Though the early evening was still bright, Della’s front garden lay in shadow, which gave it a placid, melancholy air in contrast to the busy, dusty road that ran beyond the gates. As Strike rang the doorbell, he noted two large dog turds on the otherwise immaculate front lawn and he wondered who was helping Della with such mundane tasks now that her marriage was over.

The door opened, revealing the Minister for Sport in her impenetrable black glasses. She was wearing what Strike’s elderly aunt back in Cornwall would have called a housecoat, a knee-length purple fleece robe that buttoned to the high neck, giving her a vaguely ecclesiastic air. The guide dog stood behind her, looking up at Strike with dark, mournful eyes.

“Hi, it’s Cormoran Strike,” said the detective, without moving. Given that she could neither recognize him by sight nor examine any of the identification he carried, the only way she could know whom she was admitting to her house was by the sound of his voice. “We spoke on the phone earlier and you asked me to come and see you.”

“Yes,” she said, unsmiling. “Come in, then.”

She stepped back to let him pass, one hand on the Labrador’s collar. Strike entered, wiping his feet on the doormat. A swell of music, loud strings and woodwind instruments, cut through by the pounding of a kettle drum, issued from what Strike assumed was the sitting room. Strike, who had been raised by a mother who listened mainly to metal bands, knew very little about classical music, but there was a looming, ominous quality about this music that he didn’t particularly care for. The hall was dark, because the lights hadn’t been turned on, and otherwise nondescript, with a dark brown patterned carpet that, while practical, was rather ugly.

“I’ve made coffee,” said Della. “I’ll need you to carry the tray into the sitting room for me, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“No problem,” said Strike.

He followed the Labrador, which padded along at Della’s heels, its tail wagging vaguely. The symphony grew louder as they passed the sitting room, the doorframe of which Della touched lightly as she passed, feeling for familiar markers to orient herself.

“Is that Beethoven?” asked Strike, for something to say.

“Brahms. Symphony Number One, C Minor.”

The edges of every surface in the kitchen were rounded. The knobs on the oven, Strike noticed, had raised numbers stuck to them. On a cork noticeboard was a list of phone numbers headed IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, that he imagined were for the use of a cleaner or home help. While Della crossed to the worktop opposite, Strike extracted his mobile from his coat pocket and took a picture of Geraint Winn’s number. Della’s outstretched hand reached the rim of the deep ceramic sink, and she moved sideways, where a tray sat already laden with a mug and a cafetière of freshly brewed coffee. Two bottles of wine stood beside it. Della felt for both of these, turned and held them out to Strike, still unsmiling.

“Which is which?” she asked.

“Châteauneuf-du-Pape, 2010, in your left hand,” said Strike, “and Château Musar, 2006, in your right.”

“I’ll have a glass of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape if you wouldn’t mind opening the bottle and pouring it for me. I assumed that you wouldn’t want a drink, but if you do, help yourself.”

“Thanks,” said Strike, picking up the corkscrew she had laid beside the tray, “coffee will be fine.”

She set off silently for the sitting room, leaving him to follow with the tray. As he entered the room he caught the heavy scent of roses and was fleetingly reminded of Robin. While Della grazed furniture with her fingertips, feeling her way towards an armchair with wide wooden arms, Strike saw four large bunches of flowers positioned in vases around the room and punctuating the overall drabness with their vivid colors, red, yellow and pink.

Aligning herself by pressing the backs of her legs against the chair, Della sat down neatly, then turned her face towards Strike as he set the tray on the table.

“Would you put my glass here, on my right chair arm?” she said, patting it, and he did so, while the pale Labrador, which had flopped down beside Della’s chair, watched him out of kind, sleepy eyes.

The strings of the violins in the symphony swooped and fell as Strike sat down. From the fawn carpet to the furniture, all of which might have been designed in the seventies, everything seemed to be in different shades of brown. Half of one wall was covered in built-in shelves holding what he thought must be at least a thousand CDs. On a table to the rear of the room was a stack of Braille manuscripts. A large, framed photograph of a teenage girl sat on the mantelpiece. It occurred to Strike that her mother could not even enjoy the bittersweet solace of looking at Rhiannon Winn every day, and he found himself filled with inconvenient compassion.

“Nice flowers,” he commented.

“Yes. It was my birthday a few days ago,” said Della.

“Ah. Many happy returns.”

“Are you from the West Country?”

“Partly. Cornwall.”

“I can hear it in your vowels,” said Della.

