‘Now. A few weeks before she was murdered – boyfriend Dolan doesn’t remember exactly when, but he says between two and three weeks before – Rhian found something in a cloth tote bag that she’d taken into work with her. She swore that when she took the bag in, all that was in it was a scarf and a copy of the Daily Mail. When she took it home at the end of the day and unpacked it, she found a little hand-made book: white folded paper with staples in the middle, about five inches by five inches – stiff card, really, more than paper. Only eight pages in total if you didn’t count the cover; twelve if you did. There was nothing to suggest who’d put the book there, or what it meant. Most of the pages were blank, but on one towards the back, someone had handwritten the words, ‘I wonder if it hurts to live’ in black ink, cursive writing. Rhian had no idea what this meant, and described the experience of finding it in her bag as “creepy”. More later on these little books, since each of Billy’s victims received one in similar circumstances.’

  ‘Yes, let’s come to the books later,’ Kerensa Moore agreed.

  ‘The investigation into Rhian’s death soon established that, unless she was keeping something well hidden, there was no obvious reason for her to get herself killed,’ Grace Woolston went on. ‘No trouble at all at home, in the extended family, friendship circle, at work, with any of the families whose kids she babysat for – nothing. Boyfriend didn’t do it – he was at work surrounded by people all afternoon. He’s got no criminal record, there’s nothing amiss about him as far as we can tell, and he’s obviously devastated – DC Wing and his team said that wasn’t an act?’

  James Wing nodded his confirmation.

  ‘Billy left his DNA on the mug he drank his tea from. We know it’s his because he did the same at two of the other three crime scenes – Linzi and Angela. Josh Norbury was shot before he got as far as making Billy his first cuppa, so there was nothing there. The DNA profile we’re assuming is Billy’s from three of the four scenes matched none on record, so we’re none the wiser. We’ve taken samples from anyone and everyone connected to all four victims, and there was no match for our Billy DNA. Things were looking bleak. But then, once all obvious avenues of investigation had been covered and had turned up nothing, a stroke of luck occurred.’

  James Wing muttered something inaudible, then said, ‘Only to un-occur a few weeks later. Sorry. Go on, Grace. It’s painful, but I’ll sit it out.’

  ‘Right,’ said Woolston. ‘Well, another of Rhian and Dolan’s neighbours, seventy-one-year-old Muriel Pearson – the deaf lady I mentioned earlier, with the too-loud TV in the noise dispute – she lives at number 20 Nettle Edge, and she remembered suddenly, long after she’d told us she hadn’t seen anything suspicious on the afternoon of Rhian’s murder, and long after we’d said, “Are you absolutely sure?” and she’d said, “Oh, yes, quite sure!” – she remembered that she had, lo and behold, seen a blonde woman behaving suspiciously outside her house.’

  ‘And we got all excited,’ said Wing bitterly. ‘We imagined that if we could only scrape Blondie’s cheek with a wooden stick, we’d get our DNA match with the Billy mugs.’

  ‘Further probing based on what Muriel Pearson was watching on telly revealed that she might well have seen this woman at around the time Rhian was killed,’ Woolston went on. ‘What she described was this: she was watching TV, with the volume turned up very loud because she’s completely deaf—’

  ‘Yeah, and even though she can’t hear any better with the volume up as high as it’ll go, because she can’t hear sod all, she still puts it up to max, because she’s hard of hearing – so if she’s ever going to hear anything, it’s only going to be with the volume on full, isn’t it?’ Wing shook his head. ‘As if the fu— As if the telly’s going to restore her hearing by yelling at her at the top of its voice.’

  ‘DC Wing, I understand that this is your case and you want to—’ Kerensa Moore began.

  ‘Sorry, Doc.’ Wing held up his hands. ‘All right, I’ll shut up until it’s time for my star turn.’

  Grace Woolston went on in the weary tone of one who expects to be interrupted. ‘Muriel Pearson was sitting in her living room watching TV, volume way way up, and she had a sense there was, as she put it, “someone else there when there should have been no one else there” – because she was alone in the house as far as she knew. Then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, so she turned to her left and got the fright of her life when she saw a woman with blonde hair – straight, shoulder-length, heavy fringe down to just above her eyebrows – standing right outside her house and staring in through her window. Muriel’s eyesight’s pretty good – much better than her hearing. It was assumed she was as reliable a witness as any.’

