Page 222 of Troubled Blood

The letter was written on prison writing paper. There was no “Dear Mr. Tucker.”

Your letter reached me three weeks ago, but I was placed in solitary confinement shortly afterward and deprived of writing materials, so have been unable to answer. Ordinarily I’m not permitted to respond to inquiries like yours, but I gather your persistence has worn the authorities down. Unlikely as it may seem, I admire you for this, Mr. Tucker. Resilience in the face of adversity is one of my own defining characteristics.

During my three weeks of enforced solitude, I’ve wondered how I could possibly explain to you what not one man in ten thousand might hope to understand. Although you think I must be able to recall the names, faces and personalities of my various “victims,” my memory shows me only the many-limbed, many-breasted monster with whom I cavorted, a foul-smelling thing that gave tongue to pain and misery. Ultimately, my monster was never much of a companion, though there was fascination in its contortions. Given sufficient stimulus, it could be raised to an ecstasy of pain, and then it knew it lived, and stood tremulously on the edge of the abyss, begging, screaming, pleading for mercy.

How many times did the monster die, then live again? Too few to satisfy me. Even though its face and voice mutated, its reactions never varied. Richard Merridan, my old psychiatrist, gave what possessed me other names, but the truth is that I was in the grip of a divine frenzy.

Colleagues of Merridan’s disputed his conclusion that I’m sane. Regrettably, their opinions were dismissed by the judge. In conclusion: I might have killed your daughter, or I might not. Either I did so in the grip of some madness which still occludes my memory, and which a more skillful doctor might yet penetrate, or I never met her, and little Louise is out there somewhere, laughing at her daddy’s attempts to find her, or perhaps enduring a different hell to the one in which my monster lived.

Doubtless the additional psychiatric support available at Broadmoor would help me recover as much memory as possible. For their own inscrutable reasons, however, the authorities prefer to keep me here at Belmarsh. Only this morning I was threatened under the noses of warders. Regardless of the obvious fact that a cachet attaches to anyone who attacks me, I’m exposed, daily, to intimidation and physical danger. How anyone expects me to regain sufficient mental health to assist police further is a mystery.

Exceptional people ought to be studied only by those who can appreciate them. Rudimentary analysis, such as I’ve been subjected to thus far, merely entrenches my inability to recollect all that I did. Maybe you, Mr. Tucker, can help me. Until I’m in a hospital environment where I can be given the assistance I require, what incentive do I have to dredge my fragmented memory for details that may help you discover what happened to your daughter? My safety is being compromised on a daily basis. My mental faculties are being degraded.

You will naturally be disappointed not to receive confirmation of what happened to Louise. Be assured that, when the frenzy is not upon me, I am not devoid of human sympathy. Even my worst critics concede that I actually understand others much more easily than they understand me! For instance, I can appreciate what it would mean to you to recover Louise’s body and give her the funeral you so desire. On the other hand, my small store of human empathy is being rapidly depleted by the conditions in which I am currently living. Recovery from the last attack upon me, which nearly removed my eye, was delayed due to the refusal of the authorities to let me attend a civilian hospital. “Evil men forfeit the right to fair treatment!” Such seems to be the public’s view. However, brutality breeds brutality. Even the most dim-witted psychiatrists agree, there.

Do you have a merciful soul, Mr. Tucker? If so, the first letter you’ll write upon receiving this will be to the authorities, requesting that the remainder of my sentence will be served in Broadmoor, where the secrets my unruly memory still holds may be coaxed to the surface at last.

Ever yours,

Dennis

Robin finished reading, and looked up.

“You can’t see it, can you?” said Tucker, with an oddly hungry expression. “No, of course you can’t. It isn’t obvious. I didn’t see it myself, at first. Nor did the prison authorities. They were too busy warning me they weren’t going to transfer him to Broadmoor, so I needn’t ask.”

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.”