Page 28 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

They had none of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them…

John Oxenham A Maid of the Silver Sea

St George’s Avenue wasn’t a particularly long street.

Strike passed short terraces and a couple of squat, square blocks of flats, but a few minutes after he and Robin had parted, Strike’s eye fell upon a house he considered promising: tall, narrow, shabby, its bins overflowing and with four bells on a dirty panel beside the main door.

He phoned Robin.

‘Think I’ve found it.’

‘Already?’ said Robin, who was standing outside a primary school at the other end of the street.

‘It’s not far from where we parked.’

So Robin headed back up the street and found Strike standing at the top of a flight of filthy steps.

He pressed each of the four doorbells in turn, but no responding voice issued from the intercom.

Strike glanced at the only window on the ground floor.

The thin curtains, which had come partially off their rail, had been drawn together against the light with a plastic hair claw.

A rangy-looking man with a long beard was walking past on the other side of the road.

He stared at Strike and Robin as he passed, but carried on.

Then Robin spotted a pale, overweight woman wearing leggings and a sweatshirt heading down the street, carrying a bulging plastic shopping bag in one hand and holding the hand of a small boy eating a chocolate bar with the other.

The mother’s hair was dark and greasy, and she had tattoos on her hands and neck.

Robin had a strong presentiment that mother and child lived in the building they were trying to enter, and sure enough, she stopped at the foot of the steps, staring up at the two detectives.

‘Morning,’ said Strike. ‘Don’t know whether you can help us?’

‘Wha’ d’you want?’ the woman said suspiciously, climbing slowly up towards them. Strike could smell the stale cannabis on her clothes.

‘Is this where William Wright used to live?’ asked Strike.

‘Yeah,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Why?’

Strike pulled a card out of his pocket and showed it to her.

‘My name’s Cormoran Strike and this is my partner, Robin Ellacott. We’re private detectives.’

The woman took Strike’s card and stared at it. An expression of dawning comprehension spread over her face, and when she looked up again, she seemed slightly awed.

‘Are you ’im ’oo done that church? An’ got that strangler?’

‘She did the church,’ said Strike, indicating Robin. ‘I got the strangler.’

‘Ha,’ said the woman, looking from one to the other. It was clear that she considered herself in the presence of celebrity, and Strike reflected that here he was seeing the flipside of the inconveniences of becoming newsworthy: the lure, to potential witnesses, of reflected glory.

‘We’ve been hired to find out anything we can about Wright,’ he said, now pulling his wallet out of his pocket. The woman’s eyes followed it greedily as he extracted three tenners.

‘I fort they knew ’oo Wright was?’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ said Strike, ‘maybe not. Anything you tell us would be in strictest confidence. We’ve got nothing to do with the police,’ he added, in indirect acknowledgment of the strong smell of weed hanging in the crisp winter air.

She chewed her lip, thinking.

‘Yeah,’ she said at last. ‘All righ’.’

She plucked the banknotes out of Strike’s hand, then unlocked the front door while her son peered up at them with the blank, wary stare of small children.

The foursome stepped over a mess of fliers lying inside the front door that nobody had bothered to pick up.

The overhead lightbulb was out, the uncarpeted floor was of grimy stone, and there was a mingled smell of damp and cooking.

The woman opened a door on the right, and led them into her home.

What must once have been a drawing room had been converted into a cramped bedsit, which smelled strongly of cannabis and body odour.

Much of the floor was cluttered with bowls used as ashtrays, empty cigarette packets, and other, less readily identifiable bits of detritus.

In one corner of the room stood an aged cooker and a fridge; evidently occupants were supposed to wash up in the dirty sink visible through the door to a cramped bathroom.

There was a double bed, a cot, a television standing precariously on a cardboard box, a small sofa currently occupied by two bulging black bin bags, and a chest of drawers, on top of which were two mugs growing mould, and a slightly crumpled letter headed HM Courts and Tribunals Service.

Strike was instantly and unpleasantly transported back to those parts of his childhood spent with his mother. Even the man with long greasy hair who was lying face down in the double bed seemed familiar. The latter jerked awake as his partner closed the door.

‘Hurgh?’ he said groggily, turning a swollen-eyed face towards them. ‘ The fuck? ’ he repeated in dazed alarm, looking up at Strike who, even in civilian clothes, conveyed an air of officialdom to those primed to detect it.

‘’E’s Cameron Strike, the private detective,’ the woman, with dim excitement. ‘’Im what caught that Shacklewell Ripper an’ done that church. An’…’

She’d forgotten Robin’s name already.

‘Robin Ellacott,’ supplied Robin.

