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His sister Lucy called him Stick.

To Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted he was Corm, as well as to his childhood friend Ilsa.

He'd been incorrectly referred to as Cameron by too many people to count.

But he was known by many other names as well.

Some of them had obvious origins. To his old school friend Nick he was Oggy, an allusion to his Cornish origins. Graham Hardacre and other old mates from the SIB used the nickname too.

Charlotte had called him Bluey ever since she'd winkled out his middle name in bed one rainy Oxford afternoon.

And one of the more embarrassing nicknames of his childhood had been Pubehead, in unflattering reference to his wiry tangle of dark curls.

But he had other monikers, too, that made less sense.

Shanker had dubbed him Bunsen when they were boys of seventeen. He'd never known why, but some questions were better left unasked, especially with Shanker.

To Dave Polworth, his oldest mate from St. Mawes, he was Diddy. Spanner, the geeky whiz-kid he occasionally consulted on IT issues, had dubbed him Frederico, while Anstis addressed him still more bizarrely as Mystic Bob.

Only his mother had called him Cormoran. Cormoran, after the giant of St. Michael's Mount in Cornish folktales. If it hadn't suited the skinny gangling boy he'd once been, it was a fitting name for the hulking man he'd become. Cormoran. After her death, no one else ever addressed him by his given name.

Until Robin. To Robin, he was Cormoran. His birth name, the one that represented his best and truest self, the person his mother had raised him to be. Spoken in his partner's soft voice with its faint Yorkshire lilt, it echoed back to his childhood. Cormoran.

He secretly liked it that Robin called him Cormoran.