Page 120 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;

Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey’s over

There’ll be time enough to sleep.

A. E. Housman IV: Reveille, A Shropshire Lad

In spite of her tiredness, and notwithstanding lingering feelings of guilt and anxiety that were rapidly becoming habitual, Robin arrived at Gatwick at six o’clock the following morning in a state of relative cheerfulness and excitement because she was getting her wish of leaving London, however briefly.

She entered the airport pulling her small wheeled suitcase behind her and scanning the check-in desks for her partner, but saw no sign of him.

Strike’s last text to her had been at ten o’clock the previous evening, when he’d been on the still-at-liberty Plug.

Robin had just joined a queue when she spotted Strike walking towards her, a kit bag over his shoulder, unshaven, baggy-eyed with tiredness, and limping slightly.

‘Up all fucking night,’ were his first words as he joined her.

‘Why?’

‘Plug still hasn’t been fucking arrested. This is getting grim.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘He had a couple of smaller dogs in his car. Drove to fifteen Carnival Street again – that black monstrosity clearly didn’t die in the Valentine’s Day massacre – and took the dogs inside, by the scruffs of their necks.

Fucking horrible noises ensued – sounded like the black monster was ripping them apart. ’

‘Oh my God,’ said Robin.

‘I’ve called the RSCPA and told them they need to get to Carnival Street, asap. Sooner that thing’s put down, the better. Anyway, Plug then drove to fucking Barking.’

‘Appropriate.’

‘What? Oh, yeah… well, I think that black hellhound’s got a sister, because round five in the morning, Plug came out of a shithole of a house carrying a puppy that looked just like it.

‘Anyway, I had his uncle on the blower, first thing. He’s bloody furious Plug hasn’t been arrested yet. Came close to blaming me.’

‘How’s that your fault?’

‘Clients, innit,’ said Strike. ‘We’re supposed to be able to work magic. I told him the police’ll be trying to identify and bag as many of the ring as possible simultaneously, so they don’t tip off the rest, but apparently it’s my job to make them work faster.’

Bags checked in, they proceeded to the departure lounge, where Strike consumed a couple of espressos in an attempt to wake himself up.

This wasn’t the way he’d planned setting off to Sark.

Given the declaration he was hoping to make there, he’d wanted at least to have a shower first, and he was currently too exhausted to come up with much in the way of sparkling repartee.

Robin, who could see he was struggling to keep his eyes open, decided to wait until they were on the flight before engaging in the conversation about Belgium and Reata Lindvall she was burning to have.

At the same time, and even with Strike so sleepy, she enjoyed an ease she hadn’t felt much lately, and she knew part of the reason was that nobody was about to spring a conversation about lost babies or frozen eggs on her.

At last they filed onto the plane, Robin letting Strike take the window seat, because he was large enough to inconvenience both neighbours if he sat in the middle. The young man on Robin’s left was speaking volubly in French to his friend across the aisle, so she felt safe to say to Strike,

‘I did a lot of reading on Reata Lindvall last night. I know you don’t think—’

‘Forget what I said before,’ said Strike, slightly more alert for his ingestion of caffeine and thinking he should capitalise on what might be a temporary spurt of energy.

He was prepared to disavow almost anything he’d ever said if it would further his prospects with Robin, and while he had new information of his own to share, he was more than happy to listen to her first.

‘OK,’ said Robin, ‘well, I know Jim Todd can’t have killed Reata and her daughter, because he was already in jail for the trafficking, but he does seem well connected, criminally speaking. As well connected as Jason Knowles, in his way.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Shame he’s too old to have been one of Branfoot’s promising young thugs. That would’ve fitted in nicely. He could’ve recommended Oz to Branfoot as the hitman.’

‘Oz sounds younger than Todd, doesn’t he? But not really young.’

‘Agreed,’ said Strike, ‘but he and Todd seem to have an identical taste in victims: teenagers and very young women. I think it’s within the realms of possibility that they met through the trafficking stuff.’

