“He’s living with Alyssa, somewhere in Bow,” said the barmaid. “She got herself a council house but she was always bitching about the place. I don’t know exactly where it is,” she said, forestalling Strike’s question. “I never went round or nothing.”

“I tort she liked it,” said Orla vaguely. “She said there was a good nursery.”

The stripper had wriggled out of her thong and was waving it over her head, lasso-style. Having seen all there was to see, the two new punters drifted to the bar. One of them, a man old enough to be Orla’s grandfather, fixed his rheumy eyes on her cleavage. She sized him up, businesslike, then turned to Strike.

“So, you wanna private dance or not?”

“I don’t think I will,” said Strike.

Before the words were even fully out of his mouth she had put down her glass, wriggled off the chair and slid towards the sixty-year-old, who grinned, revealing more gaps than teeth.

A hulking figure appeared at Strike’s side: the neckless bouncer.

“Des wants a word,” he said in what would have been a menacing tone had his voice not been surprisingly high-pitched for a man so broad.

Strike looked around. The DJ, who was glaring across the room at him, beckoned.

“Is there a problem?” Strike asked the bouncer.

“Des’ll tell you, if there is,” was the faintly ominous answer.

So Strike crossed the room to speak to the DJ, and stood like a massive schoolboy summoned to the headmaster at his lectern. Fully alive to the absurdity of the situation, he had to wait while a third stripper deposited her glass of coins safely beside the turntable, wriggled out of her purple robe and ascended the stage in black lace and Perspex heels. She was heavily tattooed and, beneath thick makeup, spotty.

“Gentlemen, tits, ass and class from—Jackaline!”

“Africa” by Toto began. Jackaline began to spin around the pole, at which she was far more accomplished than either of her colleagues, and Des covered the microphone with his hand and leaned forwards.

“Right, pal.”

He appeared both older and harder than he had in the red light of the stage, his eyes shrewd, a scar as deep as Shanker’s running along his jaw.

“What are you asking about that bouncer for?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“He never had a contract.”

“I never said he had.”

“Unfair dismissal my fucking arse. He never told me he had fucking fits. Have you been sent here by that Alyssa bitch?”

“No,” said Strike. “I was told Noel worked here.”

“She’s a mad fucking cow.”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s him I’m looking for.”

Scratching an armpit, Des glowered at Strike while, four feet away, Jackaline slipped her bra straps from her shoulders and glared over her shoulder at the half-dozen punters watching.

“Bollocks was that bastard ever in the Special Forces,” said Des aggressively, as though Strike had insisted he had been.

“Is that what he told you?”

“It’s what she said. Alyssa. They wouldn’t take a fucking wreck like that. Anyway,” said Des, eyes narrowed, “there was other stuff I didn’t like.”