Nam Long Le Shaker had the feeling of a decadent, colonial-era bar. Dimly lit, with leafy plants and assorted paintings and prints of beautiful women, the décor mixed Vietnamese and European styles. When Robin entered the restaurant at five past seven, she found Raphael leaning up against the bar, wearing a dark suit and tieless white shirt, already halfway down a drink and talking to the long-haired beauty who stood in front of a glittering wall of bottles.

“Hi,” said Robin.

“Hello,” he responded with a trace of coolness, and then, “Your eyes are different. Were they that color at Chiswell House?”

“Blue?” asked Robin, shrugging off the coat she had worn because she felt shivery, even though the evening was warm. “Yes.”

“S’pose I didn’t notice because half the bloody lightbulbs are missing. What are you drinking?”

Robin hesitated. She ought not to drink while conducting an interview, but at the same time, she suddenly craved alcohol. Before she could decide, Raphael said with a slight edge in his voice:

“Been undercover again today, have we?”

“Why d’you ask?”

“Your wedding ring’s gone again.”

“Were your eyes this sharp in the office?” asked Robin, and he grinned, reminding her why she had liked him, even against her will.

“I noticed your glasses were fake, remember?” he said. “I thought at the time you were trying to be taken seriously, because you were too pretty for politics. So these,” he indicated his deep brown eyes, “may be sharp, but this,” he tapped his head, “not so much.”

“I’ll have a glass of red,” said Robin, smiling, “and I’ll pay, obviously.”

“If this is all on Mr. Strike, let’s have dinner,” said Raphael at once. “I’m starving and skint.”

“Really?”

After a day of trawling through the available rooms for rent on her agency salary, she was not in the mood to hear the Chiswell definition of poverty again.

“Yeah, really, little though you might believe it,” said Raphael, with a slightly acid smile, and Robin suspected he knew what she had been thinking. “Seriously, are we eating, or what?”

“Fine,” said Robin, who had barely touched food all day, “let’s eat.”

Raphael took his bottle of beer off the bar and led her through to the restaurant where they took a table for two beside the wall. It was so early that they were the only diners.

“My mother used to come here in the eighties,” said Raphael. “It was well known because the owner liked telling the rich and famous to sod off if they weren’t dressed properly to come in, and they all loved it.”

“Really?” said Robin, her thoughts miles away. It had just struck her that she would never again have dinner with Matthew like this, just the two of them. She remembered the very last time, at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. What had he been thinking while he ate in silence? Certainly he had been furious at her for continuing to work with Strike, but perhaps he had also been weighing in his mind the competing attractions of Sarah, with her well-paid job at Christie’s, her endless fund of stories about other people’s wealth, and her no doubt self-confident performance in bed, where the diamond earrings her fiancé had bought her snagged on Robin’s pillow.

“Listen, if eating with me’s going to make you look like that, I’m fine with going back to the bar,” said Raphael.

“What?” said Robin, surprised out of her thoughts. “Oh—no, it isn’t you.”

A waiter brought over Robin’s wine. She took a large slug.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about my husband. I left him last night.”

As she watched Raphael freeze in surprise with the bottle at his lips, Robin knew herself to have crossed an invisible boundary. In her whole time at the agency, she had never used truths about her private life to gain another’s confidence, never blended the private and the professional to win another person over. In turning Matthew’s infidelity into a device to manipulate Raphael, she knew that she was doing something that would appall and disgust her husband. Their marriage, he would have thought, ought to be sacrosanct, a world apart from what he saw as her seedy, ramshackle job.

“Seriously?” said Raphael.

“Yes,” said Robin, “but I don’t expect you to believe me, not after all the crap I told you when I was Venetia. Anyway,” she took her notebook out of her handbag, “you said you were OK with me asking some questions?”

“Er—yeah,” he said, apparently unable to decide whether he was more amused or disconcerted. “Is this real? Your marriage broke up last night?”

“Yes,” said Robin. “Why are you looking so shocked?”

“I don’t know,” said Raphael. “You just seem so… Girl Guidey.” His eyes moved over her face. “It’s part of the appeal.”

“Could I just ask my questions?” said Robin, determinedly unfazed.

Raphael drank some beer and said:

“Always busy with the job. Turns a man’s thoughts to what it would take to distract you.”

“Seriously—”

“Fine, fine, questions—but let’s order first. Fancy some dim sum?”

“Whatever’s good,” said Robin, opening her notebook.

Ordering food seemed to cheer Raphael up.

“Drink up,” he said.

