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Ray’s subsequent attempt at a solo career had failed to set the Mersey on fire. Harry could recall seeing his name halfway down the bill of a social club concert two or three years ago. A miserable comedown for a man who had once scaled the charts with a steeplejack’s aplomb.
    A tune came into his head and he started humming, trying to remember the words. Of course! It was ‘Blue On Blue’, the ballad with which the Brill Brothers had scored their last chart entry. Must have been around the time of the Sefton Park Strangling, Harry thought. The melody lingered as he walked towards his flat on the bank of the Mersey and when he arrived home he started searching through his record collection, sure that he had a copy of the song somewhere.
    In the end he found it on a compilation of sixties pop. He put the record on the turntable, poured himself a glass of whisky and listened to the echo-laden voice of Ray Brill. The singer invested the simple lyric of heartache with a genuine anguish and as soon as the track came to an end, Harry played it again, and then again.
    Could it be that, when he sang about the end of an affair, Ray was conveying pain he had felt in his own life after losing the girl he loved? By the time the needle reached a movie song from Gene Pitney on the next track, Harry was on his third drink and his eyelids were beginning to droop. He couldn’t care less about the man who shot Liberty Valance. But for the sake not only of the truth but of an old woman in a Woolton home whom he had never met, he wanted to find out whether Edwin Smith was indeed the man who had strangled Carole Jeffries.

Chapter Four
    and made my murderous dream come true .
    That night Harry dreamed he was in the dock. Counsel for the prosecution recited his numberless crimes in a damning monotone. The judge’s features had grown dark with contempt. A low murmur of hatred came from the people in the public seats and several of the jurors had started weeping at the horror of it all. Harry became aware of the aching of his limbs and suddenly realised he was handcuffed to the railings and wearing huge leg irons. He knew he was innocent, yet when he tried to speak, to explain the Crown’s mistake, no words came. As the prosecutor droned on with his litany of lies, Harry could feel the noose cutting into the flesh of his neck. At last his own advocate stood up, seizing a final chance to plead for him. Harry strained with every muscle for a sight of the face beneath the wig, the face of the man who could save his life.
    Oh God, no hope left. His defender was Cyril Tweats.
    Fear woke him. He was shivering uncontrollably, but as it dawned on him that he was lying in his own bed in his own home, he almost cried out with joy. No wonder he felt frozen: in his restlessness he had cast the duvet to the floor, and on the coldest night of the year so far. Forcing his body into motion, he stumbled to the window and parted the curtains.
    The black starless sky merged with the river. From his vantage point in the Empire Dock development he peered towards the lights of Wirral. Birkenhead itself was invisible. So were the dying yards where once so many ships had been built - Ark Royal, Achilles and Prince of Wales - and their incongruous neighbour, the ruined twelfth-century priory. On the water itself, nothing moved. Harry had heard talk lately of plans to bring new life to the river. The old days of colonial trade had gone, never to return, but the country’s jails were overflowing and some bright spark in Whitehall had dreamed up the idea of putting a prison ship on the Mersey. Harry suspected that if some of his clients went on board, it would make the mutiny on the Bounty seem like a squabble on Southport’s boating lake.
    Turning, he squinted at the harsh red digits of his bedside alarm. Five-twenty. Although he felt only half awake, he was sure he would never get back to sleep again. He swore at the memory of Ernest