Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)
Robert Bryndza
AUTUMN 1995
1
Detective Constable Kate Marshall was on the train home when her phone rang. It took a moment of searching the folds of her long winter coat before she found it in the inside pocket. She heaved out the huge bricklike handset, pulled up the antenna, and answered. It was her boss, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Conway.
“Sir. Hello.”
“Finally. She picks up!” he snapped, without preamble. “I’ve been calling you. What’s the bloody point in having one of these new mobile phones if you don’t answer?”
“Sorry. I’ve been in court all day for the Travis Jones sentencing. He got three years, which is more than I—”
“A dog walker found the body of a young girl dumped in Crystal Palace Park,” he said, cutting her off. “Naked. Bite marks on her body, a plastic bag tied over her head.”
“The Nine Elms Cannibal . . .”
“Operation Hemlock. You know I don’t like that name.”
Kate wanted to reply that the name had now stuck and was bedded in for life, but he wasn’t the kind of boss who encouraged banter. The press had coined the epithet two years earlier, when seventeen-year-old Shelley Norris had been found dumped in a wrecker’s yard in the Nine Elms area of South West London, close to the Thames. Technically, the killer only bit his victims, but the press didn’t let that get in the way of a good serial killer moniker. Over the past two years, another two teenage girls had been abducted, each in the early evening, on the way home from school. Their bodies had shown up several days after their disappearances, dumped in parks around London. Nothing sold newspapers more than a cannibal on the loose.
“Kate. Where are you?”
It was dark outside the train window. She looked up at the electronic display in the carriage.
“On the DLR. Almost home, sir.”
“I’ll pick you up outside the station, our usual spot.” He hung up without waiting for a response.
Twenty minutes later, Kate was waiting on a small stretch of pavement between the station underpass and the busy south circular where a line of cars ground slowly past. Much of the area around the station was under development, and Kate’s route home to her small flat took her through a long road of empty building sites. It wasn’t somewhere to linger after dark. The passengers she’d left the train with had crossed the road and dispersed into the dark streets. She glanced back over her shoulder at the dank empty underpass bathed in shadows and shifted on her heels; a small bag of groceries she’d bought for dinner sat between her feet.
A spot of water hit her neck, and another, and then it started to rain. She turned up the collar of her coat and hunched down, moving closer to the bright headlights in the line of traffic.
Kate had been assigned to Operation Hemlock sixteen months previously, when the Nine Elms Cannibal body count stood at two. It had been a coup to join a high-profile case, particularly because doing so had come with a promotion to the rank of plainclothes detective.
In the eight months since the third victim’s body had been found—a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl called Carla Martin—the case had gone cold. Operation Hemlock had been scaled back, and Kate, along with several other junior officers, had been reassigned to the drug squad.
Kate squinted through the rain, down the long line of traffic. Bright headlights appeared around a sharp bend in the road, but there were no police sirens in the distance. She checked her watch and stepped back out of the glare.
She hadn’t seen Peter for two months. Shortly before she was reassigned, she had slept with him. He rarely socialized with his team, and during a rare night of after-work drinks, they’d wound up talking, and she’d found his company and his intelligence stimulating. They had stayed late in the pub, after the rest of the team went home, and ended up back at her flat. And then the next night he had invited her over to his place. Kate’s dalliance with her boss, on not one but two occasions, was something that burned inside her with regret. It was a moment of madness. Two moments, before they both came to their senses. She had a strong moral compass. She was a good police officer.
I’ll pick you up outside the station, our usual spot.
It bothered her that Peter had said this on the phone. He’d given her a lift to work twice, and both times he had also picked up her colleague, Detective Inspector Cameron Rose, who lived close by. Would he have said our usual spot to Cam?
The cold was starting to creep up the back of her long coat, and the rain had seeped in through the holes in the bottoms of the “good shoes” she wore for court. Kate adjusted her collar and huddled down in her coat, turning her attention to the line of traffic. Almost all the drivers were men, white, in their mid-to-late thirties. The perfect serial killer demographic.
A grimy white van slid past, the driver’s face distorted by the rainwater on the windshield. The police believed the Nine Elms Cannibal was using a van to abduct his victims. Carpet fibers matching a 1994 Citro?n Dispatch white van, of which there were more than a hundred thousand registered in and around London, had been found on two of the victims. Kate wondered if the officers who’d been retained for Operation Hemlock were still working through that list of Citro?n Dispatch owners. And who was this new victim? There had been nothing in the newspapers about a missing person.