The sad, scuffed trainers, the pile of dogeared paperbacks on the bedside table. It could be her room. There was a story here, the sort of story that could get her back onto any newspaper she wanted, but more and more it looked like writing that story would mean discovering a side to her mother she couldn’t have guessed.

Parker stood up suddenly.

“Listen, the coffee here is bloody awful. Do you want to go and, uh, get some lunch?”

Looking up, she saw that there was a faint blush across the tops of his cheeks. Smiling, she put the photo down.

“Let’s do that.”

They went to a place around the corner, a small cozy restaurant that Heather guessed wasn’t a regular police hangout. Parker ordered a kind of complicated sandwich that promptly fell apart when he tried to pick it up. Heather stuck to a pasta salad, from which she picked out all the bits of meat. To her surprise, he ordered a beer, and when she raised her eyebrows he just smiled.

“So, what’s your history with Michael Reave?” she asked, when she was halfway through her demolished salad. “You’ve had to deal with him before, I’m guessing.”

“I’m too young to have been involved in the original investigation—as my DCI keeps reminding me—but I had to talk to him about another case a few years ago.” He tapped his fingers against the neck of his beer bottle. They sat with their back to the large window at the front of the restaurant, and a shard of autumn daylight fell across the shoulder of his shirt. “It was relating to a cold case, a woman who went missing in 1979 that we had always thought he was responsible for. It turned out she had links with an old East End gang, and suddenly it seemed possible that she’d gone missing for entirely different reasons, so I went in there to talk to him about it. This was back when I had just moved up to CID. It was a small, probably pointless job, so they gave it to the newest recruit.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It was pointless. He barely said anything at all. But he did listen, he didn’t show off or shout. As these things are measured, that was almost a success in itself. So the case moved on. But I didn’t forget Reave.”

“He made an impression?”

“I’d read all about him during my degree. It was quite the thing, to meet him face to face. A serial killer as strange and as singular as him. He’s a real outlier, as strange as Bundy was, really.”

He was warming up now, she realized, getting into the subject. She thought of the notebook in her bag, and with it came a pang of guilt. He was opening up to her, when she hadn’t been entirely honest with him—all those notes she’d been making all along were looking more and more like an article.

“Bundy?”

“Ted Bundy. They’re not similar, not really, but Bundy was remarkable in the way he was able to shut himself off from what he’d done. Like he was two different people, living in the same body. Right up until the end, he was trying to explain it all away, as though he wasn’t responsible.”