The Hallmarked Man Real-Time Re-Read, Chapters 60-64: Why Robin is a pit pony and Valentine Longcaster is Bellatrix Lestrange.

Greetings from snowy (actually, mostly sleety) Virginia, where roads are practically impassible!  Playing catch-up on the re-read. 

Strike and Robin continue their physical and emotional distance from each other in this next section. Strike has only one brief chapter (61) ,so I'll start with that, then address Robin's visit to God's Own Junkyard and its aftermath. 

Two and a half hours after leaving Crieff, Strike broke his journey south in the small Scottish town of Moffat, where a café in the market square supplied him with a coffee and a burger and a welcome chance to rest his right knee.

 Strike makes a pit stop in this small town, but is still disgruntled and sore, with even the town's ram statue reminded him of Robin. 

..the statue of a ram standing atop a pile of rocks, visible through the café window, darkened his mood still further. Sheep, even when cast in bronze, had a tendency to remind him of Robin’s father, the professor of sheep medicine, and of the evening he and Robin had spent at the Ritz together, when she’d first given Strike this information.

Strike checks out the note the Niall Semple left behind and, though he can read the adage "Omnia in numeris sita sunt” which is Latin for "Everything is veiled in numbers," he can't make much sense of it. He tries to find connections between Freemasonry and the SAS, but comes up with fairly little. Then, he takes a call from Eric Wardle, which gives hm both case and personal information:

• The police are mad that he got pictures of Wright's body. 
• KFC is described as a "shit-stirrer" and "man-eater" which is hardly surprising given what we've seen of her so far. 
• Wardle himself is suffering from depression, and on leave from the Met. 

It's very interesting that his immediate thought is that his friend might be at risk of suicide. Although Robin was clearly more emotionally affected by what happened to Cherie Gittins in TRG, Strike apparently hasn't forgotten either. He assures Wardle that the agency will happily hire him and arranges to meet for curry when he gets back to London. 

Call finished, Strike looked out of the window, feeling even more depressed. The rain was falling more thickly outside. He pulled out his vape, caught the censorious eye of the waitress, put it back in his pocket and ordered a second coffee.

We'll shift back to London to see how Robin's Tuesday is progressing in Chapter 60. 

Four hundred and fifty miles away, Robin was standing in an industrial estate in Walthamstow, watching the entrance of a large storage unit that housed God’s Own Junkyard.

It's cold, it's boring and Robin is annoyed to see Ciara Porter as one of the models in Valentine's photo shoot.  She's continuing the pattern of multiplying Strike's offenses in her head. 

...to Robin, she’d forever be one of the women Cormoran Strike had slept with. London was littered with them, apparently: possibly she’d sat opposite one of them on the bus just now, or been served coffee by another before boarding it…

Stop obsessing about him, for God’s sake, you need to get over this.

She notices a mechanic with a bandana tied over his face, but apparently does not suspect anything about him at this stage. A call from an angry Ryan Murphy about the Silver Vault corpse pictures does not help. Honestly, just forget about his drinking on the sly and dropping hints about babies. What I really want him to do is to stop calling Robin while she's on the job.  They argue, she hangs up on him and ponders all the things she is not telling her boyfriend. 

She hung up, now torn between rage and misery on account of Murphy as well as Strike. It was just as well she hadn’t told him that MI5 had warned them off investigating Niall Semple, wasn’t it? Or about DCI Malcom Truman’s alleged membership of the masonic lodge? Or the rubber gorilla hidden in her sock drawer?

The man with his face covered like a bandit was still watching her.

By Chapter 62, it's late evening. Robin has a spaghetti dinner with Valentine F*cking Longcaster. 

It was half past six and dark on the industrial estate. Most of the people moving in and out of the units surrounding God’s Own Junkyard had disappeared, though a few stragglers remained, for which Robin was grateful, because it made her own presence seem less odd.

Ciara is part of a group of four models who stare and laugh when Robin approaches Vile-lentine, and one of them asks an odd question "Is this PP?" which VFL seems to confirm. Robin suggests talking at a nearby casual pasta house. Definitely not VFL's "kind of place."

