Page 139 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Now who beat his head in? Who would be most likely to beat his head in?

John Oxenham A Maid of the Silver Sea

Shortly after leaving Tottenham Court Road station an hour later, Robin realised that Strike had sent her a text while she’d been on the Tube.

Call when you’re awake, I’ve had a busy night

Robin pressed his number.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I thought you’d still be asleep. Where are you?’

‘Charing Cross Road.’

‘The hell are you doing up so early?’ said Strike.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ said Robin.

‘Know the feeling,’ said Strike. He’d taken a taxi back to Harlesden to pick up his car, deposited it in the usual garage, headed back to the office, and then, struck by an idea and feeling far too awake to go to bed, had spent the ensuing hours going back over the silver vault file.

‘Where are you?’ asked Robin, who could hear background chat and clinking.

‘Dunno,’ said Strike. ‘Where am I? Hang on… Little Portland Café on Little Portland Street. I’m having a full English. Didn’t have any dinner.’

‘D’you want some company?’

‘Yeah, if it’s you,’ said Strike and, tired and miserable though Robin was, she felt a flicker of comfort at these words.

‘OK, I’ll see you there.’

Shortly before she arrived at the café, she received another text from her boyfriend.

Please just call me.

Another wave of anger and guilt washed over Robin. She needed to decide what she was going to say before she responded to Murphy. She currently had no idea.

When she entered the café, an old-fashioned greasy spoon, where the air was thick with the smell of bacon fat and frying eggs, she saw Strike at a corner table looking as she felt: exhausted and slightly unkempt.

‘What’s happened?’ Robin asked, dropping into the seat opposite him.

‘You all right?’ Strike asked, because Robin looked very pale and tired.

‘Fine,’ said Robin.

She had no intention of telling Strike about Murphy’s drinking: she felt too much loyalty to her boyfriend for that.

‘Want to eat something while I tell you?’

‘Actually,’ said Robin, who hadn’t had breakfast, ‘yes.’

She ordered tea and a bacon roll, and when the waiter had departed, Strike filled her in on his overnight activities, starting with Barnaby’s, moving through the discovery of two corpses, and concluding with his arrest, interview and release without charge, by which time Robin’s roll and mug of tea had arrived, and her mouth was hanging open.

‘Oh – my – God .’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘And there’s more. Iverson asked me whether our client has been pregnant or had a kid recently.’

Robin’s hand flew to her mouth, exactly as Fiona Freeman’s had, when Robin had told her she’d been caught on camera putting the cipher note through the agency’s door.

‘Apparently,’ Strike continued, ‘Wright told one of the upstairs neighbours that his girlfriend was expecting.’

‘Oh no,’ Robin whispered, through her fingers.

‘He could’ve been bullshitting,’ said Strike, who’d expected this reaction.

‘But—’

‘He might’ve been trying to paint a picture of himself as a man with something going for him, for the benefit of his new neighbours.’

‘I know, but—’

‘I got a fuck of a shock when she said it,’ Strike admitted, ‘but this still doesn’t make Fleetwood Wright.

For all we know, Powell or Semple might’ve knocked – been expecting kids themselves,’ Strike corrected himself quickly, because after what Robin had told him on Sark, he didn’t want to sound glib about pregnancy.

‘Anyway, I’m even keener to find Hussein Mohamed now, and Shah thinks he’s found the right house. ’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, just saw it in the file. The wife opened the door to Shah and he saw a wheelchair behind her in the hall. The wife says her husband’s working as an Uber driver.

She seemed panicky about getting the knock on the door and shut it in Shah’s face before he could ask about Wright.

I think we need to keep an eye on the house and see if we can catch Hussein going in and out between shifts. ’

‘Do we tell Decima what Wright said?’

Strike chewed a mouthful of sausage, thinking.

‘I’d rather not,’ he said. ‘Not unless we get something else, something concrete. There was that bloke who called claiming to be Fleetwood, remember?’

‘Has Decima got back to you about that?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Predictable answer. “Everyone heard me calling Rupert ‘Bear’, that man could have been faking a deep voice” – note the tacit admission that Fleetwood has got a deep voice – and “everyone who worked at Dino’s knew about the nef being stolen”.

She thinks it was someone impersonating him, either for a macabre joke or because they were involved in his killing and are trying to throw us off the scent.

Frankly, I think we could frogmarch the living Fleetwood right up to her at this point and she’d still insist he was dead. ’

‘Tish Benton’s back from Sardinia,’ said Robin, taking out her phone and bringing up Tish’s Instagram account. ‘I don’t think it was a holiday, or not entirely. She’s got a new job, which is going to mean a lot of travel. We might be lucky to catch her in London, going forwards.’

