The snowy smoothness of the stranger’s shirt made Strike doubly conscious of the thousand or so creases in his own clothes. He stood up to give Bristow the full benefit of his six feet three inches, held out a hairy-backed hand and attempted to counter his visitor’s sartorial superiority by projecting the air of a man too busy to worry about laundry.

‘Cormoran Strike; how d’you do.’

‘John Bristow,’ said the other, shaking hands. His voice was pleasant, cultivated and uncertain. His gaze lingered on Strike’s swollen eye.

‘Could I offer you gentlemen some tea or coffee?’ asked Robin.

Bristow asked for a small black coffee, but Strike did not answer; he had just caught sight of a heavy-browed young woman in a frumpy tweed suit, who was sitting on the threadbare sofa beside the door of the outer office. It beggared belief that two potential clients could have arrived at the same moment. Surely he had not been sent a second temp?

‘And you, Mr Strike?’ asked Robin.

‘What? Oh – black coffee, two sugars, please, Sandra,’ he said, before he could stop himself. He saw her mouth twist as she closed the door behind her, and only then did he remember that he did not have any coffee, sugar or, indeed, cups.

Sitting down at Strike’s invitation, Bristow looked round the tatty office in what Strike was afraid was disappointment. The prospective client seemed nervous in the guilty way that Strike had come to associate with suspicious husbands, yet a faint air of authority clung to him, conveyed mainly by the obvious expense of his suit. Strike wondered how Bristow had found him. It was hard to get word-of-mouth business when your only client (as she regularly sobbed down the telephone) had no friends.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Bristow?’ he asked, back in his own chair.

‘It’s – um – actually, I wonder whether I could just check… I think we’ve met before.’

‘Really?’

‘You wouldn’t remember me, it was years and years ago… but I think you were friends with my brother Charlie. Charlie Bristow? He died – in an accident – when he was nine.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Strike. ‘Charlie… yeah, I remember.’

And, indeed, he remembered perfectly. Charlie Bristow had been one of many friends Strike had collected during a complicated, peripatetic childhood. A magnetic, wild and reckless boy, pack leader of the coolest gang at Strike’s new school in London, Charlie had taken one look at the enormous new boy with the thick Cornish accent, and appointed him his best friend and lieutenant. Two giddy months of bosom friendship and bad behaviour had followed. Strike, who had always been fascinated by the smooth workings of other children’s homes, with their sane, well-ordered families, and the bedrooms they were allowed to keep for years and years, retained a vivid memory of Charlie’s house, which had been large and luxurious. There had been a long sunlit lawn, a tree house, and iced lemon squash served by Charlie’s mother.