The plane began to move.

‘Well, I found out a few new things about the Lindvall murders last night,’ said Robin. ‘I was combing through old news reports, and obviously they’re mostly in French, so it wasn’t easy, but the human remains they found in the woods are interesting – more for what was missing than what was there.’

‘Which bits were missing?’

‘Heads, hands and feet,’ said Robin. ‘The bone fragments they retrieved were so small they couldn’t even tell whether they’d come from an adult or a child. Whoever the bones belonged to seemed to have been dismembered, and the bones were then baked to make them easier to crush.’

Pushed back into her seat as the plane’s nose rose into the air, she brought up a saved article on her own phone, which showed pictures of the woodland beside the Lac d’Ougrée.

‘I know wild animals might’ve dug up or carried off bits of the corpses in the years before the remains were found,’ said Robin, ‘but it seems very convenient foxes would have removed the exact parts that might have led to an ID.’

‘It does, yeah,’ said Strike. The caffeine was wearing off quicker than he’d hoped, but he was forcing himself to concentrate, partly out of a desire to ingratiate himself, but also because his interest had been genuinely awakened.

‘So we’ve got a definite overlap in the m.o.

of the Lindvalls’ killer and William Wright’s? ’

‘Exactly,’ said Robin, ‘but there’s more.

Most of the old articles I’ve found take it for granted that Reata and Jolanda were both in the woods, because clothing and belongings from both were found there, but the most detailed contemporary account I’ve found, which I had to translate into English, says the bone fragments only showed one set of DNA.

The trouble is, Reata and Jolanda both had unknown fathers, and Reata’s mother had been cremated, so there was no way of telling whether the fragments were the mother’s or the daughter’s, and of course the belongings in the woods had rotted and rusted and were untestable, and the accused boyfriend had chucked all their stuff at home. ’

‘Makes you think,’ said Strike, not entirely honestly. In spite of his best efforts, he was feeling increasingly groggy.

‘And then the case became really politicised,’ said Robin, swiping right to show a picture of a women’s march proceeding along a bridge over the River Meuse, near the Lac d’Ougrée. ‘Did you read about the protests while the trial was going on?’

‘Angry women,’ said Strike, as the plane hit a small amount of turbulence and he and Robin bumped elbows.

‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Maes’s defence team argued Reata had neglected Jolanda, found her an inconvenience, regretted not having her adopted, and killed her, possibly accidentally, in a fit of temper.

The defence argued that the possessions of Reata’s found at the burial site could have been planted by Reata herself, in the hope people would think she was dead, as well as Jolanda. ’

‘Pretty thin,’ said Strike.

‘I know. You can see why it became a real cause célèbre for feminists. I’m not saying the jury was swayed by that, but objectively speaking, they had no concrete proof that two people had been murdered.

All that’s beyond doubt is that parts of one body were in the woods.

But Maes was the only person claiming Reata was a neglectful mother.

Other witnesses said she loved Jolanda. Meanwhile the prosecution argued that the bone fragments found were more likely to be Reata’s, because Jolanda’s would have been smaller and easier to hide.

Maes still sticks to it that he’s innocent.

He’s got a little online fan club of men who think he was framed by Reata.

There are supposed sightings of her after she disappeared, but none of them look very credible. ’

In spite of Strike’s best efforts, Robin could tell he wasn’t finding what she was telling him of gripping import, so she reverted to a more obviously relevant subject.

‘I’m making some headway with Powell’s friend Wynn Jones, by the way. We’ve been texting back and forth.’

‘Really?’ said Strike, fighting another yawn. He was finding the plane’s motion distinctly soporific.

‘Yes. He’s actually been a bit—’ The word that came to Robin’s mind was ‘creepy’, but reflecting that, compared to some of the men involved in this case, Jones’ behaviour was more oafish than sinister, she said, ‘—flirty.’

‘Has he, now?’

‘Yes. He Googled pictures of me going in and out of court,’ said Robin.

