“Heather, I don’t know what to say.”

“And then there’s the note she left behind. To you both. The monsters in the wood? I mean, I thought that was weird enough before I found the letters, and now …”

There was a second’s silence. Heather could hear a clock ticking in the hallway. She shook her head. Spilling it all out to Nikki only seemed to be making it more unbelievable.

“And he’s in the news now? What’s happened?”

Nikki brought up one of the more reputable news sites on her laptop and pushed it toward Heather.

“An old lady found the body in a field in Lancashire, or at least most of the body. It had been dismembered and placed inside a tree. It’s everything the Red Wolf used to do, except that the Red Wolf has been safely packed away in prison for decades.” Nikki paused, her lips pressed into a thin line. “And it’s not the first one. Do you remember, a few weeks ago, that young woman who went missing from Manchester? Everyone was looking for her.”

Heather’s stomach turned over. “Sharon Barlow. They found her by a river, didn’t they? I remember …” Except that the horrible thing was, she didn’t remember much. Once the frantic search was over, media attention had faded away and Sharon Barlow became one more woman lost to an unknown monster.

“The police seem to think it was the same guy.”

“There will be stuff they haven’t told the press, stuff that links the two cases together.” Heather thought of her days on the newspaper, sniffing after every tiny detail the police let slip. “Christ, I dread to think.’ She looked away from the laptop, trying not to picture what had happened to Sharon Barlow. “So, what? He has a tribute act?”

“He’s always said he didn’t do it, you know,” said Nikki. “Even twenty odd years later, he still says he didn’t. What if they have the wrong man after all and maybe … your mum knew that?”

Heather curled her hand around the hot mug of tea, trying to find some comfort in the familiarity of it. A new serial killer on the loose, or a miscarriage of justice. Did this man, who had known a side to her mum completely invisible to Heather, also know why she had killed herself? Either way, these were questions she desperately wanted answers to.

“Hev,” Nikki said eventually. “Hev, you’ll have to take these letters to the police. There could be stuff in here that might be useful to them. Look, there’s a phone number here for anyone with information.’

Heather nodded slowly. She thought of the man in the mugshot and wondered what he looked like, twenty-five years later.

“Nikki,” she said, “do you think they’ll let me speak to him?”

“What?”

“This man knows more about my mother than anyone else on earth. Christ, they could have been phoning each other, Nikki! She could have been visiting him, and I wouldn’t have known. I’m sure if anyone knows why she killed herself, it’s him. Maybe that’s what she was getting at in her note. I want to talk to him.”