She waited while he dealt with the cafetière and poured himself coffee. When the sounds of clinking and pouring had ceased, she said:

“As I said on the phone, I’m very worried about Aamir. He’ll still be in London, I’m sure, because it’s all he’s ever known. Not with his family,” she added, and Strike thought he heard a trace of contempt. “I’m extremely concerned about him.”

She felt carefully for the wine glass next to her and took a sip.

“When you’ve reassured him that he isn’t in any kind of trouble, and that anything Chiswell told you about him will go no further, you must tell him to contact me—urgently.”

The violins continued to screech and whine in what, to the untutored Strike, was a dissonant expression of foreboding. The guide dog scratched herself, her paw thudding off the carpet. Strike took out his notebook.

“Have you got the names or contact details of any friends Mallik might have gone to?”

“No,” said Della. “I don’t think he has many friends. Latterly he mentioned someone from university but I don’t remember a name. I doubt it was anyone particularly close.”

The thought of this distant friend seemed to make her uneasy.

“He studied at the LSE, so that’s an area of London he knows well.”

“He’s on good terms with one of his sisters, isn’t he?”

“Oh, no,” said Della, at once. “No, no, they all disowned him. No, he’s got nobody, really, other than me, which is what makes this situation so dangerous.”

“The sister posted a picture on Facebook of the two of them fairly recently. It was in that pizza joint opposite your house.”

Della’s expression betrayed not merely surprise, but displeasure.

“Aamir told me you’d been snooping online. Which sister was it?”

“I’d have to ch—”

“But I doubt he’d be staying with her,” said Della, talking over him. “Not with the way the family as a whole has treated him. He might have contacted her, I suppose. You might see what she knows.”

“I will,” said Strike. “Any other ideas about where he might go?”

“He really doesn’t have anyone else,” she said. “That’s what worries me. He’s vulnerable. It’s essential I find him.”

“Well, I’ll certainly do my best,” Strike promised her. “Now, you said on the phone that you’d answer a few questions.”

Her expression became slightly more forbidding.

“I doubt I can tell you anything of interest, but go on.”

“Can we start with Jasper Chiswell, and your and your husband’s relationship with him?”

By her expression, she managed to convey that she found the question both impertinent and slightly ludicrous. With a cold smile and raised eyebrows, she responded:

“Well, Jasper and I had a professional relationship, obviously.”

“And how was that?” asked Strike, adding sugar to his coffee, stirring it and taking a sip.

“Given,” said Della, “that Jasper hired you to try and discover disreputable information about us, I think you already know the answer to that question.”

“You maintain that your husband wasn’t blackmailing Chiswell, then, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

Strike knew that pushing on this particular point, when Della’s super-injunction had already shown what lengths she would go to in her own defense, would only alienate her. A temporary retreat seemed indicated.

“What about the rest of the Chiswells? Did you ever run across any of them?”

“Some,” she said, a little warily.

“And how did you find them?”

“I barely know them. Geraint says Izzy was hardworking.”

“Chiswell’s late son was on the junior British fencing team with your daughter, I think?”

The muscles of her face seemed to contract. He was reminded of an anemone shutting in on itself when it senses a predator.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you like Freddie?”

“I don’t think I ever spoke to him. Geraint was the one who ferried Rhiannon around to her tournaments. He knew the team.”

The shadow stems of the roses closest to the window stretched like bars across the carpet. The Brahms symphony crashed stormily on in the background. Della’s opaque lenses contributed to a feeling of inscrutable menace and Strike, though wholly unintimidated, was put in mind of the blind oracles and seers that peopled ancient myths, and the particular supernatural aura attributed by the able-bodied to this one particular disability.

“What was it that made Jasper Chiswell so eager to find out things to your disadvantage, would you say?”

“He didn’t like me,” said Della simply. “We disagreed frequently. He came from a background that finds anything that deviates from its own conventions and norms to be suspect, unnatural, even dangerous. He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.”

“In what way?”

“Ask his wife.”

“You know Kinvara, do you?”

“I wouldn’t say I ‘know’ her. I had an encounter with her a while ago that was certainly interesting in the light of Chiswell’s public proclamations about the sanctity of marriage.”

Strike had the impression that beneath the lofty language, and in spite of her genuine anxiety about Aamir, Della was deriving pleasure from saying these things.

“What happened?” Strike asked.

“Kinvara turned up unexpectedly late one afternoon at the ministry, but Jasper had already left for Oxfordshire. I think it was her aim to surprise him.”

