Sheryl squeezed past Strike—“sorry”—and hugged Ray. They swayed together briefly, both big people, their bellies pressed together, arms stretched around each other’s necks. Ray began sobbing again, his face in her broad shoulder.

“Come through,” hiccoughed Hazel, dabbing at her eyes as she led the way into the sitting room. She had the look of a Bruegel peasant, with her rounded cheeks, prominent chin and wide nose. Eyebrows as thick and bushy as tiger moth caterpillars overhung her puffy eyes. “It’s been like this all week. People hearing and coming over and… sorry,” she finished on a gasp.

He had been apologized to half a dozen times in the space of two minutes. Other cultures would have been ashamed of an insufficient display of grief; here in quiet Finchley, they were ashamed to have him witness it.

“Nobody knows what to say,” Hazel whispered, pressing away her tears as she gestured him to the sofa. “It’s not like she was hit by a car, or was ill. They don’t know what you say when someone’s been—” She hesitated, but balked at the word and her sentence ended in a gargantuan sniff.

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, taking his turn. “I know this is a terrible time for you.”

The sitting room was immaculate and somehow unwelcoming, perhaps because of its chilly color scheme. A three-piece suite covered in striped silvery-gray cloth, white wallpaper with a thin gray stripe, cushions angled on their points, ornaments on the mantelpiece perfectly symmetrical. The dust-free television screen gleamed with reflected light from the window.

Sheryl’s misty form trotted past on the other side of the net curtains, wiping her eyes. Ray shuffled past the sitting-room door on his bare feet, dabbing under his glasses with the end of his toweling-robe belt, his shoulders stooped. As though she had read Strike’s mind, Hazel explained:

“Ray broke his back trying to get a family out of a boarding house that caught fire. Wall gave way and his ladder fell. Three stories.”

“Christ,” said Strike.

Hazel’s lips and hands were trembling. Strike remembered what Wardle had said: that the police had mishandled Hazel. Suspicion or rough questioning of her Ray would have seemed unforgivable cruelty to her in this state of shock, an inexcusable exacerbation of their appalling ordeal. Strike knew a lot about the brutal intrusion of officialdom into private devastation. He had been on both sides of the fence.

“Anyone want a brew?” Ray called huskily from what Strike assumed was the kitchen.

“Go to bed!” Hazel called back, clutching a sodden ball of tissues. “I can make ’em! Go to bed!”

“You sure?”

“Get to bed, I’ll wake you at three!”

Hazel wiped her whole face with a fresh tissue, as though it were a face cloth.

“He’s not one for disability pay and all that, but nobody wants to give him a proper job,” she told Strike quietly as Ray shuffled, sniffing, back past the door. “Not with his back and his age and his lungs not being the best. Cash in hand… shift work…”