Page 16 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)
We are all of us, though not all equally, mistaken.
Albert Pike The Liturgy of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
Only after Robin had left the Denmark Street office did a certain trepidation about the forthcoming evening creep over her.
She was well aware that her detective partner and her boyfriend, who’d been reasonably friendly before she and Murphy began their relationship, were now antagonistic to each other.
Murphy had more than once revealed his suspicion of Robin and Strike’s friendship, and she’d finally succeeded in shutting that down by telling her boyfriend that Strike was in a relationship with a lawyer, even though it was untrue; Strike’s brief affair with Bijou Watkins had ended before she’d told Murphy about it.
Robin hadn’t corrected the story since, as it continued to serve her purpose.
She completely understood why Murphy was uptight about her closeness to Strike, because his ex-wife had left him for a male friend, but she didn’t need more unnecessary displays of jealousy, having had quite enough of those from her ex-husband.
The reasons for Strike’s antipathy towards Murphy were more mysterious to Robin, but she had a suspicion it was because he was afraid he was going to lose his business partner to marriage and children.
If that was indeed his concern, Robin found it both insulting and infuriating, because she’d surely proven her commitment to the job and the agency ten times over by now.
Of course, there was another possible explanation for Strike’s attitude, but she wasn’t going to think about that – except that she did think about it, more often than she wanted to admit.
I told Amelia exactly what Charlotte wrote… she knew I was in love with you…
Stop it, Robin told herself firmly, while tidying her sitting room at six o’clock that evening.
She resented feeling apprehensive, and hated her ill-disciplined brain for returning, yet again, to the conversation in which Strike had lobbed his bombshell, then walked nonchalantly away.
He’s not in love with you, he was just being an annoying sod.
She wiped the coffee table a little more energetically than was required, as though to defy the slight throbbing of her operation site, and reminded herself that she was happy with Murphy.
Her jangled nerves weren’t helped when she turned on the news for distraction and saw a picture of Jonathan Wace, cult leader, staring back at her. She turned the TV off again.
She’d hoped Murphy would be there at half past six, and in situ when Strike arrived, but he was twenty-five minutes late.
Just as she was thinking that Murphy would have only himself to blame if Strike got there ahead of him, her boyfriend knocked on her front door carrying a water bottle, his gym bag over his shoulder, looking flushed.
‘Bloke downstairs let me in. Sorry I’m late. Did an hour at the gym, but when I came out some tosser had blocked me in in the car park. Had to wait for him to come out.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, greeting him with a kiss and a hug, glad to know he’d been doing some exercise; hopefully it had brought down his stress levels, which, given the ongoing drubbing his team was getting in the press for failing to catch the shooter of the two young boys, remained high.
‘I’m so grateful for this, Ryan, I really am. ’
‘Yeah, well, you didn’t want the weekend in Paris… He not here yet?’
‘No, but he will be any minute,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve ordered pizzas.’
She was trying to show Murphy she was making no special effort for her detective partner, and had dressed in jeans and an old sweatshirt for that reason.
‘You’ve warned Strike, haven’t you, that this is sen — ?’
The doorbell rang again. Robin buzzed Strike in, and a few minutes later he and Murphy were shaking hands and exchanging what almost qualified as smiles.
Strike handed Robin a bottle of red wine, for which she thanked him, heading into the kitchen to get glasses.
The doorbell then rang for a third time.
‘I’ll get it,’ Murphy called to Robin, and while he was buzzing in the pizza delivery man, Strike took off his coat and hung it up, glancing around Robin’s sitting room, noting Murphy’s gym bag lying nonchalantly outside the bedroom door.
The flat was mostly unchanged since the last time Strike had been here, when he’d been sleeping over, though unfortunately only on the sofa bed.
He wondered whether Murphy knew that. He noticed that the plant he’d given Robin as a housewarming gift was flourishing, but to his displeasure, one of the photographs on the mantelpiece was now of Robin and Murphy, arms around each other in front of what looked ominously like Robin’s family home in Yorkshire.
When Murphy had tipped the delivery man and passed the pizzas to Robin in the kitchen, he returned to Strike, who was still standing in the middle of the room, and said quietly,
‘What I’ve got is highly confidential. If anyone finds out I’ve passed it on, I’ll be up to my neck in shit. My contact shouldn’t have said as much as she did, so it’ll be her neck on the line, too, if anything gets blabbed.’
