Gail’s younger sister had never lost hope that Gail was still alive. “I couldn’t believe it until I saw the ring with my own eyes. Until that moment, I honestly thought there’d been a mistake. I kept telling Mum and Dad she’d come back. I couldn’t believe there was wickedness like that in the world, and that my sister could have met it.

“He isn’t human. He played with us, with the families, during the trial. Smiling and waving at us every morning. Looking at the parents or the brother or whoever, whenever their relative was mentioned. Then, afterward, after he was convicted, he keeps telling a bit more, and a bit more, and we’ve had to live with that hanging over us for years, what Gail said, or how she begged him. I’d murder him with my own bare hands if I could, but I could never make him suffer the way he made Gail suffer. He isn’t capable of human feeling, is he? It makes you—”

There was a loud bang from the hall and Robin jumped so severely that water slopped over the edge of the bath.

“Just me!” called Max, who sounded uncharacteristically cheerful, and she heard him greeting Wolfgang. “Hello, you. Yes, hello, hello…”

“Hi,” called Robin. “I took him out earlier!”

“Thanks very much,” said Max, “Come join me, I’m celebrating!”

She heard Max climbing the stairs. Pulling out the plug, she continued to sit in the bath as the water ebbed away, crisp bubbles still clinging to her as she finished the chapter.

“It makes you pray there’s a hell.”

In 1976, Creed told prison psychiatrist Richard Merridan that he tried to “lie low” following the discovery of Wrightman’s remains. Creed admitted to Merriman that he felt a simultaneous desire for notoriety and a fear of capture.

“I liked reading about the Butcher in the papers. I buried her in Epping Forest like the others because I wanted people to know that the same person had done them all, but I knew I was risking everything, not varying the pattern. After that, after Vi had seen me with her, and come in the flat with her there, I thought I’d better just do whores for a bit, lie low.”

But the choice to “do whores” would lead, just a few months later, to Creed’s closest brush with capture yet.

The chapter ended here. Robin got out of the bath, mopped up the spilled water, dressed in pajamas and dressing gown, then headed upstairs to the living area where Max sat watching television, looking positively beatific. Wolfgang seemed to have been infected by his owner’s good mood: he greeted Robin as though she’d been away on a long journey and set to work licking the bath oil off her ankles until she asked him kindly to desist.

“I’ve got a job,” Max told Robin, muting the TV. Two champagne glasses and a bottle were sitting on the coffee table in front of him. “Second lead, new drama, BBC One. Have a drink.”

“Max, that’s fantastic!” said Robin, thrilled for him.

“Yeah,” he said, beaming. “Listen. D’you think your Strike would come over for dinner? I’m playing a veteran. It’d be good to speak to someone who’s actually ex-army.”

“I’m sure he would,” said Robin, hoping she was right. Strike and Max had never met. She accepted a glass of champagne, sat down and held up her glass in a toast. “Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” he said, clinking his glass against hers. “I’ll cook, if Strike comes over. It’ll be good, actually. I need to meet more people. I’m turning into one of those ‘he always kept himself to himself’ blokes you see on the news.”

“And I’ll be the dumb flatmate,” said Robin, her thoughts still with Vi Cooper, “who thought you were lovely and never questioned why I kept coming across you hammering the floorboards back down.”

Max laughed.

“And they’ll blame you more than me,” said Max, “because they always do. The women who didn’t realize… mind you, some of them… who was that guy in America who made his wife call him on an intercom before he’d let her into the garage?”

“Jerry Brudos,” said Robin. Brudos had been mentioned in The Demon of Paradise Park. Like Creed, Brudos had been wearing women’s clothing when he abducted one of his victims.

“I need to get a bloody social life going again,” said Max, more expansive than Robin had ever known him under the influence of alcohol and good news. “I’ve been feeling like hell ever since Matthew left. Kept wondering whether I shouldn’t just sell this place and move on.”

Robin thought her slight feeling of panic might have shown in her face, because Max said,

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to. But it’s half-killed me, keeping it going. I really only bought the place because of him. ‘Put it all into property, you can’t lose with property,’ he said.”

He looked as though he was going to say something else, but if so, decided against it.

“Max, I wanted to ask you something,” said Robin, “but it’s totally fine if the answer’s no. My younger brother and a girlfriend are looking for a place to stay in London for the weekend of the fourteenth and fifteenth of February. But if you don’t—”

“Don’t be silly,” said Max. “They can sleep on this,” he said, patting the sofa. “It folds out.”

“Oh,” said Robin, who hadn’t known this. “Well, great. Thanks, Max.”

The champagne and the hot bath had made Robin feel incredibly sleepy, but they talked on for a while about Max’s new drama, until at last Robin apologized and said she really did need to go to bed.

As she pulled the duvet over herself, Robin decided against starting a new chapter on Creed. It was best not to have certain things in your head if you wanted to get to sleep. However, once she’d turned out her bedside lamp she found her mind refusing to shut down, so she reached for her iPod.

She never listened to music on headphones unless she knew Max was in the flat. Some life experiences made a person forever conscious of their ability to react, to have advance warning. Now, though, with the front door safely double-locked (Robin had checked, as she always did), and with her flatmate and a dog mere seconds away, she inserted her earbuds and pressed shuffle on the four albums of Joni Mitchell’s she’d now bought, choosing music over another bottle of perfume she didn’t like.

Sometimes, when listening to Mitchell, which Robin was doing frequently these days, she could imagine Margot Bamborough smiling at her through the music. Margot was forever frozen at twenty-nine, fighting not to be defeated by a life more complicated than she had ever imagined it would be, when she conceived the ambition of raising herself out of poverty by brains and hard work.

An unfamiliar song began to play. The words told the story of the end of a love affair. It was a simpler, more direct lyric than many of Mitchell’s, with little metaphor or poetry about it. Last chance lost/The hero cannot make the change/Last chance lost/The shrew will not be tamed.

Robin thought of Matthew, unable to adapt himself to a wife who wanted more from life than a steady progression up the property ladder, unable to give up the mistress who had always, in truth, been better suited to his ideals and ambitions than Robin. So did that make Robin the shrew, fighting for a career that everyone but she thought was a mistake?