Page 114 of The Hallmarked Man

He lay, still vaping, trying to frame an opening in his head.

‘Listen, there’s something I want to say.’

‘I need you to know something.’

‘I’ve been looking for a way to tell you this.’

It now occurred to him that this would be only the second time in his life he’d made the first move on a woman. Every other time (and he could imagine the reactions of other men, should he ever be fool enough to say this out loud) the woman had been the instigator, or had signalled so very clearly that a sexual approach would be welcome that it came to the same thing. The one exception had been at that student party in Oxford, where he’d swaggered drunkenly up to Charlotte, to whom he’d never spoken before in his life. She’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, but he’d risked nothing whatsoever: at worst, he knew he’d have had a good anecdote to tell about his audacity in approaching the woman every man at the party was eyeing with equal parts of lust and awe.

This was different. If he laid everything on the line today, he needed to brace for the possible consequences: the business blown up, his most important friendship destroyed, all hope of the one relationship he really wanted, gone. The unerasable mental image of Robin’s expression as he’d moved to kiss her outside the Ritz rose in his mind’s eye as he lay in bed, listening to the window pane in the kitchen shivering in the wind. If he were to be met today with that same look…

But he had to speak. He couldn’t live with knowing that he hadn’t at least tried. Thus resolved, he sat up, swung himself off the bed and hopped, using the familiar balancing aids of chair backs and door jambs, towards the bathroom.

He’d just finished breakfast when, at nine o’clock precisely, somebody hammered on the door of his flat. Disconcerted, he opened it to find his office manager on the landing.

‘Have you read it?’ demanded Pat in her baritone.

‘Read what?’

‘You. In the paper. By that Culpepper man.’

‘What – another one?’

‘Yeah. I didn’t realise – they called yesterday, asking for a comment. I thought it was about the last thing. There’s fifteen-odd messages on the answer machine downstairs, and there’s two of ’em hanging around outside.’

Strike strode immediately to the laptop that was charging on his kitchen table, sat down and flicked it open.

‘What d’you want me to do?’ said Pat, watching him.

‘Say “no comment” to anyone who rings.’

He’d just spotted the story. As Pat closed the door behind her, Strike began to read the article.

Jonny Rokeby Son in Sex Worker Abuse Claim

Cormoran Strike, illegitimate son of rock star Jonny Rokeby and wealthy Londoners’ favourite private detective, is alleged to have hired Candy, a 23-year-old sex worker, to entrap a married man and, when the scheme failed, attempted to force her into sex with himself…

‘It was in 2013 and I thought he must be a good guy, he’d caught that strangler who went after working girls… I waskind of excited, actually. I thought I was going to help him do something good…

‘… doesn’t seem fair naming the target, he didn’t want to do anything with me. But when I asked Strike for my money, he said he’d only give it me if I slept with him…’

… this newspaper’srecent reporton Cormoran Strike, in which a second woman claimed that she’d been used by the detective to procure information needed in a case…

… son of rock star Jonny Rokeby and 70s super-groupie Leda Strike, who died of a heroin overdose in 1994…

‘This is yet more proof, as if we needed it, that private detectives are operating in an unregulated Wild West that needs urgent legislative attention,’ says Lord Oliver Branfoot ‘… the grubby tactics used by these detectives need to be addressed for the good of the public…’

We asked Cormoran Strike for comment.

Strike sat motionless, staring at the screen, every muscle tensed, a roaring in his ears, his guts full of lava. Culpepper had crossed over the line into pure invention; this story was entirely without foundation. Was the girl – her face was pixelated in the two pictures accompanying the story, but her body was clearly visible, in its skimpy red underwear – a chimera, too? Or had Culpepper paid some real sex worker a fee to become Candy, in print?

Strike looked away from the screen and his eyes fell on the fisherman’s priest which lay quiescent on the windowsill, a worn relic of Ted, a man of whom nobody could ever have believed this kind of sleaze. Strike then glanced down at his mobile. Nobody had texted him. Doubtless his friends and his family were wondering whether it could be true, whether this was how he conducted his professional life, whether this was his dirty little secret.

He got to his feet, feeling as though his heart was attempting to knock its way through his ribs, grabbed his keys and left the flat, slamming the door behind him.

32

What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?