Strike had fallen asleep, fully clothed, his prosthesis still attached, on top of the bedcovers in his attic bedroom. The cardboard folder containing everything pertaining to the Chiswell file was lying on his chest, vibrating gently as he snored, and he dreamed that he was walking hand in hand with Charlotte through an otherwise deserted Chiswell House, which they had bought together. Tall, slim and beautiful, she was no longer pregnant. She trailed Shalimar and black chiffon behind her, but their mutual happiness was evaporating in the damp chill of the shabby rooms through which they were wandering. What could have prompted the reckless, quixotic decision to purchase this drafty house, with the peeling walls and the wires dangling from the ceiling?

The loud buzz of a text arriving jerked Strike from sleep. For a fraction of a second he registered the fact that he was back in his attic room, alone, neither the owner of Chiswell House nor the lover of Charlotte Ross, before groping for the phone on which he was half lying in the full expectation that he was about to see a message from Charlotte.

He was wrong: it was Robin’s name he saw when he peered groggily at the screen, and it was, moreover, one in the morning. Momentarily forgetting that she had been out at a party with Flick, Strike sat up hurriedly and the cardboard file that had been lying on his chest slid smoothly off him, scattering its various pages across the floorboards, while Strike squinted, blurry-eyed, at the photograph Robin had just sent him.

“Fuck me backwards.”

Ignoring the mess of notes at his feet, he called her back.

“Hi,” said Robin jubilantly, over the unmistakable sounds of a London night bus: the clatter and roar of the engine, the grinding of brakes, the tinny ding of the bell and the obligatory drunken laughter of what sounded like a gaggle of young women.

“How the fuck did you manage that?”

“I’m a woman,” said Robin. He could hear her smile. “I know where we hide things when we really don’t want them found. I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Where are you—a bus? Get off and grab a cab. We can charge it to the Chiswell account if you get a receipt.”

“There’s no need—”

“Do as you’re bloody told!” Strike repeated, a little more aggressively than he had intended, because while she had just pulled off quite a coup, she had also been knifed, out alone on the street after dark, a year previously.

“All right, all right, I’ll get a cab,” said Robin. “Have you read Chiswell’s note?”

“Looking at it now,” said Strike, switching to speakerphone so that he could read Chiswell’s note while talking to her. “I hope you left it where you found it?”

“Yeah. I thought that was best?”

“Definitely. Where exactly—?”

“Inside a sanitary towel.”

“Christ,” said Strike, taken aback. “I’d never’ve thought to—”

“No, nor did Jimmy and Barclay,” said Robin smugly. “Can you read what it says at the bottom? The Latin?”

Squinting at the screen, Strike translated:

“‘I hate and I love. Why do I do it, you might ask? I don’t know. I just feel it, and it crucifies me…’ that’s Catullus again. A famous one.”

“Did you do Latin at university?”

“No.”

“Then how—?”

“Long story,” said Strike.

In fact, the story of his ability to read Latin wasn’t long, merely (to most people) inexplicable. He didn’t feel like telling it in the middle of the night, nor did he want to explain that Charlotte had studied Catullus at Oxford.

“‘I hate and I love,’” Robin repeated. “Why would Chiswell have written that down?”

“Because he was feeling it?” Strike suggested.

His mouth was dry: he had smoked too much before falling asleep. He got up, feeling achy and stiff, and picked his way carefully around the fallen notes, heading for the sink in the other room, phone in hand.

“Feeling it for Kinvara?” asked Robin dubiously.

“Ever see another woman around while you were in close contact with him?”

“No. Of course, he might not have been talking about a woman.”

“True,” admitted Strike. “Plenty of man love in Catullus. Maybe that’s why Chiswell liked him so much.”

He filled a mug with cold tap water, drank it down in one, then threw in a tea bag and switched on the kettle, all the while peering down at the lit screen of his phone in the darkness.

“‘Mother,’ crossed out,” he muttered.

“Chiswell’s mother died twenty-two years ago,” said Robin. “I’ve just looked her up.”

“Hmm,” said Strike. “‘Bill,’ circled.”

“Not Billy,” Robin pointed out, “but if Jimmy and Flick thought it meant his brother, people must sometimes call Billy ‘Bill.’”

“Unless it’s the thing you pay,” said Strike. “Or a duck’s beak, come to that… ‘Suzuki’… ‘Blanc de’… Hang on. Jimmy Knight’s got an old Suzuki Alto.”

“It’s off the road, according to Flick.”

“Yeah. Barclay says it failed its MOT.”

“There was a Grand Vitara parked outside Chiswell House when we visited, too. One of the Chiswells must own it.”

