Tha Hallmarked Man Real-Time Re-Read, Chapters 73-75: Two restaurants and a hotel room

"The dimly lit basement room, which was swathed
in greenery to suggest the rainforest" 

In Chapter 73, Strike surprises Robin by subbing for MIdge and joining her at a restaurant for surveillance. 

At eight o’clock the following evening, Robin, who’d been informed by Two-Times that his wife would be celebrating a female friend’s birthday at Coya, a Latin American restaurant in Mayfair, sat down to watch his so far blameless spouse drinking and eating with seven other women.

 The date is presumably Wednesday, Feb. 8th. Robin is wearing her Ritz outfit (blue dress and opal pendant) but also the matching earrings that RFM gave her for Christmas. This chapter is primarily an information dump, though naturally it is accompanied by Robin's "electric shock in the pit of her stomach" when Strike turns up. 

The main points of case-related catch-up:

• Strike has learned that Niall's Semples dead comrade in arms, Ben Lidell, had a sister named Rena, who could well be both their Scottish Gateshead and the woman Semple was planning to meet when he disappeared. 
• Bizarrely, even though the conversation makes Robin think of her Reata Lindvall lead, it does not seem to occur to either detective that Rena Liddel could also be "Rita Linda."
• Jim Todd is actually Todd Jameson, a convicted rapist who spent time in jail in Belgium for participating in a sex-trafficking ring. 
• Pamela was lured by from the shop by a text from a burner phone, claiming to be an old girlfriend of her husband's who what having an affair with him. 
• Robin has talked to Tyler Powell's father, who had no useful information and seemed not to care about his son.
• She has checked out the car accident and found no good evidence of tampering. 

There is some general case chat, particularly about the number of sexual predators that appear to be turning up among the suspects. Strike also passes on KFC's erroneous report that the girl Albie Simpson-White met at the bar was named "Clarissa," who spoke of an upcming trip to Sicily. It struck me on this read-through how much Kim messed this one up. If Tish was planning to go to Sardina to see her and Albie's mutual friend Rupert, they were bound to have mentioned him at some point in the conversation. KFC must have been too busy texting nudes of herself to have caught any of that conversation. 

Their personal conversation is very limited. Robin tells Strike the new Land Rover is great and, when he asks about house-hunting, Robin tells him they have an offer accepted. 

“Ah," said Strike, with the same old feeling of being punched in the solar plexus. "Congratulations."

"Thanks," said Robin, her eyes on her food.

Chapter 74 is short and sweet, with Strike and Bijou's meet-up in the Savoy for the DNA test on Thursday, February 9th. 

The knowledge that Robin and Murphy were definitely moving in together was still lying like lead in Strike’s stomach when he entered the Savoy Hotel from the Thames-facing side of the building at half past three the following afternoon.

Strike arrives first, and, in another example of his tremendous luck in stumbling into blues, flips through a magazine to find a magazine article about Cosmina Longcaster, which happens to mention she has taken a commercial DNA test. I was already strongly suspecting the incest angle by this point, and this alert pretty much clinched it for me, 

When Bijou takes the saple from Strike, her hand brushes his and he "withdrew his hand as though burned." Robin will have a very different reaction when she touches Strike's hand on Sark.

Like Strike, I hope this is absolutely the last glimpse we'll get of Bijou. 

“There’s just – there’s no need to be so foul about all this!"

"You’ve led a bloody sheltered life if you think this is foul," said Strike, and he left.

Chapter 75 picks up the next day (February 10th) with more developments:

Robin was standing outside the Longcaster house in Belgravia the next day when Strike called her.

"News," he announced baldly. "Kenneth Ramsay just called to tell me Jim Todd’s disappeared. He didn’t turn up to work at Ramsay Silver on Thursday, didn’t go to the Kingsway office on Friday, isn’t answering his phone and nobody’s answering the door at his flat." 

This phrasing is a bit odd, considering it is a Friday. If Todd had only recently vanished, I would expect Strike to say "yesterday" and "today" rather than "Thursday" or "Friday." And, if it was the previous week, I'd expect him to day "last Thursday" and "last Friday." not to mention that it is odd for Ken "Find my silver!" Ramsay to wait a full week to give Strike this news. At this point, we don't know if Todd had already been killed or has just gone into hiding--  he clearly knew he was in danger since he left his flat for his mom's-- but if he's already dead, those corpses would have been a real mess by the time Strike found them on February 26th. 

As Robin is leaving her stake-out of the Longcaster's to go meet RFM for dinner, she gets a call from her mother that Carmen and Martin have split up--- again.  Robin makes an odd remark that Carmen is at home with a sick baby, given that on Sark, she will tell Strike Dirk did not leave the hospital until Feb. 21st. Her call to Linda is interrupted by Chloe's supposed friend, "Zeta" who tells Robin she suspects Tyler Semple of trying to run her off the road in retaliation for gossiping about Hugo and Ann Marie's car accident. 

Robin's dinner with Murphy has some odd vibes. He starts off a bit hostile, wanting to know why Robin hadn't told him that the police had ruled out Knowles as the body in the vault. He asks some rather pointed questions about Strike's criminal contact (Shanker), then volunteers a decent chunk of information about the police tracing the silver getaway car. But, Robin (and we) are left to question his motives when he then takes the discussion into the area of children. Robin is relatively truthful here, telling him she doesn't know if she will eve want kids, and giving Murphy an out if that's a "deal-breaker."  Unfortunately, it isn't, and all of this takes Robin back to an uncomfortable place. 

“I know I need to make a decision about egg freezing. I know time’s not on my side."

The feeling of constriction she’d experienced back in that sea captain’s house in Deptford, which she’d thought she’d left behind for ever, had returned.

 On Tuesday, we'll meet Todd's neighbors, a really nasty dog named Lennon and Robin's ever-so-handy pepper spray. 

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