Page 205 of The Hallmarked Man
‘On balance, slightly more likely than Fleetwood,’ said Strike, ‘because he’s a mason and, from what Jade says, he got a bit obsessive about Freemasonry, post-injury. Plus, there’s a connection with the name William Wright. On the other hand, would he have been capable of all the subterfuge involved in pretending to be Wright, with a brain injury? And why was he going on twenty-mile runs? That suggests to me he was training for something, or thought he was. I can’t help wondering whether he hasn’t left the country, tried to get back to a battlefield, find or avenge his best mate.’
‘But we’d know if he’d left the UK.’
‘You think the SAS always travel on their own passports?’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, to whom this hadn’t occurred.
‘We’re talking about the kind of bloke who can navigate by the stars, scale buildings without ropes, learn Arabic in two weeks flat – they’re the best of the best, the SAS. I struggle to see why a man like that would think it important to go undercover in a silver shop in London.’
‘Maybe the brain injury made him abnormally interested in the Murdoch silver?’
‘Oh yeah, and she gave me a picture of the note he left for her,’ said Strike, pulling out his phone, and Robin’s anger at him burned a little hotter for him ignoring her suggestion. Nevertheless, she took the mobile and read the strange message.
‘“RL knows where”,’ she read aloud. ‘Any idea what that means?’
‘No,’ said Strike.
Only now did it occur to him that these were Reata Lindvall’s initials, but as they were millions of other people’s initials, too, he didn’t find the fact of overwhelming relevance.
‘The other thing I found out was that he’d handcuffed his briefcase to him. I thought it looked like that, when I saw the photo in the press.’
‘You think he had something valuable in there?’
‘That would seem the obvious explanation, but if so, he must’vegot hold of the valuable thing between leaving Crieff on the twenty-seventh of May and visiting a cashpoint on the fourth of June. Jade says he didn’t take anything valuable with him. Maybe some old masonic books.’
‘Well, I managed to speak to Tia Thompson, Sapphire’s friend, yesterday,’ said Robin, handing Strike back his phone and making sure their fingers didn’t touch.
‘Ah, good work,’ said Strike, trying to curry favour, but she didn’t smile. After giving Strike a concise summary of all Tia had told her, she concluded,
‘… and the last thing she told me was, this mysterious man in the music business told Sapphire she reminded him of a Swedish girl he’d once known.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Strike, choosing not to voice his opinion that ‘you look Swedish’ was a fairly easy line to toss at a young blonde Brit you were trying to flatter. Nevertheless, still trying to ingratiate himself, he said, ‘Well, we aren’t exactly swamped with candidates for Rita Linda, so we should definitely bear Lindvall in mind… speaking of schoolkids, Pat thinks she’s found Hussein Mohamed – or his daughter, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘she emailed me.’
‘With the photo of the kid that was in the paper, we could—’
‘Hang around primary schools in Forest Gate and tail her home?’ said Robin.
‘It worked with Tia Thompson.’
‘I didn’t tail her home, and Tia’s sixteen. Do you seriously think that’s the same thing as stalking a child in a wheelchair who’s just escaped a civil war?’
‘I’m not talking aboutstalk– OK, forget it, it was just an idea,’ said Strike.
‘We’d better pay for our coffees,’ said Robin. ‘We haven’t got long now.’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Strike, reaching for his wallet.
‘I need the bathroom,’ said Robin, standing up. ‘Er – Dilys’s house is up quite a steep road, I’ve just seen the sign. If your leg’s bad—’
‘It’s fine,’ said Strike shortly.
Sod you, then,thought Robin, walking away in search of the Ladies.
Strike asked for the bill then stared gloomily out of the window at the huge iron bridge. Suddenly, his subconscious decided to throwup the thing that had been nagging at him in the café in Moffat. The unknown Scottish woman who’d twice called the office to beg for his help, and asked him to meet her in the Golden Fleece, had said:It’s all hid under the bridge.
Meanwhile Robin, who was washing her hands at the sink, looked into the mirror over it and noticed not only how pale and exhausted she looked, but also the large black smudge of mascara under her right eye. Strike could have told her about it, she thought furiously, as she wiped it away.
