Page 152 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)
Indulge me but a moment: if I fail
—Favoured with such an audience, understand!—
To set things right, why, class me with the mob
As understander of the mind of man!
The mob,—now, that’s just how the error comes!
Robert Browning Tertium Quid
Robin was currently too angry at Strike to accept his texted apology. Work was supposed to be the one place in her life where she wasn’t subject to men taking out their bad moods on her and she saw no reason to show a good grace Strike himself rarely displayed.
Plug still hadn’t been arrested, which irrationally compounded Robin’s anger at Strike: she connected his bad behaviour with the breeder of dangerous dogs, who still remained unpunished.
Yet again running surveillance on Plug’s mother’s house that afternoon, it gave Robin no solace whatsoever to tell herself that her tiredness and misery were nothing compared to the exhaustion she’d endured while undercover at the Universal Humanitarian Church.
She was sleeping very poorly, and today had awoken at four a.m., convinced she was back in the church dormitory from which she’d had to sneak once a week, to send Strike a report.
She’d then lain awake brooding about Murphy until her alarm went off.
He’d called her before she’d even reached home on Saturday, apologising for storming out on her after lunch.
As Robin had suspected, his parents had no idea about his recent relapse, nor about the investigation he was facing at work.
He’d told Robin that he always found his father’s garrulity and boozing hard to take, and that his mother had been interrogating him remorselessly about the cancelled purchase of their joint house before Robin had arrived for lunch.
Robin was certain her suspicions about Mrs Murphy’s feelings had been correct; that she thought Robin wasn’t the devoted girlfriend he deserved.
She hadn’t asked her boyfriend whether his parents knew about the ectopic pregnancy, because she didn’t want to hear the answer, but she was certain they did.
She also suspected they knew about the diamond solitaire hidden inside Murphy’s wardrobe.
They’d come over to London to meet Murphy’s soon-to-be fiancée, and the possible mother of future grandchildren, while in total ignorance of the things their son had done to make Robin afraid of making long-term plans with him.
She’d accepted Murphy’s apology where she hadn’t accepted Strike’s, because the former had sounded distraught on the phone and she still felt the responsibility of supporting him in sobriety.
If there was one good thing to come out of their most recent row, she thought, it was that he’d been left in no doubt that now was a very bad time to propose.
She’d have preferred to believe he’d abandoned the idea entirely, but the fact that the ring and its receipt hadn’t been returned suggested that he was still hoping that a suitable opportunity might yet present itself.
Plug remained at home until half past five, at which time Robin handed over surveillance to Midge.
She ate a sandwich in the Land Rover, then headed off for Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, where she was to interview the father of Hugo Whitehead, who’d crashed Tyler Powell’s car.
As she knew from her online research, the Whiteheads had packed up and left Ironbridge for good shortly after Hugo’s funeral.
Robin arrived in Tilsworth Road shortly before seven o’clock.
The Whiteheads’ house was large, made of red brick and had a double garage.
As Mrs Whitehead wasn’t supposed to know Robin had visited, she drove the Land Rover a little way up the road to a parking space outside the range of street lights, then walked back to the house.
The front door was opened almost as soon as she’d rung the bell, and there stood Faber Whitehead, who Robin knew to be an award-winning architect.
An odd-looking man who reminded her of a beluga whale in glasses, having very pale skin, small eyes and a massive domed, bald forehead, he was wearing a baggy black sweater and jeans, and the lenses of his glasses, which had bright red frames, were so thick they reduced his eyes to small points.
‘Miss Ellacott?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, holding out her hand, which he shook.
‘Come in,’ said Whitehead, and after taking her coat and hanging it up for her, he led Robin through the hall into a large sitting room with walls of fashionable dark greige, a coffee table made of glass and a long, low, black and steel sofa with such a deep seat that Robin had the choice of perching on the edge, or sitting back and holding her legs out straight in front of her.
‘Could I get you anything?’ Whitehead asked Robin. ‘Tea, coffee…?’
‘A glass of water would be great,’ said Robin. ‘Thank you.’
While Whitehead was fetching it, Robin glanced around and saw a digital photo frame sitting on a cabinet of black wood.
