“You’ve got to thign out,” said Luca, holding out a pen to her.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Robin, with a breathless giggle. “I told you—it’s my first time here.”

She bent over the visitors’ book. Directly below the signature she’d written on entering the building was Luca’s.

LUCA RICCI

In the space left for “Comments” he’d written,

BROUGHT HIM SOME CHOCOLATES FOR HIS BIRTHDAY ON THURSDAY, PLEASE GIVE HIM THEM ON THE MORNING OF THE 25TH JULY.

Robin scrawled the time beside her signature, then turned back to the door. He was holding it open for her.

“Fanks very much,” she said breathlessly, sidling past him into the fresh air.

“Give you a lift anywhere?” Luca asked her, pausing at the top of the steps to the street. “My car’th round the corner. Athton Martin.”

“Oh, no, fanks very much, though,” said Robin. “I’m meeting my boyfriend.”

“Be good, then,” said Luca Ricci. “And if you can’t be good, be thafe, hahaha.”

“Yes,” said Robin, a little wildly. “Oh, and enjoy Florida!”

He raised a hand to her and began to walk away, whistling “Begin the Beguine.” Light-headed with relief, Robin walked off in the opposite direction. It took the utmost restraint to stop herself breaking into a run.

Once she’d reached the square, she slid behind the lilac bush and watched the front of the nursing home for a full half an hour. Once she was certain that Luca Ricci had genuinely left, she doubled back.

62

Oftimes it haps, that sorrowes of the mynd

Find remedie vnsought, which seeking cannot fynd.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

The row, for which Robin was braced, was one of the worst she and Strike had ever had. His fury that she’d approached Mucky Ricci, after his clear warnings and instructions not to, remained unabated even after a solid hour’s argument in the office that evening, which culminated in Robin seizing her bag and walking out while Strike was mid-sentence, leaving him facing the vibrating glass door, wishing it had shattered, so he could bill her.

A night’s sleep only slightly mitigated Strike’s anger. Yes, there were major differences between Robin’s actions this time, and those that had seen him sack her three years previously: she hadn’t, for instance, spooked a suspect into hiding. Nor was there any indication, at least in the first twenty-four hours following her visit, that either the Ricci family or the nursing home suspected “Vanessa Jones” of being anyone other than she’d claimed to be. Above all (but this fact rankled, rather than soothed), Robin was now a partner in the firm, rather than a lowly subcontractor. For the first time, Strike was brought up against the hard fact that if they ever parted ways, a legal and financial tangle would engulf him. It would, in fact, be akin to a divorce.

He didn’t want to split from Robin, but his newly awakened awareness that he’d made it very difficult to do so increased his ire. The atmosphere between them remained strained for a fortnight after her visit to St. Peter’s until, on the first morning in August, Robin received a terse text from Strike asking her to abandon her fresh attempt to befriend Shifty’s PA, and come back to the office.

When she entered the inner room, she found Strike sitting at the partners’ desk, with bits and pieces of the Bamborough police file laid out in front of him. He glanced up at her, noted that her eye and hair color were her own, then said brusquely,

“The Shifty clients have just rung up. They’ve terminated the job, for lack of results.”

“Oh no,” said Robin, sinking into the chair opposite him. “I’m sorry, I really tried with Shifty’s PA—”

“And Anna and Kim want to talk to us. I’ve set up a conference call at four o’clock.”

“They aren’t—?”

“Winding things up?” said Strike unemotionally. “Probably. Apparently they’ve had a spur-of-the-moment invitation from a friend to join them on holiday in Tuscany. They want to talk to us before they go, because they’ll still be away on the fifteenth.”

There was a long silence. Strike didn’t appear to have anything else to say, but resumed his perusal of various bits of the case file.

“Cormoran,” said Robin.

“What?”

“Can we please talk about St. Peter’s?”

“I’ve said everything I’ve got to say,” said Strike, picking up Ruby Elliot’s statement about the two women struggling together in the rain, and pretending to read it again.

“I don’t mean about me going there. I’ve already said—”

“You said you wouldn’t approach Ricci—”

“I ‘agreed’ not to go near Ricci,” said Robin, sketching quotation marks in the air, “just like you ‘agreed’ with Gregory Talbot not to tell the police where you got that roll of film.” Hyperaware of Pat typing away in the outer office, Robin was speaking quietly. “I didn’t set out to defy you; I left him up to you, remember? But it needed doing, and you couldn’t. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a damn sight better than you are at disguising my appearance.”

“That’s not in question,” said Strike, throwing aside Ruby Elliot’s statement and picking up Gloria’s description of Theo, instead. “What bugs me, as you bloody well know, is that you didn’t tell me you were going to—”

“D’you ring me every three seconds and tell me what you’re going to do next? You’re happy enough for me to work on my own initiative when it suits—”

“Luca Ricci’s done time for putting electrodes on people’s genitals, Robin!” said Strike, dropping the pretense that the description of Theo had his attention.

“How many times are we going to go over this? D’you think I was pleased when he walked in the room? I’d never have gone in there if I’d known he was about to make a surprise appearance! The fact remains—”

“—it’s not a fact—”

“—if I hadn’t—”

“—this theory—”

“It isn’t a bloody theory, Strike, it’s reality, and you’re just being pig-headed about it.” Robin pulled her mobile out of her back pocket and brought up the photo she’d taken on her second visit to the nursing home, which had lasted barely two minutes, and involved her taking a quick, unwitnessed photograph of Luca Ricci’s handwriting in the visitors’ book.

“Give me the anonymous note,” she ordered Strike, holding out her hand for the piece of crumpled blue paper they’d taken away from their meeting with the Bayliss sisters. “There.”

She set them side by side, facing Strike. To Robin, the similarities were undeniable: the same odd mixture of capital and lower-case letters, all distinct and separate, but with odd and unnecessary little flourishes, rather like the incongruous lisp of a tall, dangerous-looking man whose skin was as pitted as a partly peeled orange.

“You can’t prove it’s the same writing from a photograph,” said Strike. He knew he was being ungracious, but his anger wasn’t yet fully spent. “Expert analysis relies on pen pressure, apart from anything else.”

“OK, fine,” said Robin, who now had a hard, angry lump in her throat. She got up and walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. Through the gap, Strike heard her talking to Pat, followed by the tinkle of mugs. Annoyed though he was, he still hoped she was going to get him a cup of tea, as well.

Frowning slightly, he pulled Robin’s mobile and the anonymous note toward him and looked again from one to the other. She was right, and he’d known, though not acknowledged it, from the moment she’d shown him the picture on her phone, on her return from St. Peter’s. Though he hadn’t told Robin so, Strike had forwarded a picture of both the anonymous note and Luca Ricci’s visitors’ book message to an expert handwriting analyst he’d reached through his police contacts. The woman had expressed caution about reaching a hard and fast conclusion without having the original samples in front of her, but said that, on the evidence, she was “seventy to eighty percent certain” that both had been written by the same person.

“Does handwriting remain that consistent, forty years apart?” Strike asked.

“Not always,” the expert replied. “You expect changes, typically. Mostly, people’s handwriting deteriorates with age because of physical factors. Mood can have an influence, too. My research tends to show that handwriting alters least in people who write infrequently, compared with those who write a lot. Occasional writers seem to stick with the style they adopted early, possibly in school. In the case of these two samples, there are certainly distinctive features that seem to have hung around from youth.”

“I think it’s fair to say this guy doesn’t write a lot in his line of work,” said Strike.