The Hallmarked Man

1

The windscreen wipers had been working their hardest ever since the BMW had entered the county of Kent, their soporific swish and clunk aggravating Cormoran Strike’s exhaustion as he stared out through thick rain, which had turned the deserted road ahead to gleaming jet.

Shortly after he’d boarded the sleeper train from Cornwall to London the previous evening, his detective partner’s boyfriend, who Strike always referred to inside his head as ‘Ryan Fucking Murphy’, had called to say that Robin had come down with a high fever and sore throat and would therefore be unable to accompany Strike on today’s visit to their newest prospective client.

Everything about this call had annoyed Strike, and an awareness that he was being unjust – because this was the first time in six years Robin had taken a sick day, and if she had a temperature of 104 and a swollen throat it was perfectly reasonable for her to ask her boyfriend to call on her behalf – deepened rather than alleviated his grumpiness. He’d been counting on Robin driving him into Kent in her old Land Rover, and the prospect of several hours in her company had been the only point in favour of keeping this appointment. A mixture of professionalism and masochism had stopped him cancelling, so after a quick shower and change of clothes at his attic flat in Denmark Street, he’d set out for the village of Temple Ewell, in Kent.

Having to drive himself wasn’t only depressing, but also physically painful. The hamstring in the leg on which a prosthesis had replaced the calf, ankle and foot was tight and throbbing, because his sojourn in Cornwall had involved a lot of heavy lifting.

Ten days previously, he’d dashed down to Truro because his elderly uncle had suffered his second stroke. Strike’s sister, Lucy, had been helping Ted pack up for his imminent removal to a nursing home in London when, in her words, ‘his face went funny and he couldn’t answer me’. Ted had died twelve hours after Strike had arrived at the hospital, his niece and nephew holding his hands.

Strike and Lucy had then proceeded to their uncle’s home in St Mawes, which had been left to them jointly, to arrange and attend the funeral, and to make decisions about the house’s contents. Predictably, Lucy had been horrified by her brother’s suggestion that they might hire professionals to empty the place once they’d removed those sentimental items the family wanted to keep. She couldn’t bear the idea of strangers touching any of it: the old Tupperware once used for picnics on the beach, their uncle’s threadbare gardening trousers, the jar of spare buttons kept carefully by their late aunt, some of them belonging to dresses long since donated to jumble sales. Feeling guilty that Lucy had had to cope with Ted’s final lapse from consciousness alone, Strike acceded to her wishes, remaining in St Mawes to lug boxes, nearly all of which were labelled ‘Lucy’, out of the house into a rented van, to throw rubbish into a hired skip and take regular breaks in which he administered tea and comfort to his sister, whose eyes had been constantly red from dust and weeping.

Lucy believed the stress of Ted’s removal to a nursing home had brought on his fatal stroke, and Strike had had to force himself not to become impatient with her repeated bursts of self-recrimination, doing his utmost not to match her fractiousness with ill-temper, not to snap, nor to become irritable when explaining that just because he didn’t want to take more of the objects associated with the most stable parts of their childhood, it didn’t mean he wasn’t suffering as much as she was from the loss of the man who’d been his only true father figure. All Strike had taken for himself were Ted’s Royal Military Police red beret, his ancient fishing hat, his old ‘priest’ (a wooden cosh with which to finish off fish still fighting for life), and a handful of faded photos. These items were currently sitting in a shoe box inside the holdall Strike hadn’t yet had time to unpack.

Mile by mile, with no company except the emotional hangover of the past ten days and the aching of his hamstring, the dislike Strike had already taken towards today’s prospective client mounted. Decima Mullins had the kind of accent he associated with the many wealthy, wronged wives who’d come to his detective agency hoping to prove their husbands’ infidelity or criminality in hope of securing a better divorce settlement. On the evidence of their only phone conversation to date, she was melodramatic and entitled. She’d said she couldn’t possibly visit Strike’s office in Denmark Street, for reasons she’d disclose in person, and insisted that she was only prepared to discuss her problem face to face at her house in Kent. All she’d deigned to divulge so far was that she wanted something proven, and as Strike couldn’t imagine any possible investigative scenario that didn’t involve proving something, he wasn’t particularly grateful for the pointer.

In this unpropitious mood he proceeded along Canterbury Road through a landscape of bare trees and sodden fields. At last, windscreen wipers still swishing and clunking, he turned up a narrow, puddled track to the left, following a sign to Delamore Lodge.

2

The house to which Strike had driven wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Far from being a country manor, Delamore Lodge was a small, run-down dwelling of dark stone that resembled an abandoned chapel, set in a wild garden that looked as though it hadn’t been touched in years. As Strike parked, he noticed that one of the Gothic windows had several cracked panes which had been covered from the inside with what looked like a black bin bag. Some of the roof tiles were missing. Viewed against an ominous November sky and through driving rain, Delamore Lodge was the kind of place local children might easily believe to be inhabited by a witch.

Placing his fake foot carefully, because sodden leaves from a few bare trees had formed a slimy carpet on the uneven path, Strike approached the oak front door and knocked. It opened seconds later.

Strike’s mental image of Decima Mullins as a well-groomed blonde in tailored tweed could hardly have been wider of the mark. He found himself facing a pale, dumpy woman whose long, straggly brown hair had greying roots and which looked as though it hadn’t been cut in a long time. She was wearing black tracksuit bottoms and a thick black woollen poncho. In conjunction with the wild garden and the ramshackle house, her outfit made Strike wonder whether he was looking at an upper-class eccentric who’d turned her back on society to paint bad pictures or throw wonky pots. It was a type he failed to find endearing.

‘Miss Mullins?’

‘Yes. You’re Cormoran?’

‘That’s me,’ said Strike, noticing that she got his first name right. Most people said ‘Cameron’.

‘Could I see some ID?’

Given how unlikely it was that a roving burglar had decided to turn up at her house by daylight in a BMW, at exactly the same time she was expecting a detective she’d summoned into Kent, Strike resented having to stand in the downpour while fumbling in his pocket for his driving licence. Once he’d shown it to her, she moved aside to let him enter a cramped hall, which seemed unusually full of umbrella stands and shoe racks, as though successive owners had added their own without removing the older ones. Strike, who’d endured too much squalor in his childhood, was unsympathetic to untidiness and dirtiness in those capable of tackling them, and his negative impression of this dowdy upper-class woman intensified. Possibly some of his disapproval showed in his expression because Decima said,

‘This used to be my great-aunt’s house. It was tenanted until a few months ago and they didn’t look after the place. I’m going to do it up and sell it.’

There were, however, no signs of redecoration or renovation. The wallpaper in the hall had torn in places and one of the overhead lamps was lacking a bulb.

Strike followed Decima into a poky kitchen, which had an old-fashioned range and worn flagstones that looked as though they’d been there hundreds of years. A wooden table was surrounded by mismatched chairs. Possibly, Strike thought, eyes on a red leather notebook lying on the table, his hostess was an aspiring poet. This, in his view, was a step down even from pottery.

‘Before we start,’ said Decima, turning to look up at Strike, ‘I need you to promise me something.’

‘OK,’ said Strike.

The light from the old-fashioned lamp hanging overhead didn’t flatter her round, rather flat face. If better groomed, she might have attained a mild prettiness, but the overall impression was one of neglectful indifference to her appearance. She’d made no attempt to conceal her purple eyebags or what looked like a nasty case of rosacea on both nose and cheeks.

‘You keep things confidential for clients, don’t you?’

‘There’s a standard contract,’ said Strike, unsure what he was being asked.

‘Yes, I know there’d be a contract, that’s not what I mean. I don’t want anyone to know where I’m living.’

‘I can’t see why I’d need—’

‘I want an assurance you won’t tell anyone where I am.’

‘OK,’ said Strike again. He suspected it might not take much for Decima Mullins to start shouting or (and after the last ten days, he’d find this even less palatable) crying.

‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘D’you want coffee?’

‘That’d be great, thanks.’

‘You can sit down.’

She proceeded to the range, on which a pewter pot was sitting.

The chair creaked under Strike’s weight, the rain drummed on the intact windows, and the black bin bag stuck over the cracked panes with gaffer tape rustled in the wind. Apart from themselves, the house seemed to be deserted. Strike noticed that Decima’s poncho was stained in places, as though she’d been wearing it for days. The back of her hair was also matted in places.

Watching her make heavy work of brewing coffee, opening and closing cupboards as though she kept forgetting where things were, and muttering under her breath, Strike’s opinion of her shifted again. There were three kinds of people he was unusually good at identifying on short acquaintance: liars, addicts and the mentally ill. He had a hunch Decima Mullins might belong in the third category, and while this might excuse her ill-kempt appearance, it made him no keener to take her case.

At last she carried two mugs of coffee and a jug of milk over to the table, then, for no obvious reason, sat down extremely slowly as though she thought she might do herself an injury by hitting the chair too hard.

‘So,’ said Strike, pulling out his notebook and pen, more eager than ever to get this interview over with, ‘you said on the phone you want something proven, one way or another?’

‘Yes, but I need to say something else first.’

‘OK,’ said Strike, for the third time, and he tried to look receptive.

‘I wanted you because I know you’re the best,’ said Decima Mullins, ‘but I was in two minds about hiring you, because we know people in common.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. My brother’s Valentine Longcaster. I know you don’t like each other much.’

This information came as such a surprise that Strike was temporarily lost for words. Valentine, whom he’d met infrequently and always reluctantly over a certain period of his life, was a good-looking, floppy-haired, extravagantly dressed man who worked as a stylist for various arty glossy magazines. He’d also been one of the closest friends of the late Charlotte Campbell, Strike’s sometime fiancée, who’d died by suicide a few months previously.

‘So “Mullins” is…?’

‘My married name, from when I was in my twenties.’

‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Right.’

Could she be telling the truth? He couldn’t remember Valentine mentioning a sister, but then, Strike had always paid as little attention as possible to anything Valentine said. If they were indeed brother and sister, Strike had rarely met a pair of siblings who resembled each other less, although in some ways that might add credence to Decima’s story: it would have been perfectly in character for Valentine to hush up this squat, grubby-looking woman, because he was a man who placed a very high premium on looks and stylishness.

‘It’s especially important you don’t tell Valentine where I am, or – or anything else I might ask you to keep private,’ said Decima.

‘OK,’ said Strike, for the fourth time.

‘And you know Sacha Legard, too, don’t you?’

Now starting to feel as though some personal devil had decided to devote its day to kicking him repeatedly in the balls, because Sacha was Charlotte’s half-brother, Strike said,

‘You’re related to him, too, are you?’

‘No,’ said Decima, ‘but he’s involved in… in what I want you to investigate. I never really knew Charlotte Campbell, though. I only met her a couple of times.’

Some might have considered her flat tone insensitive, given Charlotte’s recent death in a blood-filled bathtub, but as Strike was more than happy to dispense with prurient questions or faux sympathy, he said,

‘Right, well, why don’t you explain what it is you want me to do?’

‘I need you to find out who a body was,’ said Decima, eyeing him with a mixture of wariness and defiance.

‘A body,’ repeated Strike.

‘Yes. You probably read about it in the papers. It was the man they found in the vault of a silver shop, in June.’

Five months previously, Strike had been almost entirely focused on a complex case the agency had been investigating, and had had little attention to spare for much else, but he remembered this news story, which had generated a short but intense burst of media coverage.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘If it’s the one I’m thinking of,’ (though God knew why he was saying this, because how many men were found dead in silver vaults, on average, per month, in London?) ‘the police identified him quite quickly.’

‘No, they didn’t,’ said Decima, her tone brooking no contradiction.

‘I thought,’ said Strike, though what he really meant was, ‘as I accurately recall’, ‘he turned out to be a convicted thief?’

‘No,’ said Decima, shaking her head, ‘he wasn’t that thief. Not definitely.’

‘I’m pretty sure that’s what I read,’ said Strike, tugging his phone out of his pocket. He was hopeful, now, he’d be able to get out of here within ten minutes, because she was giving him a cast-iron reason for refusing a case he definitely didn’t want. ‘Yeah, see here?’ said Strike, having typed a few words into Google. ‘“… the dead man, who posed as salesman William Wright during his two weeks’ employment at Ramsay Silver, has now been identified as convicted armed robber Jason Knowles, 28, of Haringey.”’

‘It wasn’t definite,’ insisted Decima. ‘I know a policeman, and he told me so.’

‘Which policeman is this?’ asked Strike, who had prior experience of those who asserted imaginary ties to the police to justify their lunatic theories.

‘Sir Daniel Gayle. He’s a retired commissioner. His daughter works for me. I asked her whether I could talk to Sir Daniel, and he spoke to some people, then told me the police never got DNA confirmation. They never proved it was that Knowles man, not beyond doubt.’

‘What’s your interest in finding out who the man was?’ asked Strike.

‘I just need to know,’ said Decima. Her voice was trembling. ‘I need to. I need to know.’

Strike drank some coffee to give himself thinking time. Odd features of the case of the body in the vault came back to him. The body had been naked and heavily mutilated, which had naturally fanned the flames of press interest before the victim had been revealed as a violent criminal, at which point, public sympathy and interest had dwindled considerably. Knowles, the press reported, had so severely beaten the female cashier at a building society he’d previously robbed that she’d been left with a fractured skull and seizures. In fact, there’d been general agreement that, however nasty his end, Jason Knowles had probably had it coming.

‘Are you worried the man was someone you know?’ Strike asked.

‘Yes. I think . . no,’ said Decima, suddenly passionate, tears appearing in her eyes, ‘I know it was him, and… I need proof, because… I need proof. I just need somebody to prove it.’

‘Who exactly—?’

‘He was someone very close to me, and he matched the body exactly, and it all fits: the silver, and him being m-murdered, and he disappeared at the same time – it was him. I know it was.’

The lonely house, the tearful woman: Strike felt as though he’d been plunged back into the situation he’d left in Cornwall, but with far stranger overtones. Unable to think of anything else to do, he flicked open his notebook.

‘All right, what similarities are there between the body and the man you know?’

‘I’ve written it all down,’ said Decima at once, reaching for the red notebook, and she flicked to the back of what was revealed to be a weekly diary, where Strike saw several densely written pages. ‘My friend was twenty-six – the press said the body was of a man in his mid-twenties to mid-thirties. William Wright was left-handed; so was my friend. The body was blood group A positive – that’s the same. Five feet six or seven – that matches. Wright was interviewed for the job on the nineteenth of May – I didn’t see my friend that day. Wright moved into a rented room on May the twenty-first – that fits, because my friend was moving out of his house that weekend – I wanted him to bring all his things to my place, but he wouldn’t. I didn’t understand where he was putting it all. It must have been this rented room.’

Having tried and failed to think of a more tactful way of posing his next question, Strike said,

‘And why would your friend have changed his name and gone to work in a silver shop?’

‘Because – it’s complicated.’

‘Have you reported him missing?’

‘Yes, of course, but the police aren’t helping, they just took his aunt’s word for it that—’

She broke off, then said in a higher-pitched voice.

‘Look, I know it was him, I know it was, all right?’

Strike, Robin and their subcontractors had a name for the kind of people who’d emailed and phoned their office in increasing numbers as the agency’s profile grew, desperate to tell the detectives that they were being spied on by domestic appliances, that Satanic rings were being run out of Westminster, or that they were in relationships with celebrities who were unaccountably withholding their affections due to malign forces: Gatesheads. The distinguishing characteristics of a Gateshead were an irrational belief, a dislike of common sense questions and an inability to contemplate alternative explanations for their dilemmas. The woman sitting opposite Strike was currently presenting a classic set of symptoms.

‘You said Sir Daniel Gayle’s daughter works for you,’ Strike said, hoping to unravel the problem by tugging on a different thread. ‘What exactly—?’

‘I’ve got a restaurant,’ said Decima. ‘The Happy Carrot, on Sloane Street. She’s my maître d’.’

Strike happened to know the restaurant in question, which, in spite of the name, wasn’t a vegan café but a very well-reviewed and expensive eatery offering organically produced food, to which Strike had recently tailed an unfaithful commercial pilot and his mistress. Unless Decima was lying about being Valentine’s sister she came from money: the Longcasters were a very wealthy family, and Decima and Valentine’s father, whom Strike had never met, but about whom he knew far more than he’d ever wanted to, owned one of the most expensive private members’ clubs in London. Trying yet another tack, he asked,

‘How well did you know the man you think was the body in the vault?’

‘Very well,’ said Decima. ‘I—’

To Strike’s consternation, something now stirred beneath Decima’s poncho, as though her breasts had developed independent motion. Then, making Strike jump, an ear-splitting screech echoed through the kitchen.

