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  ‘Was the letter dated?’

  ‘Yes. May this year.’

  ‘And she said he lived in a flat on the site where 10 Rillington Place had been?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it should be easy to identify him, surely?’

  ‘Not if it’s a big block of flats.’

  ‘Did the letter give you any other information? Like how old he was?’

  ‘No. But you should be able to work that out from the other letters. Because . . .’

  This time she didn’t look guilty, she looked hurt.

  Time to help her out. ‘Because it was your husband’s son as well as hers?’

  ‘Yes. Which means it was me who couldn’t have children, not him.’

  ‘You never had fertility investigations?’

  ‘No. Children just didn’t happen. We didn’t want to know whose fault it was. I hadn’t realized, but I’d always assumed it was his. I suppose I was –’

  She was about to launch into a self-examination which she would never normally have done even to a complete stranger, I reckoned, and since I had to work with her I didn’t want her feeling bad about it and taking against me, so I stopped her.

  ‘Sure there was no other information in the letter that I should know about?’

  She looked taken aback. ‘No, apart from what I’ve told you.’

  ‘And what was the point of the letter? Just to express her anxiety?’ ‘No. She wanted to meet Robbie, to discuss it, or for him to speak to the young man.’ ‘And what you want me to do is identify him, tell you and tip off the police?’

  ‘I – suppose so.’

  ‘You’d better let me get on with it, then.’

  I got up. She didn’t. She cleared her throat. I waited.

  ‘I’m not sure I explained,’ she said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Explained what I wanted you to do. I don’t want the process.’

  ‘What process?’

  ‘The process of discovery. I don’t want the name, of the boy. I don’t want you to tell me who the boy is, before you’re absolutely sure.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure that this affair is real. Sure that there was such a woman and that she had this relationship with Robbie. I don’t believe it, you see. He wasn’t like that. I’d have known. So I don’t want you to keep me informed at all, as you investigate, because I’ll hear the names and it’ll be just like reading the letters, and that was what I hired you to avoid.’

  ‘So ...’

  ‘So, I don’t want you to tell me the name of the boy. I don’t want to hear from you again until you can tell me if it’s true that this woman was having an affair with my husband, and until you can tell me her name. I want you to inform the police as soon as you have the name of the boy referred to in the letters. I want you to leave me out of it, because I won’t talk to the police myself, and if you name me I’ll deny it, because I can’t . . . can’t . . . It’s too complicated. I should try to untangle it, but—’

  ‘I understand,’ I interrupted, determined at all costs to avoid a soul-baring session. ‘I’ll get right on to it,’ I said, and waited.

  ‘And you should probably have this,’ she said, taking a piece of paper from her bag and handing it to me.

  It was a folded page of A4, blank on one side. I opened it. Half a page of word-processed, ink-jet printed text. ‘That’s the letter,’ she said. ‘Her last letter.’ I was utterly taken aback. ‘You said you ate it,’ I said limply. ‘Then I lied.’

  Chapter Six

  Hilary Lucas left, annoyed with me because I hadn’t listened to the secrets she really wouldn’t have wanted to tell me.

  Neither was I best pleased with her, so her huff didn’t worry me. She might have left me trawling through the envelope full of letters, possibly to stumble across a serial killer The danger didn’t worry me so much, mostly because I didn’t believe that the identity of the killer lay so easily at the heart of the emotional mess that Robbie Lucas had bequeathed his wife, but I was annoyed by the feeling that Hilary was trying to draw me into her pain, feeding me dribs and drabs of half-information. Didn’t she have any friends?

  And what did she mean, pissing me about over the letter? Why say she ate it? Seriously odd and out of character. Trying to distract me? Or maybe just a spurt of irritation that came from extreme pressure, which I suppose she was under.

  I opened the folded paper and read the letter. It was dated May and it began without a preamble.

  Now I’m really worried. I thought he was pretending, to annoy me. You know he likes to annoy me. He always has. But he really likes that place he’s living in – I didn’t know why. It was built over that dreadful murderer’s house, where he killed those sad women and buried them or bricked them in. 10 Rillington Place. He chose to live there, and he likes it, and he says some women deserve to die. Our own Boy. He was such a beautiful child. I’m now seriously afraid. He talks so oddly about the Notting Hill Killer. Please speak to him, One. He listens to you.