“Good spot,” said Strike.

He switched on the overhead light and crossed to the table by the window, where he had left his pen and notebook.

“You know,” said Robin thoughtfully, “I think I’ve seen ‘Blanc de blanc’ somewhere recently.”

“Yeah? Been drinking champagne?” asked Strike, who had sat down to make more notes.

“No, but… yeah, I suppose I must’ve seen it on a wine label, mustn’t I? Blanc de blancs… what does it mean? ‘White from whites?’”

“Yeah,” said Strike.

For nearly a minute, neither of them spoke, both examining the note. “You know, I hate to say this, Robin,” said Strike at last, “but I think the most interesting thing about this is that Flick had it. Looks like a to-do list. Can’t see anything here that proves wrongdoing or suggests grounds for blackmail or murder.”

“Mother, crossed out,” Robin repeated, as though determined to wring meaning out of the cryptic phrases. “Jimmy Knight’s mother died of asbestosis. He just told me so, at Flick’s party.”

Strike tapped his notepad lightly with the end of his pen, thinking, until Robin voiced the question that he was grappling with.

“We’re going to have to tell the police about this, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, we are,” sighed Strike, rubbing his eyes. “This proves she had access to Ebury Street. Unfortunately, that means we’re going to have to pull you out of the jewelry shop. Once the police search her bathroom, it won’t take her long to work out who must’ve tipped them off.”

“Bugger,” said Robin. “I really felt like I was getting somewhere with her.”

“Yeah,” Strike agreed. “This is the problem with having no official standing in an inquiry. I’d give a lot to have Flick in an interrogation room… This bloody case,” he said, yawning. “I’ve been going through the file all evening. This note’s like everything else: it raises more questions than it answers.”

“Hang on,” said Robin, and he heard sounds of movement, “sorry—Cormoran, I’m going to get off here, I can see a taxi rank—”

“OK. Great work tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow—later today, I mean.”

When she had hung up, Strike set his cigarette down in the ashtray, returned to his bedroom to pick up the scattered case notes off the floor, and took them back to the kitchen. Ignoring the freshly boiled kettle, he took a beer from the fridge, sat back down at the table with the file and, as an afterthought, opened the sash window beside him a few inches, to let some clean air into the room while he kept smoking.

The Military Police had trained him to organize interrogations and findings into three broad categories: people, places and things, and Strike had been applying this sound old principle to the Chiswell file before falling asleep on the bed. Now he spread the contents of the file out over the kitchen table and set to work again, while a cold night breeze laden with petrol fumes blew across the photographs and papers, so that their corners trembled.

“People,” Strike muttered.

He had written a list before he slept of the people who most interested him in connection with Chiswell’s death. Now he saw that he had unconsciously ranked the names according to their degree of involvement in the dead man’s blackmail. Jimmy Knight’s name topped the list, followed by Geraint Winn’s, and then by what Strike thought of as each man’s respective deputy, Flick Purdue and Aamir Mallik. Next came Kinvara, who knew that Chiswell was being blackmailed, and why; Della Winn, whose super-injunction had kept the blackmail out of the press, but whose precise degree of involvement in the affair was otherwise unknown to Strike, and then Raphael, who had by all accounts been ignorant both of what his father had done, and of the blackmail itself. At the bottom of the list was Billy Knight, whose only known connection with the blackmail was the bond of blood between himself and the primary blackmailer.

Why, Strike asked himself, had he ranked the names in this particular order? There was no proven link between Chiswell’s death and the blackmail, unless, of course, the threat of exposure of his unknown crime had indeed pushed Chiswell into killing himself.

It then occurred to Strike that a different hierarchy was revealed if he turned the list on its head. In this case Billy sat on top, a disinterested seeker, not of money or another man’s disgrace, but of truth and justice. In the reversed order, Raphael came in second, with his strange and, to Strike, implausible story of being sent to his stepmother on the morning of his father’s death, which Henry Drummond claimed grudgingly to have hidden some honorable motive as yet unknown. Della rose to third place, a widely admired woman of impeccable morality, whose true thoughts and feelings towards her blackmailing husband and to his victim remained inscrutable.

Read backwards, it seemed to Strike that each suspect’s relation to the dead man became cruder, more transactional, until the list terminated with Jimmy Knight and his angry demand for forty thousand pounds.

