Strike straightened his injured leg, which was still sore, and considered, again, the possibility that he would have to return to see his consultant. He found even this degree of proximity to a hospital slightly depressing. His stomach rumbled. He had passed a McDonald’s on the way here. If he had not found her by midday, he would go and eat there.

Twice more he shouted ‘Rochelle!’ at black women who entered and exited the building, and both times they glanced back, purely to see who had shouted, in one case giving him a look of disdain.

Then, just after eleven, a short, stocky black girl emerged from the hospital with a slightly awkward, rocking, side-to-side gait. He knew quite well that he had not missed her going in, not only because of her distinctive walk, but because she wore a very noticeable short coat of magenta-coloured fake fur, which flattered neither her height nor her breadth.

‘Rochelle!’

The girl stopped, turned and stared around, scowling, looking for the person who had called her name. Strike limped towards her, and she glared at him with an understandable mistrust.

‘Rochelle? Rochelle Onifade? Hi. My name’s Cormoran Strike. Can I have a word?’

‘I always come in Redbourne Street entrance,’ she told him five minutes later, after he had given a garbled and fictitious account of the way he had found her. ‘I come out this way ’cause I was gonna go to McDonald’s.’

So that was where they went. Strike bought two coffees and two large cookies, and carried them to the window table where Rochelle was waiting, curious and suspicious.

She was uncompromisingly plain. Her greasy skin, which was the colour of burned earth, was covered in acne pustules and pits; her small eyes were deep-set and her teeth were crooked and rather yellow. The chemically straightened hair showed four inches of black roots, then six inches of harsh, coppery wire-red. Her tight, too-short jeans, her shiny grey handbag and her bright white trainers looked cheap. However, the squashy fake-fur jacket, garish and unflattering though Strike found it, was of a different quality altogether: fully lined, as he saw when she took it off, with a patterned silk, and bearing the label not (as he had expected, remembering Lula Landry’s email to the designer) of Guy Somé, but of an Italian of whom even Strike had heard.

‘You sure you inna journalist?’ she asked, in her low, husky voice.

Strike had already spent some time outside the hospital trying to establish his bona fides in this respect.

‘No, I’m not a journalist. Like I said, I know Lula’s brother.’

‘You a friend of his?’

‘Yeah. Well, not exactly a friend. He’s hired me. I’m a private detective.’

She was instantly, openly scared.

‘Whaddayuhwanna talk to me for?’

‘There’s nothing to worry about…’

‘Whyd’yuhwanna talk to me, though?’