Lethal White

1

Such is the universal desire for fame that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.

For many weeks after the capture of the Shacklewell Ripper, Strike had feared that his greatest detective triumph might have dealt his career a fatal blow. The smatterings of publicity his agency had hitherto attracted seemed now like the two submersions of the drowning man before his final descent to the depths. The business for which he had sacrificed so much, and worked so hard, relied largely on his ability to pass unrecognized in the streets of London, but with the capture of a serial killer he had become lodged in the public imagination, a sensational oddity, a jokey aside on quiz shows, an object of curiosity all the more fascinating because he refused to satisfy it.

Having wrung every last drop of interest out of Strike’s ingenuity in catching the Ripper, the papers had exhumed Strike’s family history. They called it “colorful,” though to him it was a lumpen internal mass that he had carried with him all his life and preferred not to probe: the rock star father, the dead groupie mother, the army career that ended with the loss of half his right leg. Grinning journalists bearing checkbooks had descended on the only sibling with whom he had shared a childhood, his half-sister, Lucy. Army acquaintances had given off-the-cuff remarks that, shorn of what Strike knew was rough humor, assumed the appearance of envy and disparagement. The father whom Strike had only met twice, and whose surname he did not use, released a statement through a publicist, implying a non-existent, amicable relationship that was proceeding far from prying eyes. The aftershocks of the Ripper’s capture had reverberated through Strike’s life for a year, and he was not sure they were spent yet.

Of course, there was an upside to becoming the best-known private detective in London. New clients had swarmed to Strike in the aftermath of the trial, so that it had become physically impossible for him and Robin to cover all the jobs themselves. Given that it was advisable for Strike to keep a low profile for a while, he had remained largely office-bound for several months while subcontracted employees—mostly ex-police and military, many from the world of private security—took on the bulk of the work, Strike covering nights and paperwork. After a year of working on as many jobs as the enlarged agency could handle, Strike had managed to give Robin an overdue pay rise, settle the last of his outstanding debts and buy a thirteen-year-old BMW 3 series.

Lucy and his friends assumed that the presence of the car and additional employees meant that Strike had at last achieved a state of prosperous security. In fact, once he had paid the exorbitant costs of garaging the car in central London and met payroll, Strike was left with almost nothing to spend on himself and continued to live in two rooms over the office, cooking on a single-ringed hob.

The administrative demands freelance contractors made and the patchy quality of the men and women available to the agency were a constant headache. Strike had found only one man whom he had kept on semi-permanently: Andy Hutchins, a thin, saturnine ex-policeman ten years older than his new boss, who had come highly recommended by Strike’s friend in the Met, Detective Inspector Eric Wardle. Hutchins had taken early retirement when he had been struck by a sudden bout of near-paralysis of his left leg, followed by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. When he had applied for contract work, Hutchins had warned Strike that he might not always be fit; it was, he explained, an unpredictable disease, but he had not relapsed in three years. He followed a special low-fat diet that to Strike sounded positively punitive: no red meat, no cheese, no chocolate, nothing deep-fried. Methodical and patient, Andy could be trusted to get the job done without constant supervision, which was more than could be said for any of Strike’s other hires apart from Robin. It seemed incredible to him, still, that she had walked into his life as a temporary secretary to become his partner and outstanding colleague.

Whether they were still friends, though, was another question.

Two days after Robin and Matthew’s wedding, when the press had driven him out of his flat, while it was still impossible to turn on the TV without hearing his own name, Strike had sought refuge, in spite of invitations from friends and his sister, in a Travelodge near Monument station. There he had attained the solitude and privacy he craved; there he had been free to sleep for hours undisturbed; and there he had downed nine cans of lager and become increasingly desirous of speaking to Robin with each empty can that he threw, with diminishing accuracy, across the room into the bin.

They had had no contact since their hug on the stairs, to which Strike’s thoughts had turned repeatedly in the ensuing days. He was sure that Robin would be going through a hellish time, holed up in Masham while deciding whether to pursue a divorce or an annulment, arranging the sale of their flat while dealing with both press and family fallout. What exactly he was going to say when he reached her, Strike did not know. He only knew that he wanted to hear her voice. It was at this point, drunkenly searching his kit bag, that he discovered that in his sleep-deprived haste to leave his flat, he had not packed a recharging lead for his mobile, which was out of battery. Undeterred, he had dialed directory inquiries and succeeded, after many requests to repeat himself more clearly, in getting connected to Robin’s parents’ house.

Her father had answered.

“Hi, c’n’I speak t’Robinplease?”

“To Robin? I’m afraid she’s on her honeymoon.”

For a muzzy moment or two, Strike had not quite comprehended what he had been told.

“Hello?” Michael Ellacott had said, and then, angrily, “I suppose this is another journalist. My daughter’s abroad and I would like you to stop calling my house.”

Strike had hung up, then continued to drink until he passed out.

His anger and disappointment had lingered for days and were in no way abated by his awareness that many would say that he had no claims upon his employee’s private life. Robin wasn’t the woman he had thought her if she could have got meekly on a plane with the man he mentally referred to as “that twat.” Nevertheless, something close to depression weighed upon him while he sat in his Travelodge with his brand-new recharging lead and more lager, waiting for his name to disappear from the news.

Consciously seeking to distract himself from thoughts of Robin, he had ended his self-imposed isolation by accepting an invitation that he would usually have avoided: dinner with Detective Inspector Eric Wardle, Wardle’s wife April and their friend Coco. Strike knew perfectly well that he was being set up. Coco had previously tried to find out through Wardle whether Strike was single.

She was a small, lithe, very pretty girl with tomato-red hair, a tattoo artist by trade and a part-time burlesque dancer. He ought to have read the danger signs. She was giggly and slightly hysterical even before they started drinking. Strike had taken her to bed in the Travelodge in the same way he had drunk nine cans of Tennent’s.

Coco had taken some shaking loose in the weeks that followed. Strike did not feel good about it, but one advantage of being on the run from the press was that one-night stands found it far harder to track you down.

One year on, Strike had no idea why Robin had chosen to remain with Matthew. He supposed her feelings for her husband ran so deep that she was blind to what he really was. He was in a new relationship himself, now. It had lasted ten months, the longest since he had split up with Charlotte, who had been the only woman whom he had ever contemplated marrying.

The emotional distance between the detective partners had become a simple fact of daily existence. Strike could not fault Robin’s work. She did everything she was told promptly, meticulously and with initiative and ingenuity. Nevertheless, he had noticed a pinched look that had never been there before. He thought her slightly jumpier than usual and, once or twice while parceling out work between his partner and subcontractors, he had caught an uncharacteristic blank, unfocused expression that troubled him. He knew some of the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and she had now survived two near-fatal attacks. In the immediate aftermath of losing half his leg in Afghanistan, he, too, had experienced dissociation, finding himself suddenly and abruptly removed from his present surroundings to those few seconds of acute foreboding and terror that had preceded the disintegration of the Viking in which he had been sitting, and of his body and military career. He had been left with a deep dislike of being driven by anybody else and, to this day, with dreams of blood and agony that sometimes woke him, bathed in sweat.

However, when he had attempted to discuss Robin’s mental health in the calm, responsible tones of her employer, she had cut him off with a finality and a resentment that he suspected could be traced to the sacking. Thereafter, he had noticed her volunteering for trickier, after-dark assignments and it had been something of a headache to arrange work so that he did not appear to be trying, as in fact he was, to keep her on the safest, most mundane jobs.

They were polite, pleasant and formal with each other, talking about their private lives in the broadest brushstrokes, and then only when necessary. Robin and Matthew had just moved house and Strike had insisted that she take a full week off to do it. Robin had been resistant, but Strike had overruled her. She had taken very little leave all year, he reminded her, in a tone that brooked no argument.

On Monday, the latest of Strike’s unsatisfactory subcontractors, a cocky ex–Red Cap Strike had not known while in the service, had driven his moped into the rear of a taxi he was supposed to be tailing. Strike had enjoyed sacking him. It had given him somebody on whom to vent his anger, because his landlord had also chosen this week to inform Strike that, along with nearly every other owner of office space in Denmark Street, he had sold out to a developer. The threat of losing both office and home now loomed over the detective.

To set the seal on a particularly shitty few days, the temp he had hired to cover basic paperwork and answer the phone in Robin’s absence was as irritating a woman as Strike had ever met. Denise talked nonstop in a whiny, nasal voice that carried even through the closed door of his inner office. Strike had latterly resorted to listening to music on headphones, with the result that she had had to bang on the door repeatedly and shout before he heard her.

“What?”

“I’ve just found this,” said Denise, brandishing a scribbled note in front of him. “It says ‘clinic’… there’s a word beginning with ‘V’ in front… the appointment’s for half an hour’s time—should I have reminded you?”

Strike saw Robin’s handwriting. The first word was indeed illegible.

“No,” he said. “Just throw it away.”

Mildly hopeful that Robin was quietly seeking professional help for any mental problems she might be suffering, Strike replaced his earphones and returned to the report he was reading, but found it hard to concentrate. He therefore decided to leave early for the interview he had scheduled with a possible new subcontractor. Mainly to get away from Denise, he was meeting the man in his favorite pub.

Strike had had to avoid the Tottenham for months in the aftermath of his capture of the Shacklewell Ripper, because journalists had lain in wait for him here, word having got out that he was a regular. Even today, he glanced around suspiciously before deciding that it was safe to advance on the bar, order his usual pint of Doom Bar and retire to a corner table.

Partly because he had made an effort to give up the chips that were a staple of his diet, partly because of his workload, Strike was thinner now than he had been a year ago. The weight loss had relieved pressure on his amputated leg, so that both the effort and the relief of sitting were less noticeable. Strike took a swig of his pint, stretching his knee from force of habit and enjoying the relative ease of movement, then opened the cardboard file he had brought with him.

The notes within had been made by the idiot who had crashed his moped into the back of the taxi, and they were barely adequate. Strike couldn’t afford to lose this client, but he and Hutchins were struggling to cover workload as it was. He urgently needed a new hire, and yet he wasn’t entirely sure that the interview he was about to conduct was wise. He had not consulted Robin before making the bold decision to hunt down a man he had not seen for five years, and even as the door of the Tottenham opened to admit Sam Barclay, who was punctual to the minute, Strike was wondering whether he was about to make an almighty mistake.

He would have known the Glaswegian almost anywhere as an ex-squaddie, with his T-shirt under his thin V-neck jumper, his close-cropped hair, his tight jeans and over-white trainers. As Strike stood up and held out his hand, Barclay, who appeared to have recognized him with similar ease, grinned and said:

“Already drinking, aye?”

“Want one?” asked Strike.

While waiting for Barclay’s pint, he watched the ex-Rifleman in the mirror behind the bar. Barclay was only a little over thirty, but his hair was prematurely graying. He was otherwise exactly as Strike remembered. Heavy browed, with large round blue eyes and a strong jaw, he had the slightly beaky appearance of an affable owl. Strike had liked Barclay even while working to court-martial him.

“Still smoking?” Strike asked, once he’d handed over the beer and sat down.

“Vapin’ now,” said Barclay. “We’ve had a baby.”

“Congratulations,” said Strike. “On a health kick, then?”

“Aye, somethin’ like that.”

“Dealing?”

“I wasnae dealin’,” said Barclay hotly, “as you fuckin’ well know. Recreational use only, pal.”

“Where are you buying it now, then?”

“Online,” said Barclay, sipping his pint. “Easy. First time I did it, I thought, this cannae fuckin’ work, can it? But then I thought, ‘Och, well, it’s an adventure.’ They send it to you disguised in fag packets and that. Choose off a whole menu. Internet’s a great thing.”

He laughed and said, “So whut’s this all about? Wasnae expectin’ to hear from you anytime soon.”

Strike hesitated.

“I was thinking of offering you a job.”

There was a beat as Barclay stared at him, then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Fuck,” he said. “Why didn’t ye say that straight off, like?”

“Why d’you think?”

“I’m no vapin’ every night,” said Barclay earnestly. “I’m no, seriously. The wife doesnae like it.”

Strike kept his hand closed on the file, thinking.

He had been working a drugs case in Germany when he had run across Barclay. Drugs were bought and sold within the British army as in every other part of society, but the Special Investigation Branch had been called in to investigate what appeared to be a rather more professional operation than most. Barclay had been fingered as a key player and the discovery of a kilo brick of prime Moroccan hash among his effects had certainly justified an interview.

Barclay insisted that he had been stitched up and Strike, who was sitting in on his interrogation, was inclined to agree, not least because the Rifleman seemed far too intelligent not to have found a better hiding place for his hashish than the bottom of an army kit bag. On the other hand, there was ample evidence that Barclay had been using regularly, and there was more than one witness to the fact that his behavior was becoming erratic. Strike felt that Barclay had been lined up as a convenient scapegoat, and decided to undertake a little side excavation on his own.

This threw up interesting information relating to building materials and engineering supplies that were being reordered at a thoroughly implausible rate. While it was not the first time that Strike had uncovered this kind of corruption, it so happened that the two officers in charge of these mysteriously vanishing and highly resalable commodities were the very men so keen to secure Barclay’s court martial.

Barclay was startled, during a one-to-one interview with Strike, to find the SIB sergeant suddenly interested, not in hashish, but in anomalies relating to building contracts. At first wary, and sure he would not be believed given the situation in which he found himself, Barclay finally admitted to Strike that he had not only noticed what others had failed to see, or chosen not to inquire into, but begun to tabulate and document exactly how much these officers were stealing. Unfortunately for Barclay, the officers in question had got wind of the fact that he was a little too interested in their activities, and it was shortly after this that a kilo of hashish had turned up in Barclay’s effects.

When Barclay showed Strike the record he had been keeping (the notebook had been hidden a good deal more skillfully than the hashish), Strike had been impressed by the method and initiative it displayed, given that Barclay had never been trained in investigative technique. Asked why he had undertaken the investigation for which nobody was paying, and which had landed him in so much trouble, Barclay had shrugged his broad shoulders and said “no right, is it? That’s the army they’re robbin’. Taxpayers’ money they’re fuckin’ pocketin’.”

Strike had put in many more hours on the case than his colleagues felt was merited, but finally, with Strike’s additional investigations into the matter to add weight, the dossier on his superiors’ activities that Barclay had compiled led to their conviction. The SIB took credit for it, of course, but Strike had made sure that accusations against Barclay were quietly laid to rest.

“When ye say ‘work,’” Barclay wondered aloud now, as the pub hummed and tinkled around them, “ye mean detective stuff?”

Strike could see that the idea appealed.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “What have you been doing since I last saw you?”

The answer was depressing, though not unexpected. Barclay had found it hard to get or keep a regular job in the first couple of years out of the army and had been doing a bit of painting and decorating for his brother-in-law’s company.

“The wife’s bringin’ in most o’ the money,” he said. “She’s got a good job.”

“OK,” said Strike, “I reckon I can give you a couple of days a week for starters. You’ll bill me as a freelancer. If it doesn’t work out, either of us can walk away at any time. Sound fair?”

“Aye,” said Barclay, “aye, fair enough. What are you paying, like?”

They discussed money for five minutes. Strike explained how his other employees set themselves up as private contractors and how receipts and other professional expenses should be brought into the office for reimbursement. Finally he opened the file and slid it around to show Barclay the contents.

“I need this guy followed,” he said, pointing out a photograph of a chubby youth with thick curly hair. “Pictures of whoever he’s with and what he’s up to.”

“Aye, all right,” said Barclay, getting out his mobile and taking pictures of the target’s photograph and address.

“He’s being watched today by my other guy,” said Strike, “but I need you outside his flat from six o’clock tomorrow morning.”

He was pleased to note that Barclay did not query the early start.

“Whut happened to that lassie, though?” Barclay inquired as he put his phone back into his pocket. “The one who was in the papers with ye?”

“Robin?” said Strike. “She’s on holiday. Back next week.”

They parted with a handshake, Strike enjoying a moment’s fleeting optimism before remembering that he would now have to return to the office, which meant proximity to Denise, with her parrot-like chatter, her habit of talking with her mouth full and her inability to remember that he detested pale, milky tea.

He had to pick his way through the ever-present roadworks at the top of Tottenham Court Road to get back to his office. Waiting until he was past the noisiest stretch, he called Robin to tell her that he had hired Barclay, but his call went straight to voicemail. Remembering that she was supposed to be at the mysterious clinic right now, he cut the call without leaving a message.

Walking on, a sudden thought occurred to him. He had assumed that the clinic related to Robin’s mental health, but what if—?

The phone in his hand rang: the office number.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Strike?” said Denise’s terrified squawk in his ear. “Mr. Strike, could you come back quickly, please? Please—there’s a gentleman—he wants to see you very urgently—”

Behind her, Strike heard a loud bang and a man shouting.

“Please come back as soon as you can!” screamed Denise.

“On my way!” Strike shouted and he broke into an ungainly run.

2

Panting, his right knee aching, Strike used the handrail to pull himself up the last few steps of the metal staircase leading to his office. Two raised voices were reverberating through the glass door, one male, the other shrill, frightened and female. When Strike burst into the room, Denise, who was backed against the wall, gasped, “Oh, thank God!”

Strike judged the man in the middle of the room to be in his mid-twenties. Dark hair fell in straggly wisps around a thin and dirty face that was dominated by burning, sunken eyes. His T-shirt, jeans and hoodie were all torn and filthy, the sole of one of his trainers peeling away from the leather. An unwashed animal stench hit the detective’s nostrils.

That the stranger was mentally ill could be in no doubt. Every ten seconds or so, in what seemed to be an uncontrollable tic, he touched first the end of his nose, which had grown red with repeated tapping, then, with a faint hollow thud, the middle of his thin sternum, then let his hand drop to his side. Almost immediately, his hand would fly to the tip of his nose again. It was as though he had forgotten how to cross himself, or had simplified the action for speed’s sake. Nose, chest, hand at his side; nose, chest, hand at his side; the mechanical movement was distressing to watch, and the more so as he seemed barely conscious that he was doing it. He was one of those ill and desperate people you saw in the capital who were always somebody else’s problem, like the traveler on the Tube everybody tried to avoid making eye contact with and the ranting woman on the street corner whom people crossed the street to avoid, fragments of shattered humanity who were too common to trouble the imagination for long.

“You him?” said the burning-eyed man, as his hand touched nose and chest again. “You Strike? You the detective?”

With the hand that was not constantly flying from nose to chest, he suddenly tugged at his flies. Denise whimpered, as if scared he might suddenly expose himself, and, indeed, it seemed entirely possible.

“I’m Strike, yeah,” said the detective, moving around to place himself between the stranger and the temp. “You OK, Denise?”

“Yes,” she whispered, still backed against the wall.

“I seen a kid killed,” said the stranger. “Strangled.”

“OK,” said Strike, matter-of-factly. “Why don’t we go in here?”

He gestured to him that he should proceed into the inner office.

“I need a piss!” said the man, tugging at his zip.

“This way, then.”

Strike showed him the door to the toilet just outside the office. When the door had banged shut behind him, Strike returned quietly to Denise.

“What happened?”

“He wanted to see you, I said you weren’t here and he got angry and started punching things!”

“Call the police,” said Strike quietly. “Tell them we’ve got a very ill man here. Possibly psychotic. Wait until I’ve got him into my office, though.”

The bathroom door banged open. The stranger’s flies were gaping. He did not seem to be wearing underpants. Denise whimpered again as he frantically touched nose and chest, nose and chest, unaware of the large patch of dark pubic hair he was exposing.

“This way,” said Strike pleasantly. The man shuffled through the inner door, the stench of him doubly potent after a brief respite.

On being invited to sit down, the stranger perched himself on the edge of the client’s chair.

“What’s your name?” Strike asked, sitting down on the other side of the desk.

“Billy,” said the man, his hand flying from nose to chest three times in quick succession. The third time his hand fell, he grabbed it with his other hand and held it tightly.

“And you saw a child strangled, Billy?” said Strike, as in the next room Denise gabbled:

“Police, quickly!”

“What did she say?” asked Billy, his sunken eyes huge in his face as he glanced nervously towards the outer office, one hand clasping the other in his effort to suppress his tic.

“That’s nothing,” said Strike easily. “I’ve got a few different cases on. Tell me about this child.”

Strike reached for a pad and paper, all his movements slow and cautious, as though Billy were a wild bird that might take fright.

“He strangled it, up by the horse.”

Denise was now gabbling loudly into the phone beyond the flimsy partition wall.

“When was this?” asked Strike, still writing.

“Ages… I was a kid. Little girl it was, but after they said it was a little boy. Jimmy was there, he says I never saw it, but I did. I saw him do it. Strangled. I saw it.”

“And this was up by the horse, was it?”

“Right up by the horse. That’s not where they buried her, though. Him. That was down in the dell, by our dad’s. I seen them doing it, I can show you the place. She wouldn’t let me dig, but she’d let you.”

“And Jimmy did it, did he?”

“Jimmy never strangled nobody!” said Billy angrily. “He saw it with me. He says it didn’t happen but he’s lying, he was there. He’s frightened, see.”

“I see,” lied Strike, continuing to take notes. “Well, I’ll need your address if I’m going to investigate.”

He half-expected resistance, but Billy reached eagerly for the proffered pad and pen. A further gust of body odor reached Strike. Billy began to write, but suddenly seemed to think better of it.

“You won’t come to Jimmy’s place, though? He’ll fucking tan me. You can’t come to Jimmy’s.”

“No, no,” said Strike soothingly. “I just need your address for my records.”

Through the door came Denise’s grating voice.

“I need someone here quicker than that, he’s very disturbed!”

“What’s she saying?” asked Billy.

To Strike’s chagrin, Billy suddenly ripped the top sheet from the pad, crumpled it, then began to touch nose and chest again with his fist enclosing the paper.

“Don’t worry about Denise,” said Strike, “she’s dealing with another client. Can I get you a drink, Billy?”

“Drink of what?”

“Tea? Or coffee?”

“Why?” asked Billy. The offer seemed to have made him even more suspicious. “Why do you want me to drink something?”

“Only if you fancy it. Doesn’t matter if you don’t.”

“I don’t need medicine!”

“I haven’t got any medicine to give you,” said Strike.

“I’m not mental! He strangled the kid and they buried it, down in the dell by our dad’s house. Wrapped in a blanket it was. Pink blanket. It wasn’t my fault. I was only a kid. I didn’t want to be there. I was just a little kid.”

“How many years ago, do you know?”

“Ages… years… can’t get it out of my head,” said Billy, his eyes burning in his thin face as the fist enclosing the piece of paper fluttered up and down, touching nose, touching chest. “They buried her in a pink blanket, down in the dell by my dad’s house. But afterwards they said it was a boy.”

“Where’s your dad’s house, Billy?”

“She won’t let me back now. You could dig, though. You could go. Strangled her, they did,” said Billy, fixing Strike with his haunted eyes. “But Jimmy said it was a boy. Strangled, up by the—”

There was a knock on the door. Before Strike could tell her not to enter, Denise had poked her head inside, much braver now that Strike was here, full of her own importance.

“They’re coming,” she said, with a look of exaggerated meaning that would have spooked a man far less jumpy than Billy. “On their way now.”

“Who’s coming?” demanded Billy, jumping up. “Who’s on their way?”

Denise whipped her head out of the room and closed the door. There was a soft thud against the wood, and Strike knew that she was leaning against it, trying to hold Billy in.

“She’s just talking about a delivery I’m expecting,” Strike said soothingly, getting to his feet. “Go on about the—”

“What have you done?” yelped Billy, backing away towards the door while he repeatedly touched nose and chest. “Who’s coming?”

“Nobody’s coming,” said Strike, but Billy was already trying to push the door open. Meeting resistance, he flung himself hard against it. There was a shriek from outside as Denise was thrown aside. Before Strike could get out from around the desk, Billy had sprinted through the outer door. They heard him jumping down the metal stairs three at a time and Strike, infuriated, knowing that he had no hope of catching a younger and, on the evidence, fitter man, turned and ran back into his office. Throwing up the sash window, he leaned outside just in time to see Billy whipping around the corner of the street out of sight.

“Bollocks!”

A man heading inside the guitar shop opposite stared around in some perplexity for the source of the noise.

Strike withdrew his head and turned to glare at Denise, who was dusting herself down in the doorway to his office. Incredibly, she looked pleased with herself.

“I tried to hold him in,” she said proudly.

“Yeah,” said Strike, exercising considerable self-restraint. “I saw.”

“The police are on their way.”

“Fantastic.”

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Then I think I’ll go and freshen up the bathroom,” she said, adding in a whisper, “I don’t think he used the flush.”

3

As she walked along the unfamiliar Deptford street, Robin was raised to temporary light-heartedness, then wondered when she had last felt this way and knew that it had been over a year. Energized and uplifted by the afternoon sunshine, the colorful shopfronts and general bustle and noise, she was currently celebrating the fact that she never need see the inside of the Villiers Trust Clinic again.

Her therapist had been unhappy that she was terminating treatment.

“We recommend a full course,” she had said.

“I know,” Robin replied, “but, well, I’m sorry, I think this has done me as much good as it’s going to.”

The therapist’s smile had been chilly.

“The CBT’s been great,” Robin had said. “It’s really helped with the anxiety, I’m going to keep that up…”

She had taken a deep breath, eyes fixed on the woman’s low-heeled Mary Janes, then forced herself to look her in the eye.

“… but I’m not finding this part helpful.”

Another silence had ensued. After five sessions, Robin was used to them. In normal conversation, it would be considered rude or passive aggressive to leave these long pauses and simply watch the other person, waiting for them to speak, but in psychodynamic therapy, she had learned, it was standard.

Robin’s doctor had given her a referral for free treatment on the NHS, but the waiting list had been so long that she had decided, with Matthew’s tight-lipped support, to pay for treatment. Matthew, she knew, was barely refraining from saying that the ideal solution would be to give up the job that had landed her with PTSD and which in his view paid far too poorly considering the dangers to which she had been exposed.

“You see,” Robin had continued with the speech she had prepared, “my life is pretty much wall to wall with people who think they know what’s best for me.”

“Well, yes,” said the therapist, in a manner that Robin felt would have been considered condescending beyond the clinic walls, “we’ve discussed—”

“—and…”

Robin was by nature conciliatory and polite. On the other hand, she had been urged repeatedly by the therapist to speak the unvarnished truth in this dingy little room with the spider plant in its dull green pot and the man-sized tissues on the low pine table.

“… and to be honest,” she said, “you feel like just another one of them.”

Another pause.

“Well,” said the therapist, with a little laugh, “I’m here to help you reach your own conclusions about—”

“Yes, but you do it by—by pushing me all the time,” said Robin. “It’s combative. You challenge everything I say.”

Robin closed her eyes, as a great wave of weariness swept her. Her muscles ached. She had spent all week putting together flat-pack furniture, heaving around boxes of books and hanging pictures.

“I come out of here,” said Robin, opening her eyes again, “feeling wrung out. I go home to my husband, and he does it, too. He leaves big sulky silences and challenges me on the smallest things. Then I phone my mother, and it’s more of the same. The only person who isn’t at me all the time to sort myself out is—”

She pulled up short, then said:

“—is my work partner.”

“Mr. Strike,” said the therapist sweetly.

It had been a matter of contention between Robin and the therapist that she had refused to discuss her relationship with Strike, other than to confirm that he was unaware of how much the Shacklewell Ripper case had affected her. Their personal relationship, she had stated firmly, was irrelevant to her present issues. The therapist had raised him in every session since, but Robin had consistently refused to engage on the subject.

“Yes,” said Robin. “Him.”

“By your own admission you haven’t told him the full extent of your anxiety.”

“So,” said Robin, ignoring the last comment, “I really only came today to tell you I’m leaving. As I say, I’ve found the CBT really useful and I’m going to keep using the exercises.”

The therapist had seemed outraged that Robin wasn’t even prepared to stay for the full hour, but Robin had paid for the entire session and therefore felt free to walk out, giving her what felt like a bonus hour in the day. She felt justified in not hurrying home to do more unpacking, but to buy herself a Cornetto and enjoy it as she wandered through the sun-drenched streets of her new area.

Chasing her own cheerfulness like a butterfly, because she was afraid it might escape, she turned up a quieter street, forcing herself to concentrate, to take in the unfamiliar scene. She was, after all, delighted to have left behind the old flat in West Ealing, with its many bad memories. It had become clear during his trial that the Shacklewell Ripper had been tailing and watching Robin for far longer than she had ever suspected. The police had even told her that they thought he had hung around Hastings Road, lurking behind parked cars, yards from her front door.

Desperate though she had been to move, it had taken her and Matthew eleven months to find a new place. The main problem was that Matthew had been determined to “take a step up the property ladder,” now that he had a better-paid new job and a legacy from his late mother. Robin’s parents, too, had expressed a willingness to help them, given the awful associations of the old flat, but London was excruciatingly expensive. Three times had Matthew set his heart on flats that were, realistically, well out of their price range. Three times had they failed to buy what Robin could have told him would sell for thousands more than they could offer.

“It’s ridiculous!” he kept saying, “it isn’t worth that!”

“It’s worth whatever people are prepared to pay,” Robin had said, frustrated that an accountant didn’t understand the operation of market forces. She had been ready to move anywhere, even a single room, to escape the shadow of the killer who continued to haunt her dreams.

On the point of doubling back towards the main road, her eye was caught by the opening in a brick wall, which was flanked by gateposts topped with the strangest finials she had ever seen.

A pair of gigantic, crumbling stone skulls sat on top of carved bones on gateposts, beyond which a tall square tower rose. The finials would have looked at home, Robin thought, moving closer to examine the empty black eye sockets, garnishing the front of a pirate’s mansion in some fantasy film. Peering through the opening, Robin saw a church and mossy tombs lying amid an empty rose garden in full bloom.

She finished her ice cream while wandering around St. Nicholas’s, a strange amalgam of an old red-brick school grafted onto the rough stone tower. Finally she sat down on a wooden bench that had grown almost uncomfortably hot in the sun, stretched her aching back, drank in the delicious scent of warm roses and was suddenly transported, entirely against her will, back to the hotel suite in Yorkshire, almost a year ago, where a blood-red bouquet of roses had witnessed the aftermath of her abandonment of Matthew on the dance floor at her wedding reception.

Matthew, his father, his Aunt Sue, Robin’s parents and brother Stephen had all converged on the bridal suite where Robin had retreated to escape Matthew’s fury. She had been changing out of her wedding dress when they had burst in, one after another, all demanding to know what was going on.

A cacophony had ensued. Stephen, first to grasp what Matthew had done in deleting Strike’s calls, started to shout at him. Geoffrey was drunkenly demanding to know why Strike had been allowed to stay for dinner given he hadn’t RSVPed. Matthew was bellowing at all of them to butt out, that this was between him and Robin, while Aunt Sue said over and over, “I’ve never seen a bride walk out of her first dance. Never! I’ve never seen a bride walk out of her first dance.”

Then Linda had finally grasped what Matthew had done, and began telling him off, too. Geoffrey had leapt to his son’s defense, demanding to know why Linda wanted her daughter to go back to a man who allowed her to get stabbed. Martin had arrived, extremely drunk, and had taken a swing at Matthew for reasons that nobody had ever explained satisfactorily, and Robin had retreated to the bathroom where, incredibly, given that she had barely eaten all day, she had thrown up.

Five minutes later, she had been forced to let Matthew in because his nose was bleeding and there, with their families still shouting at each other in the next door bedroom, Matthew had asked her, a wodge of toilet roll pressed to his nostrils, to come with him to the Maldives, not as a honeymoon, not anymore, but to sort things out in private, “away,” as he put it thickly, gesturing towards the source of the yelling, “from this. And there’ll be press,” he added, accusingly. “They’ll be after you, for the Ripper business.”

He was cold-eyed over the bloody toilet paper, furious with her for humiliating him on the dance floor, livid with Martin for hitting him. There was nothing romantic in his invitation to board the plane. He was proposing a summit, a chance for calm discussion. If, after serious consideration, they came to the conclusion that the marriage was a mistake, they would come home at the end of the fortnight, make a joint announcement, and go their separate ways.

And at that moment, the wretched Robin, arm throbbing, shaken to the core by the feelings that had risen inside when she had felt Strike’s arms around her, knowing that the press might even now be trying to track her down, had seen Matthew, if not as an ally, at least as an escape. The idea of getting on a plane, of flying out of reach of the tsunami of curiosity, gossip, anger, solicitude and unsought advice that she knew would engulf her as long as she remained in Yorkshire, was deeply appealing.

So they had left, barely speaking during the flight. What Matthew had been thinking through those long hours, she had never inquired. She knew only that she had thought about Strike. Over and again, she had returned to the memory of their embrace as she watched the clouds slide past the window.

Am I in love with him? she had asked herself repeatedly, but without reaching any firm conclusion.

Her deliberations on the subject had lasted days, an inner torment she could not reveal to Matthew as they walked on white beaches, discussing the tensions and resentments that lay between the two of them. Matthew slept on the living-room sofa at night, Robin in the net-draped double bed upstairs. Sometimes they argued, at other times they retreated into hurt and furious silences. Matthew was keeping tabs on Robin’s phone, wanting to know where it was, constantly picking it up and checking it, and she knew that he was looking for messages or calls from her boss.

What made things worse was that there were none. Apparently Strike wasn’t interested in talking to her. The hug on the stairs, to which her thoughts kept scampering back like a dog to a blissfully pungent lamppost, seemed to have meant far less to him than it had to her.

Night after night, Robin walked by herself on the beach, listening to the sea’s deep breathing, her injured arm sweating beneath its rubber protective brace, her phone left at the villa so that Matthew had no excuse to tail her and find out whether she was talking secretly to Strike.

But on the seventh night, with Matthew back at the villa, she had decided to call Strike. Almost without acknowledging it to herself, she had formulated a plan. There was a landline at the bar and she knew the office number off by heart. It would be diverted to Strike’s mobile automatically. What she was going to say when she reached him, she didn’t know, but she was sure that if she heard him speak, the truth about her feelings would be revealed to her. As the phone rang in distant London, Robin’s mouth had become dry.

The phone was answered, but nobody spoke for a few seconds. Robin listened to the sounds of movement, then heard a giggle, and then at last somebody spoke.

“Hello? This is Cormy-Warmy—”

As the woman broke into loud, raucous laughter, Robin heard Strike somewhere in the background, half-amused, half-annoyed and certainly drunk:

“Gimme that! Seriously, give it—”

Robin had slammed the receiver back onto its rest. Sweat had broken out on her face and chest: she felt ashamed, foolish, humiliated. He was with another woman. The laughter had been unmistakably intimate. The unknown girl had been teasing him, answering his mobile, calling him (how revolting) “Cormy.”

She would deny phoning him, she resolved, if ever Strike asked her about the dropped call. She would lie through her teeth, pretend not to know what he was talking about…

The sound of the woman on the phone had affected her like a hard slap. If Strike could have taken somebody to bed so soon after their hug—and she would have staked her life on the fact that the girl, whoever she was, had either just slept with Strike, or was about to—then he wasn’t sitting in London torturing himself about his true feelings for Robin Ellacott.

The salt on her lips made her thirsty as she trudged through the night, wearing a deep groove in the soft white sand as the waves broke endlessly beside her. Wasn’t it possible, she asked herself, when she was cried out at last, that she was confusing gratitude and friendship with something deeper? That she had mistaken her love of detection for love of the man who had given her the job? She admired Strike, of course, and was immensely fond of him. They had passed through many intense experiences together, so that it was natural to feel close to him, but was that love?

Alone in the balmy, mosquito-buzzing night, while the waves sighed on the shore and she cradled her aching arm, Robin reminded herself bleakly that she had had very little experience with men for a woman approaching her twenty-eighth birthday. Matthew was all she had ever known, her only sexual partner, a place of safety to her for ten long years now. If she had developed a crush on Strike—she employed the old-fashioned word her mother might have used—mightn’t it also be the natural side effect of the lack of variety and experimentation most women of her age had enjoyed? For so long faithful to Matthew, hadn’t she been bound to look up one day and remember that there were other lives, other choices? Hadn’t she been long overdue to notice that Matthew was not the only man in the world? Strike, she told herself, was simply the one with whom she had been spending the most time, so naturally it had been he onto whom she projected her wondering, her curiosity, her dissatisfaction with Matthew.

Having, as she told herself, talked sense into that part of her that kept yearning for Strike, she reached a hard decision on the eighth evening of her honeymoon. She wanted to go home early and announce their separation to their families. She must tell Matthew that it had nothing to do with anybody else, but after agonizing and serious reflection, she did not believe they were well suited enough to continue in the marriage.

She could still remember her feeling of mingled panic and dread as she had pushed open the cabin door, braced for a fight that had never materialized. Matthew had been sitting slumped on the sofa and when he saw her, he mumbled, “Mum?”

His face, arms and legs had been shining with sweat. As she moved towards him, she saw an ugly black tracing of veins up the inside of his left arm, as though somebody had filled them with ink.

“Matt?”

Hearing her, he had realized that she was not his dead mother.

“Don’t… feel well, Rob…”

She had dashed for the phone, called the hotel, asked for a doctor. By the time he arrived, Matthew was drifting in and out of delirium. They had found the scratch on the back of his hand and, worried, concluded that he might have cellulitis, which Robin could tell, from the faces of the worried doctor and nurse, was serious. Matthew kept seeing figures moving in the shadowy corners of the cabin, people who weren’t there.

“Who’s that?” he kept asking Robin. “Who’s that over there?”

“There’s nobody else here, Matt.”

Now she was holding his hand while the nurse and doctor discussed hospitalization.

“Don’t leave me, Rob.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

She had meant that she was going nowhere just now, not that she would stay forever, but Matthew had begun to cry.

“Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to walk… I love you, Rob. I know I fucked up, but I love you…”

The doctor gave Matthew oral antibiotics and went to make telephone calls. Delirious, Matthew clung to his wife, thanking her. Sometimes he drifted into a state where, again, he thought he saw shadows moving in the empty corners of the room, and twice more he muttered about his dead mother. Alone in the velvety blackness of the tropical night, Robin listened to winged insects colliding with the screens at the windows, alternately comforting and watching over the man she had loved since she was seventeen.

It hadn’t been cellulitis. The infection had responded, over the next twenty-four hours, to antibiotics. As he recovered from the sudden, violent illness, Matthew watched her constantly, weak and vulnerable as she had never seen him, afraid, she knew, that her promise to stay had been temporary.

“We can’t throw it all away, can we?” he had asked her hoarsely from the bed where the doctor had insisted he stay. “All these years?”

She had let him talk about the good times, the shared times, and she had reminded herself about the giggling girl who had called Strike “Cormy.” She envisioned going home and asking for an annulment, because the marriage had still not been consummated. She remembered the money her parents had spent on the wedding day she had hated.

Bees buzzed in the churchyard roses around her as Robin wondered, for the thousandth time, where she would be right now if Matthew hadn’t scratched himself on coral. Most of her now-terminated therapy sessions had been full of her need to talk about the doubts that had plagued her ever since she had agreed to remain married.

In the months that had followed, and especially when she and Matthew were getting on reasonably well, it seemed to her that it had been right to give the marriage a fair trial, but she never forgot to think of it in terms of a trial, and this in itself sometimes led her, sleepless at night, to castigate herself for the pusillanimous failure to pull herself free once Matthew had recovered.

She had never explained to Strike what had happened, why she had agreed to try and keep the marriage afloat. Perhaps that was why their friendship had grown so cold and distant. When she had returned from her honeymoon, it was to find Strike changed towards her—and perhaps, she acknowledged, she had changed towards him, too, because of what she had heard on the line when she had called, in desperation, from the Maldives bar.

“Sticking with it, then, are you?” he had said roughly, after a glance at her ring finger.

His tone had nettled her, as had the fact that he had never asked why she was trying, never asked about her home life from that point onwards, never so much as hinted that he remembered the hug on the stairs.

Whether because Strike had arranged matters that way or not, they had not worked a case together since that of the Shacklewell Ripper. Imitating her senior partner, Robin had retreated into a cool professionalism.

But sometimes she was afraid that he no longer valued her as he once had, now that she had proven herself so conventional and cowardly. There had been an awkward conversation a few months ago in which he had suggested that she take time off, asked whether she felt she was fully recovered after the knife attack. Taking this as a slight upon her bravery, afraid that she would again find herself sidelined, losing the only part of her life that she currently found fulfilling, she had insisted that she was perfectly well and redoubled her professional efforts.

The muted mobile in her bag vibrated. Robin slipped her hand inside and looked to see who was calling. Strike. She also noticed that he had called earlier, while she was saying a joyful goodbye to the Villiers Trust Clinic.

“Hi,” she said. “I missed you earlier, sorry.”

“Not a problem. Move gone all right?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Just wanted to let you know, I’ve hired us a new subcontractor. Name of Sam Barclay.”

“Great,” said Robin, watching a fly shimmering on a fat, blush-pink rose. “What’s his background?”

“Army,” said Strike.

“Military police?”

“Er—not exactly.”

As he told her the story of Sam Barclay, Robin found herself grinning.

“So you’ve hired a dope-smoking painter and decorator?”

“Vaping, dope vaping,” Strike corrected her, and Robin could tell that he was grinning, too. “He’s on a health kick. New baby.”

“Well, he sounds… interesting.”

She waited, but Strike did not speak.

“I’ll see you Saturday night, then,” she said.

Robin had felt obliged to invite Strike to her and Matthew’s house-warming party, because she had given their most regular and reliable subcontractor, Andy Hutchins, an invitation, and felt it would be odd to leave out Strike. She had been surprised when he had accepted.

“Yeah, see you then.”

“Is Lorelei coming?” Robin asked, striving for casualness, but not sure she had succeeded.

Back in central London, Strike thought he detected a sardonic note in the question, as though challenging him to admit that his girlfriend had a ludicrous moniker. He would once have pulled her up on it, asked what her problem was with the name “Lorelei,” enjoyed sparring with her, but this was dangerous territory.

“Yeah, she’s coming. The invitation was to both—”

“Yes, of course it was,” said Robin hastily. “All right, I’ll see you—”

“Hang on,” said Strike.

He was alone in the office, because he had sent Denise home early. The temp had not wanted to leave: she was paid by the hour, after all, and only after Strike had assured her that he would pay for a full day had she gathered up all her possessions, talking nonstop all the while.

“Funny thing happened this afternoon,” said Strike.

Robin listened intently, without interrupting, to Strike’s vivid account of the brief visit of Billy. By the end of it, she had forgotten to worry about Strike’s coolness. Indeed, he now sounded like the Strike of a year ago.

“He was definitely mentally ill,” said Strike, his eyes on the clear sky beyond the window. “Possibly psychotic.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I know,” said Strike. He picked up the pad from which Billy had ripped his half-written address and turned it absently in his free hand. “Is he mentally ill, so he thinks he saw a kid strangled? Or is he mentally ill and he saw a kid strangled?”

Neither spoke for a while, during which time both turned over Billy’s story in their minds, knowing that the other was doing the same. This brief, companionable spell of reflection ended abruptly when a cocker spaniel, which Robin had not noticed as it came snuffling through the roses, laid its cold nose without warning on her bare knee and she shrieked.

“What the fuck?”

“Nothing—a dog—”

“Where are you?”

“In a graveyard.”

“What? Why?”

“Just exploring the area. I’d better go,” she said, getting to her feet. “There’s another flat-pack waiting for me at home.”

“Right you are,” said Strike, with a return to his usual briskness. “See you Saturday.”

“I’m so sorry,” said the cocker spaniel’s elderly owner, as Robin slid her mobile back into her bag. “Are you frightened of dogs?”

“Not at all,” said Robin, smiling and patting the dog’s soft golden head. “He surprised me, that’s all.”

As she headed back past the giant skulls towards her new home, Robin thought about Billy, whom Strike had described with such vividness that Robin felt as though she had met him, too.

So deeply absorbed in her thoughts was she, that for the first time all week, Robin forgot to glance up at the White Swan pub as she passed it. High above the street, on the corner of the building, was a single carved swan, which reminded Robin, every time she passed it, of her calamitous wedding day.

4

Six and a half miles away, Strike set his mobile down on his desk and lit a cigarette. Robin’s interest in his story had been soothing after the interview he had endured half an hour after Billy had fled. The two policemen who had answered Denise’s call had seemed to relish their opportunity to make the famous Cormoran Strike admit his fallibility, taking their time as they ascertained that he had succeeded in finding out neither full name nor address of the probably psychotic Billy.

The late afternoon sun hit the notebook on his desk at an angle, revealing faint indentations. Strike dropped his cigarette into an ashtray he had stolen long ago from a German bar, picked up the notepad and tilted it this way and that, trying to make out the letters formed by the impressions, then reached for a pencil and lightly shaded over them. Untidy capital letters were soon revealed, clearly spelling the words “Charlemont Road.” Billy had pressed less hard on the house or flat number than the street name. One of the faint indents looked like either a 5 or an incomplete 8, but the spacing suggested more than one figure, or possibly a letter.

Strike’s incurable predilection for getting to the root of puzzling incidents tended to inconvenience him quite as much as other people. Hungry and tired though he was, and despite the fact that he had sent his temp away so he could shut up the office, he tore the paper carrying the revealed street name off the pad and headed into the outer room, where he switched the computer back on.

There were several Charlemont Roads in the UK, but on the assumption that Billy was unlikely to have the means to travel very far, he suspected that the one in East Ham had to be the right one. Online records showed two Williams living there, but both were over sixty. Remembering that Billy had been scared that Strike might turn up at “Jimmy’s place,” he had searched for Jimmy and then James, which turned up the details of James Farraday, 49.

Strike made a note of Farraday’s address beneath Billy’s indented scribbles, though not at all confident that Farraday was the man he sought. For one thing, his house number contained no fives or eights and, for another, Billy’s extreme unkemptness suggested that whomever he lived with must take a fairly relaxed attitude to his personal hygiene. Farraday lived with a wife and what appeared to be two daughters.

Strike turned off the computer, but continued to stare abstractedly at the dark screen, thinking about Billy’s story. It was the detail of the pink blanket that kept nagging at him. It seemed such a specific, unglamorous detail for a psychotic delusion.

Remembering that he needed to be up early in the morning for a paying job, he pulled himself to his feet. Before leaving the office, he inserted the piece of paper bearing both the impressions of Billy’s handwriting and Farraday’s address into his wallet.

London, which had recently been at the epicenter of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, was preparing to host the Olympics. Union Jacks and the London 2012 logo were everywhere—on signs, banners, bunting, keyrings, mugs and umbrellas—while jumbles of Olympic merchandise cluttered virtually every shop window. In Strike’s opinion, the logo resembled shards of fluorescent glass randomly thrown together and he was equally unenamored of the official mascots, which looked to him like a pair of cycloptic molars.

There was a tinge of excitement and nervousness about the capital, born, no doubt, of the perennially British dread that the nation might make a fool of itself. Complaints about non-availability of Olympics tickets were a dominant theme in conversation, unsuccessful applicants decrying the lottery that was supposed to have given everybody a fair and equal chance of watching events live. Strike, who had hoped to see some boxing, had not managed to get tickets, but laughed out loud at his old school friend Nick’s offer to take his place at the dressage, which Nick’s wife Ilsa was overjoyed to have bagged.

Harley Street, where Strike was due to spend Friday running surveillance on a cosmetic surgeon, remained untouched by Olympic fever. The grand Victorian façades presented their usual implacable faces to the world, unsullied by garish logos or flags.

Strike, who was wearing his best Italian suit for the job, took up a position near the doorway of a building opposite and pretended to be talking on his mobile, actually keeping watch over the entrance of the expensive consulting rooms of two partners, one of whom was Strike’s client.

“Dodgy Doc,” as Strike had nicknamed his quarry, was taking his time living up to his name. Possibly he had been scared out of his unethical behavior by his partner, who had confronted him after realizing that Dodgy had recently performed two breast augmentations that had not been run through the business’s books. Suspecting the worst, the senior partner had come to Strike for help.

“His justification was feeble, full of holes. He is,” said the white-haired surgeon, stiff-lipped but full of foreboding, “and always has been a… ah… womanizer. I checked his internet history before confronting him and found a website where young women solicit cash contributions for their cosmetic enhancements, in return for explicit pictures. I fear… I hardly know what… but it might be that he has made an arrangement with these women that is not… monetary. Two of the younger women had been asked to call a number I did not recognize, but which suggested surgery might be arranged free in return for an ‘exclusive arrangement.’”

Strike had not so far witnessed Dodgy meeting any women outside his regular hours. He spent Mondays and Fridays in his Harley Street consulting rooms and the mid-week at the private hospital where he operated. Whenever Strike had tailed him outside his places of work, he had merely taken short walks to purchase chocolate, to which he seemed addicted. Every night, he drove his Bentley home to his wife and children in Gerrards Cross, tailed by Strike in his old blue BMW.

Tonight, both surgeons would be attending a Royal College of Surgeons dinner with their wives, so Strike had left his BMW in its expensive garage. The hours rolled by in tedium, Strike mostly concerned with shifting the weight off his prosthesis at regular intervals as he leaned up against railings, parking meters and doorways. A steady trickle of clients pressed the bell at Dodgy’s door and were admitted, one by one. All were female and most were sleek and well-groomed. At five o’clock, Strike’s mobile vibrated in his breast pocket and he saw a text from his client.

