The involuntary expression she had made when forcing herself to say “Daddy” was with Strike still: she had looked like a child trying to swallow cold tripe, under threat of punishment. Twelve years old and she had learned life was only bearable for her family if she shut up and took whatever he wanted to do without complaint.

Strike had taken against Mrs. Brockbank from their first interview. She had been thin and over made-up, a victim, no doubt, in her way, but it seemed to Strike that she had voluntarily jettisoned Brittany to save the other two children, that she turned two blind eyes to the long absences from the house of her husband and eldest child, that her determination not to know was tantamount to collaboration. Brockbank had told Brittany that he would strangle both her mother and her sister if she ever spoke about what he did to her in the car when he took her on lengthy excursions into nearby woods, into dark alleyways. He would cut all of them up into little bits and bury them in the garden. Then he’d take Ryan—Brockbank’s small son, the only family member whom he seemed to value—and go where no one would ever find them.

“It was a joke, just a joke. I didn’t mean any of it.”

Thin fingers twisting, her glasses lopsided, her legs not long enough for her feet to reach the floor. She was still refusing point blank to be physically examined when Strike and Hardacre went to Brockbank’s house to bring him in.

“He was pissed when we got there. I told him why we’d come and he came at me with a broken bottle.

“I knocked him out,” said Strike without bravado, “but I shouldn’t’ve touched him. I didn’t need to.”

He had never admitted this out loud before, even though Hardacre (who had backed him to the hilt in the subsequent inquiry) had known it as well.

“If he came at you with a bottle—”

“I could’ve got the bottle off him without decking him.”

“You said he was big—”

“He was pretty pissed. I could’ve managed him without punching him. Hardacre was there, it was two on one.

“Truth is, I was glad he came at me. I wanted to punch him. Right hook, literally knocked him senseless—which is how he got away with it.”

“Got away with—”

“Got off,” said Strike. “Got clean away.”

“How?”

Strike drank more coffee, his eyes unfocused, remembering.

“He was hospitalized after I hit him because he had a massive epileptic seizure when he came out of the concussion. Traumatic brain injury.”

“Oh God,” said Robin.

“He needed emergency surgery to stop the bleeding from his brain. He kept having fits. They diagnosed TBI, PTSD and alcoholism. Unfit to stand trial. Lawyers came stampeding in. I was put on an assault charge.

“Luckily, my legal team found out that, the weekend before I hit him, he’d played rugby. They dug around a bit and found out he’d taken a knee to the head from an eighteen-stone Welshman and been stretchered off the field. A junior medic had missed the bleeding from his ear because he was covered in mud and bruises, and just told him to go home and take it easy. As it turned out, they’d missed a basal skull fracture, which my legal team found out when they got doctors to look at the post-match X-ray. The skull fracture had been done by a Welsh forward, not me.