“Who was the other army guy?”

“Noel Brockbank. Desert Rat.”

“Desert—what?”

“Seventh Armoured Brigade.”

Strike was becoming steadily more taciturn, his expression brooding. Robin wondered whether this was because he was hungry—he was a man who needed regular sustenance to maintain an equable mood—or for some darker reason.

“Shall we eat, then?” Robin asked.

“Yeah,” said Strike, draining his pint and getting to his feet.

The cozy basement restaurant comprised a red-carpeted room with a second bar, wooden tables and walls covered in framed prints. They were the first to sit down and order.

“You were saying, about Noel Brockbank,” Robin prompted Strike when he had chosen fish and chips and she had asked for a salad.

“Yeah, he’s another one with good reason to hold a grudge,” said Strike shortly. He had not wanted to talk about Donald Laing and he was showing even more reluctance to discuss Brockbank. After a long pause in which Strike glared over Robin’s shoulder at nothing, he said, “Brockbank’s not right in the head. Or so he claimed.”

“Did you put him in prison?”

“No,” said Strike.

His expression had become forbidding. Robin waited, but she could tell nothing more was coming on Brockbank, so she asked:

“And the other one?”

This time Strike did not answer at all. She thought he had not heard her.

“Who’s—?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” grunted Strike.

He glowered into his fresh pint, but Robin refused to be intimidated.

“Whoever sent that leg,” she said, “sent it to me.”

“All right,” said Strike grudgingly, after a brief hesitation. “His name’s Jeff Whittaker.”

Robin felt a thrill of shock. She did not need to ask how Strike knew Jeff Whittaker. She already knew, although they had never discussed him.

Cormoran Strike’s early life was documented on the internet and it had been endlessly rehashed by the extensive press coverage of his detective triumphs. He was the illegitimate and unplanned offspring of a rock star and a woman always described as a supergroupie, a woman who had died of an overdose when Strike was twenty. Jeff Whittaker had been her much younger second husband, who had been accused and acquitted of her murder.

They sat in silence until their food arrived.

“Why are you only having a salad? Aren’t you hungry?” asked Strike, clearing his plate of chips. As Robin had suspected, his mood had improved with the ingestion of carbohydrates.

“Wedding,” said Robin shortly.

Strike said nothing. Comments on her figure fell strictly outside the self-imposed boundaries he had established for their relationship, which he had determined from the outset must never become too intimate. Nevertheless, he thought she was becoming too thin. In his opinion (and even the thought fell outside those same boundaries), she looked better curvier.

“Aren’t you even going to tell me,” Robin asked, after several more minutes’ silence, “what your connection with that song is?”

He chewed for a while, drank more beer, ordered another pint of Doom Bar then said, “My mother had the title tattooed on her.”