Perversely, Strike hung around, watching as the partners left the building some fifteen minutes later. His client was tall and white-haired; Dodgy, a sleek, dapper olive-skinned man with shiny black hair, who wore three-piece suits. Strike watched them get into a taxi and leave, then yawned, stretched and contemplated heading home, possibly with a takeaway.

Almost against his will, he pulled out his wallet and extracted the piece of crumpled paper on which he had managed to reveal Billy’s street name.

All day, at the back of his mind, he had thought he might go and seek out Billy in Charlemont Road if Dodgy Doc left work early, but he was tired and his leg sore. If Lorelei knew that he had the evening off, she would expect Strike to call. On the other hand, they were going to Robin’s house-warming together tomorrow night and if he spent tonight at Lorelei’s, it would be hard to extricate himself tomorrow, after the party. He never spent two nights in a row at Lorelei’s flat, even when the opportunity had occurred. He liked to set limits on her rights to his time.

As though hoping to be dissuaded by the weather, he glanced up at the clear June sky and sighed. The evening was clear and perfect, the agency so busy that he did not know when he would next have a few hours to spare. If he wanted to visit Charlemont Road, it would have to be tonight.

5

His journey coinciding with rush hour, it took Strike over an hour to travel from Harley Street to East Ham. By the time he had located Charlemont Road his stump was aching and the sight of the long residential street made him regret that he was not the kind of man who could simply write off Billy as a mental case.

The terraced houses had a motley appearance: some were bare brick, others painted or pebble-dashed. Union Jacks hung at windows: further evidence of Olympics fever or relics of the Royal Jubilee. The small plots in front of the houses had been made into pocket gardens or dumps for debris, according to preference. Halfway along the road lay a dirty old mattress, abandoned to whoever wanted to deal with it.

His first glimpse of James Farraday’s residence did not encourage Strike to hope that he had reached journey’s end, because it was one of the best-maintained houses in the street. A tiny porch with colored glass had been added around the front door, ruched net curtains hung at each window and the brass letterbox gleamed in the sunshine. Strike pressed the plastic doorbell and waited.

After a short wait, a harried woman opened the door, releasing a silver tabby, which appeared to have been waiting, coiled behind the door, for the first chance to escape. The woman’s cross expression sat awkwardly above an apron printed with a “Love Is…” cartoon. A strong odor of cooking meat wafted out of the house.

“Hi,” said Strike, salivating at the smell. “Don’t know whether you can help me. I’m trying to find Billy.”

“You’ve got the wrong address. There’s no Billy here.”

She made to close the door.

“He said he was staying with Jimmy,” said Strike, as the gap narrowed.

“There’s no Jimmy here, either.”

“Sorry, I thought somebody called James—”

“Nobody calls him Jimmy. You’ve got the wrong house.”

She closed the door.

Strike and the silver tabby eyed each other; in the cat’s case, superciliously, before it sat down on the mat and began to groom itself with an air of dismissing Strike from its thoughts.

Strike returned to the pavement, where he lit a cigarette and looked up and down the street. By his estimate there were two hundred houses on Charlemont Road. How long would it take to knock on every household’s door? More time than he had this evening, was the unfortunate answer, and more time than he was likely to have anytime soon. He walked on, frustrated and increasingly sore, glancing in through windows and scrutinizing passersby for a resemblance to the man he had met the previous day. Twice, he asked people entering or leaving their houses whether they knew “Jimmy and Billy,” whose address he claimed to have lost. Both said no.

Strike trudged on, trying not to limp.

At last he reached a section of houses that had been bought up and converted into flats. Pairs of front doors stood crammed side by side and the front plots had been concreted over.

Strike slowed down. A torn sheet of A4 had been pinned to one of the shabbiest doors, from which the white paint was peeling. A faint but familiar prickle of interest that he would never have dignified with the name “hunch” led Strike to the door.

The scribbled message read:

Strike lifted the sheet of paper with a finger, saw a house number ending in 5, let the note fall again and moved to peer through the dusty downstairs window.

An old bed sheet had been pinned up to block out sunlight, but a corner had fallen down. Tall enough to squint through the uncovered portion of glass, Strike saw a slice of empty room containing an open sofa bed with a stained duvet on it, a pile of clothes in the corner and a portable TV standing on a cardboard box. The carpet was obscured by a multitude of empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. This seemed promising. He returned to the peeling front door, raised a large fist and knocked.

Nobody answered, nor did he hear any sign of movement within.

Strike checked the note on the door again, then set off. Turning left into Vicarage Lane, he saw the community center right in front of him, “The Well” spelled out boldly in shining Perspex letters.

An elderly man wearing a Mau cap and a wispy, graying beard was standing just outside the glass doors with a pile of leaflets in his hand. As Strike approached, the man, whose T-shirt bore the washed-out face of Che Guevara, eyed him askance. Though tieless, Strike’s Italian suit struck an inappropriately formal note. When it became clear that the community center was Strike’s destination, the leaflet-holder shuffled sideways to bar the entrance.

“I know I’m late,” said Strike, with well-feigned annoyance, “but I’ve only just found out the bloody venue’s been changed.”

His assurance and his size both seemed to disconcert the man in the Mau cap, who nevertheless appeared to feel that instant capitulation to a man in a suit would be unworthy of him.

“Who are you representing?”

Strike had already taken a swift inventory of the capitalized words visible on the leaflets clutched against the other man’s chest: DISSENT—DISOBEDIENCE—DISRUPTION and, rather incongruously, ALLOTMENTS. There was also a crude cartoon of five obese businessmen blowing cigar smoke to form the Olympic rings.

“My dad,” Strike said. “He’s worried they’re going to concrete over his allotment.”

“Ah,” said the bearded man. He moved aside. Strike tugged a leaflet out of his hand and entered the community center.

There was nobody in sight except for a gray-haired woman of West Indian origin, who was peering through an inner door that she had opened an inch. Strike could just hear a female voice in the room beyond. Her words were hard to distinguish, but her cadences suggested a tirade. Becoming aware that somebody was standing immediately behind her, the woman turned. The sight of Strike’s suit seemed to affect her in opposite fashion to the bearded man at the door.

“Are you from the Olympics?” she whispered.

“No,” said Strike. “Just interested.”

She eased the door open to admit him.

Around forty people were sitting on plastic chairs. Strike took the nearest vacant seat and scanned the backs of the heads in front of him for the matted, shoulder-length hair of Billy.

A table for speakers had been set up at the front. A young woman was currently pacing up and down in front of it as she addressed the audience. Her hair was dyed the same bright red shade as Coco’s, Strike’s hard-to-shake one-night stand, and she was speaking in a series of unfinished sentences, occasionally losing herself in secondary clauses and forgetting to drop her “h”s. Strike had the impression that she had been talking for a long time.

“… think of the squatters and artists who’re all being—’cause this is a proper community, right, and then in they come wiv like clipboards and it’s, like, get out if you know what’s good for you, thin end of the, innit, oppressive laws, it’s the Trojan ’orse—it’s a coordinated campaign of, like…”

Half the audience looked like students. Among the older members, Strike saw men and women who he marked down as committed protestors, some wearing T-shirts with leftist slogans like his friend on the door. Here and there he saw unlikely figures who he guessed were ordinary members of the community who had not taken kindly to the Olympics’ arrival in East London: arty types who had perhaps been squatting, and an elderly couple, who were currently whispering to each other and who Strike thought might be genuinely worried about their allotment. Watching them resume the attitudes of meek endurance appropriate to those sitting in church, Strike guessed that they had agreed that they could not easily leave without drawing too much attention to themselves. A much-pierced boy covered in anarchist tattoos audibly picked his teeth.

Behind the girl who was speaking sat three others: an older woman and two men, who were talking quietly to each other. One of them was at least sixty, barrel-chested and lantern-jawed, with the pugnacious air of a man who had served his time on picket lines and in successful showdowns with recalcitrant management. Something about the dark, deep-set eyes of the other made Strike scan the leaflet in his hand, seeking confirmation of an immediate suspicion.

Heavy stubble and a general air of scruffiness notwithstanding, the man with the sunken eyes was nowhere near as filthy as Billy and his hair had certainly been cut within the last couple of months. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, and while squarer of face and more muscular, he had the same dark hair and pale skin as Strike’s visitor. On the available evidence, Strike would have put a sizable bet on Jimmy Knight being Billy’s older brother.

Jimmy finished his muttered conversation with his Workers’ Alliance colleague, then leaned back in his seat, thick arms folded, wearing an expression of abstraction that showed he was not listening to the young woman any more than her increasingly fidgety audience.

Strike now became aware that he was under observation from a nondescript man sitting in the row in front of him. When Strike met the man’s pale blue gaze, he redirected his attention hastily towards Flick, who was still talking. Taking note of the blue-eyed man’s clean jeans, plain T-shirt and the short, neat hair, Strike thought that he would have done better to have forgone the morning’s close shave, but perhaps, for a ramshackle operation like CORE, the Met had not considered it worthwhile to send their best. The presence of a plainclothes officer was to be expected, of course. Any group currently planning to disrupt or resist the arrangements for the Olympics was likely to be under surveillance.

A short distance from the plainclothes policeman sat a professional-looking young Asian man in shirtsleeves. Tall and thin, he was watching the speaker fixedly, chewing the fingernails of his left hand. As Strike watched, the man gave a little start and took his finger away from his mouth. He had made it bleed.

“All right,” said a man loudly. The audience, recognizing a voice of authority, sat a little straighter. “Thanks very much, Flick.”

Jimmy Knight got to his feet, leading the unenthusiastic applause for Flick, who walked back around the table and sat down in the empty chair between the two men.

In his well-worn jeans and unironed T-shirt, Jimmy Knight reminded Strike of the men his dead mother had taken as lovers. He might have been the bass player in a grime band or a good-looking roadie, with his muscled arms and tattoos. Strike noticed that the back of the nondescript blue-eyed man had tensed. He had been waiting for Jimmy.

“Evening, everyone, and thanks very much for coming.”

His personality filled the room like the first bar of a hit song. Strike knew him from those few words as the kind of man who, in the army, was either outstandingly useful or an insubordinate bastard. Jimmy’s accent, like Flick’s, revealed an uncertain provenance. Strike thought that Cockney might have been grafted, in his case more successfully, onto a faint, rural burr.

“So, the Olympic threshing machine’s moved into East London!”

His burning eyes swept the newly attentive crowd.

“Flattening houses, knocking cyclists to their deaths, churning up land that belongs to all of us. Or it did.

“You’ve heard from Lilian what they’re doing to animal and insect habitats. I’m here to talk about the encroachment on human communities. They’re concreting over our common land, and for what? Are they putting up the social housing or the hospitals we need? Of course not! No, we’re getting stadiums costing billions, showcases for the capitalist system, ladies and gentlemen. We’re being asked to celebrate elitism while, beyond the barriers, ordinary people’s freedoms are encroached, eroded, removed.

“They tell us we should be celebrating the Olympics, all the glossy press releases the right-wing media gobbles up and regurgitates. Fetishize the flag, whip up the middle classes into a frenzy of jingoism! Come worship our glorious medalists—a shiny gold for everyone who passes over a big enough bribe with a pot of someone else’s piss!”

There was a murmur of agreement. A few people clapped.

“We’re supposed to get excited about the public schoolboys and girls who got to practice sports while the rest of us were having our playing fields sold off for cash! Sycophancy should be our national Olympic sport! We deify people who’ve had millions invested in them because they can ride a bike, when they’ve sold themselves as fig leaves for all the planet-raping, tax-dodging bastards who are queuing up to get their names on the barriers—barriers shutting working people off their own land!”

The applause, in which Strike, the old couple beside him and the Asian man did not join, was as much for the performance as the words. Jimmy’s slightly thuggish but handsome face was alive with righteous anger.

“See this?” he said, sweeping from the table behind him a piece of paper with the jagged “2012” that Strike disliked so much. “Welcome to the Olympics, my friends, a fascist’s wet dream. See the logo? D’you see it? It’s a broken swastika!”

The crowd laughed and applauded some more, masking the loud rumble of Strike’s stomach. He wondered whether there might be a takeaway nearby. He had even started to calculate whether he might have time to leave, buy food and return, when the gray-haired West Indian woman whom he had seen earlier opened the door to the hall and propped it open. Her expression clearly indicated that CORE had now outstayed its welcome.

Jimmy, however, was still in full flow.

“This so-called celebration of the Olympic spirit, of fair play and amateurism is normalizing repression and authoritarianism! Wake up: London’s being militarized! The British state, which has honed the tactics of colonization and invasion for centuries, has seized on the Olympics as the perfect excuse to deploy police, army, helicopters and guns against ordinary citizens! One thousand extra CCTV cameras—extra laws hurried through—and you think they’ll be repealed when this carnival of capitalism moves on?”

“Join us!” shouted Jimmy, as the community center worker edged along the wall towards the front of the hall, nervous but determined. “CORE is part of a broader global justice movement that meets repression with resistance! We’re making common cause with all leftist, anti-oppressive movements across the capital! We’re going to be staging lawful demonstrations and using every tool of peaceful protest still permitted to us in what is rapidly becoming an occupied city!”

More applause followed, though the elderly couple beside Strike seemed thoroughly miserable.

“All right, all right, I know,” added Jimmy to the community center worker, who had now reached the front of the audience and was gesturing timidly. “They want us out,” Jimmy told the crowd, smirking and shaking his head. “Of course they do. Of course.”

A few people hissed at the community center worker.

“Anyone who wants to hear more,” said Jimmy, “we’ll be in the pub down the road. Address on your leaflets!”

Most of the crowd applauded. The plainclothes policeman got to his feet. The elderly couple was already scuttling towards the door.

6

Chairs clattered, bags were hoisted onto shoulders. The bulk of the audience began to head for the doors at the back, but some appeared reluctant to leave. Strike took a few steps towards Jimmy, hoping to talk to him, but was outpaced by the young Asian man, who was striding jerkily towards the activist with an air of nervous determination. Jimmy exchanged a few more words with the man from the Workers’ Alliance, then noticed the newcomer, bade Walter goodbye and moved forward with every appearance of goodwill to speak to what he clearly assumed was a convert.

As soon as the Asian man began to speak, however, Jimmy’s expression clouded. As they talked in low voices in the middle of the rapidly emptying room, Flick and a cluster of young people loitered nearby, waiting for Jimmy. They seemed to consider themselves above manual labor. The community center worker cleared away chairs alone.

“Let me do that,” Strike offered, taking three from her and ignoring the sharp twinge in his knee as he hoisted them onto a tall stack.

“Thanks very much,” she panted. “I don’t think we’ll be letting this lot—”

She allowed Walter and a few others to pass before continuing. None of them thanked her.

“—use the center again,” she finished resentfully. “I didn’t realize what they were all about. Their leaflet’s on about civil disobedience and I don’t know what else.”

“Pro-Olympics, are you?” Strike asked, placing a chair onto a pile.

“My granddaughter’s in a running club,” she said. “We got tickets. She can’t wait.”

Jimmy was still locked in conversation with the young Asian man. A minor argument seemed to have developed. Jimmy seemed tense, his eyes shifting constantly around the room, either seeking an escape or checking that nobody else was within earshot. The hall was emptying. The two men began to move towards the exit. Strike strained his ears to hear what they were saying to each other, but the clumping footsteps of Jimmy’s acolytes on the wooden floor obliterated all but a few words.

“… for years, mate, all right?” Jimmy was saying angrily. “So do whatever the fuck you want, you’re the one who volunteered yourself…”

They passed out of earshot. Strike helped the community center volunteer stack the last of the chairs and, as she turned off the light, asked for directions to the White Horse.

Five minutes later, and in spite of his recent resolution to eat more healthily, Strike bought a bag of chips at a takeaway and proceeded along White Horse Road, at the end of which he had been told he would find the eponymous pub.

As he ate, Strike pondered the best way to open conversation with Jimmy Knight. As the reaction of the elderly Che Guevara fan on the door had shown, Strike’s current attire did not tend to foster trust with anti-capitalist protestors. Jimmy had the air of an experienced hard-left activist and was probably anticipating official interest in his activities in the highly charged atmosphere preceding the opening of the Games. Indeed, Strike could see the nondescript, blue-eyed man walking behind Jimmy, hands in his jean pockets. Strike’s first job would be to reassure Jimmy that he was not there to investigate CORE.

The White Horse turned out to be an ugly prefabricated building, which stood on a busy junction facing a large park. A white war memorial with neatly ranged poppy wreaths at its base rose like an eternal reproach to the outside drinking area opposite, where old cigarette butts lay thickly on cracked concrete riven with weeds. Drinkers were milling around the front of the pub, all smoking. Strike spotted Jimmy, Flick and several others standing in a group in front of a window that was decorated with an enormous West Ham banner. The tall young Asian man was nowhere to be seen, but the plainclothes policeman loitered alone on the periphery of their group.

Strike went inside to fetch a pint. The décor inside the pub consisted mostly of Cross of St. George flags and more West Ham paraphernalia. Having bought a pint of John Smith’s, Strike returned to the forecourt, lit a fresh cigarette and advanced on the group around Jimmy. He was at Flick’s shoulder before they realized that the large stranger in a suit wanted something from them. All talk ceased as suspicion flared on every face.

“Hi,” said Strike, “my name’s Cormoran Strike. Any chance of a quick word, Jimmy? It’s about Billy.”

“Billy?” repeated Jimmy sharply. “Why?”

“I met him yesterday. I’m a private detect—”

“Chizzle’s sent him!” gasped Flick, turning, frightened, to Jimmy.

“’K’up!” he growled.

While the rest of the group surveyed Strike with a mixture of curiosity and hostility, Jimmy beckoned to Strike to follow him to the edge of the crowd. To Strike’s surprise, Flick tagged along. Men with buzz cuts and West Ham tops nodded at the activist as he passed. Jimmy came to a halt beside two old white bollards topped by horse heads, checked that nobody else was within earshot, then addressed Strike.

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Cormoran, Cormoran Strike. Is Billy your brother?”

“Younger brother, yeah,” said Jimmy. “Did you say he came to see you?”

“Yep. Yesterday afternoon.”

“You’re a private—?”

“Detective. Yes.”

Strike saw dawning recognition in Flick’s eyes. She had a plump, pale face that would have been innocent without the savage eyeliner and the uncombed tomato-red hair. She turned quickly to Jimmy again.

“Jimmy, he’s—”

“Shacklewell Ripper?” asked Jimmy, eyeing Strike over his lighter as he lit another cigarette. “Lula Landry?”

“That’s me,” said Strike.

Out of the corner of Strike’s eye, he noticed Flick’s eyes traveling down his body to his lower legs. Her mouth twisted in seeming contempt.

“Billy came to see you?” repeated Jimmy. “Why?”

“He told me he’d witnessed a kid being strangled,” said Strike.

Jimmy blew out smoke in angry gusts.

“Yeah. He’s fucked in the head. Schizoid affective disorder.”

“He seemed ill,” agreed Strike.

“Is that all he told you? That he saw a kid being strangled?”

“Seemed enough to be getting on with,” said Strike.

Jimmy’s lips curved in a humorless smile.

“You didn’t believe him, did you?”

“No,” said Strike truthfully, “but I don’t think he should be roaming the streets in that condition. He needs help.”

“I don’t think he’s any worse than usual, do you?” Jimmy asked Flick, with a somewhat artificial air of dispassionate inquiry.

“No,” she said, turning to address Strike with barely concealed animosity. “He has ups and downs. He’s all right if he takes his meds.”

Her accent had become markedly more middle-class away from the rest of their friends. Strike noticed that she had painted eyeliner over a clump of sleep in the corner of one eye. Strike, who had spent large portions of his childhood living in squalor, found a disregard for hygiene hard to like, except in those people so unhappy or ill that cleanliness became an irrelevance.

“Ex-army, aren’t you?” she asked, but Jimmy spoke over her.

“How did Billy know how to find you?”

“Directory inquiries?” suggested Strike. “I don’t live in a bat cave.”

“Billy doesn’t know how to use directory inquiries.”

“He managed to find my office OK.”

“There’s no dead kid,” Jimmy said abruptly. “It’s all in his head. He goes on about it when he’s having an episode. Didn’t you see his tic?”

Jimmy imitated, with brutal accuracy, the compulsive nose to chest movement of a twitching hand. Flick laughed.

“Yeah, I saw that,” said Strike, unsmiling. “You don’t know where he is, then?”

“Haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. What do you want him for?”

“Like I say, he didn’t seem in any fit state to be wandering around on his own.”

“Very public spirited of you,” said Jimmy. “Rich and famous detective worrying about our Bill.”

Strike said nothing.

“Army,” Flick repeated, “weren’t you?”

“I was,” said Strike, looking down at her. “How’s that relevant?”

“Just saying.” She had flushed a little in her righteous anger. “Haven’t always been this worried about people getting hurt, have you?”

Strike, who was familiar with people who shared Flick’s views, said nothing. She would probably believe him if he told her he had joined the forces in the hope of bayoneting children.

Jimmy, who also seemed disinclined to hear more of Flick’s opinions on the military, said:

“Billy’ll be fine. He crashes at ours sometimes, then goes off. Does it all the time.”

“Where does he stay when he’s not with you?”

“Friends,” said Jimmy, shrugging. “I don’t know all their names.” Then, contradicting himself, “I’ll ring around tonight, make sure he’s OK.”

“Right you are,” said Strike, downing his pint and handing the empty to a tattooed bar worker, who was marching through the forecourt, grabbing glasses from all who had finished with them. Strike took a last drag on his cigarette, dropped it to join the thousands of its brethren on the cracked forecourt, ground it out beneath his prosthetic foot, then pulled out his wallet.

“Do me a favor,” he said to Jimmy, taking out a card and handing it over, “and contact me when Billy turns up, will you? I’d like to know he’s safe.”

Flick gave a derisive snort, but Jimmy seemed caught off guard.

“Yeah, all right. Yeah, I will.”

“D’you know which bus would get me back to Denmark Street quickest?” Strike asked them. He could not face another long walk to the Tube. Buses were rolling past the pub with inviting frequency. Jimmy, who seemed to know the area well, directed Strike to the appropriate stop.

“Thanks very much.” As he put his wallet back inside his jacket, Strike said casually, “Billy told me you were there when the child was strangled, Jimmy.”

Flick’s rapid turn of the head towards Jimmy was the giveaway. The latter was better prepared. His nostrils flared, but otherwise he did a creditable job of pretending not to be alarmed.

“Yeah, he’s got the whole sick scene worked out in his poor fucked head,” he said. “Some days he thinks our dead mum might’ve been there, too. Pope next, I expect.”

“Sad,” said Strike. “Hope you manage to track him down.”

He raised a hand in farewell and left them standing on the forecourt. Hungry in spite of the chips, his stump now throbbing, he was limping by the time he reached the bus stop.

After a fifteen-minute wait, the bus arrived. Two drunk youths a few seats in front of Strike got into a long, repetitive argument about the merits of West Ham’s new signing, Jussi Jääskeläinen, whose name neither of them could pronounce. Strike stared unseeingly out of the grimy window, leg sore, desperate for his bed, but unable to relax.

Irksome though it was to admit it, the trip to Charlemont Road had not rid him of the tiny niggling doubt about Billy’s story. The memory of Flick’s sudden, frightened peek at Jimmy, and above all her blurted exclamation “Chizzle’s sent him!” had turned that niggling doubt into a significant and possibly permanent impediment to the detective’s peace of mind.

7

Robin would have been happy to spend the weekend relaxing after her long week unpacking and putting together furniture, but Matthew was looking forward to the house-warming party, to which he had invited a large number of colleagues. His pride was piqued by the interesting, romantic history of the street, which had been built for shipwrights and sea captains back when Deptford had been a shipbuilding center. Matthew might not yet have arrived in the postcode of his dreams, but a short cobbled street full of pretty old houses was, as he had wanted, a “step up,” even if he and Robin were only renting the neat brick box with its sash windows and the moldings of cherubs over the front door.

Matthew had objected when Robin first suggested renting again, but she had overridden him, saying that she could not stand another year in Hastings Road while further purchases of overpriced houses fell through. Between the legacy and Matthew’s new job, they were just able to make rent on the smart little three-bedroomed house, leaving the money they had received from the sale of their Hastings Road flat untouched in the bank.

Their landlord, a publisher who was off to New York to work at head office, had been delighted with his new tenants. A gay man in his forties, he admired Matthew’s clean-cut looks and made a point of handing over the keys personally on their moving day.

“I agree with Jane Austen on the ideal tenant,” he told Matthew, standing in the cobbled street. “‘A married man, and without children; the very state to be wished for.’ A house is never well cared for without a lady! Or do you two share the hoovering?”

“Of course,” Matthew had said, smiling. Robin, who was carrying a box of plants over the threshold behind the two men, had bitten back a caustic retort.

She had a suspicion that Matthew was not disclosing to friends and workmates that they were tenants rather than owners. She deplored her own increasing tendency to watch Matthew for shabby or duplicitous behavior, even in small matters, and imposed private penances on herself for thinking the worst of him all the time. It was in this spirit of self-castigation that she had agreed to the party, bought alcohol and plastic tumblers, made food and set everything up in the kitchen. Matthew had rearranged the furniture and, over several evenings, organized a playlist now blaring out of his iPod in its dock. The first few bars of “Cutt Off” by Kasabian started as Robin hurried upstairs to change.

Robin’s hair was in foam rollers, because she had decided to wear it as she had on their wedding day. Running out of time before guests were due, she pulled out the rollers one-handed as she yanked open the wardrobe door. She had a new dress, a form-fitting pale gray affair, but she was afraid that it drained her of color. She hesitated, then took out the emerald-green Roberto Cavalli that she had never worn in public. It was the most expensive item of clothing she owned, and the most beautiful: the “leaving” present that Strike had bought her after she had gone to him as a temp and helped him catch their first killer. The expression on Matthew’s face when she had excitedly shown him the gift had prevented her ever wearing it.

For some reason her mind drifted to Strike’s girlfriend, Lorelei, as she held the dress up against herself. Lorelei, who always wore jewel-bright colors, affected the style of a 1940s pin-up. As tall as Robin, she had glossy brunette hair that she wore over one eye like Veronica Lake. Robin knew that Lorelei was thirty-three, and that she co-owned and ran a vintage and theatrical clothing store on Chalk Farm Road. Strike had let slip this information one day and Robin, making a mental note of the name, had gone home and looked it up online. The shop appeared to be glamorous and successful.

“It’s a quarter to,” said Matthew, hurrying into the bedroom, stripping off his T-shirt as he came. “I might shower quickly.”

He caught sight of her, holding the green dress against herself.

“I thought you were wearing the gray one?”

Their eyes met in the mirror. Bare-chested, tanned and handsome, Matthew’s features were so symmetrical that his reflection was almost identical to his real appearance.

“I think it makes me look pale,” said Robin.

“I prefer the gray one,” he said. “I like you pale.”

She forced a smile.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll wear the gray.”

Once changed, she ran fingers through her curls to loosen them, pulled on a pair of strappy silver sandals and hurried back downstairs. She had barely reached the hall when the doorbell rang.

If she had been asked to guess who would arrive first, she would have said Sarah Shadlock and Tom Turvey, who had recently got engaged. It would be like Sarah to try and catch Robin on the hop, to make sure she had an opportunity to nose around the house before anybody else, and to stake out a spot where she could look over all the arrivals. Sure enough, when Robin opened up, there stood Sarah in shocking pink, a big bunch of flowers in her arms, Tom carrying beer and wine.

“Oh, it’s gorgeous, Robin,” crooned Sarah, the moment she got over the doorstep, staring around the hall. She hugged Robin absentmindedly, her eyes on the stairs as Matthew descended, doing up his shirt. “Lovely. These are for you.”

Robin found herself encumbered by an armful of stargazer lilies.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll just go and put them in water.”

They didn’t have a vase big enough for the flowers, but Robin could hardly leave them in the sink. She could hear Sarah’s laugh from the kitchen, even over Coldplay and Rihanna, who were now belting out “Princess of China” from Matthew’s iPod. Robin dragged a bucket out of the cupboard and began to fill it, splattering herself with water in the process.

The idea had once been mooted, she remembered, that Matthew would refrain from taking Sarah out for lunches during their office lunch hours. There had even been talk of stopping socializing with her, after Robin had found out that Matthew had been cheating with Sarah in their early twenties. However, Tom had helped Matthew get the higher-paid position he now enjoyed at Tom’s firm, and now that Sarah was the proud owner of a large solitaire diamond, Matthew did not seem to think that there should be the slightest awkwardness attached to social events including the future Mr. and Mrs. Turvey.

Robin could hear the three of them moving around upstairs. Matthew was giving a tour of the bedrooms. She heaved the lily-filled bucket out of the sink and shoved it into a corner beside the kettle, wondering whether it was mean-spirited to suspect that Sarah had brought flowers just to get Robin out of the way for a bit. Sarah had never lost the flirtatious manner towards Matthew she had had since their shared years at university.

Robin poured herself a glass of wine and emerged from the kitchen as Matthew led Tom and Sarah into the sitting room.

“… and Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton are supposed to have stayed in number 19, but it was called Union Street then,” he said. “Right, who wants a drink? It’s all set up in the kitchen.”

“Gorgeous place, Robin,” said Sarah. “Houses like this don’t come up that often. You must’ve got really lucky.”

“We’re only renting,” said Robin.

“Really?” said Sarah beadily, and Robin knew that Sarah was drawing her own conclusions, not about the housing market, but about Robin and Matthew’s marriage.

“Nice earrings,” said Robin, keen to change the subject.

“Aren’t they?” said Sarah, pulling back her hair to give Robin a better view. “Tom’s birthday present.”

The doorbell rang again. Robin went to answer it, hoping that it would be one of the few people she had invited. She had no hope of Strike, of course. He was bound to be late, as he had been to every other personal event to which she had invited him.

“Oh, thank God,” said Robin, surprised at her own relief when she saw Vanessa Ekwensi.

Vanessa was a police officer: tall, black, with almond-shaped eyes, a model’s figure and a self-possession Robin envied. She had come to the party alone. Her boyfriend, who worked in Forensic Services at the Met, had a prior commitment. Robin was disappointed: she had looked forward to meeting him.

“You all right?” Vanessa asked as she entered. She was carrying a bottle of red wine and wearing a deep purple slip dress. Robin thought again of the emerald-green Cavalli upstairs and wished she had worn it.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Come through to the back, you can smoke there.”

She led Vanessa through the sitting room, past Sarah and Matthew, who were now mocking Tom’s baldness to his face.

The rear wall of the small courtyard garden was covered in ivy. Well-maintained shrubs stood in terra-cotta tubs. Robin, who did not smoke, had put ashtrays and a few fold-up chairs out there, and dotted tea candles around. Matthew had asked her with an edge in his voice why she was taking so much trouble over the smokers. She had known perfectly well why he was saying it and pretended not to.

“I thought Jemima smoked?” she asked, with a feigned air of confusion. Jemima was Matthew’s boss.

“Oh,” he said, caught off balance. “Yeah—yeah, but only socially.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure this is a social occasion, Matt,” said Robin sweetly.

She fetched Vanessa a drink and came back to find her lighting up, her lovely eyes fixed on Sarah Shadlock, who was still mocking Tom’s hairline, with Matthew her hearty accomplice.

“That’s her, is it?” Vanessa asked.

“That’s her,” said Robin.

She appreciated the small show of moral support. Robin and Vanessa had been friends for months before Robin had confided the history of her relationship with Matthew. Before that they had talked police work, politics and clothes on evenings that took them to the cinema, or to cheap restaurants. Robin found Vanessa better company than any other woman she knew. Matthew, who had met her twice, told Robin he found her “cold,” but said he could not explain why.

Vanessa had had a succession of partners; she had been engaged once, but broken it off when he had cheated. Robin sometimes wondered whether Vanessa found her laughably inexperienced: the woman who’d married her boyfriend from school.

A few moments later, a dozen people, colleagues of Matthew’s with their partners, who had obviously been to the pub first, streamed into the sitting room. Robin watched Matthew greeting them and showing them where the drinks were. He had adopted the loud, bantering tone that she had heard him using on work nights out. It irritated her.

The party quickly became crowded. Robin effected introductions, showed people where to find drink, set out more plastic cups and handed a couple of plates of food around because the kitchen was becoming packed. Only when Andy Hutchins and his wife arrived did she feel she could relax for a moment and spend some more time with her own guests.

“I made you some special food,” Robin told Andy, after she had shown him and Louise out into the courtyard. “This is Vanessa. She’s Met. Vanessa, Andy and Louise—stay there, Andy, I’ll get it, it’s dairy-free.”

Tom was standing against the fridge when she got to the kitchen.

“Sorry, Tom, need to get in—”

He blinked at her, then moved aside. He was already drunk, she thought, and it was barely nine o’clock. Robin could hear Sarah’s braying laugh from the middle of the crowd outside.

“Lemmelp,” said Tom, holding the fridge door that threatened to close on Robin as she bent down to the lower shelf to get the tray of dairy-free, non-fried food she had saved for Andy. “God, you’ve got a nice arse, Robin.”

She straightened up without comment. In spite of the drunken grin, she could feel the unhappiness flowing from behind it, like a cool draft. Matthew had told her how self-conscious Tom was about his hairline, that he was even considering a transplant.

“That’s a nice shirt,” said Robin.

“Wha’ this? You like it? She bought it for me. Matt’s got one like it, hasn’t he?”

“Er—I’m not sure,” said Robin.

“You’re not sure,” repeated Tom, with a short, nasty laugh. “So much f’ surveillance training. You wanna pay more attention at home, Rob.”

Robin contemplated him for a moment in equal amounts of pity and anger, then, deciding that he was too drunk to argue with, she left, carrying Andy’s food.

The first thing she saw as people cleared out of the way to let her back into the courtyard was that Strike had arrived. He had his back to her and was talking to Andy. Lorelei was beside him, wearing a scarlet silk dress, the gleaming fall of dark hair down her back like an advertisement for expensive shampoo. Somehow, Sarah had inveigled her way into the group in Robin’s brief absence. When Vanessa caught Robin’s eye, the corner of her mouth twitched.

“Hi,” said Robin, setting the platter of food down on the wrought iron table beside Andy.

“Robin, hi!” said Lorelei. “It’s such a pretty street!”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Robin, as Lorelei kissed the air behind Robin’s ear.

Strike bent down, too. His stubble grazed Robin’s face, but his lips did not touch skin. He was already opening one of the six-pack of Doom Bar he had brought with him.

Robin had mentally rehearsed things to say to Strike once he was in her new house: calm, casual things that made it sound as though she had no regrets, as though there were some wonderful counterweight that he couldn’t appreciate that tipped the scales in Matthew’s favor. She also wanted to question him about the strange matter of Billy and the strangled child. However, Sarah was currently holding forth on the subject of the auction house, Christie’s, where she worked, and the whole group was listening to her.

“Yeah, we’ve got ‘The Lock’ coming up at auction on the third,” she said. “Constable,” she added kindly, for the benefit of anyone who did not know art as well as she did. “We’re expecting it to make over twenty.”

“Thousand?” asked Andy.

“Million,” said Sarah, with a patronizing little snort of laughter.

Matthew laughed behind Robin and she moved automatically to let him join the circle. His expression was rapt, Robin noticed, as so often when large sums of money were under discussion. Perhaps, she thought, this is what he and Sarah talk about when they have lunch: money.

“‘Gimcrack’ went for over twenty-two last year. Stubbs. Third most valuable Old Master ever sold.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw Lorelei’s scarlet-tipped hand slide into Strike’s, which had been marked across the palm with the very same knife that had forever scarred Robin’s arm.

“Anyway, boring, boring, boring!” said Sarah insincerely. “Enough work chat! Anyone got Olympics tickets? Tom—my fiancé—he’s furious. We got ping pong.” She pulled a droll face. “How have you lot got on?”

Robin saw Strike and Lorelei exchange a fleeting look, and knew that they were mutually consoling each other for having to endure the tedium of the Olympics ticket conversation. Suddenly wishing that they hadn’t come, Robin backed out of the group.

An hour later, Strike was in the sitting room, discussing the England football team’s chances in the European Championships with one of Matthew’s friends from work while Lorelei danced. Robin, with whom he had not exchanged a word since they had met outside, crossed the room with a plate of food, paused to talk to a redheaded woman, then continued to offer the plate around. The way she had done her hair reminded Strike of her wedding day.

The suspicions provoked by her visit to that unknown clinic uppermost in his mind, he appraised her figure in the clinging gray dress. She certainly didn’t appear to be pregnant, and the fact that she was drinking wine seemed a further counter-indication, but they might only just have begun the process of IVF.

Directly opposite Strike, visible through the dancing bodies, stood DI Vanessa Ekwensi, whom Strike had been surprised to find at the party. She was leaning up against the wall, talking to a tall blond man who seemed, by his over-attentive attitude, to have temporarily forgotten that he was wearing a wedding ring. Vanessa glanced across the room at Strike and by a wry look signaled that she would not mind him breaking up the tête-à-tête. The football conversation was not so fascinating that he would be disappointed to leave it, and at the next convenient pause he circumnavigated the dancers to talk to Vanessa.

“Evening.”

“Hi,” she said, accepting his peck on the cheek with the elegance that characterized all her gestures. “Cormoran, this is Owen—sorry, I didn’t catch your surname?”

It didn’t take long for Owen to lose hope of whatever he had wanted from Vanessa, whether the mere pleasure of flirting with a good-looking woman, or her phone number.

“Didn’t realize you and Robin were this friendly,” said Strike, as Owen walked away.

“Yeah, we’ve been hanging out,” said Vanessa. “I wrote her a note after I heard you sacked her.”

“Oh,” said Strike, swigging Doom Bar. “Right.”

“She rang to thank me and we ended up going for a drink.”

Robin had never mentioned this to Strike, but then, as Strike knew perfectly well, he had been at pains to discourage anything but work talk since she had come back from her honeymoon.

“Nice house,” he commented, trying not to compare the tastefully decorated room with his combined kitchen and sitting room in the attic over the office. Matthew must be earning very good money to have afforded this, he thought. Robin’s pay rise certainly couldn’t have done it.

“Yeah, it is,” said Vanessa. “They’re renting.”

Strike watched Lorelei dance for a few moments while he pondered this interesting piece of information. An arch something in Vanessa’s tone told him that she, too, read this as a choice not entirely related to the housing market.

“Blame sea-borne bacteria,” said Vanessa.

“Sorry?” said Strike, thoroughly confused.

She threw him a sharp look, then shook her head, laughing.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Yeah, we didn’t do too badly,” Strike heard Matthew telling the redheaded woman in a lull in the music. “Got tickets for the boxing.”

Of course you fucking did, thought Strike irritably, feeling in his pocket for more cigarettes.

“Enjoy yourself?” asked Lorelei in the taxi, at one in the morning.

“Not particularly,” said Strike, who was watching the headlights of oncoming cars.

He had had the impression that Robin had been avoiding him. After the relative warmth of their conversation on Thursday, he had expected—what? A conversation, a laugh? He had been curious to know how the marriage was progressing, but was not much the wiser. She and Matthew seemed amicable enough together, but the fact that they were renting was intriguing. Did it suggest, even subconsciously, a lack of investment in a joint future? An easier arrangement to untangle? And then there was Robin’s friendship with Vanessa Ekwensi, which Strike saw as another stake in the life she led independently of Matthew.

Blame sea-borne bacteria.

What the hell did that mean? Was it connected to the mysterious clinic? Was Robin ill?

After a few minutes’ silence it suddenly occurred to Strike that he ought to ask Lorelei how her evening had been.

“I’ve had better,” sighed Lorelei. “I’m afraid your Robin’s got a lot of boring friends.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I think that’s mainly her husband. He’s an accountant. And a bit of a tit,” he added, enjoying saying it.

The taxi bowled on through the night, Strike remembering how Robin’s figure had looked in the gray dress.

“Sorry?” he said suddenly, because he had the impression that Lorelei had spoken to him.

“I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’”

“Nothing,” lied Strike, and because it was preferable to talking, he slid an arm around her, pulled her close and kissed her.

8

Robin texted Strike on Sunday evening to ask what he wanted her to do on Monday, because she had handed over all her jobs before taking a week’s leave. His terse response had been “come to office,” which she duly entered at a quarter to nine the following day, glad, no matter how matters stood between her and her partner, to be back in the shabby old rooms.

The door to Strike’s inner office was standing open when she arrived. He was sitting behind his desk, listening to someone on his mobile. Sunlight fell in treacle-gold pools across the worn carpet. The soft mumble of traffic was soon obliterated by the rattle of the old kettle and, five minutes after her arrival, Robin set a mug of steaming dark brown Typhoo in front of Strike, who gave her a thumbs up and a silent “thanks.” She returned to her desk, where a light was flashing on the phone to indicate a recorded message. She dialed their answering service and listened while a cool female voice informed her that the call had been made ten minutes before Robin had arrived and, presumably, while Strike was either upstairs, or busy with the other call.

A cracked whisper hissed in Robin’s ear.

“I’m sorry I ran out on you, Mr. Strike, I’m sorry. I can’t come back, though. He’s keeping me here, I can’t get out, he’s wired the doors…”

The end of the sentence was lost in sobs. Worried, Robin tried to attract Strike’s attention, but he had turned in his swivel chair to look out of the window, still listening to his mobile. Random words reached Robin through the pitiable sounds of distress on the phone.

“… can’t get out… I’m all alone…”

“Yeah, OK,” Strike was saying in his office. “Wednesday, then, OK? Great. Have a good one.”

“… please help me, Mr. Strike!” wailed the voice in Robin’s ear.

She smacked the button to switch to speakerphone and at once the tortured voice filled the office.

“The doors will explode if I try and escape, Mr. Strike, please help me, please come and get me, I shouldn’t have come, I told him I know about the little kid and it’s bigger, much bigger, I thought I could trust him—”

Strike spun in his desk chair, got up and came striding through to the outer office. There was a clunk as though the receiver had been dropped. The sobbing continued at a distance, as though the distraught speaker was stumbling away from the phone.

“That’s him again,” said Strike. “Billy, Billy Knight.”

The sobbing and gasping grew louder again and Billy said in a frantic whisper, his lips evidently pressed against the mouthpiece:

“There’s someone at the door. Help me. Help me, Mr. Strike.”

The call was cut.

“Get the number,” said Strike. Robin reached for the receiver to dial 1471, but before she could do so, the phone rang again. She snatched it up, her eyes on Strike’s.

“Cormoran Strike’s office.”

“Ah… yes, good morning,” said a deep, patrician voice.

Robin grimaced at Strike and shook her head.

“Shit,” he muttered, and moved back into his office to get his tea.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Strike, please.”

“I’m afraid he’s on another call right now,” lied Robin.

Their standard practice for a year had been to phone the client back. It weeded out journalists and cranks.

“I’ll hold,” said the caller, who sounded captious, unused to not getting his way.

“He’ll be a while, I’m afraid. Could I take a number and get him to call you back?”

“Well, it needs to be within the next ten minutes, because I’m about to go into a meeting. Tell him I want to discuss a job I’d like him to do for me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t guarantee that Mr. Strike will be able to undertake the job in person,” said Robin, which was also the standard response to deflect press. “Our agency’s quite booked up at the moment.”

She pulled pen and paper towards her.

“What kind of job are you—?”

“It has to be Mr. Strike,” said the voice firmly. “Make that clear to him. It has to be Mr. Strike himself. My name’s Chizzle.”

“How are you spelling that?” asked Robin, wondering whether she had heard correctly.

“C-H-I-S-W-E-L-L. Jasper Chiswell. Ask him to call me on the following number.”

Robin copied down the digits Chiswell gave her and bade him good morning. As she set down the receiver, Strike sat down on the fake leather sofa they kept in the outer room for clients. It had a disobliging habit of making unexpected farting noises when you shifted position.

“A man called Jasper Chizzle, spelled ‘Chiswell,’ wants you to take on a job for him. He says it’s got to be you, nobody else.” Robin screwed up her forehead in perplexity. “I know the name, don’t I?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “He’s Minister for Culture.”

“Oh my God,” said Robin, realization dawning. “Of course! The big man with the weird hair!”

“That’s him.”

A clutch of vague memories and associations assailed Robin. She seemed to remember an old affair, resignation in disgrace, rehabilitation and, somewhat more recently, a fresh scandal, another nasty news story…

“Didn’t his son get sent to jail for manslaughter not that long ago?” she said. “That was Chiswell, wasn’t it? His son was stoned and driving and he killed a young mother?”

Strike recalled his attention, it seemed, from a distance. He was wearing a peculiar expression.

“Yeah, that rings a bell,” said Strike.

“What’s the matter?”

“A few things, actually,” said Strike, running a hand over his stubbly chin. “For starters: I tracked down Billy’s brother on Friday.”

“How?”

“Long story,” said Strike, “but turns out Jimmy’s part of a group that’s protesting against the Olympics. ‘CORE,’ they call themselves. Anyway, he was with a girl, and the first thing she said when I told them I was a private detective was: ‘Chiswell’s sent him.’”

Strike pondered this point while drinking his perfectly brewed tea.

“But Chiswell wouldn’t need me to keep an eye on CORE,” he went on, thinking aloud. “There was already a plainclothes guy there.”

Though keen to hear what other things troubled Strike about Chiswell’s call, Robin did not prompt him, but sat in silence, allowing him to mull the new development. It was precisely this kind of tact that Strike had missed when she was out of the office.

“And get this,” he went on at last, as though there had been no interruption. “The son who went to jail for manslaughter isn’t—or wasn’t—Chiswell’s only boy. His eldest was called Freddie and he died in Afghanistan. Yeah. Major Freddie Chiswell, Queen’s Royal Hussars. Killed in an attack on a convoy in Basra. I investigated his death in action while I was still SIB.”

“So you know Chiswell?”

“No, never met him. You don’t meet families, usually… I knew Chiswell’s daughter years ago, as well. Only slightly, but I met her a few times. She was an old school friend of Charlotte’s.”

Robin experienced a tiny frisson at the mention of Charlotte. She had a great curiosity, which she successfully concealed, about Charlotte, the woman Strike had been involved with on and off for sixteen years, whom he had been supposed to marry before the relationship ended messily and, apparently, permanently.

“Pity we couldn’t get Billy’s number,” said Strike, running a large, hairy-backed hand over his jaw again.

“I’ll make sure I get it if he calls again,” Robin assured him. “Are you going to ring Chiswell back? He said he was about to go into a meeting.”

“I’m keen to find out what he wants, but the question is whether we’ve got room for another client,” said Strike. “Let’s think…”

He put his hands behind his head, frowning up at the ceiling, on which many fine cracks were exposed by the sunlight. Screw that now… the office would soon be a developer’s problem, after all…

“I’ve got Andy and Barclay watching the Webster kid. Barclay’s doing well, by the way. I’ve had three solid days’ surveillance out of him, pictures, the lot.

“Then there’s old Dodgy Doc. He still hasn’t done anything newsworthy.”

“Shame,” said Robin, then she caught herself. “No, I don’t mean that, I mean good.” She rubbed her eyes. “This job,” she sighed. “It messes with your ethics. Who’s watching Dodgy today?”

“I was going to ask you to do it,” said Strike, “but the client called yesterday afternoon. He’d forgotten to tell me Dodgy’s at a symposium in Paris.”

Eyes still on the ceiling, brow furrowed in thought, Strike said:

“We’ve got two days at that tech conference starting tomorrow. Which do you want to do, Harley Street or a conference center out in Epping Forest? We can swap over if you want. D’you want to spend tomorrow watching Dodgy, or with hundreds of stinking geeks in superhero T-shirts?”

“Not all tech people smell,” Robin reprimanded him. “Your mate Spanner doesn’t.”

“You don’t want to judge Spanner by the amount of deodorant he puts on to come here,” said Strike.

Spanner, who had overhauled their computer and telephone system when the business had received its dramatic boost in business, was the younger brother of Strike’s old friend Nick. He fancied Robin, as she and Strike were equally aware.

Strike mulled over options, rubbing his chin again.

“I’ll call Chiswell back and find out what he’s after,” he said at last. “You never know, it might be a bigger job than that lawyer whose wife’s sleeping around. He’s next on the waiting list, right?”

“Him, or that American woman who’s married to the Ferrari dealer. They’re both waiting.”

Strike sighed. Infidelity formed the bulk of their workload.

“I hope Chiswell’s wife isn’t cheating. I fancy a change.”

The sofa made its usual flatulent noises as Strike quit it. As he strode back to the inner office, Robin called after him:

“Are you happy for me to finish up this paperwork, then?”

“If you don’t mind,” said Strike, closing the door behind him.

Robin turned back to her computer feeling quite cheerful. A busker had just started singing “No Woman, No Cry” in Denmark Street and for a while there, while they talked about Billy Knight and the Chiswells, she had felt as though they were the Strike and Robin of a year ago, before he had sacked her, before she had married Matthew.