“When was this?”

“I should say… a year ago, at least. Shortly before Parliament went into recess, I think. She was in a state of great distress. I heard a commotion outside and went to find out what was going on. I could tell by the silence of the outer office that they were all agog. She was very emotional, demanding to see her husband. Initially I thought she must have had dreadful news and perhaps needed Jasper as a source of comfort and support. I took her into my office.

“Once it was just the two of us, she broke down completely. She was barely coherent, but from the little I could understand,” said Della, “she’d just found out there was another woman.”

“Did she say who?”

“I don’t think so. She may have done, but she was—well, it was quite disturbing,” said Della austerely. “More as though she had suffered a bereavement than the end of a marriage. ‘I was just part of his game,’ ‘He never loved me’ and so forth.”

“What game did you take her to mean?” asked Strike.

“The political game, I suppose. She spoke of being humiliated, of being told, in so many words, that she had served her purpose…

“Jasper Chiswell was a very ambitious man, you know. He’d lost his career once over infidelity. I imagine he cast around quite clinically for the kind of new wife who’d burnish his image. No more Italian fly-by-nights now he was trying to get back into the cabinet. He probably thought Kinvara would go down very well with the county Conservatives. Well-bred. Horsey.

“I heard, later, that Jasper had bundled her off into some kind of psychiatric clinic not long afterwards. That’s how families like the Chiswells deal with excessive emotion, I suppose,” said Della, taking another sip of wine. “Yet she stayed with him. Of course, people do stay, even when they’re treated abominably. He talked about her within my hearing as though she was a deficient, needy child. I remember him saying Kinvara’s mother would be ‘babysitting’ her for her birthday, because he had to be in Parliament for a vote. He could have paired his vote, of course—found a Labor MP and struck a deal. Simply couldn’t be bothered.

“Women like Kinvara Chiswell, whose entire self-worth is predicated on the status and success of marriage, are naturally shattered when everything goes wrong. I think all those horses of hers were an outlet, a substitute and—oh yes,” said Della, “I’ve just remembered—the very last thing she said to me that day was that in addition to everything else, she now had to go home to put down a beloved mare.”

Della felt for the broad, soft head of Gwynn, who was lying beside her chair.

“I felt very sorry for her, there. Animals have been an enormous consolation to me in my life. One can hardly overstate the comfort they give, sometimes.”

The hand that caressed the dog still sported a wedding ring, Strike noticed, along with a heavy amethyst ring that matched her housecoat. Somebody, he supposed Geraint, must have told her that it was the same color and again, he felt an unwelcome pang of pity.

“Did Kinvara tell you how or when she’d found out that her husband had been unfaithful?”

“No, no, she simply gave way to an almost incoherent outpouring of rage and grief, like a small child. Kept saying, ‘I loved him and he never loved me, it was all a lie.’ I’ve never heard such a raw explosion of grief, even at a funeral or a deathbed. I never spoke to her again except for hello. She acted as though she had no memory of what had passed between us.”

Della took another sip of wine.

“Can we return to Mallik?” Strike asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said at once.

“The morning that Jasper Chiswell died—the thirteenth—you were here, at home?”

There was a lengthy silence.

“Why are you asking me that?” Della said, in a changed tone.

“Because I’d like to corroborate a story I’ve heard,” said Strike.

“You’re mean, that Aamir was here with me, that morning?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, that’s quite true. I’d slipped downstairs and sprained my wrist. I called Aamir and he came over. He wanted me to go to casualty, but there was no need. I could still move all my fingers. I simply needed some help managing breakfast and so on.”

“You called Mallik?”

“What?” she said.

It was the age-old, transparent “what?” of the person who is afraid they’ve made a mistake. Strike guessed that some very rapid thinking was going on behind the dark glasses.

“You called Aamir?”

“Why? What does he say happened?”

“He says your husband went in person to fetch him from his house.”

“Oh,” said Della and then, “of course, yes, I forgot.”

“Did you?” asked Strike gently. “Or are you backing up their story?”

“I forgot,” Della repeated firmly. “When I said I ‘called’ him I wasn’t talking about the telephone. I meant that I called ‘on’ him. Via Geraint.”

“But if Geraint was here when you slipped, couldn’t he have helped you with your breakfast?”

“I think Geraint wanted Aamir to help persuade me to go to casualty.”

“Right. So it was Geraint’s idea to go to Aamir, rather than yours?”

