He worked on, in what he had come to think of as Robin’s chair, late into the night. The last thing he did before turning in was to underline, three times, the words ‘Malmaison Hotel, Oxford’ and to circle in heavy ink the name ‘J. P. Agyeman’.

The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on Sunday and watched the day’s gaffes, counterclaims and promises being tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was difficult to comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be inflicted.

On Monday morning Strike set out for a rendezvous in Canning Town, where he was to meet Marlene Higson, Lula Landry’s biological mother. The arrangement of this interview had been fraught with difficulty. Bristow’s secretary, Alison, had telephoned Robin with Marlene Higson’s number, and Strike had called her personally. Though clearly disappointed that the stranger on the phone was not a journalist, she had initially expressed herself willing to meet Strike. She had then called the office back, twice: firstly to ask Robin whether the detective would pay her expenses to travel into the centre of town, to which a negative answer was given; next, in high dudgeon, to cancel the meeting. A second call from Strike had secured a tentative agreement to meet in her local pub; then an irritable voicemail message cancelled once more.

Strike had then telephoned her for a third time, and told her that he believed his investigation to be in its final phase, after which evidence would be laid to the police, resulting, he had no doubt, in a further explosion of publicity. Now that he came to think about it, he said, if she was unable to help, it might be just as well for her to be protected from another deluge of press inquiry. Marlene Higson had immediately clamoured for her right to tell everything she knew, and Strike condescended to meet her, as she had already suggested, in the beer garden of the Ordnance Arms on Monday morning.