The Cuckoo's Calling

1

STRIKE VISITED ULU EARLY TO shower, and dressed with unusual care, on the morning of his visit to the studio of Guy Somé. He knew, from his perusal of the designer’s website, that Somé advocated the purchase and wear of such items as chaps in degraded leather, ties of metal mesh and black-brimmed headbands that seemed to have been made by cutting the tops out of old bowlers. With a faint feeling of defiance, Strike put on the conventional, comfortable dark blue suit he had worn to Cipriani.

The studio he sought had been a disused nineteenth-century warehouse, which stood on the north bank of the Thames. The glittering river dazzled his eyes as he tried to find the entrance, which was not clearly marked; nothing on the outside proclaimed the use to which the building was being put.

At last he discovered a discreet, unmarked bell, and the door was opened electronically from within. The stark but airy hallway was chilly with air-conditioning. A jingling and clacking noise preceded the entrance into the hall of a girl with tomato-red hair, dressed in head-to-toe black and wearing many silver bangles.

“Oh,” she said, seeing Strike.

“I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Somé at ten,” he told her. “Cormoran Strike.”

“Oh,” she said again. “OK.”

She disappeared the same way she had come. Strike used the wait to call the mobile telephone number of Rochelle Onifade, as he had been doing ten times a day since he had met her. There was no response.

Another minute passed, and then a small black man was suddenly crossing the floor towards Strike, catlike and silent on rubber soles. He walked with an exaggerated swing of his hips, his upper body quite still except for a little counterbalancing sway of the shoulders, his arms almost rigid.

Guy Somé was nearly a foot shorter than Strike and had perhaps a hundredth of his body fat. The front of the designer’s tight black T-shirt was decorated with hundreds of tiny silver studs which formed an apparently three-dimensional image of Elvis’s face, as though his chest were a Pin Art toy. The eye was further confused by the fact that a well-defined six-pack moved underneath the tight Lycra. Somé’s snug gray jeans bore a faint dark pinstripe, and his trainers seemed to be made out of black suede and patent leather.

His face contrasted strangely with his taut, lean body, for it abounded in exaggerated curves: the eyes exophthalmic so that they appeared fishlike, looking out of the sides of his head. The cheeks were round, shining apples and the full-lipped mouth was a wide oval: his small head was almost perfectly spherical. Somé looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.

He held out a hand with a slight crook of the wrist.

“Yeah, I can see a bit of Jonny,” he said, looking up into Strike’s face; his voice was camp and faintly cockney. “Much butcher, though.”

Strike shook hands. There was surprising strength in the fingers. The red-haired girl came jingling back.

“I’ll be busy for an hour, Trudie, no calls,” Somé told her. “Bring us some tea and bicks, darling.”

He executed a dancer’s turn, beckoning to Strike to follow him.

Down a whitewashed corridor they passed an open door, and a flat-faced middle-aged oriental woman stared back at Strike through the gauzy film of gold stuff she was throwing over a dummy; the room around her was as brilliantly lit as a surgical theater, but full of workbenches, cramped and cluttered with bolts of fabric, the walls a collage of fluttering sketches, photographs and notes. A tiny blonde woman, dressed in what appeared to Strike to be a giant black tubular bandage, opened a door and crossed the corridor in front of them; she gave him precisely the same cold, blank stare as the red-haired Trudie. Strike felt abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among capuchin monkeys.

He followed the strutting designer to the end of the corridor and up a spiral staircase of steel and rubber, at the top of which was a large white rectangular office space. Floor-to-ceiling windows all along the right-hand side showed a stunning view of the Thames and the south bank. The rest of the whitewashed walls were hung with photographs. What arrested Strike’s attention was an enormous twelve-foot-tall blowup of the infamous “Fallen Angels” on the wall opposite Somé’s desk. On closer inspection, however, he realized that it was not the shot with which the world was familiar. In this version, Lula had thrown back her head in laughter: the strong column of her throat rose vertically out of the long hair, which had become disarranged in her amusement, so that a single dark nipple protruded. Ciara Porter was looking up at Lula, the beginnings of laughter on her own face, but slower to get the joke: the viewer’s attention was drawn, as in the more famous version of the picture, immediately to Lula.

She was represented elsewhere; everywhere. There on the left, among a group of models all wearing transparent shifts in rainbow colors; further along, in profile, with gold leaf on her lips and eyelids. Had she learned how to compose her face into its most photogenic arrangement, to project emotion so beautifully? Or had she simply been a pellucid surface through which her feelings naturally shone?

“Park your arse anywhere,” said Somé, dropping into a seat behind a dark wood and steel desk covered in sketches; Strike pulled up a chair composed of a single length of contorted perspex. There was a T-shirt lying on the desk, which carried a picture of Princess Diana as a garish Mexican Madonna, glittering with bits of glass and beads, and complete with a flaming scarlet heart of shining satin, on which an embroidered crown was perched lopsided.

“You like?” said Somé, noticing the direction of Strike’s gaze.

“Oh yeah,” lied Strike.

“Sold out nearly everywhere; bad-taste letters from Catholics; Joe Mancura wore one on Jools Holland. I’m thinking of doing William as Christ on a long-sleeve for winter. Or Harry, do you think, with an AK47 to hide his cock?”

Strike smiled vaguely. Somé crossed his legs with a little more flourish than was strictly necessary and said, with startling bravado:

“So, the Accountant thinks Cuckoo might’ve been killed? I always called Lula ‘Cuckoo,’ ” he added, unnecessarily.

“Yeah. John Bristow’s a lawyer, though.”

“I know he is, but Cuckoo and I always called him the Accountant. Well, I did, and Cuckoo sometimes joined in, if she was feeling wicked. He was forever nosing into her percentages and trying to wring every last cent out of everyone. I suppose he’s paying you the detective equivalent of the minimum wage?”

“He’s paying me a double wage, actually.”

“Oh. Well he’s probably a bit more generous now he’s got Cuckoo’s money to play with.”

Somé chewed on a fingernail, and Strike was reminded of Kieran Kolovas-Jones; the designer and driver were similar in build, too, small but well proportioned.

“All right, I’m being a bitch,” said Somé, taking his nail out of his mouth. “I never liked John Bristow. He was always on Cuckoo’s case about something. Get a life. Get out of the closet. Have you heard him rhapsodizing about his mummy? Have you met his girlfriend? Talk about a beard: I think she’s got one.”

He rattled out the words in one nervy, spiteful stream, pausing to open a hidden drawer in the desk, from which he took out a packet of menthol cigarettes. Strike had already noticed that Somé’s nails were bitten to their quicks.

“Her family was the whole reason she was so fucked up. I used to tell her, ‘Drop them, sweetie, move on.’ But she wouldn’t. That was Cuckoo for you, always flogging a dead horse.”

He offered Strike one of the pure white cigarettes, which the detective declined, before lighting one with an engraved Zippo. As he flipped the lid of the lighter shut, Somé said:

“I wish I’d thought of calling in a private detective. It never occurred to me. I’m glad someone’s done it. I just cannot believe she committed suicide. My therapist says that’s denial. I’m having therapy twice a week, not that it makes any fucking difference. I’d be snaffling Valium like Lady Bristow if I could still design when I’m on it, but I tried it the week after Cuckoo died and I was like a zombie. I suppose it got me through the funeral.”

Jingling and rattling from the spiral staircase announced the reappearance of Trudie, who emerged through the floor in jerky stages. She laid upon the desk a black lacquered tray, on which stood two silver filigree Russian tea glasses, in each of which was a pale green steaming concoction with wilted leaves floating in it. There was also a plate of wafer-thin biscuits that looked as though they might be made of charcoal. Strike remembered his pie and mash and his mahogany-colored tea at the Phoenix with nostalgia.

“Thanks, Trudie. And get me an ashtray, darling.”

The girl hesitated, clearly on the verge of protesting.

“Just do it,” snarled Somé. “I’m the fucking boss, I’ll burn the building down if I want to. Pull the fucking batteries out of the fire alarms. But get the ashtray first.

“The alarm went off last week, and set off all the sprinklers downstairs,” Somé explained to Strike. “So now the backers don’t want anyone smoking in the building. They can stick that one right up their tight little bumholes.”

He inhaled deeply, then exhaled through his nostrils.

“Don’t you ask questions? Or do you just sit there looking scary until someone blurts out a confession?”

“We can do questions,” said Strike, pulling out his notebook and pen. “You were abroad when Lula died, weren’t you?”

“I’d just got back, a couple of hours before.” Somé’s fingers twitched a little on the cigarette. “I’d been in Tokyo, hardly any sleep for eight days. Touched down at Heathrow at about ten thirty with the most fucking appalling jet lag. I can’t sleep on planes. I wanna be awake if I’m going to crash.”

“How did you get home from the airport?”

“Cab. Elsa had fucked up my car booking. There should’ve been a driver there to meet me.”

“Who’s Elsa?”

“The girl I sacked for fucking up my car booking. It was the last thing I fucking wanted, to have to find a cab at that time of night.”

“Do you live alone?”

“No. By midnight I was tucked up in bed with Viktor and Rolf. My cats,” he added with a flicker of a grin. “I took an Ambien, slept for a few hours, then woke up at five in the morning. I switched on Sky News from the bed, and there was a man in a horrible sheepskin hat, standing in the snow in Cuckoo’s street, saying she was dead. The ticker-tape across the bottom of the screen was saying it too.”

Somé inhaled heavily on the cigarette, and white smoke curled out of his mouth with his next words.

“I nearly fucking died. I thought I was still asleep, or that I’d woken up in the wrong fucking dimension or something…I started calling everyone…Ciara, Bryony…all their phones were engaged. And all the time I was watching the screen, thinking they’d flash up something saying there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t her. I kept praying it was the bag lady. Rochelle.”

He paused, as though he expected some comment from Strike. The latter, who had been making notes as Somé spoke, asked, still writing:

“You know Rochelle, do you?”

“Yeah. Cuckoo brought her in here once. In it for all she could get.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She hated Cuckoo. Jealous as fuck; I could see it, even if Cuckoo couldn’t. She was in it for the freebies, she didn’t give a monkey’s whether Cuckoo lived or died. Lucky for her, as it turned out…

“So, the longer I watched the news, I knew there wasn’t a mistake. I fell a-fucking-part.”

His fingers trembled a little on the snow-white stick he was sucking.

“They said that a neighbor had overheard an argument; so of course I thought it was Duffield. I thought Duffield had knocked her through the window. I was all set to tell the pigs what a cunt he is; I was ready to stand in the dock and testify to the fucker’s character. And if this ash falls off my cigarette,” he continued in precisely the same tone, “I will fire that little bitch.”

As though she had heard him, Trudie’s rapid footfalls grew louder and louder until she emerged again into the room, breathing heavily and clutching a heavy glass ashtray.

“Thank you,” said Somé, with a pointed inflection, as she placed it in front of him and scurried back downstairs.

“Why did you think it was Duffield?” asked Strike, once he judged Trudie to be safely out of earshot.

“Who else would Cuckoo have let in at two in the morning?”

“How well do you know him?”

“Well enough, little piss ant that he is.” Somé picked up his mint tea. “Why do women do it? Cuckoo, too…she wasn’t stupid—actually, she was razor-sharp—so what did she see in Evan Duffield? I’ll tell you,” he said, without pausing for an answer. “It’s that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You’re not fucking Byron.”

He slammed his glass down and cupped his right elbow in his left hand, steadying his forearm and continuing to draw heavily on the cigarette.

“No man would put up with the likes of Duffield. Only women. Maternal instinct gone warped, if you ask me.”

“You think he had it in him to kill her, do you?”

“Of course I do,” said Somé dismissively. “Of course he has. All of us have got it in us, somewhere, to kill, so why would Duffield be any exception? He’s got the mentality of a vicious twelve-year-old. I can imagine him in one of his rages, having a tantrum and then just—”

With his cigarette-free hand he made a violent shoving movement.

“I saw him shouting at her once. At my after-show party, last year. I got in between them; I told him to have a go at me instead. I might be a little poof,” Somé said, the round-cheeked face set, “but I’d back myself against that drugged-up fuck any day. He was a tit at the funeral, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Lurching around, off his face. No fucking respect. I was full of tranks myself or I’d’ve told him what I thought of him. Pretending to be devastated, hypocritical little shit.”

“You never thought it was suicide?”

Somé’s strange, bulging eyes bored into Strike.

“Never. Duffield says he was at his dealer’s, disguised as a wolf. What kind of fucking alibi is that? I hope you’re checking him out. I hope you’re not dazzled by his fucking celebrity, like the police.”

Strike remembered Wardle’s comments on Duffield.

“I don’t think they found Duffield dazzling.”

“They’ve got more taste than I credited them with, then,” said Somé.

“Why are you so sure it wasn’t suicide? Lula had had mental health problems, hadn’t she?”

“Yeah, but we had a pact, like Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. We’d sworn that if either of us was thinking seriously of killing themselves, we’d call the other. She would’ve called me.”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“She phoned me on the Wednesday, while I was still in Tokyo,” said Somé. “Silly cow always forgot it was eight hours ahead; I had my phone on mute at two in the morning, so I didn’t pick up; but she left a message, and she was not suicidal. Listen to this.”

He reached into his desk drawer again, pressed several buttons, then held the mobile out to Strike.

And Lula Landry spoke close and real, slightly raw and throaty, in Strike’s ear, in deliberately affected mockney.

“Aw wight, darlin’? Got something to tell you, I’m not sure whether you’re going to like it but it’s a biggie, and I’m so fucking happy I’ve gotta tell someone, so ring me when you can, OK, can’t wait, mwah mwah.”

Strike handed back the phone.

“Did you call her back? Did you find out what the big news was?”

“No.” Somé ground out his cigarette and reached immediately for another one. “The Japs had me in back-to-back meetings; every time I thought of calling her, the time difference was in the way. Anyway…to tell you the truth, I thought I knew what she was going to say, and I wasn’t any too fucking pleased about it. I thought she was pregnant.”

Somé nodded several times with the fresh cigarette clutched between his teeth; then he removed it to say:

“Yeah, I thought she’d gone and got herself knocked up.”

“By Duffield?”

“I hoped to fuck not. I didn’t know at the time that they’d got back together. She wouldn’t have dared hook up with him if I’d been in the country; no, she waited till I was in Japan, the sneaky little bitch. She knew I hated him, and she cared what I thought. We were like family, Cuckoo and me.”

“Why did you think she might be pregnant?”

“It was the way she sounded. You’ve heard it—she was so excited…I had this feeling. It was the kind of thing Cuckoo would’ve done, and she’d have expected me to be as pleased as she was, and fuck her career, fuck me, counting on her to launch my brand-new accessories line…”

“Was this the five-million-pound contract her brother told me about?”

“Yeah, and I’ll bet the Accountant pushed her to hold out for as much as she could get, too,” said Somé, with another flash of temper. “It wasn’t like Cuckoo to try and wring every last penny out of me. She knew it was going to be fabulous, and would take her to a whole new level if she fronted it. It shouldn’t have been all about the money. Everyone associated her with my stuff; her big break came on a shoot for Vogue when she wore my Jagged dress. Cuckoo loved my clothes, she loved me, but people get to a certain level, and everyone’s telling them they’re worth more, and they forget who put them there, and suddenly it’s all about the bottom line.”

“You must’ve thought she was worth it, to commit to a five-million-pound contract?”

“Yeah, well, I’d pretty much designed the range for her, so having to shoot around a fucking pregnancy wouldn’t have been funny. And I could just imagine Cuckoo going silly afterwards, throwing it all in, not wanting to leave the fucking baby. She was the type; always looking for people to love, for a surrogate family. Those Bristows fucked her up good. They only adopted her as a toy for Yvette, who is the scariest bitch in the world.”

“In what way?”

“Possessive. Morbid. Didn’t want to let Cuckoo out of her sight in case she died, like the kid she’d been bought to replace. Lady Bristow used to come to all the shows, getting under everyone’s feet, till she got too ill. And there was an uncle, who treated Cuckoo like scum until she started pulling in big money. He got a bit more respectful then. They all know the value of a buck, the Bristows.”

“They’re a wealthy family, aren’t they?”

“Alec Bristow didn’t leave that much, not relatively speaking. Not compared to proper money. Not like your old man. How come,” said Somé, swerving suddenly off the conversational track, “Jonny Rokeby’s son’s working as a private dick?”

“Because that’s his job,” said Strike. “Go on about the Bristows.”

Somé did not appear to resent being bossed around; if anything, he seemed to relish it, possibly because it was such an unusual experience.

“I just remember Cuckoo telling me that most of what Alec Bristow left was in shares in his old company, and Albris has gone down the pan in the recession. It’s hardly fucking Apple. Cuckoo had out-earned the whole fucking lot of them before she was twenty.”

“Was that picture,” said Strike, indicating the enormous “Fallen Angels” image on the wall behind him, “part of the five-million-pound campaign?”

“Yeah,” said Somé. “Those four bags were the start of it. She’s holding ‘Cashile’ there; I gave them all African names, for her. She was fixated on Africa. That whorish real mother she unearthed had told her her father was African, so Cuckoo had gone mad on it; talking about studying there, doing voluntary work…never mind that the old slapper had probably been sleeping with about fifty Yardies. African,” said Guy Somé, grinding out his cigarette stub in the glass ashtray, “my Aunt Fanny. The bitch just told Cuckoo what she wanted to hear.”

“And you decided to go ahead and use the picture for the campaign, even though Lula had just…?”

“It was meant as a fucking tribute.” Somé spoke loudly over him. “She’d never looked more beautiful. It was supposed to be a fucking tribute to her, to us. She was my muse. If the bastards couldn’t understand that, fuck ’em, that’s all. The press in this country are lower than scum. Judging everyone by their fucking selves.”

“The day before she died, some handbags were sent to Lula…”

“Yeah, they were mine. I sent her one of each of those,” said Somé, indicating the picture with the end of a new cigarette, “and I sent Deeby Macc some clothes by the same courier.”

“Had he ordered them, or…?”

“Freebies, dear,” drawled Somé. “Just good business. Couple of customized hoodies and some accessories. Celebrity endorsements never hurt.”

“Did he ever wear the stuff?”

“I don’t know,” said Somé in a more subdued tone. “I had other things to worry about the next day.”

“I’ve seen YouTube footage of him wearing a hoodie with studs on it, like that,” said Strike, pointing at Somé’s chest. “Making a fist.”

“Yeah, that was one of them. Someone must’ve sent the stuff on to him. One had a fist, one had a handgun, and some of his lyrics on the backs.”

“Did Lula talk to you about Deeby Macc coming to stay in the flat downstairs?”

“Oh yeah. She wasn’t nearly excited enough. I kept saying to her, babes, if he’d written three tracks about me I’d be waiting behind the front door naked when he got in.” Somé blew smoke in two long streams from his nostrils, looking sideways at Strike. “I like ’em big and rough,” he said. “But Cuckoo didn’t. Well, look what she hooked up with. I kept telling her, you’re the one making all this fucking song-and-dance about your roots; find yourself a nice black boy and settle down. Deeby would’ve been fucking perfect; why not?

“Last season’s show, I had her walking down the catwalk to Deeby’s ‘Butterface Girl.’ ‘Bitch you ain’t all that, get a mirror that don’ fool ya, Give it up an’ tone it down, girl, ’cause you ain’t no fuckin’ Lula.’ Duffield hated it.”

Somé smoked for a moment in silence, his eyes on the wall of photographs. Strike asked:

“Where do you live? Around here?” though he knew the answer.

“No, I’m in Charles Street, in Kensington,” said Somé. “Moved there last year. It’s a long fucking way from Hackney, I can tell you, but it was getting silly, I had to leave. Too much hassle. I grew up in Hackney,” he explained, “back when I was plain old Kevin Owusu. I changed my name when I left home. Like you.”

“I was never Rokeby,” said Strike, flicking over a page in his notebook. “My parents weren’t married.”

“We all know that, dear,” said Somé, with another flash of malice. “I dressed your old man for a Rolling Stone shoot last year: skinny suit and broken bowler. D’you see him much?”

“No,” said Strike.

“No, well, you’d make him look fucking old, wouldn’t you?” said Somé, with a cackle. He fidgeted in his seat, lit yet another cigarette, clamped it between his lips and squinted at Strike through billows of menthol smoke.

“Why are we talking about me, anyway? Do people usually start telling you their life stories when you get out that notebook?”

“Sometimes.”

“Don’t you want your tea? I don’t blame you. I don’t know why I drink this shit. My old dad would have a coronary if he asked for a cup of tea and got this.”

“Is your family still in Hackney?”

“I haven’t checked,” said Somé. “We don’t talk. I practice what I preach, see?”

“Why do you think Lula changed her name?”

“Because she hated her fucking family, same as me. She didn’t want to be associated with them anymore.”

“Why choose the same name as her Uncle Tony, then?”

“He’s not famous. It made a good name. Deeby couldn’t have written ‘Double L U B Mine’ if she’d been Lula Bristow, could he?”

“Charles Street isn’t too far from Kentigern Gardens, is it?”

“About a twenty-minute walk. I wanted Cuckoo to move in with me when she said she couldn’t stand her old place anymore, but she wouldn’t; she chose that fucking five-star prison instead, just to get away from the press. They drove her into that place. They bear responsibility.”

Strike remembered Deeby Macc: The motherfuckin’ press chased her out that window.

“She took me to see it. Mayfair, full of rich Russians and Arabs and bastards like Freddie Bestigui. I said to her, sweetie, you can’t live here; marble everywhere, marble isn’t chic in our climate…it’s like living in your own tomb…”

He faltered, then went on:

“She’d been through this head-fuck for a few months. There’d been a stalker who was hand-delivering letters through her front door at three in the morning; she kept getting woken up by the letter box going. The things he said he wanted to do to her, it scared her. Then she split up with Duffield, and she had the paps round the front of her house all the bloody time. Then she finds out they’re hacking all her calls. And then she had to go and find that bitch of a mother. It was all getting too much. She wanted to be away from it all, to feel secure. I told her to move in with me, but instead she went and bought that fucking mausoleum.

“She took it because it felt like a fortress with the round-the-clock security. She thought she’d be safe from everyone, that nobody would be able to get at her.

“But she hated it from the word go. I knew she would. She was cut off from everything she liked. Cuckoo loved color and noise. She liked being on the street, she liked walking, being free.

“One of the reasons the police said it wasn’t murder was the open windows. She’d opened them herself; it was only her prints on the handles. But I know why she opened them. She always opened the windows, even when it was freezing cold, because she couldn’t stand the silence. She liked being able to hear London.”

Somé’s voice had lost all its slyness and sarcasm. He cleared his throat and went on:

“She was trying to connect with something real; we used to talk about it all the time. It was our big thing. That’s what made her get involved with bloody Rochelle. It was a case of ‘there but for the grace of God.’ Cuckoo thought that’s what she’d have been, if she hadn’t been beautiful; if the Bristows hadn’t taken her in as a little plaything for Yvette.”

“Tell me about this stalker.”

“Mental case. He thought they were married or something. He was given a restraining order and compulsory psychiatric treatment.”

“Any idea where he is now?”

“I think he was deported back to Liverpool,” said Somé. “But the police checked him out; they told me he was in a secure ward up there the night she died.”

“Do you know the Bestiguis?”

“Only what Lula told me, that he was sleazy and she’s a walking waxwork. I don’t need to know her. I know her type. Rich girls spending their ugly husbands’ money. They come to my shows. They want to be my friend. Gimme an honest hooker any day.”

“Freddie Bestigui was at the same country-house weekend as Lula, a week before she died.”

“Yeah, I heard. He had a hard-on for her,” said Somé dismissively. “She knew it, as well; it wasn’t exactly a unique experience in her life, you know. He never got further than trying to get in the same lift, though, from what she told me.”

“You never spoke to her after their weekend at Dickie Carbury’s, did you?”

“No. Did he do something then? You don’t suspect Bestigui, do you?”

Somé sat up in his seat, staring.

“Fuck…Freddie Bestigui? Well, he’s a shit, I know that. This little girl I know…well, friend of a friend…she was working for his production company, and he tried to fucking rape her. No, I am not exaggerating,” said Somé. “Literally. Rape. Got her a bit drunk after work and had her on the floor; some assistant had forgotten his mobile and came back for it, and walked in on them. Bestigui paid them both off. Everyone was telling her to press charges, but she took the money and ran. They say he used to discipline his second wife in some pretty fucking kinky ways; that’s why she walked away with three mill; she threatened him with the press. But Cuckoo would never have let Freddie Bestigui into her flat at two in the morning. Like I say, she wasn’t a stupid girl.”

“What do you know about Derrick Wilson?”

“Who’s he?”

“The security guard who was on duty the night she died.”

“Nothing.”

“He’s a big guy, with a Jamaican accent.”

“This might shock you, but not all the black people in London know each other.”

“I wondered whether you’d ever spoken to him, or heard Lula talk about him.”

“No, we had more interesting things to talk about than the security guard.”

“Does the same apply to her driver, Kieran Kolovas-Jones?”

“Oh, I know who Kolovas-Jones is,” said Somé, with a slight smirk. “Striking little poses whenever he thought I might be looking out of the window. He’s about five fucking feet too short to model.”

“Did Lula ever talk about him?”

“No, why would she?” asked Somé restlessly. “He was her driver.”

“He’s told me they were quite close. He mentioned that she’d given him a jacket you designed. Worth nine hundred quid.”

“Big fucking deal,” said Somé, with easy contempt. “My proper stuff goes for upwards of three grand a coat. I slap the logo on shell suits and they sell like crazy, so it’d be silly not to.”

“Yeah, I was going to ask you about that,” said Strike. “Your—ready-to-wear line, is it?”

Somé looked amused.

“That’s right. That’s the stuff that isn’t made-to-measure, see? You buy it straight off the rack.”

“Right. How widely is that stuff sold?”

“It’s everywhere. When were you last in a clothes shop?” asked Somé, his wicked bulging eyes roving over Strike’s dark blue jacket. “What is that, anyway, your demob suit?”

“When you say ‘everywhere’…”

“Smart department stores, boutiques, online,” rattled off Somé. “Why?”

“One of two men caught on CCTV running away from Lula’s area that night was wearing a jacket with your logo on it.”

Somé twitched his head very slightly, a gesture of repudiation and irritation.

“Him and a million other people.”

“Didn’t you see—?”

“I didn’t look at any of that shit,” said Somé fiercely. “All the—all the coverage. I didn’t want to read about it, I didn’t want to think about it. I told them to keep it away from me,” he said, gesturing towards the stairs and his staff. “All I knew was that she was dead and Duffield was behaving like someone with something to hide. That’s all I knew. That was enough.”

“OK. Still on the subject of clothes, in the last picture of Lula, the one where she was walking into the building, she seemed to be wearing a dress and a coat…”

“Yeah, she was wearing Maribelle and Faye,” said Somé. “The dress was called Maribelle—”

“Yeah, got it,” said Strike. “But when she died, she was wearing something different.”

This seemed to surprise Somé.

“Was she?”

“Yeah. In the police pictures of the body—”

But Somé threw up his arm in an involuntary gesture of refutation, of self-protection, then got to his feet, breathing hard, and walked to the photograph wall, where Lula stared out of several pictures, smiling, wistful or serene. When the designer turned to face Strike again, the strange bulging eyes were wet.

“Fucking hell,” he said, in a low voice. “Don’t talk about her like that. ‘The body.’ Fucking hell. You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you? No fucking wonder old Jonny’s not keen on you.”

“I wasn’t trying to upset you,” said Strike calmly. “I only want to know whether you can think of any reason she’d have changed her clothes when she got home. When she fell, she was wearing trousers and a sequined top.”

“How the fuck should I know why she changed?” asked Somé, wildly. “Maybe she was cold. Maybe she was—This is fucking ridiculous. How could I know that?”

“I’m only asking,” said Strike. “I read somewhere that you’d told the press she died in one of your dresses.”

“That wasn’t me, I never announced it. Some tabloid bitch rang the office and asked for the name of that dress. One of the seamstresses told her, and they called her my spokesman. Making out I’d tried to get publicity out of it, the cunts. Fucking hell.”

“D’you think you could put me in touch with Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford?”

Somé seemed off-balance, confused.

“What? Yeah…”

But he had begun to cry in earnest; not like Bristow, with wild gulps and sobs, but silently, with tears sliding down his smooth dark cheeks and on to his T-shirt. He swallowed and closed his eyes, turned his back on Strike, rested his forehead against the wall and trembled.

Strike waited in silence until Somé had wiped his face several times and turned again towards him. He made no mention of his tears, but walked back to his chair, sat down and lit a cigarette. After two or three deep drags, he said in a practical and unemotional voice:

“If she changed her clothes, it was because she was expecting someone. Cuckoo always dressed the part. She must’ve been waiting for someone.”

“Well that’s what I thought,” said Strike. “But I’m no expert on women and their clothes.”

“No,” said Somé, with a ghost of his malicious smile, “you don’t look it. You want to speak to Ciara and Bryony?”

“It’d help.”

“They’re both doing a shoot for me on Wednesday: 1 Arlington Terrace in Islington. If you come along fivish, they’d be free to talk to you.”

“That’s good of you, thanks.”

“It isn’t good of me,” said Somé quietly. “I want to know what happened. When are you speaking to Duffield?”

“As soon as I can get hold of him.”

“He thinks he’s got away with it, the little shit. She must’ve changed because she knew he was coming, mustn’t she? Even though they’d rowed, she knew he’d follow her. But he’ll never talk to you.”

“He’ll talk to me,” said Strike easily, as he put away his notebook and checked his watch. “I’ve taken up a lot of your time. Thanks again.”

As Somé led Strike back down the spiral stairs and along the white-walled corridor, some of his swagger returned to him. By the time they shook hands in the cool tiled lobby, no trace of distress remained on show.

“Lose some weight,” he told Strike, as a parting shot, “and I’ll send you something XXL.”

As the warehouse door swung closed behind Strike, he heard Somé call to the tomato-haired girl at the desk: “I know what you’re thinking, Trudie. You’re imagining him taking you roughly from behind, aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Big rough soldier boy,” and Trudie’s squeal of shocked laughter.

2

CHARLOTTE’S ACCEPTANCE OF STRIKE’S SILENCE was unprecedented. There had been no further calls or texts; she was maintaining the pretense that their last, filthy, volcanic row had changed her irrevocably, stripped away her love and purged her of fury. Strike, however, knew Charlotte as intimately as a germ that had lingered in his blood for fifteen years; knew that her only response to pain was to wound the offender as deeply as possible, no matter what the cost to herself. What would happen if he refused her an audience, and kept refusing? It was the only strategy he had never tried, and all he had left.

Every now and then, when Strike’s resistance was low (late at night, alone on his camp bed) the infection would erupt again: regret and longing would spike, and he saw her at close quarters, beautiful, naked, breathing words of love; or weeping quietly, telling him that she knew she was rotten, ruined, impossible, but that he was the best and truest thing she had ever known. Then, the fact that he was a few pressed buttons away from speaking to her seemed too fragile a barricade against temptation, and he sometimes pulled himself back out of his sleeping bag and hopped in the darkness to Robin’s abandoned desk, switching on the lamp and poring, even for hours, over the case report. Once or twice he placed early-morning calls to Rochelle Onifade’s mobile, but she never answered.

On Thursday morning, Strike returned to the wall outside St. Thomas’s, and waited for three hours in the hope of seeing Rochelle again, but she did not turn up. He had Robin call the hospital, but this time they refused to comment on Rochelle’s non-attendance, and resisted all attempts at getting an address for her.

On Friday morning, Strike returned from an outing to Starbucks to find Spanner sitting not on the sofa beside Robin’s desk, but on the desk itself. He had an unlit roll-up in his mouth, and was leaning over her, apparently being more amusing than Strike had ever found him, because Robin was laughing in the slightly grudging manner of a woman who is entertained, but who wishes, nevertheless, to make it clear that the goal is well defended.

“Morning, Spanner,” said Strike, but the faintly repressive quality of his greeting did nothing to moderate either the computer specialist’s ardent body language or his broad smile.

“All right, Fed? Brought your Dell back for you.”

“Great. Double decaff latte,” Strike told Robin, setting the drink down beside her. “No charge,” he added, as she reached for her purse.

She was touchingly averse to charging minor luxuries to petty cash. Robin made no objection in front of their guest, but thanked Strike, and turned again to her work, which involved a small clockwise swivel of her desk chair, away from the two men.

The flare of a match turned Strike’s attention from his own double espresso to his guest.

“This is a non-smoking office, Spanner.”

“What? You smoke like a fucking chimney.”

“Not in here I don’t. Follow me.”

Strike led Spanner into his own office and closed the door firmly behind him.

“She’s engaged,” he said, taking his usual seat.

“Wasting my powder, am I? Ah well. Put in a word for me if the engagement goes down the pan; she’s just my type.”

“I don’t think you’re hers.”

Spanner grinned knowingly.

“Already queuing, are you?”

“No,” said Strike. “I just know her fiancé’s a rugby-playing accountant. Clean-cut, square-jawed Yorkshireman.”

He had formed a surprisingly clear mental image of Matthew, though he had never seen a photograph.

“You never know; she might fancy rebounding on to something a bit edgier,” said Spanner, swinging Lula Landry’s laptop on to the desk and sitting down opposite Strike. He was wearing a slightly tatty sweatshirt and Jesus sandals on bare feet; it was the warmest day of the year so far. “I’ve had a good look at this piece of crap. How much technical detail do you want?”

“None; but I need to know that you could explain it clearly in court.”

Spanner looked, for the first time, truly intrigued.