Meanwhile, in the inner office, Strike’s call to Jasper Chiswell had been answered almost instantly.

“Chiswell,” he barked.

“Cormoran Strike here,” said the detective. “You spoke to my partner a short while ago.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Minister for Culture, who sounded as though he were in the back of a car. “I’ve got a job for you. Nothing I want to discuss over the phone. I’m busy today and this evening, unfortunately, but tomorrow would suit.”

“Ob-observing the hypocrites…” sang the busker down in the street.

“Sorry, no chance tomorrow,” said Strike, watching motes of dust fall through the bright sunlight. “No chance until Friday, actually. Can you give me an idea what kind of job we’re talking about, Minister?”

Chiswell’s response was both tense and angry.

“I can’t discuss it over the phone. I’ll make it worth your while to meet me, if that’s what you want.”

“It isn’t a question of money, it’s time. I’m solidly booked until Friday.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake—”

Chiswell suddenly removed his phone from his mouth and Strike heard him talking furiously to somebody else.

“—left here, you moron! Lef—for fuck’s sake! No, I’ll walk. I’ll bloody walk, open the door!”

In the background, Strike heard a nervous man say:

“I’m sorry, Minister, it was No Entry—”

“Never mind that! Open this—open this bloody door!”

Strike waited, eyebrows raised. He heard a car door slam, rapid footsteps and then Jasper Chiswell spoke again, his mouth close to the receiver.

“The job’s urgent!” he hissed.

“If it can’t wait until Friday, you’ll have to find someone else, I’m afraid.”

“My feet is my only carriage,” sang the busker.

Chiswell said nothing for a few seconds; then, finally:

“It’s got to be you. I’ll explain when we meet, but—all right, if it has to be Friday, meet me at Pratt’s Club. Park Place. Come at twelve, I’ll give you lunch.”

“All right,” Strike agreed, now thoroughly intrigued. “See you at Pratt’s.”

He hung up and returned to the office where Robin was opening and sorting mail. When he told her the upshot of the conversation, she Googled Pratt’s for him.

“I didn’t think places like this still existed,” she said in disbelief, after a minute’s reading off the monitor.

“Places like what?”

“It’s a gentleman’s club… very Tory… no women allowed, except as guests of club members at lunchtime… and ‘to avoid confusion,’” Robin read from the Wikipedia page, “‘all male staff members are called George.’”

“What if they hire a woman?”

“Apparently they did in the eighties,” said Robin, her expression midway between amusement and disapproval. “They called her Georgina.”

9

At half past eleven the following Friday, a suited and freshly shaven Strike emerged from Green Park Tube station and proceeded along Piccadilly. Double-deckers rolled past the windows of luxury shops, which were capitalizing on Olympics fever to push an eclectic mix of goods: gold-wrapped chocolate medals, Union Jack brogues, antique sporting posters and, over and again, the jagged logo that Jimmy Knight had compared to a broken swastika.

Strike had allowed a generous margin of time to reach Pratt’s, because his leg was again aching after two days in which he had rarely been able to take the weight off his prosthesis. He had hoped that the tech conference in Epping Forest, where he had spent the previous day, might have offered intervals of rest, but he had been disappointed. His target, the recently fired partner of a start-up, was suspected of trying to sell key features of their new app to competitors. For hours, Strike had tailed the young man from booth to booth, documenting all his movements and his interactions, hoping at some point that he would tire and sit. However, between the coffee bar where customers stood at high tables, to the sandwich bar where everyone stood and ate sushi with their fingers out of plastic boxes, the target had spent eight hours walking or standing. Coming after long hours of lurking in Harley Street the day before, it was hardly surprising that the removal of his prosthesis the previous evening had been an uncomfortable affair, the gel pad that separated stump from artificial shin difficult to prize off. As he passed the cool off-white arches of the Ritz, Strike hoped Pratt’s contained at least one comfortable chair of generous proportions.

He turned right into St. James’s Street, which led him in a gentle slope straight down to the sixteenth-century St. James’s Palace. This was not an area of London that Strike usually visited on his own account, given that he had neither the means nor the inclination to buy from gentlemen’s outfitters, long-established gun shops or centuries-old wine dealers. As he drew nearer to Park Place, though, he was visited by a personal memory. He had walked this street more than ten years previously, with Charlotte.

They had walked up the slope, not down it, heading for a lunch date with her father, who was now dead. Strike had been on leave from the army and they had recently resumed what was, to everyone who knew them, an incomprehensible and obviously doomed affair. On neither side of their relationship had there ever been a single supporter. His friends and family had viewed Charlotte with everything from mistrust to loathing, while hers had always considered Strike, the illegitimate son of an infamous rock star, as one more manifestation of Charlotte’s need to shock and rebel. Strike’s military career had been nothing to her family, or rather, it had been just another sign of his plebeian unfitness to aspire to the well-bred beauty’s hand, because gentlemen of Charlotte’s class did not enter the Military Police, but Cavalry or Guards regiments.

She had clutched his hand very tightly as they entered an Italian restaurant somewhere nearby. Its precise location escaped Strike now. All he remembered was the expression of rage and disapproval on Sir Anthony Campbell’s face as they had approached the table. Strike had known before a word was spoken that Charlotte had not told her father that she and Strike had resumed their affair, or that she would be bringing him with her. It had been a thoroughly Charlottian omission, prompting the usual Charlottian scene. Strike had long since come to believe that she engineered situations out of an apparently insatiable need for conflict. Prone to outbursts of lacerating honesty amid her general mythomania, she had told Strike towards the end of their relationship that at least, while fighting, she knew she was alive.

As Strike drew level with Park Place, a line of cream-painted townhouses leading off St. James’s Street, he noted that the sudden memory of Charlotte clinging to his hand no longer hurt, and felt like an alcoholic who, for the first time, catches a whiff of beer without breaking into a sweat or having to grapple with his desperate craving. Perhaps this is it, he thought, as he approached the black door of Pratt’s, with its wrought iron balustrade above. Perhaps, two years after she had told him the unforgivable lie and he had left for good, he was healed, clear of what he sometimes, even though not superstitious, saw as a kind of Bermuda triangle, a danger zone in which he feared being pulled back under, dragged to the depths of anguish and pain by the mysterious allure Charlotte had held for him.

With a faint sense of celebration, Strike knocked on the door of Pratt’s.

A petite, motherly woman opened up. Her prominent bust and alert, bright-eyed mien put him in mind of a robin or a wren. When she spoke, he caught a trace of the West Country.

“You’ll be Mr. Strike. The minister’s not here yet. Come along in.”

He followed her across the threshold into a hall through which could be glimpsed an enormous billiard table. Rich crimsons, greens and dark wood predominated. The stewardess, who he assumed was Georgina, led him down a set of steep stairs, which Strike took carefully, maintaining a firm grip on the banister.

The stairs led to a cozy basement. The ceiling had sunk so low that it appeared partially supported by a large dresser on which sundry porcelain platters were displayed, the topmost ones half embedded into the plaster.

“We aren’t very big,” she said, stating the obvious. “Six hundred members, but we can only serve fourteen a meal at a time. Would you like a drink, Mr. Strike?”

He declined, but accepted an invitation to sit down in one of the leather chairs grouped around an aged cribbage board.

The small space was divided by an archway into sitting and dining areas. Two places had been set at the long table in the other half of the room, beneath small, shuttered windows. The only other person in the basement apart from himself and Georgina was a white-coated chef working in a minuscule kitchen a mere yard from where Strike sat. The chef bade Strike welcome in a French accent, then continued carving cold roast beef.

Here was the very antithesis of the smart restaurants where Strike tailed errant husbands and wives, where the lighting was chosen to complement glass and granite, and sharp-tongued restaurant critics sat like stylish vultures on uncomfortable modern chairs. Pratt’s was dimly lit. Brass picture lights dotted walls papered in dark red, which was largely obscured by stuffed fish in glass cases, hunting prints and political cartoons. In a blue and white tiled niche along one side of the room sat an ancient iron stove. The china plates, the threadbare carpet, the table bearing its homely load of ketchup and mustard all contributed to an ambience of cozy informality, as though a bunch of aristocratic boys had dragged all the things they liked about the grown-up world—its games, its drink and its trophies—down into the basement where Nanny would dole out smiles, comfort and praise.

Twelve o’clock arrived, but Chiswell did not. “Georgina,” however, was friendly and informative about the club. She and her husband, the chef, lived on the premises. Strike could not help but reflect that this must be some of the most expensive real estate in London. To maintain the little club, which, Georgina told him, had been established in 1857, was costing somebody a lot of money.

“The Duke of Devonshire owns it, yes,” said Georgina brightly. “Have you seen our betting book?”

Strike turned the pages of the heavy, leather-bound tome, where long ago wagers had been recorded. In a gigantic scrawl dating back to the seventies, he read: “Mrs. Thatcher to form the next government. Bet: one lobster dinner, the lobster to be larger than a man’s erect cock.”

He was grinning over this when a bell rang overhead.

“That’ll be the minister,” said Georgina, bustling away upstairs.

Strike replaced the betting book on its shelf and returned to his seat. From overhead came heavy footsteps and then, descending the stairs, the same irascible, impatient voice he had heard on Monday.

“—no, Kinvara, I can’t. I’ve just told you why, I’ve got a lunch meeting… no, you can’t… Five o’clock, then, yes… yes… yes!… Goodbye!”

A pair of large, black-shod feet descended the stairs until Jasper Chiswell emerged into the basement, peering around with a truculent air. Strike rose from his armchair.

“Ah,” said Chiswell, scrutinizing Strike from beneath his heavy eyebrows. “You’re here.”

Jasper Chiswell wore his sixty-eight years reasonably well. A big, broad man, though round-shouldered, he still had a full head of gray hair which, implausible though it seemed, was his own. This hair made Chiswell an easy target for cartoonists, because it was coarse, straight and rather long, standing out from his head in a manner that suggested a wig or, so the unkind suggested, a chimney brush. To the hair was added a large red face, small eyes and a protuberant lower lip, which gave him the air of an overgrown baby perpetually on the verge of a tantrum.

“M’wife,” he told Strike, brandishing the mobile still in his hand. “Come up to town without warning. Sulking. Thinks I can drop everything.”

Chiswell stretched out a large, sweaty hand, which Strike shook, then eased off the heavy overcoat he was wearing despite the heat of the day. As he did so, Strike noticed the pin on his frayed regimental tie. The uninitiated might think it a rocking horse, but Strike recognized it at once as the White Horse of Hanover.

“Queen’s Own Hussars,” said Strike, nodding at it as both men sat down.

“Yerse,” said Chiswell. “Georgina, I’ll have some of that sherry you gave me when I was in with Alastair. You?” he barked at Strike.

“No thanks.”

Though nowhere near as dirty as Billy Knight, Chiswell did not smell very fresh.

“Yerse, Queen’s Own Hussars. Aden and Singapore. Happy days.”

He didn’t seem happy at the moment. His ruddy skin had an odd, plaque-like appearance close up. Dandruff lay thick in the roots of his coarse hair and large patches of sweat spread around the underarms of his blue shirt. The minister bore the unmistakable appearance, not unusual in Strike’s clients, of a man under intense strain, and when his sherry arrived, he swallowed most of it in a single gulp.

“Shall we move through?” he suggested, and without waiting for an answer he barked, “We’ll eat straight away, Georgina.”

Once they were seated at the table, which had a stiff, snowy-white tablecloth like those at Robin’s wedding, Georgina brought them thick slices of cold roast beef and boiled potatoes. It was English nursery food, plain and unfussy, and none the worse for it. Only when the stewardess had left them in peace, in the dim dining room full of oil paintings and more dead fish, did Chiswell speak again.

“You were at Jimmy Knight’s meeting,” he said, without preamble. “A plainclothes officer there recognized you.”

Strike nodded. Chiswell shoved a boiled potato in his mouth, masticated angrily, and swallowed before saying:

“I don’t know who’s paying you to get dirt on Jimmy Knight, or what you may already have on him, but whoever it is and whatever you’ve got, I’m prepared to pay double for the information.”

“I haven’t got anything on Jimmy Knight, I’m afraid,” said Strike. “Nobody was paying me to be at the meeting.”

Chiswell looked stunned.

“But then, why were you there?” he demanded. “You’re not telling me you intend to protest against the Olympics?”

So plosive was the “p” of “protest” that a small piece of potato flew out of his mouth across the table.

“No,” said Strike. “I was trying to find somebody I thought might be at the meeting. They weren’t.”

Chiswell attacked his beef again as though it had personally wronged him. For a while, the only sounds were those of their knives and forks scraping the china. Chiswell speared the last of his boiled potatoes, put it whole into his mouth, let his knife and fork fall with a clatter onto his plate and said:

“I’d been thinking of hiring a detective before I heard you were watching Knight.”

Strike said nothing. Chiswell eyed him suspiciously.

“You have the reputation of being very good.”

“Kind of you to say so,” said Strike.

Chiswell continued to glare at Strike with a kind of furious desperation, as though wondering whether he dared hope that the detective would not prove yet another disappointment in a life beset with them.

“I’m being blackmailed, Mr. Strike,” he said abruptly. “Blackmailed by a pair of men who have come together in a temporary, though probably unstable, alliance. One of them is Jimmy Knight.”

“I see,” said Strike.

He, too, put his knife and fork together. Georgina appeared to know by some psychic process that Strike and Chiswell had eaten their fill of the main course. She arrived to clear away, reappearing with a treacle tart. Only once she had retired to the kitchen, and both men had helped themselves to large slices of pudding, did Chiswell resume his story.

“There’s no need for sordid details,” he said, with an air of finality. “All you need to know is that Jimmy Knight is aware that I did something that I would not wish to see shared with the gentlemen of the fourth estate.”

Strike said nothing, but Chiswell seemed to think his silence had an accusatory flavor, because he added sharply:

“No crime was committed. Some might not like it, but it wasn’t illegal at the—but that’s by the by,” said Chiswell, and took a large gulp of water. “Knight came to me a couple of months ago and asked for forty thousand pounds in hush money. I refused to pay. He threatened me with exposure, but as he didn’t appear to have any proof of his claim, I dared hope he would be unable to follow through on the threat.

“No press story resulted, so I concluded that I was right in thinking he had no proof. He returned a few weeks later and asked for half the former sum. Again, I refused.

“It was then, thinking to increase the pressure on me, I assume, that he approached Geraint Winn.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who—?”

“Della Winn’s husband.”

“Della Winn, the Minister for Sport?” said Strike, startled.

“Yes, of course Della-Winn-the-Minister-for-Sport,” snapped Chiswell.

The Right Honorable Della Winn, as Strike knew well, was a Welshwoman in her early sixties who had been blind since birth. No matter their party affiliation, people tended to admire the Liberal Democrat, who had been a human rights lawyer before standing for Parliament. Usually photographed with her guide dog, a pale yellow Labrador, she had been much in evidence in the press of late, her current bailiwick being the Paralympics. She had visited Selly Oak while Strike had been in the hospital, readjusting to the loss of his leg in Afghanistan. He had been left with a favorable impression of her intelligence and her empathy. Of her husband, Strike knew nothing.

“I don’t know whether Della knows what Geraint’s up to,” said Chiswell, spearing a piece of treacle tart and continuing to speak while he chewed it. “Probably, but keeping her nose clean. Plausible deniability. Can’t have the sainted Della involved in blackmail, can we?”

“Her husband’s asked you for money?” asked Strike, incredulous.

“Oh no, no. Geraint wants to force me from office.”

“Any particular reason why?” said Strike.

“There’s an enmity between us dating back many years, rooted in a wholly baseless—but that’s irrelevant,” said Chiswell, with an angry shake of the head. “Geraint approached me, ‘hoping it isn’t true,’ and ‘offering me a chance to explain.’ He’s a nasty, twisted little man who’s spent his life holding his wife’s handbag and answering her telephone calls. Naturally he’s relishing the idea of wielding some actual power.”

Chiswell took a swig of sherry.

“So, as you can see, I’m in something of a cleft stick, Mr. Strike. Even if I were minded to pay off Jimmy Knight, I still have to contend with a man who wants my disgrace, and who may well be able to lay hands on proof.”

“How could Winn get proof?”

Chiswell took another large mouthful of treacle tart and glanced over his shoulder to check that Georgina remained safely in the kitchen.

“I’ve heard,” he muttered, and a fine mist of pastry flew from the slack lips, “that there may be photographs.”

“Photographs?” repeated Strike.

“Winn can’t have them, of course. If he had, it would all be over. But he might be able to find a way of getting hold of them. Yerse.”

He shoved the last piece of tart into his mouth, then said:

“Of course, there’s a chance the photographs don’t incriminate me. There are no distinguishing marks, so far as I’m aware.”

Strike’s imagination frankly boggled. He yearned to ask, “Distinguishing marks on what, Minister?” but refrained.

“It all happened six years ago,” continued Chiswell. “I’ve been over and over the damn thing in my head. There were others involved who might have talked, but I doubt it, I doubt it very much. Too much to lose. No, it’s all going to come down to what Knight and Winn can dig up. I strongly suspect that if he gets hold of the photographs, Winn will go straight to the press. I don’t think that would be Knight’s first choice. He simply wants money.

“So here I am, Mr. Strike, a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi. I’ve lived with this hanging over me for weeks now. It hasn’t been enjoyable.”

He peered at Strike through his tiny eyes, and the detective was irresistibly put in mind of a mole, blinking up at a hovering spade that waited to crush it.

“When I heard you were at that meeting I assumed you were investigating Knight and had some dirt on him. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way out of this diabolical situation is to find something that I can use against each of them, before they get their hands on those photographs. Fight fire with fire.”

“Blackmail with blackmail?” said Strike.

“I don’t want anything from them except to leave me the hell alone,” snapped Chiswell. “Bargaining chips, that’s all I want. I acted within the law,” he said firmly, “and in accordance with my conscience.”

Chiswell was not a particularly likable man, but Strike could well imagine that the ongoing suspense of waiting for public exposure would be torture, especially to a man who had already endured his fair share of scandals. Strike’s scant research on his prospective client the previous evening had unearthed gleeful accounts of the affair that had ended his first marriage, of the fact that his second wife had spent a week in a clinic for “nervous exhaustion” and of the grisly drug-induced car crash in which his younger son had killed a young mother.

“This is a very big job, Mr. Chiswell,” said Strike. “It’ll take two or three people to thoroughly investigate Knight and Winn, especially if there’s time pressure.”

“I don’t care what it costs,” said Chiswell. “I don’t care if you have to put your whole agency on it.

“I refuse to believe there isn’t anything dodgy about Winn, sneaking little toad that he is. There’s something funny about them as a couple. She, the blind angel of light,” Chiswell’s lip curled, “and he, her potbellied henchman, always scheming and backstabbing and grubbing up every freebie he can get. There must be something there. Must be.

“As for Knight, Commie rabble rouser, there’s bound to be something the police haven’t yet caught up with. He was always a tearaway, a thoroughly nasty piece of work.”

“You knew Jimmy Knight before he started trying to blackmail you?” asked Strike.

“Oh, yes,” said Chiswell. “The Knights are from my constituency. The father was an odd-job man who did a certain amount of work for our family. I never knew the mother. I believe she died before the three of them moved into Steda Cottage.”

“I see,” said Strike.

He was recalling Billy’s anguished words, “I seen a child strangled and nobody believes me,” the nervous movement from nose to chest as he made his slipshod half-cross, and the prosaic, precise detail of the pink blanket in which the dead child had been buried.

“There’s something I think I should tell you before we discuss terms, Mr. Chiswell,” said Strike. “I was at the CORE meeting because I was trying to find Knight’s younger brother. His name’s Billy.”

The crease between Chiswell’s myopic eyes deepened a fraction.

“Yerse, I remember that there were two of them, but Jimmy was the elder by a considerable amount—a decade or more, I would guess. I haven’t seen—Billy, is it?—in many years.”

“Well, he’s seriously mentally ill,” said Strike. “He came to me last Monday with a peculiar story, then bolted.”

Chiswell waited, and Strike was sure he detected tension.

“Billy claims,” said Strike, “that he witnessed the strangling of a small child when he was very young.”

Chiswell did not recoil, horrified; he did not bluster or storm. He did not demand whether he was being accused, or ask what on earth that had to do with him. He responded with none of the flamboyant defenses of the guilty man, and yet Strike could have sworn that to Chiswell, this was not a new story.

“And who does he claim strangled the child?” he asked, fingering the stem of his wine glass.

“He didn’t tell me—or wouldn’t.”

“You think this is what Knight is blackmailing me over? Infanticide?” asked Chiswell roughly.

“I thought you ought to know why I went looking for Jimmy,” said Strike.

“I have no deaths on my conscience,” said Jasper Chiswell forcefully. He swallowed the last of his water. “One cannot,” he added, replacing the empty glass on the table, “be held accountable for unintended consequences.”

10

The detective and the minister emerged from 14 Park Place an hour later and walked the few yards that took them back to St. James’s Street. Chiswell had become less curmudgeonly and gnomic over coffee, relieved, Strike suspected, to have put in train some action that might lift from him what had clearly become an almost intolerable burden of dread and suspense. They had agreed terms and Strike was pleased with the deal, because this promised to be a better-paid and more challenging job than the agency had been given in a while.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Strike,” said Chiswell, staring off down St. James’s as they both paused on the corner. “I must leave you here. I have an appointment with my son.”

Yet he did not move.

“You investigated Freddie’s death,” he said abruptly, glancing at Strike out of the corner of his eyes.

Strike had not expected Chiswell to raise the subject, and especially not here, as an afterthought, after the intensity of their basement discussion.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”

Chiswell’s eyes remained fixed on a distant art gallery.

“I remembered your name on the report,” said Chiswell. “It’s an unusual one.”

He swallowed, still squinting at the gallery. He seemed strangely unwilling to depart for his appointment.

“Wonderful boy, Freddie,” he said. “Wonderful. Went into my old regiment—well, as good as. Queen’s Own Hussars amalgamated with the Queen’s Royal Irish back in ’ninety-three, as you’ll know. So it was the Queen’s Royal Hussars he joined.

“Full of promise. Full of life. But of course, you never knew him.”

“No,” said Strike.

Some polite comment seemed necessary.

“He was your eldest, wasn’t he?”

“Of four,” said Chiswell, nodding. “Two girls,” and by his inflection he waved them away, mere females, chaff to wheat, “and this other boy,” he added darkly. “He went to jail. Perhaps you saw the newspapers?”

“No,” lied Strike, because he knew what it felt like to have your personal details strewn across the newspapers. It was kindest, if at all credible, to pretend you hadn’t read it all, politest to let people tell their own story.

“Been trouble all his life, Raff,” said Chiswell. “I got him a job in there.”

He pointed a thick finger at the distant gallery window.

“Dropped out of his History of Art degree,” said Chiswell. “Friend of mine owns the place, agreed to take him on. M’wife thinks he’s a lost cause. He killed a young mother in a car. He was high.”

Strike said nothing.

“Well, goodbye,” said Chiswell, appearing to come out of a melancholy trance. He offered his sweaty hand once more, which Strike shook, then strode away, bundled up in the thick coat that was so inappropriate on this fine June day.

Strike proceeded up St. James’s Street in the opposite direction, pulling out his mobile as he went. Robin picked up on the third ring.

“Need to meet you,” said Strike without preamble. “We’ve got a new job, a big one.”

“Damn!” she said. “I’m in Harley Street. I didn’t want to bother you, knowing you were with Chiswell, but Andy’s wife broke her wrist falling off a stepladder. I said I’d cover Dodgy while Andy takes her to hospital.”

“Shit. Where’s Barclay?”

“Still on Webster.”

“Is Dodgy in his consulting room?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll risk it,” said Strike. “He usually goes straight home on Fridays. This is urgent. I need to tell you about it face to face. Can you meet me in the Red Lion in Duke of York Street?”

Having refused all alcohol during his meal with Chiswell, Strike fancied a pint rather than returning to the office. If he had stuck out in his suit at the White Horse in East Ham, he was perfectly dressed for Mayfair, and two minutes later he entered the Red Lion in Duke of York Street, a snug Victorian pub whose brass fittings and etched glass reminded him of the Tottenham. Taking a pint of London Pride off to a corner table, he looked up Della Winn and her husband on his phone and began reading an article about the forthcoming Paralympics, in which Della was extensively quoted.

“Hi,” said Robin, twenty-five minutes later, dropping her bag onto the seat opposite him.

“Want a drink?” he asked.

“I’ll get it,” said Robin. “Well?” she said, rejoining him a couple of minutes later, holding an orange juice. Strike smiled at her barely contained impatience. “What was it all about? What did Chiswell want?”

The pub, which comprised only a horseshoe space around a single bar, was already tightly packed with smartly dressed men and women, who had started their weekend early or, like Strike and Robin, were finishing work over a drink. Lowering his voice, Strike told her what had passed between him and Chiswell.

“Oh,” said Robin blankly, when at last Strike had finished filling her in. “So we’re… we’re going to try and get dirt on Della Winn?”

“On her husband,” Strike corrected her, “and Chiswell prefers the phrase ‘bargaining chips.’”

Robin said nothing, but sipped her orange juice.

“Blackmail’s illegal, Robin,” said Strike, correctly reading her uneasy expression. “Knight’s trying to screw forty grand out of Chiswell and Winn wants to force him out of his job.”

“So he’s going to blackmail them back and we’re going to help him do it?”

“We get dirt on people every day,” said Strike roughly. “It’s a bit late to start getting a conscience about it.”

He took a long pull on his pint, annoyed not only by her attitude, but by the fact that he had let his resentment show. She lived with her husband in a desirable sash-windowed house in Albury Street, while he remained in two drafty rooms, from which he might soon be ejected by the redevelopment of the street. The agency had never before been offered a job that gave three people full employment, possibly for months. Strike was not about to apologize for being keen to take it. He was tired, after years of graft, of being plunged back into the red whenever the agency hit a lean patch. He had ambitions for his business that couldn’t be achieved without building up a far healthier bank balance. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to defend his position.

“We’re like lawyers, Robin. We’re on the client’s side.”

“You turned down that investment banker the other day, who wanted to find out where his wife—”

“—because it was bloody obvious he’d do her harm if he found her.”

“Well,” said Robin, a challenging look in her eye, “what if the thing they’ve found out about Chiswell—”

But before she could finish her sentence, a tall man in deep conversation with a colleague walked straight into Robin’s chair, flinging her forward into the table and knocking over her orange juice.

“Oi!” barked Strike, as Robin tried to wipe the juice off her sopping dress. “Fancy apologizing?”

“Oh dear,” said the man in a drawl, eyeing the juice-soaked Robin as several people turned to stare. “Did I do that?”

“Yes, you bloody did,” said Strike, heaving himself up and moving around the table. “And that’s not an apology!”

“Cormoran!” said Robin warningly.

“Well, I’m sorry,” said the man, as though making an enormous concession, but taking in Strike’s size, his regret seemed to become more sincere. “Seriously, I do apol—”

“Bugger off,” snarled Strike. “Swap seats,” he said to Robin. “Then if some other clumsy tosser walks by they’ll get me, not you.”

Half-embarrassed, half-touched, she picked up her handbag, which was also soaked, and did as he had requested. Strike returned to the table clutching a fistful of paper napkins, which he handed to her.

“Thanks.”

It was difficult to maintain a combative stance given that he was voluntarily sitting in a chair covered in orange juice to spare her. Still dabbing off the juice, Robin leaned in and said quietly:

“You know what I’m worried about. The thing Billy said.”

The thin cotton dress was sticking to her everywhere: Strike kept his gaze resolutely on her eyes.

“I asked Chiswell about that.”

“Did you?”

“Of course I did. What else was I going to think, when he said he was being blackmailed by Billy’s brother?”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he had no deaths on his hands, but ‘one cannot be held accountable for unintended consequences.’”

“What on earth does that mean?”

“I asked. He gave me the hypothetical example of a man dropping a mint, on which a small child later choked to death.”

“What?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Billy hasn’t called back, I suppose?”

Robin shook her head.

“Look, the overwhelming probability is Billy’s delusional,” said Strike. “When I told Chiswell what Billy had said, I didn’t get any sense of guilt or fear…”

As he said it, he remembered the shadow that had passed over Chiswell’s face, and the impression he had received that the story was not, to Chiswell, entirely new.

“So what are they blackmailing Chiswell about?” asked Robin.

“Search me,” said Strike. “He said it happened six years ago, which doesn’t fit with Billy’s story, because he wouldn’t have been a little kid six years ago. Chiswell said some people would think what he did was immoral, but it wasn’t illegal. He seemed to be suggesting that it wasn’t against the law when he did it, but is now.”

Strike suppressed a yawn. Beer and the heat of the afternoon were making him drowsy. He was due at Lorelei’s later.

“So you trust him?” Robin asked.

“Do I trust Chiswell?” Strike wondered aloud, his eyes on the extravagantly engraved mirror behind Robin. “If I had to bet on it, I’d say he was being truthful with me today because he’s desperate. Do I think he’s generally trustworthy? Probably no more than anyone else.”

“You didn’t like him, did you?” asked Robin, incredulously. “I’ve been reading about him.”

“And?”

“Pro-hanging, anti-immigration, voted against increasing maternity leave—”

She didn’t notice Strike’s involuntary glance down her figure as she continued:

“—banged on about family values, then left his wife for a journalist—”

“All right, I wouldn’t choose him for a drinking buddy, but there’s something slightly pitiable about him. He’s lost one son, the other one’s just killed a woman—”

“Well, yes, there you are,” said Robin. “He advocates locking up petty criminals and throwing away the key, then his son runs over someone’s mother and he pulls out all the stops to get him a short sen—”

She broke off suddenly as a loud female voice said: “Robin! How lovely!”

Sarah Shadlock had entered the pub with two men.

“Oh God,” muttered Robin, before she could help herself, then, more loudly, “Sarah, hi!”

She would have given much to avoid this encounter. Sarah would be delighted to tell Matthew that she had found Robin and Strike having a tête-à-tête in a Mayfair pub, when she herself had told Matthew by phone only an hour ago that she was alone in Harley Street.

Sarah insisted on wiggling around the table to embrace Robin, something the latter was sure she would not have done had she not been with men.

“Darling, what’s happened to you? You’re all sticky!”

She was just a little posher here, in Mayfair, than anywhere else Robin had met her, and several degrees warmer to Robin.

“Nothing,” muttered Robin. “Spilled orange juice, that’s all.”

“Cormoran!” said Sarah blithely, swooping in for a kiss on his cheek. Strike, Robin was pleased to note, sat impassive and did not respond. “Bit of R and R?” said Sarah, embracing them both in her knowing smile.

“Work,” said Strike bluntly.

Receiving no encouragement to stay, Sarah moved along the bar, taking her colleagues with her.

“I forgot Christie’s is round the corner,” muttered Robin.

Strike checked his watch. He didn’t want to have to wear his suit to Lorelei’s, and indeed, it was now stained with orange juice from having taken Robin’s seat.

“We need to talk about how we’re going to do this job, because it starts tomorrow.”

“OK,” said Robin with some trepidation, because it had been a long time since she had worked a weekend. Matthew had got used to her coming home.

“It’s all right,” said Strike, apparently reading her mind, “I won’t need you till Monday.

“The job’s going to take three people at a minimum. I reckon we’ve already got enough on Webster to keep the client happy, so we’ll put Andy full time on Dodgy Doc, let the two waiting-list clients know we’re not going to be able to do them this month and Barclay can come in with us on the Chiswell case.

“On Monday, you’re going into the House of Commons.”

“I’m what?” said Robin, startled.

“You’re going to go in as Chiswell’s goddaughter, who’s interested in a career in Parliament, and get started on Geraint, who runs Della’s constituency office at the other end of the corridor to Chiswell’s. Chat him up…”

He took a swig of beer, frowning at her over the top of the glass.

“What?” said Robin, unsure what was coming.

“How d’you feel,” said Strike, so quietly that she had to lean in to hear him, “about breaking the law?”

“Well, I tend to be opposed to it,” said Robin, unsure whether to be amused or worried. “That’s sort of why I wanted to do investigative work.”

“And if the law’s a bit of a gray area, and we can’t get the information any other way? Bearing in mind that Winn’s definitely breaking the law, trying to blackmail a Minister of the Crown out of his job?”

“Are you talking about bugging Winn’s office?”

“Right in one,” said Strike. Correctly reading her dubious expression, he went on. “Listen, by Chiswell’s account, Winn’s a slapdash loudmouth, which is why he’s stuck in the constituency office and kept well away from his wife’s work at the Department for Sport. Apparently he leaves his office door open most of the time, shouts about constituents’ confidential affairs and leaves private papers lying around in the communal kitchen. There’s a good chance you’ll be able to inveigle indiscretions out of him without needing the bug, but I don’t think we can count on it.”

Robin swilled the last of her orange juice in her glass, deliberating, then said:

“All right, I’ll do it.”

“Sure?” said Strike. “OK, well you won’t be able to take devices in, because you’ll have to go through a metal detector. I’ve said I’m going to get a handful to Chiswell tomorrow. He’ll pass them to you once you’re inside.

“You’ll need a cover name. Text it to me when you’ve thought of one so I can let Chiswell know. You could use ‘Venetia Hall’ again, actually. Chiswell’s the kind of bloke who’d have a goddaughter called Venetia.”

“Venetia” was Robin’s middle name, but Robin was too full of apprehension and excitement to care that Strike, from his smirk, continued to find it amusing.

“You’re going to have to work a disguise as well,” said Strike. “Nothing major, but Chiswell remembered what you look like from the Ripper coverage, so we’ve got to assume Winn might, too.”

“It’ll be too hot for a wig,” she said. “I might try colored contact lenses. I could go and buy some now. Maybe some plain-lensed glasses on top.” A smile she could not suppress surfaced again. “The House of Commons!” she repeated excitedly.

Robin’s excited grin faded as Sarah Shadlock’s white-blonde head intruded on the periphery of her vision, on the other side of the bar. Sarah had just repositioned herself to keep Robin and Strike in her sights.

“Let’s go,” Robin said to Strike.

As they walked back towards the Tube, Strike explained that Barclay would be tailing Jimmy Knight.

“I can’t do it,” said Strike regretfully. “I’ve blown my cover with him and his CORE mates.”

“So what will you be up to?”

“Plug gaps, follow up leads, cover nights if we need them,” said Strike.

“Poor Lorelei,” said Robin.

It had slipped out before she could stop herself. Increasingly heavy traffic was rolling past, and when Strike did not answer, Robin hoped that he hadn’t heard her.

“Did Chiswell mention his son who died in Iraq?” she asked, rather like a person hastily coughing to hide a laugh that has already escaped them.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Freddie was clearly his favorite child, which doesn’t say much for his judgment.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Freddie Chiswell was a prize shit. I investigated a lot of Killed in Actions, and I never had so many people ask me whether the dead officer had been shot in the back by his own men.”

Robin looked shocked.

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum?” asked Strike.

Robin had learned quite a lot of Latin, working with Strike.

“Well,” she said quietly, for the first time finding some pity in her heart for Jasper Chiswell, “you can’t expect his father to speak ill of him.”

They parted at the top of the street, Robin to shop for colored contact lenses, Strike heading for the Tube.

He felt unusually cheerful after the conversation with Robin: as they contemplated this challenging job, the familiar contours of their friendship had suddenly resurfaced. He had liked her excitement at the prospect of entering the House of Commons; liked being the one who had offered the chance. He had even enjoyed the way she stress-tested his assumptions about Chiswell’s story.

On the point of entering the station, Strike turned suddenly aside, infuriating the irate businessman who had been walking six inches in his wake. Tutting furiously, the man barely avoided a collision and strode off huffily into the Underground while the indifferent Strike leaned up against the sun-soaked wall, enjoying the sensation of heat permeating his suit jacket as he phoned Detective Inspector Eric Wardle.

Strike had told Robin the truth. He didn’t believe that Chiswell had ever strangled a child, yet there had been something undeniably odd about his reaction to Billy’s story. Thanks to the minister’s revelation that the Knight family had lived in proximity to his family home, Strike now knew that Billy had been a “little kid” in Oxfordshire. The first logical step in assuaging his continued unease about that pink blanket was to find out whether any children in the area had disappeared a couple of decades ago, and never been found.

11

Lorelei Bevan lived in an eclectically furnished flat over her thriving vintage clothes store in Camden. Strike arrived that night at half past seven, a bottle of Pinot Noir in one hand and his mobile clamped to his ear with the other. Lorelei opened the door, smiled good-naturedly at the familiar sight of him on the phone, kissed him on the mouth, relieved him of his wine and returned to the kitchen, from which a welcome smell of Pad Thai was issuing.

“… or try and get into CORE itself,” Strike told Barclay, closing the door behind him and proceeding to Lorelei’s sitting room, which was dominated by a large print of Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylors. “I’ll send you everything I’ve got on Jimmy. He’s involved with a couple of different groups. No idea whether he’s working. His local’s the White Horse in East Ham. Think he’s a Hammers fan.”

“Could be worse,” said Barclay, who was speaking quietly, as he had just got the teething baby to sleep. “Could be Chelsea.”

“You’ll have to admit to being ex-army,” said Strike, sinking into an armchair and hoisting his leg up onto a conveniently positioned square pouf. “You look like a squaddie.”

“Nae problem,” said Barclay. “I’ll be the poor wee laddie who didnae know whut he was gettin’ himself intae. Hard lefties love that shit. Let ’em patronize me.”

Grinning, Strike took out his cigarettes. For all his initial doubts, he was starting to think that Barclay might have been a good hire.

“All right, hang fire till you hear from me again. Should be sometime Sunday.”

As Strike rang off, Lorelei appeared with a glass of red for him.

“Want some help in the kitchen?” Strike asked, though without moving.

“No, stay there. I won’t be long,” she replied, smiling. He liked her fifties-style apron.

As she returned to the kitchen, he lit up. Although Lorelei did not smoke, she had no objection to Strike’s Benson & Hedges as long as he used the kitsch ashtray, decorated with cavorting poodles, that she had provided for the purpose.

Smoking, he admitted to himself that he envied Barclay infiltrating Knight and his band of hard-left colleagues. It was the kind of job Strike had relished in the Military Police. He remembered the four soldiers in Germany who had become enamored of a local far-right group. Strike had managed to persuade them that he shared their belief in a white ethno-nationalist super-state, infiltrated a meeting and secured four arrests and prosecutions that had given him particular satisfaction.

Turning on the TV, he watched Channel 4 News for a while, drinking his wine, smoking in pleasurable anticipation of Pad Thai and other sensual delights, and for once enjoying what so many of his fellow workers took for granted, but which he had rarely experienced: the relief and release of a Friday night.

Strike and Lorelei had met at Eric Wardle’s birthday party. It had been an awkward evening in some ways, because Strike had seen Coco there for the first time since telling her by phone that he had no interest in another date. Coco had got very drunk; at one in the morning, while he was sitting on a sofa deep in conversation with Lorelei, she had marched across the room, thrown a glass of wine over both of them and stormed off into the night. Strike had not been aware that Coco and Lorelei were old friends until the morning after he woke up in Lorelei’s bed. He considered that this was really more Lorelei’s problem than his. She seemed to think the exchange, for Coco wanted nothing more to do with her, more than fair.

“How d’you do it?” Wardle had asked, the next time they met, genuinely puzzled. “Blimey, I’d like to know your—”

Strike raised his heavy eyebrows and Wardle appeared to gag on what had come perilously close to a compliment.

“There’s no secret,” said Strike. “Some women just like fat one-legged pube-headed men with broken noses.”

“Well, it’s a sad indictment of our mental health services that they’re loose on the streets,” Wardle had said, and Strike had laughed.

Lorelei was her real name, taken not from the mythical siren of the Rhine, but from Marilyn Monroe’s character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her mother’s favorite film. Men’s eyes swiveled when she passed them in the street, but she evoked neither the profound longing nor the searing pain that Charlotte had caused Strike. Whether this was because Charlotte had stunted his capacity to feel so intensely, or because Lorelei lacked some essential magic, he did not know. Neither Strike nor Lorelei had said “I love you.” In Strike’s case this was because, desirable and amusing though he found her, he could not have said it honestly. It was convenient to him to assume that Lorelei felt the same way.

She had recently ended a five-year-long live-in relationship when, after several lingering looks across Wardle’s dark sitting room, he had strolled across to talk to her. He had wanted to believe her when she had told him how glorious it was to have her flat to herself and her freedom restored, yet lately he had felt tiny spots of displeasure when he had told her he had to work weekends, like the first heavy drops of rain that presage a storm. She denied it when challenged: no, no, of course not, if you’ve got to work…

But Strike had set out his uncompromising terms at the outset of the relationship: his work was unpredictable and his finances poor. Hers was the only bed he intended to visit, but if she sought predictability or permanence, he was not the man for her. She had appeared content with the deal, and if, over the course of ten months, she had grown less so, Strike was ready to call things off with no hard feelings. Perhaps she sensed this, because she had forced no argument. This pleased him, and not merely because he could do without the aggravation. He liked Lorelei, enjoyed sleeping with her and found it desirable—for a reason he did not bother to dwell on, being perfectly aware what it was—to be in a relationship just now.

The Pad Thai was excellent, their conversation light and amusing. Strike told Lorelei nothing about his new case, except that he hoped it would be both lucrative and interesting. After doing the dishes together, they repaired to the bedroom, with its candy-pink walls and its curtains printed with cartoonish cowgirls and ponies.

Lorelei liked to dress up. To bed that night, she wore stockings and a black corset. She had the talent, by no means usual, of staging an erotic scene without tipping into parody. Perhaps, with his one leg and his broken nose, Strike ought to have felt ludicrous in this boudoir, which was all frivolity and prettiness, but she played Aphrodite to his Hephaestus so adeptly that thoughts of Robin and Matthew were sometimes driven entirely from his mind.

There was, after all, little pleasure to compare with that given by a woman who really wanted you, he thought next day at lunchtime, as they sat side by side at a pavement café, reading separate papers, Strike smoking, Lorelei’s perfectly painted nails trailing absently along the back of his hand. So why had he already told her that he needed to work this afternoon? It was true that he needed to drop off the listening devices at Chiswell’s Belgravia flat, but he could easily have spent another night with her, returned to the bedroom, the stockings and the basque. The prospect was certainly tempting.

Yet something implacable inside him refused to give in. Two nights in a row would break the pattern; from there, it would be a short slide into true intimacy. In the depths of himself Strike could not imagine a future in which he lived with a woman, married or fathered children. He had planned some of those things with Charlotte, in the days when he had been readjusting to life minus half his leg. An IED on a dusty road in Afghanistan had blasted Strike out of his chosen life into an entirely new body and a new reality. Sometimes he saw his proposal to Charlotte as the most extreme manifestation of his temporary disorientation in the aftermath of his amputation. He had needed to relearn how to walk, and, almost as hard, to live a life outside the military. From a distance of two years, he saw himself trying to hold tight to some part of his past as everything else slipped away. The allegiance he had given the army, he had transferred to a future with Charlotte.

“Good move,” his old friend Dave Polworth had said without missing a beat, when Strike told him of the engagement. “Shame to waste all that combat training. Slightly increased risk of getting killed, though, mate.”

Had he ever really thought the wedding would happen? Had he truly imagined Charlotte settling for the life he could give her? After everything they had been through, had he believed that they could achieve redemption together, each of them damaged in their own untidy, personal and peculiar ways? It seemed to the Strike sitting in the sunshine with Lorelei that for a few months he had both believed it wholeheartedly and known that it was impossible, never planning more than a few weeks ahead, holding Charlotte at night as though she were the last human on earth, as though only Armageddon could separate them.

“Want another coffee?” murmured Lorelei.

“I’d better make a move,” said Strike.

“When will I see you?” she asked, as Strike paid the waiter.

“Told you, I’ve got this big new job on,” he said. “Timings are going to be a bit unpredictable for a while. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll go out as soon as I can get a clear evening.”

“All right,” she said, smiling, and added softly, “Kiss me.”

He did so. She pressed her full lips against his, irresistibly recalling certain highlights of the early morning. They broke apart. Strike grinned, bade her goodbye and left her sitting in the sun with her newspaper.

The Minister for Culture did not invite Strike inside when he opened the door of his house in Ebury Street. Chiswell seemed keen, in fact, for the detective to leave as quickly as possible. After taking the box of listening devices, he muttered, “Good, right, I’ll make sure she gets them,” and was on the point of closing the door when he suddenly called after Strike, “What’s her name?”

“Venetia Hall,” said Strike.

Chiswell shut the door, and Strike turned his tired footsteps back along the street of quiet golden townhouses, towards the Tube and Denmark Street.

His office seemed stark and gloomy after Lorelei’s flat. Strike threw open the windows to let in the noise of Denmark Street down below, where music lovers continued to visit the instrument stores and old record shops that Strike feared were doomed by the forthcoming redevelopment. The sound of engines and horns, of conversation and footsteps, of guitar riffs played by would-be purchasers and the distant bongos of another busker were pleasant to Strike as he settled to work, knowing that he had hours ahead in the computer chair if he were to wrest the bare bones of his targets’ lives from the internet.

If you knew where to search and had time and expertise, the outline of many existences could be unearthed in cyberspace: ghostly exoskeletons, sometimes partial, sometimes unnervingly complete, of the lives led by their flesh and blood counterparts. Strike had learned many tricks and secrets, become adept ferreting in even the darkest corners of the internet, but often the most innocent social media sites held untold wealth, a minor amount of cross-referencing all that was necessary to compile detailed private histories that their careless owners had never meant to share with the world.

Strike first consulted Google Maps to examine the place where Jimmy and Billy had grown up. Steda Cottage was evidently too small and insignificant to be named, but Chiswell House was clearly marked, a short way outside the village of Woolstone. Strike spent five minutes fruitlessly scanning the patches of woodland around Chiswell House, noticing a couple of tiny squares that might be estate cottages—they buried it down in the dell by my dad’s house—before resuming his investigation of the older, saner brother.

CORE had a website where Strike found, sandwiched between lengthy polemics about celebration capitalism and neo-liberalism, a useful schedule of protests at which Jimmy was planning to demonstrate or speak, which the detective printed out and added to his file. He then followed a link to the Real Socialist Party website, which was an even busier and more cluttered affair than that of CORE. Here he found another lengthy article by Jimmy, arguing for the dissolution of the “apartheid state” of Israel and the defeat of the “Zionist lobby” which had a stranglehold on the Western capitalist establishment. Strike noted that Jasper Chiswell was among the “Western Political Elite” listed at the bottom of this article as a “publicly declared Zionist.”

Jimmy’s girlfriend, Flick, appeared in a couple of photographs on the Real Socialist website, sporting black hair as she marched against Trident and blonde shaded to pink as she cheered Jimmy, who was speaking on an open-air stage at a Real Socialist Party rally. Following a link to Flick’s Twitter handle, he perused her timeline, which was a strange mixture of the cloying and the vituperative. “I hope you get fucking arse cancer, you Tory cunt” sat directly above a video clip of a kitten sneezing so hard that it fell out of its basket.

As far as Strike could tell, neither Jimmy nor Flick owned or ever had owned property, something that he had in common with both of them. He could find no indication online of how they were supporting themselves, unless writing for far-left websites paid better than he had imagined. Jimmy was renting the miserable flat in Charlemont Road from a man called Kasturi Kumar, and while Flick made casual mention on social media of living in Hackney, he could not find an address for her anywhere online.

Digging deeper into online records, Strike discovered a James Knight of the correct age who seemed to have cohabited for five years with a woman called Dawn Clancy, and upon delving into Dawn’s highly informative, emoji-strewn Facebook page, Strike discovered that they had been married. Dawn was a hairdresser who had run a successful business in London before returning to her native Manchester. Thirteen years older than Jimmy, she seemed to have neither children nor any present-day contact with her ex-husband. However, a comment she had made to a jilted girlfriend’s “all men are trash” post, caught Strike’s eye: “Yeah, he’s a shit, but at least he hasn’t sued you! I win (again)!”

Intrigued, Strike turned his attention to court records and, after a little digging, found several useful nuggets of information. Jimmy had been charged with affray twice, once on an anti-capitalism march, once at an anti-Trident protest, but this, Strike had expected. What was far more interesting was to find Jimmy on a list of vexatious litigants on the website of HM Courts and Tribunals Service. Due to a longstanding habit of beginning frivolous legal actions, Knight was now “forbidden from starting civil cases in courts without permission.”

Jimmy had certainly had a good run for his, or the state’s, money. Over the past decade he had brought civil actions against sundry individuals and organizations. The law had taken his side only once, when, in 2007, he had won compensation from Zanet Industries, who were found not to have followed due process when dismissing him.

Jimmy had represented himself in court against Zanet and, presumably elated by his win, had gone on to represent himself in suing several others, among them a garage owner, two neighbors, a journalist he alleged had defamed him, two officers in the Metropolitan Police he claimed had assaulted him, two more employers and, finally, his ex-wife, who he said had harassed him and caused him loss of earnings.

