Page 163 of The Hallmarked Man
Robert Browning
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus
‘I’ve been working on this guy I know forweeks, and he finally came across last night,’ said Kim triumphantly, unfolding her chair and sitting down while Robin quietly burned with resentment. It wasn’t just that Kim was about to outshine her (though it was, definitely, partly that): Kim’s offhand tone when speaking to Robin, and the broad smile she saved for Strike, rankled.
‘OK,’ said Kim, opening the manila envelope, ‘needless to say, if anyone finds out the guy gave me copies of these—’
‘They won’t,’ said Strike, holding out a hand. Although there were three different pictures, Kim handed the lot to Strike, and Robin’s resentment burned a little hotter.
‘Jesus,’ said Strike. After examining the first picture, he slid it across the table to his partner.
The gouged-out eyes were dark and terrifying hollows. Dried blood, like lipstick applied by a drunk, coated the mouth from which the teeth had been torn. One ear had been sliced off; the other wound was still covered by the long dark hair. The masonic sash – black and red, with gold embroidery that shone in the flash of the camera – lay across a chest that was muscled and hairless, and had an artificial tan, which hadn’t been properly applied: there were patches of white under the arms. However, the falsely healthy skin tone couldn’t conceal the large patches of bluish-purple discolouration, which weren’t bruises, but signs of livor mortis. His penis had been cut off, too, leavinganother gaping, blackened wound. The arms ended in stumps where the hands should have been: Robin could see bone and tendons, and she wondered, feeling slightly queasy, what had become of the dismembered parts of the body. Shoved into bags, or pockets?
She’d expressed surprise to Strike that the press hadn’t been more interested in what had been done to this unidentified man, once they realised he was a criminal. Now she felt a slight stirring of guilt that she, too, had stopped thinking of him as a human being as the case had proceeded. The body in the vault – such a strange, contrived scene, with the sash and the silver, the unlikelihood of it all, the theatricality – had reduced the corpse almost to a waxwork figure in her mind, the centrepiece of a strange conundrum.
‘The back view,’ said Strike, sliding another picture across the desk to Robin.
She’d been imagining the hallmark carved into the dead man’s back to be a small thing. On the contrary, the Salem cross ran from the nape of the neck to the cleft in the buttocks. Chunks of flesh had been removed to make the slanting three-barred cross, reminding Robin of a scored side of bacon.
‘The mutilation was done a good bit after he was killed,’ said Strike. ‘There’s not enough blood here for it to have been done immediately after death.’
‘His killers were in the shop for two hou—’ began Robin.
‘He was attacked from behind, hit over the head with something heavy,’ said Kim, interrupting Robin. ‘The back of the skull’s caved in. The PM said that’s what actually killed him, the stoving-in of the head. Blood must’ve started pooling in the lower part of the body before they started to mutilate it. Maybe that was deliberate. Maybe they didn’t want blood seeping out under the vault door.’
‘Wouldn’t have mattered if it had, nobody was there on Saturday or Sunday,’ said Strike. ‘D’you know where this footprint was, relative to the body?’ he said, looking at the third picture.
‘Underneath it,’ said Kim. ‘They saw it when they lifted him.’
‘Really?’ said Strike, frowning slightly as he handed the last picture to Robin, who saw a faint, partial print in what had clearly been fresh blood. She noticed a couple of things about it, but rather than say them in front of Kim, she asked,
‘What about the four men who entered the shop that night?’
‘They didn’t,’ said Kim, looking at Strike, rather than Robin.‘They’ve been ruled out. Apparently, everyone’s shitting themselves, and that’s largely down to you.’
‘What’ve I got to do with it?’ said Strike.
‘My contact says you fed them info from a contact – an actual gangster, or someone – who said it wasn’t Jason Knowles in the vault.’
Kim’s bright brown eyes were searching Strike’s face for confirmation, but as he remained impassive, she said,
‘So, not long after you did that – if it’s true – they got confirmation of what you’d said. My guy says they got new information, I don’t know from where.’
From the undercover NCA guy,Strike and Robin thought simultaneously.
‘Apparently Jason Knowles was lured away thinking he was going to do a big housebreaking, so he had nothing to do with the silver vault job after all, and now everyone’s pissed off at you for being right.’
‘How did they rule out the four men in Wild Court?’ asked Strike.
‘Well, everyone’s been scrambling to re-check everything Truman did, and they went back to the footage of the four men entering Wild Court from Great Queen Street. I don’t know the ins and outs, but they finally traced them. Four pissed foreign students, apparently. They were lost, wandered down Wild Court, had some kind of argument, split up and finally found their way back to their hostel. The police have ruled them out completely as having anything to do with the robbery, so now the mystery is, how and when did Wright get back to the shop if he wasn’t one of those four men, because they can’t find footage to match him anywhere.
‘Plus,’ said Kim, ‘there was something about a delivery driver called McGee or something who went to Dalston, but I didn’t quite understand what my contact was saying there. I’d got him quite drunk,’ Kim added, with another of her little laughs.
‘Dalston,’ repeated Strike, making a note.
‘Yeah, he drove there and back up Old Street or something, but as I say, I don’t know how that’s relevant – I expect you do,’ Kim said, smiling at Strike.
She sat back in her chair, legs crossed, and looking, as Robin supposed she had every right to do, exceptionally pleased with herself.