“You serious?”

“Very. Would you be able to prove to a defending counsel that you know your stuff?”

“ ’Course I could.”

“Then just give me the important bits.”

Spanner hesitated for a moment, trying to read Strike’s expression. Finally he began:

“Password’s Agyeman, and it was reset five days before she died.”

“Spell it?”

Spanner did so, adding, to Strike’s surprise: “It’s a surname. Ghanaian. She bookmarked the homepage of SOAS—School of Oriental and African Studies—and it was on there. Look here.”

As he spoke, Spanner’s nimble fingers were clacking keyboard keys; he had brought up the home page he described, bordered with bright green, with sections on the school, news, staff, students, library and so on.

“When she died, though, it looked like this.”

And with another outburst of clicking, he retrieved an almost identical page, featuring, as the rapidly darting cursor soon revealed, a link to the obituary of one Professor J. P. Agyeman, Emeritus Professor of African Politics.

“She saved this version of the page,” said Spanner. “And her internet history shows she’d browsed Amazon for his books in the month before she died. She was looking at a lot of books on African history and politics round then.”

“Any evidence she applied to SOAS?”

“Not on here.”

“Anything else of interest?”

“Well, the only other thing I noticed was that a big photo file was deleted off it on the seventeenth of March.”

“How d’you know that?”

“There’s software that’ll help you recover even stuff people think’s gone from the hard drive,” said Spanner. “How d’you think they keep catching all those pedos?”

“Did you get it back?”

“Yeah. I’ve put it on here.” He handed Strike a memory stick. “I didn’t think you’d want me to put it back on.”

“No—so the photographs were…?”

“Nothing fancy. Just deleted. Like I say, your average punter doesn’t realize you’ve got to work a damn sight harder than pressing ‘delete’ if you really want to hide something.”

“Seventeenth of March,” said Strike.

“Yeah. St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Ten weeks after she died.”

“Could’ve been the police,” suggested Spanner.

“It wasn’t the police,” said Strike.

After Spanner had left, he hurried into the outer office and displaced Robin, so that he could view the photographs that had been removed from the laptop. He could feel Robin’s anticipation as he explained to her what Spanner had done and opened up the file on the memory stick.

Robin was afraid, for a fraction of a second, as the first photograph bloomed onscreen, that they were about to see something horrible; evidence of criminality or perversion. She had only heard about the concealment of pictures online in the context of dreadful abuse cases. After several minutes, however, Strike voiced her own feelings.

“Just social snaps.”

He did not sound as disappointed as Robin felt, and she was a little ashamed of herself; had she wanted to see something awful? Strike scrolled down, through pictures of groups of giggling girls, fellow models, the occasional celebrity. There were several pictures of Lula with Evan Duffield, a few of them clearly taken by one or other of the pair themselves, holding the camera at arm’s length, both of them apparently stoned or drunk. Somé made several appearances; Lula looked more formal, more subdued, by his side. There were many of Ciara Porter and Lula hugging in bars, dancing in clubs and giggling on a sofa in somebody’s crowded flat.

“That’s Rochelle,” said Strike suddenly, pointing to a sullen little face glimpsed under Ciara’s armpit in a group shot. Kieran Kolovas-Jones had been roped into this picture; he stood at the end, beaming.

“Do me a favor,” said Strike, when he had finished trawling through all two hundred and twelve pictures. “Go through these for me, and try and at least identify the famous people, so we can make a start on finding out who might have wanted the photos off her laptop.”

“But there’s nothing incriminating here at all,” said Robin.

“There must be,” said Strike.

He returned to his inner office, where he placed calls to John Bristow (in a meeting, and not to be disturbed; “Please get him to call me as soon as you can”), to Eric Wardle (voicemail: “I’ve got a question about Lula Landry’s laptop”) and to Rochelle Onifade (on the off-chance; no answer; no chance of leaving a message: “Voicemail full.”)

“I’m still having no luck with Mr. Bestigui,” Robin told Strike, when he emerged from his inner office to find her performing searches related to an unidentified brunette posing with Lula on a beach. “I phoned again this morning, but he just won’t call me back. I’ve tried everything; I’ve pretended to be all sorts of people, I’ve said it’s urgent—what’s funny?”

“I was just wondering why none of these people who keep interviewing you have offered you a job,” said Strike.

“Oh,” said Robin, blushing faintly. “They have. All of them. I’ve accepted the human resources one.”

“Oh. Right,” said Strike. “You didn’t say. Congratulations.”

“Sorry, I thought I’d told you,” lied Robin.

“So you’ll be leaving…when?”

“Two weeks.”

“Ah. I expect Matthew’s pleased, is he?”

“Yes,” she said, slightly taken aback, “he is.”

It was almost as if Strike knew how little Matthew liked her working for him; but that was impossible; she had been careful not to give the slightest hint of the tensions at home.

The telephone rang, and Robin answered it.

“Cormoran Strike’s office?…Yes, who’s speaking, please?…It’s Derrick Wilson,” she told him, passing over the receiver.

“Derrick, hi.”

“Mister Bestigui’s gone away for a coupla days,” said Wilson’s voice. “If you wanna come an’ look at the building…”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” said Strike.

He was on his feet, checking his pockets for wallet and keys, when he became aware of Robin’s slight air of dejection, though she was continuing to pore over the unincriminating photographs.

“D’you want to come?”

“Yes!” she said gleefully, seizing her handbag and closing down her computer.

3

THE HEAVY BLACK-PAINTED FRONT door of number 18, Kentigern Gardens, opened on to a marbled lobby. Directly opposite the entrance was a handsome built-in mahogany desk, to the right of which was the staircase, which turned immediately out of sight (marble steps, with a brass and wood handrail); the entrance to the lift, with its burnished gold doors, and a solid dark-wood door set into the white-painted wall. On a white cubic display unit in the corner between this and the front doors was a vast display of deep pink oriental lilies in tall tubular vases, their scent heavy on the warm air. The left-hand wall was mirrored, doubling the apparent size of the space, reflecting the staring Strike and Robin, the lift doors and the modern chandelier hung in cubes of crystal overhead, and lengthening the security desk to a vast stretch of polished wood.

Strike remembered Wardle: “Flats done up with marble and shit like…like a fucking five-star hotel.” Beside him, Robin was trying not to look impressed. This, then, was how multimillionaires lived. She and Matthew occupied the lower floor of a semidetached house in Clapham; its sitting room was the same size as that designated for the off-duty guards, which Wilson showed them first. There was just enough room for a table and two chairs; a wall-mounted box contained all the master keys, and another door led into a tiny toilet cubicle.

Wilson was wearing a black uniform that was constabular in design, with its brass buttons, black tie and white shirt.

“Monitors,” he pointed out to Strike as they emerged from the back room and paused behind the desk, where a row of four small black-and-white screens was hidden from guests. One showed footage from the camera over the front door, affording a circumscribed view of the street; another displayed a similarly deserted view of an underground car park; a third the empty back garden of number 18, which comprised lawn, some fancy planting and the high back wall Strike had hoisted himself up on; and the fourth the interior of the stationary lift. In addition to the monitors, there were two control panels for the communal alarms and those for the doors into the pool and car park, and two telephones, one attached to an outside line, the other connected only to the three flats.

“That,” said Wilson, indicating the solid wooden door, “goes to the gym, the pool an’ the car park,” and at Strike’s request he led them through it.

The gym was small, but mirrored like the lobby, so that it appeared twice as big. It had one window, facing the street, and contained a treadmill, rowing and step machines and a set of weights.

A second mahogany door led to a narrow marble stair, lit by cubic wall lights, which took them on to a small lower landing, where a plain painted door led to the underground car park. Wilson opened it with two keys, a Chubb and a Yale, then flicked a switch. The floodlit area was almost as long as the street itself, full of millions of pounds’ worth of Ferrari, Audi, Bentley, Jaguar and BMW. At twenty-foot intervals along the back wall were doors like the one through which they had just come: inner entrances to each of the houses of Kentigern Gardens. The electric garage doors leading from Serf’s Way were close by number 18, outlined by silvery daylight.

Robin wondered what the silent men beside her were thinking. Was Wilson used to the extraordinary lives of the people who lived here; used to underground car parks and swimming pools and Ferraris? And was Strike thinking (as she was) that this long row of doors represented possibilities she had not once considered: chances of secret, hidden scurrying between neighbors, and of hiding and departing in as many ways as there were houses in the street? But then she noticed the numerous black snouts pointing from regular spots on the shadowy upper walls, feeding footage back to countless monitors. Was it possible that none of them had been watched that night?

“OK,” said Strike, and Wilson led them back onto the marble staircase, and locked up the car park door behind them.

Down another short flight of stairs, the smell of chlorine became stronger with every step, until Wilson opened a door at the bottom and they were assailed by a wave of warm, damp, chemically laden air.

“This is the door that wasn’t locked that night?” Strike asked Wilson, who nodded as he pressed another switch, and light blazed.

They had walked on to the broad marble rim of the pool, which was shielded by a thick plastic cover. The opposite wall was, again, mirrored; Robin saw the three of them standing there, incongruous in full dress against a mural of tropical plants and fluttering butterflies that extended up over the ceiling. The pool was around fifteen meters long, and at the far end was a hexagonal jacuzzi, beyond which were three changing cubicles, fronted by lockable doors.

“No cameras here?” asked Strike, looking around, and Wilson shook his head.

Robin could feel sweat prickling on the back of her neck and under her arms. It was oppressive in the pool area, and she was pleased to climb the stairs ahead of the two men, back to the lobby, which in comparison was pleasant and airy. A petite young blonde had appeared in their absence, wearing a pink overall, jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a plastic bucket full of cleaning implements.

“Derrick,” she said in heavily accented English, when the security guard emerged from downstairs. “I neet key for two.”

“This is Lechsinka,” said Wilson. “The cleaner.”

She favored Robin and Strike with a small, sweet smile. Wilson moved around behind the mahogany desk and handed her a key from beneath it, and Lechsinka then ascended the stairs, her bucket swinging, her tightly bejeaned backside swelling and swaying seductively. Strike, conscious of Robin’s sideways glance, withdrew his gaze from it reluctantly.

Strike and Robin followed Wilson upstairs to Flat 1, which he opened up with a master key. The door on to the stairwell, Strike noted, had an old-fashioned peephole.

“Mister Bestigui’s place,” announced Wilson, stifling the alarm by entering the code on a pad to the right of the door. “Lechsinka’s already bin in this morning.”

Strike could smell polish and see the track marks of a vacuum cleaner on the white carpet of the hallway, with its brass wall lights and its five immaculate white doors. He noticed the discreet alarm keypad on the right wall, at right angles to a painting in which dreamy goats and peasants floated over a blue-toned village. Tall vases of orchids stood on a black japanned table beneath the Chagall.

“Where’s Bestigui?” Strike asked Wilson.

“LA,” said the security guard. “Back in two days.”

The light, bright sitting room had three tall windows, each of them with a shallow stone balcony beyond; its walls were Wedgwood blue and nearly everything else was white. All was pristine, elegant and beautifully proportioned. Here, too, there was a single superb painting: macabre, surreal, with a spear-bearing man masked as a blackbird, arm in arm with a gray-toned headless female torso.

It was from this room that Tansy Bestigui maintained she had heard a screaming match two floors above. Strike moved up close to the long windows, noting the modern catches, the thickness of the panes, the complete lack of noise from the street, though his ear was barely half an inch from the cold glass. The balcony beyond was narrow, and filled with potted shrubs trimmed into pointed cones.

Strike moved off towards the bedroom. Robin remained in the sitting room, turning slowly where she stood, taking in the chandelier of Venetian glass, the muted rug in shades of pale blue and pink, the enormous plasma TV, the modern glass and iron dining table and silk-cushioned iron chairs; the small silver objets d’art on glass side tables and on the white marble mantelpiece. She thought, a little sadly, of the IKEA sofa of which she had, until now, felt so proud; then she remembered Strike’s camp bed in the office with a twinge of shame. Catching Wilson’s eye, she said, unconsciously echoing Eric Wardle:

“It’s a different world, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You couldn’t have kids in here.”

“No,” said Robin, who had not considered the place from that point of view.

Her employer strode out of the bedroom, evidently absorbed in establishing some point to his own satisfaction, and disappeared into the hall.

Strike was, in fact, proving to himself that the logical route from the Bestiguis’ bedroom to their bathroom was through the hall, bypassing the sitting room altogether. Furthermore, it was his belief that the only place in the flat from which Tansy could conceivably have witnessed the fatal fall of Lula Landry—and realized what she was seeing—was from the sitting room. In spite of Eric Wardle’s assertion to the contrary, nobody standing in the bathroom could have had more than a partial view of the window past which Landry had fallen: insufficient, at night, to be sure that whatever had fallen was a human, let alone to identify which human it had been.

Strike returned to the bedroom. Now that he was in solitary possession of the marital home, Bestigui was sleeping on the side nearest the door and the hall, judging by the clutter of pills, glasses and books piled on that bedside table. Strike wondered whether this had been the case while he cohabited with his wife.

A large walk-in wardrobe with mirrored doors led off the bedroom. It was full of Italian suits and shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Two shallow subdivided drawers were devoted entirely to cufflinks in gold and platinum. There was a safe behind a false panel at the back of the shoe racks.

“I think that’s everything in here,” Strike told Wilson, rejoining the other two in the sitting room.

Wilson set the alarm when they left the flat.

“You know all the codes for the different flats?”

“Yeah,” said Wilson. “Gotta, in case they go off.”

They climbed the stairs to the second floor. The staircase turned so tightly around the lift shaft that it was a succession of blind corners. The door to Flat 2 was identical to that of Flat 1, except that it was standing ajar. They could hear the growl of Lechsinka’s vacuum cleaner from inside.

“We got Mister an’ Missus Kolchak in here now,” said Wilson. “Ukrainian.”

The hallway was identical in shape to that of number 1, with many of the same features, including the alarm keypad on the wall at right angles to the front door; but it was tiled instead of carpeted. A large gilt mirror faced the entrance instead of a painting, and two fragile, spindly wooden tables on either side of it bore ornate Tiffany lamps.

“Were Bestigui’s roses on something like that?” asked Strike.

“On one that’s jus’ like ’em, yeah,” said Wilson. “It’s back in the lounge now.”

“And you put it here, in the middle of the hall, with the roses on it?”

“Yeah, Bestigui wanted Macc to see ’em soon as he walked in, but there was plenty of room to walk around ’em, you can see that. No need to knock ’em over. But he was young, the copper,” said Wilson tolerantly.

“Where are the panic buttons you told me about?” Strike asked.

“Round here,” said Wilson, leading him out of the hall and into the bedroom. “There’s one by the bed, and there’s another one in the sitting room.”

“Have all the flats got these?”

“Yeah.”

The relative positions of the bedrooms, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom were identical to those of Flat 1. Many of the finishings were similar, down to the mirrored doors in the walk-in wardrobe, which Strike went to check. While he was opening doors and surveying the thousands of pounds’ worth of women’s dresses and coats, Lechsinka emerged from the bedroom with a belt, two ties and several polythene-covered dresses, fresh from the dry-cleaner’s, over her arm.

“Hi,” said Strike.

“Hello,” she said, moving to a door behind him and pulling out a tie rack. “Excuse, please.”

He stood aside. She was short and very pretty in a pert, girlish way, with a rather flat face, a snub nose and Slavic eyes. She hung up the ties neatly while he watched her.

“I’m a detective,” he said. Then he remembered that Eric Wardle had described her English as “crap.”

“Like a policeman?” he ventured.

“Ah. Police.”

“You were here, weren’t you, the day before Lula Landry died?”

It took a few tries to convey exactly what he meant. When she grasped the point, however, she showed no objection to answering questions, as long as she could continue putting the clothes away as she talked.

“I always clean stair first,” she said. “Miz Landry is talking very loud at her brudder; he shouting that she gives boyfriend too much moneys, and she very bad with him.

“I clean number two, empty. Is clean already. Quick.”

“Were Derrick and the man from the security firm there while you were cleaning?”

“Derrick and…?”

“The repairman? The alarm man?”

“Yes, alarm man and Derrick, yes.”

Strike could hear Robin and Wilson talking in the hall, where he had left them.

“Do you set the alarms again after you’ve cleaned?”

“Put alarm? Yes,” she said. “One nine six six, same as door, Derrick tells me.”

“He told you the number before he left with the alarm man?”

Again, it took a few tries to get the point across, and when she grasped it, she seemed impatient.

“Yes, I already say this. One nine six six.”

“So you set the alarm after you’d finished cleaning in here?”

“Put alarm, yes.”

“And the alarm man, what did he look like?”

“Alarm man? Look?” She frowned attractively, her small nose wrinkling, and shrugged. “I not see he’s face. But blue—all blue…” she added, and with the hand not holding polythened dresses, she made a sweeping gesture down her body.

“Overall?” he suggested, but she met the word with blank incomprehension. “OK, where did you clean after that?”

“Number one,” said Lechsinka, returning to her task of hanging up the clothes, moving around him to find the correct rails. “Clean big windows. Miz Bestigui talking on telephone. Angry. Upset. She say she no want to lie no more.”

“She didn’t want to lie?” repeated Strike.

Lechsinka nodded, standing on tiptoes to hang up a floor-length gown.

“You heard her say,” he repeated clearly, “on the phone, that she didn’t want to lie anymore?”

Lechsinka nodded again, her face blank, innocent.

“Then she see me and she shout ‘Go away, go away!’ ”

“Really?”

Lechsinka nodded and continued to put away clothes.

“Where was Mr. Bestigui?”

“Not there.”

“Do you know who she was speaking to? On the phone?”

“No.” But then, a little slyly, she said, “Woman.”

“A woman? How do you know?”

“Shouting, shouting on telephone. I can hear woman.”

“It was a row? An argument? They were yelling at each other? Loud, yeah?”

Strike could hear himself lapsing into the absurd, overdeliberate language of the linguistically challenged Englishman. Lechsinka nodded again as she pulled open drawers in search of the place for the belt, the only item now remaining in her arms. When at last she had coiled it up and put it away, she straightened and walked away from him, into the bedroom. He followed.

While she made the bed and neatened the bedside tables, he established that she had cleaned Lula Landry’s flat last that day, after the model had left to visit her mother. She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor had she spotted any blue writing paper, whether written on or blank. Guy Somé’s handbags, and the various items for Deeby Macc, had been delivered to the security desk by the time she had finished, and the last thing she had done at work that day had been to take the designer’s gifts up to Lula’s and Macc’s respective flats.

“And you set the alarms again after putting the things in there?”

“I put alarms, yes.”

“Lula’s?”

“Yes.”

“And one nine six six in Flat Two?”

“Yes.”

“Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”

She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime around her wrists) cufflinks.

After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe, so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.

Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining Robin and Wilson in the hall.

As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the alarm to 1966, like the front door.

“I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”

“Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”

“Really young guy. Hair to here.”

Wilson indicated the base of his neck.

“White?”

“Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”

They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry. Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.

The top flat was architecturally different from the other two: smaller and airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown. Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color; but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in silence to the sitting room.

The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.

“Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.

“Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”

Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-and-white prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months previously.

Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.

He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging, half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of their impending demise, she had broken on the road.

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof.

His mobile phone rang as he stood there. John Bristow’s name and number were displayed; he took the call.

“Hi, John, thanks for getting back to me.”

“No problem. Any news?” asked the lawyer.

“Maybe. I’ve had an expert look at Lula’s laptop, and he found out a file of photographs had been deleted from it after Lula died. Do you know anything about that?”

His words were met by complete silence. The only reason Strike knew that they had not been cut off was that he could hear a small amount of background noise at Bristow’s end.

At last the lawyer said, in an altered voice:

“They were taken off after Lula died?”

“That’s what the expert says.”

Strike watched a car roll slowly down the street below, and pause halfway along. A woman got out, swathed in fur.

“I—I’m sorry,” Bristow said, sounding thoroughly shaken. “I’m just—just shocked. Perhaps the police removed this file?”

“When did you get the laptop back from them?”

“Oh…sometime in February, I suppose, early February.”

“This file was removed on March the seventeenth.”

“But—but this just doesn’t make sense. Nobody knew the password.”

“Well, evidently somebody did. You said the police told your mother what it was.”

“My mother certainly wouldn’t have removed—”

“I’m not suggesting she did. Is there any chance she could have left the laptop open, and running? Or that she gave somebody else the password?”

He thought that Bristow must be in his office. He could hear faint voices in the background, and, distantly, a woman laughing.

“I suppose that’s possible,” said Bristow slowly. “But who would have removed photographs? Unless…but God, that’s horrible…”

“What is?”

“You don’t think one of the nurses could have taken the pictures? To sell to a newspaper? But that’s a dreadful thought…a nurse…”

“All the expert knows is that they were deleted; there’s no evidence that they were copied and stolen. But as you say—anything’s possible.”

“But who else—I mean, naturally I hate to think it could be a nurse, but who else could it be? The laptop’s been at my mother’s ever since the police gave it back.”

“John, are you aware of every visitor your mother’s had in the last three months?”

“I think so. I mean, obviously, I can’t be sure…”

“No. Well, there’s the difficulty.”

“But why—why would anyone do this?”

“I can think of a few reasons. It would be a big help if you could ask your mother about this, though, John. Whether she had the laptop running in mid-March. Whether any of her visitors expressed an interest in it.”

“I—I’ll try.” Bristow sounded very stressed, almost tearful. “She’s very, very weak now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, formally. “I’ll be in touch shortly. ’Bye.”

He stepped back from the balcony and closed the doors, then turned to Wilson.

“Derrick, can you show me how you searched this place? What order you looked in the rooms that night?”

Wilson thought for a moment, then said:

“I come in here first. Looked around, seen the doors open. Didn’t touch ’em. Then,” he indicated that they should follow him, “I looked in here…”

Robin, following in the two men’s wake, noticed a subtle change in the way that Strike was talking to the security man. He was asking simple, deft questions, focusing on what Wilson had felt, touched, seen and heard at each step of his way through the flat.

Under Strike’s guidance, Wilson’s body language started to change. He began to enact the way he had held the doorjambs, leaning into rooms, casting a rapid look around. When he crossed to the only bedroom, he did it at a slow-motion run, responding to the spotlight of Strike’s undivided attention; he dropped to his knees to demonstrate how he had looked under the bed, and at Strike’s prompting remembered that a dress had lain crumpled beneath his legs; he led them, face set with concentration, to the bathroom, and showed them how he had swiveled to check behind the door before sprinting (he almost mimed it, arms moving exaggeratedly as he walked) back to the front door.

“And then,” said Strike, opening it and gesturing Wilson through, “you came out…”

“I came out,” agreed Wilson, in his bass voice, “an’ I jabbed the lift button.”

He pretended to do it, and feigned pushing open the doors in his anxiety to see what was inside.

“Nothing—so I started running back down again.”

“What could you hear now?” Strike asked, following him; neither of them were paying any attention to Robin, who closed the flat door behind her.

“Very distant—the Bestiguis yelling—and I turn round this corner and—”

Wilson stopped dead on the stair. Strike, who seemed to have anticipated something like this, stopped too; Robin careered straight into him, with a flustered apology that he cut off with a raised hand, as though, she thought, Wilson was in a trance.

“And I slipped,” said Wilson. He sounded shocked. “I forgot that. I slipped. Here. Backwards. Sat down hard. There was water. Here. Drops. Here.”

He was pointing at the stairs.

“Drops of water,” repeated Strike.

“Yeah.”

“Not snow.”

“No.”

“Not wet footprints.”

“Drops. Big drops. Here. Mi foot skidded and I slipped. And I just got up and kept running.”

“Did you tell the police about the drops of water?”

“No. I forgot. Till now. I forgot.”

Something that had bothered Strike all along had at last been made clear. He let out a great satisfied sigh and grinned. The other two stared.

4

THE WEEKEND STRETCHED AHEAD, WARM and empty. Strike sat at his open window again, smoking and watching the hordes of shoppers passing along Denmark Street, the case report open on his lap, the police file on the desk, making a list for himself of points still to be clarified, and sifting the morass of information he had collected.

For a while he contemplated a photograph of the front of number 18 as it had been on the morning after Lula died. There was a small, but to Strike significant, difference between the frontage as it had been then, and as it was now. From time to time he moved to the computer; once to find out the agent who represented Deeby Macc; then to look at the share price for Albris. His notebook lay open beside him at a page full of truncated sentences and questions, all in his dense, spiky handwriting. When his mobile rang, he raised it to his ear without checking who was on the other end.

“Ah, Mr. Strike,” said Peter Gillespie’s voice. “How nice of you to pick up.”

“Oh, hello, Peter,” said Strike. “Got you working weekends now, has he?”

“Some of us have no option but to work at weekends. You haven’t returned any of my weekday phone calls.”

“I’ve been busy. Working.”

“I see. Does that mean we can expect a repayment soon?”

“I expect so.”

“You expect so?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I should be in a position to give you something in the next few weeks.”

“Mr. Strike, your attitude astounds me. You undertook to repay Mr. Rokeby monthly, and you are now in arrears to the tune of—”

“I can’t pay you what I haven’t got. If you hold tight, I should be able to give you all of it back. Maybe even in a oner.”

“I’m afraid that simply isn’t good enough. Unless you bring these repayments up to date—”

“Gillespie,” said Strike, his eyes on the bright sky beyond the window, “we both know old Jonny isn’t going to sue his one-legged war-hero son for repayment of a loan that wouldn’t keep his butler in fucking bath salts. I’ll give him back his money, with interest, within the next couple of months, and he can stick it up his arse and set fire to it, if he likes. Tell him that, from me, and now get off my fucking back.”

Strike hung up, interested to note that he had not really lost his temper at all, but still felt mildly cheerful.

He worked on, in what he had come to think of as Robin’s chair, late into the night. The last thing he did before turning in was to underline, three times, the words “Malmaison Hotel, Oxford” and to circle in heavy ink the name “J. P. Agyeman.”

The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on Sunday and watched the day’s gaffes, counterclaims and promises being tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was difficult to comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be inflicted.

On Monday morning Strike set out for a rendezvous in Canning Town, where he was to meet Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother. The arrangement of this interview had been fraught with difficulty. Bristow’s secretary, Alison, had telephoned Robin with Marlene Higson’s number, and Strike had called her personally. Though clearly disappointed that the stranger on the phone was not a journalist, she had initially expressed herself willing to meet Strike. She had then called the office back, twice: firstly to ask Robin whether the detective would pay her expenses to travel into the center of town, to which a negative answer was given; next, in high dudgeon, to cancel the meeting. A second call from Strike had secured a tentative agreement to meet in her local pub; then an irritable voicemail message cancelled once more.

Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had immediately clamored for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.

He took the train out to Canning Town station. It was overlooked by Canary Wharf, whose sleek, futuristic buildings resembled a series of gleaming metal blocks on the horizon; their size, like that of the national debt, impossible to gauge from such a distance. But a few minutes’ walk later, he was as far from the shining, suited corporate world as it was possible to be. Crammed up alongside dockside developments where many of those financiers lived in neat designer pods, Canning Town exhaled poverty and deprivation. Strike knew it of old, because it had once been home to the old friend who had given him Brett Fearney’s location. Down Barking Road he walked, his back to Canary Wharf, past a building with a sign that advertised “Kills 4 Communities,” at which he frowned for a moment before realizing that somebody had swiped the “S.”

The Ordnance Arms sat beside the English Pawnbroking Company Ltd. It was a large, low-slung, off-white-painted pub. The interior was no-nonsense and utilitarian, with a selection of wooden clocks on a terracotta-colored wall and a lividly patterned piece of red carpet the only gesture to anything as frivolous as decoration. Otherwise, there were two large pool tables, a long and accessible bar and plenty of empty space for milling drinkers. Just now, at eleven in the morning, it was empty except for one little old man in the corner and a cheery serving girl, who addressed her only customer as “Joey” and gave Strike directions through the back.

The beer garden turned out to be the grimmest of concrete backyards, containing bins and a solitary wooden table, at which a woman was sitting on a white plastic chair, with her fat legs crossed and her cigarette held at right angles to her cheek. There was barbed wire on top of the high wall, and a plastic bag had caught in it and was rustling in the breeze. Beyond the wall there rose a vast block of flats, yellow-painted and with evidence of squalor bulging over many of the balconies.

“Mrs. Higson?”

“Call me Marlene, love.”

She looked him up and down, with a slack smile and a knowing gaze. She was wearing a pink Lycra vest top under a zip-up gray hoodie, and leggings that ended inches above her bare gray-white ankles. There were grubby flip-flops on her feet and many gold rings on her fingers; her yellow hair, with its inches of graying brown root, was pulled back into a dirty toweling scrunchie.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“I’ll have a pint of Carling, if you twist my arm.”

The way she bent her body towards him, the way she pushed straw-like strands of hair out of her pouchy eyes, even the way she held her cigarette; all were grotesquely coquettish. Perhaps she knew no other way of relating to anything male. Strike found her simultaneously pathetic and repulsive.

“Shock?” said Marlene Higson, after Strike had bought them both beer, and joined her at the table. “You can say that again, when I’d gave ’er up for lost. It near broke my ’eart when she wen’, but I fort I was giving ’er a better life. I wouldna ’ad the strenf to do it uvverwise. Fort I was giving ’er all the fings I never ’ad. I grew up poor, proper poor. We ’ad nothing. Nothing.”

She looked away from him, drawing hard on her Rothman’s; when her mouth puckered into hard little lines around the cigarette, it looked like a cat’s anus.

“And Dez, me boyfriend, see, wasn’t too keen—you know, with ’er being colored, it were obvious she weren’t ’is. They go darker, see; when she were born, she looked white. But I still never woulda given ’er up if I ’adn’t seen a chance for ’er to get a better life, and I fort, she won’t miss me, she’s too young. I’ve gave ’er a good start, and mebbe, when she’s older, she’ll come and find me. And me dream come true,” she added, with a ghastly show of pathos. “She come’n’ found me.

“I’ll tell you somefing reely strange, right,” she said, without drawing breath. “A man friend of mine says to me, just a week before I got the call from ’er, ‘You know ’oo you look like?’ he says. I says, ‘Dahn be ser silly,’ but he says, ‘Straight up. Across the eyes, and the shape of the eyebrows, y’know?’ ”

She looked hopefully at Strike, who could not bring himself to respond. It seemed impossible that the face of Nefertiti could have sprung from this gray and purple mess.

“You can see it in photos of me when I were younger,” she said, with a hint of pique. “Point is, I fort I was giving her a better life, and then they went an’ give her to those bastards, pardon my language. If I’d’a known, I’d of kept ’er, and I told ’er that. That made ’er cry. I’d of kept her and never let ’er go.

“Oh yeah. She talked to me. It all poured out. She got on all right wiv the father, with S’Ralec. He sounded all right. The mother’s a right mad bitch, though. Oh yeah. Pills. Poppin’ pills. Fackin’ rich bitches takin’ pills f’ their fackin’ nerves. Lula could talk to me, see. Well, it’s a bond, innit. You can’ break it, blood.

“She was scared what that bitch’d do, if she found out Lula was lookin’ for ’er real mum. She was proper worried about what the cow was gonna do when the press found out about me, but there you are, when yore famous like she was, they find out ev’rythin’, don’ they? Oh, the lies they tell, though. Some o’ the things they said abaht me, I’m still thinkin’ o’ suin’.

“What was I sayin’? ’Er mother, yeah. I says to Lula, ‘Why worry, love, sounds to me like you’re better off wivout ’er anyway. Let ’er be pissed off if she don’ want us to see each uvver.’ But she was a good girl, Lula, an’ she kep’ visitin’ ’er, outta duty.

“Anyway, she ’ad ’er own life, she was free to do what she wanted, weren’ she? She ’ad Evan, a man of ’er own. I told ’er I disapproved, mind,” said Marlene Higson, with a pantomime of strictness. “Oh yeah. Drugs, I’ve seen too many go that way. But I ’ave to admit, ’e’s a sweet boy underneath. I ’ave to admit that. He di’n’t have nothin’ to do wiv it. I can tell ya that.”

“Met him, did you?”

“No, but she called ’im once while she was with me and I ’eard them on the phone togevver, and they were a lovely couple. No, I got nuthin’ bad to say about Evan. ’E ’ad nuthin’ to do with it, that’s proved. No, I’ve got nuthin’ bad to say about ’im. As long as ’e’d of gone clean, ’e’d of ’ad my blessing. I said to ’er, ‘Bring ’im along, see wevver I approve,’ but she never. ’E was always busy. ’E’s a lovely-lookin’ boy, under all that ’air,” said Marlene. “You can see it in all ’is photos.”

“Did she talk to you about her neighbors?”

“Oh, that Fred Beastigwee? Yeah, she told me all about ’im, offerin’ ’er parts hin ’is films. I said to ’er, why not? It might be a larf. Even if she ’adn’t liked it, it woulda bin, what, another ’arf mill in the bank?”

Her bloodshot eyes squinted at nothing; she seemed momentarily mesmerized, lost in contemplation of sums so vast and dazzling that they were beyond her ken, like an image of infinity. Merely to speak of them was to taste the power of money, to roll dreams of wealth around her mouth.

“Did you ever hear her talk about Guy Somé?”

“Oh yeah, she liked Gee, ’e was good to ’er. Person’lly, I prefer more classic things. It’s not my kinda style.”

The shocking-pink Lycra, tight on the rolls of fat spilling over the waistband of her leggings, rippled as she leaned forward to tap her cigarette delicately into the ashtray.

