“Any of your ladies free for me this morning?” he asked.

“What kind you like?” said the voice.

He could see Robin coming back in the wing mirror, her strawberry-blonde hair blowing freely in the breeze, a gold pack of Benson & Hedges glinting in her hand.

“Dark,” said Strike, after a fractional hesitation. “Thai.”

“We have two Thai ladies free for you. What service you look for?”

Robin pulled open the driver’s door and got back in.

“What have you got?” asked Strike.

“One-lady sensual massage with oils, ninety pound. Two-lady sensual massage with oil, one hundred twenty. Full body-to-body naked massage with oil, one hundred fifty. You negotiate extras with lady, OK?”

“OK, I’d like the—er—one lady,” said Strike. “Be with you in a bit.”

He hung up.

“It’s a massage parlor,” he told Robin, examining the map, “but not the kind you’d take your bad knee to.”

“Really?” she said, startled.

“They’re everywhere,” he said. “You know that.”

He understood why she was disconcerted. The scene beyond the windscreen—St. Dionysius, the godly grammar school on stilts, a busy and prosperous high street, a St. George’s Cross rippling in the breeze outside a nearby pub—might have appeared on a poster advertising the town.

“What are you going to—where is it?” asked Robin.

“Not far away,” he said, showing her on the map. “I’m going to need a cashpoint first.”

Was he actually going to pay for a massage? Robin wondered, startled, but she did not know how to frame the question, and nor was she sure that she wanted to hear the answer. After pulling in at a cashpoint to enable Strike to increase his overdraft by another two hundred pounds, she followed his directions onto St. Mary’s Road, which lay at the end of the main street. St. Mary’s Road proved to be a perfectly respectable-looking thoroughfare lined with estate agents, beauty spas and solicitors, most of them in large detached buildings.

“That’s it,” said Strike, pointing, as they drove past a discreet establishment that sat on a corner. A glossy purple and gold sign read THAI ORCHID MASSAGE. Only the dark blinds on the windows hinted at activities beyond the medically sanctioned manipulation of sore joints. Robin parked in a side street and watched Strike until he passed out of sight.

Approaching the massage parlor’s entrance, Strike noticed that the orchid depicted on the glossy sign overhead looked remarkably like a vulva. He rang the bell and the door was opened instantly by a long-haired man almost as tall as himself.

“I just phoned,” Strike said.

The bouncer grunted and nodded Strike through a pair of thick black inner curtains. Immediately inside was a small, carpeted lounge area with two sofas, where an older Thai woman sat along with two Thai girls, one of whom looked about fifteen. A TV in the corner was showing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The girls’ expressions changed from bored to alert as he entered. The older woman stood up. She was vigorously chewing gum.