Page 91 of The Hallmarked Man

‘I was going to say, I can only think of two possibilities,’ said Robin. ‘Either he was doing something completely unrelated to the silver delivery, or he wanted to tamper with the silver in some way – but the silver wasn’t tampered with.’

‘You say that, but somethingdidgo wrong with the delivery. The Oriental Centrepiece didn’t go where it was supposed to.’

‘But it ended up at Ramsay Silver in the end. That seems such a pointless thing to do, switch the addresses on two crates, if that’s what he did.’

‘Pamela never saw the centrepiece, though. She dashed out of the shop right after the crate was put in the basement, so she never had an opportunity to photograph it and send the picture to Gibsons. We’ve got no proof it ever ended up there.’

‘You think Wright stole it, on the way back from Bullen & Co?’

‘Can’t see how he could’ve done. He couldn’t have lifted it alone and he arrived back at the shop bloody quickly for someone who’d have to have made a detour to deposit it with someone else.’

‘But of all the pieces to steal, the centrepiece would be the very last one, surely?’

‘That’s exactly what the woman at the auction house just said to me.’

‘Pamela told me it was virtually unsellable, even to masons.’

Robin’s eyes were currently trained on the front door of the house where Mrs Two-Times was visiting a female friend.

‘I assume,’ said Strike, breaking another short silence, ‘the police decided McGee’s detour’s irrelevant, but I’d still like to know whether they talked to him. Might try and trace relatives, find out if he was ever interviewed. Wouldn’t mind seeing the post-mortem results, either.’

Robin felt an increasingly familiar prickle of unease. Strike was, once again, checking back over the police’s work, and she thought again of Murphy, and that note on the office board about DCI Malcolm Truman’s alleged membership of a masonic lodge.

‘Not sure I’ve ever had a case where so many senseless things seem to have happened,’ Strike continued. ‘I can’t see why McGee disappeared off the radar before delivering the silver and I still can’t fathom why Wright had to be bumped off in the vault.’

‘We’re definitely accepting what Shanker said, are we? This was a planned killing, not a fight that got out of hand?’

‘Can’t say for sure until we know exactly how Wright died, can we? If there were defensive marks and stab wounds to the front of his body it still might’ve been a punch-up that got out of hand, but it still seems a bloody strange place for a fatal knife fight to break out. Like I said before, a heist is a quick in-out job. You get pissed off at someone during it, you wait until you’re off the premises to thrash things out. I don’t think we should neglect the Ramsay Silver angle,going forwards. It’s all very well trying to fit different candidates to Wright, but I’ve got a feeling that when we find out why he was killed in the vault, we’ll know who he was.’

‘What happened to “means before motive”?’ asked Robin, repeating back to Strike his own oft-quoted dictum.

‘Thisismeans,’ said Strike. ‘The motive could be anything: rage, jealousy, he hadn’t paid a debt. What I want to know is why Wright was killedthere.We know he left Ramsay Silver at six, and we know he returned to the shop by night. It beggars belief that he turned up there by chance at one in the morning without realising a large-scale robbery was about to take place, so that suggests Wright’s a crook himself. Trouble is, with Knowles ruled out, the only current candidate for Wright we know had already committed theft is—’

‘Rupert Fleetwood,’ said Robin.

‘Exactly.’

‘But you don’t think Wright’s Fleetwood.’

‘I suppose,’ said Strike reluctantly, ‘framed like this, he has to move up the suspect list a bit, with one proven theft of silver behind him, but there’s a hell of a difference between him marching out of his godfather’s club in broad daylight, staggering under the weight of that nef, and this meticulously planned robbery – because you’ve got to give whoever did it that much credit, they’ve got clean away with it. No trace of the silver since, and no leads. But if the dead man’s Fleetwood, I’d say it was particularly unwise for the gang to polish him off in the vault. Fleetwood was a well-connected upper-class young man, a famous actor’s cousin, and when people like that get killed, you expect payback. I struggle to see how, with three other men in the vault, one of them wouldn’t have stepped in to stop a fight between Fleetwood and his assailant, knowing what the potential consequences might be of leaving him dead on the floor.’

‘I agree,’ said Robin. ‘It doesn’t add up.’

‘But if Wright’s killing was deliberate, planned murder, it seems even stranger than a spontaneous fight. Of all the places to polish someone off, the vault of a masonic silver shop seems one of the stupidest. Ramsays’ security might’ve been shit, but it was still a risky place to get into and you’re absolutely guaranteeing press interest.’

‘Strike, I’m going to have to go, I think she’s off shopping again,’ said Robin, watching Mrs Two-Times descend the steps of the house with her friend, and she ended the call, leaving Strike, whose stomachwas now grumbling, to enter a supermarket to buy lunch. Murphy still in mind, he chose a salad, rather than the large BLT he really wanted.

The blonde he’d noticed earlier on the corner of Denmark Street had gone, but when Strike opened the street door to his office he spotted a small white envelope that definitely hadn’t been on the doormat when he’d left. On bending to pick it up, he saw the usual approximation of his own name printed in capitals: CAMERON STRIKE. The writing had an odd appearance, as though carefully formed between two horizontal lines, and Strike, who’d previously had reason to consult handwriting experts, suspected this had been done to eradicate any trace of individuality.

On entering the office, he found Midge and Pat in conversation. They fell silent when he entered. Midge’s eyes, he noticed, were bloodshot.

‘Morning,’ he said, pretending he hadn’t noticed. Walking past the goldfish, he closed the door of the inner office, sat down at the partners’ desk and opened the white envelope. Inside was a piece of paper on which were written two lines of what he recognised as pigpen cipher.

‘The fuck?’ he muttered, and had just turned on his computer to translate it, when Pat knocked on the dividing door.

‘There’s a man ringing the buzzer. Says he wants to talk to you about Niall Semple.’

‘Really?’ said Strike, thinking immediately of the man who’d advised Jade Semple not to speak to him, on the phone. ‘Has he given a name?’