Page 9 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

‘Fine,’ said Strike, trying to inject a note of finality into his voice.

Kim took the hint and stood up. She was good at taking the hint.

‘I’ll be off, then. Email me the hours you need me this weekend, and I’ll be there.’

‘Thanks,’ said Strike. ‘Appreciate it.’

Kim left. After another twenty minutes fiddling with the rota, his eyes itching with tiredness, Strike locked up the office and headed upstairs to his attic flat, to make himself a solitary dinner.

He did his best to ignore the mounting pain in his hamstring while cooking himself a steak and vegetables, but his deepening depression was harder to dismiss.

After sitting down at his small Formica table, his thoughts moved to the dilemma that had been dominating his thoughts for many months now, latterly becoming acute, and in no way diminished by his miserable interlude in Cornwall.

He’d discussed the matter with nobody because he wanted neither advice nor comfort.

Indeed, as far as he was concerned, there’d been quite enough unwelcome interest in the subject already.

When a man is forced to recognise that, in spite of his best efforts to prevent it happening, he’s fallen in love with the woman with whom he’s built a thriving business, and who he considers his best friend; when that woman has been in a stable, happy relationship with another man for over a year; when the first man knows he risks both business and friendship if he makes an open avowal of his feelings, yet has decided he doesn’t want to live with the knowledge that he might have had what he wanted if only he’d spoken, then that man must determine how, when and where the long-resisted discussion is to take place.

Strike had been mulling over this problem ever since he’d made his first sober attempt to breach the barriers he himself had erected between himself and Robin Ellacott, by telling her that Charlotte had been certain he was in love with his business partner, and had mentioned the fact in her suicide note.

For the umpteenth time, as he sat eating his solitary meal, Strike recalled Robin’s reaction when he’d uttered these words.

‘Stunned’ perhaps described it best. Stunned, and then flustered.

The conversation had been cut short by the appearance at the office of Ryan Fucking Murphy.

The next time Strike and Robin had come face to face, there’d been a definite tinge of self-consciousness on Robin’s part that hadn’t been there before.

Such behaviour was, of course, open to widely divergent interpretations.

Perhaps it showed he had grounds for hope.

Strike had been alert in the days following his oblique admission for any uptick in the frequency of Robin’s mentions of Murphy, or references to how happy she was with the CID officer, because these would surely be the obvious way to warn Strike that further mention of the word ‘love’ between them would be unwelcome, but he’d detected no such increase.

On the other hand, she’d made no attempt to return to the conversation, even obliquely or in jest.

Sometimes since, when tallying up promising signs, he’d reminded himself that embarrassment didn’t necessarily denote revulsion, that Robin had once uttered the words ‘I don’t want to lose you’ and that she’d freely told him he, too, was her best friend.

He recalled her wedding day, when she’d run out on her first dance to follow and hug him.

Yet in his darker moments he relived those fatal, drunken few seconds outside the Ritz a little over two years previously, when he’d moved to kiss her and seen a clear refusal in her expression.

He was eight years older than Murphy, and while he knew, without vanity, that he was very attractive to certain kinds of women, on the available evidence, he wasn’t physically what Robin liked.

Both her current boyfriend and her ex-husband (Matthew Fucking Cunliffe) had been slim, fit, classically handsome men, whereas Strike resembled a broken-nosed Beethoven and was still, in spite of intermittently strenuous efforts, over a stone off his ideal weight, which in itself had to be calculated to accommodate the loss of half his leg.

And Robin had hung up as soon as he’d mentioned Charlotte today. Why? Because she feared hearing, again, that Charlotte had thought him in love with her? Because she wanted to shut down any further discussion of the subject?

His steak finished, and feeling, if anything, worse, Strike went to the holdall he’d brought back from Cornwall and extracted the shoe box containing Ted’s two old hats, the leather-bound fisherman’s cosh and the photographs Strike had removed from the familiar, now mournfully empty house.

He hadn’t cried at Ted’s funeral, in spite of the invisible, weighty slab that had lain on his chest throughout.

His uncle had become increasingly frail and confused after the death of his wife two years previously, but even as Strike had nodded at the bromides delivered by well-wishers at the crowded wake – ‘perhaps it was for the best’, ‘he never wanted to be a burden’, ‘it’s what he would have wanted, going quickly’ – he’d found it hard to disguise a latent antagonism.

They all appeared to have forgotten who Ted really was; not the shambling figure who’d got lost one morning on the beach he’d once known better than his own face, but the hero of Strike’s youth, his model of a man.

Strike had been brought closest to tears when, in a welcome interlude at the bar with his oldest friend, Dave Polworth, the latter had raised a pint of Cornish ale to the ceiling and said,

‘Proper man, Ted.’

‘Proper man’ was a Polworth-ism with many connotations.

To be a proper man meant to be a strong man, an outdoors man, but also a man of principle.

It meant lack of bombast, a repudiation of shallowness and a core of quiet self-belief.

It meant being slow to anger, but firm in conviction.

Polworth, like Strike, had had to take his male role models where he could find them, because neither had a father who qualified as ‘proper’, and both boys had found in Edward Nancarrow a man worthy of admiration and emulation, whose approval meant more than any school teacher’s star and whose rebukes spurred a desire to do better, to work harder, to earn back Ted’s good opinion.

