The Cuckoo's Calling

1

IT STARTED TO RAIN ON Wednesday. London weather; dank and gray, through which the old city presented a stolid front: pale faces under black umbrellas, the eternal smell of damp clothing, the steady pattering on Strike’s office window in the night.

The rain in Cornwall had a different quality, when it came: Strike remembered how it had lashed like whips against the panes of Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted’s spare room, during those months in the neat little house that smelled of flowers and baking, while he had attended the village school in St. Mawes. Such memories swam to the forefront of his mind whenever he was about to see Lucy.

Raindrops were still dancing exuberantly on the windowsills on Friday afternoon, while at opposite ends of her desk, Robin wrapped Jack’s new paratrooper doll, and Strike wrote her a check to the amount of a week’s work, minus the commission of Temporary Solutions. Robin was about to attend the third of that week’s “proper” interviews, and was looking neat and groomed in her black suit, with her bright gold hair pinned back in a chignon.

“There you are,” they both said simultaneously, as Robin pushed across the desk a perfect parcel patterned with small spaceships, and Strike held out the check.

“Cheers,” said Strike, taking the present. “I can’t wrap.”

“I hope he likes it,” she replied, tucking the check away in her black handbag.

“Yeah. And good luck with the interview. D’you want the job?”

“Well, it’s quite a good one. Human resources in a media consultancy in the West End,” she said, sounding unenthusiastic. “Enjoy the party. I’ll see you Monday.”

The self-imposed penance of walking down into Denmark Street to smoke became even more irksome in the ceaseless rain. Strike stood, minimally shielded beneath the overhang of his office entrance, and asked himself when he was going to kick the habit and set to work to restore the fitness that had slipped away along with his solvency and his domestic comfort. His mobile rang while he stood there.

“Thought you might like to know your tip-off’s paid dividends,” said Eric Wardle, who sounded triumphant. Strike could hear engine noise and the sound of men talking in the background.

“Quick work,” commented Strike.

“Yeah, well, we don’t hang around.”

“Does this mean I’m going to get what I was after?”

“That’s what I’m calling about. It’s a bit late today, but I’ll bike it over Monday.”

“Sooner rather than later suits me. I can hang on here at the office.”

Wardle laughed a little offensively.

“You get paid by the hour, don’t you? I’d’ve thought it suited you to string it out a bit.”

“Tonight would be better. If you can get it here this evening, I’ll make sure you’re the first to know if my old mate drops any more tip-offs.”

In the slight pause that followed, Strike heard one of the men in the car with Wardle say:

“…Fearney’s fucking face…”

“Yeah, all right,” said Wardle. “I’ll get it over later. Might not be till seven. Will you still be there?”

“I’ll make sure I am,” Strike replied.

The file arrived three hours later, while he was eating fish and chips out of a small polystyrene tray in his lap and watching the London evening news on his portable television. The courier buzzed the outer door and Strike signed for a bulky package sent from Scotland Yard. Once unwrapped, a thick gray folder full of photocopied material was disclosed. Strike took it back to Robin’s desk, and began the lengthy process of digesting the contents.

Here were statements from those who had seen Lula Landry during the final evening of her life; a report on the DNA evidence lifted from her flat; photocopied pages of the visitors’ book complied by security at number 18, Kentigern Gardens; details of the medication Lula had been prescribed to control bipolar disorder; the autopsy report; medical records for the previous year; mobile phone and landline records; and a precis of the findings on the model’s laptop. There was also a DVD, on which Wardle had scribbled CCTV 2 Runners.

The DVD drive on Strike’s secondhand computer had not worked since he acquired it; he therefore slipped the disc into the pocket of the overcoat hanging by the glass door, and resumed his contemplation of the printed material contained within the ring-binder, his notebook open beside him.

Night descended outside the office, and a pool of golden light fell from the desk lamp on to each page as Strike methodically read the documents that had added up to a conclusion of suicide. Here, amid the statements shorn of superfluity, minutely detailed timings, the copied labels from the bottles of drugs found in Landry’s bathroom cabinet, Strike tracked the truth he had sensed behind Tansy Bestigui’s lies.

The autopsy indicated that Lula had been killed on impact with the road, and that she had died from a broken neck and internal bleeding. There was a certain amount of bruising to the upper arms. She had fallen wearing only one shoe. The photographs of the corpse confirmed LulaMyInspirationForeva’s assertion that Landry had changed her clothes on coming home from the nightclub. Instead of the dress in which she had been photographed entering her building, the corpse wore a sequined top and trousers.

Strike turned to the shifting statements that Tansy had given to the police; the first simply claiming a trip to the bathroom from the bedroom; the second adding the opening of her sitting-room window. Freddie, she said, had been in bed throughout. The police had found half a line of cocaine on the flat marble rim of the bath, and a small plastic bag of the drug hidden inside a box of Tampax in the cabinet above the sink.

Freddie’s statement confirmed that he had been asleep when Landry fell, and that he had been woken by his wife’s screams; he said that he had hurried into the sitting room in time to see Tansy run past him in her underwear. The vase of roses he had sent to Macc, and which a clumsy policeman had smashed, were intended, he admitted, as a gesture of welcome and introduction; yes, he would have been glad to strike up an acquaintance with the rapper, and yes, it had crossed his mind that Macc might be perfect in a thriller now in development. His shock at Landry’s death had undoubtedly made him overreact to the ruin of his floral gift. He had initially believed his wife when she said she had overheard the argument upstairs; he had subsequently come, reluctantly, to accept the police view that Tansy’s account was indicative of cocaine consumption. Her drug habit had placed great strain on the marriage, and he had admitted to the police that he was aware that his wife habitually used the stimulant, though he had not known that she had a supply in the flat that night.

Bestigui further stated that he and Landry had never visited each other’s flats, and that their simultaneous stay at Dickie Carbury’s (which the police appeared to have heard about on a subsequent occasion, for Freddie had been reinterviewed after the initial statement) had barely advanced their acquaintance. “She associated mainly with the younger guests, while I spent most of the weekend with Dickie, who is a contemporary of mine.” Bestigui’s statement presented the unassailable front of a rock face without crampons.

After reading the police account of events inside the Bestiguis’ flat, Strike added several sentences to his own notes. He was interested in the half a line of cocaine on the side of the bath, and even more interested in the few seconds after Tansy had seen the flailing figure of Lula Landry fall past the window. Much would depend, of course, on the layout of the Bestiguis’ apartment (there was no map or diagram of it in the folder), but Strike was bothered by one consistent aspect of Tansy’s shifting stories: she insisted throughout that her husband had been in bed, asleep, when Landry fell. He remembered the way she had shielded her face, by pretending to push back her hair, as he pressed her on the point. All in all, and notwithstanding the police view, Strike considered the precise location of both Bestiguis at the moment Lula Landry fell off her balcony to be far from proven.

He resumed his systematic perusal of the file. Evan Duffield’s statement conformed in most respects to Wardle’s secondhand tale. He admitted to having attempted to prevent his girlfriend leaving Uzi by seizing her by the upper arms. She had broken free and left; he had followed her shortly afterwards. There was a one-sentence mention of the wolf mask, couched in the unemotional language of the policeman who had interviewed him: “I am accustomed to wearing a wolf’s-head mask when I wish to avoid the attentions of photographers.” A brief statement from the driver who had taken Duffield from Uzi confirmed Duffield’s account of visiting Kentigern Gardens and moving on to d’ Arblay Street, where he had dropped his passenger and left. The antipathy Wardle claimed the driver had felt towards Duffield was not conveyed in the bald factual account prepared for his signature by the police.

There were a couple of other statements supporting Duffield’s: one from a woman who claimed to have seen him climbing the stairs to his dealer’s, one from the dealer, Whycliff, himself. Strike recalled Wardle’s expressed opinion that Whycliff would lie for Duffield. The woman downstairs could have been cut in on any payment. The rest of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Duffield roaming the streets of London could only honestly say that they had seen a man in a wolf mask.

Strike lit a cigarette and read through Duffield’s statement again. He was a man with a violent temper, who had admitted to attempting to force Lula to remain in the club. The bruising to the upper arms of the body was almost certainly his work. If, however, he had taken heroin with Whycliff, Strike knew that the odds of him being in a fit state to infiltrate number 18, Kentigern Gardens, or to work himself into a murderous rage, were negligible. Strike was familiar with the behavior of heroin addicts; he had met plenty at the last squat his mother had lived in. The drug rendered its slaves passive and docile; the absolute antithesis of shouting, violent alcoholics, or twitchy, paranoid coke-users. Strike had known every kind of substance-abuser, both inside the army and out. The glorification of Duffield’s habit by the media disgusted him. There was no glamour in heroin. Strike’s mother had died on a filthy mattress in the corner of the room, and nobody had realized she was dead for six hours.

He got up, crossed the room and wrenched open the dark, rain-spattered window, so that the thud of the bass from the 12 Bar Café became louder than ever. Still smoking, he looked out at Charing Cross Road, glittering with car lights and puddles, where Friday-night revelers were striding and lurching past the end of Denmark Street, umbrellas wobbling, laughter ringing above the traffic. When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Robin his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Charlotte and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people’s surprise and pity. The bright orange cigarette stub flew down into the dark street and was extinguished in the watery gutter; Strike pushed down the window, returned to his desk and pulled the file firmly back towards him.

Derrick Wilson’s statement told him nothing he did not already know. There was no mention in the file of Kieran Kolovas-Jones, or of his mysterious blue piece of paper. Strike turned next, with some interest, to the statements of the two women with whom Lula had spent her final afternoon, Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford.

The makeup artist remembered Lula as cheerful and excited about Deeby Macc’s imminent arrival. Porter, however, stated that Landry “had not been herself,” that she had seemed “low and anxious,” and had refused to discuss what was upsetting her. Porter’s statement added an intriguing detail that nobody had yet told Strike. The model asserted that Landry had made specific mention, that afternoon, of an intention to leave “everything” to her brother. No context was given; but the impression left was of a girl in a clearly morbid frame of mind.

Strike wondered why his client had not mentioned that his sister had declared her intention of leaving him everything. Of course, Bristow already had a trust fund. Perhaps the possible acquisition of further vast sums of money did not seem as noteworthy to him as it would to Strike, who had never inherited a penny.

Yawning, Strike lit another cigarette to keep himself awake, and began to read the statement of Lula’s mother. By Lady Yvette Bristow’s own account, she had been drowsy and unwell in the aftermath of her operation; but she insisted that her daughter had been “perfectly happy” when she came to visit that morning, and had evinced nothing but concern for her mother’s condition and prospects of recovery. Perhaps the blunt, unnuanced prose of the recording officer was to blame, but Strike took from Lady Bristow’s recollections the impression of a determined denial. She alone suggested that Lula’s death had been an accident, that she had somehow slipped over the balcony without meaning to; it had been, said Lady Bristow, an icy night.

Strike skim-read Bristow’s statement, which tallied in all respects with the account he had given Strike in person, and proceeded to that of Tony Landry, John and Lula’s uncle. He had visited Yvette Bristow at the same time as Lula on the day before the latter’s death, and asserted that his niece had seemed “normal.” Landry had then driven to Oxford, where he had attended a conference on international developments in family law, staying overnight in the Malmaison Hotel. His account of his whereabouts was followed by some incomprehensible comments about telephone calls. Strike turned, for elucidation, to the annotated copies of phone records.

Lula had barely used her landline in the week prior to her death, and not at all on the day before she died. From her mobile, however, she had made no fewer than sixty-six calls on her last day of life. The first, at 9:15 in the morning, had been to Evan Duffield; the second, at 9:35, to Ciara Porter. There followed a gap of hours, in which she had spoken to nobody on the mobile, and then, at 1:21, she had begun a positive frenzy of telephoning two numbers, almost alternately. One of these was Duffield’s; the other belonged, according to the crabbed scribble beside the number’s first appearance, to Tony Landry. Again and again she had telephoned these two men. Here and there were gaps of twenty minutes or so, during which she made no calls; then she would begin telephoning again, doubtless hitting “redial.” All of this frenetic calling, Strike deduced, must have taken place once she was back in her flat with Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter, though neither of the two women’s statements made mention of repeated telephoning.

Strike turned back to Tony Landry’s statement, which cast no light on the reason his niece had been so anxious to contact him. He had turned off the sound on his mobile while at the conference, he said, and had not realized until much later that his niece had called him repeatedly that afternoon. He had no idea why she had done so and had not called her back, giving as his reason that by the time he realized that she had been trying to reach him, she had stopped calling, and he had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that she would be in a nightclub somewhere.

Strike was now yawning every few minutes; he considered making himself coffee, but could not muster the energy. Wanting his bed, but driven on by habit to complete the job in hand, he turned to the copies of security logbook pages showing the entrances and exits of visitors to number 18 on the day preceding Lula Landry’s death. A careful perusal of signatures and initials revealed that Wilson had not been as meticulous in his record-keeping as his employers might have hoped. As Wilson had already told Strike, the movements of the building’s residents were not recorded in the book; so the comings and goings of Landry and the Bestiguis were missing. The first entry Wilson had made was for the postman, at 9:10; next, at 9:22, came Florist delivery Flat 2; finally, at 9:50, Securibell. No time of departure was marked for the alarm checker.

Otherwise it had been (as Wilson had said) a quiet day. Ciara Porter had arrived at 12:50; Bryony Radford at 1:20. While Radford’s departure was recorded with her own signature at 4:40, Wilson had added the entrance of caterers to the Bestiguis’ flat at 7, Ciara’s exit with Lula at 7:15 and the departure of the caterers at 9:15.

It frustrated Strike that the only page that the police had photocopied was the day before Landry’s death, because he had hoped that he might find the surname of the elusive Rochelle somewhere in the entrance log’s pages.

It was nearly midnight when Strike turned his attention to the police report on the contents of Landry’s laptop. They appeared to have been searching, principally, for emails indicating suicidal mood or intent, and in this respect they had been unsuccessful. Strike scanned the emails Landry had sent and received in the last two weeks of her life.

It was strange, but nevertheless true, that the countless photographs of her otherworldly beauty had made it harder rather than easier for Strike to believe that Landry had ever really existed. The ubiquity of her features had made them seem abstract, generic, even if the face itself had been uniquely beautiful.

Now, however, out of these dry black marks on paper, out of erratically spelled messages littered with in-jokes and nicknames, the wraith of the dead girl rose before him in the dark office. Her emails gave him what the multitude of photographs had not: a realization in the gut, rather than the brain, that a real, living, laughing and crying human being had been smashed to death on that snowy London street. He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file’s pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.

He saw, now, why John Bristow insisted that his sister had had no thought of death. The girl who had typed out these words emerged as a warmhearted friend, sociable, impulsive, busy and glad to be so; enthusiastic about her job, excited, as Bristow had said, about the prospect of a trip to Morocco.

Most of the emails had been sent to the designer Guy Somé. They held nothing of interest except a tone of cheery confidentiality, and, once, a mention of her most incongruous friendship:

Geegee, will you pleeeeeze make Rochelle something for her birthday, please please? I’ll pay. Something nice (don’t be horrible). For Feb 21st? Pleezy please. Love ya. Cuckoo.

Strike remembered the assertion of LulaMyInspirationForeva that Lula had loved Guy Somé “like a brother.” His statement to the police was the shortest in the file. He had been in Japan for a week and had arrived home on the night of her death. Strike knew that Somé lived within easy walking distance of Kentigern Gardens, but the police appeared to have been satisfied with his assertion that, once home, he had simply gone to bed. Strike had already noted the fact that anyone walking from Charles Street would have approached Kentigern Gardens from the opposite direction to the CCTV camera on Alderbrook Road.

Strike closed the file at last. As he moved laboriously through his office, undressing, removing the prosthesis and unfolding the camp bed, he thought of nothing but his own exhaustion. He fell asleep quickly, lulled by the sounds of humming traffic, the pattering rain and the deathless breath of the city.

2

A LARGE MAGNOLIA TREE STOOD in the front garden of Lucy’s house in Bromley. Later in the spring it would cover the front lawn in what looked like crumpled tissues; now, in April, it was a frothy cloud of white, its petals waxy as coconut shavings. Strike had only visited this house a few times, because he preferred to meet Lucy away from her home, where she always seemed most harried, and to avoid encounters with his brother-in-law, for whom his feelings were on the cooler side of tepid.

Helium-filled balloons, tied to the gate, bobbled in the light breeze. As Strike walked down the steeply sloping front path to the door, the package Robin had wrapped under his arm, he told himself that it would soon be over.

“Where’s Charlotte?” demanded Lucy, short, blonde and round-faced, immediately upon opening the front door.

