He had driven her to Catford on the last few mornings because it was on the way to the company he was auditing in Bromley. He was being nice about the despised Land Rover now, even while he crashed the gears and stalled it at junctions, saying what a wonderful gift it had been, how kind Linda was to have given it to them, how useful a car was when he was sent somewhere out of town. During yesterday’s commute he had offered to remove Sarah Shadlock from the wedding guest list. Robin could tell that he had had to screw up his courage even to ask the question, afraid that mentioning Sarah’s name might provoke a row. She had thought about it for a while, wondering how she really felt, and finally said no.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’d rather she came. It’s fine.”

Removing Sarah from the list would tell Sarah that Robin had found out what had happened years before. She would rather pretend that she had always known, that Matthew had confessed long ago, that it was nothing to her; she had her pride. However, when her mother, who had also queried Sarah’s attendance, asked whom Robin wanted to put on Sarah’s free side, now that Sarah and Matthew’s mutual university friend Shaun couldn’t make it, Robin answered with a question.

“Has Cormoran RSVP’d?”

“No,” said her mother.

“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he says he’s going to.”

“You want to put him next to Sarah, do you?”

“No, of course not!” snapped Robin.

There was a short pause.

“Sorry,” said Robin. “Sorry, Mum… stressed… no, could you sit Cormoran next to… I don’t know…”

“Is his girlfriend coming?”

“He says not. Put him anywhere, just not near bloody—I mean, not by Sarah.”

So, Robin settled in to wait for a glimpse of Stephanie on the warmest morning so far. The shoppers on Catford Broadway were wearing T-shirts and sandals; black women passed in brightly colored head wraps. Robin, who had put on a sundress under an old denim jacket, leaned back into one of her accustomed nooks in the theater building, pretending that she was talking on the mobile and killing time before she pretended to peruse the scented candles and incense sticks on the nearest stall.

It was difficult to maintain concentration when you were convinced that you had been sent on a wild goose chase. Strike might insist that he still thought Whittaker a suspect in Kelsey’s killing, but Robin was quietly unconvinced. She increasingly inclined to Wardle’s view that Strike had it in for his ex-stepfather and that his usually sound judgment was clouded by old grievances. Glancing up periodically at the unmoving curtains of Whittaker’s flat, she remembered that Stephanie had last been seen being bundled into the back of a transit van by Whittaker, and wondered whether she was even inside the flat.

From faint resentment that this was going to be another wasted day, she fell easily to dwelling on the main grudge she currently felt against Strike: his appropriation of the search for Noel Brockbank. Somehow Robin had come to feel that Brockbank was particularly her own suspect. Had she not successfully impersonated Venetia Hall, they would never have known that Brockbank was living in London, and if she had not had the wit to recognize that Nile was Noel, they would never have traced him to the Saracen. Even the low voice in her ear—Do A know you, little girl?—creepy as it had been, constituted a strange kind of connection.