Seven-year-old Lucy had yearned for hair like the West Indian girls. On the long drive back to St Mawes that had terminated their Brixton life, she had expressed a fervent desire for beaded braids from the back seat of Uncle Ted and Aunt Joan’s Morris Minor. Strike remembered Aunt Joan’s calm agreement that the style was very pretty, a frown line between her eyebrows reflected in the rear-view mirror. Joan had tried, with diminishing success through the years, not to disparage their mother in front of the children. Strike had never discovered how Uncle Ted had found out where they were living; all he knew was that he and Lucy had let themselves into the squat one afternoon to find their mother’s enormous brother standing in the middle of the room, threatening Shumba with a bloody nose. Within two days, he and Lucy were back in St Mawes, at the primary school they attended intermittently for years, taking up with old friends as though they had not left, and swiftly losing the accents they had adopted for camouflage, wherever Leda had last taken them.

He had not needed the directions Derrick Wilson had given Robin, because he knew the Phoenix Café on Coldharbour Lane of old. Occasionally Shumba and his mother had taken them there: a tiny, brown-painted, shed-like place where you could (if not a vegetarian, like Shumba and his mother) eat large and delicious cooked breakfasts, with eggs and bacon piled high, and mugs of tea the colour of teak. It was almost exactly as he remembered: cosy, snug and dingy, its mirrored walls reflecting tables of mock-wood Formica, stained floor tiles of dark red and white, and a tapioca-coloured ceiling covered in moulded wallpaper. The squat middle-aged waitress had short straightened hair and dangling orange plastic earrings; she moved aside to let Strike past the counter.

A heavily built West Indian man was sitting alone at one table, reading a copy of the Sun, under a plastic clock that bore the legend Pukka Pies.

‘Derrick?’

‘Yeah… you Strike?’

Strike shook Wilson’s big, dry hand, and sat down. He estimated Wilson to be almost as tall as himself when standing. Muscle as well as fat swelled the sleeves of the security guard’s sweatshirt; his hair was close-cropped and he was clean-shaven, with fine almond-shaped eyes. Strike ordered pie and mash off the scrawled menu board on the back wall, pleased to reflect that he could charge the £4.75 to expenses.

‘Yeah, the pie ’n’ mash is good here,’ said Wilson.

A faint Caribbean lilt lifted his London accent. His voice was deep, calm and measured. Strike thought that he would be a reassuring presence in a security guard’s uniform.

‘Thanks for meeting me, I appreciate it. John Bristow’s not happy with the results of the inquest on his sister. He’s hired me to take another look at the evidence.’

‘Yeah,’ said Wilson, ‘I know.’

‘How much did he give you to talk to me?’ Strike asked casually.

Wilson blinked, then gave a slightly guilty, deep-throated chuckle.