More big golden foil balloons, this time in the shape of the number seven, filled the hall behind her. Screams that might have denoted excitement or pain were issuing from some unseen region of the house, disturbing the suburban peace.

“She had to go back to Ayr for the weekend,” lied Strike.

“Why?” asked Lucy, standing back to let him in.

“Another crisis with her sister. Where’s Jack?”

“They’re all through here. Thank God it’s stopped raining, or we’d have had to have them in the house,” said Lucy, leading him out into the back garden.

They found his three nephews tearing around the large back lawn with twenty assorted boys and girls in party clothes, who were shrieking their way through some game that involved running to various cricket stumps on which pictures of pieces of fruit had been taped. Parent helpers stood around in the weak sunlight, drinking wine out of plastic cups, while Lucy’s husband, Greg, manned an iPod standing in a dock on a trestle table. Lucy handed Strike a lager, then dashed away from him almost immediately, to pick up the youngest of her three sons, who had fallen hard and was bawling with gusto.

Strike had never wanted children; it was one of the things on which he and Charlotte had always agreed, and it had been one of the reasons other relationships over the years had foundered. Lucy deplored his attitude, and the reasons he gave for it; she was always miffed when he stated life aims that differed from hers, as though he were attacking her decisions and choices.

“All right, there, Corm?” said Greg, who had handed over the control of the music to another father. Strike’s brother-in-law was a quantity surveyor, who never seemed quite sure what tone to take with Strike, and usually settled for a combination of chippiness and aggression that Strike found irksome. “Where’s that gorgeous Charlotte? Not split up again, have you? Ha ha ha. I can’t keep track.”

One of the little girls had been pushed over: Greg hurried off to help one of the other mothers deal with more tears and grass stains. The game roared on in chaos. At last, a winner was declared; there were more tears from the runner-up, who had to be placated with a consolation prize from the black bin bag sitting beside the hydrangeas. A second round of the same game was then announced.

“Hi there!” said a middle-aged matron, sidling up to Strike. “You must be Lucy’s brother!”

“Yeah,” he said.

“We heard all about your poor leg,” she said, staring down at his shoes. “Lucy kept us all posted. Gosh, you wouldn’t even know, would you? I couldn’t even see you limping when you arrived. Isn’t it amazing what they can do these days? I expect you can run faster now than you could before!”

Perhaps she imagined that he had a single carbon-fiber prosthetic blade under his trousers, like a Paralympian. He sipped his lager, and forced a humorless smile.

“Is it true?” she asked, ogling him, her face suddenly full of naked curiosity. “Are you really Jonny Rokeby’s son?”

Some thread of patience, which Strike had not realized was strained to breaking point, snapped.

“Fucked if I know,” he said. “Why don’t you call him and ask?”

She looked stunned. After a few seconds, she walked away from him in silence. He saw her talking to another woman, who glanced towards Strike. Another child fell over, crashing its head on to the cricket stump decorated with a giant strawberry, and emitting an ear-splitting shriek. With all attention focused on the fresh casualty, Strike slipped back inside the house.

The front room was blandly comfortable, with a beige three-piece suite, an Impressionist print over the mantelpiece and framed photographs of his three nephews in their bottle-green school uniform displayed on shelves. Strike closed the door carefully on the noise from the garden, took from his pocket the DVD Wardle had sent, inserted it into the player and turned on the TV.

There was a photograph on top of the set, taken at Lucy’s thirtieth birthday party. Lucy’s father, Rick, was there with his second wife. Strike stood at the back, where he had been placed in every group photograph since he was five years old. He had been in possession of two legs then. Tracey, fellow SIB officer and the girl whom Lucy had hoped her brother would marry, was standing next to him. Tracey had subsequently married one of their mutual friends, and had recently given birth to a daughter. Strike had meant to send flowers, but had never got round to it.

He dropped his gaze to the screen, and pressed “play.”

The grainy black-and-white footage began immediately. A white street, thick blobs of snow drifting past the eye of the camera. The 180° view showed the intersection of Bellamy and Alderbrook Roads.

A man walked, alone, into view, from the right side of the screen; tall, his hands deep in his pockets, swathed in layers, a hood over his head. His face looked strange in the black-and-white footage; it tricked the eye; Strike thought that he was looking at a stark white lower face and a dark blindfold, before reason told him that he was in fact looking at a dark upper face, and a white scarf tied over the nose, mouth and chin. There was some kind of mark, perhaps a blurry logo, on his jacket; otherwise his clothing was unidentifiable.

As the walker approached the camera, he bowed his head and appeared to consult something he drew out of his pocket. Seconds later, he turned up Bellamy Road and disappeared out of range of the camera. The digital clock in the lower right-hand portion of the screen registered 01:39.

The film jumped. Here again was the blurred view of the same intersection, apparently deserted, the same heavy flakes of snow obscuring the view, but now the clock in the lower corner read 02:12.

The two runners burst into view. The one in front was recognizable as the man who had walked out of range with his white scarf over his mouth; long-legged and powerful, he ran, his arms pumping, straight back down Alderbrook Road. The second man was smaller, slighter, hooded and hatted; Strike noticed the dark fists, clenched as he pelted along behind the first, losing ground to the taller man all the way. Under a street lamp, a design on the back of his sweatshirt was briefly illuminated; halfway along Alderbrook Road he veered suddenly left and up a side street.

Strike replayed the few seconds’ footage again, and then again. He saw no sign of communication between the two runners; no sign that they had called to each other, or even looked for each other, as they sprinted away from the camera. It seemed to have been every man for himself.

He replayed the footage for a fourth time, and froze it, after several attempts, at the second when the design on the back of the slower man’s sweatshirt had been illuminated. Squinting at the screen, he edged closer to the blurry picture. After a minute’s prolonged staring, he was almost sure that the first word ended in “ck,” but the second, which he thought began with a “J,” was indecipherable.

He pressed “play” and let the film run on, trying to make out which street the second man had taken. Three times Strike watched him split away from his companion, and although its name was unreadable onscreen, he knew, from what Wardle had said, that it must be Halliwell Street.

The police had thought that the fact that the first man had picked up a friend off-camera diminished his plausibility as a killer. This was assuming that the two were, indeed, friends. Strike had to concede that the fact that they had been caught on film together, in such weather, and at such an hour, acting in an almost identical fashion, suggested complicity.

Allowing the footage to run on, he watched as it cut, in almost startling fashion, to the interior of a bus. A girl got on; filmed from a position above the driver, her face was foreshortened and heavily shadowed, though her blonde ponytail was distinctive. The man who followed her on to the bus bore, as far as it was possible to see, a strong resemblance to the one who had later walked up Bellamy Street towards Kentigern Gardens. He was tall and hooded, with a white scarf over his face, the upper part lost in shadow. All that was clear was the logo on his chest, a stylized GS.

The film jerked to show Theobalds Road. If the individual walking fast along it was the same person who had got on the bus, he had removed his white scarf, although his build and walk were strongly reminiscent. This time, Strike thought that the man was making a conscious effort to keep his head bowed.

The film ended in a blank black screen. Strike sat looking at it, deep in thought. When he recalled himself to his surroundings, it was a slight surprise to find them multicolored and sunlit.

He took his mobile out of his pocket and called John Bristow, but reached only voicemail. He left a message telling Bristow that he had now viewed the CCTV footage and read the police file; that there were a few more things he would like to ask, and would it be possible to meet Bristow sometime during the following week.

He then called Derrick Wilson, whose telephone likewise went to voicemail, to which he reiterated his request to come and view the interior of 18 Kentigern Gardens.

Strike had just hung up when the sitting-room door opened, and his middle nephew, Jack, sidled in. He looked flushed and overwrought.

“I heard you talking,” Jack said. He closed the door just as carefully as his uncle had done.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the garden, Jack?”

“I’ve been for a pee,” said his nephew. “Uncle Cormoran, did you bring me a present?”

Strike, who had not relinquished the wrapped parcel since arriving, handed it over and watched as Robin’s careful handiwork was destroyed by small, eager fingers.

“Cool,” said Jack happily. “A soldier.”

“That’s right,” said Strike.

“He’s got a gun an’ dev’rything.”

“Yeah, he has.”

“Did you have a gun when you were a soldier?” asked Jack, turning over the box to look at the picture of its contents.

“I had two,” said Strike.

“Have you still got them?”

“No, I had to give them back.”

“Shame,” said Jack, matter-of-factly.

“Aren’t you supposed to be playing?” asked Strike, as renewed shrieks erupted from the garden.

“I don’t wanna,” said Jack. “Can I take him out?”

“Yeah, all right,” said Strike.

While Jack ripped feverishly at the box, Strike slipped Wardle’s DVD out of the player and pocketed it. Then he helped Jack to free the plastic paratrooper from the restraints holding him to the cardboard insert, and to fix his gun into his hand.

Lucy found them both sitting there ten minutes later. Jack was making his soldier fire around the back of the sofa and Strike was pretending to have taken a bullet to the stomach.

“For God’s sake, Corm, it’s his party, he’s supposed to be playing with the others! Jack, I told you you weren’t allowed to open any presents yet—pick it up—no, it’ll have to stay in here—no, Jack, you can play with it later—it’s nearly time for tea anyway…”

Flustered and irritable, Lucy ushered her reluctant son back out of the room with a dark backwards look at her brother. When Lucy’s lips were pursed she bore a strong resemblance to their Aunt Joan, who was no blood relation to either of them.

The fleeting similarity engendered in Strike an uncharacteristic spirit of cooperation. He behaved, in Lucy’s terms, well throughout the rest of the party, devoting himself in the main to defusing brewing arguments between various overexcited children, then barricading himself behind a trestle table covered in jelly and ice cream, thus avoiding the intrusive interest of the prowling mothers.

3

STRIKE WAS WOKEN EARLY ON Sunday morning by the ringing of his mobile, which was recharging on the floor beside his camp bed. The caller was Bristow. He sounded strained.

“I got your message yesterday, but Mum’s in a bad way and we haven’t got a nurse for this afternoon. Alison’s going to come over and keep me company. I could meet you tomorrow, in my lunch hour, if you’re free? Have there been any developments?” he added hopefully.

“Some,” said Strike cautiously. “Listen, where’s your sister’s laptop?”

“It’s here in Mum’s flat. Why?”

“How would you feel about me having a look at it?”

“Fine,” said Bristow. “I’ll bring it along tomorrow, shall I?”

Strike agreed that this would be a good idea. When Bristow had given him the name and address of his favorite place to eat near his office, and hung up, Strike reached for his cigarettes, and lay for a while smoking and contemplating the pattern made on the ceiling by the sun through the blind slats, savoring the silence and the solitude, the absence of children screaming, of Lucy’s attempts to question him over the raucous yells of her youngest. Feeling almost kindly towards his peaceful office, he stubbed out the cigarette, got up and prepared to take his usual shower at ULU.

He finally reached Derrick Wilson, after several more attempts, late on Sunday evening.

“You can’t come this week,” said Wilson. “Mister Bestigui’s round a lot at the moment. I gotta think about mi job, you understand me. I’ll call you if there’s a good time, all right?”

Strike heard a distant buzzer.

“Are you at work now?” called Strike, before Wilson could hang up.

He heard the security guard say, away from the receiver:

“(Just sign the book, mate.) What?” he added loudly, to Strike.

“If you’re there now, could you check the logbook for the name of a friend who used to visit Lula sometimes?”

“What friend?” asked Wilson. “(Yeah, see yuh.)”

“The girl Kieran talked about; the friend from rehab. Rochelle. I want her surname.”

“Oh, her, yeah,” said Wilson. “Yeah, I’ll take a look an’ I’ll buzz y—”

“Could you have a quick look now?”

He heard Wilson sigh.

“Yeah, all right. Wait there.”

Indistinct sounds of movement, clunks and scrapings, then the flick of turning pages. While Strike waited, he contemplated various items of clothing designed by Guy Somé, which were arrayed on his computer screen.

“Yeah, she’s here,” said Wilson’s voice in his ear. “Her name’s Rochelle…I can’ read…looks like Onifade.”

“Can you spell it?”

Wilson did so, and Strike wrote it down.

“When’s the last time she was there, Derrick?”

“Back in early November,” said Wilson. “(Yeah, good evenin’.) I gotta go now.”

He put the receiver down on Strike’s thanks, and the detective returned to his can of Tennent’s and his contemplation of modern day-wear, as envisaged by Guy Somé, in particular a hooded zip-up jacket with a stylized GS in gold on the upper left-hand side. The logo was much in evidence on all the ready-to-wear clothing in the menswear section of the designer’s website. Strike was not entirely clear on the definition of “ready-to-wear”; it seemed a statement of the obvious, though whatever else the phrase might connote, it meant “cheaper.” The second section of the site, named simply “Guy Somé,” contained clothing that routinely ran into thousands of pounds. Despite Robin’s best endeavors, the designer of these maroon suits, these narrow knitted ties, these minidresses embroidered with mirror fragments, these leather fedoras, was continuing to turn a corporate deaf ear to all requests for an interview concerning the death of his favorite model.

4

“It’s a nice day out there.”

“Will you please read this? Please?”

It was Monday morning, and Strike had just returned from a smoke in the sunny street and a chat with the girl from the record shop opposite. Robin’s hair was loose again; she obviously had no more interviews today. This deduction, and the effects of sunlight after rain, combined to lift Strike’s spirits. Robin, however, looked strained, standing behind her desk and holding out a pink piece of paper embellished with the usual kittens.

“Still at it, is he?”

Strike took the letter and read it through, grinning.

“I don’t understand why you aren’t going to the police,” said Robin. “The things he’s saying he wants to do to you…”

“Just file it,” said Strike dismissively, tossing the letter down and rifling through the rest of the paltry pile of mail.

“Yes, well, that’s not all,” said Robin, clearly annoyed by his attitude. “Temporary Solutions have just called.”

“Yeah? What did they want?”

“They asked for me,” said Robin. “They obviously suspect I’m still here.”

“And what did you say?”

“I pretended to be somebody else.”

“Quick thinking. Who?”

“I said my name was Annabel.”

“When asked to come up with a fake name on the spot, people usually choose one beginning with ‘A,’ did you know that?”

“But what if they send somebody to check?”

“Well?”

“It’s you they’ll try and get money from, not me! They’ll try and make you pay a recruitment fee!”

He smiled at her genuine anxiety that he would have to pay money he could not afford. He had been intending to ask her to telephone the office of Freddie Bestigui again, and to begin a search through online telephone directories for Rochelle Onifade’s Kilburn-based aunt. Instead he said:

“OK, we’ll vacate the premises. I was going to check out a place called Vashti this morning, before I meet Bristow. Maybe it’d look more natural if we both went.”

“Vashti? The boutique?” said Robin, at once.

“Yeah. You know it, do you?”

It was Robin’s turn to smile. She had read about it in magazines: it epitomized London glamour to her; a place where fashion editors found items of fabulous clothing to show their readers, pieces that would have cost Robin six months’ salary.

“I know of it,” she said.

He took down her trench coat and handed it to her.

“We’ll pretend you’re my sister, Annabel. You can be helping me pick out a present for my wife.”

“What’s the death-threat man’s problem?” asked Robin, as they sat side by side on the Tube. “Who is he?”

She had suppressed her curiosity about Jonny Rokeby, and about the dark beauty who had fled Strike’s building on her first day at work, and the camp bed they never mentioned; but she was surely entitled to ask questions about the death threats. It was she, after all, who had so far slit open three pink envelopes, and read the unpleasant and violent outpourings scrawled between gamboling kittens. Strike never even looked at them.

“He’s called Brian Mathers,” said Strike. “He came to see me last June because he thought his wife was sleeping around. He wanted her followed, so I put her under surveillance for a month. Very ordinary woman: plain, frumpy, bad perm; worked in the accounts department of a big carpet warehouse. Spent her weekdays in a poky little office with three female colleagues, went to bingo every Thursday, did the weekly shop on Fridays at Tesco, and on Saturdays went to the local Rotary Club with her husband.”

“When did he think she was sleeping around?” asked Robin.

Their pale reflections were swaying in the opaque black window; drained of color in the harsh overhead light, Robin looked older, yet ethereal, and Strike craggier, uglier.

“Thursday nights.”

“And was she?”

“No, she really was going to bingo with her friend Maggie, but all four Thursdays that I watched her, she made herself deliberately late home. She drove around a little bit after she’d left Maggie. One night she went into a pub and had a tomato juice on her own, sitting in a corner looking timid. Another night she waited in her car at the end of their street for forty-five minutes before driving around the corner.”