“I can’t remember now,” she said, but then, contradicting herself, “I’d fallen rather heavily. Geraint has a bad back, naturally he wanted help and I thought of Aamir, and then the pair of them nagged me to go to A&E, but there was no need. It was a simple sprain.”

The light was now fading beyond the net curtains. Della’s black lenses reflected the neon red of the dying sun above the rooftops.

“I’m extremely worried about Aamir,” she said again, in a strained voice.

“A couple more questions and I’m done,” Strike replied. “Jasper Chiswell hinted in front of a roomful of people that he knew something disreputable about Mallik. What can you tell me anything about that?”

“Yes, well, it was that conversation,” said Della quietly, “that first made Aamir think about resigning. I could feel him pulling away from me after it happened. And then you finished the job, didn’t you? You went to his house, to taunt him further.”

“There was no taunting, Mrs. Winn—”

“Liwat, Mr. Strike, did you never learn what that meant all the time you were in the Middle East?”

“Yeah, I know what it means,” said Strike matter-of-factly. “Sodomy. Chiswell seemed to be threatening Aamir with exposure—”

“Aamir wouldn’t suffer from exposure of the truth, I assure you!” said Della fiercely. “Not that it matters a jot, but he doesn’t happen to be gay!”

The Brahms symphony continued on what, to Strike, was its gloomy and intermittently sinister course, horns and violins competing to jar the nerves.

“You want the truth?” said Della loudly. “Aamir objected to being groped and harassed, felt up by a senior civil servant, whose inappropriate touching of young men passing through his office is an open secret, even a joke! And when a comprehensive-educated Muslim boy loses his cool and smacks a senior civil servant, which of the two do you imagine finds themselves smeared and stigmatized? Which of them, do you think, becomes the subject of derogatory rumors, and is forced out of a job?”

“I’m guessing,” said Strike, “not Sir Christopher Barrowclough-Burns.”

“How did you know whom I was talking about?” said Della sharply.

“Still in the post, is he?” asked Strike, ignoring the question.

“Of course he is! Everybody knows about his harmless little ways, but nobody wants to go on the record. I’ve been trying to get something done about Barrowclough-Burns for years. When I heard Aamir had left the diversity program in murky circumstances, I made it my business to find him. He was in a pitiable state when I first made contact with him, absolutely pitiable. Quite apart from the derailing of what should have been a stellar career, there was a malicious cousin who’d heard some gossip and spread the rumor that Aamir had been fired for homosexual activity at work.

“Well, Aamir’s father isn’t the sort of man to look kindly on a gay son. Aamir had been resisting his parents’ pressure to marry a girl they thought suitable. There was a terrible row and a complete breach. This brilliant young man lost everything, family, home and job, in the space of a couple of weeks.”

“So you stepped in?”

“Geraint and I had an empty property around the corner. Both our mothers used to live there. Neither Geraint nor I have siblings. It had become too difficult to manage our mothers’ care from London, so we brought them up from Wales and housed them together, around the corner. Geraint’s mother died two years ago, mine this, so the house was empty. We didn’t need the rent. It seemed only sensible to let Aamir stay there.”

“And this was nothing but disinterested kindness?” Strike said. “You weren’t thinking of how useful he might be to you, when you gave him a job and a house?”

“What d’you mean, ‘useful’? He’s a very intelligent young man, any office would be—”

“Your husband was pressuring Aamir to get incriminating information on Jasper Chiswell from the Foreign Office, Mrs. Winn. Photographs. He was pressuring Aamir to go to Sir Christopher for pictures.”

Della reached out for her glass of wine, missed the stem by inches and hit the glass with her knuckles. Strike lunged forwards to try and catch it, but too late: a whip-like trail of red wine described a parabola in the air and spattered the beige carpet, the glass falling with a thud beside it. Gwynn got up and approached the spill with mild interest, sniffing the spreading stain.

“How bad is it?” asked Della urgently, her fingers grasping the arms of her chair, her face inclined to the floor.

“Not good,” said Strike.

“Salt, please… put salt on it. In the cupboard to the right of the cooker!”

Turning on the light as he entered the kitchen, Strike’s attention was caught for the first time by an odd something he had failed to spot on his previous entry into the room: an envelope stuck high up on a wall-mounted cabinet to the right, too high for Della to reach. Having grabbed the salt out of the cupboard he made a detour to read the single word written on it: Geraint.

“To the right of the cooker!” Della called a little desperately from the sitting room.

