“Darling, I haven’t got any dough,” she would say. “Really, darling, I haven’t, or I’d give you some, wouldn’t I?”

Leda had fallen pregnant in Strike’s eighteenth year, while he was applying for university. He had been horrified, but even then he had not expected her to marry Whittaker. She had always told her son that she had hated being a wife. Her first teenage essay into matrimony had lasted two weeks before she had fled. Nor did marriage seem at all Whittaker’s style.

Yet it had happened, undoubtedly because Whittaker thought it would be the only sure way to get his hands on those mysteriously hidden millions. The ceremony took place at the Marylebone registry office, where two Beatles had previously married. Perhaps Whittaker had imagined that he would be photographed in the doorway like Paul McCartney, but nobody had been interested. It would take the death of his beaming bride to bring the photographers swarming to the court steps.

Strike suddenly realized that he had walked all the way to Aldgate East station without meaning to. This whole trip, he castigated himself, had been a pointless detour. If he had got back on the train at Whitechapel he would have been well on the way to Nick and Ilsa’s by now. Instead, he had careered off as fast as he could in the wrong direction, timing his arrival perfectly to hit the rush-hour crush on the Tube.

His size, to which was added the offense of a backpack, caused unexpressed disgruntlement in those commuters forced to share the space with him, but Strike barely noticed. A head taller than anyone near him, he held on to a hand strap and watched his swaying reflection in the darkened windows, remembering the last part, the worst part: Whittaker in court, arguing for his liberty, because the police had spotted anomalies in his story of where he had been on the day that the needle entered his wife’s arm, inconsistencies in his account of where the heroin had come from and what Leda’s history of drug use had been.

A raggle-taggle procession of fellow squat-dwellers had given evidence about Leda and Whittaker’s turbulent, violent relationship, about Leda’s eschewal of heroin in all its forms, about Whittaker’s threats, his infidelities, his talk of murder and of money, his lack of noticeable grief after Leda’s body had been found. They had insisted over and again, with unwise hysteria, that they were sure Whittaker had killed her. The defense found them pathetically easy to discredit.

An Oxford student in the dock had come as a refreshing change. The judge had eyed Strike with approval: he was clean, articulate and intelligent, however large and intimidating he might be if not suited and tied. The prosecution had wanted him there to answer questions on Whittaker’s preoccupation with Leda’s wealth. Strike told the silent court about his stepfather’s previous attempts to get his hands on a fortune that existed largely in Whittaker’s own head, and about his increasing pleas to Leda for her to put him in her will as proof of her love for him.