“No, I won’t, I won’t,” said Tucker. His eyes were small, flecked and almost colorless, set in pouches of purple. “But this might be our one and only chance, so it must be done in the right way and by the right interrogator.”

“Is he not coming?” said Lauren. “Cormoran Strike? Grandad said he might be coming.”

“No,” said Robin, and seeing the Tuckers’ faces fall, she added quickly, “He’s on another case just now, but anything you’d say to Cormoran, you can say to me, as his part—”

“It’s got to be him who interviews Creed,” Tucker said. “Not you.”

“I under—”

“No, love, you don’t,” said Tucker firmly. “This has been my whole life. I understand Creed better than any of the morons who’ve written books about him. I’ve studied him. He’s been cut off from any kind of attention for years, now. Your boss is a famous man. Creed’ll want to meet him. Creed’ll think he’s cleverer, of course he will. He’ll want to beat your boss, want to come out of it on top, but the temptation of seeing his name in the papers again? He’s always thrived on the publicity. I think he’ll be ready to talk, as long as your boss can make him believe it’s worth his while… he’s kosher, your boss, is he?”

Under almost any other circumstances, Robin would have said “he’s actually my partner,” but today, understanding what she was being asked, she said,

“Yes, he’s kosher.”

“Yeah, I thought he seemed it, I thought so,” said Brian Tucker. “When your contact got in touch, I went online, I looked it all up. Impressive, what he’s done. He doesn’t give interviews, does he?”

“No,” said Robin.

“I like that,” said Tucker, nodding. “In it for the right reasons. But the name’s known, now, and that’ll appeal to Creed, and so will the fact your boss has had contact with famous people. Creed likes all that. I’ve told the Ministry of Justice and I told your contact, I want this Strike to do it, I don’t want the police interviewing him. They’ve had their go and we all know how well that went. And no more bloody psychiatrists, thinking they’re so smart and they can’t even agree on whether the bastard’s sane or not.

“I know Creed. I understand Creed. I’ve made a lifelong study of his psychology. I was there every day in court, during the trial. They didn’t ask him about Lou in court, not by name, but he made eye contact with me plenty of times. He’ll have recognized me, he’ll have known who I was, because Lou was my spitting image.

“When they asked him in court about the jewelry—you know about the pendant, Lou’s pendant?”

“Yes,” said Robin.

“She got it a couple of days before she disappeared. Showed it to her sister Liz, Lauren’s mother—didn’t she?” he asked Lauren, who nodded. “A butterfly on a chain, nothing expensive, and because it was mass-produced, the police said it could have been anyone’s. Liz remembered the pendant differently—that’s what threw the police off, she wasn’t sure at first that it was Lou’s—but she admitted she only saw it briefly. And when they mentioned the jewelry, Creed looked straight at me. He knew who I was. Lou was my spit image,” repeated Tucker. “You know his explanation for having a stash of jewelry under the floorboards?”

“Yes,” said Robin, “he said he’d bought it because he liked to cross-dress—”

“That he’d bought it,” said Tucker, talking over Robin, “to dress up in.”

“Mr. Tucker, you said on the phone—”

“Lou nicked it from that shop they all used to go to, what was it—”

“Biba,” said Lauren.

“Biba,” said Tucker. “Two days before she disappeared, she played truant and that evening she showed Lauren’s mum, Liz, what she’d stolen. She was a handful, Lou. Didn’t get on with my second wife. The girls’ mum died when Lou was ten. It affected Lou the worst, more than the other two. She never liked my second wife.”

He’d told Robin all of this on the phone, but still, she nodded sympathetically.

“My wife had a row with Lou the morning before she disappeared, and Lou bunked off school again. We didn’t realize until she didn’t come home that night. Rang round all her friends, none of them had seen her, so we called the cops. We found out later, one of her friends had lied. She’d smuggled Lou upstairs and not told her parents.

“Lou was spotted three times next day, still in her school uniform. Last known sighting was outside a launderette in Kentish Town. She asked some geezer for a light. We knew she’d started smoking. That was partly what she rowed with my wife about.

“Creed picked up Vera Kenny in Kentish Town, too,” said Tucker, hoarsely. “In 1970, right after he’d moved into the place by Paradise Park. Vera was the first woman he took back to that basement. He chained them up, you know, and kept them alive while he—”

“Grandad,” said Lauren plaintively, “don’t.”

“No,” Tucker muttered, dipping his head, “sorry, love.”

“Mr. Tucker,” said Robin, seizing her chance, “you said on the phone you had information about Margot Bamborough nobody else knows.”

“Yeah,” said Tucker, groping inside his windcheater for a wad of folded papers, which he unfolded with shaking hands. “This top one, I got through a warder at Wakefield, back in ’79. I used to hang round there every weekend in the late seventies, watch them all coming in and out. Found out where they liked to drink and everything.

“Anyway, this particular warder, I won’t say his name, but we got chummy. Creed was on a high-security wing, in a single cell, because all the other cons wanted to take a pop at him. One geezer nearly took out Creed’s eye in ’82, stole a spoon from the canteen and sharpened the handle to a point in his cell. Tried to stab Creed through the eyeball. Just missed, because Creed dodged. My mate told me he screamed like a little girl,” said Tucker, with relish.

“Anyway, I said to my mate, I said, anything you can find out, anything you can tell me. Things Creed’s saying, hints he gives, you know. I paid him for it. He could’ve lost his job if anyone had found out. And my mate got hold of this and smuggled it out to me. I’ve never been able to admit to having it, because both of us would be in trouble if it got out, but I called up Margot Bamborough’s husband, what was his name—”

“Roy Phipps.”

“Roy Phipps, yeah. I said, ‘I’ve got a bit of Creed’s writing here you’re going to want to see. It proves he killed your wife.’”

A contemptuous smile revealed Tucker’s toffee-brown teeth again.

“But he didn’t want to know,” said Tucker. “Phipps thought I was a crank. A year after I called him, I read in the paper he’d married the nanny. Creed did Dr. Phipps a good turn, it seems.”

“Grandad!” said Lauren, shocked.

“All right, all right,” muttered Tucker. “I never liked that doctor. He could’ve done us a lot of good, if he’d wanted to. Hospital consultant, he was the kind of man the Home Secretary would’ve listened to. We could’ve kept up the pressure if he’d helped us, but he wasn’t interested, and when I saw he was off with the nanny I thought, ah, right, everything’s explained.”