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today. He moved to the microphone that had been set up, while I walked over to the whiteboards along the back wall. They covered it floor to ceiling, all the way across. I turned my back on the expectant gazes for a few moments, and stared at the boards instead.
    Photographs of the five victims were taped across them, with information scribbled in by various hands around each one. It was all on the computers, but I found it helpful to have a visual cue as well – to be able to see as much of it all at once as I could. So here were almost countless names, dates and addresses, people of interest. We’d assumed the attacker would be someone known to the first victim, Katie Rayland, so every possible male acquaintance, every angry ex-boyfriend, had been tracked down and ruled out of the inquiry. That theory had been more or less discarded as the number of assaults rose, and a connection between the victims proved apparently non-existent. The names were still there, just in case, but it was the victims I was interested in right now.
    I stared at the photographs, oblivious to the room behind me. Superficially, the women all looked very different. They ranged in height, ethnic origin, hair colour, eye colour. But still, what I’d said to Chris in the car was true: I was sure they had been targeted. Because it was clear that our man had a type. He liked women in their mid to late twenties. He liked women who lived alone. And – the most obvious similarity between them – he liked women who would be considered conventionally very attractive. All five were, in their separate ways, exceptionally beautiful.
    Of course, liked wasn’t the right word, except in the most tangential sense. In reality, he hated his victims. Along with his size and strength, each of them had emphasised the hate that they’d felt coming off him in waves. It seemed increasingly obvious to me that he hated them for what they were, rather than who. Young, attractive and successful, they were the kind of women you’d imagine finding on the arm of an alpha male, being shown off like a trophy or a badge.
    If his hatred was obvious, something else was too. These photographs had all been taken after the assaults, to detail the injuries the women had received. And when you moved your gaze along the line of images, a strange thing happened. Despite the disparity in their appearances, you could trace along from the first picture to the last, from Katie Rayland to Julie Kennedy, and see damage accumulating. The victims merged into one, so that the effect was almost of viewing the cumulative destruction of the idea of a beautiful woman. While the rapes remained a constant feature, the assaults were becoming more vicious, more extended, more central to the crime. Our man was escalating. Julie had nearly been killed. It was only a matter of time before somebody actually was …
    Beside me, Chris coughed.
    The room had fallen totally silent. I stepped away from the boards and joined him at the table, not apologising or even acknowledging the delay. Not caring, in fact, what anyone thought, including Drake, leaning there with his knotty little forearms and his expression of impatience.
    No pressure .
    It wasn’t true.

Five

    That evening, after work, I went to visit John.
    It was a pleasure as well as a duty. John wasn’t my father, but he might as well have been, and a part of me actually thought of him that way – not that I’d ever admit it to him, of course. Increasingly, though, I’d started dreading these weekly visits. Dreading seeing him.
    My mother died young, so I didn’t have the chance to watch her age properly, and I never knew my real father at all. The estate housing I grew up in was single-storey and ramshackle, frequently dirty and untidy, and from an early age I was often left alone. There would be times I’d wake up in the morning and find my mother passed out on the settee, empty cans of beer littering the carpet and the smell of weed still