‘John needs to be back in the office at half past ten,’ Alison informed Strike, in a slightly louder voice. ‘We’ll need to be off in ten minutes at the most.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Strike assured her blandly, before returning to the inner office, where Bristow was sitting as though in prayer, his head bowed over his clasped hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, as Strike sat back down. ‘It’s still difficult talking about it.’

‘No problem,’ said Strike, picking up his notebook again. ‘So Lula came to see your mother? What time was that?’

‘Elevenish. It all came out at the inquest, what she did after that. She got her driver to take her to some boutique that she liked, and then she went back to her flat. She had an appointment at home with a make-up artist she knew, and her friend Ciara Porter joined her there. You’ll have seen Ciara Porter, she’s a model. Very blonde. They were photographed together as angels, you probably saw it: naked except for handbags and wings. Somé used the picture in his advertising campaign after Lula died. People said it was tasteless.

‘So Lula and Ciara spent the afternoon together at Lula’s flat, and then they left to go out to dinner, where they met up with Duffield and some other people. The whole group went on to Uzi, the nightclub, and they were there until past midnight.

‘Then Duffield and Lula argued. Lots of people saw it happen. He manhandled her a bit, tried to make her stay, but she left the club alone. Everyone thought he’d done it, afterwards, but he turned out to have a cast-iron alibi.’

‘Cleared on the evidence of his drug dealer, wasn’t he?’ asked Strike, still writing.

‘Yes, exactly. So – so Lula arrived back at her flat around twenty past one. She was photographed going inside. You probably remember that picture. It was everywhere afterwards.’

Strike remembered: one of the world’s most photographed women, head bowed, shoulders hunched, eyes heavy and arms folded tightly around her torso, twisting her face away from the photographers. Once the verdict of suicide had been clearly established, it had taken on a macabre aspect: the rich and beautiful young woman, less than an hour from her death, attempting to conceal her wretchedness from the lenses she had courted, and which had so adored her.

‘Were there usually photographers outside her door?’

‘Yes, especially if they knew she was with Duffield, or they wanted to get a shot of her coming home drunk. But they weren’t only there for her that night. An American rapper was supposed to be arriving to stay in the same building that evening; Deeby Macc’s his name. His record company had rented the apartment beneath hers. In the event he never stayed there, because with the police all over the building it was easier for him to go to a hotel. But the photographers who had chased Lula’s car when she left Uzi joined the ones who were waiting for Macc outside the flats, so that made quite a crowd of them around the entrance of the building, though they all drifted away not long after she’d gone inside. Somehow they got a tip-off that Macc wouldn’t be there for hours.