,’ said Sacha, with a self-deprecating smile, ‘you’re only as good as your last review in this game.’

‘He can afford to say that,’ trilled Grace from the counter, ‘because he “owns the stage”, according to the Independent!’

‘“Owns the stage”,’ said Sacha, with a grin and a slight eye roll, as he sat back down. ‘What does that even mean?’

Strike had often thought Sacha more natural onstage than off. When the cameras were on, or the curtain went up, Sacha perfectly aped genuine human emotion. Offstage he always had a slight air of performing himself, and Strike was currently being given a private performance of Talented Actor, Resting.

‘So, you’re Lord Legard these days,’ said Strike.

‘Oh, Christ, no,’ said Sacha, with a laugh. ‘No, I’m like Dad, I don’t use the title. It’s so bloody outdated, all that.’

But you let underlings know, for joking purposes. Prick.

Approaching the theatre, Strike had wondered whether Sacha would mention Charlotte, whether he’d press Strike’s hand in condolence or reuse his Romeo and Juliet quotation, all of which Strike would have found thoroughly objectionable, but the total absence of comment stuck in his craw even more. He supposed he should have realised that Sacha would prefer no mention of the past and, perversely, this made Strike determined to make allusion to it when the opportunity arose.

Grace set a coffee in front of Strike, who thanked her. She left the bar.

‘So,’ said Sacha, ‘you want to talk about Rupe?’

‘That’s right,’ said Strike, taking out his notebook.

‘OK, well, I should probably tell you straight off the bat, I’m not going to be much help. I was shooting in Mexico when all this business with him and Dessie happened – I barely know her, actually – so, honestly, you probably know more than I do about it all. But obviously, I want to help,’ said Sacha earnestly. ‘Anything I can do.’

‘You barely know Decima?’

‘’Fraid so. I’ve only ever met her a handful of times – just through Valentine, you know. I mean, I’ve eaten at the Happy Carrot. She’s a really gifted chef. It’s a shame, what’s happening to the restaurant, I hear it’s in trouble. She’s taken a leave of absence or something, hasn’t she?’

Strike suspected he was being invited to acknowledge that his client was having some kind of emotional crisis. When he didn’t speak, Sacha went on,

‘Yeah, so I’m afraid I’m out of the loop with the whole thing, because I went straight from filming Conquest into rehearsals for this.’

Strike had no idea what Conquest was – film, TV series, aftershave commercial – and cared even less, so he merely asked,

‘Rupert’s your first cousin, right?’

‘That’s right, yeah, Dad’s sister’s boy. Poor little sod. You know what happened? The avalanche, et cetera?’

‘Yeah, Decima told me.’

‘Bloody awful thing. I was only twelve when it happened. I can still remember bawling my eyes out. My first experience of real grief.’

Strike having declined, by his silence, the tacit invitation to commiserate with the actor, Sacha continued,

‘Yeah, so, Rupe was brought up in Switzerland by his paternal aunt. She kept a pretty tight grip on him while he was growing up. It was all Dad could do to get him over to Heberley every few years, and Rupe’s a lot younger than me, so we never really, you know, hung out much when we were kids. Lovely guy, though,’ said Sacha.

‘He seems to have got himself into a lot of trouble, one way or another,’ said Strike.

‘Well, as I say, you probably know more about that than I do,’ said Sacha, with a rueful expression.

‘Did you know about the drug debt?’

‘The – what, sorry?’ said Sacha, and Strike recognised his reaction as one of obfuscation, rather than genuine confusion.

‘Rupert was being threatened. His housemate stiffed a drug dealer who then turned his attention to Rupert.’

‘Ah,’ said Sacha.

‘And Rupert ended up paying the guy a couple of grand to get him to back off.’

‘Oh,’ said Sacha. ‘Right.’

‘You didn’t know he had a vengeful coke dealer after him?’

‘I… no, I had no idea.’

‘Did he ask to borrow money from you?’

A faint pink flush had now suffused Sacha’s handsome face.

‘I don’t know that that’s any of your business.’

‘My whole business is asking questions that wouldn’t usually be any of my business.’

‘“Dirty work, but someone’s got to do it”?’

‘Wouldn’t claim I’ve got to,’ said Strike. ‘Just the line of work that best suits my abilities.’

‘Look, the person you really need to talk to is Rupe’s aunt, Anjelica. She’ll know the whole story.’

‘I’ve already talked to her. She wasn’t very complimentary about Rupert, nor very sympathetic to his predicament.’

‘Ah,’ said Sacha, with another rueful smile. ‘Well, I think she worries Rupe’s genetically predisposed to being a wastrel.’

‘Rupert’s parents were wastrels, were they?’

‘Not my aunt, but Peter Fleetwood wasn’t what you’d call one of the world’s hardest workers. Charming guy, but he mostly gambled and drank.’

‘Did you know about Rupert nicking this silver ship thing from Dino’s?’

A less experienced interviewer might have missed the tiny twitch at the corner of Sacha Legard’s mouth.

‘No. Again, you see, I was—’

‘Mexico, yeah. But you found out subsequently?’

‘Yes,’ said Sacha, and Strike detected a slight reluctance at having to admit to this concrete knowledge, minimal though it was.

‘When did you find that out?’

‘Er… it was on my birthday, as a matter of fact.’

‘Which is when?’ said Strike.

‘May the twenty-first.’

‘Did Rupert tell you what he’d done?’

‘No, I – well, to tell you the truth, I saw Rupe and Valentine having some kind of confrontation in a corner, at my party. We were at Claridge’s and, yeah, there was a slight scene. I hadn’t actually invited Rupe – it wasn’t a big party, he wouldn’t have known many people there – anyway, I looked round and there he was. Kind of crazy to gatecrash, all things considered; you’d think he’d have avoided any place where the Longcasters were.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, who was making rapid notes, ‘you would. Was Dino at your party?’

‘God, no,’ said Sacha, with a little laugh. ‘Dino never attends parties unless they’re held at his club. D’you know him?’

‘No,’ said Strike.

‘Quite a character,’ said Sacha.

‘Tara doesn’t mind you hanging out with her ex-husband?’

‘Oh, that’s all water under the bridge,’ said Sacha easily. ‘Ma doesn’t dictate who I see. No, with my party – I only invited Val and Cosima. She was in tears, actually.’

‘Who’s Cosima?’ asked Strike, though he already knew.

‘Decima and Valentine’s half-sister. Lovely girl.’

Strike seemed to remember that in Robin’s notes of her interview with Albie Simpson-White, Cosima Longcaster had been described as ‘a spoiled brat’.

‘Why was she in tears?’

‘I assume because Rupe was being aggressive, or offensive. I… to tell you the truth,’ said Sacha for the second time, lowering his voice, ‘I had to ask security to ask Rupe to leave. He seemed to have come looking for a fight. After he’d gone, I asked Val what it was all about, and he told me about this silver ship thing that had gone missing.’

‘Did he say why Rupert had turned up?’

‘I assume he was trying to get Val to call off the police, or something. Val was pretty pissed off about it all, as you can imagine.’

‘How was Valentine supposed to call off the police? The stolen property was his father’s, wasn’t it?’

‘I honestly don’t know details,’ said Sacha, with a slightly helpless gesture. ‘It was all news to me, I didn’t know what was going on – and as you can imagine, I had a lot of people to speak to and so on, that night, so I let it drop.’

‘Did you hear from Rupert after the party?’

‘No, the next thing I heard, he’d left for New York.’

‘How did you find that out?’

‘Anjelica emailed all the trustees, said he’d got himself a job there.’

‘Have you heard from him since he went to New York?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Sacha, brow slightly furrowed again. He leaned forwards, lowered his voice still further, and said,

‘Listen – can I speak honestly? I think… look, I don’t like saying this, but honestly, I really do think Dessie’s – you know – a bit deluded. Val thinks it would be better for her – kinder, at this point – for her to be helped to face facts.’

‘Which are?’

‘Come on, Corm,’ said Sacha, smiling, and Strike resented hearing the abbreviation of his name used by his friends, and by Charlotte, when she wasn’t calling him ‘Bluey’, ‘Dessie’s a lot older than Rupe. I hate saying this, but I think Rupe just wised up and wanted out. Dessie’s lovely, she’s great, but I think Rupe probably fell into this thing with her while he was working at Dino’s, and she’s made it into some grand amour in her head. He’s twenty-six. He doesn’t want to be tied down at his age.’

Conveniently forgetting that he’d told Robin that Decima wasn’t the kind of thirty-eight-year-old he could ‘see a twenty-six-year-old going for’, and that he’d asserted that Decima’s attraction for Rupert had been her money, Strike said,

‘They were together a year, weren’t they? Hardly a one-night stand.’

‘I don’t know, because—’

‘You were in Mexico, yeah. Have you got a number for Rupert in New York?’

‘No,’ said Sacha.

‘D’you know where he’s working?’

‘You’d have to ask Anjelica.’

‘I have. She refused to give me contact details.’

