On the night that Lula had died, according to a multitude of sources, Duffield had left the nightclub shortly after his girlfriend, wearing – and Strike found it hard to see this as anything other than deliberate showmanship – a wolf’s mask. His account of what he had got up to for the rest of the night might not have satisfied online conspiracy theorists, but the police seemed to have been convinced that he had had nothing to do with subsequent events at Kentigern Gardens.

Strike followed the speculative train of his own thoughts over the rough terrain of news sites and blogs. Here and there he stumbled upon pockets of feverish speculation, of theories about Landry’s death that mentioned clues the police had failed to follow up, and which seemed to have fed Bristow’s own conviction that there had been a murderer. LulaMyInspirationForeva had a long list of Unanswered Questions, which included, at number five, ‘Who called off the paps before she fell?’; at number nine, ‘Why did the men with the covered faces runnin away from her flat at 2 a.m. never come forward? Where are they and who wer they?’; and at number thirteen, ‘Why was luLa wearing a different outfit to the one she came home in when she fell off the balcony?’

Midnight found Strike drinking a can of lager and reading about the posthumous controversy that Bristow had mentioned, of which he had been vaguely aware while it unfolded, without being very interested. A furore had sprung up, a week after the inquest had returned a verdict of suicide, around the advertising shot for the wares of designer Guy Somé. It featured two models posing in a dirty alleyway, naked except for strategically placed handbags, scarves and jewels. Landry was perched on a dustbin, Ciara Porter sprawled on the ground. Both wore huge curving angel’s wings: Porter’s a swan-like white; Landry’s a greenish black fading to glossy bronze.

Strike stared at the picture for minutes, trying to analyse precisely why the dead girl’s face drew the eye so irresistibly, how she managed to dominate the picture. Somehow she made the incongruity, the staginess of it, believable; she really did look as though she had been slung from heaven because she was too venal, because she so coveted the accessories she was clutching to herself. Ciara Porter, in all her alabaster beauty, became nothing but a counterpoint; in her pallor and her passivity, she looked like a statue.