“I shouldn’t be drinking at all,” she replied, and indeed, she hadn’t touched the wine since her first gulp. “OK, I wanted to talk about Ebury Street.”

“Go on,” said Raphael.

“You heard what Kinvara said about the keys. I wondered whether—”

“—I ever had one?” asked Raphael with equanimity. “Guess how many times I was ever in that house.”

Robin waited.

“Once,” said Raphael. “Never went there as a kid. When I got out of—you know—Dad, who hadn’t visited me once while I was inside, invited me down to Chiswell House to see him, so I did. Brushed my hair, put on a suit, got all the way down to that hellhole and he didn’t bother turning up. Detained by a late vote at the House or some crap. Picture how happy Kinvara was to have me on her hands for the night, in that bloody depressing house that I’ve had bad dreams about ever since I was a kid. Welcome home, Raff.

“I took the early train back to London. Following week, no contact from Dad until I get another summons, this time to go to Ebury Street. I considered just not bloody turning up. Why did I go?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin. “Why did you?”

He looked directly into her eyes.

“You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.”

“Yes,” said Robin quietly, “of course you can.”

“So round I trot to Ebury Street, thinking I might get—not a heart to heart, I mean, you met my father—but maybe, you know, some human emotion. He opened the door, said ‘There you are,’ shunted me into the sitting room and there was Henry Drummond and I realized I was there for a job interview. Drummond said he’d take me on, Dad barked at me not to fuck it up and shoved me back out onto the street. First and last time I was ever inside the place,” said Raphael, “so I can’t say I’ve got fond associations with it.”

He paused to consider what he’d just said, then let out a short laugh.

“And my father killed himself there, of course. I was forgetting that.”

“No key,” said Robin, making a note.

“No, among the many things I didn’t get that day were a spare key and an invitation to let myself in whenever I fancied it.”

“I need to ask you something that might seem as though it’s slightly out of left field,” said Robin cautiously.

“This sounds interesting,” said Raphael, leaning forwards.

“Did you ever suspect that your father was having an affair?”

“What?” he said, almost comically taken aback. “No—but—what?”

“Over the last year or so?” said Robin. “While he was married to Kinvara?”

He seemed incredulous.

“OK,” said Robin, “if you don’t—”

“What on earth makes you think he was having an affair?”

“Kinvara was always very possessive, very concerned about your father’s whereabouts, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah,” said Raphael, now smirking, “but you know why that was. That was you.”

“I heard that she broke down months before I went to work in the office. She told somebody that your father had cheated on her. She was distraught, by all accounts. It was around the time her mare was put down and she—”

“—hit Dad with the hammer?” He frowned. “Oh. I thought that was because of her not wanting the horse put down. Well, I suppose Dad was a ladies’ man when he was younger. Hey—maybe that’s what he was up to, the night I went down to Chiswell House and he stayed up in London? Kinvara was definitely expecting him back and she was furious when he cried off at the last minute.”

“Yes, maybe,” said Robin, making a note. “Can you remember what date that was?”

“Er—yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. You don’t tend to forget the day you’re released from jail. I got out on Wednesday the sixteenth of February last year, and Dad asked me to go down to Chiswell House on the following Saturday, so… the nineteenth.”

Robin made a note.

“You never saw or heard signs there was another woman?”

“Come on,” said Raphael, “you were there, at the Commons. You saw how little I had to do with him. Was he going to tell me he was playing around?”

“He told you about seeing the ghost of Jack o’Kent roaming the grounds at night.”

“That was different. He was drunk then, and—morbid. Weird. Banging on about divine retribution… I don’t know, I suppose he could’ve been talking about an affair. Maybe he’d grown a conscience at last, three wives down the line.”

“I didn’t think he married your mother?”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed.

“Sorry. Momentarily forgot I’m the bastard.”

“Oh, come on,” said Robin gently, “you know I didn’t mean—”

“All right, sorry,” he muttered. “Being touchy. Being left out of a parent’s will does that to a person.”

Robin remembered Strike’s dictum about inheritance: It is the money, and it isn’t, and in an uncanny echo of her thoughts, Raphael said:

“It isn’t the money, although God knows I could use the money. I’m jobless, and I don’t think old Henry Drummond’s going to give me a reference, do you? And now my mother looks like she’s going to settle permanently in Italy, so she’s talking about selling the London flat, which means I’ll be homeless. It’ll come to this, you know,” he said bitterly. “I’ll end up as Kinvara’s bloody stable boy. No one else will work for her and no one else’ll employ me…

“But it’s not just the money. When you’re left out of the will… well, left out, that says it all. The last statement of a dead man to his family and I didn’t rate a single mention and now I’ve got fucking Torquil advising me to piss off to Siena with my mother and ‘start again.’ Tosser,” said Raphael, with a dangerous expression.

