Page 55 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Why not, then, have earlier spoken,

Written, bustled? Who’s to blame

If your silence kept unbroken?

Robert Browning Waring

Strike considered self-pity an unjustifiable waste of time, yet the dejection gripping him the following morning refused to lift.

Whatever Robin had said previously about the strains of a family Christmas, who was to say she wouldn’t be softened by the festive atmosphere once she got to Masham?

There’d be kids and carol services, and maybe mulled bloody wine, and everyone charmed by her immensely eligible CID officer…

Strike had only ever visited Masham once before, to gatecrash Robin’s wedding.

Well, he was fucked if he’d do that a second time.

He was currently sitting in his BMW, keeping watch over a builders’ warehouse to which he’d tailed the unemployed Plug. While watching the warehouse doors for Plug’s reappearance, Strike exacerbated his own despondency by pondering the many other dilemmas facing him.

Fergus Robertson’s article had appeared in the Telegraph that morning.

As the detective supposed he should have foreseen, some tattered code of honour among hacks had prevented Robertson from telling the world the real reason that Dominic Culpepper was currently determined to trash Strike’s reputation, but he’d intimated that Strike had made many enemies during his investigative career and quoted Strike in full as regarded his denial of everything pertaining to Candy, and his empty threat of legal action.

Perhaps, Strike thought, eyes on the warehouse, he really should hire a lawyer.

The costs would be exorbitant, but he had a nasty feeling his rebuttal wouldn’t be sufficient to make the Candy story disappear for good.

He had no intention of accepting his father’s offer of financial help, which he was certain stemmed from a desire on Rokeby’s part to bolster his own public image.

Strike considered that Rokeby had violated a territorial boundary by calling his office in Denmark Street and speaking to one of Strike’s employees.

Yes, Robin was probably right: the wisest course was to ignore his father, but if she returned from Masham engaged, Strike would consider all previous pledges cancelled.

Meanwhile, Jade, the abandoned wife of Niall Semple, had texted him the previous evening.

look theres no point you coming to see me because I don’t think Niall was the man in that shop any more

This was bad news, because in the event that Robin returned from Masham ringless, a trip to Scotland would give Strike an excellent opportunity to declare himself, whereas if they were only travelling as far as Ironbridge, it would be difficult to justify an overnight stay in a hotel. He’d typed back:

What changed your mind?

Her answer was,

I think he’s with another woman

Strike had replied asking whether it wouldn’t put her mind at rest to make sure her husband hadn’t been in the vault, but there’d been no response.

As if all this wasn’t enough to be dealing with, Strike had received an anonymous call to his mobile, forwarded from the office phone, shortly after leaving Denmark Street that morning. After some guttural breathing, a rasping voice had said,

‘Leave it. We’ve got gow-too on our side. Leave it. ’

‘The fuck’s “gow-too”?’ Strike had said, at which the caller had hung up.

Gow-too. Since the unknown man had threatened Robin in Harrods, Strike was no longer disposed to dismiss the anonymous caller as a joker amusing himself at the agency’s expense.

That said, as Robin was currently safe in Yorkshire, he was simply riled that another irritant had been added to his already tottering pile.

There was nothing in Strike’s immediate future likely to cheer him up.

He’d gladly have slept through the next three days, but he wasn’t even allowed that.

The following day was Christmas Eve, which meant having to attend Lucy’s party for the neighbours, followed by a night in the spare room and the enforced jollity of Christmas Day, with his brother-in-law Greg making the usual barbed comments about Strike’s life choices.

The detective usually ignored these for his sister’s sake, though it occurred to him, as he sat in his car watching the warehouse where Plug was shopping, that punching Greg might be almost as satisfying as battering Dominic Culpepper, and he indulged himself for a few seconds by imagining knocking Greg out over the turkey.

However, before he got anywhere near Christmas lunch, he had to meet Sacha Legard at the National Theatre, a prospect that was dredging up memories of Strike’s late fiancée which, in his weakened emotional state, he was finding impossible to fend off.

