Strike found that he didn’t resent the blunt mention of his disability from Della.

“Yeah, I’ve had a bit of that,” he admitted. “Bloke I was at school with. Hadn’t seen him in years. It was my first time back in Cornwall since I got blown up. Five pints in, he asked me at what point I warned women my leg was going to come off with my trousers. He thought he was being funny.”

Della smiled thinly.

“Never occurs to some people that it is we who should be making the jokes, does it? But it will be different for you, as a man… most people seem to think it in the natural order of things that the able-bodied woman should look after the disabled man. Geraint had to deal with that for years… people assuming there was something peculiar about him, because he chose a disabled wife. I think I may have tried to compensate for that. I wanted him to have a role… status… but it would have been better for both of us, in retrospect, if he had done something unconnected to me.”

Strike thought she was a little drunk. Perhaps she hadn’t eaten. He felt an inappropriate desire to check her fridge. Sitting here with this impressive and vulnerable woman, it was easy to understand how Aamir had become so entangled with her both professionally and privately, without ever intending to become so.

“People assume I married Geraint because there was nobody else who wanted me, but they’re quite wrong,” said Della, sitting up straighter in her chair. “There was a boy I was at school with who was smitten with me, who proposed when I was nineteen. I had a choice and I chose Geraint. Not as a carer, or because, as journalists have sometimes implied, my limitless ambition made a husband necessary… but because I loved him.”

Strike remembered the day he had followed Della’s husband to the stairwell in King’s Cross, and the tawdry things that Robin had told him about Geraint’s behavior at work, yet nothing that Della had just said struck him as incredible. Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.

“Are you married, Mr. Strike?”

“No,” he said.

“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can’t go on. I don’t really know when I stopped loving him, but at some point after Rhiannon died, it slipped—”

Her voice broke.

“—slipped away from us.” She swallowed. “Please will you pour me another glass of wine?”

He did so. The room was very dark now. The music had changed again, to a melancholy violin concerto which at last, in Strike’s opinion, was appropriate to the conversation. Della had not wanted to talk to him, but now seemed reluctant to let the conversation end.

“Why did your husband hate Jasper Chiswell so much?” Strike asked quietly. “Because of Chiswell’s political clashes with you, or—?”

“No, no,” said Della Winn wearily. “Because Geraint has to blame somebody other than himself for the misfortunes that befall him.”

Strike waited, but she merely drank more wine, and said nothing.

“What exactly—?”

“Never mind,” she said loudly. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

But a moment later, after another large gulp of wine, she said:

“Rhiannon didn’t really want to do fencing. Like most little girls, what she wanted was a pony, but we—Geraint and I—we didn’t come from pony-owning backgrounds. We didn’t have the first idea what one does with horses. As I think back, I suppose there were ways around that, but we were both terribly busy and felt it would be impractical, so she took up fencing instead, and very good she was at it, too…

“Have I answered enough of your questions, Mr. Strike?” she asked a little thickly. “Will you find Aamir?”

“I’ll try,” Strike promised her. “Could you give me his number? And yours, so I can keep you updated?”

She had both numbers off by heart, and he copied them down before closing his notebook and getting back to his feet.

“You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Winn. Thank you.”

“That sounds worrying,” she said, with a faint crease between the eyebrows. “I’m not sure I meant to be.”

“Will you be—?”

“Perfectly,” said Della, enunciating over-clearly. “You’ll call me when you find Aamir, won’t you?”

“If you don’t hear from me before then, I’ll update you in a week’s time,” Strike promised. “Er—is anyone coming in tonight, or—?”

“I see you aren’t quite as hardened as your reputation would suggest,” said Della. “Don’t worry about me. My neighbor will be in to walk Gwynn for me shortly. She checks the gas dials and so forth.”

“In that case, don’t get up. Good night.”

The near-white dog raised her head as he walked towards the door, sniffing the air. He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen.

Closing the front door, Strike couldn’t remember the last time he had felt such a strange mixture of admiration, sympathy and suspicion.

55

… let us at least fight with honorable weapons, since it seems we must fight.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Matthew, who had supposedly been out just for the morning, still hadn’t come home. He had sent two texts since, one at three in the afternoon:

Tom got work troubles, wants to talk. Gone to pub with him (I’m on Cokes.) Back as soon as I can.

And then, at seven o’clock:

Really sorry, he’s pissed, I can’t leave him. Going to find him a taxi then come back. Hope you’ve eaten. Love you x

Still with her caller ID switched off, Robin had again phoned Tom’s mobile. He had answered immediately. There was no background babble of a pub.

“Yes?” said Tom testily and apparently sober, “who is this?”

Robin hung up.

Two bags were packed and waiting in the hall. She had already phoned Vanessa and asked whether she could stay on her sofa for a couple of nights, before she got a new place to live. She found it strange that Vanessa didn’t sound more surprised, but at the same time, was glad not to have to fend off pity.

Waiting in the sitting room, watching night fall outside the window, Robin wondered whether she would even have been suspicious had she not found the earring. Lately she had become simply grateful for time without Matthew, when she could relax, not having to hide anything, whether the work she was doing on the Chiswell case or the panic attacks that must be conducted quietly, without fuss, on the bathroom floor.

Sitting in the stylish armchair belonging to their absent landlord, Robin felt as though she were inhabiting a memory. How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever? She would remember this room for a long time, and she gazed around it now, with the aim of fixing it in her mind, thereby trying to ignore the sadness, the shame and the pain that burned and twisted inside her.