‘Good luck,’ he said, resting his hand lightly on the small of her back. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, and she ducked rapidly into the safety of the car.

Leticia sat down opposite the anonymous-looking prisoner and wondered if she had been paired up with the wrong offender. The man, perhaps only five-six, balding and skinny, looked utterly harmless. He had trendy red-framed glasses, a sparse swirl of fluffy white hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He looked considerably older than his true age of sixty-three. Though she had been emailed a picture of Neil Wright’s face, in the flesh she had still expected to detect an aura of evil and had fully anticipated being unnerved by the man, given his reputation. But Neville Rollason now seemed transformed into Neil Wright, as if the pseudonym was actually a whole new personality. She introduced herself, and with a smile he held out a hand to shake hers. She made brief contact, and it was nothing remarkable. Soft, dry, warm skin. She could have been shaking hands with a colleague at work.

‘I’m very glad to meet you, pet,’ he said, with just a trace of a north-east accent.

‘And you, Neil,’ she said. ‘So how are you finding it here?’

They were in a bright and airy interview room at HMP Spring Hill. It was painted in pastel blue and yellow, with matching plastic furniture and a potted plant in a corner. She could see a prison officer in an adjacent office through an internal window, but there was no one else in the room with them.

He laughed, showing what were clearly bleached as well as reconstructed teeth. ‘A proper soft bed, much less racket from the corridors and a civilised class of neighbour. Even the screws are nice and young, with downy little moustaches and lovely long blond eyelashes.’ He licked his lips. ‘And they call us men, not prisoners.’

Leticia felt a pulse of anger at this man’s sense of entitlement, the way he felt he could still broadcast his proclivities even to a probation officer. She suspected he knew he had more power than she did. Even if she recommended that he not be released, at this late stage she would probably be overruled. The Parole Board machinery had ground out its decision after considerable deliberation and wasn’t likely to reverse it easily, especially as DI Morgan still had hopes of extracting from him the location of the final victim.

‘I’ve been made aware, of course, of your full background,’ she said. ‘We’ve no need to go into any of that at this meeting, which is mainly about the practical arrangements of your release plan. We will however still need to see you quite regularly to assess how you are meeting the objectives we set in this, and to action any additional requirements.’ She tapped the document in front of her.