“Of course,” said Robin, as they drove towards the village, “a cross sticking out of the ground doesn’t mean there’s anything buried beneath it.”

“True,” said Strike, who had needed most of his breath on the return walk for the frequent obscenities he uttered as he stumbled and skidded on the forest floor, “but it makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Robin said nothing. Her hands on the steering wheel were covered in nettle stings that prickled and burned.

The country inn they reached five minutes later was the very image of picture-postcard England, a white, timbered building with leaded bay windows, moss-covered slates on the roof and climbing red roses around the door. A beer garden with parasols completed the picture. Robin turned the Land Rover into the small car park opposite.

“This is getting stupid,” muttered Strike, who had left the cross on the dashboard and was now climbing out of the car, staring at the pub.

“What is?” asked Robin, coming around the back of the car to join him.

“It’s called the White Horse.”

“After the one up the hill,” said Robin, as they set off across the road together. “Look at the sign.”

Painted on the board atop a wooden pole was the strange chalk figure they had seen earlier.

“The pub where I met Jimmy Knight the first time was called the White Horse, too,” said Strike.

“The White Horse,” said Robin, as they walked up the steps into the beer garden, Strike’s limp now more pronounced than ever, “is one of the ten most popular pub names in Britain. I read it in some article. Quick, those people are leaving—grab their table, I’ll get the drinks.”

The low-ceilinged pub was busy inside. Robin headed first for the Ladies where she stripped off her jacket, tied it around her waist and washed her smarting hands. She wished that she had managed to find dock leaves on the journey back from Steda Cottage, but most of her attention on the return walk had been given to Strike who had nearly fallen twice more and hobbled on looking furious with himself, repelling offers of assistance with bad grace and leaning heavily on the walking stick she had fashioned from a branch.

The mirror showed Robin that she was disheveled and grubby compared to the prosperous middle-aged people she had just seen in the bar, but being in a hurry to return to Strike and review the morning’s activities, she merely dragged a brush through her hair, wiped a green stain off her neck and returned to queue for drinks.

“Cheers, Robin,” said Strike gratefully, when she returned to him with a pint of Arkell’s Wiltshire Gold, shoving the menu across the table to her. “Ah, that’s good,” he sighed, taking a swig. “So what’s the most popular one?”

“Sorry?”

“The most popular pub name. You said the White Horse is in the top ten.”

“Oh, right… it’s either the Red Lion or the Crown, I can’t remember which.”

“The Victory’s my real local,” said Strike reminiscently.

He had not been back to Cornwall in two years. He saw the pub now in his mind’s eye, a squat building of whitewashed Cornish stone, the steps beside it winding down to the bay. It was the pub in which he had first managed to get served without ID, sixteen years old and dumped back at his uncle and aunt’s for a few weeks, while his mother’s life went through one of its regular bouts of upheaval.

“Ours is the Bay Horse,” said Robin, and she, too, had a sudden vision of a pub from what she would always think of as home, also white, standing on a street that led off the market square in Masham. It was there that she had celebrated her A-level results with her friends, the same night that Matthew and she had got into a stupid row, and he had left, and she had refused to follow, but remained with her friends.

“Why ‘bay’?” asked Strike, now halfway down his pint and luxuriating in the sunshine, his sore leg stretched out in front of him. “Why not just ‘brown’?”

“Well, there are brown horses,” said Robin, “but bay means something different. Black points: legs, mane and tail.”

“What color was your pony—Angus, wasn’t it?”

“How did you remember that?” asked Robin, surprised.

“Dunno,” said Strike. “Same as you remembering pub names. Some things stick, don’t they?”

“He was gray.”

“Meaning white. It’s all just jargon to confuse non-riding plebs, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Robin, laughing. “Gray horses have black skin under the white hair. True whites—”

“—die young,” said Strike, as a barmaid arrived to take their order. Having ordered a burger, Strike lit another cigarette and as the nicotine hit his brain, felt a wave of something close to euphoria. A pint, a hot day in August, a well-paid job, food on the way and Robin, sitting across from him, their friendship restored, if not entirely to what it had been before her honeymoon, then perhaps as close as was possible, now that she was married. Right now, in this sunny beer garden, and in spite of the pain in his leg, his tiredness and the unresolved mess that was his relationship with Lorelei, life felt simple and hopeful.

“Group interviews are never a good idea,” he said, exhaling away from Robin’s face, “but there were some interesting crosscurrents among the Chiswells, weren’t there? I’m going to keep working on Izzy. I think she might be a bit more forthcoming without the family around.”

Izzy will like being worked on, Robin thought, as she took out her mobile.

“I’ve got something to show you. Look.”

She brought up her photograph of Freddie Chiswell’s birthday party.

“That,” she said, pointing at the girl’s pale, unhappy face, “is Rhiannon Winn. She was at Freddie Chiswell’s eighteenth birthday party. Turns out—” she scrolled back a picture, to show the group in white tunics, “they were on the British fencing team together.”

“Christ, of course,” said Strike, taking the phone from Robin. “The sword—the sword in Ebury Street. I bet it was Freddie’s!”

