She was running herself a bath when her mobile rang again. Her heart sank a little when she saw that it was her brother Jonathan, who was in his final year of university in Manchester. She thought she knew what he was calling about.

“Hi, Jon,” she said.

“Hey, Robs. You didn’t answer my text.”

She knew perfectly well that she hadn’t. He’d sent it that morning, while she’d been watching Two-Times’ girlfriend having a blameless coffee, alone with a Stieg Larsson novel. Jon wanted to know whether he and a female friend could come and stay at her flat on the weekend of the fourteenth and fifteenth of February.

“Sorry,” said Robin, “I know I didn’t, it’s been a busy day. I’m not sure, to be honest, Jon. I don’t know what Max’s plans—”

“He wouldn’t mind us crashing in your room, would he? Courtney’s never been to London. There’s a comedy show we want to see on Saturday. At the Bloomsbury Theatre.”

“Is Courtney your girlfriend?” asked Robin, smiling now. Jonathan had always been quite cagey with the family about his love life.

“Is she my girlfriend,” repeated Jonathan mockingly, but Robin had an idea that he was quite pleased with the question really, and surmised that the answer was “yes.”

“I’ll check with Max, OK? And I’ll ring you back tomorrow,” said Robin.

Once she’d disposed of Jonathan, she finished running the bath and headed into her bedroom to fetch pajamas, dressing gown and something to read. The Demon of Paradise Park lay horizontally across the top of her neat shelf of novels. After hesitating for a moment, she picked it up and took it back to the bathroom with her, trying as she did so to imagine getting ready for bed with her brother and an unknown girl in the room, as well. Was she prudish, stuffy and old before her time? She’d never finished her university degree: “crashing” on floors in the houses of strangers had never been part of her life, and in the wake of the rape that had occurred in her halls of residence, she’d never had any desire to sleep anywhere except in an environment over which she had total control.

Sliding into the hot bubble bath, Robin let out a great sigh of pleasure. It had been a long week, sitting in the car for hours or else trudging through the rainy streets after Shifty or Elinor Dean. Eyes closed, enjoying the heat and the synthetic jasmine of her cheap bubble bath, her thoughts drifted back to Dave Underwood’s daughter.

At least Creed can’t get you, eh? Setting aside the offensively jocular tone, it struck her as significant that a woman who’d known for years that Creed hadn’t been driving the sun-emblazoned van was nevertheless certain that he’d abducted Margot.

Because, of course, Creed hadn’t always used a van. He’d killed two women before he ever got the job at the dry cleaner’s, and managed to persuade women to walk into his basement flat even after he’d acquired the vehicle.

Robin opened her eyes, reached for The Demon of Paradise Park and turned to the page where she had last left it. Holding the book clear of the hot, foamy water, she continued to read.

One night in September 1972, Dennis Creed’s landlady spotted him bringing a woman back to the basement flat for the first time. She testified at Creed’s trial that she heard the front gate “squeak” at close to midnight, glanced down from her bedroom window at the steps into the basement and saw Creed and a woman who “seemed a bit drunk but was walking OK,” heading into the house.

When she asked Dennis who the woman was, he told her the implausible story that she was a regular client of the dry cleaner’s. He claimed he’d met the drunk woman by chance in the street, and that she had begged him to let her come into his flat to phone a taxi.

In reality, the woman Violet had seen Dennis steering into the flat was the unemployed Gail Wrightman, who’d been stood up that evening by a boyfriend. Wrightman left the Grasshopper, a bar in Shoreditch, at half past ten in the evening, after consuming several strong cocktails. A woman matching Wrightman’s description was seen getting into a white van at a short distance from the bar. Barring Cooper’s glimpse of a brunette in a light-colored coat entering Creed’s flat that night, there were no further sightings of Gail Wrightman after she left the Grasshopper.

By now, Creed had perfected a façade of vulnerability that appealed particularly to older women like his landlady, and a convivial, sexually ambiguous persona that worked well with the drunk and lonely. Creed subsequently admitted to meeting Wrightman in the Grasshopper, adding Nembutal to her drink and lying in wait outside the bar where, confused and unsteady on her feet, she was grateful for his offer of a lift home.

Cooper accepted his explanation of the dry-cleaning client who’d wanted to call a taxi “because I had no reason to doubt it.”

In reality, Gail Wrightman was now gagged and chained to a radiator in Creed’s bedroom, where she would remain until Creed killed her by strangulation in January 1973. This was the longest period he kept a victim alive, and demonstrates the degree of confidence he had that his basement flat was now a place of safety, where he could rape and torture without fear of discovery.

However, shortly before Christmas that year, his landlady visited him on some trivial pretext, and she recalled in the witness box that “he wanted to get rid of me, I could tell. I thought there was a nasty smell about the place, but we’d had problems with next door’s drains before. He told me he couldn’t chat because he was waiting for a phone call.

“I know it was Christmastime when I went down there, because I remember asking him why he hadn’t put any cards up. I knew he didn’t have many friends but I thought someone must have remembered him and I thought it was a shame. The radio was playing ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool,’ and it was loud, I remember that, but that wasn’t anything unusual. Dennis liked music.”

Cooper’s surprise visit to the basement almost certainly sealed Wrightman’s death warrant. Creed later told a psychiatrist that he’d been toying with the idea of simply keeping Wrightman “as a pet” for the foreseeable future, to spare himself the risks that further abductions would entail, but that he reconsidered and decided to “put her out of her misery.”

Creed murdered Wrightman on the night of January 9th, 1973, a date chosen to coincide with a three-day absence of Vi Cooper to visit a sick relative. Creed cut off Wrightman’s head and hands in the bath before driving the rest of the corpse in his van to Epping Forest by night, wrapped in tarpaulin, and burying it in a shallow grave. Back at home, he boiled the flesh off Wrightman’s head and hands and smashed up the bones, as he’d done to the corpses of both Vera Kenny and Nora Sturrock, adding the powdered bone to the inlaid ebony box he kept under his bed.

On her return to Liverpool Road, Violet Cooper noted that the “bad smell” had gone from the basement flat and concluded that the drains had been sorted out.

Landlady and lodger resumed their convivial evenings, drinking and singing along to records. It’s likely that Creed experimented with drugging Vi at this time. She later testified that she often slept so soundly on nights that Dennis joined her for a nightcap that she found herself still groggy the next morning.

Wrightman’s grave remained undisturbed for nearly four months, until discovered by a dog walker whose terrier dug and retrieved a thigh bone. Decomposition, the absence of head and hands or any clothing rendered identification almost impossible given the difficulties of tissue typing in such circumstances. Only after Creed’s arrest, when Wrightman’s underwear, pantyhose and an opal ring her family identified as having belonged to her were found under the floorboards of Creed’s sitting room, were detectives able to add Wrightman’s murder to the list of charges against him.