Page 15 of The Hallmarked Man

The family’s chocolate Labrador had been old, but Robin had loved him. She felt the still-unshed tears of the last few days sting her eyes. Linda, meanwhile, was clearly crying.

‘We had to,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘It was his liver… there was nothing they could do. Better for him to… go quickly…’

‘Yes, of course it was,’ said Robin, ‘but I’ll really miss him. How’s Dad?’

‘He wants another one… he’s already looking at puppies online. I don’t know, though… dogs are such a tie… and there’ll n-never be another Rowntree…’

They spoke for a further twenty minutes, Robin mentioning none of her own troubles. When at last Linda had rung off, Robin turned back to her laptop, now doubly eager to bury herself in anything that would keep her mind busy.

She Googled ‘silver vault murder’, then scrolled downwards.

As she quickly saw, there’d been four distinct phases to the news coverage of the silver vault murder, all of it happening over a month in the summer, while Robin had been completely isolated from the outside world at Chapman Farm.

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of William Wright’s body, words like ‘naked’, ‘dismembered’, ‘mutilated’ and ‘masonic’ had featured in a hundred lurid headlines. From one of these, Robin learned that the discoverer of the handless, eyeless corpse had been the silver shop’s owner, Kenneth Ramsay.

‘It was the most appalling shock, as you can imagine. I genuinely thought I was going to have a heart attack. The body on the floor, all the Murdoch silver gone. We can’t understandhowit happened, let alone why. Wright didn’t have keys or codes, he shouldn’t have been able to get into the shop that night, and he definitely didn’t know how to open the vault.’

Robin clicked on a related article to discover what the ‘Murdoch silver’ might be.

Priceless masonic treasures, recently bought at auction, were stolen from the vault in which William Wright was murdered. These were part of the collection of A. H. Murdoch, a Scottish-born explorer and Freemason, who discovered the second largest silver mine in Peru in 1827. Murdoch amassed the biggest, most important collection of masonic artefacts in the world, some commissioned from silver from his own mine, others collected over many years. These included the ceremonial dagger of John Skene, the first Freemason ever to emigrate to America.

The articles stopped short of suggesting that William Wright had been murdered as part of some masonic plot, though plenty of reports nudged up against the exciting possibility.

Murdered in the shadow of Freemasons’ Hall, the imposing meeting place of over a thousand masonic lodges…

The Murdoch silver holds great significance for those who practise the secretive ‘craft’ of Freemasonry…

The next phase of press coverage had been triggered by the discovery that there had been no such person as William Wright, whose name, CV and personal details had been found to be fake. The possibility of masonic involvement was now deemed to have grown stronger.

‘MASONIC MURDER’: WHO WAS SLAIN VICTIM?

Police continue to appeal for information on the salesman posing as ‘William Wright’ of Doncaster, who was stripped and dismembered in the vault of a masonic silver shop… several notable Freemasons have borne the surname Wright, including Sir Almroth Wright, bacteriologist, and author Dudley Wright…

Grainy images of Wright taken from Ramsay Silver’s internal security camera had been released to the press, but they were of such poor quality that Wright could have been almost any bearded, bespectacled man. His shape was the most distinctive thing about him, because, while quite short, he was well-proportioned, with broad shoulders. The blurry nature of the pictures seemed to have added to the mysterious aura around the murder. During this second phase of the reporting, police announced that they’d had many leads about Wright’s possible identity, and were following them all up.

The next wave of news stories, which was by far the most excitable, began when the police released more still photographs, this time from CCTV cameras close to the silver shop at night, which appeared to show William Wright and three other men heading towards the shop in the early hours of Saturday the eighteenth of June. These pictures were also fairly indistinct, although one of the men was definitely short and sported a beard. The tabloids now became feverish with excitement, and while the broadsheets reported the wildly spiralling stories of masonic ritual killing only to urge caution in believing them, they nevertheless devoted multiple paragraphs to the theories.

Online sleuths have been quick to point out that the murder of ‘William Wright’ has strange echoes of the legend of ‘Hiram Abiff’, the mythical Grand Master of the stonemasons, who was entrusted with the building of King Solomon’s temple, including a secret vault to house the Ark of the Covenant.

Abiff possessed knowledge of a secret word, a symbol of divine wisdom.

Three lesser masons, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, wished to gain knowledge of the word and threatened Abiff, whorefused to give it up, and was therefore murdered inside the temple by the three tools sacred to Freemasons: the gauge, the square and the gavel. Ornate versions of these were among the objects stolen from the Ramsay silver vault, where the body of Wright was found.

Robin glanced through excitable reader comments, some of whom had spotted still more masonic features in the killing of William Wright.

The severing of the body’s hands is an allusion to the dismembered Hands of the Mysteries that unlock the temple of wisdom.

The surrounding silver might well have been an illusion to the scripture reading in the Third Degree: ‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed.’

I’ve heard the letter G was carved into Wright’s back – obvious reference to the only surviving letter of Hiram’s secret word.

But then had come phase four, which proved horribly anticlimactic. The police had announced that ‘William Wright’ had in fact been Jason Knowles, twenty-eight, of Haringey. Knowles had previously served six years for the burglary of a building society in Lewes in 2010 and his mugshot showed a broad-shouldered, thick-necked, well-muscled man, with a narrow, freckled face, and a slightly manic glare.

An article inThe Timesconcluded:

‘Given the widespread speculation on social media about a so-called “masonic killing”, which has been amplified by some sections of the press, I’d like to confirm that we have no reason to believe that Knowles’ death was in any way associated with, inspired by or committed by Freemasons, nor does the proximity of the United Grand Lodge have any bearing on the case whatsoever,’ said DCI Malcolm Truman, who has led the investigation. ‘We’re now as certain as we can be that Knowles and his killer, or killers, were motivated by nothing but financial gain, and we continue to appeal forinformation about the murder, and the objects stolen from the Ramsay Silver vault.’

Robin wasn’t surprised to see that this dampening news hadn’t entirely extinguished the hopes of those reluctant to give up the possibility that the killing had been a deliberate re-enactment of the murder of Hiram Abiff.