Page 127 of The Hallmarked Man

Meanwhile, Jade, the abandoned wife of Niall Semple, had texted him the previous evening.

look theres no point you coming to see me because I don’t think Niall was the man in that shop any more

This was bad news, because in the event that Robin returned from Masham ringless, a trip to Scotland would give Strike an excellent opportunity to declare himself, whereas if they were only travelling as far as Ironbridge, it would be difficult to justify an overnight stay in a hotel. He’d typed back:

What changed your mind?

Her answer was,

I think he’s with another woman

Strike had replied asking whether it wouldn’t put her mind at rest to make sure her husband hadn’t been in the vault, but there’d been no response.

As if all this wasn’t enough to be dealing with, Strike had received an anonymous call to his mobile, forwarded from the office phone, shortly after leaving Denmark Street that morning. After some guttural breathing, a rasping voice had said,

‘Leave it. We’ve got gow-too on our side.Leave it.’

‘The fuck’s “gow-too”?’ Strike had said, at which the caller had hung up.

Gow-too.Since the unknown man had threatened Robin in Harrods, Strike was no longer disposed to dismiss the anonymous caller as a joker amusing himself at the agency’s expense. That said, as Robin was currently safe in Yorkshire, he was simply riled that another irritant had been added to his already tottering pile.

There was nothing in Strike’s immediate future likely to cheer him up. He’d gladly have slept through the next three days, but he wasn’t even allowed that. The following day was Christmas Eve, which meant having to attend Lucy’s party for the neighbours, followed by a night in the spare room and the enforced jollity of Christmas Day, with his brother-in-law Greg making the usual barbed comments about Strike’s life choices. The detective usually ignored these for his sister’s sake, though it occurred to him, as he sat in his car watching the warehouse where Plug was shopping, that punching Greg might be almost as satisfying as battering Dominic Culpepper, and he indulged himself for a few seconds by imagining knocking Greg out over the turkey. However, before he got anywhere near Christmas lunch, he had to meet Sacha Legard at the National Theatre, a prospect that was dredging up memories of Strike’s late fiancée which, in his weakened emotional state, he was finding impossible to fend off.

Charlotte’s attitude towards her half-brother Sacha, and indeed her entire family, had always swung between two polar extremes. She’d spent much of her life damning them all to hell and declaring that she hated and dreaded Heberley House, the stately home in which she’d spent most of her childhood, and where her mother and stepfather had thrown extravagant, druggy parties, at one of which Charlotte, aged ten, had accidentally ingested LSD. She’d insisted that she despised the conventions of her class, blamed her boarding schools and relatives for her unhappiness, and claimed that all she wanted out of life now that she was free of them were simple pleasures and genuine human connection. This had been the part of Charlotte that Strike had both loved and pitied, and which, in the earliest days of their affair, he’d allowed himself to believe was the ‘real’ Charlotte.

However, with age and experience had come the unwilling realisation that the woman he loved was chameleon-like, multifaceted and often manipulative, containing many other selves which were just as real as his favourite one. Shifts between these different aspects of her personality would come without warning; suddenly, she’d find the amusements Strike could afford on a military policeman’s salary dulland restrictive, and she’d announce a desire for an expensive day out at the races with champagne and heavy betting, or a drop-of-the-hat trip to Marrakesh with high society friends, including ‘Sachy’ and ‘Val’, because ‘come on, darling, it’ll be fun’, and then she’d mock Strike for his reluctance and for his bourgeois obsession with solvency and sincerity.

‘Oh, ofcourseSachy’s a massive hypocrite,’ Charlotte had once said, laughing, when Strike had laid this charge against her half-brother, after a dinner party during which Sacha and another wealthy actor had talked socialism through three courses. ‘We all know he votes Tory and there’s not a tax dodge he isn’t wise to. Lighten up, darling, you take these things way too seriously.’

In the manic episodes that seized Charlotte at regular intervals, she’d ask why Strike cared that the public face didn’t match the private mores, as long as the person concerned was entertaining and stylish. Why did Strike have to bore and embarrass everyone with quibbles rooted in actual experience of poverty and squalor? And arguments would ensue, in which she’d accuse Strike of parsimony and joylessness, and if he reminded Charlotte of things she’d said, days or even hours previously, about her hatred of double standards, falseness and materialism, there’d be a sudden eruption of rage, in which she’d throw wild accusations at him: that he hated and despised her, and thought her worthless and shallow, and then would come either self-destructive drinking or flung missiles, and often both.

The one family member towards whom Charlotte had never, under any circumstances, expressed love, was her mother. Charlotte had been regarded as surplus to requirements by both her parents, who’d been hoping for a son after her elder sister. Charlotte had only ever known disdain and unkindness from Tara, which Strike had always believed was rooted in their close physical resemblance, the narcissistic Tara hating to see her own lost youthful beauty blinking at her across the breakfast table. Never, before or since, had he known a parent and child hate each other as Tara and Charlotte had, and he ascribed most of Charlotte’s mental instability to a childhood of neglect that had amounted, at times, to outright abuse.

Tara’s latent maternal instinct had finally awoken with the arrival of Sacha, who was the product of her third marriage. Tara had doted on her only son, perfectly content to see her own features in masculine form, and he’d become the only person the hedonistic, profoundlyself-centred Tara cared about as much as herself. In consequence, Sacha was the only person in Charlotte’s drink- and drug-riven family who could sincerely say that he’d had an entirely happy upbringing.

