Page 292 of The Hallmarked Man

Strike was, yet again, back in Carnival Street in Haringey, watching the house where Plug’s friends were keeping the gigantic black dog. He was starting to feel a lot of sympathy for the client’s view that it was outrageous Plug hadn’t been arrested yet. Strike wasn’t overly sentimental about animals; with the sole exception of a snake he’d once succeeded in catching as a boy, he’d never felt the urge for a pet. Nevertheless, what he’d witnessed at the dog fight, and seen of Plug since, had convinced him the sadistic bastard deserved a prison sentence, as soon as possible, thereby freeing both his mother and his son from his bullying and coercion.

Strike was currently standing in a patch of deep shadow beneath a non-functioning street lamp, vaping and waiting for the reappearance of his target. Stars appeared gradually above him, a little more visible than they might have been in a better lit street, though by no means as bright as they’d been when viewed from Sark. Preferring not to brood about the night at the Old Forge, Strike crossed the road and found himself another patch of shadow on the pavement outside the junkyard. A large sign proclaimed that the place was called Brian Judge Scrap and its border fence ran the length of the road. Strike could see the tops of heaps of compacted metal. He wondered whether Robin’s old Land Rover had been consigned to such a metal cemetery.

A rusted van passed and pulled up at the entrance of the yard. The driver killed the lights, got out and went to speak into the intercom beside the gate.

As the man’s face was illuminated by the security light over the gate, Strike had the strange feeling he’d seen him somewhere before. He was smaller than average, hairy, fortyish, very dark and not particularly good-looking. Strike had the idea he’d once seen the man wearing a suit and tie rather than the grubby sweatshirt and jeans he was currently sporting, and that he’d been walking along with a group of similarly smartly attired others, but when or where this might have happened, he couldn’t think.

Chains clinked from within the yard. The gates began to open. The driver got back into the van, leaving the lights off, and drove inside. The gates closed again.

Where the hell had he seen that man before? At a wedding? A funeral? He associated him vaguely with church, but Strike hadn’t set foot in a church more than a handful of times in the past ten years. The dark man most certainly hadn’t attended either Ted’s or Joan’s funerals, nor had he been present in the empty church Strike had spent part of the morning he’d learned that Charlotte was dead.

The door of the house Strike was watching opened. Plug emerged, holding a large, wriggling puppy. Strike took a few photos from the shadows and was about to tail Plug back up the street when he suddenly remembered where he’d seen the van driver before.

A few years previously, Strike and Robin had investigated a cold case that had brought them within the orbit of a pair of violent criminals called the Ricci brothers. The pair visited their father, Niccolò (a gangster who’d been known as ‘Mucky’ in his pimping and pornography-making heyday), every Sunday at his nursing home. Strike could now visualise the group turning up, children and wives smartly dressed, the two men in suits. The older brother, Luca, had had the more fearsome reputation, but Marco, the younger of the two, and the man who’d just driven a van into Brian Judge Scrap, had his own respectable tally of acid attacks and knifings.

A powerful instinct was telling Strike to stay put, rather than tail Plug, so he watched Plug out of sight without following. Now alone on the otherwise deserted street, Strike asked himself what he was playing at, but had no answer, except that his subconscious, havingrevealed the identity of the man in the van, seemed to be trying to tell him something else.

He resumed his position in the first patch of shadow in which he’d lurked, on the opposite side of the street to the scrapyard. Ten minutes passed, with Strike staring at the sign giving the junkyard’s name. Then, rather as scrap itself may slide and settle, something in the depths of his mind shifted, and he saw what had lain hidden, and knew why he’d stayed.

Cockney rhyming slang.

Brian Judge.

Judge.

Barnaby Rudge.

As he felt in his pocket for his mobile, a Renault glided to a halt in front of the gates. Marco Ricci slid back out of the yard, got into the car, and it drove away. From inside the scrapyard came a rumbling sound. An odd time to start the noisy business of compacting a vehicle or firing up an incinerator, but under certain circumstances, such jobs might be a matter of urgency.

Shanker answered Strike’s call within thirty seconds.

‘’S’up, Bunsen?’

‘Wanted to ask you a question. Do you, personally, have any stake in Barnaby’s?’

When Shanker spoke again, he sounded cagey.

‘Why’re you askin’?’

‘Answer me.’

‘I ain’t ever used it, personal,’ said Shanker. ‘No.’

‘So the police couldn’t tie you to anything in Haringey? Specifically, Carnival Street?’

Strike waited for Shanker to deny that Barnaby’s was in Carnival Street, but instead, in an ominous tone, he asked,

‘Woss goin’ on, Bunsen?’

‘I’m giving you a heads-up, in return for the one you gave me a few months back.’

‘’Oo’s grassed?’ said Shanker furiously.

‘Someone was tailed and certain suspicious activity was observed,’ said Strike.

‘Fuck,’ said Shanker. Then, ‘You ain’t wiv a pig right now, are ya?’

‘You think I’d call you if I had a copper with me?’ said Strike.