“‘ ’E’s like a brother to me,’ she sez, an’ I sez, never mind pretend brothers, why don’t we try an’ find my boys togevver? But she weren’t int’rested.”

“Your boys?”

“Me sons, me ovver kids. Yeah, I ’ad two more after ’er: one wiv Dez, an’ then later there wuz another one. Social Services took ’em off me, but I sez to ’er, wiv your money we could find ’em, gimme a bit, not much, I dunno, coupla grand, an’ I’ll try an’ get someone to find ’em, keep it quiet from the press, I’ll ’andle it, I’ll keep you out of it. But she weren’ interested,” repeated Marlene.

“Do you know where your sons are?”

“They took ’em as babies, I dunno where they are now. I was havin’ problems. I ain’t gonna lie to ya, I’ve had a bloody hard life.”

And she told him, at length, about her hard life. It was a sordid story littered with violent men, with addiction and ignorance, neglect and poverty, and an animal instinct for survival that jettisoned babies in its wake, for they demanded skills that Marlene had never developed.

“So you don’t know where your two sons are now?” Strike repeated, twenty minutes later.

“No, how the fuck could I?” said Marlene, who had talked herself into bitterness. “She weren’ int’rested anyway. She already had a white brother, di’n’t she? She wuz after black family. That’s what she reely wanted.”

“Did she ask you about her father?”

“Yeah, an’ I told ’er ev’rything I knew. ’E was an African student. Lived upstairs from me, jus’ along the road ’ere, Barking Road, wiv two others. There’s the bookie’s downstairs now. Very good-looking boy. ’Elped me with me shopping a couple of times.”

To hear Marlene Higson tell it, the courtship had proceeded with an almost Victorian respectability; she and the African student seemed barely to have progressed past handshakes during the first months of their acquaintance.

“And then, ’cos ’e’d ’elped me all them times, one day I asked ’im in, y’know, jus’ as a thank-you, really. I’m not a prejudiced person. Ev’ryone’s the same to me. Fancy a cuppa, I sez, that were all. And then,” said Marlene, harsh reality clanging down amidst the vague impressions of teacups and doilies, “I finds out I’m expecting.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Oh yeah, an’ ’e was full of ’ow ’e was gonna ’elp, an’ shoulder ’is respons’bilities, an’ make sure I wuz all right. An’ then it was the college ’olidays. ’E said ’e was coming back,” said Marlene, contemptuously. “Then ’e ran a mile. Don’t they all? And what was I gonna do, run off to Africa to find ’im?

“It was no skin off my nose, anyway. I wasn’t breaking me ’eart; I was seeing Dez by then. ’E didn’t mind the baby. I moved in with Dez not long after Joe left.”

“Joe?”

“That was his name. Joe.”

She said it with conviction, but perhaps, thought Strike, that was because she had repeated the lie so often that the story had become easy, automatic.

“What was his surname?”

“I can’ fuckin’ remember. You’re like her. It was twenny-odd years ago. Mumumba,” said Marlene Higson, unabashed. “Or something like that.”

“Could it have been Agyeman?”

“No.”

“Owusu?”

“I toldya,” she said aggressively, “it were Mumumba or something.”

“Not Macdonald? Or Wilson?”

“You takin’ the piss? Macdonald? Wilson? From Africa?”

Strike concluded that her relationship with the African had never progressed to the exchange of surnames.

“And he was a student, you said? Where was he studying?”

“College,” said Marlene.

“Which one, can you remember?”

“I don’t bloody know. All right if I cadge a ciggie?” she added, in a slightly more conciliatory tone.

“Yeah, help yourself.”

She lit her cigarette with her own plastic lighter, puffed enthusiastically, then said, mellowed by the free tobacco:

“It mighta bin somethin’ to do with a museum. Attached, like.”

“Attached to a museum?”

“Yeah, ’cause I remember ’im sayin’, ‘Ay sometimes visit the museum in my free ahrs.’ ” Her imitation made the African student sound like an upper-class Englishman. She was smirking, as though this choice of recreation was absurd, ludicrous.

“Can you remember which museum it was that he visited?”

“The—the Museum of England or summit,” she said; and then, irritably, “You’re like her. How the fuck am I s’posedta remember after all this time?”

“And you never saw him again after he went home?”

“Nope,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to.” She drank lager. “He’s probably dead,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Africa, innit?” she said. “He coulda bin shot, couldn’t ’e? Or starved. Anythin’. Y’know what it’s like out there.”

Strike did know. He remembered the teeming streets of Nairobi; the aerial view of Angola’s rainforest, mist hanging over the treetops, and the sudden breathtaking beauty, as the chopper turned, of a waterfall in the lush green mountainside; and the Masai woman, baby at her breast, sitting on a box while Strike questioned her painstakingly about alleged rape, and Tracey manned the video camera beside him.

“D’you know whether Lula tried to find her father?”

“Yeah, she tried,” said Marlene dismissively.

“How?”

“She looked up college records,” said Marlene.

“But if you couldn’t remember where he went…”

“I dunno, she thought she’d found the place or summit, but she couldn’t find ’im, no. Mebbe I wasn’ remembrin’ his name right, I dunno. She used to go on an’ fuckin’ on; what did ’e look like, where was ’e studyin’. I said to ’er, he was tall an’ skinny an’ you wanna be grateful you got my ears, not ’is, ’cause there wouldna bin no fuckin’ modelin’ career if you’d got them fucking elephant lugs.”

“Did Lula ever talk to you about her friends?”

“Oh, yeah. There was that little black bitch, Raquelle, or whatever she called ’erself. Leechin’ all she could outta Lula. Oh, she did herself all right. Fuckin’ clothes an’ jew’lry an’ I-dunno-what-the-fuck else. I sez to Lula once, ‘I wouldn’ mind a new coat.’ But I wasn’ pushy, see. That Raquelle din’ mind askin’.”

She sniffed, and drained her glass.

“Did you ever meet Rochelle?”

“That was ’er name, was it? Yeah, once. She come along in a fuckin’ car with a driver to pick Lula up from seein’ me. Like Lady Muck out the back window, sneerin’ at me. She’ll be missin’ all of that now, I ’spect. In it for all she could get.

“An’ there was that Ciara Porter,” Marlene plowed on, with, if possible, even greater spite, “sleepin’ with Lula’s boyfriend the night she fuckin’ died. Nasty fuckin’ bitch.”

“Do you know Ciara Porter?”

“I seen it in the fuckin’ papers. ’E wen’ off to ’er place, di’n’t ’e, Evan? After he rowed with Lula. Went to Ciara. Fuckin’ bitch.”

It became clear, as Marlene talked on, that Lula had kept her natural mother firmly segregated from her friends, and that, with the exception of a brief glimpse of Rochelle, Marlene’s opinions and deductions about Lula’s social set were based entirely on the press reports she had greedily consumed.

Strike fetched more drinks, and listened to Marlene describe the horror and shock she had experienced on hearing (from the neighbor who had run in with the news, early in the morning of the 8th) that her daughter had fallen to her death from her balcony. Careful questioning revealed that Lula had not seen Marlene for two months before she died. Strike then listened to a diatribe about the treatment she had received from Lula’s adoptive family, following the model’s death.

“They di’n’t want me around, ’specially that fuckin’ uncle. ’Ave ya met ’im, ’ave ya? Fuckin’ Tony Landry? I contacted ’im abou’ the funeral an’ all I got was threats. Oh yeah. Fuckin’ threats. I said to ’im, ‘I’m ’er mother. I gotta right to be there.’ An’ he tole me I wasn’t ’er mother, that mad bitch was ’er mother, Lady Bristow. Funny, I says, ’cause I remember pushing ’er outta my fanny. Sorry for my crudity, but there you are. An’ he said I was causing distress, talkin’ to the press. They come an’ found me,” she told Strike furiously, and she jabbed her finger at the block of flats overlooking them. “Press come an’ foun’ me. ’Course I tole my side o’ the fuckin’ story. ’Course I did.

“Well, I didn’t wanna scene, not at a funeral, I didn’t wanna ruin things, but I wasn’t gonna be kept away. I went an’ sat in the back. I seen fuckin’ Rochelle there, givin’ me looks like I wuz dirt. But nobody stopped me in the end.

“They got what they wanted, that fuckin’ family. I di’n’ get nothin’. Nothin’. Tha’s not what Lula woulda wanted, I know that for a fact. She woulda wanted me to ’ave something. Not,” said Marlene, with an assumption of dignity, “that I cared abou’ the money. It weren’ about the money for me. Nuthin’ was gonna replace my daughter, not ten, not twenny mill.

“Mind you, she’d of bin livid if she’d known I didn’t get nuthin’,” she went on. “All that money goin’ begging; people can’t believe it when I tell ’em that I got nuthin’. Struggling to make the rent, and me own daughter lef’ millions. But there you are. That’s how the rich stay rich, ain’t it? They didn’ need it, but they didn’ mind a bit more. I dunno how that Landry sleeps at night, but that’s ’is business.”

“Did Lula ever tell you she was going to leave you anything? Did she mention having made a will?”

Marlene seemed suddenly alert to a whiff of hope.

“Oh yeah, she said she’d look aft’r me, yeah. Yeah, she tole me she’d see me all right. D’you think I shoulda tole someone that? Mentioned it, like?”

“I don’t think it would have made any difference, unless she made a will and left you something in it,” said Strike.

Her face fell back into its sullen expression.

“They prob’ly fuckin’ destroyed it, them bastards. They coulda done. That’s the sort of people they are. I wouldn’t put nuthin’ past that uncle.”

5

“I’M SO SORRY HE HASN’T got back to you,” Robin told the caller, seven miles away in the office. “Mr. Strike’s incredibly busy at the moment. Let me take your name and number, and I’ll make sure he phones you this afternoon.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” said the woman. She had a pleasant, cultivated voice with a faint suspicion of hoarseness, as though her laugh would be sexy and bold. “I don’t really need to speak to him. Could you just give him a message for me? I wanted to warn him, that’s all. God, this is…it’s a bit embarrassing; it isn’t the way I’d have chosen…Well, anyway. Could you please just tell him that Charlotte Campbell called, and that I’m engaged to Jago Ross? I didn’t want him to hear about it from anyone else, or read about it. Jago’s parents have gone and put it in the bloody Times. Mortifying.”

“Oh. All right,” said Robin, her mind suddenly paralyzed like her pen.

“Thanks very much—Robin, did you say? Thanks. ’Bye.”

Charlotte rang off first. Robin replaced the receiver in slow motion, feeling acutely anxious. She did not want to deliver this news. She might be only the messenger, but she would feel as though she were delivering an assault on Strike’s determination to keep his private life under wraps, on his firm avoidance of the subject of the boxes of possessions, the camp bed, the detritus of his evening meals in the bins every morning.

Robin pondered her options. She could forget to relay the message, and simply tell him to call Charlotte and get her to do her own dirty work (as Robin put it to herself). What, though, if Strike refused to call, and somebody else told him about the engagement? Robin had no means of knowing whether Strike and his ex (girlfriend? fiancée? wife?) had legions of mutual friends. If she and Matthew ever split up, if he became engaged to another woman (it gave her a twisting feeling in her chest to even think of it), all her closest friends and family would feel involved, and would undoubtedly stampede to tell her; she would, she supposed, prefer to be forewarned in as low-key and private a way as possible.

When she heard Strike ascending the stair nearly an hour later, apparently talking on his mobile and in good spirits, Robin experienced a sharp stab of panic to the stomach as though she were about to sit an exam. When he pushed open the glass door, and she saw that he was not holding a mobile at all, but rapping under his breath, she felt even worse.

“Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari,” muttered Strike, who was holding a boxed electric fan in his arms. “Afternoon.”

“Hello.”

“Thought we could use this. It’s stuffy in here.”

“Yes, that would be good.”

“Just heard Deeby Macc playing in the shop,” Strike informed her, setting down the fan in a corner and peeling off his jacket. ‘Something something and Ferrari, Fuck yo’ meds and fuck Johari.’ Wonder who Johari was. Some rapper he was having a feud with, d’you think?”

“No,” said Robin, wishing that he was not so cheerful. “It’s a psychological term. The Johari window. It’s all to do with how well we know ourselves, and how well other people know us.”

Strike paused in the act of hanging up his jacket and stared at her.

“You didn’t get that out of Heat magazine.”

“No. I was doing psychology at university. I dropped out.”

She felt, obscurely, that it might somehow even the playing field to tell him about one of her own personal failures, before delivering the bad news.

“You dropped out of university?” He seemed uncharacteristically interested. “That’s a coincidence. I did, too. So why ‘fuck Johari’?”

“Deeby Macc had therapy in prison. He became interested and did a lot of reading on psychology. I got that bit out of the papers,” she added.

“You’re a mine of useful information.”

She experienced another elevator-drop in the pit of her stomach.

“There was a call, when you were out. From a Charlotte Campbell.”

He looked up quickly, frowning.

“She asked me to give you a message, which was,” Robin’s gaze slid sideways, to hover momentarily on Strike’s ear, “that she’s engaged to Jago Ross.”

Her eyes were drawn, irresistibly, back to his face, and she felt a horrible chill.

One of the earliest and most vivid memories of Robin’s childhood was of the day that the family dog had been put down. She herself had been too young to understand what her father was saying; she took the continuing existence of Bruno, her oldest brother’s beloved Labrador, for granted. Confused by her parents’ solemnity, she had turned to Stephen for a clue as to how to react, and all security had crumbled, for she had seen, for the first time in her short life, happiness and comfort drain out of his small and merry face, and his lips whiten as his mouth fell open. She had heard oblivion howling in the silence that preceded his awful scream of anguish, and then she had cried, inconsolably, not for Bruno, but for the terrifying grief of her brother.

Strike did not speak immediately. Then he said, with palpable difficulty:

“Right. Thanks.”

He walked into the inner office, and closed the door.

Robin sat back down at her desk, feeling like an executioner. She could not settle to anything. She considered knocking on the door again, and offering a cup of tea, but decided against. For five minutes she restlessly reorganized the items on her desk, glancing regularly at the closed inner door, until it opened again, and she jumped, and pretended to be busy at the keyboard.

“Robin, I’m just going to nip out,” he said.

“OK.”

“If I’m not back at five, you can lock up.”

“Yes, of course.”

“See you tomorrow.”

He took down his jacket, and left with a purposeful tread that did not deceive her.

The roadworks were spreading like a lesion; every day there was an extension of the mayhem, and of the temporary structures to protect pedestrians and enable them to pick their way through the devastation. Strike noticed none of it. He walked automatically over trembling wooden boards to the Tottenham, the place he associated with escape and refuge.

Like the Ordnance Arms, it was empty but for one other drinker; an old man just inside the door. Strike bought a pint of Doom Bar and sat down on one of the low red leather seats against the wall, almost beneath the sentimental Victorian maid who scattered rosebuds, sweet and silly and simple. He drank as though his beer was medicine, without pleasure, intent on the result.

Jago Ross. She must have been in touch with him, seeing him, while they were still living together. Even Charlotte, with all her mesmeric power over men, her astonishing sure-handed skill, could not have moved from reacquaintance to engagement in three weeks. She had been meeting Ross on the sly, while swearing undying love to Strike.

This put a very different light on the bombshell she had dropped on him a month before the end, and the refusal to show him proof, and the shifting dates, and the sudden conclusion of it all.

Jago Ross had been married once already. He had kids; Charlotte had heard on the grapevine that he was drinking hard. She had laughed with Strike about her lucky escape of so many years before; she had expressed pity for his wife.

Strike bought a second pint, and then a third. He wanted to drown the impulses, crackling like electrical charges, to go and find her, to bellow, to rampage, to break Jago Ross’s jaw.

He had not eaten at the Ordnance Arms, nor since, and it had been a long time since he had consumed so much alcohol in one sitting. It took him barely an hour of steady, solitary, determined beer consumption to become properly drunk.

Initially, when the slim, pale figure appeared at his table, he told it thickly that it had the wrong man and the wrong table.

“No I haven’t,” said Robin firmly. “I’m just going to get myself a drink too, all right?”

She left him staring hazily at her handbag, which she had placed on the stool. It was comfortingly familiar, brown, a little shabby. She usually hung it up on a coat peg in the office. He gave it a friendly smile, and drank to it.

Up at the bar, the barman, who was young and timid-looking, said to Robin: “I think he’s had enough.”

“That’s hardly my fault,” she retorted.

She had looked for Strike in the Intrepid Fox, which was nearest to the office, in Molly Moggs, the Spice of Life and the Cambridge. The Tottenham had been the last pub she was planning to try.

“Whassamatter?” Strike asked her, when she sat down.

“Nothing’s the matter,” said Robin, sipping her half-lager. “I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”

“Yez’m fine,” said Strike, and then, with an effort at clarity, “I yam fine.”

“Good.”

“Jus’ celebratin’ my fiancée zengagement,” he said, raising his eleventh pint in an unsteady toast. “She shou’ never’ve left’m. Never,” he said, loudly and clearly, “have. Left. The Hon’ble. Jago Ross. Who is’n outstanding cunt.”

He virtually shouted the last word. There were more people in the pub than when Strike had arrived, and most of them seemed to have heard him. They had been casting him wary looks even before he shouted. The scale of him, with his drooping eyelids and his bellicose expression, had ensured a small no-go zone around him; people skirted his table on the way to the bathrooms as though it was three times the size.

“Shall we take a walk?” Robin suggested. “Get something to eat?”

“D’you know what?” he said, leaning forwards with his elbows on the table, almost knocking over his pint. “D’you know what, Robin?”

“What?” she said, holding his beer steady. She was suddenly possessed of a strong desire to giggle. Many of their fellow drinkers were watching them.

“Y’re a very nice girl,” said Strike. “Y’are. Y’re a very nice p’son. I’ve noticed,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Yes. ’Ve noticed that.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling, trying not to laugh.

He sat back in his seat, closed his eyes and said:

“Sorry. ’M’pissed.”

“Yes.”

“Don’ do it much these days.”

“No.”

“Haven’ eat’n anything.”

“Shall we go and get something to eat, then?”

“Yeah, we c’do,” he said, with his eyes still shut. “She tol’ me she was pregnant.”

“Oh,” said Robin, sadly.

“Yeah. Tol’ me. An’ then sh’said it was gone. Can’t’ve been mine. Nev’ added up.”

Robin said nothing. She did not want him to remember that she had heard this. He opened his eyes.

“She left ’im for me, an’ now she’s left ’im…no, she’s lef’ me fr’im…”

“I’m sorry.”

“…lef’ me fr’im. Don’t be sorry. Y’re a nice person.”

He pulled cigarettes out of his pocket, and inserted one between his lips.

“You can’t smoke in here,” she reminded him gently, but the barman, who seemed to have been waiting for a cue, came hurrying over towards them now, looking tense.

“You need to go outside to do that,” he told Strike loudly.

Strike peered up at the boy, bleary-eyed, surprised.

“It’s all right,” Robin told the barman, gathering up her handbag. “Come on, Cormoran.”

He stood, massive, ungainly, swaying, unfolding himself out of the cramped space behind the table and glaring at the barman, whom Robin could not blame for taking a step backwards.

“There’z no need,” Strike told him, “t’shout. No need. Fuckin’ rude.”

“OK, Cormoran, let’s go,” said Robin, standing back to give him space to pass.

“Juz a moment, Robin,” said Strike, one large hand held aloft. “Juz a moment.”

“Oh God,” said Robin quietly.

“ ’V’ you ever done any boxing?” Strike asked the barman, who looked terrified.

“Cormoran, let’s go.”

“I wuzza boxer. ’Narmy, mate.”

Over at the bar, some wisecracker murmured, “I could’ve been a contender.”

“Let’s go, Cormoran,” said Robin. She took his arm, and to her great relief and surprise he came along meekly. It reminded her of leading the enormous Clydesdale her uncle had kept on his farm.

Out in the fresh air Strike leaned back against one of the Tottenham’s windows and tried, fruitlessly, to light his cigarette; Robin had to work the lighter for him in the end.

“What you need is food,” she told him, as he smoked with his eyes closed, listing slightly so that she was afraid he would fall over. “Sober you up.”

“I don’ wanna sober up,” Strike muttered. He overbalanced and only saved himself from falling with several rapid sidesteps.

“Come on,” she said, and she guided him across the wooden bridge spanning the gulf in the road, where the clattering machines and builders had at last fallen silent and departed for the night.

“Robin, didjer know I wuzza boxer?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” she said.

She had meant to take him back to the office and give him food there, but he came to a halt at the kebab shop at the end of Denmark Street and had lurched through the door before she could stop him. Sitting outside on the pavement at the only table, they ate kebabs, and he told her about his boxing career in the army, digressing occasionally to remind her what a nice person she was. She managed to persuade him to keep his voice down. The full effect of all the alcohol he had consumed was still making itself felt, and food seemed to be doing little to help. When he went off to the bathroom, he took such a long time that she began to worry that he had passed out.

Checking her watch, she saw that it was now ten past seven. She called Matthew, and told him she was dealing with an urgent situation at the office. He did not sound pleased.

Strike wound his way back on to the street, bouncing off the door frame as he emerged. He planted himself firmly against the window and tried to light another cigarette.

“R’bin,” he said, giving up and gazing down at her. “R’bin, d’you know wadda kairos mo…” He hiccoughed. “Mo…moment is?”

“A kairos moment?” she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. “No, I don’t. Shall we go back to the office?”

“You don’t know whadditis?” he asked, peering at her.

“No.”

“ ’SGreek,” he told her. “Kairos. Kairos moment. An’ it means,” and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, “the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment.”

Oh please, thought Robin, please don’t tell me we’re having one.

“An’ d’you know what ours was, R’bin, mine an’ Charlotte’s?” he said, staring into the middle distance, his unlit cigarette hanging from his hand. “It was when she walk’d into the ward—I was in hosp’tal f’long time an’ I hadn’ seen her f’two years—no warning—an’ I saw her in the door an’ ev’ryone turned an’ saw her too, an’ she walked down the ward an’ she never said a word an,” he paused to draw breath, and hiccoughed again, “an’ she kissed me aft’ two years, an’ we were back together. Nobody talkin’. Fuckin’ beautiful. Mos’ beaut’ful woman I’ve ’ver seen. Bes’ moment of the whole fuckin’—’fmy whole fuckin’ life, prob’bly. I’m sorry, R’bin,” he added, “f’r sayin’ ‘fuckin’.’ Sorry ’bout that.”

Robin felt equally inclined to laughter and tears, though she did not know why she should feel so sad.

“Shall I light that cigarette for you?”

“Y’re a great person, Robin, y’know that?”

Near the turning into Denmark Street he stopped dead, still swaying like a tree in the wind, and told her loudly that Charlotte did not love Jago Ross; it was all a game, a game to hurt him, Strike, as badly as she could.

Outside the black door to the office he halted again, holding up both hands to stop her following him upstairs.

“Y’ gotta go home now, R’bin.”

“Let me just make sure you get upstairs OK.”

“No. No. ’M fine now. An’ I might chunder. ’M legless. An’,” said Strike, “you don’ get that fuckin’ tired old fuckin’ joke. Or do you? Know most of it now. Did I tell you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ne’r mind, R’bin. You go home now. I gotta be sick.”

“Are you sure…?”

“’M sorry I kep’ sayin’ fuck—swearin’. Y’re a nice pers’n, R’bin. G’bye now.”

She looked back at him when she reached Charing Cross Road. He was walking with the awful, clumsy deliberation of the very drunk towards the dingy entrance to Denmark Place, there, no doubt, to vomit in the dark alleyway, before staggering upstairs to his camp bed and kettle.

6

THERE WAS NO CLEAR MOMENT of moving from sleep to consciousness. At first he was lying facedown in a dreamscape of broken metal, rubble and screams, bloodied and unable to speak; then he was lying on his stomach, doused in sweat, his face pressed into the camp bed, his head a throbbing ball of pain and his open mouth dry and rank. The sun pouring in at the unblinded windows scoured his retinas even with his eyelids closed: raw red, with capillaries spread like fine black nets over tiny, taunting, popping lights.

He was fully clothed, his prosthesis still attached, lying on top of his sleeping bag as though he had fallen there. Stabbing memories, like glass shards through his temple: persuading the barman that another pint was a good idea. Robin, across the table, smiling at him. Could he really have eaten a kebab in the state he was in? At some point he remembered wrestling his fly, desperate to piss but unable to extract the end of shirt caught in his zip. He slid a hand underneath himself—even this slight movement made him want to groan or vomit—and found, to his vague relief, that the zip was closed.

Slowly, like a man balancing some fragile package on his shoulders, Strike moved himself into a sitting position and squinted around the brightly lit room with no idea what time it could be, or indeed what day it was.

The door between inner and outer offices was closed, and he could not hear any movement on the other side. Perhaps his temp had left for good. Then he saw a white oblong lying on the floor, just inside the door, pushed under the gap at the bottom. Strike moved gingerly on to his hands and knees, and retrieved what he soon saw was a note from Robin.

Dear Cormoran (he supposed there was no going back to “Mr. Strike” now),

I read your list of points to investigate further at the front of the file. I thought I might be able to follow up the first two (Agyeman and the Malmaison Hotel). I will be on my mobile if you would rather I came back to the office.

I have set an alarm just outside your door for 2 p.m., so that you have enough time to get ready for your 5 p.m. appointment at I Arlington Place, to interview Ciara Porter and Bryony Radford.

There is water, paracetamol and Alka-Seltzer on the desk outside.

Robin

PS Please don’t be embarrassed about last night. You didn’t say or do anything you should regret.

He sat quite still on his camp bed for five minutes, holding the note, wondering whether he was about to throw up, but enjoying the warm sunshine on his back.

Four paracetamol and a glass of Alka-Seltzer, which almost decided the vomiting question for him, were followed by fifteen minutes in the dingy toilet, with results offensive to both nose and ear; but he was sustained throughout by a feeling of profound gratitude for Robin’s absence. Back in the outer office, he drank two more bottles of water and turned off the alarm, which had set his throbbing brains rattling in his skull. After some deliberation, he chose a set of clean clothes, took shower gel, deodorant, razor, shaving cream and towel out of the kitbag, pulled a pair of swimming trunks out of the bottom of one of the cardboard boxes on the landing, extracted the pair of gray metal crutches from another, then limped down the metal stair with a sports bag over his shoulder and the crutches in his other hand.

He bought himself a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk on the way to Malet Street. Bernie Coleman, an acquaintance in the Army Medical Corps, had once explained to Strike how the majority of the symptoms associated with a crashing hangover were due to dehydration and hypoglycemia, which were the inevitable results of prolonged vomiting. Strike munched his way through the chocolate, crutches jammed under his arm and every step jarring his head, which still felt as though it was being compressed by tight wires.

But the laughing god of drunkenness had not yet forsaken him. Agreeably detached from reality and from his fellow human beings, he walked down the steps to the ULU pool with an unfeigned sense of entitlement, and as usual nobody challenged him, not even the only other occupant of the changing room, who, after one glance of arrested interest at the prosthesis Strike was unstrapping, kept his eyes politely averted. His false leg stuffed into a locker along with yesterday’s clothes, and leaving the door open due to lack of change, Strike moved towards the shower on crutches, his belly spilling over the top of his trunks.

He noted, as he soaped himself, that the chocolate and paracetamol were beginning to take the edge off his nausea and pain. Now, for the first time, he walked out to the large pool. There were only two students in here, both in the fast lane and wearing goggles, oblivious to everything but their own prowess. Strike proceeded to the far side, set the crutches down carefully beside the steps and slid into the slow lane.

He was more unfit than he had ever been in his life. Ungainly and lopsided, he kept swimming into the side of the pool, but the cool, clean water was soothing to body and spirit. Panting, he completed a single length and rested there, his thick arms spread along the side of the pool, sharing the responsibility for his heavy body with the caressing water and gazing up at the high white ceiling.

Little waves, outrunners sent by the young athletes on the other side of the pool, tickled his chest. The terrible pain in his head was receding into the distance; a fiery red light viewed through mist. The chlorine was sharp and clinical in his nostrils, but it no longer made him want to be sick. Deliberately, like a man ripping off a bandage on a congealing wound. Strike turned his attention to the thing he had attempted to drown in alcohol.

Jago Ross; in every respect the antithesis of Strike: handsome in the manner of an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfill a preordained place in his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of well-documented lineage can give. He had quit a succession of high-flying jobs, developed a persistent drinking problem, and was vicious in the manner of an overbred, badly disciplined animal.

Charlotte and Ross belonged to that tight, interconnected network of public-schooled blue bloods who all knew each other’s families, connected through generations of interbreeding and old-school ties. While the water lapped his thickly hairy chest, Strike seemed to see himself, Charlotte and Ross at a great distance, from the wrong end of a telescope, so that the arc of their story became clear: it mirrored Charlotte’s restless day-to-day behavior, that craving for heightened emotion that expressed itself most typically in destructiveness. She had secured Jago Ross as a prize when eighteen, the most extreme example she could find of his type and the very epitome of eligibility, as her parents had seen it. Perhaps that had been too easy, and certainly too expected, because she had then dumped him for Strike, who, for all his brains, was anathema to Charlotte’s family; an uncategorizable mongrel. What was left, after all these years, to a woman who craved emotional storms, but to leave Strike again and again, until at last the only way to leave with real éclat was to move full circle, back to the place where he had found her?

Strike allowed his aching body to float in the water. The racing students were still thrashing their way up and down the fast lane.

Strike knew Charlotte. She was waiting for him to rescue her. It was the final, cruelest test.

He did not swim back down the pool, but hopped sideways through the water, using his arms to grip the long side of the pool as he had done during physiotherapy in the hospital.

The second shower was more pleasurable than the first; he made the water as hot as he could stand, lathered himself all over, then turned the dial to cold to rinse himself.

The prosthesis reattached, he shaved over a sink with a towel tied around his waist, then dressed with unusual care. He had never worn the most expensive suit and shirt that he owned. They had been gifts from Charlotte on his last birthday: raiment suitable for her fiancé; he remembered her beaming at him as he stared at his unfamiliarly well-styled self in a full-length mirror. The suit and shirt had hung in their carry case ever since, because he and Charlotte had not gone out much after last November; because his birthday had been the last truly happy day they had spent together. Soon afterwards, the relationship had begun to stagger back into the old familiar grievances, into the same mire in which it had foundered before, but which, this time, they had sworn to avoid.

He might have incinerated the suit. Instead, in a spirit of defiance, he chose to wear it, to strip it of its associations and render it mere pieces of cloth. The tailoring of the jacket made him look slimmer and fitter. He left the white shirt open at the throat.

Strike had had a reputation, in the army, for being able to bounce back from excessive alcohol consumption with unusual speed. The man staring at him out of the small mirror was pale, with purple shadows under his eyes, yet in the sharp Italian suit he looked better than he had done in weeks. His black eye had vanished at last, and his scratches had healed.

A cautiously light meal, copious amounts of water, another evacuatory trip to the restaurant bathroom, more painkillers; then, at five o’clock, a prompt arrival at number 1, Arlington Place.

The door was answered, after his second knock, by a cross-looking woman in black-framed glasses and a short gray bob. She let him in with an appearance of reluctance, then walked briskly away across a stone-floored hall which incorporated a magnificent staircase with a wrought-iron banister, calling “Guy! Somebody Strike?”

There were rooms on both sides of the hall. To the left, a small knot of people, all of whom seemed to be dressed in black, were staring in the direction of some powerful light source that Strike could not see, but which illuminated their rapt faces.

Somé appeared, striding through this door into the hall. He too was wearing glasses, which made him look older; his jeans were baggy and ripped and his white T-shirt was emblazoned with an eye that appeared to be weeping glittering blood, which on closer examination proved to be red sequins.

“You’ll have to wait,” he said curtly. “Bryony’s busy and Ciara’s going to be hours. You can park yourself in there if you want,” he pointed towards the right-hand room, where the edge of a tray-laden table was visible, “or you can stand around and watch like these useless fuckers,” he went on, suddenly raising his voice and glaring at the huddle of elegant young men and women who were staring towards the light source. They dispersed at once, without protest, some of them crossing the hall into the room opposite.

“Better suit, by the way,” Somé added, with a flash of his old archness. He marched back into the room from which he had come.

Strike followed the designer, and took up the space vacated by the roughly dispatched onlookers. The room was long and almost bare, but its ornate cornices, pale blank walls and curtainless windows gave it an atmosphere of mournful grandeur. A further group of people, including a long-haired male photographer bent over his camera, stood between Strike and the scene at the far end of the room, which was dazzlingly illuminated by a series of arc lights and light screens. Here was an artful arrangement of tattered old chairs, one on its side, and three models. They were a breed apart, with faces and bodies in rare proportions that fell precisely between the categories of strange and impressive. Fine-boned and recklessly slim, they had been chosen, Strike assumed, for the dramatic contrast in their coloring and features. Sitting like Christine Keeler on a back-to-front chair, long legs splayed in spray-on white leggings, but apparently naked from the waist up, was a black girl as dark-skinned as Somé himself, with an Afro and slanting, seductive eyes. Standing over her in a white vest decorated in chains, which just covered her pubis, was a Eurasian beauty with flat black hair cut into an asymmetric fringe. To one side, leaning alone and sideways on the back of another chair, was Ciara Porter; alabaster fair, with long baby-blonde hair, wearing a white semitransparent jumpsuit through which her pale, pointed nipples were clearly visible.

The makeup artist, almost as tall and thin as the models, was bending over the black girl, pressing a pad into the sides of her nose. The three models waited silently in position, still as portraits, all three faces blank and empty, waiting to be called to attention. The other people in the room (the photographer appeared to have two assistants; Somé, now biting his fingernails on the sidelines, was accompanied by the cross-looking woman in glasses) all spoke in low mutters, as though frightened of disturbing some delicate equilibrium.

