Strike, who was not in the mood for humor, replied brusquely. After Wardle had hung up, he continued to sit at his kitchen table, lost in thought while the traffic growled past in Charing Cross Road below. Only the recollection that he had to get to Finchley the next morning to meet Kelsey’s sister finally motivated him to begin the usual onerous process of dealing with his prosthesis before bed.

Strike’s knowledge of London was, thanks to his mother’s peripatetic habits, extensive and detailed, but there were gaps, and Finchley was one of them. All he knew about the area was that it had been Margaret Thatcher’s constituency in the 1980s, while he, Leda and Lucy had been moving between squats in places like Whitechapel and Brixton. Finchley would have been too far away from the center to suit a family entirely reliant on public transport and takeaways, too expensive for a woman who frequently ran out of coins for the electricity meter: the kind of place, as his sister Lucy might once have wistfully put it, where proper families lived. In marrying a quantity surveyor and producing three impeccably turned-out sons, Lucy had fulfilled her childhood yearning for neatness, order and security.

Strike took the Tube to West Finchley and endured a long walk to Summers Lane rather than find a taxi, because his finances were so bad. Sweating slightly in the mild weather, he moved through road after road of quiet detached houses, cursing the place for its leafy quiet and its lack of landmarks. Finally, thirty minutes after he had left the station, he found Kelsey Platt’s house, smaller than many of its fellows, with a whitewashed exterior and a wrought-iron gate.

He rang the doorbell and immediately heard voices through the pane of frosted glass like the one in his own office door.

“Ah think it’s the detective, pet,” said a Geordie voice.

“You get it!” said a woman’s high-pitched voice.

A large red mass bloomed behind the glass and the door opened onto the hall, which was mostly concealed by a burly, barefoot man in a scarlet toweling robe. He was bald, but his bushy gray beard, coupled with the scarlet robe, would have suggested Santa had he looked jolly. However, he was frantically mopping his face with the sleeve of his dressing gown. The eyes behind his glasses were swollen into bee-stung slits and his ruddy cheeks were shining with tears.

“Sorry,” he said gruffly, moving aside to let Strike in. “Working nights,” he added in explanation of his attire.

Strike sidled past. The man smelled strongly of Old Spice and camphor. Two middle-aged women were locked in a tight embrace at the foot of the stairs, one blonde, the other dark, both sobbing. They broke apart as Strike watched, wiping their faces.

“Sorry,” gasped the dark-haired woman. “Sheryl’s our neighbor. She’s been in Magaluf, she’s only just h-heard about Kelsey.”

“Sorry,” echoed red-eyed Sheryl. “I’ll give you space, Hazel. Anything you need. Anything, Ray—anything.”