He turned and followed her the short distance to Denmark Street. When women were in her state, they were often malleable in ways they would not be when less distressed or frightened. They forgot to do all the things that bitches did routinely to keep the likes of him at bay: keys between their knuckles, phones in their hands, rape alarms in their pockets, walking in packs. They became needy, grateful for a kind word, a friendly ear. That was how he had landed It.

His pace quickened as she turned into Denmark Street, which the press had at last given up as a bad job after eight days. She opened the black door of the office and went inside.

Would she come out again, or was she going to spend the day with Strike? He really hoped they were screwing each other. They probably were. Just the two of them in the office all the time—bound to be.

He withdrew into a doorway and pulled out his phone, keeping one eye on the second-floor window of number twenty-four.

18

I’ve been stripped, the insulation’s gone.

Blue Öyster Cult, “Lips in the Hills”

The first time that Robin had ever entered Strike’s office had been on her first morning as an engaged woman. Unlocking the glass door today, she remembered watching the new sapphire on her finger darken, shortly before Strike had come hurtling out of the office and nearly knocked her down the metal staircase to her death.

There was no ring on her finger anymore. The place where it had sat all these months felt hypersensitive, as though it had left her branded. She was carrying a small holdall that contained a change of outfit and a few toiletries.

You can’t cry here. You mustn’t cry here.

Automatically she performed the usual start-of-the-working-day tasks: took off her coat, hung it up with her handbag on a peg beside the door, filled and switched on the kettle, and stowed the holdall under her desk, where Strike would not see it. She kept turning back to check that she’d done what she had meant to do, feeling disembodied, like a ghost whose chilly fingers might slip through the handles of handbags and kettles.

It had taken four days to dismantle a relationship that had lasted nine years. Four days of mounting animosity, of grudges aired and accusations hurled. Some of it seemed so trivial, looking back. The Land Rover, the Grand National, her decision to take her laptop home. On Sunday there had been a petty squabble about whose parents were paying for the wedding cars, which had led yet again to an argument about her pitiful pay packet. By the time they had got into the Land Rover on Monday morning to drive back home, they had barely been speaking.

Then last night, at home in West Ealing, had come the explosive argument that had rendered all the squabbling that had gone before trivial, mere warning tremors of the seismic disaster that would lay waste to everything.