Her mother, Glenda, was at her bedside. Gripping her hand. More out of duty, tense and fearful, showing no joy at the prospect of her first grandchild. One of the tabloid newspapers was paying for the private room. It had been a last resort, ironically, to try and gain some privacy. In return for footing the bill, the newspaper would have an exclusive photo of mother and baby, taken at a time of Kate’s choosing, through the window of the hospital room. For now, the blind had been pulled down, but Kate noticed how her mother kept eyeing it, knowing that a photographer was waiting on the other side, in the office building across the street.
Kate hadn’t known she was four and a half months pregnant on the night she cracked the case. Her internal organs had been sliced up badly, and the attack left her in intensive care with complications and a serious infection for several weeks. By the time she could make the choice to have a termination, the pregnancy had gone beyond the legal limit.
It was a long and painful birth, and when the baby finally fought his way out, his first scream was chilling to Kate. She sat back, exhausted, and closed her eyes.
‘It’s a boy, and he’s healthy,’ said the midwife. ‘Do you want to hold him?’
Kate kept her eyes closed and shook her head. She didn’t want to look at him or hold him, and Kate was grateful when they took him away and the crying ceased. Glenda left her bedside for a few hours to get some rest in the nearby hotel, and Kate lay in the dark. She felt she was in an alternative reality. The baby had been forced upon her by fate. She resented it, and she resented everyone. And it was a boy. Boys become serial killers, not girls.
She fell into a restless sleep, and when she woke up the room was dark. A cot had been placed by the bed. A soft gurgling sound drew her towards it. In her mind the baby had been born with horns and red eyes, but she found herself looking down at the most beautiful baby boy. He opened his eyes. They were a startling clear blue, and one had an orange burst of colour, just like hers. A tiny hand reached up. She put out her finger and he grabbed it, giving her a gummy smile.
Kate had heard how the maternal instinct kicked in, and it was like a jolt to her body, a switch being flicked. An overwhelming wave of love crashed over her. How could she think this tiny, beautiful baby was bad? Yes, he shared Peter Conway’s DNA, but he shared hers too. They both shared the same rare eye colouring, and that had to count for something. Surely it meant that he was more like his mother than his father? She reached down and gently picked him up, feeling how his warm little body fitted perfectly in the curve of her arm, how his head smelt, that heavenly smell of tiny baby . . . her baby.
Kate came back to the present. The students were staring at her with concern. The silence in the lecture theatre was thick and heavy.
She clicked the projector round to the final slide, and a news clipping flashed up of Peter Conway being led in handcuffs into the Old Bailey court in London. Above it was written:
KILLER CANNIBAL JAILED FOR LIFE
‘This is something we’ll debate during the course. Nature versus nurture. Are serial killers born, or made? And to answer your question . . . I want to . . . no, I have to believe it’s the latter.’
CHAPTER 2
After the lecture, Kate went up to her office. Her desk was beside a large bay window looking out over the sea. The campus building sat right on the edge of the beach, separated by a road and the sea wall.
The tide was far in, and waves rolled and smashed against the wall, shooting up a stream of spray into the sky. It was a cosy office, with two cluttered desks next to a battered sofa, and a large bookshelf covering the back wall.
‘You okay?’ asked Tristan, sitting at his desk in the corner and sifting through a pile of post. ‘It must be tough, to keep reliving it.’
‘Yes, sometimes it’s like Groundhog Day,’ said Kate, pulling out her chair and sinking into it, relieved. They’d grabbed coffee on their way up, and as she took the plastic lid off her cup she wished she had a miniature whiskey to add to her Americano. Just one little Jack Daniel’s, warm and soothing, to round off the hot bitterness of the coffee and take all the feelings away. She took a deep breath and pushed the thought of alcohol away. It’s never just one drink.
Everyone on the faculty knew the story of Kate and Peter Conway – including Tristan – but this was the first time she had talked about it in detail in front of him. She refused to be a victim of her past, but once you were a victim in the eyes of others, it stuck.
‘I can’t think that many students who take Criminology have a lecturer who actually caught a serial killer,’ he said, blowing on his coffee and taking a sip. ‘Pretty cool.’ He turned and booted up his computer and started to type.
Tristan hadn’t looked at her differently, nor did he want to delve deeper and ask her questions. He wanted to carry on as normal, and for this she was grateful. One of the reasons she liked having a male assistant was that guys were much more straightforward. Tristan worked hard, but he was laid back and easy to be around. They could work in comfortable silence without having to make conversation. She turned to her computer and switched it on.
‘Have you heard anything back from Alan Hexham?’
‘I emailed him on Friday,’ said Tristan, scrolling through his emails. ‘He hasn’t replied.’
Alan Hexham was a forensic pathologist Kate had been working with for the past three years. He came in once or twice a semester as a guest lecturer on her cold case classes.
‘Try him again. I need him to confirm for next week’s lecture on forensic protocols at a crime scene.’
‘Do you want me to call him?’
‘Yes, please. His number is in the contacts folder on the desktop.’
‘I’m on it.’
Kate opened her inbox. She didn’t recognise the address of the first email, and she clicked on it.
Clearview Cottage
Chew Magna
Bristol
BS40 1PY
25th September 2010
Dear Ms Marshall,
I’m sorry for writing to you like this, out of the blue. My name is Malcolm Murray, and I’m writing to you on behalf of myself and my wife, Sheila.
Our daughter, Caitlyn Murray, went missing on Sunday the 9th September 1990. She was only sixteen years old. She went out to meet a friend, and never came home. For reasons I’ll explain, we are convinced that Caitlyn was abducted and murdered by Peter Conway.
Over the years we have become more desperate, first, working with the police, and then when the case went cold, we hired a private investigator. All to no avail, and it seems that our darling girl just vanished off the face of the earth. Last year we felt we had reached rock bottom when we went to visit a psychic, who told us that Caitlyn had died and she is now is peace, but that her life ended shortly after she went missing in 1990.
Earlier in the year, I bumped into Megan Hibbert, an old schoolfriend of Caitlyn’s, who emigrated with her family to Melbourne a few weeks before Caitlyn went missing. This was back in 1990, before the Internet, so Megan hadn’t been as exposed to the Peter Conway case (and Caitlyn went missing five years before the Nine Elms case made headlines).
I got talking with Megan, and she remembered Caitlyn saying she had been out on a few sly dates with a policeman. Megan says she saw Caitlyn with this man, and described him as similar to Peter Conway. As you know, Peter Conway served as a detective inspector for Greater Manchester Police from 1989 to 1991, before his move to the London Met.