She looked up at him when he reached her, with big eyes, and long dark hair, and soft, pale cleavage revealed by the gaping shirt.

Strike’s strange, nomadic childhood, with its constant uprootings and graftings on to motley groups of children and teenagers, had forged in him an advanced set of social skills; he knew how to fit in, to make people laugh, to render himself acceptable to almost anyone. That night, his tongue had become numb and rubbery. He seemed to remember swaying slightly.

‘Did you want something?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said. He pulled his T-shirt away from his torso and showed her the curry sauce. ‘What d’you reckon’s the best way to get this out?’

Against her will (he saw her trying to fight it), she giggled.

Some time later, an Adonis called the Honourable Jago Ross, known to Strike by sight and reputation, swung into the room with a posse of equally well-bred friends, and discovered Strike and Charlotte sitting side by side on the windowsill, deep in conversation.

‘You’re in the wrong fucking room, Char, darling,’ Ross had said, staking out his rights by the caressing arrogance of his tone. ‘Ritchie’s party’s upstairs.’

‘I’m not coming,’ she said, turning a smiling face upon him. ‘I’ve got to go and help Cormoran soak his T-shirt.’

Thus had she publicly dumped her Old Harrovian boyfriend for Cormoran Strike. It had been the most glorious moment of Strike’s nineteen years: he had publicly carried off Helen of Troy right under Menelaus’s nose, and in his shock and delight he had not questioned the miracle, but simply accepted it.

Only later had he realised that what had seemed like chance, or fate, had been entirely engineered by her. She had admitted it to him months later: that she had, to punish Ross for some transgression, deliberately entered the wrong room, and waited for a man, any man, to approach her; that he, Strike, had been a mere instrument to torture Ross; that she had slept with him in the early hours of the following morning in a spirit of vengefulness and rage that he had mistaken for passion.

There, in that first night, had been everything that had subsequently broken them apart and pulled them back together: her self-destructiveness, her recklessness, her determination to hurt; her unwilling but genuine attraction to Strike, and her secure place of retreat in the cloistered world in which she had grown up, whose values she simultaneously despised and espoused. Thus had begun the relationship that had led to Strike lying here on his camp bed fifteen years later, racked with more than physical pain, and wishing that he could rid himself of her memory.

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