Page 161 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

But Vengeance travels in a dangerous way,

Double of issue, full of pits and snares

For all who pass, pursuers and pursued—

That way is dubious for a mother’s prayer.

Matthew Arnold Merope: A Tragedy

Branfoot’s entrance had caused a ripple of excitement to pass through the room. Many heads had turned, and most expressions were amused.

Strike was the first to recover from the surprise of seeing Kim.

As he stood to accept Branfoot’s handshake, his mental processes seemed to move up a gear, as they were wont to do when he was under pressure.

He saw laid out in front of him, like a sequence of toppling dominoes, the trail of events that would have brought this pair together; he felt certain it was Kim who’d initiated contact, and Branfoot who’d gleefully accepted the Navabi agency’s expensive assistance in neutralising the threat posed to him by Strike and Robin.

Robin felt her bag slip off her lap and bent down to pick it up, glad of a reason to hide the shock she knew had shown in her face.

‘You and Miss Ellacott alweady know Miss Cochwan, I think?’ Branfoot said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Strike.

Neither Kim nor Strike extended a hand to the other.

‘Pwease don’t let us huwwy you,’ said Branfoot genially, as Strike drained his glass of whisky.

‘Not at all,’ said Strike. ‘We’re ready for our dinner.’

Robin, who’d picked up her bag, stood up in the knowledge that she probably looked as she felt: definitely ruffled.

‘The pwess photographs don’t do you justice, Miss Ellacott,’ said the beaming Branfoot.

Robin reluctantly allowed Branfoot to shake her hand. This was the man who’d tried to have Danny de Leon killed, and who was doing his best to sabotage their agency: his flattery added insult to the injuries concealed by the pink dress.

‘Shall we, then?’ said Branfoot, waving a long arm in the direction of the hall.

More heads turned as the foursome headed for the door, and Branfoot beamed back at every smiling face, acknowledging a few with a half salute.

Kim walked beside him, looking neither left nor right, her heels an inch higher than Robin’s, every hair on her dark head in place.

Robin glanced sideways at her partner, trying to gauge his reaction to this unexpected situation, but Strike’s expression told her nothing.

At the same time, Robin’s mind had begun to race, and a suspicion dawned on her as she walked behind Kim, and the more she thought about it, the more certain she felt that she was right.

As they walked through the lobby, with its wallpaper painted with palms, an elderly man gave a cry of delight at the sight of Branfoot and stopped to wring his hand.

‘We need you back!’ he told Branfoot earnestly, while his wife hovered, smiling nervously. ‘You’d win in a landslide!’

‘ Aut viam inveniam aut faciam, ’ said the chortling Branfoot. ‘Watch this space.’

As the three detectives and Branfoot entered the large, grand, white-walled dining room complete with chandeliers and a crimson carpet, Strike said,

‘If you’ll excuse me a moment, I need to make a quick phone call.’

‘Of course,’ said the smirking Branfoot.

In complete ignorance of who Strike was calling, or why, or indeed whether he was actually making a phone call at all, Robin was led, along with Branfoot and Kim, to a round corner table with a snow-white cloth.

The waiter’s deferential air was tinged with the same anticipatory amusement shown by others who’d recognised Branfoot.

It was as though he was the friend whose arrival is greeted with delight at a party; now the fun would truly start.

‘ Well, ’ said Branfoot, ‘I’m delighted to meet you, Miss Ellacott. Let me say, I have the gweatest wespect faw what you did with wegard to that dweadful cult last year. That was indeed a noble undertaking.’

‘Thank you,’ said Robin.

‘Young people are vulnewable in ways society often overlooks – young men in particular. The otherwise healthy desire faw a cause , faw service, faw a mission, leads many young men astway, and what you did was all the more wemarkable given that you have no formal twaining in police work, do you?’

‘Well, I’ve had nearly seven years on the job n—’

‘You were Mister Stwike’s secwetary , in fact?’

‘Not exactly. I worked for the agency as a tempor—’

‘As a temp, yes, exactly, that’s what I meant,’ said Branfoot genially. ‘Wemarkable caweer pwogwession! And given your personal histowy you’ve displayed weally extwaordinary bwavery.’

Robin might have asked ‘what personal history?’ but didn’t trust herself to do so.

Branfoot might be talking about the knife wound on her right forearm, which had been in the press, but if Strike was correct in his theory that Green Jacket was one of Branfoot’s young criminals, Branfoot knew about her rape.

She reached for bread and was angry to see her fingers trembling.

‘I understand you’re womantically involved with a CID officer, is that wight?’ Branfoot persisted.

‘I’d rather not talk about my personal life, if you don’t mind,’ said Robin firmly.

