Page 246 of The Hallmarked Man
Robin released Murphy’s hand to dig in her bag for her notebook. Murphy laughed.
‘What?’ said Robin.
‘Whenever you get a sniff of intel, you get the same look on your face…’
‘What look?’
‘I saw it the day I first drove you home, when I told you we’d arrested Phillip Ormond. Like a dog seeing a rabbit. Concentrated. Intense.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin.
‘I like it,’ said Murphy.
A waitress arrived to take their food order. When she’d left, Murphy lowered his voice and said,
‘The Peugeot was hired from a car rental in Reading, late on the Thursday.’
‘Who hired it?’ said Robin.
‘A young blonde.’
‘Ablonde?’ said Robin, thinking of Sofia Medina.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Because…’ They were moving in together. She needed to be honest with him, where honesty was practicable. ‘There’s a girl called Sofia Medina, a Spanish student, who we think might have had something to do with the man in the vault’s killing.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, but she had long black – oh,’ said Robin, struck by a sudden thought.
‘“Oh”, what?’
‘Sofia had wigs. She wore them for her OnlyFans videos, a witness told m – no, wait. Were the blonde and brunette the same size?’
‘What?’ said Murphy, understandably confused.
‘Same height, I mean,’ said Robin, thinking of tall, skinny Sapphire Neagle, who’d been nicknamed ‘Olive Oyl’.
‘No idea,’ said Murphy.
‘OK, forget that,’ said Robin. ‘Go on about the blonde.’
‘She presented a fake driving licence at the hire place.’
‘D’you know the name on it?’
‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘Anyway, the team have had to trawl through hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage to try and piece together what the vehicle did, and it wasn’t easy, because the plates were changed and it went in and out of areas where there’s no CCTV.
‘She left the car rental and turned off the M4 towards Whistley Green – it’s a village – and was lost from view overnight. Late Friday morning, she reappeared on the M4 with fake plates and drove to Dalston.’
‘Dalston,’ repeated Robin, who was scribbling. ‘She’s still alone in the car at this point?’
‘Yeah,’ said Murphy. ‘She disappeared off camera in Dalston, but they’re pretty sure she entered this semi-derelict line of garages that are due for demolition. Then there’s a period of hours during which the car’s not seen, but the blonde’s caught on camera, on foot.’
‘Going where?’
‘She enters Dalston Junction station. They still haven’t pinned down where or when she got out. But a girl with long dark hair comes out of Dalston Junction around six o’clock in the evening, wearing different clothes—’