“Why?” asked Robin, as the train rattled loudly through a lengthy tunnel.

“Well that’s the question, isn’t it? Proving something? Trying to get him worked up? Taunting him? Punishing him? Trying to inject a bit of excitement into their dull marriage? Every Thursday, just a bit of unexplained time.

“He’s a twitchy bugger, and he’d swallowed the bait all right. It was driving him mad. He was sure she was meeting a lover once a week, that her friend Maggie was covering for her. He’d tried following her himself, but he was convinced that she went to bingo on those occasions because she knew he was watching.”

“So you told him the truth?”

“Yeah, I did. He didn’t believe me. He got very worked up and started shouting and screaming about everyone being in a conspiracy against him. Refused to pay my bill.

“I was worried he was going to end up doing her an injury, which was where I made my big mistake. I phoned her and told her he’d paid me to watch her, that I knew what she was doing, and that her husband was heading for breaking point. For her own sake, she ought to be careful how far she pushed him. She didn’t say a word, just hung up on me.

“Well, he was checking her mobile regularly. He saw my number, and drew the obvious conclusion.”

“That you’d told her he was having her watched?”

“No, that I had been seduced by her charms and was her new lover.”

Robin clapped her hands over her mouth. Strike laughed.

“Are your clients usually a bit mad?” asked Robin, when she had freed her mouth again.

“He is, but they’re usually just stressed.”

“I was thinking about John Bristow,” Robin said hesitantly. “His girlfriend thinks he’s deluded. And you thought he might be a bit…you know…didn’t you?” she asked. “We heard,” she added, a little shamefacedly, “through the door. The bit about ‘armchair psychologists.’ ”

“Right,” said Strike. “Well…I might have changed my mind.”

“What do you mean?” asked Robin, her clear gray-blue eyes wide. The train was jolting to a halt; figures were flashing past the windows, becoming less blurred with every second. “Do you—are you saying he’s not—that he might be right—that there really was a…?”

“This is our stop.”

The white-painted boutique they sought stood on some of the most expensive acreage in London, in Conduit Street, close to the junction with New Bond Street. To Strike, its colorful windows displayed a multitudinous mess of life’s unnecessities. Here were beaded cushions and scented candles in silver pots; slivers of artistically draped chiffon; gaudy kaftans worn by faceless mannequins; bulky handbags of an ostentatious ugliness; all spread against a pop-art backdrop, in a gaudy celebration of consumerism he found irritating to retina and spirit. He could imagine Tansy Bestigui and Ursula May in here, examining price tags with expert eyes, selecting four-figure bags of alligator skin with a pleasureless determination to get their money’s worth out of their loveless marriages.

Beside him, Robin too was staring at the window display, but only dimly registering what she was looking at. A job offer had been made to her that morning, by telephone, while Strike was smoking downstairs, just before Temporary Solutions had called. Every time she contemplated the offer, which she would have to accept or decline within the next two days, she felt a jab of some intense emotion to the stomach that she was trying to persuade herself was pleasure, but increasingly suspected was dread.

She ought to take it. There was much in its favor. It paid exactly what she and Matthew had agreed she ought to aim for. The offices were smart and well placed for the West End. She and Matthew would be able to lunch together. The employment market was sluggish. She should be delighted.

“How did the interview go on Friday?” asked Strike, squinting at a sequined coat he found obscenely unattractive.

“Quite well, I think,” said Robin vaguely.

She recalled the excitement she had felt mere moments ago when Strike had hinted that there might, after all, have been a killer. Was he serious? Robin noted that he was now staring hard at this massive assemblage of fripperies as though they might be able to tell him something important, and this was surely (for a moment she saw with Matthew’s eyes, and thought in Matthew’s voice) a pose adopted for effect, or show. Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.

Robin reflected that if she took the human resources job, she might never know (unless she saw it, one day, on the news) how this investigation turned out. To prove, to solve, to catch, to protect: these were things worth doing; important and fascinating. Robin knew that Matthew thought her somehow childish and naive for feeling this way, but she could not help herself.

Strike had turned his back on Vashti, and was looking at something in New Bond Street. His gaze, Robin saw, was fixed on the red letter box standing outside Russell and Bromley, its dark rectangular mouth leering at them across the road.

“OK, let’s go,” said Strike, turning back to her. “Don’t forget, you’re my sister and we’re shopping for my wife.”

“But what are we trying to find out?”

“What Lula Landry and her friend Rochelle Onifade got up to in there, on the day before Landry died. They met here, for fifteen minutes, then parted. I’m not hopeful; it’s three months ago, and they might not have noticed anything. Worth a try, though.”

The ground floor of Vashti was devoted to clothing; a sign pointing up the wooden stairs indicated that a café and “lifestyle” were housed above. A few women were browsing the shining steel clothes racks; all of them thin and tanned, with long, clean, freshly blow-dried hair. The assistants were an eclectic bunch; their clothing eccentric, their hairstyles outré. One of them was wearing a tutu and fishnets; she was arranging a display of hats.

To Strike’s surprise, Robin marched boldly over to this girl.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “There’s a fabulous sequined coat in your middle window. I wonder whether I could try it on?”

The assistant had a mass of fluffy white hair the texture of cotton candy, gaudily painted eyes and no eyebrows.

“Yeah, no probs,” she said.

As it turned out, however, she had lied: retrieving the coat from the window was distinctly problematic. It needed to be taken off the mannequin that was wearing it, and disentangled from its electronic tag; ten minutes later, the coat had still not emerged, and the original assistant had called two of her colleagues into the window display to help her. Robin, meanwhile, was drifting around without talking to Strike, picking out an assortment of dresses and belts. By the time the sequined coat was carried out from the window, all three assistants involved in its retrieval seemed somehow invested in its future, and all accompanied Robin towards the changing room, one volunteering to help her carry the pile of extras she had chosen, the other two bearing the coat.

The curtained changing rooms consisted of ironwork frames draped with thick cream silk, like tents. As he positioned himself close enough to listen to what went on inside, Strike felt that he was only now starting to appreciate the full range of his temporary secretary’s talents.

Robin had taken over ten thousand pounds’ worth of goods into the changing room with her, of which the sequined coat cost half. She would never have had the nerve to do this under normal circumstances, but something had got into her this morning: recklessness and bravado; she was proving something to herself, to Matthew, and even to Strike. The three assistants fussed around her, hanging up dresses and smoothing out the heavy folds of the coat, and Robin felt no shame that she could not have afforded even the cheapest of the belts now draped over the arm of the redhead with tattoos up both arms, and that none of the girls would ever receive the commission for which they were, undoubtedly, vying. She even allowed the assistant with pink hair to go and find a gold jacket she assured Robin would suit her admirably, and go wonderfully well with the green dress she had picked out.

Robin was taller than any of the shop girls, and when she had swapped her trench coat for the sequined one, they cooed and gasped.

“I must show my brother,” she told them, after surveying her reflection with a critical eye. “It isn’t for me, you see, it’s for his wife.”

And she strode back out through the changing-room curtains with the three assistants hovering behind her. The rich girls over by the clothing rack all turned to stare at Robin through narrow eyes as she asked boldly:

“What do you think?”

Strike had to admit that the coat he had thought so vile looked better on Robin than on the mannequin. She twirled on the spot for him, and the thing glittered like a lizard’s skin.

“It’s all right,” he said, masculinely cautious, and the assistants smiled indulgently. “Yeah, it’s quite nice. How much is it?”

“Not that much, by your standards,” said Robin, with an arch look at her handmaidens. “Sandra would love this, though,” she said firmly to Strike, who, caught off guard, grinned. “And it is her fortieth.”

“She could wear it with anything,” the cotton candy girl assured Strike eagerly. “So versatile.”

“OK, I’ll try that Cavalli dress,” said Robin blithely, turning back to the changing room.

“Sandra told me to come with him,” she told the three assistants, as they helped her out of the coat, and unzipped the dress to which she had pointed. “To make sure he doesn’t make another stupid mistake. He bought her the world’s ugliest earrings for her thirtieth; they cost an arm and a leg and she’s never had them out of the safe.”

Robin did not know where the invention was coming from; she felt inspired. Stepping out of her jumper and skirt, she began to wriggle into a clinging poison-green dress. Sandra was becoming real to her as she talked: a little spoiled, somewhat bored, confiding in her sister-in-law over wine that her brother (a banker, Robin thought, though Strike did not really look like her idea of a banker) had no taste at all.

“So she said to me, take him to Vashti and get him to crack open his wallet. Oh yes, this is nice.”

It was more than nice. Robin stared at her own reflection; she had never worn anything so beautiful in her life. The green dress was magically constructed to shrink her waist to nothingness, to carve her figure into flowing curves, to elongate her pale neck. She was a serpentine goddess in glittering viridian, and the assistants were all murmuring and gasping their appreciation.

“How much?” Robin asked the redhead.

“Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine,” said the girl.

“Nothing to him,” said Robin airily, striding out through the curtains to show Strike, whom they found examining a pile of gloves on a circular table.

His only comment on the green dress was “Yeah.” He had barely looked at her.

“Well, maybe it’s not Sandra’s color,” said Robin, with a sudden feeling of embarrassment; Strike was not, after all, her brother or her boyfriend; she had perhaps taken invention too far, parading in front of him in a skintight dress. She retreated into the changing room.

Stripped again to bra and pants she said:

“The last time Sandra was here, Lula Landry was in your café. Sandra said she was gorgeous in the flesh. Even better than in pictures.”

“Oh yeah, she was,” agreed the pink-haired girl, who was clutching to her chest the gold jacket she had fetched. “She used to be in here all the time, we used to see her every week. Do you want to try this?”

“She was in here the day before she died,” said the cotton candy–haired girl, helping Robin to wriggle into the gold jacket. “In this changing room, actually in this one.”

“Really?” said Robin.

“It’s not going to close over the bust, but it looks great open,” said the redhead.

“No, that’s no good, Sandra’s a bit bigger than me, if anything,” said Robin, ruthlessly sacrificing her fictional sister-in-law’s figure. “I’ll try that black dress. Did you say Lula Landry was here actually the day before she died?”

“Oh yeah,” said the girl with pink hair. “It was so sad, really so sad. You heard her, didn’t you, Mel?”

The tattooed redhead, who was holding up a black dress with lace inserts, made an indeterminate noise. Watching her in the mirror, Robin saw no eagerness to talk about what she had, whether deliberately or accidentally, overheard.

“She was speaking to Duffield, wasn’t she, Mel?” prompted the chatty pink-haired girl.

Robin saw Mel frown. Tattoos notwithstanding, Robin had the impression that Mel might well be the other two girls’ senior. She seemed to feel that discretion about what took place in these cream silk tents was part of her job, whereas the other two bubbled with the desire to recount gossip, particularly to a woman who seemed so eager to spend her rich brother’s money.

“It must be impossible not to hear what goes on in these—these tent things,” Robin commented, a little breathlessly, as she was inched into the lacy black dress by the combined efforts of the three assistants.

Mel unbent slightly.

“Yeah, it is. And people just come in here and start mouthing off about whatever they fancy. You can’t help overhearing stuff through this,” she said, pointing towards the stiff curtain of raw silk.

Now heavily constricted in a lace-and-leather straitjacket, Robin gasped:

“You’d think Lula Landry would be a bit more careful, with the press following her around wherever she went.”

“Yeah,” said the redhead. “You would. I mean, I’d never pass on anything I heard, but some people might.”

Disregarding the fact that she had evidently shared whatever she’d heard with her colleagues, Robin expressed appreciation for this rare sense of decency.

“I suppose you had to tell the police, though?” she said, pulling the dress straight and bracing herself for the raising of the zip.

“The police never came here,” said the girl with cotton candy hair, regret in her voice. “I said Mel should have gone and told them what she’d heard, but she didn’t want to.”

“It wasn’t anything,” said Mel, quickly. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I mean, he wasn’t there, was he? That was proven.”

Strike had moved as close as he dared to the silk curtain, without arousing suspicious looks from the customers and remaining assistants.

Inside the changing cubicle, the pink-haired girl was heaving on the zip. Slowly Robin’s ribcage was compressed by a hidden boned corset. The listening Strike was disconcerted that her next question was almost a groan.

“D’you mean that Evan Duffield wasn’t at her flat when she died?”

“Yeah,” said Mel. “So it didn’t matter what she was saying to him earlier, did it? He wasn’t there.”

The four women considered Robin’s reflection for a moment.

“I don’t think,” said Robin, observing the way that two thirds of her breasts were squashed flat by the straining material, while the upper slopes overflowed the neckline, “Sandra’s going to fit into this. But don’t you think,” she said, breathing more freely as the cotton candy–haired girl unzipped her, “you ought to have told the police what she said, and let them decide whether it was important?”

“I said that, Mel, didn’t I?” crowed the pink-haired girl. “I told her that.”

Mel was immediately on the defensive.

“But he wasn’t there! He never went to her flat! He must’ve been saying he had something on and he didn’t want to see her, because she was going, ‘Come after, then, I’ll wait up, it don’t matter. I probably won’t be home till one anyway. Please come, please.’ Like, begging him. Anyway, she had her friend in the cubicle with her. Her friend heard everything; she would’ve told the police, wouldn’t she?”

Robin was pulling on the glittering coat again, for something to do. Almost as an afterthought, as she twisted and turned in front of the mirror, she asked:

“And it was definitely Evan Duffield she was talking to, was it?”

“Of course it was,” said Mel, as though Robin had insulted her intelligence. “Who else would she’ve been asking round to her place in the early hours? She sounded desperate to see him.”

“God, his eyes,” said the girl with the cotton candy hair. “He is so gorgeous. And massive charisma in person. He came in here with her once. God, he’s sexy.”

Ten minutes later, Robin having modeled a further two outfits for Strike, and agreed with him in front of the assistants that the sequined coat was the best of the bunch, they decided (with the assistants’ agreement) that she ought to bring Sandra in to have a look at it the following day before they committed themselves. Strike reserved the five-thousand-pound coat under the name of Andrew Atkinson, gave an invented mobile phone number and left the boutique with Robin in a shower of friendly good wishes, as though they had already spent the money.

They walked fifty yards in silence, and Strike had lit up a cigarette before he said:

“Very, very impressive.”

Robin glowed with pride.

5

STRIKE AND ROBIN PARTED AT New Bond Street station. Robin took the underground back to the office to call BestFilms, look through online telephone directories for Rochelle Onifade’s aunt, and evade Temporary Solutions (“Keep the door locked” was Strike’s advice).

Strike bought himself a newspaper and caught the underground to Knightsbridge, then walked, having plenty of time to spare, to the Serpentine Bar and Kitchen, which Bristow had chosen for their lunch appointment.

The trip took him across Hyde Park, down leafy walkways and across the sandy bridle path of Rotten Row. He had jotted down the bare bones of the girl called Mel’s evidence on the Tube, and now, in the sun-dappled greenery, his mind drifted, lingering on the memory of Robin as she had looked in the clinging green dress.

He had disconcerted her by his reaction, he knew that; but there had been a weird intimacy about the moment, and intimacy was precisely what he wanted least at the moment, most especially with Robin, bright, professional and considerate as she was. He enjoyed her company and he appreciated the way that she respected his privacy, keeping her curiosity in check. God knew, thought Strike, moving over to avoid a cyclist, he had come across that particular quality rarely enough in life, particularly from women. Yet the fact that he would, quite soon, be free of Robin was an inextricable part of his enjoyment of her presence; the fact that she was going to move on imposed, like her engagement ring, a happy boundary. He liked Robin; he was grateful to her; he was even (after this morning) impressed by her; but, having normal sight and an unimpaired libido, he was also reminded every day she bent over the computer monitor that she was a very sexy girl. Not beautiful; nothing like Charlotte; but attractive, nonetheless. That fact had never been so crudely presented to him as when she walked out of the changing room in the clinging green dress, and in consequence he had literally averted his eyes. He acquitted her of any deliberate provocation, but he was realistic, all the same, about the precarious balance that must be maintained for his own sanity. She was the only human with whom he was in regular contact, and he did not underestimate his current susceptibility; he had also gathered, from certain evasions and hesitations, that her fiancé disliked the fact that she had left the temping agency for this ad hoc agreement. It was safest all round not to let the burgeoning friendship become too warm; best not to admire openly the sight of her figure draped in jersey.

Strike had never been to the Serpentine Bar and Kitchen. It was set on the boating lake, a striking building that was more like a futuristic pagoda than anything he had ever seen. The thick white roof, looking like a giant book that had been placed down on its open pages, was supported by concertinaed glass. A huge weeping willow caressed the side of the restaurant and brushed the water’s surface.

