“You didn’t call me back,” said Charlotte. “I left a message with your Robin. Didn’t she give it to you?”

“Yeah, she gave it to me.”

“But you didn’t call.”

“What d’you want, Charlotte?”

The sane part of his brain was telling him to end the call, but still he held the phone to his ear, listening, waiting. She’d been like a drug to him for a long time: a drug, or a disease.

“Interesting,” said Charlotte dreamily. “I thought she might have decided not to pass on the message.”

He said nothing.

“Are the two of you together yet? She’s quite good-looking. And always there. On tap. So conven—”

“Why are you calling?”

“I’ve told you, I wanted to talk to you… d’you know what day it is today? The twins’ first birthday. The entire famille Ross has turned up to fawn over them. This is the first moment I’ve had to myself all day.”

He knew, of course, that she’d had twins. There’d been an announcement in The Times, because she’d married into an aristocratic family that routinely announced births, marriages and deaths in its columns, although Strike had not, in fact, read the news there. It was Ilsa who’d passed the information on, and Strike had immediately remembered the words Charlotte had said to him, over a restaurant table she had tricked him into sharing with her, more than a year previously.

All that’s kept me going through this pregnancy is the thought that once I’ve had them, I can leave.

But the babies had been born prematurely and Charlotte had not left them.

Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is.

There’d been two previous tipsy phone calls to Strike like this one in the past year, both made late at night. He’d ended the first one mere seconds in, because Robin was trying to reach him. Charlotte had hung up abruptly a few minutes into the second.

“Nobody thought they’d live, did you know that?” Charlotte said now. “It’s,” she whispered, “a miracle.”

“If it’s your kids’ birthday, I should let you go,” said Strike. “Goodnight, Char—”

“Don’t go,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Don’t go, please don’t.”

Hang up, said the voice in his head. He didn’t.

“They’re asleep, fast asleep. They don’t know it’s their birthday, the whole thing’s a joke. Commemorating the anniversary of that fucking nightmare. It was hideous, they cut me open—”

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’m busy.”

“Please,” she almost wailed. “Bluey, I’m so unhappy, you don’t know, I’m so fucking miserable—”

“You’re a married mother of two,” he said brutally, “and I’m not an agony aunt. There are anonymous services you can call if you need them. Goodnight, Charlotte.”

He cut the call.

The rain was coming down harder. It drummed on his dark windows. Dennis Creed’s face was now the wrong way up on the cast-aside book. His light-lashed eyes seemed reversed in the upside-down face. The effect was unsettling, as though the eyes were alive in the photograph.

Strike opened the book again and continued to read.

9

Faire Sir, of friendship let me now you pray,

That as I late aduentured for your sake,

The hurts whereof me now from battell stay,

Ye will me now with like good turne repay.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

George Layborn still hadn’t managed to lay hands on the Bamborough file when Robin’s birthday arrived.

For the first time in her life, she woke on the morning of October the ninth, remembered what day it was and experienced no twinge of excitement, but a lowering sensation. She was twenty-nine years old today, and twenty-nine had an odd ring to it. The number seemed to signify not a landmark, but a staging post: “Next stop: THIRTY.” Lying alone for a few moments in her double bed in her rented bedroom, she remembered what her favorite cousin, Katie, had said during Robin’s last trip home, while Robin had been helping Katie’s two-year-old son make Play-Doh monsters to ride in his Tonka truck.

“It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us.”

Then, seeing something in Robin’s face that made her regret her words, Katie had hastily added,

“I don’t mean it in a bad way! You seem really happy. Free, I mean! Honestly,” Katie had said, with hollow insincerity, “I really envy you sometimes.”

Robin hadn’t known a second’s regret for the termination of a marriage that, in its final phase, had made her deeply unhappy. She could still conjure up the mood, mercifully not experienced since, in which all color seemed drained from her surroundings—and they had been pretty surroundings, too: she knew that the sea captain’s house in Deptford where she and Matthew had finally parted had been a most attractive place, yet it was strange how few details she could remember about it now. All she could recall with any clarity was the deadened mood she’d suffered within those walls, the perpetual feelings of guilt and dread, and the dawning horror which accompanied the realization that she had shackled herself to somebody whom she didn’t like, and with whom she had next to nothing in common.

Nevertheless, Katie’s blithe description of Robin’s current life as “happy” and “free” wasn’t entirely accurate. For several years now, Robin had watched Strike prioritize his working life over everything else—in fact, Joan’s diagnosis had been the first occasion she’d known him to reallocate his jobs, and make something other than detection his top concern—and these days Robin, too, felt herself becoming taken over by the job, which she found satisfying to the point that it became almost all-consuming. Finally living what she’d wanted ever since she first walked through the glass door of Strike’s office, she now understood the potential for loneliness that came with a single, driving passion.

Having sole possession of her bed had been a great pleasure at first: nobody sulking with their back to her, nobody complaining that she wasn’t pulling her weight financially, or droning on about his promotion prospects; nobody demanding sex that had become a chore rather than a pleasure. Nevertheless, while she missed Matthew not at all, she could envisage a time (if she was honest, was perhaps already living it) when the lack of physical contact, of affection and even of sex—which for Robin was a more complicated prospect than for many women—would become, not a boon, but a serious absence in her life.

And then what? Would she become like Strike, with a succession of lovers relegated firmly to second place, after the job? No sooner had she thought this than she found herself wondering, as she’d done almost daily since, whether her partner had called Charlotte Campbell back. Impatient with herself, she threw back the covers and, ignoring the packages lying on top of her chest of drawers, went to take a shower.

Her new home in Finborough Road occupied the top two floors of a terraced house. The bedrooms and bathroom were on the third floor, the public rooms on the fourth. A small terraced area lay off the sitting room, where the owner’s elderly rough-coated dachshund, Wolfgang, liked to lie outside on sunny days.