  ‘That’s right, rub it in,’ James Wing muttered.

  ‘The blonde woman wasn’t looking at Muriel,’ said Woolston. ‘Instead, she was looking straight ahead, but she was smiling, as if she’d just spotted a friend, when in fact she was staring at the far wall of Muriel’s lounge. Understandably, Muriel was unsettled by this – even more unsettled when, instead of stepping back from the window, the woman moved to the side in a way that looked – and I quote – “funny and just not right”. She was heading for the front door, Muriel assumed, but when Muriel went to look there was no one there. The blonde woman is – or I suppose I should say “was”, from DC Wing’s hints – a person of interest.’

  ‘Was,’ Wing agreed. He sat forward and rested his head in his hands briefly. ‘I’ll start with the geography, because it matters. Rhian Douglas and her boyfriend Dolan lived in the first of a row of four tiny terraced cottages, numbers 17 to 20 Nettle Edge, which isn’t a proper street. It’s unmade: a mess of bumpy potholes and about as narrow as it’s possible for a road to be – only a few centimetres wider than one car or van. No pavements. When I stand in Rhian and Dolan’s living room with my car parked outside, I can’t see the wheels.’

  ‘Why would you want to see the wheels of your own car while interviewing a witness?’ Proust asked.

  ‘I didn’t say I would or did, did I?’ Turning pointedly away from the Snowman, Wing said, ‘As you all know, we assigned our mysterious blonde at the window to a sketch artist. Before we had a chance to do anything with his handiwork, we got a call: Muriel Pearson’s son. Asked if I’d go round and see his mother again. She had something she needed to discuss, he said. She was worried about it, and scared … As you can imagine, that was enough to get me haring round there. At first the old lady was all het up, apologetic, she never meant to tell a lie, all that. Since we all know people who say that usually did mean to lie, I thought, “Oh, here we go”, made the right noises and sat back, waiting for the confession.’ Wing laughed and shook his head.

  ‘And?’ said Simon.

  ‘Muriel Pearson didn’t lie. But she did make a mistake. A fu— An important mistake, the correcting of which leaves us with no more mysterious blonde woman to search for. She was never there.’

  ‘The blonde woman was never there?’ said Sam.

  ‘Nope.’ Wing smiled enigmatically. ‘No grinning blonde lady outside the window who moved to the side in a peculiar way. It didn’t happen.’

  ‘So how did a woman with decent eyesight, who didn’t mean to lie …? I don’t get it,’ Grace Woolston said.

  ‘Muriel Pearson’s house is next door to number 19, where Samantha Granger lives,’ said Wing. ‘That’s Samantha Granger who was having her shopping delivered at the time a shot was heard, remember? Delivered by a man in a van?’

  ‘So … the driver, he was who Muriel Pearson saw?’ asked Sam. ‘She saw a man and mistook him for a woman?’

  ‘Nope.’ James Wing was enjoying this too much. Simon wanted to press his face against a wall, sideways on, so that his mouth looked squished and stupid. He shook his head to banish the violent image. At one time, long ago in his police career, he’d have jumped out of his chair and made his fantasy a reality.

  ‘The woman Muriel saw wasn’t a real woman, or a man,’ said Wing.

  ‘A eunuch?’ said the Snowman with a heavy sigh.

  ‘It was a picture – a life-size picture – of a woman. Blonde, yes, grinning, yes, and seemingly staring at Muriel Pearson’s living room wall because, being an image, her eyes could only stare straight ahead. Anyone here ever seen an Asda delivery van?’

  Grace Woolston gasped, covered her mouth with her hands, then spluttered with laughter. ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘I have.’ Sam was nodding. ‘Yes, a blonde woman with a fringe, smiling. She’s on most of the Asda vans, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’ve seen her too,’ said Neil Dunning. ‘But wait a second, you’re not seriously telling me—’

  ‘That anyone could mistake a picture of a woman for an actual woman?’ Wing cut him off. ‘I thought that too. So next time Samantha Granger had an Asda delivery due, I made sure to be in Muriel Pearson’s front room. It was uncanny. If I hadn’t known it was the Asda van lady, yeah, I reckon I might have thought she was real. Muriel Pearson lives in a tiny, light-deprived cottage. Her window’s pretty small and the van would have been right up against it. From where she was sitting on the sofa watching telly, she wouldn’t have been able to see its top, sides or wheels – only a woman’s face and upper body. She assumed, as I think at least a few others might have, that it was a real woman.’

