“How many times are we going to go over this? D’you think I was pleased when he walked in the room? I’d never have gone in there if I’d known he was about to make a surprise appearance! The fact remains—”

“—it’s not a fact—”

“—if I hadn’t—”

“—this theory—”

“It isn’t a bloody theory, Strike, it’s reality, and you’re just being pig-headed about it.” Robin pulled her mobile out of her back pocket and brought up the photo she’d taken on her second visit to the nursing home, which had lasted barely two minutes, and involved her taking a quick, unwitnessed photograph of Luca Ricci’s handwriting in the visitors’ book.

“Give me the anonymous note,” she ordered Strike, holding out her hand for the piece of crumpled blue paper they’d taken away from their meeting with the Bayliss sisters. “There.”

She set them side by side, facing Strike. To Robin, the similarities were undeniable: the same odd mixture of capital and lower-case letters, all distinct and separate, but with odd and unnecessary little flourishes, rather like the incongruous lisp of a tall, dangerous-looking man whose skin was as pitted as a partly peeled orange.

“You can’t prove it’s the same writing from a photograph,” said Strike. He knew he was being ungracious, but his anger wasn’t yet fully spent. “Expert analysis relies on pen pressure, apart from anything else.”

“OK, fine,” said Robin, who now had a hard, angry lump in her throat. She got up and walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. Through the gap, Strike heard her talking to Pat, followed by the tinkle of mugs. Annoyed though he was, he still hoped she was going to get him a cup of tea, as well.

Frowning slightly, he pulled Robin’s mobile and the anonymous note toward him and looked again from one to the other. She was right, and he’d known, though not acknowledged it, from the moment she’d shown him the picture on her phone, on her return from St. Peter’s. Though he hadn’t told Robin so, Strike had forwarded a picture of both the anonymous note and Luca Ricci’s visitors’ book message to an expert handwriting analyst he’d reached through his police contacts. The woman had expressed caution about reaching a hard and fast conclusion without having the original samples in front of her, but said that, on the evidence, she was “seventy to eighty percent certain” that both had been written by the same person.

“Does handwriting remain that consistent, forty years apart?” Strike asked.

“Not always,” the expert replied. “You expect changes, typically. Mostly, people’s handwriting deteriorates with age because of physical factors. Mood can have an influence, too. My research tends to show that handwriting alters least in people who write infrequently, compared with those who write a lot. Occasional writers seem to stick with the style they adopted early, possibly in school. In the case of these two samples, there are certainly distinctive features that seem to have hung around from youth.”

“I think it’s fair to say this guy doesn’t write a lot in his line of work,” said Strike.

Luca’s last spell in jail, as Shanker had told him, had been for ordering and overseeing a stabbing. The victim had been knifed in the balls. By a miracle, he’d survived, “but ’e won’t be ’avin’ any more kids, poor cunt,” Shanker had informed Strike, two nights previously. “Can’t get a fuckin’ ’ard-on wivvout agony. Not worf living, is it, after that? The knife sliced straight through the right bollock, I ’eard—course, they ’ad him pinned down—”

“No need for details,” Strike had said. He’d just experienced a nasty sensation radiating out of his own balls up to his chest.

Strike had called Shanker on some slight pretext, purely to see whether any rumor had reached his old friend of Luca Ricci being concerned that a female detective had turned up in his father’s nursing home. As Shanker hadn’t mentioned anything, Strike had to conclude that no such whispers were abroad.

While this was a relief, it wasn’t really a surprise. Once he’d calmed down, Strike had been forced to admit to himself that he was sure Robin had got away with it. Everything Strike knew about Luca Ricci suggested he’d never have let her walk away unscathed if he’d believed she was there to investigate any member of his family. The kinds of people whose darkest impulses were kept in check by their own consciences, the dictates of the law, by social norms and common sense might find it hard to believe anyone would be so foolish or reckless as to hurt Robin inside a nursing home bedroom, or march her out of the building with a knife to her back. He wouldn’t do it in broad daylight, they’d say. He wouldn’t dare, with witnesses all around! But Luca’s fearsome reputation rested on his propensity for brazen violence, no matter where he was, or who was watching. He operated on an assumption of impunity, for which he had much justification. For every prison term he’d served, there’d been many incidents that should have seen him convicted, but which he’d managed to escape by intimidating witnesses, or terrifying others into taking the rap.

Robin returned to the inner office, stony-faced, but carrying two mugs of tea. She pushed the door closed with her foot, then set down the darker of the two teas in front of Strike.

“Thanks,” muttered Strike.

“You’re welcome,” she replied stiffly, checking her watch as she sat down again. They had twenty minutes to go, before the conference call with Anna and Kim.

“We can’t,” said Strike, “tell Anna we think Luca Ricci wrote the anonymous notes.”

Robin simply looked at him.

“We can’t have two nice middle-class women walking around telling people Ricci threatened Margot, and maybe killed her,” said Strike. “We’d be putting them in danger, quite apart from ourselves.”

“Can’t we at least show the samples to an expert?”

“I have,” said Strike, and he explained what the woman had said.

“Why didn’t you tell—”

“Because I was still bloody angry,” said Strike, sipping his tea. It was exactly the way he liked it, strong, sweet and the color of creosote. “Robin, the reality is, if we take the photo and the note to the police, whether or not anything comes of it, you’ll have painted a giant target on your back. Ricci’ll start digging around on who could have photographed his handwriting in that visitors’ book. It won’t take him long to find us.”

“He was twenty-two when Margot went missing,” said Robin quietly. “Old enough and big enough to abduct a woman. He had contacts to help with the disposal of a body. Betty Fuller thought the person who wrote the notes was the killer, and she’s still scared of telling us who it was. That could imply the son, just as well as the father.”

“I grant you all that,” said Strike, “but it’s time for a reality check. We haven’t got the resources to go up against organized criminals. You going to St. Peter’s was reckless enough—”

“Could you explain to me why it was reckless when I did it, but not when you were planning to do it?” said Robin.

Strike was momentarily stymied.