Page 14 of The Hallmarked Man

‘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 exactlylike 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 himtonight. 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, whichhe 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.

7

Dully at the leaden sky

Staring, and with idle eye

Measuring the listless plain,

I began to think again.

A. E. Housman

XXXI: Hell Gate, Last Poems

Robin was discharged from hospital on Sunday morning, with advice to take paracetamol and ibuprofen as needed, refrain from strenuous exercise and resume normal activities only after a further three days’ rest. She’d slept badly again, not because of noise this time, but because she’d dreamed, repeatedly, that she was back in the box into which she’d been locked overnight at Chapman Farm. These nightmares had plagued her over the last couple of months, but she’d told nobody about them, nor about the waves of panic that slid over her unpredictably, especially in crowded spaces, nor about the fact that unless Murphy was spending the night with her, she slept with her bedside lamp on. Robin knew what happened when she told people she was struggling mentally: they told her to stop doing her job. Strike had once or twice suggested her taking more leave after those intense months undercover, but Robin didn’t want a holiday: she wanted to be busy, to bury herself in investigation, to fill up her restless mind with other people’s problems.

She took a taxi back to her flat with a thudding pain in her lower right side that painkillers had dulled without removing. In spite of what she’d told Murphy, whose gang shooting case was keeping him at work, about being fine alone, Robin felt weepy, and infuriated withherself for being so.Get a grip. This was nothing. Think of Strike, with half his leg blown off. You’ll be fine once you get home.

But she’d been back inside her flat barely ten minutes when the man upstairs turned on music which, as usual, was very loud. Robin listened to the pulsing bassline, too sore and tired to go upstairs and ask him to turn it down, but feeling more strongly than ever that she’d like to cry. Instead, she went to fetch her laptop. She’d just opened it when her mobile rang and she saw her mother’s number again.

Mentally bracing herself, Robin answered.

‘Hi Mum. Sorry I didn’t call you back yesterday,’ she said, before Linda could ask. ‘I was working.’

‘I thought you must be,’ said Linda, whose voice sounded thickened.

‘Is everything OK?’

‘I just wanted to let you know… we had to put Rowntree down.’

‘Oh no,’ said Robin. ‘Oh Mum, I’m sorry.’