Nine Elms: The thrilling first book in a brand-new, electrifying crime series (Kate Marshall 1)

by Robert Bryndza

  CHAPTER 4

  After lunch, Kate was left alone in her office. There was a stack of papers to mark, but she couldn’t concentrate, and she kept checking her email to see if Malcolm Murray had written back.

  We just want to find our little girl . . . Our wish now is to give her a proper Christian burial.

  In her reply to him she had avoided making any promises. What could she do? She was no longer a police officer. She had no access to any kind of investigative tools. She’d offered to speak to him, and to put him in touch with one of the police officers from the original case, but she wished she hadn’t been so hasty with this. She wasn’t in contact with any of the officers. Cameron was now a DCI and married with kids. He lived up north. Marsha had died of lung cancer four years after Peter was convicted, and the rest of her colleagues had scattered to the wind.

  Kate put the marking to one side, pulled up the Google homepage and did a search online for information about Caitlyn Murray’s disappearance. There was very little local online newspaper archive material going back to 1990, and all she found was a tiny follow-up article from 1997, when the missing persons case had been officially closed by the police. Kate then logged on to the UK Missing Persons Unit website. It was heartbreaking to see the thousands of people being sought out by family members and loved ones.

  It took some digging, but she finally found Caitlyn in the database. Her name had been misspelled as ‘Caitlin’. There was one photo, where Caitlyn wore a school uniform of black brogues, a short green skirt and black tights with a cream shirt and green blazer. It looked like it was cropped from a larger class photo. Caitlyn sat on a plastic chair, and behind her was a corner of a grey suit jacket belonging to a male pupil or teacher. She had been a beautiful girl, with a heart-shaped face and wide blue eyes. Caitlyn’s hands were clasped on her lap and her shoulders a little hunched over. Her light brown hair was tied back, and long wisps were carried off to one side, which made Kate think the photo had been taken outside on a cold windy day. It struck Kate how she engaged with the camera, staring straight on with confidence and a wry smile.

  The tiny newspaper article she’d found from 1997 was taken from the Altrincham Echo. It said that Caitlyn had been a pupil at Altrincham Old Scholars Grammar School. Kate pulled up the school website, but their archive of photos only went back to 2000. As the afternoon wore on and the sun sank down over the sea, she felt she’d reached a dead end. Just before six, Kate checked her email for the last time and, seeing there was still no reply, she left the office.

  The house was lovely and warm when Kate stepped into the hallway. The central heating was ancient, and now the weather was turning bad, she worried it wouldn’t last another winter. She hung up her coat, and it was comforting to hear the click and clank of the boiler in the roof, followed by a gurgle as hot water surged through the pipes.

  The ground floor of the house was open plan, and the hallway led into a huge living room and kitchen. A picture window ran all along the back wall looking out to sea, and next to it sat a comfy armchair. This was where Kate spent most of her free time. There was something hypnotic and deeply soothing about watching the sea. It was always changing. Tonight it was clear, and the day’s storm had blown itself out. The moon was almost full, and cast a silver slick on the water.

  The rest of the furniture in the living room was old and heavy – a battered sofa and coffee table, and an upright piano that she didn’t play against one wall. The house came with the job and the contents had belonged to her predecessor. The other walls were covered in bookshelves stacked untidily with novels and academic papers. Kate went to the kitchen, dropped her bag on the small breakfast bar and opened the fridge. It shone a bright yellow triangle over the dark room. She took out a jug of iced tea and a plate of sliced lemon. The impulse to have an after-work drink had never left her. She took out a tumbler and half filled it with ice, adding a slice of the lemon and the iced tea. She kept the lights off and went to sit in the armchair by the window, looking out at the dark rolling sea glittering in the moonlight. She took a sip, savouring the cold sweet-and-sharp of the tea, sugar and lemon.