Though it was a cool, breezy day, the view over the lake was splendid in the sunlight. Strike chose an outdoor table right beside the water, ordered a pint of Doom Bar and read his paper.

Bristow was already ten minutes late when a tall, well-made, expensively suited man with foxy coloring stopped beside Strike’s table.

“Mr. Strike?”

In his late fifties, with a full head of hair, a firm jaw and pronounced cheekbones, he looked like an almost-famous actor hired to play a rich businessman in a miniseries. Strike, whose visual memory was highly trained, recognized him immediately from the photographs that Robin had found online as the tall man who had looked as though he deplored his surroundings at Lula Landry’s funeral.

“Tony Landry. John and Lula’s uncle. May I sit down?”

His smile was perhaps the most perfect example of an insincere social grimace that Strike had ever witnessed; a mere baring of even white teeth. Landry eased himself out of his overcoat, draped it over the back of the seat opposite Strike and sat.

“John’s delayed at the office,” he said. The breeze ruffled his hair, showing how it had receded at the temples. “He asked Alison to call you and let you know. I happened to be passing her desk at the time, so I thought I’d come and deliver the message in person. It gives me an opportunity to have a private word with you. I’ve been expecting you to contact me; I know you’re working your way slowly through all my niece’s contacts.”

He slid a pair of steel-rimmed glasses out of his top pocket, put them on and took a moment to consult the menu. Strike drank some beer and waited.

“I hear you’ve been speaking to Mrs. Bestigui?” said Landry, setting down the menu, taking off his glasses again and reinserting them into his suit pocket.

“That’s right,” said Strike.

“Yes. Well, Tansy is undoubtedly well intentioned, but she is doing herself no favors at all by repeating a story the police have proven, conclusively, could not have been true. No favors at all,” repeated Landry portentously. “And so I have told John. His first duty ought to be to the firm’s client, and what is in her best interests.

“I will have the ham hock terrine,” he added to a passing waitress, “and a still water. Bottled. Well,” he continued, “it’s probably best to be direct, Mr. Strike.

“For many reasons, all of them good ones, I am not in favor of raking over the circumstances of Lula’s death. I don’t expect you to agree with me. You make money by digging through the seamy circumstances of family tragedies.”

He flashed his aggressive, humorless smile again.

“I’m not entirely unsympathetic. We all have our livings to make, and no doubt there are plenty of people who would say my profession is just as parasitic as yours. It might be helpful to both of us, though, if I lay certain facts in front of you, facts I doubt John has chosen to disclose.”

“Before we get into that,” said Strike, “what exactly is keeping John at the office? If he isn’t going to make it, I’ll arrange an alternative appointment with him; I’ve got other people to see this afternoon. Is he still trying to sort out this Conway Oates business?”

He knew only what Ursula had told him, that Conway Oates had been an American financier, but this mention of the firm’s dead client had the desired effect. Landry’s pomposity, his desire to control the encounter, his comfortable air of superiority, vanished entirely, leaving him clothed in nothing but temper and shock.

“John hasn’t—can he really have been so…? That is strictly confidential business of the firm!”

“It wasn’t John,” said Strike. “Mrs. Ursula May mentioned that there’s been a bit of trouble around Mr. Oates’s estate.”

Clearly thrown, Landry spluttered, “I am very surprised—I wouldn’t have expected Ursula—Mrs. May…”

“So will John be along at all? Or have you given him something that will keep him busy all through lunch?”

He enjoyed watching Landry wrestle his own temper, trying to regain control of himself and the encounter.

“John will be here shortly,” he said finally. “I hoped, as I said, to be able to lay certain facts in front of you, in private.”

“Right, well, in that case, I’ll need these,” said Strike, removing a notebook and pen from his pocket.

Landry looked quite as put out by the sight of these objects as Tansy had.

“There’s no need to take notes,” he said. “What I’m about to say has no bearing—or at least, no direct bearing—on Lula’s death. That is,” he added pedantically, “it will add nothing to any theory other than that of suicide.”

“All the same,” said Strike, “I like to have my aide-memoire.”

Landry looked as though he would like to protest, but thought better of it.

“Very well, then. Firstly, you should know that my nephew John was deeply affected by his adopted sister’s death.”

“Understandable,” commented Strike, tilting the notebook so that the lawyer could not read it, and writing the words deeply affected, purely to annoy Landry.

“Yes, naturally. And while I would never go so far as to suggest that a private detective refuse a client on the basis that they are under strain, or depressed—as I said, we all have our livings to make—in this case…”

“You think it’s all in his head?”

“That’s not how I’d have phrased it, but bluntly, yes. John has already suffered more sudden bereavements than many people experience in a lifetime. You probably weren’t aware that he’s already lost a brother…”

“Yeah, I knew. Charlie was an old schoolmate of mine. That’s why John hired me.”

Landry contemplated Strike with what seemed to be surprise and disfavor.

“You were at Blakeyfield Prep?”

“Briefly. Before my mother realized she couldn’t afford the fees.”

“I see. I did not know that. Even so, perhaps you’re not fully aware…John has always been—let’s use my sister’s expression for it—highly strung. His parents had to bring in psychologists after Charlie died, you know. I don’t claim to be a mental health expert, but it seems to me that Lula’s passing has, finally, tipped him over the…”

“Unfortunate choice of phrase, but I see what you mean,” said Strike, writing Bristow off rocker. “How exactly has John been tipped over the edge?”

“Well, many would say that instigating this reinvestigation is irrational and pointless,” said Landry.

Strike kept his pen poised over the notepad. For a moment, Landry’s jaws moved as though he was chewing; then he said forcefully:

“Lula was a manic depressive who jumped out of the window after a row with her junkie boyfriend. There is no mystery. It was goddamn awful for all of us, especially her poor bloody mother, but those are the unsavory facts. I’m forced to the conclusion that John is having some kind of breakdown, and, if you don’t mind me speaking frankly…”

“Feel free.”

“…your collusion is perpetuating his unhealthy refusal to accept the truth.”

“Which is that Lula killed herself?”

“A view that is shared by the police, the pathologist and the coroner. John, for reasons that are obscure to me, is determined to prove murder. How he thinks that will make any of us feel any better, I could not tell you.”

“Well,” said Strike, “people close to suicides often feel guilty. They think, however unreasonably, that they might have done more to help. A murder verdict would exonerate the family of any blame, wouldn’t it?”

“None of us has anything to feel guilty about,” said Landry, his tone steely. “Lula received the very best medical care from her early teens, and every material advantage her adoptive family could give her. ‘Spoiled rotten’ might be the phrase best suited to describe my adopted niece, Mr. Strike. Her mother would have literally died for her, and scant repayment she ever received.”

“You thought Lula ungrateful, did you?”

“There’s no need to bloody write that down. Or are those notes destined for some tawdry rag?”

Strike was interested in how completely Landry had jettisoned the suavity he had brought to the table. The waitress arrived with Landry’s food. He did not thank her, but glared at Strike until she had passed on. Then he said:

“You’re poking around where you can only do harm. I was stunned, frankly, when I found out what John was up to. Stunned.”

“Hadn’t he expressed doubts about the suicide theory to you?”

“He’d expressed shock, naturally, like all of us, but I certainly don’t recall any suggestion of murder.”

“Are you close to your nephew, Mr. Landry?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“It might explain why he didn’t tell you what he was thinking.”

“John and I have a perfectly amicable working relationship.”

“‘Working relationship’?”

“Yes, Mr. Strike: we work together. Do we live in each other’s pockets outside the office? No. But we are both involved in caring for my sister—Lady Bristow, John’s mother, who is now a terminal case. Our out-of-hours conversations usually concern Yvette.”

“John strikes me as a dutiful son.”

“Yvette’s all he has left now, and the fact that she’s dying isn’t helping his mental condition either.”

“She’s hardly all he’s got left. There’s Alison, isn’t there?”

“I am not aware that that is a very serious relationship.”

“Perhaps one of John’s motives, in employing me, is a desire to give his mother the truth before she dies?”

“The truth won’t help Yvette. Nobody enjoys accepting that they have reaped what they have sown.”

Strike said nothing. As he had expected, the lawyer could not resist the temptation to clarify, and after a moment he continued:

“Yvette has always been morbidly maternal. She adores babies.” He spoke as though this was faintly disgusting, a kind of perversion. “She would have been one of those embarrassing women who have twenty children if she could have found a man of sufficient virility. Thank God Alec was sterile—or hasn’t John mentioned that?”

“He told me Sir Alec Bristow wasn’t his natural father, if that’s what you mean.”

If Landry was disappointed not to be first with the information, he rallied at once.

“Yvette and Alec adopted the two boys, but she had no idea how to manage them. She is, quite simply, an atrocious mother. No control, no discipline; complete overindulgence and a point-blank refusal to see what is under her nose. I don’t say it was all down to her parenting—who knows what the genetic influences were—but John was whiny, histrionic and clingy and Charlie was completely delinquent, with the result—”

Landry stopped talking abruptly, patches of color high in his cheeks.

“With the result that he rode over the edge of a quarry?” Strike suggested.

He had said it to watch Landry’s reaction, and was not disappointed. He had the impression of a tunnel contracting, a distant door closing: a shutting down.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. And it was a bit late, then, for Yvette to start screaming and clawing at Alec, and passing out cold on the floor. If she’d had an iota of control, the boy wouldn’t have set out expressly to defy her. I was there,” said Landry, stonily. “On a weekend visit. Easter Sunday. I had been for a walk down to the village, and I came back to find them all looking for him. I headed straight for the quarry. I knew, you see. It was the place he’d been forbidden to go—so there he was.”

“You found the body, did you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That must have been highly distressing.”

“Yes,” said Landry, his lips barely moving. “It was.”

“And it was after Charlie died, wasn’t it, that your sister and Sir Alec adopted Lula?”

“Which was probably the single most stupid thing Alec Bristow ever agreed to,” said Landry. “Yvette had already proven herself a disastrous mother; was she likely to be any more successful while in a state of abandoned grief? Of course, she’d always wanted a daughter, a baby to dress in pink, and Alec thought it would make her happy. He always gave Yvette anything she wanted. He was besotted with her from the moment she joined his typing pool, and he was an unvarnished East Ender. Yvette has always had a predilection for a bit of rough.”

Strike wondered what the real source of Landry’s anger could be.

“You don’t get along with your sister, Mr. Landry?” asked Strike.

“We get along perfectly well; it is simply that I am not blind to what Yvette is, Mr. Strike, nor how much of her misfortune is her own damn fault.”

“Was it difficult for them to get approved for another adoption after Charlie died?” asked Strike.

“I daresay it would have been, if Alec hadn’t been a multimillionaire,” snorted Landry. “I know the authorities were concerned about Yvette’s mental health, and they were both a bit long in the tooth by then. It’s a great pity that they weren’t turned down. But Alec was a man of infinite resourcefulness and he had all sorts of strange contacts from his barrow-boy days. I don’t know the details, but I’d be prepared to bet money changed hands somewhere. Even so, he couldn’t manage a Caucasian. He brought another child of completely unknown provenance into the family, to be raised by a depressed and hysterical woman of no judgment. It was hardly a surprise to me that the result was catastrophic. Lula was as unstable as John and as wild as Charlie, and Yvette had just as little idea how to manage her.”

Scribbling away for Landry’s benefit, Strike wondered whether his belief in genetic predetermination accounted for some of Bristow’s preoccupation with Lula’s black relatives. Doubtless Bristow had been privy to his uncle’s views through the years; children absorbed the views of their relatives at some deep, visceral level. He, Strike, had known in his bones, long before the words had ever been said in front of him, that his mother was not like other mothers, that there was (if he believed in the unspoken code that bound the rest of the adults around him) something shameful about her.

“You saw Lula the day she died, I think?” Strike said.

Landry’s eyelashes were so fair they looked silver.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah…” Strike flicked back through his notebook ostentatiously, coming to a halt at an entirely blank page. “…you met her at your sister’s flat, didn’t you? When Lula called in to see Lady Bristow?”

“Who told you that? John?”

“It’s all in the police file. Isn’t it true?”

“Yes, it’s perfectly true, but I can’t see how it’s relevant to anything we’ve been discussing.”

“I’m sorry; when you arrived, you said you’d been expecting to hear from me. I got the impression you were happy to answer questions.”

Landry had the air of a man who has found himself unexpectedly snookered.

“I have nothing to add to the statement I gave to the police,” he said at last.

“Which is,” said Strike, leafing backwards through blank pages, “that you dropped in to visit your sister that morning, where you met your niece, and that you then drove to Oxford to attend a conference on international developments in family law?”

Landry was chewing on air again.

“That’s correct,” he said.

“What time would you say you arrived at your sister’s flat?”

“It must have been about ten,” said Landry, after a short pause.

“And you stayed how long?”

“Half an hour, perhaps. Maybe longer. I really can’t remember.”

“And you drove directly from there to the conference in Oxford?”

Over Landry’s shoulder, Strike saw John Bristow questioning a waitress; he appeared out of breath and a little disheveled, as though he had been running. A rectangular leather case dangled from his hand. He glanced around, panting slightly, and when he spotted the back of Landry’s head, Strike thought that he looked frightened.

6

“JOHN,” SAID STRIKE, AS HIS client approached them.

“Hi, Cormoran.”

Landry did not look at his nephew, but picked up his knife and fork and took a first bite of his terrine. Strike moved around the table to make room for Bristow to sit down opposite his uncle.

“Have you spoken to Reuben?” Landry asked Bristow coldly, once he had finished his mouthful of terrine.

“Yes. I’ve said I’ll go over this afternoon and take him through all the deposits and drawings.”

“I’ve just been asking your uncle about the morning before Lula died, John. About when he visited your mother’s flat,” said Strike.

Bristow glanced at Landry.

“I’m interested in what was said and done there,” Strike continued, “because, according to the chauffeur who drove her back from her mother’s flat, Lula seemed distressed.”

“Of course she was distressed,” snapped Landry. “Her mother had cancer.”

“The operation she’d just had was supposed to have cured her, wasn’t it?”

“Yvette had just had a hysterectomy. She was in pain. I don’t doubt Lula was disturbed at seeing her mother in that condition.”

“Did you talk much to Lula, when you saw her?”

A minuscule hesitation.

“Just chit-chat.”

“And you two, did you speak to each other?”

Bristow and Landry did not look at each other. A longer pause, of a few seconds, before Bristow said:

“I was working in the home office. I heard Tony come in, heard him speaking to Mum and Lula.”

“You didn’t look in to say hello?” Strike asked Landry.

Landry considered him through slightly boiled-looking eyes, pale between the light lashes.

“You know, nobody here is obliged to answer your questions, Mr. Strike,” said Landry.

“Of course not,” agreed Strike, and he made a small and incomprehensible note in his pad. Bristow was looking at his uncle. Landry seemed to reconsider.

“I could see through the open door of the home study that John was hard at work, and I didn’t want to disturb him. I sat with Yvette in her room for a while, but she was groggy from the painkillers, so I left her with Lula. I knew,” said Landry, with the faintest undertone of spite, “that there was nobody Yvette would prefer to Lula.”

“Lula’s telephone records show that she called your mobile phone repeatedly after she left Lady Bristow’s flat, Mr. Landry.”

Landry flushed.

“Did you speak to her on the phone?”

“No. I had my mobile switched to silent; I was late for the conference.”

“They vibrate, though, don’t they?”

He wondered what it would take to make Landry leave. He was sure that the lawyer was close.

“I glanced at my phone, saw it was Lula and decided it could wait,” he said shortly.

“You didn’t call her back?”

“No.”

“Didn’t she leave any kind of message, to tell you what she wanted to talk about?”

“No.”

“That seems odd, doesn’t it? You’d just seen her at her mother’s, and you say nothing very important passed between you; yet she spent much of the rest of the afternoon trying to contact you. Doesn’t that seem as though she might have had something urgent to say to you? Or that she wanted to continue a conversation you’d been having at the flat?”

“Lula was the kind of girl who would call somebody thirty times in a row, on the flimsiest pretext. She was spoiled. She expected people to jump to attention at the sight of her name.”

Strike glanced at Bristow.

“She was—sometimes—a bit like that,” her brother muttered.

“Do you think your sister was upset purely because your mother was weak from her operation, John?” Strike asked Bristow. “Her driver, Kieran Kolovas-Jones, is emphatic that she came away from the flat in a dramatically altered mood.”

Before Bristow could answer, Landry, abandoning his food, stood up and began to put on his overcoat.