“Ah, the right!” Strike shouted back, as he tugged down the envelope and slit it open.

Inside was a receipt from “Kennedy Bros. Joiners,” for the replacement of a bathroom door. Strike licked his finger, dampened down the envelope flap, resealed it as best he could and stuck it back where he had found it.

“Sorry,” he told Della, re-entering the room. “It was right in front of me and I didn’t notice.”

He twisted the top of the cardboard tub and poured salt liberally over the purple stain. The Brahms symphony came to an end as he straightened up, dubious as to the likely success of the home remedy.

“Have you done it?” Della whispered into the silence.

“Yeah,” said Strike, watching the wine rising into the white and turning it a dirty gray. “I think you’re still going to need a carpet cleaner, though.”

“Oh dear… the carpet was new this year.”

She seemed deeply shaken, though whether this was entirely due to the spilled wine was, Strike thought, debatable. As he returned to the sofa and set down the salt beside the coffee, music started up again, this time a Hungarian air that was no more restful than the symphony, but weirdly manic.

“Would you like more wine?” he asked her.

“I—yes, I think I would,” she said.

He poured her another and passed it directly into her hand. She drank a little, then said shakily:

“How could you know what you just told me, Mr. Strike?”

“I’d rather not answer that, but I assure you it’s true.”

Clutching her wine in both hands Della said:

“You have to find Aamir for me. If he thought I sanctioned Geraint telling him to go to Barrowclough-Burns for favors, it’s no wonder he—”

Her self-control was visibly disintegrating. She tried to set the wine down on the arm of her chair and had to feel for it with the other hand before doing so successfully, all the while shaking her head in little jerks of disbelief.

“No wonder he what?” asked Strike quietly.

“Accused me of… of smothering… controlling… well, of course, this explains everything… we were so close—you wouldn’t understand—it’s hard to explain—but it was remarkable, how soon we became—well, like family. Sometimes, you know, there’s an instant affinity—a connection that years couldn’t forge, with other people—

“But these past few weeks, it all changed—I could feel it—starting when Chiswell made that jibe in front of everyone—Aamir became distant. It was as though he no longer trusted me… I should have known… oh Lord, I should have known… you have to find him, you have to…”

Perhaps, Strike thought, the depth of her burning sense of need was sexual in origin, and perhaps on some subconscious level it had indeed been tinged with appreciation of Aamir’s youthful masculinity. However, as Rhiannon Winn watched over them from her cheap gilt frame, wearing a smile that didn’t reach her wide, anxious eyes, her teeth glinting with heavy braces, Strike thought it far more likely that Della was a woman possessed of that which Charlotte so conspicuously lacked: a burning, frustrated maternal drive tinged, in Della’s case, with unassuageable regret.

“This as well,” she whispered. “This as well. What hasn’t he ruined?”

“You’re talking about—”

“My husband!” said Della numbly. “Who else? My charity—our charity—but you know that, of course? It was you who told Chiswell about the missing twenty-five thousand, wasn’t it? And the lies, the stupid lies, Geraint’s been telling people? David Beckham, Mo Farah—all those impossible promises?”

“My partner found out.”

“Nobody will believe me,” said Della distractedly, “but I didn’t know, I had no idea. I’ve missed the last four board meetings—preparations for the Paralympics. Geraint only told me the truth after Chiswell threatened him with the press. Even then he claimed it was the accountant’s fault, but he swore to me the other things weren’t true. Swore it, on his mother’s grave.”

She twisted the wedding ring on her finger, apparently distracted.

“I suppose your wretched partner tracked down Elspeth Lacey-Curtis, as well?”

“Afraid so,” lied Strike, judging that a gamble was indicated. “Did Geraint deny that, too?”

“If he’d said anything to make the girls uncomfortable he felt awful, but he swore there was nothing else to it, no touching, just a couple of risqué jokes. But in this climate,” said Della furiously, “a man ought to damned well think about what jokes he makes to a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls!”

Strike leaned forwards and grabbed Della’s wine, which was in danger of being upended again.

“What are you doing?”

“Moving your glass onto the table,” said Strike.

“Oh,” said Della, “thank you.” Making a noticeable effort to control herself, she continued, “Geraint was representing me at that event, and it will go the way it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all of it! Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”

Breathing hard, she pressed her trembling fingers to her temples. Beyond the net curtains night, deep blue, was inching like a veil over the glaring red of sunset and as the room grew darker, Rhiannon Winn’s features faded gradually into the twilight. Soon all that would be visible was her smile, punctuated by the ugly braces.