Now Strike took out the old pictures and examined them, one by one, pausing on the oldest one of all, which was black and white.

It showed a large, swarthy, crudely handsome man with dark, curly hair exactly like Strike’s, standing with his back to the sea, his enormous hand on the shoulder of Ted the boy, whose face was pinched with anxiety.

Trevik Nancarrow, Strike’s Cornish grandfather, had died before Strike was born, and given what he knew about the man, Strike had no sense of loss.

Hard-drinking and powerfully built, Trevik had passed for a solid member of the community outside the family home.

Within it, according to his children, he’d been pure terror.

Trevik’s long-suffering wife had died young, leaving him in sole charge of two children, born fourteen years apart: Ted, who’d been sixteen, and Peggy, Strike’s mother, who’d been only two – the same age Rupert Fleetwood had been, it now occurred to Strike, when both his parents disappeared beneath a deadly mass of thundering snow.

Trevik’s mother had offered the fetching little Peggy a home.

As capricious and mean-spirited as her hard-drinking son, the old woman had had no time for Ted: teenage boys were messy and loud, and their place was with their father, whereas Peggy, the old woman insisted, loved and needed her granny, who took pride in dressing her and looking after her mane of long dark hair.

Ted had told Strike much later that he’d known if he’d stayed in his father’s house beyond the age of eighteen, murder would have been done, and it was a toss-up which of them would be killer and which the victim.

National Service had saved the young man, and having no desire to return to St Mawes while his father lived, Ted, to Trevik’s disgust, had remained in the army, forgoing the sea and the rugged coastline he loved for the military police, returning only when news reached him of his father’s premature death.

Ted had then married the local girl with whom he’d corresponded for seven years.

It was Ted who’d broken the pattern of hard-drinking violence that had plagued the Nancarrow men through generations.

Ted’s wife had had no need to fear his fists and his surrogate children had known firmness, but never brutality.

Ted had embodied the virtues, hitherto almost unknown in that family, of steadiness, sobriety and fair play, whereas Peggy, who at eighteen had seized her first chance of escaping her draconian grandmother and run away with a youth who’d come to Truro with the fair, had rechristened herself ‘Leda’ and carried chaos with her wherever she went, until her death in a squalid squat in London.

Staring at Ted and Trevik, Strike found himself wishing the strong, capable storehouse of sense he’d just lost could be here with him tonight.

Ted had always had a way of putting into words things the unsettled and often angry teenage Strike had recognised as true, even if he hadn’t yet lived long enough to test Ted’s words for himself.

‘There’s no pride in having what you never worked for,’ had been one of Ted’s well-worn maxims. Strike was prepared to put in the work with Robin, but the weeks that had elapsed since he’d seen the look of shock on her face had afforded few opportunities to advance his own cause.

It wasn’t only that, until the hiring of Kim, the agency had been overstretched covering its cases.

Strike could also tell that Robin was finding the onslaught of press coverage about the UHC hard to handle; she seemed jumpier and more anxious than usual, yet had snapped at him when he’d mooted the idea of her taking more time off.

He’d several times cut one of the subcontractors short when they’d wanted to tell Robin gleefully about a further UHC arrest, in the expectation that she’d be as happy about it as they were.

For weeks now, Strike had daily postponed the declaration he wanted to make, because he feared that dumping his feelings on Robin right now would be selfish.

Then Ted’s death had forced Strike away from London, and now this this virus of Robin’s was prolonging their separation and, no doubt, affording Murphy endless opportunities to play the considerate boyfriend.

While he hadn’t yet heard any concrete indications, Strike feared that Murphy might be planning a proposal.

Murphy and Robin’s relationship appeared to be as strong as ever, and both were clearly of a marrying disposition, given that each of them already had an ex-spouse.

Robin was in her thirties, and might even be thinking of children.

She’d seemed ambivalent on that subject the only time it had ever been mentioned between her and Strike, but that had been a while ago, before she’d met her handsome CID officer.

After their last big case, and Robin’s long and traumatic spell undercover, she might well feel now was the time to take a career break.

These fears added urgency to Strike’s predicament.

He needed to speak up before Murphy went ring shopping, or Robin announced she’d be needing maternity leave.

‘Never let the other chap change your game plan,’ Ted had once told Strike, though they’d been speaking of boxing, rather than romance. ‘Stick to your own, and play to your strengths.’

And what were Strike’s strengths, in this particular case?

Undoubtedly, the agency that he and Robin had built together, which he was almost certain meant as much to her as it did to him.

Their work offered opportunities, although lately not enough of them, to spend a lot of time together.

So many missed chances, thought Strike bitterly: overnight stays, shared meals and long car journeys, and he, like the stupid prick he was, had prided himself on not letting his attraction overmaster him, and what was the upshot?

He was sitting here alone with the dregs of a pint and a throbbing leg, while Murphy was probably at Robin’s flat, racking up points by bringing flowers and heating up soup.

Bored by his own misery, he got to his feet again and washed his dinner things. Brooding would do no good whatsoever: what was needed was decisive action.

It seemed to Strike that the wraith of Edward Nancarrow nodded approvingly at this conclusion, so having finished the washing-up, he replaced the photographs and two hats in the shoe box and then, after a second’s deliberation, placed the old fisherman’s priest on the windowsill, the only ornament, if it could be so called, he’d ever put on display.