At last the makeup artist joined Somé, who talked inaudibly and rapidly to her, gesticulating; she stepped back into the bright light and, without speaking to the model, ruffled and rearranged Ciara Porter’s long mane of hair; Ciara showed no sign that she knew she was being touched, but waited in patient silence. Bryony retreated into the shadows once more, and asked Somé something; he responded with a shrug and gave her some inaudible instruction that had her look around until her eyes rested on Strike.

They met at the foot of the magnificent staircase.

“Hi,” she whispered. “Let’s go through here.”

She led him across the hall into the opposite room, which was slightly smaller than the first, and dominated by the large table covered with buffet-style food. Several long, wheeled clothing racks, jammed with sequined, ruffled and feathered creations arranged according to color, stood in front of a marble fireplace. The displaced onlookers, all of them in their twenties, were gathered in here; talking quietly, picking in desultory fashion at the half-empty platters of mozzarella and Parma ham and talking into, or playing with, their phones. Several of them subjected Strike to appraising looks as he followed Bryony into a small back room which had been turned into a makeshift makeup station.

Two tables with big portable mirrors stood in front of the large single window, which looked out on to a spruce garden. The black plastic boxes standing around reminded Strike of those his Uncle Ted had taken fly-fishing, except that Bryony’s drawers were crammed with colored powders and paints; tubes and brushes lay lined up on towels spread across the table tops.

“Hi,” she said, in a normal voice. “God. Talk about cutting the tension with a knife, eh? Guy’s always a perfectionist, but this is his first proper shoot since Lula died, so he’s, you know, seriously uptight.”

She had dark, choppy hair; her skin was sallow, her features, though large, were attractive. She was wearing tight jeans on long, slightly bandy legs, a black vest, several fine gold chains around her neck, rings on her fingers and thumbs, and also what looked like black leather ballet shoes. This kind of footwear always had a slightly anaphrodisiac effect on Strike, because it reminded him of the fold-up slippers his Aunt Joan used to carry in her handbag, and therefore of bunions and corns.

Strike began to explain what he wanted from her, but she cut him off.

“Guy’s told me everything. Want a ciggie? We can smoke in here if we open this.”

So saying, she wrenched open the door that led directly on to a paved area of the garden.

She made a small space on one of the cluttered makeup tables and perched herself on it; Strike took one of the vacated chairs and drew out his notebook.

“OK, fire away,” she said, and then, without giving him time to speak, “I’ve been thinking about that afternoon nonstop ever since, actually. So, so sad.”

“Did you know Lula well?” asked Strike.

“Yeah, pretty well. I’d done her makeup for a couple of shoots, made her up for the Rainforest Benefit. When I told her I can thread eyebrows…”

“You can what?”

“Thread eyebrows. It’s like plucking, but with threads?”

Strike could not imagine how this worked.

“Right…”

“…she asked me to do them for her at home. The paps were all over her, all the time, even if she was going to the salon. It was insane. So I helped her out.”

She had a habit of tossing back her head to flick her overlong fringe out of her eyes, and a slightly breathy manner. Now she threw her hair over to one side, raked it with her fingers and peered at him through her fringe.

“I got there about three. She and Ciara were all excited about Deeby Macc arriving. Girlie gossip, you know. I’d never have guessed what was coming. Never.”

“Lula was excited, was she?”

“Oh God, yeah, what d’you think? How would you feel if someone had written songs about…Well,” she said, with a breathy little laugh, “maybe it’s a girl thing. He’s so charismatic. Ciara and I were having a laugh about it while I did Lula’s eyebrows. Then Ciara asked me to do her nails. I ended up making them both up, as well, so I was there for, must’ve been three hours. Yeah, I left about six.”

“So you’d describe Lula’s mood as excited, would you?”

“Yeah. Well, you know, she was a bit distracted; she kept checking her phone; it was lying in her lap while I was doing her eyebrows. I knew what that meant: Evan was messing her around again.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but I knew she was really pissed off at him. Why do you think she said that to Ciara about her brother? About leaving him everything?”

This seemed a stretch to Strike.

“Did you hear her say that too?”

“What? No, but I heard about it. I mean, afterwards. Ciara told us all. I think I was in the loo when she actually said it. Anyway, I totally believe it. Totally.”

“Why’s that?”

She looked confused.

“Well—she really loved her brother, didn’t she? God, that was always obvious. He was probably the only person she could really rely on. Months before, around the time she and Evan split up the first time, I was making her up for the Stella show, and she was telling everyone her brother was really pissing her off, going on and on about what a freeloader Evan was. And you know, Evan was jacking her around again, that last afternoon, so she was thinking that James—is it James?—had had him right all along. She always knew he had her interests at heart, even if he was a bit bossy sometimes. This is a really, really exploitative business, you know. Everyone’s got an agenda.”

“Who do you think had an agenda for Lula?”

“Oh my God, everyone,” said Bryony, making a wide sweeping gesture with her cigarette-holding hand, which encompassed all of the inhabited rooms outside. “She was the hottest model out there, everyone wanted a piece of her. I mean, Guy—” But Bryony broke off. “Well, Guy’s a businessman, but he did adore her; he wanted her to go and live with him after that stalker business. He’s still not right about her dying. I heard he tried to contact her through some spiritualist. Margo Leiter told me. He’s still devastated, he can barely hear her name without crying. Anyway,” said Bryony, “that’s all I know. I never dreamed that afternoon would be the last time I saw her. I mean, my God.”

“Did she talk about Duffield at all, while you were—er—threading her eyebrows?”

“No,” said Bryony, “but she wouldn’t, would she, if he was really hacking her off?”

“So as far as you can remember, she mainly spoke about Deeby Macc?”

“Well…it was more Ciara and me talking about him.”

“But you think she was excited to meet him?”

“God, yeah, of course.”

“Tell me, did you see a blue piece of paper with Lula’s handwriting on it when you were in the flat?”

Bryony shook her hair over her face again, and combed it with her fingers.

“What? No. No, I didn’t see anything like that. Why, what was it?”

“I don’t know,” said Strike. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“No, I didn’t see it. Blue, did you say? No.”

“Did you see any paper at all with her writing on it?”

“No, I can’t remember any papers. No.” She shook her hair out of her face. “I mean, something like that could’ve been lying around, but I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed it.”

The room was dingy. Perhaps he only imagined that she had changed color, but he had not invented the way she twisted her right foot up on to her knee and examined the sole of the leather ballet slipper for something that was not there.

“Lula’s driver, Kieran Kolovas-Jones…”

“Oh, that really, really cute guy?” said Bryony. “We used to tease her about Kieran; he had such a gigantic crush on her. I think Ciara uses him now sometimes.” Bryony gave a meaningful little giggle. “She’s got a bit of a rep as a good-time girl, Ciara. I mean, you can’t help liking her, but…”

“Kolovas-Jones says that Lula was writing something on blue paper in the back of his car, when she left her mother’s that day…”

“Have you talked to Lula’s mother yet? She’s a bit weird.”

“…and I’d like to find out what it was.”

Bryony flicked her cigarette stub out of the open door and shifted restlessly on the desk.

“It could have been anything.” He waited for the inevitable suggestion, and was not disappointed. “A shopping list or something.”

“Yeah, it could’ve been; but if, for the sake of argument, it was a suicide note…”

“But it wasn’t—I mean, that’s silly—how could it’ve been? Who’d write a suicide note that far in advance, and then get their face done and go out dancing? That doesn’t make any sense at all!”

“It doesn’t seem likely, I agree, but it would be good to find out what it was.”

“Maybe it had nothing to do with her dying. Why couldn’t it have been a letter to Evan or something, telling him how hacked off she was?”

“She doesn’t seem to have become hacked off with him until later that day. Anyway, why would she write a letter, when she had his telephone number and was going to see him that night?”

“I don’t know,” said Bryony restlessly. “I’m just saying, it could’ve been something that doesn’t make any difference.”

“And you’re quite sure you didn’t see it?”

“Yes, I’m quite sure,” she said, her color definitely heightened. “I was there to do a job, not go snooping around her stuff. Is that everything, then?”

“Yeah, I think that’s all I’ve got to ask about that afternoon,” said Strike, “but you might be able to help me with something else. Do you know Tansy Bestigui?”

“No,” said Bryony. “Only her sister, Ursula. She’s hired me a couple of times for big parties. She’s awful.”

“In what way?”

“Just one of those spoiled rich women—well,” said Bryony, with a twist to her mouth, “she isn’t nearly as rich as she’d like to be. Both those Chillingham sisters went for old men with bags of money; wealth-seeking missiles, the pair of them. Ursula thought she’d hit the jackpot when she married Cyprian May, but he hasn’t got nearly enough for her. She’s knocking forty now; the opportunities aren’t there the way they used to be. I suppose that’s why she hasn’t been able to trade up.”

Then, evidently feeling that her tone needed some explanation, she continued:

“I’m sorry, but she accused me of listening to her bloody voicemail messages.” The makeup artist folded her arms across her chest, glaring at Strike. “I mean, please. She chucked me her mobile and told me to call her a cab, without so much as a bloody please or thank you. I’m dyslexic. I hit the wrong button and the next thing I know, she’s screaming her bloody head off at me.”

“Why do you think she was so upset?”

“Because I heard a man she wasn’t married to telling her he was lying in a hotel room fantasizing about going down on her, I expect,” said Bryony, coolly.

“So she might be trading up after all?” asked Strike.

“That’s not up,” said Bryony; but then she added hastily, “I mean, pretty tacky message. Anyway, listen, I’ve got to get back out there, or Guy will be going ballistic.”

He let her go. After she had left, he made two more pages of notes. Bryony Radford had shown herself a highly unreliable witness, suggestible and mendacious, but she had told him much more than she knew.

7

THE SHOOT LASTED FOR ANOTHER three hours. Strike waited in the garden, smoking and consuming more bottled water, while dusk fell. From time to time he wandered back into the building to check on progress, which seemed immensely slow. Occasionally he glimpsed or heard Somé, whose temper seemed frayed, barking instructions at the photographer or one of the black-clad minions who flitted between clothes racks. Finally, at nearly nine o’clock, after Strike had consumed a few slices of the pizza that had been ordered by the morose and exhausted stylist’s assistant, Ciara Porter descended the stairs where she had been posing with her two colleagues, and joined Strike in the makeup room, which Bryony was busy stripping bare.

Ciara was still wearing the stiff silver minidress in which she had posed for the last pictures. Attenuated and angular, with milk-white skin, hair almost as fair, and pale blue eyes set very wide apart, she stretched out her endless legs, in platform shoes that were tied with long silver threads up her calves, and lit a Marlboro Light.

“God, I can’t believe you’re Rokers’ son!” she said breathlessly, her chrysoberyl eyes and full lips both wide. “Just beyond weird! I know him; he invited Looly and me to the Greatest Hits launch last year! And I know your brothers, Al and Eddie! They told me they had a big brother in the army! God. Mad. Is that you done, Bryony?” Ciara added pointedly.

The makeup artist seemed to be making a laborious business of gathering up the tools of her trade. Now she sped up perceptibly, while Ciara smoked and watched her in silence.

“Yep, that’s me,” said Bryony brightly at last, hoisting a heavy box over her shoulder and picking up more cases in each hand. “See you, Ciara. Goodbye,” she added to Strike, and left.

“She is so bloody nosy, and such a gossip,” Ciara told Strike. She threw back her long white hair, rearranged her coltish legs and asked:

“D’you see a lot of Al and Eddie?”

“No,” said Strike.

“And your mum,” she said, unfazed, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “I mean, she’s just, like, a legend. You know how Baz Carmichael did a whole collection two seasons back called ‘Supergroupie,’ and it was like, Bebe Buell and your mum were the whole inspiration? Maxi skirts and buttonless shirts and boots?”

“I didn’t,” said Strike.

“Oh, it was, like—you know that great quote about Ossie Clark dresses, how men liked them because they could just, like, open them up really easily and fuck the girls? That’s, like, your mum’s whole era.”

She shook her hair out of her eyes again and gazed at him, not with the chilling and offensive appraisal of Tansy Bestigui, but in what seemed to be frank and open wonder. It was difficult for him to decide whether she was sincere, or performing her own character; her beauty got in the way, like a thick cobweb through which it was difficult to see her clearly.

“So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you about Lula.”

“God, yeah. Yeah. No, I really want to help. When I heard someone was investigating it, I was, like, well, good. At last.”

“Really?”

“God, yeah. The whole thing was so fucking shocking. I just couldn’t believe it. She’s still on my phone, look at this.”

She rummaged in an enormous handbag, finally retrieving a white iPhone. Scrolling down the contact list, she leaned into him, showing him the name “Looly.” Her perfume was sweet and peppery.

“I keep expecting her to call me,” said Ciara, momentarily subdued, slipping the phone back into her bag. “I can’t delete her; I keep going to do it, and then just, like, bottling it, you know?”

She raised herself restlessly, twisted one of the long legs underneath her, sat back down and smoked in silence for a few seconds.

“You were with her most of her last day, weren’t you?” Strike asked.

“Don’t fucking remind me,” said Ciara, closing her eyes. “I’ve only been over it, like, a million times. Trying to get my head around how you can go from, like, completely bloody happy to dead in, like, hours.”

“She was completely happy?”

“God, happier than I’d ever seen her, that last week. We got back from a job in Antigua for Vogue, and she and Evan got back together and they had the commitment ceremony; it was all fantastic for her, she was on cloud nine.”

“You were at this commitment ceremony?”

“Oh yeah,” said Ciara, dropping her cigarette end into a can of Coke, where it was extinguished with a small hiss. “God, it was beyond romantic. Evan just, like, sprang it on her at Dickie Carbury’s house. You know Dickie Carbury, the restaurateur? He’s got this fabulous place in the Cotswolds, and we were all there for the weekend, and Evan had bought them both matching bangles from Fergus Keane, gorgeous, oxidized silver. He forced us all down to the lake after dinner in the freezing cold and the snow, and then he recited this poem he’d written to her, and put the bangle on her wrist. Looly was laughing her head off, but then she just, like, recited a poem she knew back to him. Walt Whitman. It was,” said Ciara, with an air of sudden seriousness, “honestly, like, so impressive, just to have the perfect poem to say, just like that. People think models are dumb, you know.” She threw her hair back again and offered Strike a cigarette before taking another herself. “I get so bored of telling people I’ve got a deferred place to read English at Cambridge.”

“Have you?” asked Strike, unable to suppress the surprise in his voice.

“Yeah,” she said, blowing out smoke prettily, “but, you know, the modeling’s going so well, I’m going to give it another year. It’s opening doors, you know?”

“So this commitment ceremony was when—a week before Lula died?”

“Yeah,” said Ciara, “the Saturday before.”

“And it was just an exchange of poems and bangles. No vows, no officiant?”

“No, it wasn’t legally binding or anything, it was just, like, this lovely, this perfect moment. Well, except for Freddie Bestigui, he was being a bit of a pain. But at least,” Ciara drew hard on her cigarette, “his bloody wife wasn’t there.”

“Tansy?”

“Tansy Chillingham, yeah. She’s a bitch. It’s so not a surprise they’re divorcing; they led, like, totally separate lives, you never saw them out together.

“To tell you the truth, Freddie wasn’t too bad that weekend, seeing what a nasty rep he’s got. He was just a bore, the way he kept trying to suck up to Looly, but he wasn’t awful like they say he can be. I heard a story about this, like, totally naive girl he promised a bit part in a film…Well, I don’t know whether it was true.” Ciara squinted for a moment at the end of her cigarette. “She never reported it, anyway.”

“You said Freddie was being a pain; in what way?”

“Oh God, he kept, like, cornering Looly and going on about how great she’d be on screen, and like, what a great bloke her dad was.”

“Sir Alec?”

“Yeah, Sir Alec, of course. Oh my God,” said Ciara, wide-eyed, “if he’d known her real father, Looly would’ve, like, flipped out completely! That would have been, like, the dream of her life! No, he just said he’d known Sir Alec years and years ago, and they came from, like, the same East End manor or something, so he should be considered, like, her godfather or something. I think he was trying to be funny, but not. Anyway, everyone could tell he was just trying to work out how to get her into a film. He was a jerk about the commitment ceremony; he kept shouting ‘I’ll give away the bride.’ He was pissed; he drank like crazy all through dinner. Dickie had to shut him up. Then after the ceremony, we all had champagne back at the house and Freddie had, like, another two bottles on top of everything he’d already put away. He kept yelling at Looly that she’d make such a great actress, but she didn’t care. She just ignored him. She was cuddled up with Evan on the sofa, just, like…”

And suddenly, tears were sparkling in Ciara’s kohled eyes, and she squashed them out of sight with the flat palms of her pretty white hands.

“…crazy in love. She was so fucking happy, I’d never seen her happier.”

“You met Freddie Bestigui again, didn’t you, on the evening before Lula died? Didn’t the two of you pass him in the lobby, on your way out?”

“Yeah,” said Ciara, still dabbing at her eyes. “How did you know that?”

“Wilson, the security guard. He thought Bestigui said something to Lula that she didn’t like.”

“Yeah. He’s right. I’d forgotten about that. Freddie said something about Deeby Macc, about Looly being excited about him coming, how he really wanted to get them on film together. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but he made it sound dirty, you know?”

“Did Lula know that Bestigui and her adoptive father had been friends?”

“She told me it was the first she’d ever heard of it. She always stayed out of Freddie’s way at the flats. She didn’t like Tansy.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, Looly wasn’t interested in that whole, like, whose husband’s got the biggest fucking yacht crap, she didn’t want to get into their crowd. She was so much better than that. So not like the Chillingham girls.”

“OK,” said Strike, “can you talk me through the afternoon and evening you were with her?”

Ciara dropped her second fag end into the Coke can, with another little spitting fizz, and immediately lit another.

“Yeah. OK, let me think. Well, I met her at her place in the afternoon. Bryony came over to do her eyebrows and ended up giving us both manicures. We just had, like, a girlie afternoon together.”

“How did she seem?”

“She was…” Ciara hesitated. “Well, she wasn’t quite as happy as she’d been that week. But not suicidal, I mean, no way.”

“Her driver, Kieran, thought she seemed strange when she left her mother’s house in Chelsea.”

“Oh God, yeah, well why wouldn’t she be? Her mum had cancer, didn’t she?”

“Did Lula discuss her mother, when she saw you?”

“No, not really. I mean, she said she’d just been sitting with her, because she was a bit, you know, pulled down after her op, but nobody thought then that Lady Bristow was going to die. The op was supposed to cure her, wasn’t it?”

“Did Lula mention any other reason that she was feeling less happy than she had been?”

“No,” said Ciara, slowly shaking her head, the white-blonde hair tumbling around her face. She raked it back again and took a deep drag on her cigarette. “She did seem a bit down, a bit distracted, but I just put it down to having seen her mum. They had a weird relationship. Lady Bristow was, like, really overprotective and possessive. Looly found it, you know, a bit claustrophobic.”

“Did you notice Lula telephoning anyone while she was with you?”

“No,” said Ciara, after a thoughtful pause. “I remember her checking her phone a lot, but she didn’t speak to anyone, as far as I can remember. If she was phoning anyone, she was doing it on the quiet. She was in and out of the room a bit. I don’t know.”

“Bryony thought she seemed excited about Deeby Macc.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ciara impatiently. “It was everyone else who was excited about Deeby Macc—Guy and Bryony and—well, even I was, a bit,” she said, with endearing honesty. “But Looly wasn’t that fussed. She was in love with Evan. You can’t believe everything Bryony says.”

“Did Lula have a piece of paper with her, that you can remember? A bit of blue paper, which she’d written on?”

“No,” said Ciara again. “Why? What was it?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Strike, and Ciara looked suddenly thunderstruck.

“God—you’re not telling me she left a note? Oh my God. How fucking mad would that be? But—no! That would mean she’d have, like, already decided she was going to do it.”

“Maybe it was something else,” said Strike. “You mentioned at the inquest that Lula expressed an intention to leave everything to her brother, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Ciara earnestly, nodding. “Yeah, what happened was, Guy had sent Looly these fabby handbags from the new range. I knew he wouldn’t have sent me any, even though I was in the advert too. Anyway, I unwrapped the white one, Cashile, you know, and it was just, like, beautiful; he does these detachable silk linings and he’d had it custom-printed for her with this amazing African print. So I said, ‘Looly, will you leave me this one?’ just as a joke. And she said, like, really seriously, ‘I’m leaving everything to my brother, but I’m sure he’d let you have anything you want.’ ”

Strike was watching and listening for any sign that she was lying or exaggerating, but the words came easily and, to all appearances, frankly.

“That was a strange thing to say, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah, I s’pose,” said Ciara, shaking the hair back off her face again. “But Looly was like that; she could go a bit dark and dramatic sometimes. Guy used to say, ‘Less of the cuckoo, Cuckoo.’ Anyway,” Ciara sighed, “she didn’t take the hint about the Cashile bag. I was hoping she’d just give it to me; I mean, she had four.”

“Would you say you were close to Lula?”

“Oh God, yeah, super-close, she told me everything.”

“A couple of people have mentioned that she didn’t trust too easily. That she was scared of confidences turning up in the press. I’ve been told that she tested people to see whether she could trust them.”

“Oh yeah, she did get a bit, like, paranoid after her real mum started selling stories about her. She actually asked me,” said Ciara, with an airy wave of her cigarette, “whether I’d told anyone she was back with Evan. I mean, come on. There was no way she was going to keep that quiet. Everyone was talking about it. I said to her, ‘Looly, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ That’s Oscar Wilde,” she added, kindly. “But Looly didn’t like that side of being famous.”

“Guy Somé thinks that Lula wouldn’t have got back with Duffield if he hadn’t been out of the country.”

Ciara glanced towards the door, and dropped her voice.

“Guy would say that. He was just, like, super-protective of Looly. He adored her; he really loved her. He thought Evan was bad for her, but honestly, he doesn’t know the real Evan. Evan’s, like, totally fucked up, but he’s a good person. He went to see Lady Bristow not long ago, and I said to him, ‘Why, Evan, what on earth did you put yourself through that for?’ Because, you know, her family hated him. And d’you know what he said? ‘I just wanna speak to somebody who cares as much as I do that she’s gone.’ I mean, how sad is that?”

Strike cleared his throat.

“The press have totally got it in for Evan, it’s just so unfair, he can’t do anything right.”

“Duffield came to your place, didn’t he, the night she died?”

“God, yeah, and there you are!” said Ciara indignantly. “They made out we were, like, shagging or something! He had no money, and his driver had disappeared, so he just, like, hiked across London so he could crash at mine. He slept on the sofa. So we were together when we heard the news.”

She raised her cigarette to her full mouth and drew deeply on it, her eyes on the floor.

“It was terrible. You can’t imagine. Terrible. Evan was…oh my God. And then,” she said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “they were all saying it was him. After Tansy Chillingham said she’d heard a row. The press just went crazy. It was awful.”

She looked up at Strike, holding her hair off her face. The harsh overhead light merely illuminated her perfect bone structure.

“You haven’t met Evan, have you?”

“No.”

“D’you want to? You could come with me now. He said he was going along to Uzi tonight.”

“That’d be great.”

“Fabby. Hang on.”

She jumped up and called through the open door:

“Guy, sweetie, can I wear this tonight? Go on. To Uzi?”

Somé entered the small room. He looked exhausted behind his glasses.

“All right. Make sure you’re photographed. Wreck it and I’ll sue your skinny white arse.”

“I’m not going to wreck it. I’m taking Cormoran to meet Evan.”

She stuffed her cigarettes away into her enormous bag, which appeared to hold her day clothes too, and hoisted it over her shoulder. In her heels, she was within an inch of the detective’s height. Somé looked up at Strike, his eyes narrowed.

“Make sure you give the little shit a hard time.”

“Guy!” said Ciara, pouting. “Don’t be horrible.”

“And watch yourself, Master Rokeby,” Somé added, with his usual edge of spite. “Ciara’s a terrible slut, aren’t you, dear? And she’s like me. She likes them big.”

“Guy!” said Ciara, in mock horror. “Come on, Cormoran. I’ve got a driver outside.”

8

STRIKE, FOREWARNED, WAS NOWHERE NEAR as surprised to see Kieran Kolovas-Jones as the driver was to see him. Kolovas-Jones was holding open the left-hand passenger door, faintly lit by the car’s interior light, but Strike spotted his momentary change of expression when he laid eyes on Ciara’s companion.

“Evening,” said Strike, moving around the car to open his own door and get in beside Ciara.

“Kieran, you’ve met Cormoran, haven’t you?” said Ciara, buckling herself in. Her dress had ridden up to the very top of her long legs. Strike could not be absolutely certain that she was wearing anything beneath it. She had certainly been braless in the white jumpsuit.

“Hi, Kieran,” said Strike.

The driver nodded at Strike in the rearview mirror, but did not speak. He had assumed a strictly professional demeanor that Strike doubted was habitual in the absence of detectives.

The car pulled away from the curb. Ciara started rummaging again in her bag; she removed a perfume spray and squirted herself liberally in a wide circle around her face and shoulders; then dabbed lip gloss over her lips, talking all the while.

“What am I going to need? Money. Cormoran, could you be a total darling and keep this in your pocket? I’m not going to take this massive thing in.” She handed him a crumpled wad of twenties. “You’re a sweetheart. Oh, and I’ll need my phone. Have you got a pocket for my phone? God, this bag’s a mess.”

She dropped it on the car floor.

“When you said that it would have been the dream of Lula’s life to find her real father…”

“Oh God, it would have been. She used to talk about that all the time. She got really excited when that bitch—her birth mother—told her he was African. Guy always said that was bullshit, but he hated the woman.”

“He met Marlene Higson, did he?”

“Oh no, he just hated the whole, like, idea of her. He could see how excited Looly got, and he just wanted to protect her from being disappointed.”

So much protection, Strike thought, as the car turned a corner in the dark. Had Lula been that fragile? The back of Kolovas-Jones’s head was rigid, correct; his eyes flickering more often than was necessary to rest upon Strike’s face.

“And then Looly thought she had a lead on him—her real father—but that went completely cold on her. Dead end. Yeah, it was so sad. She really thought she’d found him and then it all just fell through her fingers.”

“What lead was this?”

“It was something about where the college was. Something her mother said. Looly thought she’d found the place it must have been, and she went to look at the records, or something, with this funny friend of hers called…”

“Rochelle?” suggested Strike. The Mercedes was now purring up Oxford Street.

“Yeah, Rochelle, that’s right. Looly met her in rehab or something, poor little thing. Looly was, like, unbelievably sweet to her. Used to take her shopping and stuff. Anyway, they never found him, or it was the wrong place, or something. I can’t remember.”

“Was she looking for a man called Agyeman?”

“I don’t think she ever told me the name.”

“Or Owusu?”

Ciara turned her beautiful light eyes upon him in astonishment.

“That’s Guy’s real name!”

“I know.”

“Oh my God,” Ciara giggled. “Guy’s dad never went to college. He was a bus driver. He used to beat Guy up for sketching dresses all the time. That’s why Guy changed his name.”

The car was slowing down. The long queue, four people wide, stretching along the block, led to a discreet entrance that might have been to a private house. A gaggle of dark figures was gathered around a white-pillared doorway.

“Paps,” said Kolovas-Jones, speaking for the first time. “Careful how you get out of the car, Ciara.”

He slid out of the driver’s seat and walked around to the left-hand back door; but the paparazzi were already running; ominous, darkly clad men, raising their long-nosed cameras as they closed in.

Ciara and Strike emerged into flashes like gunfire; Strike’s retinas were in sudden, dazzling whiteout; he ducked his head, his hand closed instinctively around Ciara Porter’s slender upper arm, and he steered her ahead of him through the black oblong that represented sanctuary, as the doors opened magically to admit them. The queuing hordes were shouting, protesting at their easy entry, yelping with excitement; and then the flashes stopped, and they were inside, where there was an industrial roar of noises, and a loud insistent bass line.

“Wow, you’ve got a great sense of direction,” said Ciara. “I usually, like, ricochet off the bouncers and they have to push me in.”

Streaks and blazes of purple and yellow light were still burned across Strike’s field of vision. He dropped her arm. She was so pale that she looked almost luminous in the gloom. Then they were jostled further inside the club by the entry of another dozen people behind them.

“C’mon,” said Ciara, and she slipped a soft, long-fingered hand inside his and tugged him along behind her.

Faces turned as they walked through the packed crowd, both of them taller by far than the majority of clubbers. Strike could see what looked like long glass fish tanks set into the walls, containing what seemed to be great floating blobs of wax, reminding him of his mother’s old lava lamps. There were long black leather banquettes along the walls, and, further in, nearer the dance floor, booths. It was hard to tell how big the club was, because of judiciously placed mirrors; at one point, Strike caught a glimpse of himself, head-on, looking like a sharply dressed heavy behind the silvery sylph that was Ciara. The music pounded through every part of him, vibrating through his head and body; the crowd on the dance floor was so dense that it seemed miraculous that they were managing even to stamp and sway.

They had reached a padded doorway, guarded by a bald bouncer who grinned at Ciara, revealing two gold teeth, and pushed open the concealed entrance.

They entered a quieter, though hardly less crowded bar area that was evidently reserved for the famous and their friends. Strike noticed a miniskirted television presenter, a soap actor, a comedian primarily famous for his sexual appetite; and then, in a distant corner, Evan Duffield.

He was wearing a skull-patterned scarf wound around his neck and skintight black jeans, sitting at the join of two black leather banquettes with arms stretched at right angles along the backs of the benches on either side, where his companions, mostly women, were crammed. His dark shoulder-length hair had been dyed blonde; he was pallid and bony-faced, and the smudges around his bright turquoise eyes were dark purple.

The group containing Duffield was emanating an almost magnetic force over the room. Strike saw it in the sneaking sidelong glances other occupants were shooting them; in the respectful space left around them, a wider orbit than anybody else had been granted. Duffield and his cohorts’ apparent unselfconsciousness was, Strike recognized, nothing but expert artifice; they had, all of them, the hyper-alertness of the prey animal combined with the casual arrogance of predators. In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted; they were receiving their due.

Duffield was talking to a sexy brunette. Her lips were parted as she listened, almost ludicrously immersed in him. As Ciara and Strike drew nearer, Strike saw Duffield glance away from the brunette for a fraction of a second, making, Strike thought, a lightning-fast recce of the bar, taking the measure of the room’s attention, and of other possibilities it might offer.

“Ciara!” he yelled hoarsely.

The brunette looked deflated as Duffield jumped nimbly to his feet; thin and yet well muscled, he slid out from behind the table to embrace Ciara, who was eight inches taller than he in her platform shoes; she dropped Strike’s hand to return the hug. The whole bar seemed, for a few shining moments, to be watching; then they remembered themselves, and returned to their chat and their cocktails.

“Evan, this is Cormoran Strike,” said Ciara. She moved her mouth close to Duffield’s ear and Strike saw rather than heard her say, “He’s Jonny Rokeby’s son!”

“All right, mate?” asked Duffield, holding out a hand, which Strike shook.

Like other inveterate womanizers Strike had encountered, Duffield’s voice and mannerisms were slightly camp. Perhaps such men became feminized by prolonged immersion in women’s company, or perhaps it was a way of disarming their quarry. Duffield indicated with a flutter of the hand that the others should move along the bench to make room for Ciara; the brunette looked crestfallen. Strike was left to find himself a low stool, drag it alongside the table and ask Ciara what she wanted to drink.

“Oooh, get me a Boozy-Uzi,” she said, “and use my money, sweetie.”

Her cocktail smelled strongly of Pernod. Strike bought himself water, and returned to the table. Ciara and Duffield were now almost nose to nose, talking; but when Strike set down the drinks, Duffield looked around.

“So what d’you do, Cormoran? Music biz?”

“No,” said Strike. “I’m a detective.”

“No shit,” said Duffield. “Who’m I supposed to have killed this time?”

The group around him permitted themselves wry, or nervous, smiles, but Ciara said:

“Don’t joke, Evan.”

“I’m not joking, Ciara. You’ll notice when I am, because it’ll be fucking funny.”

The brunette giggled.

“I said I’m not joking,” snapped Duffield.

The brunette looked as though she had been slapped. The rest of the group seemed imperceptibly to withdraw, even in the cramped space; they began their own conversation, temporarily excluding Ciara, Strike and Duffield.

“Evan, not nice,” said Ciara, but her reproach seemed to caress rather than sting, and Strike noticed that the glance she threw the brunette held no pity.

Duffield drummed his fingers on the edge of the table.

“So, what kind of a detective are you, Cormoran?”

“A private one.”

“Evan, darling, Cormoran’s been hired by Looly’s brother…”

But Duffield had apparently spotted someone or something of interest up at the bar, for he leapt to his feet and disappeared into the crowd there.

“He’s always a bit ADHD,” said Ciara apologetically. “Plus, he’s still really, really fucked up about Looly. He is,” she insisted, half cross, half amused, as Strike raised his eyebrows and looked pointedly in the direction of the voluptuous brunette, who was now cradling an empty mojito glass and looking morose. “You’ve got something on your smart jacket,” Ciara added, and she leaned forwards to brush off what Strike thought were pizza crumbs. He caught a strong whiff of her sweet, spicy perfume. The silver material of her dress was so stiff that it gaped, like armor, away from her body, affording him an unhampered view of small white breasts and pointed shell-pink nipples.