“Give me back my wine, please.”

Strike did so. Della drank most of it down at once and continued to clasp the glass as she said bitterly:

“There are plenty of people ready to think all kinds of odd things about a blind woman. Of course, when I was younger, it was worse. There was often a prurient interest in one’s private life. It was the first place some men’s minds went. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too, have you, with your one leg?”

Strike found that he didn’t resent the blunt mention of his disability from Della.

“Yeah, I’ve had a bit of that,” he admitted. “Bloke I was at school with. Hadn’t seen him in years. It was my first time back in Cornwall since I got blown up. Five pints in, he asked me at what point I warned women my leg was going to come off with my trousers. He thought he was being funny.”

Della smiled thinly.

“Never occurs to some people that it is we who should be making the jokes, does it? But it will be different for you, as a man… most people seem to think it in the natural order of things that the able-bodied woman should look after the disabled man. Geraint had to deal with that for years… people assuming there was something peculiar about him, because he chose a disabled wife. I think I may have tried to compensate for that. I wanted him to have a role… status… but it would have been better for both of us, in retrospect, if he had done something unconnected to me.”

Strike thought she was a little drunk. Perhaps she hadn’t eaten. He felt an inappropriate desire to check her fridge. Sitting here with this impressive and vulnerable woman, it was easy to understand how Aamir had become so entangled with her both professionally and privately, without ever intending to become so.

“People assume I married Geraint because there was nobody else who wanted me, but they’re quite wrong,” said Della, sitting up straighter in her chair. “There was a boy I was at school with who was smitten with me, who proposed when I was nineteen. I had a choice and I chose Geraint. Not as a carer, or because, as journalists have sometimes implied, my limitless ambition made a husband necessary… but because I loved him.”

Strike remembered the day he had followed Della’s husband to the stairwell in King’s Cross, and the tawdry things that Robin had told him about Geraint’s behavior at work, yet nothing that Della had just said struck him as incredible. Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.

“Are you married, Mr. Strike?”

“No,” he said.

“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can’t go on. I don’t really know when I stopped loving him, but at some point after Rhiannon died, it slipped—”

Her voice broke.

“—slipped away from us.” She swallowed. “Please will you pour me another glass of wine?”

He did so. The room was very dark now. The music had changed again, to a melancholy violin concerto which at last, in Strike’s opinion, was appropriate to the conversation. Della had not wanted to talk to him, but now seemed reluctant to let the conversation end.

“Why did your husband hate Jasper Chiswell so much?” Strike asked quietly. “Because of Chiswell’s political clashes with you, or—?”

“No, no,” said Della Winn wearily. “Because Geraint has to blame somebody other than himself for the misfortunes that befall him.”

Strike waited, but she merely drank more wine, and said nothing.

“What exactly—?”

“Never mind,” she said loudly. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

But a moment later, after another large gulp of wine, she said:

“Rhiannon didn’t really want to do fencing. Like most little girls, what she wanted was a pony, but we—Geraint and I—we didn’t come from pony-owning backgrounds. We didn’t have the first idea what one does with horses. As I think back, I suppose there were ways around that, but we were both terribly busy and felt it would be impractical, so she took up fencing instead, and very good she was at it, too…

“Have I answered enough of your questions, Mr. Strike?” she asked a little thickly. “Will you find Aamir?”

“I’ll try,” Strike promised her. “Could you give me his number? And yours, so I can keep you updated?”

She had both numbers off by heart, and he copied them down before closing his notebook and getting back to his feet.

“You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Winn. Thank you.”

“That sounds worrying,” she said, with a faint crease between the eyebrows. “I’m not sure I meant to be.”

“Will you be—?”

“Perfectly,” said Della, enunciating over-clearly. “You’ll call me when you find Aamir, won’t you?”

“If you don’t hear from me before then, I’ll update you in a week’s time,” Strike promised. “Er—is anyone coming in tonight, or—?”

“I see you aren’t quite as hardened as your reputation would suggest,” said Della. “Don’t worry about me. My neighbor will be in to walk Gwynn for me shortly. She checks the gas dials and so forth.”

“In that case, don’t get up. Good night.”

The near-white dog raised her head as he walked towards the door, sniffing the air. He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen.

Closing the front door, Strike couldn’t remember the last time he had felt such a strange mixture of admiration, sympathy and suspicion.