“He was the most parasitic fucker I’ve ever met,” said Strike. “It’d be like him to try and siphon off a bit of fame from someone else.”

She could feel him becoming angry again beside her in the small space. He reacted consistently at every mention of each of the three suspects: Brockbank made him guilty, Whittaker angry. Laing was the only one he discussed with anything like objectivity.

“Hasn’t Shanker come up with anything yet?”

“Says he’s in Catford. Shanker’ll track him down. Whittaker’ll be there, somewhere, in some filthy corner. He’s definitely in London.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Just London, isn’t it?” said Strike, staring across the car park at the terraced houses. “He came from Yorkshire originally, Whittaker, you know, but he’s pure cockney now.”

“You haven’t seen him for ages, have you?”

“I don’t need to. I know him. He’s part of the junk that washes up in the capital looking for the big time and never leaves. He thought London was the only place that deserved him. Had to be the biggest stage for Whittaker.”

Yet Whittaker had never managed to claw his way out of the dirty places of the capital where criminality, poverty and violence bred like bacteria, the underbelly where Shanker still dwelled. Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavor there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible. The distance between Elin’s vanilla-columned flat in Clarence Terrace and the filthy Whitechapel squat where his mother had died could not be measured in mere miles. They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgment and lucky breaks. His mother and Elin, both beautiful women, both intelligent, one sucked down into a morass of drugs and human filth, the other sitting high over Regent’s Park behind spotless glass.

Robin, too, was thinking about London. It had Matthew in its spell, but he had no interest in the labyrinthine worlds she probed daily during her detective work. He looked excitedly towards the surface glitter: the best restaurants, the best areas to live, as though London were a huge Monopoly board. He had always had a divided allegiance to Yorkshire, to their hometown Masham. His father was Yorkshire-born, while his late mother had come from Surrey and had carried with her an air of having gone north on sufferance. She had persistently corrected any Yorkshire turns of speech in Matthew and his sister Kimberley. His carefully neutral accent had been one of the reasons that Robin’s brothers had not been impressed when they had started dating: in spite of her protestations, in spite of his Yorkshire name, they had sensed the wannabe southerner.