The Hallmarked Man полностью

‘Dunno,’ said Strike. ‘Where am I? Hang on… Little Portland Café on Little Portland Street. I’m having a full English. Didn’t have any dinner.’

‘D’you want some company?’

‘Yeah, if it’s you,’ said Strike and, tired and miserable though Robin was, she felt a flicker of comfort at these words.

‘OK, I’ll see you there.’

Shortly before she arrived at the café, she received another text from her boyfriend.

Please just call me.

Another wave of anger and guilt washed over Robin. She needed to decide what she was going to say before she responded to Murphy. She currently had no idea.

When she entered the café, an old-fashioned greasy spoon, where the air was thick with the smell of bacon fat and frying eggs, she saw Strike at a corner table looking as she felt: exhausted and slightly unkempt.

‘What’s happened?’ Robin asked, dropping into the seat opposite him.

‘You all right?’ Strike asked, because Robin looked very pale and tired.

‘Fine,’ said Robin.

She had no intention of telling Strike about Murphy’s drinking: she felt too much loyalty to her boyfriend for that.

‘Want to eat something while I tell you?’

‘Actually,’ said Robin, who hadn’t had breakfast, ‘yes.’

She ordered tea and a bacon roll, and when the waiter had departed, Strike filled her in on his overnight activities, starting with Barnaby’s, moving through the discovery of two corpses, and concluding with his arrest, interview and release without charge, by which time Robin’s roll and mug of tea had arrived, and her mouth was hanging open.

‘Oh – my – God.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘And there’s more. Iverson asked me whether our client has been pregnant or had a kid recently.’

Robin’s hand flew to her mouth, exactly as Fiona Freeman’s had, when Robin had told her she’d been caught on camera putting the cipher note through the agency’s door.

‘Apparently,’ Strike continued, ‘Wright told one of the upstairs neighbours that his girlfriend was expecting.’

‘Oh no,’ Robin whispered, through her fingers.

‘He could’ve been bullshitting,’ said Strike, who’d expected this reaction.

‘But—’

‘He might’ve been trying to paint a picture of himself as a man with something going for him, for the benefit of his new neighbours.’

‘I know, but—’

‘I got a fuck of a shock when she said it,’ Strike admitted, ‘but this still doesn’t make Fleetwood Wright. For all we know, Powell or Semple might’ve knocked – been expecting kids themselves,’ Strike corrected himself quickly, because after what Robin had told him on Sark, he didn’t want to sound glib about pregnancy. ‘Anyway, I’m even keener to find Hussein Mohamed now, and Shah thinks he’s found the right house.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, just saw it in the file. The wife opened the door to Shah and he saw a wheelchair behind her in the hall. The wife says her husband’s working as an Uber driver. She seemed panicky about getting the knock on the door and shut it in Shah’s face before he could ask about Wright. I think we need to keep an eye on the house and see if we can catch Hussein going in and out between shifts.’

‘Do we tell Decima what Wright said?’

Strike chewed a mouthful of sausage, thinking.

‘I’d rather not,’ he said. ‘Not unless we get something else, something concrete. There was that bloke who called claiming to be Fleetwood, remember?’

‘Has Decima got back to you about that?’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Predictable answer. “Everyone heard me calling Rupert ‘Bear’, that man could have been faking a deep voice” – note the tacit admission that Fleetwood has got a deep voice – and “everyone who worked at Dino’s knew about the nef being stolen”. She thinks it was someone impersonating him, either for a macabre joke or because they were involved in his killing and are trying to throw us off the scent. Frankly, I think we could frogmarch the living Fleetwood right up to her at this point and she’d still insist he was dead.’

‘Tish Benton’s back from Sardinia,’ said Robin, taking out her phone and bringing up Tish’s Instagram account. ‘I don’t think it was a holiday, or not entirely. She’s got a new job, which is going to mean a lot of travel. We might be lucky to catch her in London, going forwards.’

Strike took the phone from her. A pretty girl with shiny black hair beamed out of the most recent picture, standing in front of a sign that read Hotel Serenità, with the caption:

So thrilled to announce that from March 1st I’ll be working as #brandconsultant for #ClairmontHotelsEurope!!! #travel #dreamjob #luxuryhotels

‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Well, we’ll have to try and doorstep her between flights.’

Robin really did look exhausted and miserable, Strike thought, as he passed her back her phone. He couldn’t attribute it all to shock about the increased likelihood that Wright had been Fleetwood, because she’d arrived looking pale and sad.

‘You sure you’re all right?’ he asked, remembering her previous admission that she hadn’t been able to sleep.

‘Yes,’ said Robin automatically, ‘fine.’