“What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”

She thrust a wrist under his nose.

“It’s Guy’s new one,” she said. “It’s called Éprise—it’s French for ‘smitten,’ you know?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Duffield had returned, holding another drink, cleaving his way back through the crowd, whose faces revolved after him, tugged by his aura. His legs in their tight jeans were like black pipe cleaners, and with his darkly smudged eyes he looked like a Pierrot gone bad.

“Evan, babes,” said Ciara, when Duffield had reseated himself, “Cormoran’s investigating—”

“He heard you the first time,” Strike interrupted her. “There’s no need.”

He thought that the actor had heard that, too. Duffield drank his drink quickly, and tossed a few comments into the group beside them. Ciara sipped her cocktail, then nudged Duffield.

“How’s the film going, sweetie?”

“Great. Well. Suicidal drug dealer. It’s not a stretch, y’know.”

Everyone smiled, except Duffield himself. He drummed his fingers on the table, his legs jerking in time.

“Bored now,” he announced.

He was squinting towards the door, and the group was watching him, openly yearning, Strike thought, to be scooped up and taken along.

Duffield looked from Ciara to Strike.

“Wanna come back to mine?”

“Fabby,” squeaked Ciara, and with a feline glance of triumph at the brunette, she downed her drink in one.

Just outside the VIP area, two drunk girls ran at Duffield; one of them pulled up her top and begged him to sign her breasts.

“Don’t be dirty, love,” said Duffield, pushing past her. “You gotta car, Cici?” he yelled over his shoulder, as he plowed his way through the crowds, ignoring shouts and pointing fingers.

“Yes, sweetie,” she shouted. “I’ll call him. Cormoran, darling, have you got my phone?”

Strike wondered what the paparazzi outside would make of Ciara and Duffield leaving the club together. She was shouting into her iPhone. They reached the entrance; Ciara said, “Wait—he’s going to text when he’s right outside.”

Both she and Duffield looked slightly nervy; watchful, self-aware, like competitors waiting to enter a stadium. Then Ciara’s phone gave a little buzz.

“OK, he’s there,” she said.

Strike stood back to let her and Duffield out first, then walked rapidly to the front passenger seat as Duffield ran around the back of the car in the blinding popping lights, to screams from the queue, and threw himself into the backseat with Ciara, whom Kolovas-Jones had helped inside. Strike slammed the front passenger door, forcing the two men who had leaned in to take shot after shot of Duffield and Ciara to jump backwards out of the way.

Kolovas-Jones seemed to take an unconscionable amount of time to return to the car; Strike felt as though the Mercedes’ interior was a test tube, simultaneously enclosed and exposed as more and more flashes fired. Lenses were pressed to the windows and windscreen; unfriendly faces floated in the darkness, and black figures darted back and forth in front of the stationary car. Beyond the explosions of light, the shadowy crowd-queue surged, curious and excited.

“Put your foot down, for fuck’s sake!” Strike growled at Kolovas-Jones, who revved the engine. The paparazzi blocking the road moved backwards, still taking pictures.

“Bye-bye, you cunts,” said Evan Duffield from the backseat as the car pulled away from the curb.

But the photographers ran alongside the vehicle, flashes erupting on either side; and Strike’s whole body was bathed in sweat: he was suddenly back on a yellow dirt road in the juddering Viking, with a sound like firecrackers popping in the Afghanistan air; he had glimpsed a youth running away from the road ahead, dragging a small boy. Without conscious thought he had bellowed “Brake!” lunged forwards and seized Anstis, a new father of two days’ standing, who was sitting right behind the driver; the last thing he remembered was Anstis’s shouted protest, and the low metallic boom of him hitting the back doors, before the Viking disintegrated with an ear-splitting bang, and the world became a hazy blur of pain and terror.

The Mercedes had rounded the corner on to an almost deserted road; Strike realized that he had been holding himself so tensely that his remaining calf muscles were sore. In the wing mirror he could see two motorbikes, each being ridden pillion, following them. Princess Diana and the Parisian underpass; the ambulance bearing Lula Landry’s body, with cameras held high to the darkened glass as it passed; both careered through his thoughts as the car sped through the dark streets.

Duffield lit a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw Kolovas-Jones scowl at his passenger in the rearview mirror, though he made no protest. After a moment or two, Ciara began whispering to Duffield. Strike thought he heard his own name.

Five minutes later, they turned another corner and saw, ahead of them, another small crowd of black-clad photographers, who began flashing and running towards the car the moment it appeared. The motorbikes were pulling up right behind them; Strike saw the four men running to catch the moment when the car doors opened. Adrenalin erupted: Strike imagined himself exploding out of the car, punching, sending expensive cameras crashing on to concrete as their holders crumpled. And as if he had read Strike’s mind, Duffield said, with his hand poised on the door handle:

“Knock their fucking lights out, Cormoran, you’re built for it.”

The open doors, the night air and more maddening flashes; bull-like, Strike walked fast with his big head bowed, his eyes on Ciara’s tottering heels, refusing to be blinded. Up three steps they ran, Strike at the rear; and it was he who slammed the front door of the building in the faces of the photographers.

Strike felt himself momentarily allied with the other two by the experience of being hunted. The tiny, dimly lit lobby felt safe and friendly. The paparazzi were still yelling to each other on the other side of the door, and their terse shouts recalled soldiers recceing a building. Duffield was fiddling at an inner door, trying a succession of keys in the lock.

“I’ve only been here a couple of weeks,” he explained, finally opening it with a barging shoulder. Once over the threshold, he wriggled out of his tight jacket, threw it on to the floor by the door and then led the way, his narrow hips swinging in only slightly less exaggerated fashion than Guy Somé’s, down a short corridor into a sitting room, where he switched on lamps.

The spare, elegant gray and black decor had been overlaid by clutter and stank of cigarette smoke, cannabis and alcohol fumes. Strike was reminded vividly of his childhood.

“Need a slash,” announced Duffield, and called over his shoulder as he disappeared, with a directive jab of the thumb, “Drinks are in the kitchen, Cici.”

She threw a smile at Strike, then left through the door Duffield had indicated.

Strike glanced around the room, which looked as though it had been left, by parents of impeccable taste, in the care of a teenager. Every surface was covered in debris, much of it in the form of scribbled notes. Three guitars stood propped against the walls. A cluttered glass coffee table was surrounded by black-and-white seats, angled towards an enormous plasma TV. Bits of debris had overflowed from the coffee table on to the black fur rug below. Beyond the long windows, with their gauzy gray curtains, Strike could make out the shapes of the photographers still prowling beneath the street light.

Duffield had returned, tugging up his fly. On finding himself alone with Strike, he gave a nervous giggle.

“Make yourself at home, big fella. Hey, I know your old man, actually.”

“Yeah?” said Strike, sitting down in one of the squashy ponyskin cube-shaped armchairs.

“Yeah. Met him a couple of times,” said Duffield. “Cool dude.”

He picked up a guitar, began to pick out a twiddling tune on it, thought better of it and put the instrument back against the wall.

Ciara returned, carrying a bottle of wine and three glasses.

“Couldn’t you get a cleaner, dearie?” she asked Duffield reprovingly.

“They give up,” said Duffield. He vaulted over the back of a chair and landed with his legs sprawled over the side. “No fucking stamina.”

Strike pushed aside the mess on the coffee table so that Ciara could set down the bottle and glasses.

“I thought you’d moved in with Mo Innes,” she said, pouring out wine.

“Yeah, that didn’t work out,” said Duffield, raking through the detritus on the table for cigarettes. “Ol’ Freddie’s rented me this place just for a month, while I’m going out to Pinewood. He wants to keep me away from me old haunts.”

His grubby fingers passed over a string of what seemed to be rosary beads; numerous empty cigarette packets with bits of card torn out of them; three lighters, one of them an engraved Zippo; Rizla papers; tangled leads unattached to appliances; a pack of cards; a sordid stained handkerchief; sundry crumpled pieces of grubby paper; a music magazine featuring a picture of Duffield in moody black and white on the cover; opened and unopened mail; a pair of crumpled black leather gloves; a quantity of loose change and, in a clean china ashtray on the edge of the debris, a single cufflink in the form of a tiny silver gun. At last he unearthed a soft packet of Gitanes from under the sofa; lit up, blew a long jet of smoke at the ceiling, then addressed Ciara, who had placed herself on the sofa at right angles to the two men, sipping her wine.

“They’ll say we’re fucking each other, again, Ci,” he said, pointing out of the window at the prowling shadows of the waiting photographers.

“And what’ll they say Cormoran’s here for?” asked Ciara, with a sidelong glance at Strike. “A threesome?”

“Security,” said Duffield, appraising Strike through narrowed eyes. “He looks like a boxer. Or a cage fighter. Don’t you want a proper drink, Cormoran?”

“No, thanks,” said Strike.

“What’s that, AA or being on duty?”

“Duty.”

Duffield raised his eyebrows and sniggered. He seemed nervous, shooting Strike darting looks, drumming his fingers on the glass table. When Ciara asked him whether he had visited Lady Bristow again, he seemed relieved to be offered a subject.

“Fuck, no. Once was enough. It was fucking horrible. Poor bitch. On her fucking deathbed.”

“It was beyond nice of you to go, though, Evan.”

Strike knew that she was trying to show Duffield off in his best light.

“Do you know Lula’s mother well?” he asked Duffield.

“No. I only met her once before Lu died. She didn’t approve of me. None of Lu’s family approved of me. I dunno,” he fidgeted, “I just wanted to talk to someone who really gives a shit that she’s dead.”

“Evan!” Ciara pouted. “I care she’s dead, excuse me!”

“Yeah, well…”

With one of his oddly feminine, fluid movements, Duffield curled up in the chair so that he was almost fetal, and sucked hard on his cigarette. On a table behind his head, illuminated by a cone of lamplight, was a large, stagey photograph of him with Lula Landry, clearly taken from a fashion shoot. They were mock-wrestling against a backdrop of fake trees; she was wearing a floor-length red dress, and he was in a slim black suit, with a hairy wolf’s mask pushed up on top of his forehead.

“I wonder what my mum would say if I carked it? My parents’ve got an injunction out against me,” Duffield informed Strike. “Well, it was mainly my fucking father. Because I nicked their telly a couple of years ago. D’you know what?” he added, craning his neck to look at Ciara, “I’ve been clean five weeks, two days.”

“That’s so fabulous, baby! That’s fantastic!”

“Yeah,” he said. He swiveled upright again. “Aren’t you gonna ask me any questions?” he demanded of Strike. “I thought you were investigating Lu’s murder?”

The bravado was undermined by the tremor in his fingers. His knees began bouncing up and down, just like John Bristow’s.

“D’you think it was murder?” Strike asked.

“No.” Duffield dragged on his cigarette. “Yeah. Maybe. I dunno. Murder makes more sense than fucking suicide, anyway. Because she wouldn’ta gone without leaving me a note. I keep waiting for a note to turn up, y’know, and then I’ll know it’s real. It don’t feel real. I can’t even remember the funeral. I was out of my fucking head. I took so much stuff I couldn’t fucking walk. I think, if I could just remember the funeral, it’d be easier to get my head round.”

He jammed his cigarette between his lips and began drumming with his fingers on the edge of the glass table. After a while, apparently discomforted by Strike’s silent observation, he demanded:

“Ask me something, then. Who’s hired you, anyway?”

“Lula’s brother John.”

Duffield stopped drumming.

“That money-grabbing, poker-arsed wanker?”

“Money-grabbing?”

“He was fucking obsessed with how she spent her fucking money, like it was any of his fucking business. Rich people always think everyone else is a fucking freeloader, have you noticed that? Her whole frigging family thought I was gold-digging, and after a bit,” he raised a finger to his temple and made a boring motion, “it went in, it planted doubts, y’know?”

He snatched one of the Zippos from the table and began flicking at it, trying to make it ignite. Strike watched tiny blue sparks erupt and die as Duffield talked.

“I expect he thought she’d be better off with some rich fucking accountant, like him.”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“Whatever. What’s the difference, it’s all about helping rich people keep their mitts on as much money as they can, innit? He’s got his fucking trust fund from Daddy, what skin is it off his nose what his sister did with her own money?”

“What was it that he objected to her buying, specifically?”

“Shit for me. The whole fucking family was the same; they didn’t mind if she chucked it their way, keep it in the fucking family, that was OK. Lu knew they were a mercenary load of fuckers, but, like I say, it still left its fucking mark. Planted ideas in her head.”

He threw the dead Zippo back on to the table, drew his knees up to his chest and glared at Strike with his disconcerting turquoise eyes.

“So he still thinks I did it, does he? Your client?”

“No, I don’t think he does,” said Strike.

“He’s changed his narrow fuckwitted mind, then, because I heard he was going round telling everyone it was me, before they ruled it as suicide. Only, I’ve got a cast-iron fucking alibi, so fuck him. Fuck. Them. All.”

Restless and nervy, he got to his feet, added wine to his almost untouched glass, then lit another cigarette.

“What can you tell me about the day Lula died?” Strike asked.

“The night, you mean.”

“The day leading up to it might be quite important too. There are a few things I’d like to clear up.”

“Yeah? Go on, then.”

Duffield dropped back down into the chair, and pulled his knees up to his chest again.

“Lula called you repeatedly between around midday and six in the evening, but you didn’t answer your phone.”

“No,” said Duffield. He began picking, childishly, at a small hole in the knee of his jeans. “Well, I was busy. I was working. On a song. Didn’t want to stem the flow. The old inspiration.”

“So you didn’t know she was calling you?”

“Well, yeah. I saw her number coming up.” He rubbed his nose, stretched his legs out on to the glass table, folded his arms and said, “I felt like teaching her a little lesson. Let her wonder what I was up to.”

“Why did you think she needed a lesson?”

“That fucking rapper. I wanted her to move in with me while he was staying in her building. ‘Don’t be silly, don’t you trust me?’ ” His imitation of Lula’s voice and expression was disingenuously girlish. “I said to her, ‘Don’t you be fucking silly. Show me I got nothing to worry about, and come and stay with me.’ But she wouldn’t. So then I thought, two can play at that fucking game, darling. Let’s see how you like it. So I got Ellie Carreira over to my place, and we did a bit of writing together, and then I brought Ellie along to Uzi with me. Lu couldn’t fucking complain. Just business. Just songwriting. Just friends, like her and that rapper-gangster.”

“I didn’t think she’d ever met Deeby Macc.”

“She hadn’t, but he’d made his intentions pretty fucking public, hadn’t he? Have you heard that song he wrote? She was creaming her panties over it.”

“‘Bitch you ain’t all that…’ ” Ciara began to quote obligingly, but a filthy look from Duffield silenced her.

“Did she leave you voicemail messages?”

“Yeah, a couple. ‘Evan, will you call me, please. It’s urgent. I don’t want to say it on the phone.’ It was always fucking urgent when she wanted to find out what I was up to. She knew I was pissed off. She was worried I might’ve called Ellie. She had a real hang-up about Ellie, because she knew we’d fucked.”

“She said it was urgent, and that she didn’t want to say it on the phone?”

“Yeah, but that was just to try and make me call. One of her little games. She could be fucking jealous, Lu. And pretty fucking manipulative.”

“Can you think why she’d be calling her uncle repeatedly that day as well?”

“What uncle?”

“His name’s Tony Landry; he’s another lawyer.”

“Him? She wouldn’t be calling him, she fucking hated him worse than her brother.”

“She called him, repeatedly, over the same period that she was calling you. Leaving more or less the same message.”

Duffield raked his unshaven chin with dirty nails, staring at Strike.

“I dunno what that was about. Her mum, maybe. Old Lady B going into hospital or something.”

“You don’t think something might have happened that morning which she thought was either relevant to or of interest to both you and her uncle?”

“There isn’t any subject that could interest me and her fucking uncle at the same time,” said Duffield. “I’ve met him. Share prices and shit are all he’d be interested in.”

“Maybe it was something about her, something personal?”

“If it was, she wouldn’t call that fucker. They didn’t like each other.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She felt about him like I feel about my fucking father. Neither of them thought we were worth shit.”

“Did she talk to you about that?”

“Oh, yeah. He thought her mental problems were just attention-seeking, bad behavior. Put on. Burden on her mother. He got a bit smarmier when she started making money, but she didn’t forget.”

“And she didn’t tell you why she’d been calling you, once she got to Uzi?”

“Nope,” said Duffield. He lit another cigarette. “She was fucked off from the moment she arrived, because Ellie was there. Didn’t like that at all. In a right fucking mood, wasn’t she?”

For the first time he appealed to Ciara, who nodded sadly.

“She didn’t really talk to me,” said Duffield. “She was mostly talking to you, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Ciara. “And she didn’t tell me there was anything, like, upsetting her or anything.”

“A couple of people have told me her phone was hacked…” began Strike; Duffield talked over him.

“Oh yeah, they were listening in on our messages for fucking weeks. They knew everywhere we were meeting and everything. Fucking bastards. We changed our phone numbers when we found out what was going on and we were fucking careful what messages we left after that.”

“So you wouldn’t be surprised, if Lula had had something important or upsetting to tell you, that she didn’t want to be explicit over the phone?”

“Yeah, but if it was that fucking important, she woulda told me at the club.”

“But she didn’t?”

“No, like I say, she never spoke to me all night.” A muscle was jumping in Duffield’s chiseled jaw. “She kept checking the time on her fucking phone. I knew what she was doing; trying to wind me up. Showing me she couldn’t wait to get home and meet fucking Deeby Macc. She waited until Ellie went off to the bog; then got up, came over to tell me she was leaving, and said I could have my bangle back; the one I gave her when we had our commitment ceremony. She chucked it down on the table in front of me, with everyone fucking gawping. So I picked it up and said, ‘Anyone fancy this, it’s going spare?’ and she fucked off.”

He did not speak as though Lula had died three months previously, but as though it had all happened the day before, and there was still a possibility of reconciliation.

“You tried to restrain her, though, right?” asked Strike.

Duffield’s eyes narrowed.

“Restrain her?”

“You grabbed her arms, according to witnesses.”

“Did I? I can’t remember.”

“But she pulled free, and you stayed behind, is that right?”

“I waited ten minutes, because I wasn’t gonna give her the satisfaction of chasing her in front of all those people, and then I left the club and got my driver to take me to Kentigern Gardens.”

“Wearing the wolf mask,” said Strike.

“Yeah, to stop those fucking scumbags,” he nodded towards the window, “selling pictures of me looking wasted or pissed off. They hate it when you cover your face. Depriving them of making their fucking parasitic living. One of them tried to pull Wolfie off me, but I held on. I got in the car and gave ’em a few pictures of the Wolf giving them the finger, out the back window. Got to the corner of Kentigern Gardens and there were more paps everywhere. I knew she must’ve got in already.”

“Did you know the key code?”

“Nineteen sixty-six, yeah. But I knew she’d’ve told security not to let me up. I wasn’t gonna walk in in front of all of them and then get chucked out on me arse five minutes later. I tried to phone her from the car, but she wouldn’t pick up. I thought she’d probably gone downstairs to welcome Deeby fucking Macc to London. So I went off to see a man about pain relief.”

He ground out his cigarette on a loose playing card on the edge of the table and began hunting for more tobacco. Strike, who wanted to oil the flow of conversation, offered him one of his own.

“Oh, cheers. Cheers. Yeah. Well, I got the driver to drop me off and I went to visit my friend, who has since given the police a full statement to that effect, as Uncle Tony might say. Then I wandered around a bit, and there’s camera footage in that station to prove that, and then about, I dunno…threeish? Fourish?”

“Half past four,” said Ciara.

“Yeah, I went to crash at Ciara’s.”

Duffield sucked on the cigarette, watching the tip burn, then, exhaling, said cheerfully:

“So my arse is covered, is it not?”

Strike did not find his satisfaction likeable.

“And when did you find out that Lula was dead?”

Duffield drew his legs up to his chest again.

“Ciara woke me up and told me. I couldn’t—I was fucking—yeah, well. Fucking hell.”

He put his arms over the top of his head and stared at the ceiling.

“I couldn’t fucking…I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t fucking believe it.”

And as Strike watched, he thought he saw realization wash over Duffield that the girl of whom he spoke so flippantly, and who he had, by his own account, provoked, taunted and loved, was really and definitely never coming back; that she had been smashed into pulp on snow-covered asphalt, and that she and their relationship were now beyond the possibility of repair. For a moment, staring at the blank white ceiling, Duffield’s face became grotesque as he appeared to grin from ear to ear; it was a grimace of pain, of the exertion necessary to beat back tears. His arms slipped down, and he buried his face in them, his forehead on his knees.

“Oh, sweetie,” said Ciara, putting her wine down on the table with a clunk, and reaching forward to place a hand on his bony knee.

“This has fucked me up proper,” said Duffield thickly from behind his arms. “This has fucked me up good. I wanted to marry her. I fucking loved her, I did. Fuck, I don’t wanna talk about it anymore.”

He jumped up and left the room, sniffing ostentatiously and wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Ciara whispered to Strike. “He’s a mess.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He seems to have cleaned up his act. Off heroin for a month.”

“I know, and I don’t want him to fall off the wagon.”

“This is a lot gentler than he would have had from the police. This is polite.”

“You’ve got an awful look on your face, though. Really, like, stern and as if you don’t believe a word he’s saying.”

“D’you think he’s going to come back?”

“Yes, of course he is. Please be a bit nicer…”

She sat quickly back in her seat as Duffield walked back in; he was grim-faced and his camp strut was very slightly subdued. He flung himself into the chair he had previously occupied and said to Strike:

“I’m out of fags. Can I have another one of yours?”

Reluctantly, because he was down to three, Strike handed it across, lit it for him, then said:

“All right to keep talking?”

“About Lula? You can talk, if you want. I dunno what else I can tell you. I ain’t got any more information.”

“Why did you split up? The first time, I mean; I’m clear on why she ditched you in Uzi.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ciara make an indignant little gesture; apparently this did not qualify as “nicer.”

“What the fuck’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’s all relevant,” said Strike. “It all gives a picture of what was going on in her life. It all helps explain why she might’ve killed herself.”

“I thought you were looking for a murderer?”

“I’m looking for the truth. So why did you break up, the first time?”

“Fuck, how’s this fucking important?” exploded Duffield. His temper, as Strike had expected, was violent and short-fused. “What, are you trying to make out it’s my fault she fucking jumped off a balcony? How can us splitting up the first time have anything to do with it, knucklehead? That was two fucking months before she died. Fuck, I could call meself a detective and ask a lot of fuckass questions. Bet it pays all right, dunnit, if you can find some fuckwit rich client?”

“Evan, don’t,” said Ciara, distressed. “You said you wanted to help…”

“Yeah, I wanna help, but how’s this fucking fair?”

“No problem, if you don’t want to answer,” said Strike. “You’re under no obligation here.”

“I ain’t got nothing to hide, it’s just fucking personal stuff, innit? We split up,” he shouted, “because of drugs, and her family and her friends putting down poison about me, and because she didn’t trust nobody because of the fucking press, all right? Because of all the pressure.”

And Duffield made his hands into trembling claws and pressed them, like earphones, over his ears, making a compressing movement.

“Pressure, fucking pressure, that’s why we split up.”

“You were taking a lot of drugs at the time, were you?”

“Yeah.”

“And Lula didn’t like it?”

“Well, people round her were telling her she didn’t like it, you know?”

“Like who?”

“Like her family, like fucking Guy Somé. That little pansy twat.”

“When you say that she didn’t trust anybody because of the press, what do you mean by that?”

“Fuck, innit obvious? Don’t you know all this, from your old man?”

“I know jack shit about my father,” said Strike coolly.

“Well, they were tapping her fucking phone, man, and that gives you a weird fucking feeling; haven’t you got any imagination? She started getting paranoid about people selling stuff on her. Trying to work out what she’d said on the phone, and what she hadn’t, and who mighta given stuff to the papers and that. It fucked with her head.”

“Was she accusing you of selling stories?”

“No,” snapped Duffield, and then, just as vehemently, “Yeah, sometimes. How did they know we were coming here, how did they know I said that to you, yadda yadda yadda…I said to her, it’s all part and fucking parcel of fame, innit, but she thought she could have her cake and eat it.”

“But you didn’t ever sell stories about her to the press?”

He heard Ciara’s hissing intake of breath.

“No I fucking didn’t,” said Duffield quietly, holding Strike’s gaze without blinking. “No I fucking did not. All right?”

“And you split up for how long?”

“Two months, give or take.”

“But you got back together, what, a week before she died?”

“Yeah. At Mo Innes’s party.”

“And you had this commitment ceremony forty-eight hours later? At Carbury’s house in the Cotswolds?”

“Yeah.”

“And who knew that was going to happen?”

“It was a spontaneous thing. I bought the bangles and we just did it. It was beautiful, man.”

“It really was,” echoed Ciara sadly.

“So, for the press to have found out so quickly, someone who was there must have told them?”

“Yeah, I s’pose so.”

“Because your phones weren’t being tapped then, were they? You’d changed your numbers.”

“I don’t fucking know if they were being tapped. Ask the shits at the rags who do it.”

“Did she talk to you at all about trying to trace her father?”

“He was dead…what, you mean the real one? Yeah, she was interested, but it was no go, wannit? Her mother didn’t know who he was.”

“She never told you whether she’d managed to find out anything about him?”

“She tried, but she didn’t get anywhere, so she decided that she was gonna to do a course in African studies. That was gonna be Daddy, the whole fucking continent of Africa. Fucking Somé was behind that, shit-stirring as usual.”

“In what way?”

“Anything that took her away from me was good. Anything that bracketed them together. He was one possessive bastard where she was concerned. He was in love with her. I know he’s a poof,” Duffield added impatiently, as Ciara began to protest, “but he’s not the first one I’ve known who’s gone funny over a girlfriend. He’ll fuck anything, man-wise, but he didn’t want to let her out of his sight. He threw hissy fits if she didn’t see him, he didn’t like her working for anyone else.

“He hates my fucking guts. Right back atcha, you little shit. Egging Lu on with Deeby Macc. He’d’ve got a real kick out of her fucking him. Doing me over. Hearing all the fucking details. Getting her to introduce him, get his fucking clothes photographed on a gangster. He’s no fucking fool, Somé. He used her for his business all the time. Tried to get her cheap and for free, and she was dumb enough to let him.”

“Did Somé give you these?” asked Strike, pointing at the black leather gloves on the coffee table. He had recognized the tiny gold GS logo on the cuff.

“You what?”

Duffield leaned over and hooked one of the gloves on to an index finger; he dangled it in front of his eyes, examining it.

“Fuck, you’re right. They’re going in the bin, then,” and he threw the glove into a corner; it hit the abandoned guitar, which let out a hollow, echoing chord. “I kept them from that shoot,” said Duffield, pointing at the black-and-white magazine cover. “Somé wouldn’t give me the steam off his piss. Have you got another fag?”

“I’m all out,” lied Strike. “Are you going to tell me why you invited me home, Evan?”

There was a long silence. Duffield glared at Strike, who intuited that the actor knew he was lying about having no cigarettes. Ciara was gazing at him too, her lips slightly parted, the epitome of beautiful bewilderment.

“What makes you think I’ve got anything to tell you?” sneered Duffield.

“I don’t think you asked me back here for the pleasure of my company.”

“I dunno,” said Duffield, with a distinct overtone of malice. “Maybe I hoped you were a laugh, like your old man?”

“Evan,” snapped Ciara.

“OK, if you haven’t got anything to tell me…” said Strike, and he pushed himself up out of the armchair. To his slight surprise, and Duffield’s evident displeasure, Ciara set her empty wineglass down and began to unfold her long legs, preparatory to standing.

“All right,” said Duffield sharply. “There’s one thing.”

Strike sank back into his chair. Ciara thrust one of her own cigarettes at Duffield, who took it with muttered thanks, then she too sat down, watching Strike.

“Go on,” said the latter, while Duffield fiddled with his lighter.

“All right. I dunno whether it matters,” said the actor. “But I don’t want you to say where you got the information.”

“I can’t guarantee that,” said Strike.

Duffield scowled, his knees jumping up and down, smoking with his eyes on the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, Strike saw Ciara open her mouth to speak, and forestalled her, one hand in the air.

“Well,” said Duffield, “two days ago I was having lunch with Freddie Bestigui. He left his BlackBerry on the table when he went up to the bar.” Duffield puffed and jiggled. “I don’t wanna be fired,” he said, glaring at Strike. “I need this fucking job.”

“Go on,” said Strike.

“He got an email. I saw Lula’s name. I read it.”

“OK.”

“It was from his wife. It said something like, ‘I know we’re supposed to be talking through lawyers, but unless you can do better than £1.5 million, I will tell everyone exactly where I was when Lula Landry died, and exactly how I got there, because I’m sick of taking shit for you. This is not an empty threat. I’m starting to think I should tell the police anyway.’ Or something like that,” said Duffield.

Dimly, through the curtained window, came the sound of a couple of the paparazzi outside laughing together.

“That’s very useful information,” Strike told Duffield. “Thank you.”

“I don’t want Bestigui to know it was me who told you.”

“I don’t think your name’ll need to come into it,” said Strike, standing up again. “Thanks for the water.”

“Hang on, sweetie, I’m coming,” said Ciara, her phone pressed to her ear. “Kieran? We’re coming out now, Cormoran and me. Right now. Bye-bye, Evan darling.”

She bent over and kissed him on both cheeks, while Duffield, halfway out of his chair, looked disconcerted.

“You can crash here if you—”

“No, sweetie, I’ve got a job tomorrow afternoon; need my beauty sleep,” she said.

More flashes blinded Strike as he stepped outside; but the paparazzi seemed confused this time. As he helped Ciara down the steps, and followed her into the back of the car, one of them shouted at Strike: “Who the fuck are you?”

Strike slammed the door, grinning. Kolovas-Jones was back in the driver’s seat; they were pulling away from the curb, and this time they were not pursued.

After a block or so of silence, Kolovas-Jones looked in the rear-view mirror and asked Ciara:

“Home?”

“I suppose so. Kieran, will you turn on the radio? I fancy a bit of music,” she said. “Louder than that, sweetie. Oh, I love this.”

“Telephone” by Lady Gaga filled the car.

She turned to Strike as the orange glow of street lights swept across her extraordinary face. Her breath smelled of alcohol, her skin of that sweet, peppery perfume.

“Don’t you want to ask me anything else?”

“You know what?” said Strike. “I do. Why would you have a detachable lining in a handbag?”

She stared at him for several seconds, then let out a great giggle, slumping sideways into his shoulder, nudging him. Lithe and slight, she continued to rest against him as she said:

“You are funny.”

“But why would you?”

“Well, it just makes the bag more, like, individual; you can customize them, you see; you can buy a couple of linings and swap them over; you can pull them out and use them as scarves; they’re beautiful. Silk with gorgeous patterns. The zip edging is very rock-and-roll.”

“Interesting,” said Strike, as her upper leg moved to rest lightly along his own, and she gave a second, deep-throated giggle.

Call all you want, but there’s no one home, sang Lady Gaga.

The music masked their conversation, but Kolovas-Jones’s eyes were moving with unnecessary regularity from road ahead to rear-view mirror. After another minute, Ciara said:

“Guy’s right, I do like them big. You’re very butch. And, like, stern. It’s sexy.”

A block later she whispered:

“Where do you live?” while rubbing her silky cheek against his, like a cat.

“I sleep on a camp bed in my office.”

She giggled again. She was definitely a little drunk.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll go to mine, then, shall we?”

Her tongue was cool and sweet and tasted of Pernod.

“Have you slept with my father?” he managed to say, between the pressings of her full lips on to his.

“No…God, no…” A little giggle. “He dyes his hair…it’s, like, purple close up…I used to call him the rocking prune…”

And then, ten minutes later, a lucid voice in his mind urging him not to let desire lead on to humiliation, he surfaced for air to mutter:

“I’ve only got one leg.”

“Don’t be silly…”

“I’m not being silly…it got blown off in Afghanistan.”

“Poor baby…” she whispered. “I’ll rub it better.”

“Yeah—that’s not my leg…It’s helping, though…”

9

ROBIN RAN UP THE CLANGING metal stairs in the same low heels that she had worn the previous day. Twenty-four hours ago, unable to dislodge the word “gumshoe” from her mind, she had selected her frumpiest footwear for a day’s walking; today, excited by what she had achieved in the old black shoes, they had taken on the glamour of Cinderella’s glass slippers. Hardly able to wait to tell Strike everything she had found out, she had almost run to Denmark Street through the sunlit rubble. She was confident that any lingering awkwardness after Strike’s drunken escapades of two nights previously would be utterly eclipsed by their mutual excitement about her dazzling solo discoveries of the previous day.

But when she reached the second landing, she pulled up short. For the third time, the glass door was locked, and the office beyond it unlit and silent.

She let herself in and made a swift survey of the evidence. The door to the inner office stood open. Strike’s camp bed was folded neatly away. There was no sign of an evening meal in the bin. The computer monitor was dark, the kettle cold. Robin was forced to conclude that Strike had not (as she phrased it to herself) spent the night at home.

She hung up her coat, then took from her handbag a small notebook, turned on the computer and, after a few minutes’ hopeful but fruitless wait, began to type up a precis of what she had found out the day before. She had barely slept for the excitement of telling Strike everything in person. Typing it all out was a bitter anticlimax. Where was he?

