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the street to the pub on the corner. When they were out of sight he let the curtain go and turned to face the room. He called the place his office, but in reality it was a museum stuffed to the gills with a chaotically un-collated mess of detritus. What other people called rubbish, he deemed important artefacts of social history. Where other people saw junk, he saw evidence. One such item was now sitting on his cluttered desk forming a puddle of colour amidst the piles of buff folders and grey document boxes. He would like to think that the scarf was final proof, the one piece of evidence that he needed, but long and bitter experience told him that it wasn’t enough. Nothing ever seemed to be enough.
    He looked at the fabric, at the swirling colours and the distinctive pattern and compared it to the photograph above the desk. The photograph was old, the paper yellowed and the ancient ink formed an indistinct, grainy image. Jean Lockwood had owned a scarf like this; she was wearing it in the photograph. There could be no colour match, the picture was in black and white, but the pattern was familiar, it had the same hypnotic print as the scarf on his desk. As evidence it might not be enough on its own, but it was an addition to the body of proof. Every little helped the cause.
    He moved back to the window and looked across the square to Number 17. If his hunch were correct, there would be a lot more coming out of that house soon.
    ‘Not long now,’ he said aloud to the pictures of the dead women who lined his wall. As he turned away from them, a quietly confident smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

Chapter Three
    When Edie had been younger, The Crown had been a typical spit and sawdust dive which she had glimpsed occasionally through the hatch in the ‘off sales’ cubicle. The thought made her feel old, she couldn’t think of the last time she’d been in a pub that had a separate space where people could buy their booze to drink off the premises, another tradition that seemed to have died out. That had been in the days when she and Rose could gain a few pennies for sweets by taking empty bottles back to the pub’s offie and pocketing the deposits. They called that kind of thing recycling now, back then it had just been a way of life.
    Now the place had been taken over by a chain and had the generic ambience of all such places. Wednesday was pensioners’ credit crunch lunch, and curry and a pint night. Thursday was win a cirrhotic liver in the weekly quiz, and Friday was two for ten, as long as it was deep fried, microwaved and could clog your arteries at thirty paces. Edie found it frankly depressing and took no comfort from the fact that she could have free refills of her watery diet coke.
    Sam seemed to catch her appraising the place. ‘Dire, isn’t it? Do you remember when old Charlie was the landlord and we used to scam him for deposits by nicking the empties from the yard and selling them back to him?’ he said it with the same impish grin he’d had as a boy.
    Edie gave him a wry smile. ‘Thanks for bringing up our criminal past.’
    ‘We would never have got caught if it hadn’t been for you dropping all those bottles, cutting yourself and squealing like a stuck pig.’
    Edie gave him a mock scowl. ‘I was five, the bottles were bigger than me and that incident scarred me for life!’ She rolled up her trouser leg and showed him the tiny white scar on her knee. ‘It didn’t hurt half as much as the pasting I got from Beattie afterwards.’ She could never think of Beattie as Nanna or Granny, those were soft terms designed for use with affection. There had been little that had been soft or affectionate about Beattie.
    ‘I’ll bet. She was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever encountered, and given that Lena is my mum that’s saying something.’ They both laughed, Beattie had indeed been a scourge.
    Edie recalled her black crepe clad grandmother, who still loomed large in her imagination as the