‘Oh God!’ said Decima in panic, scrambling to her feet. ‘I hoped he’d sleep—’

She now struggled out of her poncho, which caused her fine hair to stand up in the static, to reveal a very small baby strapped to her in a fleecy sling.

‘You mustn’t tell anyone about him!’ Decima told Strike frantically over the baby’s squalling. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone I’ve got a baby!’

Strike’s disconcerted expression appeared to trigger still more panic in Decima.

‘He’s mine! I can show you the birth certificate! I had him three weeks ago! But nobody knows about him, and you mustn’t tell them!’

Robin had chosen a fine fucking day to get a sore throat, thought Strike, as Decima tried and failed to extricate herself from the harness attaching the screaming baby to her. Finally, and mostly because he wanted the noise to stop, he went to her aid, successfully prising apart a clasp in which part of the poncho had become entangled.

‘Thank you – I think he’s hungry – I’m feeding him myself…’

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Strike at once, more than happy to go and sit in his car if that was what it took not to have to watch.

‘No, I – if you’ll just turn your back—’

He willingly did as he was bidden, turning to stare through the window not covered with a bin bag.

The baby’s screams dwindled; Strike heard the scraping of chair legs and a small whimper of pain from Decima. He tried not to visualise what was happening behind him, and hoped to God she wasn’t one of those women who’d happily bare their breasts in front of strangers. At last, after what felt much longer than a couple of minutes, she said in a shaky voice,

‘It’s all right, you can turn round.’

Decima had pulled the poncho back over herself and the baby was once more hidden from view. As Strike sat down again, Decima said tremulously,

‘Please, you can’t tell anyone I’ve got him! Nobody knows, except the people at the hospital!’

While he’d thought she was living here alone, Strike had been agreeable to keeping her secrets, notwithstanding his suspicion that she wasn’t in perfect mental health. She’d given no indication of suicidality, and she had family; if she wanted to hide out at her miserable inherited house, it wasn’t any of his business. However, Strike didn’t want the burden of being the only person who knew this baby existed, outside the hospital.

‘Haven’t you got a—?’ He struggled to think of someone whose responsibility women who’d just given birth might be. ‘A health visitor, or—?’

‘I don’t need one. You can’t tell anyone about Lion. I need a guarantee—’

Strike, who was fairly sure she’d just told him her son’s name was ‘Lion’, which didn’t strengthen his reliance on her mental health, said,

‘Why don’t you want anyone to know you’ve got a child?’

Decima burst into tears. When it became clear she wasn’t going to stop any time soon, Strike looked around for kitchen roll, saw none, so pushed himself back into a standing position and limped off in search of toilet roll.

The small bathroom off the hall had an old-fashioned chain-operated cistern and a dead spider plant on the windowsill. He took the entire roll off its holder, returned to the kitchen and set it in front of the weeping Decima, who sobbed her thanks and groped one-handed for a few sheets. Strike sat back down in front of his open notebook.

‘This man you think was killed in the vault,’ said Strike. ‘Is he your baby’s father?’

Decima began to sob even more loudly, pressing toilet roll to her eyes. Strike took this as a ‘yes’.

‘He hasn’t left me!’

She’d already told Strike her ‘friend’ was twenty-six, and Strike judged her own age to be nearing forty. Strike’s own mother had married a man seventeen years younger than herself, at whose hands Strike remained convinced (though the jury hadn’t agreed) she’d died. Jeff Whittaker had married Leda Strike for the money he’d believed she had, and had been furious to discover that it was tied up in ways that meant he couldn’t touch it. In consequence, Cormoran Strike wasn’t very well disposed to much younger men who attached themselves to wealthy older women.

‘Everyone says he’s left me!’ sobbed Decima. ‘Valentine – he was vile about me and Rupe, from the start – he actually said to me, “you’d better not get knocked up by him.” He actually said that! And I was already pregnant! He was g-glad when Rupe disappeared! And my f-father said Rupe was only after my money – it isn’t true! When we met, it was instant, like nothing I’ve ever felt before – it was as though I’d always known him, and Rupe f-felt exactly the same, he told me so – we had this incredible connection! It was as though we – we recognised each other, as though we’d known each other—’ don’t say in a previous life ‘—in a previous life!’

‘His name’s Rupert, is it?’ was Strike’s only response, picking up his pen again.

‘Y-yes… Rupert Fleetwood.’ Decima was struggling to pull herself together, and after a few gulps said, ‘Rupert Peter Bernard Christian Fleetwood… he was born on March the eighth, 1990, and he g-grew up in Zurich.’

‘Is he Swiss?’

‘No… his aunt married a Swiss man, and… when Rupe was two… his parents took him there for a v-visit… and his mum and dad went skiing… and there was an avalanche… and they were k-killed… so he was raised there, by his aunt and uncle. But he hated it in Zurich, he had a really unhappy childhood, he just wanted to get back to the UK, and f-finally he got to London, and then Sacha – Sacha’s Rupe’s cousin – suggested he try for a job at my father’s club, because Daddy’s Rupe’s godfather… and so, that’s how we m-met. I w-was splitting my time between Daddy’s club and my own place, because Daddy’s previous chef was fired…’

The news that Rupert was the cousin of Sacha Legard, who was an acclaimed actor and exceptionally good-looking, added weight to Strike’s suspicion that Rupert Fleetwood had been interested in Decima’s money rather than herself. If he resembled Sacha, he could probably have taken his pick of younger, more glamorous women.

‘How long were you and Rupert in a relationship?’

‘A y-year.’

‘Did Fleetwood know you were pregnant?’

‘Yes, and he was delighted, he was so, so happy!’ sobbed Decima. ‘But he was having some problems and – he’s proud, he wanted to fix things himself – but he’d never have left me for good, we were so in love – n-nobody understands!’

‘You mentioned him moving out of his house. You weren’t living together?’

‘Obviously we were going to, eventually, but he had things he needed to s-sort out first – he was trying to protect me!’

‘Protect you from what?’

‘He had someone after him, someone dangerous!’

‘Who was that?’

‘A drug dealer! And my f-father had – had called the police on him…’

‘Why did your father call the police?’

‘Because Rupe had taken – but I still think he had a right to it!’ said Decima shrilly.

‘A right to what?’

‘A… a nef.’

‘A what?’ said Strike, looking up. He’d never heard of such a thing.

‘It’s a big silver table ornament,’ said Decima, sketching an object some two feet square in the air with her free arm, ‘s-seventeenth century… in the shape of a ship… it used to b-belong to Rupe’s parents. D-Daddy and Peter Fleetwood used to play backgammon and bet, and one night they were drunk, Daddy w-went and won this nef from Peter…’

‘So Rupert thought he had a right to it, because it had once been his parents’?’

‘Y – no – look, right after Daddy won it from Peter, Peter and Veronica died! So you’d think he’d’ve g-given the nef back to Rupe, if not when he was a child, then when he needed money so badly! But he d-didn’t – his own godson! How c-could he c-call the police on him?’

Because he’d nicked his bloody silver, was Strike’s unsympathetic thought, but aloud he said,

‘He had a drug dealer after him too?’

‘Yes, but that was all Zac’s fault!’

‘Who’s Zac?’

‘Rupe’s housemate – he got mixed up in drugs, in coke, and there was this proper, real gangster after him, because Zac hadn’t paid what he’d promised, or something, and Zac ran for it, his parents got him a job out in Kenya, and Rupe got stuck with Zac’s rent and security deposit and then this awful dealer was pursuing Rupe for payment of Zac’s debt, threatening him—’

‘D’you know what the drug dealer’s name was?’

‘They called him Dredge, I don’t know his real name. He was literally threatening to kill Rupe unless he got his money, because he thought Rupe was rich, like Zac, but he’s not – there’s hardly anything left in his trust fund, he could barely cover all the outstanding bills Zac left him with, because his aunt and uncle used nearly all the money left by Rupe’s parents to send him to a b-boarding school near Zurich he loathed – and then my father sacked him from D-Dino’s, and that’s why he took the nef, because he was desperate! I wanted to help him out financially, but he refused, because he knew people were saying he was only with me for my m-money!’

Strike strongly suspected there were things he wasn’t being told. Fleetwood seemed to have had no scruples about brazen theft, so it seemed unlikely he’d refused a loan or a gift of money from his girlfriend. Strike thought it far more likely that the young man had shown a token reluctance to let Decima help him pay off the dealer, trying to maintain the fiction that he loved her for herself, and assuming that she’d continue to press the offer. When she’d taken him at his word, he’d turned to other ways of cashing in on the wealthy Longcasters.

‘OK,’ said Strike, turning a page in his notebook. ‘When’s the last time you saw Rupert?’

‘On S-Sunday the fifteenth of May,’ said Decima thickly, groping again for the red diary. ‘I c-cooked him dinner. He was r-really worried about Dredge coming for him, and about being unemployed, with the baby coming. So, you see, don’t you?’ said Decima, her eyes imploring. ‘He must have taken the nef to that shop, Ramsay Silver, and they agreed to take it, but they c-couldn’t let him have the money until they’d found a buyer! And then Ramsay Silver had a vacancy, and Rupe t-took it, just to have some money coming in! He’ll have thought, once the nef was sold, he could get Dredge off his back, and stop being William Wright, and come back to me! B-but then Dredge must have tracked him down and k-killed him!’

This was the first time Strike had ever met somebody who wanted an assurance their loved one was dead, rather than alive. This, he supposed, was the most extreme manifestation of a phenomenon with which he was only too familiar: a woman absolutely refusing to accept that her partner wasn’t what she thought him.

‘When did you last hear from Rupert?’

‘On the t-twenty-second of May… we talked on the phone. He was moving out of his house that weekend, so we d-didn’t talk for long… we – we—’

Sobs overcame her once more. Strike drank more of his now cool coffee. At last Decima said,

‘We argued. I wanted Rupe to j-just give the nef back to Daddy, but he refused, which wasn’t like him, he wasn’t usually like that, at all – he just told me it was his and he was keeping it! So you see’ – her voice rose to a wail – ‘it’s my fault, what happened! It’s my fault he went to Ramsay Silver! He thought he had nobody on his side, he was desperate… and then he was k-killed! His phone’s dead, his social media stopped – I went to the police, I was frantic with worry, and they didn’t get back to me for weeks, and in the end they told me R-Rupe’s in New York, which is just ridiculous, he’s not, I know he’s not!’

‘Why do the police think he’s in New York?’

‘They took his aunt’s word for it! She c-claims Rupe rang her on the twenty-fifth of May and told her he’d got a job there, but that’s ridiculous, he doesn’t know anyone in New York, what would he do there?’

‘What’s Rupert’s aunt’s name?’

‘Anjelica Wallner. She’s an awful woman, Rupe hates her! That’s what’s so ridiculous – he wouldn’t tell Anjelica anything!’

‘Have you spoken to Mrs Wallner yourself?’

‘Yes, but she just shouted “he’s in America!” and told me to stop p-pestering her! Rupe… well, he hadn’t told her we were together… she hates my father, or something…’

‘What about Rupert’s other relatives? Friends?’

‘Nobody’s seen him since the twenty-second of May! Sacha won’t even take my calls any more! All he said was, “if Anjelica says he’s in New York, that’s where he is!”

‘Nobody’s taking this seriously! Rupe’s friend Albie says he thinks Rupe went away to “get his head together” but even Albie’s stopped answering my calls now! Sacha won’t talk to me – Valentine’s been so vicious about it all, I came down here to have the baby in peace—

‘I need Lion to know his daddy only went away to try and fix things, and he never meant to leave us for good! I’ve got to prove it! And then I’ll be able to give Rupe a proper f-funeral… and at least we’ll have… a g-grave to visit. I can’t go on like this – I need you to prove it was Rupe in that vault!’ wailed Decima Mullins, her eyes as pink and swollen as a piglet’s, her thief of a boyfriend’s baby hidden beneath her dirty poncho.

3

Robin Ellacott had lied to her detective partner about having a sore throat and a high fever. In fact, she was currently lying in a hospital bed on a morphine drip, determined that as few people as possible should know why she was there.

The previous afternoon, Robin had been crossing the concourse of Victoria station in pursuit of a surveillance target when she’d suddenly felt as though a red-hot knife had pierced her lower right side. Her knees had buckled and she’d vomited. A pair of middle-aged women had hurried to her assistance and, muttering in panic about burst appendixes, had hailed a station attendant. In a remarkably short period of time, Robin had been gurney-ed out of the station to a waiting ambulance. She had a hazy memory of the paramedics’ faces, of more searing pain, and the bumping of the trolley as she was sped into the hospital, then of the icy ultrasound wand on her belly, and the anaesthetist’s masked face. Her next clear memory was of waking up, being told that she’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and that her fallopian tube had burst.

Robin had phoned her boyfriend, CID officer Ryan Murphy, as soon as she’d been able to reach her mobile, but he was too far across London to have any realistic chance of reaching her before evening visiting time had ended. She’d begged Murphy, who was horrified by what had happened, to call Strike with the excuse of the fever and sore throat, and tell him she wouldn’t be able to drive him into Kent. Robin had also impressed upon her boyfriend that her parents weren’t, on any account, to know what had happened. The very last thing Robin needed right now was her mother hovering over her, and blaming what had happened on Robin’s job, which she was sure, however unfairly, to do.

The shock of her sudden hospitalisation, and the reason for it, had been such that twenty-four hours later, Robin still felt as though she’d slipped through some kind of portal into a reality that wasn’t her own. She’d barely slept the previous night, due to the low moans of an elderly woman in the next bed. That morning, Robin had been wheeled into a newly vacant single room, for which she was grateful, though without being entirely sure what she’d done to deserve it, except that one of the older nurses on duty seemed to pity her for having had no visitors.

Groggy though she was from the combination of sleeplessness and morphine, Robin had spent a lot of the morning trying to retrace events in her head, to work out when the contraceptive failure must have happened, given the likely date of conception given by her surgeon. She now thought she’d worked out when the mistake must have been made, and she dreaded having to talk to Murphy about it when he arrived in the afternoon. Most of all she felt a vast sense of self-recrimination, for not having managed her own body better, for having, as she saw it, brought this avoidable catastrophe upon herself.

She was lying watching a murmuration of starlings twirl across the leaden sky outside her window when her mobile rang. She picked it up and saw her mother was calling. Unable to face the conversation, she let it ring. Linda gave up at exactly the moment the door of Robin’s room opened. She looked around to see the broad, genial face of her surgeon, Mr Butler.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, smiling.

‘Hello,’ said Robin.

‘How’re we feeling?’ he asked, taking her chart from the end of the bed and casting an eye over it.

‘Fine,’ said Robin, as Mr Butler pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘No pain?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Good. Well, now… did you know you were pregnant?’

‘No,’ said Robin. Not wanting to seem stupid, she said, ‘I had to come off the pill for a bit, but we’ve been using condoms. I suppose one of them must have split, and we didn’t notice.’

‘A shock, then?’ said Mr Butler.

‘It was, yes,’ said Robin, with polite understatement.

‘Well, as I told you yesterday, we had no choice but to remove the ruptured tube. It’s very fortunate you got here so quickly, because it could’ve been life-threatening, but I’m afraid there’s an issue you might not have been aware of,’ said Mr Butler, no longer smiling.

‘What’s that?’ asked Robin.

‘We found significant scarring on the fallopian tube we removed. We had a quick look at the other one, and it’s exactly the same.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

‘Have you ever had a diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘To your knowledge, have you ever had chlamydia?’

The dart of dread was blunted by the morphine, but Robin felt it nonetheless.

‘Yes, when I was nineteen, but they gave me antibiotics.’

‘Right,’ said Mr Butler, nodding slowly. ‘Well, by the looks of it, the antibiotics didn’t work. It can happen. Did you continue to have symptoms?’

‘Not really,’ said Robin. There’d been some pain, certainly, in the months following the rape that had ended her university career, but she’d told herself it was psychosomatic. The last thing she’d wanted at the time were any more intimate physical examinations. ‘No, I thought it had gone.’

‘Well, the symptoms are variable, they can be easy to miss. Can you remember when you were next given antibiotics?’

‘I think… maybe a year later?’ she said, struggling to remember. ‘I got strep throat. I was given more then.’

‘Right, well, that lot probably did the trick, because there’s no current infection. Unfortunately, though, you’ve been left with quite a lot of damage. I think it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to conceive naturally, I’m afraid.’

Robin simply looked at him. Possibly he thought she hadn’t understood, because he continued,

‘The embryo couldn’t get past the scarring, you see, which is why it implanted in the tube and ruptured it. And as I say, the other side’s just as bad.’

‘Right,’ said Robin.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, looking back at her chart.

