Page 141 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

… the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden

And the gleam of her golden hair.

Matthew Arnold The Forsaken Merman

News of the murders of Jim Todd and his mother hit the London Evening Standard the following day.

To Strike’s relief, his presence at the scene wasn’t mentioned.

For once, his own and the Met’s interests seemed to have coincided: they didn’t want publicity about the fact that the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency might be ahead of them in investigations into the silver vault murder, and Strike had no wish to encourage journalists back into Denmark Street.

The papers didn’t seem to have spotted the connection between the murder of Wright and those of Todd and his mother, for which Robin, too, was grateful.

She needed no further complications in her severely strained relations with Murphy.

She and her boyfriend met at last on Tuesday evening, back in the Duke pub. Murphy looked as though he’d lost weight in the two days since they’d last seen each other. Slightly hunched and red-eyed, he listened as Robin delivered the speech she’d planned.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ she began, and tears started in Murphy’s eyes; he reached out and grabbed her hand, but Robin pulled it away. ‘But we can’t pretend everything’s fine and normal, Ryan, because it really isn’t. I can’t move in with you until we’ve rebuilt some trust.’

‘That’s fair,’ said Murphy. ‘That’s completely fair. I thought I’d fucking lost you for good,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘I love you so fucking much, Robin.’

‘I love you too,’ said Robin, ‘but we do need honesty this time. I need you to tell me exactly what’s going on, at work, and with your drink—’

‘I went back to AA yesterday,’ said Murphy. ‘I’d stopped going to meetings. There was so much pressure at work I told myself I couldn’t afford the time – but that comes first, now. If this bloody investigation was only over—’

‘Why are you being investigated? Drinking?’

‘No, it’s just the first guy I arrested for the gang shooting,’ muttered Murphy, who very clearly didn’t want to elaborate, but Robin pressed him.

‘But why are they investigating you for that?’

‘He… claims I roughed him up.’

‘Did you?’

There was a short pause. Then Murphy nodded.

‘He’s got plenty of previous and his break-up with the kids’ mother was fucking toxic.

I wasn’t the only one who thought he’d done it.

I lost it. I’d seen the younger boy with half his head blown off,’ Murphy said, knuckles white around his glass of sparkling water.

‘Word was, he didn’t think the little one was his.

I know I shouldn’t’ve… the mother’s fucking taken him back, as well, and she’s egging him on to sue, because she fucking hates coppers as much as he does. ’

‘Ryan, I’m sorry, that’s terrible. But going forwards, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on with you. You can’t just bury it all.’

‘I know,’ said Murphy, reaching again for her hand, and this time Robin didn’t pull away. ‘I will.’

Standing in the chilly rain on Wednesday afternoon, watching the front of Dino’s, Robin told herself she was doing the right thing.

She and Murphy had been through a lot together and she truly cared about him.

Walking out on him at this point would be wanton cruelty.

She’d decide later, when he was back on an even emotional keel, whether…

but this was a thought she kept refusing to finish.

Charlotte Campbell, in a blood-filled bath; Kim’s ex-boyfriend, in his carbon monoxide-filled car. She couldn’t leave Murphy now.

Work wasn’t proving much of a distraction today.

Robin doubted she was going to get much out of shivering beneath her umbrella for hours, even though she’d concluded that her only realistic possibility of speaking to Cosima face to face was when the girl was either entering or leaving Dino’s, which was the only place she ever seemed to go without a posse of friends.

The trouble was that there were only a few short steps between the street and the club’s front door, over which a doorman in a burgundy tail coat and top hat stood guard.

Nevertheless, experience had taught Robin that a sudden, unexpected approach sometimes surprised answers out of interviewees, and the agency’s lack of progress in discovering Rupert Fleetwood’s whereabouts had decided her on this last-ditch effort.

As she stood there, scanning the rainswept road for some sign of her quarry, the hypervigilant Robin noticed a middle-aged man sitting in a parked Honda Accord a short distance from her Land Rover.

He seemed to have been watching her, because he turned his head quickly when Robin looked at him.

He had thick greying hair and an unusually small nose, which resembled a button mushroom in the middle of a large, square face.