  ‘Who slid to the side,’ said Grace Woolston, trying not to laugh.

  ‘Yeah, as the van drove off, obviously,’ said Wing. He shrugged. ‘I don’t think I need to spell it out, do I? Our one promising lead’s down the pan.’

  ‘Muriel Pearson had never seen her neighbour’s shopping being delivered before that day?’ Simon asked. ‘Most people who shop online have a regular supermarket they use. How come Pearson wasn’t already familiar with the blonde woman on the side of the Asda van?’

  ‘She sits in her chair all day long watching telly she can’t hear, barely taking her eyes off the screen,’ said James Wing. ‘Maybe the day Rhian was murdered was the first time the van driver parked in that particular spot, right outside Muriel’s window. In any case it was the first time Muriel saw or noticed her.’

  ‘You asked her that?’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never thought the blonde woman was Billy,’ said Proust. ‘If you’ve just shot someone, you don’t wander along the street and smile in at the neighbours before disappearing – you scarper.’

  ‘Simon, what are you thinking?’ Sam asked.

  ‘He’s wondering when to launch his brilliant new theory,’ said the Snowman. ‘The Asda lady – the real woman in the photo – secretly follows the vans that bear her image, and murders the people they deliver shopping to – except in this case she miscalculated and got an innocent neighbour by mistake.’

  ‘There’s nothing implausible about a real person being there that day as well as the picture on the van,’ said Simon. ‘We know someone else was in the vicinity: Rhian Douglas’s killer. Who might, for all we know, be blonde and smiley, with a fringe – and for all Muriel Pearson knows, if she’d never seen that van before and sits in her chair all day, never looking out of the window. How does she know?’

  ‘She positively IDd the Asda van picture as the woman she saw at the window,’ Wing said. ‘When I showed her the photo, she turned pale and started to cry. “That’s definitely her,” she said.’

  ‘Your ignorance of the female anatomy is, as ever, your Achilles heel, Waterhouse. Real women don’t slide to the side as if on wheels. They walk. On these things they have called legs.’

  Unbelievable. They’d all missed it.

  Simon smiled and stared at the wall, like a picture of a man on the side of a van.

  ‘Do you really believe all this?’ DC Colin Sellers held up page 27 of Lifeworld magazine so that the woman opposite him could see her own words. Would she turn away in embarrassment when confronted by her own stupidity?

  The two of them were sitting at a window table in the Artesian bar of The Langham hotel in London; her choice of venue, not his. While he waited for an answer to his question, Sellers silently listed all Sondra Halliday’s worst physical features – too-small eyes, too-small forehead, bitten nails – in a futile attempt to persuade himself he didn’t fancy her.

  He did.

  She had as many good attributes as bad: long legs that tapered to exactly the sort of bony ankles he liked best, shiny brown waist-length hair, a trace of a northern accent, a gurgly laugh that was achingly sexy, and a way of looking at the world that should have angered Sellers but instead fascinated him. That a person who shared the same planet and probably watched some of the same TV shows as him could have such alien ideas in her head …

  That’s if Halliday was serious. For as long as they’d been talking, Sellers had wondered if she was about to admit that her whole personality was a wind-up.

  ‘Shit,’ she said loudly, startling him. A waitress nearby adjusted her smile setting from ‘warm and effusive’ to ‘brave face’, and moved so that she was standing directly in front of the elderly couple to whom she was serving mint tea, blocking their view of the sweary lady.

  Sellers could guess how Sondra Halliday would feel about being called a lady. She’d said something incomprehensible about her ‘biological sex’ within twenty seconds of arriving, but, although the words were all ones Sellers knew, their order resembled nothing he was used to.

  ‘Pardon?’ he asked now.

