Feeling a little shaken and more than a little tired, Heather opened the door to her mother’s house, half expecting more trapped birds. Michael Reave’s reaction had frightened her, but more than that, she felt haunted by dead women – by Sharon Barlow and Elizabeth Bunyon, by all the women butchered decades ago, and most of all, by her mum. Reave, with his scarred hands and green eyes, was connected to all these deaths, and if she could just figure out how … Perhaps she could end it. And that might just ease some of her relentless guilt.

Instead of birds, she was greeted by the gentle sound of the radio and the faint smell of the coffee she had brewed that morning. The normality of the situation reassured her, and she made herself a pile of scrambled eggs on toast and wolfed it down in front of her laptop, eating for once at the kitchen table.

Reading the names of his victims, seeing the photos of them while they were still alive, none of it had really conveyed the monstrousness of what he had done. She and Nikki had skirted around the edges of it with their own serial killer research, but there had been an unspoken agreement between them not to unearth anything they couldn’t handle. Well, today she felt she had caught a glimpse of the beast Michael Reave really was, and perhaps it was time to face that.

She revisited the brief Wikipedia page, but there was very little information there about his background, or details on the murders themselves – all of which backed up DI Parker’s comments about Reave’s past being a mysterious blank space. She would have to look elsewhere for the information she wanted.

Back when she had worked on the newspaper, she had picked up the skills required to excavate the murkier bits of the internet, and taking sips of wine every now and then, her plate empty save for a few scraps of egg, she began to look for the raw reality of the Red Wolf murders. Quickly the screen was filled with some very basic-looking websites, all favouring vaguely unpleasant colour schemes of black, green, and red. There were titles like ‘nightmare fuel’, ‘dead lovers’, and ‘corpse faces’.