Page 5 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Too suddenly thou tellest such a loss.

Matthew Arnold Merope: A Tragedy

Robin Ellacott had lied to her detective partner about having a sore throat and a high fever. In fact, she was currently lying in a hospital bed on a morphine drip, determined that as few people as possible should know why she was there.

The previous afternoon, Robin had been crossing the concourse of Victoria station in pursuit of a surveillance target when she’d suddenly felt as though a red-hot knife had pierced her lower right side.

Her knees had buckled and she’d vomited.

A pair of middle-aged women had hurried to her assistance and, muttering in panic about burst appendixes, had hailed a station attendant.

In a remarkably short period of time, Robin had been gurney-ed out of the station to a waiting ambulance.

She had a hazy memory of the paramedics’ faces, of more searing pain, and the bumping of the trolley as she was sped into the hospital, then of the icy ultrasound wand on her belly, and the anaesthetist’s masked face.

Her next clear memory was of waking up, being told that she’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and that her fallopian tube had burst.

Robin had phoned her boyfriend, CID officer Ryan Murphy, as soon as she’d been able to reach her mobile, but he was too far across London to have any realistic chance of reaching her before evening visiting time had ended.

She’d begged Murphy, who was horrified by what had happened, to call Strike with the excuse of the fever and sore throat, and tell him she wouldn’t be able to drive him into Kent.

Robin had also impressed upon her boyfriend that her parents weren’t, on any account, to know what had happened.

The very last thing Robin needed right now was her mother hovering over her, and blaming what had happened on Robin’s job, which she was sure, however unfairly, to do.

The shock of her sudden hospitalisation, and the reason for it, had been such that twenty-four hours later, Robin still felt as though she’d slipped through some kind of portal into a reality that wasn’t her own.

She’d barely slept the previous night, due to the low moans of an elderly woman in the next bed.

That morning, Robin had been wheeled into a newly vacant single room, for which she was grateful, though without being entirely sure what she’d done to deserve it, except that one of the older nurses on duty seemed to pity her for having had no visitors.

Groggy though she was from the combination of sleeplessness and morphine, Robin had spent a lot of the morning trying to retrace events in her head, to work out when the contraceptive failure must have happened, given the likely date of conception given by her surgeon.

She now thought she’d worked out when the mistake must have been made, and she dreaded having to talk to Murphy about it when he arrived in the afternoon.

Most of all she felt a vast sense of self-recrimination, for not having managed her own body better, for having, as she saw it, brought this avoidable catastrophe upon herself.

She was lying watching a murmuration of starlings twirl across the leaden sky outside her window when her mobile rang.

She picked it up and saw her mother was calling.

Unable to face the conversation, she let it ring.

Linda gave up at exactly the moment the door of Robin’s room opened.

She looked around to see the broad, genial face of her surgeon, Mr Butler.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, smiling.

‘Hello,’ said Robin.

‘How’re we feeling?’ he asked, taking her chart from the end of the bed and casting an eye over it.

‘Fine,’ said Robin, as Mr Butler pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘No pain?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Good. Well, now… did you know you were pregnant?’

‘No,’ said Robin. Not wanting to seem stupid, she said, ‘I had to come off the pill for a bit, but we’ve been using condoms. I suppose one of them must have split, and we didn’t notice.’

‘A shock, then?’ said Mr Butler.

‘It was, yes,’ said Robin, with polite understatement.

‘Well, as I told you yesterday, we had no choice but to remove the ruptured tube. It’s very fortunate you got here so quickly, because it could’ve been life-threatening, but I’m afraid there’s an issue you might not have been aware of,’ said Mr Butler, no longer smiling.

‘What’s that?’ asked Robin.

‘We found significant scarring on the fallopian tube we removed. We had a quick look at the other one, and it’s exactly the same.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

‘Have you ever had a diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘To your knowledge, have you ever had chlamydia?’

The dart of dread was blunted by the morphine, but Robin felt it nonetheless.

‘Yes, when I was nineteen, but they gave me antibiotics.’

‘Right,’ said Mr Butler, nodding slowly. ‘Well, by the looks of it, the antibiotics didn’t work. It can happen. Did you continue to have symptoms?’

‘Not really,’ said Robin. There’d been some pain, certainly, in the months following the rape that had ended her university career, but she’d told herself it was psychosomatic. The last thing she’d wanted at the time were any more intimate physical examinations. ‘No, I thought it had gone.’

‘Well, the symptoms are variable, they can be easy to miss. Can you remember when you were next given antibiotics?’

