He jabbed the bottom of the letter with a yellow-nailed finger.
“The clue’s there. Last line. First letter. My sentence. Put together the first letter of every sentence, and see what you get.”
Robin did as she was bidden.
“Y—O—U—R—D—A—U—G—H—T—E—R…” Robin read out loud, until, fearing where the message was going to end, she fell silent, until she reached the last sentence, when the taste of milky coffee seemed to turn rancid in her mouth, and she said, “Oh God.”
“What’s it say?” asked Lauren, frowning and straining to see.
“Never you mind,” said Tucker shortly, taking the letter back. “There you are,” he told Robin, folding up the papers and shoving them back into his inside pocket. “Now you see what he is. He killed Lou like he killed your doctor and he’s gloating about it.”
Before Robin could say anything, Tucker spun his next bit of paper to face her, and she saw a photocopied map of Islington, with a circle inked around what looked like a large house.
“Now,” he said, “there are two places nobody’s ever looked, where I think he might’ve hid bodies. I’ve been back over everywhere what had a connection with him, kid or adult. Police checked all the obvious, flats he’d lived and that, but never bothered with these.
“When Lou disappeared in November ’72, he wouldn’t’ve been able to bury her in Epping Forest, because—”
“They’d just found Vera Kenny’s body there,” said Robin.
Tucker looked grudgingly impressed.
“You do your homework at that agency, don’t you? Yeah, exactly. There was still a police presence in the forest at the time.
“But see that, there?” said Tucker, tapping on the marked building. “That’s a private house, now, but in the seventies it was the Archer Hotel, and guess who used to do their laundry? Creed’s dry cleaner’s. He used to pick up stuff from them once a week in his van, and bring it back again, sheets and bedspreads and what have you…
“Anyway, after he was arrested, the woman who owned the Archer Hotel gave a quote to the Mail, saying he always seemed so nice and polite, always chatty when he saw her…
“That isn’t marked on modern maps,” said Tucker, now moving his finger to a cross marked in the grounds of the property, “but it’s on the old deeds. There’s a well out the back of that property. Just a shaft into the ground that collects rainwater. Predated the current building.
“I tracked the owner down in ’89, after she’d sold up. She told me the well was boarded up in her time, and she planted bushes round it, because she didn’t want no kid going down it accidental. But Creed used to go through that garden to deliver laundry, right past the place where the well was. He’ll have known it was there. She couldn’t remember telling him,” said Tucker quickly, forestalling Robin’s question, “but that’s neither here nor there, is it? She wasn’t going to remember every word they said to her, was she, after all that time?
“Dead of night, Creed could’ve pulled up a van by the rear entrance, gone in through the back gate… but by the time I realized all this,” said Tucker, gritting his brown teeth in frustration, “the Archer’d gone back to being a private property, and now there’s been a bloody conservatory built over the old well.”
“Don’t you think,” said Robin cautiously, “when they built over it, they might have noticed—”
“Why would they?” said Tucker aggressively. “I never knew a builder who went looking for work when he could just slap concrete over it. Anyway, Creed’s not stupid. He’d’ve thrown rubbish down there on top of the body, wouldn’t he? Cover it up. So that’s a possibility,” he said firmly. “And then you’ve got this.”
Tucker’s last piece of paper was a second map.
“That there,” he said, tapping his swollen-knuckled finger on another circled building, “is Dennis Creed’s great-grandmother’s house. It’s mentioned in The Demon of Paradise Park. Creed said, in one of his interviews, the only time he ever saw countryside when he was a kid was when he got taken there.
“And look here,” said Tucker, pointing on a large patch of green. “The house backs right onto Great Church Wood. Acres of woodland, acres and acres. Creed knew the way there. He had a van. He’d played in those woods as a child.
“We know he chose Epping Forest for most of the bodies, because he had no known connection with the place, but by ’75, police were regularly checking Epping Forest by night, weren’t they? But here’s a different wood he knows, and it’s not so far away from London, and Creed’s got his van and his spades ready in the back.
“My best guess,” said Tucker, “is my Lou and your doc are in the well or in the woods. And they’ve got different technology now to what they had in the seventies. Ground-penetrating radar and what have you. It wouldn’t be difficult to see if there was a body in either of those places, not if the will was there.
“But,” said Tucker, sweeping the two maps off the table and folding them up with his shaking hands, “there’s no will, or there hasn’t been, not for years. Nobody in authority cares. They think it’s all over, they think Creed’ll never talk. So that’s why it’s got to be your boss who interviews him. I wish it could be me,” said Tucker, “but you’ve seen what Creed thought I was worth…”
As Tucker slid his papers back inside his windcheater, Robin became aware that the café around them had filled up during their conversation. At the nearest table sat three young men, all with amusingly Edwardian beards. So long attuned only to Tucker’s low, hoarse voice, Robin’s ears seemed suddenly full of noise. She felt as though she’d suddenly been transported from the distant past into a brash and indifferent present. What would
