Little waves, outrunners sent by the young athletes on the other side of the pool, tickled his chest. The terrible pain in his head was receding into the distance; a fiery red light viewed through mist. The chlorine was sharp and clinical in his nostrils, but it no longer made him want to be sick. Deliberately, like a man ripping off a bandage on a congealing wound, Strike turned his attention to the thing he had attempted to drown in alcohol.

Jago Ross; in every respect the antithesis of Strike: handsome in the manner of an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfil a preordained place in his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of well-documented lineage can give. He had quit a succession of high-flying jobs, developed a persistent drinking problem, and was vicious in the manner of an overbred, badly disciplined animal.

Charlotte and Ross belonged to that tight, interconnected network of public-schooled blue-bloods who all knew each other’s families, connected through generations of interbreeding and old-school ties. While the water lapped his thickly hairy chest, Strike seemed to see himself, Charlotte and Ross at a great distance, from the wrong end of a telescope, so that the arc of their story became clear: it mirrored Charlotte’s restless day-to-day behaviour, that craving for heightened emotion that expressed itself most typically in destructiveness. She had secured Jago Ross as a prize when eighteen, the most extreme example she could find of his type and the very epitome of eligibility, as her parents had seen it. Perhaps that had been too easy, and certainly too expected, because she had then dumped him for Strike, who, for all his brains, was anathema to Charlotte’s family; an uncategorisable mongrel. What was left, after all these years, to a woman who craved emotional storms, but to leave Strike again and again, until at last the only way to leave with real éclat was to move full circle, back to the place where he had found her?

Strike allowed his aching body to float in the water. The racing students were still thrashing their way up and down the fast lane.

Strike knew Charlotte. She was waiting for him to rescue her. It was the final, cruellest test.

He did not swim back down the pool, but hopped sideways through the water, using his arms to grip the long side of the pool as he had done during physiotherapy in the hospital.

The second shower was more pleasurable than the first; he made the water as hot as he could stand, lathered himself all over, then turned the dial to cold to rinse himself.