Page 39 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

‘We’ll all be rich before we die yet.’

‘Depends when we die,’ growled Tom – in which observation – obvious as it was – there was undoubtedly much truth.

John Oxenham A Maid of the Silver Sea

Strike’s trip to Ipswich yielded a small amount of further information about the friend of Plug’s whom Kim had identified as an ex-embezzler.

According to a neighbour who’d emerged from her house with a Red Setter, and with whom Strike struck up a conversation by pretending to be a great dog lover, Plug’s friend had been prosecuted under the Animal Cruelty Act and banned from keeping any domestic pet for five years.

‘Disgusting,’ the neighbour told Strike, scowling in the direction of the man’s overgrown front garden.

‘I think you should get a lifetime ban on keeping pets if you’re prosecuted for cruelty.

What he did to that lurcher… I’ve got no time for people who mistreat animals.

They should have the same done back to them, if you ask me. ’

While driving back to London that evening, Strike wondered whether animal cruelty formed any part of whatever business was driving Plug and his associates’ discreet exchanges of cash.

On arriving home he made an anonymous call to the RSPCA, tipping off the animal welfare charity that a large animal or animals appeared to be incarcerated without fresh air or sunlight in Plug’s padlocked shed.

That, he hoped, might flush out something interesting.

As he left the office, he noticed that Pat’s aquarium had now acquired three inhabitants, and stopped to look at them.

These weren’t goldfish as he recognised them.

Indeed, one of them, which was black, appeared to him to be so misshapen he wondered whether it wasn’t diseased, having what looked like a knobbly growth on its head, a lumpy body and a distinctly waddling action.

Propped against the base of the tank was a card on which was written in Pat’s handwriting ‘DO NOT FEED I’VE ALREADY DONE IT’, an instruction with which Strike was more than happy to comply. He left, turning out the light.

His plan for the following day was to trace Larry McGee, the delivery man who’d been fired from Gibsons at some point after delivering the Murdoch silver.

Strike set out for the auction house after breakfast, planning to pretend he didn’t know McGee had been sacked, and hoping to wring details of his dismissal from whoever he could manage to talk to.

A woman was standing on the corner of Denmark Street and Charing Cross Road as Strike approached it.

Alert as he was for the possibility of journalistic interest after Culpepper’s story, Strike eyed her as he drew nearer, but discounted the idea that she worked for the papers.

She was a well-built young woman with white-blonde hair extensions; as he drew nearer, he saw false eyelashes and plumped-up lips, and the figure revealed by the tightly belted coat showed evidence of cosmetic enhancement too, reminding him of Bijou Watkins, who’d also had large breast implants.

The blonde bowed her head and hunched her shoulders as Strike passed her, but he suspected this was due less to any wish to preserve her incognito than a workaday wish not to be importuned by a random male, which he suspected might happen to her quite frequently.

Half an hour later, Strike arrived at Gibsons Auction House, which was situated in an elegant Edwardian building on Northumberland Avenue.

Tasteful gold Christmas lights had been fixed around the edge of a large window, where a pair of abstract paintings were hung on almost invisible strings.

A man as tall as Strike, who was wearing an immaculate black suit and had a goatee and a shaven head, stood guard outside the door.

‘Morning,’ said Strike, pulling a card out of his wallet and showing it to the security man. ‘I’m hoping to talk to Larry McGee.’

‘You’ll be lucky,’ said the man.

‘Why’s that?’

‘He’s dead, mate.’

The security man looked down at the card Strike had handed him and raised his eyebrows.

‘You that bloke what solved the Lula Landry thing?’

‘That’s me,’ said Strike. ‘Was McGee was still working here when he died?’

‘Nah,’ said the security man, who was now looking at Strike with curiosity. ‘He wuz sacked.’

‘Any chance I could talk to someone about that?’

Five minutes later, and slightly to Strike’s surprise, because he’d anticipated a rebuff, he was led by the security man into a stark white office with another abstract painting hanging behind the uncluttered desk.

Its occupant was a tall black woman in her thirties, who was dressed in a violet trouser suit and wore her hair in long spiral curls.

The name plate on her desk declared her name to be Diana Boadu and her accent suggested a private education, though she displayed none of the superciliousness Strike might have expected from her stylish appearance and the beautifully appointed Edwardian building in which she worked.

On the contrary, like the security man, Diana seemed intrigued if not mildly excited to be speaking to Cormoran Strike.

