It was at this moment, as a cold breeze whistled up Albemarle Way, that Strike caught a whiff of what he had thought were the dying stargazer lilies, but now realized was coming from Robin herself. The perfume wasn’t exactly the same as the one that Lorelei had worn; his ex’s had been strangely boozy, with overtones of rum (and he’d liked it when the scent had been an accompaniment to easy affection and imaginative sex; only later had he come to associate it with passive-aggression, character assassination and pleas for a love he could not feel). Nevertheless, this scent strongly resembled Lorelei’s; he found it cloying and sickly.

Of course, many would say it was rich for him to have opinions about how women smelled, given that his signature odor was that of an old ashtray, overlain with a splash of Pour Un Homme on special occasions. Nevertheless, having spent much of his childhood in conditions of squalor, Strike found cleanliness a necessary trait in anyone he could find attractive. He’d liked Robin’s previous scent, which he’d missed when she wasn’t in the office.

“This way,” he said, and they proceeded through the rain into an irregular pedestrianized square. A few seconds later, Strike suddenly became aware that he’d left Robin behind, and walked back several paces to join her in front of St. John Priory Church, a pleasingly sym­metrical building of red brick, with long windows and two white stone pillars flanking the entrance.

“Thinking about her lying in a holy place?” he asked, lighting up again while the rain beat down on him. Exhaling, he held the cigarette cupped in his hand, to prevent its extinguishment.

“No,” said Robin, a little defensively, but then, “yes, all right, maybe a bit. Look at this…”

Strike followed her through the open gates into a small garden of remembrance, open to the public and full (as Robin read off a small sign on the inner wall) of medicinal herbs, including many used in medieval times, in the Order of St. John’s hospitals. A white figure of Christ hung on the back wall, surrounded with the emblems of the four evangelists: the bull, the lion, the eagle and the angel. Fronds and leaves undulated gently beneath the rain. As Robin’s eyes swept the small, walled garden, Strike, who’d followed her, said,

“I think we can agree that if somebody buried her in here, a cleric would have noticed disturbed earth.”

“I know,” said Robin. “I’m just looking.”

As they returned to the street, she added,

“There are Maltese crosses everywhere, look. They were on that archway we just passed through, too.”

“It’s the cross of the Knights Hospitaller. Knights of St. John. Hence the street names and the emblem of St. John ambulance; they’ve got their headquarters back in St. John’s Lane. If that medium Googled the area Margot went missing, she can’t have missed Clerkenwell’s associations with the Order of St. John. I’ll bet you that’s where she got the idea for that little bit of ‘holy place’ padding. But bear it in mind, because the cross is going to come up again once we reach the pub.”

“You know,” said Robin, turning to look back at the Priory, “Peter Tobin, that Scottish serial killer—he attached himself to churches. He joined a religious sect at one point, under an assumed name. Then he got a job as a handyman at a church in Glasgow, where he buried that poor girl beneath the floorboards.”

“Churches are good cover for killers,” said Strike. “Sex offenders, too.”

“Priests and doctors,” said Robin thoughtfully. “It’s hardwired in most of us to trust them, don’t you think?”

“After the Catholic Church’s many scandals? After Harold Shipman?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Robin. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”

“Think you’re onto something there,” said Strike, as they entered a short pedestrian lane called Jerusalem Passage. “I told Gupta it was odd that Joseph Brenner didn’t like people. I thought that might be a basic job requirement for a doctor. He soon put me right.

“Let’s stop here a moment,” Strike said, doing so. “If Margot got this far—I’m assuming she’d’ve taken this route, because it’s the shortest and most logical way to the Three Kings—this is the first time she’d have passed residences rather than offices or public buildings.”

Robin looked at the buildings around them. Sure enough, there were a couple of doors whose multiple buzzers indicated flats above.

“Is there a chance,” said Strike, “however remote, that someone living along this lane could have persuaded or forced her inside?”

Robin looked up and down the street, the rain pattering onto her umbrella.

“Well,” she said slowly, “obviously it could have happened, but it seems unlikely. Did someone wake up that day and decide they wanted to abduct a woman, reach outside and grab one?”

“Have I taught you nothing?”

“OK, fine: means before motive. But there are problems with the means, too. This is really overlooked as well. Does nobody see or hear her being abducted? Doesn’t she scream or fight? And I assume the abductor lives alone, unless their housemates are also in on the kidnapping?”

“All valid points,” admitted Strike. “Plus, the police went door to door here. Everyone was questioned, though the flats weren’t searched.

“But let’s think this through… She’s a doctor. What if someone shoots out of a house and begs her to come inside to look at an injured person—a sick relative—and once inside, they don’t let her go? That’d be a good ploy for getting her inside, pretending there was a medical emergency.”

“OK, but that presupposes they knew she was a doctor.”

“The abductor could’ve been a patient.”

“But how did they know she’d be passing their house at that particular time? Had she alerted the whole neighborhood that she was about to go to the pub?”

“Maybe it was a random thing, they saw her passing, they knew she was a doctor, they ran out and grabbed her. Or—I dunno, let’s say there really was a sick or dying person inside, or someone’s had an accident—perhaps there’s an argument—she disagrees with the treatment or refuses to help—the fight becomes physical—she’s accidentally killed.”

There was a short silence, while they moved aside for a group of chattering French students. When these had passed, Strike said,

“It’s a stretch, I grant you.”

“We can find out how many of these buildings are occupied by the same people they were thirty-nine years ago,” said Robin, “but we’ve still got the problem of how they’ve kept her body hidden for nearly four decades. You wouldn’t dare move, would you?”

“That’s a problem, all right,” admitted Strike. “As Gupta said, it’s not like disposing of a table of equivalent weight. Blood, decomposition, infestation… plenty have tried keeping bodies on the premises. Crippen. Christie. Fred and Rose West. It’s generally considered a mistake.”

“Creed managed it for a while,” said Robin. “Boiling down severed hands in the basement. Burying heads apart from bodies. It wasn’t the corpses that got him caught.”