The Hallmarked Man полностью

No I don’t know why Tyler left, he was hardly talking to me before I went interrailing and my boyfriend was getting angry if I even said hello to him in the street after he gave me that crappy birth flower bracelet thing. Why are you still pestering me? I DON’T KNOW WHERE TYLER POWELL IS AND I DON’T FUCKING CARE.

Robin sent a fresh WhatsApp message.

Out of interest, where were you, the night that Hugo and Anne-Marie crashed?

She had a hunch that Chloe might want to do some thinking before she answered that one.

Robin now looked up Stone Road in Newham, where William Wright had visited a foodbank. They needed just one person who hadn’t been drunk, drugged, or suffering visual problems when viewing Wright by daylight; just one, who’d look at a photograph and say, with conviction, it was him…

Mohamed had, understandably, mistaken the name of the street where the foodbank was situated: it was ‘Strone’, not Stone. Robin made a note of this, remembering as she did so Wynn Jones’ smug correction of herself: on Wellsey Road – Wesley Road…

Words that were easily mistaken for each other… things that looked as you expected them to look. A sheaf of corn, or a tree. A black lion on a yellow background…

Names… William Wright was a wholesale manufacturer of catering silverware, or an eighteenth-century Scottish botanist, or a famous English football player, or a Freemason who’d drowned in the First World War… the meaning of names…

Struck by a random idea, Robin looked up the meaning of a name on Google.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered.

With shaking hands, she opened Instagram yet again. She had to be sure, before she contacted Strike. She must be absolutely certain.

An hour passed, and for the first time since she’d been attacked outside the Whiteheads’ house, Robin forgot her fear. She neither jumped at small night-time noises, nor did she get up from her table to re-check that the door was locked. It didn’t occur to her to cross to the window to stare down into Blackhorse Road, in case Wade King was watching her windows. All she cared about was proving the shocking theory that had leapt out at her, from the meaning of a name.

At last, she reached for the mobile beside her and called her partner’s number.

Strike answered almost immediately.

‘Where are you?’ asked Robin.

‘Just left Rena Liddell in a Travelodge,’ said Strike. ‘I’ve paid for her to stay there a couple of nights. How’re you?’

‘Strike, I think I’ve got something important – really important.’

‘Funnily enough,’ said Strike, who was limping towards to his BMW, ‘so have I.’

PART TEN

Here, of a surety, he said to himself, was the silver heart from which the scattered veins had been projected.

John Oxenham

A Maid of the Silver Sea

117

Knight of the East, or the Sword…

Most men yield to the stress of the current, and float with it to the shore, or are swept over the rapids; and only here and there the stout, strong heart and vigorous arms struggle on toward ultimate success.

Albert Pike

Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

‘I still think,’ said Strike, ‘we’ll be very lucky to interest the Met with what we’ve got right now.’

He was back at the office, sitting at the partners’ desk, the sky jet black outside the window. He and Robin were still on the call he’d taken on the way to his car, two hours previously. Each had shared everything they’d discovered and deduced, and while both believed that, at long last, they’d isolated the puzzle pieces of William Wright from those of other men and assembled them correctly, their conversation had been going round in circles for a while.

‘I’ve been kicking myself,’ said Robin. ‘I should’ve seen…’

‘We’ve been hunting a needle in a fucking haystack,’ said Strike, ‘but I can’t see what our counterargument is if the police say all we’ve got is guesswork, a couple of fake Instagram accounts and an old ad on eBay… bloody good work finding that, though.’