“What have you done?” asked Robin, squeezing past the coffee table to sit beside Lorraine on the sofa. The Jack Russell immediately jumped up beside her and, mercifully, stopped barking.

“I got a load of chip fat dropped on me,” said Lorraine. “At work.”

“Christ,” said Strike, settling himself in the armchair. “That must’ve been agony.”

“Yeah, it was. They say I’ll be off at least a month. Least it wasn’t far to go to casualty.”

Lorraine, it transpired, worked in the canteen of the local hospital.

“So what’s Donnie done?” Lorraine muttered, puffing smoke, once the subject of her injury had been thoroughly aired. “Robbery again, is it?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Strike carefully.

“He robbed me,” she said.

Robin saw, now, that the brusqueness was a façade. Lorraine’s long cigarette trembled as she said it.

“When was this?” asked Strike.

“When he walked out. Took all my jewelry. Mum’s wedding ring, everything. He knew what that meant to me. She’d not been dead a year. Yeah, one day he just walks out of the house and never comes back. I called the police, I thought he’d had an accident. Then I realized my purse was empty and my jewelry was gone.”

The humiliation had not left her. Her sunken cheeks flushed as she said it.

Strike felt in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“I want to make sure we’re talking about the same man. Does this picture look familiar?”

He handed her one of the photographs Laing’s ex-mother-in-law had given him in Melrose. Big and broad in his blue and yellow kilt, with his dark ferret-like eyes and that low-sprouting crop of fox-red hair, Laing was standing outside a registry office. Rhona clung to his arm, less than half his width in what looked like a poorly fitting, possibly secondhand wedding gown.

Lorraine examined the photograph for what seemed like a very long time. At last she said:

“I think it’s him. It could be.”

“You can’t see it, but he had a big tattoo of a yellow rose on his left forearm,” said Strike.

“Yeah,” said Lorraine heavily. “That’s right. He did.”

She smoked, staring at the picture.

“He’d been married, had he?” she asked, with a slight quaver in her voice.

“Didn’t he tell you?” asked Robin.

“No. Told me he’d never been.”

“How did you meet him?” asked Robin.

“Pub,” said Lorraine. “He didn’t look much like that when I knew him.”

She turned in the direction of the sideboard behind her and made a vague attempt to get up.

“Can I help?” Robin offered.

“In that middle drawer. There might be a picture.”

The Jack Russell began barking again as Robin opened a drawer containing an assortment of napkin rings, crocheted doilies, souvenir teaspoons, toothpicks and loose photographs. Robin extracted as many of the latter as she could and brought them back to Lorraine.

“That’s him,” said Lorraine, after sorting through many pictures that mostly featured a very elderly woman whom Robin assumed to be Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine passed the picture straight to Strike.