In Strike’s experience, those who disdained the use of representation in court were either unbalanced or so arrogant that it came to the same thing. Jimmy’s litigious history suggested that he was greedy and unprincipled, sharp without being wise. It was always useful to have a handle on a man’s vulnerabilities when trying to ferret out his secrets. Strike added the names of all the people Jimmy had tried to sue, plus the current address of his ex-wife, to the file beside him.

At close to midnight Strike retired to his flat for some much-needed sleep, rose early on Sunday, and transferred his attention to Geraint Winn, remaining hunched at the computer until the light began to fade again, by which time a new cardboard file labeled CHISWELL sat beside him, fat with miscellaneous but crosschecked information on Chiswell’s two blackmailers.

Stretching and yawning, he became suddenly aware of the noises reaching him through the open windows. The music shops had closed at last, the bongos had ceased, but traffic continued to swish and rumble along Charing Cross Road. Strike heaved himself up, supporting himself on the desk because his remaining ankle was numb after hours in the computer chair, and stooped to look through the inner office window at a tangerine sky spread beyond the rooftops.

It was Sunday evening and in less than two hours England would be playing Italy at the quarter-finals of the European Football Championships in Kiev. One of the few personal indulgences Strike had allowed himself was a subscription to Sky so that he could watch football. The small portable TV that was all his flat upstairs could comfortably accommodate might not be the ideal medium on which to watch such an important game, but he could not justify a night in a pub given that he had an early start on Monday, covering Dodgy Doc again, a prospect that gave him little pleasure.

He checked his watch. He had time to get a Chinese takeaway before the match, but he still needed to call both Barclay and Robin with instructions for the next few days. As he was on the point of picking up the phone, a musical alert told him that he had received an email.

The subject line read: “Missing Kids in Oxfordshire.” Strike laid his mobile and keys back on the desk and clicked it open.

12

The sunset cast a ruddy glow across the duvet behind Robin as she sat at the dressing table in her and Matthew’s spacious new bedroom. Next-door’s barbecue was now smoking the air that had earlier been fragrant with honeysuckle. She had just left Matthew downstairs, lying on the sofa watching the warm-up to the England–Italy game, a cold bottle of Peroni in his hand.

Opening the dressing table drawer, she took out a pair of colored contact lenses she had concealed there. After trial and error the previous day, she had decided the hazel ones appeared most natural with her strawberry-blonde hair. Gingerly, she extracted first one, then the other, placing them over her watering blue-gray irises. It was essential that she get used to wearing them. Ideally she would have had them in all weekend, but Matthew’s reaction when he had seen her in them had dissuaded her.

“Your eyes!” he had said, after staring at her, perplexed, for a few seconds. “Bloody hell, that looks horrible, take them out!”

As Saturday had already been ruined by one of their tense disagreements about her job, she had chosen not to wear the lenses all weekend, because they would serve as a constant reminder to Matthew about what she was up to the following week. He seemed to think that working undercover in the House of Commons was tantamount to treason, and her refusal to tell him who either her client or her targets were had further aggravated him.

Robin kept telling herself that Matthew was worried about her safety and that he could hardly be blamed for it. It had become a mental exercise she performed like a penance: you can’t blame him for being concerned, you nearly got killed last year, he wants you to be safe. However, the fact that she had gone for a drink with Strike on Friday seemed to be worrying Matthew far more than any potential killer.

“Don’t you think you’re being bloody hypocritical?” he said.

Whenever he was angry, the skin around his nose and upper lip became taut. Robin had noticed it years ago, but lately it gave her a sensation close to revulsion. She had never mentioned this to her therapist. It had felt too nasty, too visceral.

“How am I hypocritical?”

“Going for cozy little drinks with him—”

“Matt, I work with—”

“—then complaining when I have lunch with Sarah.”

“Have lunch with her!” said Robin, her pulse quickening in anger. “Do it! As a matter of fact, I met her in the Red Lion, out with some men from work. Do you want to call Tom and tell him his fiancée’s drinking with colleagues? Or am I the only one who’s not allowed to do it?”

The skin around his nose and mouth looked like a muzzle as it tightened, Robin thought: a pale muzzle on a snarling dog.

“Would you have told me you’d gone for a drink with him if Sarah hadn’t seen you?”

“Yes,” said Robin, her temper snapping, “and I’d’ve known you’d be a dick about it, too.”

The tense aftermath of this argument, by no means their most serious of the last month, had lingered all through Sunday. Only in the last couple of hours, with the prospect of the England game to cheer him, had Matthew become amiable again. Robin had even volunteered to fetch him a Peroni from the kitchen and kissed him on the forehead before leaving him, with a sense of liberation, for her colored contact lenses and her preparations for the following day.

Her eyes felt gradually less uncomfortable with repeated blinking. Robin moved across to the bed, where her laptop lay. Pulling it towards her, she saw that an email from Strike had just arrived.

Robin was annoyed. Strike was supposed to be “plugging gaps” and working nights. Did he think she had done no research of her own over the weekend? Nevertheless, she clicked on the first of several attachments, a document summarizing the fruits of Strike’s online labor.

Strike had managed to dig up a couple of poor-quality pictures of Geraint with his well-known wife, both of which Robin had already found and saved to her laptop. She knew how hard Strike had had to work to find an image of Geraint, because it had taken her a long time the previous night, while Matthew slept, to find them. Press photographers did not seem to feel he added much to pictures. A thin, balding man who wore heavy-framed glasses, he had a lipless mouth, a weak chin and a pronounced overbite, which taken together put Robin in mind of an overweight gecko.

Strike had also attached information on the Minister for Sport.

Even though Robin had read as much as she could about Della over the weekend, she plowed diligently through both articles. They told her little that she did not already know. Della had worked for a prominent human rights charity before successfully standing for election in the Welsh constituency in which she had been born. She was a long-time advocate for the benefit of sports in deprived areas, a champion of disabled athletes and a supporter for projects that used sport to rehabilitate injured veterans. The founding of her charity, the Level Playing Field, to support young athletes and sportspeople facing challenges, whether of poverty or physical impairment, had received a fair amount of press coverage. Many high-profile sportspeople had given their time to fundraisers.

The articles that Strike had attached both mentioned something that Robin already knew from her own research: the Winns, like the Chiswells, had lost a child. Della and Geraint’s daughter and only offspring had killed herself at the age of sixteen, a year before Della had stood for Parliament. The tragedy was mentioned in every profile Robin had read on Della Winn, even those lauding her substantial achievements. Her maiden speech in Parliament had supported a proposed bullying hotline, but she had never otherwise discussed her child’s suicide.

Robin’s mobile rang. After checking that the bedroom door was closed, Robin answered.

“That was quick,” said Strike thickly, through a mouthful of Singapore noodles. “Sorry—took me by surprise—just got a takeaway.”

“I’ve read your email,” said Robin. She heard a metallic snap and was sure he was opening a can of beer. “Very useful, thanks.”

“Got your disguise sorted?” Strike asked.

“Yes,” said Robin, turning to examine herself at the mirror. It was strange how much a change of eye color transformed your face. She was planning to wear a pair of clear-lensed glasses over her hazel eyes.

“And you know enough about Chiswell to pretend to be his goddaughter?”

“Of course,” said Robin.

“Go on then,” said Strike, “impress me.”

“Born 1944,” Robin said at once, without reading her notes. “Studied Classics at Merton College, Oxford, then joined Queen’s Own Hussars, saw active service in Aden and Singapore.

“First wife, Lady Patricia Fleetwood, three children: Sophia, Isabella and Freddie. Sophia’s married and lives in Northumberland, Isabella runs Chiswell’s Parliamentary office—”

“Does she?” said Strike, sounding vaguely surprised, and Robin was pleased to know that she had discovered something he did not.

“Is she the daughter you knew?” she asked, remembering what Strike had said in the office.

“Wouldn’t go as far as ‘knew.’ I met her a couple of times with Charlotte. Everyone called her ‘Izzy Chizzy.’ One of those upper-class nicknames.”

“Lady Patricia divorced Chiswell after he got a political journalist pregnant—”

“—which resulted in the disappointing son at the art gallery.”

“Exactly—”

Robin moved the mouse around to bring up a saved picture, this time of a dark and rather beautiful young man in a charcoal suit, heading up courtroom steps accompanied by a stylish, black-haired woman in sunglasses whom he closely resembled, though she looked hardly old enough to be his mother.

“—but Chiswell and the journalist split up not long after Raphael was born,” said Robin.

“The family calls him ‘Raff,’” said Strike, “and the second wife doesn’t like him, thinks Chiswell should have disowned him after the car crash.”

Robin made a further note.

“Great, thanks. Chiswell’s current wife, Kinvara, was unwell last year,” Robin continued, bringing up a picture of Kinvara, a curvaceous redhead in a slinky black dress and heavy diamond necklace. She was some thirty years younger than Chiswell and pouting at the camera. Had she not known, Robin would have guessed them father and daughter rather than a married couple.

“With nervous exhaustion,” said Strike, beating her to it. “Yeah. Drink or drugs, d’you reckon?”

Robin heard a clang and surmised that Strike had just dropped an empty Tennent’s can in the office bin. He was alone, then. Lorelei never stayed in the tiny flat upstairs.

“Who knows?” said Robin, her eyes still on Kinvara Chiswell.

“One last thing,” said Strike. “Just in. A couple of kids went missing in Oxfordshire around the right time to tally with Billy’s story.”

There was a brief pause.

“You still there?” asked Strike.

“Yes… I thought you don’t believe Chiswell strangled a child?”

“I don’t,” said Strike. “The timescale doesn’t fit, and if Jimmy knew a Tory minister had strangled a kid, he wouldn’t have waited twenty years to try and monetise it. But I’d still like to know whether Billy’s imagining that he saw someone throttled. I’m going to do a bit of digging on the names Wardle’s given me and if either seem credible I might ask you to sound Izzy out. She might remember something about a kid disappearing in the vicinity of Chiswell House.”

Robin said nothing.

“Like I said in the pub, Billy’s very ill. It’s probably nothing,” said Strike, with a trace of defensiveness. As he and Robin were both well aware, he had previously jettisoned paid cases and rich clients to pursue mysteries that others might have let lie. “I just—”

“—can’t rest easy until you’ve looked into it,” said Robin. “All right. I understand.”

Unseen by her, Strike grinned and rubbed his tired eyes.

“Well, best of luck tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be on my mobile if you need me.”

“What are you going to be up to?”

“Paperwork. Jimmy Knight’s ex doesn’t work Mondays. I’m off to Manchester to find her on Tuesday.”

Robin experienced a sudden wave of nostalgia for the previous year, when she and Strike had undertaken a road trip together to interrogate women left behind in the wake of dangerous men. She wondered whether he had thought about it while he planned this journey.

“Watching England–Italy?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “There’s nothing else, is there?”

“No,” said Robin hurriedly. She had not meant to sound as though she wanted to detain him. “Speak soon, then.”

She cut the call on his farewell and tossed the mobile aside onto the bed.

13

The following morning, Robin woke, gasping, her fingers at her own throat, trying to loosen a non-existent hold. She was already at the bedroom door when Matthew woke, confused.

“It’s nothing, I’m fine,” she muttered, before he could articulate a question, groping to find the handle that would let her out of the bedroom.

The surprise was that it hadn’t happened more often since she had heard the story of the strangled child. Robin knew exactly how it felt to have fingers close tightly around your neck, to feel your brain flood with darkness, to know that you were seconds from being blotted out of existence. She had been driven into therapy by sharp-edged fragments of recollection that were unlike normal memories and which had the power to drag her suddenly out of her body and plunge her back into a past where she could smell the strangler’s nicotine-stained fingers, and feel the stabber’s soft, sweatshirted belly against her back.

She locked the bathroom door and sat down on the floor in the loose T-shirt she had worn to bed, focusing on her breathing, on the feel of the cool tiles beneath her bare legs, observing, as she had been taught, the rapid beating of her heart, the adrenaline jolting through her veins, not fighting her panic, but watching it. After a while, she consciously noticed the faint smell of the lavender body wash she had used last night, and heard the distant passing of an airplane.

You’re safe. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Through two closed doors, she heard Matthew’s alarm go off. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” Robin called back, over the running tap.

She opened the door.

“Everything OK?” he asked, watching her closely.

“Just needed a pee,” said Robin brightly, heading back to the bedroom for her colored contact lenses.

Before starting work with Strike, Robin had signed on with an agency called Temporary Solutions. The offices to which they had sent her were jumbled in her memory now, so that only anomalies, eccentrics and oddities remained. She remembered the alcoholic boss whose dictated letters she had reworded out of kindness, the desk drawer she had opened to find a complete set of dentures and a pair of stained underpants, the hopeful young man who had nicknamed her “Bobbie” and tried, ineptly, to flirt over their back-to-back monitors, the woman who had plastered the interior of her cubicle workspace with pictures of the actor Ian McShane and the girl who had broken up with her boyfriend on the telephone in the middle of the open-plan office, indifferent to the prurient hush falling over the rest of the room. Robin doubted whether any of the people with whom she had come into glancing contact remembered her any better than she remembered them, even the timid romancer who had called her “Bobbie.”

However, from the moment that she arrived at the Palace of Westminster, she knew that what happened here would live in her memory forever. She felt a ripple of pleasure simply to leave the tourists behind and pass through the gate where the policeman stood guard. As she approached the palace, with its intricate gold moldings starkly shadowed in the early morning sun, the famous clock tower silhouetted against the sky, her nerves and her excitement mounted.

Strike had told her which side door to use. It led into a long, dimly lit stone hall, but first she must pass through a metal detector and X-ray machine of the kind used at airports. As she took off her shoulder bag to be scanned, Robin noticed a tall, slightly disheveled natural blonde in her thirties waiting a short distance away, holding a small package wrapped in brown paper. The woman watched as Robin stood for an automated picture that would appear on a paper day pass, to be worn on a lanyard around her neck, and when the security man waved Robin on, stepped forwards.

“Venetia?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“Izzy,” said the other, smiling and holding out a hand. She was wearing a loose blouse with a splashy pattern of oversize flowers on it, and wide-legged trousers. “This is from Papa.” She pressed the package she was holding into Robin’s hands. “I’m rilly sorry, we’ve got to dash—so glad you got here on time—”

She set off at a brisk walk, and Robin hastened to follow.

“—I’m in the middle of printing off a bunch of papers to take over to Papa at DCMS—I’m snowed under just now. Papa being Minister for Culture, with the Olympics coming, it’s just crazy—”

She led Robin at a near jog through the hall, which had stained-glass windows at the far end, and off along labyrinthine corridors, talking all the while in a confident, upper-class accent, leaving Robin impressed by her lungpower.

“Yah, I’m leaving at the summer recess—setting up a decorating company with my friend Jacks—I’ve been here for five years—Papa’s not happy—he needs somebody rilly good and the only applicant he liked turned us down.”

She talked over her shoulder at Robin, who was hurrying to keep up.

“I don’t s’pose you know any fabulous PAs?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Robin, who had retained no friends from her temping career.

“Nearly there,” said Izzy, who had led Robin through a bewildering number of narrow corridors, all carpeted in the same forest green as the leather seats Robin had seen in the Commons on TV. At last they reached a side-passage off which led several heavy wooden doors, arched in the gothic style.

“That,” said Izzy in a stage whisper, pointing as they passed the first door on the right, “is Winn’s. This,” she said, marching to the last door on the left, “is ours.”

She stood aside to let Robin pass into the room first.

The office was cramped and cluttered. The arched stone windows were hung with net curtains, beyond which lay the terrace bar, where shadowy figures moved against the dazzling brightness of the Thames. There were two desks, a multitude of bookshelves and a sagging green armchair. Green drapes hung at the overflowing bookshelves that covered one wall, only partially concealing the untidy stacks of files stacked there. On top of a filing cabinet stood a TV monitor, showing the currently empty interior of the Commons, its green benches deserted. A kettle sat beside mismatched mugs on a low shelf and had stained the wallpaper above it. The desktop printer whirred wheezily in a corner. Some of the papers it was disgorging had slid onto the threadbare carpet.

“Oh, shit,” said Izzy, dashing over and scooping them up, while Robin closed the door behind her. As she tapped the fallen papers back into a neat stack on her desk, Izzy said:

“I’m thrilled Papa’s brought you in. He’s been under so much strain, which he really doesn’t need with everything we’ve got on now, but you and Strike will sort it out, won’t you? Winn’s a horrible little man,” said Izzy, reaching for a leather folder. “Inadequate, you know. How long have you worked with Strike?”

“A couple of years,” said Robin, as she undid the package Izzy had given her.

“I’ve met him, did he tell you? Yah—I was at school with his ex, Charlie Campbell. Gorgeous but trouble, Charlie. D’you know her?”

“No,” said Robin. A long-ago near-collision outside Strike’s office had been her only contact with Charlotte.

“I always quite fancied Strike,” said Izzy.

Robin glanced around, surprised, but Izzy was matter-of-factly inserting papers into the folder.

“Yah, people couldn’t see it, but I could. He was so butch and so… well… unapologetic.”

“Unapologetic?” Robin repeated.

“Yah. He never took any crap from anyone. Didn’t give a toss that people thought he wasn’t, you know—”

“Good enough for her?”

As soon as the words escaped her, Robin felt embarrassed. She had felt suddenly strangely protective of Strike. It was absurd, of course: if anybody could look after themselves, it was he.

“S’pose so,” said Izzy, still waiting for her papers to print. “It’s been ghastly for Papa, these past couple of months. And it isn’t as though what he did was wrong!” she said fiercely. “One minute it’s legal, the next it isn’t. That’s not Papa’s fault.”

“What wasn’t legal?” asked Robin innocently.

“Sorry,” Izzy replied, pleasantly but firmly. “Papa says, the fewer people know, the better.”

She peeked through the net curtains at the sky. “I won’t need a jacket, will I? No… sorry to dash, but Papa needs these and he’s off to meet Olympic sponsors at ten. Good luck.”

And in a rush of flowered fabric and tousled hair, she was gone, leaving Robin curious but strangely reassured. If Izzy could take this robust view of her father’s misdemeanor, it surely could not be anything dreadful—always assuming, of course, that Chiswell had told his daughter the truth.

Robin ripped the last piece of wrapping from the small parcel Izzy had given her. It contained, as she had known it would, the half-dozen listening devices that Strike had given to Jasper Chiswell over the weekend. As a Minister of the Crown, Chiswell was not required to pass through the security scanner every morning, as Robin was. She examined the bugs carefully. They had the appearance of normal plastic power points, and were designed to be fitted over genuine plug sockets, allowing the latter to function as normal. They would begin to record only when somebody spoke in their vicinity. She could hear her own heartbeat in the silence left by Izzy’s departure. The difficulty of her task was only just beginning to sink in.

She took off her coat, hung it up, then removed from her shoulder bag a large box of Tampax, which she had brought for the purpose of concealing the listening devices she wasn’t using. After hiding all but one of the bugs inside it, she placed the box in the bottom drawer of her desk. Next, she searched the cluttered shelves until she found an empty box file, in which she hid the remaining device beneath a handful of letters with typos that she took out of a pile labeled “for shredding.” Thus armed, Robin took a deep breath and left the room.

Winn’s door had opened since she had arrived. As Robin walked past, she saw a tall young Asian man wearing thick-lensed glasses and carrying a kettle.

“Hi!” said Robin at once, imitating Izzy’s bold, cheery approach. “I’m Venetia Hall, we’re neighbors! Who are you?”

“Aamir,” muttered the other, in a working-class London accent. “Mallik.”

“Do you work for Della Winn?” asked Robin.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, she’s so inspirational,” gushed Robin. “One of my heroines, actually.”

Aamir did not reply, but radiated a desire to be left alone. Robin felt like a terrier trying to harass a racehorse.

“Have you worked here long?”

“Six months.”

“Are you going to the café?”

“No,” said Aamir, as though she had propositioned him, and he turned sharply away towards the bathroom.

Robin walked on, holding her box file, wondering whether she had imagined animosity rather than shyness in the young man’s demeanor. It would have been helpful to make a friend in Winn’s office. Having to pretend to be an Izzy-esque goddaughter of Jasper Chiswell was hampering her. She couldn’t help but feel that Robin Ellacott from Yorkshire might have befriended Aamir more easily.

Having set off with fake purpose, she decided to explore for a while before returning to Izzy’s office.

Chiswell’s and Winn’s offices were in the Palace of Westminster itself, which, with its vaulted ceilings, libraries, tearooms and air of comfortable grandeur, might have been an old university college.

A half-covered passageway, watched over by large stone statues of a unicorn and lion, led to an escalator to Portcullis House. This was a modern crystal palace, with a folded glass roof, triangular panes held in place by thick black struts. Beneath was a wide, open-plan area including a café, where MPs and civil servants mingled. Flanked by full-grown trees, large water features consisting of long blocks of covered-in shallow pools became dazzling strips of quicksilver in the June sunshine.

There was a shiver of ambition in the thrumming air, and the sense of being part of a vital world. Beneath the ceiling of artfully fragmented glass, Robin passed political journalists perched on leather benches, all of whom were checking or talking on their mobiles, typing onto laptops or intercepting politicians for comment. Robin wondered whether she might have enjoyed working here if she had never been sent to Strike.

Her explorations ended in the third, dingiest and least interesting of the buildings that housed MPs’ offices, which resembled nothing so much as a three-star hotel, with worn carpets and cream walls and row upon row of identical doors. Robin doubled back, still clutching her file, and passed Winn’s door again fifty minutes after she had last seen it. Quickly checking that the corridor was deserted, she pressed her ear against the thick oak and thought she heard movement within.

“How’s it going?” asked Izzy, when Robin re-entered her office a couple of minutes later.

“I haven’t seen Winn yet.”

“He might be over at DCMS. He goes to see Della on any excuse,” said Izzy. “Fancy a coffee?”

But before she could leave her desk, her telephone rang.

While Izzy fielded a call from an irate constituent who had been unable to secure tickets for the Olympic diving—“yes, I like Tom Daley, too,” she said, rolling her eyes at Robin, “but it’s a lottery, madam”—Robin spooned out instant coffee and poured UHT milk, wondering how many times she had done this in offices she hated, and feeling suddenly extraordinarily grateful that she had escaped that life forever.

“Hung up,” said Izzy indifferently, setting down the receiver. “What were we talking about? Oh, Geraint, yah. He’s furious Della didn’t make him a SPAD.”

“What’s a SPAD?” Robin asked, setting Izzy’s coffee down and taking a seat at the other desk.

“Special Adviser. They’re like temporary civil servants. Lots more prestige, but you don’t hand the posts out to family, it’s not done. Anyway, Geraint’s hopeless, she wouldn’t want him even if it were possible.”

“I just met the man who works with Winn,” said Robin. “Aamir. He wasn’t too friendly.”

“Oh, he’s odd,” said Izzy, dismissively. “Barely civil to me. It’s probably because Geraint and Della hate Papa. I’ve never really got to the bottom of why, but they seem to hate all of us—oh, that reminds me: Papa texted a minute ago. My brother Raff’s going to be coming in later this week, to help out in here. Maybe,” Izzy added, though she did not sound particularly hopeful, “if Raff’s any good, he might be able to take over from me. But Raff doesn’t know anything about the blackmail or who you really are, so don’t say anything, will you? Papa’s got about fourteen godchildren. Raff’ll never know the difference.”

Izzy sipped her coffee again, then, suddenly subdued, she said:

“I suppose you know about Raff. It was all over the papers. That poor woman… it was awful. She had a four-year-old daughter…”

“I did see something,” said Robin, noncommittally.

“I was the only one in the family who visited him in jail,” said Izzy. “Everyone was so disgusted by what he’d done. Kinvara—Papa’s wife—said he should have got life, but she’s got no idea,” she continued, “how ghastly it was in there… people don’t realize what prison’s like… I mean, I know he did a terrible thing, but…”

Her words trailed away. Robin wondered, perhaps ungenerously, whether Izzy was suggesting that jail was no place for a young man as refined as her half-brother. Doubtless it had been a horrible experience, Robin thought, but after all, he had taken drugs, climbed into a car and mown down a young mother.

“I thought he was working in an art gallery?” Robin asked.

“He’s gone and messed up at Drummond’s,” sighed Izzy. “Papa’s really taking him in to keep an eye on him.”

Public money paid for these salaries, Robin thought, remembering again the unusually short prison sentence the son of the minister had served for that drug-induced fatal accident.

“How did he mess up at the gallery?”

To her great surprise, Izzy’s doleful expression vanished in a sudden spurt of laughter.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. He shagged the other sales assistant in the loo,” she said, quaking with giggles. “I know it isn’t funny really—but he’d just got out of jail, and Raff’s lovely looking and he’s always pulled anyone he wants. They shoved him into a suit and put him in close proximity with some pretty little blonde art graduate, what did they think was going to happen? But as you can imagine, the gallery owner wasn’t too chuffed. He heard them going at it and put Raff on a final warning. Then Raff and the girl went and did it again, so Papa had a total fit and says he’s coming here instead.”

Robin didn’t feel particularly amused, but Izzy appeared not to notice, lost in her own thoughts.

“You never know, it could be the making of them, Papa and Raff,” she said hopefully, then checked her watch.

“Better return some calls,” she sighed, setting down her coffee mug, but as she reached for her phone she froze, fingers on the receiver as a sing-song male voice rang out in the corridor beyond the closed door.

“That’s him! Winn!”

“Well, here I go,” said Robin, snatching up her box file again.

“Good luck!” whispered Izzy.

Emerging into the corridor, Robin saw Winn standing in the doorway of his office, apparently talking to Aamir, who was inside. Winn was holding a folder with orange lettering on it saying “The Level Playing Field.” At the sound of Robin’s footsteps, he turned to face her.

“Well, hello there,” he said with a Cardiff lilt, stepping back into the corridor.

His gaze dribbled down Robin’s neck, fell onto her breasts, then up again to her mouth and her eyes. Robin knew him from that single look. She had met plenty of them in offices, the type who watched you in a way that made you feel clumsy and self-conscious, who would place a hand in the small of the back as they sidled behind you or ushered you through doors, who peered over your shoulder on the excuse of reading your monitor and made chancy little comments on your clothes that progressed to comments on your figure during after-work drinks. They cried “joke!” if you got angry, and became aggressive in the face of complaints.

“Where d’you fit in, then?” asked Geraint, making the question sound salacious.

“I’m interning for Uncle Jasper,” said Robin, smiling brightly.

“Uncle Jasper?”

“Jasper Chiswell, yes,” said Robin, pronouncing the name, as the Chiswells did themselves, “Chizzle.” “He’s my godfather. Venetia Hall,” said Robin, holding out her hand.

Everything about Winn seemed faintly amphibian, down to his damp palm. He was less like a gecko in the flesh, she thought, and more like a frog, with a pronounced potbelly and spindly arms and legs, his thinning hair rather greasy.

“And how did it come about that you’re Jasper’s goddaughter?”

“Oh, Uncle Jasper and Daddy are old friends,” said Robin, who had a full backstory prepared.

“Army?”

“Land management,” said Robin, sticking to her prearranged story.

“Ah,” said Geraint; then, “Lovely hair. Is it natural?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

His eyes slid down her body again. It cost Robin an effort to keep smiling at him. At last, gushing and giggling until her check muscles ached, agreeing that she would indeed give him a shout should she need any assistance, Robin walked on down the corridor. She could feel him watching her until she turned out of sight.

Just as Strike had felt after discovering Jimmy Knight’s litigious habits, Robin was sure that she had just gained a valuable insight into Winn’s weakness. In her experience, men like Geraint were astoundingly prone to believe that their scattergun sexual advances were appreciated and even reciprocated. She had spent no inconsiderable part of her temping career trying to rebuff and avoid such men, all of whom saw lubricious invitations in the merest pleasantry, and for whom youth and inexperience were an irresistible temptation.

How far, she asked herself, was she prepared to go in her quest to find out things to Winn’s discredit? Walking with sham purpose through endless corridors to support her pretense of having papers to deliver, Robin pictured herself leaning over his desk while the inconvenient Aamir was elsewhere, breasts at eye-level, asking for help and advice, giggling at smutty jokes.

Then, with a sudden, dreadful lurch of imagination she saw, clearly, Winn’s lunge, saw the sweaty face swooping for her, its lipless mouth agape, felt hands gripping her arms, pinning them to her sides, felt the potbelly press itself into her, squashing her backwards into a filing cabinet…

The endless green of carpet and chairs, the dark wood arches and the square panels seemed to blur and contract as Winn’s imagined pass became an attack. She pushed through the door ahead as though she could physically force herself past her panic…

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

“Bit overwhelming the first time you see it, eh?”

The man sounded kindly and not very young.

“Yes,” said Robin, barely knowing what she said. Breathe.

“Temporary, eh?” And then, “You all right, dear?”

“Asthma,” said Robin.

She had used the excuse before. It gave her an excuse to stop, to breathe deeply, to re-anchor herself to reality.

“Got an inhaler?” asked the elderly steward in concern.

He wore a frock coat, white tie and tails and an ornate badge of office. In his unexpected grandeur, Robin thought wildly of the white rabbit, popping up in the middle of madness.

“I left it in my office. I’ll be fine. Just need a second…”

She had blundered into a blaze of gold and color that was increasing her feeling of oppression. The Members’ Lobby, that familiar, ornate, Victorian-gothic chamber she had seen on television, stood right outside the Commons, and on the periphery of her vision loomed four gigantic bronze statues of previous prime ministers—Thatcher, Atlee, Lloyd George and Churchill—while busts of all the others lined the walls. They appeared to Robin like severed heads and the gilding, with its intricate tracery and richly colored embellishments, danced around her, jeering at her inability to cope with its ornate beauty.

She heard the scraping of a chair’s legs. The steward had brought her a seat and was asking a colleague to fetch a glass of water.

“Thank you… thank you…” said Robin numbly, feeling inadequate, ashamed and embarrassed. Strike must never know about this. He would send her home, tell her she wasn’t fit to do the job. Nor must she tell Matthew, who treated these episodes as shameful, inevitable consequences of her stupidity in continuing surveillance work.

The steward talked to her kindly while she recovered and within a few minutes she was able to respond appropriately to his well-intentioned patter. While her breathing returned to normal, he told her the tale of how Edward Heath’s bust had begun to turn green on the arrival of the full-sized Thatcher statue beside him, and how it had had to be treated to turn it back to its dark brown bronze.

Robin laughed politely, got to her feet and handed him the empty glass with renewed thanks.

What treatment would it take, she wondered as she set off again, to return her to what she had once been?

14

Strike rose early on Tuesday morning. After showering, putting on his prosthesis and dressing, he filled a thermos with dark brown tea, took the sandwiches he had made the previous evening out of the fridge, stowed them in a carrier bag along with two packets of Club biscuits, chewing gum and a few bags of salt and vinegar crisps, then headed out into the sunrise and off to the garage where he kept his BMW. He had an appointment for a haircut at half past twelve, with Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife, in Manchester.

Once settled in the car, his bag of provisions within easy reach, Strike pulled on the trainers he kept in the car, which gave his fake foot better purchase on the brake. He then took out his mobile and began to compose a text to Robin.

Starting with the names that Wardle had given him, Strike had spent much of Monday researching, as best as he could, the two children the policemen had told him had vanished from the Oxfordshire area twenty years previously. Wardle had misspelled the boy’s first name, which had cost Strike time, but Strike had finally dug out archived press reports about Imamu Ibrahim, in which Imamu’s mother had asserted that her estranged husband had kidnapped the boy and taken him to Algeria. Strike had finally dredged up two lines about Imamu and his mother on the website of an organization that worked to resolve international custody issues. From this, Strike had to conclude that Imamu had been found alive and well with his father.

The fate of Suki Lewis, the twelve-year-old runaway from a care home, was more mysterious. Strike had finally discovered an image of her, buried in an old news story. Suki had vanished from her residential care home in Swindon in 1992 and Strike could find no other mention of her since. Her blurry picture showed a rather toothy, undersized child, fine-featured, with short dark hair.

Little girl it was, but after they said it was a little boy.

So a vulnerable, androgynous child might have disappeared off the face of the earth around the same time, and in the approximate area, that Billy Knight claimed to have witnessed the strangling of a boy-girl.

In the car, he composed a text to Robin.

The dirt on his windscreen shimmered and blurred in the rising sun as he left London. Driving was no longer the pleasure it had once been. Strike could not afford a specially adapted vehicle, and even though it was an automatic, the operation of the BMW’s pedals remained challenging with his prosthesis. In challenging conditions, he sometimes reverted to operating brake and accelerator with his left foot.

When he finally joined the M6, Strike hoped to settle in at sixty miles an hour, but some arsehole in a Vauxhall Corsa decided to tailgate him.

“Fucking overtake,” growled Strike. He was not minded to alter his own speed, having settled in comfortably without needing to use his false foot more than was necessary, and for a while he glowered into his rearview mirror until the Vauxhall driver got the hint and took himself off.

Relaxing to the degree that was ever possible behind the wheel these days, Strike wound down the window to admit the fine, fresh summer’s day and allowed his thoughts to return to Billy and the missing Suki Lewis.

She wouldn’t let me dig, he had said in the office, compulsively tapping his nose and his chest, but she’d let you.

Who, Strike wondered, was “she”? Perhaps the new owner of Steda Cottage? They might well object to Billy asking to dig up flowerbeds in search of bodies.

After feeling around with his left hand inside his provisions bag, extracting and ripping open a bag of crisps with his teeth, Strike reminded himself for the umpteenth time that Billy’s whole story might be a chimera. Suki Lewis could be anywhere. Not every lost child was dead. Perhaps Suki, too, had been stolen away by an errant parent. Twenty years previously, in the infancy of the internet, imperfect communication between regional police forces could be exploited by those wishing to reinvent themselves or others. And even if Suki was no longer alive, there was nothing to suggest that she had been strangled, let alone that Billy Knight had witnessed it. Most people would surely conclude that this was a case of much smoke, but no fire.

Chewing crisps by the handful, Strike reflected that whenever it came to a question of what “most people” would think, he usually envisaged his half-sister Lucy, the only one of his seven half-siblings with whom he had shared his chaotic and peripatetic childhood. To him, Lucy represented the acme of all that was conventional and unimaginative, even though they had both grown up on intimate terms with the macabre, the dangerous and the frightening.

Before Lucy had gone to live permanently with their aunt and uncle in Cornwall, at the age of fourteen, their mother had hauled her and Strike from squat to commune to rented flat to friend’s floor, rarely remaining in the same place more than six months, exposing her children to a parade of eccentric, damaged and addicted human beings along the way. Right hand on the wheel, left hand now groping around for biscuits, Strike recalled some of the nightmarish spectacles that he and Lucy had witnessed as children: the psychotic youth fighting an invisible devil in a basement flat in Shoreditch, the teenager literally being whipped at a quasi-mystical commune in Norfolk (still, for Strike’s money, the worst place that Leda had ever taken them) and Shayla, one of the most fragile of Leda’s friends and a part-time prostitute, sobbing about the brain damage inflicted on her toddler son by a violent boyfriend.

That unpredictable and sometimes terrifying childhood had left Lucy with a craving for stability and conformity. Married to a quantity surveyor whom Strike disliked, with three sons he barely knew, she would probably dismiss Billy’s story of the strangled boy-girl as the product of a broken mind, sweeping it swiftly away into the corner with all the other things she could not bear to think about. Lucy needed to pretend that violence and strangeness had vanished into a past as dead as their mother; that with Leda gone, life was unshakably secure.

Strike understood. Profoundly different though they were, often though she exasperated him, he loved Lucy. Nevertheless, he could not help comparing her with Robin as he bowled towards Manchester. Robin had grown up in what seemed to Strike the very epitome of middle-class stability, but she was courageous in a way that Lucy was not. Both women had been touched by violence and sadism. Lucy had reacted by burying herself where she hoped it would never reach her again; Robin, by facing it almost daily, investigating and resolving other crimes and traumas, driven to do so by the same impulse to actively disentangle complications and disinter truths that Strike recognized in himself.

As the sun climbed higher, still dappling the grubby windscreen, he experienced a powerful regret that she wasn’t here with him now. She was the best person he had ever met to run a theory past. She’d unscrew the thermos for him and pour him tea. We’d have a laugh.

They had slipped back into their old bantering ways a couple of times lately, since Billy had entered the office with a story troubling enough to break down the reserve that had, over a year, hardened into a permanent impediment to their friendship… or whatever it was, thought Strike, and for a moment or two he felt her again in his arms on the stairs, breathed in the scent of white roses and of the perfume that hung around the office when Robin was at her desk…

With a kind of mental grimace, he reached for another cigarette, lit up and forced his mind towards Manchester, and the line of questioning he intended to take with Dawn Clancy, who, for five years, had been Mrs. Jimmy Knight.

15

While Strike was speeding northwards, Robin was summoned without explanation to a personal meeting with the Minister for Culture himself.

Walking in the sunshine towards the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which stood in a large white Edwardian building a few minutes away from the Palace of Westminster, Robin found herself almost wishing that she were one of the tourists cluttering the pavement, because Chiswell had sounded bad tempered on the phone.

Robin would have given a great deal to have something useful to tell the minister about his blackmailer, but as she had only been on the job a day and a half, all she could say with any certainty was that her first impressions of Geraint Winn had now been confirmed: he was lazy, lecherous, self-important and indiscreet. The door of his office stood open more often than not, and his sing-song voice rang down the corridor as he talked with injudicious levity about his constituents’ petty concerns, name-dropped celebrities and senior politicians and generally sought to give the impression of a man for whom running a mere constituency office was an unimportant sideshow.

He hailed Robin jovially from his desk whenever she passed his open door, showing a pronounced eagerness for further contact. However, whether by chance or design, Aamir Mallik kept thwarting Robin’s attempts to turn these greetings into conversations, either interrupting with questions for Winn or, as he had done just an hour previously, simply closing the door in Robin’s face.

The exterior of the great block that housed the DCMS, with its stone swags, its columns and its neoclassical façade, was not reassuring. The interior had been modernized and hung with contemporary art, including an abstract glass sculpture that hung from the cupola over the central staircase, up which Robin was led by an efficient-seeming young woman. Believing her to be the minister’s goddaughter, her companion was at pains to show her points of interest.

“The Churchill Room,” she said, pointing left as they turned right. “That’s the balcony he gave his speech from, on VE Day. The minister’s just along here…”

She led Robin down a wide, curving corridor that doubled as an open-plan workspace. Smart young people sat at an array of desks in front of lengthy windows to the right, which looked out onto a quadrangle, which, in size and scale, bore the appearance of a colosseum, with its high white windowed walls. It was all very different from the cramped office where Izzy made their instant coffee from a kettle. Indeed, a large, expensive machine complete with pods sat on one desk for that purpose.

The offices to the left were separated from this curving space by glass walls and doors. Robin spotted the Minister for Culture from a distance, sitting at his desk beneath a contemporary painting of the Queen, talking on the telephone. He indicated by a brusque gesture that her escort should show Robin inside the office and continued talking on the telephone as Robin waited, somewhat awkwardly, for him to finish his call. A woman’s voice was issuing from the earpiece, high-pitched and to Robin, even eight feet away, hysterical.

“I’ve got to go, Kinvara!” barked Chiswell into the mouthpiece. “Yes… we’ll talk about this later. I’ve got to go.”

Setting down the receiver harder than was necessary, he pointed Robin to a chair opposite him. His coarse, straight gray hair stood out around his head in a wiry halo, his fat lower lip giving him an air of angry petulance.

“The newspapers are sniffing around,” he growled. “That was m’wife. The Sun rang her this morning, asking whether the rumors are true. She said ‘what rumors?’ but the fella didn’t specify. Fishing, obviously. Trying to surprise something out of her.”

He frowned at Robin, whose appearance he seemed to find wanting.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven,” she said.

“You look younger.”

It didn’t sound like a compliment.

“Managed to plant the surveillance device yet?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Robin.

“Where’s Strike?”

“In Manchester, interviewing Jimmy Knight’s ex-wife,” said Robin.

Chiswell made the angry, subterranean noise usually rendered as “harrumph,” then got to his feet. Robin jumped up, too.

“Well, you’d better get back and get on with it,” said Chiswell. “The National Health Service,” he added, with no change of tone, as he headed towards the door. “People are going to think we’re bloody mad.”

“Sorry?” said Robin, entirely thrown.

Chiswell pulled open the glass door and indicated that Robin should pass through it ahead of him, out into the open-plan area where all the smart young people sat working beside their sleek coffee machine.

“Olympics opening ceremony,” he explained, following her. “Lefty bloody crap. We won two bloody world wars, but we’re not supposed to celebrate that.”

“Nonsense, Jasper,” said a deep, melodious Welsh voice close at hand. “We celebrate military victories all the time. This is a different kind of celebration.”

Della Winn, the Minister for Sport, was standing just outside Chiswell’s door, holding the leash of her near-white Labrador. A woman of stately appearance, with gray hair swept back off a broad forehead, she wore sunglasses so dark that Robin could make out nothing behind them. Her blindness, Robin knew from her research, had been due to a rare condition in which neither eyeball had grown in utero. She sometimes wore prosthetic eyes, especially when she was to be photographed. Della was sporting a quantity of heavy, tactile jewelry in gold, with a large necklace of intaglios, and dressed from head to foot in sky blue. Robin had read in one of Strike’s printed profiles of the politician that Geraint laid out Della’s clothes for her every morning and that it was simplest for him, not having a great feel for fashion, to select things in the same color. Robin had found this rather touching when she read it.

Chiswell did not appear to relish the sudden appearance of his colleague and indeed, given that her husband was blackmailing him, Robin supposed that this was hardly surprising. Della, on the other hand, gave no sign of embarrassment.

“I thought we might share the car over to Greenwich,” she said to Chiswell, while the pale Labrador snuffled gently at the hem of Robin’s skirt. “Give us a chance to go over the plans for the twelfth. What are you doing, Gwynn?” she added, feeling the Labrador’s head tugging.

“She’s sniffing me,” said Robin nervously, patting the Labrador.

“This is my goddaughter, ah…”

“Venetia,” said Robin, as Chiswell was evidently struggling to remember her name.

“How do you do?” said Della, holding out her hand. “Visiting Jasper?”

“No, I’m interning in the constituency office,” said Robin, shaking the warm, be-ringed hand, as Chiswell walked away to examine the document held by a hovering young man in a suit.

“Venetia,” repeated Della, her face still turned towards Robin. A faint frown appeared on the handsome face, half-masked behind the impenetrable black glasses. “What’s your surname?”

“Hall,” said Robin.

She felt a ridiculous flutter of panic, as though Della were about to unmask her. Still poring over the document he had been shown, Chiswell moved away, leaving Robin, or so it felt, entirely at Della’s mercy.

“You’re the fencer,” said Della.

“Sorry?” said Robin, totally confused again, her mind on posts and rails. Some of the young people around the space-age coffee machine had turned around to listen, expressions of polite interest on their faces.

“Yes,” said Della. “Yes, I remember you. You were on the English team with Freddie.”

Her friendly expression had hardened. Chiswell was now leaning over a desk while he struck through phrases on the document.

“No, I never fenced,” said Robin, thoroughly out of her depth. She had realized at the mention of the word “team” that swords were under discussion, rather than fields and livestock.

“You certainly did,” said Della flatly. “I remember you. Jasper’s goddaughter, on the team with Freddie.”

It was a slightly unnerving display of arrogance, of complete self-belief. Robin felt inadequate to the job of continuing to protest, because there were now several listeners. Instead, she merely said, “Well, nice to have met you,” and walked away.

“Again, you mean,” said Della sharply, but Robin made no reply.

16

After four and a half hours in the driving seat, Strike’s exit from the BMW in Manchester was far from graceful. He stood for a while in Burton Road, a broad, pleasant street with its mixture of shops and houses, leaning on the car, stretching his back and leg, grateful that he had managed to find a parking space only a short way from “Stylz.” The bright pink shopfront stood out between a café and a Tesco Express, pictures of moody models with unnaturally tinted hair in the window.

With its black and white tiled floor and pink walls that reminded Strike of Lorelei’s bedroom, the interior of the small shop was determinedly trendy, but it did not appear to cater to a particularly youthful or adventurous clientele. There were currently only two clients, one of whom was a large woman of at least sixty, who was reading Good Housekeeping in front of a mirror, her hair a mass of foil. Strike made a bet with himself as he entered that Dawn would prove to be the slim peroxide blonde with her back to him, chatting animatedly to an elderly lady whose blue hair she was perming.

“I’ve got an appointment with Dawn,” Strike told the young receptionist, who looked slightly startled to see anything so large and male in this fug of perfumed ammonia. The peroxided blonde turned at the sound of her name. She had the leathery, age-spotted skin of a committed sunbed user.

“With you in a moment, cock,” she said, smiling. He settled to wait on a bench in the window.

Five minutes later, she was leading him to an upholstered pink chair at the back of the shop.

“What are you after, then?” she asked him, inviting him with a gesture to sit down.

“I’m not here for a haircut,” said Strike, still standing. “I’ll happily pay for one, I don’t want to waste your time, but,” he pulled a card and his driver’s license from his pocket, “my name’s Cormoran Strike. I’m a private detective and I was hoping to talk to you about your ex-husband, Jimmy Knight.”

She looked stunned, as well she might, but then fascinated.

“Strike?” she repeated, gaping. “You aren’t him that caught that Ripper guy?”

“That’s me.”

“Jesus, what’s Jimmy done?”

“Nothing much,” said Strike easily. “I’m just after background.”

She didn’t believe him, of course. Her face, he suspected, was full of filler, her forehead suspiciously smooth and shiny above the carefully penciled eyebrows. Only her stringy neck betrayed her age.

“That’s over. It was over ages ago. I never talk about Jimmy. Least said, soonest mended, don’t they say?”

But he could feel the curiosity and excitement radiating from her like heat. Radio 2 jangled in the background. She glanced towards the two women sitting at the mirrors.

“Sian!” she said loudly, and the receptionist jumped and turned. “Take out her foils and keep an eye on the perm for me, love.” She hesitated, still holding Strike’s card. “I’m not sure I should,” she said, wanting to be talked into it.

“It’s only background,” he said. “No strings.”

Five minutes later she was handing him a milky coffee in a tiny staffroom at the rear of the shop, talking merrily, a little haggard in the fluorescent overhead light, but still good-looking enough to explain why Jimmy had first shown interest in a woman thirteen years his senior.

“… yeah, a demonstration against nuclear weapons. I went with this friend of mine, Wendy, she was big into all that. Vegetarian,” she added, nudging the door into the shop closed with her foot and taking out a pack of Silk Cut. “You know the type.”

“Got my own,” said Strike, when she offered the pack. He lit her cigarette for her, then one of his Benson & Hedges. They blew out simultaneous streams of smoke. She crossed her legs towards him and rattled on.

“… yeah, so Jimmy gave a speech. Weapons and how much we could save, give to the NHS and everything, what was the point… he talks well, you know,” said Dawn.

“He does,” agreed Strike, “I’ve heard him.”

“Yeah, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Thought he was some kind of Robin Hood.”

Strike heard the joke coming before she made it. He knew it was not the first time.

“Robbing Hood, more like,” she said.

She was already divorced when she had met Jimmy. Her first husband had left her for another girl at the London salon they had owned together. Dawn had done well out of the divorce, managing to retain the business. Jimmy had seemed a romantic figure after her wide-boy first husband and, on the rebound, she had fallen for him hard.

“But there were always girls,” she said. “Lefties, you know. Some of them were really young. He was like a pop star to them or something. I only found out how many of them there were later, after he’d set up cards on all my accounts.”

Dawn told Strike at length how Jimmy had persuaded her to bankroll a lawsuit against his ex-employer, Zanet Industries, who had failed to follow due process in firing him.

“Very keen on his rights, Jimmy. He’s not stupid, though, you know. Ten grand payout he got from Zanet. I never saw a penny of it. He pissed it all away, trying to sue other people. He tried to take me to court, after we split up. Loss of earnings, don’t make me laugh. I’d kept him for five years and he claimed he’d been working with me, building up the business for no pay and left with occupational asthma from the chemicals—so much shit he talked—they chucked it out of court, thank God. And then he tried to get me on a harassment charge. Said I’d keyed his car.”

She ground out her cigarette and reached for another one.

“I had, too,” she said, with a sudden, wicked smile. “You know he’s been put on a list, now? Can’t sue anyone without permission.”

“I did know, yeah,” said Strike. “Was he ever involved in any criminal activity while you were together, Dawn?”

She lit up again, watching Strike over her fingers, still hoping to hear what Jimmy was supposed to have done to have Strike after him. Finally she said:

“I’m not sure he was too careful about checking all the girls he was playing around with were sixteen. I heard, after, one of them… but we’d split up by then. It wasn’t my problem anymore,” said Dawn, as Strike made a note.

“And I wouldn’t trust him if it was anything to do with Jews. He doesn’t like them. Israel’s the root of all evil, according to Jimmy. Zionism: I got sick of the bloody sound of the word. You’d think they’d suffered enough,” said Dawn vaguely. “Yeah, his manager at Zanet was Jewish and they hated each other.”

