Betty’s milky eyes were expressionless. Her thin chest labored to get enough oxygen into her lungs. Strike had just concluded that she definitely wasn’t going to talk, when she opened her mouth.

“Local girl I knew,” she said, “friend o’ mine… she met Mucky… ’e come cruisin’… our corner…’e says to Jen…‘You’re better’n this… workin’ the street… body like yours… I could get you… five times what… you’re earnin’ ’ere…’ so off Jen goes,” said Betty, “up West… Soho… strippin’ for punters… sex wiv ’is mates…”

“I met ’er… coupla years later… visitin’ ’er mum… and she tole me a story.

“Girl at their club… gorgeous girl, Jen said… got raped… knifepoint. Cut…” said Betty Fuller, indicating her own sagging torso, “right down the ribs… by a mate… of Ricci’s…

“Some people,” said the old woman, “fink a hooker… being raped… it just means she never… got paid…’spect your Miss Stick-Up-’Er-Arse,” said Betty, glancing at the window, “finks that… but it ain’t that…

“This girl… angry… wants revenge… get back… at Ricci… so the silly bitch… turns police informer…

“And Mucky found out,” wheezed Betty Fuller, “and ’e filmed it… as they killed ’er. My mate Jen was told… by someone… what ’ad seen… the film… Ricci kept it… in the safe… show people… if they needed… scaring…

“Jen’s dead now,” said Betty Fuller. “Overdosed… firty-odd years ago… fort she’d be better… up West… and ’ere’s me… workin’ the streets… still alive.

“I ain’t got nuffing… to say… about no notes… it warn’t Marcus… that’s all… That’s my meals on wheels,” said Betty, her head turning, and Strike saw a man heading toward the outside door, with a pile of foil trays in his arms.

“I’m done,” Betty said, who seemed suddenly tired and cross. “You can turn… telly back on… and move… that table over… pass me that knife and fork… in the loo…”

She’d rinsed them off in the bathroom sink, but they were still dirty. Strike washed them again before taking them to her. After arranging the table in front of her armchair, and turning The Only Way is Essex back on, he opened the door to the meals-on-wheels man, who was gray-haired and cheery.

“Oh hello,” said the newcomer in a loud voice. “This your son, Betty?”

“Is he fuck,” wheezed Betty Fuller. “Whatchew got?”

“Chicken casserole and jelly and custard, love…”

“Thanks very much for talking to me, Mrs. Fuller,” said Strike, but Betty’s stock of goodwill had plainly been exhausted, and she was now far more interested in her food.

Robin was leaning against a nearby wall, reading something off her phone, when Strike emerged from the building.

“I thought it was best to clear out,” she said, in a flat voice. “How did it go?”

“She won’t talk about the notes,” said Strike, as the pair of them headed back down Sans Walk, “and if you ask me why, I’d say it’s because she thinks Mucky Ricci wrote them. I’ve found out a bit more about that girl in the snuff movie.”

“You’re joking?” said Robin, looking worried.

“Apparently she was a police informer in one of Ricci’s—”

Robin gasped.

“Kara Wolfson!”

“What?”

“Kara Wolfson. One of the women they thought Creed might have killed. Kara worked at a nightclub in Soho—the owners put it about after she disappeared that she’d been a police informer!”

“How did you know that?” asked Strike, taken aback. He couldn’t remember this information from The Demon of Paradise Park.

Robin suddenly remembered that she’d heard this from Brian Tucker, back at the Star Café. She hadn’t yet heard back from the Ministry of Justice about the possibility of interviewing Creed, and as Strike still had no inkling what she was up to, she said, “Think I read it online…”

But with a new heaviness pressing on her heart, Robin remembered that Kara’s only remaining close relative, the brother she’d raised, had drunk himself to death. Hutchins had said the police weren’t able to do anything about that film. Kara Wolfson’s body might be anywhere. Some stories didn’t have neat endings: there was nowhere to lay flowers for Kara Wolfson, unless it was on the corner near the strip joint where she’d last been seen.

Fighting the depression now threatening to overwhelm her, Robin raised her phone to show Strike what she’d been looking up, and said in a determinedly matter-of-fact voice, “I was just reading about somnophilia, otherwise known as sleeping princess syndrome.”

“Which, I take it—”

“Was Brenner’s kink,” said Robin, and reading off her phone, she said, “‘Somnophilia is a paraphilia in which the individual is sexually aroused by someone non-responsive… some psychologists have linked somnophilia with necrophilia.’ Cormoran… you know how he had barbiturates stocked up in his office?”

“Yeah,” said Strike slowly, as they walked back toward his car. “Well, this is going to give us something to talk to Dorothy’s son about, isn’t it? I wonder whether she was game for playing dead? Or whether she found herself sleeping a long time, after Brenner had been round for lunch?”

Robin gave a small shudder.

“I know,” Strike continued, as he lit up, “I said he’d be a last resort, but we’ve only got three months left. I’m starting to think I’m going to have to pay Mucky Ricci a visit.”

57

But all his mind is set on mucky pelfe,

To hoord vp heapes of euill gotten masse,

For which he others wrongs, and wreckes himself.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Adding daytime surveillance of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Nursing Home to the rota meant that as May progressed, the agency was again struggling to cover all open cases. Strike wanted to know how many visitors were going in and out, and at what times, so that he might ascertain when he’d have the best chance of entering the building without running into one of the old gangster’s relatives.

The nursing home lay in a quiet Georgian street on the very edge of Clerkenwell, in a quiet, leafy enclave where dun-colored brick houses sported neo-classical pediments and glossy black front doors. A dark wood plaque on the exterior wall of the nursing home was embellished with a cross, and a biblical quotation, in gold:

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

Peter 1:18–19

“Nice sentiment,” as Strike commented to Robin, on one of their handovers, “but nobody’s getting in there without a good bit of cash.”

The private nursing home was small and clearly expensive. The staff, all of whom the agency quickly grew to know by sight, wore dark blue scrubs and hailed mostly from abroad. There was a black male nurse who sounded as though he’d come from Trinidad, and two blondes who talked Polish to each other every morning as they passed whichever agency member happened to be loitering in the area at the time, feigning a call on their mobile, reading a newspaper or appearing to wait, slightly impatiently, for a friend who never showed up.

A podiatrist and a hairdresser went regularly in and out of the home, but after two weeks’ daytime surveillance, the agency tentatively concluded that Ricci only received visits on Sundays, when his two sons appeared, wearing the resigned looks of people for whom this was an unwelcome chore. It was easy to identify which brother was which from pictures that had appeared in the press. Luca looked, in Barclay’s phrase, “like a piano fell oan his heid,” having a bald, flat, noticeably scarred skull. Marco was smaller, slighter and hairier, but gave off an air of barely contained violence, slamming his hand repeatedly on the nursing home’s doorbell if the door wasn’t opened immediately, and slapping a grandson around the back of the head for dropping a chocolate bar on the pavement. Both the brothers’ wives had a hard-boiled look about them, and none of the family had the good looks Robin associated with Italians. The great-grandfather sitting mutely behind the doors of the nursing home might have been a true Latin, but his descendants were disappointingly pallid and Saxon in appearance, right down to the little ginger-haired boy who dropped his chocolate.