I am indebted to Detective Sergeant Graham McMillan of Cambridgeshire’s Major Crime Unit for his help with this book; also to Detective Sergeant Susie Hine of Cambridge CID for advice on the first draft. Inaccuracies are mine, not theirs.
Thank you Superintendent Jon Hutchinson for facilitating my visits to Cambridgeshire’s MCU.
For guidance on pathology, thank you Clare Craig, consultant pathologist at Imperial College NHS Trust. For postmortem and coroners detail, thanks to Michael Osborn, consultant histopathologist at Imperial.
For Maureen Dent’s Irish vernacular, thanks to Marissa McConville.
For Tony Wright’s Scots vernacular, thanks to Eileen MacCallum.
For advice on criminal law, thank you Daniel Burbidge.
The report published by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in November 2011 into staff–prisoner relations in Whitemoor, on which Edith fictionally assisted as a researcher, is real. It is readily available online and is a riveting and humane read. Find it here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/217381/staff-prisoner-relations-whitemoor.pdf
Thanks Sandra Laville, of the Guardian, for advice on hacking and Soham.
Thanks to Sian Rickett, Susannah Waters, Alexandra Shelley, Daniel Burbidge, John Steiner, Deborah Steiner and Zoe Ross for careful reading and good advice. And to Katie Espiner and Andrea Walker for brilliant editing. Thank you Eleanor Jackson, for going out to bat for me Stateside. To Sarah Ballard, thank you for everything, as always. Thank you Tom Happold for being my first and last reader and for all your support. And George and Ben Happold for bundling in from school and filling the house with joyful noise after the silence of the attic.