Page 297 of The Hallmarked Man

Strike stepped back inside flat 39 and closed the door in the woman’s face.

No matter that he’d seen plenty of bodies in his life, decaying corpses held no attraction for Strike. Nevertheless, he pulled his coat lapel up over his face to block out the worst of the carrion smell and returned to the sitting room, determined to make the most of the ten or fifteen minutes he was likely to have before the police arrived.

Another glance at the bodies confirmed his opinion that they’d been dead for days, even though putrefaction had undoubtedly been hastened by the gas fire. Todd, he observed, had a head injury, in addition to having been knifed several times in the abdomen and neck.

Strike looked around the small, fairly bare room. The woodchip wallpaper was peeling in places. The TV was at least ten years old. A large, angled, solid crystal paperweight lay on the floor, covered with dried blood and a single grey hair. Otherwise, there was no sign of a struggle.

Strike went to check the rest of the small flat. The bathroom wasn’t overly clean, but showed no traces of blood. Nancy’s bedroom was cluttered, untidy and smelled unsavoury. The next room was crammed with junk, but the single bed, with its disarranged duvet, suggested that Todd had been sleeping there. A corner of a book was visible beneath the pillow, which Strike moved to expose the title:How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker, by Doyle ‘Texas Dolly’ Brunson.

A distant siren was growing steadily louder. Strike could hear voices outside: more neighbours were coming out of their flats, massing like coffin flies. Pulling his coat lapel back over his nose, Strike headed out of the flat in time to see the flashing blue light enter the dark forecourt.

PART EIGHT

For months he had been following up a vein which ran out under the sea, and grew richer and richer as he laid it bare. He believed it would lead him to the mother vein…

John Oxenham

A Maid of the Silver Sea

93

You have had your turn and spoken your home-truths:

The hand’s mine now, and here you follow suit.

Thus much conceded, still the first fact stays—

You do despise me…

Robert Browning

Bishop Blougram’s Apology

Strike’s professional life had more often seen him as interrogator rather than interrogated, but in recent years he’d found himself on the uncomfortable end of a police interview far more often than he’d have liked. Admittedly, there’d been occasions when he’d been there as a victim – the previous year he and Robin had been shot at, and the year before that an explosive device had been sent to their office – but this was the third occasion on which Strike had turned up a corpse in London, and that was without taking into account the two that Robin had found. Considering the matter impersonally, he could understand why the Met might be getting touchy about what was starting to look like a predilection, rather than happenstance.

He drove himself to the local police station, accompanied by a uniformed officer, and gave a statement, waiving his right to a lawyer. After listening to Strike’s account of how he’d come to find the two dead Jamesons, which included the fact that he’d been hired to identify the body in the Ramsay Silver vault, his interlocutor, an older man with a squint, demanded that Strike hand over his skeleton keys, which didn’t bother him, because he had several sets. The officer then left the room muttering about needing to make some calls. The detective remained alone at the scratched grey table for nearly an hour, vaping until told not to by an irate female officer who’d brought him a tepid cup of tea.

When the officer with the squint finally returned, it was to announce that Strike was going to be taken to Scotland Yard. When Strike asked whether he could drive his own car again, he was told ‘no’, and then, almost as an afterthought, placed under arrest.

‘What for?’ he asked, sure of the answer, but wanting confirmation.

‘Breaking and entering,’ said the sergeant with the squint.

It was almost midnight by the time Strike got out of the police car at Scotland Yard. The last time Strike had been here, he’d been genuinely, as opposed to euphemistically, assisting the Met with their enquiries. He was taken to a new interview room on an upper floor and, again, left alone.

Bearing in mind Wardle’s warning that he’d seriously pissed off the murder investigation team he assumed he was about to meet, Strike was intending to be honest as far as was practicable, while maintaining a sensible level of self-preservation. A jury might forgive his ingress into Mrs Jameson’s flat if convinced that he’d thought the two people on the floor might have been saved, so he intended to stick stubbornly to the story of which he’d laid foundations back in Magdalen Court. Should he find the investigative team intransigent, he was holding in reserve a serviceable metaphorical stick and a tempting informational carrot, and was confident both could be deployed to good effect. He therefore took out his vape pen and resumed his quiet enjoyment of nicotine until, at shortly before one o’clock in the morning, two plainclothes officers entered the room: a flabby-looking white man of around fifty, who wore a cheap-looking suit and a constipated expression, and a woman in her mid-thirties who had shoulder-length red hair. If forced to give an opinion, Strike would have called this woman prettyish. She had a large mole on her cheek, teeth with large gaps between them, but a good complexion and attractive green eyes. He had a feeling this might be Murphy’s contact: the woman called Iverson with whom Robin’s boyfriend had once had a drunken grope. Strike wondered whether the pair been summoned from their beds to interview him, or were pulling all-nighters. The man’s uptight expression might have been explained by either.

He switched on the recording device and introduced himself as DCI Northmore and, confirming Strike’s guess, the redhead as DCI Iverson. Northmore gave the date and time, revealing himself to have extremely bad breath, which Strike could smell from four feet away. Northmore invited Strike to state his name and address, asked himto confirm that he’d waived his right to a lawyer, then informed him that Iverson was investigating the silver vault murder, whereas he was enquiring into the murder of Sofia Medina. Strike was interested in this last piece of information: the Met had evidently reconsidered their opinion that the man and woman seen in St George’s Avenue were figments of Mandy’s imagination.

Northmore consulted the written notes the uniformed officer from Harlesden had handed over, then said,

‘You say you’ve been hired to identify the body that was found at Ramsay Silver on the twentieth of June last year.’

‘That’s right,’ said Strike.

‘Who’s hired you?’

‘Can’t tell you that, sorry.’