“I can’t let you print anything out, Oggy,” said Hardacre as Strike sat down on the wheeled computer chair, “but you could take a picture of the screen. Coffee?”

“Tea, if you’ve got any. Cheers.”

Hardacre left the room, closing the door carefully behind him, and Strike took out his mobile to take pictures of the screen. When he was confident he had a decent likeness he scrolled down to see Brockbank’s full record, making a note of his date of birth and other personal details.

Brockbank had been born on Christmas Day in the year of Strike’s own birth. He had given a home address in Barrow-in-Furness when he had joined the army. Shortly before serving in Operation Granby—better known to the public as the first Gulf war—he had married a military widow with two daughters, one of them Brittany. His son had been born while he was serving in Bosnia.

Strike went through the record, making notes as he did so, all the way down to the life-changing injury that had put paid to Brockbank’s career. Hardacre reentered the room with two mugs and Strike muttered thanks as he continued to peruse the digital file. There was no mention in here of the crime of which Brockbank had been accused, which Strike and Hardacre had investigated and of which they both remained convinced that Brockbank was guilty. The fact that he had eluded justice was one of the biggest regrets of Strike’s military career. His most vivid memory of the man was Brockbank’s expression, feral in its wildness, as he launched himself at Strike bearing a broken beer bottle. He had been around Strike’s own size, perhaps even taller. The sound of Brockbank hitting the wall when Strike punched him had been, Hardacre said later, like a car ramming the side of the flimsy army accommodation.

“He’s drawing a nice fat military pension, I see,” muttered Strike, scribbling down the various locations to which it had been sent since Brockbank had left the military. He had gone home first: Barrow-in-Furness. Then Manchester, for a little under a year.

“Ha,” said Strike quietly. “So it was you, you bastard.”

Brockbank had left Manchester for Market Harborough, then returned to Barrow-in-Furness.

“What’s this here, Hardy?”

“Psych report,” said Hardacre, who had sat down on a low chair by the wall and was perusing a file of his own. “You shouldn’t be looking at that at all. Very careless of me to have left it up there.”

“Very,” agreed Strike, opening it.

However, the psychiatric report did not tell Strike much that he did not already know. Only once he had been hospitalized had it become clear that Brockbank was an alcoholic. There had been much debate among his doctors as to which of his symptoms could be attributed to alcohol, which to PTSD and which to his traumatic brain injuries. Strike had to Google some of the words as he went: aphasia—difficulty finding the right word; dysarthria—disordered speech; alexithymia—difficulty understanding or identifying one’s own emotions.