Page 64 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Fuck’s sake. Was he about to be sent another ‘oops, sorry, didn’t mean to send that to you’ text, or a nude picture?

What Kim Cochran didn’t realise was, Strike had played these kinds of games at a far more sophisticated level, with a Grand Master, for sixteen years; this really was minor league attempted seduction.

An obese man in a reindeer-patterned sweater had just left the bathroom; the woman who smelled of BO staggered into it instead. As Strike moved along to stand beside the closed door, another text from Jade Semple arrived.

a woman took money out on Nialls card after that body was found

Strike was still contemplating this message when the bathroom door opened.

‘ I didn’t make the smell, ’ shouted the woman in the baggy dress, balancing herself with the door jamb, clearly very drunk. ‘That was him, before!’

Everyone but Strike laughed. The woman staggered out of his way and he entered the bathroom.

She wasn’t wrong about the smell; Strike opened the bathroom window before taking a long piss.

He’d have liked to barricade himself in here for the rest of the party, as long as the stench cleared, so that he could concentrate on Jade Semple.

Even as it was, he thought he could chance a few minutes of peaceful seclusion, so he sent her a text reading:

If Niall had a connection to the name ‘William Wright’ I’d very much like to talk to you in person.

He waited a few minutes, but she didn’t answer, so, relishing the temporary release from small talk, he sat down on the closed toilet seat, and Googled: ‘Fyola Fay porn star real name’. Just as the search results arrived, someone pounded on the bathroom door.

‘ Quickly, please, he’s going to throw up! ’

Strike unlocked the door, and flattened himself against the wall as a red-headed boy of around six, green of face and being half-carried, half-dragged along by his mother, gave a great heave and vomited copiously a foot short of the toilet, splattering Strike’s shoes, trouser bottoms and the fluffy white splash mat around the base of the sink.

‘He’s lactose intolerant,’ said the harassed mother. ‘He went and ate a whole load of cheese straws – didn’t you, Hector? ’ she said angrily, thrusting the boy’s head down into the toilet as he heaved again.

Strike didn’t consider himself a particularly squeamish man, but vomit was by far his least favourite bodily fluid; he also happened to rate personal cleanliness highly on his list of virtues, so being unable to mop the chunks of what looked like curried baked bean off himself was particularly irksome.

He headed back downstairs, but had to pause halfway, because of the bottleneck of leavers just inside the front door.

Marguerite was lurking in the hall below like a basking shark, and he saw, even though not looking directly at her, the upward tilt of her face as she gazed at him.

The battery on one of her flashing earrings was dead.

Her attention was luckily claimed by whippet face just as Strike reached the hall, so he managed to evade her on the way back to the kitchen, where he hoped to effect a cleaning job with the aid of wet kitchen roll. As he passed Greg, he said,

‘Think you should know, your bathroom’s just been the scene of a major environmental incident.’

‘Why, what’ve you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything. A kid called Hector ate some cheese straws.’

He might have added that one of Greg’s pals had also done a shit that radiated like nuclear waste, but the culprit was standing two feet away, perfectly unconcerned and shovelling down cocktail sausages.

‘ Fuck’s sake,’ said Greg, and he pushed his way out of the kitchen.

‘Excuse me,’ said the drunk woman in the baggy dress from behind him; Strike smelled her before seeing her.

She put her hands around his waist from behind, as though to bodily shift him, but then she slipped on a patch of spilled liquid on the floor, and as he instinctively grabbed her to stop her falling, his phone slid from his hand.

‘You’re a good man, ’ she said indistinctly, and he held her rigidly away from him as she regained her balance, because he didn’t want to be hugged again.

Marguerite had picked up his phone.

‘Oh my God,’ she gasped, half-laughing.

He glimpsed what she was staring at: a close-up picture of Fyola Fay, with her mouth clamped around a huge black penis.

Strike snatched it out of her hands; no doubt the story would spread around Lucy’s social circle that he’d been having a wank in the bathroom during her Christmas party, and unable to think of any explanation that wouldn’t sound impossibly lame, he shoved his phone back in his pocket and headed, stony-faced, towards the sink, where he did his best to clean off Hector’s vomit.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the solid mass of silver approaching.

Do not fucking tell me you like porn.

‘It’s all right,’ she said in an arch whisper. ‘I don’t gossip. Women can like porn too, you know.’

‘Excuse me,’ he said, and once again, he let himself out into the back garden, his wet trouser leg chilly on his real ankle.

Why the hell had he given up smoking? As he walked down the steps from the wooden decking onto the lawn, intent on dissolving into the darkness where he could have peace for a few minutes, his phone buzzed yet again.

If he’d been sent an ‘accidental’ nude from fucking Kim he was about to have a few blunt words with her, but when he dragged his mobile out of his pocket, he saw, with a lightening of the heart, a message from Robin. Then he read it:

idy~#=eeid

Butt dial, obviously . However, he responded:

Cipher? If so, send key.