Strike had somehow imagined an all-male staff, even though he knew that male prisons had female warders. Dr. Bijral pushed open a door to a small office that had the air of a converted treatment room, with chipped paint on the walls and bars on the windows.

“Have a seat,” said Dr. Bijral, waving his hand at the chair opposite his desk, and with slightly forced politeness, he asked, “Did you have a good journey? Come up from London?”

“Yeah, it was a nice drive,” said Strike.

As he sat down behind the desk, Dr. Bijral became business-like.

“All right, so: we’re going to give you forty-five minutes with Creed.”

“Forty-five minutes,” repeated Strike.

“If Dennis wants to admit to another killing, that should be ample time,” said Dr. Bijral, “but… may I be honest with you, Mr. Strike?”

“Of course.”

“If it had been down to Dennis’s treatment team, we prob-ably wouldn’t have permitted this visit. I know the MoJ feel the Bamboroughs and the Tuckers ought to be given a last chance to ask Dennis about their relatives, but—”

Dr. Bijral leaned back in his seat and sighed.

“—he’s a classic sociopath, you see, a pure example of the type. He scores very highly on the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Devious, sadistic, unrepentant and extremely egotistical.”

“Not a fan, then?” said Strike, and the doctor permitted himself a perfunctory smile.

“The problem, you see, is if he admitted to another murder under your questioning, you’d get the credit. And Dennis can’t have that, he can’t allow somebody else to come out on top. He had to give his consent to meeting you, of course, and I think he’s agreed because it feeds his ego to be questioned, especially by a man who’s been in the papers, and I think he’d like to manipulate you into being an advocate for him in some way. He’s been lobbying to get out of Broadmoor and back into prison for a long time now.”

“I thought he was desperate to get in here?”

“He was, once,” said Bijral. “High-profile sex offenders are usually under risk of attack in the prison system, as you probably know. You might have seen in the papers, one man nearly took his eye out with a sharpened spoon handle. Dennis wanted to come to Broadmoor when he was first convicted, but there were no grounds to admit him to hospital back then. Psychopathy isn’t, in itself, treatable.”

“What changed?”

“He was exceptionally difficult to manage in the prison system. He managed to talk a young offender with Asperger’s syndrome into killing himself. For that, he was put into solitary confinement. They ended up keeping him there for almost a year. By night, he took to reenacting what had happened in the basement in Liverpool Road, screaming through the night, doing his voice and the women’s. Warders couldn’t stand hearing it, let alone prisoners.

“After eleven months in solitary, he became suicidal. First he went on hunger strike. Then he began trying to bite his own wrists open, and smashing his head against the wall. He was assessed, judged psychotic and transferred here.

“Once we’d had him a couple of months, he claimed he’d been faking his mental illness, which is pure Dennis. Nobody else can be cleverer than he is. But actually, his mental health was very poor when he came to us, and it took many months of medication and therapy to stop him self-harming and trying to kill himself.”

“And now he wants to leave?”

“Once he was well enough to fully appreciate the difference between jail and hospital, I think it’s fair to say he was disappointed. He had more freedom in Belmarsh. He did a lot of writing and drawing before he got ill. I read the autobiography he’d been working on, when he was admitted. It was useful in assessing him. He writes very well for a man who had hardly any education, but…” Dr. Bijral laced his fingers together, and Strike was reminded of another doctor, who’d talked of teamwork while eating fig rolls. “You see, persuading patients to discuss their crimes is usually an important part of the therapeutic process. You’re trying to find a pathway to accountability and remorse, but Dennis feels no remorse. He’s still aroused by the thought of what he did to those women, and he enjoys talking and writing about it. He used to draw episodes from the basement, as well; essentially producing his own hardcore pornography. So when he came here, we confiscated all writing and drawing materials.

“Dennis blames us for his deteriorating mental faculties, although in fact, for a seventy-seven-year-old man, he’s remarkably sharp. Every patient is different, and we manage Dennis on a strict reward and penalty system. His chosen rewards are unusual. He enjoys chess; he taught himself in Belmarsh, so sometimes I’ll give him a game. He likes crosswords and logic puzzles, too. We allow him access to those when he’s behaving himself.

