Page 184 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

When shall I be dead and rid

Of the wrong my father did?

How long, how long, till spade and hearse

Put to sleep my mother’s curse?

A. E. Housman XXVIII: The Welsh Marches, A Shropshire Lad

The Hotel Serenità was even more beautiful in reality than on Instagram: a large building of weathered yellow stone, which had once been a country estate.

Having paid the driver, Robin crossed the air-conditioned lobby with an assumed air of confidence, heading straight through it to an exterior area where she could see a few people enjoying lunch.

She intended to order a meal, and then start making enquiries of the staff.

But that wasn’t necessary. Robin had barely been seated for two minutes when a round-faced, short-necked young man whose blond hair had been bleached nearly white in the Sardinian sun appeared, to offer her a menu written in English, and enquire whether he could get her a drink before she ordered.

‘Rupert,’ said Robin. Even though she’d expected him to be here, his sudden physical materialisation had come as a shock.

Fleetwood’s round face became suddenly slack with what Robin guessed was the culmination of months of dread.

‘My name’s Robin Ellacott,’ she said. ‘I’m a private—’

‘I know who you are,’ he said, in his deep, bass voice. ‘Oh Christ – she’s not here, is she?’

‘Decima?’ said Robin. ‘No, she’s in the UK.’

‘Does she—?’

‘She knows you’re working for a Clairmont hotel, but she doesn’t know which one. I guessed you were here. I knew Tish Benton came here out of season, and I thought she’d probably come to visit you.’

Fleetwood stared at her, frozen to the spot.

‘I’m not here to cause you trouble, Rupert,’ said Robin quietly, because a family at a nearby table were watching the waiter, intrigued by his strange, slack-jawed behaviour. ‘I just want to talk to you. When d’you get a break?’

She thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then, with an air of hopelessness, he muttered,

‘Three.’

‘Could we talk then, please? I promise I won’t contact anyone before then.’

He assented with a miserable nod.

So, at three o’clock, Robin and Rupert Fleetwood met on a shady terrace with a canopy of bright pink bougainvillea that was just coming into flower.

Fleetwood brought coffees for both of them with him, but seemed unable to meet Robin’s eye.

When she’d thanked him he nodded, then added sugar to his own without looking at her.

‘How is she?’ he said, staring at the surface of the coffee he was stirring.

‘Not great,’ said Robin.

‘I tried to… I called your partner.’

‘I know,’ said Robin.

‘So she’d know I was alive.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘but that was even more painful to her than the idea you were dead. She couldn’t understand why you’d just have left her like that, especially when she was pregnant.’

Rupert dropped his spoon with a tiny clang that reminded Robin of the brick hitting the Murdoch silver.

‘Did she have an abortion?’ he whispered.

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘You’ve got a son.’

‘Oh God,’ he said, putting his face in his hands.

‘He’s fine,’ said Robin. ‘He was born without problems.’

After a while it became clear that Rupert was crying, not loudly, like Danny de Leon or Murphy, but soundlessly, his shoulders quaking.

‘Rupert,’ said Robin, ‘I think I know why you left.’

‘You can’t,’ came his muffled voice.

‘I think I can,’ said Robin. The pair of ’em looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee together – just imagine the moon-faced children. ‘You found out Decima’s your half-sister.’

He looked up, his tear-stained face aghast.

‘How—?’

‘I read a magazine interview with Cosima and saw she’d taken a DNA test. Then I realised you all look a bit alike,’ said Robin. ‘Dino, Decima and you.’

Rupert wiped his face roughly on his white waiter’s sleeve, but tears were still leaking out of his eyes. He had, Robin thought, a very likeable face; not precisely handsome, but better-looking in person than he’d been in the photo she and Strike had been showing people connected to William Wright.

‘How did you find out?’ she asked.

After wiping his face a second time on his sleeve, Fleetwood reached into the breast pocket of his waistcoat, took out a packet of Marlboro Lights, lit one, and said croakily,

‘Valentine.’

‘He told you?’

‘Not… definitely,’ said Fleetwood.

