Page 116 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

More than I, if truth were told,

Have stood and sweated hot and cold,

And through their reins in ice and fire

Fear contended with desire.

A. E. Housman XXX, A Shropshire Lad

‘Fucking typical it kicks off the night Barclay’s on them,’ said Strike, pulling his phone out of his pocket. ‘He needs to clear out. The blokes who dragged him off that roof are probably there.’

He called Barclay, informed him that he and Robin were on their way, and that he should leave before he was spotted.

‘Strange night to have a dog fight, Valentine’s Day,’ commented Robin, once Strike had hung up.

‘I don’t think we’re dealing with born romantics here.’

‘At least he hasn’t brought his son along,’ said Robin. ‘God, I feel sorry for that boy.’

‘Yeah, I can’t imagine it’s much fun having Plug as a father… did you read my email about the bloke in sunglasses who went looking for Todd after he moved out?’ asked Strike.

‘Yes, I’ve read all your emails,’ said Robin, a little more snappily than she’d meant to.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes, fine,’ said Robin quickly. The last thing she wanted right now was a discussion about her mood. ‘You were going to say something else before he came out of the house. “On an unrelated subject…”’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Strike. ‘I think I’ve identified Danny de Lion.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Nope. Still don’t know whether he’s dead or alive, but there’s a record of him on Sark, which fits everything you got out of Fay: no cars, only tractors or horse-drawn carts, small island.

If I’ve got the right bloke, his real surname’s de Leon with an ‘e’, not an ‘i’.

He’s the right age and there are a couple of old photos floating around online that look like him, before he got into peroxide and fake tan, and he’s still got a mother and brother living on Sark.

D’you know what the Sark flag looks like? ’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Cross of St George with two lions passant in the upper left quadrant.’

‘Oh God,’ said Robin, unable to help herself.

The agency proving Malcolm Truman had conspired to hush up the facts around William Wright’s killing certainly wasn’t going to help the strain on her relationship with Murphy, although admittedly she was currently so angry with him this was troubling her slightly less than it would before he’d called about the gazumping.

‘I can’t find a landline number for de Leon’s mother or brother,’ Strike continued, ‘but Sark’s so small, I’m considering going out there to bang on their front doors.

I won’t bill Decima,’ he added, before Robin could protest. ‘I’ve got the cash from Ted and Joan’s house, I’ll pay out of my own pocket. ’

‘You think de Leon was Wright, don’t you?’ said Robin.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it yet,’ said Strike, ‘but he’s the only one I can find a coherent narrative for: he was a blackmailer and got polished off in the vault because it gave Branfoot maximum control over the investigation.

However, we’re a long way off proving that, which is why I want to go to Sark.

If de Leon’s family have had contact with him since June the seventeenth last year, we can rule him out.

If they haven’t, I’ll go to Fyola’s boyfriend and try and scare him into telling me where Branfoot’s doing his secret filming.

Finding out the address of the flat where he keeps his camera and two-way mirror will scare off his goons, if anything does. ’

Robin’s mobile rang and connected at once to Bluetooth, revealing Murphy’s name.

‘Ignore that,’ she said, as the phone continued to ring. ‘So you’re inclined to rule out Semple and Powell?’

‘Not yet,’ said Strike, who was far more interested in the fact that Robin was ignoring Murphy’s call on Valentine’s Day than he was in Niall Semple or Tyler Powell. ‘Must admit, since I met Hardy I’ve been rethinking Semple a bit.’

‘In what way?’

‘It was just… seeing Freemasons’ Hall and listening to Hardy. I maybe… projected too much of my own stuff on to Semple.’

Murphy rang off. The ensuing silence seemed particularly loud.

‘What d’you mean, you projected…?’ asked Robin.

‘I haven’t got much use for religion or mysticism, so I s’pose it made far more sense to me that an ex-member of the SAS would’ve tried to get back to active service on his own, rather than that he went down a masonic rabbit hole.

But he was brain injured, and that bridge thing’s nagging at me a bit…

‘I downloaded a book Hardy mentioned to me, Bridge to Light . It’s an introduction to the masonic degrees.’

Strike opened Kindle on his phone to look at the passages he’d marked the previous evening.

‘Hardy told me there’s a bridge in the ceremony of induction into the fifteenth degree, when you become a Knight of the East. Jade Semple told me whatever degree Niall had reached was called “Knight of something”.