As her fingers flew over the keyboard, an answer she did not much like presented itself for her consideration. Devastated as he had been at the news of his ex’s engagement, was it not likely that he had gone to beg her not to marry this other man? Hadn’t he shouted to the whole of Charing Cross Road that Charlotte did not love Jago Ross? Perhaps, after all, it was true; perhaps Charlotte had thrown herself into Strike’s arms, and they were now reconciled, lying asleep, entwined, in the house or flat from which he had been ejected four weeks ago. Robin remembered Lucy’s oblique inquiries and insinuations about Charlotte, and suspected that any such reunion would not bode well for her job security. Not that it matters, she reminded herself, typing furiously, and with uncharacteristic inaccuracy. You’re leaving in a week’s time. The reflection made her feel even more agitated.

Alternatively, of course, Strike had gone to Charlotte and she had turned him away. In that case, the matter of his current whereabouts became a matter of more pressing, less personal concern. What if he had gone out, unchecked and unprotected, hell-bent on intoxication again? Robin’s busy fingers slowed and stopped, mid-sentence. She swiveled on her computer chair to look at the silent office telephone.

She might well be the only person who knew that Cormoran Strike was not where he was supposed to be. Perhaps she ought to call him on his mobile? And if he did not pick up? How many hours ought she to let elapse before contacting the police? The idea of ringing Matthew at his office and asking his advice came to her, only to be swatted away.

She and Matthew had rowed when Robin arrived home, very late, after walking a drunken Strike back to the office from the Tottenham. Matthew had told her yet again that she was naive, impressionable and a sucker for a hard-luck story; that Strike was after a secretary on the cheap, and using emotional blackmail to achieve his ends; that there was probably no Charlotte at all, that it was all an extravagant ploy to engage Robin’s sympathy and services. Then Robin had lost her temper, and told Matthew that if anybody was blackmailing her it was he, with his constant harping on the money she ought to be bringing in, and his insinuation that she was not pulling her weight. Hadn’t he noticed that she was enjoying working for Strike; hadn’t it crossed his insensitive, obtuse accountant’s mind that she might be dreading the tedious bloody job in human resources? Matthew had been aghast, and then (though reserving the right to deplore Strike’s behavior) apologetic; but Robin, usually conciliatory and amiable, had remained aloof and angry. The truce effected the following morning had prickled with antagonism, mainly Robin’s.

Now, in the silence, watching the telephone, some of her anger at Matthew spilled over on to Strike. Where was he? What was he doing? Why was he acting up to Matthew’s accusations of irresponsibility? She was here, holding the fort, and he was presumably off chasing his ex-fiancée, and never mind their business…

…his business…

Footsteps on the stairwell: Robin thought she recognized the very slight unevenness in Strike’s tread. She waited, glaring towards the stairs, until she was sure that the footfalls were proceeding beyond the first landing; then she turned her chair resolutely back to face the monitor and began pounding at the keys again, while her heart raced.

“Morning.”

“Hi.”

She accorded Strike a fleeting glance while continuing to type. He looked tired, unshaven and unnaturally well dressed. She was instantly confirmed in her view that he had attempted a reconciliation with Charlotte; by the looks of it, successfully. The next two sentences were pockmarked with typos.

“How’re things?” asked Strike, noting Robin’s clench-jawed profile, her cold demeanor.

“Fine,” said Robin.

She now intended to lay her perfectly typed report in front of him, and then, with icy calm, discuss the arrangements for her departure. She might suggest that he hire another temp this week, so that she could instruct her replacement in the day-to-day management of the office before she left.

Strike, whose run of appalling luck had been broken in fabulous style just a few hours previously, and who was feeling as close to buoyant as he had been for many months, had been looking forward to seeing his secretary. He had no intention of regaling her with an account of his night’s activities (or at least, not those that had done so much to restore his battered ego), for he was instinctively close-lipped about such matters, and he was hoping to shore up as much as remained of the boundaries that had been splintered by his copious consumption of Doom Bar. He had, however, been planning an eloquent speech of apology for his excesses of two nights before, an avowal of gratitude, and an exposition of all the interesting conclusions he had drawn from yesterday’s interviews.

“Fancy a cup of tea?”

“No thanks.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’m only eleven minutes late.”

“It’s up to you when you arrive. I mean,” she attempted to backtrack, for her tone had been too obviously hostile, “it’s none of my business what you—when you get here.”

From having mentally rehearsed a number of soothing and magnanimous responses to Strike’s imagined apologies for his drunken behavior of forty-eight hours previously, she now felt that his attitude was distastefully free of shame or remorse.

Strike busied himself with kettle and cups, and a few minutes later set down a mug of steaming tea beside her.

“I said I didn’t—”

“Could you leave that important document for a minute while I say something to you?”

She saved the report with several thumps of the keys and turned to face him, her arms folded across her chest. Strike sat down on the old sofa.

“I wanted to say sorry about the night before last.”

“There’s no need,” she said, in a small, tight voice.

“Yeah, there is. I can’t remember much of what I did. I hope I wasn’t obnoxious.”

“You weren’t.”

“You probably got the gist. My ex-fiancée’s just got engaged to an old boyfriend. It took her three weeks after we split to get another ring on her finger. That’s just a figure of speech; I never actually bought her a ring; I never had the money.”

Robin gathered, from his tone, that there had been no reconciliation; but in that case, where had he spent the night? She unfolded her arms and unthinkingly picked up her tea.

“It wasn’t your responsibility to come and find me like that, but you probably stopped me collapsing in a gutter or punching someone, so thanks very much.”

“No problem,” said Robin.

“And thanks for the Alka-Seltzer,” said Strike.

“Did it help?” asked Robin, stiffly.

“I nearly puked all over this,” said Strike, dealing the sagging sofa a gentle punch with his fist, “but once it kicked in, it helped a lot.”

Robin laughed, and Strike remembered, for the first time, the note she had pushed under the door while he slept, and the excuse she had given for her tactful absence.

“Right, well, I’ve been looking forward to hearing how you got on yesterday,” he lied. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

Robin expanded like a water blossom.

“I was just typing it up…”

“Let’s have it verbally, and you can put it into the file later,” said Strike, with the mental reservation that it would be easy to remove if useless.

“OK,” said Robin, both excited and nervous. “Well, like I said in my note, I saw that you wanted to look into Professor Agyeman, and the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford.”

Strike nodded, grateful for the reminder, because he had not been able to remember the details of the note, read once in the depths of his blinding hangover.

“So,” said Robin, a little breathlessly, “first of all I went along to Russell Square, to SOAS; the School of Oriental and African Studies. That’s what your notes meant, isn’t it?” she added. “I checked a map: it’s walking distance from the British Museum. Isn’t that what all those scribbles meant?”

Strike nodded again.

“Well, I went in there and pretended I was writing a dissertation on African politics, and I wanted some information on Professor Agyeman. I ended up speaking to this really helpful secretary in the politics department, who’d actually worked for him, and she gave me loads of information on him, including a bibliography and a brief biography. He studied at SOAS as an undergraduate.”

“He did?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “And I got a picture.”

From inside the notebook she pulled out a photocopy, and passed it across to Strike.

He saw a black man with a long, high-cheekboned face; close-cropped graying hair and beard and gold-rimmed glasses supported by overlarge ears. He stared at it for several long moments, and when at last he spoke, he said:

“Christ.”

Robin waited, elated.

“Christ,” said Strike again. “When did he die?”

“Five years ago. The secretary got upset talking about it. She said he was so clever, and the nicest, kindest man. A committed Christian.”

“Any family?”

“Yes. He left a widow and a son.”

“A son,” repeated Strike.

“Yes,” said Robin. “He’s in the army.”

“In the army,” said Strike, her deep and doleful echo. “Don’t tell me.”

“He’s in Afghanistan.”

Strike got up and started pacing up and down, the picture of Professor Josiah Agyeman in his hand.

“Didn’t get a regiment, did you? Not that it matters. I can find out,” he said.

“I did ask,” said Robin, consulting her notes, “but I don’t really understand—is there a regiment called the Sappers or some—”

“Royal Engineers,” said Strike. “I can check up on all that.”

He stopped beside Robin’s desk, and stared again at the face of Professor Josiah Agyeman.

“He was from Ghana originally,” she said. “But the family lived in Clerkenwell until he died.”

Strike handed her back the picture.

“Don’t lose that. You’ve done bloody well, Robin.”

“That’s not all,” she said, flushed, excited and trying to keep from smiling. “I took the train out to Oxford in the afternoon, to the Malmaison. Do you know, they’ve made a hotel out of an old prison?”

“Really?” said Strike, sinking back on to the sofa.

“Yes. It’s quite nice, actually. Well, anyway, I thought I’d pretend to be Alison and check whether Tony Landry had left something there or something…”

Strike sipped his tea, thinking that it was highly implausible that a secretary would be dispatched in person for such an inquiry three months after the event.

“Anyway, that was a mistake.”

“Really?” he said, his tone carefully neutral.

“Yes, because Alison actually did go to the Malmaison on the seventh, to try and find Tony Landry. It was incredibly embarrassing, because one of the girls on reception had been there that day, and she remembered her.”

Strike lowered his mug.

“Now that,” he said, “is very interesting indeed.”

“I know,” said Robin excitedly. “So then I had to think really fast.”

“Did you tell them your name was Annabel?”

“No,” she said, on a half-laugh. “I said, well, OK then, I’ll tell the truth, I’m his girlfriend. And I cried a bit.”

“You cried?”

“It wasn’t actually that hard,” said Robin, with an air of surprise. “I got right into character. I said I thought he was having an affair.”

“Not with Alison? If they’ve seen her, they wouldn’t believe that…”

“No, but I said I didn’t think he’d really been at the hotel at all…Anyway, I made a bit of a scene and the girl who’d spoken to Alison took me aside and tried to calm me down; she said they couldn’t give out information about people without a good reason, they had a policy, blah blah…you know. But just to stop me crying, in the end she told me that he had checked in on the evening of the sixth, and checked out on the morning of the eighth. He made a fuss about being given the wrong newspaper while he was checking out, that’s why she remembered. So he was definitely there. I even asked her a bit, you know, hysterically, how she knew it was him, and she described him to a T. I know what he looks like,” she added, before Strike could ask. “I checked before I left; his picture’s on the Landry, May, Patterson website.”

“You’re brilliant,” said Strike, “and this is all bloody fishy. What did she tell you about Alison?”

“That she arrived and asked to see him, but he wasn’t there. They confirmed that he was staying with them, though. And then she left.”

“Very odd. She should have known he was at the conference; why didn’t she go there first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did this helpful hotel employee say she’d seen him at any times other than check-in and check-out?”

“No,” said Robin. “But we know he went to the conference, don’t we? I checked that, remember?”

“We know he signed in, and probably picked up a name tag. And then he drove back to Chelsea to see his sister, Lady Bristow. Why?”

“Well…she was ill.”

“Was she? She’d just had an operation that was supposed to cure her.”

“A hysterectomy,” said Robin. “I don’t imagine you’d feel wonderful after that.”

“So we’ve got a man who doesn’t like his sister very much—I’ve had that from his own lips—who believes she’s just had a life-saving operation and knows she’s got two of her children in attendance. Why the urgency to see her?”

“Well,” said Robin, with less certainty, “I suppose…she’d just got out of hospital…”

“Which he presumably knew was going to happen before he drove off to Oxford. So why not stay in town, visit her if he felt that strongly about it, and then head out to the afternoon session of the conference? Why drive fifty-odd miles, stay overnight in this plush prison, go to the conference, sign in and then double back to town?”

“Maybe he got a call saying she was feeling bad, something like that? Maybe John Bristow rang him and asked him to come?”

“Bristow’s never mentioned asking his uncle to drop in. I’d say they were on bad terms at the time. They’re both shifty about that visit of Landry’s. Neither of them likes talking about it.”

Strike stood up and began to walk up and down, limping slightly, barely noticing the pain in his leg.

“No,” he said, “Bristow asking his sister, who by all accounts was the apple of his mother’s eye, to drop by—that makes sense. Asking his mother’s brother, who was out of town and by no means her biggest fan, to make a massive detour to see her…that doesn’t smell right. And now we find out that Alison went looking for Landry at his hotel in Oxford. It was a workday. Was she checking up on him on her own account, or did someone send her?”

The telephone rang. Robin picked up the receiver. To Strike’s surprise, she immediately affected a very stilted Australian accent.

“Oy’m sorry, shiz not here…Naoh…Naoh…I dunnaoh where she iz…Naoh…My nem’s Annabel…”

Strike laughed quietly. Robin threw him a look of mock anguish. After nearly a minute of strangled Australian, she hung up.

“Temporary Solutions,” she said.

“I’m getting through a lot of Annabels. That one sounded more South African than Australian.”

“Now I want to hear what happened to you yesterday,” said Robin, unable to conceal her impatience any longer. “Did you meet Bryony Radford and Ciara Porter?”

Strike told her everything that had happened, omitting only the aftermath of his excursion to Evan Duffield’s flat. He placed particular emphasis on Bryony Radford’s insistence that it was dyslexia that had caused her to listen to Ursula May’s voicemail messages; on Ciara Porter’s continuing assertion that Lula had told her she would leave everything to her brother; on Evan Duffield’s annoyance that Lula had kept checking the time while she was in Uzi; and on the threatening email that Tansy Bestigui had sent her estranged husband.

“So where was Tansy?” asked Robin, who had listened to every word of Strike’s story with gratifying attention. “If we can just find out…”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I know where she was,” said Strike. “It’s getting her to admit it, when it might blow her chances of a multimillion-pound settlement from Freddie, that’s going to be the difficult bit. You’ll be able to work it out too, if you just look through the police photographs again.”

“But…”

“Have a look at the pictures of the front of the building on the morning Lula died, and then think about how it was when we saw it. It’ll be good for your detective training.”

Robin experienced a great surge of excitement and happiness, immediately tempered by a cold pang of regret, because she would soon be leaving for human resources.

“I need to change,” said Strike, standing up. “Please will you try Freddie Bestigui again for me?”

He disappeared into the inner room, closed the door behind him and swapped his lucky suit (as he thought he might henceforth call it) for an old and comfortable shirt, and a roomier pair of trousers. When he passed Robin’s desk on the way to the bathroom, she was on the telephone, wearing that expression of disinterested attentiveness that betokens a person on hold. Strike cleaned his teeth in the cracked basin, reflecting on how much easier life with Robin would be, now that he had tacitly admitted that he lived in the office, and returned to find her off the telephone and looking exasperated.

“I don’t think they’re even bothering to take my messages now,” she told Strike. “They say he’s out at Pinewood Studios and can’t be disturbed.”

“Ah well, at least we know he’s back in the country,” said Strike.

He took the interim report out of the filing cabinet, sank back down on the sofa and began to add his notes of yesterday’s conversations, in silence. Robin watched out of the corner of her eye, fascinated by the meticulousness with which Strike tabulated his findings, making a precise record of how, where and from whom he had gained each piece of information.

“I suppose,” she asked, after a long stretch of silence, during which she had divided her time between covert observation of Strike at work, and examination of a photograph of the front of number 18, Kentigern Gardens on Google Earth, “you have to be very careful, in case you forget anything?”

“It’s not only that,” said Strike, still writing, and not looking up. “You don’t want to give defending counsel any footholds.”

He spoke so calmly, so reasonably that Robin considered the implication of his words for several moments, in case she could have misunderstood.

“You mean…in general?” she said at last. “On principle?”

“No,” said Strike, continuing his report. “I mean that I specifically do not want to allow the defending counsel in the trial of the person who killed Lula Landry to get off because he was able to show that I can’t keep records properly, thereby calling into question my reliability as a witness.”

Strike was showing off again, and he knew it; but he could not help himself. He was, as he put it to himself, on a roll. Some might have questioned the taste of finding amusement in the midst of a murder inquiry, but he had found humor in darker places.

“Couldn’t nip out for some sandwiches, Robin, could you?” he added, just so that he could glance up at her satisfyingly astonished expression.

He finished his notes during her absence, and was just about to call an old colleague in Germany when Robin burst back in, holding two packs of sandwiches and a newspaper.

“Your picture’s on the front of the Standard,” she panted.

“What?”

It was a photograph of Ciara following Duffield into his flat. Ciara looked stunning; for half a second Strike was transported back to half past two that morning, when she had lain, white and naked, beneath him, that long silky hair spread on the pillow like a mermaid’s as she whispered and moaned.

Strike refocused: he was half cropped out of the picture; one arm raised to keep the paparazzi at bay.

“That’s all right,” he told Robin with a shrug, handing her back the paper. “They think I was the minder.”

“It says,” said Robin, turning to the inside page, “that she left Duffield’s with her security guard at two.”

“There you go, then.”

Robin stared at him. His account of the night had terminated with himself, Duffield and Ciara at Duffield’s flat. She had been so interested in the various pieces of evidence he had laid out before her, she had forgotten to wonder where he had slept. She had assumed that he had left the model and the actor together.

He had arrived at the office still wearing the clothes in the photograph.

She turned away, reading the story on page two. The clear implication of the piece was that Ciara and Duffield had enjoyed an amorous encounter while the supposed minder waited in the hall.

“Is she stunning-looking in person?” asked Robin with an unconvincing casualness as she folded the Standard.

“Yeah, she is,” said Strike, and he wondered whether it was his imagination that the three syllables sounded like a boast. “D’you want cheese and pickle, or egg mayonnaise?”

Robin made her selection at random and returned to her desk chair to eat. Her new hypothesis about Strike’s overnight whereabouts had eclipsed even her excitement over the progress of the case. It was going to be difficult to reconcile her view of him as a blighted romantic with the fact that he had just (it seemed incredible, and yet she had heard his pathetic attempt to conceal his pride) slept with a supermodel.

The telephone rang again. Strike, whose mouth was full of bread and cheese, raised a hand to forestall Robin, swallowed, and answered it himself.

“Cormoran Strike.”

“Strike, it’s Wardle.”

“Hi, Wardle; how’s it going?”

“Not so good, actually. We’ve just fished a body out of the Thames with your card on it. Wondered what you could tell us about it.”

10

IT WAS THE FIRST TAXI that Strike had felt justified in taking since the day he had moved his belongings out of Charlotte’s flat. He watched the charges mount with detachment, as the cab rolled towards Wapping. The taxi driver was determined to tell him why Gordon Brown was a fucking disgrace. Strike sat in silence for the entire trip.

This would not be the first morgue Strike had visited, and far from the first corpse he had viewed. He had become almost immune to the despoliation of gunshot wounds; bodies ripped, torn and shattered, innards revealed like the contents of a butcher’s shop, shining and bloody. Strike had never been squeamish; even the most mutilated corpses, cold and white in their freezer drawers, became sanitized and standardized to a man with his job. It was the bodies he had seen in the raw, unprocessed and unprotected by officialdom and procedure, that rose again and crawled through his dreams. His mother in the funeral parlor, in her favorite floor-length bell-sleeved dress, gaunt yet young, with no needle marks on view. Sergeant Gary Topley lying in the blood-spattered dust of that Afghanistan road, his face unscathed, but with no body below the upper ribs. As Strike had lain in the hot dirt, he had tried not to look at Gary’s empty face, afraid to glance down and see how much of his own body was missing…but he had slid so swiftly into the maw of oblivion that he did not find out until he woke up in the field hospital…

An Impressionist print hung on the bare brick walls of the small anteroom to the morgue. Strike fixed his gaze on it, wondering where he had seen it before, and finally remembering that it hung over the mantelpiece at Lucy and Greg’s.

“Mr. Strike?” said the gray-haired mortician, peering around the inner door, in white coat and latex gloves. “Come on in.”

They were almost always cheerful, pleasant men, these curators of corpses. Strike followed the mortician into the chilly glare of the large, windowless inner room, with its great steel freezer doors all along the right-hand wall. The gently sloping tiled floor ran down to a central drain; the lights were dazzling. Every noise echoed off the hard and shiny surfaces, so that it sounded as though a small group of men was marching into the room.

A metal trolley stood ready in front of one of the freezer doors, and beside it were the two CID officers, Wardle and Carver. The former greeted Strike with a nod and a muttered greeting; the latter, paunchy and mottle-faced, with suit shoulders covered in dandruff, merely grunted.

The mortician wrenched down the thick metal arm on the freezer door. The tops of three anonymous heads were revealed, stacked one above the other, each draped in a white sheet worn limp and fine through repeated washings. The mortician checked the tag pinned to the cloth covering the central head; it bore no name, only the previous day’s scribbled date. He slid the body out smoothly on its long-runnered tray and deposited it efficiently on to the waiting trolley. Strike noticed Carver’s jaw working as he stepped back, giving the mortician room to wheel the trolley clear of the freezer door. With a clunk and a slam, the remaining corpses vanished from view.

“We won’t bother with a viewing room, seeing as we’re the only ones here,” said the mortician briskly. “Light’s best in the middle,” he added, positioning the trolley just beside the drain, and pulling back the sheet.

The body of Rochelle Onifade was revealed, bloated and distended, her face forever wiped of suspicion, replaced by a kind of empty wonder. Strike had known, from Wardle’s brief description on the telephone, whom he would see when the sheet was revealed, but the awful vulnerability of the dead struck him anew as he looked down on the body, far smaller than it had been when she had sat opposite him, consuming fries and concealing information.

Strike told them her name, spelling it so that both the mortician and Wardle could transcribe it accurately on to clipboard and notebook respectively; he also gave the only address he had ever known for her: St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless, in Hammersmith.

“Who found her?”

“River police hooked her out late last night,” said Carver, speaking for the first time. His voice, with its south London accent, held a definite undertone of animosity. “Bodies usually take about three weeks to rise to the surface, eh?” he added, directing the comment, more statement than question, at the mortician, who gave a tiny, cautious cough.

“That’s the accepted average, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be less in this case. There are certain indications…”

“Yeah, well, we’ll get all that from the pathologist,” said Carver, dismissively.

“It can’t have been three weeks,” said Strike, and the mortician gave him a tiny smile of solidarity.

“Why not?” demanded Carver.

“Because I bought her a burger and chips two weeks ago yesterday.”

“Ah,” said the mortician, nodding at Strike across the body. “I was going to say that a lot of carbohydrates taken prior to death can affect the body’s buoyancy. There’s a degree of bloating…”

“That’s when you gave her your card, is it?” Wardle asked Strike.

“Yeah. I’m surprised it was still legible.”

“It was stuck in with her Oyster card, in a plastic cover inside her back jeans pocket. The plastic protected it.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Big pink fake-fur coat. Like a skinned Muppet. Jeans and trainers.”

“That’s what she was wearing when I bought her the burger.”

“In that case, the contents of the stomach should give an accurate—” began the mortician.

“D’you know if she’s got any next of kin?” Carver demanded of Strike.

“There’s an aunt in Kilburn. I don’t know her name.”

Slivers of glistening eyeball showed through Rochelle’s almost closed lids; they had the characteristic brightness of the drowned. There were traces of bloody foam in the creases around her nostrils.

“How are her hands?” Strike asked the mortician, because Rochelle was uncovered only to the chest.

“Never mind her hands,” snapped Carver. “We’re done here, thanks,” he told the mortician loudly, his voice reverberating around the room; and then, to Strike: “We want a word with you. Car’s outside.”

He was helping police with their inquiries. Strike remembered hearing the phrase on the news when he had been a small boy, obsessed by every aspect of police work. His mother had always blamed this strange early preoccupation on her brother, Ted, ex-Red Cap and fount of (to Strike) thrilling stories of travel, mystery and adventure. Helping police with their inquiries: as a five-year-old, Strike had imagined a noble and disinterested citizen volunteering to give up his time and energy to assist the police, who issued him with magnifying glass and truncheon and allowed him to operate under a cloak of glamorous anonymity.

This was the reality: a small interrogation room, with a cup of machine-made coffee given to him by Wardle, whose attitude towards Strike was devoid of the animosity that crackled from Carver’s every open pore, but free of every trace of former friendliness. Strike suspected that Wardle’s superior did not know the full extent of their previous interactions.

A small black tray on the scratched desk held seventeen pence in change, a single Yale key and a plastic-covered bus pass; Strike’s card was discolored and crinkled but still legible.

“What about her bag?” Strike asked Carver, who was sitting across the desk, while Wardle leaned up against the filing cabinet in the corner. “Gray. Cheap and plastic-looking. That hasn’t turned up, has it?”

“She probably left it in her squat, or wherever the fuck she lived,” said Carver. “Suicides don’t usually pack a bag to jump.”

“I don’t think she jumped,” said Strike.

“Oh don’t you, now?”

“I wanted to see her hands. She hated water over her face, she told me so. When people have struggled in the water, the position of their hands—”

“Well, it’s nice to get your expert opinion,” said Carver, with sledgehammer irony. “I know who you are, Mr. Strike.”

He leaned back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head, revealing dried patches of sweat on the underarms of his shirt. The sharp, sour, oniony smell of BO wafted across the desk.

“He’s ex-SIB,” threw in Wardle, from beside the filing cabinet.

“I know that,” barked Carver, raising wiry eyebrows flecked with scurf. “I’ve heard from Anstis all about the fucking leg and the life-saving medal. Quite the colorful CV.”

Carver removed his hands from behind his head, leaned forwards and laced his fingers together on the desk instead. His corned-beef complexion and the purple bags under his hard eyes were not flattered by the strip lighting.

“I know who your old man is and all.”

Strike scratched his unshaven chin, waiting.

“Like to be as rich and famous as Daddy, would you? Is that what all this is about?”

Carver had the bright blue, bloodshot eyes that Strike had always (since meeting a major in the Paras with just such eyes, who was subsequently cashiered for serious bodily harm) associated with a choleric, violent nature.

“Rochelle didn’t jump. Nor did Lula Landry.”

“Bollocks,” shouted Carver. “You’re speaking to the two men who proved Landry jumped. We went through every bit of fucking evidence with a fine-toothed fucking comb. I know what you’re up to. You’re milking that poor sod Bristow for all you can get. Why are you fucking smiling at me?”

“I’m thinking what a tit you’re going to look when this interview gets reported in the press.”

“Don’t you dare fucking threaten me with the press, dickhead.”

Carver’s blunt, wide face was clenched; his glaring blue eyes vivid in the purple-red face.

“You’re in a heap of trouble here, pal, and a famous dad, a peg leg and a good war aren’t going to get you out of it. How do we know you didn’t scare the poor bitch into fucking jumping? Mentally ill, wasn’t she? How do we know you didn’t make her think she’d done something wrong? You were the last person to see her alive, pal. I wouldn’t like to be sitting where you are now.”

“Rochelle crossed Grantley Road and walked away from me, as alive as you are. You’ll find someone who saw her after she left me. Nobody’s going to forget that coat.”

Wardle pushed himself off the filing cabinets, dragged a hard plastic chair over to the desk and sat down.

“Let’s have it, then,” he told Strike. “Your theory.”

“She was blackmailing Lula Landry’s killer.”

“Piss off,” snapped Carver, and Wardle snorted in slightly stagey amusement.

“The day before she died,” said Strike, “Landry met Rochelle for fifteen minutes in that shop in Notting Hill. She dragged Rochelle straight into a changing cubicle, where she made a telephone call begging somebody to meet her at her flat in the early hours of the following morning. That call was overheard by an assistant at the shop; she was in the next cubicle; they’re separated by a curtain. Girl called Mel, red hair and tattoos.”

“People will spout any amount of shit when there’s a celebrity involved,” said Carver.

“If Landry phoned anyone from that cubicle,” said Wardle, “it was Duffield, or her uncle. Her phone records show they were the only people she called, all afternoon.”

“Why did she want Rochelle there when she made the call?” asked Strike. “Why drag her friend into the cubicle with her?”

“Women do that stuff,” said Carver. “They piss in herds, too.”

“Use your fucking intelligence: she was making the call on Rochelle’s phone,” said Strike, exasperated. “She’d tested everyone she knew to try and see who was talking to the press about her. Rochelle was the only one who kept her mouth shut. She established that the girl was trustworthy, bought her a mobile, registered it in Rochelle’s name but took care of all the charges. She’d had her own phone hacked, hadn’t she? She was getting paranoid about people listening in and reporting on her, so she bought a Nokia and registered it to somebody else, to give herself a totally secure means of communication when she wanted it.

“I grant you, that doesn’t necessarily rule out her uncle, or Duffield, because calling them on the alternative number might have been a signal they’d organized between them. Alternatively, she was using Rochelle’s number to speak to somebody else; someone she didn’t want the press to know about. I’ve got Rochelle’s mobile number. Find out what network she was with and you’ll be able to check all this. The unit itself is a crystal-covered pink Nokia, but you won’t find that.”

“Yeah, because it’s at the bottom of the Thames,” said Wardle.

“Course it isn’t,” said Strike. “The killer’s got it. He’ll have got it off her before he threw her into the river.”

“Fuck off!” jeered Carver, and Wardle, who had seemed interested against his better judgment, shook his head.

“Why did Landry want Rochelle there when she made the call?” Strike repeated. “Why not make it from the car? Why, when Rochelle was homeless, and virtually destitute, did she never sell her story on Landry? They’d have given her a great wad for it. Why didn’t she cash in, once Landry was dead, and couldn’t be hurt?”

“Decency?” suggested Wardle.

“Yeah, that’s one possibility,” said Strike. “The other’s that she was making enough by blackmailing the killer.”

“Boll-ocks,” moaned Carver.

“Yeah? That Muppet coat she was pulled up wearing cost one and a half grand.”

A tiny pause.

“Landry probably gave it to her,” said Wardle.

“If she did, she managed to buy her something that wasn’t in the shops back in January.”

“Landry was a model, she had inside contacts—fuck this shit,” snapped Carver, as though he had irritated himself.

“Why,” said Strike, leaning forwards on his arms into the miasma of body odor that surrounded Carver, “did Lula Landry make a detour to that shop for fifteen minutes?”

“She was in a hurry.”

“Why go at all?”

“She didn’t want to let the girl down.”

“She got Rochelle to come right across town—this penniless, homeless girl, the girl she usually gave a lift home afterwards, in her chauffeur-driven car—dragged her into a cubicle, and then walked out fifteen minutes later, leaving her to make her own way home.”

“She was a spoiled bitch.”

“If she was, why turn up at all? Because it was worth it, for some purpose of her own. And if she wasn’t a spoiled bitch, she must have been in some kind of emotional state that made her act out of character. There’s a living witness to the fact that Lula begged somebody, over the phone, to come and see her, at her flat, sometime after one in the morning. There’s also that piece of blue paper she had before she went into Vashti, and which nobody’s admitting to having seen since. What did she do with it? Why was she writing in the back of the car, before she saw Rochelle?”

“It could’ve been—” said Wardle.

“It wasn’t a fucking shopping list,” groaned Strike, thumping the desk, “and nobody writes a suicide note eight hours in advance, and then goes dancing. She was writing a bloody will, don’t you get it? She took it into Vashti to get Rochelle to witness it…”

“Bollocks!” said Carver, yet again, but Strike ignored him, addressing Wardle.

“…which fits with her telling Ciara Porter that she was going to leave everything to her brother, doesn’t it? She’d just made it legal. It was on her mind.”

“Why suddenly make a will?”

Strike hesitated and sat back. Carver leered at him.

“Imagination run out?”

Strike let out his breath in a long sigh. An uncomfortable night of alcohol-sodden unconsciousness; last night’s pleasurable excesses; half a cheese and pickle sandwich in twelve hours: he felt hollowed-out, exhausted.

“If I had hard evidence, I’d have brought it to you.”

“The odds of people close to a suicide killing themselves go right up, did you know that? This Raquelle was a depressive. She has a bad day, remembers the way out her mate took, and does a copycat jump. Which leads us right back to you, pal, persecuting people and pushing them…”

“…over the edge, yeah,” said Strike. “People keep saying that. Very poor fucking taste, in the circumstances. What about Tansy Bestigui’s evidence?”

“How many times, Strike? We proved she couldn’t have heard it,” Wardle said. “We proved it beyond doubt.”

“No you didn’t,” said Strike—finally, when he least expected it, losing his temper. “You based your whole case on one almighty fuck-up. If you’d taken Tansy Bestigui seriously, if you’d broken her down and got her to tell you the whole fucking truth, Rochelle Onifade would still be alive.”

Pulsating with rage, Carver kept Strike there for another hour. His last act of contempt was to tell Wardle to make sure he saw “Rokeby Junior” firmly off the premises.

Wardle walked Strike to the front door, not speaking.

“I need you to do something,” said Strike, halting at the exit, beyond which they could see the darkening sky.

“You’ve had enough from me already, mate,” said Wardle, with a wry smile. “I’m gonna be dealing with that,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, towards Carver and his temper, “for days because of you. I told you it was suicide.”

“Wardle, unless someone brings the fucker in, there are two more people in danger of being knocked off.”

“Strike…”

“What if I bring you proof that Tansy Bestigui wasn’t in her flat at all when Lula fell? That she was somewhere she could have heard everything?”

Wardle looked up towards the ceiling, and closed his eyes momentarily.

“If you’ve got proof…”

“I haven’t, but I will have in the next couple of days.”

Two men walked past them, talking, laughing. Wardle shook his head, looking exasperated, and yet he did not turn away.

“If you want something from the police, call Anstis. He’s the one who owes you.”

“Anstis can’t do this for me. I need you to call Deeby Macc.”

“What the fuck?”

“You heard me. He’s not going to take my calls, is he? But he’ll speak to you; you’ve got the authority, and it sounds as though he liked you.”

“You’re telling me Deeby Macc knows where Tansy Bestigui was when Lula Landry died?”

“No, of course he bloody doesn’t, he was in Barrack. I want to know what clothes he got sent on from Kentigern Gardens to Claridges. Specifically, what stuff he got from Guy Somé.”

Strike did not pronounce the name Ghee for Wardle.

