Nicola Walker narrates the account of the 10 Rillington Place murders in the 50s – and the macabre media whirlwind that followed

The Peepshow opens in 1953 with a sex worker being approached by a middle-aged man in spectacles in London. When she asks if he’d like to go home with her, he is insistent she come to his house. After she declines, he suggests they meet in Paddington the following day where, after completing their “business”, he will take her to his home to take some nude photos. But when the time comes, the man doesn’t show up. That weekend, she sees his photo in the News of the World and learns that he is John “Reg” Christie, now missing after police uncovered the bodies of three women, each of them strangled to death, behind the kitchen alcove in his house at 10 Rillington Place.

Kate Summerscale’s follow-up to 2020’s The Haunting of Alma Fielding unpacks the Christie murders, setting them against a backdrop of postwar London where the air was filthy, racism was rife and “spivs and flash boys … frequented the drug dens, gambling clubs, pubs and late-night cafes”.