Strike knew from acquaintances back in Denmark Street that press photographers were still hanging around the door to his office and he was resigned to spending the rest of the week in Nick and Ilsa’s guest room, which had bare white walls and a melancholy sense of awaiting its true destiny. They had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have a child. Strike never inquired as to their progress and sensed that Nick, in particular, was grateful for his restraint.

He had known them both for a long time, Ilsa for most of his life. Fair-haired and bespectacled, she came from St. Mawes in Cornwall, which was the most constant home that Strike had ever known. He and Ilsa had been in the same primary school class. Whenever he had gone back to stay with Ted and Joan, as had happened regularly through his youth, they had resumed a friendship initially based on the fact that Joan and Ilsa’s mother were themselves old schoolmates.

Nick, whose sandy hair had begun receding in his twenties, was a friend from the comprehensive in Hackney where Strike had finished his school career. Nick and Ilsa had met at Strike’s eighteenth birthday party in London, dated for a year, then split up when they went off to separate universities. In their midtwenties they had met again, by which time Ilsa was engaged to another lawyer and Nick dating a fellow doctor. Within weeks both relationships were over; a year later, Nick and Ilsa had married, with Strike as best man.

Strike returned to their house at half past ten in the evening. As he closed the front door Nick and Ilsa greeted him from the sitting room and urged him to help himself to their still-plentiful takeaway curry.

“What’s this?” he asked, looking around, disconcerted, at long lengths of Union Jack bunting, many sheets of scribbled notes and what looked like two hundred red, white and blue plastic cups in a large polythene bag.

“We’re helping organize the street party for the royal wedding,” said Ilsa.

“Jesus Christ almighty,” said Strike darkly, heaping his plate with lukewarm Madras.

“It’ll be fun! You should come.”

Strike threw her a look that made her snigger.

“Good day?” asked Nick, passing Strike a can of Tennent’s.

“No,” said Strike, accepting the lager with gratitude. “Another job canceled. I’m down to two clients.”

Nick and Ilsa made sympathetic noises, and there followed a comradely silence while he shoveled curry into his mouth. Tired and dispirited, Strike had spent most of the journey home contemplating the fact that the arrival of the severed leg was having, as he had feared, the effect of a wrecking ball on the business he had been working so hard to build up. His photograph was currently proliferating online and in the papers, in connection with a horrible, random act. It had been a pretext for the papers to remind the world that he was himself one-legged, a fact of which he was not ashamed, but which he was hardly likely to use in advertising; a whiff of something strange, something perverse, was attached to him now. He was tainted.