Page 154 of The Hallmarked Man
‘No,’ said Zacharias. ‘Try her parents, they’re in Hampshire.’
Strike made a note, then said,
‘What was that about Rupert ripping up his clothes?’
‘Not hisclothes,’ said Zacharias, as though Strike were the one who’d said it, not him, ‘just this stupid bloody lucky T-shirt he used to wear all the time. He tore it up. Like a – you know – gesture, I s’pose. Get more sympathy off Tish,’ he sneered.
‘When did Rupert tear up his T-shirt?’
‘I don’t know, not long before I left…’
Zacharias glanced at something out of the frame of the shot, possibly an approaching employer, because he next said,
‘I’m going to have to go, I’ve got work to do.’
‘What are you up to, over there?’ asked Strike.
‘Eco-lodge tourism stuff,’ said Zacharias dourly.
It was, Strike thought, the twenty-first century equivalent of shunting off the unsatisfactory son to the colonies. Possibly the ease with which Zacharias’s family had provided him with a comfortable sinecure accounted for the throwaway suggestion that Rupert Fleetwood might have disappeared to the Alps to become a ski instructor.
‘Can I ask one last question?’ said Strike.
‘What?’ said Zacharias ungraciously.
‘Did either you or Rupert know a man called Osgood, or Oz?’
‘No,’ said Zacharias.
‘Ever hear Rupert mention anyone of that name?’
‘No,’ said Zacharias again.
Strike heard a door open offscreen.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said Zacharias hurriedly. He leaned forwards, pressed a button, and disappeared.
The detective sat back in his chair, frowning at the blank screen, then looked down at his notes.
Tish Benton knows more?
Fleetwood speaks German and Italian
Destroyed ‘lucky T-shirt’
He doubted this information would crack the case, and he needed some kind of breakthrough, because the expense of the expanding investigation was growing steadily higher. There was still a trip to Scotland and Ironbridge to come, and Strike hadn’t forgotten that Decima’s restaurant appeared to be in trouble. Tearing the page out of his notebook, he got to his feet, unfolded the wooden wings overthe cork noticeboard and pinned these sparse notes beneath the picture of Rupert Fleetwood.
There’d been a new addition to the board since he last viewed it, clearly put there by Robin when she’d passed through the office. This was a printout of the article Robin had found online, screenshotted and already sent to Strike. It related to a Swedish woman called Reata Lindvall, who’d been murdered alongside her six-year-old daughter in Belgium, in 1998. Her ex-lover had been found guilty of the crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Strike had already responded to Robin’s text about Lindvall with a non-committal ‘worth bearing in mind’, but he didn’t want to clutter up the board with things that, in his view, had only remote speculative value. All their current candidates for William Wright had been children when Lindvall had been murdered and none had any known connection to Belgium. Had any other detective at the agency pinned the paragraph there, he’d have taken it straight down again, but as it was Robin’s, he left it there, for now.
Taking a step backwards, coffee in hand, Strike examined the pattern most of the notes made, set in columns beneath their possible Wrights. Strike had no hunches about any of them, no underlying certainty thattherewas their man; it seemed eminently likely, still, that William Wright had been somebody else entirely.
He returned to his desk, picked up his mobile, and called Robin. She answered, and he could hear that she was driving.
‘Where are you?’
‘Mrs Two-Times is in Chelsea,’ said Robin.
