‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘It might explain why he didn’t tell you what he was thinking.’

‘John and I have a perfectly amicable working relationship.’

‘“Working relationship”?’

‘Yes, Mr Strike: we work together. Do we live in each other’s pockets outside the office? No. But we are both involved in caring for my sister – Lady Bristow, John’s mother, who is now a terminal case. Our out-of-hours conversations usually concern Yvette.’

‘John strikes me as a dutiful son.’

‘Yvette’s all he has left now, and the fact that she’s dying isn’t helping his mental condition either.’

‘She’s hardly all he’s got left. There’s Alison, isn’t there?’

‘I am not aware that that is a very serious relationship.’

‘Perhaps one of John’s motives, in employing me, is a desire to give his mother the truth before she dies?’

‘The truth won’t help Yvette. Nobody enjoys accepting that they have reaped what they have sown.’

Strike said nothing. As he had expected, the lawyer could not resist the temptation to clarify, and after a moment he continued:

‘Yvette has always been morbidly maternal. She adores babies.’ He spoke as though this was faintly disgusting, a kind of perversion. ‘She would have been one of those embarrassing women who have twenty children if she could have found a man of sufficient virility. Thank God Alec was sterile – or hasn’t John mentioned that?’

‘He told me Sir Alec Bristow wasn’t his natural father, if that’s what you mean.’

If Landry was disappointed not to be first with the information, he rallied at once.

‘Yvette and Alec adopted the two boys, but she had no idea how to manage them. She is, quite simply, an atrocious mother. No control, no discipline; complete overindulgence and a point-blank refusal to see what is under her nose. I don’t say it was all down to her parenting – who knows what the genetic influences were – but John was whiny, histrionic and clingy and Charlie was completely delinquent, with the result—’

Landry stopped talking abruptly, patches of colour high in his cheeks.

‘With the result that he rode over the edge of a quarry?’ Strike suggested.

He had said it to watch Landry’s reaction, and was not disappointed. He had the impression of a tunnel contracting, a distant door closing: a shutting down.