“Is Kolovas-Jones that strange-looking colored boy?” he asked, looking down at Strike and Bristow. “The one who wanted Lula to get him modeling and acting work?”

“He’s an actor, yeah,” said Strike.

“Yes. On Yvette’s birthday, the last before she became ill, I had a problem with my car. Lula and that man called by to give me a lift to the birthday dinner. Kolovas-Jones spent most of the journey badgering Lula to use her influence with Freddie Bestigui to get him an audition. Quite an encroaching young man. Very familiar in his manner. Of course,” he added, “the less I knew about my adopted niece’s love life, the better, as far as I was concerned.”

Landry threw a ten-pound note down on the table.

“I’ll expect you back at the office soon, John.”

He stood in clear expectation of a response, but Bristow was not paying attention. He was staring, wide-eyed, at the picture on the news story that Strike had been reading when Landry arrived; it showed a young black soldier in the uniform of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

“What? Yes. I’ll be straight back,” he told his uncle distractedly, who was looking at him coldly. “Sorry,” Bristow added to Strike, as Landry walked away. “It’s just that Wilson—Derrick Wilson, you know, the security guard—he’s got a nephew out in Afghanistan. For a moment, God forbid…but it’s not him. Wrong name. Dreadful, this war, isn’t it? And is it worth this loss of life?”

Strike shifted the weight off his prosthesis—the trudge across the park had not helped the soreness in his leg—and made a noncommittal noise.

“Let’s walk back,” said Bristow, when they had finished eating. “I fancy some fresh air.”

Bristow chose the most direct route, which involved navigating stretches of lawn that Strike would not have chosen to walk, on his own, because it demanded much more energy than tarmac. As they passed the memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, whispering, tinkling and gushing along its long channel of Cornish granite, Bristow suddenly announced, as though Strike had asked:

“Tony’s never liked me much. He preferred Charlie. People said that Charlie looked like Tony did, when he was a boy.”

“I can’t say he spoke about Charlie with much fondness before you arrived, and he doesn’t seem to have had much time for Lula, either.”

“Didn’t he give you his views on heredity?”

“By implication.”

“No, well, he’s not usually shy about them. It made an extra bond between Lula and me, the fact that Uncle Tony considered us a pair of sow’s ears. It was worse for Lula; at least my biological parents must have been white. Tony’s not what you’d call unprejudiced. We had a Pakistani trainee last year; she was one of the best we’ve ever had, but Tony drove her out.”

“What made you go and work with him?”

“They made me a good offer. It’s the family firm; my grandfather started it, not that that was an inducement. No one wants to be accused of nepotism. But it’s one of the top family law firms in London, and it made my mother happy to think I was following in her father’s footsteps. Did he have a go at my father?”

“Not really. He hinted that Sir Alec might have greased some palms to get Lula.”

“Really?” Bristow sounded surprised. “I don’t think that’s true. Lula was in care. I’m sure the usual procedures were followed.”

There was a short silence, after which Bristow said, a little timidly:

“You, ah, don’t look very much like your father.”

It was the first time that he had acknowledged openly that he might have been sidetracked on to Wikipedia while researching private detectives.

“No,” agreed Strike. “I’m the spitting image of my Uncle Ted.”

“I gather that you and your father aren’t—ah—I mean, you don’t use his name?”

Strike did not resent the curiosity from a man whose family background was almost as unconventional and casualty-strewn as his own.

“I’ve never used it,” he said. “I’m the extramarital accident that cost Jonny a wife and several million pounds in alimony. We’re not close.”

“I admire you,” said Bristow, “for making your own way. For not relying on him.” And when Strike did not answer, he added anxiously, “I hope you didn’t mind me telling Tansy who your father is? It—it helped get her to talk to you. She’s impressed by famous people.”

“All’s fair in securing a witness statement,” said Strike. “You say that Lula didn’t like Tony, and yet she took his name professionally?”

“Oh no, she chose Landry because it was Mum’s maiden name; nothing to do with Tony. Mum was thrilled. I think there was another model called Bristow. Lula liked to stand out.”

They wove their way through passing cyclists, bench-picnickers, dog walkers and roller skaters, Strike trying to disguise the increasing unevenness in his step.

“I don’t think Tony’s ever really loved anyone in his life, you know,” said Bristow suddenly, as they stood aside to allow a helmeted child, wobbling along on a skateboard, to pass. “Whereas my mother’s a very loving person. She loved all three of her children very much, and I sometimes think Tony didn’t like it. I don’t know why. It’s something in his nature.

“There was a breach between him and my parents after Charlie died. I wasn’t supposed to know what was said, but I heard enough. He as good as told Mum that Charlie’s accident was her fault, that Charlie had been out of control. My father threw Tony out of the house. Mum and Tony were only really reconciled after Dad died.”

To Strike’s relief, they had reached Exhibition Road, and his limp became less perceptible.

“Do you think there was ever anything between Lula and Kieran Kolovas-Jones?” he asked, as they crossed the street.

“No, that’s just Tony leaping to the most unsavory conclusion he can think of. He always thought the worst when it came to Lula. Oh, I’m sure Kieran would have been only too eager, but Lula was smitten by Duffield—more’s the pity.”

They walked on down Kensington Road, with the leafy park to their left, and then into the white-stuccoed territory of ambassadors’ houses and royal colleges.

“Why do you think your uncle didn’t come and say hello to you, when he called at your mother’s the day she got out of hospital?”

Bristow looked intensely uncomfortable.

“Had there been a disagreement between you?”

“Not…not exactly,” said Bristow. “We were in the middle of a very stressful time at work. I—ought not to say. Client confidentiality.”

“Was this to do with the estate of Conway Oates?”

“How do you know that?” asked Bristow sharply. “Did Ursula tell you?”

“She mentioned something.”

“Christ almighty. No discretion. None.”

“Your uncle found it hard to believe that Mrs. May could have been indiscreet.”

“I’ll bet he did,” said Bristow, with a scornful laugh. “It’s—well, I’m sure I can trust you. It’s the kind of thing a firm like ours is touchy about, because with the kind of clients we attract—high net worth—any hint of financial impropriety is death. Conway Oates held a sizable client account with us. All the money’s present and correct; but his heirs are a greedy bunch and they’re claiming it was mismanaged. Considering how volatile the market’s been, and how incoherent Conway’s instructions became towards the end, they should be grateful there’s anything left. Tony’s irritable about the whole business and…well, he’s a man who likes to spread the blame around. There have been scenes. I’ve copped my share of criticism. I usually do, with Tony.”

Strike could tell, by the almost perceptible heaviness that seemed to be descending upon Bristow as he walked, that they were approaching his offices.

“I’m having difficulty contacting a couple of useful witnesses, John. Is there any chance you’d be able to put me in touch with Guy Somé? His people don’t seem keen on letting anyone near him.”

“I can try. I’ll call him this afternoon. He adored Lula; he ought to want to help.”

“And there’s Lula’s birth mother, too.”

“Oh yes,” sighed Bristow. “I’ve got her details somewhere. She’s a dreadful woman.”

“Have you met her?”

“No, I’m going on what Lula told me, and everything that was in the papers. Lula was determined to find out where she came from, and I think Duffield was encouraging her—I strongly suspect him of leaking the story to the press, though she always denied that…Anyway, she managed to track her down, this Higson woman, who told her that her father was an African student. I don’t know whether that was true or not. It was certainly what Lula wanted to hear. Her imagination ran wild: I think she had visions of herself being the long-lost daughter of a high-ranking politician, or a tribal princess.”

“But she never traced her father?”

“I don’t know, but,” said Bristow, displaying his usual enthusiasm for any line of inquiry that might explain the black man caught on film near her flat, “I’d have been the last person she’d have told if she did.”

“Why?”

“Because we’d had some pretty nasty rows about the whole business. My mother had just been diagnosed with uterine cancer when Lula went searching for Marlene Higson. I told Lula that she could hardly have chosen a more insensitive moment to start tracing her roots, but she—well, frankly, she had tunnel vision where her own whims were concerned. We loved each other,” said Bristow, running a weary hand over his face, “but the age difference got in the way. I’m sure she tried to look for her father, though, because that was what she wanted more than anything: to find her black roots, to find that sense of identity.”

“Was she still in contact with Marlene Higson when she died?”

“Intermittently. I had the feeling that Lula was trying to cut the connection. Higson’s a ghastly person; shamelessly mercenary. She sold her story to anyone who would pay, which, unfortunately, was a lot of people. My mother was devastated by the whole business.”

“There are a couple of other things I wanted to ask you.”

The lawyer slowed down willingly.

“When you visited Lula at her flat that morning, to return her contract with Somé, did you happen to see anyone who looked like they might have been from a security firm? There to check the alarms?”

“Like a repairman?”

“Or an electrician. Maybe in overalls?”

When Bristow screwed up his face in thought, his rabbity teeth protruded more than ever.

“I can’t remember…let me think…As I passed the flat on the second floor, yes…there was a man in there fiddling with something on the wall…Would that have been him?”

“Probably. What did he look like?”

“Well, he had his back to me. I couldn’t see.”

“Was Wilson with him?”

Bristow came to a halt on the pavement, looking a little bewildered. Three suited men and women bustled past, some carrying files.

“I think,” he said haltingly, “I think both of them were there, with their backs to me, when I walked back downstairs. Why do you ask? How can that matter?”

“It might not,” said Strike. “But can you remember anything at all? Hair or skin color, maybe?”

Looking even more perplexed, Bristow said:

“I’m afraid I didn’t really register. I suppose…” He screwed up his face again in concentration. “I remember he was wearing blue. I mean, if pressed, I’d say he was white. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

“I doubt you’ll have to,” said Strike, “but that’s still a help.”

He pulled out his notebook to remind himself of the questions he had wanted to put to Bristow.

“Oh, yeah. According to her witness statement to the police, Ciara Porter said that Lula had told her she wanted to leave everything to you.”

“Oh,” said Bristow unenthusiastically. “That.”

He began to amble along again, and Strike moved with him.

“One of the detectives in charge of the case told me that Ciara had said that. A Detective Inspector Carver. He was convinced from the first that it was suicide and he appeared to think that this supposed talk with Ciara demonstrated Lula’s intent to take her own life. It seemed a strange line of reasoning to me. Do suicides bother with wills?”

“You think Ciara Porter’s inventing, then?”

“Not inventing,” said Bristow. “Exaggerating, maybe. I think it’s much more likely that Lula said something nice about me, because we’d just made up after our row, and Ciara, in hindsight, assuming that Lula was already contemplating suicide, turned whatever it was into a bequest. She’s quite a—a fluffy sort of girl.”

“A search was made for a will, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yeah, the police looked very thoroughly. We—the family—didn’t think Lula had ever made one; her lawyers didn’t know of one, but naturally a search was made. Nothing was found, and they looked everywhere.”

“Just supposing for a moment that Ciara Porter isn’t misremembering what your sister said, though…”

“But Lula would never have left everything solely to me. Never.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would have explicitly cut out our mother, which would have been immensely hurtful,” said Bristow earnestly. “It isn’t the money—Dad left Mum very well off—it’s more the message that Lula would have been sending, cutting her out like that. Wills can cause all kinds of hurt. I’ve seen it happen countless times.”

“Has your mother made a will?” Strike asked.

Bristow looked startled.

“I—yes, I believe so.”

“May I ask who her legatees are?”

“I haven’t seen it,” said Bristow, a little stiffly. “How is this…?”

“It’s all relevant, John. Ten million quid is a hell of a lot of money.”

Bristow seemed to be trying to decide whether or not Strike was being insensitive, or offensive. Finally he said:

“Given that there is no other family, I would imagine that Tony and I are the main beneficiaries. Possibly one or two charities will be remembered; my mother has always been generous to charities. However, as I’m sure you’ll understand,” pink blotches were rising again up Bristow’s thin neck, “I am in no hurry to find out my mother’s last wishes, given what must happen before they are acted upon.”

“Of course not,” said Strike.

They had reached Bristow’s office, an austere eight-story building entered by a dark archway. Bristow stopped beside the entrance and faced Strike.

“Do you still think I’m deluded?” he asked, as a pair of dark-suited women swept up past them.

“No,” said Strike, honestly enough. “No, I don’t.”

Bristow’s undistinguished countenance brightened a little.

“I’ll be in touch about Somé and Marlene Higson. Oh—and I nearly forgot. Lula’s laptop. I’ve charged it for you, but it’s password-protected. The police people found out the password, and they told my mother, but she can’t remember what it was, and I never knew. Perhaps it was in the police file?” he added hopefully.

“Not as far as I can remember,” said Strike, “but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Where has this been since Lula died?”

“In police custody, and since then, at my mother’s. Nearly all Lula’s things are lying around at Mum’s. She hasn’t worked herself up to making decisions about them.”

Bristow handed Strike the case and bid him farewell; then, with a small bracing movement of his shoulders, he headed up the steps and disappeared through the doors of the family firm.

7

THE FRICTION BETWEEN THE END of Strike’s amputated leg and the prosthesis was becoming more painful with every step as he headed towards Kensington Gore. Sweating a little in his heavy overcoat, while a weak sun made the park shimmer in the distance, Strike asked himself whether the strange suspicion that had him in its grip was anything more than a shadow moving in the depths of a muddy pool: a trick of the light, an illusory effect of the wind-ruffled surface. Had these minute flurries of black silt been flicked up by a slimy tail, or were they nothing but meaningless gusts of algae-fed gas? Could there be something lurking, disguised, buried in the mud, for which other nets had trawled in vain?

Heading for Kensington Tube station, he passed the Queen’s Gate into Hyde Park; ornate, rust-red and embellished with royal insignia. Incurably observant, he noted the sculpture of the doe and fawn on one pillar and the stag on the other. Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed. The same, yet profoundly different…Lula Landry’s laptop banged harder and harder into his leg as his limp worsened.

In his sore, stymied and frustrated state, there was a dull inevitability about Robin’s announcement, when he finally reached the office at ten to five, that she was still unable to penetrate past the telephone receptionist of Freddie Bestigui’s production company; and that she had had no success in finding anyone of the name Onifade with a British Telecom number in the Kilburn area.

“Of course, if she’s Rochelle’s aunt, she could have a different surname, couldn’t she?” Robin pointed out, as she buttoned her coat and prepared to leave.

Strike agreed to it wearily. He had dropped on to the sagging sofa the moment he had come through the office door, something that Robin had never seen him do before. His face was pinched.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Any sign of Temporary Solutions this afternoon?”

“No,” said Robin, pulling her belt tight. “Perhaps they believed me when I said I was Annabel? I did try and sound Australian.”

He grinned. Robin closed the interim report she had been reading while she waited for Strike to return, set it neatly back on its shelf, bade Strike goodnight and left him sitting there, the laptop lying beside him on the threadbare cushions.

When the sound of Robin’s footsteps was no longer audible, Strike stretched a long arm sideways to lock the glass door; then broke his own weekday ban on smoking in the office. Jamming the lit cigarette between his teeth, he pulled up his trouser leg and unlaced the strap holding the prosthesis to his thigh. Then he unrolled the gel liner from the stump of his leg and examined the end of his amputated tibia.

He was supposed to examine the skin surface for irritation every day. Now he saw that the scar tissue was inflamed and over-warm. There had been various creams and powders back in the bathroom cabinet at Charlotte’s dedicated to the care of this patch of skin, subject as it was these days to forces for which it had not been designed. Perhaps she had thrown the corn powder and Oilatum into one of the still unpacked boxes? But he could not muster the energy to go and find out, nor did he want to refit the prosthesis just yet; and so he sat smoking on the sofa with the lower trouser leg hanging empty towards the floor, lost in thought.

His mind drifted. He thought about families, and names, and about the ways in which his and John Bristow’s childhoods, outwardly so different, had been similar. There were ghostly figures in Strike’s family history, too: his mother’s first husband, for instance, of whom she had rarely spoken, except to say that she had hated being married from the first. Aunt Joan, whose memory had always been sharpest where Leda’s had been most vague, said that the eighteen-year-old Leda had run out on her husband after only two weeks; that her sole motivation in marrying Strike Snr (who, according to Aunt Joan, had arrived in St. Mawes with the fair) had been a new dress, and a change of name. Certainly, Leda had remained more faithful to her unusual married moniker than to any man. She had passed it to her son, who had never met its original owner, long gone before his unconnected birth.

Strike smoked, lost in thought, until the daylight in his office began to soften and dim. Then, at last, he struggled up on his one foot and, using the doorknob and the dado rail on the wall beyond the glass door to steady himself, hopped out to examine the boxes still stacked on the landing outside his office. At the bottom of one of them he found those dermatological products designed to assuage the burning and prickling in the end of his stump, and set to work to try and repair the damage first done by the long walk across London with his kitbag over his shoulder.

