Page 294 of The Hallmarked Man

He looked up at her, red-eyed, face wet.

‘You’ve gone on andonabout honesty,’ whispered Robin, ‘andall this time, you’ve been drinking…’

‘Not all the time – I swear, not all the time, it’s been stop-start – I kept trying to – I’m going back to AA tomorrow. I’ll throw all the booze I’ve got out, you can watch me doing it.’

‘You’ve got more, in this flat?’ said Robin, testing to see what he’d say.

‘Yeah, in – in the wardrobe,’ said Murphy. ‘I’ll do it right now. Robin, you’re literally the best thing that happened to me, I’ll make this up to you—’

‘What about that night?’ she said. ‘The night I got pregnant?’

‘I wasn’t drunk then,’ he said quickly. ‘It started after that.’

She didn’t believe him. Getting up off the sofa, she went into his bedroom to fetch the overnight holdall she’d already packed, and her coat. When she returned, Murphy was on his feet.

‘Robin, I swear I’m going back to AA tomorrow, it’ll stop—’

‘I need… not to be here,’ said Robin, pulling her coat on. Her insides felt icy. For months now she’d felt guilty about lying to him by omission, while he’d been hiding this gigantic secret.

‘Is this it?’ he said, sounding panicked. ‘It’s over?’

‘I need some time,’ said Robin.

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes,’ she said automatically.

‘The house—’

‘We need to withdraw the offer,’ said Robin. She’d thought that through as well, while he’d been picking up his phone from whichever pub or bar he’d been in, unless he really had gone to the gym and sat in the café, drinking neat vodka, pretending to be rehydrating after exercise.

‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘Robin, please—’

‘You need to focus on getting sober,’ said Robin. ‘We’re not adding moving house to everything else that’s going on. I’ll call you when I’ve—’

‘Decided how to break it to me gently that it’s over?’ said Murphy, starting to sob again. ‘Robin, don’t go. Please don’t leave. I swear, I’m going to clean up—’

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ said Robin. She shouldered her holdall and headed out of the front door.

92

My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore…

A. E. Housman

IX, Last Poems

Strike assumed Robin was having too good an evening with Murphy to bother picking up his call, which somewhat blunted his sense of triumph about his unexpected Barnaby’s epiphany. Tired, but with no desire to go home and be depressed in his attic, he had decided to head for Harlesden and the last known address of Jim Todd’s mother, Nancy Jameson, née Philpott.

Forty minutes after leaving Carnival Road, he pulled up in a car park flanked on three sides by low-rise blocks of flats. Even in semi-darkness, Magdalen Court looked a dismal place; Strike would have chosen Carnival Street and a view of the scrapyard before this. Litter was strewn everywhere. A small patch of dead grass beside Strike’s parking space was covered in cigarette ends. Graffiti covered several grey walls. The buildings were of concrete and in their diluted brutalism looked like cheap homages to the National Theatre. Long grey balconies stretched across each floor, doors set at regular intervals. Squinting upwards, Strike saw Nancy Jameson’s flat, number 39, illuminated on the second floor of the middle block. A light was on in her window.

A group of five youths stood vaping a short distance away from where Strike had parked, all eyeing the BMW speculatively. Two of the youths were white, two brown and the last black. Strike headed straight for them, entering a fug of cannabis vapour.

‘There’s a fiver in it for each of you if that car’s in the same state I left it in when I get back downstairs.’

‘Wha’?’ said one of the white boys blearily; he had long, dryperoxided hair and was wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the words WACKEN OPEN AIR.

‘Yeah, all right,’ said the black youth, who was tall, wiry, and wore no jacket over his Snoop Dogg T-shirt, in spite of the chilliness of the evening.