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collapsing. The subsequent two days she’d spent here in the Baines Wing of the hospital in a critical condition. For us, that period had been spent collecting evidence from her house, interviewing neighbours, pursuing leads.
    ‘Julie,’ I said. ‘I know this is difficult, and you’ve done very well. But I want to talk about what happened before the attack.’
    ‘Before? I was asleep.’
    ‘No, before that. When you went to bed.’
    She tried to frown, but the stitches in her face wouldn’t let her.
    ‘It was … just the same as always.’
    ‘Did you check the door was locked?’
    ‘Yes. I always do. Locked, chained, sash jams.’
    She was emphatic about that, and I believed her.
    ‘All right,’ I said.
    I didn’t bother to kick myself this time, as I was concentrating on how to frame the next question. You have to be careful in this sort of investigation. You need to know, which means you have to ask, but this line of inquiry is always in danger of toppling over into blaming the victim. After everything Julie had been through, I had no wish to do that. But we needed to know how our man was getting into his victims’ houses.
    ‘All right,’ I said again, rubbing my hands together slowly. ‘What about the windows?’
     
    ‘She claims the window was closed,’ Chris said.
    We were walking back through the warren of hospital corridors. I was brimming with a residual mix of anger and frustration, and while none of it was directed at him, that was how it came out.
    ‘No. Get it right. What she said was that she didn’t know. She said she thought so, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d opened it. And she was hesitant about that.’
    ‘You don’t think she’d remember leaving the window open?’
    ‘I don’t want to assume anything. You know what the weather’s been like. It’s sweltering. Everyone opens their windows. Maybe not everyone closes them properly again.’
    ‘It’s a twelve-point lock,’ Chris said. ‘You need a key to open it from the inside. As soon as the handle’s turned back down, it locks automatically. Clicks in place. It’s like the ones I’ve got at home.’
    ‘I’m aware of how windows work, Chris. Even if I hadn’t been before, it’s not like it hasn’t come up.’
    ‘Exactly. And it keeps coming down to this. When you’ve had the window open, and you pull it closed in the evening, or whatever, you automatically turn the handle down.’
    ‘I do. You do. He, she or it does.’ I was walking too quickly, and he was struggling to keep up. ‘But what do we know about what Julie Kennedy did? Even she doesn’t remember. Maybe the phone rang as she was closing the window. Maybe there was a wasp buzzing around outside, and she just pulled it to for a bit and then forgot about it.’
    We reached the main foyer and headed out of the doors. The midday air was solid and hot, and after the artificial light of the hospital, the brightness ahead of us was momentarily blinding.
    ‘You’re grasping at straws,’ Chris said.
    I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was right, and I don’t like to admit such a thing at the best of times.
    But, yes, grasping at straws. Julie’s recollections matched those of the previous victims. In each case, the house had been secure when they went to bed: all the doors were locked, with any sash jams, chains or bolts in place. When the police arrived, they found a single downstairs window open. That had to be the exit point for the attacker, as it would have been impossible for him to leave via a door and then apply bolts and sash jams from outside. But we had no idea how he was entering the properties in the first place.
    The open windows were undamaged. With those kinds of locks – and I know how windows work – you can’t lever them open from the outside because the frames snap off. It’s a security feature. There’s no access to the locks from the outside either. But none of the victims’ windows had been drilled.
    One