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knew that the old man was reliving the killing.
    After a few seconds Duns put the ring down. ‘I know that was risky, taking souvenirs. That’s another way that serial killers get caught. If anyone found those rings then I’d be done for. But you need something to remind you of what you did. The cuttings aren’t enough. And memories fade. But when you can hold something that was physically there when you did it, then all the memories flood back. The sounds, the smells, the feelings.’ He shuddered again.
    Duns took another sip of tea, then put down the mug, picked up the album and slowly turned the pages. He found a newspaper cutting from the Sun . TRAFFIC WARDEN KNIFED. The old man tapped the cutting. ‘I stabbed him in the neck and stayed to watch him die. I didn’t bother trying to hide the body, he was walking down an alley in Birmingham and I came up behind him. One cut, across the throat, that’s all it took. He gurgled for almost a minute before he bled out. If I hold that ring and close my eyes I can still hear the sound. Like a babbling brook.’
    Dobbsy strained at the washing-line bonds and rocked from side to side, but even as he struggled he knew that he was wasting his time.
    ‘I was an equal opportunity serial killer,’ the old man continued. ‘That comes down to the profile. I did two black men, and three black women. I did a Pakistani and a Chinese girl. I made sure that the cops wouldn’t think that I had a type. In fact I did. I preferred young women and I preferred blondes. But I couldn’t let them know that.
    ‘The last one I killed was fifteen years ago,’ said the old man. He opened his eyes. ‘It was a girl. A shop assistant in Cardiff. I had a van. A rental. I did a Ted Bundy, put my arm in a sling and asked her to help me lift a table into the van. Tied her up and took her to a cottage I’d rented. Miles from anywhere it was. I spent three days with her. Three wonderful days. Then I strangled her with my bare hands.’ He held up his gnarled hands and smiled ruefully. ‘Couldn’t do it now, of course. But back then … there’s no feeling like it, boys. To put your hands around a soft, warm throat and to squeeze the life out of a girl, to watch as the eyes glaze over and the body goes still. Sarah, her name was.’
    He turned over the pages until he found the cutting he was looking for and he tapped it. It was from the South Wales Echo . He held it up so that they could see a photograph of a smiling blond girl, a sprinkling of freckles across her upturned nose. ‘She was lovely, was Sarah. She even said that she loved frat she me. She didn’t, of course, she was just saying that because she thought it might stop me killing her. Silly cow.’ He chuckled throatily.
    ‘I cut her up in the bathroom. That’s always the best way. You cut the body up into manageable bits and then you dispose of them in places where they’ll never be found. Burying them is best, but you have to bury them deep. There’s a knack to cutting up a body, you know that? You don’t just hack away. You cut the tendons at the joints and pop the joints out. The knees, the elbows, the shoulders, the hips. That gives you eight manageable pieces right there. Then you work the spine out of the skull and the head pops off. It literally pops off. Sounds like a balloon bursting. Then all you have to worry about is the torso and there’s no way around it, the torso is messy. But at the end of the day you can get any body into two small suitcases. Toss them into the boot of a car and Bob’s your uncle.’
    He put the open album back on to the coffee table and sat looking at the photograph of Sarah. ‘She was a student. Studying economics. Her parents spent years looking for her. Every anniversary they go to the papers. They do that computer stuff to show what she’d look like today. But she’s not getting any older. She’s buried out in the Black Mountains. Buried deep.’
    He sighed and closed the album. It