‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m going to visit Holborn Library this morning.’
‘To find out why Scots don’t have pubs called “the Golden Fleece”?’ said Robin, nonplussed.
‘No, because I want to see if they’ve got any old plans of Freemasons’ Hall and Wild Court. I can’t find anything online, but the library might have old stuff in a file.’
‘What d’you want plans of Wild Court for?’
‘Because I still can’t fathom how Wright and Oz got to the shop that night. You said before there must be CCTV footage of them heading towards the shop, but if the police had found it, they’d have released it by now. The only people spotted going into Wild Court around the right time were those four students they’ve ruled out. So how the hell did two men manage to materialise in Wild Court without being seen by anyone, or captured on camera?’
‘I don’t know, but how would plans—? Wait,’ said Robin, unsure whether to be amused or not. ‘You’re not suggesting some kind of—?’
‘Secret passage between the hall and the shop it backs on to? I grant you it sounds far-fetched, but I want to check when that shop was built, and find out whether any part of the hall was converted to make it. If there’s a connection between the two buildings, we’d potentially be looking for two men who entered Freemasons’ Hall on the evening after Wright got on the Tube at Covent Garden.’
‘But the hall would be closed – oh. You mean to attend a masonic meeting?’
‘Possibly. I’m trying to find out which lodges met there that night. If Oz and Wright were both masons, it might explain Wright trusting Oz, even though he knew someone might be coming for him.’
‘But if Wright trusted Oz because they were both masons, Oz could have lured him anywhere,’ said Robin. ‘Why meet him at Freemasons’ Hall, with loads of fellow masons as witnesses, then lead him away from the meeting just so he could be killed at Ramsay Silver?’
‘Why did it have to be done in the vault,’ said Strike, frowning. ‘Yeah. Right back where we started.’
96
… the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden
And the gleam of her golden hair.
News of the murders of Jim Todd and his mother hit the London Evening Standard the following day. To Strike’s relief, his presence at the scene wasn’t mentioned. For once, his own and the Met’s interests seemed to have coincided: they didn’t want publicity about the fact that the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency might be ahead of them in investigations into the silver vault murder, and Strike had no wish to encourage journalists back into Denmark Street. The papers didn’t seem to have spotted the connection between the murder of Wright and those of Todd and his mother, for which Robin, too, was grateful. She needed no further complications in her severely strained relations with Murphy.
She and her boyfriend met at last on Tuesday evening, back in the Duke pub. Murphy looked as though he’d lost weight in the two days since they’d last seen each other. Slightly hunched and red-eyed, he listened as Robin delivered the speech she’d planned.
‘I’m not leaving you,’ she began, and tears started in Murphy’s eyes; he reached out and grabbed her hand, but Robin pulled it away. ‘But we can’t pretend everything’s fine and normal, Ryan, because it really isn’t. I can’t move in with you until we’ve rebuilt some trust.’
‘That’s fair,’ said Murphy. ‘That’s completely fair. I thought I’d fucking lost you for good,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘I love you so fucking much, Robin.’
‘I love you too,’ said Robin, ‘but we do need honesty this time. I need you to tell me exactly what’s going on, at work, and with your drink—’
‘I went back to AA yesterday,’ said Murphy. ‘I’d stopped going to meetings. There was so much pressure at work I told myself I couldn’t afford the time – but that comes first, now. If this bloody investigation was only over—’
‘Why are you being investigated? Drinking?’
‘No, it’s just the first guy I arrested for the gang shooting,’ muttered Murphy, who very clearly didn’t want to elaborate, but Robin pressed him.
‘But why are they investigating you for that?’
‘He… claims I roughed him up.’
‘Did you?’
There was a short pause. Then Murphy nodded.
‘He’s got plenty of previous and his break-up with the kids’ mother was fucking toxic. I wasn’t the only one who thought he’d done it. I lost it. I’d seen the younger boy with half his head blown off,’ Murphy said, knuckles white around his glass of sparkling water. ‘Word was, he didn’t think the little one was his. I know I shouldn’t’ve… the mother’s fucking taken him back, as well, and she’s egging him on to sue, because she fucking hates coppers as much as he does.’
‘Ryan, I’m sorry, that’s terrible. But going forwards, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on with you. You can’t just bury it all.’
‘I know,’ said Murphy, reaching again for her hand, and this time Robin didn’t pull away. ‘I will.’
Standing in the chilly rain on Wednesday afternoon, watching the front of Dino’s, Robin told herself she was doing the right thing. She and Murphy had been through a lot together and she truly cared about him. Walking out on him at this point would be wanton cruelty. She’d decide later, when he was back on an even emotional keel, whether… but this was a thought she kept refusing to finish. Charlotte Campbell, in a blood-filled bath; Kim’s ex-boyfriend, in his carbon monoxide-filled car. She couldn’t leave Murphy now.
Work wasn’t proving much of a distraction today. Robin doubted she was going to get much out of shivering beneath her umbrella for hours, even though she’d concluded that her only realistic possibility of speaking to Cosima face to face was when the girl was either entering or leaving Dino’s, which was the only place she ever seemed to go without a posse of friends. The trouble was that there were only a few short steps between the street and the club’s front door, over which a doorman in a burgundy tail coat and top hat stood guard. Nevertheless, experience had taught Robin that a sudden, unexpected approach sometimes surprised answers out of interviewees, and the agency’s lack of progress in discovering Rupert Fleetwood’s whereabouts had decided her on this last-ditch effort.
As she stood there, scanning the rainswept road for some sign of her quarry, the hypervigilant Robin noticed a middle-aged man sitting in a parked Honda Accord a short distance from her Land Rover. He seemed to have been watching her, because he turned his head quickly when Robin looked at him. He had thick greying hair and an unusually small nose, which resembled a button mushroom in the middle of a large, square face. Robin continued watching him, wondering whether she should be worried. He looked larger and softer than the man who’d brandished the masonic dagger at her. She shifted position slightly, hoping to see his number plate, but then spotted Dino Longcaster’s chauffeured Mercedes gliding down the road, and recognised Cosima, sitting alone in the back seat.