“But you mustn’t think he’s typical of our patients,” added Dr. Bijral earnestly. “The vast majority of mentally ill people pose absolutely no risk of violence, as I’m sure you know. And people do leave Broadmoor, they do get better. People’s behavior can change, if they’re motivated, if they’re given the right help. Our aim is always recovery. One can hate the crime, but feel compassion for the perpetrator. Many of the men in here had appallingly abusive childhoods. Dennis’s childhood was pure hell—though, of course, other people have upbringings as bad and never do what Dennis did. In fact, one of our former patients—”

There was a knock on the door and a cheery blonde poked her head inside.

“That’s Dennis ready in the room, Ranbir,” she said, and withdrew.

“Shall we?” said Dr. Bijral, getting to his feet. “I’ll be sitting in on the interview, and so will Dennis’s primary nurse.”

The woman who’d announced Dennis’s arrival in the meeting room walked with Strike and the psychiatrist down another couple of corridors. Now there were doors that had to be unlocked and relocked at every passage. Through the third set of locked doors, Strike saw an obese man shuffling along in Nike tracksuit bottoms, flanked by a pair of nurses, each of whom held one of the patient’s stiff arms behind his back. The patient gave Strike a glazed look as the trio passed in silence.

Finally, Strike’s party reached a deserted open-plan area, with armchairs and a switched-off TV. Strike had assumed the blonde woman was Creed’s nurse, but he was wrong: a burly man with tattoos down both arms, and a prominent, square jaw, was introduced as “Marvin, Dennis’s lead nurse,” and the blonde woman smiled at Strike, wished him luck and walked away.

“Well, shall we?” said Dr. Bijral, and Marvin opened the door onto a Spartan meeting room, with a single window and a whiteboard on the wall.

The only occupant, a small, obese, bespectacled man, wore jeans and a black sweatshirt. He had a triple chin, and his belly kept him a foot and a half away from the white Formica-topped table at which he was sitting. Transplanted to a bus stop, Dennis Creed would have been just another old man, a little unkempt, his light gray hair in need of a trim.

(He’d pressed hot-irons to the bare breasts of secretary Jackie Aylett. He’d pulled out all of hairdresser Susan Meyer’s finger and toenails. He’d dug the eyeballs out of estate agent Noreen Sturrock’s face while she was still alive and manacled to a radiator.)

“Dennis, this is Cormoran Strike,” said Dr. Bijral, as he sat down in a chair against the wall. Marvin stood, tattooed arms folded, beside him.

“Hello, Dennis,” said Strike, sitting down opposite him.

“Hello, Cormoran,” said Creed, in a flat voice which retained its working-class, East London accent.

The sunlight fell like a gleaming pane across the table between them, highlighting the smears on the lenses of Creed’s wire-rimmed glasses and the dust motes in the air. Behind the dirt, Strike saw irises of such pale gray that they faded into the sclera, so that the enormous pupils seemed surrounded by whiteness. Close to, Strike could see the jagged scar which ran from temple to nose, dragging at his left lower eyelid, a relic of the attack that had almost taken half Creed’s sight. The plump, pale hands on the table were slightly shaking and the slack mouth trembled: side-effects, Strike guessed, of Creed’s medication.

“Who’re you working for?” Creed asked.

“’Spect you’ll be able to work that out, from my questions,” said Strike.

“Why not say, then?” asked Creed, and when Strike didn’t answer, he said, “Sign of narcissism, withholding information to make yourself feel powerful, you know.”

Strike smiled.

“It’s not a question of trying to feel powerful. I’m simply familiar with the King’s Gambit.”

Creed pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up his nose.

“Told you I play chess, did they?”

“Yeah.”

“D’you play?”

“Badly.”

“So how does the King’s Gambit apply to this situation?”

“Your opening move appears to open an easy route to your king. You’re offering to jump straight into discussing the missing woman I’m investigating.”

“But you think that’s a ploy?”

“Maybe.”

There was a short pause. Then Creed said,

“I’ll tell you who I think sent you, then, shall I?”