Page 85 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

When the bells justle in the tower

The hollow night amid,

Then on my tongue the taste is sour

Of all I ever did.

A. E. Housman IX, Additional Poems

Cormoran Strike had been called many things by the women in his life, but ‘stupid’ had never been one of them.

Robin’s bald announcement that she and Murphy were setting up home together, the icy tone of her email and the terse work-related texts they exchanged over the following forty-eight hours all told him as plainly as if she’d shouted it in his face that he’d now been issued the unvarnished rebuff he’d been alert for all these months, but which, until now, had never materialised.

Something had changed, but he didn’t know what.

Had her anger at his refusal to put surveillance on Albie Simpson-White mounted to white-hot rage since their coffee at Bar Italia?

Had Murphy raised objections to their trip north, asking (with some justification) why two of them needed to travel to Scotland to interview a lone woman?

Had Strike been oblivious to an accumulation of smaller grievances, symbolised by Robin’s angry reference to his removal of Reata Lindvall from the noticeboard?

He’d called Robin after arriving at the office and hearing the new threatening message, left by the unknown man with the rasping voice, but the call had gone to voicemail.

Robin had responded with a brief text, telling him that she was taking all possible precautions.

The tone of this message made him wonder whether to try and force a conversation, to send a facile ‘is everything all right?’ text, but long experience of women who were angry at him made him suspect the most he’d get in return was a passive-aggressive ‘fine’.

The sordid Bijou business was weighing on his conscience, but Robin couldn’t know anything about that, could she?

Ilsa had promised not to tell her, and if Kim had blabbed, Robin would surely have asked him about it?

He certainly wasn’t going to tell her about it unforced: he didn’t want to look any more of a feckless, philandering bastard than he already did.

He cancelled his booking at the Lake District hotel, because he was damned if he was going to stare out at Windermere on his own, and at half past eleven on Monday evening, in spite of the self-discipline that usually prevented him drinking alone, Strike clambered aboard the Caledonian Sleeper with two pints of Doom Bar already inside him, and a bottle of Scotch nestling in the holdall he’d packed for his overnight journey to Glasgow.

His cabin was small and overheated. Without taking off his coat, Strike sat down on the lower bunk and downed a plastic cup of neat whisky.

The Scotsmen next door were talking so loudly Strike could make out some of the words, mainly ‘ya cunt’ and ‘ya bastard’.

It was impossible to tell whether they were bantering or arguing.

Self-disgust and a bleak fatalism had Strike in their grip tonight.

It seemed far more likely than it had three days previously that he was, in fact, the father of Bijou’s child.

The insurmountable distance between himself and the only woman he wanted was going to be counterbalanced by a tightening of the unwanted bond with a woman he’d never even liked.

Wouldn’t that be a fucking funny cosmic joke?

He, with his lifelong resentment of a father who’d begotten him accidentally, who’d had to be forced into the most perfunctory parental obligations by a DNA test, now shackled to his own unwanted kid?

Seven years of missed opportunities with Robin; he’d be tallying them up for ever, as a miser counts his pennies.

He’d fucked it all up, and it was over: she was going to move in with Murphy, and marry him, and have his kids, and leave the agency, and he, like the gigantic prick that he was, would have to live with it, because he’d been too late to act, too late to recognise what was bloody obvious, and he deserved this misery, deserved the hopelessness engulfing him, because he’d been an arrogant fuckwit who thought she was there for the taking if he chose…

At a quarter to midnight the train lurched off, taking Strike towards an interview he’d arranged purely to have an excuse for dinner with Robin.

A second whisky didn’t do much except make him sweat.

He struggled out of his coat and wrenched open the cabin window, then lay down on the lower bunk, balancing a plastic cup of whisky on his chest, and thinking about the email in which Robin had finally acknowledged she and Murphy were moving in together, which he was well on the way to knowing off by heart.

He couldn’t, as far as he could see, do much, right this moment, to improve relations – not that he imagined there was any chance of resuscitating what had always perhaps been a futile hope of romance, but he didn’t want to lose her as a business partner or, worse, a friend.

