Page 389 of The Hallmarked Man
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow
Of terror, and insane distress,
And headlong fate, be happiness.
Matthew Arnold
Memorial Verses: April, 1850
Eleven days after Ian Griffiths and friends had been taken into custody, and Strike and Sapphire Neagle had been driven by ambulance to the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, Strike donned his only black suit in his attic flat, and drove, again, to Hereford.
He and Robin had been planning to tidy away the last fragment of the silver vault case that very day, but then Jade Semple had called the office and issued Strike with a personal invitation to her husband’s funeral. Semple’s decayed and waterlogged corpse had been found, as Strike had guessed, at the bottom of Regent’s Canal, beneath the railway bridge, weighted to the bed by a briefcase full of bricks to which the body’s wrist remained handcuffed.
‘Think I should go,’ he’d told Robin, though with some regret. He’d fancied another trip with her, even if he’d lost all hope of capitalising on beautiful scenery to derail her impending engagement. ‘You’ve earned the last bit, you can do it alone.’
Strike had no worries about Robin’s safety today. Even if Griffiths had trafficking associates in Italy, there’d be no point attacking Robin now that multiple computers and phones were being examined by forensic experts, and a network spanning across the continent was being slowly and methodically revealed. The full scale of the storyhadn’t yet seeped into the press. No journalist knew of the connection between the murdered man at Ramsay Silver and the trafficking ring. All that had been reported was that a missing girl had been found at a house in Ironbridge and, a few days later (which had reached several newspaper front pages), that the body of a second young woman had been recovered under the lumpy concrete floor of Griffiths’ homemade basement. The corpse hadn’t yet been identified, although the agency’s Met contact, George Layborn, had confidentially revealed to Strike that the body was that of a young, pregnant female.
The detective agency’s involvement in Griffiths’ arrest was, so far, unknown to the papers, which Strike imagined suited the police as well as it did him. Nobody had made much of a fuss about skeleton keys this time; nobody close to the case seemed to feel unnecessary force had been used against Griffiths and his fellow rapists. Strike’s almost severed ear had helped there, of course. There also seemed tacit agreement that as long as the agency stepped quietly aside, allowing the police to talk blandly of ‘sources’ and ‘tips’, and take credit for busting the trafficking ring, any unorthodox or indeed illegal acts committed by Strike, Wardle and Barclay, up to and including several physical assaults, could be overlooked.
Meanwhile, Robertson’s scoop on Lord Oliver Branfoot had been published in theSunday Telegraph(‘fuckin’ lawyers near enough took a fuckin’ stool sample off me’, as the journalist had informed Strike by phone) and for the previous forty-eight hours, it had appeared there was little other news in the United Kingdom, even including the body found under Griffiths’s basement floor. Danny de Leon had cut himself a lucrative tell-all deal with theSun; Branfoot’s wife and sons had been followed down the street by shouting reporters, until one young Branfoot took a swing at a cameraman, missed and hit a female journalist in the jaw; the regular host of the quiz show on which Branfoot had made a dozen appearances had issued a ‘shocked and disgusted’ statement; Branfoot himself, who was rumoured to have hired the most expensive PR agency in London, had disappeared from public view, though he’d issued a statement that neither confirmed nor denied anything, but did so in a tone of dignified injury; Craig Wheaton appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth; and several young women who’d unknowingly been caught on film in Black Prince Road had banded together to hire none other than Andrew Honbold QC.
It was of this furore that Strike found himself thinking as he stood in the weak April sunlight, standing respectfully at the back of the crowd surrounding the grave into which Niall Scott Semple’s earthly remains would be lowered. The churchyard of St Martin’s already had its fair share of SAS graves, all with almost identical headstones of pale stone, engraved with the regiment’s winged dagger badge.
