‘Wouldn’t the iPads and the other stuff have to be turned on?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t think this is a coincidence.’

‘I’ll get the computer guys on it first thing in the morning.’

After Darby hung up, she threw on a shirt and then paced the rough carpet in her bare feet. The Red Hill Ripper had used those devices to watch himself, she was sure of it.

The phone rang and she realized she had forgotten about her drink with Williams.

‘Sorry, Ray, I’m running late. I’ve found something about the Ripper – how he’s watching himself and the families.’

Williams didn’t answer.

‘Ray? You there?’

‘You’ve got really nice tits. And I like those tight little boy shorts you just put on.’

The voice on the other end of the line was deep and guttural, almost a moan. It was also disguised by a voice-changer.

‘I can’t wait to get you in the rope.’

‘Why wait? Why not –’

‘Goooooodbye.’

Darby was staring at the window when the line went dead.

Day Two

My mother, whose name was also Sarah, was a slim woman with rough hands who wore too much makeup and smoked too much and dressed every day like she was going off to a country-club dance or a thousand-dollars-a-plate political fundraiser. She had wanted a girl and made no secret about it.

Boys confused her, she told me on several occasions. They ate like pigs, shovelling food into their mouths before bouncing outside with the boundless energy of a puppy, and spent each day rolling around and digging in dirt and getting into fistfights and playing sports. They came home covered in filth and sweat and reeked of BO. They wolfed down their supper and they put up a fuss when they were asked to wash their hands or take a shower.

Girls, my mother said, were the complete opposite in almost every way. They didn’t come home smelling like they had spent their day swimming in a sewer. They enjoyed taking long baths and they wore clean clothes and they made an effort to look pretty. They were polite and had table manners. The biggest difference – the most important one, my mother argued – was when girls reached puberty they didn’t act like unneutered dogs, humping legs and bedposts, pillows, whatever got them off. Girls developed into ladies. Boys turned into monsters of fornication.

I don’t know how my father felt about boys or girls or children in general because I’d never met him. My mother told me his name was Roy, just Roy, no last name needed, and the only contact I had with my father was through a small steamer trunk that sat in a dusty attic corner strung with cobwebs. Inside, I found an army uniform and a bayonet and a collection of detective magazines from the fifties and sixties. They had had the word ‘detective’ in the titles – Real Detective, Spicy Detective and Gold Seal Detective – and each cover featured a woman wearing a ripped dress or a skimpy bikini or just her underwear and bra. All the women were tightly bound with thick rope to chairs, posts, beds, tables and radiators, some gagged, some captured mid-scream with their teeth bared and their lips painted blood-red, every one of them frightened.

The articles were the kind of tripe you’d usually expect – ‘THE NUDIST CAMP MURDERS!’ and ‘HE MADE THEM SLAVES … AND THEY LIKED IT!’ A few, though, usually the ones that weren’t advertised on the front cover, were instructive, explaining the mysteries of women, how they really wanted to be treated, their true desires, needs and wants.

When my mother wasn’t home, which was often, I would spend long afternoons inside the attic, alone with the pictures. It was the most peaceful time of my life. I was thirteen. Everything ended – changed – when my mother caught me in flagrante delicto – the magazines spread over the floor and my shorts and underwear around my ankles, my free hand slowly increasing the tension on the rope I had tied around my neck. She didn’t give me a chance to explain. She beat me with her hands, and when she spotted my father’s belt, which was conveniently sitting inside the trunk, she picked it up and hit me with it until I couldn’t stand without help.

That night she made me kneel on grains of rice as she read from the Good Book. When dawn finally, mercifully arrived – my knees cut and bleeding, the muscles in my thighs and lower back locked in spasm and my head filled with an excruciating, skull-splitting pain that had, at least twice that awful night, caused me to collapse and black out – my mother slammed her Bible shut, convinced that she had fully exorcized the succubus. From that day on, until I left home for good, she’d tie me up every night to prevent the demon from returning, binding my wrists to the headboard and tying my ankles to the bedpost.

I’m startled into wakefulness, the red glow of the alarm clock the only light in the bedroom. In my mind’s eye I see my mother staring at me accusingly. She has a smile that says I know who you really are and I know all your dirty little secrets. Wait until I get hold of you …

She would never speak that way to me, of course. Too many words.

Sarah, my loving partner all these years, gently touches my arm.

‘Bad dream?’

She’s dead, I remind myself. I swallow, my heart tripping. She’s dead and I buried her.

‘You’re shaking,’ Sarah says.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You were crying out for Tricia. Who’s that?’

I whip off the covers. ‘I’m going out for a run,’ I say.

It’s coming up on 5 a.m. and the cold air feels like razor blades against my skin, like shards of ice inside my lungs. I want to turn around and go home, but I keep running, pushing myself, because exercise is the only way I can banish my mother. Even now, after all the years she’s been dead, it still amazes me in a naive, childlike way how you can bury someone but you can’t bury that’s person’s memory, their connection to you. I spoke about my mother once to a psychologist, years ago, a matronly woman with kind eyes who had once been a nun. She refused to see me again. The woman’s secretary never explained why.

I don’t need a psychologist to explain to me why my mother visits me in my dreams: she is the embodiment of my fear, specifically the fear of being discovered by the police. I made a critical mistake at the Downes home. If the police don’t discover it, Hoder will.

I return home, rubber-legged and sweating, and take a long shower. When I arrive downstairs, the air is warm and smells of coffee and eggs and sausage. Sarah is cooking breakfast and listening to the radio, an old model with a manual dial and an antenna mended with duct tape. It sits on the windowsill above the sink, tuned to the local news. She shuffles about the kitchen, wearing her slippers and the frumpy pink housecoat I’ve told her to get rid of tied around her body, which has started to thicken with age.

I curl and uncurl my fists for a reason I can’t pinpoint or explain.

Sarah hands me a mug of coffee and returns to the stove. I sit at the table and stare out the kitchen window. The exercise and fresh air and shower and promise of another fine morning – the sky above the tall pines is a deep red and gold, cloudless – these things should have me feeling light. Buoyant. Instead, nameless and shapeless thoughts like an army of fire ants crawl through my skull, eating their way through my brain.

Sarah puts a plate of eggs, ham and sausage in front of me and goes back to the stove to fix her breakfast. My two Sarahs, I think, picking up a fork. One a demon who visits me almost every night in my dreams, the other a Milquetoast angel who offers up endless and bottomless wells of forgiveness, patience and kindness.

Sarah refills my coffee mug and I’m possessed by the urge to tell her about what happened at the Downes house. About the mistake I made and how the FBI are in town and they’re poking around – I want to unburden myself but it would only burden her.