Page 146 of The Hallmarked Man
‘Puke, did you?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘ButI’mthe one who’s drinking.’
‘Ryan, I thought you’d be able to tell which pint was which by the smell of them,’ said Robin, standing just inside the door, not wanting to get too close to him before she could brush her teeth. ‘That’s all. I wasn’t accusing you of drinking real pints.’
She was very conscious of trying to enunciate clearly, because the whisky wasn’t quite out of her system. When Murphy didn’t respond, Robin moved towards the bedroom chair, on which lay her pyjamas.
‘Can’t let even Christmas Eve go without sneaking off to text him,’ he said suddenly.
‘What?’ said Robin, disconcerted, standing up with her pyjamas in her hands.
‘Strike. What you were doing, when you went outside.’
‘I haven’t texted Strike.’
‘Liar,’ he said, and the word clanged through the room like a dropped skillet.
‘I haven’t texted Strike,’ she repeated. ‘Not since we got here.’
‘Liar,’ he said again. ‘You left your phone behind when you went to the bathroom. He texted you back, I saw it.’
Robin felt in her pockets, pulled out her phone and stared down at Strike’s incomprehensible message, which only made sense once shesaw what she’d accidentally sent him, probably after abandoning her attempt to read about Reata Lindvall.
‘Ryan, it was a butt dial. Look.’
She walked over to the bed and held out her phone. He took it and read the two messages.
‘Oh,’ he said.
Robin took back her phone. She wasn’t yet sober, and she really wanted to cry, but instead, she went to fetch her dressing gown, prior to leaving for the bathroom. As she reached for the door handle, Murphy said,
‘Why did you get so drunk tonight?’
‘Because I rowed with Mum,’ said Robin, her throat constricting, ‘and then I rowed with you… and everyone’s bloody pregnant.’
He raised himself a little on the pillows, incredibly handsome in the half-light. (Who’s the Paul Newman lookalike?)
‘Robin, I’m sorry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come here.’
‘Not now,’ she said, fighting tears. ‘I need to wash and clean my teeth, I’m disgusting.’
‘You’re never disgusting.’
‘Let me get clean,’ she said, and then she ducked down to her almost empty holdall, groped for Strike’s present, which lay hidden beneath her slippers, stood up with the box concealed by her robe, and left the room.
The house was silent. Robin shut herself in the bathroom and locked the door. She’d have liked to shower, but she feared waking Annabel, so she stripped off and washed, put on her pyjamas and cleaned her teeth for twice as long as usual, until no taste of whisky remained. Her head had begun to throb, but at least the floor remained steady beneath her feet, and the walls stationary.
Having pulled on her robe, she sat down on the edge of the bath and picked up Strike’s present, which was covered in blue paper patterned with small gold stars. She could tell he’d wrapped it himself, because it was lumpy. He’d used too much Sellotape. He was awful at wrapping presents.
But when she tore off the paper, she saw what was unmistakeably a jeweller’s box, made of thick pale blue card. Slowly, as though the contents might explode, she took off the lid.
A thick silver chain bracelet, from which hung seven charms, lay on a bed of black foam, and Robin recognised the middle charmimmediately: it was the masonic orb she’d admired in Ramsay Silver. She stared, transfixed, unaware that her mouth was open. Then she lifted the bracelet out of its box, and amazed as she was, she could follow Strike’s thought process perfectly. He’d gone back for the orb, and someone, maybe Kenneth Ramsay, had tried to sell him more charms – make it a bracelet! – and that had given him the idea, but he hadn’t been content to buy a job lot from Ramsay; instead, he’d painstakingly built this, and it was like Strike, in that it was a bit clunky and inelegant, the charms mis-matched, but there was so much thought in every one of them: private jokes and shared memories, incommunicable to anyone but the two of them.
A silver Land Rover, representing the car which perhaps only Strike would miss as much as she did; the Houses of Parliament, where she’d worked undercover and planted a bug every bit as legally suspect as the one for which Mitch Patterson had been arrested (she’d never told Murphy that); a miniature enamelled shield bearing the coat of arms for Skegness, where they’d once eaten chips together, and joked about donkey rides, and interviewed the key witness in a thirty-year-old murder case; a silver sheep (‘What does your dad do for a living? You’ve never told me.’ ‘He’s a professor of sheep medicine, production and reproduction… why’s that funny?’); a tiny pair of silver scales (‘That’s Libra, it’s my sign, I used to have a keyring with that on it.’ ‘Yeah, well, I’m team rational.’); a silver and enamel robin, the newest and brightest charm of them all, for her name, and, perhaps, for Christmas; and in the middle of them all, what she didn’t doubt had been the most expensive of the lot, barring the chain itself: the little silver orb, with its ornate catch which, when released, unfurled into the jointed masonic cross, and she’d raised it close to her eyes to examine the symbols inscribed inside before she realised she couldn’t see, because of the tears now pouring down her cheeks.
What did you do that for?she thought, and she slid off the side of the bath onto the floor and sobbed quietly into her knees, two patches of tears spreading on her pyjama bottoms, the bracelet clutched in her hand.