‘Well – with respect,’ said Sacha, ‘she’s not obliged to, is she?’

‘So you’ve never checked that he’s actually gone to New York?’

‘He’s a grown man, he doesn’t want me hounding him.’

‘So your position is: he’s gone to New York, he’s definitely alive—’

‘What d’you mean, “alive”?’ said Sacha, no longer smiling.

Perhaps the actor, like the detective himself, now felt as though a spectral Charlotte had drawn up a seat at the table, smiling. She’d always been stimulated by tension and the possibility of rows, and she’d loved seeing members of the family she claimed to hate, but from which she could never quite pull free, clashing with the boyfriend who was impressed by neither their wealth nor their breeding. Rupert Fleetwood, towards whom Strike had felt very little sympathy until this point, seemed suddenly to have become her surrogate: a young man towards whom his blood relations seemed indifferent at best, who’d slipped out of sight, occasioning exasperation rather than concern. The night that Charlotte had so nearly been killed by a London bus felt as though it had occurred mere days previously as Strike said,

‘Don’t really know how much more simply to put it. “Not dead”, if you prefer.’

‘Why the hell would he be dead?’

‘He’d lost his job, he was broke, he had a drug dealer threatening him, the police were after him, he’d just had a ruptured love affair, no family to speak of—’

‘He’s got family,’ said Sacha.

‘I don’t mean any criticism,’ said Strike, ‘but my information is that he doesn’t get on with the aunt and uncle in Switzerland, which leaves you, and by your own admission—’

‘D’you think I wouldn’t have done something, if I thought Rupe had genuinely gone missing?’

No, you fucker, I don’t.

Strike could almost see Charlotte’s wide smile. Now starting to take a vindictive pleasure in this interview, he said,

‘Where exactly did it come from, this nef thing?’

‘From Dino’s club.’

‘I mean: was it originally Fleetwood property, or Legard?’

‘How’s that relevant?’

‘Well, where did Rupert think he was going to offload it?’

There was a pause. Strike watched Sacha’s pale face colour.

‘You aren’t seriously suggesting…?’

‘Not suggesting anything,’ said Strike dishonestly. He didn’t for a second believe Rupert had stolen the nef on Sacha’s orders, so that it might henceforth grace the sideboard in Heberley House, but he enjoyed hinting that Sacha, so eel-like in his ability to wriggle free of responsibility and culpability, might yet be drawn into the story of the stolen nef and the drug dealer, by police or press. ‘It was a Fleetwood relic, then, was it?’

‘No,’ said Sacha, after another fractional pause, ‘it was ours. I mean, Dad’s sister’s.’

‘Ah,’ said Strike, making a further note. ‘Well, I doubt Rupert would have taken it abroad. He needed cash. He’ll have wanted to sell it. Have you had any press enquiries at all?’ he asked, the idea suggested by his own recent troubles.

‘What about?’

‘Plenty there to keep the tabloids excited, “famous actor’s cousin pursued by coke dealer, does flit with ancestral treasure”—’

‘No,’ said Sacha, ‘nobody – no, there’s been no interest.’

Strike raised his eyebrows to indicate surprise, enjoying the discomfort now apparent in Sacha’s expression.

‘You’re a member of Dino’s, right?’ Strike said. ‘You were the one who suggested Rupert went and worked there?’

‘Yes,’ said Sacha.

‘Any idea why Rupert’s aunt thinks Dino Longcaster’s a “ghastly man”?’

‘Plenty of people think Dino’s a ghastly man,’ said Sacha, forcing a smile. ‘Didn’t you ever hear my mama on the subject?’

‘I did, yeah. Is Tara in contact with Rupert?’ asked Strike, who didn’t doubt the answer was ‘no’, because he could think of little Tara would be less interested in, than an impecunious nephew by a previous marriage.

‘No,’ said Sacha, goaded at last into a display of weak temper, ‘and I’d advise—’

He stopped short, but Strike, whose sole aim now was to needle the actor as much as he could before Sacha terminated the interview, said,

‘You’d advise me not to contact your mother?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘Drying out somewhere again, is she?’ asked Strike, so politely that it was a few seconds before Sacha seemed to register the sense of his words, at which his colour mounted higher.

‘I’d advise you not to contact her,’ he said, now looking tense, ‘for reasons I’d have thought would be obvious.’

‘Charlotte, you mean,’ said Strike.

The name had been spoken at last, and of the two men facing each other across the wooden table, Strike was by far the more at ease, and not only because he was the one who’d shattered the taboo. The detective was considerably larger than the actor, unafraid of adding another fracture to his already bent nose, and in any case quite keen on the idea of hitting someone, whereas he was certain that Sacha, though angry, was currently wishing a panic button had been installed somewhere in the cast’s bar.

‘The sight of me would drag up unbearable memories of her beloved dead daughter, you think?’ said Strike. ‘That was the wording in her press statement, wasn’t it? “Our beloved Charlotte”?’

‘I’m afraid I need to get going,’ said Sacha, who looked rather paler than he had when Strike had entered the bar.

Strike could tell the actor had hoped Strike would get up to leave on these words, and therefore took great pleasure in remaining exactly where he was.

It is the great misfortune of the coward that he sees danger everywhere, and of the snob that he perpetually underestimates those he considers his inferiors. Thus Cormoran Strike knew that Sacha Legard, who was both snob and coward, was placing no rational reliance upon the self-control of the common ex-soldier sitting opposite him.

‘Corm, I don’t want a row.’

But you’re getting one, you fucking shitweasel.

‘Going to make a hell of a splash in the papers, two of your relatives topping themselves within months of each other. Where should I send pictures of Rupert’s body, when I find it? Via your agent?’

‘Are you threatening me?’ said Sacha, in a half-whisper.

‘Asking a simple question.’

‘I’ve got no reason to suppose Rupert’s – that he’s hurt himself.’

‘Nobody’s seen him for six months. Social media’s inactive. No phone calls. Drug lord after him. Family insisting he’s in America but obstructing anyone who wants to contact him.’

‘Why not go all in and suggest one of us murdered him?’ said Sacha, with a poor attempt at a scornful laugh.

‘Struggling to see a motive, unless you really wanted that nef back at Heberley House and didn’t want to pay him for it,’ said Strike.

‘I’ve been told Rupert’s in New York,’ said Sacha. ‘I can only tell you what I’ve been told.’

‘I’d run that line past your PR people before using it at the inquest,’ said Strike.

‘Are you – is that what this is?’ said Sacha, who appeared to have scraped up a mote of weak courage from somewhere. Perhaps he was counting on the barman to come to his aid, should Strike dive across the table and seize him by the throat. ‘You want revenge, or something? Charlotte was ill for years—’

‘Oh, you noticed, did you?’

‘So it is revenge?’ said Sacha, now white about the mouth and eyes. ‘Charlotte had the best psychiatrists, the best care the family could give her. You don’t know—’

‘I don’t fucking know? I don’t?’

‘You couldn’t even turn up to her funeral!’

‘I had a different fucking fashion show to go to that day.’

Strike got to his feet and saw, with pleasure, Sacha shrink slightly in his seat.

‘I’ve been hired to do a job,’ said Strike. ‘If it so happens that I have to testify in court that you’re a self-centred cunt who isn’t arsed when his desperate relatives go missing, trust me, I’ll be owning the fucking stage myself. Have a nice Christmas.’

37

‘… well, if he did, it’s criminal,’ Murphy was saying.

Robin paused on the stairs. She’d slept until half past nine, which she hadn’t done for months, and had woken to find her boyfriend gone from the bed. Judging by the quietness of the house, Robin guessed that one or both of Annabel’s parents had taken her out for a trip to the shops or the park. Robin had been halfway downstairs to the kitchen when she’d heard Murphy talking, and something in his tone made her pause between walls on which family photographs were displayed, listening.

‘Has she talked to you about it?’ said Linda.

‘No,’ said Murphy, ‘and I haven’t brought it up. She gets ratty.’

‘I don’t think she can bear to admit he’s not perfect, in case we all tell her she should get a different job, but it’s not as though there aren’t other places she could work. But this is a whole other level, this is really… really grubby. Has he got a girlfriend currently, do you know?’

‘Yeah, some lawyer, apparently,’ said Murphy.

‘I wonder what she said when she saw it.’

‘Christ knows,’ said Murphy. ‘He probably told her it was rubbish. What else could he say?’

‘It said in the Telegraph he was going to sue.’

Robin’s heart was thumping uncomfortably fast, but she told herself to remain calm. It would be playing right into her mother’s hands, and, indeed, Murphy’s, to become overly emotional. She tiptoed down the last few stairs.

‘She hasn’t mentioned court action to me.’

‘Well, if he isn’t suing—’

‘Talking about Strike and Candy?’ said Robin, entering the kitchen, forcing herself to sound brisk rather than incensed.

Murphy looked startled and guilty. Linda had frozen in the act of drying a dinner plate. The puppy, Betty, gambolled towards Robin, barking a welcome. Robin bent automatically to pet her, but she was looking at her boyfriend as she did it.