It was lighter now than it had been at eight o’clock two weeks ago; still daylight when Strike was seated, for the second time in ten days, in Wong Kei, the tall, white-fronted Chinese restaurant with a window view of an arcade center called Play to Win. It had been extremely painful to reattach the prosthetic leg, and still more to walk down Charing Cross Road on it, but he had disdained the use of the gray metal sticks he had also found in the box, relics of his release from Selly Oak Hospital.

While Strike ate Singapore noodles one-handed, he examined Lula Landry’s laptop, which lay open on the table, beside his beer. The dark pink computer casing was patterned with cherry blossom. It did not occur to Strike that he presented an incongruous appearance to the world as he hunched, large and hairy, over the prettified, pink and palpably feminine device, but the sight had drawn smirks from two of the black-T-shirted waiters.

“How’s tricks, Federico?” asked a pallid, straggly-haired young man at half past eight. The newcomer, who dropped into the seat opposite Strike, wore jeans, a psychedelic T-shirt, Converse sneakers, and a leather bag slung diagonally across his chest.

“Been worse,” grunted Strike. “How’re you? Want a drink?”

“Yeah, I’ll have a lager.”

Strike ordered the drink for his guest, whom he was accustomed, for long-forgotten reasons, to call Spanner. Spanner had a first-class degree in computer science, and was much better paid than his clothing suggested.

“I’m not that hungry, I had a burger after work,” Spanner said, looking down the menu. “I could do a soup. Wonton soup, please,” he added to the waiter. “Interesting choice of laptop, Fed.”

“It’s not mine,” said Strike.

“It’s the job, is it?”

“Yeah.”

Strike slid the computer around to face Spanner, who surveyed the device with the mixture of interest and disparagement characteristic of those to whom technology is no necessary evil, but the stuff of life.

“Junk,” said Spanner cheerfully. “Where’ve you been hiding yourself, Fed? People’ve been worried.”

“Nice of them,” said Strike, through a mouthful of noodles. “No need, though.”

“I was round Nick and Ilsa’s coupla nights ago and you were the only topic of conversation. They were saying you’ve gone underground. Oh, cheers,” he said, as his soup arrived. “Yeah, they’ve been ringing your flat and they keep getting the answering machine. Ilsa reckons it’s woman trouble.”

It now occurred to Strike that the best way to inform his friends of his ruptured engagement might be through the medium of the unconcerned Spanner. The younger brother of one of Strike’s old friends, Spanner was largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the long and tortured history of Strike and Charlotte. Given that it was face-to-face sympathy and postmortems that Strike wanted to avoid, and that he had no intention of pretending forever that he and Charlotte had not split up, he agreed that Ilsa had correctly divined his main trouble, and that it would be better if his friends avoided calling Charlotte’s flat henceforth.

“Bummer,” said Spanner, and then, with the incuriosity towards human pain versus technological challenges that was characteristic of him, he pointed a spatulate fingertip at the Dell and asked: “What d’you want doing with this, then?”

“The police have already had a look at it,” said Strike, lowering his voice even though he and Spanner were the only people nearby not speaking Cantonese, “but I want a second opinion.”

“Police’ve got good techie people. I doubt I’m gonna find anything they haven’t.”

“They might not have been looking for the right stuff,” said Strike, “and they might not’ve realized what it meant even if they found it. They seemed mostly interested in her recent emails, and I’ve already seen them.”

“What am I looking for, then?”

“All activity on or leading up to the eighth of January. The most recent internet searches, stuff like that. I haven’t got the password, and I’d rather not go back to the police and ask unless I have to.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Spanner. He was not writing these instructions down, but typing them on to his mobile phone; Spanner was ten years younger than Strike, and he rarely wielded a pen by choice. “Who’s it belong to, anyway?”

When Strike told him, Spanner said:

“The model? Whoa.”

But Spanner’s interest in human beings, even when dead or famous, was still secondary to his fondness for rare comics, technological innovation and bands of which Strike had never heard. After eating several spoonfuls of soup, Spanner broke the silence to inquire brightly how much Strike was planning to pay him for the work.

When Spanner had left with the pink laptop under his arm, Strike limped back to his office. He washed the end of his right leg carefully that night and then applied cream to the irritated and inflamed scar tissue. For the first time in many months, he took painkillers before easing himself into his sleeping bag. Lying there waiting for the raw ache to deaden, he wondered whether he ought to make an appointment to see the consultant in rehabilitation medicine under whose care he was supposed to fall. The symptoms of choke syndrome, the nemesis of amputees, had been described to him repeatedly: suppurating skin and swelling. He was wondering whether he might be showing the early signs, but he dreaded the prospect of returning to corridors stinking of disinfectant; of doctors with their detached interest in this one small mutilated portion of his body; of further minute adjustments to the prosthesis necessitating still more visits to that white-coated, confined world he had hoped he had left forever. He feared advice to rest the leg, to desist from normal ambulation; a forced return to crutches, the stares of passersby at his pinned-up trouser leg and the shrill inquiries of small children.

His mobile, charging as usual on the floor beside the camp bed, made the buzzing noise that announced the arrival of a text. Glad for any minor distraction from his throbbing leg, Strike groped in the dark and picked up the telephone from the floor.

Please could you give me a quick call when convenient? Charlotte

Strike did not believe in clairvoyance or psychic ability, yet his immediate irrational thought was that Charlotte had somehow sensed what he had just told Spanner; that he had twitched the taut, invisible rope still binding them, by placing their breakup on an official footing.

He stared at the message as though it was her face, as though he could read her expression on the tiny gray screen.

Please. (I know you don’t have to: I’m asking you to, nicely.) A quick call. (I have a legitimate reason for desiring speech with you, so we can do it swiftly and easily; no rows.) When convenient. (I do you the courtesy of assuming that you have a busy life without me.)

Or, perhaps: Please. (To refuse is to be a bastard, Strike, and you’ve hurt me enough.) A quick call. (I know you’re expecting a scene; well, don’t worry, that last one, when you were such an unbelievable shit, has finished me with you forever.) When convenient. (Because, let’s be honest, I always had to slot in around the army and every other damn thing that came first.)

Was it convenient now? he asked himself, lying in pain that the pills had yet to touch. He glanced at the time: ten past eleven. She was clearly still awake.

He put the mobile back on the floor beside him, where it lay silently charging, and raised a large hairy arm over his eyes, blotting out even the strips of light on the ceiling cast by the street lamps through the window slats. Against his will, he saw Charlotte the way that he had laid eyes on her for the first time in his life, as she sat alone on a windowsill at a student party in Oxford. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and nor, judging by the sideways flickering of countless male eyes, the overloud laughter and voices, the angling of extravagant gestures towards her silent figure, had any of the rest of them.

Gazing across the room, the nineteen-year-old Strike had been visited by precisely the same urge that had come over him as a child whenever snow had fallen overnight in Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted’s garden. He wanted his footsteps to be the first to make deep, dark holes in that tantalizingly smooth surface: he wanted to disturb and disrupt it.

“You’re pissed,” warned his friend, when Strike announced his intention to go and talk to her.

Strike agreed, downed the dregs of his seventh pint and strode purposefully over to the window ledge where she sat. He was vaguely aware of people nearby watching, primed, perhaps, for laughter, because he was massive, and looked like a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt.

She looked up at him when he reached her, with big eyes, and long dark hair, and soft, pale cleavage revealed by the gaping shirt.

Strike’s strange, nomadic childhood, with its constant uprootings and graftings on to motley groups of children and teenagers, had forged in him an advanced set of social skills; he knew how to fit in, to make people laugh, to render himself acceptable to almost anyone. That night, his tongue had become numb and rubbery. He seemed to remember swaying slightly.

“Did you want something?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled his T-shirt away from his torso and showed her the curry sauce. “What d’you reckon’s the best way to get this out?”

Against her will (he saw her trying to fight it), she giggled.

Sometime later, an Adonis called the Honorable Jago Ross, known to Strike by sight and reputation, swung into the room with a posse of equally well-bred friends, and discovered Strike and Charlotte sitting side by side on the windowsill, deep in conversation.

“You’re in the wrong fucking room, Char, darling,” Ross had said, staking out his rights by the caressing arrogance of his tone. “Ritchie’s party’s upstairs.”

“I’m not coming,” she said, turning a smiling face upon him. “I’ve got to go and help Cormoran soak his T-shirt.”

Thus had she publicly dumped her Old Harrovian boyfriend for Cormoran Strike. It had been the most glorious moment of Strike’s nineteen years: he had publicly carried off Helen of Troy right under Menelaus’s nose, and in his shock and delight he had not questioned the miracle, but simply accepted it.

Only later had he realized that what had seemed like chance, or fate, had been entirely engineered by her. She had admitted it to him months later: that she had, to punish Ross for some transgression, deliberately entered the wrong room, and waited for a man, any man, to approach her; that he, Strike, had been a mere instrument to torture Ross; that she had slept with him in the early hours of the following morning in a spirit of vengefulness and rage that he had mistaken for passion.

There, in that first night, had been everything that had subsequently broken them apart and pulled them back together: her self-destructiveness, her recklessness, her determination to hurt; her unwilling but genuine attraction to Strike, and her secure place of retreat in the cloistered world in which she had grown up, whose values she simultaneously despised and espoused. Thus had begun the relationship that had led to Strike lying here on his camp bed fifteen years later, racked with more than physical pain, and wishing that he could rid himself of her memory.

8

WHEN ROBIN ARRIVED NEXT MORNING, it was, for the second time, to a locked glass door. She let herself in with the spare key that Strike had now entrusted to her, approached the closed inner door and stood silent, listening. After a few seconds, she heard the faintly muffled but unmistakable sound of deep snoring.

This presented her with a delicate problem, because of their tacit agreement not to mention Strike’s camp bed, or any of the other signs of habitation lying around the place. On the other hand, Robin had something of an urgent nature to communicate to her temporary boss. She hesitated, considering her options. The easiest route would be to try and wake Strike by clattering around the outer office, thereby giving him time to organize himself and the inner room, but that might take too long: her news would not keep. Robin therefore took a deep breath and rapped on the door.

Strike woke instantly. For one disoriented moment he lay there, registering the reproachful daylight pouring through the window. Then he remembered setting down the mobile phone after reading Charlotte’s text, and knew that he had forgotten to set the alarm.

“Don’t come in!” he bellowed.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Robin called through the door.

“Yeah—yeah, that’d be great. I’ll come out there for it,” Strike added loudly, wishing, for the first time, that he had fitted a lock on the inner door. His false foot and calf was standing propped against the wall, and he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

Robin hurried away to fill the kettle, and Strike fought his way out of his sleeping bag. He dressed at speed, making a clumsy job of putting on the prosthesis, folding the camp bed into its corner, pushing the desk back into place. Ten minutes after she had knocked on the door, he limped into the outer office smelling strongly of deodorant, to find Robin at her desk, looking very excited about something.

“Your tea,” she said, indicating a steaming mug.

“Great, thanks. Just give me a moment,” he said, and he left to pee in the bathroom on the landing. As he zipped up his fly, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, crumpled-looking and unshaven. Not for the first time, he consoled himself that his hair looked the same whether brushed or unbrushed.

“I’ve got news,” said Robin, when he had re-entered the office through the glass door and, with reiterated thanks, picked up his mug of tea.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve found Rochelle Onifade.”

He lowered the mug.

“You’re kidding. How the hell…?”

“I saw in the file that she was supposed to attend an outpatient clinic at St. Thomas’s,” said Robin excitedly, flushed and talking fast, “so I rang up the hospital yesterday evening, pretending to be her, and I said I’d forgotten the time of my appointment, and they told me it’s at ten thirty on Thursday morning. You’ve got,” she glanced at her computer monitor, “fifty-five minutes.”

Why had he not thought to tell her to do this?

“You genius, you bloody genius…”

He had slopped hot tea over his hand, and put the mug down on her desk.

“D’you know exactly…?”

“It’s in the psychiatric unit round the back of the main building,” said Robin, exhilarated. “See, you go in off Grantley Road, there’s a second car park…”

She had turned the monitor towards him to show him the map of St. Thomas’s. He checked his wrist, but his watch was still in the inner room.

“You’ll have time if you leave now,” Robin urged him.

“Yeah—I’ll get my stuff.”

Strike hurried to fetch his watch, wallet, cigarettes and phone. He was almost through the glass door, cramming his wallet into his back pocket, when Robin said:

“Er—Cormoran…”

She had never called him by his first name before. Strike assumed that this accounted for her slight air of bashfulness; then he realized that she was pointing meaningfully at his navel. Looking down, he saw that he had done up the buttons on his shirt wrongly, and was exposing a patch of belly so hairy that it resembled black coconut matting.

“Oh—right—cheers…”

Robin turned her attention politely to her monitor while he undid and refastened the buttons.

“See you later.”

“Yeah, ’bye,” she said, smiling at him as he departed at speed; but within seconds he was back, panting slightly.

“Robin, I need you to check something.”

She already had the pen in her hand, waiting.

“There was a legal conference in Oxford on the seventh of January. Lula Landry’s uncle Tony attended it. International family law. Anything you can find out. Specifically about him being there.”

“Right,” said Robin, scribbling.

“Cheers. You’re a genius.”

And he was gone, with uneven steps, down the metal stairs.

Though she hummed to herself as she settled down at her desk, a little of Robin’s cheerfulness drained away as she drank her tea. She had half hoped that Strike would invite her along to meet Rochelle Onifade, whose shadow she had hunted for two weeks.

Rush hour past, the crowds on the Tube had thinned. Strike was pleased, because the end of his stump was still smarting, to find a seat with ease. He had bought himself a pack of Extra Strong Mints at the station kiosk before boarding his train, and was now sucking four simultaneously, trying to conceal the fact that he had not had time to clean his teeth. His toothbrush and toothpaste were hidden inside his kitbag, even though it would have been much more convenient to leave them on the chipped sink in the bathroom. Catching sight of himself again, in the darkened train window, with his heavy stubble and his generally unkempt appearance, he asked himself why, when it was perfectly obvious that Robin knew he slept there, he maintained the fiction that he had some other home.

Strike’s memory and map sense were more than adequate to the task of locating the entrance to the psychiatric unit at St. Thomas’s, and he proceeded there without mishap, arriving at shortly after ten. He spent five minutes checking that the automatic double doors were the only entrance on Grantley Road, before positioning himself on a stone wall in the car park, some twenty yards away from the entrance, giving him a clear view of everyone entering and leaving.

Knowing only that the girl he sought was probably homeless, and certainly black, he had thought through his strategy for finding her on the Tube, and concluded that there was really only one option open to him. At twenty past ten, therefore, when he saw a tall, thin black girl walking briskly towards the entrance, he called out (even though she looked too well-groomed, too neatly dressed):

“Rochelle!”

She glanced up to see who had shouted, but kept walking without any sign that the name had a personal application, and disappeared into the building. Next came a couple, both white; then a group of people of assorted ages and races whom Strike guessed to be hospital workers; but on the mere off-chance he called again:

“Rochelle!”

Some of them glanced at him, but returned immediately to their conversations. Consoling himself that frequenters of this entrance were probably used to a degree of eccentricity in those they met in its vicinity, Strike lit a cigarette and waited.

Half past ten passed, and no black girl went through the doors. Either she had missed her appointment, or she had used a different entrance. A feather-light breeze tickled the back of his neck as he sat smoking, watching, waiting. The hospital building was enormous, a vast concrete box with rectangular windows; there were surely numerous entrances on every side.

Strike straightened his injured leg, which was still sore, and considered, again, the possibility that he would have to return to see his consultant. He found even this degree of proximity to a hospital slightly depressing. His stomach rumbled. He had passed a McDonald’s on the way here. If he had not found her by midday, he would go and eat there.

Twice more he shouted “Rochelle!” at black women who entered and exited the building, and both times they glanced back, purely to see who had shouted, in one case giving him a look of disdain.

Then, just after eleven, a short, stocky black girl emerged from the hospital with a slightly awkward, rocking, side-to-side gait. He knew quite well that he had not missed her going in, not only because of her distinctive walk, but because she wore a very noticeable short coat of magenta-colored fake fur, which flattered neither her height nor her breadth.

“Rochelle!”

The girl stopped, turned and stared around, scowling, looking for the person who had called her name. Strike limped towards her, and she glared at him with an understandable mistrust.

“Rochelle? Rochelle Onifade? Hi. My name’s Cormoran Strike. Can I have a word?”