‘Thirty-two,’ said Robin.

‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with the ovaries. If you’re planning on children, though, I’d consider freezing your eggs sooner rather than later. Your best chance would be IVF.’

‘OK,’ said Robin.

‘And you should be very careful with contraception, going forwards. There’s a significant chance the same thing could happen in the remaining tube, if you conceive accidentally again.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ said Robin.

‘Good.’

Mr Butler got to his feet and replaced Robin’s chart at the end of the bed.

‘We’re going to keep you another night, but assuming you’re going on well, I think you’ll be able to go home tomorrow.’

‘Great,’ said Robin. ‘Thank you.’

The surgeon left.

Robin turned to look out of the window again, but the starlings had gone; the pewter-coloured sky was empty. Her mind was blank. She couldn’t have said what she was feeling. She was simply numb.

She ought to have gone back on the pill, of course, after being forced to stop taking it during the four months she’d recently spent undercover in a cult where all contraception had been banned. The repercussions of Robin’s stay with the United Humanitarian Church were still playing out in the newspapers and on TV. Investigators had finished recovering all the bodies buried in unmarked graves on the land where the cult had first started; its originators, a couple called the Waces, were in custody, along with the upper echelons of the UHC’s management, and attempts were being made to trace many trafficked babies. Celebrity supporters were trying to backtrack, with various degrees of success; a famous novelist was currently in hiding, while a young actress had been dropped from her new film after she was revealed to be one of the cult leader’s ‘spirit wives’.

The role the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency had played in bringing down the cult had been minimised by both police and the agency itself. Robin had given a full, detailed statement of all she’d witnessed at Chapman Farm to the police, but, to her immense relief, she’d been told she wouldn’t be required to give evidence in court. Emboldened by the public exposure of the UHC’s regime of faked supernatural events, hard labour and brainwashing, hundreds of former members were continuing to come forwards to give their accounts. For decades, the UHC had wielded its money and power to silence all critics; now it seemed that every few days there was another television or online interview with someone else the cult had harmed. A mere two months after Chapman Farm had been raided, the first memoir of an ex-member appeared and shot immediately to the top of the bestseller charts.

All of this should have been gratifying to Robin, and she was indeed deeply relieved that the so-called church appeared to have been dealt a mortal blow, but she found the endless news coverage far more traumatising than she’d expected. She’d rather not have been reminded about the Retreat Rooms, where cult members demonstrated their spiritual purity by having unprotected sex with anyone who wanted it; she’d have liked to expunge from her mind all memories of the five-sided Temple where she’d been almost drowned; she’d have been delighted never again to see the pictures of the dark woods that kept being shown in the papers.

And, of course, it was impossible to completely extinguish all trace of the agency’s role in bringing down the cult. While there were enough sordid details of what had gone on at Chapman Farm to keep journalists busy for months, and nobody except those very closest to the investigation knew the specifics of what Robin had gone through, there’d been press calls to the agency’s office, and her name, and that of the agency, had been mentioned in some of the coverage. An enterprising young tabloid reporter had tried to badger Robin into comment as she came and went from Denmark Street, until he was literally chased off by one of the agency’s subcontractors, Midge, who advised the man ‘get the fook out of it, she’s got nothing to fookin’ tell you, you fookin’ prick’.

Robin worked steadily through all of this, determined not to admit to anyone how fragile she felt about it all. By her own choice, there’d only been a one-week break to decompress after those months of non-stop, high-stress work, but she hadn’t wanted to add extra hormones to what she privately acknowledged to herself was a very shaky state of mind. So her pills had remained in her dressing table drawer for the time being, although she’d looked up the efficacy of condoms before deciding to rely on them for a while (she hadn’t left everything to chance) and they were ninety-eight per cent effective, if used correctly.

If used correctly.

Robin’s mobile rang again. She stretched out a hand, picked it up and saw Strike’s number. Glancing towards the glass panel in the door, in case another medic was about to walk in, and glad of a chance to think about something other than her fallopian tubes, she decided to risk it, and answered.

4

‘Hi,’ said Strike. ‘How’s the throat? Can you talk? If not, I’ll email you later.’

‘I can talk,’ said Robin. Her voice was slightly hoarse, because the hospital room was so warm, which was helpful to her cover story. ‘I’m really sorry I couldn’t drive you. Where are you?’

‘Parked outside a pub called the Fox,’ said Strike, watching the rain splattering on his windscreen. ‘I’ve just left Decima Mullins.’

‘How was she?’

‘There’s no single-word answer for that,’ said Strike. ‘I want your opinion.’

He described the interview he’d just had, outlining Decima’s theory that her boyfriend had been the body found in the vault of a silver shop in Holborn.

‘Oh God,’ said Robin, when Strike had finished speaking. ‘Poor woman. So we’re supposed to track down Rupert Fleetwood for her?’

‘Nope,’ said Strike.

‘What?’

‘She’s very clear about the fact that she doesn’t want him found alive. Any time I came close to hinting he might just have buggered off because of all the trouble he’d got himself into, she had another meltdown. We’re in proper Gateshead territory. It’s identify that body, or nothing.’

‘Tell me about this murder at the silver shop,’ Robin said. She’d been undercover at the cult without access to news in June, and this was the first she’d heard of it.

‘Salesman calling himself William Wright was hired to work at Ramsay Silver, which he did until he was found dead in the vault two weeks later. Police theory is, he went back with accomplices by night to rob the place, but a fight broke out and he was killed. I remember thinking the story was a bit off when I read it—’

‘How was it off?’ asked Robin.

‘Well, speed tends to be the essential component of a heist, doesn’t it? If they were slick enough to get into the vault you’d think they’d be smart enough not to have a punch-up mid-job, but a load of valuable silver was nicked the night he was killed, so it’s hard to see what other explanation fits other than a burglary that turned into accidental killing. Before they identified the corpse the story got a lot of coverage, because the body was badly mutilated – the police seemed to think that was done to prevent identification – and the shop deals in masonic stuff and is right beside the Master Lodge of All England or something—’

‘Conspiracy theories?’

‘By the lorry-load, but once the papers found out it wasn’t a masonic ritual killing, they lost interest.’

‘And the dead man was definitely this thief?’

‘Well,’ said Strike reluctantly, ‘Mullins claims the ID of the body wasn’t definite and she might, possibly, be right, because I’ve just had a look, and in all the news reports where the bloke in charge of the investigation is quoted directly, he says he’s “ninety-nine per cent certain” it’s Jason Knowles but then appeals for more information. I’ve had a quick Google, and I can’t find anything more definite since, no “DNA has now confirmed”, “we have proven beyond doubt” – and they haven’t caught the killers or found the silver, either. And the retired police commissioner Decima claims to know, Sir Daniel Gayle, is real.

‘But none of that means Fleetwood was in the vault. She’s tried to construct a story around the fact that he had this bit of old silver to sell, but for her theory to be right, this drug dealer who was threatening to kill Fleetwood if he didn’t pay off his housemate’s debts would have had to track him down to the shop where he was pretending to be Wright, get in there by night with a couple of mates, open up the vault, murder Fleetwood, who’s conveniently there alone at one in the morning, carve up the body, remove this haul of silver, reset the alarm on the vault, leave the shop and lock it up behind him without leaving any trace of his presence, then scarper with a large sack full of masonic candlesticks, or whatever was taken. And I think you’ll agree that if he managed all that, the man wouldn’t have needed his money back, because he’d be a fucking genie.’

Robin’s laugh was cut short by a small exclamation of pain, because she’d experienced a sharp twinge in the operation site.

‘You all right?’ said Strike.

‘Yes, just my throat.’

‘Personally, I think Auntie in Switzerland pulled some strings to get him away from his cradle-snatching girlfriend, and he’s exactly where she says he is: New York.’

‘What d’you mean, “cradle-snatching”?’

‘Decima’s thirty-eight. I just Googled her.’

‘We’ve investigated enough men with wives twenty years younger than themselves, haven’t we?’ said Robin, a little coolly.

Too late Strike remembered that he didn’t want to suggest to Robin that there was anything wrong with age gaps between romantic partners.

‘I’m only – she’s not the kind of thirty-eight-year-old I can see your average twenty-six-year-old going for.’

‘Well, if he’s really in New York, it shouldn’t be too hard to prove.’

‘Except that she doesn’t want us to prove it. She’d literally rather believe he’s dead than that he left her. She’s called the baby “Lion”,’ Strike added inconsequentially.

‘As in Aslan?’ said Robin, smiling. She knew perfectly well how ludicrous Strike would find the name ‘Lion’.

‘Yeah.’

‘A lot of posh people call their kids strange things,’ said Robin.

‘As do nutters,’ said Strike. ‘Anyway, I’m calling for your opinion, because I don’t think it’s ethical to take her money.’

‘No… but it sounds as though she’ll just try and hire someone else.’

‘Oh, she will,’ said Strike, ‘and it’s the sort of case where you could bleed the client dry, if you were unscrupulous.’

There was a short silence, during which Robin stared at the ceiling of her hospital room, and Strike watched his exhaled vapour unfurl across the rain-spattered windscreen.

‘I think,’ said Strike at last, ‘I’ll tap a couple of police contacts and find out just how certain they are the body was Knowles. If it’s become a hundred per cent certainty since the news reports, I’ll tell Decima free of charge it wasn’t Fleetwood, and then maybe she’ll face up to reality.’

‘And if it’s still ninety-nine per cent?’ asked Robin, checking the time on her phone, because visiting hour was fast approaching.

‘Well,’ said Strike, whose Google search on Decima had confirmed that she was exactly who she claimed to be, ‘I’d say we could investigate just to put paid to her delusions, because at least we wouldn’t string her along, but in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that she and Fleetwood are both connected to people I hoped never to speak to again.’

‘Who?’

‘Valentine Longcaster and Sacha Legard.’

‘Sacha Legard, the actor?’ said Robin. ‘Why d—? Oh.’

The realisation had been a little delayed by the morphine.

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Sacha’s Rupert Fleetwood’s cousin, and Valentine’s Decima’s brother, who was one of Charlotte’s best friends.’

Immediately, both Strike and Robin thought about the last time Strike’s late fiancée had been mentioned between them, which had been over a month previously, on the day Strike had told Robin that Charlotte had been certain he was in love with his detective partner. In spite of the morphine, Robin now felt a strange mixture of anticipation and panic. Strike had opened his mouth to speak again when Robin suddenly said,

‘Strike, I’m really sorry, I’m going to have to go.’

Without waiting for his response, she hung up.

5

Robin had just seen visitors passing the glass panel in the door of her room, and sure enough – here was her boyfriend, tall, handsome, wearing a look of extreme anxiety and holding a bunch of red roses, several magazines and a large box of Maltesers.

‘Christ, Robin,’ muttered Murphy, taking in the drip and the hospital gown.

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin. ‘I’m fine.’

Murphy set down his gifts and bent to hug her, very gently.

‘I’m fine,’ Robin repeated, although even the simple act of raising her arms to hug him back caused her some pain.

Murphy dragged a chair to her bedside.

‘Tell me what the doctor said.’

To Robin’s alarm, a hard ball seemed suddenly to have lodged itself in her throat. She hadn’t cried since being admitted to hospital, and she didn’t want to cry now, but having to say out loud the things the surgeon had just told her was going to make what had happened real, rather than a strange interlude she could half-convince herself was a nightmare.

She managed to tell Murphy the substance of what she’d been told without shedding any tears, hating how dirty and ashamed it made her feel, to talk about the infection she hadn’t realised was quietly destroying her fallopian tubes. By the time she’d finished talking, he had his face in his hands.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered. ‘It must’ve… a condom must’ve split.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘Or come off. Or something.’

He looked up at her.

‘You think it happened that night we rowed.’

‘It was that night,’ said Robin, her throat constricted. ‘From the dates – that’s the only night it could have happened.’

‘You still think I was drunk?’ he asked, in a low voice.

‘No, of course I don’t,’ said Robin quickly. ‘I know it was an accident.’

Murphy had arrived late at Robin’s flat on the night in question, on edge, his manner brusque. He’d been dealing (and was still dealing) with a dreadful case at work. A six-year-old boy had been shot dead and his nine-year-old brother blinded when caught in the crossfire of what was believed to be a gang shooting in East London. The Met had no leads and the press were being highly critical of the way the investigation was being conducted.

Murphy hadn’t been rough during sex on the night in question so much as clumsy. When he’d withdrawn from her she’d asked whether the condom was intact, because she’d had misgivings, and he’d said, ‘yeah, ’s fine – I’m checking – ’s fine’ in a voice that was definitely slurred. When she’d asked, tentatively, whether he’d been drinking, Murphy, a recovered alcoholic, had blown up as Robin had never known him to do before. If his voice wasn’t razor sharp, he shouted, pulling his clothes back on, it was because he was fucking exhausted. What was she playing at, asking him if he was back on the booze; was a man not allowed to be tired? He’d then walked out.

Forty-five minutes later, he’d returned, full of contrition, and made an abject apology. Her question, he’d said, had reminded him of his ex-wife, who’d apparently refused to believe he was capable of sobriety even when he was on the wagon. His explanation had been perfectly cogent, there’d been no smell of alcohol on him, and Robin had felt ashamed. Her boyfriend had been nothing but understanding and supportive after she’d ended the undercover job that had left her physically drained and emotionally spent, and she felt immensely guilty that she’d failed to extend similar consideration to him when he was going through work difficulties of his own.

Robin had now had twenty-four hours alone in hospital to reflect on the fact that she ought to have gone to get the morning-after pill following that night, but she’d assumed her worries about the condom had been as baseless as her suspicion that Murphy had been drinking. In any case, she’d needed to be up early for a surveillance job. Thank God her mother would never need to know that she’d prioritised an investigation over her own health… thank God nobody would ever need to know…

‘I thought the thing was intact,’ muttered Murphy. ‘I swear I did.’

‘I know,’ said Robin, reaching for his hand. ‘This is on both of us. I should have gone for the morning-after pill, it was really stupid not to. But I’m going to restart the pill, because as I – as I say, the surgeon said there’s a high chance…’

Her voice broke. Murphy made to hug her again, but Robin held him off.

‘Sorry – I’m just sore…’

He passed her some tissues, then clasped her hand again.

‘Thank you for my flowers, they’re lovely,’ said Robin, blowing her nose.

‘When will they let you come home?’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Robin.

‘Shit, that quickly?’

‘What, you wanted a longer break from me?’ said Robin, forcing herself to smile.

‘No, but I’m supposed to be – I could see if I can get time off—’

‘Ryan, it’s fine, I’ll get a taxi back. It was keyhole surgery, it’s not a big deal. I haven’t even got an overnight bag to carry.’

‘But you’ll need help at home – let me call your parents—’

‘No,’ said Robin firmly. ‘I can’t stand them coming down here and fussing over me again. I can’t, Ryan. Promise you won’t tell them.’

‘OK,’ he said uneasily, ‘but I still think—’

‘I’ll order takeaways and lie on the sofa and watch TV,’ said Robin. ‘I don’t need anyone else – apart from you,’ she added, ‘obviously.’

6

As it was Saturday, Denmark Street was full of shoppers when Strike arrived back there that afternoon. As he limped past the familiar guitar shops and record stores, even more tired, sore and depressed than when he’d left them that morning, the opening chords of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ issued from an open door. In spite of his low mood, this caused Strike a brief moment of amusement: the owner of that particular shop had once told him he slapped an extra hundred quid on the price of any guitar bought by someone who played the riff in front of him.

He climbed the metal stairs with difficulty, let himself into his deserted place of work, made himself a mug of creosote-coloured tea, then took a pile of files through to the inner office, because he wanted to catch up on what he’d missed during the ten days he’d spent in Cornwall. However, before opening these, he turned again to Google and scrolled slowly down through the search results, pausing on a picture of Decima in a white chef’s coat and hat, which belonged to the website for the Happy Carrot. Here, she looked far younger and fairly pretty, with her hair swept back in a shining bun and a dimpled smile.

In a spirit of masochism, he then Googled Valentine Longcaster, which resulted in myriad images of Charlotte and Valentine together, falling out of clubs, attending launch parties and opening nights, Charlotte darkly beautiful, Valentine foppishly dressed, and both of them either beaming or bellowing with laughter.

Charlotte and Valentine hadn’t been just friends. To their great amusement, they’d been step-siblings during their childhood. For two acrimonious and explosive years, Charlotte’s mother, Tara, had been married to Dino, Valentine’s father, although their respective children had never lived under the same roof, because Valentine (and presumably Decima) had been spirited off to Los Angeles by their own mother, who’d rebounded onto a composer of film scores.