‘I left you to sleep because I thought you needed it,’ said Murphy, who was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and holding his water bottle. ‘I was going to go for a run.’

‘Well, don’t let me stop you,’ said Robin, in a tone that said I’ll deal with you later.

Not entirely to her surprise, Murphy headed for the back door, looking sheepish. When it had closed behind him, Robin said to her mother,

‘If you’re interested in Strike, it’s probably best to ask me for details rather than Ryan. I’m the one who works with him.’

The Telegraph was lying on the kitchen table, which exacerbated Robin’s bad temper. Possibly her mother had been skimming it to check whether there were any more unpleasant stories about Strike she could discuss with Murphy, while Robin was out of earshot.

‘I was only—’ began Linda.

‘I know what you were “only”,’ said Robin, heading for the coffee pot with Betty lolloping around her slippered feet. ‘So ask away.’

‘I just saw the story about that – that woman, and – well, people round here know you work with him, so they asked me about it.’

‘OK, well, here’s your chance to get a full bulletin for the neighbours,’ said Robin.

‘Robin, don’t be like—’

‘If you want to talk about me behind my back—’

‘We weren’t talking about you—’

‘“She gets ratty.” “She can’t bear to think he’s not perfect.”’

‘We were—’

‘Our agency found out the wife of that journalist is having an affair,’ said Robin. ‘That was the journalist’s revenge, claiming we hired a sex worker to entrap a man.’

‘He didn’t say all of you had done it,’ said Linda.

‘None of us did it,’ said Robin forcefully, now turning to glare at her mother. ‘None of us.’

‘OK, well, if you say it’s not true, it’s not true,’ said Linda. She still had the dinner plate and tea towel in her hands, but was doing nothing with them.

‘And Strike is suing,’ said Robin, out of sheer temper. ‘So be sure and keep an eye out for the retraction, so you can alert the neighbours when it comes in.’

‘Robin—’

‘If you want to bitch about my partner, do it to my face, not my boyfriend’s,’ said Robin, whose temper was increasing rather than diminishing as she vented it; she hadn’t realised how much anger she had stored up (because she was the easy child, the placator, the one primed not to make a fuss, amid three rambunctious brothers). ‘I’m sick and tired of this constant chipping away at Strike, and the agency. Maybe if this didn’t happen every single bloody time I see you, I’d want to come home more often!’

She knew how much she’d hurt her mother by Linda’s involuntary gasp, but didn’t care. Robin was thinking of the aftermath of the operation she’d gone through alone, rather than endure Linda’s insistence that her heavy work schedule had led to the mistake; of the week she’d spent with her parents after her long undercover job, during which Linda had increased rather than soothed her anxiety; of the countless jibes about the dangers she ran, whereas Jenny, the pregnant vet, got off with ‘we were worried’, not with a loud insistence that she should give up the career she loved, and for which she’d worked so hard.

‘Strike doesn’t need to try and intimidate sex workers into screwing him,’ Robin said, on a roll now. ‘Seeing as you’re so interested, you should know he does bloody well for himself with women, he doesn’t need to hire them. I seem to remember you liking him, and telling me he’s “got something about him”, before you decided he’s the Devil incarnate – and given his background, he doesn’t need Ryan to tell him it’s criminal to try and coerce women into sex by withholding payment.’

‘Robin—’

‘Just say it to my face! Say you don’t like him, say you’d rather I’d stayed the girl I was after I got raped!’

‘You can’t – how can you say that to me?’ whispered Linda.

‘Easily. I’m where I belong, where I was always meant to be. It just took me longer to get there, because of what happened, but you’d rather I had a kind of half-life, you’d rather—’

‘I wouldn’t rather you were still with Matthew,’ said Linda. ‘We never liked him. I was glad when you called off the wedding, I never wanted to say it, but I was, we always thought he was wrong for you—’

‘Pity you’re not as smart when it comes to what’s right for me,’ said Robin.

‘Robin—’

‘I’m not still in that bloody stairwell,’ said Robin, her voice becoming louder, ‘but you make me feel like I never left it, the way you treat me!’

She’d overfilled her mug with black coffee, which had spilled over the sides. Betty, who hadn’t liked the raised voices, had skittered away and was now worrying a rubber bone in the corner. Robin knew she’d hurt Linda worse than she’d ever done before, even in her teens, when a certain amount of door slamming and mutual recrimination had of course taken place. She and her mother had been close, once; but for the last four years, ever since Robin had received the injury that had left an eight-inch scar on her forearm, a gulf had been steadily widening between mother and daughter. Robin was infuriated and insulted by Linda’s constant, implicit suggestion that her daughter was a malleable fool who did whatever her business partner wanted, without agency, without sense; her mother had no idea how often Strike had urged caution on his best female operative, how little he wanted to see her hurt.

‘You haven’t got children,’ said Linda in a low voice.

‘Thanks for pointing that out,’ said Robin. ‘I was worried I’d left them somewhere.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like, to worry yourself sick about your daughter—’

‘You don’t know what it’s like to have my worries,’ said Robin, thinking of the icy ultrasound wand on her stomach, and the rubber gorilla hidden in her sock drawer in London, and MI5 being angry at the agency for investigating, and DCI Malcolm Truman and his masonic lodge. ‘So we’re even.’

She’d just tipped some of her brimming cup of coffee into the sink when she heard the front door open and her father, Stephen and Annabel entered the kitchen, all pink-faced, cheerful and talkative. Linda hastily wiped her eyes on the tea towel as Michael Ellacott set a bulging bag of shopping on the table.

‘Auntie Bobbin,’ said Annabel, trotting over to Robin to show her a stick. ‘I’ve got Stick Man.’

‘We’re in a big Stick Man phase,’ Stephen informed his sister.

‘Lovely,’ Robin said to Annabel, who was big for her age, brunette, like her mother, but with her father’s dimples. ‘You need to look after him.’

‘Or a dog will take him,’ said Annabel, nodding gravely.

‘Jenny still asleep?’ Stephen asked Linda.

‘Yes, and so’s Jonathan,’ said Linda, her voice artificially cheerful as she resumed her drying and putting away of crockery. ‘I don’t know what his excuse is.’

Robin sat down at the kitchen table and pulled the abandoned Telegraph towards her while the others clattered around her, Linda opening and closing cupboards, Michael putting away groceries, Stephen unbuttoning Annabel’s coat and fetching her a drink. After staring mindlessly at an article on the United Nations Security Council without taking in a word, Robin turned the page.

Lord Oliver Branfoot was pictured, scruffy and bull-like, beaming in black tie beside a very tall man, and a large blonde woman in evening dress. The caption read, ‘Branfoot Trust Recommends Reintroduction of Borstals’.

‘Have you been hearing the Martin saga?’ said a voice near Robin, and she started.

‘What?’

‘Mum been filling you in on Martin?’ asked Stephen.

‘No,’ said Robin, getting to her feet, coffee in one hand, paper in the other. ‘Sorry, it’ll have to wait. I’ve got to call Strike.’

38

Though technically on Christmas leave, Strike was sitting at the partners’ desk. To spare himself another trip upstairs he’d brought down the holdall he’d packed for his brief stay at Lucy’s, plus two carrier bags full of Christmas presents for the family, comprising the pastel-coloured scarf he’d chosen for Lucy in Liberty’s, a bottle of gin for Greg, gift tokens for his eldest and youngest nephews and, for Jack, his favourite, a survival kit Strike would have loved himself when young. Among other things, the khaki rucksack contained water purifying tablets, a compass, emergency food rations, camouflage make-up, an elaborate penknife and a couple of safety light sticks. The last of these had reminded Strike of the tube-shaped object that had fallen from William Wright’s pocket on the night he’d shared a takeaway and cannabis with Mandy and Daz, and which Wright had claimed was a blood sample. What the hell that had really been, Strike still had no idea.

Pat was now on Christmas leave, but she’d propped another handwritten card against the aquarium.

DON’T FEED, THERE’S A TIME RELEASE BLOCK OF FOOD IN HERE, WILL LAST A WEEK.

The subcontractors were on various jobs, which left Strike alone and free to do a bit of research he preferred to do in privacy: trying to identify the woman who’d shoved the cipher note through their office door. This meant trawling through stills advertising porn films, and he didn’t fancy being discovered with an erection, nor did he much relish the idea of explaining to the accountant why he was charging porn to the business account, which was why he was trying not to pay for anything.

Starting on the premise that the blonde might have worked with Dangerous Dick de Lion, if she knew or feared he’d been murdered, Strike was working his way steadily through de Lion’s oeuvre, which included such titles as Twelve Horny Men and The Ass House. The man had done ‘crossover’, meaning he worked in both straight and gay porn, so Strike was currently squinting at various naked or scantily dressed women in an attempt to identify the woman he’d seen only once. He was staring at a brunette being penetrated both anally and orally when his mobile rang.

‘Hi,’ said Robin. ‘Sorry to call on Christmas Eve.’

