Page 316 of The Hallmarked Man

‘Like Fyola Fay,’ interposed Robin.

‘—exactly – because he rechristened himself Sidney Reilly. And Laurel Rose Willson wrote an invented memoir of her life in a Satanic abuse cult under the name Lauren Stratford, made a load of money out of it before she was exposed as a fraud, then re-emerged as a Holocaust survivor, which she also wasn’t, under the name Laura Grabowski.’

‘Where’s Wardle this evening?’ asked Robin.

‘On Mrs Two-Times,’ said Strike. ‘Thought I’d give him an easy one to get started.’

Robin’s mobile rang. Her heart sank when she saw it was Murphy.

‘Hi,’ she said, getting up and moving into the outer office to stop Strike saying anything to her, because she didn’t want Murphy to know she and Strike were alone at the office together.

‘You’re not home,’ he said.

‘No, I’m still at the office. As you were working I thought I’d take care of some paperwork. How d’you know I’m not home?’ she added, wondering whether he was sitting outside her flat.

‘I swung by on the off-chance, just a coffee or something. I’m heading back into town now.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘If I’d known you had a free hour, I’d have come home.’

‘So you’re still at the office? Strike there?’

‘No,’ she lied again, with the familiar, gnawing sense of guilt. ‘He’s on surveillance.’

Her call with Murphy terminated, Robin returned to the inner office. She felt guiltier than she had before he’d called, and even though she’d have preferred to stay and talk about the silver vault case with Strike, she said,

‘I’d better get going.’

‘Right,’ he said.

When she’d gone, Strike, well aware he was slipping into a pattern of drinking alone, something he’d guarded against for years, poured himself more whisky before returning to his PC, selecting Tom Waits’ albumBlue Valentineand pressing ‘shuffle’. He always appreciated the blunt solace offered by his gravel-voiced favourite. Waits sang of desperation, drugs and drunkenness, of unmourned deaths and lives spent in poverty and hopelessness; love, to Waits, was generally doomed or dirty, and death came early, randomly and brutally. Strike had discovered the singer for himself in his teens, and found him a blessed antidote to the guitar-driven seventies rock bands his mother played incessantly.

Romeo is bleeding but nobody can tell,

Sings along with the radio

With a bullet in his chest…

Twenty minutes and one long piss later, Strike returned to his newly configured laptop, ready to enter the badlands of the internet, where the buying and selling of drugs, weapons and stolen data were commonplace, where fake documents could be bought and hackers hired, and where videos of dreadful acts were viewable, for those who found them exciting.

It took him nearly an hour to find an archived version of Sofia Medina’s OnlyFans page, on a website headed DEAD SLAGS, which was devoted to providing fodder for men who liked their masturbatory material to feature women who’d provably died from male violence, rather than those who were pretending.

He scrolled down through the names and comments of subscribers. Could Oz be ‘Fat_Hard_Cock’? ‘Bucket O’Jism’? He doubted it. Oz had been seeking real-life contact, and a man pretending to be a wealthy music producer would be unlikely to open the conversation with ‘fist yourself’. SkunkB, on the other hand, had posted, ‘you’re beautiful. I hope you’ve got a man who’s treating you the way you should be treated’, to which Medina had replied with three heartemojis. However, if SkunkB had pursued this promising exchange, it wasn’t publicly visible.

Tom Waits was still singing.

I’m callin out my bloodhounds, chase the devil through the corn…

The whisky was driving Strike deeper into his depressive trough, but he kept mindlessly scrolling through the cyber swamps, perusing sites offering forged documentation and credit cards from countries as diverse as Ukraine and Thailand, or else what Strike strongly suspected was human merchandise. One heavily encrypted site with the nameNurserywas peppered with flower emojis. From the context, he suspected this was a substitute for the words ‘little girl’.

Telling himself Interpol had enough experts trying to track down forgers and paedophiles without his assistance, he now searched for Daesh execution videos, thinking of the secret mission that had cost Niall Semple his best friend.

Each of the films Strike began methodically opening carried the black and white flag of Islamic State in the corner, bearing a white circle containing, in Arabic, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohamed is his messenger’. Strike was reminded of the captured Daesh flag he’d seen at the SAS headquarters in Hereford, which was framed, and facing a captured WW2 swastika on the opposite wall. In Strike’s view, there was nothing to choose between the two groups. The Nazis had visited unspeakable atrocities on their own people, as well as non-Germans; Daesh murdered many more Muslims than Westerners, and both groups were sadistic beyond the imagination of most human beings. Death was insufficient punishment in their eyes: opponents must also suffer extreme indignity, humiliation, terror and pain before the job was considered done.

He watched, blank faced, as men were burned, shot, beheaded and drowned. The filming was expert: Daesh wanted the world to know precisely how terrifyingly devoid of human empathy they were. Corpses were thrown by jeering masked men into a deep natural abyss in north Syria called al-Hota. Strike’s Arabic was too rudimentary to understand what they were saying, but they appeared to be making a game of it, trying to dislodge a corpse stuck on a ledge with a second man’s body. He’d seen al-Hota once, many years before. Local legends were told of the monster that lived in its depths.

Feeling vaguely sickened, he closed down his laptop at exactly the moment his mobile rang. Wardle was calling him.

‘Heads-up,’ said the ex-policeman, who sounded rather perplexed. ‘She’s about to ring the office doorbell.’