After the trial and the conviction, Strike had packed up and left everything behind: the short-lived burst of press, Aunt Joan’s desperate disappointment at the end of his Oxford career, Charlotte, bereft and incensed by his disappearance and already sleeping with someone new, Lucy’s screams and scenes. With the sole support of Uncle Ted, he had vanished into the army, and refound there the life he had been taught by Leda: constant uprootings, self-reliance and the endless appeal of the new.

Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as ‘tragic’, in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

How easy it was to capitalise on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

Nearly all the physical evidence of Lula’s murder had long since been wiped away, trodden under foot or covered by thickly falling snow; the most persuasive clue Strike had was, after all, that grainy black-and-white footage of two men running away from the scene: a piece of evidence given a cursory check and tossed aside by the police, who were convinced that nobody could have entered the building, that Landry had committed suicide, and that the film showed nothing more than a pair of larcenous loiterers with intent.

Strike roused himself and looked at his watch. It was half past ten, but he was sure the man to whom he wished to speak would be awake. He flicked on his desk lamp, took up his mobile and dialled, this time, a number in Germany.

‘Oggy,’ bellowed the tinny voice on the other end of the phone. ‘How the fuck are you?’

‘Need a favour, mate.’

And Strike asked Lieutenant Graham Hardacre to give him all the information he could find on one Agyeman of the Royal Engineers, Christian name and rank unknown, but with particular reference to the dates of his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

12

It was only the second car he had driven since his leg had been blown off. He had tried driving Charlotte’s Lexus, but today, trying not to feel in any way emasculated, he had hired an automatic Honda Civic.