Page 135 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore…

A. E. Housman IX, Last Poems

Strike assumed Robin was having too good an evening with Murphy to bother picking up his call, which somewhat blunted his sense of triumph about his unexpected Barnaby’s epiphany.

Tired, but with no desire to go home and be depressed in his attic, he had decided to head for Harlesden and the last known address of Jim Todd’s mother, Nancy Jameson, née Philpott.

A group of five youths stood vaping a short distance away from where Strike had parked, all eyeing the BMW speculatively. Two of the youths were white, two brown and the last black. Strike headed straight for them, entering a fug of cannabis vapour.

‘There’s a fiver in it for each of you if that car’s in the same state I left it in when I get back downstairs.’

‘Wha’?’ said one of the white boys blearily; he had long, dry peroxided hair and was wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the words WACKEN OPEN AIR.

‘Yeah, all right,’ said the black youth, who was tall, wiry, and wore no jacket over his Snoop Dogg T-shirt, in spite of the chilliness of the evening.

Strike headed for the stairwell visible on the corner of the middle building.

The interior walls were graffitied, too, and someone had recently either thrown a takeaway curry over the banisters, or vomited.

Strike, who’d lived in places like this with his mother, offered up an inner prayer of gratitude that he no longer had to.

He reached the second-floor balcony and knocked on the door of flat 39. Nobody answered.

Glancing down into the forecourt he saw the five youths staring up at him.

‘D’you know Nancy Jameson?’ he called down at them.

One of the two South Asian boys, who had a patchy beard, called back,

‘She’ll be pissed.’

His companions laughed. Strike knocked again. Nobody answered.

He moved to look through the window, but the very dirty net curtains made it almost impossible to make out more than the fact that a lamp was switched on. Nevertheless, after watching for a few seconds, he thought he saw a movement in the corner of the room.

He returned to the front door and knocked a third time. There was no response. He returned to the car park.

‘You know Nancy, do you?’ he asked the bearded youth, as he approached the group.

‘Yeah, she’s a right old bitch,’ said the teenager, to mutters of agreement and laughs from his friends.

‘Seen her lately?’

The boy shook his head.

‘Any of you?’ said Strike, looking around the group.

‘I seen her,’ said the second white boy, who was wearing a Millwall football strip. ‘Wiv a fat bloke.’

‘Younger than herself?’

The boy shrugged. Strike remembered being that age himself; everyone over forty looked decrepit.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I have reason to believe Nancy might’ve done herself an injury and is unable to open the front door.’

It was a flimsy excuse, but as the youths would be witnesses to what he was doing in any case, Strike thought he might as well lay the foundation of a defence now. He returned to his car and extracted his bunch of skeleton keys from the glove compartment.

‘You gonna break in?’ said the bearded youth, in interest.

‘It’s not breaking in,’ lied Strike.

‘Can we come?’ said the youth in the Millwall top.

‘Worried about Nancy too, are you?’ said Strike.

‘Yeah,’ said the second of the South Asian boys, who alone was wearing a coat, and whose acne looked painful. ‘We’ve been dead worried.’

‘And you think I ought to get in there and check on her, do you?’ said Strike, still thinking of what he might have to tell a lawyer.

The boy with acne laughed.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Def’nitely.’

Strike supposed it was the skeleton keys that interested them, or perhaps they wanted to witness the old woman’s drunken outrage at a stranger entering her flat. He doubted there was much else to do in Magdalen Court on a Sunday night in February.

‘I need at least one of you to keep an eye on my car,’ he said.

‘Does the one minding the car get the whole twenny-five quid?’ asked the black youth.

‘No, but he gets an extra fiver,’ said Strike.

‘Awright then, I’ll stay,’ said the boy.

So Strike traipsed back upstairs, the two white boys and the two South Asian boys following in his wake.

‘That was Baggy,’ he heard one of the boys saying to another, pointing at the curry or vomit splattered at the foot of the stairs, and they all chuckled.

Strike knocked a fourth time on Nancy’s flat door without result, so he inserted the key in the lock and turned it. No inside chain had been put up, so he wasn’t obliged to shoulder the door or break any part of it.

‘What’s that fucking smell?’ said the bearded youth, pushing forwards, but finding himself impeded by the arm Strike had just thrown up.

‘Stay here,’ said the detective firmly. ‘Do not come in.’