  No ending, no signature, not even an initial. More a memo than a love letter, but absolutely confident in its tone, more intimate even than a love letter, perhaps! And why did she call him ‘One’?

  Anyway, it was time for action. First stop: Rillington Place. I got out out my oldest A-Z and looked up the index, just in case. No Rillington Place.

  The library, obvious next stop, was closed on Thursday afternoons, and it would take time to go all the way down to the central library in Kensington High Street. A local policeman might know.

  Eddy Barstow was my first port of call for anything like, this, even though he was based at West End Central, and Rillington Place would be Notting Hill.

  I lay on the floor – it was warmer there, near the fire – propped my feet on the desk, and dialled West End Central. Answer. Wait. Same voice, ‘Can anyone else help?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  Wait wait, then Eddy’s voice. ‘Alex! Light of my loins!’

  ‘Don’t mix your metaphors, Eddy.’

  ‘Real Ripper weather, isn’t it? Foggier than a hippo’s fart here, and cold with it. Same with you, I reckon.’

  Hardly surprising, since we were no more than a mile apart.

  ‘Got the thermal underwear on, have we?’ he continued.

  ‘Hardly. What about you?’

  ‘I never feel the cold, you know that. I’m wearing the usual high-fashion garment.’ Explosive laugh.

  Summer or winter, Eddy wore a polyester suit of the kind of fabric that had never been slapped into breath by a midwife. He’d be red faced, shiny and sweaty: he always was.

  ‘I expect you need help,’ he said. ‘You only ever call me on the scrounge. So what is it?’

  ‘I need to find Rillington Place,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry to have to tell you, Princess, we closed the Christie case a while back.’

  ‘Sorry to have to tell you, Eddy, but you hanged the wrong man.’

  ‘Only the first time,’ he said breezily.

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ I said. Eddy was a lot more sensitive than he let on.

  ‘No, I don’t, poor half-witted bugger,’ he said. ‘But that’s water under the bridge, right? What’s it to you?’

  ‘I just need to know where it was,’ I said. ‘It’s not on my oldest A-Z and it’s early closing at the library.’

  ‘OK. I’m pushed at the minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you, right? Give me an hour.’

  I hadn’t had my daily run. So I put on joggers and a sweatshirt and my air Nikes, did the warm-up exercises, and set off for the Scrubs by way of Lil’s old people’s home.

  The home was newish, built about five years ago when they’d pulled down the slab-ugly but solid redbrick early-Victorian school on the site. The architect hadn’t had his eye on the ball because not only had there been massive cost overruns but he’d forgotten to include any toilets in the original designs, and no one picked up on it until the ceremonial opening: an unc
omfortable occasion. It didn’t look bad, however, just nondescript postmodern: grey brick with bright-blue window frames, doors and trellis-like metal outcrops.

  I talked my way through the security system (two gates and a door) only to be told by a late-middle-aged supervisor that Lil wasn’t in yet. ‘She’s missed her supper.’

  ‘I’ll leave a message.’

  ‘We don’t take messages for the residents.’

  ‘If you can lend me a pencil and some paper, I’ll write a note.’

  ‘We don’t lend pencil and paper.’

  I opened my mouth to argue and closed it again. Her tone wasn’t obstructive, just exhausted.

  As I thanked her and turned to leave, she carried on with the task I’d interrupted, spraying air-freshener in the reception area. It wasn’t working.

  Not far to the Scrubs from there. I was jogging, not running, because I couldn’t see a hand’s length in front of me and twice I nearly collided with a tree. The quiet was eerie: once I was on the open ground, the fog muffled traffic noise and cars were just a slow-moving necklace of haloed lights rimming the space. The massive bulk of the prison loomed out of the dark at me and then away as I circled the perimeter and thought about the Notting Hill Killer and accessibility.

