Page 63 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
A. E. Housman LXII, A Shropshire Lad
Strike arrived at Lucy’s party in Bromley at half past nine.
His objective had been to miss as much of the party as he could without being rude, and above all to avoid the painful early stage of every such gathering, where the crowd is sparse, small talk particularly laboured, and the choice of company so limited that you risked being trapped with a bore who’d then stick to you all evening.
However, he was later than he’d meant to be, because he’d lost track of time while trying to identify the blonde he believed had put the cipher note through the agency’s door.
Frustratingly, immediately before he’d realised he was late, and been forced to set out for Bromley with a bag of presents and an overnight bag in the boot of his BMW, he’d found her.
Her professional name was Fyola Fay, and she’d featured with de Lion in I Know Who You Did Last Summer and Done Girl.
Had Strike not promised to attend this bloody party he’d have been able to remain sitting at the partners’ desk in the office, working his way systematically through OnlyFans, Flickr, ModelHub and any of the other myriad places where a woman could make additional money selling nudes or camcorder footage online, looking for clues to Fay’s real name and ways of contacting her.
Instead, he was trudging towards Lucy’s front door, passing the bare magnolia bush in the front garden, carrying his bags of clumsily wrapped presents and preparing, after an afternoon of staring at breasts, huge penises and orifices, both male and female, to fake an interest in other people’s jobs, houses and children.
He’d expected Lucy to be annoyed that he was late, but when his youngest nephew, Adam, opened the front door, Strike’s sister, who was further down the hall and wearing a pair of flashing antlers with her party dress, cried ‘Stick!’ and hurried past the women she’d been talking to, to hug him, and it occurred to him, with a slight stirring of guilt, that she was happy and relieved that he’d turned up at all.
‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ was pounding out of speakers in the sitting room.
Resolving to behave as well as possible, Strike climbed the stairs to deposit his bags in the spare room, greeted his favourite nephew, Jack, who was in his own bedroom playing some kind of shoot-’em-up game on his PlayStation with three other boys of around the same age, then returned to the crowded ground floor, which was full of adults wearing Christmas sweaters and party dresses, and several small children Strike did his best not to step on or knock over as he made his way to the kitchen where, he assumed, there would be food and beer.
‘Here he is!’ said Greg, his brother-in-law, falsely enthusiastic.
Greg was standing with three other men, who raised their cans of lager simultaneously to their mouths as though they’d been practising the movement, all of them eyeing Strike with that brand of defiance certain men display upon coming face to face with a male who might in any way be considered their superior, whether in terms of size, fitness or worldly success.
‘We meet again!’ said a female voice behind Strike, and, turning, he saw a woman he had no memory of ever meeting: dark, overweight, greasy-skinned, wearing a kind of knee-length silver kaftan that made him think of Bacofoil, and angel earrings that flashed, like Lucy’s antlers.
‘Marguerite,’ she said, her face falling, when Strike’s expression remained blank.
‘We met here, at your birthday dinner, a few years ago. You brought your girlfriend, Nina.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Strike, now placing her: Lucy had invited Marguerite to meet her brother, not realising he was going to turn up with another woman. ‘How’re you?’
‘Great,’ she said. ‘Is Nina here?’
‘No,’ said Strike.
‘Easy come, easy go for you with women, isn’t it, Corm?’ said Greg, in the aggressively jocular tone he often employed towards his brother-in-law. Marguerite’s expression brightened.
‘Just getting a beer,’ Strike told her, because he’d spotted a stack of six-packs of lager on a distant work surface, and he forced a path through the crowd around the central table piled with food, causing a small ripple of muttering and turned heads.
In his current pessimistic mood, he suspected this was due to the Candy story rather than any appreciation of his detective triumphs, and was careful not to meet anyone’s eyes, reaching the lager with a sense of achieving safe harbour.
As he yanked off a ring pull, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Hoping it was a text from Robin, he pulled out the mobile, but saw a message from Kim instead.
