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The Missing Madonna · BBC Radio Scotland

Episode 8 - The Rise of the Silver Fox

August 25, 2023·28 min·2 clips
On the Euston tape, Robbie offered to hand the Da Vinci straight to the nearest police station — and undercover officer John Craig told him not to.
The tape starts uneasy. Robbie is heading to a meeting with Marshall and John Craig, who turns out to be an undercover police officer. Everyone is trying to sound careful. Robbie keeps pushing for the rescue plan to be proper, above board, and written down, because he does not want anyone making him look like he is doing something bad. Then court changes the mood. The narrator and her sisters wait outside Edinburgh High Court while the trial pulls apart Robbie's secret recordings and what he says on the stand. The Silver Fox nickname lands oddly. The prosecution tries to make it sound sly, but Robbie says it might just be because he has silver hair. People giggle in court, and the moment sticks. The episode keeps asking whether Robbie is tricky, plainspoken, forthright, or some uncomfortable mix. The photographs make things stranger. The defence walks him through images from Lochabee Manor, including the moment where he changed his shirt. Soon a photo that could be read as him in bed with Madonna turns into courtroom theatre. The memories do not all point one way. One voice says Robbie came across as straightforward and not duplicitous, both in the recorded meetings and on the stand. Another liked him. Lovable rogue hangs over everything, warm in one mouth and dangerous in another. After eight weeks of evidence, the jury is all that matters, while Robbie's family waits with the blunt fear that he has to come home because there is no mum at home instead.

As heard by us

Secret tape, courtroom memory, and a case that keeps tilting from ordinary to strange.

Episode 8 centers on a secretly recorded meeting that begins in careful, procedural territory, with people weighing what is proper, what is legal, and what can be put on paper before the story moves into the High Court of Justice in Edinburgh.

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Why you'd press play

A secret tape pulls a rescue plan into court.

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