Strike continued to pore over the list of names as though he might suddenly see something emerging out of his dense, spiky handwriting, the way unfocused eyes may spot the 3D image hidden in a series of brightly colored dots. All that occurred to him, however, was the fact that there was an unusual number of pairs connected to Chiswell’s death: couples—Geraint and Della, Jimmy and Flick; pairs of full siblings—Izzy and Fizzy, Jimmy and Billy; the duo of blackmailing collaborators—Jimmy and Geraint; and the subsets of each blackmailer and his deputy—Flick and Aamir. There was even the quasi-parental pairing of Della and Aamir. This left two people who formed a pair in being isolated within the otherwise close-knit family: the widowed Kinvara and Raphael, the unsatisfactory, outsider son.

Strike tapped his pen unconsciously against the notebook, thinking. Pairs. The whole business had begun with a pair of crimes: Chiswell’s blackmail and Billy’s allegation of infanticide. He had been trying to find the connection between them from the start, unable to believe that they could be entirely separate cases, even if on the face of it their only link was in the blood tie between the Knight brothers.

Turning the page, he examined the notes he had headed “Places.” After a few minutes spent examining his own jottings concerning access to the house in Ebury Street, and the locations, in several cases unknown, of the suspects at the time of Chiswell’s death, he made a note to remind himself that he still hadn’t received from Izzy contact details for Tegan Butcher, the stable girl who could confirm that Kinvara had been at home in Woolstone while Chiswell was suffocating in a plastic bag in London.

He turned to the next page, headed “Things,” and now he set down his pen and spread Robin’s photographs out so that they formed a collage of the death scene. He scrutinized the flash of gold in the pocket of the dead man, and then the bent sword, half hidden in shadow in the corner of the room.

It seemed to Strike that the case he was investigating was littered with objects that had been found in surprising places: the sword in the corner, the lachesis pills on the floor, the wooden cross found in a tangle of nettles at the bottom of the dell, the canister of helium and the rubber tubing in a house where no child’s party had ever been held, but his tired mind could find neither answers nor patterns here.

Finally, Strike downed the rest of his beer, lobbed the empty can across the room into the kitchen bin, turned to a blank page in his notebook and began to write a to-do list for the Sunday of which two hours had already elapsed.

After a little further thought, he finished the list with

After tidying up the Chiswell file, tipping the overflowing ashtray into the bin, opening the window wider to admit more cold, fresh air, Strike went for a last pee, cleaned his teeth, switched off the lights and returned to his bedroom, where a single reading lamp still burned.

Now, with his defenses weakened by beer and tiredness, the memories he had sought to bury in work forced their way to the forefront of his mind. As he undressed and removed his prosthetic leg, he found himself going back over every word Charlotte had said to him across the table for two in Franco’s, remembering the expression of her green eyes, the scent of Shalimar reaching him through the garlic fumes of the restaurant, her thin white fingers playing with the bread.

He got into bed between the chilly sheets and lay, hands behind his head, staring up into the darkness. He wished he could feel indifferent, but in fact his ego had stretched luxuriously at the idea that she had read all about the cases that had made his name and that she thought about him while in bed with her husband. Now, though, reason and experience rolled up their sleeves, ready to conduct a professional post-mortem on the remembered conversation, methodically disinterring the unmistakable signs of Charlotte’s perennial will to shock and her apparently insatiable need for conflict.

The abandonment of her titled husband and newborn children for a famous, one-legged detective would certainly constitute the crowning achievement of a career of disruption. Having an almost pathological hatred of routine, responsibility or obligation, she had sabotaged every possibility of permanence before she had to deal with the threats of boredom or compromise. Strike knew all this, because he knew her better than any other human being, and he knew that their final parting had happened at the exact moment where real sacrifice and hard choices had to be made.

But he also knew—and the knowledge was like ineradicable bacteria in a wound that stopped it ever healing—that she loved him as she had never loved anyone else. Of course, the skeptical girlfriends and wives of his friends, none of whom had liked Charlotte, had told him over and over again, “That’s not love, what she does to you,” or, “Not being funny, Corm, but how do you know she hasn’t said exactly the same to all the others she’s had?” Such women saw his confidence that Charlotte loved him as delusion or egotism. They had not been present for those times of total bliss and mutual understanding that remained some of the best of Strike’s life. They had not shared jokes inexplicable to any other human being but himself and Charlotte, or felt the mutual need that had drawn them back together for sixteen years.

She had walked from him straight into the arms of the man she thought would hurt Strike worst, and indeed, it had hurt, because Ross was the absolute antithesis of him and had dated Charlotte before Strike had even met him. Yet Strike remained certain her flight to Ross had been self-immolation, done purely for spectacular effect, a Charlottian form of sati.

Strike turned off the light, closed his eyes and sank, once more, into uneasy dreams of the empty house where squares of unfaded wallpaper bore witness to the removal of everything of value, but this time he walked alone, with the strange sensation that hidden eyes were watching.