‘Yeah,’ said the woman. ‘They wanna talk abou’ William Wright. They’re not police, Daz.’

Strike, who had considerable expertise in this area, recognised in the sleepy man the signs of a fully committed pothead: slothful speech, dazed affect and a slight, though in this instance not unreasonable, paranoia.

‘Yeah, but – the fuck?’ said Daz again, weakly. ‘I’ve got nuffing fuckin’ on, Mandy.’

Mandy cackled, tugged a pair of jeans out of one of the black bin bags and chucked them at her boyfriend.

‘Put ’em on under the duvet,’ she instructed him, now heaving both bin bags off the sofa. ‘Gonna go the laundrette later,’ she informed the detectives. Her son ran to pick up a Spider-Man action figure which had been dislodged from between the sofa cushions.

‘Council put us ’ere,’ Mandy informed Strike and Robin.

‘Shit’ole, innit? You can sit down,’ she said, pointing at the sofa.

It was extremely dirty, but the two detectives did as invited, forced to sit so close that their arms and thighs touched.

Mandy perched on the end of the bed; Daz, now hidden beneath the duvet, was wriggling into his jeans.

‘They don’t fink William was that Jason Fing,’ Mandy informed the undulating lump beneath the bedclothes. ‘ I never fort ’e was,’ she said proudly.

‘Yeah, you did,’ came Daz’s muffled voice from under the duvet.

Their son was now rummaging through Mandy’s bag of shopping.

‘ No , Clint!’ said Mandy sharply. ‘ Fuck’s sake—’

Clint began to cry.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said, relenting instantly. She pulled out a pack of chocolate biscuits, ripped them open with her teeth and handed him one. ‘Don’ blame me when the dentist wants to take ’em all out,’ she added, pulling out a packet of Mayfair cigarettes for herself, and unwrapping them.

‘Is it OK if we take notes?’ Robin asked.

‘Yeah, go on,’ said Mandy, looking rather excited.

‘I’ll do it,’ muttered Strike to Robin, pulling out his own notebook. He thought Robin might appear less threatening to Daz, whose head had just re-emerged from beneath the duvet.

‘So you didn’t think Wright was Jason Knowles, Mandy?’ asked Robin.

‘You did,’ said Daz, before his girlfriend could answer. ‘When it was on the news, you said, “fuck, ’e was on the run!” I was the one what said ’is voice was off. ’E wa’n from Doncaster,’ Daz informed Robin. ‘I ’ad a mate from Doncaster.’

‘You think he was putting the accent on?’ asked Robin.

‘Yeah,’ said Daz.

‘Could he have been Scottish?’ she said, thinking of Niall Semple.

‘Dunno,’ said Daz. ‘Maybe.’

‘Could he have been upper class, and trying to sound working class?’ Robin asked, thinking of Rupert Fleetwood.

‘Maybe,’ said Daz again.

‘I seen ’im out there,’ said Mandy, who seemed to want to reclaim the detectives’ attention, and she pointed towards the hall. ‘Seen ’im the day ’e arrived.’

‘Did he have much stuff with him?’ asked Robin.

‘Just a suitcase,’ said Mandy. She bent down, retrieved a lighter from beside a sock on the floor, and lit her cigarette.

‘Which room did he have?’ asked Robin.

‘One above this,’ said Mandy, pointing at the ceiling. ‘S’even worse. ’Alf the size. Mind, there was on’y one of ’im.’

‘Were you the people who identified William from the pictures in the press?’

‘Nah, that was Hussein,’ said Mandy, exhaling smoke. ’’E’s moved out now, ’im an’ ’is wife an’ daughter. They wuz in the rooms on the top.’

‘D’you know their surname?’ asked Robin. ‘Where they went?’

‘Mohamed, their surname was. Syrian. Dunno where they went. Their little girl was in a wheelchair. They got council ’ousing fast, because of being shoved up top, ’ere. Maybe if I shoved Clint in a wheelchair we’d get an ’ouse, ’an all,’ said Mandy bitterly.

Daz got out of bed, bare-chested and -footed, and switched on the kettle standing on top of the fridge. He was somehow both skinny but also soft-looking, a small white paunch hanging over his jeans. A large tattoo on his back showed the Roman numerals for four and twenty.

‘Did you see much of Wright?’ asked Robin.

‘Bit, yeah. Fort ’e was weird, din’t we?’ Mandy said to Daz.

‘Yeah,’ said Daz, with a snigger. ‘Looked like one of them on Guess ’Oo.’

‘Wh—? Oh, the children’s game?’ said Robin, after a few seconds’ confusion.