‘Anyway, I think I’ve managed to convince him the Whiteheads aren’t our clients.

I told him we’re working for a woman and he said “it’s Dilys, isn’t it?

” I said I couldn’t confirm that, but he told me Dilys had called him, worried that Tyler was the body in the vault, and he – Jones – told Dilys she was soft in the head. ’

‘Might explain why Dilys thinks Jones is rude.’

‘That’s what I thought. Anyway, I’m hoping to get him to FaceTime me and press him on why Powell mentioned silver on the phone to him, because he’s ignored that question twice.

‘But while we’re on Powell: I don’t feel great about this, but I really do think I should try and talk to the Whiteheads.

Just to find out whether there was any concrete reason for thinking Powell sabotaged his own car, or if it was just a rumour.

And there are a couple of other things,’ said Robin.

‘This might be absolutely nothing, but—’

She realised, mid-sentence, that Strike had sunk into a doze, head against the window. As she looked at him, he let out a loud, deep snore. To her left, the Frenchman laughed.

‘’E’s tired, your ’usband.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, tugging the in-flight magazine out of the pocket in front of her. ‘He works nights.’

Fifty minutes later, as the plane began its bumpy descent, Strike woke with a start.

‘Shit,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin.

‘Was I snoring?’

‘A bit.’

Strike wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, afraid he’d also been drooling.

‘Don’t think I snored as badly as this before my nose got broken,’ he said apologetically.

‘How did that happen?’ said Robin, who’d never asked.

‘Boxing. Uppercut from a Welsh Grenadier. He got lucky.’

‘Of course he did,’ said Robin, amused.

‘He did,’ Strike insisted. ‘I knocked him out the following round. You were telling me more about Lindvall,’ he added.

‘I’d finished,’ said Robin untruthfully. ‘That was it.’

Strike falling asleep while she was talking had temporarily dimmed her enthusiasm for the subject.

Strike yawned, then said,

‘Did you know they found silver on Sark in the nineteenth century?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Nineteenth century. They hit a good vein, thought they’d struck it rich, and poured money into the mines, but the vein petered out.

Cost a fortune, because they were digging out under the sea and they needed pumps to keep the water out.

Then a shaft caved in, drowning ten miners, and that was the end of Sark silver. Ruined the Seigneur.’

‘Who’s the Seigneur?’

‘Feudal ruler of Sark. It’s a weird place,’ said Strike. ‘Last feudal system in Europe, till 2008, when they decided to try democracy instead.’

Robin’s fantasies of warmth and light were dashed by her first sight of Guernsey, where it was chilly and wet.

She and Strike took a taxi from the airport to the town of St Peter Port, from which they were to catch the ferry to Sark.

The talkative taxi driver made further discussion of the case impossible until they’d left him outside the ferry ticket office, where they were informed that, in addition to their ferry tickets, they should purchase luggage labels, which would ensure their bags were transported to their lodgings by tractor on arrival on Sark.

‘How’re your sea legs?’ Strike asked Robin as they walked towards the harbour, rain peppering their faces as they looked out over the choppy grey sea.

‘They’ve never been tested much,’ Robin admitted.

‘Ah well,’ said Strike. ‘Short trip.’

Only as he began to descend the long, steep, wet, grilled-metal ramp down to the ferry did it occur to Strike that he should have thrown his walking stick into the kit bag he’d packed, necessarily hastily, that morning.

He walked slowly, his right knee trembling on every alternate step, holding tight to the handrail, while Robin watched in some trepidation.

However, Strike reached the interior of the small ferry without mishap and, not wanting to take any more chances, sat in the first row of cold plastic seats, directly opposite a sign reading: Sark Shipping reserves the right to refuse embarkation and passage to any person who appears to be in a drunken state .

The engines roared into life, and the ferry heaved away from the dock.

‘Eyes on the horizon if you feel ill,’ Strike advised Robin, and she thought immediately of Christmas Eve, her jerky vision, and Murphy’s hunched, angry back.