Page 131 of The Hallmarked Man
‘Did he say why Rupert had turned up?’
‘I assume he was trying to get Val to call off the police, or something. Val was pretty pissed off about it all, as you can imagine.’
‘How was Valentine supposed to call off the police? The stolen property was his father’s, wasn’t it?’
‘I honestly don’t know details,’ said Sacha, with a slightly helpless gesture. ‘It was all news to me, I didn’t know what was going on – and as you can imagine, I had a lot of people to speak to and so on, that night, so I let it drop.’
‘Did you hear from Rupert after the party?’
‘No, the next thing I heard, he’d left for New York.’
‘How did you find that out?’
‘Anjelica emailed all the trustees, said he’d got himself a job there.’
‘Have you heard from him since he went to New York?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sacha, brow slightly furrowed again. He leaned forwards, lowered his voice still further, and said,
‘Listen – can I speak honestly? I think… look, I don’t like saying this, but honestly, I really do think Dessie’s – you know – a bitdeluded. Val thinks it would be better for her –kinder, at this point – for her to be helped to face facts.’
‘Which are?’
‘Come on, Corm,’ said Sacha, smiling, and Strike resented hearing the abbreviation of his name used by his friends, and by Charlotte, when she wasn’t calling him ‘Bluey’, ‘Dessie’s a lot older than Rupe. I hate saying this, but I think Rupe just wised up and wanted out. Dessie’s lovely, she’s great, but I think Rupe probably fell into this thing with her while he was working at Dino’s, and she’s made it into somegrand amourin her head. He’s twenty-six. He doesn’t want to be tied down at his age.’
Conveniently forgetting that he’d told Robin that Decima wasn’t the kind of thirty-eight-year-old he could ‘see a twenty-six-year-old going for’, and that he’d asserted that Decima’s attraction for Rupert had been her money, Strike said,
‘They were together a year, weren’t they? Hardly a one-night stand.’
‘I don’t know, because—’
‘You were in Mexico, yeah. Have you got a number for Rupert in New York?’
‘No,’ said Sacha.
‘D’you know where he’s working?’
‘You’d have to ask Anjelica.’
‘I have. She refused to give me contact details.’
‘Well – with respect,’ said Sacha, ‘she’s not obliged to, is she?’
‘So you’ve never checked that he’s actually gone to New York?’
‘He’s a grown man, he doesn’t want me hounding him.’
‘So your position is: he’s gone to New York, he’s definitely alive—’
‘What d’you mean, “alive”?’ said Sacha, no longer smiling.
Perhaps the actor, like the detective himself, now felt as though a spectral Charlotte had drawn up a seat at the table, smiling. She’d always been stimulated by tension and the possibility of rows, and she’d loved seeing members of the family she claimed to hate, but from which she could never quite pull free, clashing with the boyfriend who was impressed by neither their wealth nor their breeding. Rupert Fleetwood, towards whom Strike had felt very little sympathy until this point, seemed suddenly to have become her surrogate: a young man towards whom his blood relations seemed indifferent at best, who’d slipped out of sight, occasioning exasperation ratherthan concern. The night that Charlotte had so nearly been killed by a London bus felt as though it had occurred mere days previously as Strike said,
‘Don’t really know how much more simply to put it. “Not dead”, if you prefer.’
‘Why the hell would he be dead?’
‘He’d lost his job, he was broke, he had a drug dealer threatening him, the police were after him, he’d just had a ruptured love affair, no family to speak of—’
