“I read it all in the papers. I saw him on the news, heard everything he did. Terrible, just terrible. What would make a person do that?

“After the trial was over, I thought back to him, all naked and bloody on the lino where I’d had him, with my stepfather standing over us, threatening to drown him, and I swear to you now,” said Agnes Waite, “I wish I’d let it happen.”

Strike stubbed out his cigarette and reached for the can of Tennent’s sitting beside the ashtray. A light rain pattered against his windows as he flicked a little further on in the book, pausing midway through chapter two.

… grandmother, Ena, was unwilling or unable to protect the youngest member of the household from her husband’s increasingly sadistic punishments.

Awdry took a particular satisfaction in humiliating Dennis for his persistent bedwetting. His step-grandfather would pour a bucket of water over his bed, then force the boy to sleep in it. Creed recalled several occasions on which he was forced to walk to the corner shop without trousers, but still wearing sodden pajama bottoms, to buy Awdry cigarettes.

“One took refuge in fantasy,” Creed wrote to me later. “Inside my head I was entirely free and happy. But there were, even then, props in the material world that I enjoyed incorporating into my secret life. Items that attained a totemic power in my fantasies.”

By the age of twelve, Dennis had discovered the pleasures of voyeurism.

“It excited me,” he wrote, after our third interview, “to watch a woman who didn’t know she was being observed. I’d do it to my sisters, but I’d creep up to lit windows as well. If I got lucky, I’d see women or girls undressing, adjusting themselves or even a glimpse of nudity. I was aroused not only by the obviously sensual aspects, but by the sense of power. I felt I stole something of their essence from them, taking that which they thought private and hidden.”

He soon progressed to stealing women’s underwear from neighbors’ washing lines and even from his grandmother, Ena. These he enjoying wearing in secret, and masturbating in…

Yawning, Strike flicked on, coming to rest on a passage in chapter four.

… a quiet member of the mailroom staff at Fleetwood Electric, who astonished his colleagues when, on a works night out, he donned the coat of a female co-worker to imitate singer Kay Starr.

“There was little Dennis, belting out ‘Wheel of Fortune’ in Jenny’s coat,” an anonymous workmate told the press after Creed’s arrest. “It made some of the older men uncomfortable. A couple of them thought he was, you know, queer, after. But the younger ones, we all cheered him like anything. He came out of his shell a bit after that.”

But Creed’s secret fantasy life didn’t center on a life of amateur theatrics or pub singing. Unbeknownst to anyone watching the tipsy sixteen-year-old onstage, his elaborate fantasies were becoming ever more sadistic…

Colleagues at Fleetwood Electric were appalled when “little Dennis” was arrested for the rape and torture of Sheila Gaskins, 22, a shop assistant whom he’d followed off a late night bus. Gaskins, who survived the attack only because Creed was scared away by a nightwatchman who heard sounds down an alleyway, was able to provide evidence against him.

Convicted, he served five years in HMP Pentonville. This was the last time Creed would give way to sudden impulse.

Strike paused to light himself a fresh cigarette, then flicked ten chapters on through the book, until a familiar name caught his eye.

… Dr. Margot Bamborough, a Clerkenwell GP, on October 11th 1974.

DI Bill Talbot, who headed the investigation, immediately noted suspicious similarities between the disappearance of the young GP and those of Vera Kenny and Gail Wrightman.

Both Kenny and Wrightman had been abducted on rainy nights, when the presence of umbrellas and rainwashed windscreens provided handy impediments to would-be witnesses. There was a heavy downpour on the evening Margot Bamborough disappeared.

A small van with what were suspected to be fake number plates had been seen in both Kenny’s and Wrightman’s vicinities shortly before they vanished. Three separate witnesses came forward to say that a small white van of similar appearance had been seen speeding away from the vicinity of Margot Bamborough’s practice that night.

