Not for the first time, Strike wondered exactly how egotistical it was to suspect that Robin’s feelings toward him might be warmer than those of pure friendship. He got on with her better than he’d ever got on with any woman. Their mutual liking had survived all the stresses of running a business together, the personal trials each had endured since they had met, even the major disagreement that had once seen him sack her. She’d hurried to the hospital when he had found himself alone with a critically ill nephew, brooking, he had no doubt, the displeasure of the ex-husband Strike never forgot to call “that arsehole” inside his own head.

Nor was Strike unconscious of Robin’s good looks: indeed, he’d been fully aware of them ever since she’d taken off her coat in his office for the first time. But her physical appeal was less of a threat to his peace of mind than the deep, guilty liking for being, currently, the main man in her life. Now that the possibility of something more lay in front of him, now that her husband was gone, and she was single, he found himself seriously wondering what would happen, should they act upon what he was beginning to suspect was a mutual attraction. Could the agency, for which they’d both sacrificed so much, which for Strike represented the culmination of all his ambitions, survive the partners falling into bed together? However he reframed this question, the answer always came back “no,” because he was certain, for reasons that had to do with past trauma, not from any particularly puritanical streak, that what Robin sought, ultimately, was the security and permanence of marriage.

And he wasn’t the marrying kind. No matter the inconveniences, what he craved at the end of a working day was his private space, clean and ordered, organized exactly as he liked it, free of emotional storms, from guilt and recriminations, from demands to service Hallmark’s idea of romance, from a life where someone else’s happiness was his responsibility. The truth was that he’d always been responsible for some woman: for Lucy, as they grew up together in squalor and chaos; for Leda, who lurched from lover to lover, and whom he had sometimes had to physically protect as a teenager; for Charlotte, whose volatility and self-destructive tendencies had been given many different names by therapists and psychiatrists, but whom he had loved in spite of it all. He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he’d had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He’d sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.

Except that, almost against his will, he did care about Robin. He felt familiar stirrings of a desire to make her happy that irked him far more than the habit he’d developed of looking determinedly away when she bent over a desk. They were friends, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and he suspected the best way to guarantee that was never see each other naked.

When he’d washed up his plate, Strike opened the window to admit the cold night air, reminding himself that every woman he knew would have been complaining immediately about the draft. He then lit a cigarette, opened the laptop he’d brought upstairs and drafted a letter to the Ministry of Justice, explaining that he’d been hired by Anna Phipps, setting out his proven credentials as an investigator both within the army and outside it, and requesting permission to visit and question Dennis Creed in Broadmoor.

Once finished, he yawned, lit his umpteenth cigarette of the day and went to lie down on his bed, as usual undoing his trousers first. Picking up The Demon of Paradise Park, he turned to the final chapter.

The question that haunts the officers who entered Creed’s basement in 1976 and saw for themselves the combination of jail and torture chamber that he’d constructed there, is whether the 12 women he is known to have assaulted, raped and/or killed represent the total tally of his victims.

In our final interview, Creed, who that morning had been deprived of privileges following an aggressive outburst against a prison officer, was at his least communicative and most cryptic.

Q: People suspect there may have been more victims.

A: Is that right?

Q: Louise Tucker. She was sixteen, she’d run away—

A: You journalists love putting ages on people, don’t you? Why is that?

Q: Because it paints a picture. It’s a detail we can all identify with. D’you know anything about Louise Tucker?

A: Yeah. She was sixteen.

Q: There was unclaimed jewelry in your basement. Unclaimed pieces of clothing.

A:…

Q: You don’t want to talk about the unclaimed jewelry?

A:…

Q: Why don’t you want to talk about those unclaimed items?

A:…

Q: Does any part of you think, “I’ve got nothing to lose, now. I could put people’s minds at rest. Stop families wondering”?

A:…

Q: You don’t think, it would be a kind of reparation? I could

repair something of my reputation?

A: [laughs] “Reputation”… you think I spend my days worrying about my reputation? You people really don’t [indistinguishable]

Q: What about Kara Wolfson? Disappeared in ’73.

A: How old was she?

Q: Twenty-six. Club hostess in Soho.

A: I don’t like whores.

Q: Why’s that?

A: Filthy.

Q: You frequented prostitutes.

A: When there was nothing else on offer.

Q: You tried—Helen Wardrop was a prostitute. And she got away from you. Gave a description to the police.

A:…

Q: You tried to abduct Helen in the same area Kara was last seen.

A:…

Q: What about Margot Bamborough?

A:…

Q: A van resembling your van was seen speeding in the area she disappeared.

A:…

Q: If you abducted Bamborough, she’d have been in your basement at the same time as Susan Meyer, wouldn’t she?

A:… Nice for her.

Q: Was it nice for her?

A: Someone to talk to.

Q: Are you saying you were holding both Bamborough and Meyer at the same time?

A: [smiles]

Q: What about Andrea Hooton? Was Bamborough dead when you abducted Andrea?

A:…

Q: You threw Andrea’s body off cliffs. That was a change in your m.o. Was she the first body you threw off there?

A:…

Q: You don’t want to confirm whether you abducted Margot Bamborough?

A: [smiles]

Strike put down the book and lay for a while, smoking and thinking. Then he reached for Bill Talbot’s leather-bound notebook, which he’d earlier thrown onto his bed when taking off his coat.

Flicking through the densely packed pages, looking for something comprehensible, something he could connect with a solid fact or reference point, he suddenly placed a thick finger in the book to stop the pages turning, his attention caught by a sentence written mostly in English that seemed familiar.

It was an effort to get up and fetch his own notebook, but this he did. Slumping back onto his bed, he found the sentence that Pat had translated for him from Pitman shorthand:

And that is the last of them, the twelfth, and the circle will be closed upon finding the tenth—unknown word—Baphomet. Transcribe in the true book

The unknown word, Strike realized, was the same symbol that followed the word “Killer” in Talbot’s notebook.