‘Alone at last, Detective Riley,’ she says once the solicitor has made a hasty retreat.

I sit down, adopt a less formal stance and lean in towards her from across the table. ‘How long have you known, about my identity I mean?’

She smiles.

‘We didn’t get to finish our dinner together Daniel… shame, the lamb cutlets really were tasty. I think they use a special marinade you know, an ancient Greek recipe…’

I get up from the seat and the scraping sound startles her, momentarily shattering her cocksure façade that’s as brittle as glass.

‘Why, Rebecca. Please, tell me why?’ I place my hands flat on the table. The photographs are still strewn across it, gruesome images of her victims staring up at us. I point a finger at one of them. ‘Just tell me you haven’t done this to that child… tell me he’s safe. You can do that, I know you can,’ I say, imploring her, ‘you can redeem yourself, just tell me where he is and let us go and make sure he’s okay. He’s just a baby, a tiny, helpless baby.’ I hear the emotion in my own voice, unable to disguise my desperation.

I touch the tips of her fingers with my own and she runs her index finger gently over the top of mine for a second before pulling her hand away.

‘I know about your childhood; Dr Magnesson told me about the abuse, what happened to you and your mother – what you did to protect her. Talk to me and perhaps we can do some kind of deal? I can talk to the right people, have you sent to a secure hospital, somewhere they can help you. Do you know what they do to baby killers in prison? Do you? I don’t want that for you, Rebecca. I know you’ve suffered enough.’

I hear the click in her throat as she swallows. Her face seems to be getting paler by the second and suddenly she bends double as though in pain. I ask her if she’s okay.

She sucks in breath through her teeth. ‘Cramps,’ she explains, grimacing, ‘time of the month.’

‘Do you need some pills, some paracetamol? I can arrange for a doctor to come down and administer some.’

She smiles through her obvious discomfort. ‘That’s your trouble isn’t it, Daniel? You care too much. It’s been both your success and downfall in life hasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do care. I care about George. And I care about you too.’ Worse still, I actually mean it.

She sucks in another breath before straightening herself up. ‘Don’t listen to that bitch Magnesson, she knows nothing.’ Her face changes and I catch a fleeting glimpse of the malice within her. ‘Silly cunt thought she had all the answers. But the truth was she never even had the right questions.’

‘And what are the right questions? Jesus, Rebecca… what are?’

‘No hospitals,’ she says quietly after a moment, ‘please.’

‘I can help you,’ I say, ‘let me help you, let me help you help yourself. Tell us where George is.’

She appears to be somewhere else, lost in thought. ‘Do you know what it’s like, being in one of those places as a child? Greene Parks was nothing more than a concentration camp, a torture chamber masquerading as a hospital. It was no better than the home I had come from, just in a different sort of way. They abused me too; studied me, experimented on me like a laboratory rat. I wasn’t treated as a human being, I was a subject.’

‘You were just a child.’

‘I was never a child,’ she hisses, ‘I was sucking my father’s cock at five years old.’

I grimace inwardly. I look at the photographs on the table to remind myself of what she is, what she’s capable of.

‘Is that why you killed Nigel Baxter and Karen Walker, Rebecca? Was it retribution for your own suffering, for what your father did to you?’

She snorts at me like I’m an imbecile who hasn’t got a clue.

‘You mother suffered too didn’t she, years and years of horrendous abuse, is that why you killed her, put her out of her misery, stopped her suffering for good?’

‘Oh Daniel, you really don’t know anything do you?’ She throws me a pitiful glance. ‘I didn’t kill my mother,’ she says, ‘my father did, well as good as. Mother, she tried to take her own life so many times over the years I lost count in the end. Pills, alcohol, slit her wrists twice… She threw herself down the stairs in the end. We had this big house with a large Victorian staircase. First time she just knocked herself out so she tried again and broke her ankle, didn’t make a very good job of it. The third attempt she almost succeeded.’ Rebecca seems to drift off somewhere else for a moment. ‘She broke both her legs, one an open fracture, and her back. She was still breathing when I found her but I knew it was bad, I knew that she would suffer more, that she was already suffering and wanted to die. I figured that it would only be a matter of time before my father actually murdered her, or that she would once again try to kill herself. I just couldn’t bear to watch her in so much agony. The physical pain was torture enough, but it was the emotional and psychological anguish that was the worst to witness. She couldn’t even get killing herself right, she was just so… so defeated by him, by the years of abuse, and so I sat with her for a while, at the bottom of the stairs, watching as she slipped in and out of consciousness, high on a cocktail of prescription drugs that basically allowed her to function as a human being, jabbering nonsense, wailing. And then I kissed her and put a pillow underneath her head and one over her face, held it there, and sang nursery rhymes to her, just like the ones she used to sing to me when I was a child. She didn’t kick or scream, she couldn’t I suppose because of the injuries, but I don’t think she would’ve done anyway. She welcomed her death. If she could’ve thanked me I know she would’ve.’

