He saw a face he recognized as soon as he got onto the train, but he hid in a corner and thought he hadn’t been seen. It seemed like a sign. Was Margaret talking to him from the grave? Did she want him to run and find a new life for himself without her? Or was there something else she needed from him? In the space by the doors a group of kids stood. They were laughing and he felt a terrible resentment. How dare they? Then he realized that they were talking about the murders. He took an instant dislike to the first girl to speak. She was too young for make-up, but was wearing it all the same.

‘Your dad’s in the police, Jess.’ Her voice so loud that everyone in the carriage could hear it. ‘Have they caught the killer yet?’ The other passengers stared, and perhaps that was what she’d wanted.

The lass Jess seemed younger than the others. Skinny and unsure of herself, but wanting them to like her. Malcolm knew how that felt.

‘I was there,’ she said with a touch of pride. ‘I found the first body.’

Malcolm looked down the aisle at the prying, curious eyes and in his head he was screaming at the girl: You shouldn’t have said that. We didn’t need to know. It was a complication.

All the way into town he peered out into the carriage. Alert. Some sort of hunting dog, aware of every passenger, wondering how he might separate the one he wanted from the crowd.

He thought he was certainly going mad. Lack of sleep. Or forty years of stress. He’d thought he didn’t care any more, that he was dead, like the specimens the professor collected in his lab at Cullercoats. Looking fresh and glossy on the outside, but inside hard and frozen. That he was as good as dead, at least. No feelings. No soul. But now he saw that there was a possibility of escape. Of living again, feeling whole, and he felt a moment of hope. That depended on him parting the group and picking off the individual. He felt a sudden rush of excitement, the same brief, destructive excitement that he’d felt forty years before.

He was a reading a copy of the free newspaper that he’d picked up at Partington station and snatched a look over the top of it. Had his quarry seen him? He couldn’t be certain and he couldn’t take the risk. He shrank back into his corner and his mind slid back, time rewinding, the newspaper a screen between the present and the past.