It’s after 8:00 when I get home.

Joan is watching TV Eye.

‘They’re repeating that Mind of the Ripper,’ she says.

I sit in front of the TV, watching the faces swim by.

I am forty years old, Joan thirty-eight.

We have no children.

I can’t sleep -

I never can.

My back bad, getting worse and worse, day by day.

Always awake, sweating and afraid, eyes wide in the dark beside Joan.

The radio on -

Always on:

Hunger strikers near death, thirty-two murdered in one LA weekend;

Gdansk, Tehran, Kabul, the Dakota;

The North of England -

No law.

I get out of bed and go downstairs.

I can hear the rain against the window pane, behind the curtains.

I go into the kitchen and put the radio on and wait for the kettle to boil.

The rain against the pane, a song on the radio:

‘Don’t be afraid to go to hell and back -’

I open my briefcase and take out the red ring-binder, the red ring-binder they gave me:

Murders and Assaults upon Women in the North of England.

The kettle’s boiling, whistling:

Everyone gets everything they want.

I unlock the back door and take the tea and the red ring-binder out into the black garden and the rain. I walk down the side of the garage to the shed I built at the back. I take the key from my dressing gown pocket and unlock the door to the shed.

I am cold, freezing.

I go inside, lock the door behind me and put on the light.

My room -

One door, one light, no windows; the smell of earth and damp, old exhaust fumes and ageing gardening gloves; a long desk across the length of the back wall, two grey metal filing cabinets standing guard on each of the side walls. Between them, on top of the desk, a computer and keyboard, a black and white portable television, a CB radio, a cassette recorder and a reel to reel, a typewriter. Under the desk, across the floor, wires and cables, plugs and adapters, boxes of paper, stacks of magazines and newspapers, tins and jars and pots of pens and pencils and paperclips.