Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(34)

“It will have to wait until tomorrow. I’ve got this bloody Battenberg cake to make for the WI fundraiser, and I haven’t got a clue how to set up a Facebook profile.”

“You’ll have to stand over him while he does it. I can get my assistant to look at Jake’s profile when it’s done, and I’ll set up a profile tomorrow,” said Kate.

“Do you want to tell him?” asked Glenda. “I can get him from his room.”

“No. You tell him. Be the good guy.”

“Thank you . . . Oh, bloody hell, my jam!” she said, leaping up. “Bye, darling!”

“Speak to you tomorrow, and give Jake a kiss from me,” said Kate, and she ended the Skype call.

It was always uplifting to speak to Jake, but there was a horrible emptiness when she ended the call and was suddenly alone. It was silent, and she heard the wind keening around the house. She went back out to her car, retrieved the box file with all the information about Caitlyn, brought it in, and made herself a sandwich and a glass of iced tea.

She’d been very abrupt with Tristan when she’d dropped him home, and she gave him a call after she’d eaten.

“Is this a good time?” she asked.

“I’m just running a bath,” he said. “Hang on.” She heard the squeak of taps being closed and a splash of water.

“I won’t keep you. I just wanted to say thank you for your help today. I didn’t expect things to take such an odd turn.”

“I know. What’s going to happen now? It looks like the bird has linked Emma Newman’s death at the wrecker’s yard with Kaisha Smith.”

Kate thought about it, and she wasn’t as enthusiastic as Tristan. She didn’t want to be part of another case so closely linked with Peter Conway.

“The police have it now, and they have my address if they want to talk to us . . .” It was frustrating for Kate to be on the other side of policing and to be kept in the dark. She was curious, and horrified, but she had to focus on what she could do, and that was finding out what had happened to Caitlyn.

“We’re not in trouble, are we?” asked Tristan.

“With who?”

“The police.”

“Why would we be in trouble? We weren’t trespassing. Admittedly, it was a little weird to explain what we did, but I was the one who climbed up the cars . . . Not my most elegant hour. And we had justification for doing it. And we handed over the evidence immediately.”

“Do you think they’ll call us in for an interview at the station?”

“No. We’ve given a statement. They might ask us to elaborate on it, but that would be over the phone, or they would want to visit informally. If they ever catch who it is, we might be called to the trial . . .” Kate’s voice faltered. She hadn’t thought that far. She changed the subject. “Are you in tomorrow morning? I’ve got two lectures in the afternoon.”

“Yeah, I’ll be in. I’m interested to get cracking on the Caitlyn Murray case,” said Tristan. He still sounded a little nervous, but Kate didn’t press him on it. When they had left the meeting with Malcolm and Sheila, they had wanted to discuss payment with Kate, but she and Tristan had agreed they would do this for free and asked if they could use the case in the future for one of the cold case modules in the criminology course. They didn’t feel like they could take a penny from the grieving pair, and they could use work hours to do the research, just as they did when they were preparing other cold case material for lectures. It was a bit of a stretch to justify using the university’s resources, but Kate thought ultimately it would help all parties involved.

She ended the call with Tristan, but she felt wide awake, so she opened the box from Caitlyn’s parents and started to look through everything inside.





17

The day at Great Barwell Psychiatric Hospital started early when the breakfast bell rang at 6:30 a.m., and Peter Conway’s allotted time to visit the shower and shave was 7:10.

The small bathroom at the end of his ward always made him think of the boardinghouses he and Enid had stayed in during his childhood holidays: scuffed wood partition walls, drafty air, the drip of water in ancient porcelain sinks and toilets, bare bulbs, the clinging smell of boiled food.

He stood naked in front of the spotted mirror, scraping at the foam on his face with the cheap plastic safety razor, and he looked at his body properly for the first time in months. In his glory days he had been broad shouldered with strong arms, a thin waist, and muscular legs. Now he had run to fat. His hairy white belly protruded and hung over a thatch of pubic hair. His arms were puny and pouches of fat sagged under his armpits, and his legs were now skinny, like two Woodbine cigarettes poking out of the packet, as Enid liked to say. His penis was flaccid. Asleep. And like the rest of his body, numbed by a cocktail of mood-dampening drugs he took.

He had used the gym for a few years, but since the nose-biting incident, he had lost gym privileges. He was let out twice a day into the exercise yard, but it was a godforsaken little snatch of outdoor space.

“How you getting on there?” asked Winston, poking his head around the doorway to look through the grille. A grille with a small square hatch at waist level had been installed in this bathroom so that Peter could be watched at all times, but Winston always gave him privacy, something he was grateful for.