Strike had been more affected by the discovery of Semple’s body than he’d expected or admitted, even to Robin. Compared to the sensation made by Branfoot’s wrongdoings, and the discovery of Jolanda’s body under the concrete floor, Semple’s suicide had occasioned hardly a ripple in the press. The unspoken consensus appeared to be that his death was sad, but the sort of thing you’d expect to happen to a brain-damaged soldier, and then the public moved on, preferring to gloat over Lord Branfoot’s gaudy, dirty excesses. To Strike, though, there was something in this ending in murky water, the body lying there unseen and unnoticed, that tugged brutally at the gut, something beyond grief. At least part of the reason he was here, rather than travelling to Italy with Robin, was that he’d seen comments beneath the few, scattered news reports of Semple’s death that had angered him: token expressions of regret followed by lengthy diatribes about Britain’s foreign policy, and the role the army played in colonial and oppressive enterprises. None of them seemed to wonder whether Semple and his ilk had risked their lives so that more civilians, maybe even themselves or their families, might not be run down by a murderous extremist while crossing a bridge.
Such thoughts were distracting Strike from the vicar’s words, though not the throbbing in his left ear. He’d needed microsurgery to reattach it, because it had been almost completely cut off. He had a dim memory of someone saying he might lose the whole thing, and a slightly clearer memory of laughing when a nurse suggested he could still have cosmetic surgery, if he was worried about the appearance.
This wasn’t the first time Strike had turned up at a church service injured, but even so, he felt his ear bandage was unreasonably conspicuous. The bruising to his face – nobody had been swift enough to catch him when he’d fainted in Griffiths’ sitting room, meaning he’d slammed face first into the floor – hadn’t yet faded completely, either, which added to the impression of a man who’d decided to participate in a cage fight before driving on to the funeral.
The vicar concluded his remarks. Strike was tall enough to seethe coffin being lowered, even though three rows of people stood between him and the grave. Jade was sobbing quietly into a handkerchief, flanked by her twin and her mother.
At last, the committal was over. Strike had just set off back to his car when his phone rang. He’d hoped it would be Robin, but it was Wardle. As Strike knew Wardle to be in contact with Iverson, the redhead on the murder investigation team, he took the call.
‘They’ve found the Wolves weights,’ said Wardle without preamble. ‘And a pair of human hands.’
‘Petts Wood?’
‘Yeah, yesterday evening. They’re still searching.’
An enormous wave of relief washed over Strike at this news. Even as he’d been driving along towards Hereford this morning he’d been plagued with doubts about whether Tyler Powell would be identified, and Griffiths’ hand in his death proven.
‘Sapphire’s talking,’ said Wardle, ‘a lot. Griffiths picked her up in London, kept her in a shitty room with two other underage girls, regularly visited by Wade King, Todd and assorted others, then moved her north to Ironbridge, where the shit-heels we met took turns.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Strike in disgust. ‘Listen, you wouldn’t happen to know whether Griffiths forced her to impersonate a couple of young women over the phone, would you?’
‘He did, yeah,’ said Wardle, who sounded surprised. ‘How did you—?’
‘Robin realised. She got calls from two girls, a supposed great-niece of Dilys Powell’s, and a girl called Zeta we never traced. Both times they were feeding her misinformation about Tyler Powell and trying to find out what we knew. One of those times, the girl got local names wrong.’
‘Ah,’ said Wardle. ‘Well, they’ve found about six different burner phones so far in Griffiths’ house, plus a curly wig and a ruby necklace hidden in a case on top of a wardrobe.’
‘Jesus, Iverson’s not shy about sharing information, is she?’ said Strike, surprised. ‘I’d’ve thought she’d have kept her mouth shut after the way they went after Murphy for helping us.’
‘She, ah… we had a drink last night,’ said Wardle, with a tone of embarrassed constraint that told Strike all he needed to know. Susan Iverson, he guessed, was in the same mood he’d been when he’d accepted Bijou Watkins’ suggestion of a drink over a year previously:in search of ego-salving distraction, her hopes of Murphy irrevocably dashed. Possibly, Strike thought, with a sagging of his spirits, the rebound onto Wardle meant Robin and Murphy were now, at last, definitely engaged. Instead of saying any of this, he asked,