  Wormwood Scrubs isn’t a park, it’s common land. Some of its edges are effectively fenced by buildings like the prison, the hospital, the athletic stadium and the railway depot, but the side bounded by Scrubs Lane is completely open, and I assumed it was on this side where the bodies had been found. It would be very labour intensive to keep a watch here, on the off-chance that the Killer came back. By day Scrubs Lane carries heavy traffic and there are often cars parked on the pavement while their owners walk their dogs or eat their sandwiches or dump rubbish. It’s emptier by night, but you still get dog walkers, plus illicit couples.

  Dodging an impending tree, I decided an hour’s exercise was enough and headed home.

  I was in the shower when the phone rang.

  Eddy.

  ‘I’ve got the man for you,’ he said. ‘Lowly PC doing door-todoor on the Christie case. Did his time as beat copper in Notting Hill. Nothing went on he didn’t know. Long time retired. Lives up your way.’ Pause. ‘This for one of your documentaries, is it?’

  Easier to say yes, or he’d fuss.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Just asking, because I’m off to Florida tomorrow first thing, won’t be around to keep an eye on you. Keep Arthur off the subject of families, right? You don’t want to hear about his wife and daughter. Got a pencil?’

  I took down the name, address and telephone number he gave me.

  ‘He’s expecting you,’ he said. ‘He owes me a favour or two, OK?’

  There wasn’t a man, woman, dog or horse in the Metropolitan Police who didn’t owe Eddy a favour. That’s why he’d survived so long with his unorthodox policing methods. That was why he was so useful to me. Our long friendship had started with his banging my mother and he’d gone on to incorporate me virtually as part of his family, especially when I went out with his son Peter, youngest of his five sons, when I was eighteen and Peter was twenty. Eddy tried to hit on me every time we spoke, but that wasn’t a particular compliment because he tried every woman between sixteen and fifty.

  Arthur Fishburn lived about half a mile north of my flat, in a neat little council house in a neat little council street. His front garden was mown lawn, a tiny handkerchief-sized square, littered with leaves in the other houses but spotless in his and a sickly green under the streetlights. The heavy brown curtains across his front window were tightly drawn, but the net curtain covering the square of glass in the top of his door was white, and moved as I went up the flagged path.

  I was two minutes after the time fixed and he was waiting for me. He’d have met the height requirement when he joined – still five foot ten then – but time had shrunk him. He carried himself stiffly erect and he wore a crisp blue shirt and dark-blue trousers which still gave the illusion of uniform.

  His eyes were bright blue and his face was weathered, clean-shaven and well maintained. ‘Arthur Fishburn,’ he said briskly, and offered a hand which shook only slightly.

  ‘Alex Tanner,’ I said. He must be nearer eighty than seventy, I thought, but he didn’t look it.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Did you come in a car?’

  ‘I walked.’

  He tut-tutted. ‘Shouldn’t walk alone in a fog like this, ’tisn’t safe for a young girl like you. There are bad men out there, believe me. Cup of tea? Beer?’

  ‘Beer would be good,’ I said.

  ‘Kitchen should do us, if that suits,’ he said, ushering me firmly past the door to the front room. ‘I don’t use the parlour much, and any friend of Eddy’s is a friend of mine.’

  The back room, where he obviously lived, contained a cooker so clean that I reckoned it had never been used, a sink with one cup standing in it, and a round table with, a yellow vinyl cover with a blue pattern of marching elephants. One of everything – knife, fork, spoon, plate – was drying on a kitchen towel on the sink drainer, and on the table was a newspaper. A tabloid. He was doing the crossword.

  He produced two bottled, room-temperature beers. Not my preference, but we sat on the two kitchen chairs, drank the beer and talked about the weather and Eddy, who Arthur called the Guv’nor, and I tried not to shout, get on with it, and thought about how some people had no time and other people, like the unemployed and the retired, had too much time, and how it should all be shuffled and redealt so everyone had a reasonable amount, except for me, because I liked the pressure.

  Meanwhile I got used to his tics. He had a sequence: rub the back of his neck, tilt his head sideways, stretch his jaw in a half-yawn, clear his throat, extend his right leg and shake it. Maybe he had cramp.

