Page 145 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

‘Of course,’ said Robin hesitantly, ‘there’s also the possibility he’s—’

‘MI5?’

‘Well, maybe,’ said Robin.

‘Christ, we’ve fucked off a lot of people over this case,’ said Strike. ‘Have you circulated the Accord bloke’s description to the others?’

‘Yes, and the bit of the number plate I got.’

‘Good,’ he said, and took a swig of whisky. Eyes on the plans of Wild Court and Freemasons’ Hall that lay in front of Robin, he asked,

‘Had any luck with those? I haven’t had time to look properly.’

‘Nothing that’s going to help us,’ said Robin. ‘The shop was created out of a couple of storage rooms at the back of Freemasons’ Hall in 1958. There were two doors in the back walls, but they were bricked up when the rooms became a shop.’

‘There was a door on the basement level, was there?’

‘Yes, when it was a downstairs cupboard.’

‘Where exactly was the door?’

‘At the back of the vault, but as I say, it’s gone, bricked up. There’s also a bit of dead space behind the basement wall where the cupboards are, but to get into that you’d have to tunnel through brick as well.’

‘Is it a big enough space to accommodate a lurking murderer?’

‘Maybe a child on their hands and knees,’ said Robin, ‘but the child would have had to walk in through the front door of the shop first, go downstairs into the basement and break their way through the wall to get into it.’

‘And even Kenneth Ramsay might’ve noticed that happening,’ said Strike. ‘So Wright and Oz can’t have got into the basement that night via Freemasons’ Hall?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Then how the hell did they get back there without being seen?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ admitted Robin, reaching for another slice of cold pizza. ‘What do you want to look at on the dark web, anyway?’ she said, watching Strike still tinkering with his new laptop.

‘Couple of long shots,’ said Strike, ‘but I’m ready to try almost anything at this point. One thing I wouldn’t mind seeing is Sofia Medina’s OnlyFans account.’

‘It’s gone,’ said Robin, ‘I looked.’

‘Yeah, gone from the surface web, but it occurred to me that it might still be floating around in the cesspit beneath.’

‘Looking for Oz?’

‘Yeah. I know he won’t have been calling himself “Oz” on OnlyFans, but people often adopt usernames that leave clues, even people a damn sight more intelligent than Jim Todd. Rodolphe Lemoine. Sidney Reilly. Laurel Rose Willson – though, admittedly, she was off her rocker.’

‘Who are Rodolphe Lemoine, Sidney Reilly and – who?’

‘Lemoine,’ said Strike, bending down to plug in the new laptop, ‘was a French spymaster in World War Two whose real name was Stallmann, but took his wife’s maiden name for espionage purposes.’

‘Like Todd taking his mother’s maiden name for trafficking purposes.’

‘There you go. Sigmund Rosenblum, otherwise known as the Ace of Spies, presumably liked his initials—’

‘Like Fyola Fay,’ interposed Robin.

‘—exactly – because he rechristened himself Sidney Reilly. And Laurel Rose Willson wrote an invented memoir of her life in a Satanic abuse cult under the name Lauren Stratford, made a load of money out of it before she was exposed as a fraud, then re-emerged as a Holocaust survivor, which she also wasn’t, under the name Laura Grabowski. ’

‘Where’s Wardle this evening?’ asked Robin.

‘On Mrs Two-Times,’ said Strike. ‘Thought I’d give him an easy one to get started.’

Robin’s mobile rang. Her heart sank when she saw it was Murphy.

‘Hi,’ she said, getting up and moving into the outer office to stop Strike saying anything to her, because she didn’t want Murphy to know she and Strike were alone at the office together.

‘You’re not home,’ he said.

‘No, I’m still at the office. As you were working I thought I’d take care of some paperwork. How d’you know I’m not home?’ she added, wondering whether he was sitting outside her flat.

‘I swung by on the off-chance, just a coffee or something. I’m heading back into town now.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘If I’d known you had a free hour, I’d have come home.’

‘So you’re still at the office? Strike there?’

‘No,’ she lied again, with the familiar, gnawing sense of guilt. ‘He’s on surveillance.’

