When Robin let herself into the flat forty minutes later, carrying a bag of groceries and looking forward to an early night, she found the place empty except for Wolfgang, who greeted her exuberantly, then whined in a way that indicated a full bladder. With a sigh, Robin found his lead and took him downstairs for a quick walk around the block. After that, too tired to cook a proper meal, she scrambled herself some eggs and ate them with toast while watching the news on TV.
She was running herself a bath when her mobile rang again. Her heart sank a little when she saw that it was her brother Jonathan, who was in his final year of university in Manchester. She thought she knew what he was calling about.
“Hi, Jon,” she said.
“Hey, Robs. You didn’t answer my text.”
She knew perfectly well that she hadn’t. He’d sent it that morning, while she’d been watching Two-Times’ girlfriend having a blameless coffee, alone with a Stieg Larsson novel. Jon wanted to know whether he and a female friend could come and stay at her flat on the weekend of the fourteenth and fifteenth of February.
“Sorry,” said Robin, “I know I didn’t, it’s been a busy day. I’m not sure, to be honest, Jon. I don’t know what Max’s plans—”
“He wouldn’t mind us crashing in your room, would he? Courtney’s never been to London. There’s a comedy show we want to see on Saturday. At the Bloomsbury Theatre.”
“Is Courtney your girlfriend?” asked Robin, smiling now. Jonathan had always been quite cagey with the family about his love life.
“Is she my girlfriend,” repeated Jonathan mockingly, but Robin had an idea that he was quite pleased with the question really, and surmised that the answer was “yes.”
“I’ll check with Max, OK? And I’ll ring you back tomorrow,” said Robin.
Once she’d disposed of Jonathan, she finished running the bath and headed into her bedroom to fetch pajamas, dressing gown and something to read. The Demon of Paradise Park lay horizontally across the top of her neat shelf of novels. After hesitating for a moment, she picked it up and took it back to the bathroom with her, trying as she did so to imagine getting ready for bed with her brother and an unknown girl in the room, as well. Was she prudish, stuffy and old before her time? She’d never finished her university degree: “crashing” on floors in the houses of strangers had never been part of her life, and in the wake of the rape that had occurred in her halls of residence, she’d never had any desire to sleep anywhere except in an environment over which she had total control.
Sliding into the hot bubble bath, Robin let out a great sigh of pleasure. It had been a long week, sitting in the car for hours or else trudging through the rainy streets after Shifty or Elinor Dean. Eyes closed, enjoying the heat and the synthetic jasmine of her cheap bubble bath, her thoughts drifted back to Dave Underwood’s daughter.
At least Creed can’t get you, eh? Setting aside the offensively jocular tone, it struck her as significant that a woman who’d known for years that Creed hadn’t been driving the sun-emblazoned van was nevertheless certain that he’d abducted Margot.
Because, of course, Creed hadn’t always used a van. He’d killed two women before he ever got the job at the dry cleaner’s, and managed to persuade women to walk into his basement flat even after he’d acquired the vehicle.
Robin opened her eyes, reached for The Demon of Paradise Park and turned to the page where she had last left it. Holding the book clear of the hot, foamy water, she continued to read.
One night in September 1972, Dennis Creed’s landlady spotted him bringing a woman back to the basement flat for the first time. She testified at Creed’s trial that she heard the front gate “squeak” at close to midnight, glanced down from her bedroom window at the steps into the basement and saw Creed and a woman who “seemed a bit drunk but was walking OK,” heading into the house.
When she asked Dennis who the woman was, he told her the implausible story that she was a regular client of the dry cleaner’s. He claimed he’d met the drunk woman by chance in the street, and that she had begged him to let her come into his flat to phone a taxi.
In reality, the woman Violet had seen Dennis steering into the flat was the unemployed Gail Wrightman, who’d been stood up that evening by a boyfriend. Wrightman left the Grasshopper, a bar in Shoreditch, at half past ten in the evening, after consuming several strong cocktails. A woman matching Wrightman’s description was seen getting into a white van at a short distance from the bar. Barring Cooper’s glimpse of a brunette in a light-colored coat entering Creed’s flat that night, there were no further sightings of Gail Wrightman after she left the Grasshopper.
By now, Creed had perfected a façade of vulnerability that appealed particularly to older women like his landlady, and a convivial, sexually ambiguous persona that worked well with the drunk and lonely. Creed subsequently admitted to meeting Wrightman in the Grasshopper, adding Nembutal to her drink and lying in wait outside the bar where, confused and unsteady on her feet, she was grateful for his offer of a lift home.
Cooper accepted his explanation of the dry-cleaning client who’d wanted to call a taxi “because I had no reason to doubt it.”
In reality, Gail Wrightman was now gagged and chained to a radiator in Creed’s bedroom, where
