It was in this context that her acquaintance with Mike Grundy was forged and tempered.

When she first met him, in 2006, Grundy was a detective constable who had relocated after a sideways move from the uniformed branch. He was hardworking, cheerful, and laid-back. He was not particularly handsome, but he made up for this with a natural charm that made him easy to like. He enjoyed his work enough to be un worried about the necessity of making upward progress through the ranks. Having had no education in science to speak of, he was fascinated by the apparent miracles that the lab workers could perform in regard to fibers and stains, and fascinated by the lab itself, which seemed to him to be a kind of wizard’s cave. He loved to be invited to look down a microscope or to inspect some intricate pattern inscribed in gray gel by patient electrophoresis. And he laughed at Lisa’s jokes.

He didn’t always understand the jokes, but he laughed at them anyway. He soon became her favorite source of puzzles, and she in her turn became his favorite consultant. Without actually intending to, they began to rely on one another, not merely for constructive assistance, but for all the kinds of reassuring strokes that made the routines of everyday life more comfortable. They never dated, and rarely saw one another in any kind of one-to-one situation, but whenever they were in a crowd, they gravitated together to form a distinct subunit.

If Mike Grundy was ever jealous of Morgan Miller—or, for that matter, of Chan and Burdillon—he never gave any sign of it. His sexual interest was routinely attracted by women much prettier than Lisa, and any flirtatiousness in their relationship was understood by both parties to be purely superficial. Once their friendship was solid and comprehensively defined, in fact, Mike frequently used Lisa as a useful source of advice on the management of his love life. Once he had grown used to seeing her as an expert, he tended to assume that her expertise was far less specialized than it was. He had such awesome faith in the linearity of her intelligence that he seemed to expect her to know everything he didn’t, or at least to be able to form a more reliable impression than his own. This did not, however, prevent him from disagreeing with her on various issues of personal importance. One of them was marriage.

“You’re wrong about there being no point in marrying if you don’t intend to have children, Lis,” he told her, while using her as a shoulder to cry on the first time he had made an unsuccessful proposal, in 2012 or 2013. “People aren’t programmed for the solitary life. They’re gregarious, and families—even if they’re just couples—are the real units of society, not individuals.”

“It’s a common argument,” she informed him loftily. “The couple as the atom of community—a hydrogen atom, one presumes. But which partner is to become the proton and which the mere orbiting electron? During courtship, it’s the men who buzz around the honey pot—but once the ceremony’s over, they expect the roles to be reversed, taking it for granted that they’ll be the nuclei around which their wives will helplessly circle. I can see why men like the idea—but I think I’d rather be a free radical.”

Mike had no idea that the metaphor had become disastrously mixed, although none of her university friends would have allowed her to get away with it. Even Ed Burdillon would probably have begun rhapsodizing about the analogies to be drawn between the waywardness of human passion and the counterintuitive wonders of quantum mechanics, but Mike Grundy’s intellect was cut from coarser and more utilitarian cloth.

“That’s sotwentieth century,” he protested. “In fact, it borders on the Victorian. Modern marriage isn’t a matter of domestic slavery. Everybody works nowadays, if they can. Modern marriage is more like a business partnership.”

Lisa did not like to seem trite, and flatly refused to consider the obvious jokes about sleeping partners, shareholdings, and dividends. “Partnership creates unnecessary obligations,” she said instead. “The modern trend is toward freelance consultancy and free-floating labor.”

“Not in our Une of work,” he pointed out. “The consulting detective was a literary conceit, like the lone scientific genius making monsters in the basement.”

“Those are all surprisingly stubborn conceits,” Lisa observed, “but not as stubborn as the love story. You don’t feel obliged to fit your working life into the mold formed by TV cop shows, so why feel obliged to fit your private life into the mold of the kind of paperback pulp you’d be ashamed to display on your bookshelves?”

“Given the number of crimes of passion we have to deal with,” he said, “that’s ridiculously cynical.”

“Given the percentage of crimes of passion that fall into the thoroughly modern categories of road rage, phone rage, and store rage, it would be ridiculous to take any other view.”

“That’s frustration, not passion.”

“All passion is frustration, Mike. Sexual frustration is no different, physiologically, from all the other kinds of stress that eat away at the lining of your gut and pile pressure on your clogged-up arteries. The trick is to deal with it without letting the adrenaline run wild. If you can’t do that, your natural cheerfulness and charm will leach away by slow degrees, until you turn into a middle-aged grouch—just like all the other senior officers.”

It wasn’t intended as a prophecy, but it proved all too true. Mike Grundy’s cheerfulness and natural charm did indeed diminish with every decade that passed and every promotion he gained. The fact that he got stuck at DI didn’t save him, any more than impact with her own glass ceiling saved Lisa from adding the last few twists to her own brand of bitterness. Mike got married too, to his precious Helen of Troy: an unambiguously lovely girl he always considered to be that little bit too good for him.

It was an opinion that the Helen in question inevitably came to share, as Lisa could have prophesied but never did. Where Mike Grundy was concerned, she felt obliged to keep her Cassandra Complex on a tight rein—and she sometimes wished in later years that she had kept it under even slightly tighter control in her relationship with Morgan Miller.

There were times, during the early phases of Mike’s marriage, when Lisa doubted her own judgment of that institution, and she was by no means glad when the passage of time eventually proved her right.

Although they had more than enough in common, Helen Grundy and Lisa never got on well after the marriage. It would have been an exaggeration to say that Helen ever hated Lisa, but that probably had more to do with a policy decision to consider her too contemptible to be worthy of hatred than any lack of passion. In hydrogen-atom terms, Helen had no intention of being switched from a nuclear to an orbital role by any mere ritual. Having given herself in marriage, she expected to become and remain the center of her husband’s existence, and she was intolerant of any distraction beyond the demands of duty. From the very beginning, Lisa could see that Helen was far more career-minded than Mike, and that his lack of impetus in that regard would develop into a nasty bone of contention, but she never told Mike. At least, not in so many words. He would not have believed her, and he would have resented the prediction.

He would have resented it even more when it eventually came true, but the fact that Lisa had never actually spelled it out enabled her to remain sympathetic and steadfast when disaster finally struck.

Helen Cornwell, as she was before her marriage, was a hospital social worker at the Royal United, which had recently been combined with the nearby Manor Hospital into one of the country’s largest healthcare institutions—exactly the kind of institution that a burgeoning cityplex needed. Her duties ranged from abortion counseling to surgical aftercare, and she was constantly under pressure to extend herself even further; she worked hours that were just as long and often as unsociable as a detective’s, and had found that as injurious to her personal relationships as did any policeman.