Robin experienced a sudden wave of nostalgia for the previous year, when she and Strike had undertaken a road trip together to interrogate women left behind in the wake of dangerous men. She wondered whether he had thought about it while he planned this journey.

“Watching England–Italy?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “There’s nothing else, is there?”

“No,” said Robin hurriedly. She had not meant to sound as though she wanted to detain him. “Speak soon, then.”

She cut the call on his farewell and tossed the mobile aside onto the bed.

13

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen.

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

The following morning, Robin woke, gasping, her fingers at her own throat, trying to loosen a non-existent hold. She was already at the bedroom door when Matthew woke, confused.

“It’s nothing, I’m fine,” she muttered, before he could articulate a question, groping to find the handle that would let her out of the bedroom.

The surprise was that it hadn’t happened more often since she had heard the story of the strangled child. Robin knew exactly how it felt to have fingers close tightly around your neck, to feel your brain flood with darkness, to know that you were seconds from being blotted out of existence. She had been driven into therapy by sharp-edged fragments of recollection that were unlike normal memories and which had the power to drag her suddenly out of her body and plunge her back into a past where she could smell the strangler’s nicotine-stained fingers, and feel the stabber’s soft, sweatshirted belly against her back.

She locked the bathroom door and sat down on the floor in the loose T-shirt she had worn to bed, focusing on her breathing, on the feel of the cool tiles beneath her bare legs, observing, as she had been taught, the rapid beating of her heart, the adrenaline jolting through her veins, not fighting her panic, but watching it. After a while, she consciously noticed the faint smell of the lavender body wash she had used last night, and heard the distant passing of an airplane.

You’re safe. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Through two closed doors, she heard Matthew’s alarm go off. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” Robin called back, over the running tap.

She opened the door.

“Everything OK?” he asked, watching her closely.

“Just needed a pee,” said Robin brightly, heading back to the bedroom for her colored contact lenses.

Before starting work with Strike, Robin had signed on with an agency called Temporary Solutions. The offices to which they had sent her were jumbled in her memory now, so that only anomalies, eccentrics and oddities remained. She remembered the alcoholic boss whose dictated letters she had reworded out of kindness, the desk drawer she had opened to find a complete set of dentures and a pair of stained underpants, the hopeful young man who had nicknamed her “Bobbie” and tried, ineptly, to flirt over their back-to-back monitors, the woman who had plastered the interior of her cubicle workspace with pictures of the actor Ian McShane and the girl who had broken up with her boyfriend on the telephone in the middle of the open-plan office, indifferent to the prurient hush falling over the rest of the room. Robin doubted whether any of the people with whom she had come into glancing contact remembered her any better than she remembered them, even the timid romancer who had called her “Bobbie.”

However, from the moment that she arrived at the Palace of Westminster, she knew that what happened here would live in her memory forever. She felt a ripple of pleasure simply to leave the tourists behind and pass through the gate where the policeman stood guard. As she approached the palace, with its intricate gold moldings starkly shadowed in the early morning sun, the famous clock tower silhouetted against the sky, her nerves and her excitement mounted.

Strike had told her which side door to use. It led into a long, dimly lit stone hall, but first she must pass through a metal detector and X-ray machine of the kind used at airports. As she took off her shoulder bag to be scanned, Robin noticed a tall, slightly disheveled natural blonde in her thirties waiting a short distance away, holding a small package wrapped in brown paper. The woman watched as Robin stood for an automated picture that would appear on a paper day pass, to be worn on a lanyard around her neck, and when the security man waved Robin on, stepped forwards.

“Venetia?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“Izzy,” said the other, smiling and holding out a hand. She was wearing a loose blouse with a splashy pattern of oversize flowers on it, and wide-legged trousers. “This is from Papa.” She pressed the package she was holding into Robin’s hands. “I’m rilly sorry, we’ve got to dash—so glad you got here on time—”

She set off at a brisk walk, and Robin hastened to follow.

“—I’m in the middle of printing off a bunch of papers to take over to Papa at DCMS—I’m snowed under just now. Papa being Minister for Culture, with the Olympics coming, it’s just crazy—”

She led Robin at a near jog through the hall, which had stained-glass windows at the far end, and off along labyrinthine corridors, talking all the while in a confident, upper-class accent, leaving Robin impressed by her lungpower.

“Yah, I’m leaving at the summer recess—setting up a decorating company with my friend Jacks—I’ve been here for five years—Papa’s not happy—he needs somebody rilly good and the only applicant he liked turned us down.”

She talked over her shoulder at Robin, who was hurrying to keep up.

“I don’t s’pose you know any fabulous PAs?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Robin, who had retained no friends from her temping career.

“Nearly there,” said Izzy, who had led Robin through a bewildering number of narrow corridors, all carpeted in the same forest green as the leather seats Robin had seen in the Commons on TV. At last they reached a side-passage off which led several heavy wooden doors, arched in the gothic style.

“That,” said Izzy in a stage whisper, pointing as they passed the first door on the right, “is Winn’s. This,” she said, marching to the last door on the left, “is ours.”

She stood aside to let Robin pass into the room first.

The office was cramped and cluttered. The arched stone windows were hung with net curtains, beyond which lay the terrace bar, where shadowy figures moved against the dazzling brightness of the Thames. There were two desks, a multitude of bookshelves and a sagging green armchair. Green drapes hung at the overflowing bookshelves that covered one wall, only partially concealing the untidy stacks of files stacked there. On top of a filing cabinet stood a TV monitor, showing the currently empty interior of the Commons, its green benches deserted. A kettle sat beside mismatched mugs on a low shelf and had stained the wallpaper above it. The desktop printer whirred wheezily in a corner. Some of the papers it was disgorging had slid onto the threadbare carpet.

“Oh, shit,” said Izzy, dashing over and scooping them up, while Robin closed the door behind her. As she tapped the fallen papers back into a neat stack on her desk, Izzy said: