Page 17 of The Hallmarked Man

‘Who is?’

‘Strike, after Cornwall. He was telling me all about it.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin, ‘right.’

‘Good to know about Victoria, anyway,’ said Kim. ‘You get back to your Lemsip.’

She hung up, leaving Robin staring, eyes narrowed, at her phone.

Robin had been telling herself that Kim Cochran was a good hire ever since the latter had joined the agency. Kim’s work was exemplary, and she had good police contacts, because she’d worked for the Met for eight years before becoming a private detective. However, the more contact Robin had with Kim, the less she liked her. This was largely due to the marked mismatch in the way Kim treated the two people whose names were engraved on the agency’s glass door. Kim laughed longer and harder at Strike’s jokes than anyone else and treated his ideas and opinions with deference. To Robin, Kim was casual, even dismissive. She’d already made a jocular sideswipe at the fact that Robin, alone of the detective team, had no police or military background, hinting that Robin’s main worth to the investigative team was that she was sleeping with a CID officer, then laughing loudly (‘I’m kidding!’) when Barclay had retorted, ‘When’s the last timeyoubrought down an entire fuckin’ cult?’

Robin set aside her laptop and headed for the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about Kim Cochran, but as she made herself tea and toast (because toast didn’t necessitate reaching up for dinner plates or bending down for saucepans) her unruly thoughts returned to something that shouldn’t have annoyed her at all: Kim asking Midge (who’d passed the information on to Robin) what Strike’s relationship status was.

When a woman has spent a period of years asking herself whether she’s fallen in love with the man she considers her best friend; when she’s sacrificed a marriage and financial security for the business they’ve built together; when, after finding out that that same best friend is secretly sleeping with another woman, she’s forced to admit to herself that she has indeed fallen in love with him, then the only thing to do is to fall out of love as quickly and as cleanly as possible, and this, Robin had made every effort to do. Unlike Strike, she didn’t particularly want to spend the rest of her non-working life living alone in a spartan flat with a succession of short-lived affairs to break up the monotony, so she’d done what had been urged upon her by their mutual friend Ilsa Herbert, and accepted Ryan Murphy’s offer of a drink.

Over a year after that first date, Robin really did think – no, sheknew– that she loved Murphy. The events of the last few days had certainly left her shellshocked and destabilised, but that would pass. Murphy was kind, intelligent and very good-looking. Yes, there’dbeen a conversation, two months previously, in which Strike had hinted—

Standing beside the toaster, Robin told herself she wasn’t going to start deconstructing that conversation again, because she didn’t need any more complications, pain, or stress in her life. She was with Murphy, and Strike could do what he liked, although if what he liked was responding to Kim’s flirtation (‘he’s pretty depressed, poor guy, he was telling me all about it’) she pitied his taste, and that was all there was to it.

Robin took her tea and toast back to her laptop while ‘Stitches’ by Shawn Mendes blasted through her sitting room ceiling. As she sat down, her mobile rang again, and this time, it was Strike.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Bit better,’ said Robin. ‘How’re you?’

‘Fine. Sitting in the BMW watching Arsehole’s ex-wife having lunch with another woman.’

‘You need to stop calling him Arsehole,’ said Robin, half-amused, half-exasperated. ‘Especially in public. Pat thinks we should use “Mr A”.’

‘Pat doesn’t have to give him weekly updates,’ said Strike.

The client in question was a South African cricketer who believed his ex-wife was having an affair with a married tabloid journalist,and that this accounted for the recent stream of unflattering, though true, stories about the cricketer’s past in that particular paper. Strike happened to know the journalist in question: his name was Dominic Culpepper, and the agency had occasionally done jobs for him in the days before they could afford to pick and choose their clients.

‘I wanted a word about the Mullins case, if you’ve got time,’ said Strike.

‘Yes, go on.’

‘I’ve tried every police contact I’ve got to see if they know anything about the body in the vault, but no dice. Wardle, Layborn – I even tried Anstis. None of them were anywhere near the case and they don’t know anyone who worked on it. Couldn’t try Vanessa Ekwensi, could you?’

‘I can, but she’s on maternity leave.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike. ‘Might ask Kim if she knows anyone.’

‘I could ask Ryan,’ Robin suggested. ‘Although he’s kind of snowed under at work just now,’ she added, when Strike didn’t say anything. ‘He’s on that gang case, where those two young brothers got shot.’

‘Nasty,’ said Strike, though without much sympathy. ‘Well, unless we can get a friendly copper to give us some inside info, I think this is a dead end. We can’t tell Decima it definitely wasn’t Fleetwood unless we know what forensics said.’

‘I’ll try Ryan,’ said Robin.

‘I’ve also called one of Fleetwood’s friends, a bloke called Albie Simpson-White,’ said Strike. ‘He’s a waiter at Decima’s father’s club, Dino’s, but “isn’t available to talk”.’

‘Dino’s?’ said Robin. ‘That private members’ place with the restaurant at the back?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I looked into taking Mum there for her sixtieth. The average cost per person for lunch is four hundred pounds.’

‘Four hundred quid?For lunch?’