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“Do you know who she was speaking to? On the phone?”

“No.” But then, a little slyly, she said, “Woman.”

“A woman? How do you know?”

“Shouting, shouting on telephone. I can hear woman.”

“It was a row? An argument? They were yelling at each other? Loud, yeah?”

Strike could hear himself lapsing into the absurd, overdeliberate language of the linguistically challenged Englishman. Lechsinka nodded again as she pulled open drawers in search of the place for the belt, the only item now remaining in her arms. When at last she had coiled it up and put it away, she straightened and walked away from him, into the bedroom. He followed.

While she made the bed and neatened the bedside tables, he established that she had cleaned Lula Landry’s flat last that day, after the model had left to visit her mother. She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor had she spotted any blue writing paper, whether written on or blank. Guy Somé’s handbags, and the various items for Deeby Macc, had been delivered to the security desk by the time she had finished, and the last thing she had done at work that day had been to take the designer’s gifts up to Lula’s and Macc’s respective flats.

“And you set the alarms again after putting the things in there?”

“I put alarms, yes.”

“Lula’s?”

“Yes.”

“And one nine six six in Flat Two?”

“Yes.”

“Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”

She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime around her wrists) cufflinks.

After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe, so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.

Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining Robin and Wilson in the hall.

As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the alarm to 1966, like the front door.

“I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”

“Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”

“Really young guy. Hair to here.”

Wilson indicated the base of his neck.

“White?”

“Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”

They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry. Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.

The top flat was architecturally different from the other two: smaller and airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown. Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color; but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in silence to the sitting room.

The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.

“Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.

“Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”

Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-and-white prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months previously.

Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.

He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging, half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of their impending demise, she had broken on the road.