He shows up 20 minutes and several snorts of cocaine later. Honestly, this isn't one of Robin's better interviews. She allows Longcaster to bait her and speaks too much about her personal life. It is interesting that Robin orders spaghetti carbonara, but can barely bring herself to eat any, whereas she cooks and enjoys it so readily on Sark. It is a very nice contrast with how her thinking about Strike deteriorates so much during this conversation, versus the healing it undergoes later. 

While perhaps not as objectively evil as Jonathan Wace--I doubt he has drowned anyone or trafficked babies-- Valentine must be the single nastiest individual we've seen since Indigo Upcott. In this single rather short interview with Robin, he manages to disparage Rupert, Decima, Decima's first husband, Strike and Robin herself.  We know he was "Charlotte's biggest fan" and blames Strike and, by extension, his allies for her suicide. At this point, his vitriol and willingness to accept everything she said at face value, suggests an obsession with her. Surely, if he was her closest friend, he know of her lying tendencies? But for right now, he seems willingly blind to them. If, as I have argued before, Charlotte is the Voldemort analog in this series, Vile seems best suited to the role of Bellatrix Lestrange.

VFL's major weapon is, like your average elementary student, name-calling. 

• Rupert is "a conviving little sh*t on the make" "thick as sh*t" and "a gigolo." 
• Mr. Mullins in "a leech."
• Decima is "not actually a cashpoint, just shaped like one."
• Strike is "Colonel Brokeby" and "a point-scoring little f*cking pedant" 
• Robin is "Miss Marple" and a "brazen bitch" even if he does disguise that last one in Latin.*

But the thing Vile really expects to nail Robin with is his explanation of "PP," which stands for "pit pony"--or, as Charlotte apparently meant it, “Cormoran Strike’s scruffy little Yorkshire helper.” However, as others have pointed out, this nickname suggests Charlotte didn't really know much about pit ponies, or Robin. Pit ponies were valued and essential workers in the coal-mining industry, at times considered harder to replace than the humans that worked alongside them. Even more importantly, when laws were passed in 1842 to protect women and young boys from the harsh working conditions of the mines, ponies took their place. Given Robin's advocacy of abused women and children in this series, pit pony is actually rather fitting for her. Like Jonathan Wace with his "Artemis" moniker, Charlotte actually proposed a more appropriate sobriquet than she knew. 

The one useful clue Vile provides amid his trash-talk is the confirmation that his younger sister (and apparently the one he likes) Cosima became upset when Rupert crashed Sacha Leguard's party and his flash of anger when Robin hints she'll track the girl down and ask her why. 

What would be interesting to know is if Robin is aware of what a pathological liar Charlotte was. She obviously knows she, like Matthew and Tom Turvey, spread the story that she and Strike started an affair shortly after they started working together. 

“You two were f*cking as soon as he left Charlotte," said Valentine.

"You’ve been misinformed," said Robin.

"It’s you who’s been misinformed, dear."

"I think I’m more likely to know who I’m sleeping—"

Yet, Vile immediately follows this with the lie about Strike being physically abusive to Charlotte. It is a testimony to how much Strike's ethical illogic in the Silver Vault case, compounded with his lies-by-omission about Bijou, have eroded her confidence in Strike that she gives this the most credence of any of the lies VFL tells her, when there are others (Strike continuing to sleep with Charlotte after 2010, Strike verbally lashing out at Charlotte on the night of her suicide) that are much more consistent with his behavior patterns. 

Thankfully, Robin finds enough backbone to end the interview with an, "I think we're done."

He strode away, jacket over his shoulder, swearing at a woman who was too slow to move aside from the door.

Robin starts Chapter 63 obviously shaken by what VFL told her. 

Robin didn’t have the slightest appetite for her spaghetti now.

She is distracted by a call from her mother, who had already tried to reach her twice since she came to the restaurant. Linda is calling with the news that Carmen had delivered her baby a month early, and that the baby had suffered a birth injury, which naturally adds to Robin's distress. She leaves the restaurant without her dinner (an American restaurant would have offered a to-go container!) and calls Ilsa, thus repeating her error of Lethal White, when she allows herself to be distracted with a phone call while walking a dark street alone, when she knows someone is stalking her. 

While Ilsa tells her an objective view of the night Strike disarmed a drunk Charlotte on the barge and embarks on a mini-lecture on women's capacity for domestic violence, Robin becomes aware of an approaching man. Unlike in Harrods, this time she reacts sensibly. 