Robin continued watching him, wondering whether she should be worried.

He looked larger and softer than the man who’d brandished the masonic dagger at her.

She shifted position slightly, hoping to see his number plate, but then spotted Dino Longcaster’s chauffeured Mercedes gliding down the road, and recognised Cosima, sitting alone in the back seat.

She almost ran to the opposite pavement.

By the time the car pulled up, Robin was waiting, ready for Cosima to get out.

The girl took her time about it, first brushing her long hair and reapplying lip gloss while looking in a flip-down mirror in the car’s ceiling, and typing out what appeared to be a text before finally putting her belongings in her bag and opening the passenger door.

‘Cosima,’ said Robin at once, as the doorman came rushing towards the pair, holding a large burgundy umbrella.

The girl looked at Robin in surprise.

‘My name’s Robin Ellacott. I’m a private detective. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Rupert—’

‘What?’ said Cosima, staring at Robin, while the doorman sheltered her from the rain with his umbrella.

‘—Rupert Fleetwood. What did he say to you at Sacha Legard’s birthday party?’

‘I – what?’ said Cosima again, but colour had flooded her pale face. ‘I don’t – leave me alone!’

‘Cosima, you must know Rupert’s gone missing,’ said Robin, hurrying alongside the girl as she strode towards the entrance of Dino’s. ‘Your sister’s incredibly worried about him, and—’

‘ Leave me alone! ’ repeated Cosima shrilly, and ducking out from beneath the umbrella, she ran through the revolving door and disappeared from sight.

The doorman, who was a tall man in his fifties, said,

‘You’ve had your orders. Get out of here.’

‘This is a public pavement,’ Robin replied coldly.

She retreated into a doorway a short way from Dino’s, wondering what her next move should be. She supposed there was a remote possibility that Cosima, like Fyola Fay, might come back to find out what Robin already knew, but she wasn’t banking on it.

Robin’s eye fell again on the parked Honda Accord containing the man with the nose like a button mushroom.

Once again, he turned his head away hastily when Robin looked at him.

She couldn’t see the Accord’s number plate at all from this position.

Wondering whether it mightn’t be a good idea to move so as to make a note of it, she was distracted by the sound of heavy footsteps to her left, and turned to see Dino Longcaster approaching, large and beautifully suited, with his dully gleaming cannonball of a head.

‘I hear you’ve been pestering my daughter,’ he drawled.

‘Not pestering,’ said Robin, forcing herself to sound unruffled, because Longcaster was intimidating both in size and manner. ‘Just asking a question.’

‘Could you spare me five minutes?’ said Dino Longcaster, looking at her down his long nose. ‘Inside the club?’

‘Of course,’ said Robin.

‘Thank you, Joshua,’ said Longcaster, as they passed the doorman.

‘Mr Longcaster, sir,’ muttered the attendant, touching his top hat, and he looked away as Robin passed him, revealing his earpiece and microphone.

A delicious warmth met Robin as she stepped into an opulent hallway full of artfully tarnished mirrors.

The walls were covered in midnight blue fabric patterned in gold with stylised 1920s women and greyhounds, the air smelled of amber and sandalwood, and a staircase wound upwards past a multitude of paintings, many of them of dogs.

A real white canine Robin recognised as a Pyrenean Mountain Dog was waiting for Longcaster just inside the door, wagging its tail; it thrust its nose into Longcaster’s hand, and he patted it.

‘We’ll go upstairs,’ said Longcaster, and he turned to a gorgeous black girl who wore her hair in a chignon and a tightly fitting burgundy dress. ‘Montagu’s empty, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Mr Longcaster, sir.’

‘This way,’ Longcaster told Robin, and he set off upstairs, the Pyrenean Mountain Dog padding after him.

There were more burgundy-clad staff on the upstairs landing, all of them good-looking, all straightening like elegant meerkats at Longcaster’s approach.

Robin was busy telling herself that she absolutely refused to be intimidated by this man or by his club, because she’d met far more frightening people than Dino Longcaster during her detective career, but the increase in alertness and nerves that seemed to touch every member of staff they passed told her that it might take a certain degree of gumption not to be frightened of Dino Longcaster.