But Robin, heading back to the office with sandwiches and crisps, felt even sorrier for Strike than she had done before. His marriage – or, if they had not been married, his live-in relationship – had failed; he was sleeping in his office; he had been injured in the war, and now she discovered that his mother had died in dubious and squalid circumstances.

She did not pretend to herself that this compassion was untinged with curiosity. She already knew that she would certainly, at some point in the near future, try and find the online particulars of Leda Strike’s death. At the same time, she felt guilty that she had been given another glimpse of a part of Strike she had not been meant to see, like that patch of virtually furry belly he had accidentally exposed that morning. She knew him to be a proud and self-sufficient man; these were the things she liked and admired about him, even if the way these qualities expressed themselves – the camp bed, the boxed possessions on the landing, the empty Pot Noodle tubs in the bin – aroused the derision of such as Matthew, who assumed that anyone living in uncomfortable circumstances must have been profligate or feckless.

Robin was not sure whether or not she imagined the slightly charged atmosphere in the office when she returned. Strike was sitting in front of her computer monitor, tapping away at the keyboard, and while he thanked her for the sandwiches, he did not (as was usual) turn away from work for ten minutes for a chat about the Landry case.

‘I need this for a couple of minutes; will you be OK on the sofa?’ he asked her, continuing to type.

Robin wondered whether Lucy had told Strike what they had discussed. She hoped not. Then she felt resentful for feeling guilty; after all, she had done nothing wrong. Her aggravation put a temporary stop on her great desire to know whether he had found Rochelle Onifade.

‘Aha,’ said Strike.

He had found, on the Italian designer’s website, the magenta fake-fur coat that Rochelle had been wearing that morning. It had become available for purchase only within the last two weeks, and it cost fifteen hundred pounds.

Robin waited for Strike to explain the exclamation, but he did not.

‘Did you find her?’ she asked, at last, when finally Strike turned from the computer to unwrap the sandwiches.

He told her about their encounter, but all the enthusiasm and gratitude of that morning, when he had called her ‘genius’ over and again, was absent. Robin’s tone, as she gave him the results of her own telephone enquiries, was, therefore, similarly cool.

‘I called the Law Society about the conference in Oxford on January the seventh,’ she said. ‘Tony Landry attended. I pretended to be somebody he’d met there, who’d mislaid his card.’