Robin got stiffly off the bed and walked away, looking back over her shoulder at Strike, trying to convey warning and restraint with her expression.

“Out here,” Carver growled at Strike.

The detective followed the policeman back through A&E. Carver had commandeered a small visitors’ room where, Strike assumed, news of imminent or actual death was conveyed to relatives. It contained several padded chairs, a box of tissues on a small table and an abstract print in shades of orange.

“I told you to stay out of it,” Carver said, taking up a position in the middle of the room, arms folded, feet wide apart.

With the door closed, Carver’s body odor filled the room. He did not stink in the same way as Whittaker: not of ingrained filth and drugs, but of sweat that he could not contain through the working day. His blotchy complexion was not improved by the overhead strip lighting. The dandruff, the wet shirt, the mottled skin: he seemed to be visibly falling to pieces. Strike had undoubtedly helped him on his way, humiliating him in the press over the murder of Lula Landry.

“Sent her to stake out Whittaker, didn’t you?” asked Carver, his face growing slowly redder, as though he were being boiled. “You did this to her.”

“Fuck you,” said Strike.

Only now, with his nose full of Carver’s sweat, did he admit to himself that he had known it for a while: Whittaker was not the killer. Strike had sent Robin after Stephanie because, in his soul, he had thought it the safest place to put her, but he had kept her on the streets, and he had known for weeks that the killer was tailing her.

Carver knew that he had hit a nerve. He was grinning.

“You’ve been using murdered women to pay off your fucking grudge against your stepdaddy,” he said, taking pleasure in Strike’s rising color, grinning to see the large hands ball into fists. Carver would enjoy nothing more than running Strike in for assault; they both knew it. “We’ve checked out Whittaker. We checked all three of your fucking hunches. There’s nothing in any of them. Now you listen to me.”

He took a step closer to Strike. Though a head shorter, he projected the power of a furious, embittered but powerful man, a man with much to prove, and with the full might of the force behind him. Pointing at Strike’s chest, he said:

“Stay out of it. You’re fucking lucky you haven’t got your partner’s blood on your hands. If I find you anywhere near our investigation again, I’ll fucking run you in. Understand me?”

He poked his stubby fingertip into Strike’s sternum. Strike resisted the urge to knock it away, but a muscle in his jaw twitched. For a few seconds they eyeballed each other. Carver grinned more widely, breathing as though he had just triumphed in a wrestling match, then strutted to the door and left, leaving Strike to stew in rage and self-loathing.