Tennison crossed the room and squatted beside Gilling’s chair. “Thank you, you did very well, and I’m sorry to have made you go through it all again.”

Gilling shrank from her, fearing to be touched, and stood up. Her nervousness was beginning to grate on Tennison.

“I go through it all the time, every time the doorbell rings, every strange sound at night . . . I see his face, keep expecting him to come back, to finish . . . I had to leave my job, I can’t sleep. He should have been put away for years, but they let him go after eighteen months. I live in terror of him coming back, because he said he would, he said he’d come back!”

Tennison climbed into the patrol car and breathed a sigh of relief. Beside her, Amson was immersed in a file.

“Marlow had a beard at the time of the rape, shaved it off for the line-up! That matches with what the toms said in Oldham, they thought the guy had a beard.”

He looked up. “D’you think there’s any truth in the story that she gave Marlow the come-on? She’s, what, thirty-eight now, and a spinster . . .”

Tennison bridled. “So am I, it doesn’t mean I want myself raped, and my front teeth kicked in!”

“Take it easy, it’s just that from the description she’s a bit of a dog. Marlow, on the other hand, is a goodlooking bloke, like myself.”

She replied with a laugh. “Be very careful, Sergeant, or you’ll be back rotting in Hornchurch!”

Two men were painting the row of garages on Marlow’s council estate. They were making quite a good job of it, considering neither of them had done much in that line before. A few yards away George Marlow was standing, hands in pockets, watching them.

One of the men went to his nearby van for a new tin of paint. He opened it and stirred it with a screwdriver, then wiped the blade on his already paint-covered overalls.

“Excuse me, are you going to be painting the whole block, or just the garages?” Marlow asked.

“Just this lot, far as we know, mate,” DC Lillie replied.

“They aren’t for residents, you know. Council rents them out to anyone who can afford them. The tenants have to park in the bay over there, known as Radio One . . .” He flashed a grin at Lillie. “Means you had one when you parked it!”

He waited for a response, which didn’t come, so he went on, “I had one, but it was nicked.”

“What, a radio?”

“My car. Rover Mark III, three-liter automatic. More’n twenty years old, collector’s item, you know.” He stared down into the tin of paint, then up at the garages.

Rosper joined in. “You leave it out? Bodywork must ’ave rusted up?”