Strike eventually agrees to Bijou Watkins’ request for a meeting. However, as Bijou is under surveillance by Farah Navabi’s agency on behalf of her former lover, Andrew Honbold, Strike must come up with a plan to prevent them being spotted together.

As he has ‘extensive knowledge of London’s five-star hotels’ he picks The Savoy as a meeting place as ‘it’s the hardest bloody hotel in London to find your way around’ (Chapter 72).

He calls Bijou and explains that he has booked a room at The Savoy (the hotel, not the cabbage).  Her cover story is that she’s meeting an old friend who is passing through London on business, and who wants to meet Bijou’s baby.

Bijou is to enter through the front entrance of the hotel.

‘Go straight through the lobby, down the steps, turn left and then right. That takes you to the red lift.’

He tells Bijou that she must make sure she gets in the lift alone, and to then press the button for the sixth floor, whereas Strike has in fact booked a room on the fourth floor of the hotel.

Strike enters the Savoy through the entrance at the Thames-facing side of the hotel.

‘He collected his key card from the reception desk in the grand green and cream lobby…’ 

‘…then proceeded upstairs in the red lift, the walls of which were lacquered and patterned in gold.’ (Chapter 74)

‘The long, deserted corridor into which he emerged was carpeted in eau-de-nil and lilac, muffling his footsteps.’

He waits for Bijou in the ‘Superior Queen’ room he has booked.  Whilst he waits he reads an email from Decima Mullins, and then reads an article in a magazine he finds in the room about Cosima Longcaster.  Bijou arrives, they quickly do what they need to do, and Strike leaves again.

The Savoy is indeed a maze. Here is the route that Strike would have taken from the riverside entrance of the hotel to the red lift.

The Savoy is a location that we knew would feature in The Hallmarked Man prior to publication as J.K. Rowling changed her header photo on Twitter/X to a picture of the red lift on 16th June 2024, over a year before it was released.

Find The Savoy hotel on the map below.