“Is that where your mother lives? Siena?”

“Yeah. She’s shacked up with an Italian count these days, and believe me, the last thing he wants is her twenty-nine-year-old son moving in. He’s showing no sign of wanting to marry her and she’s starting to worry about her old age, hence the idea of flogging the flat here. She’s getting a bit long in the tooth to pull the trick she did on my father.”

“What d’you—?”

“She got pregnant on purpose. Don’t look so shocked. My mother doesn’t believe in shielding me from the realities of life. She told me the story years ago. I’m a gamble that didn’t come off. She thought he’d marry her if she got pregnant, but as you’ve just pointed out—”

“I said I’m sorry,” said Robin. “I am. It was really insensitive and—and stupid.”

She thought perhaps Raphael was about to tell her to go to hell, but instead he said quietly:

“See, you are sweet. You weren’t entirely acting, were you? In the office?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin. “I suppose not.”

Feeling his legs shift under the table, she moved very slightly backwards again.

“What’s your husband like?” Raphael asked.

“I don’t know how to describe him.”

“Does he work for Christie’s?”

“No,” said Robin. “He’s an accountant.”

“Christ,” said Raphael, appalled. “Is that what you like?”

“He wasn’t an accountant when I met him. Can we go back over your father calling you on the morning he died?”

“If you like,” said Raphael, “but I’d much rather talk about you.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what happened that morning and then you can ask me whatever you like,” said Robin.

A fleeting smile passed over Raphael’s face. He took a swig of beer and said:

“Dad called me. Told me he thought Kinvara was about to do something stupid and told me to go straight down to Woolstone and stop it. I did ask why it had to be me, you know.”

“You didn’t tell us that at Chiswell House,” said Robin, looking up from her notes.

“Of course I didn’t, because the others were there. Dad said he didn’t want to ask Izzy. He was quite rude about her on the phone… he was an ungrateful shit, really he was,” said Raphael. “She worked her fingers to the bloody bone and you saw how he treated her.”

“What do you mean, rude?”

“He said she’d shout at Kinvara, upset her and make it worse or something. Pot and bloody kettle, but there you are. But the truth is,” said Raphael, “that he saw me as a kind of upper servant and Izzy as proper family. He didn’t mind me getting my hands dirty and it didn’t matter if I pissed off his wife by barging into her house and stopping her—”

“Stopping her what?”

“Ah,” said Raphael, “food.”

The dim sum placed on the table before them, the waitress retreated.

“What did you stop Kinvara doing?” Robin repeated. “Leaving your father? Hurting herself?”

“I love this stuff,” said Raphael, examining a prawn dumpling.

“She left a note,” persisted Robin, “saying she was leaving. Did your father send you down there to persuade her not to go? Was he afraid Izzy would egg her on to leave him?”

“D’you seriously think I could persuade Kinvara to stay in the marriage? Never having to lay eyes on me again would’ve been one more incentive to go.”

“Then why did he send you to her?”

“I’ve told you,” said Raphael. “He thought she was going to do something stupid.”

“Raff,” said Robin, “you can keep playing silly buggers—”

He corpsed.

“Christ, you sound Yorkshire when you say that. Say it again.”

“The police think there’s something fishy about your story of what you were up to that morning,” said Robin. “And so do we.”

That seemed to sober him up.

“How do you know what the police are thinking?”

“We’ve got contacts on the force,” said Robin. “Raff, you’ve given everyone the impression that your father was trying to stop Kinvara hurting herself, but nobody really buys that. The stable girl was there. Tegan. She could have prevented Kinvara from hurting herself.”

Raphael chewed for a while, apparently thinking.

“All right,” he sighed. “All right, here it is. You know how Dad had sold off everything that would raise a few hundred quid, or given it to Peregrine?”

“Who?”

“All right, Pringle,” said Raphael, exasperated. “I prefer not to use their stupid bloody nicknames.

“He didn’t sell off everything of value,” said Robin.

“What d’you mean?”

“That picture of the mare and foal is worth five to eight—”

Robin’s mobile rang. She knew from the ringtone that it was Matthew.

“Aren’t you going to get that?”

“No,” said Robin.

She waited until the phone had stopped ringing, then took it out of her bag.