“I always come in Redbourne Street entrance,” she told him five minutes later, after he had given a garbled and fictitious account of the way he had found her. “I come out this way ’cause I was gonna go to McDonald’s.”

So that was where they went. Strike bought two coffees and two large cookies, and carried them to the window table where Rochelle was waiting, curious and suspicious.

She was uncompromisingly plain. Her greasy skin, which was the color of burned earth, was covered in acne pustules and pits; her small eyes were deep-set and her teeth were crooked and rather yellow. The chemically straightened hair showed four inches of black roots, then six inches of harsh, coppery wire-red. Her tight, too-short jeans, her shiny gray handbag and her bright white trainers looked cheap. However, the squashy fake-fur jacket, garish and unflattering though Strike found it, was of a different quality altogether: fully lined, as he saw when she took it off, with a patterned silk, and bearing the label not (as he had expected, remembering Lula Landry’s email to the designer) of Guy Somé, but of an Italian of whom even Strike had heard.

“You sure you inna journalist?” she asked, in her low, husky voice.

Strike had already spent some time outside the hospital trying to establish his bona fides in this respect.

“No, I’m not a journalist. Like I said, I know Lula’s brother.”

“You a friend of his?”

“Yeah. Well, not exactly a friend. He’s hired me. I’m a private detective.”

She was instantly, openly scared.

“Whaddayuhwanna talk to me for?”

“There’s nothing to worry about…”

“Whyd’yuhwanna talk to me, though?”

“It’s nothing bad. John isn’t sure that Lula committed suicide, that’s all.”

He guessed that the only thing keeping her in the seat was her terror of the construction he might put on instant flight. Her fear was out of all proportion to his manner or words.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured her again. “John wants me to take another look at the circumstances, that’s—”

“Does ’e say I’ve got something to do wiv ’er dying?”

“No, of course not. I’m just hoping you might be able to tell me about her state of mind, what she got up to in the lead-up to her death. You saw her regularly, didn’t you? I thought you might be able to tell me what was going on in her life.”

Rochelle made as though to speak, then changed her mind and attempted to drink her scalding coffee instead.

“So, what—’er brother’s trying to make out she never killed ’erself? What, like she was pushed out the window?”

“He thinks it’s possible.”

She seemed to be trying to fathom something, to work it out in her head.

“I don’t ’ave to talk to you. You ain’t real police.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But wouldn’t you like to help find out what—”

“She jumped,” declared Rochelle Onifade firmly.

“What makes you so sure?” asked Strike.

“I jus’ know.”

“It seems to have come as a shock to nearly everyone else she knew.”

“She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus’ takes you over. It’s an illness,” she said, although she made the words sound like “it’s uh nillness.”

Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. He had slept badly. Nillness, that was where Lula Landry had gone, and where all of them, he and Rochelle included, were headed. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow’s mother…sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.

He was sure that if he took out his notebook, she would clam up, or leave. He therefore continued to ask questions as casually as he could manage, asking her how she had come to attend the clinic, how she had first met Lula.

Still immensely suspicious, she gave monosyllabic answers at first, but slowly, gradually, she became more forthcoming. Her own history was pitiful. Early abuse, care, severe mental illness, foster homes and violent outbursts culminating, at sixteen, in homelessness. She had secured proper treatment as the indirect result of being hit by a car. Hospitalized when her bizarre behavior had made treating her physical wounds nearly impossible, a psychiatrist had at last been called in. She was on drugs now, which, when she took them, greatly eased her symptoms. Strike found it pathetic, and touching, that the outpatient clinic where she had met Lula Landry seemed to have become, for Rochelle, the highlight of her week. She spoke with some affection of the young psychiatrist who ran the group.

“So that’s where you met Lula?”

“Di’n’t her brother tell ya?”

“He was vague on the details.”

“Yeah, she come to our group. She wuz referred.”

“And you got talking?”

“Yeah.”

“You became friends?”

“Yeah.”

“You visited her at home? Swam in the pool?”

“Why shou’n’t I?”

“No reason. I’m only asking.”

She thawed very slightly.

“I don’t like swimming. I don’t like water over m’face. I went in the jacuzzi. And we went shoppin’ an’ stuff.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her neighbors; the other people in her building?”

“Them Bestiguis? A bit. She din’ like them. That woman’s a bitch,” said Rochelle, with sudden savagery.

“What makes you say that?”

“Have you met ’er? She look at me like I wuz dirt.”

“What did Lula think of her?”

“She din’ like ’er neither, nor her husband. He’s a creep.”

“In what way?”

“He jus’ is,” said Rochelle, impatiently; but then, when Strike did not speak, she went on. “He wuz always tryin’ ter get her downstairs when his wife wuz out.”

“Did Lula ever go?”

“No fuckin’ chance,” said Rochelle.

“You and Lula talked to each other a lot, I suppose, did you?”

“Yeah, we did, at f—Yeah, we did.”

She looked out of the window. A sudden shower of rain had caught passersby unawares. Transparent ellipses peppered the glass beside them.

“At first?” said Strike. “Did you talk less as time went on?”

“I’m gonna have to go soon,” said Rochelle, grandly. “I got things to do.”

“People like Lula,” said Strike, feeling his way, “can be spoiled. Treat people badly. They’re used to getting their own—”

“I ain’t no one’s servant,” said Rochelle fiercely.

“Maybe that’s why she liked you? Maybe she saw you as someone more equal—not a hanger-on?”

“Yeah, igzactly,” said Rochelle, mollified. “I weren’t impressed by her.”

“You can see why she’d want you as a friend, someone more down-to-earth…”

“Yeah.”

“…and you had your illness in common, didn’t you? So you understood her on a level most people wouldn’t.”

“And I’m black,” said Rochelle, “and she wuz wanting to feel proper black.”

“Did she talk to you about that?”

“Yeah, ’course,” said Rochelle. “She wuz wanting to find out where she come from, where she belong.”

“Did she talk to you about trying to find the black side of her family?”

“Yeah, of course. And she…yeah.”

She had braked almost visibly.

“Did she ever find anyone? Her father?”

“No. She never found ’im. No fuckin’ chance.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

She began eating fast. Strike was afraid that she would leave the moment she had finished.

“Was Lula depressed when you met her at Vashti, the day before she died?”

“Yeah, she wuz.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“There don’t ’ave to be a reason why. It’s uh nillness.”

“But she told you she was feeling bad, did she?”

“Yeah,” she said, after a fractional hesitation.

“You were supposed to be having lunch together, weren’t you?” he asked. “Kieran told me that he drove her to meet you. You know Kieran, right? Kieran Kolovas-Jones?”

Her expression softened; the corners of her mouth lifted.

“Yeah, I know Kieran. Yeah, she come to meet me at Vashti.”

“But she didn’t stop for lunch?”

“No. She wuz in a hurry,” said Rochelle.

She bowed her head to drink more coffee, concealing her face.

“Why didn’t she just ring you? You’ve got a phone, have you?”

“Yeah, I gotta phone,” she snapped, bristling, and drew from the fur jacket a basic-looking Nokia, stuck all over with gaudy pink crystals.

“So why d’you think she didn’t call to say she couldn’t see you?”

Rochelle glowered at him.

“Because she didn’t like using the phone, because of them listenin’ in.”

“Journalists?”

“Yeah.”

She had almost finished her cookie.

“Journalists wouldn’t have been very interested in her saying that she wasn’t coming to Vashti, though, would they?”

“I dunno.”

“Didn’t you think it was odd, at the time, that she drove all the way to tell you she couldn’t stay for lunch?”

“Yeah. No,” said Rochelle. And then, with a sudden burst of fluency:

“When ya gotta driver it don’t matter, does it? You jus’ go wherever you want, don’t cost you nothing extra, you just get them to take you, don’t ya? She was passing, so she come in to tell me she wasn’t gonna stop because she ’ad to get ’ome to see fucking Ciara Porter.”

Rochelle looked as though she regretted the traitorous “fucking” as soon as it was out, and pursed her lips together as though to ensure no more swear words escaped her.

“And that was all she did, was it? She came into the shop, said ‘I can’t stop, I’ve got to get home and see Ciara’ and left?”

“Yeah. More uh less,” said Rochelle.

“Kieran says they usually gave you a lift home after you’d been out together.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well. She wuz too busy that day, weren’ she?”

Rochelle did a poor job of masking her resentment.

“Talk me through what happened in the shop. Did either of you try anything on?”

“Yeah,” said Rochelle, after a pause. “She did.” Another hesitation. “Long Alexander McQueen dress. He killed hiself and all,” she added, in a distant voice.

“Did you go into the changing room with her?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened in the changing room?” prompted Strike.

Her eyes reminded him of those of a bull he had once come face to face with as a small boy: deep-set, deceptively stoic, unfathomable.

“She put on the dress,” said Rochelle.

“She didn’t do anything else? Didn’t call anyone?”

“No. Well, yeah. She mighta.”

“D’you know who she called?”

“I can’t remember.”

She drank, obscuring her face again with the paper cup.

“Was it Evan Duffield?”

“It mighta bin.”

“Can you remember what she said?”

“No.”

“One of the shop assistants overheard her, while she was on the phone. She seemed to be making an appointment to meet someone at her flat much later. In the early hours of the morning, the girl thought.”

“Yeah?”

“So that doesn’t seem like it could have been Duffield, does it, seeing as she already had an arrangement to meet him at Uzi?”

“Know a lot, don’t you?” she said.

“Everyone knows they met at Uzi that night,” said Strike. “It was in all the papers.”

The dilating or contracting of Rochelle’s pupils would be almost impossible to see, because of the virtually black irises surrounding them.

“Yeah, I s’pose,” she conceded.

“Was it Deeby Macc?”

“No!” She yelped it on a laugh. “She din’ know his number.”

“Famous people can nearly always get each other’s numbers,” said Strike.

Rochelle’s expression clouded. She glanced down at the blank screen on her gaudy pink mobile.

“I don’ think she had his,” she said.

“But you heard her trying to make an arrangement to meet someone in the small hours?”

“No,” said Rochelle, avoiding his eyes, swilling the dregs of her coffee around the paper cup. “I can’ remember nuthin’ like that.”

“You understand how important this could be?” said Strike, careful to keep his tone unthreatening. “If Lula made an arrangement to meet someone at the time she died? The police never knew about this, did they? You never told them?”

“I gotta go,” she said, throwing down the last morsel of cookie, grabbing the strap of her cheap handbag and glaring at him.

Strike said:

“It’s nearly lunchtime. Can I buy you anything else?”

“No.”

But she did not move. He wondered how poor she was, whether she ate regularly or not. There was something about her, beneath the surliness, that he found touching: a fierce pride, a vulnerability.

“Yeah, all right then,” she said, dropping her handbag and slumping back on to the hard chair. “I’ll have a Big Mac.”

He was afraid she might leave while he was at the counter, but when he returned with two trays, she was still there; she even thanked him grudgingly.

Strike tried a different tack.

“You know Kieran quite well, do you?” he asked, pursuing the glow that had illuminated her at the mention of his name.

“Yeah,” she said, self-consciously. “I met him a lot with ’er. ’E wuz always driving ’er.”

“He says that Lula was writing something in the back of the car, before she arrived at Vashti. Did she show you, or give you, anything she’d written?”

“No,” she said. She crammed fries into her mouth and then said, “I ain’t seen nuthin like that. Why, what was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it were a shopping list or something?”

“Yeah, that’s what the police thought. You’re sure you didn’t notice her carrying a bit of paper, a letter, an envelope?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Kieran know you’re meeting me?” asked Rochelle.

“Yeah, I told him you were on my list. He told me you used to live at St. Elmo’s.”

This seemed to please her.

“Where are you living now?”

“What’s it to you?” she demanded, suddenly fierce.

“It’s nothing to me. I’m just making polite conversation.”

This drew a small snort from Rochelle.

“I got my own place in Hammersmith now.”

She chewed for a while and then, for the first time, proffered unsolicited information.

“We usedta listen to Deeby Macc in his car. Me, Kieran and Lula.”

And she began to rap:

No hydroquinone, black to the backbone,

Takin’ Deeby lightly, better buy an early tombstone,

I’m drivin’ my Ferrari—fuck Johari—got my head on straight

Nothin’ talks like money talks—I’m shoutin’ at ya, Mister Jake.

She looked proud, as though she had put him firmly in his place, with no retort possible.

“Tha’s from ‘Hydroquinone,’ ” she said. “On Jake On My Jack.”

“What’s hydroquinone?” Strike asked.

“Skin light’ner. We usedta rap that with the car windows down,” said Rochelle. A warm, reminiscent smile lit her face out of plainness.

“Lula was looking forward to meeting Deeby Macc, then, was she?”

“Yeah, she wuz,” said Rochelle. “She knew ’e liked ’er, she wuz pleased with herself about that. Kieran wuz proper excited an’ all, he kep’ askin’ Lula to introduce him. He wanted to meet Deeby.”

Her smile faded; she picked morosely at her burger, then said:

“Is that all you wanna know, then? ’Cause I gotta go.”

She began wolfing the remnants of her meal, cramming food into her mouth.

“Lula must have taken you to a lot of places, did she?”

“Yeah,” said Rochelle, her mouth full of burger.

“Did you go to Uzi with her?”

“Yeah. Once.”

She swallowed, and began to talk about the other places she had seen during the early phase of her friendship with Lula, which (in spite of Rochelle’s determined attempts to repudiate any suggestion that she had been dazzled by the lifestyle of a multimillionairess) had all the romance of a fairy tale. Lula had snatched Rochelle away from the bleak world of her hostel and group therapy and swept her, once a week, into a whirl of expensive fun. Strike noted how very little Rochelle had told him about Lula the person, as opposed to Lula the holder of the magic plastic cards that bought handbags, jackets and jewelry, and the necessary means by which Kieran appeared regularly, like a genie, to whisk Rochelle away from her hostel. She described, in loving detail, the presents Lula had bought her, shops to which Lula had taken her, restaurants and bars to which they had gone together, places lined with celebrities. None of these, however, seemed to have impressed Rochelle in the slightest; for every name she mentioned there was a deprecating remark:

“ ’E wuz a dick.” “She’s plastic all over.” “They ain’t nuthing special.”

“Did you meet Evan Duffield?” Strike asked.

“ ’Im.” The monosyllable was heavy with contempt. “ ’E’s a twat.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, ’e is. Ask Kieran.”

She gave the impression that she and Kieran stood together, sane, dispassionate observers of the idiots populating Lula’s world.

“In what way was he a twat?”

“ ’E treated ’er like shit.”

“Like how?”

“Sold stories,” said Rochelle, reaching for the last of her fries. “One time she tested ev’ryone. Told us all a diff’rent story to see which ones got in the papers. I wuz the only one who kep’ their mouf shut, ev’ryone else blabbed.”

“Who’d she test?”

“Ciara Porter. ’Im, Duffield. That Guy Summy,” Rochelle pronounced his first name to rhyme with “die,” “but then she reckoned it wasn’t ’im. Made excuses for ’im. But ’e used ’er as much as anyone.”

“In what way?”

“He di’n’t want ’er to work for anyone else. Wanted ’er to do it all for ’is company, get ’im all the publicity.”

“So, after she’d found out she could trust you…”

“Yeah, then she bought me the phone.”

There was a missed beat.

“So she cud get in touch wiv me whenever she wanted.”

She swept the sparkling pink Nokia suddenly off the table and stuffed it deep into the pocket of her squashy pink coat.

“I suppose you’ve had to take over the charges yourself now?” Strike asked.

He thought that she was going to tell him to mind his own business, but instead she said:

“ ’Er family ’asn’t noticed they’re still payin’ for it.”

And this thought seemed to give her a slightly malicious pleasure.

“Did Lula buy you that jacket?” Strike asked.

“No,” she snapped, furiously defensive. “I got this myself, I’m working now.”

“Really? Where are you working?”

“Whut’s it to you?” she demanded again.

“I’m showing polite interest.”

A tiny, brief smile touched the wide mouth, and she relented again.

“I’m doing afternoons in a shop up the road from my new place.”

“Are you in another hostel?”

“No,” she said, and he sensed again the digging in, the refusal to go further that he would push at his peril. He changed tack.

“It must have been a shock to you when Lula died, was it?”

“Yeah. It wuz,” she said, thoughtlessly; then, realizing what she had said, she backtracked. “I knew she wuz depressed, but you never ’spect people tuh do that.”

“So you wouldn’t say she was suicidal when you saw her that day?”

“I dunno. I never saw ’er for long enough, did I?”

“Where were you when you heard she’d died?”

