She favoured Robin and Strike with a small, sweet smile. Wilson moved around behind the mahogany desk and handed her a key from beneath it, and Lechsinka then ascended the stairs, her bucket swinging, her tightly bejeaned backside swelling and swaying seductively. Strike, conscious of Robin’s sideways glance, withdrew his gaze from it reluctantly.

Strike and Robin followed Wilson upstairs to Flat 1, which he opened up with a master key. The door on to the stairwell, Strike noted, had an old-fashioned peephole.

‘Mister Bestigui’s place,’ announced Wilson, stifling the alarm by entering the code on a pad to the right of the door. ‘Lechsinka’s already bin in this morning.’

Strike could smell polish and see the track marks of a vacuum cleaner on the white carpet of the hallway, with its brass wall lights and its five immaculate white doors. He noticed the discreet alarm keypad on the right wall, at right angles to a painting in which dreamy goats and peasants floated over a blue-toned village. Tall vases of orchids stood on a black japanned table beneath the Chagall.

‘Where’s Bestigui?’ Strike asked Wilson.

‘LA,’ said the security guard. ‘Back in two days.’

The light, bright sitting room had three tall windows, each of them with a shallow stone balcony beyond; its walls were Wedgwood blue and nearly everything else was white. All was pristine, elegant and beautifully proportioned. Here, too, there was a single superb painting: macabre, surreal, with a spear-bearing man masked as a blackbird, arm in arm with a grey-toned headless female torso.

It was from this room that Tansy Bestigui maintained she had heard a screaming match two floors above. Strike moved up close to the long windows, noting the modern catches, the thickness of the panes, the complete lack of noise from the street, though his ear was barely half an inch from the cold glass. The balcony beyond was narrow, and filled with potted shrubs trimmed into pointed cones.

Strike moved off towards the bedroom. Robin remained in the sitting room, turning slowly where she stood, taking in the chandelier of Venetian glass, the muted rug in shades of pale blue and pink, the enormous plasma TV, the modern glass and iron dining table and silk-cushioned iron chairs; the small silver objets d’art on glass side tables and on the white marble mantelpiece. She thought, a little sadly, of the IKEA sofa of which she had, until now, felt so proud; then she remembered Strike’s camp bed in the office with a twinge of shame. Catching Wilson’s eye, she said, unconsciously echoing Eric Wardle:

‘It’s a different world, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have kids in here.’

‘No,’ said Robin, who had not considered the place from that point of view.

Her employer strode out of the bedroom, evidently absorbed in establishing some point to his own satisfaction, and disappeared into the hall.