Page 182 of The Hallmarked Man

I’ll drive up to Ironbridge on Wednesday to do Dilys Powell, because I’m the one who’s talked to her previously.

Robin stopped typing again. Her eyes strayed to the noticeboard and she noticed that Strike had taken down the paragraph about Reata Lindvall. Robin knew perfectly well that none of their suspected Wrights had any known connection to Reata Lindvall, or to Belgium, but she was glad to have another reason to be angry at Strike, who’d cavalierly removed the thing she’d stumbled across on Christmas Eve, with her ex-husband standing beside her, and her angry boyfriend in the pub behind her, and Robin’s mind focused, as ever, on the job.

I noticed you’ve taken down the paragraph about Reata Lindvall but as we haven’t got any other leads on who ‘Rita Linda’ might be, could you please ask Jade whether Niall or anyone in the family has either heard of her, or has any connection with Liège?

Robin paused yet again, staring at the screen with stinging eyes, then typed on.

I won’t be able to hang around long in Ironbridge, because Ryan and I are looking at houses together and have got a couple lined up to view next week.

See you Tuesday.

PART FIVE

It was still a case of faith and hope – a case of continual putting in of work and money, and, so far, of getting little out – except the dross which intervened between them and their highest hopes.

John Oxenham

A Maid of the Silver Sea

57

When the bells justle in the tower

The hollow night amid,

Then on my tongue the taste is sour

Of all I ever did.

A. E. Housman

IX, Additional Poems

Cormoran Strike had been called many things by the women in his life, but ‘stupid’ had never been one of them. Robin’s bald announcement that she and Murphy were setting up home together, the icy tone of her email and the terse work-related texts they exchanged over the following forty-eight hours all told him as plainly as if she’d shouted it in his face that he’d now been issued the unvarnished rebuff he’d been alert for all these months, but which, until now, had never materialised.

Something had changed, but he didn’t know what. Had her anger at his refusal to put surveillance on Albie Simpson-White mounted to white-hot rage since their coffee at Bar Italia? Had Murphy raised objections to their trip north, asking (with some justification) why two of them needed to travel to Scotland to interview a lone woman? Had Strike been oblivious to an accumulation of smaller grievances, symbolised by Robin’s angry reference to his removal of Reata Lindvall from the noticeboard?

He’d called Robin after arriving at the office and hearing the new threatening message, left by the unknown man with the rasping voice, but the call had gone to voicemail. Robin had responded with a brief text, telling him that she was taking all possible precautions. The tone of this message made him wonder whether to try and forcea conversation, to send a facile ‘is everything all right?’ text, but long experience of women who were angry at him made him suspect the most he’d get in return was a passive-aggressive ‘fine’. The sordid Bijou business was weighing on his conscience, but Robin couldn’t know anything about that, could she? Ilsa had promised not to tell her, and if Kim had blabbed, Robin would surely have asked him about it? He certainly wasn’t going to tell her about it unforced: he didn’t want to look any more of a feckless, philandering bastard than he already did.

He cancelled his booking at the Lake District hotel, because he was damned if he was going to stare out at Windermere on his own, and at half past eleven on Monday evening, in spite of the self-discipline that usually prevented him drinking alone, Strike clambered aboard the Caledonian Sleeper with two pints of Doom Bar already inside him, and a bottle of Scotch nestling in the holdall he’d packed for his overnight journey to Glasgow.

His cabin was small and overheated. Without taking off his coat, Strike sat down on the lower bunk and downed a plastic cup of neat whisky. The Scotsmen next door were talking so loudly Strike could make out some of the words, mainly ‘ya cunt’ and ‘ya bastard’. It was impossible to tell whether they were bantering or arguing.

Self-disgust and a bleak fatalism had Strike in their grip tonight. It seemed far more likely than it had three days previously that he was, in fact, the father of Bijou’s child. The insurmountable distance between himself and the only woman he wanted was going to be counterbalanced by a tightening of the unwanted bond with a woman he’d never even liked. Wouldn’t that be a fucking funny cosmic joke? He, with his lifelong resentment of a father who’d begotten him accidentally, who’d had to be forced into the most perfunctory parental obligations by a DNA test, now shackled to his own unwanted kid?

Seven years of missed opportunities with Robin; he’d be tallying them up for ever, as a miser counts his pennies. He’d fucked it all up, and it was over: she was going to move in with Murphy, and marry him, and have his kids, and leave the agency, and he, like the gigantic prick that he was, would have to live with it, because he’d been too late to act, too late to recognise what was bloody obvious, and he deserved this misery, deserved the hopelessness engulfing him, because he’d been an arrogant fuckwit who thought she was there for the taking if he chose…

At a quarter to midnight the train lurched off, taking Strike towardsan interview he’d arranged purely to have an excuse for dinner with Robin. A second whisky didn’t do much except make him sweat. He struggled out of his coat and wrenched open the cabin window, then lay down on the lower bunk, balancing a plastic cup of whisky on his chest, and thinking about the email in which Robin had finally acknowledged she and Murphy were moving in together, which he was well on the way to knowing off by heart.

He couldn’t, as far as he could see, do much, right this moment, to improve relations – not that he imagined there was any chance of resuscitating what had always perhaps been a futile hope of romance, but he didn’t want to lose her as a business partner or, worse, a friend. If it was his refusal to put surveillance on Albie Simpson-White that had angered her, he couldn’t do anything about it tonight, because there was nobody available to follow the man. He was similarly stymied if the root cause of her sudden coldness was that Murphy had had an outbreak of jealousy. On the other hand, if the problemhadbeen him removing that bloody bit of paper from the noticeboard, he could pretend he was taking seriously the possibility that ‘Rita Linda’ had been Reata Lindvall. He therefore took another swig of whisky and Googled the woman, finally alighting on an account of her murder on a Belgian website, which offered a translation into bad English.

Reata had been born in Sweden in 1972 to an unwed mother and an unknown father, and was left orphaned at the age of ten when her alcoholic mother died. She’d then bounced between foster homes until running away in 1988. Having travelled to Switzerland with a friend, where the two of them had been employed as ‘chalet cleaner girls’, she’d given birth to her own daughter, Jolanda, in 1993 with, as the website put it, ‘again the father unknown’.

Repeated mention of accidentally conceived daughters was doing nothing to raise Strike’s spirits. However, he read on.

Reata had intended to put her baby up for adoption, but changed her mind when the little girl was born. Shortly after giving birth, she’d met Belgian Elias Maes, who was thirty-nine. The pair began a relationship and Reata and Jolanda had moved to Liège, to live with Maes.

The relationship with Maes was violent and difficult and both partners were large alcohol drinkers. Maes accused Lindvall of being a mother neglectful and both were accusing the others of infidelities. Neighbours said Maes complained about Jolanda’sbehaving and could be unkind to Jolanda. Lindvall and Maes parted for six months in 1998, then were reunited.