‘Mr McKee, I’m not going to ask you any more questions because I don’t want to hear you saying no comment over and over like a parrot. I’m going to tell you what’s been going on.

‘Wednesday 1st December was Wren’s first day at the abattoir, that was the first time you met him. You knew in advance that your line manager’s autistic son was coming to be apprenticed to you. You drove to work that day with the scalped and faceless corpse of Amanda Winton in the back of your white van. When you dumped her, you took Robin Wren along for the ride because no one would ever believe that a murderer disposing of a body would take along a young man with learning difficulties. You’d started grooming him and you cynically used him as a smokescreen. On TV, you saw Robin Wren on CCTV in your van at the scene of a body drop-off. You came here because you had nowhere else to go.

‘Later, you saw us crawling over the building you live in. You turned up protesting Robin Wren’s innocence, to further distance yourself from your crime. Mr McKee, you’re a misogynist, a murderer with the brain of a high stakes gambler.

‘In the abattoir, your job is to skin the corpses of cattle. According to Robin Wren’s dad, you’re the fastest skinner of corpses and the most talented skinner of corpses that he’s come across in over twenty years. You applied these skills post-mortem to Sandra O’Day, Annie Boyd and Amanda Winton.’

Silence.

‘Question. Where is Francesca Christie?’

Edgar McKee shook his head and, sitting back in his seat, looked across the table at Clay with his former show of arrogance.

‘See what I mean, Mr McKee. Me. You. Down to the last full stop.’

94

11.14 pm

In Edgar McKee’s address book there was a contact card for Dream Girls and Marlene Black’s name was written on the back of it. All major credit cards accepted.

As Winters pulled his car into Armitage Gardens, three sides of a square of semi-detached houses built around a large central green, he went over the process by which he had tracked down Marlene Black.

A call through to Dream Girls had been met with suspicion by a woman who sounded like she had been a heavy smoker from the age of six. When he offered to send his warrant card through to the agency’s email address, the woman he’d spoken to on the phone had wanted to know why the Merseyside Constabulary were interested in Marlene Black.

The words murder enquiry altered everything in the stop-start conversation.

At his desk in the incident room at Trinity Road police station, he’d hung up and waited. Within two minutes, his landline rang out. Marlene.