“… the convoy stopped, Major Chiswell told me to get out, see what was going on. I told him I could see movement up on the ridge. He told me to fucking well do as I was told.

“I hadn’t gone more than a couple of feet when I got the bullet in the back. The last thing I remember was him yelling out of the lorry at me. Then the sniper took the top of his head off.”

The lieutenant had asked Strike for a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking, but Strike had given him the half pack he had on him.

“Chiswell was a cunt,” said the young man in the wheelchair.

In Strike’s imagination he saw tall, blond Freddie swaggering up a country lane, slumming it with Jimmy Knight and his mates. He saw Freddie in fencing garb, out on the piste, watched by the indistinct figure of Rhiannon Winn, who was perhaps already entertaining suicidal thoughts.

Disliked by his soldiers, revered by his father: could Freddie be the thing that Strike sought, the element that tied everything together, that connected two blackmailers and the story of a strangled child? But the notion seemed to dissolve as he examined it, and the diverse strands of the investigation fell apart once more, stubbornly unconnected.

“I want to know what the photographs from the Foreign Office show,” said Strike aloud, his eyes on the purpling sky beyond the office window. “I want to know who hacked the Uffington white horse onto the back of Aamir Mallik’s bathroom door, and I want to know why there was a cross in the ground on the exact spot Billy said a kid was buried.”

“Well,” said Robin, standing up and beginning to clear away the debris of their Chinese takeaway, “nobody ever said you weren’t ambitious.”

“Leave that. I’ll do it. You need to get home.”

I don’t want to go home.

“It won’t take long. What are you up to tomorrow?”

“Got an afternoon appointment with Chiswell’s art dealer friend, Drummond.”

Having rinsed off the plates and cutlery, Robin took her handbag down from the peg where she’d hung it, then turned back. Strike tended to rebuff expressions of concern, but she had to say it.

“No offense, but you look terrible. Maybe rest your leg before you have to go out again? See you soon.”

She left before Strike could answer. He sat lost in thought until, finally, he knew he must begin the painful journey back upstairs to his attic flat. Having heaved himself upright again, he closed the windows, turned off the lights and locked up the office.

As he placed his false foot on the bottom stair to the floor above, his phone rang again. He knew, without checking, that it was Lorelei. She wasn’t about to let him go without at least attempting to hurt him as badly as he had hurt her. Slowly, carefully, keeping his weight off his prosthesis as much as was practical, Strike climbed the stairs to bed.

49

Rosmers of Rosmersholm—clergymen, soldiers, men who have filled high places in the state—men of scrupulous honor, every one of them…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Lorelei didn’t give up. She wanted to see Strike face to face, wanted to know why she had given nearly a year of her life, as she saw it, to an emotional vampire.

“You owe me a meeting,” she said, when he finally picked up the phone at lunchtime next day. “I want to see you. You owe me that.”

“And what will that achieve?” he asked her. “I read your email, you’ve made your feelings clear. I told you from the start what I wanted and what I didn’t want—”

“Don’t give me that ‘I never pretended I wanted anything serious’ line. Who did you call when you couldn’t walk? You were happy enough for me to act like your wife when you were—”

“So let’s both agree I’m a bastard,” he said, sitting in his combined kitchen-sitting room with his amputated leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. He was wearing only boxer shorts, but would soon need to get his prosthesis on and dress smartly enough to blend in at Henry Drummond’s art gallery. “Let’s wish each other well and—”

“No,” she said, “you don’t get out of it that easily. I was happy, I was doing fine—”

“I never wanted to make you miserable. I like you—”

“You like me,” she repeated shrilly. “A year together and you like me—”

“What do you want?” he said, losing his temper at last. “Me to limp up the fucking aisle, not feeling what I should feel, not wanting it, wishing I was out of it? You’re making me say what I don’t want to say. I didn’t want to hurt anyone—”

“But you did! You did hurt me! And now you want to walk away as though nothing happened!”

“Whereas you want a public scene in a restaurant?”

“I want,” she said, crying now, “not to feel as though I could have been anyone. I want a memory of the end that doesn’t make me feel disposable and cheap—”

“I never saw you that way. I don’t see you like that now,” he said, eyes closed, wishing he had never crossed the room at Wardle’s party. “Truth is, you’re too—”

“Don’t tell me I’m too good for you,” she said. “Leave us both with some dignity.”

She hung up. Strike’s dominant emotion was relief.

No investigation had ever brought Strike so reliably back to the same small patch of London. The taxi disgorged him onto the gently sloping pavement of St. James’s Street a few hours later, with the red brick St. James’s Palace ahead and Pratt’s on Park Place to his right. After paying off the driver, he headed for Drummond’s Gallery, which lay between a wine dealer’s and a hat shop on the left-hand side of the street. Although he had managed to put his prosthesis on, Strike was walking with the aid of a collapsible walking stick that Robin had bought him during another period when his leg had become almost too painful to bear his weight.

Even if it had marked the end of a relationship he wanted to escape, the call with Lorelei had left its mark. He knew in his heart that he was, in the spirit if not in the letter, guilty of some of the charges she had laid against him. While he had told Lorelei at the outset that he sought neither commitment nor permanence, he had known perfectly well that she had understood him to mean “right now” rather than “never” and he had not corrected that impression, because he wanted a distraction and a defense against the feelings that had dogged him after Robin’s wedding.

However, the ability to section off his emotions, of which Charlotte had always complained, and to which Lorelei had dedicated a lengthy paragraph of the email dissecting his personality, had never failed him yet. Arriving two minutes early for his appointment with Henry Drummond, he transferred his attention with ease to the questions he intended to put to the late Jasper Chiswell’s old friend.

Pausing beside the black marble exterior of the gallery, he saw himself reflected in the window and straightened his tie. He was wearing his best Italian suit. Behind his reflection, tastefully illuminated, a single painting in an ornate golden frame stood on an easel behind the spotless glass. It featured a pair of what, to Strike, looked like unrealistic horses with giraffe-like necks and staring eyes, ridden by eighteenth-century jockeys.