Page 56 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

There’d been one occasion, and one only, on which Strike had appealed to the younger man for assistance.

Notwithstanding her frequent diatribes against the place, Charlotte had been determined to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with a large party at Heberley House.

Strike had foreseen myriad possibilities for drama and conflict in trying to stage the event at Heberley, and had tried to persuade Charlotte that a party in London, or even a weekend away with him, would be preferable, but to no avail.

Charlotte wanted champagne and canapés, two hundred people in black tie crammed into the ballroom, pictures taken on the sweeping staircase and lanterns hung in the trees of the deer park, and Strike’s lack of enthusiasm for the plan was taken, inevitably, as a drag and a slight.

Maybe some remnant of the neglected, unloved child Charlotte had once been was trying to prove to herself that she had worth in the eyes of her family, or perhaps she was deliberately setting up a situation in which an implosion would occur.

Strike had become familiar, by then, with the dangerous part of Charlotte that sometimes sought to wound herself as deeply, and on as grand a scale, as possible.

Two months of entirely predictable conflict with Tara prior to the party had culminated in Tara countermanding half of the arrangements and announcing that she’d be spending the day of the event in St Moritz with her son.

Unaware that Tara had dropped this bombshell by voicemail, Strike, who’d been on leave from the army at the time, had returned to Charlotte’s flat after a pint with his old friend Nick to find no sign of his girlfriend, but the black lace dress she’d been planning to wear to her Heberley party lying in shreds on the bedroom floor, and smears of blood in the bathroom sink.

She wasn’t answering her phone, nor did she return that night.

The following morning, unable to reach any other family member, he’d called Sacha.

When he answered his mobile, Sacha was in a first-class lounge at Heathrow, among the jet set crowd with whom Tara ran.

The information that his sister had gone missing, leaving bloodstains and a ripped-up dress behind her, hadn’t made the slightest dent in Sacha’s good humour.

Though speaking to a man ten years older than himself and with far broader life experience, the twenty-year-old Sacha had adopted a world-weary tone as he told Strike that Tara’s therapist had advised her that a little tough love was in order where his sister was concerned.

The best thing Strike could do, Sacha had said, while the laughter of Tara and friends rang in the background, was to ignore this obvious bid for attention, and before Strike could tell Sacha exactly what he thought of him and his mother, the young man had hung up.

It had taken Strike a further forty-eight hours to track Charlotte down to a hospital.

She’d swallowed a handful of anti-depressants with as much whisky as she could stomach in the middle of a Soho bar.

When she’d slipped sideways off her chair, the manager had gone to her assistance, only to be roundly insulted and told to keep his fucking hands off her.

Incredibly, she’d still been able to walk, because she then staggered out onto the pavement and blundered into traffic, where she’d been clipped by a passing bus.

When Strike finally found her, a day after his own thirtieth birthday, which he’d spent making fruitless calls to more relatives and ringing hospitals, she was lying in a surgical ward after having her stomach pumped, with self-harm marks up her arms and a fractured shoulder.

His reward for three days of dread and non-stop attempts to interest her relatives in her fate had been to be told what a complete fucking bastard he was for having gone out for a pint with Nick, just when she most needed him.

She’d then presented him with one of her regular me-or-the-army ultimatums and Strike had, as usual, chosen the military, and returned to Germany, where he was then stationed, a temporarily free man.

When Charlotte had been found dead in a blood-filled bath by the police, Sacha had had the perfect, poignant statement ready for the papers: ‘I’m just one of the heartbroken people who loved her, struggling to comprehend the fact that we’ll never hear her laugh again.

“ Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. ”’

Sitting in his chilly BMW, unwillingly remembering all of this, Strike asked himself yet again what the hell he’d been playing at, all those times he’d agreed to take Charlotte back.

He prized truth; she’d been an incorrigible liar.

He’d insisted that you could, with work, rise above your genetic inheritance, whereas Charlotte had had a fatalistic belief that she was inescapably damned by a family plagued with addiction.

Yet they’d known each other so well that each had been able to predict with almost frightening accuracy what the other was thinking and feeling.

While enmeshed in the relationship, Strike had never been able to imagine loving another woman as deeply, but since it had ended, he thought of it in terms of a protracted infection he’d finally succeeded in throwing off.

It occurred to him now, as he sat staring at the builders’ warehouse, that Robin, who seemed so much less complicated than his dead ex-fiancée, was far more of a mystery to him than Charlotte had ever been.

He didn’t know what Robin was thinking and feeling, and falling in love with her, which had happened entirely against his will, didn’t resemble an infection, but the recognition of a deficiency he’d never known he had, but which had become gradually and painfully symptomatic.

And now – every thought led back there, no matter how seemingly unrelated – she was in Masham with Murphy, and he was alone and miserable, and he had nobody to blame but himself.