Page 192 of The Hallmarked Man

‘Maybe you should go and talk to the team working the case, if you want to know how likely they think it was Knowles,’ said Robin angrily. ‘I’ve got to go.’

She hung up, now torn between rage and misery on account of Murphy as well as Strike. It was just as well she hadn’t told him that MI5 had warned them off investigating Niall Semple, wasn’t it? Or about DCI Malcom Truman’s alleged membership of the masonic lodge? Or the rubber gorilla hidden in her sock drawer?

The man with his face covered like a bandit was still watching her.

61

The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them. To the one, it is all beauty and gladness… The other idly or mournfully gazes at the same scene, and everything wears a dull, dim, and sickly aspect.

Albert Pike

Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Two and a half hours after leaving Crieff, Strike broke his journey south in the small Scottish town of Moffat, where a café in the market square supplied him with a coffee and a burger and a welcome chance to rest his right knee. The mud on his coat and trousers had dried and the rain had eased off, but the mid-afternoon sky was already darkening. He supposed many would find Moffat picturesque, but Strike saw everything with the jaundiced eye of the hungover and miserable. His knee was swollen and sore, and the statue of a ram standing atop a pile of rocks, visible through the café window, darkened his mood still further. Sheep, even when cast in bronze, had a tendency to remind him of Robin’s father, the professor of sheep medicine, and of the evening he and Robin had spent at the Ritz together, when she’d first given Strike this information.

Taking out his phone, he brought up the photograph Jade had texted to him, of the note Niall Semple had left behind when he’d disappeared.

Omnia in numeris sita sunt

generative

occult

chaos

salutary

generative

chaos

divinity

salutary

RL knows where

All Strike understood of this note was the Latin, which in English read:everything lies veiled in numbers.

He looked up ‘botanist William Wright’ on his phone, and saw that the man had indeed been born in Crieff, and was buried in Edinburgh. He Googled Dunkeld, and saw that the bridge there had been built by Freemason Thomas Telford, and learned furthermore that a bridge over the River Dee had been built by the equally masonic Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Remembering that Semple had wanted to meet an unknown woman in a pub called the Engineer, he wondered vaguely whether masonry appealed particularly to engineers, or vice versa.

He looked up the masonic degrees, and learned that there were no fewer than nine called ‘knight’. He opened Truth About Freemasons again, and searched the site for anything involving the SAS or the armed forces.

He found only two vaguely relevant threads. The first, dated 2015, was discussing how many decorated soldiers were Freemasons.

K of the East:

Paddy Mayne, one of the founder members of the SAS, definitely was. Died in a collision with a parked tractor in Ireland, after a masonic dinner.

Jeroboam9: