“No,” said Strike. This wasn’t one of the photographs he had isolated. “What was it?”

“Lachesis. I saw it when I enlarged the picture.”

“Why’s that significant?”

“When Chiswell came into our office and quoted that Latin poem at Aamir, and said something about a man of your habits, he mentioned Lachesis. He said she was—”

“One of the Fates.”

“—exactly. The one who ‘knew when everyone’s number was up.’”

Strike smoked in silence for a few seconds.

“Sounds like a threat.”

“I know.”

“You definitely can’t remember which poem it was? Author, perhaps?”

“I’ve been trying, but no—wait—” said Robin suddenly. “He gave it a number.”

“Catullus,” said Strike, sitting up straighter on the iron garden chair.

“How d’you know?”

“Because Catullus’s poems are numbered, not titled, there was an old copy on Chiswell’s coffee table. Catullus described plenty of interesting habits: incest, sodomy, child rape… he might’ve missed out bestiality. There’s a famous one about a sparrow, but nobody buggers it.”

“Funny coincidence, isn’t it?” said Robin, ignoring the witticism.

“Maybe Chiswell was prescribed the pills and that put him in mind of the Fate?”

“Did he seem to you like the kind of man who’d trust homeopathy?”

“No,” admitted Strike, “but if you’re suggesting the killer dropped a tube of lachesis as an artistic flourish—”

He heard a distant trill of bells.

“There’s someone at the door,” said Robin, “I’d better—”

“Check who it is, before you answer,” said Strike. He had had a sudden presentiment.

Her footsteps were muffled by what he knew was carpet.

“Oh, God.”

“Who is it?”

“Mitch Patterson.”

“Has he seen you?”

“No, I’m upstairs.”

“Then don’t answer.”

“I won’t.”

But her breathing had become noisy and ragged.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” she said, her voice constricted.

“What’s he—?”

“I’m going to go. I’ll call you later.”

The line went dead.

Strike lowered the mobile. Feeling a sudden heat in the fingers of the hand not holding his phone, he realized his cigarette had burned to the filter. Stubbing it out on the hot paving stone, he flicked it over the wall into the garden of a neighbor whom Nick and Ilsa disliked, and immediately lit another, thinking about Robin.

He was concerned about her. It was to be expected, of course, that she was experiencing anxiety and stress after finding a body and being interviewed by the security services, but he had noticed lapses in concentration over the phone, where she asked him the same thing two or three times. There was also what he considered her unhealthy eagerness to get back to the office, or out on the street.

Convinced that she ought to be taking some time out, Strike hadn’t told Robin about a line of investigation he was currently pursuing, because he was sure she would insist on being allowed to help.

The fact was that, for Strike, the Chiswell case had begun, not with the dead man’s story of blackmail, but with Billy Knight’s tale of a strangled child wrapped in a pink blanket in the ground. Ever since Billy’s last plea for help, Strike had been phoning the telephone number from which it had been made. Finally, on the previous morning, he had got an answer from a curious passerby, who had confirmed the phone box’s position on the edge of Trafalgar Square.

Strike. That bastard soldier with the one leg. Billy’s fixated on him. Thinks he’s going to rescue him.

Surely there was a chance, however tiny, that Billy might gravitate back to the place where he had last sought help? Strike had spent a few hours wandering Trafalgar Square on the previous afternoon, knowing how remote was the possibility that Billy would show up, yet feeling compelled to do something, however pointless.

Strike’s other decision, which was even harder to justify, because it cost money the agency could currently ill afford, was to keep Barclay embedded with Jimmy and Flick.

“It’s your money,” the Glaswegian said, when the detective gave him this instruction, “but what’m I looking for?”

“Billy,” said Strike, “and in the absence of Billy, anything strange.”

Of course, the next lot of accounts would show Robin exactly what Barclay was up to.

Strike had a sudden feeling that he was being watched. Ossie, the bolder of Nick and Ilsa’s kittens, was sitting at the kitchen window, beside the kitchen taps, staring through the window with eyes of pale jade. His gaze felt judgmental.

37

I shall never conquer this completely. There will always be a doubt confronting me—a question.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Wary of breaching the conditions of the super-injunction, photographers stayed away from Chiswell’s funeral in Woolstone. News organizations restricted themselves to brief, factual announcements that the service had taken place. Strike, who had considered sending flowers, had decided against it on the basis that the gesture might be taken as a tasteless reminder that his bill remained unpaid. Meanwhile the inquest into Chiswell’s death was opened and adjourned, pending further investigations.

And then, quite suddenly, nobody was very interested in Jasper Chiswell. It was as though the corpse that had been borne aloft for a week upon a swell of newsprint, gossip and rumor, now sank beneath stories of sportsmen and women, of Olympic preparations and predictions, the country in the grip of an almost universal preoccupation, for whether they approved or disapproved of the event, it was impossible to ignore or avoid.

Robin was still phoning Strike daily, pressuring him to let her come back to work, but Strike continued to refuse. Not only had Mitch Patterson twice more appeared in her street, but an unfamiliar young busker had spent the whole week playing on the pavement opposite Strike’s office, missing chord changes every time he saw the detective and regularly breaking off halfway through songs to answer his mobile. The press, it seemed, had not forgotten that the Olympics would eventually end, and that there was still a juicy story to be run on the reason Jasper Chiswell had hired private detectives.

None of Strike’s police contacts knew anything about the progress of their colleagues’ investigation into the case. Usually able to fall asleep under even the most unpropitious conditions, Strike found himself unusually restless and wakeful by night, listening to the increased noise from the London now heaving with Olympics visitors. The last time he had endured such a long stretch of sleeplessness had been his first week of consciousness after his leg had been borne off by the IED in Afghanistan. Then he had been kept awake by a tormenting itch impossible to scratch, because he felt it on his missing foot.

Strike hadn’t seen Lorelei since the night of the Paralympic reception. After leaving Charlotte in the street, he had set off for Trafalgar Square to try and locate Billy, with the result that he had been even later to dinner with Lorelei than he had expected. Tired, sore, frustrated at his failure to find Billy and jarred by the unexpected meeting with his ex, he had arrived at the curry house in the expectation, and perhaps the hope, that Lorelei would have already left.