Strike took the phone from her. A pretty girl with shiny black hair beamed out of the most recent picture, standing in front of a sign that read Hotel Serenità, with the caption:

So thrilled to announce that from March 1st I’ll be working as #brandconsultant for #ClairmontHotelsEurope!!! #travel #dreamjob #luxuryhotels

‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Well, we’ll have to try and doorstep her between flights.’

Robin really did look exhausted and miserable, Strike thought, as he passed her back her phone. He couldn’t attribute it all to shock about the increased likelihood that Wright had been Fleetwood, because she’d arrived looking pale and sad.

‘You sure you’re all right?’ he asked, remembering her previous admission that she hadn’t been able to sleep.

‘Yes,’ said Robin automatically, ‘fine.’

But the desire to unburden herself, if not of everything, then of something, made her add,

‘Ryan’s… going through a rough time.’

‘Ah,’ said Strike, who regretted asking, because he wasn’t particularly cheered by the thought of Robin sitting up all night to console or counsel her boyfriend. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but his name came up, in last night’s interview.’

‘How?’ said Robin, in sudden panic.

‘They asked if he’d been feeding us information – I denied it, obviously. Said he’d never told either of us anything.’

They sat in silence for a minute. Then Robin said,

‘What if he was having some kind of mental crisis?’

‘Who, Murphy?’

‘No!’ said Robin quickly. ‘Rupert Fleetwood!’

‘Oh,’ said Strike, depressed by her protective tone.

‘I know you think I’m too soft on Rupert,’ she went on, ‘but hear me out, please. He’s being horribly bullied at work.

Longcaster’s taunting him about his parents’ death in front of guests.

He’s being chased for cash by a dealer. Everyone’s against his relationship.

Decima announces she’s pregnant. Say Rupert had some kind of – some kind of meltdown – and stole that nef and only then realised how much worse he’d made his situation.

That’s a lot of stress. Just say he took the job at Ramsay Silver to prove something; that he could make it on his own, that he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty, telling himself he’d return to Decima like a hero and—’

‘And get arrested for the theft of the nef,’ said Strike.

‘But if he wasn’t thinking rationally?’

Strike swallowed a large mouthful of black pudding before saying,

‘I’m not denying Fleetwood’s moved up the table of possible Wrights, but answer me this. If he was genuinely happy about the pregnancy, why did he rip up the “lucky T-shirt” he was wearing when she told him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘But if Wright had a pregnant girlfriend, and he wasn’t Fleetwood, it seems really strange that no other woman has come forward looking for the father of her child. Decima’s the only recent mother we know of who thinks Wright might’ve been her partner.’

‘Possibly the woman in question thinks she’s just been abandoned,’ said Strike. ‘The anti-Decima.’

‘I still want to know why Rupert went to Sacha Legard’s party,’ said Robin.

‘It’s the last known sighting of him and it’s really strange he gatecrashed it, given everything that was going on at the time.

I’m going to speak to Cosima this week, I’ll force her to talk to me, somehow…

have you heard from Kim since yesterday? ’

‘No. Why?’

‘I wouldn’t have expected her to go quietly. I thought she might’ve come back to you, to persuade you to keep her on.’

‘Not after what I said to her in that bar,’ said Strike. ‘No, I left a message on Pat’s desk this morning to pay her the balance of what we owed her, so hopefully that’s the end of her.’

‘What’ll she do now?’

‘Join Farah Navabi’s new agency, probably.’

‘When can Wardle start, d’you know?’

‘Wednesday. He wants to get straight on the job and he had some leave in hand. Apparently when he said he was resigning, they weren’t overkeen on him hanging around. He thinks they suspect he’s joining us.’

Robin glanced around at the rapidly filling café, and dropped her voice.

‘So… Todd.’

‘Extremely dead Todd,’ said Strike, ‘yeah. Exactly the same m.o. as Wright’s murder, minus dismemberment and mutilation. Blow to the back of the head and multiple knife wounds. The mother took a single stab to the stomach. She wouldn’t have taken much effort. Small and skinny.’

‘This is appalling,’ said Robin.

‘It’s not good,’ agreed Strike. ‘I think Oz has committed four murders in eight months, which puts us in serial killer territory, but I don’t think these are thrill killings – not all of them, anyway.

I think he enjoyed Medina, but I doubt he got a kick out of Todd and his mother.

Todd had simply become a liability, so he had to go. ’

‘Because of the upskirting?’