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read it, Patricia?”
    “I voted for it.” As Kathy started to like her, Patricia said “Are all these set on Merseyside?”
    “I believe they are.”
    “I think someone may be pleased,” Patricia said, but her next question came with the faintest frown. “Are they all about the same killer?”
    “That’s how I took them. I like the way he gets inside the girls.”
    She meant the writing. The photographer grunted with surprise if not with disapproval, as if he’d heard another meaning. She was about to revise her comment when he and Patricia lost interest in her and gazed along the hall, at the sound of a key in a lock. Kathy’s weight pinned the chair down, and she was struggling to turn it when she heard the front door open. “Dudley Smith?” Patricia said and stood up. “I hope you don’t mind, but your mother has been letting us into your secrets.”

SIX
    As Dudley climbed the slope he heard creatures fleeing through the undergrowth. Perhaps they sensed his baffled rage. They made him think of a question the interviewer could have asked him if she had bothered to turn up. “Mr Smith, what was the first thing you ever killed?” She had to have a face, and so he gave her Colette’s chubby suntanned one, and the job centre as the setting for the interview. She looked as impressed as Mrs Wimbourne and the others that he was about to be published; Lionel had removed his headset to listen, and even Morris had taken time off from his breakdown to be present. “How do you expect your career to develop?” the interviewer ought to ask, and the answer was that Dudley felt capable of writing a bestseller. The girl from the magazine could have scooped his first interview, instead of which she’d let him down.
    The trees that cramped the winding path and poked lowbranches at his face gave way to shoulder-high ferns and gorse parched dull gold. A twig snapped like a finger beneath his tread, and he yielded to a reminiscent grin before snarling at a thorny bramble tendril he was elbowing aside. Unshaded sunlight fastened on him with an electric buzz of insects, and he felt as if a spotlight had been turned on him. It was about time. If “Night Trains Don’t Take You Home” was going to cause any problems, someone at the magazine would have noticed by now.
    The path widened into an open space where brown turf exposed slabs of sandstone patched another shade of grey by lichen. A hypodermic needle glinted in the shadow of a charred bush he could smell. Gnats whined like a chorus of dentists’ drills, and a huge voice blurred by distance bellowed at him. “What’s ailing you this time, Smith? Still too sickly to join in, or do you think you’re better than your classmates?”
    “I had asthma. I haven’t got it any more,” Dudley was provoked to retort even as he grasped that he’d heard the voice but not its words. There must be a sports day at his old school down in Birkenhead; the amplified voice belonged to Mr Brink, the sports master. “Mr Brink and his awful stink,” Dudley shouted, remembering the stench of sweat and rubber soles that had filled the gymnasium, and seemed to hear the giant voice respond in his head. “Still scribbling, are you, Smith? Still think it’s healthier to sit and make up stories when you should be in the gym or on the field?”
    “Mr Fender said I could write. Maybe you turned him against me. Maybe you told him to say what I could write about,” Dudley said, and controlled himself. “Anyway, I’m not here to talk to you. The first thing I killed, that must have been the caterpillar I ate.”
    Nearly twenty years later the memory was as immediate as the sunlight: tilting his head back to drop the squirming wasp-striped object in his mouth; the tickle of its many feet inside his throat; his efforts not to cough even when he felt it try to twistaround and clamber upwards until he gulped it down; its dying struggles in his stomach, where he was sure he’d felt it growing