“A radical feminist witch.”

“Which sounds quite cool when you say it,” said Robin, “but I don’t think Talbot meant it that way.”

“You think this is why the daughters didn’t want to talk to us?”

“Maybe,” said Robin. “So I think we need to be… you know. Sensitive to what might have gone on. Definitely not go in there looking as though we suspect Wilma of anything.”

“Point well made, and taken,” said Strike.

“Right then,” said Robin with a sigh, as she put the notebook back into her messenger bag. “I’d better get going… What is he doing in there?” Robin asked quietly, looking at Elinor Dean’s front door.

“Barclay thinks it might be a rubber fetish.”

“He’d need a lot of talcum powder to wriggle himself into anything made of rubber, the size of that belly.”

Strike laughed.

“Well, I’ll see you in…” Robin checked the time on her mobile, “seven hours, forty-five minutes.”

“Sleep well,” said Strike.

As she walked away from the BMW, Strike saw her looking at her mobile again, doubtless reading Morris’s texts. He watched as she got into the ancient Land Rover, then turned the tank-like vehicle in a three-point turn, raising a hand in farewell as she passed him, heading back to Earl’s Court.

As Strike reached for the Thermos of tea under his seat, he remembered the supposed dental appointment of the other day, about which Robin had sounded strangely flustered, and which had taken place (though Strike hadn’t previously made the connection) on Morris’s afternoon off. A most unwelcome possibility crossed his mind: had Robin lied, like Irene Hickson, and for the same reason? His mind darted to what Robin had said a few months previously, when she’d mentioned her ex-husband having a new partner: “Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I told Morris.”

As he unscrewed his Thermos, Strike mentally reviewed Robin’s behavior around Morris in the last few months. She’d never seemed to particularly like him, but might that have been an act, designed to deflect attention? Were his partner and his subcontractor actually in a relationship which he, busy with his own troubles, had failed to spot?

Strike poured himself tea, settled back in his seat, and glowered at Elinor Dean’s closed door through the steam rising from plastic-tasting tea the color of mud. He was angry, he told himself, because he should have established a work rule that partners weren’t allowed to date subcontractors, and for another reason which he preferred not to examine, because he knew perfectly well what it was, and no good could come of brooding upon it.

53

Like three faire branches budding farre and wide,

That from one roote deriu’d their vitall sap:

And like that roote that doth her life diuide,

Their mother was…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Seven hours later, in the cool, flat daylight of an overcast morning, Robin, who was back in her Land Rover, took a detour on her way to the café where she and Strike would be meeting the three Bayliss sisters.

When Maya, the middle sister, had suggested meeting in Belgique in Wanstead, Robin had realized how close she’d have to drive to the Flats where Dennis Creed had disposed of his second-to-last known victim, twenty-seven-year-old hairdresser Susan Meyer.

Half an hour ahead of the planned interview, Robin parked the Land Rover beside a stretch of shops on Aldersbrook Road, then crossed the street and headed up a short footpath, which led her to the reedy bank of the man-made Alexandra Lake, a wide stretch of water on which various wildfowl were bobbing. A couple of ducks came paddling hopefully toward Robin, but when she failed to produce bread or other treats, they glided away again, compact, self-sufficient, their onyx eyes scanning both water and bank for other possibilities.

Thirty-nine years ago, Dennis Creed had driven to this lake under cover of night, and rolled the headless, handless corpse of Susan Meyer into it, bound up in black plastic and rope. Susan Meyer’s distinctive wedge cut and shy smile had earned her a prominent place on the cover of The Demon of Paradise Park.

The milky sky looked as opaque as the shallow lake, which resembled jade silk in which the gliding wildfowl made rippling creases. Hands in her pockets, Robin looked out over the water and the rustling weeds, trying to imagine the scene when a park worker had spotted the black object in the water, which he’d assumed initially was a tarpaulin swollen with air, until he hooked it with a long pole, felt the grisly weight and made an instant connection (or so he told the television crew who arrived shortly after the police and ambulance) with the bodies that kept turning up in Epping Forest, barely ten miles away.

Creed had abducted Susan exactly a month before Margot disappeared. Had they overlapped in Creed’s basement? If so, Creed had, for a brief period, held three women there simultaneously. Robin preferred not to think about what Andrea, or Margot, if she’d been there, must have felt on being dragged into Creed’s basement, seeing a fellow woman chained there, and knowing that she, too, would be reduced to that emaciated and broken-boned state before she died.

Andrea Hooton was the last woman Creed was known to have killed, and he’d varied the pattern when it came to disposing of her body, driving eighty miles from his house in Liverpool Road to throw the corpse off Beachy Head. Both Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats had become too heavily patrolled by then, and in spite of Creed’s evident wish to make sure the Essex Butcher was credited with every kill, as evidenced by the secret store of press clippings he kept beneath the floorboards in his basement flat, he’d never wanted to be caught.

Robin checked her watch: it was time to head to the interview with the Bayliss sisters. Walking back to the Land Rover, she pondered the divide between normalcy and insanity. On the surface, Creed had been far saner than Bill Talbot. Creed had left no half-crazed scribblings behind him to explain his thought processes; he’d never plotted the course of asteroids to guide him: his interviews with psychiatrists and police had been entirely lucid. Not for Creed the belief in signs and symbols, a secret language decipherable only by initiates, a refuge in mystery or magic. Dennis Creed had been a meticulous planner, a genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth.

When Robin arrived in the street where the café stood, she spotted Strike getting out of his BMW a short distance away from the entrance. Noticing the Land Rover in turn, Strike raised a hand in greeting and headed up the street toward her, while finishing what looked like a bacon and egg McMuffin, his chin stubbly, the shadows beneath his eyes purple.

“Have I got time for a fag?” were the first words he spoke, checking his watch as Robin got down out of the car and slammed the door. “No,” he answered himself, with a sigh. “Ah well…”

“You can take the lead on this interview,” he told Robin, as they headed together toward the café. “You’ve done all the legwork. I’ll take notes. Remind me what their names are?”

“Eden’s the eldest. She’s a Labor councilor from Lewisham. Maya’s the middle one, and she’s deputy headmistress of a primary school. The youngest is Porschia Dagley, and she’s a social worker—”