Summary

Chapter 36 depicts Strike's lunch with a sadly deteriorating Jerry Waldegrave, the man who has no enemies. Jerry can hardly wait until the wine waiter serves them so he can relax, but he soon passes over the line into drunkenness. His wife uses their daughter's phone to reach him and he talks to her using barely coherent foulmouthed language.

On his walk home from lunch with Jerry, Strike turns his head to look into a pub and recognizes out of the corner of his eye his now familiar stalker behind him. Without changing his pace or seeming to notice, he walks down an alley close to his office and the woman behind him makes her move. He knocks the Stanley knife out of her hands with his cane and after a struggle captures her in a headlock, then drags her up the stairs to...