‘Charlie,’ said Lady Bristow, pitifully. ‘I told her about the day he died. I had never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my life.’

Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.

‘How could I have known that that would be the last time I would ever see her?’ breathed Lady Bristow. ‘I didn’t realise that I was about to lose a second child.’

Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her hollow cheeks.

‘Could you please look in that drawer,’ she whispered, pointing a withered finger at the bedside table, ‘and get me out my pills?’

Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with various labels upon them.

‘Which…?’

‘It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,’ she said.

He took one out; it was clearly labelled Valium. She had enough in there to overdose ten times.

‘If you could pop a couple out for me?’ she said. ‘I’ll take them with some tea, if it’s cool enough.’

He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. ‘Didn’t John tell me you knew Charlie?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Strike. ‘I’ve never forgotten him.’

‘No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.’

Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months ago, when the trees must have been bare-limbed, when Lula Landry had sat where he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.

‘I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…’

Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying woman’s face as she talked.

‘Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I could not understand how God could have let it happen.