During initiation, the candidate has to cross a bridge over a river with “bodies and human limbs and heads floating in it”.

The candidate finally reaches “the treasure chamber of King Cyrus, which contains the sacred treasures… the Ark of the Covenant, golden candlesticks, the altar and the gold and silver vessels”.

‘I s’pose I’ve been assuming it was either/or for Semple, that he had a binary choice between war or Freemasonry, but this,’ said Strike, indicating the book on his phone, ‘is crammed with references to being a spiritual soldier. In fact, when you become a Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, you become “God’s soldier to war against fanaticism, intolerance, bigotry and all the evils which have made a hell of earth”, which isn’t a million miles away from:

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further; it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow

Across that angry or that glimmering sea… ’

‘What’s that?’ asked Robin.

‘Poem by James Elroy Flecker,’ said Strike.

‘Adopted as a kind of mission statement by the SAS. It’s carved into their mess bar at the base in Hereford and it’s on the clock tower, which is inscribed with the names of men killed in service.

One poor bastard survived commando operations, then got killed in a bloody hit and run in America. ’

‘You’ve been inside the SAS base?’ asked Robin, with some curiosity.

‘Once. Part of an investigation in the SIB. Have to say, their haul would give Kenneth Ramsay a run for his money.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘They’ve got entire glass cases full of silverware, and let’s just say a few valuable souvenirs formerly belonging to dictators might’ve found their way into SAS pockets while surrenders were being taken.

They’ve got Uday Hussein’s personal pistol in a case on the wall.

Took it from beside his dead body. The general feeling on the keepsakes is, “you want ’em, come and get ’em”. Doubt anyone fancies their chances.

‘What bothers me about Semple as Wright, though, is that I can’t see who’d want to bump him off. Murdering him discreetly in the basement of a silver shop without claiming responsibility doesn’t really seem Islamic State’s style.

‘With Tyler Powell, it’s the other way round.

We’ve got a clear motive for revenge, because people believed he was responsible for two deaths himself, but we still come back to: why kill him in the vault?

Powell sounds the reverse of Semple: a fairly blunt instrument.

Why go through all the levels of deception, with all the things that could go wrong, just to get him undercover in a silver shop and murder him somewhere so inconvenient? ’

‘Especially when they could just have fed him a peanut,’ said Robin, and Strike laughed. ‘What about Fleetwood?’

‘He’s still tied with Powell as highly unlikely, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Strike, ‘but I haven’t forgotten him. Kim’s on Albie again tonight. Finding Tish Benton would help…’

Another silence fell and Robin felt compelled to break it.

‘Has Pat made any progress on Hussein Mohamed?’

‘Yeah, there are three of them registered as living in the Forest Gate area. I think it’s going to come down to old-fashioned shoe leather and door-knocking.’

‘I think he is going to Ipswich,’ Robin said, as they followed Plug’s van onto the M11.

‘I’ve been looking at Todd’s poker book, the one he left behind,’ said Strike. ‘There are pencilled notes in the margins that are interesting.’

‘Saying what?’

‘It’s not what he wrote, he was only jotting down bits of his own poker wisdom. It’s how he writes. I’ll lay you odds Todd’s dyslexic. The spelling’s all over the place, and that’s even with correctly spelled text to guide him.’

For a second or two, Robin didn’t understand why this was significant.

‘Oh,’ she said, as the realisation hit her. ‘William Wright’s CV?’

‘Exactly. Full of misspellings, Pamela said.’

‘You think Todd wrote it?’

‘I think it’s a strong possibility. Todd would’ve known exactly what Kenneth Ramsay was looking for, and could have tailored Wright’s CV to fit – the jujitsu, previous work in an antiques shop and so on.

Somebody helped Wright learn enough about silver to pass the interview, as well.

Todd worked at Ramsay Silver for two years before Wright showed up, and I’d imagine anyone in sustained contact with Kenneth Ramsay would end up knowing more about masonic silverware than they ever wanted to. ’

‘You think it was Todd who put Wright’s email address on the “for interview” list?’

‘I do, yeah. Then he panicked when he heard Pamela didn’t like the CV, and added Wright’s name to the interview list without her noticing.

I didn’t buy his claim that he didn’t know how to get on the computer when I spoke to him.

I think Todd helped Wright get that job, and I think he knew exactly what was happening at Ramsay Silver on the night of June the seventeenth, which is why he insisted on continuing to play poker until four in the morning, to make sure he had a rock-solid alibi.