It was displaying a slowly changing succession of family photos and Robin’s eye fell on it as it showed a picture of red-headed Hugo, familiar to her from Chloe Griffiths’ birthday photo.
Hugo had died, she knew, at the age of twenty, but here he looked around fourteen and was wearing a rugby strip while pointing at his own mouth, apparently laughing at the absence of a tooth.
‘So,’ said Whitehead, after handing Robin her water and sitting down in an armchair that matched the sofa, holding a glass of red wine, ‘you’re investigating Tyler.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Robin. ‘As I told you in my email, we’ve been hired to try and identify the body in the silver vault. Tyler was considered a possible victim by the police, so we’ve been looking into him. If we find out where he’s gone, we’ll obviously be able to rule him out as William Wright.’
‘Right,’ said Whitehead. He gulped some wine, then said, ‘I know you’ve already spoken to Ian Griffiths and Dilys Powell.’
‘We have, yes. You’re in touch with them?’
‘I’ve made it my business to keep in touch with Griffiths,’ said Whitehead. ‘He reassured me you and your partner were above board.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Robin.
‘Griffiths and I both want Tyler found, though for rather different reasons.’
With a glance towards the darkening window Whitehead said,
‘We must keep this fairly brief, because I’m not sure how long we can count on Lucinda staying out.
She nearly cancelled dinner, but I persuaded her to go.
I think it’ll do her good. She’s on a maximum dose of antidepressants, but she’s still…
and our elder son, Harvey, he’s having to re-do his final year at university.
Fell apart completely after what happened to Hugo.
Got a compassionate deferral for his finals. ’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Robin. ‘This must be incredibly painful to talk about.’
‘It’s less painful to talk about it than to think about it, all day, every day,’ said Whitehead.
‘Lucinda wants me to “move on”. We can’t discuss it, it upsets her too much.
Harvey, though, he’s on my side. He knows I’m meeting you tonight.
He agrees that the guilty person has got clean away with it. ’
‘Tyler, you mean?’
‘Oh no,’ said Whitehead. ‘No, no, not Tyler. Chloe Griffiths. ’
Robin was so taken aback she couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘You’re surprised,’ said Whitehead, watching her intently. ‘But when I’ve explained… you know who Chloe Griffiths is?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin slowly, ‘Ian Griffiths’ daughter…’
‘Exactly, yes,’ said Whitehead. He took another gulp of wine.
‘Now, you see, there was something the police never made public – CCTV footage. The police ultimately decided it wasn’t conclusive enough to use, but there was footage of somebody getting inside that Mazda in the car park in Birmingham . ’
‘Really?’ said Robin, thinking of the poor quality CCTV footage that had already done nothing but confuse this case. ‘Would you mind if I take notes?’
‘No, no, carry on…’
As Robin took out her notebook and pen Whitehead said,
‘The police looked into it before discounting it as irrelevant. We were told it was very blurry, and there was thick rain that night, which didn’t help, but a figure that looked female moved between the Mazda and the next car, then ducked down out of sight, and the police thought they might have entered the Mazda, but then they decided the person must be just doing up a shoe or something. ’
‘What made them check the car park footage?’ asked Robin.
‘They’d got wind of all the rumours that had started up in Ironbridge, about Tyler having tampered with the car, and of course, if it was done anywhere, it must have been in the car park, because they crashed on the way back.
Now, Tyler couldn’t have done it. Not only could nobody mistake Tyler for a female, blurred footage or not, he was on the phone over the exact period that person entered the Mazda in Birmingham.
The mobile signal confirmed he was speaking from Ironbridge. ’
‘D’you know who he was talking to?’ asked Robin.
‘No, but I’m sure the police checked. I know people in Ironbridge said Tyler took off because of the crash, but I know for a fact he’d been thinking about clearing out well before then. I heard him talking to Hugo about leaving.’
‘Did he say he wanted to go to London?’
‘No, just that he wanted a change, but he had transferable skills, you know, he was a good mechanic. Anyway, it clearly can’t have been Tyler who messed with the ABS,’ said Whitehead.
‘Somebody else must have turned it off. We all knew that storm was coming. It was an undetectable way to hurt them. Anyone would have known the journey back was going to be hazardous, especially for a recently qualified driver.’