The last time Agnes saw her son in the flesh was when she made a trip to his primary school and called him over to the fence to speak to her. Though he was barely five, Creed claimed in our second interview to remember this final meeting.

“She was a thin, plain little woman, dressed like a tart,” he told me. “She didn’t look like the other boys’ mothers. You could tell she wasn’t a respectable person. I didn’t want the other children to see me talking to her. She said she was my mother and I told her it wasn’t true, but I knew it was, really. I ran away from her.”

“He didn’t want nothing to do with me,” said Agnes. “I gave up after that. I wasn’t going to go to the house if Awdry was there. Dennis was in school, at least. He looked clean…

“I used to wonder about him, how he was and that,” Agnes said. “Obviously, you do. Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is. Yeah, I used to wonder, but I moved north with Bert when he got the job with the GPO and I never went back to London, not even when my mum died, because Awdry had put it about that if I turned up he’d kick off.”

When I told Agnes I’d met Dennis a mere week before visiting her in Romford, she had only one point of curiosity.

“They say he’s very clever, is he?”

I told her that he was, undoubtedly, very clever. It was the one point on which all his psychiatrists agreed. Warders told me he read extensively, especially books of psychology.

“I don’t know where he got that from. Not me…

“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.