In the days when Strike had known her, Tara had often held forth when drunk on ‘that fucking bastard Longcaster’. Strike had often suspected that the friendship Charlotte struck up with Valentine in adulthood had been at least partly in defiance of the mother she loathed, although it was undeniable that Charlotte and Valentine had also had much in common: a waspish sense of humour, a love of cocaine, an endless quest for distraction and drama, and a detestation of all that was worthy and dull.

Looking at these pictures was the reverse of cheering, but Strike kept scrolling, pausing on a picture of Charlotte flanked by Valentine and her half-brother, the actor Sacha Legard, who strongly resembled her, except that he had vivid blue eyes instead of Charlotte’s hazel-flecked green. Legard was the product of Tara’s third and longest marriage, to a lord who owned a stately home called Heberley House. Strike couldn’t remember Sacha ever talking about a younger cousin in Switzerland, though this wasn’t much of a surprise: when Strike had known him, Sacha’s conversation had generally turned on himself.

Strike next searched for Rupert Fleetwood, and soon found an Instagram account on which there’d been no activity since May.

There were only a few selfies on Rupert’s page, and they showed him to be far from the junior Sacha Strike had imagined. Fleetwood was an ordinary-looking young man whose face would never have graced a magazine cover. He was pale, fair-haired, broad-shouldered and short-necked, with a very round face that put Strike in mind of an Edam cheese minus the wax rind.

One of the selfies showed Rupert and Decima standing in some unidentified park, both of them muffled against what looked like a chilly spring day, taken on March the eighth of the previous year. Neither of the couple had arranged themselves to best advantage before it was taken. Decima was windblown, a strand of dark hair in her eyes, her cheeks pink with cold, but with no stress-rosacea or eyebags. Rupert was red-nosed and his short neck wasn’t flattered by his turtleneck. Strike was, however, forced to acknowledge that their ages didn’t look too far apart here. Rupert had captioned the picture with words in Italian: Buon Compleanno a me (happy birthday to me) and anime gemelle (soul mates). Other than this one lapse into Italian, there was no indication on Rupert’s Instagram page of multilingualism, and no allusion to his Swiss upbringing. The bulk of his posts comprised photographs of London. No Swiss names appeared beneath his posts, which did indeed suggest he hadn’t much enjoyed growing up on the continent and had severed all ties.

There were a couple of old family pictures on the account, including a photograph of Rupert with his parents, posted on the anniversary of their death. Baby Rupert was sitting happily in the arms of his glamorous mother, Veronica, whose thin eyebrows and choppy bob pronounced her to have given birth in the nineties. Her husband Peter, narrow-faced and handsome, looked good-natured and vaguely bohemian.

Further back still was another family picture on which Strike paused. This picture showed a chubby Rupert, aged around twelve or thirteen, standing with his Uncle Ned, Charlotte’s second stepfather, in front of gigantic, many-pillared Heberley House. Like his famous actor son, Ned Legard had had piercing blue eyes.

Doubly certain he didn’t want Decima’s case, Strike closed down the Instagram account and spent the next couple of hours familiarising himself with developments in the agency’s existing investigations.

He was still reading when he heard a knock on the outer glass door. Swearing under his breath, because he supposed somebody had come to the wrong door, Strike heaved himself up.

‘Hi,’ said Kim Cochran, the agency’s latest hire, when Strike opened up. ‘I was hoping you’d be back.’

Kim, who’d left the Metropolitan Police a year previously, had worked for a rival detective agency until it had gone out of business. She was pertly pretty, always well groomed, and, with her short brunette hair and alert brown eyes, reminded Strike of a small bird.

‘I’ve got news on Plug,’ she said.

‘Ah, right,’ said Strike, wondering why she couldn’t have texted it, rather than turning up in person. ‘Come through.’

The nickname ‘Plug’ derived from its owner’s resemblance to the character in the Bash Street Kids comic strip. He was, by common agreement, the ugliest man the agency had ever been hired to investigate, having very large ears, a pronounced overbite, buck teeth and an uncoordinated lankiness. Aside from boasting a multitude of past criminal misdemeanours, mostly involving soft drugs and petty theft, Plug was also the lone parent of a scrawny teenaged son, who looked perpetually downtrodden and miserable.

Father and son had recently vacated their cramped flat in Haringey and moved, uninvited, into the Camberwell house of Plug’s mother, who had rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s. According to Plug’s well-to-do uncle, who’d hired the detective agency, Plug was not only verbally abusive to the old lady, he was gradually draining her of her life savings, and nobody in the family had yet found a legal way of stopping Plug helping himself to his mother’s money, or dislodging him from her home. The aim in hiring private detectives was to find something for which Plug could be arrested.

The Plug case made a change from the run-of-the-mill adultery cases the agency undertook for wealthy clients; it was pleasant, all felt, to be trying to stop an undeniable villain and protect a fragile old lady. Unfortunately, Plug hadn’t yet been detected in any criminal activity whatsoever.

‘He’s just met a guy at Tufnell Park station,’ said Kim, ‘and handed over a big wodge of cash. I got video.’

She held out her phone and there, sure enough, was the astoundingly ugly Plug, passing over what looked like a roll of fifty pound notes to a man with many hand tattoos.

‘What’s weird is, he didn’t get anything back,’ said Kim. ‘I was hoping to see drugs or something.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike, watching the video. Having handed over the money in furtive fashion, Plug simply turned and slouched away.

‘Might be payment for services rendered, of course,’ said Kim.

‘What did he do after this?’

‘Went back to his mum’s. Dev’s taken over, so I s’pose’ – Kim yawned – ‘sorry – we’ll find out whether Plug gets any funny deliveries this evening.’

She stretched, raising her arms to the sky and arching her back. Strike looked quickly back at the rota. She was wearing a snugly fitting black sweater.

‘Stiff,’ she said, dropping her arms back to her sides. ‘Too many hours in the car this week. Got any fun weekend plans?’

‘Work,’ said Strike, eyes on the rota. ‘Going to have to cover some of Robin’s stuff, now she’s off sick.’

‘I’m happy to do some of it, if you like,’ said Kim. ‘I haven’t got much on this weekend.’

‘That’s good of you,’ said Strike, looking back at her. ‘It’s a bit tricky otherwise, because Barclay’s away tomorrow and Monday.’

‘I like to keep busy. How was Cornwall?’

‘It was… you know,’ said Strike, eyes back on the rota.

‘Was he old, your uncle?’

‘Nearly eighty.’

‘Still. Never easy when they go.’

‘No,’ said Strike.

‘And you had to drive out to that Mullins woman as soon as you got back, too. How was she, by the way?’

‘Fine,’ said Strike, trying to inject a note of finality into his voice.

Kim took the hint and stood up. She was good at taking the hint.

‘I’ll be off, then. Email me the hours you need me this weekend, and I’ll be there.’

‘Thanks,’ said Strike. ‘Appreciate it.’

Kim left. After another twenty minutes fiddling with the rota, his eyes itching with tiredness, Strike locked up the office and headed upstairs to his attic flat, to make himself a solitary dinner.

He did his best to ignore the mounting pain in his hamstring while cooking himself a steak and vegetables, but his deepening depression was harder to dismiss. After sitting down at his small Formica table, his thoughts moved to the dilemma that had been dominating his thoughts for many months now, latterly becoming acute, and in no way diminished by his miserable interlude in Cornwall. He’d discussed the matter with nobody because he wanted neither advice nor comfort. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, there’d been quite enough unwelcome interest in the subject already.

When a man is forced to recognise that, in spite of his best efforts to prevent it happening, he’s fallen in love with the woman with whom he’s built a thriving business, and who he considers his best friend; when that woman has been in a stable, happy relationship with another man for over a year; when the first man knows he risks both business and friendship if he makes an open avowal of his feelings, yet has decided he doesn’t want to live with the knowledge that he might have had what he wanted if only he’d spoken, then that man must determine how, when and where the long-resisted discussion is to take place. Strike had been mulling over this problem ever since he’d made his first sober attempt to breach the barriers he himself had erected between himself and Robin Ellacott, by telling her that Charlotte had been certain he was in love with his business partner, and had mentioned the fact in her suicide note.

For the umpteenth time, as he sat eating his solitary meal, Strike recalled Robin’s reaction when he’d uttered these words. ‘Stunned’ perhaps described it best. Stunned, and then flustered. The conversation had been cut short by the appearance at the office of Ryan Fucking Murphy. The next time Strike and Robin had come face to face, there’d been a definite tinge of self-consciousness on Robin’s part that hadn’t been there before.

Such behaviour was, of course, open to widely divergent interpretations. Perhaps it showed he had grounds for hope. Strike had been alert in the days following his oblique admission for any uptick in the frequency of Robin’s mentions of Murphy, or references to how happy she was with the CID officer, because these would surely be the obvious way to warn Strike that further mention of the word ‘love’ between them would be unwelcome, but he’d detected no such increase. On the other hand, she’d made no attempt to return to the conversation, even obliquely or in jest.

Sometimes since, when tallying up promising signs, he’d reminded himself that embarrassment didn’t necessarily denote revulsion, that Robin had once uttered the words ‘I don’t want to lose you’ and that she’d freely told him he, too, was her best friend. He recalled her wedding day, when she’d run out on her first dance to follow and hug him. Yet in his darker moments he relived those fatal, drunken few seconds outside the Ritz a little over two years previously, when he’d moved to kiss her and seen a clear refusal in her expression. He was eight years older than Murphy, and while he knew, without vanity, that he was very attractive to certain kinds of women, on the available evidence, he wasn’t physically what Robin liked. Both her current boyfriend and her ex-husband (Matthew Fucking Cunliffe) had been slim, fit, classically handsome men, whereas Strike resembled a broken-nosed Beethoven and was still, in spite of intermittently strenuous efforts, over a stone off his ideal weight, which in itself had to be calculated to accommodate the loss of half his leg.

And Robin had hung up as soon as he’d mentioned Charlotte today. Why? Because she feared hearing, again, that Charlotte had thought him in love with her? Because she wanted to shut down any further discussion of the subject?

His steak finished, and feeling, if anything, worse, Strike went to the holdall he’d brought back from Cornwall and extracted the shoe box containing Ted’s two old hats, the leather-bound fisherman’s cosh and the photographs Strike had removed from the familiar, now mournfully empty house.

He hadn’t cried at Ted’s funeral, in spite of the invisible, weighty slab that had lain on his chest throughout. His uncle had become increasingly frail and confused after the death of his wife two years previously, but even as Strike had nodded at the bromides delivered by well-wishers at the crowded wake – ‘perhaps it was for the best’, ‘he never wanted to be a burden’, ‘it’s what he would have wanted, going quickly’ – he’d found it hard to disguise a latent antagonism. They all appeared to have forgotten who Ted really was; not the shambling figure who’d got lost one morning on the beach he’d once known better than his own face, but the hero of Strike’s youth, his model of a man. Strike had been brought closest to tears when, in a welcome interlude at the bar with his oldest friend, Dave Polworth, the latter had raised a pint of Cornish ale to the ceiling and said,

‘Proper man, Ted.’

‘Proper man’ was a Polworth-ism with many connotations. To be a proper man meant to be a strong man, an outdoors man, but also a man of principle. It meant lack of bombast, a repudiation of shallowness and a core of quiet self-belief. It meant being slow to anger, but firm in conviction. Polworth, like Strike, had had to take his male role models where he could find them, because neither had a father who qualified as ‘proper’, and both boys had found in Edward Nancarrow a man worthy of admiration and emulation, whose approval meant more than any school teacher’s star and whose rebukes spurred a desire to do better, to work harder, to earn back Ted’s good opinion.

Now Strike took out the old pictures and examined them, one by one, pausing on the oldest one of all, which was black and white. It showed a large, swarthy, crudely handsome man with dark, curly hair exactly like Strike’s, standing with his back to the sea, his enormous hand on the shoulder of Ted the boy, whose face was pinched with anxiety.

Trevik Nancarrow, Strike’s Cornish grandfather, had died before Strike was born, and given what he knew about the man, Strike had no sense of loss. Hard-drinking and powerfully built, Trevik had passed for a solid member of the community outside the family home. Within it, according to his children, he’d been pure terror.

Trevik’s long-suffering wife had died young, leaving him in sole charge of two children, born fourteen years apart: Ted, who’d been sixteen, and Peggy, Strike’s mother, who’d been only two – the same age Rupert Fleetwood had been, it now occurred to Strike, when both his parents disappeared beneath a deadly mass of thundering snow. Trevik’s mother had offered the fetching little Peggy a home. As capricious and mean-spirited as her hard-drinking son, the old woman had had no time for Ted: teenage boys were messy and loud, and their place was with their father, whereas Peggy, the old woman insisted, loved and needed her granny, who took pride in dressing her and looking after her mane of long dark hair.

Ted had told Strike much later that he’d known if he’d stayed in his father’s house beyond the age of eighteen, murder would have been done, and it was a toss-up which of them would be killer and which the victim. National Service had saved the young man, and having no desire to return to St Mawes while his father lived, Ted, to Trevik’s disgust, had remained in the army, forgoing the sea and the rugged coastline he loved for the military police, returning only when news reached him of his father’s premature death. Ted had then married the local girl with whom he’d corresponded for seven years.

It was Ted who’d broken the pattern of hard-drinking violence that had plagued the Nancarrow men through generations. Ted’s wife had had no need to fear his fists and his surrogate children had known firmness, but never brutality. Ted had embodied the virtues, hitherto almost unknown in that family, of steadiness, sobriety and fair play, whereas Peggy, who at eighteen had seized her first chance of escaping her draconian grandmother and run away with a youth who’d come to Truro with the fair, had rechristened herself ‘Leda’ and carried chaos with her wherever she went, until her death in a squalid squat in London.

Staring at Ted and Trevik, Strike found himself wishing the strong, capable storehouse of sense he’d just lost could be here with him tonight. Ted had always had a way of putting into words things the unsettled and often angry teenage Strike had recognised as true, even if he hadn’t yet lived long enough to test Ted’s words for himself.

‘There’s no pride in having what you never worked for,’ had been one of Ted’s well-worn maxims. Strike was prepared to put in the work with Robin, but the weeks that had elapsed since he’d seen the look of shock on her face had afforded few opportunities to advance his own cause. It wasn’t only that, until the hiring of Kim, the agency had been overstretched covering its cases. Strike could also tell that Robin was finding the onslaught of press coverage about the UHC hard to handle; she seemed jumpier and more anxious than usual, yet had snapped at him when he’d mooted the idea of her taking more time off. He’d several times cut one of the subcontractors short when they’d wanted to tell Robin gleefully about a further UHC arrest, in the expectation that she’d be as happy about it as they were.

For weeks now, Strike had daily postponed the declaration he wanted to make, because he feared that dumping his feelings on Robin right now would be selfish. Then Ted’s death had forced Strike away from London, and now this this virus of Robin’s was prolonging their separation and, no doubt, affording Murphy endless opportunities to play the considerate boyfriend.

While he hadn’t yet heard any concrete indications, Strike feared that Murphy might be planning a proposal. Murphy and Robin’s relationship appeared to be as strong as ever, and both were clearly of a marrying disposition, given that each of them already had an ex-spouse. Robin was in her thirties, and might even be thinking of children. She’d seemed ambivalent on that subject the only time it had ever been mentioned between her and Strike, but that had been a while ago, before she’d met her handsome CID officer. After their last big case, and Robin’s long and traumatic spell undercover, she might well feel now was the time to take a career break. These fears added urgency to Strike’s predicament. He needed to speak up before Murphy went ring shopping, or Robin announced she’d be needing maternity leave.

‘Never let the other chap change your game plan,’ Ted had once told Strike, though they’d been speaking of boxing, rather than romance. ‘Stick to your own, and play to your strengths.’

And what were Strike’s strengths, in this particular case? Undoubtedly, the agency that he and Robin had built together, which he was almost certain meant as much to her as it did to him. Their work offered opportunities, although lately not enough of them, to spend a lot of time together. So many missed chances, thought Strike bitterly: overnight stays, shared meals and long car journeys, and he, like the stupid prick he was, had prided himself on not letting his attraction overmaster him, and what was the upshot? He was sitting here alone with the dregs of a pint and a throbbing leg, while Murphy was probably at Robin’s flat, racking up points by bringing flowers and heating up soup.

Bored by his own misery, he got to his feet again and washed his dinner things. Brooding would do no good whatsoever: what was needed was decisive action.

It seemed to Strike that the wraith of Edward Nancarrow nodded approvingly at this conclusion, so having finished the washing-up, he replaced the photographs and two hats in the shoe box and then, after a second’s deliberation, placed the old fisherman’s priest on the windowsill, the only ornament, if it could be so called, he’d ever put on display.

