Strike had met countless liars; he could smell them; and he knew perfectly well that Tansy was of their number. She could not have heard what she claimed to have heard from her flat; the police had therefore deduced that she could not have heard it at all. Against Strike’s expectation, however, in spite of the fact that every piece of evidence he had heard until this moment suggested that Lula Landry had committed suicide, he found himself convinced that Tansy Bestigui really believed that she had overheard an argument before Landry fell. That was the only part of her story that rang with authenticity, an authenticity that shone a garish light on the fakery with which she garnished it.

Strike pushed himself off the wall and began to walk east along Grosvenor Street, paying slightly more attention to traffic, but inwardly recalling Tansy’s expression, her tone, her mannerisms, as she spoke of Lula Landry’s final moments.

Why would she tell the truth on the essential point, but surround it with easily disproven falsehoods? Why would she lie about what she had been doing when she heard shouting from Landry’s flat? Strike remembered Adler: ‘A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.’ Tansy had come along today to make a last attempt to find someone who would believe her, and yet swallow the lies in which she insisted on swaddling her evidence.

He walked fast, barely conscious of the twinges from his right knee. At last he realised that he had walked all along Maddox Street and emerged on Regent Street. The red awnings of Hamleys Toy Shop fluttered a little in the distance, and Strike remembered that he had intended to buy a birthday present for his nephew’s forthcoming birthday on the way back to the office.

The multicoloured, squeaking, flashing maelstrom into which he walked registered on him only vaguely. Blindly he moved from floor to floor, untroubled by the shrieks, the whirring of airborne toy helicopters, the oinks of mechanical pigs moving across his distracted path. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, he came to rest near the HM Forces dolls. Here he stood, quite still, gazing at the ranks of miniature marines and paratroopers but barely seeing them; deaf to the whispers of parents trying to manoeuvre their sons around him, too intimidated to ask the strange, huge, staring man to move.

Part Three

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Maybe one day it will be cheering even to remember these things.

Virgil, Aeneid, Book 1

1

It started to rain on Wednesday. London weather; dank and grey, through which the old city presented a stolid front: pale faces under black umbrellas, the eternal smell of damp clothing, the steady pattering on Strike’s office window in the night.