‘No problem,’ said Strike, shutting down the window on his computer as though she could see what he was doing, and hoping his hard-on would subside enough to concentrate. ‘What’s up?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen today’s Telegraph?’

‘No,’ said Strike, with an ominous feeling that, if nothing else, was helping to subdue his erection. ‘There’s not another—?’

‘No,’ said Robin, ‘nothing about you, but there’s a picture of Lord Oliver Branfoot in it, and Strike, he’s standing beside the customer we saw in Ramsay Silver. That tall man who had one eye looking up at the ceiling.’

Sitting on her bed, still in her pyjamas, Robin waited for Strike’s response. After a few seconds, he said,

‘Shit.’

‘Kenneth Ramsay said your name in front of him, remember? Not mine, though.’

‘Who is he, the customer?’ said Strike.

‘Sir Victor Lambert,’ said Robin, reading it from the newspaper. ‘He sits on the Branfoot Trust and I’ve just looked him up; he’s a banker. But he can’t have ordered Wright’s murder, can he? He’d hardly have gone shopping at Ramsay Silver afterwards.’

‘That’d seem unwise,’ agreed Strike.

‘So…’ said Robin, unwilling to put into words what she was thinking; if she’d worried that connecting Sofia Medina with the murder of Wright might sound far-fetched, this, surely, was a hundred times more so.

‘You think Lambert mentioned to his mate Branfoot that I’ve been nosing around at Ramsay Silver,’ said Strike, ‘and Branfoot, who ordered the hit on Wright, panicked and started gunning for us?’

‘Well… I know it’s a stretch,’ said Robin, ‘but you can’t say it doesn’t fit. Shanker said “you were seen”, and we knew all along that could only have been Ramsay Silver or St George’s Avenue. I know Branfoot’s a real rent-a-quote, but why’s he suddenly so interested in the private detective business? Why’s he out to get us? And he’s on the telly, which fits the cipher note, too.’

Robin heard someone coming upstairs. Right now she’d be delighted for Murphy to find her on the phone to Strike; indeed, she might ask him to leave the bedroom until they’d finished the call. However, the footsteps moved on past her bedroom door, and she reflected that Murphy would probably make sure his run was a long one, after the scene in the kitchen.

‘Well,’ said Strike at last, ‘there’s no reason, just because a man’s a raging self-publicist, he can’t also be a crook. Look at Jeffrey Archer. Look at Savile.’

He got to his feet and, once again, stood contemplating the corkboard on the office wall, where the four present candidates for William Wright were pinned, eyes on Dick de Lion, with his fake tan, his peroxided hair and his very white teeth.

‘Might be worth finding out which way Branfoot swings, sexually speaking.’

‘He’s married,’ said Robin, who’d done some speedy Googling before calling Strike. ‘To a woman. She’s here in this picture in the Telegraph, with Branfoot and Lambert. They’ve got two sons.’

‘Strong motive, if he’s been doing the dirty with de Lion, and doesn’t want the family and the papers to know,’ said Strike. ‘Still doesn’t explain why de Lion would have gone to work at Ramsay Silver, but… yeah, I think we’ll need to take a closer look at Branfoot. I might call Fergus Robertson again, see what he can tell me,’ said Strike, turning away from the board to write a reminder to himself in the notebook open on the desk. ‘We’ve had another threatening phone call, by the way.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah. “Leave it or gow-too will get you.”’

‘What’s “gow-too”?’

‘Exactly what I asked him. He hung up.’

‘Is it a name?’

‘Not one I’ve ever heard of. Anyway, be on the watch for him, or it, or them. I also spoke to Sacha Legard.’

‘Really?’ said Robin, with a slight inward tremor. ‘How did that go?’

‘Pretty informative,’ said Strike, and he described the interview, leaving out some of the more aggressive things he’d said to Legard, and concluding, ‘so one of us needs to speak to Valentine Longcaster, and if he’s not willing, we’ll see whether his sister Cosima can explain what Fleetwood was doing, gatecrashing an A-list party where he wasn’t wanted, to talk to the family he’d nicked a large bit of silver from. I’ve looked Cosima up. Remember Legs?’ he said, in reference to a teenage girl the agency had watched for a while, because her mother believed her to be having an affair with her own ex-boyfriend.

‘Yes,’ said Robin, who’d tailed the filly-like blonde teenager on a few occasions.

‘Well, she looks just like her. You might have to do that interview, if it comes to it. She’s only eighteen; I’ll probably be accused of more sexual harassment if I go anywhere near her.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Robin.

‘And there’s something else,’ said Strike. ‘Last night, I sent Shah to watch the entrance of Freemasons’ Hall. Guess who turned up for his six-thirty lodge meeting, apron bag in hand?’

‘DCI Malcolm Truman?’ said Robin, with a sinking feeling.

‘Right in one,’ said Strike. ‘Shah got some covert snaps.’

‘Interesting,’ Robin forced herself to say.

‘How’s things in Masham?’ Strike asked, moving to the window and staring down into Denmark Street, where last-minute panic buyers were wending their way in and out of the music shops.

‘Lousy. I’ve just had a blazing row with my mother.’

‘Ah,’ said Strike, thinking it was a shame it couldn’t have been Murphy as he watched an ageing hippy below, hurrying along with a ukulele under one arm and a stack of vinyl records under the other. ‘Well, it’s the season for it.’

‘When are you off to Lucy’s?’

‘Trying to leave it as late as possible,’ said Strike. ‘Aiming to arrive at the party halfway through, pleading pressure of work.’

‘If I have to suffer, so should you,’ said Robin. ‘Go early and help prepare the food or something. Earn some Brownie points.’

‘That reminds me,’ said Strike. ‘Thanks for my present.’

‘You’ve opened it already?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘I wasn’t going to do it in front of Greg.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s a cunt,’ said Strike, who thought this reason enough. Robin’s gift had been a monthly delivery of Cornish food and beer; he’d been touched by it, and was glad to have opened it without the necessity of explanations, or hearing comments about either his waistline or the woman who seemed to know him so well.

He didn’t really want the call to end, but couldn’t think of any reason to prolong it, so when Robin said, ‘I suppose I’d better go,’ he agreed that he should, too, wished her a good Christmas and hung up.

He’d just settled back at his desk, feeling marginally better for his chat with Robin, when the landline phone rang in the outer office. There was no longer any danger that it was Charlotte, who’d often called on special occasions and holidays, especially when drunk, but he was on high alert for journalists, who might be seeking to extend the Candy story into a Yuletide serial, so he got up and moved to Pat’s desk, switched on the speaker and let voicemail play. Once Pat’s gravelly voice had finished saying that the office was closed for Christmas there was a click, and a manic-sounding woman’s voice with a strong Scottish accent spoke.

‘Aye, Ah need help, he give me a bit, but there’s more, he told me, it’s all hid under the bridge but Ah need help tae get it, so come tae the Golden Fleece, ask for me there, Ah’ve gottae keep movin’, Ah’ve got people after me, Ah’m nae kiddin’, come tae the Golden Fleece.’

The message ended, leaving Strike staring at the phone in total bemusement.

39

Robin had the inevitable row with Murphy quietly, in their room, once he’d returned from his run. Now showered, and wearing a sweater Jenny had bought her, which Robin had thought it tactful to bring home for Christmas, she told her boyfriend exactly what she thought of him talking to Linda behind her back, and demanded why, if he had questions about the Candy story, he couldn’t have asked them of her.

‘You know why,’ Murphy said, also keeping his voice low. He’d been apologetic at first, flushed and sweaty after his run, but in the face of Robin’s anger had become increasingly irate himself. ‘Because you won’t hear a bloody word against Strike and the last time I mentioned I’d seen him in the paper, I got the silent treatment.’

‘I’ve told you multiple times Strike can be an annoying sod,’ said Robin, who was sure she must have done. She’d thought it often enough.

‘You must’ve said it when I had headphones on,’ retorted Murphy. ‘You always keep as quiet about him to me as you do me to him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘“I’m on my way to look at another house.”’

‘What?’

‘That’s what you said to Strike, when we were on the way to see the house in Wood Green. “I’m on my way to look at another house.”’

‘Well, we were on the way to see a h—’

‘Yeah. We were.’

‘I d—’

‘We were,’ said Murphy, no longer keeping his voice down. ‘You and me. “We.”’

‘Lunch!’ called Jonathan up the stairs.

As might have been expected, the atmosphere around the kitchen table hummed with undercurrents as the family consumed a large pasta bake. Linda was unusually quiet, but fortunately Annabel’s artless chatter filled the spaces where Robin’s conversation with her mother and boyfriend might have been, and Betty provided a distraction by producing a large turd right beside the Aga.

As Linda was taking an apple crumble out of the Aga, Robin’s third brother, Martin, banged on the back door. Like his father, Martin had dark hair and eyes, though he had neither Michael Ellacott’s sweetness of nature, nor his conscientious approach to work.

‘Isn’t Carmen with you?’ said Linda anxiously.

‘Coming later,’ said Martin, his expression sullen.

