“You’re busy, Shanker?” asked Strike, lighting a fresh cigarette.

“Yeah, Bunsen, no chance today. Woss ’appening?”

“I’m looking for Whittaker.”

“Gonna finish it, are you?”

The change in Shanker’s tone would have alarmed anyone who had forgotten who Shanker was, what he was. To Shanker and his associates, there was no proper end to a grudge other than killing and, in consequence, he had spent half his adult life behind bars. Strike was surprised Shanker had survived into his midthirties.

“I just want to know where he is,” said Strike repressively.

He doubted that Shanker would have heard about the leg. Shanker lived in a world where news was of strictly personal interest and was conveyed by word of mouth.

“I can ’ave an ask around.”

“Usual rates,” said Strike, who had a standing arrangement with Shanker for useful bits of information. “And—Shanker?”

His old friend had a habit of hanging up without warning when his attention was diverted.

“’S’there more?” said Shanker, his voice moving from distant to close as he spoke; Strike had been right to think he had removed the mobile from his ear, assuming they were done.

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Digger Malley.”

A silence on the end of the line eloquently expressed the fact that, just as Strike never forgot what Shanker was, nor did Shanker ever forget what Strike was.

“Shanker, this is between you and me, no one else. You’ve never discussed me with Malley, have you?”

After a pause, and in his most dangerous voice, Shanker said:

“The fuck would I do that for?”

“Had to ask. I’ll explain when I see you.”

The dangerous silence continued.

“Shanker, when have I ever grassed you up?” asked Strike.

Another, shorter silence, and then Shanker said in what, to Strike, was his normal voice:

“Yeah, all right. Whittaker, huh? See what I can do, Bunsen.”

The line went dead. Shanker did not do good-byes.

Strike sighed and lit up another cigarette. The journey had been pointless. He would get straight back on a train once he had finished his Benson & Hedges.

The station entrance gave onto a kind of concrete forecourt surrounded by the backs of buildings. The Gherkin, that giant black bullet of a building, glinted on the distant horizon. It had not been there twenty years previously, during Strike’s family’s brief sojourn in Whitechapel.

Looking around, Strike felt no sense of homecoming or nostalgia. He could not remember this patch of concrete, these nondescript rears of buildings. Even the station seemed only dimly familiar. The endless series of moves and upheavals that had characterized life with his mother had blurred memories of individual places; he sometimes forgot which corner shop had belonged to which rundown flat, which local pub had adjoined which squat.

He had meant to get back on the Tube and yet before he knew it, he was walking, heading for the one place in London he had avoided for seventeen years: the building where his mother had died. It had been the last of Leda’s squats, two floors of a decrepit building on Fulbourne Street, which was barely a minute from the station. As he walked, Strike began to remember. Of course: he had walked over this metal bridge over the railway line during his A-level year. He remembered the name, Castlemain Street, too… surely one of his fellow A-level students, a girl with a pronounced lisp, had lived there…