Plug’s left his son in the house with the old lady and buggered off to Carnival Street again, with a bunch of planks and chicken wire in the back of his van.
Well, what d’you want me to do about it? thought Strike irritably. He had a feeling Kim simply wanted an excuse to get in touch, a hunch strengthened by the fact that a second text came in almost immediately.
Hope you’re having a fun Christmas Eve x
Strike put his phone back in his pocket without answering, and looked up to find the group around Greg, which had now absorbed Marguerite, watching him.
Strike didn’t have the slightest wish to join them: the men had the look of those who could wring a lengthy conversation out of the best service stations on the M1, or their most recent round of golf.
Marguerite’s expression was simply hungry.
Strike’s phone buzzed again.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, to nobody in particular. He took out his phone again and, purely to get away from those gazing at him, let himself out of the back door onto the decking that Greg had built himself, facing the chilly lawn.
Expecting Kim’s name again, he was surprised to see a text from Jade Semple and, judging by her spelling, she appeared to be trying, far more successfully than he was, to drown her Christmas Eve sorrows in alcohol.
I dont t hink bNiall was thagt body it was just the naeme William Wrihgt maed me thinkn it might have been
Strike typed back:
Did Niall have some connection with that name?
Somebody tapped on the window behind Strike.
He turned and saw his eldest and least favourite nephew, Luke, whose objective in banging on the glass appeared to have been simply to make his uncle show his face to his two smirking teenage companions, as though Strike were some aquarium fish.
Scowling, the detective turned his back on the window again, and saw that Jade had texted him again.
Kind of but I was just panicking g I dobn’t think it was hijm
‘Stick, what are you doing out here?’
Lucy had come out onto the decking, shivering in her thin party dress.
‘Sorry,’ said Strike again, hastily stuffing his phone back in his pocket. ‘Work. One of my subcontractors has been punched in the face.’
It was true-ish: Shah had almost had his nose broken a couple of jobs previously.
‘Oh, that’s awful,’ said Lucy. ‘How—?’
‘Let’s go back inside,’ said Strike, feeling guilty again. ‘Introduce me to your friends.’
For the next hour he drank lager and made loud, empty conversation with various parents of children at Lucy’s kids’ schools.
Some wanted to quiz him about his detective career, others wanted to tell him how lovely his sister was; a few, who were already drunk, seemed unable to place him from the school run, and were confused as to why anyone who didn’t take their children to the local school should be present.
The exception was a sozzled, skinny woman, who was wearing a baggy dress that was probably the height of fashion, but which Strike thought looked like a postal sack: she insisted very loudly that she knew Strike ‘from taekwondo’, and that his son, Fingal, was very talented and shouldn’t be allowed to give it up.
In the end he agreed with her, and promised to preach perseverance to Fingal, upon which she hugged him and he discovered that she stank of BO.
Five minutes later, while fetching yet another lager, he was cornered by a man whose shallow forehead and long, pointed nose gave him the look of a whippet.
Strike assumed he was some species of insurance agent, because he wanted to know how Strike indemnified his business against professional mistakes that led to wrongful arrests or injuries.
When Strike said, truthfully, that his agency had never made a professional mistake that had resulted in a wrongful arrest or an injury, or at least, not an injury to an investigative subject (Robin might have had a case against him, if she’d ever chosen to pursue it) the whippet-faced man seemed annoyed.
‘But say it happened—’
‘Can’t see how it would,’ said Strike.
For the last twenty minutes, he’d been aware of the large silver mass that was Marguerite circling, like some large and unpredictable asteroid, and seeing that his interlocutor was determined to thrash the point out, Strike announced baldly, ‘need the bog’, and left him standing there.
There was, inevitably, a queue for the upstairs bathroom.
Strike joined it with reluctance, because the woman in the sack-like dress who thought he had a son called Fingal was also waiting, so he pulled out his phone again to discourage conversation.
He wanted to re-read Jade Semple’s texts, but instead saw a new message from Kim.
Working, and I’d need to know you a LOT better to send nudes.