Matthew would not like this, she had said.

He would have liked it even less had he known how much Strike had liked it.

She was nowhere near as beautiful as Charlotte. Charlotte had had the kind of beauty that made men forget themselves midsentence, that stunned them into silence. Robin, as he could hardly fail to notice when she bent over to turn off her PC at the wall, was a very sexy girl, but men were not struck dumb in her presence. Indeed, remembering Wardle, she seemed to make them more loquacious.

Yet he liked her face. He liked her voice. He liked being around her.

It wasn’t that he wanted to be with her—that would be insanity. They could not run the business together and have an affair. In any case, she wasn’t the kind of girl you had an affair with. He had only ever known her engaged or else bereft at the demise of her engagement and therefore saw her as the kind of woman who was destined for marriage.

Almost angrily, he added together those things he knew and had observed that marked her as profoundly different from him, as embodying a safer, more cloistered, more conventional world. She had had the same pompous boyfriend since sixth form (although he understood that a little better now), a nice middle-class family back in Yorkshire, parents married for decades and apparently happy, a Labrador and a Land Rover and a pony, Strike reminded himself. A bloody pony!

Then other memories intruded and a different Robin peeled away from this picture of a safe and ordered past: and there in front of him stood a woman who would not have been out of place in the SIB. This was the Robin who had taken advanced driving courses, who had concussed herself in the pursuit of a killer, who had calmly wrapped her coat like a tourniquet around his bleeding arm after he was stabbed and taken him to hospital. The Robin who had improvised so successfully in interrogating suspects that she had winkled out information that the police had not managed to get, who had invented and successfully embodied Venetia Hall, who had persuaded a terrified young man who wanted his leg amputated to confide in her, who had given Strike a hundred other examples of initiative, resourcefulness and courage that might have turned her into a plainclothes police officer by now, had she not once walked into a dark stairwell where a bastard in a mask stood waiting.

And that woman was going to marry Matthew! Matthew, who had been banking on her working in human resources, with a nice salary to complement his own, who sulked and bitched about her long, unpredictable hours and her lousy paycheck… couldn’t she see what a stupid bloody thing she was doing? Why the fuck had she put that ring back on? Hadn’t she tasted freedom on that drive up to Barrow, which Strike looked back on with a fondness that discomposed him?