Page 65 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

Creep into thy narrow bed,

Creep, and let no more be said!

Vain thy onset! all stands fast.

Thou thyself must break at last.

Matthew Arnold The Last Word

Everything had gone badly wrong at the Bay Horse.

It was closing time, and Robin was now extremely drunk (‘we’ll sort ourselves out for food’, the departing pub-goers had told Linda, but nobody had consumed any food at the pub, and Robin had ill-advisedly drunk even more neat whisky since meeting Matthew outside).

She’d returned from the bathroom to see Martin and Carmen still arguing, and then Jonathan, who’d met two old footballing friends at the bar, had wanted her to carry pints back from the bar to Stephen and Murphy.

Murphy had looked odd as he passed her the phone she’d left lying on the table and she saw she’d received a text, but she didn’t read it, because she was concentrating on not spilling the pints in her hand, and as she’d handed Murphy the glass, she’d said, ‘Is that non-alcoholic?’, thinking he’d be able to tell which beer was which by smelling them, but suddenly, out of nowhere, had come the same, sudden outburst of rage he’d displayed on the night of their worst row.

‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

She saw Stephen’s look of shock as Murphy turned his back. Robin tried to answer, but her mouth appeared to be wadded with invisible cotton wool.

‘I din’ – I jus’—’

Her vision had become a constantly sticking film. So much whisky. So many pregnant women. Matthew. Sarah. ‘Not Tonight Santa’.

And then it was closing time. It was a relief to get back out into the cold night air again, although Robin’s surroundings were still behaving like a flick book; Silver Street, and the sky, and her companions, appeared in a jerky set of still images.

Murphy was walking ahead with Jonathan, and she wasn’t sure where Martin and Carmen had gone. So much whisky…

‘What did he bite your head off for?’ said Stephen, in a low voice.

‘Nutt – nothing,’ said Robin. ‘Just a – he thought I meant – accusin’ him… I’m very drunk, Button…’

Stephen put his arm around her. Her older brother, who was the land manager of a large estate twenty miles from Masham, was the biggest of the Ellacott brothers, nearly as big as Strike, but this didn’t feel anything like Strike holding her up at the Ritz, on the night when he’d nearly kissed her. Don’t think about that.

The stars were moving jerkily as well, and you’d think stars, at least, would stay still… they said, if you were seasick, you should stare at the horizon, but she couldn’t see the horizon, only hazy street lights, and Murphy’s hunched, angry back…

Then they were home, with the empty kitchen smelling of whatever Linda, Jenny and Annabel had eaten for dinner.

Betty, woken inside her dog crate, began whining and whimpering to be let out.

Murphy proceeded wordlessly upstairs. Jonathan called a cheery good night and Robin managed to make a reciprocal noise through the invisible cotton wadding in her mouth, and it seemed to her that it might be a good idea to visit the downstairs bathroom.

‘You all right, Bobbin?’

‘Yeah’m fine, g’ t’ bed, Button…’

Unlike the small boy down in Bromley she didn’t know existed, Robin managed to reach the toilet bowl before vomiting.

A cruel, remorseless, giant hand squeezed her innards repeatedly; finally, utterly spent, trembling and doused in sweat, she lay on the hard tiled floor, weak and tired, and thinking what a terrible mess she’d made of Christmas Eve.

After what might have been ten minutes or half an hour, when the small, dark room was no longer spinning, she got gingerly to her feet.

She re-entered the kitchen as Martin and Carmen came in through the back door, both of them clearly the worse for drink.

‘Who’s in my room?’ Martin demanded, and Robin had to struggle to remember.

‘Annabel,’ she said.

Martin and Carmen had been expected to stay in their own flat tonight, which was only a twenty-minute drive away.

‘Fuck,’ said Martin angrily, as though this was Robin’s fault, and she almost felt as though it was, and she nearly offered them her room, before remembering that Murphy was in there. ‘We’ll have to sleep in the fucking sitting room,’ said Martin, and he strode off in that direction.

‘You look nearly as fucked up as I feel,’ said Carmen, peering at Robin, who tried to smile at her before heading upstairs.

She opened her bedroom door very quietly, hoping Murphy would already be asleep, but of course, he wasn’t. Lying on his back, bare-chested, illuminated by his bedside lamp, he watched her, stony-faced, as she closed the door quietly behind her.

‘Puke, did you?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘But I’m the one who’s drinking.’

‘Ryan, I thought you’d be able to tell which pint was which by the smell of them,’ said Robin, standing just inside the door, not wanting to get too close to him before she could brush her teeth. ‘That’s all. I wasn’t accusing you of drinking real pints.’

She was very conscious of trying to enunciate clearly, because the whisky wasn’t quite out of her system. When Murphy didn’t respond, Robin moved towards the bedroom chair, on which lay her pyjamas.

‘Can’t let even Christmas Eve go without sneaking off to text him,’ he said suddenly.

‘What?’ said Robin, disconcerted, standing up with her pyjamas in her hands.

‘Strike. What you were doing, when you went outside.’

‘I haven’t texted Strike.’

‘Liar,’ he said, and the word clanged through the room like a dropped skillet.

‘I haven’t texted Strike,’ she repeated. ‘Not since we got here.’

‘Liar,’ he said again. ‘You left your phone behind when you went to the bathroom. He texted you back, I saw it.’

