She took the bag and closed the car door. His headlights lit up the car park as she rooted around in her pocket for her key and opened the front door, and then it was dark. She turned to see his tail lights vanish. She’d made an idiotic mistake in sleeping with her boss, but after seeing the dead young woman, and knowing there was still a killer on the loose, it seemed to pale to nothing.
CHAPTER 4
It was cold inside the flat. A small kitchen looked out over the car park, and she quickly closed the blinds before switching on the lights. She took a long shower, staying under the water until the warmth came back into her bones, then pulled on a dressing gown and came back into the kitchen. The central heating was doing its work, pumping hot water with a gurgle through the radiators, and the room was warming up. Suddenly starving, she went to take a microwave lasagne from the shopping bag, and saw nestled on top of her groceries the bunch of keys and the Thermos flask from Peter’s car. She put the Thermos on the counter and went to the phone on the kitchen wall to call his pager, so he wouldn’t get all the way home before he discovered he didn’t have his keys. She was about to dial, when she noted the keys in her hand. There were four, all substantial and old.
Peter lived in a new build flat near Peckham. The front door had a Yale lock. She remembered this clearly from that second night when he'd invited her over for dinner. She’d hesitated outside the door, staring at the Yale lock, thinking, What the hell am I doing? The first time I was drunk. Now I’m sober and I’m back for more.
The keys in her hand were mortise keys for heavy locks, and a small length of rope was tied around the key ring. The rope was thin, with a red and blue woven pattern – heavy-duty rope, or cord, tough and well made. She turned the loop of rope over in her hand. Tied at the end was a monkey’s fist knot. She replaced the phone on its cradle and stared at the keys.
Kate felt as though the room was tilting under her feet, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. She closed her eyes and the crime scene photos of the dead girls flashed behind them – bags tied tightly round their necks, vacuum-formed, distorting their features. Tied off with the knot. She opened her eyes and looked at the keys and the monkey’s fist.
No. She was exhausted and letting her imagination run away.
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table. What did she know about Peter outside work? His father was dead. She’d heard odd bits of rumour about his mother being mentally ill and in hospital. He’d had quite a difficult upbringing that he’d struggled to extricate himself from, that he was proud to extricate himself from. He was highly thought of by top brass. He didn’t have a girlfriend or wife. He was married to the job.
Perhaps the keys belonged to a friend, or his mother? They were the type that fitted a large door, or a heavy padlock. There had been speculation that the killer would need a place to keep the van and his victims – a lock-up or a garage. If Peter had a lock-up he wouldn’t have mentioned it, but she remembered him complaining about the building where he lived. He said he paid a fortune for a space in the underground car park, and that didn’t include a garage.
No. It had been a long, stressful day and she needed sleep.
She put the keys on the counter and retrieved the lasagne from the bag. She peeled off the outer packaging and placed the small plastic box in the microwave and keyed in two minutes. Her hand hovered over the timer.
She thought back to when they had brought in an expert, a retired scout master who explained the monkey’s fist knot to the incident room. What made the knot stand out was that it could only be tied by someone with a level of expertise. The monkey's fist was tied at the end of a length of rope as an ornamental knot, and a weight, making it easier to throw. It got its name because it looked similar to a small bunched fist or paw.
The lasagne spun slowly in the microwave.
The retired scout master had told them that most young boys learned to tie knots in the scouts. The monkey’s fist knot had little practical use, but it was a knot tied by enthusiasts. Everyone in the incident room had attempted to tie the knot under the expert’s watchful instruction, and only Marsha had managed it. Peter had failed miserably, and he had made a joke out of how bad he was.
‘I couldn’t tie my own shoes until I was eight!’ he’d cried. All the officers in the incident room had laughed, and he’d put his hands over his face in mock embarrassment.
The keys were old, with a little rust. They’d been oiled to keep them in good use. The rope was shiny in places, and the monkey’s fist knot looked old, with oil and grime worn into it.
Kate chewed on her nails, not noticing that the microwave had given three loud pips to say it was finished.
She sat down at the kitchen table. The first three victims had been schoolgirls between fifteen and seventeen years old. They had all been abducted on a Thursday or a Friday, and their bodies had shown up at the beginning of the following week. The victims had all been sporty, and in all three cases had been grabbed on their way home from after-school training. The abductions had been so well executed that the killer must have known where they would be, and lain in wait.
They had questioned PE teachers across the boroughs, and brought several in for questioning, and done the same with a couple of male teachers who had 1994 Citroën Dispatch white vans registered to their names. None of their DNA had matched. They then looked at the parents of the victims, and friends of the parents. The net kept getting wider, the theories wilder as to how the victims could be linked to the killer. Kate remembered a question that had been written up on the white board of the incident room.
Who had access to the victims at school?
A thought went through Kate, like a jolt of electricity. There had been a list of teachers, classroom assistants, caretakers, lollipop ladies, dinner ladies – but what about the police? Police officers often go into schools to talk to kids about drugs and anti-social behaviour.
On two occasions Peter had roped her in to join him on a school visit, to talk to some inner-city schoolkids about road safety. He had also worked on an anti-drugs presentation given around London schools. How many schools had he visited? Twenty? Thirty? Was it staring her in the face, or was she just tired and overwhelmed? No . . . Peter had commented that he had visited the school of the third victim, Carla Martin, a month before she went missing.
Kate got up and looked in her cupboards. All she could find was a bottle of dry sherry she’d bought to offer her mother on her last visit. She poured herself a large measure and took a gulp.
What if they had no leads because the Nine Elms Cannibal was also Peter Conway? The nights they spent together moved to the front of her mind, and she pushed it back, not wanting to go there. She sat, shaking. Did she really have the balls to accuse her boss of being a serial killer? Then she spied Peter’s Thermos flask sitting beside the microwave. He’d drunk from it in the car. He would have left his DNA on it.
Kate got up, her legs trembling. Her bag was on the floor by the back door, and it took some effort to get the clasp open. In one of the inside pockets she found a new plastic evidence bag,
The flask has Peter’s DNA on it. We have the Nine Elms Cannibal’s DNA. I could quietly put in a request.
She pulled on a clean pair of latex gloves and approached the Thermos like she would a wild animal needing capture. She took a deep breath, plucked it off the counter and dropped it into the evidence bag, sealing the bag. She placed it on the tiny kitchen table. It felt like a betrayal of everything she believed in. She stood in the silence for a few minutes, listening to the rain hammering on the roof, and took another swig of the sherry, feeling it warming her insides and taking the edge off her panic.