  I chatted about Eddy and he moved on to Eddy’s family. I remembered I had to keep him off families so I said I’d gone out with Peter, and then tried to turn the conversation to the weather. After the statutory grumbles he moved on to the Notting Hill Killer and asked if I had any theories. I had none. I listened to his, realizing that his fantasy was that he’d track him down singlehanded. He must have been retired fifteen years at least. Pity he didn’t have something better to think about.

  Although as I didn’t know yet about his daughter and his wife, perhaps I was making snap judgements. Perhaps what he was doing now was better than what he might have been doing.

  Finally he cleared his throat and changed his tone. ‘The Guv’nor tells me you’re interested in the Christie case,’ he said. ‘How can I help you?’

  I was sorry to disappoint him. I told him that I was a TV researcher and I only wanted to find 10 Rillington Place.

  ‘All right, come on, then. I’ll walk you down there.’

  As we walked, he talked. He went slowly and paused now and then to catch his breath and shake his right leg. Easier if he hadn’t talked, I thought, but probably he was lonely and milking a captive audience. ‘I run the Neighbourhood Watch,’ he said. ‘I still patrol the streets of Notting Hill – and Notting Dale – to keep them safe. I still know what goes on.’ He launched into a list of criminals, pointing out where they lived and where crimes had been committed: that corner was the site of last week’s GBH; that house was where the local fence lived; that was ‘a disorderly house’, a quaint old-fashioned term which suggested not so much a brothel, which is what it meant, as a house in which clothes were thrown on the floor and milk wasn’t put in a jug.

  I adjusted my pace to his, and tried not to have my teeth set on edge by the hostility in his voice, which didn’t seem located to anything I knew, or had asked. I didn’t even know whether he was hostile to me or the criminal activities he was describing.

  ‘Not many murderers,’ I said to stem the flow.

  ‘Isn’t the current bastard enough for you? Four innocent young girls, tortured, raped, mutilated?’

  He stopped walking, and went through an aggress
ive, accelerated version of his tic.

  ‘Of course it’s terrible,’ I said, but he wasn’t listening.

  ‘Three policemen killed in Braybrook Street, over by the Scrubs, remember?’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Back in the sixties. Three policemen, just doing their jobs. And before that, Neville Heath, liked tying them up and beating them. You don’t want to know what he did to that poor woman’s body with a poker, trust me you don’t.’

  I certainly didn’t want to know what Neville Heath had done with a poker nearly fifty years ago, but neither did I trust Arthur. I walked on and he followed me, still talking.

  ‘Over in Chepstow Villas, that was. And a drug dealer knifed in the Bella, only last week. It’s always gone on, believe me, you’ve got to stay on top of it, keep watching, keep alert, dam the river of evil or else we’ll all be drowned in it.’

  I nodded, hoping to dam the river of talk. ‘Lay off, Arthur, will you? All this is spooking me.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. You can be too confident if you’re an attractive woman, as I know to my cost. Haven’t you a man to look after you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, to shut him up.

  ‘Does he know you go alone into the houses of perfect strangers?’

  ‘You came recommended, Arthur. Eddy said you were OK.’

  We’d nearly reached my flat by now. He turned away from Ladbroke Grove, into a seventies council-built estate of terraced houses. Flat roofs, landscaped public areas with grass and flower-beds (‘No ball games,’ ‘Do not allow dogs to foul this area,’ ‘Please respect the flowers’). It being November, there were no flowers, but I nodded to the bedraggled bushes.

  ‘A good estate,’ he said judiciously, calmer now he was back to business. ‘Mostly senior citizens and respectable families. Quite a few privately owned, now, after the council-house sell-off in the eighties.’

  We kept walking through it. On our left was the estate, on our right a parking area interspersed with trees, and above us to the right the underground railway, which isn’t underground in that section of the Hammersmith and City Line.

  ‘You’ll humour an old man, I know,’ he said. ‘Just in case you’re after a real live villain and not telling me, we won’t stare, will we, we’ll act casual.’ Before I could react, he went on, ‘Now we’re in Rillington Place,’ although we hadn’t passed any boundary marker that I could see, and it was still a car park. ‘And this –’ turning right into a narrow street called Bartlett Close, and nodding at the only building in it – ‘was built over several of the original houses, including number ten.’