7

Robin was discharged from hospital on Sunday morning, with advice to take paracetamol and ibuprofen as needed, refrain from strenuous exercise and resume normal activities only after a further three days’ rest. She’d slept badly again, not because of noise this time, but because she’d dreamed, repeatedly, that she was back in the box into which she’d been locked overnight at Chapman Farm. These nightmares had plagued her over the last couple of months, but she’d told nobody about them, nor about the waves of panic that slid over her unpredictably, especially in crowded spaces, nor about the fact that unless Murphy was spending the night with her, she slept with her bedside lamp on. Robin knew what happened when she told people she was struggling mentally: they told her to stop doing her job. Strike had once or twice suggested her taking more leave after those intense months undercover, but Robin didn’t want a holiday: she wanted to be busy, to bury herself in investigation, to fill up her restless mind with other people’s problems.

She took a taxi back to her flat with a thudding pain in her lower right side that painkillers had dulled without removing. In spite of what she’d told Murphy, whose gang shooting case was keeping him at work, about being fine alone, Robin felt weepy, and infuriated with herself for being so. Get a grip. This was nothing. Think of Strike, with half his leg blown off. You’ll be fine once you get home.

But she’d been back inside her flat barely ten minutes when the man upstairs turned on music which, as usual, was very loud. Robin listened to the pulsing bassline, too sore and tired to go upstairs and ask him to turn it down, but feeling more strongly than ever that she’d like to cry. Instead, she went to fetch her laptop. She’d just opened it when her mobile rang and she saw her mother’s number again.

Mentally bracing herself, Robin answered.

‘Hi Mum. Sorry I didn’t call you back yesterday,’ she said, before Linda could ask. ‘I was working.’

‘I thought you must be,’ said Linda, whose voice sounded thickened.

‘Is everything OK?’

‘I just wanted to let you know… we had to put Rowntree down.’

‘Oh no,’ said Robin. ‘Oh Mum, I’m sorry.’

The family’s chocolate Labrador had been old, but Robin had loved him. She felt the still-unshed tears of the last few days sting her eyes. Linda, meanwhile, was clearly crying.

‘We had to,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘It was his liver… there was nothing they could do. Better for him to… go quickly…’

‘Yes, of course it was,’ said Robin, ‘but I’ll really miss him. How’s Dad?’

‘He wants another one… he’s already looking at puppies online. I don’t know, though… dogs are such a tie… and there’ll n-never be another Rowntree…’

They spoke for a further twenty minutes, Robin mentioning none of her own troubles. When at last Linda had rung off, Robin turned back to her laptop, now doubly eager to bury herself in anything that would keep her mind busy.

She Googled ‘silver vault murder’, then scrolled downwards.

As she quickly saw, there’d been four distinct phases to the news coverage of the silver vault murder, all of it happening over a month in the summer, while Robin had been completely isolated from the outside world at Chapman Farm.

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of William Wright’s body, words like ‘naked’, ‘dismembered’, ‘mutilated’ and ‘masonic’ had featured in a hundred lurid headlines. From one of these, Robin learned that the discoverer of the handless, eyeless corpse had been the silver shop’s owner, Kenneth Ramsay.

‘It was the most appalling shock, as you can imagine. I genuinely thought I was going to have a heart attack. The body on the floor, all the Murdoch silver gone. We can’t understand how it happened, let alone why. Wright didn’t have keys or codes, he shouldn’t have been able to get into the shop that night, and he definitely didn’t know how to open the vault.’

Robin clicked on a related article to discover what the ‘Murdoch silver’ might be.

Priceless masonic treasures, recently bought at auction, were stolen from the vault in which William Wright was murdered. These were part of the collection of A. H. Murdoch, a Scottish-born explorer and Freemason, who discovered the second largest silver mine in Peru in 1827. Murdoch amassed the biggest, most important collection of masonic artefacts in the world, some commissioned from silver from his own mine, others collected over many years. These included the ceremonial dagger of John Skene, the first Freemason ever to emigrate to America.

The articles stopped short of suggesting that William Wright had been murdered as part of some masonic plot, though plenty of reports nudged up against the exciting possibility.

The next phase of press coverage had been triggered by the discovery that there had been no such person as William Wright, whose name, CV and personal details had been found to be fake. The possibility of masonic involvement was now deemed to have grown stronger.

Grainy images of Wright taken from Ramsay Silver’s internal security camera had been released to the press, but they were of such poor quality that Wright could have been almost any bearded, bespectacled man. His shape was the most distinctive thing about him, because, while quite short, he was well-proportioned, with broad shoulders. The blurry nature of the pictures seemed to have added to the mysterious aura around the murder. During this second phase of the reporting, police announced that they’d had many leads about Wright’s possible identity, and were following them all up.

The next wave of news stories, which was by far the most excitable, began when the police released more still photographs, this time from CCTV cameras close to the silver shop at night, which appeared to show William Wright and three other men heading towards the shop in the early hours of Saturday the eighteenth of June. These pictures were also fairly indistinct, although one of the men was definitely short and sported a beard. The tabloids now became feverish with excitement, and while the broadsheets reported the wildly spiralling stories of masonic ritual killing only to urge caution in believing them, they nevertheless devoted multiple paragraphs to the theories.

Online sleuths have been quick to point out that the murder of ‘William Wright’ has strange echoes of the legend of ‘Hiram Abiff’, the mythical Grand Master of the stonemasons, who was entrusted with the building of King Solomon’s temple, including a secret vault to house the Ark of the Covenant.

Robin glanced through excitable reader comments, some of whom had spotted still more masonic features in the killing of William Wright.

But then had come phase four, which proved horribly anticlimactic. The police had announced that ‘William Wright’ had in fact been Jason Knowles, twenty-eight, of Haringey. Knowles had previously served six years for the burglary of a building society in Lewes in 2010 and his mugshot showed a broad-shouldered, thick-necked, well-muscled man, with a narrow, freckled face, and a slightly manic glare.

An article in The Times concluded:

Robin wasn’t surprised to see that this dampening news hadn’t entirely extinguished the hopes of those reluctant to give up the possibility that the killing had been a deliberate re-enactment of the murder of Hiram Abiff.

Robin’s phone rang. She hoped it would be Strike, but it was Kim Cochran.

‘Hi,’ said Kim briskly, sounding as though she was in a car, ‘just a quick one. Did Plug look like he was heading for a train, when you lost him on Friday? Or could he have been meeting someone?’

‘Possibly meeting someone,’ said Robin. She’d had the presence of mind to text Kim after she’d come round from surgery, pretending to have confused Plug with another man in the bustle. ‘He was heading towards Caffè Nero when I lost him.’

‘I’d have thought it was impossible to mistake anyone else for Plug,’ said Kim, with a little laugh.

‘It was very crowded,’ said Robin.

‘Must’ve been. I’m only asking because I saw him handing over cash to a guy at Tufnell Park yesterday,’ said Kim. ‘I’m following him up the A12 right now. Strike asked me to do your shift this morning.’

‘Right,’ said Robin, and then, with an effort, ‘well, thanks for covering for me.’

‘He’s pretty depressed, poor guy.’

‘Who is?’

‘Strike, after Cornwall. He was telling me all about it.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin, ‘right.’

‘Good to know about Victoria, anyway,’ said Kim. ‘You get back to your Lemsip.’

She hung up, leaving Robin staring, eyes narrowed, at her phone.

Robin had been telling herself that Kim Cochran was a good hire ever since the latter had joined the agency. Kim’s work was exemplary, and she had good police contacts, because she’d worked for the Met for eight years before becoming a private detective. However, the more contact Robin had with Kim, the less she liked her. This was largely due to the marked mismatch in the way Kim treated the two people whose names were engraved on the agency’s glass door. Kim laughed longer and harder at Strike’s jokes than anyone else and treated his ideas and opinions with deference. To Robin, Kim was casual, even dismissive. She’d already made a jocular sideswipe at the fact that Robin, alone of the detective team, had no police or military background, hinting that Robin’s main worth to the investigative team was that she was sleeping with a CID officer, then laughing loudly (‘I’m kidding!’) when Barclay had retorted, ‘When’s the last time you brought down an entire fuckin’ cult?’

Robin set aside her laptop and headed for the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about Kim Cochran, but as she made herself tea and toast (because toast didn’t necessitate reaching up for dinner plates or bending down for saucepans) her unruly thoughts returned to something that shouldn’t have annoyed her at all: Kim asking Midge (who’d passed the information on to Robin) what Strike’s relationship status was.

When a woman has spent a period of years asking herself whether she’s fallen in love with the man she considers her best friend; when she’s sacrificed a marriage and financial security for the business they’ve built together; when, after finding out that that same best friend is secretly sleeping with another woman, she’s forced to admit to herself that she has indeed fallen in love with him, then the only thing to do is to fall out of love as quickly and as cleanly as possible, and this, Robin had made every effort to do. Unlike Strike, she didn’t particularly want to spend the rest of her non-working life living alone in a spartan flat with a succession of short-lived affairs to break up the monotony, so she’d done what had been urged upon her by their mutual friend Ilsa Herbert, and accepted Ryan Murphy’s offer of a drink.

Over a year after that first date, Robin really did think – no, she knew – that she loved Murphy. The events of the last few days had certainly left her shellshocked and destabilised, but that would pass. Murphy was kind, intelligent and very good-looking. Yes, there’d been a conversation, two months previously, in which Strike had hinted—

Standing beside the toaster, Robin told herself she wasn’t going to start deconstructing that conversation again, because she didn’t need any more complications, pain, or stress in her life. She was with Murphy, and Strike could do what he liked, although if what he liked was responding to Kim’s flirtation (‘he’s pretty depressed, poor guy, he was telling me all about it’) she pitied his taste, and that was all there was to it.

Robin took her tea and toast back to her laptop while ‘Stitches’ by Shawn Mendes blasted through her sitting room ceiling. As she sat down, her mobile rang again, and this time, it was Strike.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Bit better,’ said Robin. ‘How’re you?’

‘Fine. Sitting in the BMW watching Arsehole’s ex-wife having lunch with another woman.’

‘You need to stop calling him Arsehole,’ said Robin, half-amused, half-exasperated. ‘Especially in public. Pat thinks we should use “Mr A”.’

‘Pat doesn’t have to give him weekly updates,’ said Strike.

The client in question was a South African cricketer who believed his ex-wife was having an affair with a married tabloid journalist, and that this accounted for the recent stream of unflattering, though true, stories about the cricketer’s past in that particular paper. Strike happened to know the journalist in question: his name was Dominic Culpepper, and the agency had occasionally done jobs for him in the days before they could afford to pick and choose their clients.

‘I wanted a word about the Mullins case, if you’ve got time,’ said Strike.

‘Yes, go on.’

‘I’ve tried every police contact I’ve got to see if they know anything about the body in the vault, but no dice. Wardle, Layborn – I even tried Anstis. None of them were anywhere near the case and they don’t know anyone who worked on it. Couldn’t try Vanessa Ekwensi, could you?’

‘I can, but she’s on maternity leave.’

‘Shit,’ said Strike. ‘Might ask Kim if she knows anyone.’

‘I could ask Ryan,’ Robin suggested. ‘Although he’s kind of snowed under at work just now,’ she added, when Strike didn’t say anything. ‘He’s on that gang case, where those two young brothers got shot.’

‘Nasty,’ said Strike, though without much sympathy. ‘Well, unless we can get a friendly copper to give us some inside info, I think this is a dead end. We can’t tell Decima it definitely wasn’t Fleetwood unless we know what forensics said.’

‘I’ll try Ryan,’ said Robin.

‘I’ve also called one of Fleetwood’s friends, a bloke called Albie Simpson-White,’ said Strike. ‘He’s a waiter at Decima’s father’s club, Dino’s, but “isn’t available to talk”.’

‘Dino’s?’ said Robin. ‘That private members’ place with the restaurant at the back?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I looked into taking Mum there for her sixtieth. The average cost per person for lunch is four hundred pounds.’

‘Four hundred quid? For lunch?’

‘It’s got three Michelin stars.’

‘I’m not spending four hundred fucking quid on lunch unless they’re chucking in the table and chairs.’

Robin laughed, but stopped quickly, because it hurt.

‘I haven’t asked how it was in Cornwall.’

‘What? Oh. As you’d expect,’ said Strike. ‘Non-stop crying from Lucy. She’s taken virtually the entire contents of the house back to Bromley with her, which I doubt Greg’ll be happy about. Funeral was packed. I wish – shit, got to go, Mrs A’s on the move.’

Strike hung up, leaving Robin wondering what he wished.

In the absence of anything else to distract her, the disquiet she’d been trying to suppress ever since her talk with the surgeon intensified. After staring for a further minute at the name of the masonic lodge to which DCI Truman allegedly belonged, Robin moved her cursor back up to the top of her laptop screen, and, reluctantly, typed in: ‘egg freezing’.

8

The ex-wife of the cricketer Strike called ‘Arsehole’, and Pat, ‘Mr A’, was driving in the direction of her flat in Chelsea. While her social circle overlapped with that of Dominic Culpepper, she and the journalist had shown no sign so far of being anything other than nodding acquaintances. Strike had pitched to their cricketer client the idea of looking more closely at other people close to him to discover the source of leaks to Dominic Culpepper’s paper, but Arsehole – ‘living right up tae his name’, as Barclay had put it – had sneered at this suggestion, remaining insistent that the agency keep watching his ex-wife.

So Strike drove on through the steadily fading sunlight to Glebe Place, where the gorgeous ex-model parked her Mercedes S-Class and entered the townhouse she’d received as part of her divorce settlement. Strike parked his BMW, then settled back to watch the woman’s front door. Judging it safe to assume that, at a bare minimum, she was changing her clothes to go out again, he took out his mobile and found the number Decima had given him for Rupert Fleetwood’s Aunt Anjelica in Zurich.

The European dialling tone sounded long and shrill in his ear, and after a few seconds, was replaced by an upper-class voice.

‘Wallner.’

‘Mrs Anjelica Wallner?’

‘Speaking.’

‘My name’s Cormoran Strike, and I’m a private detective. I was given your contact details by—’

‘You’re what? What did you say you are?’

He got as far as ‘private detective’ a second time, at which some sort of explosion seemed to happen at the end of the line.

‘What is this? What is this? Is this that Decima again, or whatever her damn name is?’

‘I was hoping to ask you about your nephew, Rup—’

‘This is intolerable! First the police, then you!’

‘You’ve spoken to the police, have—?’

‘Who does she think she is, sending people to badger me?’

‘I understand she’s your nephew’s girlfriend,’ said Strike.

‘I’ve looked her up! I know who she is!’ said Rupert’s aunt. ‘What he thought he was doing, getting involved with the daughter of that ghastly man—’

‘You don’t like Dino Longcaster?’

‘It’s immaterial whether I like him or not! And she’s old enough to be his mother!’

‘Well, not qu—’

‘He was after her money and I suppose he didn’t get enough of it, that’s why he’s left her! Tell her that! Tell her that from me!’ shouted Mrs Wallner, née Fleetwood. ‘He just wants an easy life! Doesn’t want to work!’

‘Decima told me you think Rupert’s in New—’

‘He is in New York! I told him he needed to get a proper job and he did, and about bloody time too! He’s a grown man and he needs to sort out his own messes!’

‘Would you happen to have contact det—?’

‘If he hasn’t given her his contact details, it’s because he doesn’t want her to have them!’

‘But you’re confident he’s in America, are you? You’ve heard from him since the twenty-fifth of M—?’

‘It’s none of your business whether I’ve heard from him or not! It’s outrageous, sending people to pester me like this, outrageous!’

‘Decima’s simply concerned about Rupert, and she’d like to be reassured he’s—’

‘The police are satisfied as to his whereabouts, so I’ll thank Miss Longcaster to stop pestering me! Passing my phone number out!’

‘You haven’t got any concerns about Rupert’s safety, personally?’

‘Why should I have? Why should I have?’

‘I hear he was being threatened, before he went away,’ said Strike.

‘If he got involved with drugs, I’ve got no sympathy for him! Nothing to do with me! I told him, “I’m not giving you money, so don’t. Don’t ask!”’

‘Rupert wanted you to help him out, did he?’

‘I’m not paying off drug debts! I haven’t got money to pour down the drain!’

‘You’re aware that he was being threat—?’

‘I don’t doubt he was being threatened! He ought to choose his friends more carefully, oughtn’t he?’

‘As far as you’re aware—?’

‘That’s all I’ve got to say! Goodbye.’

The line went dead.

