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eyes. I get the feeling like they were glued shut, but they weren’t. It was just the drug doing its thing. He got her out of the car, put her over his shoulder.”
    So he had no restrictions? He could just take people to his place without worrying someone might see? Did he live out in the sticks, then? Somewhere like Dorton, a sleepy village where no one saw much after nine o’clock because they were sequestered behind their closed curtains, sitting on couches too engrossed in what was on TV for them to see anything else? Langham jotted that down. So many bloody questions, the answers remaining elusive. Fuck, he needed more.
    “And then?” Langham prompted quietly.
    “She remembered the sound of his feet and the feeling of going upwards, up some stairs—lots of stairs.”
    Apartment, a flat. So not somewhere like Dorton then. Who the fuck has the balls to cart someone into a flat? What kind of monster are we dealing with here?
    He thought about the apartments and flats in the city—too many of them to count. Shit, he had a hard task ahead trying to narrow the possible locations down.
    Oliver continued, “She’s slept on and off since. Then she woke needing the toilet but couldn’t move again. Tried to call out but couldn’t speak. So she had to shit and piss herself. After that, he’d told her to have a bath, said if she thought about escaping it’d be pointless because they were several floors up.”
    Damn excellent information.
    “She fell asleep in the bathroom, and when she woke up she was naked, in the bath, and he was…he was washing her. I can see him doing it—well, just his hand. Freckles on the fingers, hairs stopping at the wrist—and it doesn’t look or feel to me like he gets off on that. She doesn’t interest him sexually. She’s just someone he needed to wash, make sense?” Oliver rested his cheek on his hand, eyes still closed.
    Yeah, that made sense. The previous women hadn’t been sexually molested. They hadn’t struggled during an attack. No scratches or bruises on their bodies, other than on one woman, and that bruise had been old, yellowed from the passage of time. She hadn’t been missing long—what was her name again?—so she’d hurt herself long before she’d been abducted. Their fingernails had been pristine. None of the victims had fibers of any kind on them. If they’d had any prior to being dumped, the stream had merrily jostled along and swept them away.
    Oliver’s breathing was growing heavier.
    “Don’t fall asleep,” Langham said gently. “Try for more. If you can’t see more, feel more, try and think if she told you anything else.”
    “She…she said he’s soft-spoken, like his voice is a woman’s.”
    Oh dear Christ. An out and out nutter.
    “Calls her a good girl. Strokes her cheek. A lot.” Oliver sighed, the exhalation rippling as he shuddered. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” He sat up, bleary-eyed, then stood. “I need a damn Coke.”
    He looked wretched. Fucking wretched.
    Langham watched him leave the room, wishing Oliver didn’t have to go through this crap but glad he did at the same time. Selfish, he knew, wanting Oliver to see and hear things when it distressed him so much, but his information was so needed at the moment. He wondered something then. If Oliver could switch it off, block them out, would Langham be happy about that?
    He jumped up, leaving his office to stop himself going deeper with that. Strode past Oliver at the vending machine. “Come by when you’re ready.”
    In the main room, he walked through, waving his notes. “Incident room, everyone. We have one hell of a bloody break. Oliver’s here.”
    Heads snapped up. Papers shuffled. Chairs scraped back. The air changed, charged now, everyone knowing that with the mention of Oliver, things had been taken to a new level.
    Everyone except Higgings.
    “Oliver?” the young officer asked.
    “You’ll learn, son,” Langham said. “You’ll learn.”

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