“You’d think so,” Robin agreed.

“That was done for the pleasure of doing it. He had a one-man orgy in that bathroom.”

Robin was now unsure whether she was experiencing hunger or nausea.

“A sadistic maniac who’s got a grudge against me and has decided to unite his hobbies,” Strike mused aloud.

“Does that fit any of the men you suspect?” Robin asked. “Have any of them killed before, that you know of?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “Whittaker. He killed my mother.”

But in a very different way, thought Robin. It had been a needle, not knives, that had dispatched Leda Strike. Out of respect for Strike, who was looking grim, she did not voice the thought. Then she remembered something else.

“I suppose you know,” she said cautiously, “that Whittaker kept another woman’s dead body in his flat for a month?”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “I heard.”

The news had filtered through to him while he was out in the Balkans, passed on by his sister Lucy. He had found a picture online of Whittaker walking into court. His ex-stepfather had been almost unrecognizable, crew-cutted and bearded, but still with those staring gold eyes. Whittaker’s story, if Strike remembered correctly, had been that he had been afraid of “another false accusation” of murder, so he had attempted to mummify the dead woman’s body, binding it up in bin bags and hiding it under floorboards. The defense had claimed to an unsympathetic judge that their client’s novel approach to his problem was due to heavy drug use.

“He hadn’t murdered her, though, had he?” Robin asked, trying to remember exactly what Wikipedia had said.

“She’d been dead a month, so I doubt it was an easy post-mortem,” said Strike. The look that Shanker had described as ugly had returned. “Personally, I’d lay odds he killed her. How unlucky does a man get, two of his girlfriends dropping dead at home while he’s sitting there doing nothing?

“He liked death, Whittaker; he liked bodies. He claimed he’d been a gravedigger when he was a teenager. He had a thing about corpses. People took him for a hardcore goth or some ten-a-penny poseur—the necrophiliac lyrics, the Satanic Bible, Aleister Crowley, all that crap—but he was an evil, amoral bastard who told everyone he met he was an evil, amoral bastard and what happened? Women fell over themselves to get at him.

“I need a drink,” said Strike. He got up and headed for the bar.

Robin watched him go, slightly taken aback by his sudden rush of anger. His opinion that Whittaker had murdered twice was unsupported by either the courts or, as far as she knew, police evidence. She had become used to Strike’s insistence on the meticulous collection and documentation of facts, his oft-repeated reminders that hunches and personal antipathies might inform, but must never be allowed to dictate, the direction of an investigation. Of course, when it was a case of Strike’s own mother…

Strike returned with a pint of Nicholson’s Pale Ale and a couple of menus.