The Hallmarked Man

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 9 From the most orthodox of recent crime writers to a very unorthodox one, J K Rowling of Harry Potter fame. After that series concluded, and one not very successful novel about social problems, she turned to a private investigator called Cormoran Strike who, together with his assistant Robin Ellacott (hired initially as a secretary, but providing sterling support which Strike realizes he needs), solves murder mysteries. I had read several of them previously but not owned any in the series. But when a friend came out from England earlier this year and asked what I would like, I said the latest Strike would be ideal. He duly turned up with The Hallmarked Man albeit he also brought along a box of Fortnum and Mason Turkish Delight, which was much more delectable. The Strike indeed was not delectable at all, though it was a most exciting read. Rowling seems more often than not to concentrate on the dregs of humanity, and this particular book had two different sexual perverts, a gang that had fights to the death between killer dogs which they and a whole host of onlookers bet on, and another of girls kept captive for sex. And the less ghastly characters furnished endless episodes of adultery and significant incest. The plot was based on a body found in the vault of a dealer in silver, the night after he had taken delivery of much of the collection of a Freemason. The body had been mutilated, and could not be recognized, but the police decided very soon that it was the body of a gangster killed at the orders of his uncle who ran the gang. But a woman called Decima Mullins hired Strike to prove if he could that this was the body of her boyfriend, who had suddenly disappeared, after he had fathered a baby with her. She believed he had found employment in the shop under the name William Wright. Rowling She was desperate, being the daughter of a rich club owner who despised her, and having finally found love did not want to accept that the much younger man had left her. Strike decided to take on the case, bizarre though it seemed, and soon established that the police had been careless, not even bothering with a DNA test, largely it seemed because the man in charge of the case was a Freemason and seemed to think it his duty to protect the Freemasons from any hint of having been involved. The police had received two other leads as regards missing persons, but they had dismissed them as not worth pursuing. One was a former SAS man who had been injured in a shady operation, and when Strike was pursuing the case he was told by a worthy who seemed to be from MI 5 that he should back off. The other was a youngster who had left the little town of Ironbridge where he had lived all his life when he was accused of having tampered with a car which led to the death of a boy and his girlfriend, the story being that he had been in love with the girl. It takes Strike a very long time to arrange interviews with the widow of the SAS man, who lived in Scotland, and the grandmother of the other who was near enough to the border. One reason he had taken on the case, he had to admit to himself, was that he welcomed the opportunity to travel a long distance with his partner Robin Ellacott, with whom he had finally acknowledged to himself he was in love. Cormoran Strike’s realization that he was in love with his partner could well have come too late, for she was in a steady relationship with a policeman, and they were thinking of moving in together into a house, having been sleeping together at his place or hers for some time. Much of the novel is taken up with the ratiocination about their feelings of the two detectives, compounded by Robin’s unwillingness to let down the policeman Ryan Murphy who is going through a tough time at work, and by the endless affairs Strike had had in the past, one of which came back to haunt him at a particularly bad time. Life is also complicated by a new assistant who had left the police and joined the firm, who tried to actively flirt with Strike while ignoring Robin. Going into detail about all this would be tedious, but though one often wished Rowling engaged in less repetitive analysis of the diffidence of the pair, I suppose such delicacy is not inconceivable in a pair who had been through so much – Robin’s first marriage had been a disaster, following on her being raped while a student, while Strike’s first love had recently committed suicide, after endless efforts to get involved with him again. After Strike had made elaborate preparations to stay in a hotel that would provide a suitably romantic setting on the trip to Scotland, Robin said she would not come, after another revelation about Strike’s previous indiscretions. They did meet in Ironbridge, and then worked together well, in interviewing the grandmother and also a neighbour whose daughter had it seemed to have been involved with the now vanished Tyler Powell, but had turned against him after the accident involving his car. Meanwhile Strike had received a note alleging that the body was that of a porn star and, having traced the woman who had dropped it in, found that he had been used by an unctuous peer to have sex with women which he watched through a two-way mirror. Dick de Lion had attempted some sort of blackmail on the peer, who had then wanted him eliminated. Strike deduced that de Lion came from Sark, and he and Robin went there, to find him alive and well, but desperate to stay hidden. He was told that the peer was going to be exposed, and advised to tell the police his story first, to ensure he was not charged as an accessory, and he agreed to do this at the urging of his brother, who had previously not believed his story. But they wanted time to break the story first to their mother. Strike had reason to dislike the peer, since he had got involved in vilifying Strike in association with a journalist who had accused Strike of paying call girls for information and then sleeping with them himself. This in turn was because Strike, or rather his new recruit from the police, Kim, had found that a woman