Her call with Murphy terminated, Robin returned to the inner office. She felt guiltier than she had before he’d called, and even though she’d have preferred to stay and talk about the silver vault case with Strike, she said,

‘I’d better get going.’

‘Right,’ he said.

When she’d gone, Strike, well aware he was slipping into a pattern of drinking alone, something he’d guarded against for years, poured himself more whisky before returning to his PC, selecting Tom Waits’ album Blue Valentine and pressing ‘shuffle’.

He always appreciated the blunt solace offered by his gravel-voiced favourite.

Waits sang of desperation, drugs and drunkenness, of unmourned deaths and lives spent in poverty and hopelessness; love, to Waits, was generally doomed or dirty, and death came early, randomly and brutally.

Strike had discovered the singer for himself in his teens, and found him a blessed antidote to the guitar-driven seventies rock bands his mother played incessantly.

Romeo is bleeding but nobody can tell,

Sings along with the radio

With a bullet in his chest…

Twenty minutes and one long piss later, Strike returned to his newly configured laptop, ready to enter the badlands of the internet, where the buying and selling of drugs, weapons and stolen data were commonplace, where fake documents could be bought and hackers hired, and where videos of dreadful acts were viewable, for those who found them exciting.

It took him nearly an hour to find an archived version of Sofia Medina’s OnlyFans page, on a website headed DEAD SLAGS, which was devoted to providing fodder for men who liked their masturbatory material to feature women who’d provably died from male violence, rather than those who were pretending.

He scrolled down through the names and comments of subscribers.

Could Oz be ‘Fat_Hard_Cock’? ‘Bucket O’Jism’?

He doubted it. Oz had been seeking real-life contact, and a man pretending to be a wealthy music producer would be unlikely to open the conversation with ‘fist yourself’.

SkunkB, on the other hand, had posted, ‘you’re beautiful.

I hope you’ve got a man who’s treating you the way you should be treated’, to which Medina had replied with three heart emojis.

However, if SkunkB had pursued this promising exchange, it wasn’t publicly visible.

Tom Waits was still singing.

I’m callin out my bloodhounds, chase the devil through the corn…

The whisky was driving Strike deeper into his depressive trough, but he kept mindlessly scrolling through the cyber swamps, perusing sites offering forged documentation and credit cards from countries as diverse as Ukraine and Thailand, or else what Strike strongly suspected was human merchandise.

One heavily encrypted site with the name Nursery was peppered with flower emojis.

From the context, he suspected this was a substitute for the words ‘little girl’.

Telling himself Interpol had enough experts trying to track down forgers and paedophiles without his assistance, he now searched for Daesh execution videos, thinking of the secret mission that had cost Niall Semple his best friend.

Each of the films Strike began methodically opening carried the black and white flag of Islamic State in the corner, bearing a white circle containing, in Arabic, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohamed is his messenger’.

Strike was reminded of the captured Daesh flag he’d seen at the SAS headquarters in Hereford, which was framed, and facing a captured WW2 swastika on the opposite wall.

In Strike’s view, there was nothing to choose between the two groups.

The Nazis had visited unspeakable atrocities on their own people, as well as non-Germans; Daesh murdered many more Muslims than Westerners, and both groups were sadistic beyond the imagination of most human beings.

Death was insufficient punishment in their eyes: opponents must also suffer extreme indignity, humiliation, terror and pain before the job was considered done.

He watched, blank faced, as men were burned, shot, beheaded and drowned.

The filming was expert: Daesh wanted the world to know precisely how terrifyingly devoid of human empathy they were.

Corpses were thrown by jeering masked men into a deep natural abyss in north Syria called al-Hota.

Strike’s Arabic was too rudimentary to understand what they were saying, but they appeared to be making a game of it, trying to dislodge a corpse stuck on a ledge with a second man’s body.

He’d seen al-Hota once, many years before.

Local legends were told of the monster that lived in its depths.

Feeling vaguely sickened, he closed down his laptop at exactly the moment his mobile rang. Wardle was calling him.

‘Heads-up,’ said the ex-policeman, who sounded rather perplexed. ‘She’s about to ring the office doorbell.’

‘Who is?’ said Strike, confused.

The bell rang in the outer office.