Page 236 of The Running Grave

‘Of course,’ said Strike.

‘I feel so guilty,’ said Lucy, breaking into sobs. ‘We knew he was bad…’

‘If – when they find him,’ said Strike, ‘we’ll talk about what we’re going to do next. We’ll make a plan.’

He, too, felt inordinately guilty at the thought of his confused uncle setting off at dawn for some destination unknown. Remembering Ted’s old sailing boat, the Jowanet, and the sea into which Joan’s ashes had disappeared, Strike hoped to God he was being fanciful in thinking that was where the old man had gone.

His first appointment of the day wasn’t calculated to take his mind off his personal troubles and he resented having to do it at all. After several days of procrastination, Bijou’s lover, Andrew Honbold QC, had sent Strike a curt email inviting him to his flat to discuss ‘the matter under advisement’. Strike had agreed to this meeting because he wanted to shut down forever the complications in which his ill-considered liaison with Bijou had involved him, but he was in no very conciliatory mood as he approached Honbold’s duplex shortly before nine o’clock, his mind still on his uncle in Cornwall.

After ringing the bell of the barrister’s presumably recently rented residence, which lay a mere two minutes’ walk from Lavington Court Chambers, Strike had time to estimate that the place was probably costing Honbold upwards of ten thousand pounds a month. Bijou had had many lucrative reasons to be careless with her birth control.

The door was opened by a tall, supercilious-looking man with bloodhound-like jowls, a broken-veined complexion, a substantial paunch and pure white hair which had receded to show an age-spotted pate. Honbold led Strike into an open-plan living area decorated in expensive but bland taste which didn’t suit its occupant, whose Hogarthian appearance cried out for a backdrop of velvet drapes and polished mahogany.

‘So,’ said Honbold loudly, when the two men had sat down opposite each other, with the glass coffee table between them, ‘you have information for me.’

‘I do, yeah,’ said Strike, perfectly happy to dispense with the niceties. Taking out his phone, he laid it on the table with the photograph of Farah Navabi in Denmark Street displayed. ‘Recognise her?’

Honbold retrieved his gold-rimmed reading glasses from his shirt pocket, then picked up the phone and held it at various distances from his eyes, as though the picture might transform into a different woman if he found the right number of inches from which to view it.

‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘although she certainly wasn’t dressed like that when I met her. Her name’s Aisha Khan and she works for Tate and Brannigan, the reputation management people. Jeremy Tate phoned me to ask if I’d see her.’

‘Did you call him back?’

‘Did I what?’ boomed Honbold, throwing his voice as though trying to reach the back of a courtroom.

‘Did you call Tate and Brannigan back, to check it was genuinely Jeremy Tate who’d rung you?’

‘No,’ said Honbold, ‘but I looked her up. I don’t usually see people ad hoc like that, without the client. She was on their website. She’d just joined them.’

‘Was there a picture of her on the website?’

‘No,’ said Honbold, now looking uneasy.

‘Her real name,’ said Strike, ‘is Farah Navabi. She’s an undercover detective working for Patterson Inc.’

There was a second’s silence.

‘Bitch!’ Honbold exploded. ‘Working for some tabloid, is she? Or is it my bloody wife?’

‘Could be either,’ said Strike, ‘but Patterson had someone planted at my agency for the last few months. The aim could’ve been getting me in the dock for bugging you. Was Navabi alone in your office at any point?’

‘Yes,’ groaned Honbold, running a hand through his thinning hair. ‘I showed her in, but I needed a pee. She had a few minutes in there, alone. Shit,’ he exploded again. ‘She was bloody convincing!’

‘Acting’s clearly her strong suit, because she’s not much cop at undercover surveillance.’

‘Mitchell fucking Patterson… how he got off, after all the fucking phone hacking he did – I’ll have him banged up for this if it’s the last bloody thing I—’

Strike’s mobile rang.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, picking it up from the table. ‘Luce?’

‘They’ve found him.’

‘Oh, thank Christ,’ said Strike, feeling the relief wash over him like warm bath water. ‘Where was he?’

‘Down on the beach. They say he’s very confused. Stick, I’m going to go straight down there now and persuade him to come back with me, just for a visit, so we can talk to him about what he wants. He can’t go on like this.’

‘OK. D’you want me to—?’