This wasn’t, of course, Sacha’s fault and Strike didn’t blame him for it. His grudge sprang from the way Sacha had behaved once he was old enough to notice Tara’s callousness towards his sister. Sacha was the only living soul who might have been able to intervene to some effect, yet Charlotte’s suicide attempts and spells in mental health facilities had always gone unacknowledged by her half-brother, who’d never visited her, never called, and never referred to any of them after they’d passed. When Charlotte was well, Sacha was delighted to socialise with her, because she was a witty and ornamental asset to any gathering. Otherwise, as far as Sacha was concerned, Charlotte might as well not have existed.

There’d been one occasion, and one only, on which Strike had appealed to the younger man for assistance. Notwithstanding her frequent diatribes against the place, Charlotte had been determined to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with a large party at Heberley House. Strike had foreseen myriad possibilities for drama and conflict in trying to stage the event at Heberley, and had tried to persuade Charlotte that a party in London, or even a weekend away with him, would be preferable, but to no avail. Charlotte wanted champagne and canapés, two hundred people in black tie crammed into the ballroom, pictures taken on the sweeping staircase and lanterns hung in the trees of the deer park, and Strike’s lack of enthusiasm for the plan was taken, inevitably, as a drag and a slight. Maybe some remnant of the neglected, unloved child Charlotte had once been was trying to prove to herself that she had worth in the eyes of her family, or perhaps she was deliberately setting up a situation in which an implosion would occur. Strike had become familiar, by then, with the dangerous part of Charlotte that sometimes sought to wound herself as deeply, and on as grand a scale, as possible.

Two months of entirely predictable conflict with Tara prior to the party had culminated in Tara countermanding half of the arrangements and announcing that she’d be spending the day of the event in St Moritz with her son. Unaware that Tara had dropped this bombshell by voicemail, Strike, who’d been on leave from the army at the time, had returned to Charlotte’s flat after a pint with his old friend Nick to find no sign of his girlfriend, but the black lace dress she’dbeen planning to wear to her Heberley party lying in shreds on the bedroom floor, and smears of blood in the bathroom sink. She wasn’t answering her phone, nor did she return that night. The following morning, unable to reach any other family member, he’d called Sacha.

When he answered his mobile, Sacha was in a first-class lounge at Heathrow, among the jet set crowd with whom Tara ran. The information that his sister had gone missing, leaving bloodstains and a ripped-up dress behind her, hadn’t made the slightest dent in Sacha’s good humour. Though speaking to a man ten years older than himself and with far broader life experience, the twenty-year-old Sacha had adopted a world-weary tone as he told Strike that Tara’s therapist had advised her that a little tough love was in order where his sister was concerned. The best thing Strike could do, Sacha had said, while the laughter of Tara and friends rang in the background, was to ignore this obvious bid for attention, and before Strike could tell Sacha exactly what he thought of him and his mother, the young man had hung up.

It had taken Strike a further forty-eight hours to track Charlotte down to a hospital. She’d swallowed a handful of anti-depressants with as much whisky as she could stomach in the middle of a Soho bar. When she’d slipped sideways off her chair, the manager had gone to her assistance, only to be roundly insulted and told to keep his fucking hands off her. Incredibly, she’d still been able to walk, because she then staggered out onto the pavement and blundered into traffic, where she’d been clipped by a passing bus. When Strike finally found her, a day after his own thirtieth birthday, which he’d spent making fruitless calls to more relatives and ringing hospitals, she was lying in a surgical ward after having her stomach pumped, with self-harm marks up her arms and a fractured shoulder. His reward for three days of dread and non-stop attempts to interest her relatives in her fate had been to be told what a complete fucking bastard he was for having gone out for a pint with Nick, just when she most needed him. She’d then presented him with one of her regular me-or-the-army ultimatums and Strike had, as usual, chosen the military, and returned to Germany, where he was then stationed, a temporarily free man.

When Charlotte had been found dead in a blood-filled bath by the police, Sacha had had the perfect, poignant statement ready for the papers: ‘I’m just one of the heartbroken people who loved her, struggling to comprehend the fact that we’ll never hear her laughagain. “Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”’

Sitting in his chilly BMW, unwillingly remembering all of this, Strike asked himself yet again what the hell he’d been playing at, all those times he’d agreed to take Charlotte back. He prized truth; she’d been an incorrigible liar. He’d insisted that you could, with work, rise above your genetic inheritance, whereas Charlotte had had a fatalistic belief that she was inescapably damned by a family plagued with addiction. Yet they’d known each other so well that each had been able to predict with almost frightening accuracy what the other was thinking and feeling. While enmeshed in the relationship, Strike had never been able to imagine loving another woman as deeply, but since it had ended, he thought of it in terms of a protracted infection he’d finally succeeded in throwing off.

It occurred to him now, as he sat staring at the builders’ warehouse, that Robin, who seemed so much less complicated than his dead ex-fiancée, was far more of a mystery to him than Charlotte had ever been. He didn’t know what Robin was thinking and feeling, and falling in love with her, which had happened entirely against his will, didn’t resemble an infection, but the recognition of a deficiency he’d never known he had, but which had become gradually and painfully symptomatic. And now – every thought led back there, no matter how seemingly unrelated – she was in Masham with Murphy, and he was alone and miserable, and he had nobody to blame but himself.

36

A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,

One that many loved in vain,

Looked into a forest well