“At university?” said Strike, confused.

“It was right after I dropped out,” said Robin.

“Ah,” said Strike.

They had never discussed what had made her leave her psychology degree and return to Masham.

Robin had not intended to tell Strike the story, but all resolutions were adrift tonight on the little sea of alcohol with which she had filled her hungry and exhausted body. What did it matter if she told him? Without that information he would not have the full picture or be able to advise her what to do next. She was relying on him, she realized dimly, to help her. Whether she liked it or not—whether he liked it or not—Strike was her best friend in London. She had never looked that fact squarely in the face before. Alcohol buoyed you up and it washed your eyes clean. In vino veritas, they said, didn’t they? Strike would know. He had an odd, occasional habit of quoting Latin.

“I didn’t want to leave uni,” said Robin slowly, her head swimming, “but something happened and afterwards I had problems…”

That was no good. That didn’t explain it.

“I was coming home from a friend’s, in another hall of residence,” she said. “It wasn’t that late… only eight o’clock or something… but there had been a warning out about him—on the local news—”

That was no good either. Far too much detail. What she needed was a bald statement of fact, not to talk him through every little bit of it, the way she’d had to in court.

She took a deep breath, looked into Strike’s face and read dawning comprehension there. Relieved not to have to spell it out, she asked:

“Please could I have some more crisps?”

When he returned from the bar he handed them to her in silence. She did not like the look on his face.

“Don’t go thinking—it doesn’t make any difference!” she said desperately. “It was twenty minutes of my life. It was something that happened to me. It isn’t me. It doesn’t define me.”

Strike guessed that they were phrases she had been led to embrace in some kind of therapy. He had interviewed rape victims. He knew the forms of words they were given to make sense of what, to a woman, was incomprehensible. A lot of things about Robin were explained now. The long allegiance to Matthew, for instance: the safe boy from home.

However, the drunken Robin read in Strike’s silence the thing she had most feared: a shift in the way he saw her, from equal to victim.

“It doesn’t make any difference!” she repeated furiously. “I’m still the same!”

“I know that,” he said, “but it’s still one fucking horrible thing to have happened to you.”

“Well, yes… it was…” she muttered, mollified. Then, firing up again: “My evidence got him. I noticed things about him while… He had this patch of white skin under his ear—they call it vitiligo—and one of his pupils was fixed, dilated.”