  Kate was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and in AA this was frowned upon. There was no alcohol in the iced tea, but it had all the ritual of an after-work drink. But screw it, she thought. It worked for her. She went to meetings, she kept in contact with her sponsor and she had six years of sobriety under her belt. She’d always been a drinker. It was part of police work culture to go down the pub after work and get smashed. Both good days and bad days on the force warranted a drink, but after her world was turned on its head by the Nine Elms case, her drinking became a problem, and this affected her ability to be a responsible mother.

  Jake had never come to any harm, but often Kate had drunk so much that she was unable to function. Her parents, Glenda and Michael, would have him at weekends. They stepped in many times to look after him, and he spent several extended spells staying with them so Kate could get her act together.

  Things came to a head one Friday afternoon when Jake was six. He had just started primary school in south London, and Glenda and Michael had gone away for a long weekend. Kate had been drinking during the week, nothing that she thought excessive, but on the Friday afternoon she’d collapsed in the supermarket and was rushed to hospital with alcohol poisoning. She didn’t turn up to collect Jake from school, and when they tried to contact Kate and then her parents, no one picked up. It got late, and the school called social services. Jake only spent a few hours with a kind foster family until Glenda and Michael were finally tracked down, but the incident blew the lid off the problem of Kate’s drinking. She agreed to go to rehab and Glenda and Michael were given temporary custody.

  Looking back, Kate realised that she had been in a bad place mentally. She didn’t take rehab seriously. In her mind, she thought that Jake was just staying with her parents, like always, and they would be reunited once she’d paid her dues and got clean. She’d thought there must be other parents who fell ill and didn’t make the school run. It could happen to anyone. But when she was discharged from rehab, three months later, Kate discovered Glenda and Michael had applied for permanent legal custody of Jake – and won.

  In the years that followed, Kate struggled to get back on track. She found herself fighting against her parents to see her son, and she launched several legal appeals to be reinstated in the police. Peter Conway’s legal team appealed his conviction, which kept the case in the news headlines, and the whole media circus kept on rolling.

  Kate finally made sobriety stick six years ago, when she was offered a lifeline – the job at Ashdean University. It came with a house and a complete change of scenery, and she found the life of an academic fulfilling and non-judgemental. For so long her goal had been to be reunited with Jake, but by then he was eight years old. He was in a great school, he had friends and he was very happy. Kate saw that Glenda and Michael had been there for him when she couldn’t, and it was in her son’s best interests to stay with them. As the years passed, she mended their relationship and she saw Jake at every school holiday and some weekends, and they Skyped every Wednesday and Sunday. They had a good relationship. It was to her eternal guilt and shame that her son had been taken away from her, but she held onto her sobriety and the good things for dear life.

  As he got older, she saw that it was better for Jake to have Glenda drop him at school and at play dates with his friends. That way he wasn’t the kid with the notorious mother, the kid fathered by a serial murderer. With that distance from Kate, he was able to live a relatively normal life. He was able to be the kid who lived with his grandparents in the big house with the huge garden and a cute dog.

  Jake knew that his father was a bad man who was locked away, but Peter Conway didn’t play any part in his life. Peter was forbidden to have any contact with Jake until he was sixteen, but Kate could sense trouble looming in the future. In two years, Jake would be sixteen. He had already pestered Glenda to let him join Facebo
ok, and he was hitting those teenage years of self-awareness and questioning.

  It always felt wrong that Kate came home alone while her son lived somewhere else, but she had to keep looking forward; she had to keep believing that the best was yet to come. Jake was going to have a wonderful life. She was determined to make it happen, even if it meant distancing herself from his formative years.

  A small table next to the armchair held framed photos of Jake. There was his latest class photo, and another photo of Jake in her parents’ large leafy garden with Milo, his beloved Labrador. Kate’s favourite photo was the newest, taken in late August on the beach below the house. The tide was far out in the background, and they were standing next to a huge sandcastle they’d spent all afternoon building. Jake had both his arms around her waist and they were smiling. The sun was shining in their faces, highlighting the burst of orange they both had in the blue of their eyes.

  She picked up the photo and stroked his face through the glass. Jake now came up to her shoulder. He had kind eyes and dark hair, cut in the floppy boyband style worn by the boys in One Direction. He was a handsome kid, but he had Peter Conway’s nose, strong and slightly pointed at the end.