9

At eight o’clock that evening, Robin’s doorbell sounded.

‘Hi,’ said Murphy’s voice over the intercom. ‘I’ve got chips.’

‘Oh, wonderful, I’m starving,’ said Robin, and she buzzed him inside.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ were Murphy’s first words after stepping over the threshold and kissing Robin hello. He was glaring at the ceiling, through which the upstairs neighbour’s music was still pounding. ‘Want me to go up there and tell him to knock it off?’

‘There’s no point,’ said Robin. ‘He turns it down for twenty minutes then it starts creeping up again. He thinks people won’t notice as long as he does it gradually.’

‘Twat… Sit down. We only need knives and forks, I’ve brought drinks.’

‘Ryan, this is lovely, thank you,’ said Robin five minutes later, once both were eating their fish and chips off their laps, a can of zero-alcohol beer and a Diet Coke on the coffee table. ‘How’re things at work?’

‘Same,’ said Murphy, clearly disinclined to go into the complexities of the gang shooting case. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘A lot better,’ said Robin, who hoped that if she said it often enough, she’d start believing it.

They ate without talking for a few minutes, until Robin said,

‘Listen, d’you know anything about a murder that happened while I was at Chapman Farm, the one they thought was masonic?’

‘What, the body in the silver shop?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Yeah, an armed robber got bumped off,’ said Murphy through a mouthful of cod. He swallowed. ‘Alternatively, a male prostitute got murdered by the shop owner, who panicked and chucked the body in the vault because he couldn’t think what else to do with it.’

‘Was that an actual theory?’ said Robin, freezing with a chip halfway to her mouth.

‘Probably a joke. You know what it’s like. The dead guy was naked and fake tanned.’

‘You know someone who was on the case?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘Strike met a woman yesterday who’s convinced the man in the vault was really her boyfriend.’

‘She the type to date armed robbers?’

‘I wouldn’t think so. She’s quite posh, I think. Her boyfriend was a waiter – a posh waiter. We’re trying to find out for her whether it was ever confirmed beyond doubt that the man in the vault really was that armed robber.’

‘As far as I know, they’re happy with the ID,’ said Murphy.

‘A hundred per cent happy?’

‘Dunno,’ said Murphy. ‘Why? Strike fancies showing up the Met again, does he?’

‘What?’

Murphy reached for his no-alcohol beer and took a swig.

‘People have lost their careers after Strike’s come meddling, you know.’

‘Who?’ said Robin sharply. ‘Roy Carver, you mean? Strike tried to give him the solution and he wouldn’t listen. And if you’re going to blame the agency for solving things the police didn’t, you should be blaming me, too.’

Murphy ate a few more chips before saying,

‘The coppers who keep feeding Strike information aren’t winning many friends at work, I can tell you that. Eric Wardle ought to think about that, next time he accepts a free curry.’

‘We’ve given Wardle plenty of stuff in return,’ said Robin. ‘It’s been a two-way street, you know.’

She refrained from pointing out that Strike had handed Murphy the kudos of arresting a killer just a couple of months previously, and that the agency had given Murphy material assistance in another case. She couldn’t help suspecting that the continuing coverage of the successful investigation of the UHC, versus Murphy’s so far unsuccessful attempts to catch the shooter of the two young boys, was exacerbating her boyfriend’s resentment.

They ate for a few more minutes, the only sound the pounding of the bass from upstairs.

‘Sorry,’ said Murphy abruptly. ‘Just not enjoying all the slagging off we’re getting in the press.’

He drained his can of beer and said,

‘How’s that Cochran woman settling in?’

‘Well,’ said Robin. Too well.

‘She had quite the rep at work, I hear.’

Robin really wasn’t in any mood to hear what a wonderful detective Kim had been, so she changed the subject to US president-elect Donald Trump’s latest public pronouncements on the subject of whether or not he’d pursue the imprisonment of his defeated opponent, Hillary Clinton. There was one thing to be said for Trump’s shock election triumph, thought Robin: it always gave you something to talk about, if you wanted to avoid other, trickier, subjects.

After they’d finished eating, Murphy took the cutlery through to the kitchen and washed them up, instructing Robin to remain where she was, then returned with coffees. Seeing his tentative expression as he sat down again, Robin felt a prickle of dread.

‘So… how’re you feeling about…?’

‘I told you, a lot better. I’ll definitely be good to go back to work on Wednesday.’

‘I didn’t mean physically.’

Robin, who’d known exactly what Murphy had meant, said,

‘Well, I’m glad to be out of hospital, obviously… Mum just called me, by the way. They had to put Rowntree down. His liver packed up.’

‘Shit,’ said Murphy. ‘I’m sorry.’

Robin, who’d mentioned Rowntree’s death purely to change the subject, found herself temporarily unable to speak. Her throat had contracted and she was afraid she was going to cry, not least because she could tell Murphy wasn’t going to be deflected from what he really wanted to talk about.

‘Can’t we discuss it?’ he said quietly.

‘Discuss what?’ Robin said with difficulty.

‘What the doctor said.’

‘I told you, I’ve restarted the pill.’

‘No, not that. About freezing your eggs.’

‘I haven’t thought about it,’ said Robin.

‘Don’t you think it might be a good idea? To be on the safe side?’

‘What safe side?’ said Robin, her voice suddenly ragged. ‘I’ve looked up what it involves. You have to be pumped full of hormones and go under a general anaesthetic, and sometimes you have to do it multiple times, if they don’t get enough eggs, or they aren’t viable.’

‘Why wouldn’t they be viable? You’re only thirty-two.’

Shocked by her own anger, Robin was avoiding eye contact again. Don’t cry.

‘I feel like you’re blaming me,’ said Murphy.

‘I’m not blaming you, I just – you’re talking about egg freezing as though it’s nipping down to the shops. It isn’t. It’s invasive and time intensive, I might need time off work—’

‘Can you not forget about work for two minutes?’

‘That’s rich coming from you! You’ve been working round the clock lately!’

‘I’m sorry I’ve left you alone today – d’you think I wanted to? You were the one who didn’t want your parents to know!’

‘This isn’t about being left alone, I’m fine on my own, I’m just pointing out it’s apparently OK for you to put work first, but not me!’

‘That’s different, I’ve got to do what I do—’

‘Someone put a gun to your head and made you join the police, did they?’

‘Come on, you know what I mean!’

‘Yes, that my work’s so trivial it doesn’t matter if I don’t turn—’

‘I never said it was trivial!’

‘You want me to “forget about work”. Well, I don’t want to forget about it. I happen to love my work, and I’m also damn good at it,’ Robin added, in a shaking voice.

‘Bloody hell, I know you are! I’m just asking you to put yourself first for a bit!’

‘No, you’re asking me to put my eggs first. My eggs and I are not the same thing.’

A silence followed.

‘I’m trying to tell you,’ said Murphy, at last, ‘that if you want to do the egg thing, I’d support you through it, I’d be with you—’

‘What d’you mean “with me”? Will you have to be prodded and poked and fiddled about with, Ryan? Will you have to have things inserted inside you, and swallow drugs, and suffer any pain or discomfort at all?’

‘No,’ said Murphy, looking unnerved.

‘We’ve never talked about children,’ said Robin. ‘You’ve never even asked if I want them.’

‘I assumed – you like kids. Your niece, your god-kids—’

‘I do like them, I love them, of course I do. That’s not the – look,’ said Robin, still fighting tears she was determined not to shed, ‘this isn’t the way I ever wanted to have this conversation, but if you’re asking, I don’t know whether I want kids of my own, OK? But even if I don’t, it wasn’t easy – having that surgeon – tell me – out of the blue – that that fucking rapist did this to me and – no!’

Murphy, who’d risen to hug her, recoiled.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Robin. ‘I’m still sore. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise.’

Murphy dropped to his knees beside the sofa and reached for her hand instead.

‘What can I do?’ he said humbly.

‘Stop bitching about my work, and Strike, and the agency,’ said Robin angrily, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. ‘I’ve had enough of that from Matthew and my bloody mother. Nobody’s trying to show anyone up, we’re just trying to find out whether we can help that woman. She’s just given birth to her boyfriend’s baby and doesn’t know where he’s gone. It must be awful.’

‘I’ll stop bitching,’ said Murphy quietly. ‘I was being a dick. What can I do to make you feel better? Name it. Ice cream? Weekend in Paris?’

A reluctant laugh escaped Robin.

‘Dog? D’you want a puppy?’

‘Ryan, you sound like you’re trying to lure me into a van.’

He laughed, and Robin did too, even though it hurt.

‘Come on, I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Anything. Name it.’

‘Anything?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘OK,’ said Robin, taking a deep breath, ‘find out how certain the police are that it was the armed robber in that vault.’

Murphy sat back on his heels, his expression so strangely blank that Robin said,

‘Sorry, forget it. I don’t want you to do anything—’

‘It’s not that,’ said Murphy.

He rubbed a hand across his face.

‘The woman I know, who’s on the case… I had a drunken grope with her, about six years ago.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin.

‘No sex. Lizzie had just left. I was shitfaced. It happened down the pub.’

‘Right,’ said Robin.

Murphy sighed.

‘I could ask her, if it’s really that important to you. She knows I’ve got a girlfriend now.’

‘She does?’

‘Yeah,’ said Murphy, ‘because every time I run across her she makes it clear she wouldn’t mind a replay, so I mention you a fair bit… but if it’s that important to you, I could try and get her talking.’

Robin hesitated. She was aware of a need to word what she said next extremely carefully, but also dimly aware that what she currently felt wasn’t what many women would feel, faced with the prospect of their highly eligible boyfriend seeking out a woman with whom he’d previously had an amorous encounter, drunk or not.

‘Well, I trust you,’ she said slowly, ‘but I don’t love the idea of some woman trying to lure you away…’

She’d said the right thing; Murphy looked happier at that. His fingers tightened on hers.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thank you,’ said Robin, returning the pressure.

‘D’you only love me for my intel?’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘I also like the chips… and quite a lot of other stuff.’

He pulled her into a hug, and this time, Robin didn’t fend him off. The realisation that she wanted the information, even if it meant Murphy having to buy drinks for a woman who clearly fancied him, was slightly disconcerting, but given how many other things she had to worry about at the moment, there was no need to start analysing that, as well.

10

Strike called a team meeting on Wednesday morning, because the ex-wife of the cricketer Pat preferred to call ‘Mr A’ had boarded a plane to the Canary Islands. Plug was at his mother’s house in Camberwell, over which Midge was keeping watch. Strike was keen to brainstorm, with particular emphasis on getting rid of Mr A as soon as possible.

He arrived at the glass door of the office at nine o’clock to find it unlocked and office manager Pat Chauncey already at her desk. Sixty-eight years old, simian of face and with unconvincingly boot black hair, Pat had, as was her invariable practice, an e-cigarette clamped firmly between her teeth.

‘Happy birthday,’ she croaked, in the baritone that often led to her being misidentified as Strike on the phone.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

He hadn’t forgotten his birthday, he’d just hoped the rest of the agency would. He didn’t want an early morning tea party, with candles and present opening, and he didn’t particularly want to remind Robin that he was forty-two. However, a large envelope and a sizeable cube-shaped present wrapped in blue were sitting on Pat’s desk, and, glancing towards the kitchen area, he saw an old cake tin decorated with pictures of Princess Diana that definitely didn’t belong to the office.

‘A woman called Decima Mullins called,’ said Pat. ‘She wants to know when you’ll be getting a contract to her.’

‘When I’ve decided whether we’re taking her case,’ said Strike, heading towards the kettle.

‘And Mr A left a message last night. He wants an update.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

The glass door opened again. Strike turned and saw Robin.

‘Morning,’ she said, smiling.

‘You look remarkably good, for someone who’s just got off their sickbed.’

‘Yes, well, that’s blusher and concealer for you,’ said Robin, with unfeigned cheerfulness. She felt significantly better than she had at the weekend, and much happier for being back in the office. ‘Happy birthday, by the way.’

She headed a little awkwardly towards Strike to give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, which he accepted gladly.

‘And I got you this,’ said Robin, pulling a weighty wrapped package out of her tote bag, which made the operation site twinge, and handing it to him. ‘That one,’ she said, indicating the large present on Pat’s desk, ‘is from all of us. You can open mine now. It isn’t very imaginative.’

She didn’t say that she’d had to ask Murphy to buy it while she was temporarily housebound, which was why it was fairly impersonal. Strike unwrapped the box and found a bottle of what had once been his favourite whisky. Robin wasn’t to know it now reminded him of his dead ex-fiancée, so he said,

‘Fantastic, thanks very much.’

‘So why are we having a team meeting?’

‘Opportunity,’ said Strike. ‘Mrs A’s away. Midge is on Plug, but she’s going to dial in – and Two-Times—’

‘You’re kidding me,’ said Robin, freezing in the act of hanging up her jacket. ‘Two-Times is back?’

‘Morning,’ said Kim, entering the office before Strike could answer. ‘Happy birthday, Cormoran!’

‘Cheers,’ said Strike, now heading for the cupboard where they kept the fold-up plastic chairs. ‘I haven’t agreed to take Two-Times on yet,’ he told Robin over his shoulder. ‘Until we’ve made a firm decision on Decima Mullins, I don’t know whether we’ll have room for him.’

‘I should have something soon, on how certain they are that body was Knowles,’ Kim informed Strike confidently. ‘I’ve tapped a couple of contacts. People are being weirdly cagey about it, though. The lead investigator, Malcolm Truman, has been suspended.’

‘Has he?’ said Robin. ‘Why?’

The glass door opened again.

‘Morning,’ said Glaswegian Barclay. Tall, beaky-nosed and prematurely grey-haired, he, like Strike, was ex-military. ‘Oh yeah,’ he added, spotting the package on Pat’s desk. ‘Happy birthday.’

‘Cheers,’ said Strike again.

‘Told Robin about Two-Times yet?’ asked Barclay.

‘Who’s Two-Times?’ said Kim.

‘Guy who likes being cheated on,’ said Barclay. ‘He pays people tae catch his girlfriends in the act.’

‘Ah, cuckolding fetish,’ said Kim with authority.

‘Who’s the lucky woman this time?’ Robin asked Strike.

‘His wife.’

‘Oh my God – someone married him?’

‘We’ve all made mistakes,’ said Kim. ‘Admittedly, I never married one of mine.’

She laughed. Robin, the sole divorcee among the detectives present, felt the rise of an increasingly familiar antagonism, but told herself that Kim meant no offence.

When Shah, who was shorter than both his male colleagues, and so good-looking he was generally selected to sweet-talk female witnesses or suspects, had arrived, Pat dialled in Midge Greenstreet on FaceTime.

‘Happy birthday, Cormoran,’ said Midge, who had short, slicked-back dark hair, clear grey eyes, and was currently sitting in her car. ‘What are you now, forty-five?’

‘Two,’ said Strike, ‘forty-two. Right, shall we—?’

‘Have you opened our present yet?’ asked Midge.

‘You’re not easy to buy for,’ said Pat, now heaving the large package off her desk and holding it out to Strike. ‘We went for something practical.’

Strike opened the package and was relieved to find nothing that would need to be tried on in front of them all, nothing pointless he’d have to keep in his flat out of politeness, but a bulk order of his favourite vape juice.

‘Enough nicotine to kill a bull,’ said Strike. ‘That’s great. Genuinely. Thanks very much…

‘Right, better start with Plug, in case Midge needs to get going. What’s he up to?’ Strike asked the onscreen Midge.

‘He’s been shouting at his poor old mum again, the bastard. I could hear him from the street, but he hasn’t been—’

‘I’ve told Cormoran this already,’ said Kim, talking over Midge. ‘On Sunday—’

‘All right if I finish what I was saying?’ said the onscreen Midge crossly.

‘Sorry,’ said Kim, eyebrows raised. ‘Go on.’

‘—hasn’t been out,’ Midge finished, glowering.

‘Right,’ said Kim, with a little laugh. ‘Well, on Sunday he drove to Ipswich, where he met up with another couple of blokes in a pub. One of them was noting things down in a kind of ledger. I got photos of numberplates and I’m going to ask a Met mate to run them through the files.’

‘Good work, that could help,’ said Strike, and Robin, remembering Murphy’s ‘she had quite the rep at work’, tried without success not to feel resentful, ‘but we haven’t got the manpower to start tailing a bunch of Plug’s mates unless we can get rid of Arse—’ he caught Pat’s glare ‘—Mr A. Speaking of whom—’

‘She’s nae shaggin’ fuckin’ Culpepper,’ said Barclay. ‘If he wants to stop shit appearin’ aboot him in the papers he could try not bein’ an arsehole.’

