‘You were at this commitment ceremony?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Ciara, dropping her cigarette end into a can of Coke, where it was extinguished with a small hiss. ‘God, it was beyond romantic. Evan just, like, sprang it on her at Dickie Carbury’s house. You know Dickie Carbury, the restaurateur? He’s got this fabulous place in the Cotswolds, and we were all there for the weekend, and Evan had bought them both matching bangles from Fergus Keane, gorgeous, oxidised silver. He forced us all down to the lake after dinner in the freezing cold and the snow, and then he recited this poem he’d written to her, and put the bangle on her wrist. Looly was laughing her head off, but then she just, like, recited a poem she knew back to him. Walt Whitman. It was,’ said Ciara, with an air of sudden seriousness, ‘honestly, like, so impressive, just to have the perfect poem to say, just like that. People think models are dumb, you know.’ She threw her hair back again and offered Strike a cigarette before taking another herself. ‘I get so bored of telling people I’ve got a deferred place to read English at Cambridge.’

‘Have you?’ asked Strike, unable to suppress the surprise in his voice.

‘Yeah,’ she said, blowing out smoke prettily, ‘but, you know, the modelling’s going so well, I’m going to give it another year. It’s opening doors, you know?’

‘So this commitment ceremony was when – a week before Lula died?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ciara, ‘the Saturday before.’

‘And it was just an exchange of poems and bangles. No vows, no officiant?’

‘No, it wasn’t legally binding or anything, it was just, like, this lovely, this perfect moment. Well, except for Freddie Bestigui, he was being a bit of a pain. But at least,’ Ciara drew hard on her cigarette, ‘his bloody wife wasn’t there.’

‘Tansy?’

‘Tansy Chillingham, yeah. She’s a bitch. It’s so not a surprise they’re divorcing; they led, like, totally separate lives, you never saw them out together.

‘To tell you the truth, Freddie wasn’t too bad that weekend, seeing what a nasty rep he’s got. He was just a bore, the way he kept trying to suck up to Looly, but he wasn’t awful like they say he can be. I heard a story about this, like, totally naive girl he promised a bit part in a film… Well, I don’t know whether it was true.’ Ciara squinted for a moment at the end of her cigarette. ‘She never reported it, anyway.’

‘You said Freddie was being a pain; in what way?’

‘Oh God, he kept, like, cornering Looly and going on about how great she’d be on screen, and like, what a great bloke her dad was.’

‘Sir Alec?’