“‘Matt,’” said Raphael, reading the name upside down. “That’s the accountant, is it?”

“Yes,” said Robin, silencing the phone, but it immediately began to vibrate in her hand instead. Matthew had called back.

“Block him,” suggested Raphael.

“Yes,” said Robin, “good idea.”

All that was important to her right now was keeping Raphael cooperative. He seemed to enjoy watching her block Matthew. She put the mobile back in her bag and said:

“Go on about the paintings.”

“Well, you know how Dad had offloaded all the valuable ones through Drummond?”

“Some of us think five thousand pounds worth of picture is quite valuable,” said Robin, unable to help herself.

“Fine, Ms. Lefty,” said Raphael, suddenly nasty. “You can keep sneering about how people like me don’t know the value of money—”

“Sorry,” said Robin quickly, cursing herself. “I am, seriously. Look, I’ve—well, I’ve been trying to find a room to rent this morning. Five thousand pounds would change my life right now.”

“Oh,” said Raphael, frowning. “I—OK. Actually, if it comes to that I’d leap at the chance of five grand in my pocket right now, but I’m talking about seriously valuable stuff, worth tens and hundreds of thousands, things that my father wanted to keep in the family. He’d already handed them on to little Pringle to avoid death duties. There was a Chinese lacquer cabinet, an ivory workbox and a couple of other things, but there was also the necklace.”

“Which—?”

“It’s a big ugly diamond thing,” said Raphael, and with the hand not spearing dumplings he mimed a thick collar. “Important stones. It’s come down through five generations or something and the convention was that it went to the eldest daughter on her twenty-first, but my father’s father, who as you might have heard was a bit of a playboy—”

“This is the one who married Tinky the nurse?”

“She was his third or fourth,” said Raphael, nodding. “I can never remember. Anyway, he only had sons, so he let all his wives wear the thing in turn, then left it to my father, who kept the new tradition going. His wives got to wear it—even my mother got a shot—and he forgot about the handing on to the daughter on her twenty-first bit, Pringle didn’t get it and he didn’t mention it in his will.”

“So—wait, d’you mean it’s now—?”

“Dad called me up that morning and told me I had to get hold of the bloody thing. Simple job, kind of thing anyone would enjoy,” he said, sarcastically. “Bust in on a stepmother who hates my guts, find out where she’s keeping a valuable necklace, then steal it from under her nose.”

“So you think your father believed that she was leaving him, and was worried that she was going to take it with her?”

“I suppose so,” said Raphael.

“How did he sound on the phone?”

“I told you this. Groggy. I thought it was a hangover. After I heard he’d killed himself,” Raphael faltered, “… well.”

“Well?”

“To tell you the truth,” said Raphael, “I couldn’t get it out of my head that the last thing Dad wanted to say to me in this life was, ‘run along and make sure your sister gets her diamonds.’ Words to treasure forever, eh?”

At a loss for anything to say, Robin took another sip of wine, then asked quietly:

“Do Izzy and Fizzy realize the necklace is Kinvara’s now?”

Raphael’s lips twisted in an unpleasant smile.

“Well, they know it is legally, but here’s the really funny thing: they think she’s going to hand it over to them. After everything they’ve said about her, after calling her a gold-digger for years, slagging her off at every possible opportunity, they can’t quite grasp that she won’t hand the necklace over to Fizzy for Flopsy—damn it—Florence—because,” he affected a shrill upper-class voice, “‘Darling, even TTS wouldn’t do that, it belongs in the family, she must realize she can’t sell it.’

“Bullets would bounce off their self-regard. They think there’s a kind of natural law in operation, where Chiswells get what they want and lesser beings just fall into line.”

“How did Henry Drummond know you were trying to stop Kinvara keeping the necklace? He told Cormoran you went to Chiswell House for noble reasons.”

Raphael snorted.

“Cat’s really out of the bag, isn’t it? Yeah, apparently Kinvara left a message for Henry the day before Dad died, asking where she could get a valuation on the necklace.”

“Is that why he phoned your father that morning?”

“Exactly. To warn him what she was up to.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police all this?”

“Because once the others find out she’s planning to sell it, the whole thing’s going to turn nuclear. There’ll be an almighty row and the family’ll go to lawyers and expect me to join them in kicking the shit out of Kinvara, and meanwhile I’m still treated like a second-class citizen, like a fucking courier, driving all the old paintings up to Drummond in London and hearing how much Dad was getting for them, and not a penny of that did I ever see—I’m not getting caught up in the middle of the great necklace scandal, I’m not playing their bloody game. I should’ve told Dad to stuff it, the day he phoned,” said Raphael, “but he didn’t sound well, and I suppose I felt sorry for him, or something, which only goes to prove they’re right, I’m not a proper bloody Chiswell.”