‘Yeah, but the stuff in the papers is about his past arseholery,’ said Shah, ‘and if it’s not coming from his ex, who’s leaking it?’

A fifteen-minute discussion ensued about the people Mr A and his ex-wife routinely met. Robin’s mobile buzzed while this conversation was still going on. Murphy had texted her.

I’ve got what you wanted, but it’s a lot more sensitive than I realised.

Robin texted back:

Ryan, thank you so, so much. Would it be ok for Strike to hear what you’ve got, as well as me?

Having ticked Mr A off the list of things to discuss, Strike moved on to Decima Mullins. While he gave the others an overview of the current position, omitting mention of Decima’s baby, Kim reiterated her hope that one of her police contacts might be prepared to share the DNA findings on the body in the silver shop vault. Robin waited on tenterhooks for Murphy’s response, which was slow coming; the detectives had already discussed various expense-related matters, the subcontractors’ upcoming Christmas and New Year leave requirements, and agreed a couple of job swaps, before at last it appeared.

Yeah ok but we’ll do it face to face and NOBODY ELSE can know I’ve given you anything. It’s properly sensitive.

Robin looked up. Pat was removing a homemade iced cake from the tin decorated with pictures of Princess Diana. E-cigarette clamped firmly between her teeth, she stuck two candles in it, a large four and a two.

‘Wasn’t gonna put the lot on,’ she told Strike, carrying it over to the desk. ‘Fire hazard.’

Strike did his best to look appreciative while ‘Happy Birthday’ was being sung. Noticing the forced nature of Strike’s smile, Robin started to laugh before the song was finished, noting with gratitude that laughter no longer caused her much pain. Strike, unwillingly amused by Robin’s amusement, found himself genuinely grinning by the time Pat instructed him to blow out his candles.

‘Did you make a wish?’ asked Kim archly, as Pat began cutting everyone slices.

Strike, who hadn’t, didn’t answer.

‘Strike, could I have a quick word after this, about Decima Mullins?’ asked Robin.

‘Yeah, definitely,’ said Strike, accepting a bit of chocolate sponge from Pat. ‘I’ve got a couple of things to tell you, as well.’

Robin took secret satisfaction at the sight of a flicker of annoyance on Kim’s face.

11

Once the subcontractors had finished their cake and departed for their various jobs, Strike and Robin moved into the inner office, where the window was misted with fine rain. As Robin closed the door on Pat, Strike said,

‘Midge hasn’t exactly been a ray of sunshine lately.’

‘Kim talked over her,’ Robin pointed out.

‘I don’t just mean that. She’s been in a foul mood all this week.’

‘She and Tasha aren’t doing so well,’ said Robin, who’d heard the full story of Midge’s relationship troubles the last time she and Midge handed over surveillance on Mrs A. ‘Tasha’s away filming and Midge thinks she might be up to something with her leading man.’

Strike made an indeterminate noise. His subcontractors’ difficult love lives were of minimal interest to him; his own was giving him quite enough grief.

‘Ryan’s managed to get some information for us, on the body in the vault,’ Robin continued. ‘He knows someone who was on the case.’

‘Ah,’ said Strike. ‘Great.’

He didn’t like having to be obliged to Murphy for it, but information was still information.

‘I know it’s your birthday, so you’ve probably got plans,’ Robin went on, ‘but if you were free to come over to my place tonight, you could hear what he’s got directly from him. He doesn’t want to text it. Apparently it’s very sensitive.’

‘Yeah, I could do that,’ said Strike, whose plans for the evening had comprised lying on his bed drinking beer while watching Arsenal play Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League, which wasn’t what he’d told Lucy, who thought he was being taken out to dinner by his friends Nick and Ilsa.

Robin picked up a photo lying on the desk.

‘Is this what you wanted to show me?’

‘No, but you should see it anyway,’ said Strike. ‘That’s Rupert Fleetwood.’

While Robin was examining Rupert Fleetwood’s round face and broad shoulders, and his waiter’s uniform of burgundy bow tie and waistcoat, Strike said,

‘I called Shanker last night, to see if he’s heard of a big-time coke dealer who might go by the name of “Dredge”.’

Shanker, as Robin knew, was the name of a career criminal Strike had known since the age of seventeen. She had a fondness for him Strike felt was at least partially ill-advised.

‘And?’ asked Robin.

‘He knew who I was talking about. Fleetwood’s idiot housemate definitely tangled with the wrong bloke. I’ve asked Shanker to have a sniff around for me, find out whether this Dredge might’ve bumped off any ex-public schoolboys lately. Usual rates,’ Strike added.

Friends though they were, Shanker wasn’t a man who performed services for free.

‘Well, that’s good,’ said Robin. ‘I read your email about Rupert’s aunt, by the way. She doesn’t sound exactly cosy.’

‘Old-school dragon,’ said Strike. ‘Zero affection or concern. Mind you, we don’t know the backstory. Maybe he robbed her blind before leaving Switzerland for England.’

‘But she said he’s in New York?’

‘Yeah, but refused to tell me whether she’s heard from him since the twenty-fifth of May. Must admit, I can’t help wondering how hard the police would look for a man whose next of kin insist he’s not missing. Decima isn’t married to him and they weren’t living together, so she hasn’t got much standing in terms of triggering a search.’

‘I had a look through all the news coverage of the murder, while I was off,’ said Robin. ‘People talking about the masonic legend of Hiram Abiff. Had you ever heard of him?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Strike. ‘Most skilful artificer of Solomon’s temple, murdered for refusing to divulge the Master Mason’s secrets. I will keep a worthy brother Master Mason’s secrets inviolable, when communicated to and received by me as such, murder and treason excepted,’ he intoned.

Robin stared at him.

‘What?’ said Strike.

‘You’re never a Freemason?’

‘Course I’m bloody not,’ said Strike, with a snort.

‘Well, I might not know! It’s a secret society, isn’t it?’

‘“A society with secrets”, that’s the line. No, a mate of mine in the military was one. Graham Hardacre. I used to call him Hiram occasionally, for piss-taking purposes. Mind you, he only joined up to get a hot meal.’

‘What?’

‘His wife doesn’t cook. They live off sandwiches. Masonic dinners were a way he could legitimately get hold of some steak.’

‘Couldn’t he learn to cook?’

‘If that’s ever occurred to him, he’ll have dismissed it as the product of a diseased mind. He’s a funny bloke, Hardy, in both the odd and ha-ha senses. Good investigator, though.’

As he said it, Strike remembered that Hardacre had sent him an email several months previously which he, busy with both work and personal matters, had neglected to answer. Their paths had diverged dramatically since Strike had left the army for a London-based life, while Hardacre remained in the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police. Hardacre had done Strike a couple of favours in the early days of the agency, but it now occurred to Strike that they hadn’t met face to face for five years.

‘Well, it’ll be interesting to hear from Murphy how much truth there was in the Abiff rumours,’ said Strike.

‘Why do men do it?’ asked Robin.

‘What, murder people?’

‘No, why are they so keen on closed societies with rituals and things? Women don’t go in for that kind of thing as much.’

‘Dunno,’ said Strike, but after a few seconds’ thought he added, ‘Think we might like the hierarchical thing more than you do. And we tend to need a reason to meet. Go out and do something or watch something, together. We don’t hang around in each other’s houses a lot, unless there are women involved.’

‘So Freemasonry’s like five-a-side football?’

‘Except that there’s not as much emphasis on funny handshakes in five-a-side football and you don’t often hear players asking each other how old their grandmothers are.’

‘What?’ said Robin, utterly confused.

‘It’s how masons ask each other what lodge they belong to. The lodges are all numbered. “How old’s your grandmother?” “Two thousand and fifty-three.”’

‘Did Hardacre tell you all this?’

‘Some of it. You can look most of it up. From what I gleaned from Hardacre, you’re supposed to help out the needy – with an emphasis on fellow masons – and generally be a model citizen. And you’ve got your duty of admonishment.’

‘What’s that?’

‘No public exposure. Just a quiet brotherly word in the ear.’

‘Would that extend to something criminal?’ asked Robin curiously.

‘“Murder and treason excepted”,’ quoted Strike. ‘There are bits of it that aren’t for public consumption. Hardacre wouldn’t tell me the big stuff.’

Robin checked her watch, then said reluctantly, because she was interested in the conversation,

‘I’d better go, I’m taking over from Midge for a couple of hours. Does seven tonight suit you? I’ll order some pizza or something.’

‘Yeah, great,’ said Strike. ‘See you then.’

Robin headed off, leaving Strike to wonder what an evening spent in her and Murphy’s company was going to be like, because it would be the first time he’d ever been with them, alone, as a couple. Possibly, he thought, he’d be able to find a way to make Murphy look like a prick.

On this undoubtedly puerile but satisfying thought, he turned back to his computer to type out an update for Mr A.

12

Only after Robin had left the Denmark Street office did a certain trepidation about the forthcoming evening creep over her.

She was well aware that her detective partner and her boyfriend, who’d been reasonably friendly before she and Murphy began their relationship, were now antagonistic to each other. Murphy had more than once revealed his suspicion of Robin and Strike’s friendship, and she’d finally succeeded in shutting that down by telling her boyfriend that Strike was in a relationship with a lawyer, even though it was untrue; Strike’s brief affair with Bijou Watkins had ended before she’d told Murphy about it. Robin hadn’t corrected the story since, as it continued to serve her purpose. She completely understood why Murphy was uptight about her closeness to Strike, because his ex-wife had left him for a male friend, but she didn’t need more unnecessary displays of jealousy, having had quite enough of those from her ex-husband.

The reasons for Strike’s antipathy towards Murphy were more mysterious to Robin, but she had a suspicion it was because he was afraid he was going to lose his business partner to marriage and children. If that was indeed his concern, Robin found it both insulting and infuriating, because she’d surely proven her commitment to the job and the agency ten times over by now. Of course, there was another possible explanation for Strike’s attitude, but she wasn’t going to think about that – except that she did think about it, more often than she wanted to admit. I told Amelia exactly what Charlotte wrote… she knew I was in love with you…

Stop it, Robin told herself firmly, while tidying her sitting room at six o’clock that evening. She resented feeling apprehensive, and hated her ill-disciplined brain for returning, yet again, to the conversation in which Strike had lobbed his bombshell, then walked nonchalantly away. He’s not in love with you, he was just being an annoying sod. She wiped the coffee table a little more energetically than was required, as though to defy the slight throbbing of her operation site, and reminded herself that she was happy with Murphy.

Her jangled nerves weren’t helped when she turned on the news for distraction and saw a picture of Jonathan Wace, cult leader, staring back at her. She turned the TV off again.

She’d hoped Murphy would be there at half past six, and in situ when Strike arrived, but he was twenty-five minutes late. Just as she was thinking that Murphy would have only himself to blame if Strike got there ahead of him, her boyfriend knocked on her front door carrying a water bottle, his gym bag over his shoulder, looking flushed.

‘Bloke downstairs let me in. Sorry I’m late. Did an hour at the gym, but when I came out some tosser had blocked me in in the car park. Had to wait for him to come out.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, greeting him with a kiss and a hug, glad to know he’d been doing some exercise; hopefully it had brought down his stress levels, which, given the ongoing drubbing his team was getting in the press for failing to catch the shooter of the two young boys, remained high. ‘I’m so grateful for this, Ryan, I really am.’

‘Yeah, well, you didn’t want the weekend in Paris… He not here yet?’

‘No, but he will be any minute,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve ordered pizzas.’

She was trying to show Murphy she was making no special effort for her detective partner, and had dressed in jeans and an old sweatshirt for that reason.

‘You’ve warned Strike, haven’t you, that this is sen—?’

The doorbell rang again. Robin buzzed Strike in, and a few minutes later he and Murphy were shaking hands and exchanging what almost qualified as smiles. Strike handed Robin a bottle of red wine, for which she thanked him, heading into the kitchen to get glasses. The doorbell then rang for a third time.

‘I’ll get it,’ Murphy called to Robin, and while he was buzzing in the pizza delivery man, Strike took off his coat and hung it up, glancing around Robin’s sitting room, noting Murphy’s gym bag lying nonchalantly outside the bedroom door.

The flat was mostly unchanged since the last time Strike had been here, when he’d been sleeping over, though unfortunately only on the sofa bed. He wondered whether Murphy knew that. He noticed that the plant he’d given Robin as a housewarming gift was flourishing, but to his displeasure, one of the photographs on the mantelpiece was now of Robin and Murphy, arms around each other in front of what looked ominously like Robin’s family home in Yorkshire.

When Murphy had tipped the delivery man and passed the pizzas to Robin in the kitchen, he returned to Strike, who was still standing in the middle of the room, and said quietly,

‘What I’ve got is highly confidential. If anyone finds out I’ve passed it on, I’ll be up to my neck in shit. My contact shouldn’t have said as much as she did, so it’ll be her neck on the line, too, if anything gets blabbed.’

‘I don’t blab,’ Strike assured him.

‘Robin wanted this. That’s why I’ve done it.’

As it was hardly likely Strike thought Murphy had gone digging for information for love of him, Strike wasn’t entirely sure why he was being told this.

‘Anyway,’ said Murphy, and he gestured curtly towards the three-piece suite.

Strike sat down in an armchair and Murphy on the sofa. Robin, who could hear the uncomfortable silence, wished she’d thought to put on music, and sped up in her assembling of plates, napkins and glasses.

‘How’re things going with the lawyer?’ Murphy asked Strike.

‘What lawyer?’ said Strike.

Out of sight, Robin experienced a lift-drop in her stomach.

‘Thought you were going out with a lawyer? Bijou or something.’

‘Oh,’ said Strike. ‘Yeah. It’s going well.’

Robin hurried back into the room, slightly flushed, holding pizza, plates and napkins, and avoiding looking at Strike.

‘Shall we get going, then?’ she said, before sitting down on the sofa beside Murphy. The latter reached for his notebook.

‘Just been telling Strike: this can’t go any further.’

‘It won’t, Ryan, I promise,’ said Robin, pouring Strike wine.

‘Right. Well.’ Murphy picked up his notebook, as Strike helped himself to pizza. ‘You’ll know the basics. Guy calling himself William Wright got himself a job at this shop in Holborn, Ramsay Silver. Worked there two weeks. On the third Monday, the shop owner opened up the vault, found Wright’s mutilated body, and none of the valuable silver they’d put in there on Friday.

‘Cops soon found out there was no such person as William Wright. No records for him under the name and birth date given, and the references he’d given at interview were fake. The antiques shop he claimed to have worked for in Doncaster had never heard of him. Both referees’ numbers turned out to be burner phones. A member of the public came forward to say Wright had lived downstairs from him, in Newham. Wright had only been there a month, paid cash for the deposit, and the people who shared the house only knew him as William Wright, from Doncaster.’

Murphy took a sip from his water bottle, which led Strike, who was making notes, to a new realisation that water bottles carried around after exercise were an obnoxious affectation. Murphy turned a page in his notebook and continued,

‘The last verified sighting of Wright alive was on Friday the seventeenth of June. He’s on the shop’s interior security camera nearly all day Friday—’

‘“Nearly?”’ said Strike.

‘He was sent out for one errand in the late afternoon, but he came back and remained in the shop until six. At ten past six he was caught on camera entering Covent Garden Tube station.

‘There’s CCTV footage of four men entering Wild Court in the early hours of Saturday morning, which is the street Ramsay Silver’s on, close to the time they know the shop was opened up again. The presumption is that it was Wright and three associates.

‘The interior security camera footage shows somebody entering the shop around one a.m., in the dark. They crossed the floor and turned off the camera. Wright’s believed to have been killed shortly afterwards, by one or more of the men accompanying him. Forensics say he’d been dead around forty-eight hours when he was found.’

‘Wright was definitely killed in the vault, was he?’ asked Strike. ‘Not somewhere else, and shoved in the vault later?’

‘No, it definitely happened in the vault,’ said Murphy. ‘The splash patterns from the blood were un-fakeable, according to forensics. There was also a partial footprint that had clearly been made while the blood was still liquid.’

‘Have you got details on the footprint?’ asked Strike.

‘Thought you were trying to identify the body, not catch the killers?’

‘ID-ing the killers would help identify the body,’ said Strike, matching stony glare with stony glare.

‘As you’ll realise in a minute, you’d be very ill-advised to try tracking down these particular killers,’ said Murphy. He returned to his notes.

‘The security camera was switched back on around three a.m., the alarm was reset—’

‘Had they disabled it when they entered the shop?’ asked Strike.

‘I – don’t know,’ admitted Murphy, looking down at his notes. ‘I assume so. Anyway, the shop wasn’t opened again till Monday morning.’

