The Hallmarked Man Real-time Re-read; Chapters 80-83: From dog bite to a pizza in Sark.

I started this Real-Time Re-Read with the goal of covering The Hallmarked Man at roughly the same time of year in which the story played out from November 2016 to April 2017.  I intentionally timed it so my Christmas Eve post would correspond to the bracelet gift.  Now, by luck, I've hit on another post in which the dates correspond exactly, and on another holiday. So, happy Valentine's Day, dear readers and please don't think of that dreadful Longcaster son when I say it. 

“Jesus fucking Christ – what was in that bottle?" gasped Strike, who hadn’t put on his seatbelt, being unable to see, tears flooding from his eyes.

Though it doesn't start off that way in Chapter 80, we will actually wind up with the first happy Valentine's Day we've ever seen in an JKR/RG book, thanks, not to that stuffed pooch from RFM, but to Lennon, the attack dog* who has just taken a chunk out of Strike's thigh, prior to being pepper-sprayed by Robin.  As our pair races away from the scene of the incident in a car, a very strong  echo of the punch Robin took to the face in the American Bar unfolds, but is gender-reversed, with Strike the one trying to both staunch his bleeding and soothe his rapidly swelling eyes, while Robin apologizes and does as much as she can to comfort him. 

Both Robin and Strike manage to maintain a sense of humor in the midst of their pain. 

Troubled Blood: 

"Will a takeaway do?"

"No," said Robin sarcastically. "I'd like to go to the Ritz, please."

The Hallmarked Man: 

“Mind you, if the fucker had been an inch higher, I wouldn’t’ve had to worry about fathering anyone ever again. It nearly had both my bollocks off.”

In both cases, one partner suggests going to the ER, and the injured party declines. Strike stops for curry and whiskey, and later gets icepacks to soothe Robin's eyes; Robin stops for milk** and tissues to do the same for Strike.  And, just as the injury in TB let to Strike telling Robin she was his best friend, this incident leads to Robin re-acknowledging that fact:

Robin, watching Strike, who couldn’t see her, felt suddenly and strangely as though he’d come back into focus. He was infuriating, stubborn and secretive when she wished he’d be open, but he was also funny and brave, and he’d been honest tonight when she’d expected him to lie. He was, in short, her imperfect best friend.

I must admit amusement at this part, where Galbraith apparently did not trust the readers to figure out the 10-part Big Ring Chiasmus reflections on their own. (I'd like to think I would have, thank you very much!)

"Pity the fucker didn’t go for the prosthesis, like that Jack Russell, remember? It’d have broken its bloody teeth.”

This, of course, refers to the Career of Evil visit to Lorraine MacNaughton and her unruly pup Tigger, which Robin managed to subdue without pepper spray. 

Fortunately for Strike, but less so for the Jack Russell, its teeth connected with steel. It yelped and Robin capitalized on its shock by stooping swiftly, grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and lifting it up. So surprised was the dog at finding itself dangling in midair that is simply hung there. "No biting!" said Robin. 

Their friendship restored, Strike asks Robin to accompany him to Sark, saying “It’s a very small place. We can cover it twice as quickly if we go together.” Both partners seem oblivious to the illogic of this statement:  Sark being small is a reason you don't need a second person to go with you. Both are too eager to get out of London to notice. 

Robin imagined getting on a plane and flying to Sark. Perspective, light, the sea…

"Yes,’"she said. "OK."

She restarted the car. Strike’s eyes were still stinging and swollen, his thigh wound was becoming progressively more painful, he probably needed a tetanus shot, but he was suddenly happier than he’d been in months.

Thus, after past Heart Days being plagued by things like Harry and Cho's disastrous tea at Madame Puddifoots, Ilsa's miscarriage and the near-split of the Herbert marriage, the Dinner Party from Hell and Strike and Robin's screaming fight in the street, this February 14th ends on an optimistic note. 

Onto Part 7, Chapter 81, and the journey to beautiful island of Sark.  Just a few things to get out of the way first. 

It took a full forty-eight hours for the whites of Strike’s eyes to recover from the pepper spray, during which time he had an emergency tetanus shot and passed his video footage of the dog fight, and the names and addresses of Plug and his friends, to police in Ipswich.

"Possessed its own rustic charm."

Given that they are going out-of-the season, it is a full week after Valentine's Day (Wed. February 22nd) before they can travel to Sark and there is only one choice for lodgings which, unfortunately for shippers, has multiple bedrooms and lots of beds. Robin and RFM talk a lot and make up from their gazumping fight, but, on Monday night, he picks another one by, once they are cuddled up in bed, dropping the question of what Robin would have wanted to do had the pregnancy not been ectopic. 

“I don’t know, Ryan. I don’t know how I’d feel if I got pregnant accidentally with a baby that could survive, and I’m never going to know, am I?"

"I didn’t—"

"Want to upset me? Want a row? Why now? Why ask me this tonight?’

But she knew why. It was because of Sark, because of Strike; Murphy might not be doing it consciously, but she could tell he simultaneously wanted to punish her and push her into admissions that were either reassurances or rebuffs. 

Robin is sufficiently upset by this conversation that Pat can tell something's wrong the next morning in the office. Fortunately. KFC provides a good target for her anger, once Robin connects with Tish Benton on Instagram and realizes how badly the Kimphomanic botched that job. Mistaking "Riss" for "Tish" might be understandable in a noisy pub, but mistaking Sardinia for Sicily is just carelessness. And it is hard to believe they were talking about Tish visiting Sardinia without mentioning Rupert's name. Kim immediately becomes defensive and rude. Robin corrects her in the way she should have corrected Saul F. Morris.

“You know I’m a partner in this agency, right?" said Robin.

