“It’d be a strange place to come from, this, wouldn’t it?” said Strike, still looking out over the terraces. “It’s like an island. I’ve never heard that accent before either.”

A man’s voice sounded somewhere nearby, singing a rousing song. Robin thought at first that the tune was a hymn. Then the man’s unique voice was joined by more voices and the breeze changed direction so that they heard a few lines quite distinctly:

“Friends to share in games and laughter

Songs at dusk and books at noon…”

“School song,” said Robin, smiling. She could see them now, a group of middle-aged men in black suits, singing loudly as they walked up Buccleuch Street.

“Funeral,” guessed Strike. “Old schoolmate. Look at them.”

As the black-suited men drew level with the car, one of them spotted Robin looking.

“Barrow Boys’ Grammar School!” he shouted at her, fist raised as though he had just scored a goal. The men cheered, but there was melancholy to their drink-fueled swagger. They began singing the song again as they passed out of sight.

“Harbor lights and clustered shipping

Clouds above the wheeling gulls…”

“Hometowns,” said Strike.

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died—and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence—they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories.

“Shall we go?” Robin asked quietly and Strike nodded, dropping the burning stub of his cigarette into his last inch of McEwan’s, where it emitted a small, satisfying hiss.

27

A dreadful knowledge comes…

Blue Öyster Cult, “In the Presence of Another World”

They were given rooms five doors apart in the Travelodge. Robin had dreaded the man behind the desk offering a double room, but Strike had headed that off with a peremptory “two singles” before he had time to open his mouth.

Ridiculous, really, to feel suddenly self-conscious, because they had been physically closer all day in the Land Rover than they were in the lift. It felt odd saying goodnight to Strike when she reached the door of her room; not that he lingered. He merely said “’night” and walked on to his own room, but he waited outside his door until she managed to work the key card and let herself inside with a flustered wave.

Why had she had waved? Ridiculous.

She dropped her holdall on the bed and moved to the window, which offered only a bleak view of the same industrial warehouses they had passed on their way into town a few hours earlier. It felt as though they had been away from London for much longer than they had.