‘Look, I’m not saying anything,’ Matthew said, from the kitchen doorway. ‘I just think he sounds weird. And what’s with the little afternoon walks?’

‘It wasn’t a little afternoon walk, Matt. We went to see the scene of the – we went to see the place where the client thinks something happened.’

‘Robin, there’s no need to make such a bloody mystery about it,’ Matthew laughed.

‘I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement,’ she snapped over her shoulder. ‘I can’t tell you about the case.’

‘The case.’

He gave another short, scoffing laugh.

Robin strode around the tiny kitchen, putting away ingredients, slamming cupboard doors. After a while, watching her figure as she moved around, Matthew came to feel that he might have been unreasonable. He came up behind her as she was scraping the leftovers into the bin, put his arms around her, buried his face in her neck and cupped and stroked the breast that bore the bruises Strike had accidentally inflicted, and which had irrevocably coloured Matthew’s view of the man. He murmured conciliatory phrases into Robin’s honey-coloured hair; but she pulled away from him to put the plates into the sink.

Robin felt as though her own worth had been impugned. Strike had seemed interested in the things she had found online. Strike expressed gratitude for her efficiency and initiative.

‘How many proper interviews have you got next week?’ Matthew asked, as she turned on the cold tap.

‘Three,’ she shouted over the noise of the gushing water, scrubbing the top plate aggressively.

She waited until he had walked away into the sitting room before turning off the tap. There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.

4

Strike arrived at Charlotte’s flat at half past nine on Friday morning. This gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him. The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees; the butcher’s shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly unreal and stagey to Strike. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he would not stay, that he did not belong.

Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down the hall.

Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.