  ‘There was a silent “shit” at the end of your question.’ Halliday speared one of her dim sum with a chopstick and stuffed it into her mouth, then used the same chopstick to tap the page in Lifeworld where her article was printed. ‘Am I serious about all this shit that I write and have the gall to publish? Yes, I am. Would you ask a male columnist if he meant what he wrote?’

  ‘Yes, if—’

  ‘Or would you assume he did, because men have natural authority and are therefore deserving of your trust?’

  ‘No. If a man, woman, cat or dog wrote what you’ve written about these murders, here, on Twitter, on your blog … I’d have to ask them if they were doing it for a dare. You can’t honestly believe hatred of women is the motive for these killings. One of the victims is a man.’

  Sondra Halliday sighed. ‘Have you actually read what I wrote? All the way through, like a good little boy?’

  ‘Several times.’

  ‘Then you’ll remember the part where I said, that, yes, one of the victims, Joshua Norbury, was male, but 75 per cent of Billy’s victims were female. Want one of these?’ Sondra skewered another dim sum, a bright green one this time, and waved it under Sellers’ nose. ‘I’ve ordered too much as usual.’

  ‘No. Thanks.’ He took refuge behind his cup of tea. ‘It looks like a frog’s bollock.’

  ‘Ha! Yes, it does. Actually, it doesn’t.’ Halliday ate it, as if to make sure. ‘Yum. Tastes great, however it looks.’

  Sellers tried not to wonder how Sondra Halliday tasted.

  ‘It might look like we imagine a frog’s bollock would look, but I for one have never seen a frog’s bollock in the flesh. Have you? I bet they look nothing like spinach and cashew nut dumplings. Yet we could probably get every single person in this bar to agree these dim sum look just like frog’s testicles, rather as you and your cop mates have persuaded the world that Billy Dead Women’s killing spree is all about pairs of best friends – and everyone nods along because most people have never thought to wonder what murder looks like in a society that hates women. You know what it looks like to a radical feminist? Lots of men killing lots of women, all the time, while every official mouthpiece falls over itself not to call these murders what they are: misogyny.’

  ‘I dispute that,’ Sellers cut in when Halliday paused for breath. ‘We have no reason to think the motive—’

  ‘Motive! You know what? Fuck your motive. Motive’s nothing but what the killer says his reason is – his smokescreen, which he then gets you to parrot all over the place. In doing so, you aid and abet his concealment of what’s really going on: misogyny.’

  She liked to end her statements with that word, Sellers had noticed. ‘Statistically, your argument’s crap,’ he told her. Not something he’d normally say to a woman with hair he wanted to stroke and ankles he wanted to lick, but he’d certainly say it to any man talking bullshit.

  ‘How so?’ Halliday sounded interested.

  ‘100 per cent of Billy’s victims had one best friend they were much closer to than to any of their other friends. 100 per cent of his victims were murdered either shortly before or shortly after those best friends were also murdered. Not 75 per cent, but 100. That means there’s a higher chance these killings are about best friends, friendship, something along those lines, than about woman-hating. I mean, Billy might just as easily have killed two all-male pairs of best friends.’

  ‘Except he didn’t.’

  ‘No, but I’d say that’s not relevant.’

  Halliday laughed. ‘You’re so stupid, it’s almost endearing. That’s the whole point of my article. People like you – no offence intended – always think it’s irrelevant when men murder women. I don’t. I don’t believe the man-murders-three-women feature of your exciting little murder mystery is neither here nor there. And I never will, no matter how many times well-intentioned mansplainers tell me it is. It’s disgusting the way it’s presented on the news – “Ooh, what could possibly be going on in this killer’s mind? Why pairs of best friends? Aren’t we all so mystified and on the edge of our seats?” No, we’re fucking not! I know what’s going on. It’s the same thing that’s always going on. Men are hurting, maiming, raping, killing women and girls. Same old, same old.’

  ‘Misogyny?’ said Sellers. She’d forgotten to add it.

  She eyed him suspiciously, as if she suspected him of stealing something that belonged to her. Sellers was disappointed. He’d been hoping for a ‘Yeah’ or a smile.

  ‘I’ve spent my working life locking up a good few of the men you’re thinking of, the ones who murder women,’ he said. ‘Some of them, yes, without a doubt, had a problem with women as a … a group, but—’