Page 31 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

The when, and where, and how, belong

To me—’Tis sad work, but I deal in such.

‘Why have we got a fish tank?’

It was nine o’clock on Wednesday morning and Strike had just entered the office to find his office manager shovelling gravel into the bottom of an aquarium standing on a side table beside the sofa, where previously there had been a fake pot plant.

‘Because nobody told me Tilly’s nan was getting her one,’ said Pat sourly, over the clatter of gravel.

‘Tilly?’

‘One of my great-granddaughters,’ snapped Pat. ‘She wanted goldfish, it’s her birthday. I bought the whole kit and caboodle and then I find out her other nan’s bought her the lot. I’ll have to go out at lunch and get her something else.’

‘I assume you’re planning on putting fish in it?’

‘Well, I’m not going to shove a cat in,’ said Pat irritably.

Strike had no wish whatsoever to add the care of goldfish to his daily workload, but given Pat’s current irascibility he decided not to ask why she didn’t just sell the aquarium on eBay.

As he headed for the kettle, he placed a sheet of paper headed ‘Hussein Mohamed’ on Pat’s desk.

He’d asked her to make a search of online records for the Syrian family who’d lived upstairs from William Wright, and had a wheelchair-bound daughter.

‘We’ve had a couple of funny phone calls,’ Pat told him, over the clatter of gravel.

‘How, “funny”?’

Pat set down her bag of gravel, crossed to the desk and pressed a button on the phone. A reedy, petulant male voice said,

‘This is Calvin Osgood. I’d be grateful if you’d call me back immediately and tell me what this is all about. And for the record, nobody calls me Oz .’

The man dictated his mobile number and hung up.

‘That’s all right,’ Strike told Pat. ‘He’s just a bloke who got a strange email from Ramsay Silver. I’ll call him back after I’ve had a coffee. What’s the other funny call?’

Pat pressed the answer machine button again. Low, guttural breathing issued from the speaker, followed by a male voice rasping:

‘Leave it an’ you won’t get ’urt.’

‘That it?’ said Strike, turning to look at the machine as it beeped again. ‘Bit non-specific.’

‘Yeah,’ said Pat. He could tell she was trying to hide an unease for which he couldn’t blame her.

They’d both been in the office when Pat had opened an explosive device.

As Strike moved towards the kettle, he mentally reviewed the cases currently on the agency’s books, wondering exactly what ‘it’ they were supposed to leave.

Two-Times had been taken on as a client again because, whatever his personal peculiarities, he always paid his bills on time.

However, unless his fetish for unfaithful women had developed a strange new offshoot, Two-Times would hardly be calling the office to tell them to stop tailing his wife.

That left Plug and the silver vault case.

‘It could be one of the blokes who dragged Barclay off the roof of that compound,’ he said. ‘Kim thought Plug might have clocked her the other day, as well. I’ll check.’

‘Is that a new shirt?’ said Pat, squinting at him.

‘Er – yeah,’ said Strike. He’d put it on that morning because of his imminent tête-à-tête with Robin. Now he felt vaguely self-conscious, as though Pat had read his mind.

‘Suits you,’ she said gruffly, and returned to her fish tank.

Once at the partners’ desk, and fortified by half a mug of strong coffee, Strike called Kim. Her immediate response was a hitherto unexhibited sharp defensiveness.

‘Plug didn’t really spot me, I was just being super-careful,’ she said. ‘I thought there was a remote chance. Anyway, I was wigged up and wearing glasses. There’s no way he could have traced me to this agency, I just thought it was best if I didn’t follow him again too soon afterwards.’

‘Right,’ said Strike. He hadn’t forgotten that the job swap in question had meant Kim got to accompany him to the Dorchester in a backless dress.

‘It was probably Robin,’ said Kim. ‘She lost him, remember, at Victoria? He might’ve spotted her and deliberately shaken her off. She isn’t as careful as she should be about disguises, given she’s been in the press a l—’

‘Well, there’s no guarantee it was anything to do with Plug,’ said Strike. ‘I’ll let you get on.’ He hung up, drank some more coffee, then returned Calvin Osgood’s call.

Strike was halfway through explaining who he was, and why he was calling, when Osgood interrupted in the thin, whiny voice Strike imagined a mosquito might have, should it be granted speech.

‘I know who you are, you explained in your email! I haven’t got anything to do with Ramsay Silver. I told the police all this – somebody out there’s pretending to be me. That’s who this person must’ve thought they were emailing!’