“You want…why?”

“Because one of the runners on that CCTV footage was wearing one of Deeby’s sweatshirts.”

Wardle’s expression, arrested for a moment, relapsed into exasperation.

“You see that stuff everywhere,” he said after a moment or two. “That GS stuff. Shell suits. Trackies.”

“This was a customized hoodie, there was only one of them in the world. Call Deeby, and ask him what he got from Somé. That’s all I need. Whose side d’you want to be on if it turns out I’m right, Wardle?”

“Don’t threaten me, Strike…”

“I’m not threatening you. I’m thinking about a multiple murderer who’s walking around out there planning the next one—but if it’s the papers you’re worried about, I don’t think they’re going to go too easy on anyone who clung to the suicide theory once another body surfaced. Call Deeby Macc, Wardle, before someone else gets killed.”

11

“NO,” SAID STRIKE FORCEFULLY, ON the telephone that evening. “This is getting dangerous. Surveillance doesn’t fall within the scope of secretarial duties.”

“Nor did visiting the Malmaison Hotel in Oxford, or SOAS,” Robin pointed out, “but you were happy enough that I did both of them.”

“You’re not following anyone, Robin. I doubt Matthew would be very happy about it, either.”

It was funny, Robin thought, sitting in her dressing gown on her bed, with the phone pressed to her ear, how Strike had retained the name of her fiancé, without ever having met him. In her experience, men did not usually bother to log that kind of information. Matthew frequently forgot people’s names, even that of his newborn niece; but she supposed that Strike must have been trained to recall such details.

“I don’t need Matthew’s permission,” she said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be dangerous; you don’t think Ursula May’s killed anyone…”

(There was an inaudible “do you?” at the end of the sentence.)

“No, but I don’t want anyone to hear I’m taking an interest in her movements. It might make the killer nervous, and I don’t want anyone else thrown from a height.”

Robin could hear her own heart thumping through the thin material of her dressing gown. She knew that he would not tell her who he thought the killer was; she was even a little frightened of knowing, notwithstanding the fact that she could think of nothing else.

It was she who had called Strike. Hours had passed since she had received a text saying that he had been compelled to go with the police to Scotland Yard, and asking her to lock up the office behind her at five. Robin had been worried.

“Call him, then, if it’s going to keep you awake,” Matthew had said; not quite snapping, not quite indicating that he was, without knowing any of the details, firmly on the side of the police.

“Listen, I want you to do something for me,” said Strike. “Call John Bristow first thing tomorrow and tell him about Rochelle.”

“All right,” said Robin, with her eyes on the large stuffed elephant Matthew had given her on their first Valentine’s Day together, eight years previously. The present-giver himself was watching Newsnight in the sitting room. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m going to be on my way to Pinewood Studios for a few words with Freddie Bestigui.”

“How?” said Robin. “They won’t let you near him.”

“Yeah, they will,” said Strike.

After Robin had hung up, Strike sat motionless for a while in his dark office. The thought of the semi-digested McDonald’s meal lying inside Rochelle’s bloated corpse had not prevented him consuming two Big Macs, a large box of fries and a McFlurry on the way back from Scotland Yard. Gassy noises from his stomach were now mingling with the muffled thuds of the bass from the 12 Bar Café, which Strike barely noticed these days; the sound might have been his own pulse.

Ciara Porter’s messy, girlish flat, her wide, groaning mouth, the long white legs wrapped tightly around his back, belonged to a life lived long ago. All his thoughts, now, were for squat and graceless Rochelle Onifade. He remembered her talking fast into her phone, not five minutes after she had left him, dressed in exactly the same clothes she had been wearing when they pulled her out of the river.

He was sure he knew what had happened. Rochelle had called the killer to say that she had just lunched with a private detective; a meeting had been arranged over her glittering pink phone; that night, after a meal or a drink, they had sauntered through the dark towards the river. He thought of Hammersmith Bridge, sage green and gold, in the area where she claimed to have a new flat: a famous suicide spot, with its low sides, and the fast-flowing Thames below. She could not swim. Nighttime: two lovers play-fighting, a car sweeps by, a scream and a splash. Would anyone have seen?

Not if the killer had iron-clad nerves and a liberal dash of luck; and this was a murderer who had already demonstrated plenty of the former, and an unnerving, reckless reliance on the latter. Defending counsel would undoubtedly argue diminished responsibility, because of the vainglorious overreaching that made Strike’s quarry unique in his experience; and perhaps, he thought, there was some pathology there, some categorizable madness, but he was not much interested in the psychology. Like John Bristow, he wanted justice.

In the darkness of his office, his thoughts veered suddenly and unhelpfully back in time, to the most personal death of all; the one that Lucy assumed, quite wrongly, haunted Strike’s every investigation, colored every case; the killing that had fractured his and Lucy’s lives into two epochs, so that everything in their memory was cleaved clearly into that which had happened before their mother died, and that which had happened afterwards. Lucy thought he had run away to join the RMP because of Leda’s death; that he had been driven to it by his unsatisfied belief in his stepfather’s guilt; that every corpse he saw in the course of his professional life must recall their mother to his mind; that every killer he met must seem to be an echo of their stepfather; that he was driven to investigate other deaths in an eternal act of personal exculpation.

But Strike had aspired to this career long before the last needle had entered Leda’s body; long before he had understood that his mother (and every other human) was mortal, and that killings were more than puzzles to be solved. It was Lucy who never forgot, who lived in a swarm of memories like coffin flies; who projected on to any and all unnatural deaths the conflicting emotions aroused in her by their mother’s untimely demise.

Tonight, however, he found himself doing the very thing that Lucy was sure must be habitual: he was remembering Leda and connecting her to this case. Leda Strike, supergroupie. It was how they always captioned her in the most famous photograph of all, and the only one that featured his parents together. There she was, in black and white, with her heart-shaped face, her shining dark hair and her marmoset eyes; and there, separated from each other by an art dealer, an aristocratic playboy (one since dead by his own hand, the other of AIDS) and Carla Astolfi, his father’s second wife, was Jonny Rokeby himself, androgynous and wild: hair nearly as long as Leda’s. Martini glasses and cigarettes, smoke curling out of the model’s mouth, but his mother more stylish than any of them.

Everyone but Strike had seemed to view Leda’s death as the deplorable but unsurprising result of a life lived perilously, beyond societal norms. Even those who had known her best and longest were satisfied that she herself had administered the overdose they found in her body. His mother, by almost unanimous consent, had walked too close to the unsavory edges of life, and it was only to be expected that she would one day topple out of sight and fall to her death, stiff and cold, on a filthy-sheeted bed.

Why she had done it, nobody could quite explain, not even Uncle Ted (silent and shattered, leaning against the kitchen sink) or Aunt Joan (red-eyed but angry at her little kitchen table, with her arms around nineteen-year-old Lucy, who was sobbing into Joan’s shoulder). An overdose had simply seemed consistent with the trend of Leda’s life; with the squats and the musicians and the wild parties; with the squalor of her final relationship and home; with the constant presence of drugs in her vicinity; with her reckless quest for thrills and highs. Strike alone had asked whether anyone had known his mother had taken to shooting up; he alone had seen a distinction between her predilection for cannabis and a sudden liking for heroin; he alone had unanswered questions and saw suspicious circumstances. But he had been a student of twenty, and nobody had listened.

After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes. With the sole support of Uncle Ted, he had vanished into the army, and refound there the life he had been taught by Leda: constant uprootings, self-reliance and the endless appeal of the new.

Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as “tragic,” in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

Nearly all the physical evidence of Lula’s murder had long since been wiped away, trodden underfoot or covered by thickly falling snow; the most persuasive clue Strike had was, after all, that grainy black-and-white footage of two men running away from the scene: a piece of evidence given a cursory check and tossed aside by the police, who were convinced that nobody could have entered the building, that Landry had committed suicide, and that the film showed nothing more than a pair of larcenous loiterers with intent.

Strike roused himself and looked at his watch. It was half past ten, but he was sure the man to whom he wished to speak would be awake. He flicked on his desk lamp, took up his mobile and dialed, this time, a number in Germany.

“Oggy,” bellowed the tinny voice on the other end of the phone. “How the fuck are you?”

“Need a favor, mate.”

And Strike asked Lieutenant Graham Hardacre to give him all the information he could find on one Agyeman of the Royal Engineers, Christian name and rank unknown, but with particular reference to the dates of his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

12

IT WAS ONLY THE SECOND car he had driven since his leg had been blown off. He had tried driving Charlotte’s Lexus, but today, trying not to feel in any way emasculated, he had hired an automatic Honda Civic.

The journey to Iver Heath took under an hour. Entrance into Pinewood Studios was effected by a combination of fast talk, intimidation and the flashing of genuine, though outdated, official documentation; the security guard, initially impassive, was rocked by Strike’s air of easy confidence, by the words “Special Investigation Branch,” by the pass bearing his photograph.

“Have you got an appointment?” he asked Strike, feet above him in the box beside the electric barrier, his hand covering the telephone receiver.

“No.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mr. Evan Duffield,” said Strike, and he saw the security guard scowl as he turned away and muttered into the receiver.

After a minute or so, Strike was given directions and waved through. He followed a gently winding road around the outskirts of the studio building, reflecting again on the convenient uses to which some people’s reputations for chaos and self-destruction could be put.

He parked a few rows behind a chauffeured Mercedes occupying a space with a sign in it reading: PRODUCER FREDDIE BESTIGUI, made his unhurried exit from the car while Bestigui’s driver watched him in the rearview mirror, and proceeded through a glass door that led to a nondescript, institutional set of stairs. A young man was jogging down them, looking like a slightly tidier version of Spanner.

“Where can I find Mr. Freddie Bestigui?” Strike asked him.

“Second floor, first office on the right.”

He was as ugly as his pictures, bull-necked and pockmarked, sitting behind a desk on the far side of a glass partition wall, scowling at his computer monitor. The outer office was busy and cluttered, full of attractive young women at desks; film posters were tacked to pillars and photographs of pets were pinned up beside filming schedules. The pretty girl nearest the door, who was wearing a switchboard microphone in front of her mouth, looked up at Strike and said:

“Hello, can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Bestigui. Not to worry, I’ll see myself in.”

He was inside Bestigui’s office before she could respond.

Bestigui looked up, his eyes tiny between pouches of flesh, black moles sprinkled over the swarthy skin.

“Who are you?”

He was already pushing himself up, thick-fingered hands clutching the edge of his desk.

“I’m Cormoran Strike. I’m a private detective, I’ve been hired…”

“Elena!” Bestigui knocked his coffee over; it was spreading across the polished wood, into all his papers. “Get the fuck out! Out! OUT!”

“…by Lula Landry’s brother, John Bristow—”

“ELENA!”

The pretty, thin girl wearing the headset ran inside and stood fluttering beside Strike, terrified.

“Call security, you dozy little bitch!”

She ran outside. Bestigui, who was five feet six inches at the most, had pushed his way out from behind his desk now; as unafraid of the enormous Strike as a pit bull whose yard has been invaded by a Rottweiler. Elena had left the door open; the inhabitants of the outer office were staring in, frightened, mesmerized.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a few weeks, Mr. Bestigui…”

“You are in a shitload of trouble, my friend,” said Bestigui, advancing with a set jaw, his thick shoulders braced.

“…to talk about the night Lula Landry died.”

Two men in white shirts and carrying walkie-talkies were running along the glass wall to Strike’s right; young, fit, tense-looking.

“Get him out of here!” Bestigui roared, pointing at Strike, as the two guards bounced off each other in the doorway, then forced their way inside.

“Specifically,” said Strike, “about the whereabouts of your wife, Tansy, when Lula fell…”

“Get him out of here and call the fucking police! How did he get in here?”

“…because I’ve been shown some photographs that make sense of your wife’s testimony. Get your hands off me,” Strike added to the younger of the guards now tugging his upper arm, “or I’ll knock you through that window.”

The security guard did not let go, but looked towards Bestigui for instructions.

The producer’s bright dark eyes were fixed intently on Strike. He clenched and relaxed his thug’s hands. After several long seconds he said:

“You’re full of shit.”

But he did not instruct the waiting guards to drag Strike from his room.

“The photographer was standing on the pavement opposite your house in the early hours of the eighth of January. The guy who took the pictures doesn’t realize what he’s got. If you don’t want to discuss it, fine; police or press, I don’t care. It’ll come to the same thing in the end.”

Strike took a few steps towards the door; the guards, each of whom was still holding him by the arm, were caught by surprise, and momentarily forced into the absurd position of holding him back.

“Get out,” Bestigui said abruptly to his minions. “I’ll let you know if I need you. Close the door behind you.”

They left. When the door had closed, Bestigui said:

“All right, whatever your fucking name is, you can have five minutes.”

Strike sat down, uninvited, in one of the black leather chairs facing Bestigui’s desk, while the producer returned to his seat behind it, subjecting Strike to a hard, cold glare that was quite unlike the one Strike had received from Bestigui’s estranged wife; this was the intense scrutiny of a professional gambler. Bestigui reached for a packet of cigarillos, pulled a black glass ashtray towards himself and lit up with a gold lighter.

“All right, let’s hear what these alleged photographs show,” he said, squinting through clouds of pungent smoke, the picture of a film mafioso.

“The silhouette,” said Strike, “of a woman crouching on the balcony outside your sitting-room windows. She looks naked, but as you and I know, she was in her underwear.”

Bestigui puffed hard for a few seconds, then removed the cigarillo and said:

“Bullshit. You couldn’t see that from the street. Solid stone bottom of the balcony; from that angle you wouldn’t see anything. You’re taking a punt.”

“The lights were on in your sitting room. You can see her outline through the gaps in the stone. There was room then, of course, because the shrubs weren’t there, were they? People can’t resist fiddling with the scene afterwards, even when they’ve got away with it,” Strike added, conversationally. “You were trying to pretend that there was never any room for anyone to squat on that balcony, weren’t you? But you can’t go back and Photoshop reality. Your wife was perfectly positioned to hear what happened up on the third-floor balcony just before Lula Landry died.

“Here’s what I think happened,” Strike went on, while Bestigui continued to squint through the smoke rising from his cigarillo. “You and your wife had a row while she was undressing for bed. Perhaps you found her stash in the bathroom, or you interrupted her doing a couple of lines. So you decided an appropriate punishment would be to shut her outside on the sub-zero balcony.

“People might ask how a street full of paps didn’t notice a part-naked woman being shoved out on a balcony over their heads, but the snow was falling very thickly, and they’ll have been stamping their feet trying to keep the circulation going, and their attention was focused on the ends of the street, while they were waiting for Lula and Deeby Macc. And Tansy didn’t make any noise, did she? She ducked down and hid; she didn’t want to show herself, half naked, in front of thirty photographers. You might even have shoved her out there at the same time that Lula’s car came round the corner. Nobody would have been looking at your windows if Lula Landry had just appeared in a skimpy little dress.”

“You’re full of shit,” said Bestigui. “You haven’t got any photographs.”

“I never said I had them. I said I’d been shown them.”

Bestigui took the cigarillo from his lips, changed his mind about talking, and replaced it. Strike allowed several moments to elapse, but when it became clear that Bestigui was not going to avail himself of the opportunity to speak, he continued:

“Tansy must’ve started hammering on the window immediately after Landry fell past her. You weren’t expecting your wife to start screaming and banging on the glass, were you? Understandably averse to anyone witnessing your bit of domestic abuse, you opened up. She ran straight past you, screaming her head off, out of the flat, and downstairs to Derrick Wilson.

“At which point you looked down over the balustrade and saw Lula Landry lying dead in the street below.”

Bestigui puffed smoke slowly, without taking his eyes off Strike’s face.

“What you did next might seem quite incriminating to a jury. You didn’t dial 999. You didn’t run after your half-frozen, hysterical wife. You didn’t even—which the jury might find more understandable—run and flush away the coke you knew was lying in open view in the bathroom.

“No, what you did next, before following your wife or calling the police, was to wipe that window clean. There’d be no prints to show that Tansy had placed her hands on the outside of the glass, would there? Your priority was to make sure that nobody could prove you had shoved your wife out on to a balcony in a temperature of minus ten. What with your unsavory reputation for assault and abuse, and the possibility of a lawsuit from a young employee in the air, you weren’t going to hand the press or a prosecutor any additional evidence, were you?

“Once you’d satisfied yourself that you’d removed any trace of her prints from the glass, you ran downstairs and compelled her to return to your flat. In the short time available to you before the police arrived, you bullied her into agreeing not to admit where she’d been when the body fell. I don’t know what you promised her, or threatened her with; but whatever it was, it worked.

“You still didn’t feel completely safe, though, because she was so shocked and distressed you thought she might blurt out the whole story. So you tried to distract the police by ranting about the flowers that had been knocked over in Deeby Macc’s flat, hoping Tansy would pull herself together and stick to the deal.

“Well she has, hasn’t she? God knows how much it’s cost you, but she’s let herself be dragged through the dirt in the press; she’s put up with being called a coke-addled fantasist; she’s stuck to her cock-and-bull story about hearing Landry and the murderer argue, through two floors, and soundproofed glass.

“Once she realizes there’s photographic proof of where she was, though,” said Strike, “I think she’ll be glad to come clean. Your wife might think she loves money more than anything in the world, but her conscience is troubling her. I’m confident she’ll crack pretty fast.”

Bestigui had smoked his cigarillo down to its last few millimeters. Slowly he ground it out in the black glass ashtray. Long seconds passed, and the noise in the outside office filtered through the glass wall beside them: voices, the ringing of a telephone.

Bestigui stood up and lowered Roman blinds of canvas down over the glass partition, so that none of the nervy girls in the office beyond could see in. He sat back down and ran thick fingers thoughtfully over the crumpled terrain of his lower face, glancing at Strike and away again, towards the blank cream canvas he had created. Strike could almost see options occurring to the producer, as though he was riffling a deck of cards.

“The curtains were drawn,” Bestigui said finally. “There wasn’t enough light coming out of the windows to make out a woman hiding on the balcony. Tansy’s not going to change her story.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Strike, stretching out his legs; the prosthesis was still uncomfortable. “When I put it to her that the legal term for what the pair of you have done is ‘conspiring to prevent the course of justice,’ and that a belated show of conscience might keep her out of the nick; when I add in the public sympathy she’s bound to get as the victim of domestic abuse, and the amount of money she’s likely to be offered for exclusive rights to her story; when she realizes she’s going to get her say in court, and that she’ll be believed, and that she’ll be able to bring about the conviction of the man she heard murdering her neighbor—Mr. Bestigui, I don’t think even you’ve got enough money to keep her quiet.”

The coarse skin around Bestigui’s mouth flickered. He picked up his packet of cigarillos but did not extract one. There was a long silence during which he turned the packet between his fingers, round and round.

At last he said:

“I’m admitting nothing. Get out.”

Strike did not move.

“I know you’re keen to phone your lawyer,” he said, “but I think you’re overlooking the silver lining here.”

“I’ve had enough of you. I said, get out.”

“However unpleasant it’s going to be, having to admit to what happened that night, it’s still preferable to becoming the prime suspect in a murder case. It’s going to be about the lesser of evils from here on in. If you cough to what really happened, you’re putting yourself in the clear for the actual murder.”

He had Bestigui’s attention now.

“You couldn’t have done it,” said Strike, “because if you’d been the one who threw Landry off the balcony two floors above, you wouldn’t have been able to let Tansy back inside within seconds of the body falling. I think you shut your wife outside, headed off into the bedroom, got into bed, got comfy—the police said the bed looked disarranged and slept in—and kept an eye on the clock. I don’t think you wanted to fall asleep. If you’d left her too long on that balcony, you’d have been up for manslaughter. No wonder Wilson said she was shaking like a whippet. Probably in the early stages of hypothermia.”

Another silence, except for Bestigui’s fat fingers drumming lightly on the edge of the desk. Strike took out his notebook.

“Are you ready to answer a few questions now?”

“Fuck you!”

The producer was suddenly consumed by the rage he had so far suppressed, his jaw jutting and his shoulders hunched, level with his ears. Strike could imagine him looking thus as he bore down on his emaciated, coked-up wife, hands outstretched.

“You’re in the shit here,” said Strike calmly, “but it’s entirely up to you how deep you sink. You can deny everything, battle it out with your wife in the court and the papers, end up in jail for perjury and obstructing the police. Or you can start cooperating, right now, and earn Lula’s family’s gratitude and good will. That’d go a long way to demonstrating remorse, and it’ll help when it comes to pleas for clemency. If your information helps catch Lula’s killer, I can’t see you getting much worse than a reprimand from the bench. It’s going to be the police who’ll get the real going-over from the public and the press.”

Bestigui was breathing noisily, but seemed to be pondering Strike’s words. At last he snarled:

“There wasn’t any fucking killer. Wilson never found anyone up there. Landry jumped,” he said, with a small, dismissive jerk of his head. “She was a fucked-up little druggie, like my fucking wife.”

“There was a killer,” said Strike simply, “and you helped him get away with it.”

Something in Strike’s expression stifled Bestigui’s clear urge to jeer. His eyes were slits of onyx as he mulled over what Strike had said.

“I’ve heard you were keen to put Lula in a film?”

Bestigui seemed disconcerted by the change of subject.

“It was just an idea,” he muttered. “She was a flake but she was fucking gorgeous.”

“You fancied getting her and Deeby Macc into a film together?”

“License to print money, those two together.”

“What about this film you’ve been thinking of making since she died—what do they call it, a biopic? I hear Tony Landry wasn’t happy about it?”

To Strike’s surprise, a satyr’s grin impressed itself on Bestigui’s pouchy face.

“Who told you that?”

“Isn’t it true?”

For the first time, Bestigui seemed to feel he had the upper hand in the conversation.

“No, it’s not true. Anthony Landry has given me a pretty broad hint that once Lady Bristow’s dead, he’ll be happy to talk about it.”

“He wasn’t angry, then, when he called you to talk about it?”

“As long as it’s tastefully handled, yadda yadda…”

“D’you know Tony Landry well?”

“I know of him.”

“In what context?”

Bestigui scratched his chin, smiling to himself.

“He’s your wife’s divorce lawyer, of course.”

“For now he is,” said Bestigui.

“You think she’s going to sack him?”

“She might have to,” said Bestigui, and the smile became a self-satisfied leer. “Conflict of interest. We’ll see.”

Strike glanced down at his notebook, considering, with the gifted poker player’s dispassionate calculation of the odds, how much risk there was in pushing this line of questioning to the limit, on no proof.

“Do I take it,” he said, looking back up, “that you’ve told Landry you know he’s sleeping with his business partner’s wife?”

One moment’s stunned surprise, and then Bestigui laughed out loud, a boorish, aggressive blast of glee.

“Know that, do you?”

“How did you find out?”

“I hired one of your lot. I thought Tansy was doing the dirty, but it turned out she was giving alibis to her bloody sister, while Ursula was having it away with Tony Landry. It’ll be a shitload of fun to watch the Mays divorcing. High-powered lawyers on both sides. Old family firm broken up. Cyprian May’s not as limp as he looks. He represented my second wife. I’m going to have a fucking blast watching that one play out. Watching the lawyers screw each other for a change.”

“That’s a nice bit of leverage you’ve got with your wife’s divorce lawyer, then?”

Bestigui smiled nastily through the smoke.

“Neither of them know I know yet. I’ve been waiting for a good moment to tell them.”

But Bestigui seemed to remember, suddenly, that Tansy might now be in possession of an even more powerful weapon in their divorce battle, and the smile faded from his crumpled face, leaving it bitter.

“One last thing,” said Strike. “The night that Lula died: after you’d followed your wife down into the lobby, and brought her back upstairs, did you hear anything outside the flat?”

“I thought your whole fucking point is that you can’t hear anything inside my flat with the windows closed?” snapped Bestigui.

“I’m not talking about outside in the street; I’m talking about outside your front door. Tansy might’ve been making too much noise to hear anything, but I’m wondering whether, when the pair of you were in your own hall—perhaps you stayed there, trying to calm her down, once you’d got her inside?—you heard any movement on the other side of the door? Or was Tansy screaming too much?”

“She was making a fuck of a lot of noise,” said Bestigui. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing suspicious. Just Wilson, running past the door.”

“Wilson.”

“Yeah.”

“When was this?”

“When you’re talking about. When we’d got back inside our flat.”

“Immediately after you’d shut the door?”

“Yeah.”

“But Wilson had already run upstairs while you were still in the lobby, hadn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

The crevices in Bestigui’s forehead and around his mouth deepened.

“So when you got to your flat on the first floor, Wilson must’ve been out of sight and earshot already?”

“Yeah…”

“But you heard footsteps on the stairs, immediately after closing your front door?”

Bestigui did not answer. Strike could see him putting it all together in his own mind for the very first time.

“I heard…yeah…footsteps. Running past. On the stairs.”

“Yes,” said Strike. “And could you make out whether there was one set, or two?”

Bestigui frowned, his eyes unfocused, looking beyond the detective into the treacherous past. “There was…one. So I thought it was Wilson. But it couldn’t…Wilson was still up on the third floor, searching her flat…because I heard him coming down again, afterwards…after I’d called the police, I heard him go running past the door…

“I forgot that,” said Bestigui, and for a fraction of a second he seemed almost vulnerable. “I forgot. There was a lot going on. Tansy screaming.”

“And, of course, you were thinking about your own skin,” said Strike briskly, inserting notepad and pen back in his pocket and hoisting himself out of the leather chair. “Well, I won’t keep you; you’ll be wanting to call your lawyer. You’ve been very helpful. I expect we’ll see each other again in court.”

13

ERIC WARDLE CALLED STRIKE THE following day.

“I phoned Deeby,” he said curtly.

“And?” said Strike, motioning to Robin to pass him pen and paper. They had been sitting together at her desk, enjoying tea and biscuits while discussing the latest death threat from Brian Mathers, in which he promised, not for the first time, to slit open Strike’s guts and piss on his entrails.

“He got sent a customized hoodie by Somé. Handgun in studs on the front and a couple of lines of Deeby’s own lyrics on the back.”

“Just the one?”

“Yeah.”

“What else?” asked Strike.

“He remembers a belt, a beanie hat and a pair of cufflinks.”

“No gloves?”

Wardle paused, perhaps checking his notes.

“No, he didn’t mention gloves.”

“Well, that clears that up,” said Strike.

Wardle said nothing at all. Strike waited for the policeman to either hang up or impart more information.

“The inquest is on Thursday,” said Wardle abruptly. “On Rochelle Onifade.”

“Right,” said Strike.

“You don’t sound that interested.”

“I’m not.”

“I thought you were sure it was murder?”

“I am, but the inquest won’t prove that one way or the other. Any idea when her funeral’s going to be?”

“No,” said Wardle irritably. “What does that matter?”

“I thought I might go.”

“What for?”

“She had an aunt, remember?” said Strike.

Wardle rang off in what Strike suspected was disgust.

Bristow called Strike later that morning with the time and place of Rochelle’s funeral.

“Alison managed to find out all the details,” he told the detective on the telephone. “She’s super-efficient.”

“Clearly,” said Strike.

“I’m going to come. To represent Lula. I ought to have helped Rochelle.”

“I think it was always going to end this way, John. Are you bringing Alison?”

“She says she wants to come,” said Bristow, though he sounded less than enamored of the idea.

“I’ll see you there, then. I’m hoping to speak to Rochelle’s aunt, if she turns up.”

When Strike told Robin that Bristow’s girlfriend had discovered the time and place of the funeral, she appeared put out. She herself had been trying to find out the details at Strike’s request, and seemed to feel that Alison had put one over on her.

“I didn’t realize you were this competitive,” said Strike, amused. “Not to worry. Maybe she had some kind of head start on you.”

“Like what?”

But Strike was looking at her speculatively.

“What?” repeated Robin, a little defensively.

“I want you to come with me to the funeral.”

“Oh,” said Robin. “OK. Why?”

She expected Strike to reply that it would look more natural for them to turn up as a couple, just as it had seemed more natural for him to visit Vashti with a woman in tow. Instead he said:

“There’s something I want you to do for me there.”

Once he had explained, clearly and concisely, what it was that he wanted her to do, Robin looked utterly bewildered.

“But why?”

“I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“I’d rather not say that, either.”

Robin no longer saw Strike through Matthew’s eyes; no longer wondered whether he was faking, or showing off, or pretending to be cleverer than he was. She did him the credit, now, of discounting the possibility that he was being deliberately mysterious. All the same, she repeated, as though she must have heard him wrongly:

“Brian Mathers.”

“Yeah.”

“The Death Threat Man.”

“Yeah.”

“But,” said Robin, “what on earth can he have to do with Lula Landry’s death?”

“Nothing,” said Strike, honestly enough. “Yet.”

The north London crematorium where Rochelle’s funeral was held three days later was chilly, anonymous and depressing. Everything was smoothly nondenominational; from the dark-wood pews and blank walls, carefully devoid of any religious device; to the abstract-stained glass window, a mosaic of little jewel-bright squares. Sitting on hard wood, while a whiny-voiced minister called Rochelle “Roselle” and the fine rain speckled the gaudy patchwork window above him, Strike understood the appeal of gilded cherubs and plaster saints, of gargoyles and Old Testament angels, of gem-set golden crucifixes; anything that might give an aura of majesty and grandeur, a firm promise of an afterlife, or retrospective worth to a life like Rochelle’s. The dead girl had had her glimpse of earthly paradise: littered with designer goods, and celebrities to sneer at, and handsome drivers to joke with, and the yearning for it had brought her to this: seven mourners, and a minister who did not know her name.

There was a tawdry impersonality about the whole affair; a feeling of faint embarrassment; a painful avoidance of the facts of Rochelle’s life. Nobody seemed to feel that they had the right to sit in the front row. Even the obese black woman wearing thick-lensed glasses and a knitted hat, who Strike assumed was Rochelle’s aunt, had chosen to sit three benches from the front of the crematorium, keeping her distance from the cheap coffin. The balding worker whom Strike had met at the homeless hostel had come, in an open shirt and a leather jacket; behind him was a fresh-faced, neatly suited young Asian man who Strike thought might turn out to be the psychiatrist who had run Rochelle’s outpatient group.

Strike, in his old navy suit, and Robin, in the black skirt and jacket she wore to interviews, sat at the very back. Across the aisle were Bristow, miserable and pale, and Alison, whose damp double-breasted black raincoat glistened a little in the cold light.

Cheap red curtains opened, the coffin slid out of sight, and the drowned girl was consumed by fire. The silent mourners exchanged pained, awkward smiles at the back of the crematorium; hovering, trying not to add unseemly haste of departure to the other inadequacies of the service. Rochelle’s aunt, who projected an aura of eccentricity that bordered on instability, introduced herself as Winifred, then announced loudly, with an accusatory undertone:

“Dere’s sandwiches in the pub. I thought dere would be more people.”

She led the way outside, as if brooking no opposition, up the street to the Red Lion, the six other mourners following in her wake, heads bowed slightly against the rain.

The promised sandwiches sat, dry and unappetizing, on a metal foil tray covered in cling film, on a small table in the corner of the dingy pub. At some point on the walk to the Red Lion Aunt Winifred had realized who John Bristow was, and she now took overpowering possession of him, pinning him up against the bar, gabbling at him without pause. Bristow responded whenever she allowed him to get a word in edgewise, but the looks he cast towards Strike, who was talking to Rochelle’s psychiatrist, became more frequent and desperate as the minutes passed.

The psychiatrist parried all Strike’s attempts to engage him in conversation about the outpatients’ group he had run, finally countering a question about disclosures Rochelle might have made with a polite but firm reminder about patient confidentiality.

“Were you surprised that she killed herself?”

“No, not really. She was a very troubled girl, you know, and Lula Landry’s death was a great shock to her.”

Shortly afterwards he issued a general farewell and left.

Robin, who had been trying to make conversation with a monosyllabic Alison at a small table beside the window, gave up and headed for the Ladies.

Strike ambled across the small lounge and sat down in Robin’s abandoned seat. Alison threw him an unfriendly look, then resumed her contemplation of Bristow, who was still being harangued by Rochelle’s aunt. Alison had not unbuttoned her rain-flecked coat. A small glass of what looked like port stood on the table in front of her, and a slightly scornful smile played around her mouth, as though she found her surroundings ramshackle and inadequate. Strike was still trying to think of a good opener when she said unexpectedly:

“John was supposed to be at a meeting with Conway Oates’s executors this morning. He’s left Tony to meet them on his own. Tony’s absolutely furious.”

Her tone implied that Strike was in some way responsible for this, and that he deserved to know what trouble he had caused. She took a sip of port. Her hair hung limply to her shoulders and her big hands dwarfed the glass. In spite of a plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.

“You don’t think it was a nice gesture for John to come to the funeral?” asked Strike.

Alison gave a scathing little “huh,” a token laugh.

“It’s not as though he knew this girl.”

“Why did you come along, then?”

“Tony wanted me to.”

Strike noted the pleasurable self-consciousness with which she pronounced her boss’s name.

“Why?”

“To keep an eye on John.”

“Tony thinks John needs watching, does he?”

She did not answer.

“They share you, John and Tony, don’t they?”

“What?” she said sharply.

He was glad to have discomposed her.

“They share your services? As a secretary?”

“Oh—oh, no. I work for Tony and Cyprian; I’m the senior partners’ secretary.”

“Ah. I wonder why I thought you were John’s too?”

“I work on a completely different level,” said Alison. “John uses the typing pool. I have nothing to do with him at work.”

“Yet romance blossomed across secretarial rank and floors?”

