Robin ignored this comment, but as she hung up her jacket, she found herself wishing she hadn’t worn the dress. She greatly resented Morris making her feel self-conscious, but it would have been easier just to have worn jeans as usual.

“Morris has caught Mr. Smith at it, with the nanny,” said Strike.

“That was quick!” said Robin, trying to be generous, wishing Morris hadn’t been the one to do it.

“Red-handed, ten past one this morning,” said Morris, passing Robin a night vision digital camera. “Hubby was pretending to be out with the boys. Nanny always has a night off on Tuesdays. Silly fuckers said goodbye on the doorstep. Rookie error.”

Robin scrolled slowly through the pictures. The voluptuous nanny who so resembled Strike’s ex Lorelei was standing in the doorway of a terraced house, locked in the arms of Mrs. Smith’s husband. Morris had captured not only the clinch, but the street name and door number.

“Where’s this place?” Robin asked, flicking past pictures of the clinch.

“Shoreditch. Nanny’s best mate rents it,” said Morris. “Always useful to have a friend who’ll let you use their place for a sneaky shag, eh? I’ve got her name and details, too, so she’s about to get dragged into it all, as well.”

Morris stretched luxuriously on the sofa, arms over his head, and said through a yawn,

“Not often you get the chance to make three women miserable at once, is it?”

“Not to mention the husband,” said Robin, looking at the handsome profile of the commodity broker’s husband, silhouetted against a streetlamp as he made his way back to the family car.

“Well, yeah,” said Morris, holding his stretch, “him too.”

His T-shirt had ridden up, exposing an expanse of toned abdomen, a fact of which Robin thought he was probably well aware.

“Don’t fancy a breakfast meeting, do you?” Strike asked Robin. He’d just opened the biscuit tin and found it empty. “We’re overdue a Bamborough catch-up. And I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Great,” said Robin, immediately taking down her jacket again.

“You never take me out for breakfast,” Morris told Strike, getting up off the sofa. Ignoring this comment, Strike said,

“Good going on Smith, Morris. I’ll let the wife know later. See you tomorrow.”

“Terrible, isn’t it,” said Robin, as she and Strike walked back out of the black street door onto the cool of Denmark Street, where sunlight still hadn’t penetrated, “this missing plane?”

Eleven days previously, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 had taken off from Kuala Lumpur and disappeared without trace. More than two hundred people were missing. Competing theories about what had happened to the plane had dominated the news for the last week: hijack, crew sabotage and mechanical failure among them. Robin had been reading about it on the way into work. All those relatives, waiting for news. It must, surely, come soon? An aircraft holding nearly two hundred and fifty people wasn’t as easily lost as a single woman, melting away into the Clerkenwell rain.

“Nightmare for the families,” agreed Strike, as they headed out into the sun on Charing Cross Road. He paused, looking up and down the road. “I don’t want to go to Starbucks.”

So they walked to Bar Italia in Frith Street, which lay opposite Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, five minutes from the office. The small metal tables and chairs outside on the pavement were all unoccupied. In spite of its sunny promise, the March morning air still carried a chill. Every high stool at the counter inside the café bore a customer gulping down coffee before starting their working day, while reading news off their phones or else examining the shelves of produce reflected in the mirror that faced them.

“You going to be warm enough if we sit out here?” asked Strike doubtfully, looking from Robin’s dress to the counter inside. She was starting to really wish she’d worn her jeans.

“I’ll be fine,” said Robin. “And I only want a cappuccino, I already ate.”

While Strike was buying food and drink, Robin sat down on the cold metal chair, drew her jacket more tightly around her and opened her bag, with the intention of taking out Talbot’s leather notebook, but after a moment’s hesitation, she changed her mind and left it where it was. She didn’t want Strike to think that she’d been concentrating on Talbot’s astrological musings over the last few days, even though she had, in fact, spent many hours poring over the book.