If it was his refusal to put surveillance on Albie Simpson-White that had angered her, he couldn’t do anything about it tonight, because there was nobody available to follow the man.

He was similarly stymied if the root cause of her sudden coldness was that Murphy had had an outbreak of jealousy.

On the other hand, if the problem had been him removing that bloody bit of paper from the noticeboard, he could pretend he was taking seriously the possibility that ‘Rita Linda’ had been Reata Lindvall.

He therefore took another swig of whisky and Googled the woman, finally alighting on an account of her murder on a Belgian website, which offered a translation into bad English.

Reata had been born in Sweden in 1972 to an unwed mother and an unknown father, and was left orphaned at the age of ten when her alcoholic mother died.

She’d then bounced between foster homes until running away in 1988.

Having travelled to Switzerland with a friend, where the two of them had been employed as ‘chalet cleaner girls’, she’d given birth to her own daughter, Jolanda, in 1993 with, as the website put it, ‘again the father unknown’.

Repeated mention of accidentally conceived daughters was doing nothing to raise Strike’s spirits. However, he read on.

Reata had intended to put her baby up for adoption, but changed her mind when the little girl was born. Shortly after giving birth, she’d met Belgian Elias Maes, who was thirty-nine. The pair began a relationship and Reata and Jolanda had moved to Liège, to live with Maes.

The relationship with Maes was violent and difficult and both partners were large alcohol drinkers.

Maes accused Lindvall of being a mother neglectful and both were accusing the others of infidelities.

Neighbours said Maes complained about Jolanda’s behaving and could be unkind to Jolanda.

Lindvall and Maes parted for six months in 1998, then were reunited.

On 20th June 1998 Reata and Jolanda disappeared. Concerned friends have contacted the police. Maes, who was absent for business, was arrested when he returned, on suspicion of their abduction or killing. He was released later without charges.

In spite of appeals public, no sign is found of Lindvall or her daughter. Maes was still covered in suspicion and in 1999 he relocated to Antwerp.

In early 2000, police received a tip and searched the woods close to the Lac d’Ougrée. Fragments of human bone and old clothings were recovered. Analysis DNA proved human remains belonged to Reata and Jolanda.

Maes was arrested again. Belgian feminist groups campaigned outside the courtroom for the duration of the criminal trial. In March 2001, Maes was found guilty of the murders of Reata and Jolanda Lindvall, and given two life sentences.

Strike slugged more whisky and considered texting Robin with some anodyne comment or question about Lindvall to show he wasn’t dismissing her out of hand, but he still couldn’t see how the dead Swedish woman could be relevant to their inquiry, and felt masochistically certain that Robin, at this very moment, was shagging Murphy and thoroughly enjoying it.

The Scotsmen next door were still bantering or arguing, and Strike suddenly wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, other than this rattling sardine tin. Still clutching his bottle of whisky, he rose off his bunk, wrenched open the cabin door, and set off down the train.

The cramped bar compartment was harshly lit, none too clean, and hardly less depressing than his cabin.

A small knot of men were standing at the far end, all, by the sounds of them, Scottish.

Strike sat down at the only table and poured another large measure of Scotch into his plastic beaker, then stared blankly through the window at passing pylons and lit windows.

His mobile buzzed. He hoped it might be Robin, but naturally it was from Kim.

Guessing you’re not asleep yet if you’re on the sleeper. Isn’t this the woman we met at the Dorchester?!

Strike pressed the link to the press story she’d attached, and there, sure enough, was the Honourable Nina Lascelles in a wedding dress, beside the same blond man she’d pointed out on the dancefloor whose name, it transpired, was Percy, and whose wedding was newsworthy because he was a promising young Labour MP.

Strike stared at the picture for nearly a minute, wondering why one of the bridesmaids looked vaguely familiar.

Then he realised the dark and surly-looking woman was a prior investigative target.

Midge had caught the married woman visiting her lover, which explained Nina’s furious ‘ you really fucked up a friend of mine’s life ’ at the Dorchester.

He scrolled down. Beneath the Nina story was another article by Dominic Culpepper, and with an unpleasant lurch in his guts, Strike saw Charlotte’s name.