Page 346 of The Hallmarked Man
Strike, meanwhile, was pacing up and down on the pavement in front of the hotel while concluding an urgent conversation with Wardle.
‘I need a name,’ Strike said, ‘and fast, or we’re fucked.’
‘I’ll get back as soon as I can,’ said Wardle, and hung up.
Strike now called Fergus Robertson.
‘Well, well, well,’ said the latter, answering almost immediately. ‘I was going to call you when I got a—’
‘Has Danny de Leon been in touch?’
‘This morning,’ said Robertson, lowering his gleeful voice, ‘and I owe you fucking big time for this. I’m gonna fly out to the Channel Islands Monday and interview him face to face. We’ll need corroboration, obviously, but this could be fucking mass—’
‘So the story’s not about to run?’
‘Jesus fucking Christ, Strike, you can’t slam something like that in the paper without running it past the legal department!’
‘Then you need to get someone with a camera out to Branfoot’s flat on Black Prince Road this evening.’
‘Why, what’s—?’
‘Nothing yet, but I’ll lay you odds before the night’s over he’ll have sent minions to strip out filming equipment and maybe the two-way mirror.’
‘Wait – you’re gonna fuckingwarnthe cunt?’
‘If de Leon had talked when I told him to, you’d already have published your scoop and I wouldn’t be sitting opposite the fucker at a dinner table,’ said Strike angrily. ‘I’m doing you a favour here: if you want to salvage your exposé, get someone out to Black Prince Road. I’ve got to go, I’m expecting a phone call.’
He hung up and continued to pace, watched by the Goring’s bowler-hatted doorman, but after a further five minutes Wardle still hadn’t called back. Deciding he couldn’t leave Robin alone with Branfoot and Kim any longer, Strike climbed the steps back into the hotel.
‘Ah, here he is!’ said Branfoot, as he spotted Strike heading for their table. ‘Shall we order before we get down to business?Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle!’
‘Catullus wanted Fabullus to provide the food and drink, though,’ said Strike, sitting down. ‘I thought you were paying?’
This surprised a laugh out of Branfoot.
‘He also wanted Fabullus to pwovide a girl, “pwetty and willing”, don’t forget, but yes, Mr Stwike, I’m paying. So you know Catullus?’
‘Some,’ said Strike.
‘Lucky our gwisly littlewokefwiends haven’t ever wead him, isn’t it? They’d be burning down our libwawies.’
Branfoot kept up a volley of cheery talk while the four consulted their menus.
‘I canheartilywecommend the twuffle-stuffed chicken. Don’t stint yourselves, I shall be starting with the caviar myself, the oysters are wather wonderful here, too…’
Once food had been ordered, and the wine waiter had been dispatched after a fairly lengthy discussion with Branfoot, the latter said,
‘You speak Latin too, Miss Ellacott?’
‘No,’ said Robin.
‘Pedicabo ego uos et iwumabo, Auweli pathice et cinaede Fuwi…those are the opening lines of Poem Sixteen, in which Catullus thweatens to sodomise Auwelius and owally wape Fuwius, because they’d jeered at his soppier poems,’ said Branfoot. ‘Only pwoper way to deal with cwitics, eh?’
‘I’d run that past a focus group before you make it your election platform,’ said Strike, and Branfoot laughed again.
‘Where have we got to, so far?’ Strike asked the table at large.
‘We’ve barely scwatched the surface,’ said Branfoot, with the slight smirk that Robin had noticed never quite left his face. ‘I was congwatulating Miss Ellacott on the important wole your agency played in closing down the UHC and adumbwating some of my concerns wegarding the pwivate detective business. Miss Ellacott has been playing her cards vewy close to her chest.’
