And still Joan clung on. Three days after their arrival, four: she slept almost constantly, but still she clung to life.

“It’s you two,” said Ted. “She doesn’t want to go while you two are here.”

Strike was coming to dread silences too large for human voices to fill. His nerves were stretched by the constant clinking of teaspoons in hot drinks made for something to do, by the tears shed by Uncle Ted when he thought nobody was looking, by the hushed inquiries of well-meaning neighbors.

On the fifth day, Lucy’s husband Greg arrived with their three boys. Husband and wife had debated how sensible it was to take the boys out of school, and risk a journey that remained tricky, though the storms had at last subsided, but Lucy could bear their absence no longer. When Greg arrived, the boys came running out of the car toward their mother and the whole family clung to each other, while Strike and Ted looked on, united in their aloneness, unmarried man and soon-to-be widower. The boys were led up to Joan’s bedroom to see her, and she managed smiles for all of them. Even Luke was subdued afterward, and Jack cried.

Both spare rooms were now needed to accommodate the new arrivals, so Strike returned, uncomplaining, to sleep on the sofa.

“You look like shit,” Polworth informed him bluntly on day six, and indeed Strike, who’d woken every hour on the horsehair sofa, felt it. “Let’s get a pint.”

“Can I come?” asked Jack hopefully. He was showing a tendency to hang around Strike rather than his father, while Lucy sat upstairs with Joan.

“You can if your dad says it’s OK,” said Strike.

Greg, who was currently walking around the garden with his phone clamped to his ear, trying to contribute to a conference call with his London office while Luke and Adam played football around him, agreed with a thumbs up.

So Strike, Polworth and Jack walked down into St. Mawes together. Though the sky was dark and the roads still wet, the winds had at last dropped. As they reached the seafront, Strike’s mobile rang. He answered it, still walking.

“Strike.”

“It’s Shanker. Got your message.”

“I left that ten days ago,” said Strike.

“I’ve been busy, you ungrateful piece of shit.”

“Sorry,” said Strike.

He waved the other two on and paused again at the harbor wall, looking out at the green-gray sea and the hazy horizon.

“I’ve nosed around a bit,” said Shanker, “and you’re not gonna find out ’oo that bint was, Bunsen. The one on the film. Nobody knows. She’ll ’ave done somethin’ fucking serious to get that, though.”

“Deserved it, you reckon,” said Strike, as he surveyed the flat sea. It didn’t look capable, now, of the violence it had inflicted upon the town.

“I’m not saying she deserved—I’m sayin’ even Mucky Ricci didn’t make ’an ’abit of that,” said Shanker impatiently. “Are you in solitary?”

“What?”

“Where the fuck are you? There’s no noise.”

“In Cornwall.”

For a moment, Strike expected Shanker to ask where that was. Shanker was almost impressively ignorant of the country that lay beyond London.

“The fuck are you doin’ in Cornwall?”

“My aunt’s dying.”

“Oh shit,” said Shanker. “Sorry.”

“Where is he now?”

“’Oo?”

“Ricci.”

“’E’s in an ’ome. I told you.”

“All right. Thanks for trying, Shanker. Appreciate it.”

For perhaps the first time ever, it was Shanker who shouted at Strike to stop him hanging up.

“Oi—oi!”

“What?” said Strike, raising the mobile to his ear again.

“Why d’you wanna know where ’e is? You ain’t gonna go talkin’ to Ricci. You’re done.”

“I’m not done,” said Strike, eyes screwed up against the sea breeze. “I haven’t found out what happened to the doctor, yet.”

“Fuck’s sake. D’you wanna get shot through the fuckin’ ’ead?”

“See you, Shanker,” said Strike, and before his old friend could say anything else, he cut the call and muted his phone.

Polworth was already at a table with Jack when Strike reached the Victory, two pints and a Coke on the table.

“Just been telling Jack,” Polworth told Strike, as the detective sat down. “Haven’t I, eh?” he asked Jack, who nodded, beaming. “For when he’s older. This is his local.”

“A pub three hundred miles from where he lives?”

“He was born in Cornwall. He was just telling me.”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike. “I forgot about that.”

The family had been staying with Ted and Joan when Lucy went into labor a month early. Jack had been born in the same Truro hospital as Strike himself.

“And you’re a Nancarrow on your mum’s side,” Polworth told Jack, who was greatly enjoying Polworth’s approval. “So that makes you a Cornishman, born and bred.”

Polworth turned to Strike.

“Who was the pearly king on the phone there? We could hear his cockney a mile off.”

“Guy called Shanker,” said Strike. “I’ve told you about him. My mum scraped him off the street one night when he’d been stabbed. He adopted us.”

Strike sipped his pint, wondering how Polworth and Shanker would get on, in the unlikely event of them ever meeting. He fancied they might end up punching each other. They seemed to Strike like pieces from entirely different jigsaw puzzles: no point of connection. At the mention of stabbing, Polworth had glanced at Jack, but lowering his pint Strike said,

“Don’t worry about him. He wants to be a Red Cap, like me and Ted.”

Jack beamed some more. He was having a great time.

“Can I try some of that beer?” he asked his uncle.

“Don’t push it,” said Strike.

“Look at this,” said Polworth, pointing at a page in the newspaper he’d picked up. “Westminster trying to bully the Scots, the bast—”

Strike cleared his throat. Jack giggled.

“Sorry,” said Polworth. “But come on. Telling them they can’t keep the pound if they vote for independence? ’Course they’ll keep the pound. It’s in everyone’s interests…”

He talked on for the next ten minutes about small nationalism, the obvious arguments for both Scottish and Cornish independence and the idiocy of those who opposed them, until Jack looked glazed and Strike, as a last resort, dragged the conversation back to football. Arsenal, as he’d foreseen, had lost to defending champions Bayern Munich, and he didn’t doubt the second leg would see them knocked out. He and Ted had watched the game together and done a good job of pretending they cared about the result. Strike permitted Polworth to pass censorious comment on the foul that had seen Szcz˛esny sent off, and politics was mercifully dropped.

Strike thought about Polworth later that night, as he lay in the dark on the horsehair sofa again, unable to sleep. His tiredness now had a feverishness about it, exacerbated by the aching of his body, the perpetual strain of being here, in this overcrowded house, waiting for the tiny body upstairs to give up.