Outside, there’s a noise, a swish of a stick. In the front yard, Cedar is duelling an invisible enemy. He lunges, then stands up and adjusts his fedora. He starts to sing ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’, to no-one, as far as I can see. The street is empty now.

‘Have you noticed his Australian vowels?’ Lacy says. ‘Just sometimes? He wants to be like you.’

Cedar repeats the chorus, finding a harmony, naturally, combining his singing with flossing and a dab finale, dance moves copied from the internet, practised and practised.

Beyond the houses across the road, the cloud has dropped down over Mount Alyeska, quick as a shrugged shoulder. Rain starts to fall.

1978

London

Hitler was there, and Guy Fawkes. There were more murderers than I’d expected. Regular non-despotic non-genocidal murderers, most of whom killed quietly and privately, in their own neighbourhoods, even their own houses, burying the bodies inexpertly, concreting over them, papering them into walls. Murderers who killed in the clothes they turned up wearing, gassing and strangling and poisoning.

Doctor Crippen, with his wire-framed glasses, well-tended moustache, gleaming high forehead and a suit that spoke of seriousness and respectability.

The broad-shouldered German, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, electrocuted for killing the Lindbergh baby, his feet in brown slippers, rough leather belts clutching him tightly to Old Smokey, his small eyes lost in shadow.

John Christie, who, in the forties and fifties, gassed, strangled and raped in Notting Hill and hid the bodies around his house. Notting Hill. We’d be going through there on a double-decker bus as soon as we left the building. He looked like the clerk at the post office who wants to do anything but help, the English teacher who laments daily the decline in the teaching of Latin. He was fixed glancing down, disdainfully, the bulky Windsor knot of his navy tie cuffing his adam’s apple, striped collar riding high on his pencil neck, his bald pink head the rubber. John Christie looked like so many London men. I’d seen him dozens of times on the streets already.

There they all were – osteopaths, carpenters, picture framers, bank tellers – murderers gathered in the dimly lit room, where I had five minutes – five minutes – to take it all in. Something bumped me in the back, and a yelp was out of me before I could stop myself. It was Hauptmann’s unknown blunt instrument, the stiff loop of Christie’s rope, nudging me on its way to my neck. It was an elbow in a duffel coat, a mumbled British apology, audible for a second between the creak of a nearby instrument of torture and the forlorn moan of its victim.