Page 127 of Troubled Blood

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 she would remain until Creed killed her by strangulation in January 1973. This was the longest period he kept a victim alive, and demonstrates the degree of confidence he had that his basement flat was now a place of safety, where he could rape and torture without fear of discovery.

However, shortly before Christmas that year, his landlady visited him on some trivial pretext, and she recalled in the witness box that “he wanted to get rid of me, I could tell. I thought there was a nasty smell about the place, but we’d had problems with next door’s drains before. He told me he couldn’t chat because he was waiting for a phone call.

“I know it was Christmastime when I went down there, because I remember asking him why he hadn’t put any cards up. I knew he didn’t have many friends but I thought someone must have remembered him and I thought it was a shame. The radio was playing ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool,’ and it was loud, I remember that, but that wasn’t anything unusual. Dennis liked music.”

Cooper’s surprise visit to the basement almost certainly sealed Wrightman’s death warrant. Creed later told a psychiatrist that he’d been toying with the idea of simply keeping Wrightman “as a pet” for the foreseeable future, to spare himself the risks that further abductions would entail, but that he reconsidered and decided to “put her out of her misery.”

Creed murdered Wrightman on the night of January 9th, 1973, a date chosen to coincide with a three-day absence of Vi Cooper to visit a sick relative. Creed cut off Wrightman’s head and hands in the bath before driving the rest of the corpse in his van to Epping Forest by night, wrapped in tarpaulin, and burying it in a shallow grave. Back at home, he boiled the flesh off Wrightman’s head and hands and smashed up the bones, as he’d done to the corpses of both Vera Kenny and Nora Sturrock, adding the powdered bone to the inlaid ebony box he kept under his bed.

On her return to Liverpool Road, Violet Cooper noted that the “bad smell” had gone from the basement flat and concluded that the drains had been sorted out.

Landlady and lodger resumed their convivial evenings, drinking and singing along to records. It’s likely that Creed experimented with drugging Vi at this time. She later testified that she often slept so soundly on nights that Dennis joined her for a nightcap that she found herself still groggy the next morning.

Wrightman’s grave remained undisturbed for nearly four months, until discovered by a dog walker whose terrier dug and retrieved a thigh bone. Decomposition, the absence of head and hands or any clothing rendered identification almost impossible given the difficulties of tissue typing in such circumstances. Only after Creed’s arrest, when Wrightman’s underwear, pantyhose and an opal ring her family identified as having belonged to her were found under the floorboards of Creed’s sitting room, were detectives able to add Wrightman’s murder to the list of charges against him.

Gail’s younger sister had never lost hope that Gail was still alive. “I couldn’t believe it until I saw the ring with my own eyes. Until that moment, I honestly thought there’d been a mistake. I kept telling Mum and Dad she’d come back. I couldn’t believe there was wickedness like that in the world, and that my sister could have met it.

“He isn’t human. He played with us, with the families, during the trial. Smiling and waving at us every morning. Looking at the parents or the brother or whoever, whenever their relative was mentioned. Then, afterward, after he was convicted, he keeps telling a bit more, and a bit more, and we’ve had to live with that hanging over us for years, what Gail said, or how she begged him. I’d murder him with my own bare hands if I could, but I could never make him suffer the way he made Gail suffer. He isn’t capable of human feeling, is he? It makes you—”

There was a loud bang from the hall and Robin jumped so severely that water slopped over the edge of the bath.

“Just me!” called Max, who sounded uncharacteristically cheerful, and she heard him greeting Wolfgang. “Hello, you. Yes, hello, hello…”

“Hi,” called Robin. “I took him out earlier!”

“Thanks very much,” said Max, “Come join me, I’m celebrating!”

She heard Max climbing the stairs. Pulling out the plug, she continued to sit in the bath as the water ebbed away, crisp bubbles still clinging to her as she finished the chapter.

“It makes you pray there’s a hell.”

In 1976, Creed told prison psychiatrist Richard Merridan that he tried to “lie low” following the discovery of Wrightman’s remains. Creed admitted to Merriman that he felt a simultaneous desire for notoriety and a fear of capture.

“I liked reading about the Butcher in the papers. I buried her in Epping Forest like the others because I wanted people to know that the same person had done them all, but I knew I was risking everything, not varying the pattern. After that, after Vi had seen me with her, and come in the flat with her there, I thought I’d better just do whores for a bit, lie low.”

But the choice to “do whores” would lead, just a few months later, to Creed’s closest brush with capture yet.

The chapter ended here. Robin got out of the bath, mopped up the spilled water, dressed in pajamas and dressing gown, then headed upstairs to the living area where Max sat watching television, looking positively beatific. Wolfgang seemed to have been infected by his owner’s good mood: he greeted Robin as though she’d been away on a long journey and set to work licking the bath oil off her ankles until she asked him kindly to desist.

“I’ve got a job,” Max told Robin, muting the TV. Two champagne glasses and a bottle were sitting on the coffee table in front of him. “Second lead, new drama, BBC One. Have a drink.”

“Max, that’s fantastic!” said Robin, thrilled for him.

“Yeah,” he said, beaming. “Listen. D’you think your Strike would come over for dinner? I’m playing a veteran. It’d be good to speak to someone who’s actually ex-army.”

“I’m sure he would,” said Robin, hoping she was right. Strike and Max had never met. She accepted a glass of champagne, sat down and held up her glass in a toast. “Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” he said, clinking his glass against hers. “I’ll cook, if Strike comes over. It’ll be good, actually. I need to meet more people. I’m turning into one of those ‘he always kept himself to himself’ blokes you see on the news.”

“And I’ll be the dumb flatmate,” said Robin, her thoughts still with Vi Cooper, “who thought you were lovely and never questioned why I kept coming across you hammering the floorboards back down.”