  ‘Of course he’s going to look like his father, that’s nature,’ said Kate out loud. ‘The nurture, that’s my . . . that’s my parents’ job. He’s happy. There’s no reason for him to turn bad.’

  She felt her eyes fill with tears. She put the photo back and looked down at her glass of iced tea. It would be so easy to have a drink. Just one drink. She shook the thought away, and it went. She drained her iced tea and looked at Jake’s school photo. The kids in his class were posing on two rows of benches with Miss Prentice, a pretty blonde in her early twenties. Jake was surrounded by his four close friends, like a little boyband in the making, and smiling, squinting at the sun.

  Kate’s mind went back to the school photo of Caitlyn Murray. She didn’t look happy like Jake.

  Kate got up to switch on her laptop and check if Caitlyn’s father had replied to her email, when her mobile phone rang. She went to her bag in the kitchen and saw it was Alan Hexham.

  ‘Hello, working late?’ she said. She liked Alan. He came and lectured to her students every term, and as well as being a brilliant forensic pathologist, he had become a friend.

  ‘Kate, are you busy?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Everything okay?’

  ‘I want you to come down to the morgue . . . I need a second opinion.’

  ‘A second opinion?’ she asked. He was normally so upbeat, but tonight he sounded rattled. Almost scared.

  ‘Yes. Please, Kate. I could really use your help and insight.’

  CHAPTER 5

  The morgue was on the outskirts of Exmouth, only a few miles from Kate’s house. It was in the basement of a large Victorianera hospital, and the car park was quiet and empty. A tall chimney rose out the back of the building and thick black smoke was pouring out into the clear sky.

  The morgue was accessed through a side door, and then Kate was in a damp tunnel, banking down into the basement. It smelled of mould and disinfectant, and dim yellow lights dotted at intervals flickered and fizzed.

  The tunnel opened out into a bright reception area with a high ceiling and ornate Victorian plasterwork. The pattern made Kate think of tightly curled intestines, or brain tissue. She signed in and was shown through to a lecture theatre. Raked wooden seats rose up around it, and vanished into the shadows.

  A large naked corpse lay in the centre of the theatre, on a stainless-steel post-mortem table. Alan worked with two assistants. They all wore blue scrubs with clear Perspex masks. The bloated, blackening corpse was slit open from just above the groin up to the sternum, where the cut diverged out across each shoulder to the neck. The rib cage was split down the middle and bent out, like open butterfly wings. The hole where her face should have been gaped obscenely, a row of bottom teeth poking up through the flesh, which was like a cluster of poisonous mushrooms. Kate hesitated in the entrance, taking in the stench, mingled with the dusty wooden smell of the old auditorium.

  ‘Lungs are good and healthy, though close to liquefaction,’ Alan was saying, lifting them up in his bloodied hands. They hung wetly above the dismembered torso, reminding Kate of a dead octopus. ‘Quickly, they’ll disintegrate.’

  He saw Kate, and nodded in acknowledgement as one of his assistants rushed to him with a stainless-steel organ dish. He placed the lungs carefully inside.

  ‘Kate. Thank you for coming,’ he said, his voice echoing off the high ceiling. ‘Fresh scrubs are on the back of the door, and do remember shoe covers.’

  She quickly pulled on a set of scrubs and came back, stopping a few feet from the body. The room was cold, and she folded her arms over her chest. She was close enough to see the remainder of the teenager’s organs, all packed neatly into the open torso. She wondered what the body of the young woman had to do with her. It had been so long since she’d attended a post-mortem, and she hoped her stomach was still up to it. Alan towered over his two assistants as he brought Kate up to speed, explaining where and when they had found the body.

  ‘Despite having no face to identify, her body wielded a wealth of samples: semen, saliva, three separate strands of hair, pubic hair in the vagina, an eyelash from one of the bites on the back of her legs . . . ’

  ‘Bites?’ said Kate.

  ‘Yes. Six,’ said Alan, looking up at her.