“What was his name?”

“What was it?” Dawn drew heavily on her cigarette, frowning. “Paul something… Lobstein, that’s it. Paul Lobstein. He’s probably still at Zanet.”

“D’you still have any contact with Jimmy, or any of his family?”

“Christ, no. Good riddance. The only one of his family I ever met was little Billy, his brother.”

She softened a little as she said the name.

“He wasn’t right. He stayed with us for a bit at one point. He was a sweetheart, really, but not right. Jimmy said it was their father. Violent alkie. Raised them on his own and knocked the shit out of them, from what the boys said, used the belt and everything. Jimmy got away to London, and poor little Billy was left alone with him. No surprise he was how he was.”

“What d’you mean?”

“He ’ad a—a tic, do they call it?”

She mimicked with perfect accuracy the nose to chest tapping Strike had witnessed in his office.

“He was put on drugs, I know that. Then he left us, went to share a flat with some other lads for a bit. I never saw him again after Jimmy and I split. He was a sweet boy, yeah, but he annoyed Jimmy.”

“In what way?” Strike asked.

“Jimmy didn’t like him talking about their childhood. I dunno, I think Jimmy felt guilty he’d left Billy in the house alone. There was something funny about that whole business…”

Strike could tell she hadn’t thought about these things for a while.

“Funny?” he prompted.

“A couple of times, when he’d had a few, Jimmy went on about how his dad would burn for how he made his living.”

“I thought he was an odd-job man?”

“Was he? They told me he was a joiner. He worked for that politician’s family, what’s his name? The one with the hair.”

She mimed stiff bristles coming out of her head.

“Jasper Chiswell?” Strike suggested, pronouncing the name the way it was spelled.

“Him, yeah. Old Mr. Knight had a rent-free cottage in the family grounds. The boys grew up there.”

“And he said his father would go to hell for what he did for a living?” repeated Strike.

“Yeah. It’s probably just because he was working for Tories. It was all about politics with Jimmy. I don’t get it,” said Dawn restlessly. “You’ve got to live. Imagine me asking my clients how they vote before I’ll—

“Bloody hell,” she gasped suddenly, grinding out her cigarette and jumping to her feet, “Sian had better’ve taken out Mrs. Horridge’s rollers or she’ll be bald.”

17

Watching for an opportunity to plant the bug in Winn’s office, Robin spent most of the afternoon hanging around the quiet corridor on which both his and Izzy’s offices lay, but her efforts were fruitless. Even though Winn had left for a lunchtime meeting, Aamir remained inside. Robin paced up and down, box file in her arms, waiting for the moment when Aamir might go to the bathroom and returning to Izzy’s office whenever any passerby tried to engage her in conversation.

Finally, at ten past four, her luck changed. Geraint Winn swaggered around the corner, rather tipsy after what seemed to have been a prolonged lunch, and in sharp contrast to his wife, he seemed delighted to meet her as she set off towards him.

“There she is!” he said, over-loudly. “I wanted a word with you! Come in here, come in!”

He pushed open the door of his office. Puzzled, but only too eager to see the interior of the room she was hoping to bug, Robin followed him.

Aamir was working in shirtsleeves at his desk, which formed a tiny oasis of order in the general clutter. Stacks of folders lay around Winn’s desk. Robin noticed the orange logo of the Level Playing Field on a pile of letters in front of him. There was a power point directly under Geraint’s desk that would be an ideal position for the listening device.

“Have you two met?” Geraint asked jovially. “Venetia, Aamir.”

He sat down and invited Robin to take the armchair on which a sliding pile of card folders lay.

“Did Redgrave call back?” Winn asked Aamir, struggling out of his suit jacket.

“Who?” said the latter.

“Sir Steve Redgrave!” said Winn, with the suspicion of an eye roll in Robin’s direction. She felt embarrassed for him, especially as Aamir’s muttered “no” was cold.

“Level Playing Field,” Winn told Robin.

He had managed to get his jacket off. With an attempted flourish, he threw it onto the back of his chair. It slid limply onto the floor, but Geraint appeared not to notice, and instead tapped the orange logo on the topmost letter in front of him. “Our cha—” he belched. “Pardon me—our charity. Disadvantaged and disabled athletes, you know. Lots of high profile supporters. Sir Steve keen to—” he belched again, “—pardon—help. Well, now. I wanted to apologize. For my poor wife.”

He seemed to be enjoying himself hugely. Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw Aamir fling Geraint a sharp look, like the flash of a claw, swiftly retracted.

“I don’t understand,” said Robin.

“Gets names wrong. Does it all the time. If I didn’t keep an eye on her, we’d have all sorts going on, wrong letters going out to the wrong people… she thought you were someone else. I had her on the phone over lunch, insisting you were somebody our daughter ran across years ago. Verity Pulham. ’Nother of your godfather’s godchildren. Told her straight away it wasn’t you, said I’d pass on her apologies. Silly girl, she is. Very stubborn when she thinks she’s right, but,” he rolled his eyes again and tapped his forehead, the long-suffering husband of an infuriating wife, “I managed to penetrate in the end.”

“Well,” said Robin carefully, “I’m glad she knows she was mistaken, because she didn’t seem to like Verity very much.”

“Truth to tell, Verity was a little bitch,” said Winn, still beaming. Robin could tell he enjoyed using the word. “Nasty to our daughter, you see.”

“Oh dear,” said Robin, with a thud of dread beneath her ribs as she remembered that Rhiannon Winn had killed herself. “I’m sorry. How awful.”

“You know,” said Winn, sitting down and tipping back his chair against the wall, hands behind his head, “you seem far too sweet a girl to be associated with the Chiswell family.” He was definitely a little drunk. Robin could smell faint wine dregs on his breath and Aamir threw him another of those sharp, scathing looks. “What were you doing before this, Venetia?”

“PR,” said Robin, “but I’d like to do something more worthwhile. Politics, or maybe a charity. I was reading about the Level Playing Field,” she said truthfully. “It seems wonderful. You do a lot with veterans, too, don’t you? I saw an interview with Terry Byrne yesterday. The Paralympian cyclist?”

Her attention had been caught by the fact that Byrne had the same below the knee amputation as Strike.

“You’ll have a personal interest in veterans, of course,” said Winn.

Robin’s stomach swooped and fell again.

“Sorry?”

“Freddie Chiswell?” Winn prompted.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Robin. “Although I didn’t know Freddie very well. He was a bit older than me. Obviously, it was dreadful when he—when he was killed.”

“Oh, yes, awful,” said Winn, though he sounded indifferent. “Della was very much against the Iraq war. Very much against it. Your Uncle Jasper was all for it, mind you.”

For a moment, the air seemed to thrum with Winn’s unexpressed implication that Chiswell had been well served for his enthusiasm.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Robin carefully. “Uncle Jasper thought military action justified on the evidence we had at the time. Anyway,” she said bravely, “nobody can accuse him of acting out of self-interest, can they, when his son had to go and fight?”

“Ah, if you’re going to take that line, who can argue?” said Winn. He raised his hands in mock surrender, his chair slipped a little on the wall and for a few seconds he struggled to maintain balance, seizing the desk and pulling himself and the chair upright again. With a substantial effort, Robin managed not to laugh.

“Geraint,” said Aamir, “we need those letters signed if we’re going to get them off by five.”

“’S’only half four,” said Winn, checking his watch. “Yes, Rhiannon was on the British junior fencing team.”

“How marvelous,” said Robin.

“Sporty, like her mother. Fencing for the Welsh juniors at fourteen. I used to drive her all over the place for tournaments. Hours on the road together! She made the British juniors at sixteen.

“But the English lot were very stand-offish to her,” said Winn, with a glimmer of Celtic resentment. “She wasn’t at one of your big public schools, you see. It was all about connections with them. Verity Pulham, she didn’t have the ability, not really. As a matter of fact, it was only when Verity broke her ankle that Rhiannon, who was a far better fencer, got on the British team at all.”

“I see,” said Robin, trying to balance sympathy with a feigned allegiance to the Chiswells. Surely this could not be the grievance that Winn had against the family? Yet Geraint’s fanatic tone spoke of longstanding resentment. “Well, these things should come down to ability, of course.”

“That’s right,” said Winn. “They should. Look at this, now…”

He fumbled for his wallet and pulled from it an old photograph. Robin held out her hand, but Geraint, keeping a firm hold on the picture, got up clumsily, stumbled over a stack of books lying beside his chair, walked around the desk, came so close that Robin could feel his breath on her neck, and showed her the image of his daughter.

Dressed in fencing garb, Rhiannon Winn stood beaming and holding up the gold medal around her neck. She was pale and small-featured, and Robin could see very little of either parent in her face, although perhaps there was a hint of Della in the broad, intelligent brow. But with Geraint’s loud breathing in her ear, trying to stop herself leaning away from him, Robin had a sudden vision of Geraint Winn striding, with his wide, lipless grin, through a large hall of sweaty teenage girls. Was it shameful to wonder whether it had been parental devotion that had spurred him to chauffeur his daughter all over the country?

“What have you done to yourself, eh?” Geraint asked, his hot breath in her ear. Leaning in, he touched the purple knife scar on her bare forearm.

Unable to prevent herself, Robin snatched her arm away. The nerves around the scar had not yet fully healed: she hated anyone touching it.

“I fell through a glass door when I was nine,” she said, but the confidential, confiding atmosphere had been dispersed like cigarette smoke.

Aamir hovered on the edge of her vision, rigid and silent at his desk. Geraint’s smile had become forced. She had worked too long in offices not to know that a subtle transfer of power had just taken place within the room. Now she stood armed with his little drunken inappropriateness and Geraint was resentful and a little worried. She wished that she had not pulled away from him.

“I wonder, Mr. Winn,” she said breathily, “whether you’d mind giving me some advice about the charitable world? I just can’t make up my mind, politics—charity—and I don’t know anyone else who’s done both.”

“Oh,” said Geraint, blinking behind his thick glasses. “Oh, well… yes, I daresay I could…”

“Geraint,” said Aamir again, “we really do need to get those letters—”

“Yes, all right, all right,” said Geraint loudly. “We’ll talk later,” he said to Robin, with a wink.

“Wonderful,” she said, with a smile.

As Robin walked out she threw Aamir a small smile, which he didn’t return.

18

After nearly nine hours at the wheel, Strike’s neck, back and legs were stiff and sore and his bag of provisions long since empty. The first star was glimmering out of the pale, inky wash above when his mobile rang. It was the usual time for his sister, Lucy, to call “for a chat”; he ignored three out of four of her calls, because, much as he loved her, he could muster no interest in her sons’ schooling, the PTA’s squabbles or the intricacies of her husband’s career as a quantity surveyor. Seeing that it was Barclay on the line, however, he turned into a rough and ready lay-by, really the turnoff to a field, cut the engine and answered.

“’M in,” said Barclay laconically. “Wi’ Jimmy.”

“Already?” said Strike, seriously impressed. “How?”

“Pub,” said Barclay. “Interrupted him. He was talkin’ a load o’ pish about Scottish independence. The grea’ thing about English lefties,” he continued, “is they love hearin’ how shit England is. Havenae hadtae buy a pint all afternoon.”

“Bloody hell, Barclay,” said Strike, lighting himself another cigarette on top of the twenty he had already had that day, “that was good work.”

“That was just fer starters,” said Barclay. “You shoulda heard them when I told them how I’ve seen the error of the army’s imperialist ways. Fuck me, they’re gullible. I’m off tae a CORE meetin’ the morrow.”

“How’s Knight supporting himself? Any idea?”

“He told me he’s a journalist on a couple o’ lefty websites and he sells CORE T-shirts and a bit o’ dope. Mind, his shit’s worthless. We went back tae his place, after the pub. Ye’d be better off smokin’ fuckin’ Oxo cubes. I’ve said I’ll get him better. We can run that through office expenses, aye?”

“I’ll put it under ‘sundries,’” said Strike. “All right, keep me posted.”

Barclay rang off. Deciding to take the opportunity to stretch his legs, Strike got out of the car, still smoking, leaned on the five-bar gate facing a wide, dark field, and rang Robin.

“It’s Vanessa,” Robin lied, when she saw Strike’s number come up on her phone.

She and Matthew had just eaten a takeaway curry off their knees while watching the news. He had arrived home late and tired; she didn’t need another argument.

Picking up the mobile, she headed out through the French doors onto the patio that had served as the smoking area for the party. After making sure that the doors were completely closed, she answered.

“Hi. Everything OK?”

“Fine. All right to talk for a moment?”

“Yes,” said Robin, leaning against the garden wall, and watching a moth banging fruitlessly against the bright glass, trying to enter the house. “How did it go with Dawn Clancy?”

“Nothing usable,” said Strike. “I thought I might have a lead, some Jewish ex-boss Jimmy had a vendetta against, but I rang the company and the poor bloke died of a stroke last September. Then I got a call from Chiswell just after I left her. He says the Sun’s sniffing around.”

“Yes,” said Robin. “They called his wife.”

“We could’ve done without that,” said Strike, with what Robin felt was considerable understatement. “I wonder who’s tipped off the papers?”

“I’d bet on Winn,” said Robin, remembering the way that Geraint had talked that afternoon, the name-dropping, the self-importance. “He’s just the type to hint to a journalist that there’s a story on Chiswell, even if he hasn’t got proof of it yet. Seriously,” she said again, with no real hope of an answer, “what d’you think Chiswell did?”

“Be nice to know, but it doesn’t really matter,” said Strike, who sounded tired. “We aren’t being paid to get the goods on him. Speaking of which—”

“I haven’t been able to plant the bug yet,” said Robin, anticipating the question. “I hung around as late as possible, but Aamir locked the door after they both left.”

Strike sighed.

“Well, don’t get overeager and balls it up,” he said, “but we’re up against it if the Sun’s involved. Anything you can do. Get in early or something.”

“I will, I’ll try,” said Robin. “I did get something odd about the Winns today, though,” and she told him about the confusion Della had made between herself and one of Chiswell’s real goddaughters, and the story of Rhiannon on the fencing team. Strike seemed only distantly interested.

“Doubt that explains the Winns wanting Chiswell out of office. Anyway—”

“—means before motive,” she said, quoting Strike’s own, oft-repeated words.

“Exactly. Listen, can you meet me after work tomorrow, and we’ll have a proper debrief?”

“All right,” said Robin.

“Barclay’s doing good work, though,” said Strike, as though the thought of it cheered him up. “He’s already well in with Jimmy.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “Good.”

After telling her that he would text the name of a convenient pub, Strike rang off, leaving Robin alone and pensive in the quiet dark of the yard, while stars grew pin-bright overhead.

Barclay’s doing good work, though.

As opposed to Robin, who had found out nothing but an irrelevancy about Rhiannon Winn.

The moth was still fluttering desperately against the sliding doors, frantic to get at the light.

Idiot, Robin thought. It’s better out here.

The ease with which the lie about Vanessa being on the phone had slid out of her mouth ought, she reflected, to have made her feel guilty, but she was merely glad that she had got away with it. As she watched the moth continuing to bang its wings hopelessly against the brilliant glass, Robin remembered what her therapist had said to her during one of the sessions when Robin had dwelled at length on her need to discern where the real Matthew ended and her illusions about him began.

“People change in ten years,” the therapist had responded. “Why does it have to be a question of you being mistaken in Matthew? Perhaps it’s simply that you’ve both changed?”

The following Monday would mark their first wedding anniversary. At Matthew’s suggestion, they were going to spend next weekend at a fancy hotel near Oxford. In a funny kind of way, Robin was looking forward to it, because she and Matthew seemed to get along better these days with a change of scene. Being surrounded by strangers nudged them out of their tendency to bicker. She had told him the story of Ted Heath’s bust turning green, along with several other (to her) interesting facts about the House of Commons. He had maintained a bored expression through all of them, determined to signal his disapproval of the whole venture.

Reaching a decision, she opened the French window and the moth fluttered merrily inside.

“What did Vanessa want?” asked Matthew, his eyes on the news as Robin sat down again. Sarah Shadlock’s stargazer lilies were sitting on a table beside her, still in bloom ten days after they had arrived in the house, and Robin could smell their heady scent even over the curry.

“I picked up her sunglasses by mistake last time we went out,” said Robin, feigning exasperation. “She wants them back, they’re Chanel. I said I’ll meet her before work.”

“Chanel, eh?” said Matthew, with a smile that Robin found patronizing. She knew that he thought he had discovered a weakness in Vanessa, but perhaps he liked her better to think that she valued designer labels and wanted to make sure she got them back.

“I’ll have to leave at six,” said Robin.

“Six?” he said, annoyed. “Christ, I’m knackered, I don’t want to wake up at—”

“I was going to suggest I sleep in the spare room,” Robin said.

“Oh,” said Matthew, mollified. “Yeah, OK. Thanks.”

19

Robin left the house at a quarter to six the next morning. The sky was a faint blush pink and the morning already warm, justifying her lack of jacket. Her eyes flickered towards the single carved swan as she passed their local pub, but she forced her thoughts back onto the day ahead and not the man she had left behind.

On arrival in Izzy’s corridor an hour later, Robin saw that Geraint’s office door was already open. A swift peek inside showed her an empty room, but Aamir’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair.

Running to Izzy’s office, Robin unlocked it, dashed to her desk, pulled one of the listening devices from the box of Tampax, scooped up a pile of out-of-date agendas as an alibi, then ran back out into the corridor.

As she approached Geraint’s office, she slid off the gold bangle that she had worn for this purpose, and threw it lightly so that it rolled into Geraint’s office.

“Oh damn,” she said out loud.

Nobody responded from inside the office. Robin knocked on the open door, said “hello?” and put her head inside. The room was still empty.

Robin dashed across the room to the double power point just above the skirting board beside Geraint’s desk. Kneeling, she took the listening device out of her bag, unplugged the fan on his desk, pressed the device into place over the dual socket, reinserted the fan’s plug, checked that it worked, then, panting as though she had just sprinted a hundred yards, looked around for her bangle.

“What are you doing?”

Aamir was standing in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, a fresh tea in his hand.

“I did knock,” Robin said, sure that she was bright pink. “I dropped my bangle and it rolled—oh, there it is.”

It was lying just beneath Aamir’s computer chair. Robin scrambled to pick it up.

“It’s my mother’s,” she lied. “I wouldn’t be popular if that went missing.”

She slid the bangle back over her wrist, picked up the papers she had left on Geraint’s desk, smiled as casually as she could manage, then walked out of the office past Aamir, whose eyes, she saw out of the corner of her own, were narrowed in suspicion.

Jubilant, Robin re-entered Izzy’s office. At least she would have some good news for Strike when they met in the pub that evening. Barclay was no longer the only one doing good work. So absorbed was she in her thoughts that Robin didn’t realize that there was somebody else in the room until a man said, right behind her: “Who are you?”

The present dissolved. Both of her attackers had lunged at her from behind. With a scream, Robin spun around, ready to fight for her life: the papers flew into the air and her handbag slipped off her shoulder, fell to the floor and burst open, scattering its contents everywhere.

“Sorry!” said the man. “Christ, I’m sorry!”

But Robin was finding it hard to draw breath. There was a thundering in her ears and sweat had broken out all over her body. She bent down to scoop everything back up, trembling so much that she kept dropping things.

Not now. Not now.

He was talking to her, but she couldn’t understand a word. The world was fragmenting again, full of terror and danger, and he was a blur as he handed her eyeliner and a bottle of drops to moisten her contact lenses.

“Oh,” Robin gasped at random. “Great. Excuse me. Bathroom.”

She stumbled to the door. Two people were coming towards her down the corridor, their voices fuzzy and indistinct as they greeted her. Hardly knowing what she responded, she half-ran past them towards the Ladies.

A woman from the Secretary for Health’s office greeted her from the sink where she was applying lipstick. Robin blundered blindly past, locking the cubicle door with fumbling fingers.

It was no use trying to suppress the panic: that only made it fight back, trying to bend her to its will. She must ride it out, as though the fear was a bolting horse, easing it onto a more manageable course. So she stood motionless, palms pressed against the partition walls, speaking to herself inside her head as though she were an animal handler, and her body, in its irrational terror, a frantic prey creature.

You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe…

Slowly, the panic began to ebb, though her heart was still leaping erratically. At last, Robin removed her numb hands from the walls of the cubicle and opened her eyes, blinking in the harsh lights. The bathroom was quiet.

Robin peered out of the cubicle. The woman had left. There was nobody there except her own pale reflection in the mirror. After splashing cold water on her face and patting it dry with paper towels, she readjusted her clear-lensed glasses and left the bathroom.

An argument seemed to be in progress in the office she had just left. Taking a deep breath, she re-entered the room.

Jasper Chiswell turned to glare at her, his wiry mass of gray hair sticking out around his pink face. Izzy was standing behind her desk. The stranger was still there. In her shaken state, Robin would have preferred not to be the focus of three pairs of curious eyes.

“What just happened?” Chiswell demanded of Robin.

“Nothing,” said Robin, feeling cold sweat erupting again under her dress.

“You ran out of the room. Did he—” Chiswell pointed at the dark man, “—do something to you? Make a pass?”

“Wha—? No! I didn’t realize he was in here, that’s all—he spoke and I jumped. And,” she could feel herself blushing harder than ever, “then I needed the loo.”

Chiswell rounded on the dark man.

“So why are you here so early, eh?”

Now, at last, Robin realized that this was Raphael. She had known from the pictures she had found online that this half-Italian was an exotic in a family that was otherwise uniformly blond and very English in appearance, but had been wholly unprepared for how handsome he was in the flesh. His charcoal-gray suit, white shirt and a conventional dark blue spotted tie were worn with an air that none of the other men along the corridor could muster. So dark-skinned as to appear swarthy, he had high cheekbones, almost black eyes, dark hair worn long and floppy, and a wide mouth that, unlike his father’s, had a full upper lip that added vulnerability to his face.

“I thought you liked punctuality, Dad,” he said, raising his arms and letting them fall in a slightly hopeless gesture.

His father turned to Izzy. “Give him something to do.”

Chiswell marched out. Mortified, Robin headed for her desk. Nobody spoke until Chiswell’s footsteps had died away, then Izzy spoke.

“He’s under all kinds of stress just now, Raff, babes. It isn’t you. He’s honestly going berserk about the smallest things.”

“I’m so sorry,” Robin forced herself to say to Raphael. “I completely overreacted.”

“No problem,” he replied, in the kind of accent that is routinely described as “public school.” “For the record, I’m not, in fact, a sex offender.”

Robin laughed nervously.

“You’re the goddaughter I didn’t know about? Nobody tells me anything. Venetia, yeah? I’m Raff.”

“Um—yes—hi.”

They shook hands and Robin retook her seat, busying herself with some pointless paper shuffling. She could feel her color fluctuating.

“It’s just crazy at the moment,” Izzy said, and Robin knew that she was trying, for not entirely unselfish reasons, to persuade Raphael that their father wasn’t as bad to work with as he might appear. “We’re understaffed, we’ve got the Olympics coming up, TTS is constantly going off on Papa—”

“What’s going off on him?” asked Raphael, dropping down into the sagging armchair, loosening his tie and crossing his long legs.

“TTS,” Izzy repeated. “Lean over and put on the kettle while you’re there, Raff, I’m dying for a coffee. TTS. It stands for Tinky the Second. It’s what Fizz and I call Kinvara.”

The many nicknames of the Chiswell family had been explained to Robin during her office interludes with Izzy. Izzy’s older sister Sophia was “Fizzy,” while Sophia’s three children rejoiced in the pet names of “Pringle,” “Flopsy” and “Pong.”

“Why ‘Tinky the Second’?” asked Raff, unscrewing a jar of instant coffee with long fingers. Robin was still very aware of all his movements, though keeping her eyes on her supposed work. “What was Tinky the First?”

“Oh, come on, Raff, you must have heard about Tinky,” said Izzy. “That ghastly Australian nurse Grampy married last time round, when he was getting senile. He blew most of the money on her. He was the second silly old codger she’d married. Grampy bought her a dud racehorse and loads of horrible jewelry. Papa nearly had to go to court to get her out of the house when Grampy died. She dropped dead of breast cancer before it got really expensive, thank God.”

Startled by this sudden callousness, Robin looked up.

“How d’you take it, Venetia?” Raphael asked as he spooned coffee into mugs.

“White, no sugar, please,” said Robin. She thought it best if she maintained a low profile for a while, after her recent incursion into Winn’s office.

“TTS married Papa for his dosh,” Izzy plowed on, “and she’s horse-mad like Tinky. You know she’s got nine now? Nine!”

“Nine what?” said Raphael.

“Horses, Raff!” said Izzy impatiently. “Bloody uncontrollable, bad-mannered, hot-blooded horses that she mollycoddles and keeps as child substitutes and spends all the money on! God, I wish Papa would leave her,” said Izzy. “Pass the biscuit tin, babes.”

He did so. Robin, who could feel him looking at her, maintained the pretense of absorption in her work.

The telephone rang.

“Jasper Chiswell’s office,” said Izzy, trying to prize off the lid of the biscuit tin one-handed, the receiver under her chin. “Oh,” she said, suddenly cool. “Hello, Kinvara. You’ve just missed Papa…”

Grinning at his half-sister’s expression, Raphael took the biscuits from her, opened them and offered the tin to Robin, who shook her head. A torrent of indistinguishable words was pouring from Izzy’s earpiece.

“No… no, he’s gone… he only came over to say hello to Raff…”

The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.

“Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,” said Izzy. “I can’t—well, because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp—yes… goodbye.”

Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.

“She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done her much good.”

“Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,” Raphael told Robin.

He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to draw her out.

“Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!” said Izzy, apparently stung. “Of course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened—I was, Raff—Kinvara had a stillbirth two years ago,” Izzy explained, “and of course that’s sad, of course it is, and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but—no, I’m sorry,” she said crossly, addressing Raphael, “but she uses it. She does, Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and—well, she’d have been a dreadful mother, anyway,” said Izzy defiantly. “She can’t stand not being the center of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act—don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night. Telling stupid lies… funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.”

“What?” said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.

“Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.”

She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of the radiator and called over her shoulder, “Raff, you can listen to the phone messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?”

The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.

He took Ecstasy and ran his car into a mother of a four-year-old. He barely served a third of his sentence and now his father’s put him on the taxpayer’s payroll.

“How do I do this, then?” asked Raphael, moving behind Izzy’s desk.

“Just press play, I expect,” Robin muttered, sipping her coffee and pretending to make notes on a pad.

Canned messages began to issue from the answering machine, drowning out the faint hum of conversation from the terrace beyond the net-curtained window.

A man named Rupert asked Izzy to call him back about “the AGM.”

A constituent called Mrs. Ricketts spoke for two solid minutes about traffic along the Banbury road.

An irate woman said crossly that she ought to have expected an answering machine and that MPs ought to be answering to the public personally, then spoke until cut off by the machine about her neighbors’ failure to lop overhanging branches from a tree, in spite of repeated requests from the council.

Then a man’s growl, almost theatrically menacing, filled the quiet office:

“They say they piss themselves as they die, Chiswell, is that true? Forty grand, or I’ll find out how much the papers will pay.”

20

Strike had selected the Two Chairmen for his Wednesday evening catch-up with Robin because of its proximity to the Palace of Westminster. The pub was tucked away on a junction of centuries-old back streets—Old Queen Street, Cockpit Steps—amid a motley collection of quaint, sedate buildings that stood at oblique angles to each other. Only as he limped across the road and saw the hanging metal sign over the front door did Strike realize that the “two chairmen” for whom the pub was named were not, as he had assumed, joint managers of a board, but lowly servants carrying the heavy load of a sedan chair. Tired and sore as Strike was, the image seemed appropriate, although the occupant of the sedan chair in the pub sign was a refined lady in white, not a large, curmudgeonly minister with wiry hair and a short temper.

The bar was crowded with after-work drinkers and Strike had a sudden apprehension that he might not get a seat inside, an unwelcome prospect, because leg, back and neck were tight and sore after yesterday’s long drive and the hours he had spent in Harley Street today, watching Dodgy Doc.

Strike had just bought a pint of London Pride when the table by the window became free. With a turn of speed born of necessity, he nabbed the high bench with its back to the street before the nearest group of suited men and women could annex it. There was no question of anybody challenging his right to sole occupancy of a table made for four. Strike was large enough, and surly enough in appearance to make even this group of civil servants doubt their ability to negotiate a compromise.

The wooden-floored bar was what Strike mentally categorized as “upmarket utilitarian.” A faded mural on the back wall depicted bewigged eighteenth-century men gossiping together, but otherwise all was pared-back wood and monochrome prints. He peered out of the window to see whether Robin was within sight, but as there was no sign of her he drank his beer, read the day’s news on his phone and tried to ignore the menu lying on the table in front of him, which was taunting him with a picture of battered fish.

Robin, who had been due to arrive at six, was still absent at half past. Unable to resist the picture on the menu any longer, Strike ordered himself cod and chips and a second pint, and read a long article in The Times about the upcoming Olympics opening ceremony, which was really a long list of the ways in which the journalist feared it might misrepresent and humiliate the nation.

By a quarter to seven, Strike was starting to worry about Robin. He had just decided to call her when she came hurrying in through the door, flushed, wearing glasses that Strike knew she did not need and with an expression that he recognized as the barely contained excitement of one who has something worthwhile to impart.

“Hazel eyes,” he noted, as she sat down opposite him. “Good one. Changes your whole look. What’ve you got?”

“How do you know I’ve—? Well, loads, actually,” she said, deciding it was not worthwhile toying with him. “I nearly called you earlier but there have been people around all day, and I had a close shave this morning placing the listening device.”

“You did it? Bloody well done!”

“Thanks. I really want a drink, hang on.”

She came back with a glass of red wine and launched immediately into an account of the message that Raphael had found on the answering machine that morning.

“I had no chance of getting the caller’s number, because there were four messages after it. The phone system’s antiquated.”

Frowning, Strike asked: “How did the caller pronounce ‘Chiswell,’ can you remember?”

“They said it right. Chizzle.”

“Fits with Jimmy,” said Strike. “What happened after the call?”

“Raff told Izzy about it when she got back to the office,” said Robin, and Strike thought he detected a touch of self-consciousness as she said the name “Raff.” “He didn’t understand what he was passing on, obviously. Izzy called her dad straight away and he went berserk. We could hear him shouting on the end of the line, though not much of what he was actually saying.”

Strike stroked his chin, thinking.

“What did the anonymous caller sound like?”

“London accent,” Robin said. “Threatening.”

“‘They piss themselves as they die,’” repeated Strike in an undertone.

There was something that Robin wanted to say, but a brutal personal memory made it hard for her to articulate.

“Strangling victims—”

“Yeah,” said Strike, cutting her off. “I know.”

Both of them drank.

“Well, assuming the call was Jimmy,” Robin went on, “he’s phoned the department twice today.”

She opened her handbag and showed Strike the listening device hidden inside it.

“You retrieved it?” he asked, staggered.

“And replaced it with another one,” said Robin, unable to suppress a triumphant smile. “That’s why I’m late. I took a chance. Aamir, who works with Winn, left and Geraint came into our office while I was packing up, to chat me up.”

“He did, did he?” asked Strike, amused.

“I’m glad you find it funny,” said Robin coolly. “He isn’t a nice man.”

“Sorry,” said Strike. “In what way is he not a nice man?”

“Just take it from me,” said Robin. “I’ve met plenty of them in offices. He’s a pervert, but with creepy add-ons. He was just telling me,” she said, and her indignation showed in the rising tide of pink in her face, “that I remind him of his dead daughter. Then he touched my hair.”

“Touched your hair?” repeated Strike, unamused.

“Picked a bit of it off my shoulder and ran it through his fingers,” said Robin. “Then I think he saw what I thought of him and tried to pass it off as fatherly. Anyway, I said I needed the loo but asked him to stay put so we could keep chatting about charities. I nipped down the corridor and swapped the devices.”

“That was bloody good going, Robin.”

“I listened to it on the way here,” said Robin, pulling headphones out of her pocket, “and—”

Robin handed Strike the headphones.

“—I’ve cued up the interesting bit.”

Strike obediently inserted the earbuds and Robin switched on the tape in her handbag.

“… at three thirty, Aamir.”

The Welsh male voice was interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone ringing. Feet scuffled near the power point, the ring ceased and Geraint said:

“Oh, hello Jimmy… half a mo’—Aamir, close that door.”

More scuffling, footsteps.

“Jimmy, yes…?”

There followed a long stretch in which Geraint seemed to be attempting to stem the flow of a mounting tirade.

“Whoa—now, wai… Jimmy, lis… Jimmy, listen—listen! I know you’ve lost out, Jimmy, I understand how bitter you—Jimmy, please! We understand your feelings—that’s unfair, Jimmy, neither Della nor I grew up wealth—my father was a coalminer, Jimmy! Now listen, please! We’re close to getting the pictures!”

There followed a spell in which Strike thought he heard, very faintly, the rise and fall of Jimmy Knight’s fluent speech at the end of the telephone.

“I take your point,” said Geraint finally, “but I urge you to do nothing rash, Jimmy. He isn’t going to give you—Jimmy, listen! He isn’t going to give you your money, he’s made that perfectly clear. It’s the newspapers now or nothing, so… proof, Jimmy! Proof!”

Another, shorter period of unintelligible gabbling followed.

“I’ve just told you, haven’t I? Yes… no, but the Foreign Office… well, hardly… no, Aamir has a contact… yes… yes… all right then… I will, Jimmy. Good—yes, all right. Yes. Goodbye.”

The clunk of a mobile being set down was followed by Geraint’s voice.

“Stupid prick,” he said.

There were more footsteps. Strike glanced at Robin, who by a rolling gesture of the hand indicated that he should keep listening. After perhaps thirty seconds, Aamir spoke, diffident and strained.

“Geraint, Christopher didn’t promise anything about the pictures.”

Even on the tinny little tape, with the nearby shufflings of paper at Geraint’s desk, the silence sounded charged.

“Geraint, did you h—?”

“Yes, I heard!” snapped Winn. “Good God, boy, a first from the LSE and you can’t think of a way to persuade that bastard to give you pictures? I’m not asking you to take them out of the department, just to get copies. That shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man.”

“I don’t want more trouble,” muttered Aamir.

“Well, I should have thought,” said Geraint, “after everything Della in particular has done for you…”

“And I’m grateful,” said Aamir swiftly. “You know I am… all right, I’ll—I’ll try.”

For the next minute there were no sounds but scuffing footsteps and papers, followed by a mechanical click. The device automatically switched off after a minute of no talking, activated again when somebody spoke. The next voice was that of a different man asking whether Della would be attending “the sub-committee” this afternoon.

Strike removed the earbuds.

“Did you catch it all?” Robin asked.

“I think so,” said Strike.

She leaned back, watching Strike expectantly.

“The Foreign Office?” he repeated quietly. “What the hell can he have done that means the Foreign Office has got pictures?”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to be interested in what he did?” said Robin, eyebrows raised.

“I never said I wasn’t interested. Just that I’m not being paid to find out.”

Strike’s fish and chips arrived. He thanked the barmaid and proceeded to add a generous amount of ketchup to his plate.

“Izzy was completely matter of fact about whatever it is,” said Robin, thinking back. “She couldn’t possibly have spoken about it the way she did if he’d—you know—murdered anybody.”

She deliberately avoided the word “strangled.” Three panic attacks in three days were quite sufficient.

“Got to say,” said Strike, now chewing chips, “that anonymous call makes you—unless,” he said, struck by a thought, “Jimmy’s had the bright idea of trying to drag Chiswell into the Billy business on top of whatever else he’s genuinely done. A child-killing doesn’t have to be true to make trouble for a government minister who’s already got the press on his tail. You know the internet. Plenty of people out there think being a Tory as tantamount to being a child killer. This might be Jimmy’s idea of adding pressure.”

Strike stabbed a few chips moodily with his fork.

“I’d be glad to know where Billy is, if we had somebody free to look for him. Barclay hasn’t seen any sign of him and says Jimmy hasn’t mentioned having a brother.”

“Billy said he was being held captive,” Robin said tentatively.

“Don’t think we can set much store on anything Billy’s saying right now, to be honest. I knew a guy in the Shiners who had a psychotic episode on exercises. Thought he had cockroaches living under his skin.”

“In the—?”

“Shiners. Fusiliers. Want a chip?”

“I’d better not,” sighed Robin, though she was hungry. Matthew, whom she had warned by text that she would be late, had told her he would wait for her to get home, so they could eat dinner together. “Listen, I haven’t told you everything.”

“Suki Lewis?” asked Strike, hopefully.

“I haven’t been able to work her into the conversation yet. No, it’s that Chiswell’s wife claims men have been lurking in the flowerbeds and fiddling with her horses.”

“Men?” Strike repeated. “In the plural?”

“That’s what Izzy said—but she also says Kinvara’s hysterical and attention-seeking.”

“Getting to be a bit of a theme, that, isn’t it? People who’re supposed to be too crazy to know what they’ve seen.”

“D’you think that could have been Jimmy, as well? In the garden?”

Strike thought it over as he chewed.

“I can’t see what he’s got to gain from lurking in the garden or fiddling with horses, unless he’s at the point where he just wants to frighten Chiswell. I’ll check with Barclay and see whether Jimmy’s got a car or mentioned going to Oxfordshire. Did Kinvara call the police?”

“Raff asked that, when Izzy got back,” said Robin, and once again, Strike thought he detected a trace of self-consciousness as she spoke the man’s name. “Kinvara claims the dogs barked, she saw the shadow of a man in the garden, but he ran away. She says there were footprints in the horses’ field next morning and that one of them had been cut with a knife.”

“Did she call a vet?”

“I don’t know. It’s harder to ask questions with Raff in the office. I don’t want to look too nosy, because he doesn’t know who I am.”

Strike pushed his plate away from him and felt for his cigarettes.

“Photos,” he mused, returning to the central point. “Photos at the Foreign Office. What the hell can they show that would incriminate Chiswell? He’s never worked at the Foreign Office, has he?”

“No,” said Robin. “The highest post he’s ever held is Minister for Trade. He had to resign from there because of the affair with Raff’s mother.”

The wooden clock over the fireplace was telling her it was time to leave. She didn’t move.

“You’re liking Raff, then?” Strike said suddenly, catching her off guard.

“What?”

Robin was scared that she had blushed.

“What do you mean, I’m ‘liking’ him?”

“Just an impression I got,” said Strike. “You disapproved of him before you met him.”

“D’you want me to be antagonistic towards him, when I’m supposed to be his father’s goddaughter?” demanded Robin.

“No, of course not,” said Strike, though Robin had the sense that he was laughing at her, and resented it.

“I’d better get going,” she said, sweeping the headphones off the table and back into her bag. “I told Matt I’d be home for dinner.”

She got up, bade Strike goodbye and left the pub.

Strike watched her go, dimly sorry that he had commented on her manner when mentioning Raphael Chiswell. After a few minutes’ solitary beer consumption, he paid for his food and ambled out onto the pavement, where he lit a cigarette and called the Minister for Culture, who answered on the second ring.

“Wait there,” said Chiswell. Strike could hear a murmuring crowd behind him. “Crowded room.”

The clunk of a door closing and the noise of the crowd was muted.

“’M at a dinner,” said Chiswell. “Anything for me?”

“It isn’t good news, I’m afraid,” said Strike, walking away from the pub, up Queen Anne Street, between white painted buildings that gleamed in the dusk. “My partner succeeded in planting the listening device in Mr. Winn’s office this morning. We’ve got a recording of him talking to Jimmy Knight. Winn’s assistant—Aamir, is it?—is trying to get copies of those photographs you told me about. At the Foreign Office.”

The ensuring silence lasted so long that Strike wondered whether they had been cut off.

“Minist—?”

“I’m here!” snarled Chiswell. “That boy Mallik, is it? Dirty little bastard. Dirty little bastard. He’s already lost one job—let him try, that’s all. Let him try! Does he think I won’t—I know things about Aamir Mallik,” he said. “Oh yes.”

Strike waited, in some surprise, for elucidation of these remarks, but none were forthcoming. Chiswell merely breathed heavily into the telephone. Soft, muffled thuds told Strike that Chiswell was pacing up and down on carpet.

“Is that all you had to say to me?” demanded the MP at last.

“There was one other thing,” said Strike. “My partner says your wife’s seen a man or men trespassing on your property at night.”

“Oh,” said Chiswell, “yerse.” He did not sound particularly concerned. “My wife keeps horses and she takes their security very seriously.”

“You don’t think this has any connection with—?”

“Not in the slightest, not in the slightest. Kinvara’s sometimes—well, to be candid,” said Chiswell, “she can be bloody hysterical. Keeps a bunch of horses, always fretting they’re going to be stolen. I don’t want you wasting time chasing shadows through the undergrowth in Oxfordshire. My problems are in London. Is that everything?”

Strike said that it was and, after a curt farewell, Chiswell hung up, leaving Strike to limp towards St. James’s Park station.

Settled in a corner seat of the Tube ten minutes later, Strike folded his arms, stretched out his legs and stared unseeingly at the window opposite.

The nature of this investigation was highly unusual. He had never before had a blackmail case where the client was so unforthcoming about his offense—but then, Strike reasoned with himself, he had never had a government minister as a client before. Equally, it was not every day that a possibly psychotic young man burst into Strike’s office and insisted that he had witnessed a child murder, though Strike had certainly received his fair share of unusual and unbalanced communications since hitting the newspapers: what he had once called, over Robin’s occasional protests, “the nutter drawer,” now filled half a filing cabinet.

It was the precise relationship between the strangled child and Chiswell’s case of blackmail that was preoccupying Strike, even though, on the face of it, the connection was obvious: it lay in the fact of Jimmy and Billy’s brotherhood. Now somebody (and Strike thought it overwhelmingly likely to be Jimmy, judging from Robin’s account of the call) seemed to have decided to tie Billy’s story to Chiswell, even though the blackmailable offense that had brought Chiswell to Strike could not possibly have been infanticide, or Geraint Winn would have gone to the police. Like a tongue probing a pair of ulcers, Strike’s thoughts kept returning fruitlessly to the Knight brothers: Jimmy, charismatic, articulate, thuggishly good-looking, a chancer and a hothead, and Billy, haunted, filthy, unquestionably ill, bedeviled by a memory no less dreadful for the fact that it might be false.

They piss themselves as they die.

Who did? Again, Strike seemed to hear Billy Knight.

They buried her in a pink blanket, down in the dell by my dad’s house. But afterwards they said it was a boy…

He had just been specifically instructed by his client to restrict his investigations to London, not Oxfordshire.

As he checked the name of the station at which they had just arrived, Strike remembered Robin’s self-consciousness when talking about Raphael Chiswell. Yawning, he took out his mobile again and succeeded in Googling the youngest of his client’s offspring, of whom there were many pictures going up the courtroom steps to his trial for manslaughter.

As he scrolled through multiple pictures of Raphael, Strike felt a rising antipathy towards the handsome young man in his dark suit. Setting aside the fact that Chiswell’s son resembled an Italian model more than anything British, the images caused a latent resentment, rooted in class and personal injuries, to glow a little redder inside Strike’s chest. Raphael was of the same type as Jago Ross, the man whom Charlotte had married after splitting with Strike: upper class, expensively clothed and educated, their peccadillos treated more leniently for being able to afford the best lawyers, for resembling the sons of the judges deciding their fates.

The train set off again and Strike, losing his connection, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, folded his arms and resumed his blank stare at the dark window, trying to deny an uncomfortable idea headspace, but it nosed up against him like a dog demanding food, impossible to ignore.

He now realized that he had never imagined Robin being interested in any man other than Matthew, except, of course, for that moment when he himself had held her on the stairs at her wedding, when, briefly…

Angry with himself, he kicked the unhelpful thought aside, and forced his wandering mind back onto the curious case of a government minister, slashed horses and a body buried in a pink blanket, down in a dell.

21

“Why are you so busy and I’ve got bugger all to do?” Raphael asked Robin, late on Friday morning.

She had just returned from tailing Geraint to Portcullis House. Observing him from a distance, she had seen how the polite smiles of the many young women he greeted turned to expressions of dislike as he passed. Geraint had disappeared into a meeting room on the first floor, so Robin had returned to Izzy’s office. Approaching Geraint’s room she had hoped she might be able to slip inside and retrieve the second listening device, but through the open door she saw Aamir working at his computer.

“Raff, I’ll give you something to do in a moment, babes,” muttered a fraught Izzy, who was hammering at her keyboard. “I’ve got to finish this, it’s for the local party chairwoman. Papa’s coming to sign it in five minutes.”

She threw a harried glance at her brother, who was sprawled in the armchair, his long legs spread out in front of him, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, playing with the paper visitor’s pass that hung around his neck.

“Why don’t you go and get yourself a coffee on the terrace?” Izzy suggested. Robin knew she wanted him out the way when Chiswell turned up.

“Want to come for a coffee, Venetia?” asked Raphael.

“Can’t,” said Robin. “Busy.”

The fan on Izzy’s desk swept Robin’s way and she enjoyed a few seconds of cool breeze. The net-curtained window gave but a misty impression of the glorious June day. Truncated parliamentarians appeared as glowing wraiths on the terrace beyond the glass. It was stuffy inside the cluttered office. Robin was wearing a cotton dress, her hair in a ponytail, but still she occasionally blotted her upper lip with the back of her hand as she pretended to be working.

Having Raphael in the office was, as she had told Strike, a disadvantage. There had been no need to come up with excuses for lurking in the corridor when she had been alone with Izzy. What was more, Raphael watched her a lot, in an entirely different way to Geraint’s lewd up-and-down looks. She didn’t approve of Raphael, but every now and then she found herself coming perilously close to feeling sorry for him. He seemed nervy around his father, and then—well, anybody would think him handsome. That was the main reason she avoided looking at him: it was best not to, if you wanted to preserve any objectivity.

He kept trying to foster a closer relationship with her, which she was attempting to discourage. Only the previous day he had interrupted her as she hovered outside Geraint and Aamir’s door, listening with all her might to a conversation that Aamir was having on the phone about an “inquiry.” From the scant details that Robin had so far heard, she was convinced that the Level Playing Field was under discussion.

“But this isn’t a statutory inquiry?” Aamir was asking, sounding worried. “It isn’t official? I thought this was just a routine… but Mr. Winn understood that his letter to the fundraising regulator had answered all their concerns.”

Robin could not pass up the opportunity to listen, but knew her situation to be perilous. What she had not expected was to be surprised by Raphael rather than Winn.

“What are you doing, skulking there?” he had asked, laughing.

Robin walked hastily away, but she heard Aamir’s door slam behind her and suspected that he, at least, would make sure that it was closed in future.

“Are you always this jumpy, or is it just me?” Raphael had asked, hurrying after her. “Come for a coffee, come on, I’m so bloody bored.”

Robin had declined brusquely, but even as she pretended to be busy again, she had to admit that part of her—a tiny part—was flattered by his attentions.

There was a knock on the door and, to Robin’s surprise, Aamir Mallik entered the room, holding a list of names. Nervous but determined, he addressed Izzy.

“Yeah, uh, hi. Geraint would like to add the Level Playing Field trustees to the Paralympian reception on the twelfth of July,” he said.

“I’ve got nothing to do with that reception,” snapped Izzy. “DCMS are organizing it, not me. Why,” she erupted, wiping her sweaty fringe off her forehead, “does everyone come to me?”

“Geraint needs them to come,” said Aamir. The list of names quivered in his hand.

Robin wondered whether she dared creep into Aamir’s empty office right now and swap the listening devices. She got to her feet quietly, trying not to draw attention to herself.

“Why doesn’t he ask Della?” asked Izzy.

“Della’s busy. It’s only eight people,” said Aamir. “He really needs—”

“‘Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity!’”

The Minister for Culture’s booming tones preceded him into the room. Chiswell stood in the doorway, wearing a crumpled suit and blocking Robin’s exit. She sat down quietly again. Aamir, or so it seemed to Robin, braced himself.

“Know who Lachesis was, Mr. Mallik?” asked Chiswell.

“Can’t say I do,” said Aamir.

“No? Didn’t study the Greeks in your Harringay Comprehensive? You seem to have time on your hands, Raff. Teach Mr. Mallik about Lachesis.”

“I don’t know, either,” said Raphael, peering up at his father through his thick, dark lashes.

“Playing stupid, eh? Lachesis,” said Chiswell, “was one of the Fates. She measured out each man’s allotted lifespan. Knew when everyone’s number would be up. Not a fan of Plato, Mr. Mallik? Catullus more up your street, I expect. He produced some fine poetry about men of your habits. Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aurelia pathice et cinaede Furi, eh? Poem 16, look it up, you’ll enjoy it.”

Raphael and Izzy were both staring at their father. Aamir stood for a few seconds as though he had forgotten what he had come for, then stalked out of the room.

“A little Classics education for everyone,” said Chiswell, turning to watch him go with what appeared to be malicious satisfaction. “We are never too old to learn, eh, Raff?”

