Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(83)

A moment later, Gary came back to the office, smiling, with a tray of tea and biscuits.

“Right,” he said, sitting at the chair by his desk. “Fire away.”

Kate elaborated on their phone conversation and their theory that this copycat killer was using No Son of Mine to inspire where he disposed of the bodies. “Have the police been in contact with you?” finished Kate.

“No. Not yet,” he said and dunked another biscuit in his tea.

“I’d expect a call,” said Kate. “I’ve notified them about my suspicions and how the crime scenes link to Enid’s book, or should I say, your book.”

“If you solve the case, No Son of Mine could get a new print run,” he said with a grin.

“Teenage girls are being murdered,” said Kate coldly.

He put his hands up. “Sorry. I’m just being realistic. Nothing sells a book like death . . . I’ve seen the news, ugh, horrible stuff.” He shook his head and shuddered, making a big deal of being horrified.

“What made you want to be a ghostwriter and not a proper writer in your own right?” asked Tristan. Kate looked across at Tristan. She felt the same hostility toward Gary, but showing it could make him clam up.

“I was fed up with the grind of working on a newspaper,” he said. “I got the offer off the back of the reporting I did on the Nine Elms case and my famous headline. They paid me a hundred grand. I paid off my mortgage. I think that makes me a proper writer.”

“Did Enid ever say ‘no son of mine’ during the trial, when she was talking about Peter?” added Tristan.

“No . . . Did you ever hear her say it, Kate?”

“I didn’t attend the whole trial. I just gave evidence,” said Kate. She thought back to her four days on the stand, where she was ripped apart and humiliated by Peter Conway’s defense team.

“Of course, and you’d had his baby by the time the trial kicked off? Yes?”

“Yes.”

There was an awkward pause, and Kate fixed him with a glare.

“But you use quotation marks around that headline,” said Tristan.

Gary shrugged. “That’s journalism. It reflected the mood of the public, and that’s what good tabloid journalism is all about.”

Yeah, and journalists like you fuck everyone else who gets in their way, thought Kate. With a huge effort, she pushed her feelings to one side.

“So how did the idea for the book come about?” asked Kate, steering the conversation back to her line of questioning.

“I got to know Enid Conway a little, during the trial,” said Gary. “She’d cadge a ciggy now and again on breaks outside the courthouse. She’d chat about this and that, nothing too revealing, but enough to have a rapport. I’d heard her asking another journalist how much he thought her story might be worth, and it was then I knew there could be a big market for her story. I went to the publisher with the idea, a couple of weeks before the guilty verdict, and they put the book deal together soon after.”

“How many times did you meet with Enid for the book?”

Gary sat back and rested his empty teacup on his leg. “Six or seven.”

“Where did you meet?”

“Here. Usually the ghostwriter goes to the author, but Enid wanted to visit Brighton and stay in the Grand Hotel. The publisher put her up in the hotel for a week. She wanted to stay in the same room as Margaret Thatcher did when they bombed the hotel! But it was already booked, so they gave her the suite next door. We met there a couple of times and here at my house . . . It was an interesting gig.”

“In what way?” asked Tristan.

Gary rolled his eyes. “She’s the mother of a notorious serial killer, and because, as our conversations went on, it seemed like a different book was emerging,” he said. “The publisher had conceived it from my headline, ‘No Son of Mine,’ and it was agreed that it would be a sort of redemption piece. Enid would renounce her son. But as our talks unfolded, I got the impression that she had a powerful love for him and she was in denial.”

“She didn’t believe Peter killed those young women?” asked Kate.

“Oh no, Enid knew Peter did it. She believed he couldn’t help himself. She said that she was raped by an evil man, that Peter’s father was evil. And it gave him a dark side he constantly fought against. She said the good side far outweighed the bad. It wasn’t his fault he killed those young women. It was his genes that made him do it.”

Kate closed her eyes, and she felt sick at the thought. Most of the time she could separate the thought that Jake was Peter’s son, and even though she knew Enid’s words came from a place of denial, they made her deeply troubled for Jake’s future. She dropped her teacup, and it shattered on the floor.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said weakly, and got up and started to pick up the pieces.

“No worries,” said Gary. He stood and went to Kate, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“She’s fine. Can you give us a minute?” asked Tristan, shooting him a look.

“Sure. I’ll go and get a cloth,” he said, and he left the room.

“You okay to carry on?” asked Tristan, seeing the tears in her eyes. He made her sit down and started to gather up the pieces of broken cup.