The unmistakeable, sickly sweet smell of decaying flesh had just assaulted his nostrils. He could hear the buzzing of flies.

‘ Stay ,’ he said firmly to the youths, and he proceeded down the narrow hall to look through the open door to his right, where the lamp was still switched on and where an incredibly emaciated cat let out a piteous miaow, trotted past him and escaped onto the balcony.

The bodies of Jim Todd and a woman Strike assumed to be his mother, Nancy, were lying on the dirty carpet in a foul miasma encouraged by the gas fire that continued to blaze.

Todd, who was fully dressed, had been stabbed multiple times.

His now black blood had soaked his shirt and the floor beneath him.

There was evidence that the starving cat had chewed off part of his face.

Nancy, a small, slight woman in a nightdress, had been killed with a single knife wound to the chest. The tache noire , a horizontal stripe, was visible in her dull, staring eyes, in one of which a maggot was wriggling.

‘FUCK!’

Strike turned: the youths had, of course, disregarded his instruction to stay put. The boy with acne had clapped a hand over his mouth.

‘Out,’ said Strike. ‘ Out! ’

Three of the youths blundered backwards but the bearded boy remained, apparently unable to move. Strike took him roughly by the shoulder of his jacket and marched him out onto the balcony, too late to stop the boy in the Millwall strip yelling down to his mate, who was watching Strike’s car,

‘ They’ve been fucking murdered! ’

‘Shut up,’ snarled Strike. ‘This isn’t a fucking game.’

The door of flat 38 now opened and a woman with a heavily lined face, dyed red hair and a tattooed throat came outside in dressing gown and slippers.

‘Woss going on?’ she demanded angrily.

‘With you in a minute,’ said Strike.

He turned to the boy with acne, who looked very sick and seemed less excited than the others, which Strike felt indicated a level of maturity.

‘Call the police. Tell them—’

‘I said, what’s going on? ’

‘Just a moment, madam—’ Strike lowered his voice. ‘Tell them two people have been murdered and give them the add—’

‘I ain’t stayin’ if the police are comin’,’ said the boy in the WACKEN hoodie, and he set off at a jog, pushing the neighbour aside as he went.

‘Oi!’ she said, glaring after him. ‘What’s that smell?’ she added, striding closer.

‘Give the police the address,’ Strike continued, still talking to the boy with acne.

‘Then go down and wait, so you can show them up here – do not fucking tell anyone else ,’ Strike added, seeing the other two boys were already busy with their phones.

‘We don’t want fucking sightseers and you don’t want to be charged with obstruction of justice. ’

This, of course, was an entirely empty threat, but it did the job; both boys shoved their phones back into their pockets.

‘I said —’ began the neighbour ominously.

‘There’s been an accident,’ said Strike, as the three youths headed back towards the stairs. ‘The proper authorities are being notified.’

‘But—’

Strike stepped back inside flat 39 and closed the door in the woman’s face.

No matter that he’d seen plenty of bodies in his life, decaying corpses held no attraction for Strike.

Nevertheless, he pulled his coat lapel up over his face to block out the worst of the carrion smell and returned to the sitting room, determined to make the most of the ten or fifteen minutes he was likely to have before the police arrived.

Another glance at the bodies confirmed his opinion that they’d been dead for days, even though putrefaction had undoubtedly been hastened by the gas fire. Todd, he observed, had a head injury, in addition to having been knifed several times in the abdomen and neck.

Strike looked around the small, fairly bare room. The woodchip wallpaper was peeling in places. The TV was at least ten years old. A large, angled, solid crystal paperweight lay on the floor, covered with dried blood and a single grey hair. Otherwise, there was no sign of a struggle.

Strike went to check the rest of the small flat.

The bathroom wasn’t overly clean, but showed no traces of blood.

Nancy’s bedroom was cluttered, untidy and smelled unsavoury.

The next room was crammed with junk, but the single bed, with its disarranged duvet, suggested that Todd had been sleeping there.

A corner of a book was visible beneath the pillow, which Strike moved to expose the title: How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker , by Doyle ‘Texas Dolly’ Brunson.

A distant siren was growing steadily louder. Strike could hear voices outside: more neighbours were coming out of their flats, massing like coffin flies. Pulling his coat lapel back over his nose, Strike headed out of the flat in time to see the flashing blue light enter the dark forecourt.