‘Nope,’ said Anstis. ‘Until we find out whether he stayed somewhere else before he went to Talgarth Road, we’re going to assume the killer took them. The place was empty except for a bit of food and drink in the kitchen and a camping mattress and sleeping bag in one of the bedrooms. It looks like Quine was dossing down there. Hydrochloric acid’s been poured around that room too, all over Quine’s bed.’

‘No fingerprints? Footprints? Unexplained hair, mud?’

‘Nothing. We’ve still got people working on the place, but the acid’s obliterated everything in its path. Our people are wearing masks just so the fumes don’t rip their throats out.’

‘Anyone apart from this taxi driver admitted to seeing Quine since he disappeared?’

‘Nobody’s seen him entering Talgarth Road but we’ve got a neighbour at number 183 who swears she saw Quine leave it at one in the morning. Early hours of the sixth. The neighbour was letting herself in after a bonfire-night party.’

‘It was dark and she was two doors down, so what she actually saw was…?’

‘Silhouette of a tall figure in a cloak, carrying a holdall.’

‘A holdall,’ repeated Strike.

‘Yep,’ said Anstis.

‘Did the cloaked figure get into a car?’

‘No, it walked out of sight, but obviously a car could have been parked round the corner.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘I’ve got an old geezer in Putney swearing he saw Quine on the eighth. Rang his local police station and described him accurately.’

‘What was Quine doing?’

‘Buying books in the Bridlington Bookshop, where the bloke works.’

‘How convincing a witness is he?’

‘Well, he’s old, but he claims he can remember what Quine bought and the physical description’s good. And we’ve got another woman who lives in the flats across the road from the crime scene who reckons she passed Michael Fancourt walking past the house, also on the morning of the eighth. You know, that author with the big head? Famous one?’

‘Yeah, I do,’ said Strike slowly.

‘Witness claims she looked back at him over her shoulder and stared, because she recognised him.’

‘He was just walking past?’

‘So she claims.’

‘Anybody checked that with Fancourt yet?’

‘He’s in Germany, but he’s said he’s happy to cooperate with us when he gets back. Agent bending over backwards to be helpful.’

‘Any other suspicious activity around Talgarth Road? Camera footage?’

‘The only camera’s at the wrong angle for the house, it watches traffic – but I’m saving the best till last. We’ve got a different neighbour – other side, four doors down – who swears he saw a fat woman in a burqa letting herself in on the afternoon of the fourth, carrying a plastic bag from a halal takeaway. He says he noticed because the house had been empty so long. He claims she was there for an hour, then left.’

‘He’s sure she was in Quine’s house?’

‘So he says.’

‘And she had a key?’

‘That’s his story.’

‘A burqa,’ repeated Strike. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘I wouldn’t swear his eyesight’s great; he’s got very thick lenses in his glasses. He told me he didn’t know of any Muslims living in the street, so it had caught his attention.’

‘So we’ve got two alleged sightings of Quine since he walked out on his wife: early hours of the sixth, and on the eighth, in Putney.’

‘Yeah,’ said Anstis, ‘but I wouldn’t pin too much hope on either of them, Bob.’

‘You think he died the night he left,’ said Strike, more statement than question, and Anstis nodded.

‘Underhill thinks so.’

‘No sign of the knife?’

‘Nothing. The only knife in the kitchen was a very blunt, everyday one. Definitely not up to the job.’

‘Who do we know had a key to the place?’

‘Your client,’ said Anstis, ‘obviously. Quine himself must’ve had one. Fancourt’s got two, he’s already told us that by phone. The Quines lent one to his agent when she was organising some repairs for them; she says she gave it back. A next-door neighbour’s got a key so he can let himself in if anything goes wrong with the place.’

‘Didn’t he go in once the stink got bad?

‘One side did put a note through the door complaining about the smell, but the key holder left for two months in New Zealand a fortnight ago. We’ve spoken to him by phone. Last time he was in the house was in about May, when he took delivery of a couple of packages while some workmen were in and put them in the hall. Mrs Quine’s vague about who else might have been lent a key over the years.

‘She’s an odd woman, Mrs Quine,’ Anstis went on smoothly, ‘isn’t she?’

‘Haven’t thought about it,’ lied Strike.

‘You know the neighbours heard her chasing him, the night he disappeared?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah. She ran out of the house after him, screaming. The neighbours all say’ – Anstis was watching Strike closely – ‘that she yelled “I know where you’re off to, Owen!”’

‘Well, she thought she did know,’ Strike said with a shrug. ‘She thought he was going to the writer’s retreat Christian Fisher told him about. Bigley Hall.’

‘She’s refusing to move out of the house.’

‘She’s got a mentally handicapped daughter who’s never slept anywhere else. Can you imagine Leonora overpowering Quine?’

‘No,’ said Anstis, ‘but we know it turned him on to be tied up, and I doubt they were married for thirty-odd years without her knowing that.’

‘You think they had a row, then she tracked him down and suggested a bit of bondage?’

Anstis gave the suggestion of a small, token laugh, then said:

‘It doesn’t look great for her, Bob. Angry wife with the key to the house, early access to the manuscript, plenty of motive if she knew about the mistress, especially if there was any question of Quine leaving her and the daughter for Kent. Only her word for it that “I know where you’re going” meant this writer’s retreat and not the house on Talgarth Road.’

‘Sounds convincing when you put it like that,’ Strike said.

‘But you don’t think so.’

‘She’s my client,’ said Strike. ‘I’m being paid to think of alternatives.’

‘Has she told you where she used to work?’ asked Anstis, with the air of a man about to play his trump card. ‘Back in Hay-on-Wye, before they were married?’

‘Go on,’ said Strike, not without a degree of apprehension.

‘In her uncle’s butcher’s shop,’ said Anstis.

Outside the study door Strike heard Timothy Cormoran Anstis thudding down the stairs again, screaming his head off at some fresh disappointment. For the first time in their unsatisfactory acquaintance, Strike felt a real empathy for the boy.

24

All well bred persons lie – Besides, you are a woman; you must never speak what you think…

William Congreve, Love for Love

Strike’s dreams that night, fuelled by a day’s consumption of Doom Bar, by talk of blood, acid and blowflies, were strange and ugly.

Charlotte was getting married and he, Strike, was running to an eerie Gothic cathedral, running on two whole, functioning legs, because he knew that she had just given birth to his child and he needed to see it, to save it. There she was, in the vast, dark empty space, alone at the altar, struggling into a blood red gown, and somewhere out of sight, perhaps in a cold vestry, lay his baby, naked, helpless and abandoned.

‘Where is it?’ he asked.

‘You’re not seeing it. You didn’t want it. Anyway, there’s something wrong with it,’ she said.

He was afraid of what he would see if he went to find the baby. Her bridegroom was nowhere to be seen but she was ready for the wedding, in a thick scarlet veil.

‘Leave it, it’s horrible,’ she said coldly, pushing past him, walking alone away from the altar, back up the aisle towards the distant doorway. ‘You’d only touch it,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘I don’t want you touching it. You’ll see it eventually. It’ll have to be announced,’ she added in a vanishing voice, as she became a sliver of scarlet dancing in the light of the open doors, ‘in the papers…’

He was suddenly awake in the morning gloom, his mouth dry and his knee throbbing ominously in spite of a night’s rest.

Winter had slid in the night like a glacier over London. A hard frost had iced the outside of his attic window and the temperature inside his rooms, with their ill-fitting windows and doors and the total lack of insulation under the roof, had plummeted.

Strike got up and reached for a sweater lying on the end of his bed. When he came to fix on his prosthesis, he found that his knee was exceptionally swollen after the journey to and from Greenwich. The shower water took longer than usual to heat up; he cranked up the thermostat, fearing burst pipes and frozen gutters, sub-zero living quarters and an expensive plumber. After drying himself off, he unearthed his old sports bandages from the box on the landing to strap up his knee.

He knew, now, as clearly as though he had spent the night puzzling it out, how Helly Anstis knew Charlotte’s wedding plans. He had been stupid not to think of it before. His subconscious had known.

Once clean, dressed and breakfasted he headed downstairs. Glancing out of the window behind his desk, he noted that the knifelike cold was keeping away the little cluster of journalists who had waited in vain for his return the previous day. Sleet pattered on the windows as he moved back to the outer office and Robin’s computer. Here, in the search engine, he typed: charlotte campbell hon jago ross wedding.

Pitiless and prompt came the results.

Tatler, December 2010: Cover girl Charlotte Campbell on her wedding to the future Viscount of Croy…

‘Tatler,’ said Strike aloud in the office.

He only knew of the magazine’s existence because its society pages were full of Charlotte’s friends. She had bought it, sometimes, to read ostentatiously in front of him, commenting on men she had once slept with, or whose stately homes she had partied in.

And now she was the Christmas cover girl.

Even strapped up, his knee complained at having to support him down the metal stairs and out into the sleet. There was an early morning queue at the counter of the newsagents. Calmly he scanned the shelves of magazines: soap stars on the cheap ones and film stars on the expensive; December issues almost sold out, even though they were still in November. Emma Watson in white on the cover of Vogue (‘The Super Star Issue’), Rihanna in pink on Marie Claire (‘The Glamour Issue’) and on the cover of Tatler…

Pale, perfect skin, black hair blown away from high cheekbones and wide hazel-green eyes, flecked like a russet apple. Two huge diamonds dangling from her ears and a third on the hand lying lightly against her face. A dull, blunt hammer blow to the heart, absorbed without the slightest external sign. He took the magazine, the last on the shelf, paid for it and returned to Denmark Street.

It was twenty to nine. He shut himself in his office, sat down at his desk and laid the magazine down in front of him.

IN–CROY–ABLE! Former Wild Child turned future Viscountess, Charlotte Campbell.

The strapline ran across Charlotte’s swanlike neck.

It was the first time he had looked at her since she had clawed his face in this very office and run from him, straight into the arms of the Honourable Jago Ross. He supposed that they must airbrush all their pictures. Her skin could not be this flawless, the whites of her eyes this pure, but they had not exaggerated anything else, not the exquisite bone structure, nor (he was sure) the size of the diamond on her finger.

Slowly he turned to the contents page and then to the article within. A double-page picture of Charlotte, very thin in a glittering silver floor-length dress, standing in the middle of a long gallery lined with tapestries; beside her, leaning on a card table and looking like a dissolute arctic fox, was Jago Ross. More photographs over the page: Charlotte sitting on an ancient four-poster, laughing with her head thrown back, the white column of her neck rising from a sheer cream blouse; Charlotte and Jago in jeans and wellington boots, walking hand in hand over the parkland in front of their future home with two Jack Russells at their heels; Charlotte windswept on the castle keep, looking over a shoulder draped in the Viscount’s tartan.

Doubtless Helly Anstis had considered it four pounds ten well spent.

On 4 December this year, the seventeenth-century chapel at the Castle of Croy (NEVER ‘Croy Castle’ – it annoys the family) will be dusted off for its first wedding in over a century. Charlotte Campbell, breathtakingly beautiful daughter of 1960s It Girl Tula Clermont and academic and broadcaster Anthony Campbell, will marry the Hon Jago Ross, heir to the castle and to his father’s titles, principal of which is Viscount of Croy.

The future Viscountess is a not altogether uncontroversial addition to the Rosses of Croy, but Jago laughs at the idea that anyone in his family could be less than delighted to welcome the former wild child into his old and rather grand Scottish family.

‘Actually, my mother always hoped we’d marry,’ he says. ‘We were boyfriend and girlfriend at Oxford but I suppose we were just too young… found each other again in London… both just out of relationships…’

Were you? thought Strike. Were you both just out of relationships? Or were you fucking her at the same time I was, so that she didn’t know which of us had fathered the baby she was worried she might be carrying? Changing the dates to cover every eventuality, keeping her options open…

… made headlines in her youth when she went missing from Bedales for seven days, causing a national search… admitted to rehab at the age of 25…

‘Old news, move on, nothing to see,’ says Charlotte brightly. ‘Look, I had a lot of fun in my youth, but it’s time to settle down and honestly, I can’t wait.’

Fun, was it? Strike asked her stunning picture. Fun, standing on that roof and threatening to jump? Fun, calling me from that psychiatric hospital and begging me to get you out?

Ross, fresh from a very messy divorce that has kept the gossip columns busy… ‘I wish we could have settled it without the lawyers,’ he sighs… ‘I can’t wait to be a step-mummy!’ trills Charlotte…

(‘If I have to spend one more evening with the Anstises’ bratty kids, Corm, I swear to God I’ll brain one of them.’ And, in Lucy’s suburban back garden, watching Strike’s nephews playing football, ‘Why are these children such shits?’ The expression on Lucy’s round face when she overheard it…)

His own name, leaping off the page.

… including a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son Cormoran Strike, who made headlines last year…

… a surprising fling with Jonny Rokeby’s eldest son…

… Jonny Rokeby’s eldest…

He closed the magazine with a sudden, reflexive movement and slid it into his bin.

Sixteen years, on and off. Sixteen years of the torture, the madness and occasional ecstasy. And then – after all those times she had left him, throwing herself into the arms of other men as other women cast themselves onto railway tracks – he had walked out. In doing so, he had crossed an unforgivable Rubicon, for it had always been understood that he should stand rock-like, to be left and returned to, never flinching, never giving up. But on that night when he had confronted her with the tangle of lies she had told about the baby in her belly and she had become hysterical and furious, the mountain had moved at last: out of the door, with an ashtray flung after it.

His black eye had barely healed when she had announced her engagement to Ross. Three weeks it had taken her, because she knew only one way to respond to pain: to wound the transgressor as deeply as possible, with no thought for the consequences to herself. And he knew in his bones, no matter how arr

ogant his friends might tell him he was being, that the Tatler pictures, the dismissal of their relationship in the terms that would hurt him most (he could hear her spelling it out for the society mag: ‘he’s Jonny Rokeby’s son’); the Castle of Fucking Croy… all of it, all of it, was done with a view to hurting him, wanting him to watch and to see, to regret and to pity. She had known what Ross was; she had told Strike about the poorly disguised alcoholism and violence, passed through the blue-blooded network of gossip that had kept her informed through the years. She had laughed about her lucky escape. Laughed.

Self-immolation in a ball gown. Watch me burn, Bluey. The wedding was in ten days’ time and if he had ever been sure of anything in his life, it was that if he called Charlotte right now and said ‘Run away with me,’ even after their filthy scenes, the hateful things she had called him, the lies and the mess and the several tons of baggage under which their relationship had finally splintered, she would say yes. Running away was her life’s blood and he had been her favourite destination, freedom and safety combined; she had said it to him over and over again after fights that would have killed them both if emotional wounds could bleed: ‘I need you. You’re my everything, you know that. You’re the only place I’ve ever felt safe, Bluey…’

He heard the glass door on to the landing open and close, the familiar sounds of Robin arriving at work, removing her coat, filling the kettle.

Work had always been his salvation. Charlotte had hated the way he could switch, from crazy, violent scenes, from her tears and her pleas and her threats, to immerse himself totally in a case. She had never managed to stop him putting on his uniform, never prevented his return to work, never succeeded in forcing him away from an investigation. She deplored his focus, his allegiance to the army, his ability to shut her out, seeing it as a betrayal, as abandonment.