- Brenner's sister told police the he had arrived home "at the usual time" but we are never told what time that was. Given it was a Friday night, Brenner's "usual" time home would be after his weekly meeting with Betty Fuller.
- Strike puts his finger on the right answer for the wrong reasons when he speculates that Margot might have been drugged, but acknowledges that it would take many pills to do the job. We will later learn that Margaret was drugged, but via injected doughnut, not pills.
- The anecdote about Uncle Ted and the "Bennies" of the Falkland Islands war always seemed weirdly out of place. It's not a particularly funny joke, and adds nothing to the story, so the only reason I can see for it to be included is to establish that Uncle Ted was in the Falklands. Assuming he was there at the time of the combat, this would be April-June 1982. This is about a year before Charlie Bristow's death on Easter 1983.* Ted must have been back by late 1983, which is the approximate time he showed up in Brixton to threaten Shumba with a bloody nose and take the kids back to St. Mawes-- the only time we have heard of Ted and Joan insisting on taking Leda's kids, rather than waiting for her to dump them. I am still wondering if, as Ted's dementia progresses, we will learn more about this period in Strike's childhood, perhaps something related to how Ted knew the children were in Brixton and to the reason Joan wanted Strike to reconcile with Rokeby.
- I think we are supposed to see this deployment as part of Ted's army career, but the timing seems odd. Ted, we are told, is 79 in 2015, giving him a birthdate of 1936 (about 16 years older than Leda, b. 1952) and making him around 46 in 1982. Yet, later in this same book, Ted's military career is described as "that strange interlude where Ted, in revolt against his own father, had disappeared for several years into the military police." The mid-forties is an odd age to either join the service or rebel against your father, especially when it has been assumed, given that Strike does not seem to remember his Nancarrow grandparents, that they had died before Strike and Lucy began residing intermittently in St. Mawes, circa 1978. So what is Ted doing nipping off to the Falklands in 1982? Was he in the Red Cap version of the reserves?
- I think there are still many interesting Nancarrow family secrets to be uncovered when the St. Mawes house is cleared out for sale.
- Running in parallel with the them of parenting choices in this book is the theme of what happens to people, with and without children, in their old age. We have seen an ideal situation with the Gupta's: growing old together, with a comfortable income and children and grandchildren to enjoy. We see another vignette here of the 80-year-old lady celebrating her birthday, presumably with her family. The scene males Strike wonder "where he'd be if he lived to be eighty, and who'd be there with him." We'll see much less happy outcomes later with Mucky Ricci and Betty Fuller.
