“Yeah, she sent her love and all that,” said Polworth dismissively.

“Wanna keep me company while I have a smoke?” Strike asked him.

“Go on, then,” said Polworth.

“Use the shed,” suggested Ted.

So Strike and Polworth headed together across the waterlogged garden, heads bowed against the strong wind and rain, and entered Ted’s shed. Strike lit up with relief.

“You been on a diet?” asked Polworth, looking Strike up and down.

“Flu and food poisoning.”

“Oh, yeah, Lucy said you’d been ill.” Polworth jerked his head in the direction of Joan’s window. “How is she?”

“Not great,” said Strike.

“How long you down for?”

“Depends on the weather. Listen, seriously, I really appreciate everything you’ve been—”

“Shut up, you ponce.”

“Can I ask another favor?”

“Go on.”

“Persuade Ted to get a pint with you this lunchtime. He needs to get out of this house for a bit. He’ll do it if he knows I’m with her, but otherwise he won’t leave.”

“Consider it done,” said Polworth.

“You’re—”

“—a prince among men, yeah, I know I am. Arsenal through to the knockout stages, then?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Bayern Munich next, though.”

He’d missed watching his team qualify before Christmas, because he’d been tailing Shifty through the West End. The Champions League, which should have been a pleasure and a distraction, was failing to grip him as it usually did.

“Robin running things in London while you’re down here?”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

She’d texted him earlier, asking for a brief chat about the Bamborough case. He’d replied that he’d call her when he had a moment. He, too, had news on the case, but Margot Bamborough had been missing for nearly forty years and, like Kerenza the nurse, Strike was currently prioritizing the living.

When he’d finished his cigarette, they returned to the house to find Ted and Kerenza in conversation in the kitchen.

“She’d rather talk to you than to me today,” said Kerenza, smiling at Strike as she shrugged on her raincoat. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning, Ted.”

As she moved toward the back door, Polworth said,

“Ted, come and have a pint.”

“Oh, no, thanks, lad,” said Ted. “I’ll bide here just now.”

Kerenza stopped with her hand on the door knob.

“That’s a very good idea. Get a bit of fresh air, Ted—fresh water, today, I should say,” she added, as the rain clattered on the roof. “Bye-bye, now.”

She left. Ted required a little more persuasion, but finally agreed that he’d join Polworth for a sandwich at the Victory. Once they’d gone, Strike took the local paper off the table and carried it back into the sitting room.

He and Joan discussed the flooding, but the pictures of waves battering Mevagissey meant far less to her than they would have a couple of months ago. Strike could tell that Joan’s mind was on the personal, not the general.

“What does my horoscope say?” she asked, as he turned the page of the paper.

“I didn’t know you believed in that stuff, Joan.”

“Don’t know whether I do or not,” said Joan. “I always look, though.”

“You’re…” he said, trying to remember her birthday. He knew it was in the summer.

“Cancer,” she said, and then she gave a little laugh. “In more ways than one.”

Strike didn’t smile.

“‘Good time for shaking up your routine,’” he informed her, scanning her horoscope so he could censor out anything depressing, “‘so don’t dismiss new ideas out of hand. Jupiter retrograde encourages spiritual growth.’”

“Huh,” said Joan. After a short pause, she said, “I don’t think I’ll be here for my next birthday, Corm.”

The words hit him like a punch in the diaphragm.

“Don’t say that.”

“If I can’t say it to you, who can I say it to?”

Her eyes, which had always been a pale forget-me-not blue, were faded now. She’d never spoken to him like this before, as an equal. Always, she’d sought to stand slightly above him, so that from her perspective the six-foot-three soldier might still be her little boy.

“I can’t say it to Ted or Lucy, can I?” she said. “You know what they’re like.”

“Yeah,” he said, with difficulty.

“Afterward… you’ll look after Ted, won’t you? Make sure you see him. He does love you so much.”

Fuck.

For so long, she’d demanded a kind of falseness from all around her, a rose-tinted view of everything, and now at last she offered simple honesty and plain-speaking and he wished more than anything that he could be simply nodding along to news of some neighborhood scandal. Why hadn’t he visited them more often?

“I will, of course,” he said.

“I want the funeral at St. Mawes church,” she said quietly, “where I was christened. But I don’t want to be buried, because it’d have to be in the cemetery all the way up in Truro. Ted’ll wear himself out, traveling up and down, taking me flowers. I know him.

“We always said we wanted to be together, afterward, but we never made a plan and he won’t talk to me about it now. So, I’ve thought about it, Corm, and I want to be cremated. You’ll make sure this happens, won’t you? Because Ted starts crying every time I try and talk about it and Lucy just won’t listen.”

Strike nodded and tried to smile.

“I don’t want the family at the cremation. I hate cremations, the curtains and the conveyor belt. You say goodbye to me at the church, then take Ted to the pub and let the undertakers deal with the crematorium bit, all right? Then, after, you can pick up my ashes, take me out on Ted’s boat and scatter me in the sea. And when his turn comes, you can do the same for Ted, and we’ll be together. You and Lucy won’t want to be worrying about looking after graves all the way from London. All right?”

The plan had so much of the Joan he knew in it: it was full of practical kindness and forethought, but he hadn’t expected the final touch of the ashes floating away on the tide, no tombstone, no neat dates, instead a melding with the element that had dominated her and Ted’s lives, perched on their seaside town, in thrall to the ocean, except during that strange interlude where Ted, in revolt against his own father, had disappeared for several years into the military police.

“All right,” he said, with difficulty.

She sank back a little in her chair with an air of relief at having got this off her chest, and smiled at him.

“It’s so lovely, having you here.”

Over the past few days he’d become used to her short reveries and her non-sequiturs, so it was less of a surprise than it might have been to hear her say, a minute later,

“I wish I’d met your Robin.”

Strike, whose mind’s eye was still following Joan’s ashes into the sunset, pulled himself together.