Whitechapel is an area of East End London that is infamous for being the territory of Jack the Ripper. For many years both before and after the Whitechapel Murders, the area had a very bad reputation for crime and poverty.

In Chapter 10 of Career of Evil Strike finds himself getting off at Whitechapel station, with a view of the Gherkin building, which had not been there twenty years previously, when Strike had lived their briefly with his mother, Leda, and stepfather, Jeff Whittaker.

Before Strike could stop himself getting back on the Tube, he starts walking, “heading for the one place in London he had avoided for seventeen years: the building where his mother had died.”

Memories come flooding back to Strike as he walks toward Fulbourne Street. “Of course: he had walked over this metal bridge over the railway line during his A-Level year.”

“He remembered the name, Castlemain Street, too… surely one of his fellow A-Level students, a girl with a pronounced lisp, had lived there….”

When he reaches Fulbourne Street, “the buildings were shabby as he remembered them, white plaster peeling away from the frontages….”

He manages to identify the door to what had once been the squat where he had lived with his mother, next to a shop selling cheap clothing. “The brass letter box brought back a strange stab of memory. It had rattled loudly whenever anyone went in or out of the door.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck….”

Strike then walks out onto Whitechapel Road, where market stalls stand: selling more cheap clothes and gaudy plastic goods.

He remembers a snooker room and the Bell Foundry.

The Nag’s Head is an establishment that was a pub when Strike was a youth living in the area. Currently, it is a lap-dancing club. Strike doesn’t go in, but not because he had any “objection to semiclad women gyrating around him while he enjoyed a pint, but he could not justify the exorbitant price of drinks in such an establishment, not when he had lost two clients in a single day.”

He goes to Starbucks instead, and has a black coffee, until the chair he is using to rest his leg is taken by a young man who ‘reminded Strike of Robin’s fiancé Matthew, with his wavy brown hair and clean-cut good looks’.

Strike ‘sensed a tosser when he saw one’.

Thinking very deeply about his past with Leda and Jeff Whittaker, and in an increasingly foul mood, Strike then walks to Aldgate East station to get the Tube to Nick and Ilsa’s.

You can find all the Whitechapel locations on this map: