Page 163 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Wind, wave, and bark, bear Euthukles and me,

Balaustion, from—not sorrow but despair,

Not memory but the present and its pang!

Robert Browning Aristophanes’ Apology

Strike rose at five o’clock on Monday morning and set off for Northumberland in darkness, choosing to drive himself, partly because the train wasn’t much quicker, but mostly because Heberley House, the mansion in which Charlotte had spent most of her childhood and teens, was difficult to access without a car.

He’d had a broken night. The Daesh execution videos he’d been watching had chosen to resurface, belatedly and in full Technicolor, in his sleep.

He’d watched again as a line of bound, kneeling prisoners in Guantánamo Bay-inspired orange jumpsuits, each of their faces hidden by a sack, were shot through the back of the head, bloody holes appearing in the sacks as their faces were blown outwards.

He’d seen more men beheaded, others being burned alive in a cage, and a hooded man chained to a metal dumbbell, dragged onto the balustrade of a bridge, then rolled into the river below, where he sank without trace.

He’d also relived in his sleep his own, personal encounter with al-Qaeda: the yellow dirt track and the young man running away, dragging a child; the IED that had torn driver Gary Topley’s body in two, ripped off half of Richard Anstis’s face and blown away Strike’s lower right leg and foot.

He’d woken, drenched in sweat, and vaped for a while.

He didn’t need a psychologist to tell him that it was an imminent trip to Heberley that had stirred up these memories.

Charlotte was forever entangled with memories of the injury that had ended his military career, because she’d come back to him, and stayed, and helped him recuperate before, inevitably, the deep, irreconcilable rifts between them had begun to widen once more.

Tired and gloomy, he drove northwards to a house he’d happily have never seen again.

He had no fond memories of Heberley, which he’d visited as little as possible during his and Charlotte’s long, frequently fractured, relationship.

Charlotte had always been at her most tense and volatile there, she and her mother sliding past each in the dining room and corridors like hostile cats.

Ned Legard, Charlotte’s late stepfather and Sacha’s father, had been amiable enough, but was often absent, requiring regular stretches away from his wife to maintain even the pretence of a functioning marriage.

Lady Tara Jenson (formerly Tara Clairmont, Tara Campbell, Tara Longcaster and Tara Legard) had always deplored her daughter’s relationship with Strike, an opinion she’d been at few pains to disguise.

Strike had been unfazed by her disdain even as a youth.

Not only had he rarely met a person he disliked more, but his upbringing had equipped him with a resilience unlikely to be severely tested by icy silences punctuated with explosions of temper.

However, as long as he could inveigle his way through the electric gates today, he was confident Tara would talk to him.

Like her deceased daughter, she always enjoyed a chance to display her formidable powers of invective; it energised and elated her to lose control.

He’d called ahead to check that Lady Jenson was in residence, posing as a Cartier salesman who was entrusted with the delivery of an important necklace.

This choice of cover had been influenced by the twin facts that Tara was exactly the sort of woman to whom exorbitantly priced necklaces were delivered in person by slavish salesmen, and her birthday fell in March, though Strike could no longer remember the exact date.

Sacha was currently filming in America, which had a double benefit: he wouldn’t be at Heberley House to interfere, and might, plausibly, have chosen to send his mother a suitably expensive birthday gift.

The further north he drove, the more razor-sharp memories sliced Strike’s thoughts: Charlotte, running barefoot, sobbing, down the long drive, away from yet another row; Charlotte, laughing manically as the pair of them drove this road together, swearing she’d slap her mother around the face if she ‘started’; Charlotte, drunkenly crying in the small lodge that had once housed a gamekeeper, where she’d taken refuge one particularly acrimonious midnight, with Strike.

He found it hard not to reflect on the irony of his position.

He’d taken this route long ago when young and in love, and now he was middle-aged and in love, as hopelessly, though for different reasons, as he’d been at nineteen.

He remembered quoting Catullus at Charlotte on the night they’d first met.

He’d wanted to impress, to prove a young man who’d attended seventeen different schools could be just as clever and cultured as the Old Etonians with whom she mostly associated.

The memory was embarrassing, but was the forty-two-year-old really any wiser than the youth who’d memorised the love poems to Lesbia?

At least the latter had known what he’d wanted and acted, no matter the subsequently disastrous consequences.

His older self had chosen to be cautious where he should have been bold; in recognising too late what he wanted and perhaps even needed, he’d jettisoned what he was increasingly feeling was his one chance of real happiness.

Driving along the motorway, Strike thought how very fitting his first contact with Robin had been.

He’d been hurtling out of the office, intent on following Charlotte, from whom he’d broken up mere hours previously and afraid (the memory of the overdose and bus in mind) she might be about to throw herself in front of a Tube train.

Instead of catching up with his girlfriend he’d collided with Robin, with such force that he’d knocked her backwards off her feet on the landing and only his fast physical reflexes had stopped her falling down the stairs and possibly breaking her neck.

Robin blocking his path back to Charlotte, him nearly killing her in exchange: there was a blunt bit of symbolism, if ever he’d met one…

Her ring finger might still be bare, but Strike was certain it was only a matter of time before that changed.

This belief was predicated on his knowledge of Robin.

She was the kind of person who stuck things out, even when loyalty might be considered unwise, and Strike could hardly complain about this trait, because he’d benefited from it himself.

Nobody who’d had her best interests at heart would have advised her to stick with Strike and the agency in the early days, when she could have been earning far more money with a company that didn’t look as though it was going to go bust at any minute.

No, Robin was a good and decent person, and good and decent people didn’t walk away when things were tough, nor did they walk out on their romantic partners when they were having crises.

Having resented Murphy for being fit and successful, Strike now deeply begrudged the man his alcoholic lapse and his work troubles.