The Hallmarked Man полностью

And he was happy, if to know

Causes of things, and far below

His feet to see the lurid flow

Of terror, and insane distress,

And headlong fate, be happiness.

Matthew Arnold

Memorial Verses: April, 1850

Eleven days after Ian Griffiths and friends had been taken into custody, and Strike and Sapphire Neagle had been driven by ambulance to the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, Strike donned his only black suit in his attic flat, and drove, again, to Hereford.

He and Robin had been planning to tidy away the last fragment of the silver vault case that very day, but then Jade Semple had called the office and issued Strike with a personal invitation to her husband’s funeral. Semple’s decayed and waterlogged corpse had been found, as Strike had guessed, at the bottom of Regent’s Canal, beneath the railway bridge, weighted to the bed by a briefcase full of bricks to which the body’s wrist remained handcuffed.

‘Think I should go,’ he’d told Robin, though with some regret. He’d fancied another trip with her, even if he’d lost all hope of capitalising on beautiful scenery to derail her impending engagement. ‘You’ve earned the last bit, you can do it alone.’

Strike had no worries about Robin’s safety today. Even if Griffiths had trafficking associates in Italy, there’d be no point attacking Robin now that multiple computers and phones were being examined by forensic experts, and a network spanning across the continent was being slowly and methodically revealed. The full scale of the story hadn’t yet seeped into the press. No journalist knew of the connection between the murdered man at Ramsay Silver and the trafficking ring. All that had been reported was that a missing girl had been found at a house in Ironbridge and, a few days later (which had reached several newspaper front pages), that the body of a second young woman had been recovered under the lumpy concrete floor of Griffiths’ homemade basement. The corpse hadn’t yet been identified, although the agency’s Met contact, George Layborn, had confidentially revealed to Strike that the body was that of a young, pregnant female.

The detective agency’s involvement in Griffiths’ arrest was, so far, unknown to the papers, which Strike imagined suited the police as well as it did him. Nobody had made much of a fuss about skeleton keys this time; nobody close to the case seemed to feel unnecessary force had been used against Griffiths and his fellow rapists. Strike’s almost severed ear had helped there, of course. There also seemed tacit agreement that as long as the agency stepped quietly aside, allowing the police to talk blandly of ‘sources’ and ‘tips’, and take credit for busting the trafficking ring, any unorthodox or indeed illegal acts committed by Strike, Wardle and Barclay, up to and including several physical assaults, could be overlooked.

Meanwhile, Robertson’s scoop on Lord Oliver Branfoot had been published in the Sunday Telegraph (‘fuckin’ lawyers near enough took a fuckin’ stool sample off me’, as the journalist had informed Strike by phone) and for the previous forty-eight hours, it had appeared there was little other news in the United Kingdom, even including the body found under Griffiths’s basement floor. Danny de Leon had cut himself a lucrative tell-all deal with the Sun; Branfoot’s wife and sons had been followed down the street by shouting reporters, until one young Branfoot took a swing at a cameraman, missed and hit a female journalist in the jaw; the regular host of the quiz show on which Branfoot had made a dozen appearances had issued a ‘shocked and disgusted’ statement; Branfoot himself, who was rumoured to have hired the most expensive PR agency in London, had disappeared from public view, though he’d issued a statement that neither confirmed nor denied anything, but did so in a tone of dignified injury; Craig Wheaton appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth; and several young women who’d unknowingly been caught on film in Black Prince Road had banded together to hire none other than Andrew Honbold QC.

It was of this furore that Strike found himself thinking as he stood in the weak April sunlight, standing respectfully at the back of the crowd surrounding the grave into which Niall Scott Semple’s earthly remains would be lowered. The churchyard of St Martin’s already had its fair share of SAS graves, all with almost identical headstones of pale stone, engraved with the regiment’s winged dagger badge.