Page 391 of The Hallmarked Man
‘He was probably counting on the fact that she was too scared of him ever to tell anyone the truth. She’ll have been bloody useful in drawing in other young women, too. It’s a good pose, devoted single father, widowed young… but he got her pregnant. Hard to explain.’
‘You think it was his baby? Not Tyler’s?’
‘I suppose we’ll find out in due course, but yeah, I suspect it was his, and Tyler was prepared to help her raise it.’
Strike had asked himself whether he would have been as generous as Tyler Powell in this regard, without reaching a conclusion.
‘Strike, I’m going to have to go, I think I can see the hotel,’ said Robin.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll speak to you when you get back.’
He felt he ought not to remain outside, vaping, while the mourners thronged the function room, but as he turned to re-enter the hotel, he saw Ralph Lawrence exiting it. Strike suspected he’d been watching for the detective to end his call and waited, more in curiosity than concern, to hear what Lawrence wanted to say to him this time.
‘How are you?’ asked the man that Strike was now, reluctantly, prepared to concede was probably MI5.
‘Fine,’ said Strike. ‘You?’
‘You did a remarkable thing, finding him.’
‘Lucky guess,’ said Strike indifferently.
‘D’you know why he killed himself that way?’
‘I’ve got a suspicion,’ said Strike. When Lawrence looked quizzical, Strike said,
‘I saw a Daesh video on the dark net. Hooded guy chained to a barbell and chucked off a bridge. It occurred to me that that might have been Ben Liddell.’
Lawrence glanced over his shoulder at the function room, which was still filling with black-clad people, then said in a low voice:
‘Four men from E Squadron were smuggled into a territory Britishforces aren’t known to be operating in. The aim was to make contact with an anti-Islamic State group and provide them with state-of-the-art comms.
‘The mission went balls up. They were in a small plane, got hit by an anti-aircraft missile. Pilot died instantly, plane was on fire and nosediving; they had to bail at low altitude. Two Regiment guys died on impact with the ground, Semple was seriously injured and barely conscious, but was dragged to cover by Liddell.
‘They had a radio and enough ammo to hold off anyone trying to find them for a few hours, but it was touch and go whether help was going to arrive before they were captured or killed. When the rescue party arrived, they found Semple alone. Liddell had left the shelter to try and get water for Semple. He never came back.
‘MI6 passed the details to us when Semple went missing. They’d found the execution video you watched, but Islamic State don’t seem to have realised the man they caught was SAS, otherwise they’d have made a far bigger deal of it. Liddell will have known the top priority was not to admit to being Regiment. His Arabic was good. God only knows who or what he pretended to be.
‘We wiped every trace of the damn video from the surface net and, as you’ll have seen, Liddell isn’t recognisable on it. Our concern, all along, has been stopping Niall Semple broadcasting his addled version of the mission to the world. When he came out of his coma he was angry and disorientated. Pre-injury, he’d been entrusted with some very sensitive information. This is a brave new world, Mr Strike: in the old days, we were trying to stop journalists getting hold of classified information, but these days, with social media, all Semple needed was an internet connection, and people working under deep cover would have been put at immediate risk.’
‘Does Rena Liddell know how her brother died?’
‘Semple might’ve told her, but she’s still not prepared to believe her brother’s dead. You were right regarding my concerns about her. I wasn’t just worried that Semple might have told her a garbled version of what happened on the mission, I was afraid that he’d shared information we most certainly wouldn’t want in the hands of an erratic woman with mental health problems.’
‘So what are you going to do, shove her away in another mental health facility?’
‘Little though you may believe me,’ said Lawrence coolly, ‘I dobelieve in civil liberties – but sometimes national security requires measures that might infringe some dreamer’s ideal rule of justice.’
‘How old’s your grandmother?’ asked Strike, and Lawrence looked startled.
‘What?’
‘You’ve just quoted Albert Pike,’ said Strike. ‘There’s a passage inMorals and Dogmaabout the general who cuts away a bridge to save the main body of his army, even if it means he sacrifices a battalion. Such actions aren’t unjust, Pike says, but “may infringe some dreamer’s ideal rule of justice”.’
‘Ah,’ said Lawrence. ‘How old’syourgrandmother?’
‘They’re both dead,’ said Strike.
Through the glass door leading back into the function he saw the stirring of the crowd that meant the family had arrived: Jade, in her black dress and coat, her twin beside her, holding her hand.
