‘I’d strongly advise you to stay well away from Pierce until you get the all-clear from us. You don’t want to be seen to get in The Halvening’s way again, not until we’re sure we’ve got all of them. Mind you, even if we’ve missed a couple of low-level guys, they’re going to be crapping themselves once they see the news.’
‘You don’t think Anomie pushed Oliver Peach in front of the train, do you?’ Strike asked, watching Murphy carefully.
‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘We don’t.’
‘So who did?’
Murphy leaned back in his chair.
‘Ben, the bomb-maker, got his suspended sentence for pushing a kid in front of a car. The kid survived, but it was a close thing.
‘Three months ago, Ben and Oliver Peach had a proper bust-up online, before they realised we were watching them. At the time, we only had suspicions about their real identities. Charlie would rather believe your Anomie pushed his brother off the platform than one of the men he recruited into The Halvening – human nature, isn’t it? – but we think it’s going to turn out to be Ben-the-bombmaker.’
‘Is using latex masks a Halvening staple?’
Murphy picked up the manila envelope as he said,
‘Since you mention it, it is.’
‘It is?’ said Robin, who hadn’t expected this answer.
Murphy now tipped a series of photographs out of the manila envelope and slid two of them across the table. Both pictures had been taken on the street by night, and showed a male figure in a hoodie, his face jowly and expressionless. He was examining the letterbox of a small office that faced a street.
‘Those were taken eighteen months ago. The guy’s wearing a latex mask that covers the whole head and neck. There’s a very shady bloke in Germany who’ll make them to any specifications, and The Halvening have bought several. Those masks are getting far too realistic for our liking. The Halvening aren’t the only crims using them. There was a big bank job in Munich recently where the whole gang were wearing them.’
Murphy pointed at the pictures Strike and Robin were examining.
‘That’s the constituency office of Amy Wittstock. Two days after Mask came sneaking around at night, checking that letterbox, a pipe bomb arrived with the morning post.
‘These,’ Murphy went on, pushing another couple of pictures across the table, ‘were taken the night Vikas Bhardwaj was murdered in Cambridge.’
The picture showed a dark man in a wheelchair wheeling himself towards the door of the Stephen Hawking Building.
‘This is Vikas?’ said Robin.
‘Look again,’ said Murphy. ‘That wheelchair isn’t motorised. It’s one of the fold-up lightweight ones.’
‘Wait,’ said Robin. ‘This is—?’
‘—the killer,’ said Murphy. ‘They wore a brown-skinned latex mask, it was evening, and the same idiot who let you in let this guy in, thinking they were Vikas.’
Sure enough, there in the second picture was the same long-haired man helpfully holding the door open for the man in the wheelchair, while staring abstractedly at his phone. The third picture showed the dark man in the wheelchair leaving the grounds, head bowed beneath his hoodie. Strike handed the pictures back to Murphy.
‘What happened after the killer got off the grounds?’
‘The wheelchair was found folded up in bushes down a lane – but not the hard drive.’
‘What hard drive?’
‘Oh – I didn’t tell you. The hard drive on Bhardwaj’s computer was gone, which figures. If he’d been talking to anyone online about his suspicions, they wouldn’t want to leave that behind.
‘It looks as though the killer took a line across some gardens, so no CCTV footage. We’re still examining pictures from the cameras positioned nearest the gardens. It won’t be long till we’ve identified the individual, but I’m ninety per cent certain we’ve already got whoever it was in custody. We think this Vikas guy got suspicious and twigged who the Peach brothers were, so had to be taken out.’
‘Very similar m.o. to the stabbings in Highgate Cemetery,’ said Strike. ‘Kill, then head for parkland or bushes, still disguised.’
‘Yeah. Whoever perpetrated these attacks has got strong nerves and did a lot of planning. Charlie Peach trained his people well – even if one of them went rogue and tried to kill his brother.’
‘And Ormond’s off the hook,’ said Strike.
‘Yeah,’ said Murphy. ‘He didn’t make it easy for himself, not telling us the truth right off, but we got there in the end… Confidentially, he eventually ’fessed up to having put a tracking app on Edie’s phone, so he could keep tabs on her. He was taking his detention and saw the phone moving towards Highgate Cemetery when she was supposed to be at home in the flat in Finchley. He immediately guessed she was going to meet Blay, so he chucked the detention and went after her, raging.’
‘She hadn’t told him she was going to meet Josh, then?’ said Robin.
‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘His story is that by the time he got in his car the phone was leaving Highgate Cemetery and heading out onto Hampstead Heath. He drove there, followed the signal and found the phone lying in the grass. He picked it up and he claims that while he was standing there a “strange figure” emerged out of the trees and came running towards him.’
‘Strange how?’ said Strike.
‘He says it looked like a troll. Lumpy body, bald ugly head with big ears. Latex mask, obviously,’ said Murphy. ‘The person took one look at Ormond standing there with her phone – which had a bright yellow cover on it, so was distinctive – then took off into the trees and vanished.’
‘So he thinks this masked person dropped the phone, realised they didn’t have it and ran back for it?’ asked Robin.
‘Yeah,’ said Murphy. ‘And Ormond panicked once he heard she’d been murdered, because he knew he’d been a minute away from it. “I knew you’d think I was sus, everyone always thinks it’s the partner, don’t they, I panicked, wouldn’t have hurt a hair on her head—”’
‘He probably didn’t hurt a hair,’ said Robin. ‘Her throat, on the other hand…’
‘I don’t think there’s any doubt he was abusive, but we pretty much tore his flat apart. No sign of Blay’s phone, or the murder weapon, or the dossier the killer took. We didn’t have grounds to hold him any longer, but I’m as certain as I can be that he’s in the clear for murder.’
‘You think the masked person was Halvening,’ said Strike.
‘Yeah,’ said Murphy, gesturing towards the photographs of masked individuals, ‘I do. Now we’ve got them in custody we can search all their hangouts and I think there’s a good chance we’ll find Blay’s phone and the murder weapon.
‘Anyway,’ said Murphy, collecting up the photographs, ‘you tipping us off about that game was extremely helpful.’
‘Can I ask one more question?’ said Strike.
‘Go on. Can’t promise I’ll answer.’
‘Have the Met been getting anonymous phone calls telling them to dig up Edie Ledwell’s body?’
Murphy looked taken aback.
‘No. Why – have you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike.
‘Trolls,’ said Murphy.
‘Maybe,’ said Strike.
Murphy accompanied them back downstairs.
‘Been kind of busy with this case since I got back from Spain,’ Murphy told Robin in a low voice while the oblivious Strike walked ahead of them, checking Twitter on his phone. ‘But now things have calmed down…’
‘Great,’ said Robin self-consciously.
‘I’ll call you,’ said Murphy.
As he bade them farewell, he repeated,
‘And keep away from Pez Pierce. Like I say, we don’t know that we’ve got them all.’