‘An’ you tripped,’ said Strike, ‘because your tiny fuckin’ feet couldn’t fill his size nines.’
‘Strike, stop fucking talking,’ said Wardle’s impatient voice. ‘Let it go.’
‘You wen’ back t’the shop to mutilate the body. Couldn’ turn on the light… so you didn’ notice that footprint… it had dried… didn’t smudge… proves killing happened well before the mut’lation… but Todd wouldn’ help ’less it looked like the murder h’pened at night…’cause he was done for Belgium, an’ you got away scot-free… an’ don’t you fuckin’ tell me you never been to Belgium…’
Strike brandished Jones’ mobile at Griffiths.
‘That picture… your f’kin gig… see th’blonde in the picture? Thass Reata Lindvall, who died two months later… her daughter dis’ppeared… useful prop, little girl… f’r a man who wants to ’tract young women… an’ she grew up an’ she was useful, too, wasn’ she? In d’ffrent way… “Jolanda” means “violet” or “purple”… Chloe told ’im her real name… when they take ’part your computer… find a Google search on name Jolanda…’
‘Where is she? Wha’ve you done with ’er?’
‘He told me she’s under the concrete floor,’ whispered a childish voice.
Still wearing Strike’s overcoat, Sapphire stood, ghost-white, in the doorway.
Griffiths made to run for it, but he’d gone barely three paces when Barclay brought him down with a loud and satisfying bang.
‘Hard evidence,’ said Strike, opening the contacts on Jones’ phone. ‘Here we go…’
The number was stored under ‘LUGS NEW’. Strike pressed it.
Somewhere in another room, they heard the ringtone: Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’.
‘There y’are,’ Strike told Jones. ‘You’ve been played. He murdered your mate.’
Strike foolishly assumed standing up might make him feel better. The last thing he saw before his eyes rolled backward in his head and he passed out, was Jesus, smoking a joint.
EPILOGUE
He had found what he had sought with such labours and persistency. What else mattered?
124
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.
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 story hadn’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 the Sunday 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 the Sun; 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.