Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(11)

Kate came back to the present. The students were staring at her with concern. The silence in the lecture theatre was thick and heavy.

She clicked the projector round to the final slide, and a news clipping flashed up of Peter Conway being led out in handcuffs into the Old Bailey court in London. Above it was written:





KILLER CANNIBAL JAILED FOR LIFE


“This is something we’ll debate during the course. Nature versus nurture. Are serial killers born or made? And to answer your question . . . I want to—no, I have to believe it’s the latter.”





2

After the lecture, Kate went up to her office. Her desk was beside a large bay window looking out over the sea. The campus building sat right on the edge of the beach, separated by a road and the seawall.

The tide was far in, and waves rolled and smashed against the wall, shooting up a stream of spray into the sky. It was a cozy office, with two cluttered desks next to a battered sofa and a large bookshelf covering the back wall.

“You okay?” asked Tristan, sitting at his desk in the corner and sifting through a pile of post. “It must be tough, to keep reliving it.”

“Yes, sometimes it’s like Groundhog Day,” said Kate, pulling out her chair and sinking into it, relieved. They’d grabbed coffee on their way up, and as she took the plastic lid off her cup, she wished she had a miniature whiskey to add to her Americano. Just one little Jack Daniel’s, warm and soothing, to round off the hot bitterness of the coffee and take all the feelings away. She took a deep breath and pushed the thought of alcohol away. It’s never just one drink.

Everyone on the faculty knew the story of Kate and Peter Conway—including Tristan—but this was the first time she had talked about it in detail in front of him. She refused to be a victim of her past, but once you were a victim in the eyes of others, it stuck.

“I can’t think that many students who take criminology have a lecturer who actually caught a serial killer,” he said, blowing on his coffee and taking a sip. “Pretty cool.” He turned and booted up his computer and started to type.

Tristan hadn’t looked at her differently, nor did he want to delve deeper and ask her questions. He wanted to carry on as normal, and for this she was grateful. One of the reasons she liked having a male assistant was that guys were much more straightforward. Tristan worked hard, but he was laid-back and easy to be around. They could work in comfortable silence without having to make conversation. In the short time since he had started working as her assistant, Kate had come to trust him. She turned to her computer and switched it on.

“Have you heard anything back from Alan Hexham?”

“I emailed him on Friday,” said Tristan, scrolling through his emails. “He hasn’t replied.”

Alan Hexham was a forensic pathologist Kate had been working with for the past three years. He came in once or twice a semester as a guest lecturer on her cold case classes.

“Try him again. I need him to confirm for next week’s lecture on forensic protocols at a crime scene.”

“Do you want me to call him?”

“Yes, please. His number is in the contacts folder on the desktop.”

“I’m on it.”

Kate opened her in-box. She didn’t recognize the address of the first email, and she clicked on it.

Clearview Cottage

Chew Magna

Bristol

BS40 1PY





25th September 2010


Dear Ms. Marshall,

I’m sorry for writing to you like this, out of the blue. My name is Malcolm Murray, and I’m writing to you on behalf of myself and my wife, Sheila.

Our daughter, Caitlyn Murray, went missing on Sunday, the 9th September 1990. She was only sixteen years old. She went out to meet a friend and never came home. For reasons I’ll explain, we are convinced that Caitlyn was abducted and murdered by Peter Conway.

Over the years we have become more desperate, first working with the police and then, when the case went cold, hiring a private investigator. All to no avail, and it seems that our darling girl just vanished off the face of the earth. Last year we felt we had reached rock bottom when we went to visit a psychic, who told us that Caitlyn had died and she is now at peace but that her life ended shortly after she went missing in 1990.

Earlier in the year, I bumped into Megan Hibbert, an old school friend of Caitlyn’s who emigrated with her family to Melbourne a few weeks before Caitlyn went missing. This was back in 1990, before the internet, so Megan hadn’t been as exposed to the Peter Conway case (and Caitlyn went missing five years before the Nine Elms case made headlines).

I got talking with Megan, and she remembered Caitlyn saying she had been out on a few sly dates with a policeman. Megan says she saw Caitlyn with this man and described him as similar to Peter Conway. As you know, Peter Conway served as a detective inspector for Greater Manchester Police from 1989 to 1991, before his move to the London Met.

I recently wrote to the police with this information, and they duly reviewed the case file and updated Caitlyn’s details on their missing persons website, but they say it’s not enough information for them to reopen the case.

I write to you and ask if you would consider looking into this?

We both now believe that Caitlyn is dead. We just want to find our little girl. I hate to think that her remains lie forgotten somewhere in a ditch or a drain. Our wish now is to give her a proper Christian burial.