‘No idea,’ said Strike, ‘but I’ll be honest, I don’t think the Semples’ marriage was a meeting of minds. She’s from Colchester, which means she probably met him when he was still 3 Para, as it’s where they’ve got their base. To be blunt about it, men in those kinds of regiments are warned against local girls looking for a ticket out of small-town life. She’s good-looking enough, but I can’t see that they’d have had a hell of a lot in common. Semple passed SAS selection, so he’ll be very intelligent, and she said herself they were both unfaithful before they got married. I think she got pregnant, he felt cornered and thought he was doing the right thing, marrying her.’
Severely aggravated by Strike’s gall in talking so casually about accidental pregnancy, and his implicit criticism of Niall Semple for getting entangled with a woman with whom he had nothing in common, Robin said,
‘Did you ask her about Reata Lindvall and Belgium?’
‘Yeah. No connection,’ said Strike.
‘Did you ask whether he knew a man called Oz?’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘She didn’t think so.’
‘So,’ said Robin, striving to sound coolly professional, ‘how likely d’you think it is that Niall Semple was the man in the vault?’
‘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’ve got 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 about
‘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—’