She was gabbling slightly now, wolfing down her third packet of crisps.

“He tried to strangle me; I went limp and played dead and he ran for it. He’d attacked two other girls wearing the mask and neither of them could tell the police anything about him. My evidence got him put away.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Strike.

She found this response satisfactory. They sat in silence for a minute while she finished the crisps.

“Only, afterwards, I couldn’t leave my room,” she said, as though there had been no pause. “In the end, the university sent me home. I was only supposed to take a term off, but I—I never went back.”

Robin contemplated this fact, staring into space. Matthew had urged her to stay at home. When her agoraphobia had resolved, which had taken more than a year, she had begun visiting him at his university in Bath, wandering hand in hand among dwellings of soft Cotswold stone, down sweeping Regency crescents, along the tree-lined banks of the River Avon. Every time they had gone out with his friends Sarah Shadlock had been there, braying at Matthew’s jokes, touching his arm, leading the conversation constantly to the good times they all enjoyed when Robin, the tedious girlfriend from home, was not present…

She was comforting me. It was a difficult time for me too, you know!

“Right,” said Strike, “we’ve got to get you a place to spend tonight.”

“I’m going to the Travel—”

“No, you’re not.”

He did not want her staying in a place where anonymous people might wander the corridors unchallenged, or could walk in off the street. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but he wanted her somewhere that a scream would not be lost in the raucous cries of hen parties.

“I could sleep in the office,” said Robin, swaying as she tried to stand; he grabbed her by the arm. “If you’ve still got that camp—”

“You’re not sleeping in the office,” he said. “I know a good place. My aunt and uncle stayed there when they came up to see The Mousetrap. C’mon, give me the holdall.”

He had once before put his arm around Robin’s shoulders but that had been quite different: he had been using her as a walking stick. This time it was she who could barely move in a straight line. He found her waist and held her steady as they left the pub.

“Matthew,” she said, as they moved off, “would not like this.”

Strike said nothing. In spite of everything he had heard, he was not as sure as Robin was that the relationship was over. They had been together nine years and there was a wedding dress ready and waiting in Masham. He had been careful to offer no criticism of Matthew that might be repeated to her ex-fiancé in the renewal of hostilities that was surely coming, because the accumulated ties of nine years could not be severed in a single night. His reticence was for Robin’s sake rather than his own. He had no fear of Matthew.