Strike had been more affected by the discovery of Semple’s body than he’d expected or admitted, even to Robin. Compared to the sensation made by Branfoot’s wrongdoings, and the discovery of Jolanda’s body under the concrete floor, Semple’s suicide had occasioned hardly a ripple in the press. The unspoken consensus appeared to be that his death was sad, but the sort of thing you’d expect to happen to a brain-damaged soldier, and then the public moved on, preferring to gloat over Lord Branfoot’s gaudy, dirty excesses. To Strike, though, there was something in this ending in murky water, the body lying there unseen and unnoticed, that tugged brutally at the gut, something beyond grief. At least part of the reason he was here, rather than travelling to Italy with Robin, was that he’d seen comments beneath the few, scattered news reports of Semple’s death that had angered him: token expressions of regret followed by lengthy diatribes about Britain’s foreign policy, and the role the army played in colonial and oppressive enterprises. None of them seemed to wonder whether Semple and his ilk had risked their lives so that more civilians, maybe even themselves or their families, might not be run down by a murderous extremist while crossing a bridge.
Such thoughts were distracting Strike from the vicar’s words, though not the throbbing in his left ear. He’d needed microsurgery to reattach it, because it had been almost completely cut off. He had a dim memory of someone saying he might lose the whole thing, and a slightly clearer memory of laughing when a nurse suggested he could still have cosmetic surgery, if he was worried about the appearance.
This wasn’t the first time Strike had turned up at a church service injured, but even so, he felt his ear bandage was unreasonably conspicuous. The bruising to his face – nobody had been swift enough to catch him when he’d fainted in Griffiths’ sitting room, meaning he’d slammed face first into the floor – hadn’t yet faded completely, either, which added to the impression of a man who’d decided to participate in a cage fight before driving on to the funeral.
The vicar concluded his remarks. Strike was tall enough to see the coffin being lowered, even though three rows of people stood between him and the grave. Jade was sobbing quietly into a handkerchief, flanked by her twin and her mother.
At last, the committal was over. Strike had just set off back to his car when his phone rang. He’d hoped it would be Robin, but it was Wardle. As Strike knew Wardle to be in contact with Iverson, the redhead on the murder investigation team, he took the call.
‘They’ve found the Wolves weights,’ said Wardle without preamble. ‘And a pair of human hands.’
‘Petts Wood?’
‘Yeah, yesterday evening. They’re still searching.’
An enormous wave of relief washed over Strike at this news. Even as he’d been driving along towards Hereford this morning he’d been plagued with doubts about whether Tyler Powell would be identified, and Griffiths’ hand in his death proven.
‘Sapphire’s talking,’ said Wardle, ‘a lot. Griffiths picked her up in London, kept her in a shitty room with two other underage girls, regularly visited by Wade King, Todd and assorted others, then moved her north to Ironbridge, where the shit-heels we met took turns.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Strike in disgust. ‘Listen, you wouldn’t happen to know whether Griffiths forced her to impersonate a couple of young women over the phone, would you?’
‘He did, yeah,’ said Wardle, who sounded surprised. ‘How did you—?’
‘Robin realised. She got calls from two girls, a supposed great-niece of Dilys Powell’s, and a girl called Zeta we never traced. Both times they were feeding her misinformation about Tyler Powell and trying to find out what we knew. One of those times, the girl got local names wrong.’
‘Ah,’ said Wardle. ‘Well, they’ve found about six different burner phones so far in Griffiths’ house, plus a curly wig and a ruby necklace hidden in a case on top of a wardrobe.’
‘Jesus, Iverson’s not shy about sharing information, is she?’ said Strike, surprised. ‘I’d’ve thought she’d have kept her mouth shut after the way they went after Murphy for helping us.’
‘She, ah… we had a drink last night,’ said Wardle, with a tone of embarrassed constraint that told Strike all he needed to know. Susan Iverson, he guessed, was in the same mood he’d been when he’d accepted Bijou Watkins’ suggestion of a drink over a year previously: in search of ego-salving distraction, her hopes of Murphy irrevocably dashed. Possibly, Strike thought, with a sagging of his spirits, the rebound onto Wardle meant Robin and Murphy were now, at last, definitely engaged. Instead of saying any of this, he asked,
‘Any ID on the body under the floor yet? Anyone contacted Belgium for Jolanda’s DNA?’
‘They’re doing it today, apparently. Oh, and that real music producer bloke, Osgood? They’ve retrieved his deleted emails.’
‘And?’