The Hallmarked Man полностью

Robin, who was sitting in her Land Rover outside a house in Pimlico that Mrs Two-Times was visiting, didn’t answer immediately. After a short silence, both partners spoke at once.

‘I can only—’

‘I was think – go on,’ said Strike.

‘I was going to say, I can only think of two possibilities,’ said Robin. ‘Either he was doing something completely unrelated to the silver delivery, or he wanted to tamper with the silver in some way – but the silver wasn’t tampered with.’

‘You say that, but something did go wrong with the delivery. The Oriental Centrepiece didn’t go where it was supposed to.’

‘But it ended up at Ramsay Silver in the end. That seems such a pointless thing to do, switch the addresses on two crates, if that’s what he did.’

‘Pamela never saw the centrepiece, though. She dashed out of the shop right after the crate was put in the basement, so she never had an opportunity to photograph it and send the picture to Gibsons. We’ve got no proof it ever ended up there.’

‘You think Wright stole it, on the way back from Bullen & Co?’

‘Can’t see how he could’ve done. He couldn’t have lifted it alone and he arrived back at the shop bloody quickly for someone who’d have to have made a detour to deposit it with someone else.’

‘But of all the pieces to steal, the centrepiece would be the very last one, surely?’

‘That’s exactly what the woman at the auction house just said to me.’

‘Pamela told me it was virtually unsellable, even to masons.’

Robin’s eyes were currently trained on the front door of the house where Mrs Two-Times was visiting a female friend.

‘I assume,’ said Strike, breaking another short silence, ‘the police decided McGee’s detour’s irrelevant, but I’d still like to know whether they talked to him. Might try and trace relatives, find out if he was ever interviewed. Wouldn’t mind seeing the post-mortem results, either.’

Robin felt an increasingly familiar prickle of unease. Strike was, once again, checking back over the police’s work, and she thought again of Murphy, and that note on the office board about DCI Malcolm Truman’s alleged membership of a masonic lodge.

‘Not sure I’ve ever had a case where so many senseless things seem to have happened,’ Strike continued. ‘I can’t see why McGee disappeared off the radar before delivering the silver and I still can’t fathom why Wright had to be bumped off in the vault.’

‘We’re definitely accepting what Shanker said, are we? This was a planned killing, not a fight that got out of hand?’

‘Can’t say for sure until we know exactly how Wright died, can we? If there were defensive marks and stab wounds to the front of his body it still might’ve been a punch-up that got out of hand, but it still seems a bloody strange place for a fatal knife fight to break out. Like I said before, a heist is a quick in-out job. You get pissed off at someone during it, you wait until you’re off the premises to thrash things out. I don’t think we should neglect the Ramsay Silver angle, going forwards. It’s all very well trying to fit different candidates to Wright, but I’ve got a feeling that when we find out why he was killed in the vault, we’ll know who he was.’

‘What happened to “means before motive”?’ asked Robin, repeating back to Strike his own oft-quoted dictum.

‘This is means,’ said Strike. ‘The motive could be anything: rage, jealousy, he hadn’t paid a debt. What I want to know is why Wright was killed there. We know he left Ramsay Silver at six, and we know he returned to the shop by night. It beggars belief that he turned up there by chance at one in the morning without realising a large-scale robbery was about to take place, so that suggests Wright’s a crook himself. Trouble is, with Knowles ruled out, the only current candidate for Wright we know had already committed theft is—’

‘Rupert Fleetwood,’ said Robin.

‘Exactly.’

‘But you don’t think Wright’s Fleetwood.’

‘I suppose,’ said Strike reluctantly, ‘framed like this, he has to move up the suspect list a bit, with one proven theft of silver behind him, but there’s a hell of a difference between him marching out of his godfather’s club in broad daylight, staggering under the weight of that nef, and this meticulously planned robbery – because you’ve got to give whoever did it that much credit, they’ve got clean away with it. No trace of the silver since, and no leads. But if the dead man’s Fleetwood, I’d say it was particularly unwise for the gang to polish him off in the vault. Fleetwood was a well-connected upper-class young man, a famous actor’s cousin, and when people like that get killed, you expect payback. I struggle to see how, with three other men in the vault, one of them wouldn’t have stepped in to stop a fight between Fleetwood and his assailant, knowing what the potential consequences might be of leaving him dead on the floor.’

‘I agree,’ said Robin. ‘It doesn’t add up.’