‘Are you sure you’re going to be okay with that? He’s a nasty piece of work. I read what he did to some of his victims and believe me you don’t want to know the details.’

‘It’s BBC One, it’s not going to be too graphic,’ she said. ‘But I’m amazed they’re letting him out.’

Gillard sighed. ‘The canteen is full of talk about it. In the end it’s a question of quid pro quo. If a killer finally decides to let a family know where their child is buried, there has to be some kind of reward.’

‘But to let him out!’

‘I know, I know. The Parole Board say he’s better. Won’t reoffend. But who knows.’

Sam harrumphed, and pulled her knees up onto the settee. ‘Come and watch it with me.’

When the programme started it showed a presenter standing before the brooding front gate of HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

‘Later this week, from this grim high-security prison behind me, one of the most notorious killers Britain has ever seen will be released. Neville Rollason, now in his sixties, will once again be free to roam the streets of Britain.’ A black-and-white mugshot of Rollason filled the screen. It was one of the many pictures taken at the time of his arrest, and showed his lips curled and dark eyebrows flexed as if in some private joke.

‘The question has to be: is there ever a right time to release a prisoner like this?’

Chapter Eleven

The man now known as Neil Wright was watching the same Panorama programme at Spring Hill open prison and enjoying it. On the screen were his own features from decades before. The presenter then described several of the murders of which his alter ego Neville Rollason had been convicted. Images of the streets in the north-east of England from which the victims disappeared were shown, streets that were still familiar to him. Places that he visited frequently in his dreams, where he found himself cleaning away in retrospect the forensic clues that in the 1980s had sunk him.

The presenter was now in full condemnatory style. ‘Is it right to release this man, a man who has only recently shown any remorse for the brutal killings he committed more than thirty years ago in a different century? I put this question to a senior retired judge, Lord Waverley, who as Mr Justice Waverley put away many of Britain’s most notorious criminals.’