He had run out of breath. Two couples had joined them in the restaurant now. Robin watched in the mirror as a well-groomed blonde did a double take at Raphael as she sat down with her florid, overweight companion.

“So, why did you leave Matthew?” Raphael asked.

“He cheated,” said Robin. She didn’t have the energy to lie.

“Who with?”

She had the impression he was seeking to redress some kind of power balance. However much anger and contempt he had displayed during the outburst about his family, she had heard the hurt, too.

“With a friend of his from university,” said Robin.

“How did you find out?”

“A diamond earring, in our bed.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” said Robin.

She felt a sudden wave of depression and fatigue at the idea of traveling all the way back to that hard sofa in Wembley. She had not yet called her parents to tell them what had happened.

“Under normal circumstances,” said Raphael, “I’d be putting the moves on you. Well, not right now. Not tonight. But give it a couple of weeks…

“Trouble is, I look at you,” he raised a forefinger, and pointed first to her, and then to an imaginary figure behind her, “and I see your one-legged boss looming over your shoulder.”

“Is there any particular reason you feel the need to mention him being one-legged?”

Raphael grinned.

“Protective, aren’t you?”

“No, I—”

“It’s all right. Izzy fancies him, too.”

“I never—”

“Defensive, too.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Robin, half-laughing, and Raphael grinned.

“I’m having another beer. Drink that wine, why don’t you?” he said, indicating her glass, which was still two-thirds full.

When he had procured another bottle, he said with a malevolent grin, “Izzy’s always liked bits of rough. Did you notice the charged look from Fizzy to Izzy when Jimmy Knight’s name was mentioned?”

“I did, actually,” said Robin. “What was that about?”

“Freddie’s eighteenth birthday party,” said Raphael, smirking. “Jimmy crashed it with a couple of mates and Izzy—how do I put this delicately?—lost something in his company.”

“Oh,” said Robin, astonished.

“She was blind drunk. It’s passed into family legend. I wasn’t there. I was too young.

“Fizzy’s so amazed at the idea that her sister could have slept with the estate carpenter’s son that she thinks he must have some sort of supernatural, demonic sex appeal. That’s why she thinks Kinvara was slightly on his side, when he turned up asking for money.”

“What?” said Robin sharply, reaching for her notebook again, which had fallen closed.

“Don’t get too excited,” said Raphael, “I still don’t know what he was blackmailing Dad about, I never did. Not a full member of the family, you see, so not to be fully trusted.

“Kinvara told you this at Chiswell House, don’t you remember? She was alone at home, the first time Jimmy turned up. Dad was in London again. From what I’ve pieced together, when she and Dad first talked it over, she argued Jimmy’s case. Fizzy thinks that’s down to Jimmy’s sex appeal. Would you say he’s got any?”

“I suppose some people might think he has,” said Robin indifferently, who was making notes. “Kinvara thought your father should pay Jimmy his money, did she?”

“From what I understand,” said Raphael, “Jimmy didn’t frame it as blackmail on the first approach. She thought Jimmy had a legitimate claim and argued for giving him something.”

“When was this, d’you know?”

“Search me,” said Raphael, shaking his head. “I think I was in jail at the time. Bigger things to worry about…

“Guess,” he said, for the second time, “how often any of them have asked me what it was like in jail?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin cautiously.

“Fizzy, never. Dad, never—”

“You said Izzy visited.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged, with a tip of the bottle to his sister. “Yeah, she did, bless her. Good old Torks has made a couple of jokes about not wanting to bend over in the shower. I suggested,” said Raphael, with a hard smile, “that he’d know all about that kind of thing, what with his old pal Christopher sliding his hand between young men’s legs at the office. Turns out it’s serious stuff when some hairy old convict tries it, but harmless frolics for public schoolboys.”

He glanced at Robin.

“I suppose you know now why Dad was taunting that poor bloke Aamir?”

She nodded.

“Which Kinvara thought was a motive for murder,” said Raphael, rolling his eyes. “Projection, pure projection—they’re all at it.

“Kinvara thinks Aamir killed Dad, because Dad had been cruel to him in front of a room full of people. Well, you should have heard some of the things Dad was saying to Kinvara by the end.

