Page 3 of The Hallmarked Man

‘Yes. My brother’s Valentine Longcaster. I know you don’t like each other much.’

This information came as such a surprise that Strike was temporarily lost for words. Valentine, whom he’d met infrequently and always reluctantly over a certain period of his life, was a good-looking, floppy-haired, extravagantly dressed man who worked as a stylist for various arty glossy magazines. He’d also been one of the closest friends of the late Charlotte Campbell, Strike’s sometime fiancée, who’d died by suicide a few months previously.

‘So “Mullins” is…?’

‘My married name, from when I was in my twenties.’

‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Right.’

Could she be telling the truth? He couldn’t remember Valentine mentioning a sister, but then, Strike had always paid as little attention as possible to anything Valentine said. If they were indeed brother and sister, Strike had rarely met a pair of siblings who resembled each other less, although in some ways that might add credence to Decima’s story: it would have been perfectly in character for Valentine to hush up this squat, grubby-looking woman, because he was a man who placed a very high premium on looks and stylishness.

‘It’sespeciallyimportant you don’t tell Valentine where I am, or – or anything else I might ask you to keep private,’ said Decima.

‘OK,’ said Strike, for the fourth time.

‘And you know Sacha Legard, too, don’t you?’

Now starting to feel as though some personal devil had decided to devote its day to kicking him repeatedly in the balls, because Sacha was Charlotte’s half-brother, Strike said,

‘You’re related to him, too, are you?’

‘No,’ said Decima, ‘but he’s involved in… in what I want you to investigate. I never really knew Charlotte Campbell, though. I only met her a couple of times.’

Some might have considered her flat tone insensitive, given Charlotte’s recent death in a blood-filled bathtub, but as Strike was more than happy to dispense with prurient questions or faux sympathy, he said,

‘Right, well, why don’t you explain what it is you want me to do?’

‘I need you to find out who a body was,’ said Decima, eyeing him with a mixture of wariness and defiance.

‘A body,’ repeated Strike.

‘Yes. You probably read about it in the papers. It was the man they found in the vault of a silver shop, in June.’

Five months previously, Strike had been almost entirely focused on a complex case the agency had been investigating, and had had little attention to spare for much else, but he remembered this news story, which had generated a short but intense burst of media coverage.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘If it’s the one I’m thinking of,’ (though God knew why he was saying this, because how many men were found dead in silver vaults, on average, per month, in London?) ‘the police identified him quite quickly.’

‘No, they didn’t,’ said Decima, her tone brooking no contradiction.

‘I thought,’ said Strike, though what he really meant was, ‘as I accurately recall’, ‘he turned out to be a convicted thief?’

‘No,’ said Decima, shaking her head, ‘he wasn’t that thief. Not definitely.’

‘I’m pretty sure that’s what I read,’ said Strike, tugging his phone out of his pocket. He was hopeful, now, he’d be able to get out of here within ten minutes, because she was giving him a cast-iron reason for refusing a case he definitely didn’t want. ‘Yeah, see here?’ said Strike, having typed a few words into Google. ‘“… the dead man, who posed as salesman William Wright during his two weeks’ employment at Ramsay Silver, has now been identified as convicted armed robber Jason Knowles, 28, of Haringey.”’

‘It wasn’t definite,’ insisted Decima. ‘I know a policeman, and he told me so.’

‘Which policeman is this?’ asked Strike, who had prior experience of those who asserted imaginary ties to the police to justify their lunatic theories.

‘Sir Daniel Gayle. He’s a retired commissioner. His daughter works for me. I asked her whether I could talk to Sir Daniel, and he spoke to some people, then told me the police never got DNA confirmation. They neverprovedit was that Knowles man, not beyond doubt.’

‘What’s your interest in finding out who the man was?’ asked Strike.

‘I just need to know,’ said Decima. Her voice was trembling. ‘Ineedto. I need to know.’

Strike drank some coffee to give himself thinking time. Odd features of the case of the body in the vault came back to him. The body had been naked and heavily mutilated, which had naturally fanned the flames of press interest before the victim had been revealed as a violent criminal, at which point, public sympathy and interest had dwindled considerably. Knowles, the press reported, had so severely beaten the female cashier at a building society he’d previously robbed that she’d been left with a fractured skull and seizures. In fact, there’d been general agreement that, however nasty his end, Jason Knowles had probably had it coming.

‘Are you worried the man was someone you know?’ Strike asked.