Page 81 of The Hallmarked Man

Wrath, envy, discord, strife…

Sophocles tr. A. E. Housman

Oedipus Coloneus

The substitution of Two-Times for Mr A meant that the agency was once again working at full capacity. Strike and Robin saw each other only in passing over the next few days, so informed each other by text and phone call that nobody they’d approached for further information on the silver vault case had responded.

‘It’s Christmas,’ Robin reminded Strike on Monday, ‘people will be busy or visiting family.’

In spite of these frustrations, there were developments in two matters of mutual interest, both unrelated to the murder of William Wright. The first was a couple of days of high excitement in the Patterson case, which was being lavishly covered in the papers. On Tuesday, Farah Navabi took the stand, and turned in a heart-rending, charismatic performance. Breaking down in sobs, so that a solicitous judge asked whether she’d like a break to compose herself, the beautiful Navabi regaled the court with an account of how she’d been relentlessly bullied, intimidated and sexually harassed by her boss, and revealed that she’d only undertaken the job of bugging the barrister’s office because Patterson had made egregious threats of retaliation if she didn’t do as she was told.

‘I can’t tell you how much I regret it,’ she sobbed. ‘Andrew Honbold’s a good, good man, and Mitch had me convinced he was a monster.’

‘Told you,’ said Kim Cochran smugly, during what Strike made sure was a brief surveillance handover that evening. ‘She’s rented premises in Belsize Park and she’s already snagged a ton of Patterson’s clients.’

On Wednesday, Patterson, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with a deeply pitted and lined face, was pursued from car to court by paparazzi. His evidence, live-tweeted from court by several journalists, became instantly meme-worthy for his barked repetition of the phrase ‘wholly and completely untrue’. By the time he was permitted to leave the witness stand he’d said it forty-seven times, and nobody, with the possible exception of Patterson himself, was surprised when the following morning he was found guilty, with sentencing deferred to the new year.

Strike would have enjoyed all this far more had he not discovered, on the news website where he’d been reading about Patterson’s conviction, a supremely vicious piece about himself, written by Dominic Culpepper. Exactly as Strike had feared, Nina had clearly informed her cousin that it was Strike who’d been keeping his wife under surveillance at the Dorchester.

Another paper had tried to run a piece a few months previously, asserting that Strike was as big a womaniser as his father, that he routinely had sex with clients, and had slept with a woman who was also in a relationship with the very barrister whom Mitch Patterson had bugged. That article had never been published because Charlotte, of all people, had not only resisted the invitation to screw Strike over in print, but had contacted those of Strike’s girlfriends she knew, to ensure that nobody talked.

But the flimsy barricade Charlotte had erected had been swept away by Culpepper’s rage and Nina’s resentment. The journalist no longer needed quotes from the ex-lovers who’d declined to talk last time, because he had his cousin, Nina, who’d provided anonymous quotes with which Culpepper was able to bolster his portrait of a grubby, unscrupulous man who used women to obtain whatever he needed, bracketing Strike with Patterson as a libidinous, parasitic scavenger, profiting from human misery and callously manipulating good-hearted people. Culpepper had also re-hashed the story of Strike’s conception, which had famously taken place on a bean bag at a druggy A-list party in 1974, and had even found someone else to speak on the record about the grubby antics of private detectives: Lord Oliver Branfoot.

Strike had never met Branfoot, but he knew what the man looked and sounded like because Branfoot was one of those public figures who managed to penetrate the mass mind like a noxious, invisible gas. Marlborough-educated, a scion of nobility, Branfoot was a large, untidy man notable for an inability to pronounce his ‘r’s. Previously a Conservative MP, he now headed various charitable and political organisations and committees, was ever-ready with a quote for the papers, sprinkled his conversation with Latin tags and capitalised to the full on the English public’s weakness for a toff who seemed ready to laugh at himself, having a fondness for appearing on political quiz shows, where he played to the hilt the part of genial, bumbling blue-blood. While Strike didn’t know exactly why Lord Oliver Branfoot should want to attach his name to the excoriation of a man he didn’t know, he could think of one obvious reason why Branfoot might want to thunder in print that the private detective business ought to be far more stringently regulated.

Strike had no illusions as to the likely trajectory of Dominic Culpepper’s fury: this article, he suspected, was an opening shot in what was likely to become an ongoing vendetta. He was conscious of a strong desire to call Robin, because the sound of her voice usually made him feel better about whatever shit he was currently dealing with, but there was a possibility that she hadn’t spotted the article yet, and it seemed the height of folly to draw her attention to it if she hadn’t.

But Robin had, of course, already seen Culpepper’s attack on her partner, because she’d read the same online account of Patterson’s conviction, and it had certainly given her food for thought as she sat at lunchtime in the bar of the Rosewood Hotel, watching Two-Times’ beautifully coiffed wife enjoying a cocktail with a female friend.

Strike might have been very slightly heartened to know that Robin was by no means as horrified by the article’s accusations and insinuations as Culpepper intended the reader to feel. Nobody had worked more closely with Cormoran Strike over the past six and a half years than Robin Ellacott, and she was prepared to swear that whatever flaws Strike might possess, he’d never slept with, nor would he ever sleep with, a client, no matter that sundry divorced and divorcing women (she remembered in particular the alluring Miss Jones) had made their willingness to do so perfectly obvious. Robin had also noted that no ex-client was quoted, even anonymously, in the article.

Nevertheless, some unknown woman who’d helped him with a case clearly had a serious grudge against Cormoran Strike, and this, Robin presumed, was Culpepper’s cousin. The implication that Strike had seduced the unknown woman in pursuit of evidence wasn’t, Robin had to admit, a pleasant thought, although it might be argued that she didn’t have much right to condemn him, having allowed an important witness and potential suspect in a previous case to press her up against a pub wall and stick his tongue into her mouth.

At this point in her musings, two texts arrived on her phone, almost back to back. The first was from Murphy, and contained a link to a new property for them to view.

This might be worth a look? I see Patterson’s got what was coming to him. Have you read the thing on Strike? X

Strike would have been delighted to know that Robin’s immediate reaction to this message was annoyance at her boyfriend and protectiveness of her detective partner. Murphy had suffered himself from bad press of late and he hadn’t even been personally named, so Robin would have hoped he’d show some fellow feeling for another man being roughed up in print. Instead of answering the message, or opening the link to what appeared to be another terraced house, this time in Wood Green, Robin opened the second text, which was from Strike himself.

Two-Times just called. He’s about to join his missus and her friend for cocktails. You can stand down, he’ll be with her for the rest of the day.

Robin had just raised her hand for her bill when her mobile rang from an unfamiliar number, though she recognised the Ironbridge area code. She answered at once.

‘Hello, this is Robin Ellacott.’

‘Hello,’ said a tentative voice far too young to be Tyler Powell’s grandmother. ‘Are you the one who’s been calling my great-aunt?’

‘If your great-aunt’s Dilys Powell, yes,’ said Robin.

‘Well, she’s in the hospital,’ said the girl.

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. You picked up my messages, did you?’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘I’m feeding her cat. Why do you want her?’

‘I wanted to talk to her about your cousin Tyler,’ said Robin.

‘He’s not here,’ said the girl. ‘He left.’