“Fizzy thinks Jimmy Knight might’ve done it because he was angry about money. She’s bloody angry about all the family money that’s vanished, but she can’t say that in so many words, not when her husband’s half the reason it’s gone.

“Izzy thinks Kinvara must have killed Dad because Kinvara felt unloved and sidelined and disposable. Dad never thanked Izzy for a damn thing she did for him, and didn’t give a toss when she said she was leaving. You get the picture?

“None of them have got the guts to say that they all felt like killing Dad at times, not now he’s dead, so they project it all onto someone else. And that,” said Raphael, “is why none of them are talking about Geraint Winn. He gets double protection, because Saint Freddie was involved in Winn’s big grudge. It’s staring them in the face that he had a real motive, but we’re not supposed to mention that.”

“Go on,” said Robin, her pen at the ready. “Mention.”

“No, forget it,” said Raphael, “I shouldn’t have—”

“I don’t think you say much accidentally, Raff. Out with it.”

He laughed.

“I’m trying to stop fucking over people who don’t deserve it. It’s all part of the great redemption project.”

“Who doesn’t deserve it?”

“Francesca, the little girl I—you know—at the gallery. She’s the one who told me. She got it from her older sister, Verity.”

“Verity,” repeated Robin.

Sleep-deprived, she struggled to remember where she had heard that name. It was very like “Venetia,” of course… and then she remembered.

“Wait,” she said, frowning in her effort to concentrate. “There was a Verity on the fencing team with Freddie and Rhiannon Winn.”

“Right in one,” said Raphael.

“You all know each other,” said Robin wearily, unknowingly echoing Strike’s thought as she started writing again.

“Well, that’s the joy of the public school system,” said Raphael. “In London, if you’ve got the money, you meet the same three hundred people everywhere you go… Yeah, when I first arrived at Drummond’s gallery, Francesca couldn’t wait to tell me that her big sister had once dated Freddie. I think she thought that made the pair of us predestined, or something.

“When she realized I thought Freddie was a bit of a shit,” said Raphael, “she changed tack and told me a nasty story.

“Apparently, at his eighteenth, Freddie, Verity and a couple of others decided to mete out some punishment to Rhiannon for having dared to replace Verity on the fencing team. In their view she was—I don’t know—a bit common, a bit Welsh?—so they spiked her drink. All good fun. Sort of stuff that goes on the dorm, you know.

“But she didn’t react too well to neat vodka—or maybe, from their point of view, she reacted really well. Anyway, they managed to take some nice pictures of her, to pass around among themselves… this was in the early days of the internet. These days I suppose half a million people would have viewed them in the first twenty-four hours, but Rhiannon only had to endure the whole fencing team and most of Freddie’s mates having a good gloat.

“Anyway,” said Raphael, “about a month later, Rhiannon killed herself.”

“Oh my God,” said Robin quietly.

“Yeah,” said Raphael. “After little Franny told me the story, I asked Izzy about it. She got very upset, told me not to repeat it, ever—but she didn’t deny it. I got lots of ‘nobody kills themselves because of a silly joke at a party’ bluster and she told me I mustn’t talk about Freddie like that, it would break Dad’s heart…

“Well, the dead don’t have hearts to break, do they? And personally, I think it’s about time somebody pissed on Freddie’s eternal flame. If he hadn’t been born a Chiswell, the bastard would’ve been in borstal. But I suppose you’ll say I can talk, after what I did.”

“No,” said Robin gently. “That isn’t what I was going to say.”

The pugnacious expression faded from his face. He checked his watch.

“I’m going to have to go. I’ve got to be somewhere at nine.”

Robin raised her hand to signal for the bill. When she turned back to Raphael, she saw his eyes moving in routine fashion over both the other women in the restaurant, and in the mirror she saw how the blonde tried to hold his gaze.

“You can go,” she said, handing over her credit card to the waitress. “I don’t want to make you late.”

“No, I’ll walk you out.”

While she was still putting her credit card back into her handbag, he picked up her coat and held it up for her.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Out on the pavement, he hailed a taxi.

“You take this one,” he said. “I fancy a walk. Clear my head. I feel as though I’ve had a bad therapy session.”

“No, it’s all right,” said Robin. She didn’t want to charge a taxi all the way back to Wembley to Strike. “I’m going to get the Tube. Goodnight.”

“’Night, Venetia,” he said.

Raphael got into the taxi, which glided away, and Robin pulled her coat more tightly around herself as she walked off in the opposite direction. It had been a chaotic interview, but she had managed to get much more than she had expected out of Raphael. Taking out her mobile again, she phoned Strike.