"Yes, obviously I—"

"Then you might want to watch your tone."

"I’m just pointing out—"

"An apology would be great," said Robin.

"OK, fine, I’m sorry!"

Robin hung up.

Robin also views the security footage from the silver shop, trying to determine if the female customer could be Sophia or Sapphire. She concludes the customer could not be "Olive Oyl" but strongly suspects it is Sophia. She also notices "Wright" tripping as he closes the blinds. She is also dealing with, and pretending to be amused by the suggestive texts from Wynn Jones.

Just in case Robin had missed the subtle joke, he’d added two water-drop emojis, which, as Robin knew full well, could denote sweat or ejaculate. Less amused than ever, she nevertheless replied with another laughing emoji.

Even though the trip to Sark starts in Chapter 82,  Robin is still suffering emotionally. 

In spite of her tiredness, and notwithstanding lingering feelings of guilt and anxiety that were rapidly becoming habitual, Robin arrived at Gatwick at six o’clock the following morning in a state of relative cheerfulness and excitement because she was getting her wish of leaving London, however briefly.

Robin seems to be starting off the trip in a better place than Strike, who arrives unshowered and unkempt, having been up all night monitoring Plug. He arrives angry that Plug is not in jail, and disgusted at Plug's apparent training of his monster fighting dog by having him practice on two smaller dogs. 

"This is getting grim."

As if don't have enough dog pictures on this post already, I have to include the best Harry Potter Easter Egg that has appeared in the series to date, said by Strike to Robin as he's updating her on the black hellhound. 

Strike loads up on caffeine in hopes of staying awake on the flight, but to no avail. He doses off, despite Robin's very interesting report on the Reatta Lindvall case, including the fact that the heads, hands and feet were missing, that the bone fragments were crushed too much to determine the age of the victims, and only one set of DNA was found, meaning the remains were likely of either Reata or Jolanda, not both. She also reports on her efforts at speaking to creepy Wynn Jones and on her plans to interview the Whiteheads. 

“And there are a couple of other things," said Robin. "This might be absolutely nothing, but...” 

Any guess on what Robin would have said had Strike not clonked out on her? My guess is her idea that the blonde silver shop customer could have been Sophia, and Wright's tripping. 

We do get a nice throwback to the hospital scene in Lethal White, when Robin did not correct the doctor who assumed she was Jack's mother, with:

She realised, mid-sentence, that Strike had sunk into a doze, head against the window. As she looked at him, he let out a loud, deep snore. To her left, the Frenchman laughed.

‘’E’s tired, your ’usband."

"Yes," said Robin, tugging the in-flight magazine out of the pocket in front of her. "He works nights.”

Strike wakes up near the end of the plane ride and is able to tell Robin a bit about the rather disastrous attempt at silver mining on Sark, a story that is fictionalized in epigraph source Maid of the Silver Sea.  There is another echo to Troubled Blood as Strike again struggles to make it down rickety steps to the ferry. The boat takes off, with Cornishman Strike clearly more used to sailing than Yorkshire-bred Robin:

“Eyes on the horizon if you feel ill," Strike advised Robin, and she thought immediately of Christmas Eve, her jerky vision, and Murphy’s hunched, angry back.

We can see that the RFM-related stress that will lead to her breakdown in the B & B is not far from her mind, even while traveling. 

Chapter 83 heralds their arrival on the island. 

“Not too bad," said Strike, forty-five minutes later.

"No," said Robin, although in fact she hadn’t found the movement of the old ferry very pleasant and had indeed spent the last twenty minutes staring out at the horizon without talking.

They land at the ferry dock, with Strike having still more trouble with slippery stairs, and are transported to the main area of the town by some rather scary open trailers pulled by tractors.  Once on the main street, the make their way to Danny DeLeon's mother's house, and are greeted by his decidedly hostile brother Richard. I wonder how much of his hostility is due to his younger brother's adopting his name ("Dick") for his porn career?  They have a suspicious conversation, with Richard insisting Danny is in London and that they haven't heard from him since June, yet acting entirely unconcerned that the unidentified body might be his brother's. 

On their way back to a pub for a bite to eat, Robin makes a detour to a general store where she, at last, genuinely buys Strike a walking stick. This is a fitting even-numbered book connection, given that Strike bought himself one (at Robin's suggestion) in Book 2, then falsely remembered Robin buying it for him in Books 4 and 6. Robin spies Richard DeLeon on her shopping trip, who gets away as fast as he can once he sees her. 

Back at the pub, Strike reviews his information on Rena Liddell's social media, then gets a call from Wardle, which he goes outside to take. Wardle is genuinely interested in the agency job. Richard DeLeon again does one of his appear-then-disappear acts. The reason becomes clear once Strike returns inside and a helpful bartender delivers some welcome news along with their pizzas. 

“Danny?" said the barman cheerfully. "He’s up at Helen Platt’s, just seen him. Clos de Camille, on Rue de La Seigneurie. He’s doing her garden.”

 Coming up on Tuesday:  the showdown with the DeLeon brothers, and the walk to the B & B. 

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*Do we think Lennon was a fighting dog, or just around for security?  It seems strange to me that dog-fighters would name the animals that are almost certainly doomed to eventually die in the ring, but, happily, I do not know any individuals in that line of work to ask. 

**Interestingly, while milk is more effective than water in soothing the burn from ingesting capsaicin, (thanks to the protein and fat), studies looking at pepper spray on the skin show that milk is no more effective than water in relieving the pain, and the same is true for other home remedies like Maalox and baby shampoo. However, best I can tell, these studies did not consider direct eye exposure.  Obviously, it would be a lot harder to get volunteers (or approval by an ethics board) for such studies.