“You seem pretty alert to me. What drugs have they got you on?”

“I shouldn’t be on any drugs at all. I should be in assertive rehab but they won’t let me out of high dependency. They let the little schizophrenics loose in the workshops with knives over there, and I can’t have a pencil. When I came here, I thought I’d meet intelligent people… any child who can memorize a seven times table could be a doctor, it’s all rote learning and dogma. The patient’s supposed to be a partner in this therapeutic process, and I say I’m well enough to go back to prison.”

“Certainly seem sane to me,” said Strike.

“Thank you,” said Creed, who’d become flushed. “Thank you. You’re an intelligent man, it appears. I thought you would be. That’s why I agreed to this.”

“But you’re still on medication—”

“I know all about their drugs, and they’re giving me too much. I could prescribe better for myself than they know how to, here.”

“How d’you know about that stuff?” asked Strike.

“Obvious, easy,” said Creed, with a grandiose gesture. “I used myself as a guinea pig, developed my own series of standardized tests. How well I could walk and talk on twenty milligrams, thirty milligrams… made notes on disorientation, drowsiness, differences in side-effects…”

“What kinds of drugs were these?” asked Strike.

“Amobarbital, pentobarbital, phenobarbital,” rattled off Creed: the names of barbiturates of the early seventies, mostly replaced, now, by other drugs.

“Easy to buy on the street?”

“I only bought off the street occasionally, I had other channels, that were never widely known…”

And Creed launched into a meandering speech that couldn’t properly be called a story, because the narrative was disjointed and full of mysterious hints and oblique allusions, but the gist seemed to be that Creed had been associating with many unnamed but powerful people in the sixties and seventies, and that a steady supply of prescription drugs had been an incidental perk, either of working for gangsters, or spying on them for the authorities. He hinted at having been recruited by the security services, spoke of flights to America there was no evidence he’d ever taken, of barbiturate-addicted politicians and celebrities, and the dangerous desire of humans from all walks of life to dope themselves to cope with the cruel realities of the world, a tendency and temptation which Dennis Creed deplored and had always resisted.

Strike surmised that these fake reminiscences were designed to feed Creed’s overweening craving for status. No doubt his decades in high-security prisons and mental hospitals had taught him that rape and torture were considered almost as contemptible there as they’d been on the outside. He might continue to derive sexual pleasure from reliving his crimes, but in others, they elicited only contempt. Without a fantasy career in which he was part-spy, part-gangster, the man with the 140 IQ was merely a dry-cleaning delivery man, a sexual deviant buying handfuls of downers from street dealers who’d exploited, then betrayed him.

“… see all that security all round me, at the trial? There were other forces at play, that’s all I’ll say…”

There’d been a solid cordon of police around Creed on his way in and out of court because the crowd had wanted to tear him apart. The details of his torture chamber had leaked: police had found the hot-irons and the pliers, the ball gags and the whips, the photographs Creed had taken of his victims, alive and dead, and the decomposing head and hands of Andrea Hooton, sitting in his bathroom sink. But the image of himself Creed now presented Strike turned murder into something incidental to a much more prestigious criminal life, a hobby that for some reason the public continued to harp on, when there was so much more to tell, and admire.

“… because they like salivating over dirty little things that excite them, as an outlet for their own unacceptable urges,” said Creed. “I could’ve been a doctor, probably should have been, actually…”

(He’d poured cooking oil over dinner lady Vera Kenny’s head, then set her hair on fire and photographed her while it burned, a ball gag in her mouth. He’d cut out unemployed Gail Wrightman’s tongue. He’d murdered hairdresser Susan Meyer by stamping repeatedly on her head.)

“Never killed anyone by overdose, did you?” said Strike.

“It takes far more skill to disorientate them but keep them on their feet. Any fool can shove an overdose down someone’s throat. The other takes knowledge and experience. That’s how I know they’re using too much on me in here, because I understand side-effects.”

“What were you giving the women in the basement?”

“I never drugged a woman, once I had her at home. Once she was inside, I had other ways of keeping her quiet.”

Andrea Hooton’s mouth had been sewn shut by Creed while she was still alive: the traces of thread had still been present on the rotting head.

The psychiatrist glanced at his watch.

“What if a woman was already drunk?” asked Strike. “Gail Wrightman: you picked her up in a bar, right? Wasn’t there a danger of overdose, if you drugged her on top of the drink?”

“Intelligent question,” said Creed, drinking Strike in with his enormous pupils. “I can usually tell what a woman’s had to the exact unit. Gail was on her own, sulking. Some man had stood her up…”

Creed was giving nothing away: these weren’t secrets. He’d admitted to it all already, in the dock, where he’d enjoyed relaying the facts, watching the reaction of the victims’ relatives. The photographs hidden under the floorboards, of Gail and Andrea, Susan and Vera, Noreen, Jackie and Geraldine, bound, burned and stabbed, alive and maimed, their mutilated and sometimes headless corpses posed in pornographic attitudes, had damned him before he opened his mouth, but he’d insisted on a full trial, pleading guilty by reason of insanity.

“… in a wig, bit of lipstick… they think you’re harmless, odd… maybe queer. Talked to her for a minute or two, little dark corner. You act concerned…

“Bit of Nembutal in her drink… tiny amount, tiny,” said Creed, holding his trembling fingers millimeters apart. “Nembutal and alcohol, potentially dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I did, obviously…

“So I say, ‘Well, I got to go now, sweetheart, you be careful.’ ‘Be careful!’ It always worked.” Creed affected squeaky tones to imitate Gail, “‘Aw, don’t go, have a drink!’ ‘No, darling, I need my beauty sleep.’ That’s when you prove you’re not a threat. You make as if you want to leave, or actually walk away. Then, when they call you back, or run into you ten minutes later, when they’re starting to feel like shit, they’re relieved, because you’re the nice man who’s safe…

“It was all in my book, the different ways I got them. Instructive for women who want to keep out of trouble, you’d think, to read how a highly efficient killer works, but the authorities won’t let it be published, which makes you question, are they happy for slags to be picked off on the streets? Maybe they are.

“Why’re there people like me at all, Cormoran? Why’s evolution let it happen? Because humans are so highly developed, we can only thin ourselves out with intraspecies predators. Pick off the weak, the morally depraved. It’s a good thing that degenerate, drunk women don’t breed. That’s just a fact, it’s a fact,” said Dennis Creed.