Strike wanted to take notes, but knew it would change the atmosphere of confidence he was trying to nurture.

“Who’s Darrell?”

“He didn’t have anything to do with it. Youth worker at the church. He’s from Bradford,” said Hazel obscurely, “and Ray’s sure he’s gay.”

“Did she talk about her—” Strike hesitated, unsure what to call it. “Her problem with her leg at home?”

“Not to me,” said Hazel flatly. “I wouldn’t have it, I didn’t want to hear it, I hated it. She told me when she was fourteen and I told her exactly what I thought. Attention-seeking, that’s all it was.”

“There was old scarring on her leg. How did that—?”

“She did it right after Mum died. Like I didn’t have enough to worry about. She tied wire round it, tried to cut off the circulation.”

Her expression revealed a mixture, it seemed to Strike, of revulsion and anger.

“She was in the car when Mum and Malcolm died, in the back. I had to get a counselor and all that for her. He thought it was a cry for help or something, what she did to her leg. Grief. Survivors’ guilt, I can’t remember. She said not, though, said she’d wanted the leg gone for a while… I don’t know,” said Hazel, shaking her head vigorously.

“Did she talk to anyone else about it? Ray?”

“A bit, yeah. I mean, he knew what she was like. When we first got together, when he moved in, she told him some real whoppers—her dad being a spy, that was one of them, and that was why their car had crashed, and I don’t know what else. So he knew what she was like, but he didn’t get angry with her. He just used to change the subject, chat to her about school and that…”

She had turned an unattractive dark red.

“I’ll tell you what she wanted,” she burst out. “To be in a wheelchair—pushed around like a baby and to be pampered and the center of attention. That’s what it was all about. I found a diary, must have been a year or so ago. The things she’d written, what she liked to imagine, what she fantasized about. Ridiculous!”

“Such as?” asked Strike.

“Such as having her leg cut off and being in a wheelchair and being pushed to the edge of the stage and watching One Direction and having them come and make a big fuss of her afterwards because she was disabled,” said Hazel on a single breath. “Imagine that. It’s disgusting. There are people who are really disabled and they never wanted it. I’m a nurse. I know. I see them. Well,” she said, with a glance at Strike’s lower legs, “you don’t need telling.

“You didn’t, did you?” she asked suddenly, point blank. “You didn’t—you didn’t cut—do it—yourself?”

Was that why she had wanted to see him, Strike wondered. In some confused, subconscious manner, trying to find her moorings in the sea on which she was suddenly adrift, had she wanted to prove a point—even though her sister was gone and beyond understanding—that people didn’t do that, not in the real world where cushions stood neatly on points and disability came only by mischance, through crumbling walls or roadside explosives?