‘What d’you mean?’
‘He came back to the warehouse after he’d finally delivered the stuff to Ramsays, I called him straight into my office and asked what had happened. He claimed Dave was taking too much time in the chemists, and he knew they were already late, so he thought he’d better get going, and then he got lost. He knew full well he was about to be sacked. Didn’t care. Pleased about it, if anything. Smirked as he walked out.’
‘Did you ever tell the police this?’
‘Yeah,’ said Carter, ‘but they took their time coming to see us. Some young copper turned up, just to tick a box, probably. I don’t think they cared about what happened to the silver before it got to Ramsays. Never heard anything back from ’em, anyway.’
‘You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Larry McGee, would you?’ Strike asked Carter, who pulled his phone out of his overall pocket.
‘Probably got one on here,’ he muttered, and began searching.
‘No,’ said Diana, who was still examining pictures on her own mobile. ‘The woman at Ramsay Silver never sent me a picture of the Oriental Centrepiece – but she did text me to say it had arrived.’
‘That’s McGee,’ said Carter, holding his phone out to Strike. ‘Big guy in the middle. It was Hassan’s stag.’
Strike looked down at a picture of a group of men in a pub. McGee, like Carter, had been in his fifties: tall, overweight, florid of face, with a droopy lower lip that gave him the look of a camel. The little hair remaining to him was grey.
‘Could I take a picture of this on my own phone?’
‘Feel free,’ said Carter.
Strike did so, then flicked over a page in his notebook and asked,
‘Did anyone keep in touch with McGee after he was fired?’
‘Bradley saw a bit of him,’ said Carter. ‘Our security guy. He and McGee both lived in Hounslow. Same local.’
‘Would it be all right to have a quick word with Bradley?’ Strike asked Diana.
A few minutes later, Carter led the security guard into the office, the latter looking intrigued.
‘Yeah, I ran into ’im in the pub a couple of times,’ said Bradley, when asked about his post-sacking contact with McGee.
‘How soon after he was fired?’
‘Er…’ Bradley scratched his goatee. ‘Firs’ time, it was the Saturday night after.’
‘The day following the delivery?’ said Strike. ‘Before the body and the theft were discovered, on the Monday?’
‘Yeah,’ said Bradley. ‘It was before all that was on the news. I jus’ asked ’im why ’e’d ditched Dave an’ buggered off, an’ ’e talked a load of his usual boll—’
Unlike Carter, Bradley was slow at finding a synonym for the word he’d decided not to use in front of Diana. After a tongue-tied pause he substituted, ‘rubbish’.
‘What did he say?’ asked Strike.
‘Told me ’e’d been ’eld up by an “’ot little blonde” who lured him up a side alley,’ said Bradley, with a smirk.
‘Chrissake,’ muttered Carter, with an eye-roll.
‘I told ’im ’e was full of it,’ said Bradley. ‘’E jus’ laughed. Told me ’e wanted to leave Gibsons anyway, and ’e was gonna be coming into a decent bit of cash soon, so it made no odds to him, getting the ’eave ’o.’
‘Any mention of where this cash was coming from?’
‘No,’ said Bradley, ‘I fort ’e meant a will or somefing. We didn’ talk long. I never much liked ’im. ’E just lived up the road, so I sometimes ran into ’im.’
‘Ever see him after that?’
‘Yeah, once. End of October, same pub. ’E’d really let ’imself go. Looked like ’e’d packed on a coupla stone. I asked if ’e’d ’ad his windfall yet, and ’e bit my bloody ’ead off, said ’e’d never said ’e was gonna be getting a windfall, and walked out. Next I ’eard, ’e’d been found dead in his flat, after a neighbour complained about the smell. It was in the local paper.’ He continued in a self-consciously grave voice, ‘Sad way to go.’
‘In the paper, was it?’ said Strike, who was still writing.
‘Yeah. ’Ounslow ’Erald. Natural causes. Always looked like ’e had ’eart disease. That sorta corned beef skin, y’know? ’S’ow my old man went.’
‘Proper catch for a hot young blonde,’ said Carter, and Bradley sniggered.
26
… desist!
— The warrior-part of you may, an it list,
Finding real faulchions difficult to poise,
Fling them afar and taste the cream of joys
By wielding such in fancy…
‘But that’s so… weird,’ said Robin, on the phone to Strike half an hour later, while he was walking back to the office.
‘It is, yeah,’ said Strike, a finger in his free ear to block out the sounds of traffic. ‘Very weird.’
His leg was paining him again, but, remembering Murphy’s gym bag and water bottle, he was resisting the temptation to hail a cab.
‘McGee seems to have thought he was going to be paid enough to make it worth his while to sacrifice his job,’ said Strike, ‘but paid for what?’
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.’