The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of himself and Charlotte, laughing on the beach at St Mawes. Now a black-and-white studio portrait of Charlotte’s dead father smiled benignly at Strike from the same silver picture frame.

Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Charlotte, in oils. It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalise its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country. From Charlotte he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a powerful link between them, when first he and Charlotte had come together.

A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes would watch him leave. Had Charlotte known what it would feel like, to prowl the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she realised that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?

He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. The bed, like the portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence. Remember what happened here, and what can never happen again.

He carried the four boxes one by one out on to the doorstep, on the last trip coming face to face with the smirking next-door neighbour, who was locking his own front door. He wore rugby shirts with the collars turned up, and always brayed with panting laughter at Charlotte’s lightest witticisms.

‘Having a clear-out?’ he asked.

Strike shut Charlotte’s door firmly on him.

He slid the door keys off his key ring in front of the hall mirror, and laid them carefully on the half-moon table, next to the bowl of potpourri. Strike’s face in the glass was creviced and dirty-looking; his right eye still puffy; yellow and mauve. A voice from seventeen years before came to him in the silence: ‘How the fuck did a pube-headed trog like you ever pull that, Strike?’ And it seemed incredible that he ever had, as he stood there in the hall he would never see again.