Strike retreated, but only to marginally safer ground:
‘I’ll email Sacha Legard to see if he’s prepared to meet one or other of us.’
Whether because the conversation had veered back within orbit of Charlotte’s suicide note or not, Robin now glanced at her watch.
‘I’d better get going. I’m supposed to be in Camberwell in forty minutes.’
‘OK,’ said Strike, as she gathered up her things, ‘but let’s try and get out to St George’s Avenue and talk to Wright’s housemates soon. Probably have to be both of us or it’ll take all day to find the right house, given we haven’t got the number.’
‘Fine,’ said Robin again, now brisk. ‘Let me know when.’
16
Robert Browning
Strike returned to the office in a far worse mood than he’d left it. It might be the height of hypocrisy for him to feel aggrieved that Robin (as he saw it) had hidden the fact that she was house-hunting with Murphy – how much had he concealed about his own private life, throughout their friendship? – but this in no way lessened his resentment.
As Strike had told Robin, there’d been a light smattering of press about Semple when he disappeared, though interest seemed to have died fairly quickly. Strike now opened an article he hadn’t yet read, in which Semple’s wife, Jade, pleaded for information on her husband’s whereabouts. The story contained three pictures: one of a clean-shaven Semple in the dress uniform of a paratrooper, the second, of the Semples’ wedding day and the third, the last known sighting of him, at a cashpoint in Camden.
Thick of neck, with high cheekbones, Semple was a handsome man with short blond hair and bright blue eyes, who resembled the physical type most often cast as a young Nazi in films, although his smile was engaging in the clean-shaven picture.
However, in the photograph of his wedding he was wearing a full beard – a most unusual choice for a soldier in the British army – and looked stern rather than happy. His wife, Jade, resembled an over-painted doll. Strike wasn’t a fan of the fashion for thickly pencilled, angular eyebrows, which Jade had embraced whole-heartedly. Her thick hair, which was dyed a blueish-black, was pulled back in a semi-beehive, with locks left loose over her shoulders, and the bodice of her wedding dress was partly sheer, and had been constructed to make the most of her cleavage. She looked small even standing beside Semple, who, according to the article, was five foot seven. Strike didn’t find Jade Semple attractive, but he could imagine that to men who liked that sort of thing, who enjoyed feeling large and masculine beside girlish women of tiny proportions, she’d be something of a catch.
The last picture, of Semple at the cashpoint in Camden on June the fourth of the previous year, showed a scruffy man with an unkempt beard who, rather incongruously, was holding a metal briefcase. Strike squinted at the hand gripping the briefcase. Either Semple was wearing a heavy metal watch, or he’d handcuffed it to himself.
He skim-read the article and learned that Semple had undergone brain surgery in 2014 and subsequently been discharged from the army, unfit for service. He’d disappeared from his family home in Crieff, Scotland, on the twenty-seventh of May, days after his mother’s funeral.
‘I’m desperate,’ says Jade Semple. ‘I’m so worried, I can’t sleep or eat, I just want Niall to get in touch and if anybody’s seen him, to please, please call the helpline. I’m really scared he’s living rough or in some kind of bad situation.’