‘Police?’
‘Well, we know the team working the silver vault case aren’t exactly happy with us. Could they be trying to catch us interfering?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past the couple I met to try and get us for something,’ admitted Strike.
‘Of course,’ said Robin hesitantly, ‘there’s also the possibility he’s—’
‘MI5?’
‘Well, maybe,’ said Robin.
‘Christ, we’ve fucked off a lot of people over this case,’ said Strike. ‘Have you circulated the Accord bloke’s description to the others?’
‘Yes, and the bit of the number plate I got.’
‘Good,’ he said, and took a swig of whisky. Eyes on the plans of Wild Court and Freemasons’ Hall that lay in front of Robin, he asked,
‘Had any luck with those? I haven’t had time to look properly.’
‘Nothing that’s going to help us,’ said Robin. ‘The shop was created out of a couple of storage rooms at the back of Freemasons’ Hall in 1958. There were two doors in the back walls, but they were bricked up when the rooms became a shop.’
‘There was a door on the basement level, was there?’
‘Yes, when it was a downstairs cupboard.’
‘Where exactly was the door?’
‘At the back of the vault, but as I say, it’s gone, bricked up. There’s also a bit of dead space behind the basement wall where the cupboards are, but to get into that you’d have to tunnel through brick as well.’
‘Is it a big enough space to accommodate a lurking murderer?’
‘Maybe a child on their hands and knees,’ said Robin, ‘but the child would have had to walk in through the front door of the shop first, go downstairs into the basement and break their way through the wall to get into it.’
‘And even Kenneth Ramsay might’ve noticed that happening,’ said Strike. ‘So Wright and Oz can’t have got into the basement that night via Freemasons’ Hall?’
‘No,’ said Robin.
‘Then how the hell did they get back there without being seen?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ admitted Robin, reaching for another slice of cold pizza. ‘What do you want to look at on the dark web, anyway?’ she said, watching Strike still tinkering with his new laptop.
‘Couple of long shots,’ said Strike, ‘but I’m ready to try almost anything at this point. One thing I wouldn’t mind seeing is Sofia Medina’s OnlyFans account.’
‘It’s gone,’ said Robin, ‘I looked.’
‘Yeah, gone from the surface web, but it occurred to me that it might still be floating around in the cesspit beneath.’
‘Looking for Oz?’
‘Yeah. I know he won’t have been calling himself “Oz” on OnlyFans, but people often adopt usernames that leave clues, even people a damn sight more intelligent than Jim Todd. Rodolphe Lemoine. Sidney Reilly. Laurel Rose Willson – though, admittedly, she was off her rocker.’
‘Who are Rodolphe Lemoine, Sidney Reilly and – who?’
‘Lemoine,’ said Strike, bending down to plug in the new laptop, ‘was a French spymaster in World War Two whose real name was Stallmann, but took his wife’s maiden name for espionage purposes.’
‘Like Todd taking his mother’s maiden name for trafficking purposes.’
‘There you go. Sigmund Rosenblum, otherwise known as the Ace of Spies, presumably liked his initials—’
‘Like Fyola Fay,’ interposed Robin.
‘—exactly – because he rechristened himself Sidney Reilly. And Laurel Rose Willson wrote an invented memoir of her life in a Satanic abuse cult under the name Lauren Stratford, made a load of money out of it before she was exposed as a fraud, then re-emerged as a Holocaust survivor, which she also wasn’t, under the name Laura Grabowski.’
‘Where’s Wardle this evening?’ asked Robin.
‘On Mrs Two-Times,’ said Strike. ‘Thought I’d give him an easy one to get started.’
Robin’s mobile rang. Her heart sank when she saw it was Murphy.
‘Hi,’ she said, getting up and moving into the outer office to stop Strike saying anything to her, because she didn’t want Murphy to know she and Strike were alone at the office together.
‘You’re not home,’ he said.
‘No, I’m still at the office. As you were working I thought I’d take care of some paperwork. How d’you know I’m not home?’ she added, wondering whether he was sitting outside her flat.
‘I swung by on the off-chance, just a coffee or something. I’m heading back into town now.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin. ‘If I’d known you had a free hour, I’d have come home.’
‘So you’re still at the office? Strike there?’
‘No,’ she lied again, with the familiar, gnawing sense of guilt. ‘He’s on surveillance.’
Her call with Murphy terminated, Robin returned to the inner office. She felt guiltier than she had before he’d called, and even though she’d have preferred to stay and talk about the silver vault case with Strike, she said,
‘I’d better get going.’
‘Right,’ he said.
When she’d gone, Strike, well aware he was slipping into a pattern of drinking alone, something he’d guarded against for years, poured himself more whisky before returning to his PC, selecting Tom Waits’ album Blue Valentine and pressing ‘shuffle’. He always appreciated the blunt solace offered by his gravel-voiced favourite. Waits sang of desperation, drugs and drunkenness, of unmourned deaths and lives spent in poverty and hopelessness; love, to Waits, was generally doomed or dirty, and death came early, randomly and brutally. Strike had discovered the singer for himself in his teens, and found him a blessed antidote to the guitar-driven seventies rock bands his mother played incessantly.
Twenty minutes and one long piss later, Strike returned to his newly configured laptop, ready to enter the badlands of the internet, where the buying and selling of drugs, weapons and stolen data were commonplace, where fake documents could be bought and hackers hired, and where videos of dreadful acts were viewable, for those who found them exciting.
It took him nearly an hour to find an archived version of Sofia Medina’s OnlyFans page, on a website headed DEAD SLAGS, which was devoted to providing fodder for men who liked their masturbatory material to feature women who’d provably died from male violence, rather than those who were pretending.
He scrolled down through the names and comments of subscribers. Could Oz be ‘Fat_Hard_Cock’? ‘Bucket O’Jism’? He doubted it. Oz had been seeking real-life contact, and a man pretending to be a wealthy music producer would be unlikely to open the conversation with ‘fist yourself’. SkunkB, on the other hand, had posted, ‘you’re beautiful. I hope you’ve got a man who’s treating you the way you should be treated’, to which Medina had replied with three heart emojis. However, if SkunkB had pursued this promising exchange, it wasn’t publicly visible.
Tom Waits was still singing.
The whisky was driving Strike deeper into his depressive trough, but he kept mindlessly scrolling through the cyber swamps, perusing sites offering forged documentation and credit cards from countries as diverse as Ukraine and Thailand, or else what Strike strongly suspected was human merchandise. One heavily encrypted site with the name Nursery was peppered with flower emojis. From the context, he suspected this was a substitute for the words ‘little girl’.