(He’d pressed hot-irons to the bare breasts of secretary Jackie Aylett. He’d pulled out all of hairdresser Susan Meyer’s finger and toenails. He’d dug the eyeballs out of estate agent Noreen Sturrock’s face while she was still alive and manacled to a radiator.)

“Dennis, this is Cormoran Strike,” said Dr. Bijral, as he sat down in a chair against the wall. Marvin stood, tattooed arms folded, beside him.

“Hello, Dennis,” said Strike, sitting down opposite him.

“Hello, Cormoran,” said Creed, in a flat voice which retained its working-class, East London accent.

The sunlight fell like a gleaming pane across the table between them, highlighting the smears on the lenses of Creed’s wire-rimmed glasses and the dust motes in the air. Behind the dirt, Strike saw irises of such pale gray that they faded into the sclera, so that the enormous pupils seemed surrounded by whiteness. Close to, Strike could see the jagged scar which ran from temple to nose, dragging at his left lower eyelid, a relic of the attack that had almost taken half Creed’s sight. The plump, pale hands on the table were slightly shaking and the slack mouth trembled: side-effects, Strike guessed, of Creed’s medication.

“Who’re you working for?” Creed asked.

“’Spect you’ll be able to work that out, from my questions,” said Strike.

“Why not say, then?” asked Creed, and when Strike didn’t answer, he said, “Sign of narcissism, withholding information to make yourself feel powerful, you know.”

Strike smiled.

“It’s not a question of trying to feel powerful. I’m simply familiar with the King’s Gambit.”

Creed pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up his nose.

“Told you I play chess, did they?”

“Yeah.”

“D’you play?”

“Badly.”

“So how does the King’s Gambit apply to this situation?”

“Your opening move appears to open an easy route to your king. You’re offering to jump straight into discussing the missing woman I’m investigating.”

“But you think that’s a ploy?”

“Maybe.”

There was a short pause. Then Creed said,

“I’ll tell you who I think sent you, then, shall I?”

“Go on.”

“Margot Bamborough’s daughter,” said Dennis Creed, watching carefully for Strike’s reaction. “The husband gave up on her long since, but her daughter’ll be forty-odd now and she’ll be well-heeled. Whoever hired you’s got money. You won’t come cheap. I’ve read all about you, in the paper.

“The second possibility,” said Creed, when Strike didn’t respond, “is old Brian Tucker. He pops up every few years, making a spectacle of himself. Brian’s skint, though… or did he put out the begging bowl on the internet? Get on the computer and whine out some hard-luck story, so mugs send in cash? But I think, if he’d done that, it would’ve been in the papers.”

“D’you get online much?” asked Strike.

“We’re not allowed, in here,” said Creed. “Why are you wasting time? We’ve only got forty-five minutes. Ask a question.”

“That was a question, what I just asked you.”

“Why won’t you tell me which so-called victim you’re interested in?”

“‘So-called’ victim?”

“Arbitrary labels,” said Creed. “‘Victim.’ ‘Patient.’ This one deserves pity… this one gets caged. Maybe those women I killed were the real patients, and I’m the true victim?”

“Novel point of view,” said Strike.

“Yeah, well, does people good to hear novel points of view,” said Creed, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “Wake them up, if they’re capable of it.”

“What would you say you were curing those women of?”

“The infection of life? Diagnosis: life. Terminal. ‘Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler…’”

(He’d slit open the corners of schoolgirl Geraldine Christie’s mouth, and photographed her crying and screaming, before, as he told her parents from the dock, slitting her throat because she was making so much noise.)

“‘… I am unique and conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish.’ Know who said that?”

“Aleister Crowley,” said Strike.

“Unusual reading matter,” said Creed, “for a decorated soldier in the British army.”

“Oh, we’re all satanists on the sly,” said Strike.

“You think you’re joking,” said Creed, whose expression had become intense, “but you kill and you get given a medal and called a hero. I kill and get called evil and locked up forever. Arbitrary categories. Know what’s just down the road from here?”

“Sandhurst,” said Strike.

“Sandhurst,” repeated Creed, as though Strike hadn’t spoken. “Institutions for killers, side by side, one to make them, one to break them. Explain to me why’s it more moral to murder little brown children on Tony Blair’s say-so, than to do what I did? I’m made the way I am. Brain scans will show you, they’ve studied people like me. It’s how we’re wired. Why’s it more evil to kill because you’ve got to, because it’s your nature, than to blow up poor brown people because we want oil? Properly looked at, I’m the innocent, but I get fattened up and drugged like a captive pig, and you get a state pension.”

“Interesting argument,” said Strike. “So you had no control over what you did?”

“Control,” scoffed Creed, shaking his head. “That shows how far removed—I can’t explain it in terms someone like you would understand. ‘You have your way. I have my ways. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.’ Know who said that?”

“Sounds like Nietzsche,” said Strike.

“Nietzsche,” said Creed, talking over him. “Obviously, yes. I read a lot in Belmarsh, back before I got stuffed full of so many drugs I couldn’t concentrate from one end of the sentence to another.

“I’ve got diabetes now, did you know that?” Creed continued. “Yeah. Hospital-acquired diabetes. They took a thin, fit man, and piled the weight on me, with these drugs I don’t need and the pig-swill we’re forced to eat. Eight hundred so-called healers leeching a living off us. They need us ill, because we’re their livelihoods. Morlocks. Understand that word?”

“Fictional underbeings,” said Strike, “in The Time—”

“Obviously, yes,” said Creed again, who seemed irritated that Strike understood his references. “H. G. Wells. Primitive beings preying on the highly evolved species, who don’t realize they’re being farmed to eat. Except I realize it, I know what’s going on.”

“See yourself as one of the Eloi, do you?” asked Strike.

“Interesting thing about the Eloi,” said Creed, “is their total lack of conscience. The higher race is intellectual, refined, with no so-called remorse… I was exploring all this in my book, the book I was writing before they took it off me. Wells’s thing was only a superficial allegory, but he was groping toward a truth… What I was writing, part autobiography, part scientific treatise—but it was taken away from me, they’ve confiscated my manuscript. It could be an invaluable resource, but no, because it’s mine, it’s got to be destroyed. I’ve got an IQ of 140, but they want my brain flabby like my body.”