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“Yes, there were. But at the time we didn’t know Catherine Sutton was missing. She was homeless—no one had noticed her absence. Our only survivor.”
“What happened to her?”
Shepherd tips his head down, a sad gesture. “Dead. She disappeared, ten days after we got her out. We couldn’t find her. Until later. I guess it was her forte—living on the streets—so she blended back in. Vanished. But every now and again I’d have a look. Search for her name, check for any Jane Does that had been arrested.” He pauses and wipes his eyes for a second. “Unidentified female. Found in the river, and she’d been there a while, so there wasn’t much to go on. I always hoped she’d changed her name, made a new start. Got married, had kids.” He laughs to himself. “No more than misplaced optimism. Looking for the happy ending. We never found out what happened. My guess is she overdosed. Or was killed by her pimp and dumped. That’s how it usually goes for these girls.” He looks at Adam. “And Romilly Cole? How is she? I assume you’ve interviewed her again?”
Adam smiles. “Yes, she’s been helping us with the investigation. She’s good. She’s a doctor now. Oncology.”
“Yes, I heard. Strange how she followed in her father’s footsteps. You’d think she’d want nothing to do with him. I always wondered.”
“Wondered what?” Adam says.
“We could never shake the feeling she was lying.”
The Labrador lets out a long groan, then hauls himself up from in front of the fire and slumps down again at Shepherd’s side. The detective reaches down to rub his ears. Adam stays quiet. Half of him is desperate to know what he means, the other half dreading what he’ll say.
Shepherd sighs. “I shouldn’t bring it up. It’s unfair. There was nothing we could ever prove. But something about her story didn’t stack up. The timings, the house, how long it had gone on. She must have seen something.”
Adam remembers the location of her bedroom, overlooking the garden. “But she said she’d been completely unaware?”
“Right. And what use would it have been, even if we could show she’d known? She was eleven. Her life was completely destroyed. And we had him locked up. More than enough evidence to put him away for life, so why put the girl through more?”
“What was she like in the days just after?”
“Shocked. Muddled. Crying. How you’d expect if your beloved father had been arrested for the kidnap, torture, rape, and murder of five women. But she was so under his thumb. You could see it. She would have done anything for him. Makes you wonder whether she had.”
“Whether she had what?”
But the man shakes his head, reluctant to continue. “She wasn’t the only one. Everyone was like that around him. Even some of our detectives were charmed. He was so polite and funny and smart. You met him.”
“This morning. He wasn’t so pleasant.”
Shepherd nods. “We saw that side of him too. Turning nasty on the flip of a coin. The two faces of a serial killer. But he ran that GP practice for thirteen years before he was caught. We even got letters from some of his patients, saying how we were wrong, how Dr. Cole had helped them. Placards outside the courthouse proclaiming his innocence. I would have liked to show them the photos, taken them down to that outhouse. I’ll never forget it. That smell.”
His eyes drift, lost in the memory. “The girls were gone by the time I got there, but even empty it was horrific. You could almost taste their fear—it was visceral. Thick, claggy, something in the air.
“When I got home I had a shower, then got straight back in and had another. It clung to you. The death. How much those poor women … how much they suffered.”
He looks at Adam, eyes narrowed. “If you think these latest deaths have something to do with him—however improbable, however ridiculous—then they probably do.” He leans forward in his chair, resolute, his face hard. “He is the devil, that man,” Shepherd says. “The devil incarnate.”
CHAPTER
50
ADAM THANKS THE detective and leaves. But before he goes, Shepherd stops him.
“I didn’t answer your question, the reason you came here.”
For a moment, Adam can’t think what he’s referring to. Then he remembers.
“The other victims.”
“Yes. And no, I don’t think there is anyone else there.”
“But the house—”
“No. We checked it. The Roman numerals on the doorframe made us wonder whether there were more, so when we found the three bodies in the garden we went over the whole place a thousand times. Dogs, ground-penetrating radar, the lot. We ripped up the floorboards, drilled through concrete. There’s nothing else, I assure you.”
Adam nods. “Thank you,” he says again, and Shepherd shakes his hand.
