The knee onto which the prosthesis was fitted was beginning to complain as Strike strode faster and faster along the street. The Nag’s Head pub rose up on the right as though he had conjured it, squat, square and brick. Only at the door did he catch sight of the dark-clad bouncer and remember that the Nag’s Head was another lap-dancing club these days.

“Bollocks,” he muttered.

He had no objection to semiclad women gyrating around him while he enjoyed a pint, but he could not justify the exorbitant price of drinks in such an establishment, not when he had lost two clients in a single day.

He therefore entered the next Starbucks he encountered, found a seat and heaved his sore leg onto an empty chair while he moodily stirred a large black coffee. The squashy earth-colored sofas, the tall cups of American froth, the wholesome young people working with quiet efficiency behind a clean glass counter: these, surely, were the perfect antidote to Whittaker’s stinking specter, and yet he would not be driven out. Strike found himself unable to stop reliving it all, remembering…

While he had lived with Leda and her son, Whittaker’s teenage history of delinquency and violence had been known only to social services in the north of England. The tales he told about his past were legion, highly colored and often contradictory. Only after he had been arrested for murder had the truth leaked out from people from his past who surfaced, some hoping for money from the press, some determined to revenge themselves on him, others trying in their own muddled fashion to defend him.

He had been born into a moneyed upper-middle-class family headed by a knighted diplomat whom Whittaker had believed, until the age of twelve, was his father. At that point he had discovered that his older sister, whom he had been led to believe was in London working as a Montessori teacher, was actually his mother, that she had serious alcohol and drug problems and that she was living in poverty and squalor, ostracized by her family. From this time onward, Whittaker, already a problem child prone to outbursts of extreme temper during which he lashed out indiscriminately, had become determinedly wild. Expelled from his boarding school, he had joined a local gang and soon became ringleader, a phase that culminated in a spell in a correctional facility because he had held a blade to a young girl’s throat while his friends sexually assaulted her. Aged fifteen, he had run away to London, leaving a trail of petty crime in his wake and finally succeeding in tracking down his biological mother. A brief, enthusiastic reunion had deteriorated almost at once into mutual violence and animosity.

“Is anyone using this?”

A tall youth had bent over Strike, his hands already gripping the back of the chair on which Strike’s leg was resting. He reminded Strike of Robin’s fiancé Matthew, with his wavy brown hair and clean-cut good looks. With a grunt, Strike removed his leg, shook his head and watched the guy walk away carrying the chair, rejoining a group of six or more. The girls there were eager for his return, Strike could see: they straightened up and beamed as he placed the chair down and joined them. Whether because of the resemblance to Matthew, or because he had taken Strike’s chair, or because Strike genuinely sensed a tosser when he saw one, Strike found the youth obscurely objectionable.