“No,” he said. “I was blown up.”

“There you are, you see!” she said, tears erupting again, savagely triumphant. “I could have told her that—I could have told her if she’d only… if she’d asked me… but what she claimed,” said Hazel, gulping, “was that her leg felt like it shouldn’t be there. Like it was wrong to have it and it needed to come off—like a tumor or something. I wouldn’t listen. It was all nonsense. Ray says he tried to talk sense into her. He told her she didn’t know what she was asking for, that she wouldn’t want to be in hospital like he was after he broke his back, laid up for months in plaster, skin sores and infections and all the rest of it. He didn’t get angry with her, though. He’d say to her, come and help me in the garden or something, distract her.

“The police told us she was talking to people online who were like her. We had no idea. I mean, she was sixteen, you can’t go looking on their laptops, can you? Not that I’d know what to look for.”

“Did she ever mention me to you?” Strike asked.

“The police asked that. No. I can’t remember her ever talking about you and nor can Ray. I mean, no offense, but—I remember the Lula Landry trial, but I wouldn’t have remembered your name from that, or recognized you. If she’d brought you up I’d remember. It’s a funny name—no offense.”

“What about friends? Did she go out much?”

“She hardly had any friends. She wasn’t the popular sort. She lied to all the kids at school too, and nobody likes that, do they? They bullied her for it. Thought she was strange. She hardly ever went out. When she was meeting this supposed Niall, I don’t know.”

Her anger did not surprise Strike. Kelsey had been an unplanned addition to her spotless household. Now, for the rest of her life, Hazel would carry guilt and grief, horror and regret, not least that her sister’s life had been ended before she could grow out of the peculiarities that had helped estrange them.

“Would it be all right if I used your bathroom?” Strike asked.

Dabbing her eyes, she nodded.

“Straight ahead, top of the stairs.”

Strike emptied his bladder while reading a framed citation for “brave and meritorious conduct,” awarded to firefighter Ray Williams, which was hanging over the cistern. He strongly suspected that Hazel had hung that there, not Ray. Otherwise the bathroom displayed little of interest. The same meticulous attention to cleanliness and neatness displayed in the sitting room extended all the way to the inside of the medicine cabinet, where Strike learned that Hazel was still menstruating, that they bulk-bought toothpaste and that one or both of the couple had hemorrhoids.

He left the bathroom as quietly as he could. Faintly, from behind a closed door, came a soft rumbling indicating that Ray was asleep. Strike took two decisive steps to the right and found himself in Kelsey’s box room.