Page 22 of The Hallmarked Man (Cormoran Strike #8)

The deed a man may do on the spur of the moment, when his brain is on fire, is not so readily done when it has to be thought about.

John Oxenham A Maid of the Silver Sea

Strike glanced up at the camera over the street door as he and Robin emerged into the chilly afternoon. Strike suspected it was inactive, because it had a noticeable crack in the lens. This, he assumed, was the reason there’d been no pictures in the press of the killers entering the shop.

‘Let’s have a look at Wild Street,’ he said, and they headed onwards, away from Kingsway, onto a much quieter road without shops or cafés.

‘Yeah, they must’ve brought the silver here,’ said Strike, looking up and down the street, ‘and bunged it in the getaway car. There’s a pub up there,’ he added, pointing back towards the place where they’d met. ‘Fancy some food?’

‘Great,’ said Robin.

‘What was Ramsay trying to flog you, when I came upstairs?’ asked Strike as they walked.

‘Um – first a triangular pocket watch, and then a charm that was a ball that turned into a cross marked with hidden masonic symbols when you opened it. I could’ve been persuaded into buying that one.’

‘Never had you pegged as a pushover for salesmen.’

‘I’m not, but it was pretty and—’

‘You felt sorry for him.’

‘I did,’ Robin admitted, ‘yes.’

‘You haven’t got enough money to go round trying to save idiots from bankruptcy.’

‘“Idiot”’s a bit harsh.’

‘He’s an idiot,’ said Strike implacably.

‘I’m sorry for his personal misfortunes, but state-of-the-art security my arse, it’s about as lax as it could be without leaving the bloody doors and windows open.

He would’ve punched in the code for the vault right in front of us if I hadn’t stopped him, he didn’t insure this silver he’d paid a mint for, he hires an untrained security guy on the cheap, he didn’t check Wright’s references properly, never upgraded the alarm or the camera after buying the place, the locks on the front door—’

‘I know all that, but he’s lost his son, his wife’s seriously ill… people don’t always make the best decisions when they’re under a lot of stress.’

‘People who’re already in trouble are the very people who can’t afford to get careless,’ said Strike sententiously.

He didn’t notice Robin’s slightly clouded expression, and wouldn’t had understood its significance if he had.

He had no idea how much of Robin’s free time was currently spent castigating herself for what she now saw as a cavalier disregard for warning signs at the ages of both nineteen and thirty-two.

‘What were you up to, pretending to need the bathroom?’ she asked.

‘Wanted to have a shufti at that staff area. It wouldn’t take much to guess which six digits open the vault, because the keys are worn.

All you’d have to do is memorise the pattern made by whoever was punching in the code.

The sink and bog are clean, so Todd doesn’t seem to have been acting in an unusual manner when he scrubbed the staff area before the police turned up.

The cupboards under the sink are full of silver polish and Dettol. ’

‘You’re thinking collusion?’

‘First thing you’ve got to ask, when there’s a burglary like this.

Todd wiped the place clean of prints and Pamela left early on the day of the killing, leaving Wright to shut up.

Any standard set of skeleton keys would open up the latch lock on that door, as long as the mortice hadn’t been locked. Makes you think.

‘That said,’ Strike continued, the Prince of Wales pub now in sight, ‘they all seem to have very solid alibis, so it could’ve just been sloppiness.

If this Pamela was worried about her knees and her eyes, going up and down the stairs, she might’ve given Wright the vault code so he could lug stuff in and out of it for her, and not wanted to admit it to Ramsay, or the police. After you.’

Robin walked through the door Strike was holding open for her, into the large, crowded and noisy pub, which had wooden floorboards, tiled pillars and a good deal of red and gold tinsel hanging from the ceiling.

‘I’ll get the drinks in,’ said Strike. ‘What d’you want?’

‘Orange juice, please.’

‘Have some reading material,’ said Strike, handing her the catalogue Ramsay had given him.

He headed for the bar, already weighing the non-investigative possibilities offered by this apparently casual lunch, while the oblivious Robin sat down at a table beside the window and flicked through the catalogue.

The introduction explained that the ‘museum quality’ objects on sale had all been purchased or commissioned by A.

H. Murdoch, nineteenth-century American explorer, industrialist and Grand Master Freemason.

The Murdoch hallmark had been used as a backdrop to several of the pages.

It was a curious symbol: a slanted cross with additional bars.

Kenneth Ramsay had circled in Sharpie everything he’d bought, and by examining estimated prices, Robin worked out that he’d have had to pay a minimum of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to get the pieces removed from the auction.

