Page 12 of The Hallmarked Man

‘No,’ said Robin firmly. ‘I can’t stand them coming down here and fussing over me again. Ican’t, Ryan.Promiseyou won’t tell them.’

‘OK,’ he said uneasily, ‘but I still think—’

‘I’ll order takeaways and lie on the sofa and watch TV,’ said Robin. ‘I don’t need anyone else – apart from you,’ she added, ‘obviously.’

6

Grief for the loss of those we love is natural and proper. Butwelament not only the death of a friend and benefactor, but also the loss of the True Word, of which we are deprived by his death, and which we have henceforth to seek for until it is recovered.

Albert Pike

Liturgy of the Ancient and Accepted Rite of Scottish Freemasonry

As it was Saturday, Denmark Street was full of shoppers when Strike arrived back there that afternoon. As he limped past the familiar guitar shops and record stores, even more tired, sore and depressed than when he’d left them that morning, the opening chords of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ issued from an open door. In spite of his low mood, this caused Strike a brief moment of amusement: the owner of that particular shop had once told him he slapped an extra hundred quid on the price of any guitar bought by someone who played the riff in front of him.

He climbed the metal stairs with difficulty, let himself into his deserted place of work, made himself a mug of creosote-coloured tea, then took a pile of files through to the inner office, because he wanted to catch up on what he’d missed during the ten days he’d spent in Cornwall. However, before opening these, he turned again to Google and scrolled slowly down through the search results, pausing on a picture of Decima in a white chef’s coat and hat, which belonged to the website for the Happy Carrot. Here, she looked far younger and fairly pretty, with her hair swept back in a shining bun and a dimpled smile.

In a spirit of masochism, he then Googled Valentine Longcaster,which resulted in myriad images of Charlotte and Valentine together, falling out of clubs, attending launch parties and opening nights, Charlotte darkly beautiful, Valentine foppishly dressed, and both of them either beaming or bellowing with laughter.

Charlotte and Valentine hadn’t been just friends. To their great amusement, they’d been step-siblings during their childhood. For two acrimonious and explosive years, Charlotte’s mother, Tara, had been married to Dino, Valentine’s father, although their respective children had never lived under the same roof, because Valentine (and presumably Decima) had been spirited off to Los Angeles by their own mother, who’d rebounded onto a composer of film scores.

In the days when Strike had known her, Tara had often held forth when drunk on ‘that fucking bastard Longcaster’. Strike had often suspected that the friendship Charlotte struck up with Valentine in adulthood had been at least partly in defiance of the mother she loathed, although it was undeniable that Charlotte and Valentine had also had much in common: a waspish sense of humour, a love of cocaine, an endless quest for distraction and drama, and a detestation of all that was worthy and dull.

Looking at these pictures was the reverse of cheering, but Strike kept scrolling, pausing on a picture of Charlotte flanked by Valentine and her half-brother, the actor Sacha Legard, who strongly resembled her, except that he had vivid blue eyes instead of Charlotte’s hazel-flecked green. Legard was the product of Tara’s third and longest marriage, to a lord who owned a stately home called Heberley House. Strike couldn’t remember Sacha ever talking about a younger cousin in Switzerland, though this wasn’t much of a surprise: when Strike had known him, Sacha’s conversation had generally turned on himself.

Strike next searched for Rupert Fleetwood, and soon found an Instagram account on which there’d been no activity since May.

There were only a few selfies on Rupert’s page, and they showed him to be far from the junior Sacha Strike had imagined. Fleetwood was an ordinary-looking young man whose face would never have graced a magazine cover. He was pale, fair-haired, broad-shouldered and short-necked, with a very round face that put Strike in mind of an Edam cheese minus the wax rind.

One of the selfies showed Rupert and Decima standing in some unidentified park, both of them muffled against what looked like a chilly spring day, taken on March the eighth of theprevious year. Neither of the couple had arranged themselves to best advantage before it was taken. Decima was windblown, a strand of dark hair in her eyes, her cheeks pink with cold, but with no stress-rosacea or eyebags. Rupert was red-nosed and his short neck wasn’t flattered by his turtleneck. Strike was, however, forced to acknowledge that their ages didn’t look too far apart here. Rupert had captioned the picture with words in Italian:Buon Compleanno a me(happy birthday to me) andanime gemelle(soul mates). Other than this one lapse into Italian, there was no indication on Rupert’s Instagram page of multilingualism, and no allusion to his Swiss upbringing. The bulk of his posts comprised photographs of London. No Swiss names appeared beneath his posts, which did indeed suggest he hadn’t much enjoyed growing up on the continent and had severed all ties.

There were a couple of old family pictures on the account, including a photograph of Rupert with his parents, posted on the anniversary of their death. Baby Rupert was sitting happily in the arms of his glamorous mother, Veronica, whose thin eyebrows and choppy bob pronounced her to have given birth in the nineties. Her husband Peter, narrow-faced and handsome, looked good-natured and vaguely bohemian.

Further back still was another family picture on which Strike paused. This picture showed a chubby Rupert, aged around twelve or thirteen, standing with his Uncle Ned, Charlotte’s second stepfather, in front of gigantic, many-pillared Heberley House. Like his famous actor son, Ned Legard had had piercing blue eyes.

Doubly certain he didn’t want Decima’s case, Strike closed down the Instagram account and spent the next couple of hours familiarising himself with developments in the agency’s existing investigations.

He was still reading when he heard a knock on the outer glass door. Swearing under his breath, because he supposed somebody had come to the wrong door, Strike heaved himself up.

‘Hi,’ said Kim Cochran, the agency’s latest hire, when Strike opened up. ‘I was hoping you’d be back.’

Kim, who’d left the Metropolitan Police a year previously, had worked for a rival detective agency until it had gone out of business. She was pertly pretty, always well groomed, and, with her short brunette hair and alert brown eyes, reminded Strike of a small bird.

‘I’ve got news on Plug,’ she said.

‘Ah, right,’ said Strike, wondering why she couldn’t have texted it, rather than turning up in person. ‘Come through.’

The nickname ‘Plug’ derived from its owner’s resemblance to the character in the Bash Street Kids comic strip. He was, by common agreement, the ugliest man the agency had ever been hired to investigate, having very large ears, a pronounced overbite, buck teeth and an uncoordinated lankiness. Aside from boasting a multitude of past criminal misdemeanours, mostly involving soft drugs and petty theft, Plug was also the lone parent of a scrawny teenaged son, who looked perpetually downtrodden and miserable.

Father and son had recently vacated their cramped flat in Haringey and moved, uninvited, into the Camberwell house of Plug’s mother, who had rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s. According to Plug’s well-to-do uncle, who’d hired the detective agency, Plug was not only verbally abusive to the old lady, he was gradually draining her of her life savings, and nobody in the family had yet found a legal way of stopping Plug helping himself to his mother’s money, or dislodging him from her home. The aim in hiring private detectives was to find something for which Plug could be arrested.

The Plug case made a change from the run-of-the-mill adultery cases the agency undertook for wealthy clients; it was pleasant, all felt, to be trying to stop an undeniable villain and protect a fragile old lady. Unfortunately, Plug hadn’t yet been detected in any criminal activity whatsoever.

‘He’s just met a guy at Tufnell Park station,’ said Kim, ‘and handed over a big wodge of cash. I got video.’

She held out her phone and there, sure enough, was the astoundingly ugly Plug, passing over what looked like a roll of fifty pound notes to a man with many hand tattoos.

‘What’s weird is, he didn’t get anything back,’ said Kim. ‘I was hoping to see drugs or something.’