‘I think… maybe a year later?’ she said, struggling to remember. ‘I got strep throat. I was given more then.’

‘Right, well, that lot probably did the trick, because there’s no current infection. Unfortunately, though, you’ve been left with quite a lot of damage. I think it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to conceive naturally, I’m afraid.’

Robin simply looked at him. Possibly he thought she hadn’t understood, because he continued,

‘The embryo couldn’t get past the scarring, you see, which is why it implanted in the tube and ruptured it. And as I say, the other side’s just as bad.’

‘Right,’ said Robin.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, looking back at her chart.

‘Thirty-two,’ said Robin.

‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with the ovaries. If you’re planning on children, though, I’d consider freezing your eggs sooner rather than later. Your best chance would be IVF.’

‘OK,’ said Robin.

‘And you should be very careful with contraception, going forwards. There’s a significant chance the same thing could happen in the remaining tube, if you conceive accidentally again.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ said Robin.

‘Good.’

Mr Butler got to his feet and replaced Robin’s chart at the end of the bed.

‘We’re going to keep you another night, but assuming you’re going on well, I think you’ll be able to go home tomorrow.’

‘Great,’ said Robin. ‘Thank you.’

The surgeon left.

Robin turned to look out of the window again, but the starlings had gone; the pewter-coloured sky was empty. Her mind was blank. She couldn’t have said what she was feeling. She was simply numb.

She ought to have gone back on the pill, of course, after being forced to stop taking it during the four months she’d recently spent undercover in a cult where all contraception had been banned.

The repercussions of Robin’s stay with the United Humanitarian Church were still playing out in the newspapers and on TV.

Investigators had finished recovering all the bodies buried in unmarked graves on the land where the cult had first started; its originators, a couple called the Waces, were in custody, along with the upper echelons of the UHC’s management, and attempts were being made to trace many trafficked babies.

Celebrity supporters were trying to backtrack, with various degrees of success; a famous novelist was currently in hiding, while a young actress had been dropped from her new film after she was revealed to be one of the cult leader’s ‘spirit wives’.

The role the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency had played in bringing down the cult had been minimised by both police and the agency itself.

Robin had given a full, detailed statement of all she’d witnessed at Chapman Farm to the police, but, to her immense relief, she’d been told she wouldn’t be required to give evidence in court.

Emboldened by the public exposure of the UHC’s regime of faked supernatural events, hard labour and brainwashing, hundreds of former members were continuing to come forwards to give their accounts.

For decades, the UHC had wielded its money and power to silence all critics; now it seemed that every few days there was another television or online interview with someone else the cult had harmed.

A mere two months after Chapman Farm had been raided, the first memoir of an ex-member appeared and shot immediately to the top of the bestseller charts.

All of this should have been gratifying to Robin, and she was indeed deeply relieved that the so-called church appeared to have been dealt a mortal blow, but she found the endless news coverage far more traumatising than she’d expected.

She’d rather not have been reminded about the Retreat Rooms, where cult members demonstrated their spiritual purity by having unprotected sex with anyone who wanted it; she’d have liked to expunge from her mind all memories of the five-sided Temple where she’d been almost drowned; she’d have been delighted never again to see the pictures of the dark woods that kept being shown in the papers.

And, of course, it was impossible to completely extinguish all trace of the agency’s role in bringing down the cult.

While there were enough sordid details of what had gone on at Chapman Farm to keep journalists busy for months, and nobody except those very closest to the investigation knew the specifics of what Robin had gone through, there’d been press calls to the agency’s office, and her name, and that of the agency, had been mentioned in some of the coverage.

An enterprising young tabloid reporter had tried to badger Robin into comment as she came and went from Denmark Street, until he was literally chased off by one of the agency’s subcontractors, Midge, who advised the man ‘get the fook out of it, she’s got nothing to fookin’ tell you, you fookin’ prick’.

Robin worked steadily through all of this, determined not to admit to anyone how fragile she felt about it all.

By her own choice, there’d only been a one-week break to decompress after those months of non-stop, high-stress work, but she hadn’t wanted to add extra hormones to what she privately acknowledged to herself was a very shaky state of mind.

So her pills had remained in her dressing table drawer for the time being, although she’d looked up the efficacy of condoms before deciding to rely on them for a while (she hadn’t left everything to chance) and they were ninety-eight per cent effective, if used correctly.

If used correctly.

Robin’s mobile rang again. She stretched out a hand, picked it up and saw Strike’s number. Glancing towards the glass panel in the door, in case another medic was about to walk in, and glad of a chance to think about something other than her fallopian tubes, she decided to risk it, and answered.