Robin, who was under no illusions about property available in London for single women on an average wage, especially one with legal bills to pay, considered herself immensely fortunate to be living in a clean, well-maintained and tastefully decorated flat, with a double room to herself and a flatmate she liked. Her live-in landlord was a forty-two-year-old actor called Max Priestwood, who couldn’t afford to run the place without a tenant. Max, who was gay, was what Robin’s mother would have called ruggedly handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of thick, dark blond hair and a perpetually weary look about his gray eyes. He was also an old friend of Ilsa’s, who’d been at university with his younger brother.

In spite of Ilsa’s assurances that “Max is absolutely lovely,” Robin had spent the first few months of her tenancy wondering whether she’d made a huge mistake in moving in with him, because he seemed sunk in what seemed perpetual gloom. Robin tried her very best to be a good flatmate: she was naturally tidy, she never played music loudly or cooked anything very smelly; she made a fuss of Wolfgang and remembered to feed him if Max was out; she was punctilious when it came to replacing washing-up liquid and toilet roll; and she made a point of being polite and cheery whenever they came into contact, yet Max rarely if ever smiled, and when she first arrived, he’d seemed to find it an immense effort to talk to her. Feeling paranoid, Robin had wondered at first whether Ilsa had strong-armed Max into accepting her as a tenant.

Conversation had become slightly easier between them over the months of her tenancy, yet Max was never loquacious. Sometimes Robin was grateful for this monosyllabic tendency, because when she came in after working a twelve-hour stretch of surveillance, stiff and tired, her mind fizzing with work concerns, the last thing she wanted was small talk. At other times, when she might have preferred to go upstairs to the open-plan living area, she kept to her room rather than feel she was intruding upon Max’s private space.

She suspected the main reason for Max’s perennially low mood was his state of persistent unemployment. Since the West End play in which he had had a small part had ended four months ago, he hadn’t managed to get another job. She’d learned quickly not to ask him whether he had any auditions lined up. Sometimes, even saying “How was your day?” sounded unnecessarily judgmental. She knew he’d previously shared his flat with a long-term boyfriend, who by coincidence was also called Matthew. Robin knew nothing about Max’s break-up except that his Matthew had signed over his half of the flat to Max voluntarily, which to Robin seemed remarkably generous compared with the behavior of her own ex-husband.

Having showered, Robin pulled on a dressing gown and returned to her bedroom to open the packages that had arrived in the post over the past few days, and which she’d saved for this morning. She suspected her mother had bought the aromatherapy bath oils that were ostensibly from her brother Martin, that her veterinarian sister-in-law (who was currently pregnant with Robin’s first niece or nephew) had chosen the homespun sweater, which was very much Jenny’s own style, and that her brother Jonathan had a new girlfriend, who’d probably chosen the dangly earrings. Feeling slightly more depressed than she had before she’d opened the presents, Robin dressed herself all in black, which could take her through a day of paperwork at the office, a catch-up meeting with the weatherman whom Postcard was persecuting, all the way to birthday drinks that evening with Ilsa and Vanessa, her policewoman friend. Ilsa had suggested inviting Strike, and Robin had said that she would prefer it to be girls only, because she was trying to avoid any further occasions on which Ilsa might try and matchmake.

On the point of leaving her room, Robin’s eye fell on a copy of The Demon of Paradise Park which she, like Strike, had bought online. Her copy was slightly more battered than his and had taken longer to arrive. She hadn’t yet read much of it, partly because she was generally too tired of an evening to do anything other than fall into bed, but partly because what she had read had already caused a slight recurrence of the psychological symptoms she had carried with her ever since her forearm had been sliced open one dark night. Today, however, she stuffed it into her bag to read on the Tube.

A text from her mother arrived while Robin was walking to the station, wishing her a happy birthday and telling her to check her email account. This she did, and saw that her parents had sent her a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound voucher for Selfridges. This was a most welcome gift, because Robin had virtually no disposable income left, once her legal bills, rent and other living expenses had been paid, to spend on anything that might be considered self-indulgent.

Feeling slightly more cheerful as she settled into a corner of the train, Robin took The Demon of Paradise Park from her bag and opened it to the page she had last reached.

The coincidence of the first line caused her an odd inward tremor.

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.