Robin felt in her pockets, pulled out her phone and stared down at Strike’s incomprehensible message, which only made sense once she saw what she’d accidentally sent him, probably after abandoning her attempt to read about Reata Lindvall.

‘Ryan, it was a butt dial. Look.’

She walked over to the bed and held out her phone. He took it and read the two messages.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Robin took back her phone. She wasn’t yet sober, and she really wanted to cry, but instead, she went to fetch her dressing gown, prior to leaving for the bathroom. As she reached for the door handle, Murphy said,

‘Why did you get so drunk tonight?’

‘Because I rowed with Mum,’ said Robin, her throat constricting, ‘and then I rowed with you… and everyone’s bloody pregnant.’

He raised himself a little on the pillows, incredibly handsome in the half-light. ( Who’s the Paul Newman lookalike? )

‘Robin, I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come here.’

‘Not now,’ she said, fighting tears. ‘I need to wash and clean my teeth, I’m disgusting.’

‘You’re never disgusting.’

‘Let me get clean,’ she said, and then she ducked down to her almost empty holdall, groped for Strike’s present, which lay hidden beneath her slippers, stood up with the box concealed by her robe, and left the room.

The house was silent. Robin shut herself in the bathroom and locked the door.

She’d have liked to shower, but she feared waking Annabel, so she stripped off and washed, put on her pyjamas and cleaned her teeth for twice as long as usual, until no taste of whisky remained.

Her head had begun to throb, but at least the floor remained steady beneath her feet, and the walls stationary.

Having pulled on her robe, she sat down on the edge of the bath and picked up Strike’s present, which was covered in blue paper patterned with small gold stars. She could tell he’d wrapped it himself, because it was lumpy. He’d used too much Sellotape. He was awful at wrapping presents.

But when she tore off the paper, she saw what was unmistakeably a jeweller’s box, made of thick pale blue card. Slowly, as though the contents might explode, she took off the lid.

A thick silver chain bracelet, from which hung seven charms, lay on a bed of black foam, and Robin recognised the middle charm immediately: it was the masonic orb she’d admired in Ramsay Silver.

She stared, transfixed, unaware that her mouth was open.

Then she lifted the bracelet out of its box, and amazed as she was, she could follow Strike’s thought process perfectly.

He’d gone back for the orb, and someone, maybe Kenneth Ramsay, had tried to sell him more charms – make it a bracelet!

– and that had given him the idea, but he hadn’t been content to buy a job lot from Ramsay; instead, he’d painstakingly built this, and it was like Strike, in that it was a bit clunky and inelegant, the charms mis-matched, but there was so much thought in every one of them: private jokes and shared memories, incommunicable to anyone but the two of them.

A silver Land Rover, representing the car which perhaps only Strike would miss as much as she did; the Houses of Parliament, where she’d worked undercover and planted a bug every bit as legally suspect as the one for which Mitch Patterson had been arrested (she’d never told Murphy that); a miniature enamelled shield bearing the coat of arms for Skegness, where they’d once eaten chips together, and joked about donkey rides, and interviewed the key witness in a thirty-year-old murder case; a silver sheep (‘ What does your dad do for a living? You’ve never told me.

’ ‘ He’s a professor of sheep medicine, production and reproduction…

why’s that funny? ’); a tiny pair of silver scales (‘ That’s Libra, it’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.

’ ‘ Yeah, well, I’m team rational. ’); a silver and enamel robin, the newest and brightest charm of them all, for her name, and, perhaps, for Christmas; and in the middle of them all, what she didn’t doubt had been the most expensive of the lot, barring the chain itself: the little silver orb, with its ornate catch which, when released, unfurled into the jointed masonic cross, and she’d raised it close to her eyes to examine the symbols inscribed inside before she realised she couldn’t see, because of the tears now pouring down her cheeks.

What did you do that for? she thought, and she slid off the side of the bath onto the floor and sobbed quietly into her knees, two patches of tears spreading on her pyjama bottoms, the bracelet clutched in her hand.

It took Robin several long minutes to regain control of herself, and then she examined each charm again, twice over, thinking that nothing else anyone gave her today (because it must now be Christmas Day) could possibly mean as much to her; not diamonds, not a new Land Rover: nothing.

She knew how much hard work Cormoran Strike would have put into this, he who found present-giving an onerous chore, who found it inexplicable that anyone would remember what anyone liked, or wore, but he’d remembered all of this, and he wanted her to know he remembered it, and oh God, I love him , thought Robin, and then another voice in her head said sternly,

No, you don’t.

I do, I do…

You’re still drunk.

Wiping her eyes on the hem of her robe, Robin reached out for her phone. She didn’t care if she woke him, didn’t care if he wondered what she was doing awake and texting him, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when she ought to be in bed with her boyfriend.

Thank you. I love it so much xxxxx

And two hundred and fifty miles away in his sister’s spare room in Bromley, sleepless, suffering heartburn and gas after too much lager, and grumpy after what was probably the worst party he’d ever attended, Cormoran Strike heard his mobile vibrate and reached for it in the dark.

Looking down at Robin’s text, Christmas, and the unusual opportunities it afforded you, if you were prepared, at last, to put in the work, suddenly seemed a wonderful thing.

I’m glad , he typed, and then, slowly, painstakingly, he added a kiss for every one of hers.