Charlotte’s attitude towards her half-brother Sacha, and indeed her entire family, had always swung between two polar extremes.

She’d spent much of her life damning them all to hell and declaring that she hated and dreaded Heberley House, the stately home in which she’d spent most of her childhood, and where her mother and stepfather had thrown extravagant, druggy parties, at one of which Charlotte, aged ten, had accidentally ingested LSD.

She’d insisted that she despised the conventions of her class, blamed her boarding schools and relatives for her unhappiness, and claimed that all she wanted out of life now that she was free of them were simple pleasures and genuine human connection.

This had been the part of Charlotte that Strike had both loved and pitied, and which, in the earliest days of their affair, he’d allowed himself to believe was the ‘real’ Charlotte.

However, with age and experience had come the unwilling realisation that the woman he loved was chameleon-like, multifaceted and often manipulative, containing many other selves which were just as real as his favourite one.

Shifts between these different aspects of her personality would come without warning; suddenly, she’d find the amusements Strike could afford on a military policeman’s salary dull and restrictive, and she’d announce a desire for an expensive day out at the races with champagne and heavy betting, or a drop-of-the-hat trip to Marrakesh with high society friends, including ‘Sachy’ and ‘Val’, because ‘come on, darling, it’ll be fun’, and then she’d mock Strike for his reluctance and for his bourgeois obsession with solvency and sincerity.

‘Oh, of course Sachy’s a massive hypocrite,’ Charlotte had once said, laughing, when Strike had laid this charge against her half-brother, after a dinner party during which Sacha and another wealthy actor had talked socialism through three courses.

‘We all know he votes Tory and there’s not a tax dodge he isn’t wise to.

Lighten up, darling, you take these things way too seriously. ’

In the manic episodes that seized Charlotte at regular intervals, she’d ask why Strike cared that the public face didn’t match the private mores, as long as the person concerned was entertaining and stylish.

Why did Strike have to bore and embarrass everyone with quibbles rooted in actual experience of poverty and squalor?

And arguments would ensue, in which she’d accuse Strike of parsimony and joylessness, and if he reminded Charlotte of things she’d said, days or even hours previously, about her hatred of double standards, falseness and materialism, there’d be a sudden eruption of rage, in which she’d throw wild accusations at him: that he hated and despised her, and thought her worthless and shallow, and then would come either self-destructive drinking or flung missiles, and often both.

The one family member towards whom Charlotte had never, under any circumstances, expressed love, was her mother.

Charlotte had been regarded as surplus to requirements by both her parents, who’d been hoping for a son after her elder sister.

Charlotte had only ever known disdain and unkindness from Tara, which Strike had always believed was rooted in their close physical resemblance, the narcissistic Tara hating to see her own lost youthful beauty blinking at her across the breakfast table.

Never, before or since, had he known a parent and child hate each other as Tara and Charlotte had, and he ascribed most of Charlotte’s mental instability to a childhood of neglect that had amounted, at times, to outright abuse.

Tara’s latent maternal instinct had finally awoken with the arrival of Sacha, who was the product of her third marriage.

Tara had doted on her only son, perfectly content to see her own features in masculine form, and he’d become the only person the hedonistic, profoundly self-centred Tara cared about as much as herself.

In consequence, Sacha was the only person in Charlotte’s drink- and drug-riven family who could sincerely say that he’d had an entirely happy upbringing.

This wasn’t, of course, Sacha’s fault and Strike didn’t blame him for it.

His grudge sprang from the way Sacha had behaved once he was old enough to notice Tara’s callousness towards his sister.

Sacha was the only living soul who might have been able to intervene to some effect, yet Charlotte’s suicide attempts and spells in mental health facilities had always gone unacknowledged by her half-brother, who’d never visited her, never called, and never referred to any of them after they’d passed.

When Charlotte was well, Sacha was delighted to socialise with her, because she was a witty and ornamental asset to any gathering.

Otherwise, as far as Sacha was concerned, Charlotte might as well not have existed.