they were trailing because her husband was suspicious was in fact having an affair with the journalist’s wife. As the above description of its first section shows, The Hallmarked Man is horrendously complex, and the complex peccadilloes of practically all its characters seem excessive even in a wicked world. But all these are put in the shade by the central villainy of the book, which is sexual trafficking which has led to young girls being taken captive for sex, and murder, for a variety of reasons. Strike and Robin first begin to suspect what is going on when they interview the downstairs neighbours of William Wright, the name used by the man working in the shop, though that brought them no nearer to establishing his identity before he had taken on the persona that had sought a job in the silver shop. The neighbours mentioned a woman and a man who had come to his room to strip it, and they soon deduce that a body found in a wood was that of the woman. The man they suspect is a shady character who called himself Oz on social media, having taken on the identity of a genuine music show producer. The latter had been traced because there were emails to him from the silver shop, but he had an alibi for the time of the murder. The other man could not be traced, but his technique, of inveigling young girls to go along with him, was clear, and Strike and Robin tried to trace one in particular whom he had tempted. It also transpires that a name Wright had mentioned in front of his neighbours belonged to a woman mentioned in Belgium some years back. Though Strike thought this far-fetched when Robin tried to find more information about her, there was corroboration in that she was Swedish, a single mother, and Oz had told the missing girl, according to her friend, that she reminded him of a Swedish girl he knew. Strike’s focus begins to crystallize when he realizes that the handyman in the silver shop, Jim Todd, had a shady past, which involved driving for the ring trafficking women including in Belgium. But he had been in jail there when the Swedish woman was murdered. Her body had been found in a wood, and it was assumed her infant daughter too had been killed, and her new partner was jailed for the murder. But the remains had been mutilated and it was possible that there had only been one body there. The parts needed for DNA had been cut away, as had happened with the body in the silver vault. Watching again and again the video footage, though it was not very clear, of what happened on the afternoon before the murder took place, Strike and Robin noticed some anomalies, most notably that the very heavy crate Todd and Wright had carried downstairs seemed to have had very little in it. And they worked out that a woman who had kept the manager upstairs for some time could well have been Sophia Medina, who had gone to Wright’s room and then been murdered. When Todd then is murdered, along with his mother, whose flat he had gone to for refuge, Strike begins to understand the rationale for the murder taking place in the vault, with the mutilation of the body designed both to disguise its identity and suggest that Masonic elements were involved. Then step by step the different elements in the whole conglomeration of horrors were resolved. The man who ran the dogfights was caught trying to take revenge on the person who had destroyed a dog he was looking after which he thought too dangerous to keep – though that was after Strike, in trying to catch him in the act, was mauled by a beast and only saved because Robin carried around with her a pepper spray, which also proved effective when one of the agents of the biggest villain, having tried to frighten her off, then tried to kidnap her. The loathsome lord had to listen to an account of his misdeeds at a dinner to which he had invited Strike and Robin, and then brought along the dodgy assistant who had left after Strike had made it very clear he found her advances offensive. Strike explained his host’s techniques, and Kim realized that she too had been watched, and filmed, having sex with a stud she had been introduced to. The host departs in high dudgeon, but the expose in the newspapers duly happens and de Lion earns a packet for his story. And then, having worked out exactly how the murder had happened, in the afternoon, with the murderer brought in in a crate and killing Wright while the manager was distracted, and then leaving the shop disguised as him, Strike sets off to confront him. Robin meanwhile finds the missing silver behind a false wall in the basement, put there by Todd that afternoon, while Wright had been sent to fetch a piece delivered elsewhere by the delivery man who had also been a driver for the trafficking ring – and who also died soon after the incident, though there did not seem to have been foul play in this case. Strike, along with his toughest assistant, and a police officer who had retired and joined him, breaks into the villain’s house when he had gone to the pub with his mates. But one of the gang is left behind, which is fortunate for he shows the basement used for relentless sex by several men with the girl held captive. Strike knocks him out and subdues the villain who nearly cuts off his ear in the process, and then his assistants turn up and handcuff the two men who had failed to flee in time, and also the two men in the basement. And while the policeman frees the girl, Strike engages in ruthless questioning, helped by some force from his other assistant, since he also wants on record how and why the man in the vault had been killed. High drama all the way, though interspersed with the story of Strike and Robin, which ends with him proposing to her just before she goes to the Ritz to have dinner with her boyfriend, knowing that he too is about to propose to her. She does not accept Strike, since obviously this story has to run and run. But the story of the client has a reasonably happy ending, because her boyfriend is discovered, and turns out to have had a very good reason for leaving her, namely that he was her half-brother – another quirk in a totally quirky, if gripping, tale.