Page 183 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

‘I hear Quincy Jones is never happier than when breaking into silver shops,’ said Wardle, and, glum though he felt, Strike laughed.

It was the first time in a long time he’d heard Wardle make anything close to a joke.

Sex definitely cheered a man up… perhaps Strike, like Wardle, should start cutting his losses…

Call ended, he continued towards his BMW until a loud, husky voice called him by name. Turning, he saw Jade Semple, whose hand he’d briefly pressed as he headed into the church.

‘Will you come to the reception?’ she said breathlessly.

‘Yeah, of course,’ said Strike, though he’d far rather not have done.

So he drove to the hotel and joined the mourners flocking like morose crows in a large function room decorated in blue, where there were many circular tables but nowhere near enough chairs.

A buffet was laid out along the length of one wall, but nobody was yet eating.

Deciding the chairs should be left for the elderly and immediate family, feeling self-conscious and conspicuous because of his bandaged ear and slightly regretting not having brought painkillers with him, Strike bought himself a low-alcohol beer and headed towards an exterior smoking area, spotting the distinguished-looking Ralph Lawrence in the distance as he did so.

The latter gave Strike a slight nod which the detective reciprocated: a gesture appropriate both for their degree of acquaintanceship, and the mixture of dislike and respect Strike suspected both felt for each other.

Once outside, having a good pretext and unable to resist the impulse, Strike called Robin.

‘Hi,’ he said, when she answered. ‘Where are you?’

‘In the back of a taxi,’ said Robin. ‘I should be at the hotel in ten minutes.’

She was currently travelling along a road in Sardinia fringed with palm trees, beneath a clear blue sky.

As she’d flown into the capital, Cagliari, she’d felt as though she’d entered the Raoul Dufy print over her mantelpiece: glittering sea, pastel-coloured houses, hot sun on her skin.

She knew her interlude on the island would be very short, which made the beauty of the place and the glorious weather bittersweet.

At best, this was only a temporary reprieve from the myriad problems that remained behind her in gloomy grey London: she felt strangely as she had in the hospital, after her ectopic pregnancy; the same sense of unreality seemed to lie over everything.

‘Is the funeral over?’ she asked.

‘Just finished,’ said Strike. ‘Jade wanted me to come to the wake. I’m calling because Wardle just got an update from the murder investigation team.’

‘They’re still talking to us?’ said Robin, in surprise.

‘One of them is,’ said Strike, choosing not to give details. ‘Anyway…’

Robin’s reaction, when Strike had finished passing on Iverson’s information, wasn’t as celebratory as her partner had expected.

‘If I’d only twigged sooner,’ Robin sighed, staring out at the glittering sea to her left. ‘If I’d realised the same girl was calling me…’

‘Easy mistake,’ said Strike.

‘No, I should have known there was something up,’ said Robin.

‘She said the “Jockey they had to bail at low altitude.

Two Regiment guys died on impact with the ground, Semple was seriously injured and barely conscious, but was dragged to cover by Liddell.

‘They had a radio and enough ammo to hold off anyone trying to find them for a few hours, but it was touch and go whether help was going to arrive before they were captured or killed.

When the rescue party arrived, they found Semple alone.

Liddell had left the shelter to try and get water for Semple. He never came back.

‘MI6 passed the details to us when Semple went missing. They’d found the execution video you watched, but Islamic State don’t seem to have realised the man they caught was SAS, otherwise they’d have made a far bigger deal of it.

Liddell will have known the top priority was not to admit to being Regiment.

His Arabic was good. God only knows who or what he pretended to be.

‘We wiped every trace of the damn video from the surface net and, as you’ll have seen, Liddell isn’t recognisable on it.

Our concern, all along, has been stopping Niall Semple broadcasting his addled version of the mission to the world.

When he came out of his coma he was angry and disorientated.

Pre-injury, he’d been entrusted with some very sensitive information.

This is a brave new world, Mr Strike: in the old days, we were trying to stop journalists getting hold of classified information, but these days, with social media, all Semple needed was an internet connection, and people working under deep cover would have been put at immediate risk. ’

‘Does Rena Liddell know how her brother died?’

‘Semple might’ve told her, but she’s still not prepared to believe her brother’s dead.

You were right regarding my concerns about her.

I wasn’t just worried that Semple might have told her a garbled version of what happened on the mission, I was afraid that he’d shared information we most certainly wouldn’t want in the hands of an erratic woman with mental health problems.’

‘So what are you going to do, shove her away in another mental health facility?’

‘Little though you may believe me,’ said Lawrence coolly, ‘I do believe in civil liberties – but sometimes national security requires measures that might infringe some dreamer’s ideal rule of justice.’

