Please could you give me a quick call when convenient? Charlotte

Strike did not believe in clairvoyance or psychic ability, yet his immediate irrational thought was that Charlotte had somehow sensed what he had just told Spanner; that he had twitched the taut, invisible rope still binding them, by placing their break-up on an official footing.

He stared at the message as though it was her face, as though he could read her expression on the tiny grey screen.

Please. (I know you don’t have to: I’m asking you to, nicely.) A quick call. (I have a legitimate reason for desiring speech with you, so we can do it swiftly and easily; no rows.) When convenient. (I do you the courtesy of assuming that you have a busy life without me.)

Or, perhaps: Please. (To refuse is to be a bastard, Strike, and you’ve hurt me enough.) A quick call. (I know you’re expecting a scene; well, don’t worry, that last one, when you were such an unbelievable shit, has finished me with you for ever.) When convenient. (Because, let’s be honest, I always had to slot in around the army and every other damn thing that came first.)

Was it convenient now? he asked himself, lying in pain that the pills had yet to touch. He glanced at the time: ten past eleven. She was clearly still awake.

He put the mobile back on the floor beside him, where it lay silently charging, and raised a large hairy arm over his eyes, blotting out even the strips of light on the ceiling cast by the street lamps through the window slats. Against his will, he saw Charlotte the way that he had laid eyes on her for the first time in his life, as she sat alone on a windowsill at a student party in Oxford. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and nor, judging by the sideways flickering of countless male eyes, the overloud laughter and voices, the angling of extravagant gestures towards her silent figure, had any of the rest of them.

Gazing across the room, the nineteen-year-old Strike had been visited by precisely the same urge that had come over him as a child whenever snow had fallen overnight in Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted’s garden. He wanted his footsteps to be the first to make deep, dark holes in that tantalisingly smooth surface: he wanted to disturb and disrupt it.

‘You’re pissed,’ warned his friend, when Strike announced his intention to go and talk to her.

Strike agreed, downed the dregs of his seventh pint and strode purposefully over to the window ledge where she sat. He was vaguely aware of people nearby watching, primed, perhaps, for laughter, because he was massive, and looked like a boxing Beethoven, and had curry sauce all down his T-shirt.