She met his facetiousness with more disdainful silence. She seemed to see Strike as intrinsically offensive, somebody undeserving of manners, beyond the pale.

The hostel worker stood alone in a corner, helping himself to sandwiches, palpably killing time until he could decently leave. Robin emerged from the Ladies, and was instantly suborned by Bristow, who seemed eager for assistance in coping with Aunt Winifred.

“So, how long have you and John been together?” asked Strike.

“A few months.”

“You got together before Lula died, did you?”

“He asked me out not long afterwards,” she said.

“He must have been in a pretty bad way, was he?”

“He was a complete mess.”

She did not sound sympathetic, but slightly contemptuous.

“Had he been flirting for a while?”

He expected her to refuse to answer; but he was wrong. Though she tried to pretend otherwise, there was unmistakable self-satisfaction and pride in her answer.

“He came upstairs to see Tony. Tony was busy, so John came to wait in my office. He started talking about his sister, and he got emotional. I gave him tissues, and he ended up asking me out to dinner.”

In spite of what seemed to be lukewarm feelings for Bristow, he thought that she was proud of his overtures; they were a kind of trophy. Strike wondered whether Alison had ever, before desperate John Bristow came along, been asked out to dinner. It had been the collision of two people with an unhealthy need: I gave him tissues, and he asked me out to dinner.

The hostel worker was buttoning up his jacket. Catching Strike’s eye, he gave a farewell wave, and departed without speaking to anyone.

“So how does the big boss feel about his secretary dating his nephew?”

“It’s not up to Tony what I do in my private life,” she said.

“True enough,” said Strike. “Anyway, he can’t talk about mixing business with pleasure, can he? Sleeping with Cyprian May’s wife as he is.”

Momentarily fooled by his casual tone, Alison opened her mouth to respond; then the meaning of his words hit her, and her self-assurance shattered.

“That’s not true!” she said fiercely, her face burning. “Who said that to you? It’s a lie. It’s a complete lie. It’s not true. It isn’t.”

He heard a terrified child behind the woman’s protest.

“Really? Why did Cyprian May send you to Oxford to find Tony on the seventh of January then?”

“That—it was only—he’d forgotten to get Tony to sign some documents, that’s all.”

“And he didn’t use a fax machine or a courier because…?”

“They were sensitive documents.”

“Alison,” said Strike, enjoying her agitation, “we both know that’s balls. Cyprian thought Tony had sloped off somewhere with Ursula for the day, didn’t he?”

“He didn’t! He hadn’t!”

Up at the bar, Aunt Winifred was waving her arms, windmill-like, at Bristow and Robin, who were wearing frozen smiles.

“You found him in Oxford, did you?”

“No, because—”

“What time did you get there?”

“About eleven, but he’d—”

“Cyprian must’ve sent you out the moment you got to work, did he?”

“The documents were urgent.”

“But you didn’t find Tony at his hotel or in the conference center?”

“I missed him,” she said, in furious desperation, “because he’d gone back to London to visit Lady Bristow.”

“Ah,” said Strike. “Right. Bit odd that he didn’t let you or Cyprian know that he was going back to London, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said, with a valiant attempt at regaining her vanished superiority. “He was contactable. He was still on his mobile. It didn’t matter.”

“Did you call his mobile?”

She did not answer.

“Did you call it, and not get an answer?”

She sipped her port in simmering silence.

“In fairness, it would break the mood, taking a call from your secretary while you’re on the job.”

He thought that she would find this offensive, and was not disappointed.

“You’re disgusting. You’re really disgusting,” she said thickly, her cheeks a dull dark red with the prudishness she tried to disguise under a show of superiority.

“Do you live alone?” he asked her.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked, completely off-balance now.

“Just wondered. So you don’t see anything odd in Tony booking into an Oxford hotel for the night, driving back to London the following morning, then returning to Oxford again, in time to check out of his hotel the next day?”

“He went back to Oxford so that he could attend the conference in the afternoon,” she said doggedly.

“Oh, really? Did you hang around and meet him there?”

“He was there,” she said evasively.

“You’ve got proof, have you?”

She said nothing.

“Tell me,” said Strike, “would you rather think that Tony was in bed with Ursula May all day, or having some kind of confrontation with his niece?”

Over at the bar, Aunt Winifred was straightening her knitted hat and retying her belt. She seemed to be preparing to leave.

For several seconds Alison fought herself, and then, with an air of unleashing something long suppressed, she said in a ferocious whisper:

“They aren’t having an affair. I know they aren’t. It wouldn’t happen. Ursula only cares about money; it’s all that matters to her, and Tony’s got less than Cyprian. Ursula wouldn’t want Tony. She wouldn’t.”

“Oh, you never know. Physical passion might have overpowered her mercenary tendencies,” said Strike, watching Alison closely. “It can happen. It’s hard for another man to judge, but he’s not bad-looking, Tony, is he?”

He saw the rawness of her pain, her fury, and her voice was choked as she said:

“Tony’s right—you’re taking advantage—in it for all you can get—John’s gone funny—Lula jumped. She jumped. She was always unbalanced. John’s like his mother, he’s hysterical, he imagines things. Lula took drugs, she was one of those sort of people, out of control, always causing trouble and trying to get attention. Spoiled. Throwing money around. She could have anything she liked, anyone she wanted, but nothing was enough for her.”

“I didn’t realize you knew her.”

“I—Tony’s told me about her.”

“He really didn’t like her, did he?”

“He just saw her for what she was. She was no good. Some women,” she said, her chest heaving beneath the shapeless raincoat, “aren’t.”

A chill breeze cut through the musty air of the lounge as the door swung shut behind Rochelle’s aunt. Bristow and Robin kept smiling weakly until the door had closed completely, then exchanged looks of relief.

The barman had disappeared. Only four of them were left in the little lounge now. Strike became aware, for the first time, of the eighties ballad playing in the background: Jennifer Rush, “The Power of Love.” Bristow and Robin approached their table.

“I thought you wanted to speak to Rochelle’s aunt?” asked Bristow, looking aggrieved, as though he had been through an ordeal for nothing.

“Not enough to chase after her,” replied Strike cheerfully. “You can fill me in.”

Strike could tell, by the expressions on Robin’s and Bristow’s faces, that both thought this attitude strangely lackadaisical. Alison was fumbling for something in her bag, her own face hidden.

The rain had stopped, the pavements were slippery and the sky was gloomy, threatening a fresh downpour. The two women walked ahead in silence, while Bristow earnestly related to Strike all that he could remember of Aunt Winifred’s conversation. Strike, however, was not listening. He was watching the backs of the two women, both in black—almost, to the careless observer, alike, interchangeable. He remembered the sculptures on either side of the Queen’s Gate; not identical at all, in spite of the assumptions made by lazy eyes; one male, one female, the same species, yes, but profoundly different.

When he saw Robin and Alison come to a halt beside a BMW he assumed must be Bristow’s, he too slowed up, and cut across Bristow’s rambling recital of Rochelle’s stormy relations with her family.

“John, I need to check something with you.”

“Fire away.”

“You say you heard your uncle come into your mother’s flat on the morning before Lula died?”

“Yep, that’s right.”

“Are you absolutely sure that the man you heard was Tony?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You didn’t see him, though?”

“I…” Bristow’s rabbity face was suddenly puzzled. “…no, I—I don’t think I actually saw him. But I heard him let himself in. I heard his voice from the hall.”

“You don’t think that, perhaps, because you were expecting Tony, you assumed it was Tony?”

Another pause.

Then, in a changed voice:

“Are you saying Tony wasn’t there?”

“I just want to know how certain you are that he was.”

“Well…until this moment, I was completely certain. Nobody else has got a key to my mother’s flat. It couldn’t have been anyone except Tony.”

“So you heard someone let themselves into the flat. You heard a male voice. Was he talking to your mother, or to Lula?”

“Er…” Bristow’s large front teeth were much in evidence as he pondered the question. “I heard him come in. I think I heard him speaking to Lula…”

“And you heard him leave?”

“Yes. I heard him walk down the hall. I heard the door close.”

“When Lula said goodbye to you, did she make any mention of Tony having just been there?”

More silence. Bristow raised a hand to his mouth, thinking.

“I—she hugged me, that’s all I…Yes, I think she said she’d spoken to Tony. Or did she? Did I assume she’d spoken to him, because I thought…? But if it wasn’t my uncle, who was it?”

Strike waited. Bristow stared at the pavement, thinking.

“But it must have been him. Lula must have seen whoever it was, and not thought their presence remarkable, and who else could that have been, except Tony? Who else would have had a key?”

“How many keys are there?”

“Four. Three spares.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Well, Lula and Tony and I all had one. Mum liked us all to be able to let ourselves in and out, especially while she’s been ill.”

“And all these keys are present and accounted for, are they?”

“Yes—well, I think so. I assume Lula’s came back to my mother with all her other things. Tony’s still got his, I’ve got mine, and my mother’s…I expect it’s somewhere in the flat.”

“So you aren’t aware of any key that’s been lost?”

“No.”

“And none of you has ever lent your key to anyone?”

“My God, why would we do that?”

“I keep remembering how that file of photographs was removed from Lula’s laptop while it was in your mother’s flat. If there’s another key floating around…”

“There can’t be,” said Bristow. “This is…I…why are you saying Tony wasn’t there? He must have been. He says he saw me through the door.”

“You went into the office on the way back from Lula’s, right?”

“Yes.”

“To get files?”

“Yes. I just ran in and grabbed them. I was quick.”

“So you were back at your mother’s house…?”

“It can’t have been later than ten.”

“And the man who came in, when did he arrive?”

“Maybe…maybe half an hour afterwards? I can’t honestly remember. I wasn’t watching the clock. But why would Tony say he was there if he wasn’t?”

“Well, if he knew you’d been working at home, he could easily say that he came in, and didn’t want to disturb you, and just walked down the hall to speak to your mother. She, presumably, confirmed his presence to the police?”

“I suppose so. Yes, I think so.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it. Mum was groggy and in pain; she slept a lot that day. And then the next morning we had the news about Lula…”

“But you’ve never thought it was strange that Tony didn’t come into the study and speak to you?”

“It wasn’t strange at all,” said Bristow. “He was in a foul temper about the Conway Oates business. I’d have been more surprised if he had been chatty.”

“John, I don’t want to alarm you, but I think that both you and your mother could be in danger.”

Bristow’s little bleat of nervous laughter sounded thin and unconvincing. Strike could see Alison standing fifty yards away, her arms folded, ignoring Robin, watching the two men.

“You—you can’t be serious?” said Bristow.

“I’m very serious.”

“But…does…Cormoran, are you saying you know who killed Lula?”

“Yeah, I think I do—but I still need to speak to your mother before we wrap this up.”

Bristow looked as though he wished he could drink the contents of Strike’s mind. His myopic eyes scanned every inch of Strike’s face, his expression half afraid, half imploring.

“I must be there,” he said. “She’s very weak.”

“Of course. How about tomorrow morning?”

“Tony will be livid if I take off any more time during work hours.”

Strike waited.

“All right,” said Bristow. “All right. Ten thirty tomorrow.”

14

THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS FRESH and bright. Strike took the underground to genteel and leafy Chelsea. This was a part of London that he barely knew, for Leda had never, even in her most spendthrift phases, managed to secure a toehold in the vicinity of the Royal Chelsea Hospital, pale and gracious in the spring sun.

Franklin Row was an attractive street of more red brick; here were plane trees, and a great grassy space bordered with railings, in which a throng of primary school children were playing games in pale blue Aertex tops and navy blue shorts, watched by tracksuited teachers. Their happy cries punctuated the sedate quiet otherwise disturbed only by birdsong; no cars passed as Strike strolled down the pavement towards the house of Lady Yvette Bristow, his hands in his pockets.

The wall beside the partly glass door, set at the top of four white stone steps, bore an old-fashioned Bakelite panel of doorbells. Strike checked to see that Lady Yvette Bristow’s name was clearly marked beside Flat E, then retreated to the pavement and stood waiting in the gentle warmth of the day, looking up and down the street.

Ten thirty arrived, but John Bristow did not. The square remained deserted, but for the twenty small children running between hoops and colored cones beyond the railings.

At ten forty-five, Strike’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. The text was from Robin:

Alison has just called to say that JB is unavoidably detained. He does not want you to speak to his mother without him present.

Strike immediately texted Bristow:

How long are you likely to be detained? Any chance of doing this later today?

He had barely sent the message when the phone began to ring.

“Yeah, hello?” said Strike.

“Oggy?” came Graham Hardacre’s tinny voice, all the way from Germany. “I’ve got the stuff on Agyeman.”

“Your timing’s uncanny.” Strike pulled out his notebook. “Go on.”

“He’s Lieutenant Jonah Francis Agyeman, Royal Engineers. Aged twenty-one, unmarried, last tour of duty started eleventh of January. He’s back in June. Next of kin, a mother. No siblings, no kids.”

Strike scribbled it all down in his notebook, with the mobile phone held between jaw and shoulder.

“I owe you one, Hardy,” he said, putting the notebook away. “Haven’t got a picture, have you?”

“I could email you one.”

Strike gave Hardacre the office email address, and, after routine inquiries about each other’s lives, and mutual expressions of goodwill, terminated the call.

It was five to eleven. Strike waited, phone in hand, in the peaceful, leafy square, while the gamboling children played with their hoops and their beanbags, and a tiny silver plane drew a thick white line across the periwinkle sky. At last, with a small chirrup clearly audible in the quiet street, Bristow’s texted reply arrived:

No chance today. I’ve been forced to go out to Rye. Maybe tomorrow?

Strike sighed.

“Sorry, John,” he muttered, and he climbed the steps and rang Lady Bristow’s doorbell.

The entrance hall, quiet, spacious and sunny, nevertheless had a faintly depressing air of communality that a bucket-shaped vase of dried flowers and a dull green carpet and pale yellow walls, probably chosen for their inoffensiveness, could not dissipate. As at Kentigern Gardens, there was a lift, this one with wooden doors. Strike chose to walk upstairs. The building had a faint shabbiness that in no way diminished its quiet aura of wealth.

The door of the top flat was opened by the smiling West Indian Macmillan nurse who had buzzed him through the front door.

“You’re not Mister Bristow,” she said brightly.

“No, I’m Cormoran Strike. John’s on his way.”

She let him in. Lady Bristow’s hallway was pleasantly cluttered, papered in faded red and covered in watercolors in old gilt frames; an umbrella stand was full of walking sticks, and coats hung on a row of pegs. Strike glanced right, and saw a sliver of the study at the end of the corridor: a heavy wooden desk and a swivel chair with its back to the door.

“Will you wait in the sitting room while I check whether Lady Bristow is ready to see you?”

“Yeah, of course.”

He walked through the door she indicated into a charming room with primrose walls, lined with bookcases bearing photographs. An old-fashioned dial telephone sat on an end table beside a comfortable chintz-covered sofa. Strike checked that the nurse was out of sight before slipping the receiver off the hook and repositioning it, unobtrusively skewed on its rests.

Close by the bay window on a bonheur du jour stood a large photograph, framed in silver, showing the wedding of Sir and Lady Alec Bristow. The groom looked much older than his wife, a rotund, beaming, bearded man; the bride was thin, blonde and pretty in an insipid way. Ostensibly admiring the photograph, Strike stood with his back to the door, and slid open a little drawer in the delicate cherrywood desk. Inside was a supply of fine pale blue writing paper and matching envelopes. He slid the drawer shut again.

“Mister Strike? You can come through.”

Back through the red-papered hall, a short passage, and into a large bedroom, where the dominant colors were duck-egg blue and white, and everywhere gave an impression of elegance and taste. Two doors on the left, both ajar, led to a small en-suite bathroom, and what seemed to be a large walk-in wardrobe. The furniture was delicate and Frenchified; the props of serious illness—the drip on its metal stand, the bedpan lying clean and shiny on a chest of drawers, with an array of medications—were glaring impostors.

The dying woman wore a thick ivory-colored bed jacket and reclined, dwarfed by her carved wooden bed, on many white pillows. No trace of Lady Bristow’s youthful prettiness remained. The raw bones of the skeleton were clearly delineated now, beneath fine skin that was shiny and flaking. Her eyes were sunken, filmy and dim, and her wispy hair, fine as a baby’s, was gray against large expanses of pink scalp. Her emaciated arms lay limp on top of the covers, a catheter protruded. Her death was an almost palpable presence in the room, as though it stood waiting patiently, politely, behind the curtains.

A faint smell of lime blossom pervaded the atmosphere, but did not entirely eclipse that of disinfectant and bodily decay; smells that recalled, to Strike, the hospital where he had lain helpless for months. A second large bay window had been raised a few inches, so that the warm fresh air and the distant cries of the sports-playing children could enter the room. The view was of the topmost branches of the leafy sunlit plane trees.

“Are you the detective?”

Her voice was thin and cracked, her words slightly slurred. Strike, who had wondered whether Bristow had told her the truth about his profession, was glad that she knew.

“Yes, I’m Cormoran Strike.”

“Where’s John?”

“He’s been held up at the office.”

“Again,” she murmured, and then: “Tony works him very hard. It isn’t fair.” She peered at him, blurrily, and indicated a small painted chair with one slightly raised finger. “Do sit down.”

There were chalky white lines around her faded irises. As he sat, Strike noticed two more silver-framed photographs standing on the bedside table. With something akin to an electric shock, he found himself looking into the eyes of ten-year-old Charlie Bristow, chubby-faced, with his slightly mullety haircut: frozen forever in the eighties, his school shirt with its long pointed collar, and the huge knot in his tie. He looked just as he had when he had waved goodbye to his best friend, Cormoran Strike, expecting to meet each other again after Easter.

Beside Charlie’s photograph was a smaller one, of an exquisite little girl with long black ringlets and big brown eyes, in a navy blue school uniform: Lula Landry, aged no more than six.

“Mary,” said Lady Bristow, without raising her voice, and the nurse bustled over. “Could you get Mr. Strike…coffee? Tea?” she asked him, and he was transported back two and a half decades, to Charlie Bristow’s sunlit garden, and the gracious blonde mother, and the iced lemonade.

“A coffee would be great, thank you very much.”

“I do apologize for not making it myself,” said Lady Bristow, as the nurse departed, with heavy footfalls, “but as you can see, I am entirely dependent, now, on the kindness of strangers. Like poor Blanche Dubois.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, as though to concentrate better on some internal pain. He wondered how heavily medicated she was. Beneath the gracious manner, he divined the faintest whiff of something bitter in her words, much as the lime blossom failed to cover the smell of decay, and he wondered at it, considering that Bristow spent most of his time dancing attendance on her.

“Why isn’t John here?” asked Lady Bristow again, with her eyes still shut.

“He’s been held up at the office,” repeated Strike.

“Oh, yes. Yes, you said.”

“Lady Bristow, I’d like to ask you a few questions, and I apologize in advance if they seem over-personal, or distressing.”

“When you have been through what I have,” she said quietly, “nothing much can hurt you anymore. Do call me Yvette.”

“Thank you. Do you mind if I take notes?”

“No, not at all,” she said, and she watched him take out his pen and notebook with a dim show of interest.

“I’d like to start, if you don’t mind, with how Lula came into your family. Did you know anything about her background when you adopted her?”

She looked the very picture of helplessness and passivity lying there with her limp arms on the covers.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. Alec might have known, but if he did, he never told me.”

“What makes you think your husband knew something?”

“Alec always went into things as deeply as he could,” she said, with a faint, reminiscent smile. “He was a very successful businessman, you know.”

“But he never told you anything about Lula’s first family?”

“Oh no, he wouldn’t have done that.” She seemed to find this a strange suggestion. “I wanted her to be mine, just mine, you see. Alec would have wanted to protect me, if he knew anything. I could not have borne the idea that somebody out there might come and claim her one day. I had already lost Charlie, and I wanted a daughter so badly; the idea of losing her, too…”

The nurse returned bearing a tray with two cups on it and a plate of chocolate bourbons.

“One coffee,” she said cheerfully, placing it beside Strike on the nearer of the bedside tables, “and one camomile tea.”

She bustled out again. Lady Bristow closed her eyes. Strike took a gulp of black coffee and said:

“Lula went looking for her biological parents in the year before she died, didn’t she?”

“That’s right,” said Lady Bristow, with her eyes still closed. “I had just been diagnosed with cancer.”

There was a pause, in which Strike put down his coffee cup with a soft chink, and the distant cheers of the small children in the square outside floated through the open window.

“John and Tony were very, very angry with her,” said Lady Bristow. “They didn’t think she ought to have started trying to find her biological mother, when I was so very ill. The tumor was already advanced when they found it. I had to go straight on to chemotherapy. John was very good; he drove me back and forth to the hospital, and came to stay with me during the worst bits, and even Tony rallied round, but all Lula seemed to care about…” She sighed, and opened her faded eyes, seeking Strike’s face. “Tony always said that she was very spoiled. I daresay it was my fault. I had lost Charlie, you see; I couldn’t do enough for her.”

“Do you know how much Lula managed to find out about her birth family?”

“No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I think she knew how much it upset me. She didn’t tell me a great deal. I know that she found the mother, of course, because there was all the dreadful publicity. She was exactly what Tony had predicted. She hadn’t ever wanted Lula. An awful, awful woman,” whispered Lady Bristow. “But Lula kept seeing her. I was having chemotherapy all through that time. I lost my hair…”

Her voice trailed away. Strike felt, as perhaps she meant him to, like a brute as he pressed on:

“What about her biological father? Did she ever tell you she’d found out anything about him?”

“No,” said Lady Bristow weakly. “I didn’t ask. I had the impression that she had given up on the whole business once she found that horrible mother. I didn’t want to discuss it, any of it. It was too distressing. I think she realized that.”

“She didn’t mention her biological father the last time you saw her?” Strike pressed on.

“Oh no,” she said, in her soft voice. “No. That was not a very long visit, you know. She told me, the moment she arrived, I remember, that she could not stay long. She had to meet her friend Ciara Porter.”

Her sense of ill-usage wafted gently towards him like the smell of the bedridden she exuded: a little fusty, a little overripe. Something about her recalled Rochelle; although they were as different as two women could be, both gave off the resentment of those who feel shortchanged and neglected.

“Can you remember what you and Lula talked about that day?”

“Well, I had been given so many painkillers, you understand. I had had a very serious operation. I can’t remember every detail.”

“But you remember Lula coming to see you?” asked Strike.

“Oh yes,” she said. “She woke me up, I had been sleeping.”

“Can you remember what you talked about?”

“My operation, of course,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “And then, a little bit, about her big brother.”

“Her big…?”

“Charlie,” said Lady Bristow, pitifully. “I told her about the day he died. I had never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my life.”

Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.

“How could I have known that that would be the last time I would ever see her?” breathed Lady Bristow. “I didn’t realize that I was about to lose a second child.”

Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her hollow cheeks.

“Could you please look in that drawer,” she whispered, pointing a withered finger at the bedside table, “and get me out my pills?”

Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with various labels upon them.

“Which…?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” she said.

He took one out; it was clearly labeled Valium. She had enough in there to overdose ten times.

“If you could pop a couple out for me?” she said. “I’ll take them with some tea, if it’s cool enough.”

He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.

“Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. “Didn’t John tell me you knew Charlie?”

“Yes, I did,” said Strike. “I’ve never forgotten him.”

“No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.”

Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months ago, when the trees must have been barelimbed, when Lula Landry had sat where he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.

“I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…”

Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying woman’s face as she talked.

“Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I could not understand how God could have let it happen.

“But since then, I’ve come to think that perhaps I have deserved all of it,” said Lady Bristow distantly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve wondered whether I’m being punished. Because I loved them too much. I spoiled them. I couldn’t say no. Charlie, Alec and Lula. I think it must be punishment, because otherwise it would be too unspeakably cruel, wouldn’t it? To make me go through it again, and again, and again.”

Strike had no answer to give. She invited pity, but he found he could not pity her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.

“I wanted Lula so much,” said Lady Bristow, “but I don’t think she ever…She was a darling little thing. So beautiful. I would have done anything for that girl. But she didn’t love me the way Charlie and John loved me. Maybe it was too late. Maybe we got her too late.

“John was jealous when she first came to us. He had been devastated about Charlie…but they ended up being very close friends. Very close.”

A tiny frown crumpled the paper-fine skin of her forehead.

“So Tony was quite wrong.”

“What was he wrong about?” asked Strike quietly.

Her fingers twitched upon the covers. She swallowed.

“Tony didn’t think we should have adopted Lula.”

“Why not?” asked Strike.

“Tony never liked any of my children,” said Yvette Bristow. “My brother is a very hard man. Very cold. He said dreadful things after Charlie died. Alec hit him. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true—what Tony said.”

Her milky gaze slid to Strike’s face, and he thought he glimpsed the woman she must have been when she still had her looks: a little clingy, a little childish, prettily dependent, an ultra-feminine creature, protected and petted by Sir Alec, who strove to satisfy her every whim and wish.

“What did Tony say?”

“Horrible things about John and Charlie. Awful things. I don’t,” she said weakly, “want to repeat them. And then he phoned Alec, when he heard that we were adopting a little girl, and told him we ought not to do it. Alec was furious,” she whispered. “He forbade Tony our house.”

“Did you tell Lula about all this when she visited that day?” asked Strike. “About Tony, and the things he said after Charlie died; and when you adopted her?”

She seemed to sense a reproach.

“I can’t remember exactly what I said to her. I had just had a very serious operation. I was a little drowsy from all the drugs. I can’t remember precisely what I said now…”

And then, with an abrupt change of subject:

“That boy reminded me of Charlie. Lula’s boyfriend. The very handsome boy. What is his name?”

“Evan Duffield?”

“That’s right. He came to see me a little while ago, you know. Quite recently. I don’t know exactly…I lose track of time. They give me so many drugs now. But he came to see me. It was so sweet of him. He wanted to talk about Lula.”

Strike remembered Bristow’s assertion that his mother had not known who Duffield was, and he wondered whether Lady Bristow had played this little game with her son; making herself out to be more confused than she really was, to stimulate his protective instincts.

“Charlie would have been handsome like that, if he’d lived. He might have been a singer, or an actor. He loved performing, do you remember? I felt very sorry for that boy Evan. He cried here, with me. He told me that he thought she was meeting another man.”

“What other man was that?”

“The singer,” said Lady Bristow vaguely. “The singer who’d written songs about her. When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel. I felt very sorry for him. He told me he felt guilty. I told him he had nothing to feel guilty about.”

“Why did he say he felt guilty?”

“For not following her into her apartment. For not being there, to stop her dying.”

“If we could just go back for a moment, Yvette, to the day before Lula’s death?”

She looked reproachful.

“I’m afraid I can’t remember anything else. I’ve told you everything I remember. I was just out of hospital. I was not myself. They’d given me so many drugs, for the pain.”

“I understand that. I just wanted to know whether you remember your brother, Tony, visiting you that day?”

There was a pause, and Strike saw something harden in the weak face.

“No, I don’t remember Tony coming,” said Lady Bristow at last. “I know he says he was here, but I don’t remember him coming. Maybe I was asleep.”

“He claims to have been here when Lula was visiting,” said Strike.

Lady Bristow gave the smallest shrug of her fragile shoulders.

“Maybe he was here,” she said, “but I don’t remember it.” And then, her voice rising, “My brother’s being much nicer to me now he knows that I’m dying. He visits a lot now. Always putting down poison about John, of course. He’s always done that. But John has always been very good to me. He has done things for me while I’ve been ill…things no son should have to do. It would have been more appropriate for Lula…but she was a spoiled girl. I loved her, but she could be selfish. Very selfish.”

“So on that last day, the last time you saw Lula—” said Strike, returning doggedly to the main point, but Lady Bristow cut across him.

“After she left, I was very upset,” she said. “Very upset indeed. Talking about Charlie always does that to me. She could see how distressed I was, but she still left to meet her friend. I had to take pills, and I slept. No, I never saw Tony; I didn’t see anyone else. He might say he was here, but I don’t remember anything until John woke me up with a supper tray. John was cross. He told me off.”

“Why was that?”

“He thinks I take too many pills,” said Lady Bristow, like a little girl. “I know he wants the best for me, poor John, but he doesn’t realize…he couldn’t…I’ve had so much pain in my life. He sat with me for a long time that night. We talked about Charlie. We talked into the early hours of the morning. And while we were talking,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “at the very time we were talking, Lula fell…she fell off the balcony.

“So it was John who had to break the news to me, the next morning. The police had arrived on the doorstep, at the crack of dawn. He came into the bedroom to tell me and…”

She swallowed, and shook her head, limp, barely alive.

“That’s why the cancer came back, I know it. People can only bear so much pain.”

Her voice was becoming more slurred. He wondered how much Valium she had already taken, as she closed her eyes drowsily.

“Yvette, would it be all right if I used your bathroom?” he asked.

She assented with a sleepy nod.

Strike got up, and moved quickly, and surprisingly quietly for a man of his bulk, into the walk-in wardrobe.

The space was lined with mahogany doors that reached to the ceiling. Strike opened one of the doors and glanced inside, at overstuffed railings of dresses and coats, with a shelf of bags and hats above, breathing in the musty smell of old shoes and fabric which, in spite of the evident costliness of the contents, evoked an old charity shop. Silently he opened and closed door after door, until, on the fourth attempt, he saw a cluster of clearly brand-new handbags, each of a different color, that had been squeezed on to the high shelf.

He took down the blue one, shop-new and shiny. Here was the GS logo, and the silk lining that was zipped into the bag. He ran his fingers around it, into every corner, then replaced it deftly on the shelf.

He selected the white bag next: the lining was patterned with a stylized African print. Again he ran his fingers all around the interior. Then he unzipped the lining.

It came out, just as Ciara had described, like a metal-edged scarf, exposing the rough interior of the white leather. Nothing was visible inside until he looked more closely, and then he saw the line of pale blue running down the side of the stiff rectangular cloth-covered board holding the base of the bag in shape. He lifted up the board and saw, beneath it, a folded piece of pale blue paper, scribbled all over in an untidy hand.

Strike replaced the bag swiftly on the shelf with the lining bundled inside, and took from an inside pocket of his jacket a clear plastic bag, into which he inserted the pale blue paper, shaken open but unread. He closed the mahogany door and continued to open others. Behind the penultimate door was a safe, operated by a digital keypad.

Strike took a second plastic bag from inside his jacket, slid it over his hand and began to press keys, but before he had completed his trial, he heard movement outside. Hastily thrusting the crumpled bag back into a pocket, he closed the wardrobe door as quietly as possible and walked back into the bedroom, to find the Macmillan nurse bending over Yvette Bristow. She looked around when she heard him.

“Wrong door,” said Strike. “I thought it was the bathroom.”

He went into the small en-suite, and here, with the door closed, before flushing the toilet and turning on the taps for the nurse’s benefit, he read the last will and testament of Lula Landry, scribbled on her mother’s writing paper and witnessed by Rochelle Onifade.

Yvette Bristow was still lying with her eyes closed when he returned to the bedroom.

“She’s asleep,” said the nurse, gently. “She does this a lot.”

“Yes,” said Strike, the blood pounding in his ears. “Please tell her I said goodbye, when she wakes up. I’m going to have to leave now.”

They walked together down the comfortable passageway.

“Lady Bristow seems very ill,” Strike commented.

“Oh yes, she is,” said the nurse. “She could die any time now. She’s very poorly.”

“I think I might have left my…” said Strike vaguely, wandering left into the yellow sitting room he had first visited, leaning over the sofa to block the nurse’s view and carefully replacing the telephone receiver he had taken off the hook.

“Yes, here it is,” he said, pretending to palm something small and put it in his pocket. “Well, thanks very much for the coffee.”

With his hand on the door, he turned to look at her.

“Her Valium addiction’s as bad as ever, then?” he said.

Unsuspicious, trusting, the nurse smiled a tolerant smile.

“Yes, it is, but it can’t hurt her now. Mind you,” she said, “I’d give those doctors a piece of my mind. She’s had three of them giving her prescriptions for years, from the labels on the boxes.”

“Very unprofessional,” said Strike. “Thanks again for the coffee. Goodbye.”

He jogged down the stairs, his mobile already out of his pocket, so exhilarated that he did not concentrate on where he was going, so that he took a corner on the stair and let out a bellow of pain as the prosthetic foot slipped on the edge; his knee twisted and he fell, hard and heavy, down six stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom with an excruciating, fiery pain in both the joint and the end of his stump, as though it was freshly severed, as though the scar tissue was still healing.

“Fuck. Fuck!”

“Are you all right?” shouted the Macmillan nurse, gazing down at him over the banisters, her face comically inverted.

“I’m fine—fine!” he shouted back. “Slipped! Don’t worry! Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he moaned under his breath, as he pulled himself back to his feet on the newel post, scared to put his full weight on the prosthesis.

He limped downstairs, leaning on the banisters as much as possible; half hopped across the lobby floor and hung on the heavy front door as he maneuvered himself out on to the front steps.

The sporting children were receding in a distant crocodile, pale and navy blue, winding their way back to their school and lunch. Strike stood leaning against warm brick, cursing himself fluently and wondering what damage he had done. The pain was excruciating, and the skin that had already been irritated felt as though it had been torn; it burned beneath the gel pad that was supposed to protect it, and the idea of walking all the way to the underground was miserably unappealing.

He sat down on the top step and phoned a taxi, after which he made a further series of calls, firstly to Robin, then to Wardle, then to the offices of Landry, May, Patterson.

The black cab swung around the corner. For the very first time, it occurred to Strike how like miniature hearses they were, these stately black vehicles, as he hoisted himself upright and limped, in escalating pain, down to the pavement.