Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(87)

“Do you want to?” he repeated.

“I’ve had a bold idea,” said Kate, lowering her voice.

“What?”

“Bold and risky, too, but we’d be doing it for the greater good.” Kate leaned closer and told him about the staff room and the door code. “If we set out soon, we could be in Altrincham in about five hours.”

“Break in? Are you nuts?” he hissed, glancing around at the other patrons dotted around at tables drinking coffee.

“Tristan. This is the kind of thing I used to do as a copper, but back then I had a badge and I could get a search warrant. Look, if we go to the police, he could get tipped off, and if there are any photos kept hidden there, he could get rid of them.”

“What kind of photos do you think are there?” asked Tristan. “Not snuff photos of girls being murdered?”

Kate shook her head. “No. If Paul Adler was the go-to for printing pornographic photos, then he could have got to know Peter Conway—well, we think he did know him, because Enid told Gary he processed their racy photos. What if Conway took photos of other girls? And he used Adler to process them? There could also be more photos of Caitlyn. Paul said that there was a place he and Caitlyn used to go for walks, to a lake where they swam. He could have taken photos of other places they went, people. It could lead back to Caitlyn’s disappearance. He was worried enough to lie to me that he didn’t know Peter Conway.”

“It’s a pharmacy. Won’t there be alarms? People break in to steal drugs,” said Tristan.

“He said he only had cameras in the dispensary and looking at the till. This storeroom was at the end of the corridor away from where the drugs were kept.”

“It’s still breaking and entering,” said Tristan.

“We could find important evidence about Caitlyn’s disappearance. It could lead to evidence for the copycat killer case. If we’re serious about being private investigators, we have to take risks. I wouldn’t do this unless I’d seen that code and I thought we had a chance,” said Kate.

“Kate, I watch crime dramas,” he said. “If we . . .”

He stopped to let an elderly couple squeeze past with their cups of coffee and waited until they were out of earshot. “If we steal photos that then need to be used as evidence, isn’t that evidence not admissible in court?”

“Not admissible in court if the police break in without a warrant, yes. But what if we find photos with people and locations that we recognize? It could be a potential location where Caitlyn’s body was dumped . . . Tristan, Sheila and Malcolm asked us to find her, and we said we would try. Imagine if walking in, through an unlocked door, is the way we find her body? They could give her a proper burial.”

Tristan paused and rubbed his face, looking out the window to the sea.

“Okay. Let’s do it.”





52

Peter regained consciousness moments after being Tasered. He was cuffed and lying on his front in the corner of the small therapy room. Winston was sitting on Peter’s back, his large weight pressing him into the floor. He had one hand holding the back of Peter’s head, and with the other he was radioing for backup.

Peter rolled the piece of flesh around in his mouth, sucked on it, and then swallowed it down. He was grateful his head wasn’t facing the wall, as he got to watch the chaos erupting around him. The white walls were covered in a fine spray of blood, as were the patients. Ned, Derek, and Martin were each being restrained by an orderly. Martin was twitching and writhing. Derek was a drooling zombie, so he wasn’t putting up any resistance, and Ned was too frail and small to resist, but he was shouting, “Tell me what’s going on? I can taste blood! Whose blood is it?” as his milky eyes blindly rolled in their sockets. Obese Henry had fallen off his chair, and two orderlies were vainly trying to get him up but were slipping on the thick pool of blood spreading out from Meredith’s body.

The orderlies fought vainly to revive her, but Peter could see that she was dead.

“The weapon? Where is it?” shouted Winston.

“It’s on the floor by her chair, you bloody idiots!” shouted Martin as he continued to fight against being restrained. The bent piece of metal lay in the congealing blood.

“I need backup urgently to meeting room six on G wing. We have a code three eighty-one. I repeat, code three eighty-one,” said Winston into his radio. Peter could see that there was no one with a free hand to pick the weapon up.

A moment later eight orderlies arrived into the already-crowded room with a first aider carrying a medical box. Derek, Ned, and Martin were taken out of the room, followed by Henry, who was heaved up by three orderlies into his wheelchair. Its wheels ran tracks of blood across the white tiled floor as he was pushed through the door.

Peter was surrounded by four of the orderlies, with Winston still on his back, and he felt the prick of a syringe as he was given a sedative. The chaos in the room dissolved away to white.

When he came around, he could feel the cold wind on his face. He was outside the hospital, strapped to a rolling cart, and he was being wheeled out of the large main building of Great Barwell, past the tall razor wire–topped fence and over to the solitary confinement block. He couldn’t move his body. He wore a full straitjacket and spit hood, and his legs were bound to the trolley. He tilted his head up and back and saw Winston pushing the trolley, his face blank and stony.