‘Anyway, I’m currently trying to track down Todd’s ex-hooker mother to see if she knows where he is… Did you see, Patterson’s been sentenced?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Two years.’

‘Not nearly fucking long enough for me,’ said Strike. When Robin didn’t respond, he said,

‘I see they’ve put out a request for information on that silver Peugeot.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, who’d seen blurry pictures of the car online that morning. In spite of the new appeal, there’d been no admission as yet that the police had rethought their identification of Jason Knowles.

‘If both the blonde and the brunette drivers were Medina,’ said Strike, ‘I’m not sure why she didn’t keep the wig on throughout.’

‘I’d imagine a wig would be very hot and itchy, with the amount of real hair she had,’ said Robin.

‘Or perhaps a blonde was supposed to be doing part of the job, and a brunette doing the rest, and nobody was ever supposed to put them together,’ said Strike.

The sun was setting and Plug had just put on the lights of his white van when Strike’s mobile, which was still in his hand, buzzed.

Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw him read something.

He remained completely motionless for nearly thirty seconds.

Glancing sideways, Robin saw his apparently stricken face.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I… nothing,’ said Strike.

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Robin. ‘Is it more Culpepper stuff?’

‘No, it’s…’

Dazed with relief, Strike could think of nothing to say but the truth.

‘Just found out I’m not a father.’

‘What?’ said Robin faintly.

‘I didn’t want to tell you—’

Strike felt almost drunk with the release of tension, and his mouth appeared to be acting independently of his brain.

He’d only known this sensation a couple of times before in his entire life: arriving through flooded countryside at the old house in St Mawes, in time to reach his aunt’s deathbed; finding Charlotte alive, at last, in hospital, forty-eight hours after he’d found her torn-up dress.

‘—until I was sure.’

‘About what?’

‘Bijou Watkins had Honbold’s baby early,’ said Strike, ‘and he thought it might be mine. I did a DNA test, she’s just forwarded me the results, and it’s nothing to do with me.

Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Strike, running a hand over his face before reading out Bijou’s text.

‘“I’ve only just seen this, sorry for the delay” – fuck’s sake – but she knew all along it wasn’t mine, so I assume she wasn’t shitting herself about the results. ’

He glanced sideways at Robin, whose gaze was fixed on Plug’s tail-lights.

‘I know I should’ve told you,’ said Strike. ‘I just – after all the other Culpepper shit – I wanted to know for certain what I was dealing with.’

Almost against her will, the vice-like grip of anger and anguish that had been with Robin ever since Ilsa had told her about Bijou’s baby was loosening.

‘When did you take the test?’

‘Thursday. Met her at the Savoy. Cheek swab. Handed it all back to her and if I never see her again, it’ll be too fucking soon.’

He glanced at Robin’s profile.

‘You can say it.’

‘What?’

‘I’m a stupid, reckless fucker who’d have deserved it, if it had been mine.’

‘I wasn’t going—’

‘I’ll say it, then. I’m a stupid, reckless fucker and I’d’ve deserved—’

‘Accidents happen,’ said Robin, who wanted to know how much Strike would tell her.

‘It wouldn’t have been an accident, not from her end. Ilsa told me she’s adept at waste-bin salvage. Christ, ’ said Strike again, running his hand through his hair as he looked around. ‘Why isn’t there booze in here? We should keep a bottle handy.’

‘So you can celebrate every time you find out you’re not a father?’

‘There won’t be another time, I can promise you that,’ said Strike. ‘No more women who’re walking red flags. I had no excuse for not seeing trouble when it’s right in front of me, I had sixteen years’ fucking experience.’

‘So, then,’ said Robin, ‘why disregard the red flag?’

‘Because sometimes,’ said Strike, all caution gone, ‘if you can’t get what you want, you take what you can get.’

Confusion and trepidation flooded Robin.

What did he mean? What, or who, did he want?

Was there yet another woman she didn’t know about, for whom he yearned?

Was he talking about the dead Charlotte, now forever beyond hope of reform or reunion?

Or was he hinting…? But she couldn’t make herself ask.

She was scared of taking a step that might put her in possession of information that would have ramifications way beyond deciding whether she and Murphy should put in a higher bid on a house.

Beside her, Strike was thinking, ask me. Ask me what I mean and I’ll bloody say it. Ask.

Neither spoke. They drove on in silence.