“Who?”

“Prostitute. Creed tried to abduct her in ’73. He had his failures, you know. Peggy Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at a bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was off Paradise Park. He got careless toward the end. Arrogance did for him.”

“You know a lot about this, George.”

“Yeah, well, Dad was one of the first into Creed’s basement after they arrested him. He wouldn’t ever talk about what he saw in there, and he’d seen gangland killings, you name it… Creed’s never admitted to Bamborough, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. That cunt will keep people guessing till he’s dead. Evil fucking bastard. He’s played with the families of his known victims for years. Likes hinting he did more women, without giving any details. Some journalist interviewed him in the early eighties, but that was the last time they let anyone talk to him. The Ministry of Justice clamped down. Creed uses publicity as a chance to torment the families. It’s the only power he’s got left.”

Layborn drained the last of his pint and checked his watch.

“I’ll do what I can for you with the file. My old man would’ve wanted me to help. It never sat right with him, what happened with that case.”

The wind was picking up by the time Strike returned to his attic flat. His rain-speckled windows rattled in their loose frames as he sorted carefully through the receipts in his wallet for those he needed to submit to the accountant.

At nine o’clock, after eating dinner cooked on his single-ringed hob, he lay down on his bed and picked up the second-hand biography of Dennis Creed, The Demon of Paradise Park, which he’d ordered a month ago and which had so far lain unopened on his bedside table. Having undone the button on his trousers to better accommodate the large amount of spaghetti he’d just consumed, he emitted a loud and satisfying belch, lit a cigarette, laid back against his pillows and opened the book to the beginning, where a timeline laid out the bare bones of Creed’s long career of rape and murder.

1937: Born in Greenwell Terrace, Mile End.

1954: April: began National Service.

November: raped schoolgirl Vicky Hornchurch, 15.

Sentenced to 2 years, Feltham Borstal.

1955–61: Worked in a variety of short-lived manual and office jobs. Frequented prostitutes.

1961: July: raped and tortured shop assistant Sheila Gaskins, 22.

Sentenced to 5 years HMP Pentonville.

1968: April: abducted, raped, tortured and murdered schoolgirl Geraldine Christie, 16.

1969: September: abducted, raped, tortured and murdered secretary and mother of one Jackie Aylett, 29.

Killer dubbed “The Essex Butcher” by press.

1970: January: moved to Vi Hooper’s basement in Liverpool Road, near Paradise Park.

Gained job as dry-cleaning delivery man.

February: abducted dinner lady and mother of three Vera Kenny, 31. Kept in basement for three weeks. Raped, tortured and murdered.

November: abducted estate agent Noreen Sturrock, 28. Kept in basement for four weeks. Raped, tortured and murdered.

1971: August: failed to abduct pharmacist Peggy Hiskett, 34.

1972: September: abducted unemployed Gail Wrightman, 30. Kept imprisoned in basement. Raped and tortured.

1973: January: murdered Wrightman.

December: failed to abduct prostitute and mother of one Helen Wardrop, 32.

1974: September: abducted hairdresser Susan Meyer, 27. Kept imprisoned in basement. Raped and tortured.

1975: February: abducted PhD student Andrea Hooton, 23. Hooton and Meyer were held concurrently in basement for 4 weeks.

March: murdered Susan.

April: murdered Andrea.

1976: January 25th: attempted to abduct nightclub singer Melody Bower, 26.

January 31st: landlady Vi Hooper recognizes Creed from description and photofit.

February 2nd: Creed arrested.

Strike turned over the page and skim-read the introduction, which featured the only interview ever granted by Creed’s mother, Agnes Waite.

… She began by telling me that the date given on Creed’s birth certificate was false.

“It says he was born December 20th, doesn’t it?” she asked me. “That’s not right. It was the night of November 19th. He lied about it when he registered the birth, because we were outside the time you were supposed to do it.”

“‘He’ was Agnes’s stepfather, William Awdry, a man notorious in the local area for his violent temper…

“He took the baby out of my arms as soon as I’d had it and said he was going to kill it. Drown it in the outside toilet. I begged him not to. I pleaded with him to let the baby live. I hadn’t known till then whether I wanted it to live or die, but once you’ve seen them, held them… and he was strong, Dennis, he wanted to live, you could tell.

“It went on for weeks, the threats, Awdry threatening to kill him. But by then the neighbors had heard the baby crying and probably heard what [Awdry] was threatening, as well. He knew there was no hiding it; he’d waited too long. So he registered the birth, but lied about the date, so nobody would ask why he’d done it so late. There wasn’t nobody to say it had happened earlier, not anybody who’d count. They never got me a midwife or a nurse or anything…”

Creed often wrote me fuller answers than we’d had time for during face-to-face interviews. Months later he sent me the following, concerning his own suspicions about his paternity:

“I saw my supposed step-grandfather looking at me out of the mirror. The resemblance grew stronger as I got older. I had his eyes, the same shaped ears, his sallow complexion, his long neck. He was a bigger man than I was, a more masculine-looking man, and I think part of his great dislike of me came from the fact that he hated to see his own features in a weak and girlish form. He despised vulnerability…”

“Yeah, of course Dennis was his,” Agnes told me. “He [Awdry] started on me when I was thirteen. I was never allowed out, never had a boyfriend. When my mother realized I was expecting, Awdry told her I’d been sneaking out to meet someone. What else was he going to say? And Mum believed him. Or she pretended to.”

Agnes fled her stepfather’s overcrowded house shortly before Dennis’s second birthday, when she was sixteen-and-a-half.

“I wanted to take Dennis with me, but I left in the middle of the night and I couldn’t afford to make noise. I had nowhere to go, no job, no money. Just a boyfriend who said he’d look after me. So I went.”

She was to see her firstborn only twice more. When she found out William Awdry was serving nine months in jail for assault, she returned to her mother’s house in hopes of snatching Dennis away.

“I was going to tell Bert [her first husband] he was my nephew, because Bert didn’t know anything about that whole mess. But Dennis didn’t remember me, I don’t think. He wouldn’t let go of my mum, wouldn’t talk to me, and my mum told me it was too late now and I shouldn’t have left him if I wanted him so bad. So I went away without him.”