“But you decided to go anyway,” said Strike.

Visions of violent, cathartic action—picking up the pedal bin and throwing it through the steamy window, for instance—were rising chaotically in his mind’s eye. He stood quite still, large feet planted on the scuffed lino, staring at her white and stubborn face.

“I don’t regret it,” she said. “He was raping—”

“Carver’s convinced I sent you. Brockbank’s vanished. You’ve driven him underground. How’re you going to feel if he decides he’d better cut the next one into pieces before she can blab?”

“Don’t you dare put that on me!” said Robin, her voice rising. “Don’t you dare! You’re the one who punched him when you went to arrest him! If you hadn’t hit him he might’ve gone down for Brittany!”

“That makes what you did right, does it?”

He refrained from shouting only because he could hear Matthew lurking in the hall, however quiet the accountant thought he was being.

“I’ve stopped Angel being abused and if that’s a bad thing to do—”

“You’ve driven my business off the edge of a fucking cliff,” said Strike in a quiet voice that stopped her in her tracks. “We were warned away from those suspects, from the whole investigation, but you went storming in and now Brockbank’s gone to ground. The press’ll be all over me for this. Carver’ll tell them I’ve fucked it all up. They’ll bury me. And even if you don’t give a shit about any of that,” said Strike, his face rigid with fury, “how about the fact the police have just found a connection between Kelsey’s church and the one in Brixton where Brockbank was attending?”

She looked stricken.

“I—I didn’t know—”

“Why wait for the facts?” asked Strike, his eyes dark shadows in the harsh overhead lighting. “Why not just blunder in and tip him off before the police can take him in?”

Appalled, Robin said nothing. Strike was looking at her now as though he never liked her, as though they had never shared any of the experiences that, to her, had constituted a bond like no other. She had been prepared for him to punch walls and cupboards again, even, in the heat of his anger, to—

“We’re finished,” said Strike.

He took some satisfaction from the shrinking movement she could not hide, from the sudden blanching of her face.

“You don’t—”

“I don’t mean it? You think I need a partner who won’t take instruction, who does what I’ve explicitly told her not to do, who makes me look like a trouble-making egotistical prick in front of the police and causes a murder suspect to disappear under the force’s nose?”

He said it in a single breath and Robin, who had taken a step backwards, knocked the England Ruby calendar off the wall with a rustle and thud she failed to hear, so loudly was the blood pounding in her ears. She thought she might faint. She had imagined him shouting “I ought to fire you!” but not once had she considered that he might actually do it, that everything she had done for him—the risks, the injuries, the insights and the inspirations, the long hours of discomfort and inconvenience—would be washed away, rendered negligible by this one act of well-intentioned disobedience. She could not even get enough breath into her lungs to argue, because his expression was such that she knew all she could expect was further icy condemnation of her actions and an exposition of how badly she had screwed up. The memory of Angel and Alyssa holding each other on the sofa, the reflection that Angel’s suffering was finished and that her mother believed and supported her, had comforted Robin through the hours of suspense during which she waited for this blow to fall. She had not dared tell Strike what she had done. Now she thought it might have been better if she had.