“You’ve been a big help,” he told Oliver, sliding the envelope across the table. “Much appreciated.”

Oliver appeared relieved that the encounter was over. He stood up and, with one more hasty handshake and a nod to Robin, departed the café. Once Oliver had stridden out of sight, Robin sat back in her chair and sighed.

“What’s that glum expression for?” asked Strike, draining his mug of tea.

“This is going to be the shortest job on record. Izzy wants us to prove it was Kinvara.”

“She wants the truth about her father’s death,” said Strike, but he grinned at Robin’s skeptical expression, “and, yeah, she’s hoping it was Kinvara. Well, we’ll have to see whether we can break all those alibis, won’t we? I’m going to Woolstone on Saturday. Izzy’s invited me over to Chiswell House, so I can meet her sister. Are you in? I’d rather not drive, the state my leg’s in at the moment.”

“Yes, of course,” said Robin immediately.

The idea of getting out of London with Strike, even for a day, was so appealing that she did not bother to consider whether she and Matthew had plans, but surely, in the glow of their unexpected rapprochement, he would raise no difficulties. After all, she had not worked for a week and a half. “We can take the Land Rover. It’ll be better on country roads than your BMW.”

“You might need diversionary tactics if that hack’s still watching you,” said Strike.

“I think I could probably throw them off more easily in a car than on foot.”

“Yeah, you probably could,” said Strike.

Robin was in possession of an advanced driving qualification. Though he had never told her so, Robin was the only person by whom he would willingly be driven.

“What time are we supposed to be at Chiswell House?”

“Eleven,” said Strike, “but plan to be away for the whole day. I fancy taking a look at the Knights’ old place while we’re there.” He hesitated. “I can’t remember whether I told you… I kept Barclay undercover with Jimmy and Flick.”

He was braced for annoyance that he had not discussed it with her, resentment that Barclay had been working when she wasn’t, or, perhaps most justifiably, a demand to know what he was playing at, given the state of the agency’s finances, but she simply said, with more amusement than rancor:

“You know you didn’t tell me. Why did you keep him there?”

“Because I’ve got a gut feeling there’s a lot more to the Knight brothers than meets the eye.”

“You always tell me to mistrust gut feelings.”

“Never claimed not to be a hypocrite, though. And brace yourself,” Strike added, as they got up from the table, “Raphael’s not happy with you.”

“Why not?”

“Izzy says he fell for you. Quite upset you turned out to be an undercover detective.”

“Oh,” said Robin. A faint pink blush spread over her face. “Well, I’m sure he’ll bounce back fast enough. He’s that type.”

41

I was thinking of what brought us together from the first, what links us so closely to one another…

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

Strike had spent many hours of his life trying to guess what he had done to cause the sullen silence of a woman in his vicinity. The best that could be said for the prolonged sulk in which Lorelei spent most of Friday evening was that he knew exactly how he had offended her, and was even prepared to concede that her displeasure was, to some extent, justified.

Within five minutes of his arrival at her flat in Camden, Izzy had called his mobile, partly to tell him about a letter that she had received from Geraint Winn, but mainly, he knew, to talk. She was not the first of his clients to assume that they had purchased, along with detective services, a mixture of father-confessor and therapist. Izzy gave every sign that she was settling in to spend her entire Friday evening talking to Strike, and the flirtatiousness that had been apparent in the knee touching of their last encounter was even more pronounced by phone.

A tendency to size Strike up as a potential lover was not uncommon in the sometimes fragile and lonely women he dealt with in his professional life. He had never slept with a client, in spite of occasional temptation. The agency meant too much to him, but even had Izzy held attraction for him, he would have been careful to keep his manner on the antiseptic side of professional, because she would be forever tainted in his mind by association with Charlotte.

In spite of his genuine desire to cut the call short—Lorelei had cooked, and was looking particularly lovely in a silky sapphire blue dress that resembled nightwear—Izzy had displayed the persistent adhesiveness of a teasel. It took Strike nearly three-quarters of an hour to disentangle himself from his client, who laughed long and loudly at even his mildest jokes, so that Lorelei could hardly fail to know that it was a woman who was at the end of the line. Hardly had he got rid of Izzy and begun to explain to Lorelei that she was a grief-stricken client, than Barclay had called with an update on Jimmy Knight. The mere fact that he had taken the second call, considerably briefer though it was, had, in Lorelei’s eyes, compounded his original offense.

This was the first time he and Lorelei had met since she had retracted her declaration of love. Her wounded and affronted demeanor over dinner confirmed him in the unwilling belief that, far from wanting their no-strings arrangement to continue, she had clung to the hope that if she stopped pressuring him, he would be free to reach the realization that he was, in fact, deeply in love with her. Talking on the phone for the best part of an hour, while dinner slowly shriveled in the oven, had dashed her hopes of a perfect evening, and the reset of their relationship.

Had Lorelei only accepted his sincere apology, he might have felt like sex. However, by half-past two in the morning, at which time she finally burst into tears of mingled self-recrimination and self-justification, he was too tired and bad-tempered to accept physical overtures which would, he feared, assume an importance in her mind that he did not want to give them.

This has to end, he thought, as he rose, hollow-eyed and dark-jawed, at six o’clock, moving as quietly as possible in the hope that she would not wake before he made his way out of her flat. Forgoing breakfast, because Lorelei had replaced the kitchen door with an amusingly retro bead curtain that rattled loudly, Strike made it all the way to the top of the stairs to the street before Lorelei emerged from the dark bedroom, sleep tousled, sad and desirable in a short kimono.

“Weren’t you even going to say goodbye?”

Don’t cry. Please don’t fucking cry.

“You looked very peaceful. I’ve got to go, Robin’s picking me up at—”

“Ah,” said Lorelei. “No, you wouldn’t want to keep Robin hanging around.”

“I’ll call you,” said Strike.

He thought he caught a sob as he reached the front door, but by making a noisy business of opening it, he could credibly claim not to have heard.

Having left in plenty of time, Strike made a detour to a handy McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee, which he consumed at an unwiped table, surrounded by other early Saturday risers. A young man with a boil on the back of his neck was reading the Independent right ahead of Strike, who read the words Sports Minister in Marriage Split over the youth’s shoulder before he turned a page.