‘I don’t blab,’ Strike assured him.
‘Robin wanted this. That’s why I’ve done it.’
As it was hardly likely Strike thought Murphy had gone digging for information for love of him, Strike wasn’t entirely sure why he was being told this.
‘Anyway,’ said Murphy, and he gestured curtly towards the three-piece suite.
Strike sat down in an armchair and Murphy on the sofa. Robin, who could hear the uncomfortable silence, wished she’d thought to put on music, and sped up in her assembling of plates, napkins and glasses.
‘How’re things going with the lawyer?’ Murphy asked Strike.
‘What lawyer?’ said Strike.
Out of sight, Robin experienced a lift-drop in her stomach.
‘Thought you were going out with a lawyer? Bijou or something.’
‘Oh,’ said Strike. ‘Yeah. It’s going well.’
Robin hurried back into the room, slightly flushed, holding pizza, plates and napkins, and avoiding looking at Strike.
‘Shall we get going, then?’ she said, before sitting down on the sofa beside Murphy. The latter reached for his notebook.
‘Just been telling Strike: this can’t go any further.’
‘It won’t, Ryan, I promise,’ said Robin, pouring Strike wine.
‘Right. Well.’ Murphy picked up his notebook, as Strike helped himself to pizza.
‘You’ll know the basics. Guy calling himself William Wright got himself a job at this shop in Holborn, Ramsay Silver.
Worked there two weeks. On the third Monday, the shop owner opened up the vault, found Wright’s mutilated body, and none of the valuable silver they’d put in there on Friday.
‘Cops soon found out there was no such person as William Wright. No records for him under the name and birth date given, and the references he’d given at interview were fake.
The antiques shop he claimed to have worked for in Doncaster had never heard of him.
Both referees’ numbers turned out to be burner phones.
A member of the public came forward to say Wright had lived downstairs from him, in Newham.
Wright had only been there a month, paid cash for the deposit, and the people who shared the house only knew him as William Wright, from Doncaster. ’
Murphy took a sip from his water bottle, which led Strike, who was making notes, to a new realisation that water bottles carried around after exercise were an obnoxious affectation. Murphy turned a page in his notebook and continued,
‘The last verified sighting of Wright alive was on Friday the seventeenth of June. He’s on the shop’s interior security camera nearly all day Friday—’
‘“Nearly?”’ said Strike.
‘He was sent out for one errand in the late afternoon, but he came back and remained in the shop until six. At ten past six he was caught on camera entering Covent Garden Tube station.
‘There’s CCTV footage of four men entering Wild Court in the early hours of Saturday morning, which is the street Ramsay Silver’s on, close to the time they know the shop was opened up again. The presumption is that it was Wright and three associates.
‘The interior security camera footage shows somebody entering the shop around one a.m., in the dark. They crossed the floor and turned off the camera. Wright’s believed to have been killed shortly afterwards, by one or more of the men accompanying him.
Forensics say he’d been dead around forty-eight hours when he was found. ’
‘Wright was definitely killed in the vault, was he?’ asked Strike. ‘Not somewhere else, and shoved in the vault later?’
‘No, it definitely happened in the vault,’ said Murphy. ‘The splash patterns from the blood were un-fakeable, according to forensics. There was also a partial footprint that had clearly been made while the blood was still liquid.’
‘Have you got details on the footprint?’ asked Strike.
‘Thought you were trying to identify the body, not catch the killers?’
‘ID-ing the killers would help identify the body,’ said Strike, matching stony glare with stony glare.
‘As you’ll realise in a minute, you’d be very ill-advised to try tracking down these particular killers,’ said Murphy. He returned to his notes.
‘The security camera was switched back on around three a.m., the alarm was reset—’
‘Had they disabled it when they entered the shop?’ asked Strike.
‘I – don’t know,’ admitted Murphy, looking down at his notes. ‘I assume so. Anyway, the shop wasn’t opened again till Monday morning.’
He took another sip of water, then said,
‘External CCTV footage shows only individuals or pairs in the vicinity of Wild Court in the aftermath of the robbery, so the three thieves clearly split up.’
‘Were they carrying the stolen silver?’ said Robin.