The mingled smells of raw fish and incense that had come to represent Whittaker and Stephanie filled her nostrils as she leaned back against chilly stone and watched the unmoving door of his flat. Like foxes to a dustbin, her unruly thoughts slunk back to Zahara, the little girl who had answered Brockbank’s mobile. Robin had thought of her every day since they had spoken and had asked Strike for every detail about the little girl’s mother on his return from the strip club.

He had told Robin that Brockbank’s girlfriend was called Alyssa and that she was black, so Zahara must be too. Perhaps she looked like the little girl with stiff pigtails now waddling along the street, holding tight to her mother’s forefinger and staring at Robin with solemn dark eyes. Robin smiled, but the little girl did not: she merely continued to scrutinize Robin as she and her mother passed. Robin kept smiling until the little girl, twisting almost 180 degrees so as not to break eye contact with Robin, tripped over her tiny sandaled feet. She hit the ground and began to wail; her impassive mother scooped her up and carried her. Feeling guilty, Robin resumed her observation of Whittaker’s windows as the fallen toddler’s wails reverberated down the street.

Zahara almost certainly lived in the flat in Bow that Strike had told her about. Zahara’s mother complained about the flat, apparently, although Strike said that one of the girls…

One of the girls had said…

“Of course!” Robin muttered excitedly. “Of course!”

Strike wouldn’t have thought of that—of course he wouldn’t, he was a man! She began to press the keys on her phone.

There were seven nurseries in Bow. Absently replacing her mobile in her pocket and energized by her train of thought, Robin began her usual drift through the market stalls, casting the occasional glance up at the windows of Whittaker’s flat and at the perennially closed door, her mind entirely given over to the pursuit of Brockbank. She could think of two possible courses of action: stake out each of these seven nurseries, watching for a black woman picking up a girl called Zahara (and how would she know which was the right mother and daughter?) or… or… She paused beside a stall selling ethnic jewelry, barely seeing it, preoccupied by thoughts of Zahara.

Entirely by chance, she looked up from a pair of feather and bead earrings as Stephanie, whom Strike had accurately described, came out of the door beside the chip shop. Pale, red-eyed and blinking in the bright light like an albino rabbit, Stephanie leaned on the chip-shop door, toppled inside and proceeded to the counter. Before Robin could collect her wits, Stephanie had brushed past her holding a can of Coke and gone back into the building through the white door.

Shit.

“Nothing,” she told Strike on the phone an hour later. “She’s still in there. I didn’t have a chance to do anything. She was in and out in about three minutes.”