Robin spent most of the afternoon with Jenny and Annabel in the sitting room, while all male members of the family, plus Murphy, were talking football in the kitchen. Annabel was playing nurse with a rag doll, who’d apparently fallen out of a tree and broken all her bones, and while Robin helped wrap the doll in a lot of toilet roll and gave her medicine out of a plastic cup, Jenny told Robin the history of Martin and Carmen to date, which already included three break-ups and reconciliations.

‘Your mum’s worried sick,’ Jenny whispered.

‘When’s Carmen due?’ asked Robin, who’d never met the woman, but knew she’d fallen pregnant after only three months of dating Martin.

‘February,’ said Jenny quietly. ‘I’d like to put it all down to her hormones, but they’re so alike.’

‘Oh God,’ said Robin.

Martin’s employment history was patchy and his boredom threshold very low. What he enjoyed most was drinking and betting; money had always slipped through his fingers like water, and Robin’s previous suggestion that fatherhood ‘might be the making of him’ had been offered more in hope than expectation.

‘Anyone want a cup of tea?’ said Murphy, appearing in the doorway of the sitting room.

Remembering how she’d so recently refused coffee made by Kim, Robin said,

‘Yes, please, I’d love one. Thanks, Ryan,’ and she saw, as she’d intended, a slight softening of Murphy’s stony expression.

It was decided by six o’clock that evening that the four Ellacott siblings and Murphy, though not Jenny, because she was so tired, would go for a drink at the Bay Horse, the local the brothers and sister had frequented growing up. Robin was glad to get out of her mother’s vicinity, because the latter was wearing an air of martyrdom that was deepening rather than alleviating her daughter’s ire. Robin was also craving alcohol, which she thought might put her in a better festive spirit than she could achieve at home.

A very old Nissan Micra pulled up in the chilly darkness just as they were leaving the house, and from the fact that Martin immediately jogged across the street towards it, Robin assumed it was being driven by his girlfriend.

‘Better keep going,’ muttered Jonathan, ‘just in case they’re about to go off on one.’

‘Is it that bad?’ Robin asked, as she and Jonathan fell into step behind Stephen and Murphy, who were roaring with laughter at some joke Robin had missed.

‘It’s non-stop. She’s rough as hell.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Tattoos, drinks like a fish and every other word’s “fucking”. You can imagine how that goes down with Mum.’

Given her current feelings about Linda, Robin found herself more than ready to give Carmen the benefit of the doubt.

It was only as they entered the road where the Bay Horse lay that Robin, for the first time in her life, wondered why it was called Silver Street. Thoughts of masonic centrepieces, mauls and set squares filled her thoughts again as they joined the throng inside the pub where she’d had her first legal drink and, later, celebrated her A-level results, little realising how short her university career would be, and why. The pub had three sections, two either side of the main door and a room at the back, and, as was predictable on Christmas Eve, it was packed. When Murphy bellowed that he’d get the first round in, Robin asked for whisky. The last three times she’d drunk it had been with Strike. On all three occasions she’d needed the sharp, immediate relief of spirits, firstly, because he’d just given her a nosebleed and two black eyes, secondly, because she’d made what she’d feared would be a catastrophic mistake in a case, and lastly, because she’d been interviewed under caution.

The Scotch had its usual welcome effect as she gulped it down, burning her throat, starting to relax the hard, tight knot in her chest. It was easier, now, to reach out and to clasp Murphy’s hand, and he returned the pressure, then bent to kiss her on the mouth, and they smiled at each other, and Robin thought, he is lovely, really, and, still holding hands, they stood beneath the Christmas streamers, and Robin waved at a couple of schoolfriends who’d never left Masham, and was relieved when they didn’t come to speak to her.

‘Robin,’ bellowed Martin in Robin’s ear, ‘this is Carmen.’

Robin turned to see a woman taller than herself, with the sides of her head shaved and the rest of her hair dyed a vibrant tomato red and tied back in a pony tail. She was wearing a leather jacket over a clinging vest dress, and the skin above her breasts was a solid mass of tattoos: the wreck of a galleon at sunset, with mermaids on rocks. Her pregnant belly seemed not, quite, to be part of her, the rest was so skinny.

‘Hi,’ shouted Robin, as Slade began to sing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ over the speakers. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

‘And you,’ Carmen shouted back.

‘No, I’ll get this round,’ Robin said loudly to Jonathan, when she saw him fumbling for his wallet. ‘Carmen, what would you like?’

She expected the woman, seven months pregnant as she was, to say fruit juice, but Carmen said, ‘Double vodka on the rocks, please.’ Robin released Murphy’s hand to go to the bar.

Yet another pregnant woman was standing in line at the bar; she was blonde, with a bob, and her face was somehow puffy yet drawn, just like Jenny’s, back at the house. The woman glanced at Robin as the latter drew alongside her, and only then, with a shock of surprise, did Robin recognise Sarah Shadlock, her ex-husband’s old university friend, mistress and, now, second wife.

‘Hi, Sarah,’ said Robin automatically.

Sarah mumbled, ‘Hi’, and moved into the empty space left by a man who’d moved away from the bar, clutching four pints in his huge farmer’s hands.

‘Lemme help,’ said Murphy in Robin’s ear, and when she turned, smiling, he kissed her on the mouth again. She might have thought he was as tipsy as the men singing along with Slade in the corner, he looked so happy that their row was over, and she saw Sarah glance back at them, before placing her drinks order.

In the warm, fuzzy glow engendered by Robin’s second double whisky, she thought she might seek a reconciliation with Linda early the next day, before everyone else was up. Carmen and Martin were bellowing into each other’s ears, and it was hard to tell whether they were exchanging endearments or insults, but they’d probably work it all out in the end, Robin thought, before asking Stephen, whose round it was, for a third whisky. He and Murphy were getting on particularly well; laughing at another joke Robin hadn’t heard, but wasn’t this what Christmas was supposed to be about? She felt a blanket goodwill towards everyone right now, and what was needed was more whisky, to keep this going, and when Stephen thrust her third double Scotch into her hand, she said, ‘I love you, Button,’ and he laughed at her, and said, ‘You’re pissed, Bobbin,’ which was his old childhood nickname for her, as Button was hers for him.

And then, through a gap in the crowd, Robin spotted her ex-husband sitting at a table in the corner. Her eyes might have slid right past him, had Sarah not been there: he’d put on weight, and looked grey around the eyes. As Robin looked away again, ‘Not Tonight Santa’ began to play and, with an unpleasant inner shudder, she remembered the year the song had come out: she’d been twenty-one, and the man sitting in the far corner of this familiar pub, who’d later proved himself duplicitous, intensely materialistic, coercive and unfaithful, had been her one guarantee that men who wanted sex with you weren’t all monsters. That had been in the aftermath of that shattering rape, which, unbeknownst to her, had left an infection inside her that would quietly eat away her ability to do what Sarah, Jenny and Carmen had done so easily, and conceive a child the natural way, whereby no men with monobrows, armed with statistics and censorious lectures, need involve themselves at all.

‘Are you Robin Ellacott?’

‘What?’ said Robin stupidly, to the girl who’d asked the question. She was a stranger, baby-faced, wearing a dress that looked like a skimpy nightgown and false eyelashes so thick they resembled the furry caterpillars Robin and Stephen had caught and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise in bowls full of lettuce, when they were children.

‘Are you Robin Ellacott?’ repeated the young woman.

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘How can you, like, work with him, if he does stuff like that?’

‘What?’ said Robin loudly.

‘Like’ – the girl stood on tiptoes to shout into Robin’s ear – ‘how can you be with someone, if he forces girls to have sex with him?’

‘I don’t know what—’

On a slight delay, Robin realised what the girl was talking about.

‘It didn’t happen,’ she shouted.

‘What?’

‘It – didn’t – happen! You shouldn’t believe everything you read!’

She watched the girl turn and relay her response to two friends, who were also wearing scanty clothes with very thick make-up. They probably went to the same school Robin had attended, too long ago to have been there at the same time. Robin turned her back on them, gulping down more whisky, and saw Martin and Carmen, now unmistakeably arguing, over by the wall where beer barrel lids were displayed. Robin looked away; she didn’t want to see it, or worry about it, tonight. Murphy had been absorbed into a group of men Stephen knew, but here was Jonathan, thank God, holding out another double whisky.

‘Thanks, Jon,’ she said, and there ensued another shouted conversation with her youngest brother, which she was fairly certain was about his work, because she’d caught the words ‘challenge’ and ‘difficult’, and she’d noticed earlier, at the house, how he assumed a portentous tone when talking about his first real job.

‘Great,’ she said, at random, and Jonathan said, ‘What d’you mean, great?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Robin, confused. She hadn’t eaten much pasta at lunch, because of the atmosphere, and she’d now consumed around a third of a bottle of neat whisky.

‘I said,’ yelled Jonathan in her ear, ‘she’s got cancer.’

‘Shit, who has?’ said Robin, alarmed.

‘My boss,’ yelled Jonathan.

