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Troubled Blood
Part Three - 15
As for Mandy White, the schoolgirl who’d claimed to have seen Margot at a rainy window, there were so many Amanda Whites of approximately the right age to be found online that Robin was starting to despair of ever finding the right one. Robin found this line of inquiry particularly frustrating, firstly because there was a good chance that White was no longer Mandy’s surname, and secondly because, like the police before her, Robin thought it highly unlikely that Mandy had actually seen Margot at the window that night.
Having examined and discounted the Facebook accounts of another six Amanda Whites, Robin yawned, stretched and decided she was owed a break. Setting her laptop down on a side table, she swung her legs carefully off the sofa so as not to disturb Wolfgang, and crossed the open-plan area that combined kitchen, dining and living rooms, to make herself one of the low-calorie hot chocolates she was trying to convince herself was a treat, because she was still, in the middle of this long, sedentary stretch of surveillance, trying to keep an eye on her waistline.
As she stirred the unappetizing powder into boiling water, a whiff of tuberose mingled with the scent of synthetic caramel. In spite of her bath, Fracas still lingered in her hair and on her pajama. This perfume, she’d finally decided, had been a costly mistake. Living in a dense cloud of tuberose made her feel not only perpetually on the verge of a headache, but also as though she were wearing fur and pearls in broad daylight.
Troubled Blood
Part Three - 15
Wintry specks of rain were dotting the window behind the dining table. Wolfgang was fast asleep again. Robin couldn’t face perusing the social media accounts of another fifty Amanda Whites tonight. As she picked up The Demon of Paradise Park, she hesitated. She’d made a rule for herself (because it had been a long, hard journey to reach the place where she was now, and she didn’t want to lose her current good state of mental health) not to read this book after dark, or right before bed. After all, the information it contained could be found summarized online: there was no need to hear in his own words what Creed had done to each of the women he’d tortured and killed.
Nevertheless, she picked up her hot chocolate, opened the book to the page she had marked with a Tesco receipt, and began to read at the point she’d left off three days previously.
Convinced that Bamborough had fallen victim to the serial killer now dubbed the Essex Butcher, Talbot made enemies among his colleagues with what they felt was his obsessive focus on one theory.