Her dark, dirty hair was pulled back off a sunken, rabbity face, which had the violet-shadowed pallor of a consumptive. She wore a crop top, a zip-up gray hoodie and leggings that gave her thin legs the look of pipe cleaners. Arms crossed tightly across her thin torso, she entered the chip shop by leaning on the door until it gave, then half falling into it. Strike hurried across the road so fast that he caught the door as it swung closed and took a place immediately behind her in the queue.

When she reached the counter the man serving addressed her by name.

“All right, Stephanie?”

“Yeah,” she said in a low voice. “Two Cokes, please.”

She had multiple piercings in her ears, nose and lip. After counting out payment in coins she left, head bowed, without looking at Strike.

He returned to his darkened doorway across the road where he ate the chips he had just bought, his eyes never moving from the lit windows above the chippy. Her purchase of two Cokes suggested that Whittaker was up there, perhaps sprawled naked on a mattress, as Strike had so often seen him in his teens. Strike had thought himself detached, but the awareness as he had stood in the chip-shop queue that he might be mere feet from the bastard, separated only by a flimsy wood and plaster ceiling, had made his pulse race. Stubbornly he watched the flat until the lights in the windows went off around one in the morning, but there had been no sign of Whittaker.

He had been no luckier with Laing. Careful perusal of Google Street View suggested that the balcony on which the fox-haired Laing had posed for his JustGiving photograph belonged to a flat in Wollaston Close, a squat, shabby block of flats that stood a short distance from the Strata. Neither phone nor voter registration records for the property revealed any trace of Laing, but Strike still held out hope that he might be living there as the guest of another, or renting and living without a landline. He had spent hours on Tuesday evening keeping watch over the flats, bringing with him a pair of night-vision goggles that enabled him to peer through uncurtained windows once darkness fell, but saw no hint of the Scot entering, leaving or moving around inside any of the flats. Having no wish to tip Laing off that he was after him, Strike had decided against door-to-door inquiries, but had lurked by day near the brick arches of a railway bridge nearby, which had been filled in to create tunnel-like spaces. Small businesses lived here: an Ecuadorian café, a hairdresser’s. Eating and drinking silently among cheerful South Americans, Strike had been conspicuous by his silence and moroseness.

Strike’s fresh yawn turned into another groan of tiredness as he stretched in Robin’s computer chair, so that he did not hear the first clanging footsteps on the stairs in the hallway. By the time he had realized that somebody was approaching and checked his watch—it was surely too early for Robin, who had told him her mother’s train would leave at eleven—a shadow was climbing the wall outside the frosted glass. A knock on the door, and to Strike’s astonishment, Two-Times entered the office.