Chapter 5

Little though he realized it, Dennis Creed was released from prison on his true 29th birthday, 19th November, 1966. His grandmother, Ena, had died while he was in Brixton and there was no question of him returning to live with his step-grandfather. He had no close friends to call on, and anyone who might have been well disposed to him prior to his second rape conviction was, unsurprisingly, in no rush to meet or help him. Creed spent his first night as a free man in a hostel near King’s Cross.

After a week sleeping in hostels or on park benches, Creed managed to find himself a single room in a boarding house. For the next four years, Creed would move between a series of rundown rooms and short-term, cash-in-hand jobs, interspersed with periods of rough living. He admitted to me later that he frequented prostitutes a good deal at this time, but in 1968 he killed his first victim.

Schoolgirl Geraldine Christie was walking home—

Robin skipped the next page and a half. She had no particular desire to read the particulars of the harm Creed had visited upon Geraldine Christie.

… until finally, in 1970, Creed secured himself a permanent home in the basement rooms of the boarding house run by Violet Cooper, a fifty-year-old ex-theater dresser who, like his grandmother, was an incipient alcoholic. This now demolished house would, in time, become infamous as Creed’s “torture chamber.” A tall, narrow building of grubby brick, it lay in Liverpool Road, close to Paradise Park.

Creed presented Cooper with forged references, which she didn’t bother to follow up, and claimed he’d recently been dismissed from a bar job, but that a friend had promised him employment in a nearby restaurant. Asked by defending counsel at his trial why she’d been happy to rent a room to an unemployed man of no fixed abode, Cooper replied that she was “tender-hearted” and that Creed seemed “a sweet boy, bit lost and lonely.”

Her decision to rent, first a room, then the entire basement, to Dennis Creed, would cost Violet Cooper dearly. In spite of her insistence during the trial that she had no idea what was happening in the basement of her boarding house, suspicion and opprobrium have been attached to the name Violet Cooper ever since. She has now adopted a new identity, which I agreed not to disclose.

“I thought he was a pansy,” Cooper says today. “I’d seen a bit of it in the theater. I felt sorry for him, that’s the truth.”

A plump woman whose face has been ravaged by both time and drink, she admits that she and Creed quickly struck up a close friendship. At times during our conversation she seemed to forget that young “Den” who spent many evenings with her upstairs in her private sitting room, both of them tipsy and singing along to her collection of records, was the serial killer who dwelled in her basement.

“I wrote to him, you know,” she says. “After he was convicted. I said, ‘If you ever felt anything for me, if any of it was real, tell me whether you did any of them other women. You’ve got nothing to lose now, Den,’ I says, ‘and you could put people’s minds at rest.’”

But the letter Creed wrote back admitted nothing.

“Sick, he is. I realized it, then. He’d just copied out the lyrics from an old Rosemary Clooney song we used to sing together, ‘Come On-A My House.’ You know the one…‘Come on-a my house, my house, I’m-a gonna give you candy…’ I knew then he hated me as much as he hated all them other women. Taunting me, he was.”

However, back in 1970, when Creed first moved into her basement, he’d been keen to ingratiate himself with his landlady, who admits he swiftly became a combination of son and confidant. Violet persuaded her friend Beryl Gould, who owned a dry-cleaner’s, to give young Den a job as a delivery man, and this gave him access to the small van that would soon become notorious in the press…

Twenty minutes after boarding the train, Robin got out at Leicester Square. As she emerged into daylight, her mobile phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw a text from Strike. Drawing aside from the crowd emerging from the station, she opened it.

News: I’ve found Dr. Dinesh Gupta, GP who worked with Margot at the Clerkenwell Practice in 1974. He’s 80-odd but sounds completely compos mentis and is happy to meet me this afternoon at his house in Amersham. Currently watching Twinkletoes having breakfast in Soho. I’ll get Barclay to take over from me at lunchtime and go straight to Gupta’s. Any chance you could put off your meeting with Weatherman and come along?

Robin’s heart sank. She’d already had to change the time of the weatherman’s catch-up meeting once and felt it unfair to do so a second time, especially at such short notice. However, she’d have liked to meet Dr. Dinesh Gupta.

I can’t mess him around again, she typed back. Let me know how it goes.

Right you are, replied Strike.

Robin watched her mobile screen for a few more seconds. Strike had forgotten her birthday last year, realizing his omission a week late and buying her flowers. Given that he’d seemed to feel guilty about the oversight, she’d imagined that he might make a note of the date and perhaps set an alert on his mobile this year. However, no “Happy birthday, by the way!” appeared, so she put her mobile back in her pocket and, unsmiling, walked on toward the office.

10

And if by lookes one may the mind aread,

He seemd to be a sage and sober syre…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

“You are thinking,” said the small, spectacled, elderly doctor, who was dwarfed by both his suit and his upright armchair, “that I look like Gandhi.”

Strike, who’d been thinking exactly that, was surprised into a laugh.

The eighty-one-year-old doctor appeared to have shrunk inside his suit; the collar and cuffs of his shirt gaped and his ankles were skinny in their black silk socks. Tufts of white hair appeared both in and over his ears, and he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. The strongest features in his genial brown face were the aquiline nose and dark eyes, which alone appeared to have escaped the aging process, and were as bright and knowing as a wren’s.

No speck of dust marred the highly polished coffee table between them, in what bore the appearance of a seldom-used, special occasion room. The deep gold of wallpaper, sofa and chairs glowed, pristine, in the autumn sunshine diffused by the net curtains. Four gilt-framed photographs hung in pairs on the wall on either side of the fringed drapes. Each picture showed a different dark-haired young woman, all wearing mortarboards and gowns, and holding degree certificates.

Mrs. Gupta, a tiny, slightly deaf, gray-haired woman, had already told Strike what degrees each of her daughters had taken—two medicine, one modern languages and one computing—and how well each was doing in her chosen career. She’d also shown him pictures of the six grandchildren she and her husband had been blessed with so far. Only the youngest girl remained childless, “but she will have them,” said Mrs. Gupta, with a Joan-ish certainty. “She’ll never be happy without.”

Having provided Strike and her husband with tea served in china cups, and a plate of fig rolls, Mrs. Gupta retreated to the kitchen, where Escape to the Country was playing with the sound turned up high.

“As it happens, my father met Gandhi as a young man when Gandhi visited London in 1931,” said Dr. Gupta, selecting a fig roll. “He, too, had studied law in London, you see, but a while after Gandhi. But ours was a wealthier family. Unlike Gandhi, my father could afford to bring his wife to England with him. My parents decided to remain in the UK after Daddy qualified as a barrister.

“So my immediate family missed partition. Very fortunate for us. My grandparents and two of my aunts were killed as they attempted to leave East Bengal. Massacred,” said Dr. Gupta, “and both my aunts were raped before being killed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Strike, who, not having anticipated the turn the conversation had taken, had frozen in the act of opening his notebook and now sat feeling slightly foolish, his pen poised.

“My father,” said Dr. Gupta, nodding gently as he munched his fig roll, “carried the guilt with him to his grave. He thought he should have been there to protect them all, or to have died alongside them.