Robin waited. Fleetwood smoked for a full minute without speaking, then said,

‘He was really fucking down on me and Decima from the start… one night, he got really pissed at Dino’s and told me Dino had slept with my mother, that they’d had an affair…

said he caught them together on a sofa when he was a kid…

then… I dunno, he probably panicked that he’d said too much…

tried to backtrack, said he was joking, and staggered out of the club…

‘Next day, I rang him up and he told me he just wanted me to stay away from Dessie and he’d only said it to try and scare me off… but…’

Fleetwood took a deep drag on his cigarette, then said,

‘I looked at Dino that afternoon and I could… see it. Him and Dessie and me, all three of us have got round faces and kind of… shortish necks. I always knew I never looked like Peter Fleetwood… I don’t even look like my mum, except she was fair…

so… the more I looked at myself in the mirror, the more I knew I looked far more like a Longcaster than a Fleetwood… ’

‘Did you tell Decima?’

‘Shit, no,’ said Fleetwood, closing his eyes momentarily.

‘I just… I took one of those DNA tests… and yeah. It linked to the test Cosima took, online… it showed we were half-siblings… which made sense of so fucking much . My aunt always hated me… she probably knew I wasn’t related to her at all, but she got lumbered with raising me.

And she always fucking hated Dino Longcaster…

it must’ve been disgusting for her, watching me growing up and looking more and more like him. ’

‘So you went to Sacha’s party because—?’

‘I wanted to have it out with fucking Valentine,’ said Rupert.

He took another lengthy drag on his cigarette, exhaled, then said, ‘I was so fucking angry . If he’d warned me and Dessie at the start, it wouldn’t have happened.

Or even if he’d said it before she got pregnant…

cowardly fucking prick. He didn’t want to upset Dino, that’s what it was.

Let sleeping dogs fucking lie… I don’t know why the fuck Cosima was crying.

Maybe she thought I was going to make a scandal in the papers or something.

Dino fucking hates the press. Or she might’ve thought I’d have some claim on Dino’s estate, knowing her…

worried she’d have to take a quarter, not a third… ’

‘Who knows the truth?’ asked Robin. ‘Albie? Tish?’

‘Yeah, them,’ said Fleetwood, tears still leaking from the corners of his eyes. ‘Just them. I had to tell someone. I was going nuts… incest, ’ he said, staring down at the table, and Robin heard the horror and shame she guessed had been eating at him for almost a year.

‘I’ve read that people who’re related but separated can be drawn to each other, when they meet,’ said Robin. ‘They can sense a connection, they can feel it. It isn’t either of your fault.’

‘That’s what Tish and Albie said, but that’s easy to say, when it’s not you… I slept with my sister , for fuck’s sake…’

Robin couldn’t think of anything to say to that. It felt strange and incongruous to be sitting amid so much beauty, with the teal sea sparkling in the distance and the bougainvillea all around them, and to discuss an ancient taboo, broken by two people who’d had no idea they were doing so.

‘S’pose you know about the nef, do you?’ muttered Fleetwood.

‘That you stole it and sold it to Lady Jenson? Yes,’ said Robin.

‘It was my mother’s,’ said Fleetwood in a low voice. ‘It belonged to the Legards. I’m still a Legard, nobody can take that away from me. Dino had no right to it. That’s all I’ll ever take from him, ever, but he owed me something. He fucking owed me. ’

‘Rupert, Decima’s been torturing herself. She thinks you’re dead. She thinks it’s her fault—’

‘I died in the vault of a silver shop,’ said Fleetwood, closing his eyes briefly again. ‘I know, Albie told me. But I called your partner—’

‘She didn’t believe it was you. Rupert, it’d be far better – kinder – if you called Decima and explained everything yourself.’

He seemed to be thinking. Robin sipped her coffee considering the fact that, having found him so easily and quickly, she had no reason to postpone her return to London.

With the Sardinian sun on her back and the bougainvillea fluttering overhead, she remembered Murphy asking why they’d never taken a foreign trip together and then, inevitably, the platinum and diamond ring he’d hidden in his briefcase.

She was certain she had four days left before he offered it to her at the Ritz.

Robin had done nothing to prevent the proposal, because she couldn’t see how to do so without revealing she’d searched his personal possessions.

‘See,’ said Fleetwood weakly, from across the table, ‘I still love her. I’ve been really trying not to… but I do.’

‘And she still loves you,’ said Robin, ‘but there’s a baby involved now, Rupert. The two of you have got to work something out. You can’t hide for ever.’

Rupert ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.

‘What’s she called him?’

‘Lion,’ said Robin.

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Rupert, putting his face in his hands again. ‘After bloody White Lion? It meant nothing, he was never my dad…’

‘Rupert,’ said Robin, ‘she went through the birth alone. She’s been in hell for months, blaming herself for your death. Please, call her and tell her the truth.’