Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(86)

Winston patted him down for the third time that morning and then removed Peter’s spit hood. He gave Peter’s hair a quick check, ignoring the glasses, and then told Peter to take his seat in the semicircle around Meredith.

Today she wore faded blue jeans and a pink woolen jumper. The only thing that set her apart from them was that she was female and she wore a lanyard around her neck. The orderlies had warned her about wearing this in sessions, due to the risk of strangulation, but Meredith liked to act like they were all equal and friends, and she had ignored the warning.

On a couple of occasions, Peter had overheard Winston and Terrell talking about Meredith’s group sessions and how wary they were of what could happen. It was one of the only times that the Cat A patients were all in one place and allowed to mix without restraints. The orderlies made sure to carry Mace, Tasers, and their batons and were hyperalert during these sessions. This didn’t matter to Peter. He knew he was going to get caught and punished for what he was about to do. He wanted them to punish him; he just needed a few seconds in which to make it happen.

The room was small and tight, and the three orderlies were so close that Peter was unsure if he could do it. He made sure he was the first to share, saying how much he worried about his mother being out in the world on her own as she got older. Meredith smiled, her shiny face creasing around her mouth, and a dimple appeared in her cheek.

“Yes, Peter. We all worry about our loved ones. That’s a very human emotion to have,” she said. “We’re lucky to live in a predominantly socialist country that looks after its elderly. Would you like me to request that you are given an extra phone card to contact the social security office to explore options for your mother?”

“Yes. Thank you,” said Peter, nodding enthusiastically. She smiled back. It was a smug smile that gave her the hint of a double chin.

Meredith then moved on to Ned, who was sitting next to Peter. He told the group that he was worried about the wheel on his mail trolley. It was wobbly and about to come loose. He spoke in an agitated staccato: “What if the trolley goes tits up and all the post I’ve sorted goes everywhere? I have it all nicely arranged so that as I go down all the corridors, I have everyone’s mail ready. If it breaks, then I won’t be able to deliver the mail!”

Peter looked over at Henry, who was chewing on the sleeve of his pullover, attempting to get some flavor out of it. His vast buttocks spilled over the edges of his chair. Derek was asleep and drooling, and Martin was jittery, his leg jogging up and down.

Peter was trying to work out the exact moment when he could make his move, when there was a sudden commotion in the corridor outside. One of the catering trolleys rounded the corner from the next corridor and collided with the door, cracking the small pane of safety glass and emptying a tray of stew down the window. It was accompanied by a scream from a patient who was in the corridor. Winston and Terrell leaped up and went to the door to check everything was okay.

At this moment of distraction, Peter slipped the sharpened wall bracket out from under the stem of his glasses and gripped it between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

He got up and moved calmly to Meredith. She looked up at him, curiously, and barely had the chance to say his name before he grabbed her by the back of her head and slashed at her throat twice with the sharpened bracket, left to right in quick succession. He hit the bull’s-eye, and her jugular vein ruptured, bathing Peter and the screaming patients in red.

Meredith’s eyes and mouth opened wide, and her hands clawed at him as she gurgled, thrashed, and flailed, and an anguished wet sound filled the air as blood poured from the gash in her throat, saturating her clothes. She twitched and slid sideways off her chair. Peter ignored the screams and climbed on top of her, pressing his knee into her stomach.

As he bit down on her left cheek, aiming for that dimple, he felt the jolt of pain as Terrell shot him with the Taser. The electric current made his teeth clamp down, and by the time they pulled him off her, he had a chunk of Meredith’s smooth, dimpled cheek in his mouth.





51

Kate and Tristan had stopped at a coffee shop farther down the seafront to talk over the revelation that Peter Conway knew Paul Adler.

“I thought you said Paul Adler had an alibi for when Caitlyn went missing?” asked Tristan.

“He does, but he denied having any knowledge of or friendship with Peter Conway, and here we have a direct link, as told by Enid,” said Kate.

“What do you want to do? Take this to Varia Campbell?”

“No. This isn’t Varia’s case. The Caitlyn Murray case has been closed by the police. They didn’t think they had enough evidence to investigate it any further. I want more proof before we go to the police. I told you about my visit to Paul Adler’s pharmacy. There was something creepy about the harem of submissive young women who worked for him. And he’d kept those photos of Caitlyn. They weren’t in an album. They were still in the original processing sleeve, and it was marked with a number and a date . . . He said that he used to do film processing at the chemist. He also said that he would store negatives for modeling agencies and businesses, and I saw the storeroom when I was there. There were shelves and shelves of folders . . .”

“Do you want to confront him again?” asked Tristan.

Kate looked at her watch. It was coming up to two thirty p.m. She thought back to her visit to Paul Adler’s chemist in Altrincham. When they were sitting in the small staff room next to the loading bay. When Tina went out to chuck away a rubbish bag and the door closed, she’d keyed in the door code, mouthing, one, three, four, six.