‘Oh,’ said Robin, trying not to look too relieved that it was nobody she knew. ‘That’s terrible!’

‘I know,’ said Jonathan, and he kept talking, but Robin could only make out one syllable in four, and the three young girls with caterpillar-ed eyes, who hadn’t succeeded in attracting any male attention, were instead very obviously talking about that dreadful older woman, who worked with a notorious pervert, but pretended he wasn’t one. Robin wondered if they’d read about her rape online, or whether her past history had trickled down into local lore, without her realising it.

‘Just going to get a bit of fresh air,’ Robin shouted at Jonathan.

‘What?’

‘I’ll be back in a bit,’ she shouted, even louder, and Jonathan, doubtless assuming she was heading for the bathroom, turned away, so he didn’t see her making her way towards the exit, with the dregs of her whisky in her hand.

It was very cold out on Silver Street, but Robin was grateful to be out of the crowd. She leaned back against the whitewashed wall of the pub, thinking that this would sober her up, and then she’d go back inside. She tossed back the last of her fourth whisky, then, through force of habit, drew her phone out of her pocket to see whether Strike had texted her, but of course he hadn’t, because he was at Lucy’s party. It was Christmas. There was no work to be done.

Her good mood had vanished; she ought to have stopped at two whiskies, or have eaten more at lunch. Her breath rose in a cloud on the wintry air as she looked right, towards Chapman Lane, and then, with a funny inward start, she thought what a coincidence that was; strange, how you took things for granted when they were familiar, and didn’t question them, and it took distance to make you look back, and wonder why, and how, and whether it was all chance, or there was meaning there…

Strike would laugh at her, for that… mystic mumbo jumbo…

She had to make it up with her mother, especially now that she’d seen Martin and Carmen together…

Linda.

Rita Linda.

Asked if we knew ’er.

Rita Linda.

’E knew what ’appened to ’er.

Ritalin-da.

Robin raised her phone to eye level and typed in ‘Rita Linda’.

Linda Rita Clay was a hairdresser in Nantwich. Rita Linde was a German composer. Linda Mae Ritter lived in Detroit and had seven children, including a set of triplets.

Robin tried different spellings. Reeta Linder. Reena Lynda. Reata Lindar.

Did you mean Reata Lindvall?

‘All right, Rob?’

Robin looked round. Her ex-husband was standing there, a packet of Marlboro Lights in his hand. He’d smoked occasionally as a student, but never afterwards, at least while they were together.

‘Hi,’ said Robin.

He lit up.

‘Working?’ he said, with a half-smile.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Huh,’ said Matthew.

They stood in silence for a while. The church where they’d got married, where Strike had gatecrashed the ceremony, knocking over one of the flower arrangements, was barely five minutes’ walk away from where they stood.

‘Who’s the Paul Newman lookalike?’

‘What? Oh – Ryan? He’s a CID officer.’

‘Ah,’ said Matthew, nodding as he blew out smoke. ‘I always thought you’d end up with Strike.’

‘You hid that well,’ said Robin sarcastically. Matthew laughed.

‘How long you home for?’

‘Until the twenty-ninth.’

‘We’re here till New Year.’

When Robin didn’t respond, he added,

‘Takes it out of you, coming back.’

Robin, who didn’t see why it should take anything out of Matthew, turned her attention back to her phone – Did you mean Reata Lindvall? – but Matthew was talking again.

‘No kids yet, then?’

‘Nine,’ said Robin, trying to read about Reata Lindvall on her phone, but her vision was unaccountably blurred, ‘but I had them all adopted.’

He laughed again.

‘Not a bad idea. I’m going to be up all hours again, soon. Bloody nappies and—’

‘There you are.’

Sarah’s voice was icy. She was holding two coats. Robin looked at her, but the woman who’d slept with Robin’s husband in their bedroom in Deptford, and left a diamond earring in the sheets for Robin to find, no longer wanted to look back.

‘I was just having a fag,’ said Matthew, throwing the cigarette away.

‘I’m tired,’ said Sarah, pushing her husband’s coat at him.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘See you,’ he said to Robin.

‘Bye,’ said Robin.

The Cunliffes walked away. Deciding that the effort to focus on her phone’s screen was too onerous in her present condition, Robin took a deep lungful of night air, then headed back into the pub.

40

Strike arrived at Lucy’s party in Bromley at half past nine. His objective had been to miss as much of the party as he could without being rude, and above all to avoid the painful early stage of every such gathering, where the crowd is sparse, small talk particularly laboured, and the choice of company so limited that you risked being trapped with a bore who’d then stick to you all evening.

However, he was later than he’d meant to be, because he’d lost track of time while trying to identify the blonde he believed had put the cipher note through the agency’s door. Frustratingly, immediately before he’d realised he was late, and been forced to set out for Bromley with a bag of presents and an overnight bag in the boot of his BMW, he’d found her.

Her professional name was Fyola Fay, and she’d featured with de Lion in I Know Who You Did Last Summer and Done Girl. Had Strike not promised to attend this bloody party he’d have been able to remain sitting at the partners’ desk in the office, working his way systematically through OnlyFans, Flickr, ModelHub and any of the other myriad places where a woman could make additional money selling nudes or camcorder footage online, looking for clues to Fay’s real name and ways of contacting her. Instead, he was trudging towards Lucy’s front door, passing the bare magnolia bush in the front garden, carrying his bags of clumsily wrapped presents and preparing, after an afternoon of staring at breasts, huge penises and orifices, both male and female, to fake an interest in other people’s jobs, houses and children.

He’d expected Lucy to be annoyed that he was late, but when his youngest nephew, Adam, opened the front door, Strike’s sister, who was further down the hall and wearing a pair of flashing antlers with her party dress, cried ‘Stick!’ and hurried past the women she’d been talking to, to hug him, and it occurred to him, with a slight stirring of guilt, that she was happy and relieved that he’d turned up at all. ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ was pounding out of speakers in the sitting room. Resolving to behave as well as possible, Strike climbed the stairs to deposit his bags in the spare room, greeted his favourite nephew, Jack, who was in his own bedroom playing some kind of shoot-’em-up game on his PlayStation with three other boys of around the same age, then returned to the crowded ground floor, which was full of adults wearing Christmas sweaters and party dresses, and several small children Strike did his best not to step on or knock over as he made his way to the kitchen where, he assumed, there would be food and beer.

‘Here he is!’ said Greg, his brother-in-law, falsely enthusiastic.

Greg was standing with three other men, who raised their cans of lager simultaneously to their mouths as though they’d been practising the movement, all of them eyeing Strike with that brand of defiance certain men display upon coming face to face with a male who might in any way be considered their superior, whether in terms of size, fitness or worldly success.

‘We meet again!’ said a female voice behind Strike, and, turning, he saw a woman he had no memory of ever meeting: dark, overweight, greasy-skinned, wearing a kind of knee-length silver kaftan that made him think of Bacofoil, and angel earrings that flashed, like Lucy’s antlers. ‘Marguerite,’ she said, her face falling, when Strike’s expression remained blank. ‘We met here, at your birthday dinner, a few years ago. You brought your girlfriend, Nina.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Strike, now placing her: Lucy had invited Marguerite to meet her brother, not realising he was going to turn up with another woman. ‘How’re you?’

‘Great,’ she said. ‘Is Nina here?’

‘No,’ said Strike.

‘Easy come, easy go for you with women, isn’t it, Corm?’ said Greg, in the aggressively jocular tone he often employed towards his brother-in-law. Marguerite’s expression brightened.

‘Just getting a beer,’ Strike told her, because he’d spotted a stack of six-packs of lager on a distant work surface, and he forced a path through the crowd around the central table piled with food, causing a small ripple of muttering and turned heads. In his current pessimistic mood, he suspected this was due to the Candy story rather than any appreciation of his detective triumphs, and was careful not to meet anyone’s eyes, reaching the lager with a sense of achieving safe harbour.

As he yanked off a ring pull, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Hoping it was a text from Robin, he pulled out the mobile, but saw a message from Kim instead.

Plug’s left his son in the house with the old lady and buggered off to Carnival Street again, with a bunch of planks and chicken wire in the back of his van.

Well, what d’you want me to do about it? thought Strike irritably. He had a feeling Kim simply wanted an excuse to get in touch, a hunch strengthened by the fact that a second text came in almost immediately.

Hope you’re having a fun Christmas Eve x

Strike put his phone back in his pocket without answering, and looked up to find the group around Greg, which had now absorbed Marguerite, watching him. Strike didn’t have the slightest wish to join them: the men had the look of those who could wring a lengthy conversation out of the best service stations on the M1, or their most recent round of golf. Marguerite’s expression was simply hungry.

Strike’s phone buzzed again.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, to nobody in particular. He took out his phone again and, purely to get away from those gazing at him, let himself out of the back door onto the decking that Greg had built himself, facing the chilly lawn.

Expecting Kim’s name again, he was surprised to see a text from Jade Semple and, judging by her spelling, she appeared to be trying, far more successfully than he was, to drown her Christmas Eve sorrows in alcohol.

