Strike sat alone at the kitchen table in his attic flat that night. The chair was uncomfortable and the knee of his amputated leg aching after several hours tailing Mad Dad, who had taken time out of work today to stalk his younger son on a trip to the Natural History Museum. The man owned his own company or he would surely have been fired for the working hours he spent intimidating his children. Platinum, however, had gone unwatched and unphotographed. On learning that Robin’s mother was due to visit that evening, Strike had insisted on Robin taking three days off, overriding all her objections, walking her to the Tube and insisting that she text him once safely back at her flat.

Strike yearned for sleep, yet felt too weary to get up and go to bed. He had been more disturbed by the second communication from the killer than he had been prepared to admit to his partner. Appalling though the arrival of the leg had been, he now acknowledged that he had nourished a vestige of hope that the addressing of the package to Robin had been a nasty embellishment, but an afterthought. The second communication with her, sly sideways wink at Strike notwithstanding (“She’s as Beautiful as a Foot”), had told him for certain that this man, whoever he was, had Robin in his sights. Even the name of the painting on the front of the card he had selected—the image of the solitary, leggy blonde—was ominous: “In Thoughts of You.”

Rage burgeoned in the motionless Strike, chasing away his tiredness. He remembered Robin’s white face and knew that he had witnessed the death of her faint hope that the sending of the leg had not been the random act of a madman. Even so, she had argued vociferously against taking time off, pointing out that their only two paying jobs frequently clashed: Strike would be unable to cover both properly on his own and would consequently have to choose on a daily basis whether to follow Platinum or Mad Dad. He had been adamant: she should return to work only when her mother returned to Yorkshire.

Their persecutor had now succeeded in reducing Strike’s business to two clients. He had just endured a second incursion of police into his office and was worried that the press would get wind of what had happened, even though Wardle had promised not to release news of the card and the toe. Wardle agreed with Strike that one of the killer’s objectives was to focus press and police attention on the detective, and that it was playing into the killer’s hands to alert the media.

His mobile rang loudly in the small kitchen. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was twenty past ten. He seized it, barely registering Wardle’s name as he raised it to his ear, because his mind had been on Robin.

“Good news,” Wardle told him. “Well, of a kind. He hasn’t killed another woman. The toe’s Kelsey’s. Off the other leg. Waste not, want not, eh?”