Was it Robin’s imagination, or was the man behind her speeding up? She looked back again. Yes, he was definitely closer, and one hand seemed to be inside his jacket.

"… just fell apart on the stand. It couldn’t have happened the way she claimed. Meanwhile, her partner had been seen covered in abrasions and bruises…"

The man behind Robin passed beneath a street light. He was wearing a latex gorilla mask.

"Ilsa," Robin shouted, "I’m on Shernhall Street, heading towards Wood Street station and I’m being followed, and I’m about to film him and describe him to you.”

Thus, the chapter ends on a cliffhanger that makes us glad that the alternating Strike-Robin chapter pattern has been broken.

“ILSA,’ said Robin, now screaming, ‘HE’S GOT A KNIFE—”

Then, Chapter 64 resolves the situation rather anti-climatically:

“You need to stop," the man repeated, from behind the mask. "All right? You need to leave it. Then you won’t get hurt. Stop."

Before Robin could say or do anything else, he threw the dagger at her feet, turned, and sprinted away.

The dagger isn't even a real weapon, but a masonic ceremonial piece. And there's still no clue as to what investigation Robin is actually supposed to stop. Apparently, he thinks Robin will change careers on his say-so. I was half expecting to find Linda behind the mask, but I guess she's got an alibi, being at the hospital with her new grandson. 

Speaking of which, and somewhat incredibly, after reassuring a panicked Ilsa that she hasn't been knifed to death, Robin takes a follow-up call from Linda, telling her not only is her nephew premature and injured, but Martin's temper has gotten him banned from the hospital. 

Robin heads home, bags and hides the dagger, then tries, unsuccessfully, to distract herself with first food, then a hot bath. It is at home, in her apartment that we see the erratic thought patterns that indicate how much both Robin's recent traumas (Chapman Farm, the ectopic pregnancy, the gorillas) and her current stressors (Strike and her uncertainties about him, Charlotte and Bijou, RFM, her sick nephew) are affecting her psychologically. 

The gorilla mask swam into her mind’s eye, the pupils glinting in the street light. He was the third man who’d come at her, out of the dark: she remembered the hands throttling her in the stairwell, the scream of her rape alarm, the knife slicing her flesh…

Charlotte Campbell brandishing a knife on a barge; it’s on him Charlotte’s dead; a premature baby with an injured arm; fifty-five per cent chance of a live birth; the box at Chapman Farm; you don’t know what it’s like, to worry yourself sick about your daughter; a bracelet, a dagger and a rubber gorilla, hidden from the man she was house-hunting with; when you start undermining a fucking police investigation… We’re just trying to find Rupert Fleetwood… I’m really disappointed we didn’t get the house… Me? I’m great. Don’t worry about me…”

In fact, if we look at the DSM criteria for PTSD, we will see that Robin is experiencing many of the symptoms. 

• Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic event(s) (See above)
• Recurrent distressing dreams in which the content and/or affect of the dream are related to the traumatic event(s) (She's been dreaming about Chapman Farm since Chapter 7!)
• Avoidance of or efforts to avoid distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic event(s) ("Don't think about it" "Stop obsessing")
• Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world (In Robin's case, largely about Strike!)
• Persistent negative emotional state (e.g., fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame)
• Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others (From both CBS and RFM, and, to a lesser extent, her mother.)
• Hypervigilance.
• Sleep disturbance (e.g., difficulty falling or staying asleep or restless sleep)

I am a behavior analyst, not a clinical psychologist, but I think Prudence would agree that Robin meets the diagnostic criteria.  The chapter closes with more intrusive memories and hypervigilance. 

Why was she thinking about Strike, not Murphy? She turned on the TV, then turned it off almost at once. She wanted to be able to hear footsteps.

You are a fucking pit pony. Getting dragged along in the dark, like some dumb animal.

You need to leave it. Then you won’t get hurt. Stop.”

I'm not expecting to go anywhere tomorrow, so I expect the reading schedule will be back on track Tuesday.  

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*Quod si non aliud potest, ruborem ferreo canis exprimamus ore translates as "But if nothing else avails, let's force a blush on the brazen face of that bitch."