The Hallmarked Man полностью

Her professional name was Fyola Fay, and she’d featured with de Lion in I Know Who You Did Last Summer and Done Girl. Had Strike not promised to attend this bloody party he’d have been able to remain sitting at the partners’ desk in the office, working his way systematically through OnlyFans, Flickr, ModelHub and any of the other myriad places where a woman could make additional money selling nudes or camcorder footage online, looking for clues to Fay’s real name and ways of contacting her. Instead, he was trudging towards Lucy’s front door, passing the bare magnolia bush in the front garden, carrying his bags of clumsily wrapped presents and preparing, after an afternoon of staring at breasts, huge penises and orifices, both male and female, to fake an interest in other people’s jobs, houses and children.

He’d expected Lucy to be annoyed that he was late, but when his youngest nephew, Adam, opened the front door, Strike’s sister, who was further down the hall and wearing a pair of flashing antlers with her party dress, cried ‘Stick!’ and hurried past the women she’d been talking to, to hug him, and it occurred to him, with a slight stirring of guilt, that she was happy and relieved that he’d turned up at all. ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ was pounding out of speakers in the sitting room. Resolving to behave as well as possible, Strike climbed the stairs to deposit his bags in the spare room, greeted his favourite nephew, Jack, who was in his own bedroom playing some kind of shoot-’em-up game on his PlayStation with three other boys of around the same age, then returned to the crowded ground floor, which was full of adults wearing Christmas sweaters and party dresses, and several small children Strike did his best not to step on or knock over as he made his way to the kitchen where, he assumed, there would be food and beer.

‘Here he is!’ said Greg, his brother-in-law, falsely enthusiastic.

Greg was standing with three other men, who raised their cans of lager simultaneously to their mouths as though they’d been practising the movement, all of them eyeing Strike with that brand of defiance certain men display upon coming face to face with a male who might in any way be considered their superior, whether in terms of size, fitness or worldly success.

‘We meet again!’ said a female voice behind Strike, and, turning, he saw a woman he had no memory of ever meeting: dark, overweight, greasy-skinned, wearing a kind of knee-length silver kaftan that made him think of Bacofoil, and angel earrings that flashed, like Lucy’s antlers. ‘Marguerite,’ she said, her face falling, when Strike’s expression remained blank. ‘We met here, at your birthday dinner, a few years ago. You brought your girlfriend, Nina.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Strike, now placing her: Lucy had invited Marguerite to meet her brother, not realising he was going to turn up with another woman. ‘How’re you?’

‘Great,’ she said. ‘Is Nina here?’

‘No,’ said Strike.

‘Easy come, easy go for you with women, isn’t it, Corm?’ said Greg, in the aggressively jocular tone he often employed towards his brother-in-law. Marguerite’s expression brightened.

‘Just getting a beer,’ Strike told her, because he’d spotted a stack of six-packs of lager on a distant work surface, and he forced a path through the crowd around the central table piled with food, causing a small ripple of muttering and turned heads. In his current pessimistic mood, he suspected this was due to the Candy story rather than any appreciation of his detective triumphs, and was careful not to meet anyone’s eyes, reaching the lager with a sense of achieving safe harbour.

As he yanked off a ring pull, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Hoping it was a text from Robin, he pulled out the mobile, but saw a message from Kim instead.

Plug’s left his son in the house with the old lady and buggered off to Carnival Street again, with a bunch of planks and chicken wire in the back of his van.

Well, what d’you want me to do about it? thought Strike irritably. He had a feeling Kim simply wanted an excuse to get in touch, a hunch strengthened by the fact that a second text came in almost immediately.

Hope you’re having a fun Christmas Eve x

Strike put his phone back in his pocket without answering, and looked up to find the group around Greg, which had now absorbed Marguerite, watching him. Strike didn’t have the slightest wish to join them: the men had the look of those who could wring a lengthy conversation out of the best service stations on the M1, or their most recent round of golf. Marguerite’s expression was simply hungry.

Strike’s phone buzzed again.