Robin’s mobile vibrated on her desk. Strike had texted. They had agreed not to contact each other during working hours unless it was urgent. She slid the phone into her bag.

“Where’s my signing pile?” Chiswell asked Izzy. “Have you finished that letter for Brenda Bloody Bailey?”

“Printing it now,” said Izzy.

While Chiswell scribbled his signature on a stack of letters, breathing like a bulldog in the otherwise quiet room, Robin muttered something about needing to get going, and hurried out into the corridor.

Wanting to read Strike’s text without fear of interruption, she followed a wooden sign to the crypt, hastened down the narrow stone staircase indicated and found, at the bottom, a deserted chapel.

The crypt was decorated like a medieval jewel casket, every inch of gold wall embellished with motifs and symbols, heraldic and religious. There were jewel-bright saints’ pictures above the altar and the sky-blue organ pipes were wrapped in gold ribbon and scarlet fleurs-de-lys. Robin hurried into a red velvet pew and opened Strike’s text.

Robin contemplated the message for several seconds, then let out a groan that echoed around the crypt.

It was the first time in over a year that Strike had asked her to work extra hours at such short notice, but this was her anniversary weekend. The pricey hotel was booked, the bags packed and ready in the car. She was supposed to be meeting Matthew after work in a couple of hours. They were to drive straight to Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Matthew would be furious if she said she couldn’t go.

In the gilded hush of the crypt, the words Strike had said to her when he had agreed to give her detective training came back to her.

I need someone who can work long hours, weekends… you’ve got a lot of aptitude for the job, but you’re getting married to someone who hates you doing it…

And she had told him that it didn’t matter what Matthew thought, that it was up to her what she did.

Where did her allegiance lie now? She had said that she would stay in the marriage, promised to give it a chance. Strike had had many hours of unpaid overtime out of her. He could not claim that she was workshy.

Slowly, deleting words, replacing them, overthinking every syllable, she typed out a response.

She wanted to write more, but what was there to say? “My marriage isn’t going well, so it’s important I celebrate it”? “I’d much rather disguise myself as a protestor and stalk Jimmy Knight”? She pressed “send.”

Sitting waiting for his response, feeling as though she were about to get the results of medical tests, Robin’s eyes followed the course of twisting vines that covered the ceiling. Strange faces peered down at her out of the molding, like the wild Green Man of myth. Heraldic and pagan imagery mingled with angels and crosses. It was more than a place of God, this chapel. It harked back to an age of superstition, magic and feudal power.

The minutes slid by and still Strike hadn’t answered. Robin got up and walked around the chapel. At the very back she found a cupboard. Opening it, she saw a plaque to suffragette Emily Davison. Apparently, she had slept there overnight so that she could give her place of residence as the House of Commons on the census of 1911, seven years before women were given the vote. Emily Davison, she could not help but feel, would not have approved of Robin’s choice to place a failing marriage above freedom to work.

Robin’s mobile buzzed again. She looked down, afraid of what she was going to read. Strike had answered with two letters:

A lead weight seemed to slide from her chest to her stomach. Strike, as she was well aware, was still living in the glorified bedsit over the office and working through weekends. The only unmarried person at the agency, the boundary between his professional and private lives was, if not precisely non-existent, then flexible and porous, whereas hers, Barclay’s and Hutchins’s were not. And the worst of it was that Robin could think of no way of telling Strike that she was sorry, that she understood, that she wished things were different, without reminding both of them of that hug on the stairs at her wedding, now so long unmentioned that she wondered whether he even remembered it.

Feeling utterly miserable, she retraced her steps out of the crypt, still holding the papers she had been pretending to deliver.

Raphael was alone in the office when she returned, sitting at Izzy’s PC and typing at a third of her speed.

“Izzy’s gone with Dad to do something so tedious it just bounced off my brain,” he said. “They’ll be back in a bit.”

Robin forced a smile, returned to her desk, her mind on Strike.

“Bit weird, that poem, wasn’t it?” Raphael asked.

“What? Oh—oh, that Latin thing? Yes,” said Robin. “It was, a bit.”

“It was like he’d memorized it to use on Mallik. Nobody’s got that at their fingertips.”

Reflecting that Strike seemed to know strange bits of Latin off by heart, too, Robin said, “No, you wouldn’t think so.”

“Has he got it in for that Mallik, or something?”

“I really don’t know,” lied Robin.

Running out of ways to occupy her time at the desk, she shuffled papers again.

“How long are you staying, Venetia?”

“I’m not sure. Until Parliament goes into recess, probably.”

“You seriously want to work here? Permanently?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think it’s interesting.”

“What were you doing before this?”

“PR,” said Robin. “It was quite fun, but I fancied a change.”

“Hoping to bag an MP?” he said, with a faint smile.

“I can’t say I’ve seen anyone round here I’d like to marry,” said Robin.

“Hurtful,” said Raphael, with a mock sigh.

Afraid that she had blushed, Robin tried to cover up by bending down to open a drawer and taking a few objects out at random.

“So, is Venetia Hall seeing anyone?” he persisted, as she straightened up.

“Yes,” she said. “His name’s Tim. We’ve been together a year now.”

“Yeah? What does Tim do?”

“He works at Christie’s,” said Robin.

She had got the idea from the men she had seen with Sarah Shadlock in the Red Lion: immaculate, suited public-school types of the kind she imagined Chiswell’s goddaughter would know.

“What about you?” she asked. “Izzy said something—”

“At the gallery?” said Raphael, cutting her off. “That was nothing. She was too young for me. Her parents have sent her to Florence now, anyway.”

He had swung his chair around to face her, his expression grave and searching, contemplating her as though he wanted to know something that common conversation would not yield. Robin broke their mutual gaze. Holding a look that intense was not compatible with being the contented girlfriend of the imaginary Tim.

“D’you believe in redemption?”

The question caught Robin totally by surprise. It had a kind of gravity and beauty, like the gleaming jewel of the chapel at the foot of a winding stair.

“I… yes, I do,” she said.

He had picked up a pencil from Izzy’s desk. His long fingers turned it over and over as he watched her intently. He seemed to be sizing her up.

“You know what I did? In the car?”

“Yes,” she answered.

The silence that unspooled between them seemed to Robin to be peopled with flashing lights and shadowy figures. She could imagine Raphael bloody at the steering wheel, and the broken figure of the young mother on the road, and the police cars and the incident tape and the gawpers in passing cars. He was watching her intently, hoping, she thought, for some kind of benison, as though her forgiveness mattered. And sometimes, she knew, the kindness of a stranger, or even a casual acquaintance, could be transformative, something to cling to while those closest to you dragged you under in their efforts to help. She thought of the elderly steward in the Members’ Lobby, uncomprehending but immensely consoling, his hoarse, kindly words a thread to hold on to, which would lead her back to sanity.

The door opened again. Both Robin and Raphael jumped as a curvy redhead entered the room, a visitor’s pass hanging around her neck on a lanyard. Robin recognized her at once from online photographs as Jasper Chiswell’s wife, Kinvara.

“Hello,” said Robin, because Kinvara was merely staring blankly at Raphael, who had swung hastily back to his computer and began typing again.

“You must be Venetia,” said Kinvara, switching her clear golden gaze onto Robin. She had a high-pitched, girlish voice. Her eyes were catlike in a slightly puffy face. “Aren’t you pretty? Nobody told me you were so pretty.”

Robin had no idea how to respond to this. Kinvara dropped down into the sagging chair where Raff usually sat, took off the designer sunglasses holding her long red hair off her face and shook it loose. Her bare arms and legs were heavily freckled. The top buttons of her sleeveless green shirt-dress were straining across her heavy bust.

“Whose daughter are you?” asked Kinvara with a trace of petulance. “Jasper didn’t tell me. He doesn’t tell me anything he doesn’t have to tell me, actually. I’m used to it. He just said you’re a goddaughter.”

Nobody had warned Robin that Kinvara did not know who she really was. Perhaps Izzy and Chiswell had not expected them to come face to face.

“I’m Jonathan Hall’s daughter,” said Robin nervously. She had come up with a rudimentary background for Venetia-the-goddaughter, but had never expected to have to elaborate for the benefit of Chiswell’s own wife, who presumably knew all Chiswell’s friends and acquaintances.

“Who’s he?” asked Kinvara. “I should probably know, Jasper’ll be cross I haven’t paid attention—”

“He’s in land management up in—”

“Oh, was it the Northumberland property?” interrupted Kinvara, whose interest had not seemed particularly profound. “That was before my time.”

Thank God, thought Robin.

Kinvara crossed her legs and folded her arms across her large chest. Her foot bounced up and down. She shot Raphael a hard, almost spiteful look.

“Aren’t you going to say hello, Raphael?”

“Hello,” he said.

“Jasper told me to meet him here, but if you’d rather I waited in the corridor I can,” Kinvara said in her high, tight voice.

“Of course not,” muttered Raphael, frowning determinedly at his monitor.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt anything,” said Kinvara, turning from Raphael to Robin. The story of the blonde in the art gallery bathroom swam back into Robin’s mind. For a second time she pretended to be searching for something in a drawer and it was with relief that she heard the sounds of Chiswell and Izzy coming along the corridor.

“… and by ten o’clock, no later, or I won’t have time to read the whole bloody thing. And tell Haines he’ll have to talk to the BBC, I haven’t got time for a bunch of idiots talking about inclu—Kinvara.”

Chiswell stopped dead in the office door and said, without any trace of affection, “I told you to meet me at DCMS, not here.”

“And it’s lovely to see you, too, Jasper, after three days apart,” said Kinvara, getting to her feet and smoothing her crumpled dress.

“Hi, Kinvara,” said Izzy.

“I forgot you said DCMS,” Kinvara told Chiswell, ignoring her stepdaughter. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning—”

“I told you,” growled Chiswell, “I’d be in meetings till one, and if it’s about those bloody stud fees again—”

“No, it isn’t about the stud fees, Jasper, actually, and I’d have preferred to tell you in private, but if you want me to say it in front of your children, I will!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Chiswell blustered. “Come away, then, come on, we’ll find a private room—”

“There was a man last night,” said Kinvara, “who—don’t look at me like that, Isabella!”

Izzy’s expression was indeed conveying naked skepticism. She raised her eyebrows and walked into the room, acting as though Kinvara had become invisible to her.

“I said you can tell me in a private room!” snarled Chiswell, but Kinvara refused to be deflected.

“I saw a man in the woods by the house last night, Jasper!” she said, in a loud, high-pitched voice that Robin knew would be echoing all the way along the narrow corridor. “I’m not imagining things—there was a man with a spade in the woods, I saw him, and he ran when the dogs chased him! You keep telling me not to make a fuss, but I’m alone in that house at night and if you’re not going to do anything about this, Jasper, I’m going to call the police!”

22

Strike was in a thoroughly bad temper.

Why the fuck, he asked himself, as he limped towards Mile End Park the following morning, was he, the senior partner and founder of the firm, having to stake out a protest march on a hot Saturday morning, when he had three employees and a knackered leg? Because, he answered himself, he didn’t have a baby who needed watching, or a wife who’d booked plane tickets or broken her wrist, or a fucking anniversary weekend planned. He wasn’t married, so it was his downtime that had to be sacrificed, his weekend that became just two more working days.

Everything that Robin feared Strike to be thinking about her, he was, in fact, thinking: of her house on cobbled Albury Street versus his drafty two rooms in a converted attic, of the rights and status conferred by the little gold ring on her finger, set against Lorelei’s disappointment when he had explained that lunch and possibly dinner would now be impossible, of Robin’s promises of equal responsibility when he had taken her on as a partner, contrasted with the reality of her rushing home to her husband.

Yes, Robin had worked many hours of unpaid overtime in her two years at the agency. Yes, he knew that she had gone way beyond the call of duty for him. Yes, he was, in theory, fucking grateful to her. The fact remained that today, while he was limping along the street towards hours of probably fruitless surveillance, she and her arsehole of a husband were speeding off to a country hotel weekend, a thought that made his sore leg and back no easier to bear.

Unshaven, clad in an old pair of jeans, a frayed, washed-out hoodie and ancient trainers, with a carrier bag swinging from his hand, Strike entered the park. He could see the massing protestors in the distance. The risk of Jimmy recognizing him had almost decided Strike to let the march go unwatched, but the most recent text from Robin (which he had, out of sheer bad temper, left unanswered) had changed his mind.

This communication had served only to aggravate Strike. Nothing short of a concrete piece of evidence against Geraint Winn would have satisfied him right now, with the Sun on Chiswell’s case and their client so tetchy and stressed.

According to Barclay, Jimmy Knight owned a ten-year-old Suzuki Alto, but it had failed its MOT and was currently off the road. Barclay could not absolutely guarantee that Jimmy wasn’t sneaking out under cover of darkness to trespass in Chiswell’s gardens and woods seventy miles away, but Strike thought it unlikely.

On the other hand, he thought it just possible that Jimmy might have sent a proxy to intimidate Chiswell’s wife. He probably still had friends or acquaintances in the area where he grew up. An even more disturbing idea was that Billy had escaped from the prison, real or imaginary, in which he had told Strike he was being held, and decided to dig for proof that the child lay in a pink blanket by his father’s old cottage or, gripped by who knew what paranoid fantasy, to slash one of Kinvara’s horses.

Worried by these inexplicable features of the case, by the interest the Sun was taking in the minister, and aware that the agency was no closer to securing a “bargaining chip” against either of Chiswell’s blackmailers than on the day that Strike had accepted the minister as a client, he felt he had little choice but to leave no stone unturned. In spite of his tiredness, his aching muscles and his strong suspicion that the protest march would yield nothing useful, he had dragged himself out of bed on Saturday morning, strapped his prosthesis back onto a stump that was already slightly puffy and, unable to think of much he’d like to do less than walk for two hours, set off for Mile End Park.

Once close enough to the crowd of protestors to make out individuals, Strike pulled from the carrier bag swinging from his hand a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, white with curling eyebrows and mustache and now mainly associated with the hacking organization Anonymous, and put it on. Balling up the carrier bag, he shoved it into a handy bin, then hobbled on towards the cluster of placards and banners: “No missiles on homes!” “No snipers on streets!” “Don’t play games with our lives!” and several “He’s got to go!” posters featuring the prime minister’s face. Strike’s fake foot always found grass one of the most difficult surfaces to navigate. He was sweating by the time he finally spotted the orange CORE banners, with their logo of broken Olympic rings.

There were about a dozen of them. Lurking behind a group of chattering youths, Strike readjusted the slipping plastic mask, which had not been constructed for a man whose nose had been broken, and spotted Jimmy Knight, who was talking to two young women, both of whom had just thrown back their heads, laughing delightedly at something Knight had just said. Clamping the mask to his face to make sure the slits aligned with his eyes, Strike scanned the rest of the CORE members and concluded that the absence of tomato-red hair was not because Flick had dyed it another color, but because she wasn’t there.

Stewards now started herding the crowd into something resembling a line. Strike moved into the mass of protestors, a silent, lumbering figure, acting a little obtusely so that the youthful organizers, intimidated by his size, treated him like a rock around which the current must be channeled as he took up a position right behind CORE. A skinny boy who was also wearing an Anonymous mask gave Strike a double thumbs up as he was shunted towards the rear of the line. Strike returned it.

Now smoking a roll-up, Jimmy continued to joke with the two young girls beside him, who were vying for his attention. The darker of the two, who was particularly attractive, was holding a double-sided banner carrying a highly detailed painting of David Cameron as Hitler overlooking the 1936 Olympic Stadium. It was quite an impressive piece of art, and Strike had time to admire it as the procession finally set off at a steady pace, flanked by police and stewards in high visibility jackets, moving gradually out of the park and onto the long, straight Roman Road.

The smooth tarmac was slightly easier on Strike’s prosthesis, but his stump was still throbbing. After a few minutes a chant was got up: “Missiles OUT! Missiles OUT!”

A couple of press photographers were walking backwards in the road ahead, taking pictures of the front of the march.

“Hey, Libby,” said Jimmy, to the girl with the hand-painted Hitler banner. “Wanna get on my shoulders?”

Strike noted her friend’s poorly concealed envy as Jimmy crouched down so that Libby could straddle his neck and be lifted up above the crowd, her banner raised high enough for the photographers in front to see.

“Show ’em your tits, we’ll be front page!” Jimmy called up to her.

“Jimmy!” she squealed, in mock outrage. Her friend’s smile was forced. The cameras clicked, and Strike, grimacing with pain behind the plastic mask, tried not to limp too obviously.

“Guy with the biggest camera was focused on you the whole time,” said Jimmy, when he finally lowered the girl back to the ground.

“Fuck, if I’m in the papers my mum’ll go apeshit,” said the girl excitedly, and she fell into step on Jimmy’s other side, taking any opportunity to nudge or slap him as he teased her about being scared of what her parents would say. She was, Strike judged, at least fifteen years younger than he was.

“Enjoying yourself, Jimmy?”

The mask restricted Strike’s peripheral vision, so that it was only when the uncombed, tomato-red hair appeared immediately in front of him that Strike realized Flick had joined the march. Her sudden appearance had taken Jimmy by surprise, too.

“There you are!” he said, with a feeble show of pleasure.

Flick glared at the girl called Libby, who sped up, intimidated. Jimmy tried to put his arm around Flick, but she shrugged it off.

“Oi,” he said, feigning innocent indignation. “What’s up?”

“Three fucking guesses,” snarled Flick.

Strike could tell that Jimmy was debating which tack to take with her. His thuggishly handsome face showed irritation but also, Strike thought, a certain wariness. For a second time, he tried to put his arm around her. This time, she slapped it away.

“Oi,” he said again, this time aggressively. “The fuck was that for?”

“I’m off doing your dirty work and you’re fucking around with her? What kind of fucking idiot do you think I am, Jimmy?”

“Missiles OUT!” bellowed a steward with a megaphone, and the crowd took up the chant once more. The cries made by the Mohicaned woman beside Strike were as shrill and raucous as a peacock’s. The one bonus of the renewed shouting was that it left Strike at liberty to grunt with pain every time he set his prosthetic foot on the road, which was a kind of release and made the plastic mask reverberate in a ticklish fashion against his sweating face. Squinting through the eyeholes he watched Jimmy and Flick argue, but he couldn’t hear a word over the din of the crowd. Only when the chant subsided at last could he make out a little of what they were saying to each other.

“I’m fucking sick of this,” Jimmy was saying. “I’m not the one who picks up students in bars when—”

“You’d ditched me!” said Flick, in a kind of whispered scream. “You’d fucking ditched me! You told me you didn’t want anything exclusive—”

“Heat of the moment, wasn’t it?” said Jimmy roughly. “I was stressed. Billy was doing my fucking head in. I didn’t expect you to go straight to a bar and pick up some fucking—”

“You told me you were sick of—”

“Fuck’s sake, I lost my temper and said a bunch of shit I didn’t mean. If I went and shagged another woman every time you give me grief—”

“Yeah, well I sometimes think the only reason you even keep me around is Chis—”

“Keep your fucking voice down!”

“—and today, you think it was fun at that creep’s house—”

“I said I was grateful, fuck’s sake, we discussed this, didn’t we? I had to get those leaflets printed or I’d’ve come with you—”

“And I do that cleaning,” she said, with a sudden sob, “and it’s disgusting and then today you send me—it was horrible, Jimmy, he should be in hospital, he’s in a right state—”

Jimmy glanced around. Coming briefly within Jimmy’s eye-line, Strike attempted to walk naturally, though every time he asked his stump to bear his full weight, he felt as though he was pressing it down on a thousand fire ants.

“We’ll get him to hospital after,” said Jimmy. “We will, but he’ll screw it all up if we let him loose now, you know what he’s like… once Winn’s got those photos… hey,” said Jimmy gently, putting his arm around her for a third time. “Listen. I’m so fucking grateful to you.”

“Yeah,” choked Flick, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “because of the money. Because you wouldn’t even know what Chiswell had done if—”

Jimmy pulled her roughly towards him and kissed her. For a second she resisted, then opened her mouth. The kiss went on and on as they walked. Strike could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. They staggered slightly as they walked, locked together, while other CORE members grinned, and the girl whom Jimmy had lifted into the air looked crestfallen.

“Jimmy,” murmured Flick at last, when the kiss had ended, but his arm was still around her. She was doe-eyed with lust now, and soft-spoken. “I think you should come and talk to him, seriously. He keeps talking about that bloody detective.”

“What?” said Jimmy, though Strike could tell he’d heard.

“Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.”

The end point of the march came into sight at last: Bow Quarter in Fairfield Road, where the square brick tower of an old match factory, proposed site of some of the planned missiles, punctured the skyline.

“‘Rescue him’?” repeated Jimmy scornfully. “Fuck’s sake. It’s not like he’s being fucking tortured.”

The marchers were breaking ranks now, dissolving back into a formless crowd that milled around a dark green pond in front of the proposed missile site. Strike would have given much to sit down on a bench or lean up against a tree, as many of the protestors were doing, so as to take the weight off his stump. Both the end, where skin that was never meant to bear his weight was irritated and inflamed, and the tendons in his knee were begging for ice and rest. Instead, he limped on after Jimmy and Flick as they walked around the edge of the crowd, away from their CORE colleagues.

“He wanted to see you and I told him you were busy,” he heard Flick say, “and he cried. It was horrible, Jimmy.”

Pretending to be watching the young black man with a microphone, who was ascending a stage at the front of the crowd, Strike edged closer to Jimmy and Flick.

“I’ll look after Billy when I get the money,” Jimmy was telling Flick. He seemed guilty and conflicted now. “Obviously I’ll look after him… and you. I won’t forget what you’ve done.”

She liked hearing that. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw her grubby face flush with excitement. Jimmy took a pack of tobacco and some Rizlas from his jeans pocket and began to roll himself another cigarette.

“Still talking about that fucking detective, is he?”

“Yeah.”

Jimmy lit up and smoked in silence for a while, his eyes roving abstractedly over the crowd.

“Tell you what,” he said suddenly, “I’ll go see him now. Calm him down a bit. We just need him to stay put a bit longer. Coming?”

He held out his hand and Flick took it, smiling. They walked away.

Strike let them get a short head start, then stripped off the mask and the old gray hoodie, replaced the former with the sunglasses he had pocketed for this eventuality and set off after them, dumping the mask and hoodie on top of their banners.

The pace Jimmy now set was completely different to the leisurely march. Every few strides, Flick had to jog to keep up, and Strike was soon gritting his teeth as the nerve endings at the inflamed skin at the end of his stump rubbed against the prosthesis, his overworked thigh muscles groaning in protest.

He was perspiring hard, his gait becoming more and more unnatural. Passersby were starting to stare. He could feel their curiosity and pity as he dragged his prosthetic leg along. He knew he should have been doing his bloody physio exercises, that he ought to have kept to the no chips rule, that in an ideal world he’d have taken the day off today, and rested up, the prosthesis off, an ice pack on his stump. On he limped, refusing to listen to the body pleading with him to stop, the distance between himself, Jimmy and Flick growing ever wider, the compensating movement of his upper body and arms becoming grotesque. He could only pray that neither Jimmy nor Flick would turn and look behind them, because there was no way Strike could remain incognito if they saw him hobbling along like this. They were already disappearing into the neat little brick box that was Bow station, while Strike was panting and swearing on the opposite side of the road.

As he stepped off the curb, an excruciating pain shot through the back of his right thigh, as though a knife had sliced through the muscle. The leg buckled and he fell, his outstretched hand skidding along asphalt, hitting hip, shoulder and head on the open road. Somewhere in the vicinity a woman yelped in shock. Onlookers would think he was drunk. It had happened before when he had fallen. Humiliated, furious, groaning in agony, Strike crawled back onto the pavement, dragging his right leg out of the way of oncoming traffic. A young woman approached nervously to see whether he needed help, he barked at her, then felt guilty.

“Sorry,” he croaked, but she was gone, hurrying away with two friends.

He dragged himself to the railings bordering the pavement and sat there, back against metal, sweating and bleeding. He doubted whether he would be able to stand again without assistance. Running his hands over the back of his stump, he felt an egg-shaped swelling and, with a groan, guessed that he had torn a hamstring. The pain was so sharp that it was making him feel sick.

He tugged his mobile out of his pocket. The screen was cracked where he had fallen on it.

“Fuck. It. All,” he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the cold metal.

He sat motionless for several minutes, dismissed as a tramp or a drunk by the people navigating around him, while he silently assessed his limited options. At last, with a sense of being utterly cornered, he opened his eyes, wiped his face with his forearm, and punched in Lorelei’s number.

23

In retrospect, Robin knew that her anniversary weekend had been doomed before it had even begun, down in the House of Commons crypt where she had turned down Strike’s request to tail Jimmy.

Trying to throw off her sense of guilt, she had confided Strike’s request to Matthew when he picked her up after work. Already tense due to the demands of navigating the Friday night traffic in the Land Rover, which he disliked, Matthew went on the offensive, demanding to know why she felt bad after all the slave labor Strike had had out of her over the past two years and proceeding to badmouth Strike so viciously that Robin had felt compelled to defend him. They were still arguing about her job an hour later, when Matthew suddenly noticed that there was neither wedding nor engagement ring on Robin’s gesticulating left hand. She never wore these when playing the unmarried Venetia Hall, and had entirely forgotten that she would not be able to retrieve them from Albury Street before leaving for the hotel.

“It’s our bloody anniversary and you can’t even remember to put your rings back on?” Matthew had shouted.

They drew up outside the soft golden brick hotel an hour and a half later. A beaming man in uniform opened the door for Robin. Her “thank you” was almost inaudible due to the hard, angry lump in her throat.

They barely spoke over their Michelin-starred dinner. Robin, who might as well have been eating polystyrene and dust, looked around at the surrounding tables. She and Matthew were by far the youngest couple there, and she wondered whether any of these husbands and wives had been through this kind of trough in their marriages, and survived it.

They slept back to back that night.

Robin woke on Saturday in the awareness that every moment in the hotel, every step through the beautifully cultivated grounds, with the lavender walk, the Japanese garden, the orchard and organic vegetable beds, was costing them a small fortune. Perhaps Matthew was thinking the same, because he became conciliatory over breakfast. Nevertheless, their conversation felt perilous, straying regularly into dangerous territory from which they retreated precipitately. A tension headache began pounding behind Robin’s temple, but she did not want to ask hotel staff for painkillers, because any sign of dissatisfaction might lead to another argument. Robin wondered what it would be like to have a wedding day and honeymoon about which it was safe to reminisce. They eventually settled on talking about Matthew’s job as they strolled the grounds.

There was to be a charity cricket match between his firm and another the following Saturday. Matthew, who was as good at cricket as he had been at rugby, was greatly looking forward to the game. Robin listened to his boasts about his own prowess and jokes about Tom’s inadequate bowling, laughed at the appropriate moments and made sounds of agreement, and all the time a chilled and miserable part of her was wondering what was happening right now in Bow, whether Strike had gone on the march, whether he was getting anything useful on Jimmy and wondering how she, Robin, had ended up with the pompous, self-involved man beside her, who reminded her of a handsome boy she had once loved.

For the first time ever, Robin had sex with Matthew that night purely because she could not face the row that would ensue if she refused. It was their anniversary, so they had to have sex, like a notary’s stamp on the weekend, and about as pleasurable. Tears stung her eyes as Matthew climaxed, and that cold, unhappy self buried deep in her compliant body wondered why he could not feel her unhappiness even though she was trying so hard to dissemble, and how he could possibly imagine that the marriage was a success.

She put her arm over her wet eyes in the darkness after he had rolled off her and said all the things you were supposed to say. For the first time, when she said “I love you, too,” she knew, beyond doubt, that she was lying.

Very carefully, once Matthew was asleep, Robin reached out in the darkness for the phone that lay on her bedside table, and checked her texts. There was nothing from Strike. She Googled pictures of the march in Bow and thought she recognized, in the middle of the crowd, a tall man with familiar curly hair, who was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Robin turned her mobile face down on the bedside table to shut out its light, and closed her eyes.

24

Strike returned to his two attic rooms in Denmark Street six days later, early on Friday morning. Leaning on crutches, his prosthesis in a holdall over his shoulder and his right trouser leg pinned up, his expression tended to repel the sidelong glances of sympathy that passersby gave him as he swung along the short street to number twenty-four.

He hadn’t seen a doctor. Lorelei had called her local practice once she and the lavishly tipped cabbie had succeeded in supporting Strike upstairs to her flat, but the GP had asked Strike to come into his surgery for an examination.

“What d’you want me to do, hop there? It’s my hamstring, I can feel it,” he had snapped down the phone. “I know the drill: rest, ice, all that bollocks. I’ve done it before.”

He had been forced to break his no-consecutive-overnights-at-a-woman’s rule, spending four full days and five nights at Lorelei’s. He now regretted it, but what choice had he had? He had been caught, as Chiswell would have put it, a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi. He and Lorelei had been supposed to have dinner on Saturday night. Having chosen to tell her the truth rather than make an excuse not to meet, he had been forced to let her help. Now he wished that he had phoned his old friends Nick and Ilsa, or even Shanker, but it was too late. The damage was done.

The knowledge that he was being unfair and ungrateful was hardly calculated to improve Strike’s mood as he dragged himself and his holdall up the stairs. In spite of the fact that parts of the sojourn at Lorelei’s flat had been thoroughly enjoyable, all had been ruined by what had happened the previous evening, and it was entirely his own fault. He had let it happen, the thing that he had tried to guard against ever since leaving Charlotte, let it happen because he’d dropped his guard, and accepted mugs of tea, home-cooked meals and gentle affection, until finally, last night in the darkness, she had whispered onto his bare chest, “I love you.”

Grimacing again with the effort of balancing on his crutches as he unlocked his front door, Strike almost fell into his flat. Slamming the door behind him, he dropped the holdall, crossed to the small chair at the Formica table in his kitchen-cum-living room, fell into it and cast his crutches aside. It was a relief to be home and alone, however difficult it was to manage with his leg in this state. He ought to have returned sooner, of course, but being in no condition to tail anyone and in considerable discomfort, it had been easier to remain in a comfortable armchair, his stump resting on a large square pouf, texting Robin and Barclay instructions while Lorelei fetched him food and drink.

Strike lit a cigarette and thought back over all the women there had been since he’d left Charlotte. First, Ciara Parker, a gorgeous one-night stand, with no regrets on either side. A few weeks after he had hit the press for solving the Landry case, Ciara had called him. He had become elevated in the model’s mind from casual shag to possible boyfriend material by his newsworthiness, but he had turned down further meetings with her. Girlfriends who wanted to be photographed with him were no good to him in his line of work.

Next had come Nina, who had worked for a publisher, and whom he had used to get information on a case. He had liked her, but insufficiently, as he looked back on it, to treat her with common consideration. He had hurt Nina’s feelings. He wasn’t proud of it, but it hardly kept him up at nights.

Elin had been different, beautiful and, best of all, convenient, which was why he’d hung around. She had been in the process of divorcing a wealthy man and her need for discretion and compartmentalization had been at least as great as his own. They had managed a few months together before he’d spilled wine all over her, and walked out of the restaurant where they were having dinner. He had called her afterwards to apologize and she had dumped him before he finished the sentence. Given that he had left her humiliated in Le Gavroche with a hefty dry-cleaning bill, he felt that it would have been in poor taste to respond with “that’s what I was going to say next.”

After Elin there had been Coco, on whom he preferred not to dwell, and now there was Lorelei. He liked her better than any of the others, which was why he was sorry that it had been she who said “I love you.”

Strike had made a vow to himself two years previously, and he made very few vows, because he trusted himself to keep them. Having never said “I love you” to any woman but Charlotte, he would not say it to another unless he knew, beyond reasonable doubt, that he wanted to stay with that woman and make a life with her. It would make a mockery of what he’d been through with Charlotte if he said it under circumstances any less serious. Only love could have justified the havoc they had lived together, or the many times he had resumed the relationship, even while he knew in his soul that it couldn’t work. Love, to Strike, was pain and grief sought, accepted, endured. It was not in Lorelei’s bedroom, with the cowgirls on the curtains.

And so he had said nothing after her whispered declaration, and then, when she’d asked whether he’d heard her, he’d said, “Yeah, I did.”

Strike reached for his cigarettes. Yeah, I did. Well, that had been honest, as far as it went. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. After that, there’d been a fairly lengthy silence, then Lorelei had got out of bed and gone to the bathroom and stayed there for thirty minutes. Strike assumed that she’d gone there to cry, though she’d been kind enough to do it quietly, so that he couldn’t hear her. He had lain in bed, wondering what he could say to her that was both kind and truthful, but he knew that nothing short of “I love you, too” would be acceptable, and the fact was that he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to lie.

When she came back to bed, he had reached out for her in the bed. She’d let him stroke her shoulder for a while, then told him she was tired and needed some sleep.

What was I supposed to fucking do? he demanded of an imaginary female inquisitor who strongly resembled his sister, Lucy.

You could try not accepting tea and blow jobs, came the snide response, to which Strike, with his stump throbbing, answered, fuck you.

His mobile rang. He had sellotaped up the shattered screen, and through this distorted carapace he saw an unknown number.

“Strike.”

“Hi, Strike, Culpepper here.”

Dominic Culpepper, who had worked for the News of the World until its closure, had previously put work Strike’s way. Relations between them, never personally warm, had become slightly antagonistic when Strike had refused Culpepper the inside story on his two most recent murder cases. Now working for the Sun, Culpepper had been one of those journalists who had most enthusiastically raked over Strike’s personal life in the aftermath of the Shacklewell Ripper arrest.

“Wondered if you were free to do a job for us,” said Culpepper.

You’ve got a fucking nerve.

“What kind of thing’re you after?”

“Digging up dirt on a government minister.”

“Which one?”

“You’ll know if you take the job.”

“I’m pretty stretched just now. What kind of dirt are we talking?”

“That’s what we need you to find out.”

“How do you know there’s dirt there?”

“A well-placed source,” said Culpepper.

“Why do you need me if there’s a well-placed source?”

“He’s not ready to talk. He just hinted that there are beans to be spilled. Lots of them.”

“Sorry, can’t do it, Culpepper,” said Strike. “I’m booked solid.”

“Sure? We’re paying good money, Strike.”

“I’m not doing too badly these days,” said the detective, lighting a second cigarette from the tip of his first.

“No, I’ll bet you aren’t, you jammy bastard,” said Culpepper. “All right, it’ll have to be Patterson. D’you know him?”

“The ex-Met guy? Run across him a couple of times,” said Strike.

The call finished with mutually insincere good wishes, leaving Strike with an increased feeling of foreboding. He Googled Culpepper’s name and found his byline on a story about the Level Playing Field from two weeks previously.

Of course, it was possible that more than one government minister was currently in danger of being exposed by the Sun for an offense against public taste or morals, but the fact that Culpepper had recently been in close proximity with the Winns strongly suggested Robin had been right in suspecting Geraint of tipping off the Sun, and that it was Chiswell whom Patterson would shortly be investigating.

Strike wondered whether Culpepper knew that he, Strike, was already working for Chiswell, whether his call had been designed to startle information out of the detective, but it seemed unlikely. The newspaperman would have been very stupid to tell Strike whom he was about to hire, if he was aware that Strike was already in the minister’s pay.

Strike knew of Mitch Patterson by reputation: they had twice been hired by different halves of divorcing couples in the last year. Previously a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police who had “taken early retirement,” Patterson was prematurely silver-haired and had the face of an angry pug. Though personally unpleasant, or so Eric Wardle had told Strike, Patterson was a man who “got results.”

“Course, he won’t be able to kick the shit out of people in his new career,” Wardle had commented, “so that’s one useful tool in his arsenal gone.”

Strike didn’t much relish the thought that Patterson would shortly be on the case. Picking up his mobile again, he noted that neither Robin nor Barclay had called in an update within the last twelve hours. Only the previous day, he had had to reassure Chiswell, who had called to express his doubts about Robin, given her lack of results thus far.

Frustrated by his employees and his own incapacity, Strike texted Robin and Barclay the same message:

Pulling his crutches back towards him, he got up to examine the contents of his fridge and kitchen cupboards, discovering that he would be eating nothing but tinned soup for the next four meals unless he made a trip to the supermarket. After pouring spoiled milk down the sink, he made himself a mug of black tea and returned to the Formica table, where he lit a third cigarette and contemplated, without pleasure, the prospect of doing his hamstring stretches.

His phone rang again. Seeing that it was Lucy, he let it go to voicemail. The last thing he needed right now was updates on the school board’s last meeting.

A few minutes after that, when Strike was in the bathroom, she called back. He had hopped back into the kitchen with his trousers at half-mast, in the hope that it was either Robin or Barclay. When he saw his sister’s number for a second time, he merely swore loudly and returned to the bathroom.

The third call told him that she was not about to give up. Slamming down the can of soup he had been opening, Strike swept up the mobile.

“Lucy, I’m busy, what is it?” he said testily.

“It’s Barclay.”

“Ah, about time. Any news?”

“A bit on Jimmy’s bird, if that helps. Flick.”

“It all helps,” said Strike. “Why didn’t you let me know earlier?”

“Only found out ten minutes ago,” said Barclay, unfazed. “I’ve just heard her tellin’ Jimmy in the kitchen. She’s been bumpin’ money from her work.”

“What work?”

“Didnae tell me. Trouble is, Jimmy’s no that keen on her, from whut I’ve seen. I’m no sure he’d care if she got nicked.”

A distracting beeping sounded in Strike’s ear. Another caller was trying to get him. Glancing at the phone, he saw that it was Lucy again.

“Tell ye somethin’ else I got out o’ him, though,” said Barclay. “Last night, when he was stoned. He said he knew a government minister who had blood on his hands.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Strike? Ye there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

Strike had never told Barclay about Billy’s story.

“What exactly did he say, Barclay?”

“He was ramblin’ on about the government, the Tories, whut a bunch o’ bastards they are. Then, out o’ nowhere, he says ‘and fuckin’ killers.’ I says, what d’ye mean? An’ he says, ‘I know one who’s got blood on his fuckin’ hands. Kids.’”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Mind you, they’re a bunch o’ bampots, CORE. He might be talkin’ about benefit cuts. That’s as good as murder to this lot. Not that I think too much of Chiswell’s politics meself, Strike.”

“Seen any sign of Billy? Jimmy’s brother?”

“Nothin’. Naebody’s mentioned him, neither.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“And no sign of Jimmy nipping off to Oxfordshire?”

“Not on my watch.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“All right,” said Strike. “Keep digging. Let me know if you get anything.”

He rang off, jabbed at his phone’s screen and brought up Lucy’s call, instead.

“Lucy, hi,” he said impatiently. “Bit busy now, can I—?”

But as she began to talk, his expression became blank. Before she had finished gasping out the reason for her call, he had grabbed his door keys and was scrabbling for his crutches.

25

Strike’s text requesting an update reached Robin at ten to nine, as she arrived in the corridor where Izzy and Winn’s offices lay. So keen was she to see what he had to say that she stopped dead in the middle of the deserted passage to read it.

“Oh shit,” she murmured, reading that the Sun was becoming ever more interested in Chiswell. Leaning up against the wall of the corridor with its curved stone jambs, every oak door shut, she braced herself to call Strike back.

They had not spoken since she had refused to tail Jimmy. When she had phoned him on Monday to apologize directly, Lorelei had answered.

“Oh, hi, Robin, it’s me!”

One of the awful things about Lorelei was that she was likable. For reasons Robin preferred not to explore, she would have much preferred Lorelei to be unpleasant.

“He’s in the shower, sorry! He’s been here all weekend, he did his knee in following somebody. He won’t tell me the details, but I suppose you know! He had to call me from the street, it was dreadful, he couldn’t stand up. I got a cabbie to take me there and paid him to help me get Corm upstairs. He can’t wear the prosthesis, he’s on crutches…”

“Just tell him I was checking in,” said Robin, her stomach like ice. “Nothing important.”

Robin had replayed the conversation several times in her head since. There had been an unmistakably proprietorial note in Lorelei’s voice as she talked about Strike. It had been Lorelei whom he had called when he was in trouble (well, of course it was. What was he going to do, call you in Oxfordshire?), Lorelei in whose flat he had spent the rest of the weekend (they’re dating, where else was he going to go?), Lorelei who was looking after him, consoling him and, perhaps, uniting with him in abuse of Robin, without whom this injury might not have happened.

And now she had to call Strike and tell him that, five days on, she had no useful information. Winn’s office, which had been so conveniently accessible when she had started work two weeks ago, was now carefully locked up whenever Geraint and Aamir had to leave it. Robin was sure that this was Aamir’s doing, that he had become suspicious of her after the incidents of the dropped bangle, and of Raphael calling loud attention to her eavesdropping on Aamir’s phone call.

“Post.”

Robin whirled around to see the cart trundling towards her, pushed by a genial gray-haired man.

“I’ll take anything for Chiswell and Winn. We’re having a meeting,” Robin heard herself say. The postman handed over a stack of letters, along with a box with a clear cellophane window, through which Robin saw a life-size and very realistic plastic fetus. The legend across the top read: It Is Legal To Murder Me.

“Oh God, that’s horrible,” said Robin.

The postman chortled.

“That’s nothing compared to some of what they get,” he said comfortably. “Remember the white powder that was on the news? Anthrax, they claimed. Proper hoo-hah, that was. Oh, and I delivered a turd in a box once. Couldn’t smell it through all the wrapping. The baby’s for Winn, not Chiswell. She’s the pro-choice one. Enjoying it here, are you?” he said, showing a disposition for chat.

“Loving it,” Robin said, whose attention had been caught by one of the envelopes she had so rashly taken. “Excuse me.”

Turning her back on Izzy’s office, she hurried past the postman, and five minutes later emerged onto the Terrace Café, which sat on the bank of the Thames. It was separated from the river by a low stone wall, which was punctuated with black iron lamps. To the left and right stood Westminster and Lambeth bridges respectively, the former painted the green of the seats in the House of Commons, the latter, scarlet like those in the House of Lords. On the opposite bank rose the white façade of County Hall, while between palace and hall rolled the broad Thames, its oily surface lucent gray over muddy depths.

Sitting down out of earshot of the few early morning coffee drinkers, Robin turned her attention to one of the letters addressed to Geraint Winn that she had so recklessly taken from the postman. The sender’s name and address had been carefully inscribed on the reverse of the envelope in a shaky cursive: Sir Kevin Rodgers, 16 The Elms, Fleetwood, Kent, and she happened to know, due to her extensive background reading on the Winns’ charity, that the elderly Sir Kevin, who had won a silver at the hurdles in the 1956 Olympics, was one of the Level Playing Field’s trustees.

What things, Robin asked herself, did people feel the need to put in writing these days, when phone calls and emails were so much easier and faster?

Using her mobile, she found a number for Sir Kevin and Lady Rodgers at the correct address. They were old enough, she thought, to still use a landline. Taking a fortifying gulp of coffee, she texted Strike back:

She then turned off caller ID on her mobile, took out a pen and the notebook in which she had written Sir Kevin’s number and punched in the digits.

An elderly woman answered within three rings. Robin affected what she was afraid was a poor Welsh accent.

“Could I speak to Sir Kevin, please?”

“Is that Della?”

“Is Sir Kevin there?” asked Robin again, a little louder. She had been hoping to avoid actually claiming to be a government minister.

“Kevin!” called the woman. “Kevin! It’s Della!”

There was a noise of shuffling that made Robin think of tartan bedroom slippers.

“Hello?”

“Kevin, Geraint’s just got your letter,” said Robin, wincing as her accent wobbled somewhere between Cardiff and Lahore.

“Sorry, Della, what?” said the man feebly.

He seemed to be deaf, which was both help and hindrance. Robin spoke more loudly, enunciating as clearly as she could. Sir Kevin grasped what she was saying on her third attempt.

“I told Geraint I’d have to resign unless he took urgent steps,” he said miserably. “You’re an old friend, Della, and it was—it is—a worthy cause, but I have to think of my own position. I did warn him.”

“But why, Kevin?” said Robin, picking up her pen.

“Hasn’t he shown you my letter?”

“No,” said Robin truthfully, pen poised.

“Oh dear,” said Sir Kevin weakly. “Well, for one thing… twenty-five thousand pounds unaccounted for is a serious matter.”

“What else?” asked Robin, making rapid notes.

“What’s that?”

“You said ‘for one thing.’ What else are you worried about?”

Robin could hear the woman who’d answered the phone talking in the background. Her voice sounded irate.

“Della, I’d rather not go into it all on the phone,” said Sir Kevin, sounding embarrassed.

“Well, this is disappointing,” said Robin, with what she hoped was a touch of Della’s mellifluous grandeur. “I hoped you’d at least tell me why, Kevin.”

“Well, there’s the Mo Farah business—”

“Mo Farah?” repeated Robin, in unaffected surprise.

“What was that?”

“Mo—Farah?”

“You didn’t know?” said Sir Kevin. “Oh dear. Oh dear…”

Robin heard footsteps and then the woman came back on the line, first muffled, then clear.

“Let me speak to her—Kevin, let go—look, Della, Kevin’s very upset about all this. He suspected you didn’t know what’s been going on and, well, here we are, he was right. Nobody ever wants to worry you, Della,” she said, sounding as though she thought this a mistaken protectiveness, “but the fact of the matter is—no, she’s got to know, Kevin—Geraint’s been promising people things he can’t deliver. Disabled children and their families have been told they’re getting visits from David Beckham and Mo Farah and I don’t know who else. It’s all going to come out, Della, now the Charity Commission’s involved, and I’m not having Kevin’s name dragged through the mud. He’s a conscientious man and he’s done his best. He’s been urging Geraint to sort out the accounts for months now, and then there’s what Elspeth… no, Kevin, I’m not, I’m just telling her… well, it could get very nasty, Della. It might yet come to the police as well as the press, and I’m sorry, but I’m thinking of Kevin’s health.”

“What’s Elspeth’s story?” said Robin, still writing fast.

Sir Kevin said something plaintive in the background.

“I’m not going into that on the phone,” said Lady Rodgers repressively. “You’ll have to ask Elspeth.”

There was more shuffling and Sir Kevin took the receiver again. He sounded almost tearful.

“Della, you know how much I admire you. I wish it could have been otherwise.”

“Yes,” said Robin, “well, I’ll have to call Elspeth, then.”

“What was that?”

“I’ll—call—Elspeth.”

“Oh dear,” said Sir Kevin. “But you know, there might be nothing in it.”

Robin wondered whether she dared ask for Elspeth’s number, but decided not. Della would surely have it.

“I wish you’d tell me what Elspeth’s story is,” she said, her pen poised over her notebook.

“I don’t like to,” said Sir Kevin wheezily. “The damage these kinds of rumors do to a man’s reputation—”

Lady Rodgers came back on the line.

“That’s all we’ve got to say. This whole business has been very hard on Kevin, very stressful. I’m sorry, but that’s our final word on the matter, Della. Goodbye.”

Robin set her mobile down on the table beside her and checked that nobody was looking her way. She picked up her mobile again and scrolled down the list of The Level Playing Field’s trustees. One of them was called Dr. Elspeth Curtis-Lacey, but her personal number was not listed on the charity’s website and appeared, from a search of directory inquiries, to be unlisted.

Robin phoned Strike. The call went straight to voicemail. She waited a couple of minutes and tried again, with the same result. After her third failed attempt to reach him, she texted:

The dank shadow that had lain on the terrace when she had first arrived was moving incrementally backwards. The warm sun slid over Robin’s table as she eked out her coffee, waiting for Strike to call back. At last her phone vibrated to show that she had a text: heart leaping, she picked it up, but it was only Matthew.

Robin contemplated the message with a mixture of lassitude and dread. Tomorrow was the charity cricket match about which Matthew was so excited. After-work drinks with Tom and Sarah would doubtless mean plenty of banter on the subject. She could already picture the four of them at the bar: Sarah, with her perennially flirtatious attitude towards Matthew, Tom fending off Matthew’s jokes about his lousy bowling with increasingly clumsy, angry ripostes, and Robin, as was increasingly the case these days, pretending to be amused and interested, because that was the cost of not being harangued by Matthew for seeming bored, or feeling superior to her company or (as happened during their worst rows) wishing that she were drinking with Strike instead. At least, she consoled herself, it couldn’t be a late or drunken night, because Matthew, who took all sporting fixtures seriously, would want a decent sleep before the match. So she texted back:

and continued to wait for Strike to ring her.

After forty minutes, Robin began to wonder whether Strike was somewhere he couldn’t call, which left open the question of whether she ought to inform Chiswell of what she had just found out. Would Strike consider that a liberty, or would he be more annoyed if she failed to give Chiswell his bargaining chip, given the time pressure?

After debating the matter inwardly for a while longer, she called Izzy, the upper half of whose office window she could see from where she sat.

“Izzy, it’s me. Venetia. I’m calling because I can’t say this in front of Raphael. I think I’ve got some information on Winn for your father—”

“Oh, fabulous!” said Izzy loudly, and Robin heard Raphael in the background saying, “Is that Venetia? Where is she?” and the clicking of computer keys.

“Checking the diary, Venetia… He’ll be at DCMS until eleven, but then he’s in meetings all afternoon. Do you want me to call him? He could probably see you straight away if you hurry.”

