‘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 never
‘What’s your interest in finding out who the man was?’ asked Strike.
‘I just need to know,’ said Decima. Her voice was trembling. ‘I
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.
‘Yes. I think . . no,’ said Decima, suddenly passionate, tears appearing in her eyes, ‘I
‘Who exactly—?’
‘He was someone
The lonely house, the tearful woman: Strike felt as though he’d been plunged back into the situation he’d left in Cornwall, but with far stranger overtones. Unable to think of anything else to do, he flicked open his notebook.
‘All right, what similarities are there between the body and the man you know?’
‘I’ve written it all down,’ said Decima at once, reaching for the red notebook, and she flicked to the back of what was revealed to be a weekly diary, where Strike saw several densely written pages. ‘My friend was twenty-six – the press said the body was of a man in his mid-twenties to mid-thirties. William Wright was left-handed; so was my friend. The body was blood group A positive – that’s the same. Five feet six or seven – that matches. Wright was interviewed for the job on the nineteenth of May – I didn’t see my friend that day. Wright moved into a rented room on May the twenty-first – that fits, because my friend was moving out of his house that weekend – I wanted him to bring all his things to my place, but he wouldn’t. I didn’t understand where he was putting it all. It must have been this rented room.’
Having tried and failed to think of a more tactful way of posing his next question, Strike said,
