Robin was discharged from hospital on Sunday morning, with advice to take paracetamol and ibuprofen as needed, refrain from strenuous exercise and resume normal activities only after a further three days’ rest. She’d slept badly again, not because of noise this time, but because she’d dreamed, repeatedly, that she was back in the box into which she’d been locked overnight at Chapman Farm. These nightmares had plagued her over the last couple of months, but she’d told nobody about them, nor about the waves of panic that slid over her unpredictably, especially in crowded spaces, nor about the fact that unless Murphy was spending the night with her, she slept with her bedside lamp on. Robin knew what happened when she told people she was struggling mentally: they told her to stop doing her job. Strike had once or twice suggested her taking more leave after those intense months undercover, but Robin didn’t want a holiday: she wanted to be busy, to bury herself in investigation, to fill up her restless mind with other people’s problems.
She took a taxi back to her flat with a thudding pain in her lower right side that painkillers had dulled without removing. In spite of what she’d told Murphy, whose gang shooting case was keeping him at work, about being fine alone, Robin felt weepy, and infuriated with herself for being so.
But she’d been back inside her flat barely ten minutes when the man upstairs turned on music which, as usual, was very loud. Robin listened to the pulsing bassline, too sore and tired to go upstairs and ask him to turn it down, but feeling more strongly than ever that she’d like to cry. Instead, she went to fetch her laptop. She’d just opened it when her mobile rang and she saw her mother’s number again.
Mentally bracing herself, Robin answered.
‘Hi Mum. Sorry I didn’t call you back yesterday,’ she said, before Linda could ask. ‘I was working.’
‘I thought you must be,’ said Linda, whose voice sounded thickened.
‘Is everything OK?’
‘I just wanted to let you know… we had to put Rowntree down.’
‘Oh no,’ said Robin. ‘Oh Mum, I’m sorry.’
The family’s chocolate Labrador had been old, but Robin had loved him. She felt the still-unshed tears of the last few days sting her eyes. Linda, meanwhile, was clearly crying.
‘We had to,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘It was his liver… there was nothing they could do. Better for him to… go quickly…’
‘Yes, of course it was,’ said Robin, ‘but I’ll really miss him. How’s Dad?’
‘He wants another one… he’s already looking at puppies online. I don’t know, though… dogs are such a tie… and there’ll n-never be another Rowntree…’
They spoke for a further twenty minutes, Robin mentioning none of her own troubles. When at last Linda had rung off, Robin turned back to her laptop, now doubly eager to bury herself in anything that would keep her mind busy.
She Googled ‘silver vault murder’, then scrolled downwards.
As she quickly saw, there’d been four distinct phases to the news coverage of the silver vault murder, all of it happening over a month in the summer, while Robin had been completely isolated from the outside world at Chapman Farm.
In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of William Wright’s body, words like ‘naked’, ‘dismembered’, ‘mutilated’ and ‘masonic’ had featured in a hundred lurid headlines. From one of these, Robin learned that the discoverer of the handless, eyeless corpse had been the silver shop’s owner, Kenneth Ramsay.
‘It was the most appalling shock, as you can imagine. I genuinely thought I was going to have a heart attack. The body on the floor, all the Murdoch silver gone. We can’t understand
Robin clicked on a related article to discover what the ‘Murdoch silver’ might be.
Priceless masonic treasures, recently bought at auction, were stolen from the vault in which William Wright was murdered. These were part of the collection of A. H. Murdoch, a Scottish-born explorer and Freemason, who discovered the second largest silver mine in Peru in 1827. Murdoch amassed the biggest, most important collection of masonic artefacts in the world, some commissioned from silver from his own mine, others collected over many years. These included the ceremonial dagger of John Skene, the first Freemason ever to emigrate to America.