Still more suggestive was the eyewitness account of a driver who saw two women in the street, one of whom seemed to be infirm or faint, the other supporting her. Talbot at once made the connection both with the drunk Vera Kenny, who’d been seen getting into a van with what appeared to be another woman, and the testimony of Peggy Hiskett, who’d reported the man dressed as a woman at a lonely bus stop, who’d tried to persuade her to drink a bottle of beer with him, becoming aggressive before, fortunately, she managed to attract the attention of a passing car.

Convinced that Bamborough had fallen victim to the serial killer now dubbed the Essex Butcher, Talbot—

Strike’s mobile rang. Trying not to lose his page, Strike groped for it and answered it without looking at the caller’s identity.

“Strike.”

“Hello, Bluey,” said a woman, softly.

Strike set the book on the bed, pages down. There was a pause, in which he could hear Charlotte breathing.

“What d’you want?”

“To talk to you,” she said.

“What about?”

“I don’t know,” she half-laughed. “You choose.”

Strike knew this mood. She was halfway into a bottle of wine or had perhaps enjoyed a couple of whiskies. There was a moment of drunkenness—not even of drunkenness, of alcohol-induced softening—where a Charlotte emerged who was endearing, even amusing, but not yet combative or maudlin. He’d asked himself once, toward the end of their engagement, when his own innate honesty was forcing him to face facts and ask hard questions, how realistic or healthy it was to wish for a wife forever very slightly drunk.

“You didn’t call me back,” said Charlotte. “I left a message with your Robin. Didn’t she give it to you?”

“Yeah, she gave it to me.”

“But you didn’t call.”

“What d’you want, Charlotte?”

The sane part of his brain was telling him to end the call, but still he held the phone to his ear, listening, waiting. She’d been like a drug to him for a long time: a drug, or a disease.

“Interesting,” said Charlotte dreamily. “I thought she might have decided not to pass on the message.”

He said nothing.

“Are the two of you together yet? She’s quite good-looking. And always there. On tap. So conven—”

“Why are you calling?”

“I’ve told you, I wanted to talk to you… d’you know what day it is today? The twins’ first birthday. The entire famille Ross has turned up to fawn over them. This is the first moment I’ve had to myself all day.”

He knew, of course, that she’d had twins. There’d been an announcement in The Times, because she’d married into an aristocratic family that routinely announced births, marriages and deaths in its columns, although Strike had not, in fact, read the news there. It was Ilsa who’d passed the information on, and Strike had immediately remembered the words Charlotte had said to him, over a restaurant table she had tricked him into sharing with her, more than a year previously.

All that’s kept me going through this pregnancy is the thought that once I’ve had them, I can leave.

But the babies had been born prematurely and Charlotte had not left them.

Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is.

There’d been two previous tipsy phone calls to Strike like this one in the past year, both made late at night. He’d ended the first one mere seconds in, because Robin was trying to reach him. Charlotte had hung up abruptly a few minutes into the second.

“Nobody thought they’d live, did you know that?” Charlotte said now. “It’s,” she whispered, “a miracle.”

“If it’s your kids’ birthday, I should let you go,” said Strike. “Goodnight, Char—”

“Don’t go,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Don’t go, please don’t.”

Hang up, said the voice in his head. He didn’t.

“They’re asleep, fast asleep. They don’t know it’s their birthday, the whole thing’s a joke. Commemorating the anniversary of that fucking nightmare. It was hideous, they cut me open—”

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’m busy.”

“Please,” she almost wailed. “Bluey, I’m so unhappy, you don’t know, I’m so fucking miserable—”

“You’re a married mother of two,” he said brutally, “and I’m not an agony aunt. There are anonymous services you can call if you need them. Goodnight, Charlotte.”

He cut the call.

The rain was coming down harder. It drummed on his dark windows. Dennis Creed’s face was now the wrong way up on the cast-aside book. His light-lashed eyes seemed reversed in the upside-down face. The effect was unsettling, as though the eyes were alive in the photograph.

Strike opened the book again and continued to read.

9

Faire Sir, of friendship let me now you pray,

That as I late aduentured for your sake,

The hurts whereof me now from battell stay,