Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(13)
“Oh fuck,” he said, but it was carried away by the wind. He turned back to Tanya. She looked the less likely of the two to puke her guts up. “I need my phone. It’s in my left coat pocket!” he shouted, keeping hold of the victim’s head and indicating the pocket. Tanya hesitated and then reached over and rummaged gingerly in the folds of Alan’s long coat. “Quickly!” Tanya found the phone and held it out to him. “No. I need you to take a photo of this rope round her neck and the knot,” he said, keeping hold of the head. “PIN number is two, one, three, two, four, three.” With trembling hands, she unlocked the phone, stepped back, and held it up. “Closer—this isn’t a holiday photo. I need a close-up of the rope around her neck and then the knot!”
As Tanya took photos, Alan noticed that there was also a Chinese symbol tattoo on the victim’s lower back. A corner of it had been bitten away. The remainder of the tattoo had bloomed out and distorted with the bloating of the skin. Alan gently let go of the young woman’s head and got up. He was relieved to see the forensics van pulling into the fields at the top by the gate. He removed the gloves and took his phone from Tanya. He scrolled through the photos, finishing on a close-up shot of the rope and the muddy knot. He pinched the screen and zoomed in on the knot. He wouldn’t have recognized it as a monkey’s fist if all the other pieces of the crime hadn’t been in place: the bites, how she was posed, the torn-off face.
He looked up at the two young officers. They were watching him intently.
Alan put his phone away and pushed thoughts of the Nine Elms Cannibal to the back of his mind. He concentrated on preserving as much evidence as possible from the crime scene.
4
After lunch, Kate was left alone in her office. There was a stack of papers to grade, 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 grading to one side, pulled up the Google home page, 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 logged on to the UK Missing Persons 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 had been cropped from a larger class photo. Caitlyn sat on a plastic chair, and behind her was a corner of a school uniform belonging to another 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 Kate had found from 1997 was 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, which she didn’t play, against one wall. The house came with the job, and the contents had belonged to her predecessor. The rest of the walls were covered in bookshelves stacked untidily with novels and academic papers. She 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, a slice of the lemon, and then the iced tea. She kept the lights off and came to sit in the armchair by the window, looking out at the dark rolling sea glittering in the moonlight. She took a sip, savoring the cold sweet-and-sharp of the tea, sugar, and lemon.