  One of his assistants carefully lifted out the heart and carried it reverently in two hands, taking it over to a set of weighting scales.

  ‘Liam. Bring the dish to the organ. Don’t go walking around the room with it! Samira . . . ’

  Liam froze in the middle of the room, holding the heart while Samira fetched a small steel bowl for him to place the organ in. Kate ignored this little double act and moved closer to the body, smelling decaying flesh. A surgical saw, congealed with blood, lay on the adjacent table. A postmortem was always conducted with such an intense calm. ‘Ripping apart someone with care’ is how she had once heard it described.

  ‘Was she asphyxiated?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘See the ligature marks on the neck and throat, small red pinpricks, like a rash?’ He indicated with his finger. ‘Indicates rapid loss of oxygen, then the blood being rapidly re-oxygenated. She was deprived of oxygen to the point of death, and then revived . . . ’

  ‘Was she posed? Lying on her side, with one arm outstretched?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her body left in parkland?’

  ‘Moorland. Dartmoor National Park, but yes, out in the elements.’

  ‘Have you identified her?’

  ‘Not yet. Looking at her remaining teeth, she’s only just out of teenage years.’ He went to a trolley and picked up an evidence bag containing the torn neck of the drawstring plastic bag and the rope with the knot. He handed it to Kate. ‘And this was found tied around her neck.’

  For the second time that day a piece of the past was suddenly thrust into Kate’s present. A chill ran through her body as she fingered the knot through the thick plastic, feeling the tight ridges on the small ball. She looked up at Alan.

  ‘Fucking hell. A monkey’s fist knot?’ she said. Kate looked back at the body, which was so badly decayed and bloated that it was difficult to tell what she would have looked like alive. ‘What do the police say?’

  ‘About you attending my post-mortem? They don’t know,’ said Alan.

  Kate looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘A young female DCI is heading this case. I think she was still playing with her Barbie dolls when Peter Conway was on the rampage. I haven’t told her. I wanted you to look at this before I start linking this murder to a historical case.’

  Kate looked at the knot again. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind. Look at it all. It’s the Nine Elms Cannibal.’

  ‘Peter Conway hasn’t escaped, in case you’re worried. He’s still tucked up nicely in hi
s cell at Her Majesty’s pleasure.’

  Kate nodded. ‘I know. If he escapes I’m one of the first to be told. There are measures in place to protect me and my son . . . ’ Kate could see a tinge of pity in Alan’s eyes. They had never discussed her situation, but he obviously knew. ‘Whoever did this, it looks like a copycat. Am I making a leap here? There is too much here for it just to be a coincidence.’

  ‘Yes. I agree,’ said Alan.

  ‘Do you know when she died? Time of death?’ asked Kate, returning her attention to the body.

  ‘She’s been out in the elements – wind and rain, creepy crawlies. We have maggots in the flesh behind the left ear and in the shoulder, and the body is bloated. I’d put time of death five or six days ago.’

  ‘That would make it last Tuesday or Wednesday. Conway grabbed his victims on a Thursday or Friday. He’d have the weekend to torture them, kill them, then he’d dump their bodies on a Monday or Tuesday,’ said Kate. She looked up at Alan. ‘Did you get dental impressions from the bites?’

  ‘No. The skin has decayed too much.’

  ‘What about her face? Do you know how it was removed?’

  Alan took a small plastic bag from the pocket of his scrubs. It contained a long tooth.

  ‘A canine left incisor,’ he said, holding it up. It was smooth and white.

  ‘A dog?’

  Alan nodded. ‘From a Doberman or Alsatian. It would need to be pretty riled up to do this. I dread to think what was done to it. We found the tooth embedded in the remnants of her upper right-hand jawbone, but I don’t believe that the dog alone got the face off. There are also incision marks from a serrated blade.’

  ‘As if the dog attacked and the face was removed, or finished off with a knife?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alan.

  ‘Have you come across any other murders that have the hallmarks of Conway?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you check?’

  ‘Kate, I asked you for your professional opinion on this body, which I am grateful for . . . ’