‘Why on earth are you interested in Larry McGee?’ she asked, when Strike had accepted an offer of coffee, and a redheaded underling had been dispatched to make it.

‘He delivered the Murdoch silver,’ said Strike.

‘ Oh, ’ said Diana Boadu. ‘I see.’

‘But I’ve just found out he’s dead.’

‘Yes, I heard he’d died,’ said Diana, who didn’t seem unduly saddened by the fact. ‘But that was after we fired him – months later,’ she added, as though afraid that Strike might get the impression the sacking had somehow killed McGee.

‘Any idea what he died of?’

‘Carter might know, our Head of Deliveries, but I think he’s out on a job.’

‘Would you be comfortable giving me Carter’s contact details?’

Strike’s coffee arrived while Diana was dictating Carter’s number. When Strike had thanked the redhead, he said,

‘Could I ask what McGee did, to get himself sacked?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Diana. ‘I assume – I mean, given your reputation’ (Strike thought fleetingly of the recent press article about his behaviour towards women; apparently not everyone had read it) ‘you’re discreet?’

‘Very,’ he assured her, drawing out his notebook.

‘Well, we suspected him of theft.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. The first incident concerned a pair of nineteenth-century Staffordshire pottery spaniels, which disappeared between the warehouse and the purchaser. The buyer was a fairly absent-minded collector and it took him a week to register that the spaniels hadn’t been in the delivery, because he’d bid on so many lots.

‘It was a tricky situation. They could’ve been stolen at the warehouse and never loaded into McGee’s van, and – well, candidly, there’s always a chance a buyer themselves is working a scam.

We investigated, but we couldn’t prove anything, so we gave McGee the benefit of the doubt and reimbursed the buyer out of our insurance. ’

‘McGee was alone on the delivery, was he?’

‘Yes,’ said Diana. ‘We usually send people out in pairs, but it was a particularly busy time, so he did this delivery alone. We think he spotted an opportunity.’

‘How much were these pottery dog things worth?’

‘Two to three thousand pounds,’ said Diana. ‘Then – oh, that’s Carter!’ she said in surprise.

Strike looked around to see a fit-looking white man in his early fifties looking through the glass panel of Diana’s door, fist raised to knock.

‘Come in, Charlie,’ she called.

‘Just wanted to tell you, the Burne-Jones delivery’s been postponed again,’ said Carter, opening the door and poking his head inside.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Diana crossly. ‘We aren’t a storage unit. He bought it, he needs to take receipt of it!’

‘He was calling from Istanbul.’

‘OK, fine,’ sighed Diana. ‘This is Cormoran Strike, Charlie. He’s a—’

‘Private detective, yeah,’ said Carter, sidling a little further into the room. ‘Bradley told me.’

Strike surmised that Bradley was the security man.

‘He’s here to talk about Larry McGee,’ said Diana. ‘D’you want to pull up a chair?’

Carter did so with such alacrity that Strike suspected the message about the delayed delivery had been a pretext to find out what was going on in Diana’s office.

Carter looked ex-military or police; his thick grey hair was cut very short, his gaze was penetrating and his royal blue overalls were neatly pressed.

‘I’ve just been explaining about those disappearing dogs,’ Diana said. Turning back to the detective, she said, ‘Anyway, last January, the same thing happened on another delivery McGee made. This time, it was a kifwebe.’

‘A what?’ said Strike. If nothing else, the silver vault case was undoubtedly improving his vocabulary; first nefs, now this.

‘It’s a mask, produced by the Songye and Luba people.

This was nineteen-twenties and especially fine, worth around five thousand.

Again, it vanished between warehouse and purchaser and, again, the client had bought several items in the same auction, so didn’t immediately notice that one of the masks was missing.

Two incidents of easily portable objects disappearing from multiple lots delivered to the same buyer, McGee the delivery driver on both—’

‘—is a hell of a coincidence,’ said Strike.

‘Well, quite.’

‘You’d let him go out alone again, had you?’

‘No,’ said Carter, before Diana could answer.

‘He never went out alone again after the pottery dogs disappeared. There were two of ’em on the kifwebe delivery, and the co-driver backed McGee up and said there hadn’t been any opportunity for McGee to have pinched it.

He was right gormless, that kid,’ said Carter, shaking his head.

‘Panicked and thought he’d be sacked if he admitted McGee had been alone with the mask.

We had to let ’im go in the end – nothing criminal, just dozy. ’

‘And you didn’t involve the police?’ Strike asked Diana.

‘It’s tricky,’ said Diana.