To compound his stress, both his unknown half-sister, Prudence, and his half-brother Al had started texting him again. His half-siblings seemed to imagine that Strike, having enjoyed a moment of necessary catharsis by shouting at Rokeby over the phone, was probably regretting his outburst, and more amenable to attending his father’s party to make up. Strike hadn’t answered any of their texts, but he’d experienced them as insect bites: determined not to scratch, they were nevertheless the source of a niggling aggravation.

Overhanging every other worry was the Bamborough case which, for all the hours he and Robin were putting into it, was proving as opaque as it had when first they’d agreed to tackle the forty-year-old mystery. The year’s deadline was coming ever closer, and nothing resembling a breakthrough had yet occurred. If he was honest, Strike had low hopes of the interview with Wilma Bayliss’s daughters, which he and Robin would be conducting later that morning, before Strike boarded the train to Truro.

All in all, as he drove toward the house of the middle-aged woman for whom SB seemed to feel such an attraction, Strike had to admit he felt a glimmer of sympathy for any man in desperate search of what the detective was certain was some form of sexual release. Recently it had been brought home to Strike that the relationships he’d had since leaving Charlotte, casual though they’d been, had been his only unalloyed refuge from the job. His sex life had been moribund since Joan’s diagnosis of cancer: all those lengthy trips to Cornwall had eaten up time that might have been given to dates.

Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t had opportunities. Ever since the agency had become successful, a few of the rich and unhappy women who’d formed a staple of the agency’s work had shown a tendency to size up Strike as a potential palliative for their own emotional pain or emptiness. Strike had taken on a new client of exactly this type the previous day, Good Friday. As she’d replaced Mrs. Smith, who’d already initiated divorce proceedings against her husband on the basis of Morris’s pictures of him with their nanny, they’d nicknamed the thirty-two-year-old brunette Miss Jones.

She was undeniably beautiful, with long legs, full lips and skin of expensive smoothness. She was of interest to the gossip columns partly because she was an heiress, and partly because she was involved in a bitter custody battle with her estranged boyfriend, on whom she was seeking dirt to use in court. Miss Jones had crossed and re-crossed her long legs while she told Strike about her hypocritical ex-partner’s drug use, the fact that he was feeding stories about her to the papers, and that he had no interest in his six-month-old daughter other than as a means to make Miss Jones unhappy. While he was seeing her to the door, their interview concluded, she’d repeatedly touched his arm and laughed longer than necessary at his mild pleasantries. Trying to usher her politely out of the door under Pat’s censorious eye, Strike had had the sensation of trying to prize chewing gum off his fingers.

Strike could well imagine Dave Polworth’s comments had he been privy to the scene, because Polworth had trenchant theories about the sort of women who found his oldest friend attractive, and of whom Charlotte was the purest example of the type. The women most readily drawn to Strike were, in Polworth’s view, neurotic, chaotic and occasionally dangerous, and their fondness for the bent-nosed ex-boxer indicated a subconscious desire for something rocklike to which they could attach themselves like limpets.

Driving through the deserted streets of Stoke Newington, Strike’s thoughts turned naturally to his ex-fiancée. He hadn’t responded to the desperate text messages she’d sent him from what he knew, having Googled the place, to be a private psychiatric clinic. Not only had they arrived on the eve of his departure for Joan’s deathbed, he hadn’t wanted to fuel her vain hopes that he would appear to rescue her. Was she still there? If so, it would be her longest ever period of hospitalization. Her one-year-old twins were doubtless in the care of a nanny, or the mother-in-law Charlotte had once assured him was ready and willing to take over maternal duties.

A short distance away from Elinor Dean’s street, Strike called Robin.

“Is he still inside?”

“Yes. You’ll be able to park right behind me, there’s a space. I think number 14 must’ve gone away for Easter with the kids. Both cars are gone.

“See you in five.”

When Strike turned into the street, he saw the old Land Rover parked a few houses down from Elinor’s front door, and was able to park without difficulty in the space directly behind it. As he turned off his engine, Robin jumped down out of her Land Rover, closed the door quietly, and walked around the BMW to the passenger’s side, a messenger bag over her shoulder.

“Morning,” she said, sliding into the seat beside him.

“Morning. Aren’t you keen to get away?”

As he said it, the screen of the mobile in her hand lit up: somebody had texted her. Robin didn’t even look at the message, but turned the phone over on her knee, to hide its light.

“Got a few things to tell you. I’ve spoken to C. B. Oakden.”

“Ah,” said Strike.

Given that Oakden seemed primarily interested in Strike, and that Strike suspected Oakden was recording his calls, the two detectives had agreed that it should be Robin who warned him away from the case.

“He didn’t like it,” said Robin. “There was a lot of ‘it’s a free country,’ and ‘I’m entitled to talk to anyone I like.’ I said to him, ‘Trying to get in ahead of us and talk to witnesses could hamper our investigation.’ He said, as an experienced biographer—”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Strike under his breath.

“—he knows how to question people to get information out of them, and it might be a good idea for the three of us to pool our resources.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “That’s exactly what this agency needs, a convicted con man on the payroll. How did you leave it?”

“Well, I can tell he really wants to meet you and I think he’s determined to withhold everything he knows about Brenner until he comes face to face with you. He wants to keep Brenner as bait.”

Strike reached for another cigarette.

“I’m not sure Brenner’s worth C. B. Oakden.”

“Even after what Janice said?”

Strike took a drag on the cigarette, then blew smoke out of the window, away from Robin. “I grant you, Brenner looks a lot fishier now than he did when we started digging, but what are the odds Oakden’s actually got useful information? He was a kid when all this happened and nicking that obituary smacks of a man trying to scrape up things to say, rather than—”

He heard a rustling beside him and turned to see Robin opening her messenger bag. Slightly to his surprise, Robin was pulling out Talbot’s notebook again.

“Still carrying that around with you, are you?” said Strike, trying not to sound exasperated.

“Apparently I am,” she said, moving her mobile onto the dashboard so that she could open the book in her lap. Watching the phone, Strike saw a second text arrive, lighting up the screen, and this time, he caught sight of the name: Morris.

“What’s Morris texting you about?” Strike said, and even to his ears, the question sounded critical.