He took another sip of water, then said,

‘External CCTV footage shows only individuals or pairs in the vicinity of Wild Court in the aftermath of the robbery, so the three thieves clearly split up.’

‘Were they carrying the stolen silver?’ said Robin.

‘My contact didn’t have a lot to say about that – maybe they shoved it in backpacks. They think one of them got into a getaway car that arrived on Wild Street around the right time, but the nearest camera was out of commission. According to my source, a car with fake plates and a lone driver had passed an earlier camera shortly after three a.m. When it passed the next couple of cameras, there were two people in it.’

‘What make was the car?’ asked Strike.

‘Contact didn’t say,’ said Murphy, not bothering to look up this time. ‘As I say, Saturday, the shop was closed, so the body lay undisturbed until Monday, when the owner opened up the vault.’

‘The body was mutilated, right?’ said Strike.

‘Yeah, but the people working there recognised it as Wright from hair, height, build et cetera. DNA from the body matched DNA found in the shop, including hair in the U-bend of the sink. The corpse had been dressed in something weird, but my contact wouldn’t tell me what. I got the impression it was done to send a message, maybe to humiliate him.’

Murphy took another swig of water, then said,

‘The next bit is what you can’t talk about.’

‘We won’t,’ Robin assured him.

‘It explains why there’s been no absolute confirmation Wright was really Jason Knowles, but if you talk—’

‘Ryan, we won’t.’

‘All right,’ said Murphy and he continued: ‘Jason Knowles was very well connected, underworld-wise. Most of his family are cons, and his uncle’s a serious player. Knowles himself wasn’t a big fish, though, just a thief.

‘The National Crime Agency’s had a plainclothes plant in Knowles’ uncle’s circle for the past six months, because the uncle’s dealing guns. The NCA guy heard the same story from two separate sources: Jason was lured into an ambush in the belief he and his killers were doing a job together, and his body had been left unidentifiable. The rumour was, his uncle personally gave the order to kill him, suspecting he was the one leaking info to the police.’

‘Jesus,’ said Robin quietly.

‘Everything about the silver job fitted. Corpse matched Knowles in height and build, and when the cops showed the photograph of Knowles to the people working at the shop, they thought it was him. They said they couldn’t be a hundred per cent, because Wright had a beard, which Knowles didn’t in his pictures, nor did Knowles wear glasses, as Wright did, nor was Knowles usually fake tanned. Wright’s hair was darker than Knowles’, as well, but the corpse’s hair was found to be dyed. Knowles had also been boasting that his next job would be all over the papers, and the silver that was stolen was historically important.’

‘Fingerprints?’ said Strike.

‘That was a problem.’

‘Knowles’s must’ve been on record?’

‘They were, but the body’s hands were missing, which obviously implies the killer knew the fingerprints would identify the body.’

‘Weren’t Wright’s prints all over the shop?’

‘The assistants wear gloves to handle all the silver and open the glass cabinets, and unfortunately, the cleaner did a very thorough job on the shop, the staff area and the toilet on Monday morning, right before the body was found.’

‘Who’s the cleaner?’ asked Strike.

Murphy flipped over a page.

‘Bloke called Todd.’

‘Male cleaner?’ said Strike.

‘Men can clean, I’ve heard,’ said Robin.

‘Thought that was an urban myth,’ said Strike.

Acting as though he hadn’t heard this exchange, Murphy continued,

‘The NCA plant was obviously going to be in danger if the Met started pursuing DNA identification of Knowles, so the NCA asked the Met to fudge it – keep appealing for information until they’d wrapped up the gun trafficking case and Knowles’ relatives could be safely tested.

‘Unfortunately, the guy in charge of the vault case, Malcolm Truman, then went rogue, and announced the Met were certain the body was Knowles.’

‘The fuck did he do that for?’ asked Strike, genuinely perplexed.

‘Journalists were running with the Freemasonry angle, and Truman didn’t want to look like a bloke who didn’t have any leads. My source says he’s an arrogant tit who didn’t want to look clueless in the press. He was suspended after he talked. The team working the case tried to undo the damage, but the papers lost interest once they heard Wright had been a crim and the Freemasonry angle was bullshit. Bottom line,’ said Murphy, ‘William Wright was Jason Knowles, but they can’t prove it yet.’

Murphy now set down his water and reached for a slice of pizza.

‘I take it the people who worked at the shop are in the clear?’ asked Strike.

‘Yeah, they all had rock-solid alibis,’ said Murphy through a mouthful of pizza. ‘Todd the cleaner was playing cards into the small hours with a regular poker group who confirmed he was with them. The manager, name of Pamela, spent the weekend in Grantham, attending a family wedding, set off at eight on Friday evening. The owner, Ramsay, is a part-time carer for his wife; they had friends staying over the weekend who confirmed he only left the house for a pub lunch with them on Saturday.’

The three ate in silence for a minute. Robin wanted to ask Strike what he thought, but didn’t want to do so in front of Murphy. Strike, meanwhile, was musing on the fact that the CID man clearly didn’t want the agency to take this case, and even though he’d been averse to taking it himself until this moment, Strike suddenly wondered whether he wasn’t being offered a spectacular opportunity to drive a wedge between Robin and her boyfriend.

‘You mentioned other possible contenders for Wright,’ Robin said to Murphy.

‘Yeah, there were a couple,’ said Murphy. He picked up his notebook again and turned a page. ‘Nearly all of them were ruled out. There were two blokes who couldn’t be excluded, because they couldn’t get DNA.

‘One was called Tyler Powell. His grandmother called the helpline. Apparently he got himself into some kind of trouble at home in the Midlands and told Gran he’d got himself a job down south. He was the right height and in the right age range, but there’s no other reason to suppose it was him.’

‘Couldn’t they swab the grandmother to check the DNA?’ asked Strike.

‘Powell’s adopted.’

‘Who was the other possibility?’ asked Robin.

‘Man called Niall Semple. He’s been in the press, because he was an ex-paratrooper with mental health problems who vanished from his house in Scotland and cut all contact. Again, no blood relatives. They’d just cremated his mother when he disappeared. His wife contacted the police. He was the right height and blood group, but otherwise nothing to say it was him.’

‘And nobody thought Wright might be Rupert Fleetwood?’ asked Robin.

‘My source only mentioned Powell and Semple,’ said Murphy.

‘And that male prostitute thing…’ said Robin.

‘What’s this?’ said Strike, looking up from his notebook.

‘Just a bad joke that snowballed,’ said Murphy. ‘The body was naked, that’s where it started.’

‘This might be an odd question,’ said Robin, ‘but was anything carved onto the body’s back?’

‘How the fuck d’you know about that?’ said Murphy sharply.

‘I saw it online,’ said Robin, nettled by his tone, especially in front of Strike. ‘Someone commenting on the story said he had the letter “G” carved onto him.’

‘My contact told me it was a hallmark.’ Murphy closed his notebook. ‘And that’s all I’ve got.’

‘Well, thanks, Ryan,’ said Robin. ‘This has—’

‘So now what?’ said Murphy. He was looking at Strike rather than Robin.

‘We wanted to find out whether the Met had a definite ID,’ said Strike, ‘and now we know. They don’t.’

‘You can’t go fucking around with the Knowles family,’ said Murphy.

‘Not intending to. We haven’t got forensic labs, we can’t analyse DNA.’

‘So you won’t be taking the case?’ said Murphy.

‘Robin and I will have to discuss that,’ said Strike.

‘Does anyone want more—?’ Robin began.

‘It’s Knowles,’ said Murphy, glaring at Strike. ‘You’d just be stringing this woman along, pretending there’s a chance it’s her toyboy.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Strike, deliberately calm. Let Robin watch Murphy getting aggressive and trying to dictate what the agency investigated. ‘There are a lot of similarities between Rupert Fleetwood and the body, he had good reasons for wanting to lie low for a while, and he had a valuable bit of silver to sell.’

Robin, who knew perfectly well Strike didn’t believe Rupert Fleetwood had been William Wright, assumed he was saying this because he’d been as aggravated by Murphy’s dictatorial tone as she was.

‘Anyway,’ said Strike, setting down his plate and getting to his feet, ‘I’d better get going.’

‘Already?’ said Robin, disconcerted. ‘There’s more pizza. And pudding.’

‘I’m meeting Bijou,’ said Strike, looking Robin straight in the eye. Though she’d have given anything not to, Robin felt herself turn red. ‘Thanks, though,’ Strike added, looking down at the clearly fuming Murphy. ‘This has been extremely helpful.’

13

The work rota was so arranged that Strike and Robin didn’t meet again until Friday, which was cold and cloudless. Central London was now fully decked in its Christmas finery, and eleven o’clock found Robin in Mount Street in Belgravia, standing beneath one of the extravagant banners of silver lights that stretched across the road, pretending to be talking on her phone while the ex-wife of their professional cricketer client shopped in Balenciaga.

Though she was gloved and coated, the chill nipped at every exposed bit of Robin’s skin. She felt low and tired, because she was still not sleeping well. Strike’s visit had left an uncomfortable undercurrent in its wake. Murphy had returned to the subject of the body in the vault the following morning, outlining the dangers of provoking a man who’d already ordered his own nephew killed and reminding Robin, yet again, that more people than Strike would be put in danger if Lynden Knowles came to believe he was being investigated for Jason’s death. Robin had tried very hard not to sound defensive or angry as she reiterated that neither she nor Strike had any intention of going near Jason’s uncle, and assured him that the secret of the plainclothes man was completely safe with them.

She might have said far more. She might have reminded Murphy that she stood in no need of lectures on the dangers of tangling with career criminals, because she and Strike had already come up against a criminal family every bit as sociopathic as Lynden Knowles’ appeared to be. She might even have said aloud the thing that both of them knew, which was that everything Murphy was saying was coloured by his dislike of her partner. She’d refrained, though. She didn’t want an argument.

Robin would ordinarily have texted Strike to ask what he thought about taking Decima’s case, but lurking embarrassment at having been caught out in the lie about Bijou Watkins prevented her doing so. Now she stood staring across the road at a motif carved in stone over the windows of Balenciaga; it was either a tree or a sheaf of corn. Possibly she was being influenced by the masonic symbolism she’d been reading up on during her Tube journey that morning: the sheaf of corn, she now knew, represented bounty and charity to Freemasons.

Hearing her name, Robin started and looked round. Strike was walking towards her. She’d been expecting to hand over to Shah, and then only in an hour’s time. Pretending to finish her call, Robin slipped her phone back into her pocket.

‘Plug’s heading for Ipswich again,’ were Strike’s first words. ‘Christ knows what he’s up to there. Anyway, Shah’s tailing him, and he told me you were here.’

‘You’re early,’ said Robin. ‘I’m still on her for another hour.’

‘I know. I wanted to talk over the silver vault case in person. I’ve just had Decima Mullins on the phone again.’

‘Hang on,’ said Robin, eyes on the door of Balenciaga, ‘Mrs A’s on the move.’

The brunette, who was wearing a long black coat of faux-fur and very high-heeled boots, had emerged from the shop carrying a large shopping bag, and now sauntered on up the street. Robin and Strike set off on the opposite pavement, keeping pace with her, though twenty yards behind.

‘What did you tell Decima?’ asked Robin.

‘The truth,’ said Strike, ‘leaving out the plainclothes bloke, obviously. I said the circumstantial evidence points strongly towards it being Jason Knowles, but that there’s no absolute confirmation yet that it’s him.’

‘And what did she say?’ said Robin.

‘She begged me to try and prove who Wright was,’ said Strike. ‘So, what d’you think?’

‘I thought you didn’t want the job?’

‘I’m not going to lie,’ said Strike. ‘I’m getting interested in that body.’

But this, of course, wasn’t the whole truth.

Since realising how little Murphy wanted them to investigate the corpse in the vault, Strike had come to see how many opportunities this case offered with regard to the furtherance of his plans regarding Robin. Given the sensitivity around the undercover NCA agent, Strike had a perfect excuse to insist he and Robin did the bulk of this case together, excluding the subcontractors. The need for confidentiality would justify regular closed meetings between the two of them and, as a bonus, they might need to visit the home towns of the other candidates for William Wright, so as to rule them out. That would mean long car trips, plenty of joint interviews and debriefs and, with luck, overnight stays. He even had an excellent excuse to bring up Charlotte’s suicide note again, when outlining why Sacha Legard and Valentine Longcaster might not be keen on talking to him.

Strike didn’t doubt that some would call him cynical, but that didn’t trouble him in the slightest. After all, he fully intended to give Decima Mullins value for money, and if they managed to prove that Fleetwood hadn’t been the man in the vault, their client would have the resolution she needed.

The brunette on the other side of the road entered a jewellers. Strike and Robin turned automatically to look into a window opposite, watching the reflected shopfront.

‘But,’ said Strike, ‘if investigating is going to cause trouble between you and Murphy, we’ll pass.’

Caught off-guard, Robin looked up at him.

‘I – even if it did, that’s not a good reason not to take it,’ she said, without thinking.

Interesting, thought Strike, but aloud he said,

‘Well, that’d be my view in your position, but some might say that’s why I’m still single. You haven’t asked me how my date with Bijou went,’ he added, looking down at her.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry about that,’ said Robin, blushing. ‘I never – I forgot to tell Ryan you’d stopped seeing her, I – you didn’t have to—’

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said Strike. ‘She makes a far better imaginary girlfriend than she did a real one. Not,’ he added, ‘that she was ever a girlfriend.’

‘What would you call her, then?’ said Robin, thoroughly taken aback by the turn the conversation had taken. Strike’s usual form was resolute tight-lipped-ness about his private life.

‘A misguided exercise in distraction and instant gratification that’s cured me of the practice. That was quick,’ Strike added, as Mr A’s ex-wife emerged from the jewellers opposite.

‘Nothing she fancied,’ said Robin, as they turned to walk after her. ‘I think she’s Christmas shopping.’

‘Christ, don’t remind me,’ groaned Strike. ‘I fucking hate it. I’d pay a grand for someone to do it for me.’

‘Where are you spending Christmas?’ Robin asked. For the first time in six years, both partners would be free over the holidays.

‘Lucy’s,’ said Strike. ‘I couldn’t get out of it, not right after Ted dying. I’ve got to go to the Christmas Eve party with all the neighbours, too. I’d rather eat my own fucking feet. What are you up to?’

‘Ryan and I are going to Mum and Dad’s. I’m dreading that too, to be honest,’ said Robin.

‘Really?’ said Strike. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ sighed Robin. ‘It’s just families, isn’t it? The house is going to be packed…’

But there was so much she couldn’t say. There would be two pregnant women in the house, her sister-in-law, Jenny, and her brother Martin’s girlfriend; none of the family knew about Robin’s recent hospitalisation, but she didn’t doubt there’d be a lot of baby and pregnancy talk, and she was afraid Murphy might use that as an excuse to start talking about egg freezing again.

‘… I’d like to stay in London and do my own thing, but it feels as though you’re not allowed to do that unless you’ve got kids.’

‘You’re not allowed even then,’ said Strike. ‘Joan would have been mortally offended if Lucy and Greg hadn’t turned up every year with her great-nephews.’

Ahead, their target threw back her mane of professionally blow-dried hair as she walked.

‘So,’ said Strike. ‘Do we take the case? It’s your call.’

‘Well… from all you’ve said, if we don’t do it, she’ll just hire someone else.’

‘I agree. And we won’t string her along.’

‘No,’ agreed Robin, ‘and I must admit, I’m getting interested in that body, too.’

‘But as I say, if it’ll cause you trouble—’

‘Call her back, and tell her we’ll do it,’ said Robin.

‘You sure?’

‘Definitely,’ said Robin.

‘I’ll ring her now,’ said Strike, drawing out his mobile.

Robin listened to Strike’s side of the call, feeling particularly warm towards him, appreciative of his consideration with regard to Murphy, and grateful that he’d passed off her lie about Bijou Watkins as a joke.

‘Right, I’ll get that contract to you,’ Strike was saying. ‘Right… yeah… no problem at all. Our pleasure.’

He hung up.

‘Very grateful,’ he said. ‘More tears.’

The two partners walked on in silence, Strike thoroughly satisfied with his last ten minutes’ work. He’d just made an excellent start in establishing that he was no longer interested in casual affairs by saying what he had about Bijou Watkins, and Robin had agreed to the investigation, in spite of her boyfriend’s clear disapproval. No matter the risks, no matter the possible fallout, he now intended to seize the first auspicious moment to tell her what he felt, and if no such opportunity arose naturally, he’d engineer one.

There’s no pride in having what you never worked for.

Never let the other chap change your game plan.

Stick to your own, and play to your strengths.