My hand shook as I took it and headed to the door. Half of me dreaded what might be in here. What if they’d found proof that Marion’s killer also murdered the Bissets?

‘Lynch,’ Shep’s command made me jump. I turned around: ‘Your arse is mine, son. Don’t forget that.’

Chapter 32

Trinity Road, South London

Thursday, August 15, 1991; 22:00

That evening, I walked into my spick-and-span sitting room, called Eve’s name and saw a note on the table.

Dear Donal, I’ve already ruined your life once. I don’t want to ruin it again. Thank you for everything. I’ve gone to stay with a friend. I’ll be in touch. All my love, whatever that is worth to you or anyone, Eve x

She hadn’t added a number. I screwed up the paper and lobbed it over the back of the couch. The two barely burnt, lopsided candles on the table caught my eye. That was us now, I thought. We’d burned once, and brightly. But no longer.

I rang Gabby. Her spiky blonde flatmate answered.

‘Hi,’ I said brightly.

‘Hi,’ she said flatly, her tone confirming that Gabby had been talking. I couldn’t help feeling slightly pleased: at least she obviously gave a shit.

‘Can I speak to Gabby?’

‘Er, no, she’s out actually.’

‘Out?’ I said, but it sounded more like, ‘yeah right’.

‘Yes, out. And I don’t think she’d want to talk to you if she were in.’

‘If she were in?’ I repeated back, sarcastically.

‘Look, Donal,’ said Spiky coldly, ‘she doesn’t want you calling here again. Ever. Understood?’

‘But …’ I protested to the dead line.

I poured a monstrous Shiraz and suddenly thought about all those Masses of my childhood. Those words you heard, Sunday after Sunday, never leave you.

I raised the glass and addressed the wall: ‘Take this, all of you and drink from it: for this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, it will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven.’

For the first time in my entire life, I felt free. Truly properly free. Bar Fintan, I had severed all personal ties. Even the ones I’d pursued. Emotionally, I had no duty or responsibility, no debt or investment, no plan or fear, no guilt or blame.

The wine tasted sweeter than anything I’d ever drunk.

Chapter 33

Clapham Police Station, South London

Friday, August 16, 1991; 10:00

I speed-read the Bisset file. The killer’s fastidious handiwork made it plain that it wasn’t a domestic. However, as a matter of course, detectives checked out Samantha’s partner and an ex, immediate family, neighbours and everyone on her phone call records. They found nothing of interest. Yet again, neighbours didn’t see or hear anything unusual, and I marvelled at London’s collective determination to mind its own business.

Samantha’s family revealed that, until four years ago, she had been a new age traveller, living on the road with a commune. Then she settled down to be a full-time mum to Jazmine. Her daughter didn’t know her father, who had continued living the nomadic life. Detectives were trying to contact him.

Conrad, Samantha’s boyfriend of nine months and the poor bastard who found her, revealed that she rarely locked her doors or windows, sunbathed topless on her balcony and never shut her front room blinds. ‘She was a free spirit,’ said Conrad. I hoped her spirit had finally found the freedom it craved during her physical life.

Normally, you’d guess that some local Peeping Tom loser had spotted this hot blonde sunbathing with it all on show, grown obsessed and turned stalker. But the clinical, methodical, ritualistic butchering of her body and the removal of a trophy suggested that her killer had mutilated bodies before. His craftsmanship made the frenzied attack on Marion Ryan look amateur. But my mind kept getting pulled back to one indisputable connection between the cases – both Marion and Samantha had been frenziedly stabbed to death just inside their front doors. I felt convinced that it had to be the same killer. Maybe he’d planned to ceremoniously carve Marion open but got spooked or disturbed somehow.

After lunchtime, Shep bounced out of his office: ‘Bethan Trott’s in. I’m taking this one myself, Lynch. Come and watch a master inquisitor at work.’

I struggled to match Shep’s breakneck pace down the corridor. Once again, he punched in his secret code to release the security door, then stood back to let me do the work. As I pulled down the handle and shouldered hard, my thoughts turned again to that flat door at number 21, spring-loaded to cut off your fingers.

We walked into suite two, past Bethan, to the far end of the table. She sat alone, her right hand playing nervously with a large crucifix around her neck, her brown eyes darting between us. Everything about her looked meek, timid: her mousy hair, scared, tired eyes, thin busy lips, nervous fingers.

Shep didn’t turn on the tape recorder.

‘Now, Beth Ann,’ he mispronounced, probably deliberately, ‘reading your second statement, you suddenly felt a moral compulsion to mention the small fact you caught Karen and Peter fucking in the shed at work last November?’

Bethan reddened.

‘And that Karen had been using your room to spy on Peter and Marion? Then, like a magician, you produce Karen’s handwritten list of the presents Peter had bought Marion for her birthday with the words “sick” scrawled across the bottom. You know what I think, Beth Ann?’

Bethan’s eyes shot up to Shep’s for a nanosecond, the target taking one last chance to read her assassin’s bullet.

‘You know Karen killed Marion Ryan, don’t you, Beth Ann? But you don’t want to be the grass who puts her away, do you? I understand this, Beth Ann. After all, no one likes a squealer.’

Her eyes didn’t know where to look.

‘Do you know what perverting the course of justice means, Beth Ann?’

She dropped her crucifix and shook her head.

‘It’s when someone misleads the police or the justice system and wastes our time. It’s a criminal offence. Do you know what you can get for perverting the course of justice, Beth Ann?’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ whispered Bethan.

‘A life sentence. Imagine that, Beth Ann? Locked up in Holloway prison for eight or ten years? Big old jack-booted, tobacco-chewing dyke screws making you lick ’em out every night? I bet you’d love that, wouldn’t you, Beth Ann?’

She looked at me, shocked, pleading. I enjoyed giving her nothing back.

‘I want a solicitor,’ she said, her eyes narrowing, determined.

‘I offered you a duty solicitor when you first came in, Beth Ann, and you said no. Have you forgotten already? Why would you need a solicitor anyway? You’ve got nothing to hide, have you?’

She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it.

Shep read out her original statement: ‘“I had been in the communal kitchen in the Pines staff residence preparing food when Karen and Laura Foster arrived between five fifteen and five twenty p.m. There was no one else in the kitchen. I can be sure of the time, because we’d planned to watch a TV soap together in my room which started at five thirty.”

‘Tell me about Marion Ryan. Did you like her, Beth Ann?’

She nodded, uncertainly: ‘I was close to Marion. She was lovely.’

‘If you had to choose between Marion and Karen Foster, who would you say was your closer friend, Beth Ann?’

‘I’ve known Karen for a lot longer than I knew Marion, so I was closer to her.’

‘I see,’ said Shep, ‘but you don’t have to choose, do you?’

Bethan frowned. I didn’t understand what he was getting at either.

‘I don’t have that luxury,’ said Shep. ‘I like you and I like Karen, but which of you am I going to charge with perverting the course of justice?’