‘How old’s your grandmother?’ asked Strike, and Lawrence looked startled.

‘What?’

‘You’ve just quoted Albert Pike,’ said Strike.

‘There’s a passage in Morals and Dogma about the general who cuts away a bridge to save the main body of his army, even if it means he sacrifices a battalion.

Such actions aren’t unjust, Pike says, but “may infringe some dreamer’s ideal rule of justice”. ’

‘Ah,’ said Lawrence. ‘How old’s your grandmother?’

‘They’re both dead,’ said Strike.

Through the glass door leading back into the function he saw the stirring of the crowd that meant the family had arrived: Jade, in her black dress and coat, her twin beside her, holding her hand.

‘We should—’

‘Yes,’ said Lawrence, and side by side, they returned inside.

Strike had just taken up a standing position on the edge of the room when he spotted Jade wending her way towards him.

‘Fanks for coming back,’ she said.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ Strike told her formally.

He could tell Jade was, again, on the verge of tears, but he didn’t begrudge her that today. No doubt she was feeling as he had at Ted’s funeral, as though an invisible paving stone was weighing on her chest.

‘You met ’er, d’in’ you?’

‘Rena Liddell? Yes,’ said Strike, and he realised by her tone of voice that she still had her suspicions about her husband’s precise relationship with his late friend’s sister.

‘They weren’t… there was nothing romantic there.

He just wanted to make contact with her and give her that silver necklace thing. ’

‘That shoulda been mine , though,’ wailed Jade, bursting into tears.

Heads turned. Some of the expressions were accusatory: Strike was upsetting the widow.

‘Shall we go outside for a moment?’ said Strike, who didn’t fancy putting on a miserable floor show for the mourners, and he led Jade back into the smoking area.

She collapsed into a wooden chair and he sat down beside her while she sobbed.

At last, she plunged a hand into her black handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

‘Not vaping any more?’ Strike asked, watching enviously as she lit up.

‘I’ll probably go back to it,’ said Jade, taking a deep drag of her Marlboro and blowing the smoke at the sky, ‘but I’m allowed a fuckin’ cigarette today, i’n I?’

‘Definitely,’ said Strike.

‘That silver necklace was Niall’s mum’s. ’Is dad bought it years ago, in Oman. Why’d ’e give it to Rena , not me?’

‘I think,’ said Strike, ‘to make up for something. Guilt, that he survived when her brother didn’t? And he thought it was protective.’

‘So why’d ’e wanna protect ’er , not me?’ insisted Jade, mascara streaking her face as she wept.

‘Because he knew she was in trouble and had no family, now that Ben was dead?’ suggested Strike.

Jade wept, her cigarette burned slowly downwards, and Strike wished he could take it from her and finish it. At last, Jade said,

‘You know that code, on the briefcase ’e filled wiv bricks? Know what it was?’

‘No,’ said Strike.

‘My due date, for the baby I lost. So… so it must’ve meant somefing to ’im, mustn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Strike. ‘It must… there were only bricks inside the briefcase, I heard?’

‘Bricks an’ stuff ’e’d written, all wrapped up in polyfene, but they told me nobody could read it. Waterlogged. I dunno if that’s true… maybe it was a le’er to me?’

‘Maybe,’ said Strike.

He personally would have bet that Semple had written what he’d believed to be the truth about his E Squadron mission, whatever that had been. He saw no other reason for him to leave hints behind him as to where he and his information could be found, or for its suppression, waterlogged or not.

‘Sometimes you wan’ someone so bad, even when you know it’s wrong an’ it’s not gonna work, but you still wan’ ’em, y’know?’ said Jade, in a choked voice.

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, and Charlotte smiled sardonically in his mind’s eye.

‘We weren’ no good for each ovver, but we still wan’ed it.

Couldn’ get out of it. We wasn’ compa’ible, I know what ev’ryone said, an’ fine, they was righ’, but we did – I did love ’im,’ she whispered.

‘I really did. I always fel’ like I couldn’ get at ’im.

Like, if I could just get into ’im… but I couldn’. ’

Strike thought of the belief he’d long ago abandoned, that he could somehow tinker with Charlotte, and fix her, and make her whole and happy.

‘You all right, babe?’ said a wary voice behind them.

The man with the ginger moustache Strike had glimpsed in Crieff had come to collect Jade.

‘Yeah,’ she croaked, getting to her feet again. ‘’M fine… see ya,’ she said to Strike, and Ginger Moustache led her away, with a suspicious glance back at the large man with the bandaged ear.

Strike watched as Jade was absorbed by the crowd. This time, he didn’t return to the function room. Once certain that nobody was looking at him through the glass door, he returned to his car.