All he needed now was for The Secretary to take one short walk down a deserted stretch of road… but London throbbed and teemed with people all day long and here he was, frustrated and wary, watching her as he hung around the London School of Economics.

She was tracking someone too, and it was easy to see who that was. Her target had bright platinum hair extensions and led The Secretary, midafternoon, all the way back to Tottenham Court Road.

The Secretary disappeared inside a pub opposite the lap-dancing club into which her mark had gone. He debated following her inside, but she seemed dangerously watchful today, so he entered a cheap Japanese restaurant with plate-glass windows opposite the pub, took a table near the window and waited for her to emerge.

It would happen, he told himself, staring through his shades into the busy road. He would get her. He had to hold on to that thought, because this evening he was going to have to return to It and the half-life, the lie-life, that allowed the real Him to walk and breathe in secret.

The smeared and dusty London window reflected his naked expression, stripped of the civilized coating he wore to beguile the women who had fallen prey to his charm and his knives. To the surface had risen the creature that lived within, the creature that wanted nothing except to establish its dominance.

8

I seem to see a rose,

I reach out, then it goes.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Lonely Teardrops”

As Strike had been expecting ever since the news of the severed leg hit the media, his old acquaintance Dominic Culpepper of the News of the World had contacted him early on Tuesday morning in a state of advanced ire. The journalist refused to accept that Strike might have had legitimate reasons for choosing not to contact Culpepper the very second he had realized that he was in receipt of a severed limb, and Strike further compounded this offense by declining the invitation to keep Culpepper informed of every fresh development in the case, in return for a hefty retainer. Culpepper had previously put paid work Strike’s way and the detective suspected, by the time the call terminated, that this source of income would henceforth be closed to him. Culpepper was not a happy man.

Strike and Robin did not speak until midafternoon. Strike, who was carrying a backpack, called from a crowded Heathrow Express train.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Pub opposite Spearmint Rhino,” she said. “It’s called the Court. Where are you?”

“Coming back from the airport. Mad Dad got on the plane, thank Christ.”

Mad Dad was a wealthy international banker whom Strike was tailing on behalf of his wife. The couple were having an extremely contentious custody battle. The husband’s departure for Chicago would mean that Strike would have a few nights’ respite from observing him as he sat in his car outside his wife’s house at four in the morning, night-vision goggles trained on his young sons’ window.