Page 7 of The Hallmarked Man

‘What about Rupert’s other relatives? Friends?’

‘Nobody’sseen him since the twenty-second of May! Sacha won’t even take my calls any more! All he said was, “if Anjelica says he’s in New York, that’s where he is!”

‘Nobody’s taking this seriously!Rupe’s friend Albie says he thinks Rupe went away to “get his head together” but even Albie’s stopped answering my calls now! Sacha won’t talk to me – Valentine’s been so vicious about it all, I came down here to have the baby in peace—

‘I need Lion to know his daddy only went away to try and fix things, and he never meant to leave us for good! I’vegotto prove it! And then I’ll be able to give Rupe a proper f-funeral… and at least we’ll have… a g-grave to visit. I can’t go on like this –I need you to prove it was Rupe in that vault!’ wailed Decima Mullins, her eyes as pink and swollen as a piglet’s, her thief of a boyfriend’s baby hidden beneath her dirty poncho.

3

Too suddenly thou tellest such a loss.

Matthew Arnold

Merope: A Tragedy

Robin Ellacott had lied to her detective partner about having a sore throat and a high fever. In fact, she was currently lying in a hospital bed on a morphine drip, determined that as few people as possible should know why she was there.

The previous afternoon, Robin had been crossing the concourse of Victoria station in pursuit of a surveillance target when she’d suddenly felt as though a red-hot knife had pierced her lower right side. Her knees had buckled and she’d vomited. A pair of middle-aged women had hurried to her assistance and, muttering in panic about burst appendixes, had hailed a station attendant. In a remarkably short period of time, Robin had been gurney-ed out of the station to a waiting ambulance. She had a hazy memory of the paramedics’ faces, of more searing pain, and the bumping of the trolley as she was sped into the hospital, then of the icy ultrasound wand on her belly, and the anaesthetist’s masked face. Her next clear memory was of waking up, being told that she’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and that her fallopian tube had burst.

Robin had phoned her boyfriend, CID officer Ryan Murphy, as soon as she’d been able to reach her mobile, but he was too far across London to have any realistic chance of reaching her before evening visiting time had ended. She’d begged Murphy, who was horrified by what had happened, to call Strike with the excuse of the fever and sore throat, and tell him she wouldn’t be able to drive him into Kent. Robin had also impressed upon her boyfriend that her parentsweren’t, on any account, to know what had happened. The very last thing Robin needed right now was her mother hovering over her, and blaming what had happened on Robin’s job, which she was sure, however unfairly, to do.

The shock of her sudden hospitalisation, and the reason for it, had been such that twenty-four hours later, Robin still felt as though she’d slipped through some kind of portal into a reality that wasn’t her own. She’d barely slept the previous night, due to the low moans of an elderly woman in the next bed. That morning, Robin had been wheeled into a newly vacant single room, for which she was grateful, though without being entirely sure what she’d done to deserve it, except that one of the older nurses on duty seemed to pity her for having had no visitors.

Groggy though she was from the combination of sleeplessness and morphine, Robin had spent a lot of the morning trying to retrace events in her head, to work out when the contraceptive failure must have happened, given the likely date of conception given by her surgeon. She now thought she’d worked out when the mistake must have been made, and she dreaded having to talk to Murphy about it when he arrived in the afternoon. Most of all she felt a vast sense of self-recrimination, for not having managed her own body better, for having, as she saw it, brought this avoidable catastrophe upon herself.

She was lying watching a murmuration of starlings twirl across the leaden sky outside her window when her mobile rang. She picked it up and saw her mother was calling. Unable to face the conversation, she let it ring. Linda gave up at exactly the moment the door of Robin’s room opened. She looked around to see the broad, genial face of her surgeon, Mr Butler.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, smiling.

‘Hello,’ said Robin.

‘How’re we feeling?’ he asked, taking her chart from the end of the bed and casting an eye over it.

‘Fine,’ said Robin, as Mr Butler pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘No pain?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Good. Well, now… did you know you were pregnant?’

‘No,’ said Robin. Not wanting to seem stupid, she said, ‘I had to come off the pill for a bit, but we’ve been using condoms. I suppose one of them must have split, and we didn’t notice.’

‘A shock, then?’ said Mr Butler.

‘It was, yes,’ said Robin, with polite understatement.

‘Well, as I told you yesterday, we had no choice but to remove the ruptured tube. It’s very fortunate you got here so quickly, because it could’ve been life-threatening, but I’m afraid there’s an issue you might not have been aware of,’ said Mr Butler, no longer smiling.

‘What’s that?’ asked Robin.

‘We found significant scarring on the fallopian tube we removed. We had a quick look at the other one, and it’s exactly the same.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

‘Have you ever had a diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease?’

‘No,’ said Robin.