Page 18 of The Hallmarked Man
‘It’s got three Michelin stars.’
‘I’m not spending four hundred fucking quid on lunch unless they’re chucking in the table and chairs.’
Robin laughed, but stopped quickly, because it hurt.
‘I haven’t asked how it was in Cornwall.’
‘What? Oh. As you’d expect,’ said Strike. ‘Non-stop crying from Lucy. She’s taken virtually the entire contents of the house back to Bromley with her, which I doubt Greg’ll be happy about. Funeral was packed. I wish – shit, got to go, Mrs A’s on the move.’
Strike hung up, leaving Robin wondering what he wished.
In the absence of anything else to distract her, the disquiet she’d been trying to suppress ever since her talk with the surgeon intensified. After staring for a further minute at the name of the masonic lodge to which DCI Truman allegedly belonged, Robin moved her cursor back up to the top of her laptop screen, and, reluctantly, typed in: ‘egg freezing’.
8
It is the saddest of all sights upon this earth, that of a man lazy and luxurious… He is the faithless steward, that embezzles what God has given him in trust…
Albert Pike
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
The ex-wife of the cricketer Strike called ‘Arsehole’, and Pat, ‘Mr A’, was driving in the direction of her flat in Chelsea. While her social circle overlapped with that of Dominic Culpepper, she and the journalist had shown no sign so far of being anything other than nodding acquaintances. Strike had pitched to their cricketer client the idea of looking more closely at other people close to him to discover the source of leaks to Dominic Culpepper’s paper, but Arsehole – ‘living right up tae his name’, as Barclay had put it – had sneered at this suggestion, remaining insistent that the agency keep watching his ex-wife.
So Strike drove on through the steadily fading sunlight to Glebe Place, where the gorgeous ex-model parked her Mercedes S-Class and entered the townhouse she’d received as part of her divorce settlement. Strike parked his BMW, then settled back to watch the woman’s front door. Judging it safe to assume that, at a bare minimum, she was changing her clothes to go out again, he took out his mobile and found the number Decima had given him for Rupert Fleetwood’s Aunt Anjelica in Zurich.
The European dialling tone sounded long and shrill in his ear, and after a few seconds, was replaced by an upper-class voice.
‘Wallner.’
‘Mrs Anjelica Wallner?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name’s Cormoran Strike, and I’m a private detective. I was given your contact details by—’
‘You’re what? What did you say you are?’
He got as far as ‘private detective’ a second time, at which some sort of explosion seemed to happen at the end of the line.
‘What is this?What is this?Is this thatDecimaagain, or whatever her damn name is?’
‘I was hoping to ask you about your nephew, Rup—’
‘This is intolerable! First the police, then you!’
‘You’ve spoken to the police, have—?’
‘Who does she think she is, sending people to badger me?’
‘I understand she’s your nephew’s girlfriend,’ said Strike.
‘I’ve looked her up! I know who she is!’ said Rupert’s aunt. ‘Whathe thought he was doing, getting involved with the daughter of thatghastly man—’
‘You don’t like Dino Longcaster?’
‘It’s immaterial whether I like him or not! Andshe’sold enough to be his mother!’
‘Well, not qu—’
