Page 231 of The Hallmarked Man
Wardle drank more lager before answering.
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘My mum’s just died.’
‘Shit,’ said Strike, who’d had no idea of this. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah. Last month. She was never right, after my brother,’ said Wardle. ‘Broke her heart.’
His words were coming as though each adhered to his throat, and needed to be pulled up, with effort.
‘She chose not to go for a second round of chemo… raised us both as a single mum. We were her life. Terry dying half-killed her, and then April left me, and she didn’t see nearly as much of Liam any more.’
‘Liam?’
‘My son,’ said Wardle, with a faint smile. ‘The kid you just saw me put to bed.’
‘Oh, yeah, of course.’
‘Anyway… Mum left a lot more money than I expected. She came into an inheritance herself, right before she died… never got to enjoy it. Before she went, I kept telling myself I’d be mad not to hang on at work for the pension, but with what she left, I could still see Liam right.’
The policeman sighed, then said,
‘Shall we go and sit on better chairs? I spend all night in here on my laptop, sometimes, getting a numb arse…’
The sitting room held a three-piece suite, a television and little else. As Strike passed over the threshold, a distant wail of ‘Daddy!’ was heard.
‘Shit,’ muttered Wardle, and he left for the spare bedroom.
Strike sat down on the sofa, lager in hand, eyes on the television screen, thinking of that wailed word, ‘daddy’. He’d never used theword to address any man in his life, because the nearest thing he’d ever had to a father had been Ted. A very long time ago, as a boy, he’d longed to be able to say it to Rokeby, to be able to talk about him as ‘dad’, but he never had. Strike had been a stickler for accuracy, even as a child. You didn’t call a man you’d met for ten minutes your dad. He imagined the baby girl to whom Bijou had recently given birth calling him ‘daddy’, and drank more lager.
The cartoon Wardle’s son had been watching had finished. Some kind of comedy news quiz had taken its place, and Strike suddenly realised he was looking at Lord Oliver Branfoot, who sat hunched behind a lit-up podium beside a young comedian.
Large, overweight and round-shouldered, Branfoot was wearing a suit that looked as though he’d slept in it. His dark hair was either badly cut or messed up to seem that way, while his large, fleshy nose and droopy eyes gave him the droll look of a giant garden gnome.
The quiz host was speaking.
‘Of what did President Trump say this week, “the enemies keep saying it’s terrible”?’
Branfoot hit the buzzer first.
‘His hair?’ he said, in a plummy voice, which got an easy round of laughter. ‘Weally,’ said Branfoot, straight-faced, blinking at the studio audience as though surprised by their reaction. ‘Sewiously. It must be that.’
‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ said the comedian sitting next to Branfoot, which earned another round of cheap laughter.
‘I’m afwaid I take sewious offence at that wemark,’ said Branfoot, mock-dignified. He always seemed to step up his usage of words with ‘r’s in them when on television, milking the comedy value of his speech impediment. ‘I may not be Wichard Gere, but I don’t walk about with what appears to be Shwedded Wheat on my head.’
‘The answer,’ said the host, over the audience’s renewed mirth, ‘is his Twitter account.’
‘’S’all right, he just called out in his sleep,’ said Wardle, reappearing in the room. ‘Oh Christ, not that Branfoot prick. Why do they keep inviting him on these things?’
‘Because he’s happy to play the jackass,’ said Strike.
‘I’m not sure that’s an act,’ said Wardle.
‘It’s a great act,’ said Strike, staring stonily at the screen. ‘That fucker knowsexactlywhat he’s doing.’
71
But I persist, because I have my spice