His business seemed to be far from flourishing, so she wondered how on earth he’d managed this.

A. H. Murdoch’s collection wasn’t entirely masonic.

Here and there were bits of silver that were merely ornamental, but Ramsay hadn’t bid on any of these.

Instead he’d obtained a selection of objects whose use was mysterious to Robin.

What, for instance, was a ‘setting maul’?

To her, it resembled a plunger, having a handle of polished oak and a cone-shaped piece of solid silver at the end, intricately engraved with eight-pointed stars.

There were many trowels and set squares, and multiple ‘jewels’, which to Robin’s eye were medals, with elaborate designs, including a two-headed eagle on a Teutonic cross.

When Strike returned to the table with the drinks and two menus, he found Robin looking at the picture of an ornate silver centrepiece, which according to the catalogue measured nearly three and a half feet in height.

‘“Estimate: sixty to eighty thousand pounds”,’ Robin read out of the catalogue, turning it so that Strike could see it.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Strike, staring at the thing, which he found exceptionally ugly.

‘That’s the Oriental Centrepiece, which went to Bullen & Co by mistake,’ said Robin, turning the catalogue back towards herself to examine at the profusion of symbols that embellished the object. ‘Jacob’s ladder, acacia tree, the all-seeing eye, the blazing star…’

‘Been boning up on masonic symbolism?’

‘Yes… it’s strange, though.’

‘It’s an eyesore, is what it is,’ said Strike, looking at the upside-down centrepiece.

‘Not this – the theft. It’s not like stealing cash, or diamonds, which you could sell easily. The thieves can’t have been intending to melt the silver down, because its value is in its form. And this centrepiece alone must be massively heavy.’

‘Which is why I think it must’ve all gone in the getaway car in Wild Street. Why anyone wanted a pile of masonic crap, though…’

Robin thought of the spartan attic in which Strike lived, devoid of almost anything of sentimental or decorative value.

‘I think you might underestimate how obsessive people can get about objects, not being a things person yourself.’

‘A “things” person?’

‘Are there any physical objects you’re really attached to?’

‘Yeah, my prosthetic leg.’

‘Ha ha… you know what I mean. It’s not just the size and weight of them,’ said Robin, now turning the pages of the catalogue, ‘they’re all publicly linked to Wright’s murder.

D’you think whoever stole them has just stashed them in a cellar somewhere, and they go down every night to gloat over it all? ’

‘Good question,’ said Strike. He took a sip of his beer, then said, ‘Another good question is: why would Lynden Knowles want a pile of masonic silver?’

‘Maybe he knew a buyer who wouldn’t care how it was obtained?’ said Robin doubtfully.

‘Does that smell right to you? A gangster who deals in guns, suddenly turning high-class fence?’

‘Not really,’ Robin admitted.

‘And if he’d wanted the stuff for himself, which I think is highly unlikely, why tie his nephew’s murder to it?’

‘It is odd,’ admitted Robin. ‘And why kill Knowles in the vault? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to—’

‘Shoot him in the back of the head in the car on the way to a fake robbery, then dump the body? You’re right, it would… what d’you want to eat?’

‘Soup,’ said Robin. ‘I’m not that hungry.’

Strike, who was very definitely hungry, set back off for the bar, where he ordered soup for Robin and fish and chips for himself. When he returned to the table, Robin handed him her mobile, on which she’d brought up the email to the man called Osgood, allegedly sent by William Wright.

Ramsay Silver

Re: Something you should know

To: [email protected]

dear Mr Osgood (Oz)

I can help you with something that I know has been a problem for you if you would be happy to meet me.

‘Sent a week before Wright was killed,’ Strike noted. ‘No guarantee it was Wright who sent it, of course.’

‘If he didn’t, it’s odd nobody at the shop admitted to doing it,’ said Robin, taking her phone back.

‘True,’ said Strike. ‘But if the police thought this Osgood bloke had any bearing on the murder and theft, I’d have expected it to be in the press. We’ll try and contact him, though.’

‘It’s weird how quickly press interest died, isn’t it?’ said Robin. ‘Once they heard it was Knowles, nobody seems to have cared any more that his hands had been chopped off and his eyes gouged out—’

‘Standard operating procedure, isn’t it?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Let violent young men polish each other off. Who cares?’

‘But this was a really nasty killing. To do that to a body – if it had happened to a woman—’

‘Glad you said that, not me.’

‘Why?’

‘Not fashionable, to say men are seen as disposable in certain contexts.’

‘I’m not saying he was disposable— ’