“I wuz in the hostel. Loadsa people knew I knew her. Janine woke me up and told me.”

“And your immediate thought was that it was suicide?”

“Yeah. An’ I gotta go now. I gotta go.”

She had made up her mind and he could see that he was not going to be able to stop her. After wriggling back into the ludicrous fur jacket, she hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder.

“Say hullo to Kieran for me.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“See yuh.”

She waddled out of the restaurant without a backward glance.

Strike watched her walk past the window, her head down, her brows knitted, until she passed out of sight. It had stopped raining. Idly he pulled her tray towards him and finished her last few fries.

Then he stood up so abruptly that the baseball-capped girl who had been approaching his table to clear and wipe it jumped back a step with a little cry of surprise. Strike hurried out of the McDonald’s and off up Grantley Road.

Rochelle was standing on the corner, clearly visible in her furry magenta coat, part of a knot of people waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing. She was gabbling into the pink jeweled Nokia. Strike caught up with her, insinuating himself into the group behind her, making of his bulk a weapon, so that people moved aside to avoid him.

“…wanted to know who she was arrangin’ to meet that night…yeah, an’—”

Rochelle turned her head, watching traffic, and realized that Strike was right behind her. Removing the mobile from her ear, she jabbed at a button, cutting the call.

“What?” she asked him aggressively.

“Who were you calling then?”

“Mind yer own fuckin’ business!” she said furiously. The waiting pedestrians stared. “Are you followin’ me?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Listen.”

The lights changed; they were the only two not to start off over the road, and were jostled by the passing walkers.

“Will you give me your mobile number?”

The implacable bull’s eyes looked back at him, unreadable, bland, secretive.

“Wha’ for?”

“Kieran asked me to get it,” he lied. “I forgot. He thinks you left a pair of sunglasses in his car.”

He did not think she was convinced, but after a moment she dictated a number, which he wrote down on the back of one of his own cards.

“That all?” she asked aggressively, and she proceeded across the road as far as an island, where the lights changed again. Strike limped after her. She looked both angry and perturbed by his continuing presence.

“What?”

“I think you know something you’re not telling me, Rochelle.”

She glared at him.

“Take this,” said Strike, pulling a second card out of his overcoat pocket. “If you think of anything you’d like to tell me, call, all right? Call that mobile number.”

She did not answer.

“If Lula was murdered,” said Strike, while the cars whooshed by them, and rain glittered in the gutters at their feet, “and you know something, you could be in danger from the killer too.”

This evoked a tiny, complacent, scathing smile. Rochelle did not think she was in danger. She thought she was safe.

The green man had appeared. Rochelle gave a toss of her dry, wiry hair and moved away across the road, ordinary, squat and plain, still clutching her mobile in one hand and Strike’s card in the other. Strike stood alone on the island, watching her with a feeling of impotence and unease. She might never have sold her story to the newspapers, but he could not believe that she had bought that designer jacket, ugly though he found it, from the proceeds of a job in a shop.

9

THE JUNCTION OF TOTTENHAM COURT and Charing Cross Roads was still a scene of devastation, with wide gashes in the road, white hardboard tunnels and hard-hatted builders. Strike traversed the narrow walkways barricaded by metal fences, past the rumbling diggers full of rubble, bellowing workmen and more drills, smoking as he walked.

He felt weary and sore; very conscious of the pain in his leg, of his unwashed body, of the greasy food lying heavily in his stomach. On impulse, he took a detour right up Sutton Row, away from the clatter and grind of the roadworks, and called Rochelle. It went to voicemail, but it was her husky voice that answered: she had not given him a fake number. He left no message; he had already said everything he could think of saying; and yet he was worried. He half wished he had followed her, covertly, to find out where she was living.

Back on Charing Cross Road, limping on to the office through the temporary shadow of the pedestrian tunnel, he remembered the way that Robin had woken him up that morning: the tactful knock, the cup of tea, the studied avoidance of the subject of the camp bed. He ought not to have let it happen. There were other routes to intimacy than admiring a woman’s figure in a tight dress. He did not want to explain why he was sleeping at work; he dreaded personal questions. And he had let a situation arise in which she had called him Cormoran and told him to do up his buttons. He ought never to have overslept.

As he climbed the metal stairs, past the closed door of Crowdy Graphics, Strike resolved to treat Robin with a slightly cooler edge of authority for the rest of the day, to counterbalance that glimpse of hairy belly.

The decision was no sooner made than he heard high-pitched laughter, and two female voices talking at the same time, issuing from his own office.

Strike froze, listening, panicking. He had not returned Charlotte’s call. He tried to make out her tone and inflection; it would be like her to come in person and overwhelm his temp with charm, to make of his ally a friend, to saturate his own staff with Charlotte’s version of the truth. The two voices melded in laughter again, and he could not tell whose they were.

“Hi, Stick,” said a cheery voice as he pushed open the glass door.

His sister, Lucy, was sitting on the sagging sofa, with her hands around a mug of coffee, bags from Marks and Spencer and John Lewis heaped all around her.

Strike’s first surge of relief that she was not Charlotte was nevertheless tainted with a lesser dread of what she and Robin had been talking about, and how much each of them now knew about his private life. As he returned Lucy’s hug, he noticed that Robin had, again, closed the inner door on the camp bed and kitbag.

“Robin says you’ve been out detecting.” Lucy seemed in high spirits, as she so often was when she was out alone, unencumbered by Greg and the boys.

“Yeah, we do that sometimes, detectives,” said Strike. “Been shopping?”

“Yes, Sherlock, I have.”

“D’you want to go out for a coffee?”

“I’ve already got one, Stick,” she said, holding up the mug. “You’re not very sharp today. Are you limping a bit?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Have you seen Mr. Chakrabati recently?”

“Fairly recently,” lied Strike.

“If it’s all right,” said Robin, who was putting on her trench coat, “I’ll take lunch, Mr. Strike. I haven’t had any yet.”

The resolution of moments ago, to treat her with professional froideur, now seemed not only unnecessary but unkind. She had more tact than any woman he had ever met.

“That’s fine, Robin, yeah,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, Lucy,” Robin said, and with a wave she disappeared, closing the glass door behind her.

“I really like her,” said Lucy enthusiastically, as Robin’s footsteps clanged away. “She’s great. You should try and get her to stay on permanently.”

“Yeah, she’s good,” said Strike. “What were you two having such a laugh about?”

“Oh, her fiancé—he sounds a bit like Greg. Robin says you’ve got an important case on. It’s all right. She was very discreet. She says it’s a suspicious suicide. That can’t be very nice.”

She gave him a meaningful look he chose not to understand.

“It’s not the first time. I had a couple of those in the army, too.”

But he doubted that Lucy was listening. She had taken a deep breath. He knew what was coming.

“Stick, have you and Charlotte split up?”

Better get it over with.

“Yeah, we have.”

“Stick!”

“It’s fine, Luce. I’m fine.”

But her good humor had been obliterated in a great gush of fury and disappointment. Strike waited patiently, exhausted and sore, while she raged: she had known all along, known that Charlotte would do it all over again; she had lured him away from Tracey, and from his fantastic army career, rendered him as insecure as possible, persuaded him to move in, only to dump him—

“I ended it, Luce,” he said, “and Tracey and I were over before…” but he might as well have commanded lava to flow backwards: why hadn’t he realized that Charlotte would never change, that she had only returned to him for the drama of the situation, attracted by his injury and his medal? The bitch had played the ministering angel and then got bored; she was dangerous and wicked; measuring her own worth in the havoc she caused, glorying in the pain she inflicted…

“I left her, it was my choice…”

“Where have you been living? When did this happen? That absolute bloody bitch—no, I’m sorry, Stick, I’m not going to pretend anymore—all the years and years of shit she’s put you through—oh God, Stick, why didn’t you marry Tracey?”

“Luce, let’s not do this, please.”

He moved aside some of her John Lewis bags, full, he saw, of small pants and socks for her sons, and sat down heavily on the sofa. He knew he looked grubby and scruffy. Lucy seemed on the verge of tears; her day out in town was ruined.

“I suppose you haven’t told me because you knew I’d do this?” she said at last, gulping.

“It might’ve been a consideration.”

“All right, I’m sorry,” she said furiously, her eyes shining with tears. “But that bitch, Stick. Oh God, tell me you’re never going to go back to her. Please just tell me that.”

“I’m not going back to her.”

“Where are you staying—Nick and Ilsa’s?”

“No. I’ve got a little place in Hammersmith” (the first place that occurred to him, associated, now, with homelessness). “Bedsit.”

“Oh Stick…come and stay with us!”

He had a fleeting vision of the all-blue spare room, and Greg’s forced smile.

“Luce, I’m happy where I am. I just want to get on with work and be on my own for a bit.”

It took him another half-hour to shift her out of his office. She felt guilty that she had lost her temper; apologized, then attempted to justify herself, which triggered another diatribe about Charlotte. When she finally decided to leave, he helped her downstairs with her bags, successfully distracting her from the boxes full of his possessions that still stood on the landing, and finally depositing her into a black cab at the end of Denmark Street.

Her round, mascara-streaked face looked back at him out of the rear window. He forced a grin and a wave before lighting another cigarette, and reflecting that Lucy’s idea of sympathy compared unfavorably with some of the interrogation techniques they had used at Guantanamo.

10

ROBIN HAD FALLEN INTO THE habit of buying Strike a pack of sandwiches with her own, if he happened to be in the office over lunchtime, and reimbursing herself from petty cash.

Today, however, she did not hurry back. She had noticed, though Lucy had seemed oblivious, how unhappy Strike had been to find them in conversation. His expression, when he had entered the office, had been every bit as grim as the first time they had met.

Robin hoped that she had not said anything to Lucy that Strike would not like. Lucy had not exactly pried, but she had asked questions to which it was difficult to know the answer.

“Have you met Charlotte yet?”

Robin guessed that this was the stunning ex-wife or girlfriend whose exit she had witnessed on her first morning. Near-collision hardly constituted a meeting, however, so she answered:

“No, I haven’t.”

“Funny.” Lucy had given a disingenuous little smile. “I’d have thought she’d have wanted to meet you.”

For some reason, Robin had felt prompted to reply:

“I’m only temporary.”

“Still,” said Lucy, who seemed to understand the answer better than Robin did herself.

It was only now, wandering up and down the aisle of crisps without really concentrating on them, that the implications of what Lucy had said slid into place. Robin supposed that Lucy might have meant to flatter her, except that the mere possibility of Strike making any kind of pass was extremely distasteful to her.

(“Matt, honestly, if you saw him…he’s enormous and he’s got a face like some beaten-up boxer. He is not remotely attractive, I’m sure he’s over forty, and…” she had cast around for more aspersions to cast upon Strike’s appearance, “he’s got that sort of pubey hair.”

Matthew had only really become reconciled to her continuing employment with Strike now that Robin had accepted the media consultancy job.)

Robin selected two bags of salt and vinegar crisps at random, and headed towards the cash desk. She had not yet told Strike that she would be leaving in two and a half weeks’ time.

Lucy had moved from the subject of Charlotte only to interrogate Robin on the amount of business coming through the shabby little office. Robin had been as vague as she dared, intuiting that if Lucy did not know how bad Strike’s finances were, it was because he did not want her to know. Hoping that he would be pleased for his sister to think that business was good, she mentioned that his latest client was wealthy.

“Divorce case, is it?” asked Lucy.

“No,” said Robin, “it’s a…well, I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement…he’s been asked to reinvestigate a suicide.”

“Oh God, that won’t be fun for Cormoran,” said Lucy, with a strange note in her voice.

Robin looked confused.

“Hasn’t he told you? Mind you, people usually know without telling. Our mother was a famous—groupie, they call it, don’t they?” Lucy’s smile was suddenly forced, and her tone, though she was striving for detachment and unconcern, had become brittle. “It’s all on the internet. Everything is these days, isn’t it? She died of an overdose and they said it was suicide, but Stick always thought her ex-husband did it. Nothing was ever proven. Stick was furious. It was all very sordid and horrible, anyway. Perhaps that’s why the client chose Stick—I take it the suicide was an overdose?”

Robin did not reply, but it did not matter; Lucy went on without pausing for an answer:

“That’s when Stick dropped out of university and joined the military police. The family was very disappointed. He’s really bright, you know; nobody in our family had ever been to Oxford; but he just packed up and left and joined the army. And it seemed to suit him; he did really well there. I think it’s a shame he left, to be honest. He could have stayed, even with, you know, his leg…”

Robin did not betray, by so much as a flicker of her eyelid, that she did not know.

Lucy sipped her tea.

“So whereabouts in Yorkshire are you from?”

The conversation had flowed pleasantly after that, right up until the moment that Strike had walked in on them laughing at Robin’s description of Matthew’s last excursion into DIY.

But Robin, heading back to the office with sandwiches and crisps, felt even sorrier for Strike than she had done before. His marriage—or, if they had not been married, his live-in relationship—had failed; he was sleeping in his office; he had been injured in the war, and now she discovered that his mother had died in dubious and squalid circumstances.

She did not pretend to herself that this compassion was untinged with curiosity. She already knew that she would certainly, at some point in the near future, try and find the online particulars of Leda Strike’s death. At the same time, she felt guilty that she had been given another glimpse of a part of Strike she had not been meant to see, like that patch of virtually furry belly he had accidentally exposed that morning. She knew him to be a proud and self-sufficient man; these were the things she liked and admired about him, even if the way these qualities expressed themselves—the camp bed, the boxed possessions on the landing, the empty Pot Noodle tubs in the bin—aroused the derision of such as Matthew, who assumed that anyone living in uncomfortable circumstances must have been profligate or feckless.

Robin was not sure whether or not she imagined the slightly charged atmosphere in the office when she returned. Strike was sitting in front of her computer monitor, tapping away at the keyboard, and while he thanked her for the sandwiches, he did not (as was usual) turn away from work for ten minutes for a chat about the Landry case.

“I need this for a couple of minutes; will you be OK on the sofa?” he asked her, continuing to type.

Robin wondered whether Lucy had told Strike what they had discussed. She hoped not. Then she felt resentful for feeling guilty; after all, she had done nothing wrong. Her aggravation put a temporary stop on her great desire to know whether he had found Rochelle Onifade.

“Aha,” said Strike.

He had found, on the Italian designer’s website, the magenta fake-fur coat that Rochelle had been wearing that morning. It had become available for purchase only within the last two weeks, and it cost fifteen hundred pounds.

Robin waited for Strike to explain the exclamation, but he did not.

“Did you find her?” she asked, at last, when finally Strike turned from the computer to unwrap the sandwiches.

He told her about their encounter, but all the enthusiasm and gratitude of that morning, when he had called her “genius” over and again, was absent. Robin’s tone, as she gave him the results of her own telephone inquiries, was, therefore, similarly cool.

“I called the Law Society about the conference in Oxford on January the seventh,” she said. “Tony Landry attended. I pretended to be somebody he’d met there, who’d mislaid his card.”

He did not seem particularly interested in the information he had requested, nor did he compliment her on her initiative. The conversation petered out in mutual dissatisfaction.

The confrontation with Lucy had exhausted Strike; he wanted to be alone. He also suspected that Lucy might have told Robin about Leda. His sister deplored the fact that their mother had lived and died in conditions of mild notoriety, yet in certain moods she seemed to be seized with a paradoxical desire to discuss it all, especially with strangers. Perhaps it was a kind of safety valve, because of the tight lid she kept on her past with her suburban friends, or perhaps she was trying to carry the fight into the enemy’s territory, so anxious about what they might already know about her that she tried to forestall prurient interest before it could start. But he had never wanted Robin to know about his mother, or about his leg, or about Charlotte, or any of the other painful subjects which Lucy insisted on probing whenever she came close enough.

In his tiredness, and his bad mood, Strike extended to Robin, unfairly, his blanket irritation at women, who did not seem able just to leave a man in peace. He thought he might take his notes to the Tottenham this afternoon, where he would be able to sit and think without interruptions, and without being badgered for explanations.

Robin felt the atmospheric change keenly. Taking her cue from the silently munching Strike, she brushed herself free of crumbs, then gave him the morning’s messages in a brisk and impersonal tone.

“John Bristow called with a mobile number for Marlene Higson. He’s also got through to Guy Somé, who could meet you at ten o’clock on Thursday morning at his studio in Blunkett Street, if that suits. It’s out in Chiswick, near Strand-on-the-Green.”

“Great. Thanks.”

They said very little else to each other that day. Strike spent the greater part of the afternoon at the pub, returning only at ten to five. The awkwardness between them persisted, and for the first time, he was quite pleased to see Robin leave.