‘Oh, ordinawily I’d agwee secwets of the bedchamber should wemain pwivate,’ said Branfoot, still smiling, ‘but Mr Stwike wants to talk about wegulation in your industry, and it’s pwecisely the murky overlap of wegulated and unwegulated investigators that concerns me.

Indeed, I know it concerns the police themselves. ’

Robin looked across the table at Kim.

‘Tell Navabi, the man in the Honda Accord is rubbish.’

‘Sorry?’ said Kim coldly.

‘The PI in the Honda Accord, the grey-haired man with the tiny nose. You should tell Navabi, I’ve spotted him repeatedly.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sorry,’ said Kim, but a faint pink blush seemed to indicate that Robin’s shot had hit home.

Strike, meanwhile, was pacing up and down on the pavement in front of the hotel while concluding an urgent conversation with Wardle.

‘I need a name,’ Strike said, ‘and fast, or we’re fucked.’

‘I’ll get back as soon as I can,’ said Wardle, and hung up.

Strike now called Fergus Robertson.

‘Well, well, well,’ said the latter, answering almost immediately. ‘I was going to call you when I got a—’

‘Has Danny de Leon been in touch?’

‘This morning,’ said Robertson, lowering his gleeful voice, ‘and I owe you fucking big time for this. I’m gonna fly out to the Channel Islands Monday and interview him face to face. We’ll need corroboration, obviously, but this could be fucking mass—’

‘So the story’s not about to run?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Strike, you can’t slam something like that in the paper without running it past the legal department!’

‘Then you need to get someone with a camera out to Branfoot’s flat on Black Prince Road this evening.’

‘Why, what’s—?’

‘Nothing yet, but I’ll lay you odds before the night’s over he’ll have sent minions to strip out filming equipment and maybe the two-way mirror.’

‘Wait – you’re gonna fucking warn the cunt?’

‘If de Leon had talked when I told him to, you’d already have published your scoop and I wouldn’t be sitting opposite the fucker at a dinner table,’ said Strike angrily.

‘I’m doing you a favour here: if you want to salvage your exposé, get someone out to Black Prince Road.

I’ve got to go, I’m expecting a phone call. ’

He hung up and continued to pace, watched by the Goring’s bowler-hatted doorman, but after a further five minutes Wardle still hadn’t called back. Deciding he couldn’t leave Robin alone with Branfoot and Kim any longer, Strike climbed the steps back into the hotel.

‘Ah, here he is!’ said Branfoot, as he spotted Strike heading for their table. ‘Shall we order before we get down to business? Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle! ’

‘Catullus wanted Fabullus to provide the food and drink, though,’ said Strike, sitting down. ‘I thought you were paying?’

This surprised a laugh out of Branfoot.

‘He also wanted Fabullus to pwovide a girl, “pwetty and willing”, don’t forget, but yes, Mr Stwike, I’m paying. So you know Catullus?’

‘Some,’ said Strike.

‘Lucky our gwisly little woke fwiends haven’t ever wead him, isn’t it? They’d be burning down our libwawies.’

Branfoot kept up a volley of cheery talk while the four consulted their menus.

‘I can heartily wecommend the twuffle-stuffed chicken. Don’t stint yourselves, I shall be starting with the caviar myself, the oysters are wather wonderful here, too…’

Once food had been ordered, and the wine waiter had been dispatched after a fairly lengthy discussion with Branfoot, the latter said,

‘You speak Latin too, Miss Ellacott?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘ Pedicabo ego uos et iwumabo, Auweli pathice et cinaede Fuwi… those are the opening lines of Poem Sixteen, in which Catullus thweatens to sodomise Auwelius and owally wape Fuwius, because they’d jeered at his soppier poems,’ said Branfoot. ‘Only pwoper way to deal with cwitics, eh?’

‘I’d run that past a focus group before you make it your election platform,’ said Strike, and Branfoot laughed again.

‘Where have we got to, so far?’ Strike asked the table at large.

‘We’ve barely scwatched the surface,’ said Branfoot, with the slight smirk that Robin had noticed never quite left his face.

‘I was congwatulating Miss Ellacott on the important wole your agency played in closing down the UHC and adumbwating some of my concerns wegarding the pwivate detective business. Miss Ellacott has been playing her cards vewy close to her chest.’

‘Right,’ said Strike. ‘Well, I’m sure you’re a man who appreciates plain talking, so shall we get right down to it? You became very interested in us shortly after we started investigating the body found at Ramsay Silver last summer.’

‘This is the case in which you were hired by Decima Mullins?’ said Branfoot.

Robin felt a sudden dread that had nothing to do with her own affairs.

‘Told him everything, have you?’ Strike said to Kim, on whose face a faint pussycat smile now appeared. ‘Broken your NDA?’