Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(9)

“I’ve been looking forward to this lecture,” he said, handing Kate the remote. He smiled and left the stage. Seconds later the lights went out, plunging the lecture theatre into darkness. There was a murmur of excited chatter, and Kate could see the students’ faces, lit up by their mobile phones. She waited until they fell silent, then clicked the button on the projector remote.

“THE NINE ELMS CANNIBAL” flashed up on the huge screen.

There was a collective gasp as a crime scene photo then filled the screen. It had been taken in a car scrapyard. A young girl’s naked body lay on its side in the churned-up mud, next to a pile of rusting and half-crushed cars. The piles of junkyard cars stretched away, with the misty London skyline and the twin chimneys of the Battersea Power Station in the background. A lone crow perched on top of a pile of cars, looking down at the young girl’s body. The mud and exposure to the elements gave her flesh a rust color, like metal—some small grotesque object that had been dumped by its owner.

“The course you’ve signed up for is called Criminal Icons. And it reflects how we, as society, are obsessed with murder and serial killers. It’s fitting that I start with a serial killer I knew: Peter Conway, the former Met Police detective chief inspector who is now known as the Nine Elms Cannibal. The young woman in the photo was his first victim, Shelley Norris . . .” Kate stepped out of the glare of the projected image and stood to one side. “If you find this image distressing, good. That’s a normal reaction. If you want to study criminology, you’ll need to get down and dirty with the worst of humankind. The photo was taken at the Nine Elms Lane Wrecker’s yard in March 1993,” said Kate. She shuttered the slide carousel around. The next photo showed a wide-angle shot of a young woman’s body from behind, lying in long grass. A low mist hung above the surrounding trees.

“The second victim was fifteen-year-old Dawn Brockhurst. Her body was dumped in Beckenham Place Park in Kent.” The next slide was a close-up of the body from the front. Her face was missing, leaving just a bloody pulp, and only a part of the bottom jaw and a row of teeth remained.

“Kent, on the London borders, has one of the largest populations of wild foxes in the UK. Dawn’s body wasn’t discovered for several days, and the plastic bag tied over her head was torn off by scavenging foxes, and part of her face was eaten.” Kate moved to the next slide, a close-up of bite marks. “The Nine Elms Cannibal liked to bite his victims, but because Dawn’s body was decayed by the elements, the bites were wrongly attributed to the foxes. This prevented the first two murders from being immediately linked.”

There was a thudding sound as one of the wooden chairs flipped up, and a student, a young woman in the center of the auditorium, dashed out with her hand over her mouth.

Kate moved through slides of Peter’s next victim, ending with the crime scene photo of the fourth victim, Catherine Cahill. Kate was taken back to that cold, rainy night in Crystal Palace, to the hot lights in the forensics tent, which had intensified the scent of decaying flesh but also made the grass smell like it does on a summer’s day. Catherine’s eyes staring through the plastic wrapped tight over her head. And after all this, Peter tucking the towels over his car seats, concerned they’d get dirty.

Kate pressed the button, and the slide image clicked around to a picture of Peter Conway, taken in 1993 for his police ID card. He smiled into the lens, wearing his Met Police uniform and peaked cap. Handsome and charismatic.

“Peter Conway. Respected police officer by day, serial killer by night.”

Kate told the story of how she was a police officer working alongside Peter Conway and how she came to suspect he was the Nine Elms Cannibal, confronted him, and barely escaped.

The next slide showed Kate’s flat in the aftermath of Peter’s attack. The thermos flask and bunch of keys sitting on the kitchen table, each with a numbered evidence marker. The living room furniture, old and shabby, and then her bedroom. The damp, peeling wallpaper, curling at the edges with a pattern of yellow, orange, and green flowers, the double bed with a knot of blood-soaked sheets. Clumps of hardened orange wax and glass from the broken lava lamp she’d hit him with.

“I came very close to being the Nine Elms Cannibal’s fifth victim, but I fought back. Quick-thinking doctors saved my life after I was stabbed in the stomach. They also pumped Peter’s stomach, where they found partially digested pieces of flesh from Catherine Cahill’s back.”

The lecture theatre was silent. Every student was transfixed, and Tristan was with them. Kate went on.

“In September 1996, Peter Conway was tried, and in January 1997 he was jailed at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Blundeston Prison in Suffolk. After deterioration in his mental state and an attack by another prisoner, he is now being indefinitely detained under the Mental Health Act at Great Barwell Psychiatric Hospital in Sussex. It’s a case that still haunts the public imagination and a case I will always be inextricably linked to. That’s why I chose to present it first.”

There was a long pause after the lights went up. The students in the auditorium blinked at the brightness.

“Now. Who has any questions?”

A young girl with closely cropped pink hair and a pierced lip put up her hand. “You effectively solved the case, yet you were used as a scapegoat by the police and left out to dry. Do you think this is because you are a woman?”