‘You think your identity’s been stolen?’

‘I know it’s been stolen! He’s calling himself Calvin “Oz” Osgood, music producer, which is who I am, except I’ve never called myself Oz, and nor has anyone else, and he’s linked my LinkedIn profile to his bloody Instagram page, so I’ve been getting emails to him on my professional account!’

‘“Emails”, plural?’ said Strike, his mobile now pinned between shoulder and ear as he logged into LinkedIn and searched for Calvin Osgood music producer. ‘What did they say?’

‘Well, there was that one from Ramsay Silver talking about helping me with a problem, and some idiot asking if I was still interested in buying his van, and complete gibberish from a girl who couldn’t write proper English, saying I’d played a prank on her cousin, and what had I done to her, or some such crap. ’

Strike had just found what he assumed was Osgood’s genuine LinkedIn profile.

It featured a man with a chubby, though not unhandsome, face who Strike judged to be in his mid-thirties, but what interested him most was that Osgood had dark, curly hair.

Skim-reading the page, Strike learned that Osgood produced incidental music for television shows, though not any that Strike had watched.

‘Did you keep these emails for “Oz”?’

‘I deleted them,’ said Osgood, adding defensively, ‘I didn’t know I was going to have the police and a private detective calling me about them, did I?’

‘Could the deleted emails still be in your email b—?’

‘I emptied it. The police haven’t been any help at all,’ Osgood continued, his reedy voice rising still higher. ‘What’m I going to be dragged into next?’

‘This must’ve all been very difficult for you,’ said Strike, not particularly sincerely.

He’d just found the Instagram page Osgood had described.

The account purported to be that of Calvin ‘Oz’ Osgood, music producer, there was a link to the real Osgood’s LinkedIn page, to bolster the fake account’s credibility, but ‘Oz’ didn’t feature in the Instagram pictures except for the occasional wisp of dark, curly hair, the back of an equally curly head, or one lens of his mirrored sunglasses.

In the absence of full-face shots, the small visible traces of the fake Osgood might plausibly have been photographs of the real producer.

The images showed glamorous, intriguing settings – infinity pools, long white beaches, fireworks in the Seychelles, mixing desks, photographs of well-known singers that appeared to have been taken from the wings of the stage and interior shots of private planes.

The captions were short, giving little away, and tending towards brief hashtags: #HighLife, #GouldingGig, #MusicMagic.

One showed a pair of tanned bare feet standing on a pair of scales that read 68kg, with the caption #TargetWeight.

‘And those are the only emails you’ve had from people who think you and Instagram Oz are the same person, are they?’ asked Strike. ‘The one from Ramsay Silver, the one about the van, and another one about some supposed prank?’

‘Yes,’ said Osgood, sounding still more defensive. ‘Why would I lie?’

‘Just checking,’ said Strike. ‘Well, thanks for getting back to me.’

‘I was in Manchester,’ Osgood said, ‘when that Wright person was killed, and I’ve already proved it to the police!’

‘Then I needn’t trouble you any longer,’ said Strike, and having thanked Osgood again for his time, he rang off and began reverse-searching the images Oz had posted to Instagram.

As Strike had suspected, all had been stolen from other accounts, with portions of Oz’s curly hair photoshopped in.

Strike suspected the picture of the scales, showing a weight Strike would have had to lose at least a couple more limbs to achieve, was meant to explain the discrepancy in size between the real chubby-faced music producer on LinkedIn and his Instagram impersonator.

Strike took out a fresh notecard of the type he used to pin on the noticeboard and headed it: Oz

Impersonates Calvin Osgood, music producer, online

Set up fake Instagram account in January last year

Might have his own curly hair or wears curly wig when pretending to be Osgood.

Someone at Ramsay Silver emailed Osgood/Oz offering help for unspecified problem

Was emailed about a van for sale

Was emailed in bad English about prank played on girl

Strike pinned this card beneath the various press clippings and notes relating to their four possible William Wrights, returned to his desk, and spent the rest of the morning dealing with paperwork unconnected to the silver vault case.

He was still there, consuming a late lunch, when Midge arrived to file her most recent notes.

Hearing her ask Pat, ‘Are we getting fish?’ and Pat’s snapped answer, ‘No, turkeys, what’s it look like?

’ Strike called Midge through to the inner office and asked whether she thought Plug had spotted her lately.

‘No,’ she said with an unexpected degree of aggression. ‘Why? What’s Kim been fookin’ saying now?’