I dont t hink bNiall was thagt body it was just the naeme William Wrihgt maed me thinkn it might have been

Strike typed back:

Did Niall have some connection with that name?

Somebody tapped on the window behind Strike. He turned and saw his eldest and least favourite nephew, Luke, whose objective in banging on the glass appeared to have been simply to make his uncle show his face to his two smirking teenage companions, as though Strike were some aquarium fish. Scowling, the detective turned his back on the window again, and saw that Jade had texted him again.

Kind of but I was just panicking g I dobn’t think it was hijm

‘Stick, what are you doing out here?’

Lucy had come out onto the decking, shivering in her thin party dress.

‘Sorry,’ said Strike again, hastily stuffing his phone back in his pocket. ‘Work. One of my subcontractors has been punched in the face.’

It was true-ish: Shah had almost had his nose broken a couple of jobs previously.

‘Oh, that’s awful,’ said Lucy. ‘How—?’

‘Let’s go back inside,’ said Strike, feeling guilty again. ‘Introduce me to your friends.’

For the next hour he drank lager and made loud, empty conversation with various parents of children at Lucy’s kids’ schools. Some wanted to quiz him about his detective career, others wanted to tell him how lovely his sister was; a few, who were already drunk, seemed unable to place him from the school run, and were confused as to why anyone who didn’t take their children to the local school should be present. The exception was a sozzled, skinny woman, who was wearing a baggy dress that was probably the height of fashion, but which Strike thought looked like a postal sack: she insisted very loudly that she knew Strike ‘from taekwondo’, and that his son, Fingal, was very talented and shouldn’t be allowed to give it up. In the end he agreed with her, and promised to preach perseverance to Fingal, upon which she hugged him and he discovered that she stank of BO.

Five minutes later, while fetching yet another lager, he was cornered by a man whose shallow forehead and long, pointed nose gave him the look of a whippet. Strike assumed he was some species of insurance agent, because he wanted to know how Strike indemnified his business against professional mistakes that led to wrongful arrests or injuries. When Strike said, truthfully, that his agency had never made a professional mistake that had resulted in a wrongful arrest or an injury, or at least, not an injury to an investigative subject (Robin might have had a case against him, if she’d ever chosen to pursue it) the whippet-faced man seemed annoyed.

‘But say it happened—’

‘Can’t see how it would,’ said Strike.

For the last twenty minutes, he’d been aware of the large silver mass that was Marguerite circling, like some large and unpredictable asteroid, and seeing that his interlocutor was determined to thrash the point out, Strike announced baldly, ‘need the bog’, and left him standing there.

There was, inevitably, a queue for the upstairs bathroom. Strike joined it with reluctance, because the woman in the sack-like dress who thought he had a son called Fingal was also waiting, so he pulled out his phone again to discourage conversation. He wanted to re-read Jade Semple’s texts, but instead saw a new message from Kim.

Working, and I’d need to know you a LOT better to send nudes.

Fuck’s sake. Was he about to be sent another ‘oops, sorry, didn’t mean to send that to you’ text, or a nude picture? What Kim Cochran didn’t realise was, Strike had played these kinds of games at a far more sophisticated level, with a Grand Master, for sixteen years; this really was minor league attempted seduction.

An obese man in a reindeer-patterned sweater had just left the bathroom; the woman who smelled of BO staggered into it instead. As Strike moved along to stand beside the closed door, another text from Jade Semple arrived.

a woman took money out on Nialls card after that body was found

Strike was still contemplating this message when the bathroom door opened.

‘I didn’t make the smell,’ shouted the woman in the baggy dress, balancing herself with the door jamb, clearly very drunk. ‘That was him, before!’

Everyone but Strike laughed. The woman staggered out of his way and he entered the bathroom. She wasn’t wrong about the smell; Strike opened the bathroom window before taking a long piss. He’d have liked to barricade himself in here for the rest of the party, as long as the stench cleared, so that he could concentrate on Jade Semple. Even as it was, he thought he could chance a few minutes of peaceful seclusion, so he sent her a text reading:

If Niall had a connection to the name ‘William Wright’ I’d very much like to talk to you in person.

He waited a few minutes, but she didn’t answer, so, relishing the temporary release from small talk, he sat down on the closed toilet seat, and Googled: ‘Fyola Fay porn star real name’. Just as the search results arrived, someone pounded on the bathroom door.

‘Quickly, please, he’s going to throw up!’

Strike unlocked the door, and flattened himself against the wall as a red-headed boy of around six, green of face and being half-carried, half-dragged along by his mother, gave a great heave and vomited copiously a foot short of the toilet, splattering Strike’s shoes, trouser bottoms and the fluffy white splash mat around the base of the sink.

‘He’s lactose intolerant,’ said the harassed mother. ‘He went and ate a whole load of cheese straws – didn’t you, Hector?’ she said angrily, thrusting the boy’s head down into the toilet as he heaved again.

Strike didn’t consider himself a particularly squeamish man, but vomit was by far his least favourite bodily fluid; he also happened to rate personal cleanliness highly on his list of virtues, so being unable to mop the chunks of what looked like curried baked bean off himself was particularly irksome.

He headed back downstairs, but had to pause halfway, because of the bottleneck of leavers just inside the front door. Marguerite was lurking in the hall below like a basking shark, and he saw, even though not looking directly at her, the upward tilt of her face as she gazed at him. The battery on one of her flashing earrings was dead.

Her attention was luckily claimed by whippet face just as Strike reached the hall, so he managed to evade her on the way back to the kitchen, where he hoped to effect a cleaning job with the aid of wet kitchen roll. As he passed Greg, he said,

‘Think you should know, your bathroom’s just been the scene of a major environmental incident.’

‘Why, what’ve you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything. A kid called Hector ate some cheese straws.’

He might have added that one of Greg’s pals had also done a shit that radiated like nuclear waste, but the culprit was standing two feet away, perfectly unconcerned and shovelling down cocktail sausages.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Greg, and he pushed his way out of the kitchen.

‘Excuse me,’ said the drunk woman in the baggy dress from behind him; Strike smelled her before seeing her. She put her hands around his waist from behind, as though to bodily shift him, but then she slipped on a patch of spilled liquid on the floor, and as he instinctively grabbed her to stop her falling, his phone slid from his hand.

‘You’re a good man,’ she said indistinctly, and he held her rigidly away from him as she regained her balance, because he didn’t want to be hugged again.

Marguerite had picked up his phone.

‘Oh my God,’ she gasped, half-laughing.

He glimpsed what she was staring at: a close-up picture of Fyola Fay, with her mouth clamped around a huge black penis. Strike snatched it out of her hands; no doubt the story would spread around Lucy’s social circle that he’d been having a wank in the bathroom during her Christmas party, and unable to think of any explanation that wouldn’t sound impossibly lame, he shoved his phone back in his pocket and headed, stony-faced, towards the sink, where he did his best to clean off Hector’s vomit. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the solid mass of silver approaching.

Do not fucking tell me you like porn.

‘It’s all right,’ she said in an arch whisper. ‘I don’t gossip. Women can like porn too, you know.’

‘Excuse me,’ he said, and once again, he let himself out into the back garden, his wet trouser leg chilly on his real ankle.

Why the hell had he given up smoking? As he walked down the steps from the wooden decking onto the lawn, intent on dissolving into the darkness where he could have peace for a few minutes, his phone buzzed yet again. If he’d been sent an ‘accidental’ nude from fucking Kim he was about to have a few blunt words with her, but when he dragged his mobile out of his pocket, he saw, with a lightening of the heart, a message from Robin. Then he read it:

idy~#=eeid

Butt dial, obviously. However, he responded:

Cipher? If so, send key.

41

Everything had gone badly wrong at the Bay Horse. It was closing time, and Robin was now extremely drunk (‘we’ll sort ourselves out for food’, the departing pub-goers had told Linda, but nobody had consumed any food at the pub, and Robin had ill-advisedly drunk even more neat whisky since meeting Matthew outside).

She’d returned from the bathroom to see Martin and Carmen still arguing, and then Jonathan, who’d met two old footballing friends at the bar, had wanted her to carry pints back from the bar to Stephen and Murphy. Murphy had looked odd as he passed her the phone she’d left lying on the table and she saw she’d received a text, but she didn’t read it, because she was concentrating on not spilling the pints in her hand, and as she’d handed Murphy the glass, she’d said, ‘Is that non-alcoholic?’, thinking he’d be able to tell which beer was which by smelling them, but suddenly, out of nowhere, had come the same, sudden outburst of rage he’d displayed on the night of their worst row.

‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

She saw Stephen’s look of shock as Murphy turned his back. Robin tried to answer, but her mouth appeared to be wadded with invisible cotton wool.

‘I din’ – I jus’—’

Her vision had become a constantly sticking film. So much whisky. So many pregnant women. Matthew. Sarah. ‘Not Tonight Santa’.

