Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(53)

“On my first day as an officer on the beat, I was called out to an incident where an old lady had been hit across the face with a baseball bat. There was lots of blood, and I puked my guts up,” said Kate.

“Really?”

“It was in Catford in South London, by the market. All the market traders were laughing and jeering at me, so don’t beat yourself up about your reaction to seeing a mutilated dead body.”

He put a hand to his mouth again. “I just know I’m going to see her when I close my eyes tonight.”

“Me too,” said Kate. “Pour yourself a stiff drink, and I’m giving you that advice as a member of AA.”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

“Do you want to come for breakfast tomorrow? We can meet before the ten a.m. lecture and discuss everything.”

He raised a thumb and grinned.

“Don’t talk about food. I have to go,” he said, opening the door and dashing out and up a set of steps to the second-floor flat. Kate watched until he made it in and hoped he didn’t decorate the carpet in his hallway.



When she got home, she poured herself a large iced tea and came through to the living room. She sat on the piano stool, trying to work out how she felt. She’d had to harden her emotions over the years. She felt horrified that there was another dead young woman, but there was that spark in her chest, an eagerness to look into the case and solve the mystery.

She tapped the glass against her teeth. There was something about that postcard they’d found in the box on Higher Tor.

“The Jamaica Inn . . . Where have I heard that before?” she said out loud. She drained her iced tea, wishing almost subconsciously that it was Jack Daniel’s with ice, but the thought was fleeting, peripheral, and was gone. She put her glass on the piano and went to the bookshelf, moving past the rows of novels, the crime fiction, and academic papers. Tucked in at the end of one of the shelves was a hardback with the title No Son of Mine by Enid Conway.

She pulled it out. The cover was filled with a split-pane photograph. On the right was a picture of a sixteen-year-old Enid Conway cradling baby Peter. The picture was blurred in a nostalgic way, and baby Peter’s eyes were wide and staring at the camera, while Enid looked down at him adoringly. Enid was a hard-faced young woman with a shock of long, dark hair. She wore a long, flowing dress, and behind her was the sign AULDEARN UNMARRIED MOTHERS’ HOME. Through a window was the blurred image of a nun, in full penguin habit, staring out at them.

The other half of the cover was a police mug shot of Peter Conway, taken on the day he gave evidence at his preliminary trial. In this photo, his hands were cuffed, and he was smirking at the camera. His eyes had a crazed look. “A crazed come-hither look,” one tabloid journalist wrote at the time. He still had stitches above his left eyebrow—even in his semiconscious state at Kate’s Deptford flat, he had violently resisted arrest.

Kate opened the book and flicked through the pages, first seeing the signature and the charming dedication from Enid.

Rot in hell, you bitch. Enid Conway.



Kate remembered showing Myra the book one evening, when she first became Kate’s sponsor.

“Look on the bright side. My mother-in-law never bought me a book!” Myra had quipped. It had helped Kate laugh about the awful situation.

She flicked through to the index and scanned down until she found “the Jamaica Inn,” which was on page 118. With her heart racing, she paged through until she found the paragraph.

“We had so many happy holidays on Dartmoor. There is nothing better than God’s free earth, and Peter—who was a sickly child growing up, always suffering from coughs and colds—loved being out in the fresh air. Our local vicar, Father Paul Johnson, had a contact with several boardinghouses owned by the Christian association, and we were able to stay, often for free, during our holidays. The Brewers Inn was the first stop on our holiday. A small, cozy pub in the middle of nowhere, overlooking Higher Tor—”

Kate almost dropped the book in shock, seeing the tor mentioned. She carried on reading.

“On our first day, armed with a picnic, we climbed Higher Tor because Peter was keen to try letterboxing. Several spots on Dartmoor have postboxes where you could leave a postcard for the next person who opens the box to find. When we got to the top of the tor, it was all a bit of an anticlimax, as when we opened the box, there was nothing inside. Peter had bought a postcard from one of the pubs we’d visited, the Jamaica Inn, and he left this postcard, which was addressed to me with a lovely note. Sure enough, five weeks after we got home from our holiday, the postcard showed up with a postmark from Sydney, Australia! A woman who ran a dog shelter was on holiday in the UK, and she had taken the postcard all the way home before posting it . . .”

Kate flicked through to the index of photos at the back of the book, all printed on glossy paper. And three pages in, she found two images, front and back, of the Jamaica Inn, and Peter’s scrawled message on the back.

Dear Mummy.

We are having a lovely time in Devon, and I don’t want it to end. I love you more than everything in the world.

Peter xxxx



Kate went and filled her glass of iced tea and looked through the index, searching for the other locations where victims had been dumped: the Nine Elms Wrecker’s yard and Hunter’s Tor by the river.