“Is that right?” said Strike, startled.

“Yeah. Well… I’ll be off. ’Ave a good weekend.”

“You too,” said Strike.

He waited until her footsteps had died away on the metal staircase, before pulling out his cigarettes, lighting one and returning to the inner office, where the window was still open. Here, he took an old ashtray out of the desk drawer and Talbot’s leather notebook out of the top drawer of the filing cabinet, and settled down in his usual chair to flick through it once more, stopping at the final page.

Strike had never given Talbot’s final jottings more than cursory attention, partly because his patience had run out by the time he got there, partly they were among the most shambolic and incoherent parts of the notes. Tonight, though, he had a melancholy reason for examining the last page of Talbot’s notebook, because Strike, too, had come to the end of the case. So he examined Talbot’s drawing of the demon he believed he’d conjured before the ambulance came to take him away: the spirit of Margot Bamborough, returned from some astral plane to haunt him in the form of Babalon, the Mother of Abominations.

There was no pressure to understand any more. Strike defocused his mind as he’d have relaxed his eyes, the better to spot one of those apparently three-dimensional images hidden in what appeared to be a flat pattern. His eyes glided over the phrases and fragments Talbot had half-remembered from Crowley’s writings, and of consultation of the Thoth tarot. As he scrutinized the picture of the heavy-breasted demon, on whose belly the penitent Talbot had subsequently inscribed a Christian cross, he remembered Robin’s words all those months previously in Hampton Court Palace, about the allure of myth and symbol, and the idea of the collective unconscious, where archetypes lurked. This demon, and the disconnected phrases that had seemed pertinent to Talbot in his psychotic state, had sprung from the policeman’s own subconscious: it was too easy, too simplistic, to blame Crowley and Lévi for what Talbot’s own mind had chosen to retain. This was what it generated, in a last spasm of madness, in a final attempt at resolution. Seven veils, seven heads, seven streams. Lust and strange drugs. Seven around her neck. The poisoned darkness of the BLACK MOON. Blood and sin. She rides upon the lion serpent.

Strike bent the lamp closer to the page, so that he could scrutinize the drawing more closely. Was he deluding himself, or did some of these crazy jottings indicate that Talbot had noticed the odd coinci­dences that Strike had, after talking to the Bayliss sisters? As his gaze moved from one fragment of mystic writing to another, Strike thought he saw, not just a penitent churchgoer trying to make amends for his descent into witchcraft, but the last desperate effort of a good detective, trying to salvage clues from chaos, sense from madness.

63

At last resoluing forward still to fare,

Till that some end they finde or in or out,

That path they take, that beaten seemd most bare,

And like to lead the labyrinth about…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Over the next couple of weeks, Robin noticed that Astrology 14 by Steven Schmidt, the second-hand book she’d left at the office, kept changing position. One morning it was on top of the filing cabinet where she’d left it, a few days later on Strike’s half of the desk, and the following evening lying beside the kettle. Similarly, various bits of the Bamborough police records kept appearing, then disappearing again, while Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook had vanished from the filing cabinet and, she suspected, made its way upstairs to Strike’s attic flat.

The agency was once again very busy. The new client, a Premier League footballer, had sunk two million pounds into a proposed nightclub which had failed to materialize. His partner in the venture had now disappeared, along with all the money. The footballer, nicknamed Dopey by an unsympathetic Barclay, feared press exposure almost as much as not getting his cash back.

Meanwhile, Miss Jones’s boyfriend continued to live a frustratingly law-abiding life, but she appeared happy to keep paying the agency’s bills, as long as Strike endured twice-weekly phone calls with her. During these supposed catch-ups, she told Strike all her problems, and hinted broadly that a dinner invitation would be happily accepted.

In addition to these clients, and leapfrogging those on the waiting list, was Shifty’s Boss, who’d been forced into early retirement by the board. SB walked in off Denmark Street one morning looking for Barclay, who’d left his contact details with Elinor Dean. To Strike’s surprise, early retirement seemed not to have spurred SB into despair, but liberated him.

“If you can believe it, I was genuinely thinking of killing myself, just a few months back,” he told Strike. “But I’m out from under that bastard’s thumb now. Now I’ve told my wife about Elinor—”

“Told her, have you?” said Strike, surprised.

“And she’s been very understanding,” said SB. “In my previous marriage, my—well, my needs—were taken care of by my ex-wife, but since we split… anyway, Portia and I have talked it all through, and she’s perfectly happy for my arrangement with Elinor to continue, as long as there’s no infidelity.”

Strike hid his expression behind his mug. He could well imagine that Portia, with her inch-long nails and her professional blow-dries, her thrice-yearly holidays, her black American Express card and her six-bedroomed house with swimming pool in West Brompton, preferred someone else to change SB’s nappy.

“No, all I want now,” said SB, his satisfied smile replaced by a hard glare, “is to make sure that shifty bastard gets what’s coming to him. And I’m prepared to pay.”

So the agency had resumed surveillance on both Shifty and his PA.

The upshot of three demanding cases meant that most of the communication between the two partners was done by phone for the rest of the month. Their paths finally crossed one Thursday afternoon in late August, when Strike entered the office as Robin was about to leave it.

Pat, who was listening to the radio while paying a slew of bills, offered to turn it off on seeing Strike, whose attention had just been caught by the figure-hugging blue dress Robin was wearing.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “Nice to hear some music.”

“Cormoran, can I have a quick word before I go?” Robin asked, beckoning him into the inner office.

“… next up, in our hundred hits of the seventies, an oldie but goodie from one-hit-wonder Middle of the Road: ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep…’”

“Where’re you off to?” said Strike, closing the internal door on Pat. He’d spent most of the previous night on his feet, watching Shifty get drunk and coked up in a nightclub, and today driving between the various addresses Dopey’s business partner had used over the previous two years. Unshaven and aching all over, he grunted in relief as he sank into his usual chair.

“The Vintry. Wine bar in the City,” said Robin. “Gemma’s going to be there later, Andy heard her arranging it. I’m hoping she’s with girlfriends. I’m going to try and infiltrate the group somehow.”

Gemma was Shifty’s PA. Through the closed door they now heard strains of a jaunty song playing on the radio, with its incongruous lyric,