“Of course!” echoed Robin, wondering why she hadn’t realized that before.

“That can’t be long before she killed herself,” said Strike, scrutinizing more closely the miserable figure of Rhiannon Winn at the birthday party. “And—bloody hell, that’s Jimmy Knight behind her. What’s he doing at a public schoolboy’s eighteenth?”

“Free drink?” suggested Robin.

Strike gave a small snort of amusement as he handed back Robin’s phone.

“Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. Was I imagining Izzy looking self-conscious when the story of Jimmy’s teenage sex appeal came up?”

“No,” said Robin, “I noticed that, too.”

“Nobody wants us to talk to Jimmy’s old mates the Butcher brothers, either.”

“Because they know more than where their sister works?”

Strike sipped his beer, thinking back to what Chiswell had told him the first time they’d met.

“Chiswell said other people were involved in whatever he did to get blackmailed, but they had a lot to lose if it got out.”

He took out his notebook and contemplated his own spiky, hard-to-read handwriting, while Robin sat peacefully enjoying the quiet chatter of the beer garden. A lazy bee buzzed nearby, reminding her of the lavender walk at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, where she and Matthew had spent their anniversary. It was best not to compare how she felt now to the way she had felt then.

“Maybe,” said Strike, tapping the open notebook with his pen, “the Butcher brothers agreed to take on horse-slashing duties for Jimmy while he was in London? I always thought he might have mates back down here who could’ve taken care of that side of things. But we’ll let Izzy get Tegan’s whereabouts out of them before we approach them. Don’t want to upset the client unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“No,” agreed Robin. “I wonder… d’you think Jimmy met them when he came down here looking for Billy?”

“Could well have done,” said Strike, nodding over his notes. “Very interesting, that. From what they said to each other on that march, Jimmy and Flick knew where Billy was at the time. They were off to see him when my hamstring went. Now they’ve lost him again… you know, I’d give a hell of a lot to find Billy. That’s where all of this started and we’re still—”

He broke off as their food arrived: a burger with blue cheese on it for Strike, and a bowl of chili for Robin.

“We’re still?” prompted Robin, as the barmaid moved away.

“… none the wiser,” said Strike, “about the kid he claims he saw die. I didn’t want to ask the Chiswells about Suki Lewis, or not yet. Best not to suggest I’m interested in anyone but Chiswell’s death right now.”

He picked up his burger and took an enormous bite, his eyes unfocused, staring out over the road. After demolishing half of his burger, Strike turned back to his notes.

“Things to be done,” he announced, picking up his pen again. “I want to find this cleaning woman Jasper Chiswell laid off. She had a key for a bit and she might be able to tell us how and when the helium got into the house.

“Hopefully Izzy will trace Tegan Butcher for us, and Tegan’ll be able to shed some light on Raphael’s trip down there on the morning his father died, because I’m still not buying that story.

“We’ll leave Tegan’s brothers for now, because the Chiswells clearly don’t want us talking to them, but I might try and have a word with Henry Drummond, the art dealer.”

“Why?” asked Robin.

“He was an old friend, did Chiswell a favor hiring Raphael. They must’ve been reasonably close. You never know, Chiswell might’ve told him what the blackmail was about. And he tried to reach Chiswell early on the morning Chiswell died. I’d like to know why.

“So, going forwards: you’re going to have a bash at Flick at her jewelry shop, Barclay can stay on Jimmy and Flick, and I’ll tackle Geraint Winn and Aamir Mallik.”

“They’ll never talk to you,” said Robin at once. “Never.”

“Want to bet?”

“Tenner says they won’t.”

“I don’t pay you enough for you to throw tenners around,” said Strike. “You can buy me a pint.”

Strike took care of the bill and they headed back across the road to the car, Robin secretly wishing that there was somewhere else they needed to go, because the prospect of returning to Albury Street was depressing.

“We might be better off going back on the M40,” said Strike, reading a map on his phone. “There’s been an accident on the M4.”

“OK,” said Robin.

This would take them past Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. As she reversed out of the car park, Robin suddenly remembered Matthew’s texts from earlier. He had claimed to have been messaging work, but she couldn’t remember him ever contacting his office at a weekend before. One of his regular complaints about her job was that its hours and responsibilities bled into Saturday and Sunday, unlike his.

“What?” she said, becoming aware that Strike had just spoken to her.

“I said, they’re supposed to be bad luck, aren’t they?” repeated Strike, as they drove away from the pub.

“What are?”

“White horses,” he said. “Isn’t there a play where white horses appear as a death omen?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin, changing gear. “Death rides a white horse in Revelations, though.”

“A pale horse,” Strike corrected her, winding down the window so that he could smoke again.

“Pedant.”

“Says the woman who won’t call a brown horse ‘brown,’” said Strike.

He reached for the grubby wooden cross, which was sliding about on the dashboard. Robin kept her eyes on the road ahead, determinedly focused on anything but the vivid image that had occurred to her when she had first spotted it, almost hidden in the thick, whiskered stems of the nettles: that of a child, rotting in the earth at the bottom of that dark basin in the woods, dead and forgotten by everyone except a man they said was mad.