“Told you,” said Lucy and Greg’s friend, beaming at Strike with tears in his eyes, “told you they bounce!”

“Yeah,” said Strike, “I’d better let Lucy know.”

But in a calamity of errors, Jack’s panic-stricken parents had arrived at the airport, only to realize that Lucy had somehow lost her passport between hotel room and departure gate. In fruitless desperation they retraced their steps, trying to explain their dilemma to everyone from hotel staff, police and the British embassy, with the upshot that they had missed the last flight of the night.

At ten past four in the morning, the waiting room was mercifully deserted. Strike turned on the mobile he had kept switched off while on the ward and saw a dozen missed calls from Robin and one from Lorelei. Ignoring them, he texted Lucy who, he knew, would be awake in the Rome hotel to which, shortly past midnight, her passport had been delivered by the taxi driver who had found it. Lucy had implored Strike to send a picture of Jack when he got out of surgery. Strike had pretended that the picture wouldn’t load. After the stress of the day, Lucy didn’t need to see her son ventilated, his eyes covered in pads, his body swamped by the baggy hospital gown.

All looking good, he typed. Still sedated but nurse confident.

He pressed send and waited. As he had expected, she responded within two minutes.

You must be exhausted. Have they given you a bed at the hospital?

No, I’m sitting next to him, Strike responded. I’ll stay here until you get back. Try and get some sleep and don’t worry x.

Strike switched off his mobile, dragged himself back onto his one foot, reorganized his crutches and returned to the ward.

The tea was waiting for him, as pale and milky as anything Denise had made, but after emptying two sachets of sugar into it, he drank it in a couple of gulps, eyes moving between Jack and the machines both supporting and monitoring him. He had never before examined the boy so closely. Indeed, he had never had much to do with him, in spite of the pictures he drew for Strike, which Lucy passed on.

“He hero-worships you,” Lucy had told Strike several times. “He wants to be a soldier.”

But Strike avoided family get-togethers, partly because he disliked Jack’s father, Greg, and partly because Lucy’s desire to cajole her brother into some more conventional mode of existence was enervating even without the presence of her sons, the eldest of whom Strike found especially like his father. Strike had no desire to have children and while he was prepared to concede that some of them were likable—was prepared to admit, in fact, that he had conceived a certain detached fondness for Jack, on the back of Lucy’s tales of his ambition to join the Red Caps—he had steadfastly resisted birthday parties and Christmas get-togethers at which he might have forged a closer connection.

But now, as dawn crept through the thin curtains blocking Jack’s bed from the rest of the ward, Strike saw for the first time the boy’s resemblance to his grandmother, Strike’s own mother, Leda. He had the same very dark hair, pale skin and finely drawn mouth. He would, in fact, have made a beautiful girl, but Leda’s son knew what puberty was about to do to the boy’s jaw and neck… if he lived.

Course he’s going to bloody live. The nurse said—

He’s in intensive fucking care. They don’t put you in here for hiccups.

He’s tough. Wants to join the military. He’ll be OK.

He’d fucking better be. I never even sent him a text to say thank you for his pictures.

It took Strike a while to drop back into an uneasy doze.

He was woken by early morning sunshine penetrating his eyelids. Squinting against the light, he heard footsteps squeaking on the floor. Next came a loud rattle as the curtain was pulled back, opening Jack’s bed to the ward again and revealing more motionless figures, lying in beds all around them. A new nurse stood beaming at him, younger, with a long dark ponytail.

“Hi!” she said brightly, taking Jack’s clipboard. “It’s not often we get anyone famous in here! I know all about you, I read everything about how you caught that serial—”

“This is my nephew, Jack,” he said coldly. The idea of discussing the Shacklewell Ripper now was repugnant to him. The nurse’s smile faltered.

“Would you mind waiting outside the curtain? We need to take bloods, change his drips and his catheter.”

Strike dragged himself back onto his crutches and made his way laboriously out of the ward again, trying not to focus on any of the other inert figures wired to their own buzzing machines.

The canteen was already half-full when he got there. Unshaven and heavy-eyed, he had slid his tray all the way to the till and paid before he realized he could not carry it and manage his crutches. A young girl clearing tables spotted his predicament and came to help.

“Cheers,” said Strike gruffly, when she had placed the tray on a table beside a window.

“No probs,” said the girl. “Leave it there after, I’ll get it.”

The small kindness made Strike feel disproportionately emotional. Ignoring the fry-up he had just bought, he took out his phone and texted Lucy again.

All fine, nurse changing his drip, will be back with him shortly. X

As he had half-expected, his phone rang as soon as he had cut into his fried egg.

“We’ve got a flight,” Lucy told him without preamble, “but it’s not until eleven.”

“No problem,” he told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Is he awake yet?”

“No, still sedated.”

“He’ll be so chuffed to see you, if he wakes up before—before—”

She burst into tears. Strike could hear her still trying to talk through her sobs.

“… just want to get home… want to see him…”

For the first time in Strike’s life, he was glad to hear Greg, who now took the phone from his wife.

“We’re bloody grateful, Corm. This is our first weekend away together in five years, can you believe it?”

“Sod’s law.”

“Yeah. He said his belly was sore, but I thought he was at it. Thought he didn’t want us to go away. I feel a right bastard now, I can tell you.”

“Don’t worry,” said Strike, and again, “I’m going nowhere.”

After a few more exchanges and a tearful farewell from Lucy, Strike was left to his full English. He ate methodically and without pleasure amid the clatter and jangle of the canteen, surrounded by other miserable and anxious people tucking into fatty, sugar-laden food.

As he was finishing the last of his bacon, a text from Robin arrived.

I’ve been trying to call with an update on Winn. Let me know when it’s convenient to talk.

The Chiswell case seemed a remote thing to Strike just now, but as he read her text he suddenly had a simultaneous craving for nicotine and to hear Robin’s voice. Abandoning his tray with thanks to the kind girl who had helped him to his table, he set off again on his crutches.

A cluster of smokers stood around the entrance to the hospital, hunch-shouldered like hyenas in the clean morning air. Strike lit up, inhaled deeply, and called Robin back.

“Hi,” he said, when she answered. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch, I’ve been at a hospital—”