“Cappuccino,” said Strike, returning to her and setting the coffee in front of her. He’d bought himself a double espresso and a mozzarella and salami roll. Sitting down next to her, he said,

“How come mediation was canceled?”

Pleased he’d remembered, Robin said:

“Matthew claims something urgent came up.”

“Believe him?”

“No. I think it’s more mind games. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but at least it would’ve been over. So,” she said, not wanting to talk about Matthew, “have you got anything new on Bamborough?”

“Not much,” said Strike, who’d been working flat out on other cases since his return from Cornwall. “We’ve got forensics back on that blood smear I found in the book in the Athorns’ flat.”

“And?”

“Type O positive.”

“And did you call Roy to find out…”

“Yeah. Margot was A positive.”

“Oh,” said Robin.

“My hopes weren’t high,” said Strike, with a shrug. “It looked like a smear from a paper cut, if anything.

“I’ve found Mucky Ricci, though. He’s in a private nursing home called St. Peter’s, in Islington. I had to do a fair bit of impersonation on the phone to get confirmation.”

“Great. D’you want me to—?”

“No. I told you, Shanker issued stern warnings about upsetting the old bastard, in case his sons got wind of it.”

“And you feel, of the two of us, I’m the one who upsets people, do you?”

Strike smirked slightly while chewing his roll.

“There’s no point rattling Luca Ricci’s cage unless we have to. Shanker told me Mucky was gaga, which I hoped meant he was a bit less sharp than he used to be. Might even have worked in our favor. Unfortunately, from what I managed to wheedle out of the nurse, he doesn’t talk any more.”

“Not at all?”

“Apparently not. She mentioned it in passing. I tried to find out whether that’s because he’s depressed, or had a stroke, or whether he’s demented, in which case questioning him is obviously pointless, but she didn’t say.

“I went to check out the home. I was hoping for some big institu-tional place where you might slip in and out unnoticed, but it’s more like a B&B. They’ve only got eighteen residents. I’d say the chances of getting in there undetected or passing yourself off as a distant cousin are close to zero.”

Irrationally, now that Ricci seemed unreachable, Robin, who hadn’t been more interested in him than in any of the other suspects, immediately felt as though something crucial to the investigation had been lost.

“I’m not saying I won’t take a bash at him, eventually,” said Strike. “But right now, the possible gains don’t justify making a bunch of professional gangsters angry at us. On the other hand, if we’ve got nothing else come August, I might have to see whether I can get a word or two out of Ricci.”

From his tone, Robin guessed that Strike, too, was well aware that more than half their allotted year on the Bamborough case had already elapsed.

“I’ve also,” he continued, “made contact with Margot’s biographer, C. B. Oakden, who’s playing hard to get. He seems to think he’s far more important to the investigation than I do.”

“Is he after money?”

“I’d say he’s after anything he can get,” said Strike. “He seemed as interested in interviewing me as letting me interview him.”

“Maybe,” suggested Robin, “he’s thinking of writing a book about you, like the one he did on Margot?”

Strike didn’t smile.

“He comes across as equal parts wily and stupid. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that I must know a lot about his dodgy past, given that I managed to track him down after multiple name changes. But I can see how he conned all those old women. He puts up a good show over the phone of knowing and remembering everyone around Margot. There was a real fluency to it: ‘Yes, Dr. Gupta, lovely man,’ ‘Oh yes, Irene, bit of a handful.’ It’s convincing until you remember he was fourteen when Margot disappeared, and probably met them all a couple of times, tops.

“But he wouldn’t tell me anything about Brenner, which is who I’m really interested in. ‘I’ll need to think about that,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I want to go into that.’ I’ve called him twice so far. Both times he tried to divert the conversation back onto me, I dragged it back to Brenner, and he cut the call short, pretending he had something urgent to take care of. Both times, he promised to phone me back but didn’t.”

“You don’t think he’s recording the calls, do you?” asked Robin. “Trying to get stuff about you he can sell to the papers?”

“It occurred to me,” Strike admitted, tipping sugar into his coffee.