Whittaker watched out of his gold eyes, almost entirely impassive. In the last minute of his evidence, Strike and Whittaker’s eyes had met across the room. The corner of Whittaker’s mouth had lifted in a faint, derisive smile. He had raised his index finger half an inch from the place where it rested on the bench in front of him and made a tiny sideways swiping motion.

Strike had known exactly what he was doing. The micro-gesture had been made just for him, a miniature copy of one with which Strike was familiar: Whittaker’s midair, horizontal slash of the hand, directed at the throat of the person who had offended him.

“You’ll get yours,” Whittaker used to say, the gold eyes wide and manic. “You’ll get yours!”

He had brushed up well. Somebody in his moneyed family had stumped up for a decent defense lawyer. Scrubbed clean, soft-spoken and wearing a suit, he had denied everything in quiet, deferential tones. He had his story straight by the time he appeared in court. Everything that the prosecution tried to pull in to draw a picture of the man he really was—Charles Manson on the ancient record player, the Satanic Bible on the bed, the stoned conversations about killing for pleasure—were batted away by a faintly incredulous Whittaker.

“What can I tell you… I’m a musician, your honor,” he said at one point. “There’s poetry in the darkness. She understood that better than anyone.”

His voice had cracked melodramatically and he broke into dry sobs. Counsel for the defense hastened to ask whether he needed to take a moment.

It was then that Whittaker had shaken his head bravely and offered his gnomic pronouncement on Leda’s death:

“She wanted to die. She was the quicklime girl.”

Nobody else had understood the reference at the time, perhaps only Strike who had heard the song so many times through his childhood and adolescence. Whittaker was quoting from “Mistress of the Salmon Salt.”

He had walked free. The medical evidence supported the view that Leda had not been a habitual heroin user, but her reputation was against her. She had done plenty of other drugs. She was an infamous party girl. To the men in curled wigs whose job it was to classify violent deaths, it seemed wholly in character that she would die on a dirty mattress in pursuit of pleasure her mundane life could not give her.

On the court steps, Whittaker announced that he intended to write a biography of his late wife, then vanished from view. The promised book had never appeared. Leda and Whittaker’s son had been adopted by Whittaker’s long-suffering grandparents and Strike had never seen him again. Strike had quietly left Oxford and joined the army; Lucy had gone off to college; life had carried on.

Whittaker’s periodic reappearance in the newspapers, always connected with some criminal act, could never be a matter of indifference to Leda’s children. Of course, Whittaker was never front-page news: he was a man who had married somebody famous for sleeping with the famous. Such limelight as he achieved was a weak reflection of a reflection.