‘Thanks, Trudie. And get me an ashtray, darling.’

The girl hesitated, clearly on the verge of protesting.

‘Just do it,’ snarled Somé. ‘I’m the fucking boss, I’ll burn the building down if I want to. Pull the fucking batteries out of the fire alarms. But get the ashtray first.

‘The alarm went off last week, and set off all the sprinklers downstairs,’ Somé explained to Strike. ‘So now the backers don’t want anyone smoking in the building. They can stick that one right up their tight little bumholes.’

He inhaled deeply, then exhaled through his nostrils.

‘Don’t you ask questions? Or do you just sit there looking scary until someone blurts out a confession?’

‘We can do questions,’ said Strike, pulling out his notebook and pen. ‘You were abroad when Lula died, weren’t you?’

‘I’d just got back, a couple of hours before.’ Somé’s fingers twitched a little on the cigarette. ‘I’d been in Tokyo, hardly any sleep for eight days. Touched down at Heathrow at about ten thirty with the most fucking appalling jet lag. I can’t sleep on planes. I wanna be awake if I’m going to crash.’

‘How did you get home from the airport?’

‘Cab. Elsa had fucked up my car booking. There should’ve been a driver there to meet me.’

‘Who’s Elsa?’

‘The girl I sacked for fucking up my car booking. It was the last thing I fucking wanted, to have to find a cab at that time of night.’

‘Do you live alone?’

‘No. By midnight I was tucked up in bed with Viktor and Rolf. My cats,’ he added with a flicker of a grin. ‘I took an Ambien, slept for a few hours, then woke up at five in the morning. I switched on Sky News from the bed, and there was a man in a horrible sheepskin hat, standing in the snow in Cuckoo’s street, saying she was dead. The ticker-tape across the bottom of the screen was saying it too.’

Somé inhaled heavily on the cigarette, and white smoke curled out of his mouth with his next words.

‘I nearly fucking died. I thought I was still asleep, or that I’d woken up in the wrong fucking dimension or something… I started calling everyone… Ciara, Bryony… all their phones were engaged. And all the time I was watching the screen, thinking they’d flash up something saying there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t her. I kept praying it was the bag lady. Rochelle.’

He paused, as though he expected some comment from Strike. The latter, who had been making notes as Somé spoke, asked, still writing:

‘You know Rochelle, do you?’

‘Yeah. Cuckoo brought her in here once. In it for all she could get.’

‘What makes you say that?’