Page 355 of The Hallmarked Man
The name of the pub, the Old White Swan, reminded Strike unhappily of Ironbridge, but as he didn’t want to have to walk any further he entered to find a pleasant space with white and blue painted walls. He’d just bought himself a pint of alcohol-free beer and ordered fish and chips when his Met contact, George Layborn, called him.
‘Hi,’ said the policeman. ‘I got your email about Wade King.’
‘Ah,’ said Strike, sincerely hoping that this would wrap up the entire silver vault case completely. ‘So…?’
‘He was in France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth of June last year.’
‘France?’ repeated Strike, frowning.
‘Yeah, driving a lorry full of Scotch from Speyside to Cannes.’
‘This is cast iron, is it?’
‘Fully corroborated, yeah.’
‘Shit,’ said Strike. ‘No – I mean, that’s good to know. Cheers, I owe you one.’
He hung up. Layborn’s information, while useful, was unwelcome. Had Wade King been Oz, that would have settled everything, but as it was…
He accidentally dislodged his vape from his pocket in replacing his notebook there; it rolled away under an empty neighbouring table, and as Strike bent to pick it up again, he thought again of the tube-like object William Wright had dropped, which Mandy and Daz had thought was a doob tube, and which Wright had claimed had been a blood sample, and he wondered, yet again, what it had really been.
112
Oh ’tis jesting, dancing, drinking
Spins the heavy world around.
If young hearts were not so clever,
Oh, they would be young for ever:
Think no more; ’tis only thinking
Lays lads underground.
A. E. Housman
XLIX, A Shropshire Lad
So the case was closed. The agency had replaced Decima with the top client on the waiting list, and the mutilated body of the man called William Wright continued to lie unidentified, eyeless and handless in an unknown morgue, and Robin wasn’t supposed to care about him, or about dead Sofia Medina or missing Sapphire Neagle, but her mind refused to expel the disconnected facts of the silver vault case, on which it continued to chew uncomfortably, as if on bits of grit. Had Wright really had a pregnant girlfriend? Why had he visited Abused and Accused? Where was the Murdoch silver? What did the eight digits Niall Semple had left for his wife mean? Why had Chloe Griffiths become so aggressive about a bracelet? What were the things that Albie Simpson-White had said Decima was better off not knowing?
Robin knew she had to let it all go. The case was the Met’s now and, as if to underline the fact, a police spokesman announced on Thursday that Jason Knowles hadn’t been the body in the vault after all. TheSunnewspaper was the only one to give any prominence to the story, which ran beneath the headlineMASONIC BODY: COPS ‘GOT IT WRONG’.
At Strike’s insistence, Robin was continuing to work either in her flat or at the office. She was starting to feel like Pat’s assistant, dealing with paperwork and small bits of research that could be done online. On the other hand, she knew her mental state was as bad as it had ever been. As the days passed, instead of getting better, she seemed to be worse. Unexpected noises, even her phone ringing, startled her; she couldn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, and kept having flashbacks of the man who’d tried to throttle her in the Land Rover. The smallest things made her want to cry: spilled orange juice, a lost button. She was trying her best to hide all of this from everyone around her, including Murphy, certain that telling the truth would lead to a row, or an insistence that she stop work altogether for a while.
Wade King was out on bail, and he knew where to find her. Having loved living alone for the freedom it gave her, Robin now felt unsafe in her flat, which was why she was travelling to and from Denmark Street every day. Her preference would have been for being in the company of people she knew and trusted, at all times.
As she turned into Blackhorse Road on Thursday evening, expecting Murphy for dinner, he called her.
‘I’m not going to be able to come over this evening.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, angry at herself for wanting to cry again. ‘Why?’
‘An hour ago I visited a suspect at home who’s just turned out to have what looks like two pipe bombs at the bottom of his wardrobe.’
‘Shit!’
‘Yeah, and the terrorism threat’s at “severe”, so we’ve evacuated half the street and we’re waiting for the bomb squad.’
