She felt carefully for the wine glass next to her and took a sip.

“When you’ve reassured him that he isn’t in any kind of trouble, and that anything Chiswell told you about him will go no further, you must tell him to contact me—urgently.”

The violins continued to screech and whine in what, to the untutored Strike, was a dissonant expression of foreboding. The guide dog scratched herself, her paw thudding off the carpet. Strike took out his notebook.

“Have you got the names or contact details of any friends Mallik might have gone to?”

“No,” said Della. “I don’t think he has many friends. Latterly he mentioned someone from university but I don’t remember a name. I doubt it was anyone particularly close.”

The thought of this distant friend seemed to make her uneasy.

“He studied at the LSE, so that’s an area of London he knows well.”

“He’s on good terms with one of his sisters, isn’t he?”

“Oh, no,” said Della, at once. “No, no, they all disowned him. No, he’s got nobody, really, other than me, which is what makes this situation so dangerous.”

“The sister posted a picture on Facebook of the two of them fairly recently. It was in that pizza joint opposite your house.”

Della’s expression betrayed not merely surprise, but displeasure.

“Aamir told me you’d been snooping online. Which sister was it?”

“I’d have to ch—”

“But I doubt he’d be staying with her,” said Della, talking over him. “Not with the way the family as a whole has treated him. He might have contacted her, I suppose. You might see what she knows.”

“I will,” said Strike. “Any other ideas about where he might go?”

“He really doesn’t have anyone else,” she said. “That’s what worries me. He’s vulnerable. It’s essential I find him.”

“Well, I’ll certainly do my best,” Strike promised her. “Now, you said on the phone that you’d answer a few questions.”

Her expression became slightly more forbidding.

“I doubt I can tell you anything of interest, but go on.”

“Can we start with Jasper Chiswell, and your and your husband’s relationship with him?”

By her expression, she managed to convey that she found the question both impertinent and slightly ludicrous. With a cold smile and raised eyebrows, she responded:

“Well, Jasper and I had a professional relationship, obviously.”

“And how was that?” asked Strike, adding sugar to his coffee, stirring it and taking a sip.

“Given,” said Della, “that Jasper hired you to try and discover disreputable information about us, I think you already know the answer to that question.”

“You maintain that your husband wasn’t blackmailing Chiswell, then, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

Strike knew that pushing on this particular point, when Della’s super-injunction had already shown what lengths she would go to in her own defense, would only alienate her. A temporary retreat seemed indicated.

“What about the rest of the Chiswells? Did you ever run across any of them?”

“Some,” she said, a little warily.

“And how did you find them?”

“I barely know them. Geraint says Izzy was hardworking.”

“Chiswell’s late son was on the junior British fencing team with your daughter, I think?”

The muscles of her face seemed to contract. He was reminded of an anemone shutting in on itself when it senses a predator.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you like Freddie?”

“I don’t think I ever spoke to him. Geraint was the one who ferried Rhiannon around to her tournaments. He knew the team.”

The shadow stems of the roses closest to the window stretched like bars across the carpet. The Brahms symphony crashed stormily on in the background. Della’s opaque lenses contributed to a feeling of inscrutable menace and Strike, though wholly unintimidated, was put in mind of the blind oracles and seers that peopled ancient myths, and the particular supernatural aura attributed by the able-bodied to this one particular disability.

“What was it that made Jasper Chiswell so eager to find out things to your disadvantage, would you say?”

“He didn’t like me,” said Della simply. “We disagreed frequently. He came from a background that finds anything that deviates from its own conventions and norms to be suspect, unnatural, even dangerous. He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.”

“In what way?”

“Ask his wife.”

“You know Kinvara, do you?”

“I wouldn’t say I ‘know’ her. I had an encounter with her a while ago that was certainly interesting in the light of Chiswell’s public proclamations about the sanctity of marriage.”

Strike had the impression that beneath the lofty language, and in spite of her genuine anxiety about Aamir, Della was deriving pleasure from saying these things.

“What happened?” Strike asked.

“Kinvara turned up unexpectedly late one afternoon at the ministry, but Jasper had already left for Oxfordshire. I think it was her aim to surprise him.”

“When was this?”

“I should say… a year ago, at least. Shortly before Parliament went into recess, I think. She was in a state of great distress. I heard a commotion outside and went to find out what was going on. I could tell by the silence of the outer office that they were all agog. She was very emotional, demanding to see her husband. Initially I thought she must have had dreadful news and perhaps needed Jasper as a source of comfort and support. I took her into my office.

“Once it was just the two of us, she broke down completely. She was barely coherent, but from the little I could understand,” said Della, “she’d just found out there was another woman.”

“Did she say who?”

“I don’t think so. She may have done, but she was—well, it was quite disturbing,” said Della austerely. “More as though she had suffered a bereavement than the end of a marriage. ‘I was just part of his game,’ ‘He never loved me’ and so forth.”

“What game did you take her to mean?” asked Strike.

“The political game, I suppose. She spoke of being humiliated, of being told, in so many words, that she had served her purpose…

“Jasper Chiswell was a very ambitious man, you know. He’d lost his career once over infidelity. I imagine he cast around quite clinically for the kind of new wife who’d burnish his image. No more Italian fly-by-nights now he was trying to get back into the cabinet. He probably thought Kinvara would go down very well with the county Conservatives. Well-bred. Horsey.

“I heard, later, that Jasper had bundled her off into some kind of psychiatric clinic not long afterwards. That’s how families like the Chiswells deal with excessive emotion, I suppose,” said Della, taking another sip of wine. “Yet she stayed with him. Of course, people do stay, even when they’re treated abominably. He talked about her within my hearing as though she was a deficient, needy child. I remember him saying Kinvara’s mother would be ‘babysitting’ her for her birthday, because he had to be in Parliament for a vote. He could have paired his vote, of course—found a Labor MP and struck a deal. Simply couldn’t be bothered.