And then it was closing time. It was a relief to get back out into the cold night air again, although Robin’s surroundings were still behaving like a flick book; Silver Street, and the sky, and her companions, appeared in a jerky set of still images. Murphy was walking ahead with Jonathan, and she wasn’t sure where Martin and Carmen had gone. So much whisky…

‘What did he bite your head off for?’ said Stephen, in a low voice.

‘Nutt – nothing,’ said Robin. ‘Just a – he thought I meant – accusin’ him… I’m very drunk, Button…’

Stephen put his arm around her. Her older brother, who was the land manager of a large estate twenty miles from Masham, was the biggest of the Ellacott brothers, nearly as big as Strike, but this didn’t feel anything like Strike holding her up at the Ritz, on the night when he’d nearly kissed her. Don’t think about that.

The stars were moving jerkily as well, and you’d think stars, at least, would stay still… they said, if you were seasick, you should stare at the horizon, but she couldn’t see the horizon, only hazy street lights, and Murphy’s hunched, angry back…

Then they were home, with the empty kitchen smelling of whatever Linda, Jenny and Annabel had eaten for dinner. Betty, woken inside her dog crate, began whining and whimpering to be let out. Murphy proceeded wordlessly upstairs. Jonathan called a cheery good night and Robin managed to make a reciprocal noise through the invisible cotton wadding in her mouth, and it seemed to her that it might be a good idea to visit the downstairs bathroom.

‘You all right, Bobbin?’

‘Yeah’m fine, g’ t’ bed, Button…’

Unlike the small boy down in Bromley she didn’t know existed, Robin managed to reach the toilet bowl before vomiting. A cruel, remorseless, giant hand squeezed her innards repeatedly; finally, utterly spent, trembling and doused in sweat, she lay on the hard tiled floor, weak and tired, and thinking what a terrible mess she’d made of Christmas Eve. After what might have been ten minutes or half an hour, when the small, dark room was no longer spinning, she got gingerly to her feet.

She re-entered the kitchen as Martin and Carmen came in through the back door, both of them clearly the worse for drink.

‘Who’s in my room?’ Martin demanded, and Robin had to struggle to remember.

‘Annabel,’ she said.

Martin and Carmen had been expected to stay in their own flat tonight, which was only a twenty-minute drive away.

‘Fuck,’ said Martin angrily, as though this was Robin’s fault, and she almost felt as though it was, and she nearly offered them her room, before remembering that Murphy was in there. ‘We’ll have to sleep in the fucking sitting room,’ said Martin, and he strode off in that direction.

‘You look nearly as fucked up as I feel,’ said Carmen, peering at Robin, who tried to smile at her before heading upstairs.

She opened her bedroom door very quietly, hoping Murphy would already be asleep, but of course, he wasn’t. Lying on his back, bare-chested, illuminated by his bedside lamp, he watched her, stony-faced, as she closed the door quietly behind her.

‘Puke, did you?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘But I’m the one who’s drinking.’

‘Ryan, I thought you’d be able to tell which pint was which by the smell of them,’ said Robin, standing just inside the door, not wanting to get too close to him before she could brush her teeth. ‘That’s all. I wasn’t accusing you of drinking real pints.’

She was very conscious of trying to enunciate clearly, because the whisky wasn’t quite out of her system. When Murphy didn’t respond, Robin moved towards the bedroom chair, on which lay her pyjamas.

‘Can’t let even Christmas Eve go without sneaking off to text him,’ he said suddenly.

‘What?’ said Robin, disconcerted, standing up with her pyjamas in her hands.

‘Strike. What you were doing, when you went outside.’

‘I haven’t texted Strike.’

‘Liar,’ he said, and the word clanged through the room like a dropped skillet.

‘I haven’t texted Strike,’ she repeated. ‘Not since we got here.’

‘Liar,’ he said again. ‘You left your phone behind when you went to the bathroom. He texted you back, I saw it.’

Robin felt in her pockets, pulled out her phone and stared down at Strike’s incomprehensible message, which only made sense once she saw what she’d accidentally sent him, probably after abandoning her attempt to read about Reata Lindvall.

‘Ryan, it was a butt dial. Look.’

She walked over to the bed and held out her phone. He took it and read the two messages.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Robin took back her phone. She wasn’t yet sober, and she really wanted to cry, but instead, she went to fetch her dressing gown, prior to leaving for the bathroom. As she reached for the door handle, Murphy said,

‘Why did you get so drunk tonight?’

‘Because I rowed with Mum,’ said Robin, her throat constricting, ‘and then I rowed with you… and everyone’s bloody pregnant.’

He raised himself a little on the pillows, incredibly handsome in the half-light. (Who’s the Paul Newman lookalike?)

‘Robin, I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come here.’

‘Not now,’ she said, fighting tears. ‘I need to wash and clean my teeth, I’m disgusting.’

‘You’re never disgusting.’

‘Let me get clean,’ she said, and then she ducked down to her almost empty holdall, groped for Strike’s present, which lay hidden beneath her slippers, stood up with the box concealed by her robe, and left the room.

The house was silent. Robin shut herself in the bathroom and locked the door. She’d have liked to shower, but she feared waking Annabel, so she stripped off and washed, put on her pyjamas and cleaned her teeth for twice as long as usual, until no taste of whisky remained. Her head had begun to throb, but at least the floor remained steady beneath her feet, and the walls stationary.

Having pulled on her robe, she sat down on the edge of the bath and picked up Strike’s present, which was covered in blue paper patterned with small gold stars. She could tell he’d wrapped it himself, because it was lumpy. He’d used too much Sellotape. He was awful at wrapping presents.

But when she tore off the paper, she saw what was unmistakeably a jeweller’s box, made of thick pale blue card. Slowly, as though the contents might explode, she took off the lid.

A thick silver chain bracelet, from which hung seven charms, lay on a bed of black foam, and Robin recognised the middle charm immediately: it was the masonic orb she’d admired in Ramsay Silver. She stared, transfixed, unaware that her mouth was open. Then she lifted the bracelet out of its box, and amazed as she was, she could follow Strike’s thought process perfectly. He’d gone back for the orb, and someone, maybe Kenneth Ramsay, had tried to sell him more charms – make it a bracelet! – and that had given him the idea, but he hadn’t been content to buy a job lot from Ramsay; instead, he’d painstakingly built this, and it was like Strike, in that it was a bit clunky and inelegant, the charms mis-matched, but there was so much thought in every one of them: private jokes and shared memories, incommunicable to anyone but the two of them.

A silver Land Rover, representing the car which perhaps only Strike would miss as much as she did; the Houses of Parliament, where she’d worked undercover and planted a bug every bit as legally suspect as the one for which Mitch Patterson had been arrested (she’d never told Murphy that); a miniature enamelled shield bearing the coat of arms for Skegness, where they’d once eaten chips together, and joked about donkey rides, and interviewed the key witness in a thirty-year-old murder case; a silver sheep (‘What does your dad do for a living? You’ve never told me.’ ‘He’s a professor of sheep medicine, production and reproduction… why’s that funny?’); a tiny pair of silver scales (‘That’s Libra, it’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.’ ‘Yeah, well, I’m team rational.’); a silver and enamel robin, the newest and brightest charm of them all, for her name, and, perhaps, for Christmas; and in the middle of them all, what she didn’t doubt had been the most expensive of the lot, barring the chain itself: the little silver orb, with its ornate catch which, when released, unfurled into the jointed masonic cross, and she’d raised it close to her eyes to examine the symbols inscribed inside before she realised she couldn’t see, because of the tears now pouring down her cheeks.

What did you do that for? she thought, and she slid off the side of the bath onto the floor and sobbed quietly into her knees, two patches of tears spreading on her pyjama bottoms, the bracelet clutched in her hand.

It took Robin several long minutes to regain control of herself, and then she examined each charm again, twice over, thinking that nothing else anyone gave her today (because it must now be Christmas Day) could possibly mean as much to her; not diamonds, not a new Land Rover: nothing. She knew how much hard work Cormoran Strike would have put into this, he who found present-giving an onerous chore, who found it inexplicable that anyone would remember what anyone liked, or wore, but he’d remembered all of this, and he wanted her to know he remembered it, and oh God, I love him, thought Robin, and then another voice in her head said sternly,

No, you don’t.

I do, I do…

You’re still drunk.

Wiping her eyes on the hem of her robe, Robin reached out for her phone. She didn’t care if she woke him, didn’t care if he wondered what she was doing awake and texting him, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when she ought to be in bed with her boyfriend.

Thank you. I love it so much xxxxx

And two hundred and fifty miles away in his sister’s spare room in Bromley, sleepless, suffering heartburn and gas after too much lager, and grumpy after what was probably the worst party he’d ever attended, Cormoran Strike heard his mobile vibrate and reached for it in the dark. Looking down at Robin’s text, Christmas, and the unusual opportunities it afforded you, if you were prepared, at last, to put in the work, suddenly seemed a wonderful thing.

I’m glad, he typed, and then, slowly, painstakingly, he added a kiss for every one of hers.