Robin hadn’t been out since her birthday drinks with Ilsa and Vanessa, which hadn’t been as enjoyable as she’d hoped. The conversation had revolved entirely around relationships, because Vanessa had arrived with a brand-new engagement ring on her finger. Since then, Robin had used pressure of work during Strike’s absence to avoid nights out with either of her friends. Her cousin Katie’s words, it’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us, were hard to forget, but the truth was that Robin didn’t want to stand in a bar while Ilsa and Vanessa encouraged her to respond to the advances of some overfamiliar, Morris-like man with a line in easy patter and bad jokes.

She and Strike had now divided between them the people they wished to trace and re-interview in the Bamborough case. Unfortunately, Robin now knew that at least four of her allocated people had passed beyond the reach of questioning.

After careful cross-referencing of old records, Robin had managed to identify the Willy Lomax who’d been the long-serving handyman of St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell. He’d died in 1989 and Robin had so far been unable to find a single confirmed relative.

Albert Shimmings, the florist and possible driver of the speeding van seen on the night of Margot’s disappearance, had also passed away, but Robin had emailed two men she believed to be his sons. She sincerely hoped she’d correctly identified them, otherwise an insurance agent and a driving instructor were both about to get truly mystifying messages. Neither had yet responded to her request to talk to them.

Wilma Bayliss, the ex-practice cleaner, had died in 2003. A mother of two sons and three daughters, she’d divorced Jules Bayliss in 1975. By the time she died, Wilma hadn’t been a cleaner, but a social worker, and she’d raised a high-achieving family, including an architect, a paramedic, a teacher, another social worker and a Labor councilor. One of the sons now lived in Germany, but Robin nevertheless included him in the emails and Facebook messages she sent out to all five siblings. There’d been no response so far.

Dorothy Oakden, the practice secretary, had been ninety-one when she died in a North London nursing home. Robin hadn’t yet managed to trace Carl, her only child.

Meanwhile, Margot’s ex-boyfriend, Paul Satchwell, and the receptionist, Gloria Conti, were proving strangely and similarly elusive. At first Robin had been relieved when she’d failed to find a death certificate for either of them, but after combing telephone directories, census records, county court judgments, marriage and divorce certificates, press archives, social media and lists of company staff, she’d come up with nothing. The only possible explanations Robin could think of were changes of name (in Gloria’s case, possibly by marriage) and emigration.

As for Mandy White, the schoolgirl who’d claimed to have seen Margot at a rainy window, there were so many Amanda Whites of approximately the right age to be found online that Robin was starting to despair of ever finding the right one. Robin found this line of inquiry particularly frustrating, firstly because there was a good chance that White was no longer Mandy’s surname, and secondly because, like the police before her, Robin thought it highly unlikely that Mandy had actually seen Margot at the window that night.

Having examined and discounted the Facebook accounts of another six Amanda Whites, Robin yawned, stretched and decided she was owed a break. Setting her laptop down on a side table, she swung her legs carefully off the sofa so as not to disturb Wolfgang, and crossed the open-plan area that combined kitchen, dining and living rooms, to make herself one of the low-calorie hot chocolates she was trying to convince herself was a treat, because she was still, in the middle of this long, sedentary stretch of surveillance, trying to keep an eye on her waistline.

As she stirred the unappetizing powder into boiling water, a whiff of tuberose mingled with the scent of synthetic caramel. In spite of her bath, Fracas still lingered in her hair and on her pajama. This perfume, she’d finally decided, had been a costly mistake. Living in a dense cloud of tuberose made her feel not only perpetually on the verge of a headache, but also as though she were wearing fur and pearls in broad daylight.

Robin’s mobile, which was lying on the sofa beside Wolfgang, rang as she picked up her laptop again. Startled from his sleep, the disgruntled dog rose on arthritic legs. Robin lifted him to safety before picking up her phone and seeing, to her disappointment, that it wasn’t Strike, but Morris.

“Hi, Saul.”

Ever since the birthday kiss, Robin had tried to keep her manner on the colder side of professional when dealing with Morris.

“Hey, Robs. You said to call if I had anything, even if it was late.”

“Yes, of course.” I never said you could call me “Robs,” though. “What’s happened?” asked Robin, looking around for a pen.

“I got Gemma drunk tonight. Shifty’s PA, you know. Under the influence, she told me she thinks Shifty’s got something on his boss.”

Well, that’s hardly news, thought Robin, abandoning the fruitless search for a writing implement.

“What makes her think so?”

“Apparently he’s said stuff to her like, ‘Oh, he’ll always take my calls, don’t worry,’ and ‘I know where all the bodies are buried.’”

An image of a cross of St. John slid across Robin’s mind and was dismissed.

“As a joke,” Morris added. “He passed it off like he was joking, but it made Gemma think.”

“But she doesn’t know any details?”

“No, but listen, seriously, give me a bit more time and I reckon I’ll be able to persuade her to wear a wire for us. Not to blow my own horn here—can’t reach, for one thing—no, seriously,” he said, although Robin hadn’t laughed, “I’ve got her properly softened up. Just give me a bit more time—”

“Look, I’m sorry, Saul, but we went over this at the meeting,” Robin reminded Morris, suppressing a yawn, which made her eyes water. “The client doesn’t want us to tell any of the employees we’re investigating this, so we can’t tell her who you are. Pressuring her to investigate her own boss is asking her to risk her job. It also risks blowing the whole case if she decides to tell him what’s going on.”

“But again, not to toot—”

“Saul, it’s one thing her confiding in you when she’s drunk,” said Robin (why wasn’t he listening? They’d been through this endlessly at the team meeting). “It’s another asking a girl with no investigative training to work for us.”

“She’s all over me, Robin,” said Morris earnestly. “It’d be crazy not to use her.”

Robin suddenly wondered whether Morris had slept with the girl. Strike had been quite clear that that wasn’t to happen. She sank back down on the sofa. Her copy of The Demon of Paradise Park was warm, she noticed, from the dachshund lying on it. The displaced Wolfgang was now gazing at Robin from under the dining table, with the sad, reproachful eyes of an old man.

“Saul, I really think it’s time for Hutchins to take over, to see what he can do with Shifty himself,” said Robin.

“OK, but before we make that decision, let me ring Strike and—”

“You’re not ringing Strike,” said Robin, her temper rising. “His aunt’s—he’s got enough on his plate in Cornwall.”