My heart is knocking against my ribs but I stay silent, let her finish. ‘My father, he panicked, thought that he would be exposed, that it would all come out in the open, the things he had done, the years of physical, emotional and,’ she pauses slightly, ‘sexual abuse, and so he threw me under the bus, concocted a story to the police, told them that I was evil, a devil child, mentally defective, sick, and that I had killed her. He said I needed psychiatric help and so he, they, had me incarcerated.’

‘Why didn’t you tell the truth? Why didn’t you confide in someone sooner, a neighbour, a teacher, a friend’s parents?’

‘Friends? I had no friends,’ her tone is dismissive, she seems as cold to her own suffering as she is to that of others. ‘Do you understand fear, Daniel? Real fear I mean?’

‘Yes,’ I pause, I think I do.’ And my memory flashes back to the night they came to tell me that Rachel was dead, thought of the icy fear that had penetrated through my flesh and bones like fire.

‘Fear is the most debilitating of all the emotions. It paralyses you, governs your every waking moment and thought. It conditions you. And I lived in fear. Lived with it every moment from the day I was born. I was trained to be so terrified of my father that I learned to accept it, to accept all the abuse. Fear became my normality. In the end I found that I couldn’t live without it, couldn’t function. I told Magnesson about the abuse, but by then I had been written off as a psychopath. A danger to myself and others apparently; damaged goods, beyond repair. It was easier, in a way, to say I was responsible for my mother’s death. It kept me away from my father, kept me from his evil, deviant, depraved ways. But it brought a new set of fears.’

‘What happened to your father?’ She blinks at me. Her skin is pallid, almost as white as her hair. ‘The checks we made say he died of natural causes.’

She laughs then and throws her head back. It gives me the chills. I take another sip of water and refresh her glass, even though she hasn’t touched a drop of it.

‘Nothing my father ever did was natural.’

‘You continued to live with him though, that’s right isn’t it? Right up until his death? Why? Why, if your father was the monster you say he was, did you go back to live with him after you left Greene Parks? Was it some kind of misplaced loyalty? Were you still scared of him?’

‘Yes,’ she says. I notice beads of sweat have formed on her skin, small shiny beads, glistening. ‘I was always scared of him, right up to the end.’

‘What did he die of?’

‘He was a strong and fit man, my father, in the “rudest health” as he used to say. Would’ve lived to a ripe old age no doubt… those bastards always do. Only the good die young don’t they, Daniel? Like Rachel—’

I try not to show any emotion at the use of her name.

‘So why didn’t he live to a ripe old age?’

‘I poisoned him,’ she says with a look of triumph, her eyes narrowing. ‘But I did it s-l-o-w-l-y… gradually, very gradually, day by day by day… I watched him deteriorate over a long period of time. Tiny, miniscule amounts of thallium administered every day in his food and drink. I was patient, I waited. And over time, well, thallium builds in your system, it’s a toxin – and it was just enough to make him sick, slowly but surely, to debilitate him and keep him in constant poor health. After a while he began losing his hair, that really pissed him off.’ She’s smiling now and I can see Florence has all but disappeared. ‘He was so vain, my father, and his hair, it was thick, you know, took after his mother’s side. The Harpers were all very proud of their crowning glory and the fact the men in the family never went bald. But I made sure he broke the mould.’

‘Did he seek medical attention?’

‘Oh yes,’ Rebecca says, she appears to be enjoying the conversation now. ‘They were miffed. He became something of an enigma to the GP. They ran all sorts of tests on him, especially when his teeth started falling out. Said it was a vitamin deficiency of some kind. They misdiagnosed him many times.’ She seems pleased by this, like it was a great achievement. ‘He was on all kinds of medication. He needed me to care for him when he got really sick in the end. And I did. I nursed him. Fed him, washed and dressed him, administered his medicine – and some of my own. He was completely dependent on me in his final months.’

‘You wanted him to suffer?’

She smirks, a look that appears to change her whole face. And I think of what Dr Magnesson said about multiple personalities, how psychopaths can literally morph into someone unrecognisable in front of your eyes.

‘I never wanted that man’s suffering to end. I was sad when it did. Funny, I remember the doctors and nurses at the hospital showing me sympathy as I was crying over him on his deathbed, how they put their arms around me and comforted me. But I wasn’t grieving for his death. I was crying because his suffering was almost over.’

I exhale.

‘So you got your revenge in the end… you murdered the man who abused you, a man who should’ve been protecting you. Many people, Rebecca, even a judge, might go some way to understanding your actions given the nature of your father’s crimes against you.

But why go on to murder Nigel Baxter and Karen Walker? Was your father’s death not enough for you?’

She laughs again, a manic horrible sound, and her eyes roll in the back of her head making her look deranged. ‘You said it yourself Daniel – sometimes there is no why.’