So Robin replaced her mobile, notebook and pen in her bag, gulped down the last of her coffee and hurried off to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Chiswell was pacing up and down his office, speaking on the phone, when Robin arrived outside the glass partition. He beckoned her inside, pointed to a low leather sofa at a short distance from his desk, and continued to talk to somebody who appeared to have displeased him.

“It was a gift,” he was saying distinctly into the receiver, “from my eldest son. Twenty-four-karat gold, inscribed Nec Aspera Terrent. Bloody hell’s bells!” he roared suddenly, and Robin saw the heads of the bright young people just outside the office turning towards Chiswell. “It’s Latin! Pass me to somebody who can speak English! Jasper Chiswell. I’m the Minister for Culture. I’ve given you the date… no, you can’t… I haven’t got all bloody day—”

Robin gathered, from the side of the conversation that she could hear, that Chiswell had lost a money clip of sentimental value, which he thought he might have left at a hotel where he and Kinvara had spent the night of her birthday. As far as she could hear, the hotel staff had not only failed to find the clip, they were showing insufficient deference to Chiswell for having deigned to stay at one of their hotels.

“I want somebody to call me back. Bloody useless,” muttered Chiswell, hanging up and peering at Robin as though he had forgotten who she was. Still breathing heavily, he dropped down on the sofa opposite her. “I’ve got ten minutes, so this had better be worthwhile.”

“I’ve got some information on Mr. Winn,” said Robin, taking out her notebook. Without waiting for his response, she gave him a succinct summary of the information she had gleaned from Sir Kevin.

“… and,” she concluded, barely a minute and a half later, “there may be further impropriety on Mr. Winn’s part, but that information is allegedly held by Dr. Elspeth Curtis-Lacey, whose number is unlisted. It shouldn’t take us long to find a way of contacting her, but I thought,” Robin said apprehensively, because Chiswell’s tiny eyes were screwed up in what might have been displeasure, “I should bring you this immediately.”

For a few seconds he simply stared at her, his expression petulant as ever, but then he slapped his thigh in what was clearly pleasure.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “He told me you were his best. Yerse. Said so.”

Pulling a crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket he wiped his face, which had become sweaty during his phone call with the unfortunate hotel.

“Well, well, well,” he said again, “this is turning out to be a rather good day. One by one, they trip themselves up… so Winn’s a thief and a liar and maybe more?”

“Well,” said Robin cautiously, “he can’t account for the twenty-five thousand pounds, and he’s certainly promised things he can’t deliver…”

“Dr. Elspeth Curtis-Lacey,” said Chiswell, following his own train of thought. “Name’s familiar…”

“She used to be a Liberal Democrat councilor from Northumberland,” said Robin, who had just read this on the Level Playing Field’s website.

“Child abuse,” said Chiswell suddenly. “That’s how I know her. Child abuse. She was on some committee. She’s a bloody crank about it, sees it everywhere. Course, it’s full of cranks, the Lib Dems. It’s where they congregate. Stuffed to the gunnels with oddballs.”

He stood up, leaving a smattering of dandruff behind him on the black leather, and paced up and down, frowning.

“All this charity stuff’s bound to come out sooner or later,” he said, echoing Sir Kevin’s wife. “But, my Christ, they wouldn’t want it to break right now, not with Della up to her neck in the Paralympics. Winn’s going to panic when he finds out I know. Yerse. I think this might well neutralize him… in the short term, anyway. If he’s been fiddling with children, though—”

“There’s no proof of that,” said Robin.

“—that would stymie him for good,” said Chiswell, pacing again. “Well, well, well. This explains why Winn wanted to bring his trustees to our Paralympian reception next Thursday, doesn’t it? He’s clearly trying to keep them sweet, stop anyone else deserting the sinking ship. Prince Harry’s going to be there. These charity people love a royal. Only reason half of them are in it.”

He scratched his thick mop of gray hair, revealing large patches of underarm sweat.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “We’ll add his trustees to the guest list and you can come too. Then you can corner this Curtis-Lacey, find out what she’s got. All right? Night of the twelfth?”

“Yes,” said Robin, making a note, “Fine.”

“In the meantime, I’ll let Winn know I know he’s had his fingers in the till.”

Robin was almost at the door when Chiswell said abruptly:

“You don’t want a PA’s job, I suppose?”

“Sorry?”

“Take over from Izzy? What does that detective pay you? I could probably match it. I need somebody with brains and a bit of backbone.”

“I’m… happy where I am,” said Robin.

Chiswell grunted.

“Hmm. Well, perhaps it’s better this way. I might well have a bit more work for you, once we’ve got rid of Winn and Knight. Off you go, then.”

He turned his back to her, his hand already on the phone.

Out in the sunshine, Robin took out her mobile again. Strike still hadn’t called, but Matthew had texted the name of a pub in Mayfair, conveniently close to Sarah’s work. Nevertheless, Robin was now able to contemplate the evening with slightly more cheerfulness than she had felt prior to her meeting with Chiswell. She even started humming Bob Marley as she walked back towards the Houses of Parliament.

He told me you were his best. Yerse. Said so.

26

It was four in the morning, the hopeless hour when shivering insomniacs inhabit a world of hollow shadow, and existence seems frail and strange. Strike, who had fallen into a doze, woke abruptly in the hospital chair. For a second, all he felt was his aching body and the hunger that tore at his stomach. Then he saw his nine-year-old nephew, Jack, who lay motionless in the bed beside him, jelly pads over his eyes, a tube running down his throat, lines coming out of neck and wrist. A bag of urine hung from the side of the bed, while three separate drips fed their contents into a body that appeared tiny and vulnerable amid the softly humming machines, in the hushed, cavernous space of the intensive care ward.

He could hear the padding of a nurse’s soft shoes somewhere beyond the curtain surrounding Jack’s bed. They hadn’t wanted Strike to spend the night in the chair, but he had dug in and his celebrity, minor though it was, combined with his disability, had worked in his favor. His crutches stood propped against the bedside cabinet. The ward was overwarm, as hospitals always were. Strike had spent many weeks in a series of iron beds after his leg had been blown off. The smell transported him back to a time of pain and brutal readjustment, when he had been forced to recalibrate his life against a backdrop of endless obstacles, indignities and privations.

The curtain rustled and a nurse entered the cubicle, stolid and practical in her overalls. Seeing that he was awake, she gave Strike a brief, professional smile, then took the clipboard off the end of Jack’s bed and went to take readings from the screens monitoring his blood pressure and oxygen levels. When she had finished, she whispered, “Fancy a cup of tea?”

“Is he doing all right?” Strike asked, not bothering to disguise the plea in his voice. “How’s everything looking?”

“He’s stable. No need to worry. This is what we expect at this stage. Tea?”

“Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks very much.”

He realized that his bladder was full once the curtain had closed behind the nurse. Wishing he’d thought to ask her to pass his crutches, Strike hoisted himself up, holding the arm of the chair to steady himself, hopped to the wall and grabbed them, then swung out from behind the curtain and off towards the brightly lit rectangle at the far end of the dark ward.

Having relieved himself at a urinal beneath a blue light that was supposed to thwart junkies’ ability to locate veins, he headed into the waiting room close to the ward where, late yesterday afternoon, he had sat waiting for Jack to come out of emergency surgery. The father of one of Jack’s school friends, with whom Jack was meant to be staying the night when his appendix burst, had kept him company. The man had been determined not to leave Strike alone until they had “seen the little chap out of the woods,” and had talked nervously all the time Jack had been in surgery, saying things like “they bounce at that age,” “he’s a tough little bugger,” “lucky we only live five minutes from school” and, over and over again, “Greg and Lucy’ll be going frantic.” Strike had said nothing, barely listening, holding himself ready for the worst news, texting Lucy every thirty minutes with an update.

At last the surgeon had come to tell them that Jack, who had had to be resuscitated on arrival at hospital, had made it through surgery, that he had had “a nasty case of sepsis” and that he would shortly be arriving in intensive care.

“I’ll bring his mates in to see him,” said Lucy and Greg’s pal excitedly. “Cheer him up—Pokémon cards—”

“He won’t be ready for that,” said the surgeon repressively. “He’ll be under heavy sedation and on a ventilator for at least the next twenty-four hours. Are you the next of kin?”

“No, that’s me,” croaked Strike, speaking at last, his mouth dry. “I’m his uncle. His parents are in Rome for their wedding anniversary. They’re trying to get a flight back right now.”

“Ah, I see. Well, he’s not quite out of the woods yet, but the surgery was successful. We’ve cleaned out his abdomen and put a drain in. They’ll be bringing him down shortly.”

“Told you,” said Lucy and Greg’s friend, beaming at Strike with tears in his eyes, “told you they bounce!”

“Yeah,” said Strike, “I’d better let Lucy know.”

But in a calamity of errors, Jack’s panic-stricken parents had arrived at the airport, only to realize that Lucy had somehow lost her passport between hotel room and departure gate. In fruitless desperation they retraced their steps, trying to explain their dilemma to everyone from hotel staff, police and the British embassy, with the upshot that they had missed the last flight of the night.

At ten past four in the morning, the waiting room was mercifully deserted. Strike turned on the mobile he had kept switched off while on the ward and saw a dozen missed calls from Robin and one from Lorelei. Ignoring them, he texted Lucy who, he knew, would be awake in the Rome hotel to which, shortly past midnight, her passport had been delivered by the taxi driver who had found it. Lucy had implored Strike to send a picture of Jack when he got out of surgery. Strike had pretended that the picture wouldn’t load. After the stress of the day, Lucy didn’t need to see her son ventilated, his eyes covered in pads, his body swamped by the baggy hospital gown.

All looking good, he typed. Still sedated but nurse confident.

He pressed send and waited. As he had expected, she responded within two minutes.

No, I’m sitting next to him, Strike responded. I’ll stay here until you get back. Try and get some sleep and don’t worry x.

Strike switched off his mobile, dragged himself back onto his one foot, reorganized his crutches and returned to the ward.

The tea was waiting for him, as pale and milky as anything Denise had made, but after emptying two sachets of sugar into it, he drank it in a couple of gulps, eyes moving between Jack and the machines both supporting and monitoring him. He had never before examined the boy so closely. Indeed, he had never had much to do with him, in spite of the pictures he drew for Strike, which Lucy passed on.

“He hero-worships you,” Lucy had told Strike several times. “He wants to be a soldier.”

But Strike avoided family get-togethers, partly because he disliked Jack’s father, Greg, and partly because Lucy’s desire to cajole her brother into some more conventional mode of existence was enervating even without the presence of her sons, the eldest of whom Strike found especially like his father. Strike had no desire to have children and while he was prepared to concede that some of them were likable—was prepared to admit, in fact, that he had conceived a certain detached fondness for Jack, on the back of Lucy’s tales of his ambition to join the Red Caps—he had steadfastly resisted birthday parties and Christmas get-togethers at which he might have forged a closer connection.

But now, as dawn crept through the thin curtains blocking Jack’s bed from the rest of the ward, Strike saw for the first time the boy’s resemblance to his grandmother, Strike’s own mother, Leda. He had the same very dark hair, pale skin and finely drawn mouth. He would, in fact, have made a beautiful girl, but Leda’s son knew what puberty was about to do to the boy’s jaw and neck… if he lived.

Course he’s going to bloody live. The nurse said—

He’s in intensive fucking care. They don’t put you in here for hiccups.

He’s tough. Wants to join the military. He’ll be OK.

He’d fucking better be. I never even sent him a text to say thank you for his pictures.

It took Strike a while to drop back into an uneasy doze.

He was woken by early morning sunshine penetrating his eyelids. Squinting against the light, he heard footsteps squeaking on the floor. Next came a loud rattle as the curtain was pulled back, opening Jack’s bed to the ward again and revealing more motionless figures, lying in beds all around them. A new nurse stood beaming at him, younger, with a long dark ponytail.

“Hi!” she said brightly, taking Jack’s clipboard. “It’s not often we get anyone famous in here! I know all about you, I read everything about how you caught that serial—”

“This is my nephew, Jack,” he said coldly. The idea of discussing the Shacklewell Ripper now was repugnant to him. The nurse’s smile faltered.

“Would you mind waiting outside the curtain? We need to take bloods, change his drips and his catheter.”

Strike dragged himself back onto his crutches and made his way laboriously out of the ward again, trying not to focus on any of the other inert figures wired to their own buzzing machines.

The canteen was already half-full when he got there. Unshaven and heavy-eyed, he had slid his tray all the way to the till and paid before he realized he could not carry it and manage his crutches. A young girl clearing tables spotted his predicament and came to help.

“Cheers,” said Strike gruffly, when she had placed the tray on a table beside a window.

“No probs,” said the girl. “Leave it there after, I’ll get it.”

The small kindness made Strike feel disproportionately emotional. Ignoring the fry-up he had just bought, he took out his phone and texted Lucy again.

As he had half-expected, his phone rang as soon as he had cut into his fried egg.

“We’ve got a flight,” Lucy told him without preamble, “but it’s not until eleven.”

“No problem,” he told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Is he awake yet?”

“No, still sedated.”

“He’ll be so chuffed to see you, if he wakes up before—before—”

She burst into tears. Strike could hear her still trying to talk through her sobs.

“… just want to get home… want to see him…”

For the first time in Strike’s life, he was glad to hear Greg, who now took the phone from his wife.

“We’re bloody grateful, Corm. This is our first weekend away together in five years, can you believe it?”

“Sod’s law.”

“Yeah. He said his belly was sore, but I thought he was at it. Thought he didn’t want us to go away. I feel a right bastard now, I can tell you.”

“Don’t worry,” said Strike, and again, “I’m going nowhere.”

After a few more exchanges and a tearful farewell from Lucy, Strike was left to his full English. He ate methodically and without pleasure amid the clatter and jangle of the canteen, surrounded by other miserable and anxious people tucking into fatty, sugar-laden food.

As he was finishing the last of his bacon, a text from Robin arrived.

The Chiswell case seemed a remote thing to Strike just now, but as he read her text he suddenly had a simultaneous craving for nicotine and to hear Robin’s voice. Abandoning his tray with thanks to the kind girl who had helped him to his table, he set off again on his crutches.

A cluster of smokers stood around the entrance to the hospital, hunch-shouldered like hyenas in the clean morning air. Strike lit up, inhaled deeply, and called Robin back.

“Hi,” he said, when she answered. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch, I’ve been at a hospital—”

“What’s happened? Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s my nephew, Jack. His appendix burst yesterday and he—he’s got—”

To Strike’s mortification, his voice cracked. As he fought to conquer himself, he wondered how long it had been since he had cried. Perhaps not since the tears of pain and rage he had shed in the hospital in Germany to which he had been airlifted away from the patch of bloody ground where the IED had ripped off his leg.

“Fuck,” he muttered at last, the only syllable he seemed able to manage.

“Cormoran, what’s happened?”

“He’s—they’ve got him in intensive care,” said Strike, his face crumpled up in the effort to hold himself together, to speak normally. “His mum—Lucy and Greg are stuck in Rome, so they asked me—”

“Who’s with you? Is Lorelei there?”

“Christ, no.”

Lorelei saying “I love you” seemed weeks in the past, though it was only two nights ago.

“What are the doctors saying?”

“They think he’ll be OK, but, you know, he’s—he’s in intensive care. Shit,” croaked Strike, wiping his eyes, “sorry. It’s been a rough night.”

“Which hospital is it?”

He told her. Rather abruptly, she said goodbye and rang off. Strike was left to finish his cigarette, intermittently wiping his face and nose on the sleeve of his shirt.

The quiet ward was bright with sun when he returned. He propped his crutches against the wall, sat down again at Jack’s bedside with the day-old newspaper he had just pilfered from the waiting room and read an article about how Arsenal might soon be losing Robin van Persie to Manchester United.

An hour later, the surgeon and the anesthetist in charge of the ward arrived at the foot of Jack’s bed to inspect him, while Strike listened uneasily to their muttered conversation.

“… haven’t managed to get his oxygen levels below fifty percent… persistent pyrexia… urine outputs have tailed off in the last four hours…”

“… another chest X-ray, check there’s nothing going on in the lungs…”

Frustrated, Strike waited for somebody to throw him digestible information. At last the surgeon turned to speak to him.

“We’ll be keeping him sedated just now. He’s not ready to come off the oxygen and we need to get his fluid balance right.”

“What does that mean? Is he worse?”

“No, it often goes like this. He had a very nasty infection. We had to wash out the peritoneum pretty thoroughly. I’d just like to X-ray the chest as a precaution, make sure we haven’t punctured anything resuscitating him. I’ll pop in to see him again later.”

They walked away to a heavily bandaged teenager covered in even more tubes and lines than Jack, leaving Strike anxious and destabilized in their wake. Through the hours of the night Strike had come to see the machines as essentially friendly, assisting his nephew to recovery. Now they seemed implacable judges holding up numbers indicating that Jack was failing.

“Fuck,” Strike muttered again, shifting the chair nearer to the bed. “Jack… your mum and dad…” He could feel a traitorous prickle behind the eyelids. Two nurses were walking past. “… shit…”

With an almighty effort he controlled himself and cleared his throat.

“… sorry, Jack, your mum wouldn’t like me swearing in your ear… it’s Uncle Cormoran here, by the way, if you didn’t… anyway, Mum and Dad are on their way back, OK? And I’ll be with you until they—”

He stopped mid-sentence. Robin was framed in the distant doorway of the ward. He watched her asking directions from a ward sister, and then she came walking towards him, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her eyes their usual blue-gray and her hair loose, and holding two polystyrene cups.

Seeing Strike’s unguarded expression of happiness and gratitude, Robin felt amply repaid for the bruising argument with Matthew, the two changes of bus and the taxi it had taken to get here. Then the slight prone figure beside Strike came into view.

“Oh no,” she said softly, coming to a halt at the foot of the bed.

“Robin, you didn’t have to—”

“I know I didn’t,” said Robin. She pulled a chair up beside Strike’s. “But I wouldn’t want to have to deal with this alone. Be careful, it’s hot,” she added, passing him a tea.

He took the cup from her, set it down on the bedside cabinet, then reached out and gripped her hand painfully tightly. He had released her before she could squeeze back. Then both sat staring at Jack for a few seconds, until Robin, her fingers throbbing, asked:

“What’s the latest?”

“He still needs the oxygen and he’s not peeing enough,” said Strike. “I don’t know what that means. I’d rather have a score out of ten or—I don’t fucking know. Oh, and they want to X-ray his chest in case they punctured his lungs putting that tube in.”

“When was the operation?”

“Yesterday afternoon. He collapsed doing cross-country at school. Some friend of Greg and Lucy’s who lives right by the school came with him in the ambulance and I met them here.”

Neither spoke for a while, their eyes on Jack.

Then Strike said, “I’ve been a bloody terrible uncle. I don’t know any of their birthdays. I couldn’t have told you how old he was. The dad of his mate’s who brought him in knew more than me. Jack wants to be a soldier, Luce says he talks about me and he draws me pictures and I never even bloody thank him.”

“Well,” said Robin, pretending not to see that Strike was dabbing roughly at his eyes with his sleeve, “you’re here for him right now when he needs you and you’ve got plenty of time to make it up to him.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, blinking rapidly. “You know what I’ll do if he—? I’ll take him to the Imperial War Museum. Day trip.”

“Good idea,” said Robin kindly.

“Have you ever been?”

“No,” said Robin.

“Good museum.”

Two nurses, one male, one the woman whom Strike had earlier snubbed, now approached.

“We need to X-ray him,” said the girl, addressing Robin rather than Strike. “Would you mind waiting outside the ward?”

“How long will you be?” asked Strike.

“Half an hour. Forty minutes-ish.”

So Robin fetched Strike’s crutches and they went to the canteen.

“This is really good of you, Robin,” Strike said over two more pallid teas and some ginger biscuits, “but if you’ve got things to do—”

“I’ll stay until Greg and Lucy come,” said Robin. “It’ll be awful for them, being so far away. Matt’s twenty-seven and his dad was still worried sick when Matt was so ill in the Maldives.”

“Was he?”

“Yeah, you know, when he—oh, of course. I never told you, did I?”

“Told me what?”

“He got a nasty infection on our honeymoon. Scratched himself on some coral. They were talking about airlifting him off to hospital at one point, but it was OK. Wasn’t as bad as they first thought.”

As she said it, she remembered pushing open the wooden door still hot from the daylong sun, her throat constricted with fear as she prepared to tell Matthew she wanted an annulment, little knowing what she was about to face.

“You know, Matt’s mum died not that long ago, so Geoffrey was really scared about Matt… but it was all OK,” Robin repeated, taking a sip of her tepid tea, her eyes on the woman behind the counter, who was ladling baked beans onto a skinny teenager’s plate.

Strike watched her. He had sensed omissions in her story. Blame sea-borne bacteria.

“Must’ve been scary,” he said.

“Well, it wasn’t fun,” said Robin, examining her short, clean fingernails, then checking her watch. “If you want a cigarette we should go now, he’ll be back soon.”

One of the smokers they joined outside was wearing pajamas. He had brought his drip with him, and held it tightly like a shepherd’s crook to keep himself steady. Strike lit up and exhaled towards a clear blue sky.

“I haven’t asked about your anniversary weekend.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t work,” said Robin quickly. “It had been booked and—”

“That’s not why I was asking.”

She hesitated.

“It wasn’t great, to be honest.”

“Ah, well. Sometimes when there’s pressure to have a good time—”

“Yes, exactly,” said Robin.

After another short pause she asked:

“Lorelei’s working today, I suppose?”

“Probably,” said Strike. “What is this, Saturday? Yeah, I suppose so.”

They stood in silence while Strike’s cigarette shrank, millimeter by millimeter, watching visitors and arriving ambulances. There was no awkwardness between them, but the air seemed charged, somehow, with things wondered and unspoken. Finally Strike pressed out the stub of his cigarette in a large open ashtray that most smokers had ignored and checked his phone.

“They boarded twenty minutes ago,” he said, reading Lucy’s last text. “They should be here by three.”

“What happened to your mobile?” asked Robin, looking at the heavily sellotaped screen.

“Fell on it,” said Strike. “I’ll get a new one when Chiswell pays us.”

They passed the X-ray machine being rolled out of the ward as they walked back inside.

“Chest looks fine!” said the radiographer pushing it.

They sat by Jack’s side talking quietly for another hour, until Robin went to buy more tea and chocolate bars from nearby vending machines, which they consumed in the waiting room while Robin filled Strike in about everything she had discovered about Winn’s charity.

“You’ve outdone yourself,” said Strike, halfway down his second Mars bar. “That was excellent work, Robin.”

“You don’t mind that I told Chiswell?”

“No, you had to. We’re up against it time-wise with Mitch Patterson sniffing round. Has this Curtis-Lacey woman accepted the invitation to the reception?”

“I’ll find out on Monday. What about Barclay? How’s he getting on with Jimmy Knight?”

“Still nothing we can use,” Strike sighed, running a hand over the stubble that was rapidly becoming a beard, “but I’m hopeful. He’s good, Barclay. He’s like you. Got an instinct for this stuff.”

A family shuffled into the waiting room, the father sniffing and the mother sobbing. The son, who looked barely older than six, stared at Strike’s missing leg as though it was merely one more horrible detail in the nightmarish world he had suddenly entered. Strike and Robin glanced at each other and left, Robin carrying Strike’s tea as he swung along on his crutches.

Once settled beside Jack again, Strike asked, “How did Chiswell react when you told him everything you’d got on Winn?”

“He was delighted. As a matter of fact, he offered me a job.”

“I’m always surprised that doesn’t happen more often,” said Strike, unperturbed.

Just then, the anesthetist and surgeon converged at the foot of Jack’s bed again.

“Well, things are looking up,” said the anesthetist. “His X-ray’s clear and his temperature’s coming down. That’s the thing with children,” he said, smiling at Robin. “They travel fast in both directions. We’re going to see how he manages with a little less oxygen, but I think we’re getting on top of things.”

“Oh, thank God,” said Robin.

“He’s going to live?” said Strike.

“Oh yes, I think so,” said the surgeon, with a touch of patronage. “We know what we’re doing in here, you know.”

“Gotta let Lucy know,” muttered Strike, trying and failing to get up, feeling weaker at good news than he’d felt at bad. Robin fetched his crutches and helped him into a standing position. As she watched him swinging towards the waiting room, she sat back down, exhaled loudly and put her face briefly into her hands.

“Always worst for the mothers,” said the anesthetist kindly.

She didn’t bother to correct him.

Strike was away for twenty minutes. When he returned, he said:

“They’ve just landed. I’ve warned her how he looks, so they’re prepared. They should be here in about an hour.”

“Great,” said Robin.

“You can head off, Robin. I didn’t mean to balls up your Saturday.”

“Oh,” said Robin, feeling oddly deflated. “OK.”

She stood up, took her jacket off the back of the chair and collected her bag.

“If you’re sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll probably try and get a kip in now we know he’s going to be all right. I’ll walk you out.”

“There’s no need—”

“I want to. I can have another smoke.”

But when they reached the exit, Strike walked on with her, away from the huddled smokers, past the ambulances and the car park that seemed to stretch for miles, roofs glimmering like the backs of marine creatures, surfacing through a dusty haze.

“How did you get here?” he asked, once they were away from the crowds, beside a patch of lawn surrounded by stocks whose scent mingled with the smell of hot tarmac.

“Bus, then cab.”

“Let me give you the cab fare—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Seriously, no.”

“Well… thanks, Robin. It made all the difference.”

She smiled up at him.

“’S’what friends are for.”

Awkwardly, leaning on his crutches, he bent towards her. The hug was brief and she broke away first, afraid that he was going to overbalance. The kiss that he had meant to plant on her cheek landed on her mouth as she turned her face towards him.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Don’t be silly,” she said again, blushing.

“Well, I’d better get back.”

“Yes, of course.”

He turned away.

“Let me know how he is,” she called after him, and he raised one hand in acknowledgment.

Robin walked away without looking back. She could still feel the shape of his mouth on hers, her skin tingling where his stubble had scratched her, but she did not rub the sensation away.

Strike had forgotten that he had meant to have another cigarette. Whether because he was now confident that he would be able to take his nephew to the Imperial War Museum, or for some other reason, his exhaustion was now stippled with a crazy light-heartedness, as though he had just taken a shot of spirits. The dirt and heat of a London afternoon, with the smell of stocks in the air, seemed suddenly full of beauty.

It was a glorious thing, to be given hope, when all had seemed lost.

27

By the time Robin found her way back across London to the unfamiliar cricket ground, it was five in the afternoon and Matthew’s charity match was over. She found him back in his street clothes in the bar, fuming and barely speaking to her. Matthew’s side had lost. The other team was crowing.

Facing an evening of being ignored by her husband, and having no friends among his colleagues, Robin decided against going on to the restaurant with the two teams and their partners, and made her way home alone.

The following morning, she found Matthew fully dressed on the sofa, snoring drunkenly. They argued when he woke up, a row that lasted hours and resolved nothing. Matthew wanted to know why it was Robin’s job to hurry off and hold Strike’s hand, given that he had a girlfriend. Robin maintained that you were a lousy person if you left a friend alone to cope with a possibly dying child.

The row escalated, attaining levels of spite that had never yet been reached in a year of marital bickering. Robin lost her temper, and asked whether she was not owed time off for good behavior, after a decade spent watching Matthew strut around various sports fields. He was genuinely stung.

“Well, if you don’t enjoy it, you should have said!”

“Never occurred to you I might not, did it? Because I’m supposed to see all your victories as mine, aren’t I, Matt? Whereas my achievements—”

“Sorry, remind me what they are again?” Matthew said, a low blow he had never thrown at her before. “Or are we counting his achievements as yours?”

Three days passed, and they had not forgiven each other. Robin had slept in the spare room every night since their row, rising early each morning so she could leave the house before Matthew was out of the shower. She felt a constant ache behind the eyes, an unhappiness which was easier to ignore while at work, but which settled back over her like a patch of low pressure once she turned her footsteps homewards each night. Matthew’s silent anger pressed against the walls of their house, which, while twice the size of any space they had shared before, seemed darker and more cramped.

He was her husband. She had promised to try. Tired, angry, guilty and miserable, Robin felt as though she were waiting for something definitive to happen, something that would release them both with honor, without more filthy rows, with reasonableness. Over and again, her thoughts returned to the wedding day, when she had discovered that Matthew had deleted Strike’s messages. With her whole heart, she regretted not leaving then, before he could scratch himself on coral, before she could be trapped, as she now saw it, by cowardice disguised as compassion.

As Robin approached the House of Commons on Wednesday morning, not yet focused on the day ahead, but pondering her marital problems, a large man in an overcoat peeled away from the railings where he had been mingling with the first tourists of the day and walked towards her. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick silver hair and a squashed, deeply pitted and lined face. Robin did not realize that she was his object until he halted right in front of her, large feet placed firmly at right angles, blocking her onward progress.

“Venetia? Can I have a quick word, love?”

She took a panicked half-step backwards, looking up into the hard, flat face, peppered with wide pores. He had to be press. Did he recognize her? The hazel contact lenses were a little more discernible at close quarters, even through her plain-lensed glasses.

“Just started working for Jasper Chiswell, haven’t you, love? I was wondering how that came about. How much is he paying you? Known him long?”

“No comment,” said Robin, trying to sidestep him. He moved with her. Fighting the rising feeling of panic, Robin said firmly, “Get out of my way. I need to get to work.”

A couple of tall Scandinavian youths with rucksacks were watching the encounter with clear concern.

“I’m only giving you a chance to tell your side of the story, darling,” said her accoster, quietly. “Think about it. Might be your only chance.”

He moved aside. Robin knocked into her would-be rescuers as she pushed past them. Shit, shit, shit… who was he?

Once safely past the security scanner, she moved aside in the echoing stone hall where workers were striding past her and called Strike. He didn’t pick up.

“Call me, please, urgently,” she muttered to his voicemail.

Rather than heading for Izzy’s office, or the wide echoing space of Portcullis House, she took refuge in one of the smaller tearooms, which without its counter and till would have resembled a dons’ common room, paneled in dark wood and carpeted in the ubiquitous forest green. A heavy oak screen divided the room, MPs sitting at the far end, away from the lesser employees. She bought a cup of coffee, took a table beside the window, hung her coat on the back of her chair and waited for Strike to call her. The quiet, sedate space did little to calm Robin’s nerves.

It was nearly three-quarters of an hour before Strike phoned.

“Sorry, missed you, I was on the Tube,” he said, panting. “Then Chiswell called. He’s only just rung off. We’ve got trouble.”

“Oh God, what now?” said Robin, setting her coffee down as her stomach contracted in panic.

“The Sun think you’re the story.”

And at once, Robin knew whom she had just met outside the Houses of Parliament: Mitch Patterson, the private detective the newspaper had hired.

“They’ve been digging for anything new in Chiswell’s life, and there you are, good-looking new woman in his office, of course they’re going to check you out. Chiswell’s first marriage split up because he had an affair at work. Thing is, it isn’t going to take them long to find out you aren’t really his goddaughter. Ouch—fuck—”

“What’s the matter?”

“First day back on two legs and Dodgy Doc’s finally decided to go and meet a girl on the sly. Chelsea Physic Garden, Tube to Sloane Square and a bugger of a walk. Anyway,” he panted, “what’s your bad news?”

“It’s more of the same,” said Robin. “Mitch Patterson just accosted me outside Parliament.”

“Shit. D’you think he recognized you?”

“He didn’t seem to, but I don’t know. I should clear out, shouldn’t I?” said Robin, contemplating the cream ceiling, which was stuccoed in a pattern of overlapping circles. “We could put someone else in here. Andy, or Barclay?”

“Not yet,” said Strike. “If you walk out the moment you meet Mitch Patterson, it’ll look like you’re the story for sure. Anyway, Chiswell wants you to go to this reception tomorrow night, to try and get the rest of the dirt on Winn from that other trustee—what was her name, Elspeth? Bollocks—sorry—having trouble here, it’s a bloody woodchip path. Dodgy’s taking the girl for a walk into the undergrowth. She looks about seventeen.”

“Don’t you need your phone, to take photographs?”

“I’m wearing those glasses with the inbuilt camera… oh, here we go,” he added quietly. “Dodgy’s copping a feel in some bushes.”

Robin waited. She could hear a very faint clicking.

“And here come some genuine horticulturalists,” Strike muttered. “That’s driven them back out into the open…

“Listen,” he continued, “meet me at the office tomorrow after work, before you go to that reception. We’ll take stock of everything we’ve got so far and make a decision on what to do next. Try your best to get the second listening device back, but don’t replace it, just in case we need to take you out of there.”

“All right,” said Robin, full of foreboding, “but it’s going to be difficult. I’m sure Aamir is suspic—Cormoran, I’m going to have to go.”

Izzy and Raphael had just walked into the tearoom. Raphael had his arm around his half-sister, who, Robin saw at once, was distressed to the point of tears. He saw Robin, who hastily hung up on Strike, made a grimace indicating that Izzy was in a bad way, then muttered something to his sister, who nodded and headed towards Robin’s table, leaving Raphael to buy drinks.

“Izzy!” said Robin, pulling out a chair for her. “Are you all right?”

As Izzy sat down, tears leaked out of her eyes. Robin passed her a paper napkin.

“Thanks, Venetia,” she said huskily. “I’m so sorry. Making a fuss. Silly.”

She took a deep shuddering breath and sat upright, with the posture of a girl who had been told for years to sit up straight and pull herself together.

“Just silly,” she repeated, tears welling again.

“Dad’s just been a total bastard to her,” said Raphael, arriving with a tray.

“Don’t say that, Raff,” hiccuped Izzy, another tear trickling down her nose. “I know he didn’t mean it. He was upset when I arrived and then I made it worse. Did you know he’s lost Freddie’s gold money clip?”

“No,” said Raphael, without much interest.

“He thinks he left it at some hotel on Kinvara’s birthday. They’d just called him back when I arrived. They haven’t got it. You know what Papa’s like about Freddie, even now.”

An odd look passed over Raphael’s face, as though he had been struck by an unpleasant thought.

“And then,” said Izzy, shakily, “I’d misdated a letter and he flew off the handle…”

Izzy twisted the damp napkin between her hands.

“Five years,” she burst out. “Five years I’ve worked for him, and I can count on one hand how many times he’s thanked me for anything. When I told him I was thinking of leaving he said ‘not till after the Olympics,’” her voice quavered, “‘because I don’t want to have to break in someone new before then.’”

Raphael swore under his breath.

“Oh, but he’s not that bad, really,” said Izzy quickly, in an almost comical volte-face. Robin knew that she had just remembered her hope that Raphael would take over her job. “I’m just upset, making it sound worse than it—”

Her mobile rang. She read the caller’s name and let out a moan.

“Not TTS, not now, I can’t. Raff, you speak to her.”

She held out the mobile to him, but Raphael recoiled as though asked to hold a tarantula.

“Please, Raff—please… ”

With extreme reluctance, Raphael took the phone.

“Hi, Kinvara. Raff here, Izzy’s out of the office. No… Venetia’s not here… no… I’m at the office, obviously, I just picked up Izzy’s phone… He’s just gone to the Olympic Park. No… no, I’m not… I don’t know where Venetia is, all I know is, she’s not here… yes… yes… OK… bye, then—” He raised his eyebrows. “Hung up.”

He pushed the phone back across the table to Izzy, who asked:

“Why’s she so interested in where Venetia is?”

“Three guesses,” said Raphael, amused. Catching his drift, Robin looked out of the window, feeling the color rising in her face. She wondered whether Mitch Patterson had called Kinvara, and planted this idea in her head.

“Oh, come orf it,” said Izzy. “She thinks Papa’s…? Venetia’s young enough to be his daughter!”

“In case you haven’t noticed, so’s his wife,” said Raphael, “and you know what she’s like. The further down the tubes their marriage goes, the more jealous she gets. Dad’s not picking up his phone to her, so she’s drawing paranoid conclusions.”

“Papa doesn’t pick up because she drives him crazy,” said Izzy, her resentment towards her father suddenly submerged by dislike for her stepmother. “For the last two years she’s refused to budge from home or leave her bloody horses. Suddenly the Olympics are nearly here and London’s full of celebrities and all she wants to do is come up to town, dressed up to the nines and play the minister’s wife.”

She took another deep breath, blotted her face again, then stood up.

“I’d better get back, we’re so busy. Thanks, Raff,” she said, cuffing him lightly on the shoulder.

She walked away. Raphael watched her go, then turned back to Robin.

“Izzy was the only one who bothered to visit me when I was inside, you know.”

“Yes,” said Robin. “She said.”

“And when I used to have to go to bloody Chiswell House as a kid, she was the only one who’d talk to me. I was the little bastard who’d broken up their family, so they all hated my guts, but Izzy used to let me help her groom her pony.”

He swilled the coffee in his cup, looking sullen.

“I suppose you were in love with swashbuckling Freddie, were you, like all the other girls? He hated me. Used to call me ‘Raphaela’ and pretend Dad had told the family I was another girl.”

“How horrible,” said Robin, and Raphael’s scowl turned into a reluctant smile.

“You’re so sweet.”

He seemed to be debating with himself whether or not to say something. Suddenly he asked:

“Ever meet Jack o’Kent when you were visiting?”

“Who?”

“Old boy who used to work for Dad. Lived in the grounds of Chiswell House. Scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. He had a kind of sunken face and mad eyes and he used to loom out of nowhere when I was in the gardens. He never said a word except to swear at me if I got in his way.”

“I… vaguely remember someone like that,” lied Robin.

“Jack o’Kent was Dad’s nickname for him. Who was Jack o’Kent? Didn’t he have something to do with the devil? Anyway, I used to have literal nightmares about the old boy. One time he caught me trying to get into a barn and gave me hell. He put his face up close to mine and said words to the effect of, I wouldn’t like what I saw in there, or it was dangerous for little boys, or… I can’t remember exactly. I was only a kid.”

“That sounds scary,” Robin agreed, her interest awakened now. “What was he doing in there, did you ever find out?”

“Probably just storing farm machinery,” said Raphael, “but he made it sound like he was conducting Satanic rituals.

“He was a good carpenter, mind you. He made Freddie’s coffin. An English oak had come down… Dad wanted Freddie buried in wood from the estate…”

Again, he seemed to be wondering whether he ought to say what was on his mind. He scrutinized her through his dark lashes and finally said:

“Does Dad seem… well, normal to you at the moment?”

“What d’you mean?”

“You don’t think he’s acting a bit strangely? Why’s he bawling Izzy out for nothing?”

“Pressure of work?” suggested Robin.

“Yeah… maybe,” said Raphael. Then, frowning, he said, “He phoned me the other night, which is strange in itself, because he can’t normally stand the sight of me. Just to talk, he said, and that’s never happened before. Mind you, he’d had a few too many, I could tell as soon as he spoke.

“Anyway, he started rambling on about Jack o’Kent. I couldn’t make out what he was going on about. He mentioned Freddie dying, and Kinvara’s baby dying and then,” Raphael leaned in closer. Robin felt his knees touch hers under the table, “remember that phone call we got, my first day here? That bloody creepy message about people pissing themselves as they die?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“He said, ‘It’s all punishment. That was Jack o’Kent calling. He’s coming for me.’”

Robin stared at him.

“But whoever it was on the phone,” said Raphael, “it can’t have been Jack o’Kent. He died years ago.”

Robin said nothing. She had suddenly remembered Matthew’s delirium, the depth of that subtropical night, when he had thought she was his dead mother. Raphael’s knees seemed to press harder into hers. She moved her chair back slightly.

“I was awake half the night wondering whether he’s cracking up. We can’t afford to have Dad go bonkers as well, can we? We’ve already got Kinvara hallucinating horse slashers and gravediggers—”

“Gravediggers?” repeated Robin sharply.

“Did I say gravediggers?” said Raphael restlessly. “Well, you know what I mean. Men with spades in the woods.”

“You think she’s imagining them?” asked Robin.

“No idea. Izzy and the rest of them think she is, but then they’ve treated her like a hysteric ever since she lost that kid. She had to go through labor even though they knew it had died, did you know that? She wasn’t right afterwards, but when you’re a Chiswell you’re supposed to suck that sort of thing up. Put on a hat and go open a fête or something.”

He seemed to read Robin’s thoughts in her face, because he said:

“Did you expect me to hate her, just because the others do? She’s a pain in the arse, and she thinks I’m a total waste of space, but I don’t spend my life mentally subtracting everything she spends on her horses from my niece and nephews’ inheritance. She’s not a gold-digger, whatever Izzy and Fizzy think,” he said, laying arch emphasis on his other sister’s nickname. “They thought my mother was a gold-digger, too. It’s the only motivation they understand. I’m not supposed to know they’ve got cozy Chiswell family nicknames for me and my mother, as well…” His dark skin flushed. “Unlikely as it might seem, Kinvara genuinely fell for Dad, I could tell. She could have done a damn sight better if it was money she was after. He’s skint.”

Robin, whose definition of “skint” did not comprise owning a large house in Oxfordshire, nine horses, a mews flat in London or the heavy diamond necklace she had seen around Kinvara’s neck in photographs, maintained an impassive expression.

“Have you been to Chiswell House lately?”

“Not lately,” said Robin.

“It’s falling apart. Everything’s moth-eaten and miserable.”

“The one time I really remember being at Chiswell House, the grown-ups were talking about a little girl who’d disappeared.”

“Really?” said Raphael, surprised.

“Yes, I can’t remember her name. I was young myself. Susan? Suki? Something like that.”

“Doesn’t ring any bells,” said Raphael. His knees brushed hers again. “Tell me, does everyone confide their dark family secrets to you after five minutes of knowing you, or is it just me?”

“Tim always says I look sympathetic,” said Robin. “Perhaps I should forget politics and go into counseling.”

“Yeah, maybe you should,” he said, looking into her eyes. “That isn’t a very strong prescription. Why bother with glasses? Why not just wear contacts?”

“Oh, I… find these more comfortable,” said Robin, pushing the glasses back up her nose and gathering her things. “You know, I really ought to get going.”

Raphael leaned back in his chair with a rueful smile.

“Message received… he’s a lucky man, your Tim. Tell him so, from me.”

Robin gave a half-laugh and stood up, catching herself on the corner of the table as she did so. Self-conscious and slightly flustered, she walked out of the tearoom.

Making her way back to Izzy’s office, she mulled over the Minister for Culture’s behavior. Explosions of bad temper and paranoid ramblings were not, she thought, surprising in a man currently at the mercy of two blackmailers, but Chiswell’s suggestion that a dead man had telephoned him was undeniably odd. He had not struck her on either of their two encounters as the kind of man who would believe in either ghosts or divine retribution, but then, Robin reflected, drink brought out strange things in people… and suddenly, she remembered Matthew’s snarling face as he had shouted across the sitting room on Sunday.

She was almost level with Winn’s office door when she registered the fact that it was standing ajar again. Robin peered into the room beyond. It seemed to be empty. She knocked twice. Nobody answered.

It took her less than five seconds to reach the power socket beneath Geraint’s desk. Unplugging the fan, she prized the recording device loose and had just opened her handbag when Aamir’s voice said:

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Robin gasped, attempted to stand up, hit her head hard on the desk and yelped in pain. Aamir had just unfolded himself from an armchair angled away from the door, was taking headphones from his ears. He seemed to have been taking a few minutes for himself, while listening to an iPod.

“I knocked!” Robin said, her eyes watering as she rubbed the top of her head. The recording device was still in her hand and she hid it behind her back. “I didn’t think anyone was in here!”

“What,” he repeated, advancing on her, “are you doing?”

Before she could answer, the door was pushed fully open. Geraint walked in.

There was no lipless grin this morning, no air of bustling self-importance, no ribald comment at finding Robin on the floor of his office. Winn seemed somehow smaller than usual, with purplish shadows beneath the lens-shrunken eyes. In perplexity he turned from Robin to Aamir, and as Aamir began to tell him that Robin had just walked in uninvited, the latter managed to stuff the recording device into her handbag.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, getting to her feet, sweating profusely. Panic lapped at the edges of her thought, but then an idea bobbed up like a life raft. “I really am. I was going to leave a note. I was only going to borrow it.”

As the two men frowned at her, she gestured to the unplugged fan.

“Ours is broken. Our room’s like an oven. I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said, appealing to Geraint. “I was just going to borrow it for thirty minutes.” She smiled piteously. “Honestly, I felt faint earlier.”

She plucked the front of her shirt away from her skin, which was indeed clammy. His gaze fell to her chest and the usual lecherous grin resurfaced.

“Though I shouldn’t say so, overheating rather suits you,” said Winn, with the ghost of a smirk, and Robin forced a giggle.

“Well, well, we can spare it for thirty minutes, can’t we?” he said, turning to Aamir. The latter said nothing, but stood ramrod straight, staring at Robin with undisguised suspicion. Geraint lifted the fan carefully off the desk and passed it to Robin. As she turned to go, he patted her lightly on the lower back.

“Enjoy.”

“Oh, I will,” she said, her flesh crawling. “Thank you so much, Mr. Winn.”

28

The long hike to and around Chelsea Physic Garden the previous day had not benefited Strike’s hamstring injury. As his stomach was playing up from a constant diet of Ibuprofen, he had eschewed painkillers for the past twenty-four hours, with the result that he was in what his doctors liked to describe as “some discomfort” as he sat with his one and a half legs up on the office sofa on Thursday afternoon, his prosthesis leaning against the wall nearby while he reviewed the Chiswell file.

Silhouetted like a headless watchman against the window of his inner office was Strike’s best suit, plus a shirt and tie, which hung from the curtain rail, shoes and clean socks sitting below the limp trouser legs. He was going out to dinner with Lorelei tonight and had organized himself so that he need not climb the stairs to his attic flat again before bed.

Lorelei had been typically understanding about his lack of communication during Jack’s hospitalization, saying with only the slightest edge to her voice that it must have been a horrible thing to go through on his own. Strike had too much sense to tell her that Robin had been there, too. Lorelei had then requested, sweetly and without rancor, dinner, “to talk a few things through.”

They had been dating for just over ten months and she had just nursed him through five days of incapacity. Strike felt that it was neither fair, nor decent, to ask her to say what she had to say over the phone. Like the hanging suit, the prospect of having to find an answer to the inevitable question “where do you see this relationship going?” loomed ominously on the periphery of Strike’s consciousness.

Dominating his thoughts, however, was what he saw as the perilous state of the Chiswell case, for which he had so far seen not a penny in payment, but which was costing him a significant outlay in salaries and expenses. Robin might have succeeded in neutralizing the immediate threat of Geraint Winn, but after a promising start Barclay had nothing whatsoever to use against Chiswell’s first blackmailer, and Strike foresaw disastrous consequences should the Sun newspaper find its way to Jimmy Knight. Balked of the mysterious photographs at the Foreign Office that Winn had promised him, and notwithstanding Chiswell’s assertion that Jimmy would not want the story in the press, Strike thought an angry and frustrated Jimmy was overwhelmingly likely to try and profit from a chance that seemed to be slipping through his fingers. His history of litigation told its own story: Jimmy was a man prone to cutting off his own nose to spite his face.

To compound Strike’s bad mood, after several straight days and nights hanging out with Jimmy and his mates, Barclay had told Strike that unless he went home soon, his wife would be initiating divorce proceedings. Strike, who owed Barclay expenses, had told him to come into the office for a check, after which he could take a couple of days off. To his extreme annoyance, the normally reliable Hutchins had then caviled at having to take over the tailing of Jimmy Knight at short notice, rather than hanging around Harley Street, where Dodgy Doc was once again consulting patients.

“What’s the problem?” Strike had asked roughly, his stump throbbing. Much as he liked Hutchins, he had not forgotten that the ex-policeman had recently taken time off for a family holiday and to drive his wife to hospital when she broke her wrist. “I’m asking you to switch targets, that’s all. I can’t follow Knight, he knows me.”

“Yeah, all right, I’ll do it.”

“Decent of you,” Strike had said, angrily. “Thanks.”

The sound of Robin and Barclay climbing the metal stairs to the office at half past five made a welcome distraction from Strike’s increasingly dark mood.

“Hi,” said Robin, walking into the office with a holdall over her shoulder. Answering Strike’s questioning look, she explained, “Outfit for the Paralympic reception. I’ll change in the loo, I won’t have time to go home.”

Barclay followed Robin into the room and closed the door.

“We met downstairs,” he told Strike cheerfully. “Firs’ time.”

“Sam was just telling me how much dope he’s had to smoke to keep in with Jimmy,” said Robin, laughing.

“I’ve no been inhalin’,” said Barclay, deadpan. “That’d be remiss, on a job.”

The fact that the pair of them seemed to have hit it off was perversely annoying to Strike, who was now making heavy weather of hoisting himself off the fake leather cushions, which made their usual farting noises.

“It’s the sofa,” he snapped at Barclay, who had looked around, grinning. “I’ll get your money.”

“Stay there, I’ll do it,” Robin said, setting down her holdall and reaching for the checkbook in the lower drawer of the desk, which she handed to Strike, with a pen. “Want some tea, Cormoran? Sam?”

“Aye, go on, then,” said Barclay.

“You’re both bloody cheerful,” said Strike sourly, writing Barclay his check, “considering we’re about to lose the job that’s keeping us all in employment. Unless either of you have got information I don’t know about, of course.”

“Only excitin’ thing tae happen in Knightville this week was Flick havin’ a big bust up wi’ one o’ her flatmates,” said Barclay. “Lassie called Laura. She reckoned Jimmy had stolen a credit card out o’ her handbag.”

“Had he?” asked Strike sharply.

“I’d say it was more likely to be Flick herself. Told ye she was boastin’ about helpin’ herself to cash from her work, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“It all kicked off in the pub. The girl, Laura, was scunnered. She and Flick got intae a row about who was more middle class.”

In spite of the pain he was in, and his grumpy mood, Strike grinned.

“Aye, it got nasty. Ponies and foreign holidays dragged in. Then this Laura said she reckoned Jimmy nicked her new credit card off her, months back. Jimmy got aggressive, said that was slander—”

“Shame he’s banned, or he could’ve sued her,” said Strike, ripping out the check.

“—and Laura ran off intae the night, bawlin’. She’s left the flat.”

“Got a surname for her?”

“I’ll try and find out.”

“What’s Flick’s background, Barclay?” asked Strike as Barclay put his check into his wallet.

“Well, she told me she dropped out o’ uni,” said Barclay. “Failed her first-year exams and gave up.”

“Some of the best people drop out,” said Robin, carrying two mugs of tea over. She and Strike had both left their degree courses without a qualification.

“Cheers,” said Barclay, accepting a mug from Robin. “Her parents are divorced,” he went on, “and she’s no speaking tae either of them. They don’t like Jimmy. Cannae blame them. If my daughter ever hooks up wi’ a bawbag like Knight, I’ll know what tae do about it. When she’s not around, he tells the lads what he gets up to wi’ young girls. They all think they’re shaggin’ a great revolutionary, doin’ it for the cause. Flick doesnae know the half o’ what he’s up tae.”

“Any of them underage? His wife suggested he’s got form there. That’d be a bargaining chip.”

“All over sixteen so far’s I know.”

“Pity,” said Strike. He caught Robin’s eye, as she returned to them holding her own tea. “You know what I mean.” He turned to Barclay again. “From what I heard on that march, she’s not so monogamous herself.”

“Aye, one o’ her pals made a gag about an Indian waiter.”

“A waiter? I heard a student.”

“No reason it couldn’ta been both,” said Barclay. “I’d say she’s a—”

But catching Robin’s eye, Barclay decided against saying the word, and instead drank his tea.

“Anything new your end?” Strike asked Robin.

“Yes. I got the second listening device back.”

“You’re kidding,” said Strike, sitting up straighter.

“I’ve only just finished transcribing it all, there was hours of stuff on there. Most of it’s useless, but…”

She set down her tea, unzipped the holdall and took out the recording device.

“… there’s one strange bit. Listen to this.”

Barclay sat down on the arm of the sofa. Robin straightened up in her desk chair and flicked the switch on the device.

Geraint’s lilting accent filled the office.

“… keep them sweet, make sure I introduce Elspeth to Prince Harry,” said Geraint. “Right, that’s me off, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“G’night,” said Aamir.

Robin shook her head at Strike and Barclay and mouthed, “Wait.”

They heard the door close. After the usual thirty-second silence, there was a click, where the tape had stopped then restarted. A deep, Welsh female voice spoke.

“Are you there, sweetheart?”

Strike raised his eyebrows. Barclay stopped chewing.

“Yes,” said Aamir, in his flat London accent.

“Come and give me a kiss,” said Della.

Barclay made a small choking noise into his tea. The sound of lips smacking emanated from the bug. Feet shuffled. A chair was moved. There was a faint, rhythmic thudding.

“What’s that?” muttered Strike.

“The guide dog’s tail wagging,” said Robin.

“Let me hold your hand,” said Della. “Geraint won’t be back, don’t worry, I’ve sent him out to Chiswick. There. Thank you. Now, I needed a little private word with you. The thing is, darling, your neighbors have complained. They say they’ve been hearing funny noises through the walls.”

“Like what?” He sounded apprehensive.

“Well, they thought they might be animal,” said Della. “A dog whining or whimpering. You haven’t—?”

“Of course I haven’t,” said Aamir. “It must’ve been the telly. Why would I get a dog? I’m at work all day.”

“I thought it would be like you to bring home some poor little stray,” she said. “Your soft heart…”

“Well, I haven’t,” said Aamir. He sounded tense. “You don’t have to take my word for it. You can go and check if you want, you’ve got a key.”

“Darling, don’t be like that,” said Della. “I wouldn’t dream of letting myself in without your permission. I don’t snoop.”

“You’re within your rights,” he said, and Strike thought he sounded bitter. “It’s your house.”

“You’re upset. I knew you would be. I had to mention it, because if Geraint picks up the phone to them next time—it was the purest good luck the neighbor caught me—”

“I’ll make sure and keep the volume down from now on,” said Aamir. “OK? I’ll be careful.”

“You understand, my love, that as far as I’m concerned, you’re free to do whatever—”

“Look, I’ve been thinking,” Aamir interrupted. “I really think I should be paying you some rent. What if—”

“We’ve been over this. Don’t be silly, I don’t want your money.”

“But—”

“Apart from everything else,” she said, “you couldn’t afford it. A three-bedroomed house, on your own?”

“But—”

“We’ve been through this. You seemed happy when you first moved in… I thought you liked it—”

“Obviously, I like it. It was very generous of you,” he said stiffly.

“Generous… it’s not a question of generosity, for heaven’s sake… Now, listen: how would you like to come and have a curry? I’ve got a late vote and I was going to nip over to the Kennington Tandoori. My treat.”

“Sorry, I can’t,” said Aamir. He sounded stressed. “I’ve got to get home.”

“Oh,” said Della, with a great deal less warmth. “Oh… that’s disappointing. What a pity.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I said I’d meet a friend. University friend.”

“Ah. I see. Well, next time, I’ll make sure to call ahead. Find a slot in your diary.”

“Della, I—”

“Don’t be silly, I’m only teasing. You can walk out with me, at least?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

There was more scuffling, then the sound of the door opening. Robin turned off the tape.

“They’re shaggin’?” said Barclay loudly.

“Not necessarily,” said Robin. “The kiss might’ve been on the cheek.”

“‘Let me hold your hand’?” repeated Barclay. “Since when’s that normal office procedure?”

“How old’s this Aamir bloke?” asked Strike.

“I’d guess mid-twenties,” said Robin.

“And she’s, what…?”

“Mid-sixties,” said Robin.

“And she’s provided him with a house. He’s not related to her, is he?”

“There’s no family connection as far as I’m aware,” said Robin. “But Jasper Chiswell knows something personal about him. He quoted a Latin poem at Aamir when they met in our office.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“Sorry,” said Robin, remembering that this had happened shortly before she had refused to tail Jimmy on the march. “I forgot. Yes, Chiswell quoted something Latin, then mentioned ‘a man of your habits.’”

“What was the poem?”

“I don’t know, I never did Latin.”

She checked her watch.

“I’d better get changed, I’m supposed to be at DCMS in forty minutes.”

“Aye, that’s me off as well, Strike,” said Barclay.

“Two days, Barclay,” Strike said, as the other headed to the door, “then you’re back on Knight.”

“Nae bother,” said Barclay, “I’ll be wantin’ a break from the wean by then.”

“I like him,” said Robin, as Barclay’s footsteps died away down the metal stairs.

“Yeah,” grunted Strike, as he reached for his prosthesis. “He’s all right.”

He and Lorelei were meeting early, at his request. It was time to begin the onerous process of making himself presentable. Robin retired to the cramped toilet on the landing to change, and Strike, having put his prosthesis back on, withdrew to the inner office.

He had got as far as pulling on his suit trousers when his mobile rang. Half-hoping that it was Lorelei to say that she could not make dinner, he picked up the cracked phone and saw, with an inexplicable sense of foreboding, that it was Hutchins.

“Strike?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Strike… I’ve fucked up.”

Hutchins sounded weak.

“What’s happened?”

“Knight’s with some mates. I followed them into a pub. They’re planning something. He’s got a placard with Chiswell’s face on it—”

“And?” said Strike loudly.

“Strike, I’m sorry… my balance has gone… I’ve lost them.”

“You stupid fucker!” roared Strike, losing his temper completely. “Why didn’t you tell me you were ill?”

“I’ve had a lot of time off lately… knew you were stretched…”

Strike switched Hutchins to speakerphone, laid his mobile onto his desk, took his shirt off the hanger and began to dress as fast as possible.

“Mate, I’m so sorry… I’m having trouble walking…”

“I know the fucking feeling!”

Fuming, Strike stabbed off the call.

“Cormoran?” Robin called through the door. “Everything OK?”

“No, it’s fucking not!”

He opened the office door.

In one part of his brain, he registered that Robin was wearing the green dress he had bought her two years ago, as a thank you for helping him catch their first killer. She looked stunning.

“Knight’s got a placard with Chiswell’s face on it. He’s planning something with a bunch of mates. I knew it, I fucking knew this would happen now Winn’s bailed on him… I’ll bet you anything he’s heading for your reception. Shit,” said Strike, realizing he didn’t have shoes on and doubling back. “And Hutchins has lost them,” he shouted over his shoulder. “The stupid tit didn’t tell me he’s ill.”

“Maybe you can get Barclay back?” suggested Robin.

“He’ll be on the Tube by now. I’m going to have to fucking do it, aren’t I?” said Strike. He dropped back into the sofa and slid his feet into his shoes. “There are going to be press all round that place tonight if Harry’s going to be there. All it needs is for a journo to twig what Jimmy’s stupid fucking sign means, and Chiswell’s out of a job and so’re we.” He heaved himself back to his feet. “Where is this thing, tonight?”

“Lancaster House,” said Robin. “Stable Yard.”

“Right,” said Strike, heading for the door. “Stand by. You might have to bail me out. There’s a good chance I’m going to have to punch him.”

29

The taxi that Strike had picked up in Charing Cross Road turned into St. James’s Street twenty minutes later, while he was still talking to the Minister for Culture on his mobile.

“A placard? What’s on it?”

“Your face,” said Strike. “That’s all I know.”

“And he’s heading for the reception? Well, this is bloody it, isn’t it?” shouted Chiswell, so loudly that Strike winced and removed the phone from his ear. “If the press see this, it’s all over! You were supposed to stop something like this bloody happening!”

“And I’m going to try,” said Strike, “but in your shoes I’d want to be forewarned. I’d advise—”

“I don’t pay you for advice!”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” promised Strike, but Chiswell had already hung up.

“I’m not going to be able to go any further, mate,” said the taxi driver, addressing Strike in the rearview mirror from which dangled a swinging mobile, outlined in tufts of multi-colored cotton and embossed with a golden Ganesh. The end of St. James’s Street had been blocked off. A swelling crowd of royal watchers and Olympics fans, many clutching small Union Jacks, was congregating behind portable barriers, waiting for the arrival of Paralympians and Prince Harry.

“OK, I’ll get out here,” said Strike, fumbling for his wallet.

He was once again facing the crenellated frontage of St. James’s Palace, its gilded, diamond-shaped clock gleaming in the early evening sun. Strike limped down the slope again towards the crowd, passing the side street where Pratt’s stood, while smartly dressed passersby, workers and customers of galleries and wine merchants moved aside courteously as his uneven gait became progressively more pronounced.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he muttered, pain shooting up into his groin every time he put his weight onto the prosthesis as he drew closer to the assembled sports fans and royal watchers. He could see no placards or banners of a political nature, but as he joined the back of the crowd and looked down Cleveland Row, he spotted a press pen and ranks of photographers, which stood waiting for the prince and famous athletes. It was only when a car slid past, containing a glossy-haired brunette Strike vaguely recognized from the television, that he remembered he had not called Lorelei to tell her he would be late to dinner. He hastily dialed her number.

“Hi, Corm.”

She sounded apprehensive. He guessed that she thought he was going to cancel.

“Hi,” he said, his eyes still darting around for some sign of Jimmy. “I’m really sorry, but something’s come up. I might be late.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” she said, and he could tell that she was relieved that he was still intending to come. “Shall I try and change the booking?”

“Yeah—maybe make it eight instead of seven?”

Turning for the third time to scan Pall Mall behind him, Strike spotted Flick’s tomato-red hair. Eight CORE members were heading for the crowd, including a stringy, blond-dreadlocked youth and a short, thickset man who resembled a bouncer. Flick was the only woman. All bar Jimmy were holding placards with the broken Olympic rings on them, and slogans such as “Fair Play Is Fair Pay” and “Homes Not Bombs.” Jimmy was holding his own placard upside down, the picture on it turned inwards, parallel with his leg.

“Lorelei, I’ve got to go. Speak later.”

Uniformed police were walking around the perimeter fencing keeping the crowds back, walkie-talkies in hand, eyes roving constantly over the cheerful spectators. They, too, had spotted CORE, who were trying to reach a spot opposite the press pen.

Gritting his teeth, Strike began to forge a path through the pressing crowd, eyes on Jimmy.

30

Slightly self-conscious in her clinging green dress and heels, Robin attracted a considerable number of appreciative glances from male passersby as she climbed out of her taxi at the entrance to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. As she reached the doorway, she saw approaching from fifty yards away Izzy, who was wearing bright orange, and Kinvara, in what appeared to be the slinky black dress and heavy diamond necklace that she had worn in the photograph that Robin had seen of her online.

Acutely anxious about what was happening with Jimmy and Strike, Robin nevertheless registered that Kinvara appeared to be upset. Izzy rolled her eyes at Robin as they approached. Kinvara gave Robin a pointed up-and-down look that suggested she found the green dress inappropriate, if not indecent.

“We were supposed,” said a booming male voice in Robin’s near vicinity, “to be meeting here.”

Jasper Chiswell had just emerged from the building, carrying three engraved invitations, one of which he held out to Robin.

“Yes, I know that now, Jasper, thank you,” said Kinvara, puffing slightly as she approached. “Very sorry for getting it wrong again. Nobody bothered to check I knew what the arrangements were.”

Passersby stared at Chiswell, finding him vaguely familiar with his chimney-brush hair. Robin saw a suited man nudge his companion and point. A sleek black Mercedes drew up at the curb. The chauffeur got out; Kinvara walked around the back of the car to sit behind him. Izzy wriggled over into the middle of the back seat, leaving Robin to take the back seat directly behind Chiswell.

The car pulled away from the curb, the atmosphere inside unpleasant. Robin turned her head to watch the after-work drinkers and evening shoppers, wondering whether Strike had found Knight yet, scared of what might happen when he did, and wishing she could spirit the car directly to Lancaster House.

“You haven’t invited Raphael, then?” Kinvara shot at the back of her husband’s head.

“No,” said Chiswell. “He angled for an invitation, but that will be because he’s smitten with Venetia.”

Robin felt her face flood with color.

“Venetia seems to have quite the fan base,” said Kinvara tersely.

“Going to have a little chat with Raphael tomorrow,” said Chiswell. “I’m seeing him rather differently these days, I don’t mind telling you.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw Kinvara’s hands twist around the chain on her ugly evening bag, which sported a horse’s head picked out in crystals. A tense silence settled over the car’s interior as it purred on through the warm city.

31

Adrenaline made it easier for Strike to block out the mounting pain in his leg. He was closing on Jimmy and his companions, who were being thwarted in their desire to show themselves clearly to the press, because the excitable crowd had pressed forwards as the first official cars began to glide past, hoping to spot some celebrities. Late to the party, CORE now found themselves faced by an impenetrable mass.

Mercedes and Bentleys swished past, affording the crowd glimpses of the famous and the not-so-famous. A comedian got a loud cheer as he waved. A few flashes went off.

Clearly deciding that he could not hope for a more prominent spot, Jimmy began to drag his homemade banner out of the tangle of legs around him, preparatory to hoisting it aloft.

A woman ahead of Strike gave a shriek of indignation as he pushed her out of the way. In three strides, Strike had closed his large left hand around Jimmy’s right wrist, preventing him from raising the placard above waist height, forcing it back towards the ground. Strike had time to see the recognition in his eyes before Jimmy’s fist came hurtling at his throat. A second woman saw the punch coming and screamed.

Strike dodged it and brought his left foot down hard on the placard, splintering the pole, but his amputated leg was not equal to bearing all his weight, especially as Jimmy’s second punch connected. As Strike crumpled, he hit Jimmy in the balls. Knight gave a soft scream of pain, doubled up, hit the falling Strike and both of them toppled over, knocking bystanders sideways, all of whom shouted their indignation. As Strike hit the pavement, one of Jimmy’s companions aimed a kick at his head. Strike caught his foot and twisted it. Through the mounting furore, he heard a third woman shriek:

“They’re attacking that man!”

Strike was too intent on seizing hold of Jimmy’s mangled cardboard banner to care whether he was being cast as victim or aggressor. Tugging on the banner, which like himself was being trampled underfoot, he succeeded in ripping it. One of the pieces attached to the spike heel of a panicking woman trying to get out of the way of the fight, and was carried away.

Fingers closed around his neck from behind. He aimed an elbow at Jimmy’s face and his hold loosened, but then somebody kicked Strike in the stomach and another blow hit him on the back of the head. Red spots popped in front of his eyes.

More shouting, a whistle, and the crowd was suddenly thinning around them. Strike could taste blood, but, from what he could see, the splintered and torn remnants of Jimmy’s placard had been scattered by the mêlée. Jimmy’s hands were again scrabbling at Strike’s neck, but then Jimmy was pulled away, swearing fluently at the top of his voice. The winded Strike was seized and dragged to his feet as well. He put up no resistance. He doubted he could have stood of his own accord.

32

Chiswell’s Mercedes turned the corner of St. James’s Street onto Pall Mall and set off along Cleveland Row.

“What’s going on?” growled Chiswell, as the car slowed, then stopped.

The shouting ahead was not of the excited, enthusiastic kind that royalty or celebrities might expect. Several uniformed officers were converging on the crowd on the left-hand side of the street which was jostling and pushing as it tried to move away from what appeared to be a confrontation between police and protestors. Two disheveled men in jeans and T-shirts emerged from the fray, both held in armlocks by uniformed officers: Jimmy Knight, and a youth with limp blond dreadlocks.

Then Robin bit back a cry of dismay as a hobbling, bloody Strike appeared, also being led along by police. Behind them, an altercation in the crowd had not subsided, but was growing. A barrier swayed.

“Pull up, PULL UP!” bellowed Chiswell at the driver, who had just begun to accelerate again. Chiswell wound down his window. “Door open—Venetia, open your door!—that man!” Chiswell roared at a nearby policeman, who turned, startled, to see the Minister for Culture shouting at him and pointing at Strike. “He’s my guest—that man—bloody well let him go!”

Confronted by an official car, a government minister, the steely, patrician voice, the brandishing of a thick embossed invitation, the policeman did as he was told. Most people’s attention was focused on the increasingly violent brawl between police and CORE, and the consequent trampling and pushing of the crowd trying to get away from it. A couple of cameramen had broken away from the press pen up ahead, and were running towards the fracas.

“Izzy, move up—get in, GET IN!” Chiswell snarled at Strike through the window.

Robin squeezed backwards, half-sitting in Izzy’s lap to accommodate Strike as he clambered into the back seat. The door slammed. The car rolled on.

“Who are you?” squealed the frightened Kinvara, who was now pinned against the opposite door by Izzy. “What’s going on?”

“He’s a private detective,” growled Chiswell. His decision to bring Strike into the car seemed born of panic. Twisting around in his seat to glare at Strike, he said, “How does it help me if you get bloody arrested?”

“They weren’t arresting me,” said Strike, dabbing his nose with the back of his hand. “They wanted to take a statement. Knight attacked me when I went for his placard. Cheers,” he added, as, with difficulty given how tightly compressed they all were, Robin passed him a box of tissues that had been lying on the ledge behind the rear seat. He pressed one to his nose. “I got rid of the placard,” Strike added, through the blood-stained tissue, but nobody congratulated him.

“Jasper,” said Kinvara, “what’s going—?”

“Shut up,” snapped Chiswell, without looking at her. “I can’t let you out in front of all these people,” he told Strike angrily, as though the latter had suggested it. “There are more photographers… You’ll have to come in with us. I’ll fix it.”

The car was now proceeding towards a barrier where police and security were checking ID and investigations.

“Nobody say anything,” Chiswell instructed. “Shut up,” he added pre-emptively to Kinvara, who had opened her mouth.

A Bentley up ahead was admitted and the Mercedes rolled forwards.

In pain, because she was bearing a good proportion of Strike’s weight across her left hip and leg, Robin heard screeching from behind the car. Turning, she saw a young woman running after the car, a female police officer chasing her. The girl had wild tomato-red hair, a T-shirt with a logo of broken Olympic rings on it, and she screamed after Chiswell’s car:

“He put the fucking horse on them, Chiswell! He put the horse on them, you cheating, thieving bastard, you murderer—”

“I have a guest here who didn’t get his invitation,” Chiswell was shouting through his wound-down window to the armed policeman at the barrier. “Cormoran Strike, the amputee. He’s been in the papers. There was a balls-up at my department, his invitation didn’t go. The prince,” he said, with breathtaking chutzpah, “asked to meet him specifically!”

Strike and Robin were watching what was happening behind the car. Two policemen had seized the struggling Flick and were escorting her away. A few more cameras flashed. Caving under the weight of ministerial pressure, the armed policeman requested ID of Strike. Strike, who always carried a couple of forms of identification, though not necessarily in his own name, passed over his genuine driving license. A queue of stationary cars grew longer behind them. The prince was due in fifteen minutes’ time. Finally, the policeman waved them through.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” said Strike in an undertone to Robin. “Shouldn’t have let me in. Bloody lax.”

The Mercedes swung around the inner courtyard and arrived, finally, at the foot of a shallow flight of red-carpeted steps, in front of an enormous, honey-colored building that resembled a stately home. Wheelchair ramps had been set either side of the carpet, and a celebrated wheelchair basketball player was already maneuvering his way up one.

Strike pushed open the door, clambered out of the car, then turned and reached back inside to assist Robin. She accepted the offer of help. Her left leg was almost completely numb from where he’d sat on her.

“Nice to see you again, Corm,” said Izzy, beaming, as she got out behind Robin.

“Hi, Izzy,” said Strike.

Now burdened with Strike whether he wanted him or not, Chiswell hurried up the steps to explain to one of the liveried men standing outside the front door that Strike must be admitted without his invitation. They heard a recurrence of the word “amputee.” All around them, more cars were releasing their smartly dressed passengers.

“What’s all this about?” Kinvara said, who had marched around the rear of the Mercedes to address Strike. “What’s going on? What does my husband need a private detective for?”

“Will you be quiet, you stupid, stupid bitch?”

Stressed and disturbed though Chiswell undoubtedly was, his naked hostility shocked Robin. He hates her, she thought. He genuinely hates her.

“You two,” said the minister, pointing at his wife and daughter, “get inside.

“Give me one good reason I should keep paying you,” he added, turning on Strike as still more people spilled past them. “You realize,” said Chiswell, and in his necessarily quiet fury, spit flew from his mouth onto Strike’s tie, “I’ve just been called a bloody murderer in front of twenty people, including press?”

“They’ll think she’s a crank,” said Strike.

If the suggestion brought Chiswell any comfort, it didn’t show.

“I want to see you tomorrow morning at ten o’clock,” he told Strike. “Not at my office. Come to the flat in Ebury Street.” He turned away, then, as an afterthought, turned back. “You too,” he barked at Robin.

Side by side, they watched him lumbering up the steps.

“We’re about to get sacked, aren’t we?” whispered Robin.

“I’d say it’s odds on,” said Strike, who, now that he was on his feet, was in considerable pain.

“Cormoran, what was on the placard?” said Robin.

Strike allowed a woman in peach chiffon to pass, then said quietly:

“Picture of Chiswell hanging from a gallows and, beneath him, a bunch of dead children. One odd thing, though.”

“What?”

“All the kids were black.”

Still dabbing at his nose, Strike reached inside his pocket for a cigarette, then remembered where he was and let his hand fall back to his side.

“Listen, if that Elspeth woman’s in here, you might as well try and find out what else she knows about Winn. It’ll help justify our final invoice.”

“OK,” said Robin. “The back of your head’s bleeding, by the way.”

Strike dabbed at it ineffectually with the tissues he had pocketed and began to limp up the steps beside Robin.

“We shouldn’t be seen together any more tonight,” he told her, as they passed over the threshold into a blaze of ochre, scarlet and gold. “There was a café in Ebury Street, not far from Chiswell’s house. I’ll meet you there at nine o’clock tomorrow, and we can face the firing squad together. Go on, you go ahead.”

But as she moved away from him, towards the grand staircase, he called after her:

“Nice dress, by the way.”

33

The grand hallway of the mansion constituted a vast empty block of space. A red-and-gold-carpeted central staircase led to an upper balcony that split left and right. The walls, which appeared to be of marble, were ochre, dull green and rose. Sundry Paralympians were being shown to a lift on the left of the entrance, but the limping Strike made his way laboriously to the stairs and heaved himself upwards by liberal use of the banister. The sky visible through a huge and ornate skylight, supported by columns, was fading through technicolor variations that intensified the colors of the massive Venetian paintings of classical subjects hanging on every wall.

Doing his best to walk naturally, because he was afraid he might be mistaken for some veteran Paralympian and perhaps asked to expound on past triumphs, Strike followed the crowd up the right staircase, around the balcony and into a small anteroom overlooking the courtyard where the official cars were parked. From here, the guests were ushered left into a long and spacious picture gallery, where the carpet was apple green and decorated with a rosette pattern. Tall windows stood at either end of the room and almost every inch of white wall was covered in paintings.

“Drink, sir?” said a waiter just inside the doorway.

“Is it champagne?” asked Strike.

“English sparkling wine, sir,” said the waiter.

Strike helped himself, though without enthusiasm, and continued through the crowd, passing Chiswell and Kinvara, who were listening (or, Strike thought, pretending to listen) to a wheelchair-bound athlete. Kinvara shot Strike a swift, suspicious side glance as he passed, aiming for the far wall where he hoped to find either a chair, or something on which he could conveniently lean. Unfortunately, the gallery walls were so densely packed with pictures that leaning was impossible, nor were there any seats, so Strike came to rest beside an enormous painting by Count d’Orsay of Queen Victoria riding a dapple-gray horse. While he sipped his sparkling wine, he tried discreetly to staunch the blood still leaking from his nose, and wipe the worst of the dirt off his suit trousers.

Waiters were circulating, carrying trays of canapés. Strike managed to grab a couple of miniature crab cakes as they passed, then fell to examining his surroundings, noting another spectacular skylight, this one supported by a number of gilded palm trees.

The room had a peculiar energy. The prince’s arrival was imminent and the guests’ gaiety came and went in nervous spurts, with increasingly frequent glances at the doors. From his vantage point beside Queen Victoria, Strike spotted a stately figure in a primrose-yellow dress standing almost directly opposite him, close beside an ornate black and gold fireplace. One hand was keeping a gentle hold on the harness of a pale yellow Labrador, who sat panting gently at her feet in the overcrowded room. Strike had not immediately recognized Della, because she was not wearing sunglasses, but prosthetic eyes. Her slightly sunken, opaque, china-blue gaze gave her an odd innocence. Geraint stood a short distance from his wife, gabbling at a thin, mousy woman whose eyes darted around, searching for a rescuer.

A sudden hush fell near the doors through which Strike had entered. Strike saw the top of a ginger head and a flurry of suits. Self-consciousness spread through the packed room like a petrifying breeze. Strike watched the top of the ginger head move away, towards the far right side of the room. Still sipping his English wine and wondering which of the women in the room was the trustee with dirt on Geraint Winn, his attention was suddenly caught by a tall woman nearby with her back to him.

Her long dark hair was twisted up into a messy bun and, unlike every other woman present, her outfit gave no suggestion of party best. The straight black knee-length dress was plain to the point of severity, and though barelegged she wore a pair of spike-heeled, open-toed ankle boots. For a sliver of a second Strike thought he must be mistaken, but then she moved and he knew for sure that it was her. Before he could move away from her vicinity, she turned around and looked straight into his eyes.

Color flooded her face, which as he knew was normally cameo pale. She was heavily pregnant. Her condition had not touched her anywhere but the swollen belly. She was as fine-boned as ever in face and limbs. Less adorned than any other woman in the room, she was easily the most beautiful. For a few seconds they contemplated each other, then she took a few tentative steps forwards, the color ebbing from her cheeks as fast as it had come.

“Corm?”

“Hello, Charlotte.”

If she thought of kissing him, his stony face deterred her.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“Invited,” lied Strike. “Celebrity amputee. You?”

She seemed dazed.

“Jago’s niece is a Paralympian. She’s…”

Charlotte looked around, apparently trying to spot the niece, and took a sip of water. Her hand was shaking. A few drops spilled from the glass. He saw them break like glass beads on her swollen belly.

“… well, she’s here somewhere,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “She’s got cerebral palsy and she’s remarkable, actually, an incredible rider. Her father’s in Hong Kong, so her mum invited me, instead.”

His silence was unnerving her. She rattled on:

“Jago’s family like to make me go out and do things, only my sister-in-law’s cross because I got the dates mixed up. I thought tonight was dinner at the Shard and this thing was Friday, tomorrow, I mean, so I’m not dressed properly for royalty, but I was late and I didn’t have time to change.”

She gestured hopelessly at her plain black dress and her spike-heeled boots.

“Jago not here?”

Her gold-flecked green eyes flickered slightly.

“No, he’s in the States.”

Her focus moved to his upper lip.

“Have you been in a fight?”

“No,” he said, dabbing at his nose with the back of his hand again. He straightened up, lowering his weight carefully back onto his prosthesis, ready to walk away. “Well, nice to—”

“Corm, don’t go,” she said, reaching out. Her fingers did not quite make contact with his sleeve; she let her hand fall back by her side. “Don’t, not yet, I—you’ve done such incredible things. I read about them all in the papers.”

The last time they had seen each other he had been bleeding, too, because of the flying ashtray that had caught him in the face as he left her. He remembered the text, “It was yours,” sent on the eve of her wedding to Ross, referring to another baby she had claimed to be bearing, which had vanished before he ever saw proof of its existence. He remembered, too, the picture she had sent to his office of herself, minutes after saying “I do” to Jago Ross, beautiful and stricken, like a sacrificial victim.

“Congratulations,” he said, keeping his eyes on her face.

“I’m huge because it’s twins.”

She did not, as he had seen other pregnant women do, touch her belly as she talked about the babies, but looked down as though slightly surprised to see her changed shape. She had never wanted children when they had been together. It was one of the things they had had in common. The baby that she had claimed was his had been an unwelcome surprise to both of them.

In Strike’s imagination, Jago Ross’s progeny were curled under the black dress like a pair of white whelps, not entirely human, emissaries of their father, who resembled a dissolute arctic fox. He was glad they were there, if such a joyless emotion could be called gladness. All impediments, all deterrents, were welcome, because it now became apparent to him that the gravitational pull Charlotte had so long exerted over him, even after hundreds of fights and scenes and a thousand lies, was not yet spent. As ever, he had the sense that behind the green-and-gold-flecked eyes, she knew exactly what he was thinking.

“They aren’t due for ages. I had a scan, it’s a boy and a girl. Jago’s pleased about the boy. Are you here with anyone?”

“No.”

As he said it, he caught a flash of green over Charlotte’s shoulder. Robin, who was now talking brightly to the mousy woman in purple brocade who had finally escaped Geraint.

“Pretty,” said Charlotte, who had looked to see what had caught his attention. She had always had a preternatural ability to detect the slightest flicker of interest towards other women. “No, wait,” she said slowly, “isn’t that the girl who works with you? She was in all the papers—what’s her name, Rob—?”

“No,” said Strike, “that’s not her.”

He wasn’t remotely surprised that Charlotte knew Robin’s name, or that she had recognized her, even with the hazel contact lenses. He had known Charlotte would keep tabs on him.

“You’ve always liked girls with that coloring, haven’t you?” said Charlotte with a kind of synthetic gaiety. “That little American you started dating after you pretended we’d broken up in Germany had the same kind of—”

There was a kind of hushed scream in their vicinity.

“Ohmigod, Charlie!”

Izzy Chiswell was bearing down upon them, beaming, her pink face clashing with her orange dress. She was, Strike suspected, not on her first glass of wine.

“Hello, Izz,” said Charlotte, forcing a smile. Strike could almost feel the effort it cost her to tug herself free of that tangle of ancient grudges and wounds in which their relationship had gradually strangled to death.

Again, he prepared to walk away, but the crowd parted and Prince Harry was suddenly revealed in all his hyper-real familiarity, some ten feet away from where Strike and the two women stood, so that moving away from the area would be done under the scrutiny of half the room. Trapped, Strike startled a passing waiter by reaching out a long arm and snatching another glass of wine from his tray. For a few seconds, both Charlotte and Izzy watched the prince. Then, when it became apparent that he was not about to approach them any time soon, they turned back to each other.

“Showing already!” Izzy said, admiring Charlotte’s belly. “Have you had a scan? D’you know what it is?”

“Twins,” said Charlotte, without enthusiasm. She indicated Strike, “You remember—?”

“Corm, yah, of course, we brought him here!” said Izzy, beaming and clearly unconscious of any indiscretion.

Charlotte turned from her old schoolfriend to her ex, and Strike could feel her sniffing the air for the reason that Strike and Izzy would have traveled together. She shifted very slightly, apparently allowing Izzy into the conversation, but boxing Strike in so that he couldn’t walk away without asking one of them to get out of his way. “Oh, wait, of course. You investigated Freddie’s death in action, didn’t you?” she said. “I remember you telling me about it. Poor Freddie.”

Izzy acknowledged this tribute to her brother with a slight tip of her glass, then peeked back over her shoulder at Prince Harry.

“He gets sexier every passing day, doesn’t he?” she whispered.

“Ginger pubes, though, darling,” said Charlotte, deadpan.

Against his will, Strike grinned. Izzy snorted with laughter.

“Speaking of which,” said Charlotte (she never acknowledged that she had been funny), “isn’t that Kinvara Hanratty over there?”

“My ghastly stepmother? Yes,” said Izzy. “D’you know her?”

“My sister sold her a horse.”

During the sixteen years of Strike’s on-off relationship with Charlotte, he had been privy to countless conversations like this. People of Charlotte’s class all seemed to know each other. Even if they had never met, they knew siblings or cousins or friends or classmates, or else their parents knew somebody else’s parents: all were connected, forming a kind of web that constituted a hostile habitat for outsiders. Rarely did these web-dwellers leave to seek companionship or love among the rest of society. Charlotte had been unique in her circle in choosing somebody as unclassifiable as Strike, whose invisible appeal and low status had, he knew, been subjects of perennial, horrified debate among most of her friends and family.

“Well, I hope it wasn’t a horse Amelia liked,” Izzy said, “because Kinvara will ruin it. Awful hands and a horrible seat, but she thinks she’s Charlotte Dujardin. D’you ride, Cormoran?” Izzy asked.

“No,” said Strike.

“He doesn’t trust horses,” said Charlotte, smiling at him.

But he did not respond. He had no desire to touch upon old jokes or shared memories.

“Kinvara’s livid, look at her,” said Izzy, with some satisfaction. “Papa’s just dropped a heavy hint he’s going to try and talk my brother Raff into taking over from me, which is fabulous, and what I hoped would happen. Papa used to let Kinvara boss him around about Raff, but he’s putting his foot down these days.”

“I think I’ve met Raphael,” said Charlotte. “Wasn’t he working at Henry Drummond’s art gallery a couple of months ago?”

Strike checked at his watch and then back around the room. The prince was moving away from their part of the room and Robin was nowhere to be seen. With any luck, she had followed the trustee who had dirt on Winn into the bathroom and was eliciting confidences over the sink.

“Oh Lord,” said Izzy. “Look out. Geraint Bloody—hello, Geraint!”

Geraint’s object, it soon became clear, was Charlotte.

“Hello, hello,” he said, peering at her through heavily smudged glasses, his lipless smile a leer. “You’ve just been pointed out to me by your niece. What an extraordinary young woman she is, quite extraordinary. Our charity’s involved in supporting the equestrian team. Geraint Winn,” he said, holding out a hand, “The Level Playing Field.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte. “Hello.”

Strike had watched her repel lecherous men for years. Having acknowledged his presence, she stared coldly at Geraint, as though quite puzzled to know why he was still in her vicinity.

Strike’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. Reaching for it, he saw an unknown number. This was his excuse to leave.

“Need to get going, sorry. ’Scuse me, Izzy.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Izzy said, pouting. “I wanted to ask you all about the Shacklewell Ripper!”

Strike saw Geraint’s eyes widen. Inwardly cursing her, he said, “Night. Bye,” he added to Charlotte.

Limping away as fast as he could manage, he accepted the call, but by the time he had raised it to his ear, the caller had gone.

“Corm.”

Somebody lightly touched his arm. He turned. Charlotte had followed him.

“I’m leaving, too.”

“What about your niece?”

“She’s met Harry, she’ll be thrilled. She doesn’t actually like me that much. None of them do. What happened to your mobile?”

“I fell on it.”

He walked on, but, long-legged as she was, she caught up with him.

“I don’t think I’m going your way, Charlotte.”

“Well, unless you’re tunneling out, we have to walk two hundred yards together.”

He limped on without answering. To his left, he caught another flash of green. As they reached the grand staircase in the hall, Charlotte reached out and lightly grasped his arm, wobbly in the heels that were so unsuitable for a pregnant woman. He resisted the urge to shake her loose.

His mobile rang again. The same unknown number had appeared on the screen. Charlotte drew up beside him, watching his face as he answered it.

The moment the mobile touched his ear he heard a desperate, haunting scream.

“They’re going to kill me, Mr. Strike, help me, help me, please help me… ”

34

The hazy, clear-skied promise of another summer’s day hadn’t yet translated itself into actual warmth when Robin arrived next morning at the café closest to Chiswell’s house. She could have chosen one of the circular tables outside on the pavement, but instead she huddled down in a corner of the café where she was to meet Strike, hands clasped around her latte for comfort, her reflection in the espresso machine pale and heavy-eyed.

Somehow, she had known that Strike would not be here when she arrived. Her mood was simultaneously depressed and nervy. She would rather not have been alone with her thoughts, but here she was, with only the hiss of the coffeemaker for company, chilly in spite of the jacket she had grabbed on the way out of the house and full of anxiety about the imminent confrontation with Chiswell, who might quibble his bill, after the catastrophe of Strike’s fight with Jimmy Knight.

But that wasn’t all that was worrying Robin. She had woken that morning from a confused dream in which the dark, spike-booted figure of Charlotte Ross figured. Robin had recognized Charlotte immediately when she spotted her at the reception. She had tried not to watch the once-engaged couple as they’d talked, angry with herself for being so sharply interested in what was passing between them, yet, even as she had moved from group to group, shamelessly insinuating herself into conversations in the hope of finding the elusive Elspeth Curtis-Lacey, her eyes had sought out Strike and Charlotte, and when they left the reception together she had experienced a nasty sensation in her stomach, akin to the drop of an elevator.

She had arrived home unable to think of anything else, which had made her feel guilty when Matthew emerged from the kitchen, eating a sandwich. She had the impression that he had not been home long. He subjected the green dress to an up-and-down look very like the one Kinvara had given her. She made to walk past him upstairs, but he had moved to block her.

“Robin, come on. Please. Let’s talk.”

So they had gone into the sitting room and talked. Tired of conflict, she had apologized for hurting Matthew’s feelings by missing the cricket match, and for forgetting her wedding ring on their anniversary weekend. Matthew in turn had expressed regret for the things he had said during Sunday’s row, and especially for the remark about her lack of achievements.

Robin felt as though they were moving chess pieces on a board that was vibrating in the preliminary tremors of an earthquake. It’s too late. You know, surely, that none of this matters anymore?

But when the talk was finished, Matthew said, “So we’re OK?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We’re fine.”

He had stood up, held out a hand and helped her up from her chair. She had forced a smile and then he had kissed her, hard, on the mouth, and begun to tug at the green dress. She heard the fabric around the zip tear and when she began to protest, he clamped his mouth on hers again.

She knew that she could stop him, she knew that he was waiting for her to stop him, that she was being tested in an ugly, underhand way, that he would deny what he was really doing, that he would claim to be the victim. She hated him for doing it this way, and part of her wanted to be the kind of woman who could have disengaged from her own revulsion and from her own reluctant flesh, but she had fought too long and too hard to regain possession of her own body to barter it in this way.

“No,” she said, pushing him away. “I don’t want to.”

He released her at once, as she had known he would, with an expression compounded of anger and triumph. Suddenly, she knew that she had not fooled him when they had had sex on their anniversary weekend, and paradoxically that made her feel tender towards him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“Yeah,” said Matthew. “So am I.”

And he had walked out of the room, leaving Robin with a chill down her back where the green dress had torn.

Where the hell was Strike? It was five past nine and she wanted company. She also wanted to know what had happened after he left the reception with Charlotte. Anything would be preferable to sitting here, thinking about Matthew.

As though the thought had summoned him, her phone rang.

“Sorry,” he said, before she could speak. “Suspicious package at bloody Green Park. I’ve been stuck on the Tube for twenty minutes and I’ve only just got reception. I’ll be there as quick as I can, but you might have to start without me.”

“Oh, God,” said Robin, closing her tired eyes.

“Sorry,” Strike repeated, “I’m on my way. Got something to tell you, actually. Funny thing happened last night—oh, hang on, we’re moving. See you shortly.”

He hung up, leaving Robin with the prospect of having to deal alone with the first effusions of Jasper Chiswell’s anger, and still grappling formless feelings of dread and misery that swirled around a dark, graceful woman who was sixteen years’ worth of knowledge and memories ahead of her when it came to Cormoran Strike, which, Robin told herself, shouldn’t matter, for God’s sake, haven’t you got enough problems without worrying about Strike’s love life, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with you…

She felt a sudden guilty prickle around her lips, where Strike’s missed kiss had landed outside the hospital. As though she could wash it away, she downed the dregs of her coffee, got up and left the café for the broad, straight street, which comprised two symmetrical lines of identical nineteenth-century houses.

She walked briskly, not because she was in any hurry to bear the brunt of Chiswell’s anger and disappointment, but because activity helped dispel her uncomfortable thoughts.

Arriving outside Chiswell’s house precisely on time, she lingered for a few hopeful seconds beside the glossy black front door, just in case Strike were to appear at the last moment. He didn’t. Robin therefore steadied herself, walked up the three clean white steps from the pavement and knocked on the front door, which was on the latch and opened a few inches. A man’s muffled voice shouted something that might have been “come in.”

Robin passed into a small, dingy hall dominated by vertiginous stairs. The olive-green wallpaper was drab and peeling in places. Leaving the front door as she had found it, she called out:

“Minister?”

He didn’t answer. Robin knocked gently on the door to the right, and opened it.

Time froze. The scene seemed to fold in upon her, crashing through her retinas into a mind unprepared for it, and shock kept her standing in the doorway, her hand still on the handle and her mouth slightly open, trying to comprehend what she was seeing.

A man was sitting in a Queen Anne chair, his legs splayed, his arms dangling, and he seemed to have a shiny gray turnip for a head, in which a carved mouth gaped, but no eyes.

Then Robin’s struggling comprehension grasped the fact that it was not a turnip, but a human head shrink-wrapped in a clear plastic bag, into which a tube ran from a large canister. The man looked as though he had suffocated. His left foot lay sideways on the rug, revealing a small hole in the sole, his thick fingers dangled, almost touching the carpet, and there was a stain at his groin where his bladder had emptied.

And next she understood that it was Chiswell himself who sat in the chair, and that his thick mass of gray hair was pressed flat against his face in the vacuum created by the bag, and that the gaping mouth had sucked the plastic into itself, which was why it gaped so darkly.

35

Somewhere in the distance, outside the house, a man shouted. He sounded like a workman, and in some part of her brain Robin knew that that was who she had heard when she was expecting to hear “come in.” Nobody had invited her into the house. The door had simply been left ajar.

Now, when it might have been expected, she didn’t panic. There was no threat here, however horrifying the sight of that awful dummy, with the turnip head and the tube, this poor lifeless figure could not hurt her. Knowing that she must check that life was extinct, Robin approached Chiswell and gently touched his shoulder. It was easier, not being able to see his eyes, because of the coarse hair that obscured them like a horse’s forelock. The flesh felt hard beneath his striped shirt and cooler than she had expected.

But then she imagined the gaping mouth speaking, and took several quick steps backwards, until her foot landed with a crunch on something hard on the carpet and she slipped. She had cracked a pale blue plastic tube of pills lying on the carpet. She recognized them as the sort of homeopathic tablets sold in her local chemist.

Taking out her mobile, she called 999 and asked for the police. After explaining that she had found a body and giving the address, she was told that someone would be with her shortly.

Trying not to focus on Chiswell, she took in the frayed curtains, which were of an indeterminate dun color, trimmed with sad little bobbles, the antiquated TV in its faux wood cladding, the patch of darker wallpaper over the mantelpiece where a painting had once hung, and the silver-framed photographs. But the shrink-wrapped head, the rubber piping and the cold glint of the canister seemed to turn all of this everyday normality into pasteboard. The nightmare alone was real.

So Robin turned her mobile onto its camera function and began to take photographs. Putting a lens between herself and the scene mitigated the horror. Slowly and methodically, she documented the scene.

A glass sat on the coffee table in front of the body, with a few millimeters of what looked like orange juice in it. Scattered books and papers lay beside it. There was a piece of thick cream writing paper headed with a red Tudor rose, like a drop of blood, and the printed address of the house in which Robin stood. Somebody had written in a rounded, girlish hand.

As Robin bent to take a picture of the note, she heard the front door snap shut, and with a gasp, she spun around. Strike was standing on the threshold, large, unshaven, still in the suit he had worn to the reception. He was staring at the figure in the chair.

“The police are on their way,” said Robin. “I just called them.”

Strike moved carefully into the room.

“Holy shit.”

He spotted the cracked tube of pills on the floor, stepped over them, and scrutinized the tubing and the plastic-covered face.

“Raff said he was behaving strangely,” said Robin, “but I don’t think he ever dreamed…”

Strike said nothing. He was still examining the body.

“Was that there yesterday evening?”

“What?”

“That,” said Strike, pointing.

There was a semi-circular mark on the back of Chiswell’s hand, dark red against the coarse, pallid skin.

“I can’t remember,” said Robin.

The full shock of what had happened was starting to hit her and she was finding it hard to arrange her thoughts, which floated, unmoored and disconnected, through her head: Chiswell barking through the car window to persuade the police to let Strike into last night’s reception, Chiswell calling Kinvara a stupid bitch, Chiswell demanding that they meet him here this morning. It was unreasonable to expect her to remember the backs of his hands.

“Hmm,” said Strike. He noticed the mobile in Robin’s hand. “Have you taken pictures of everything?”

She nodded.

“All of this?” he asked, waving a hand over the table. “That?” he added, pointing at the cracked pills on the carpet.

“Yes. That was my fault. I trod on them.”

“How did you get in?”

“The door was open. I thought he’d left it on the latch for us,” said Robin. “A workman shouted in the street and I thought it was Chiswell saying ‘come in.’ I was expecting—”

“Stay here,” said Strike.

He left the room. She heard him climbing the stairs and then his heavy footsteps on the ceiling above, but she knew that there was nobody there. She could feel the house’s essential lifelessness, its flimsy cardboard unreality, and, sure enough, Strike returned less than five minutes later, shaking his head.

“Nobody.”

He walked past her through a door that led off the sitting room and, hearing his footsteps hit tile, Robin knew that it was the kitchen.

“Completely empty,” Strike said, re-emerging.

“What happened last night?” Robin asked. “You said something funny happened.”

She wanted to discuss a subject other than the awful form that dominated the room in its grotesque lifelessness.

“Billy called me. He said people were trying to kill him—chasing him. He claimed to be in a phone box in Trafalgar Square. I went to try and find him, but he wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

So he hadn’t been with Charlotte. Even in this extremity, Robin registered the fact, and was glad.

“The hell?” said Strike quietly, looking past her into a corner of the room.

A buckled sword was leaning against the wall in a dark corner. It looked as though it had been forced or stood on and deliberately bent. Strike walked carefully around the body to examine it, but then they heard the police car pulling up outside the house and he straightened up.

“We’ll tell them everything, obviously,” said Strike.

“Yes,” said Robin.

“Except the surveillance devices. Shit—they’ll find them in your office—”

“They won’t,” said Robin. “I took them home yesterday, in case we decided I needed to clear out because of the Sun.”

Before Strike could express admiration for this clear-eyed foresight, somebody rapped hard on the front door.

“Well, it’s been nice while it’s lasted, hasn’t it?” Strike said, with a grim smile, as he moved towards the hall. “Being out of the papers?”