‘After the wedding, we got back to my room at the Pines to find that Karen had cleaned it and put up balloons and good-luck messages. She invited Marion and me to dinner at her family’s home. I really thought that she’d finally accepted that we couldn’t carry on. But we still did the fish tanks together every fortnight and one Monday, a few months after the wedding, we had sex again.’

‘Is it true that you told her you’d made a mistake in marrying Marion? That you really loved Karen?’

‘No, God no,’ said Peter, ‘I would never say anything of the sort.’

‘She said you told her that you loved her.’

‘I did one night when I was drunk, but I never loved her. I loved Marion. She knew that. She knew I would never leave Marion.’

‘So what were your feelings for Karen?’

‘I cared for her. But that’s all. Like I say, it was a casual thing. She wanted it as much as I did.’

‘So every second Monday, she invited you to her room at the Pines for sex?’

‘Not her room. It’s next door to the matron’s and we didn’t want to get caught. She had the key to Bethan’s room. We preferred to do it in there.’

Shep leapt to his feet: ‘Bethan’s room was next to Marion and Peter’s. He must be talking about after they moved out. After January this year. Karen said they finished two months earlier, in November.’

Colin and Mick had already homed in on this anomaly.

‘Karen says that by the end of last year she hated you, and that she and Marion had become friends.’

‘You could say they were close around the time of the wedding. They maybe went out for a drink together twice late last summer. But by October last year, it was cooling between them. The three of us didn’t get together very often. When we did it was awkward. There was an atmosphere. They knew they didn’t like each other.’

Shep appealed to his inquisitors through the soundproof glass. ‘Bring it round to this year, boys.’

‘Did Marion realise you were sleeping with Karen? Did she catch on? Is that why she’s dead?’

‘She had no idea. She never knew. To be honest, I was thinking about telling her and getting it off my chest, because it was winding down.’

Shep leaned forward: ‘Winding down?’ he said.

‘What do you mean, winding down?’ asked Mick.

‘This year, we only had sex when we did the fish tanks, every second Monday. I told her I was finishing doing the overtime. That Monday was to be the last time.’

Peter started breaking down again.

‘Keep going, keep going,’ roared Shep.

‘When did you tell Karen that you were going to stop cleaning the fish tanks with her?’

‘The previous time we did them. Two weeks earlier.’

‘Right, so on Monday, 17 June – two weeks before Marion’s murder – you told Karen that you would be cleaning the fish tanks with her just one more time,’ said Mick, ‘so when did you last have sex with Karen Foster?’

‘That same evening. But I told her this was to be the last time.’

‘Did you tell Karen about your plans to move to Ireland?’

Through heaving sobs, Peter gasped: ‘Karen heard the rumours. I told her they were true, that we were moving to Ireland.’

‘When did you tell her?’

‘That night again, two weeks before, you know … Marion got killed.’

‘What did you tell her, exactly?’ shouted Colin.

‘I told her that Marion was pregnant. It was the only way I could put an end to it for good.’

‘You told your secret lover that Marion was pregnant, so that you could dump her?’

‘Yes. Oh God forgive me …’

Peter barely got the last word out before collapsing onto the table.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Shep, mouth agape, ‘I can’t fucking believe he held all this back for six weeks with his wife on a slab.’

Back in the kitchenette, Shep congratulated Mick and Colin for breaking Peter. Now, they needed to go for his jugular. ‘This is our last chance to find out if he was involved in any way,’ he said.

‘He seemed genuinely shocked about Karen spying on them,’ said Mick, ‘I think it only started dawning on him during the interview that Karen is twisted enough to have killed Marion.’

‘Could he be saving his own arse though?’ asked Shep.

Colin shook his head: ‘I think he never considered Karen capable of doing something like this before now. He’s one of those “God’s gift to women” types – too thick, selfish and vain to ever think about the consequences of his actions.’

‘Oh he’s the classic Golden Boy Irishman,’ said Shep. ‘He only cares about himself because he’s never had to care about anyone else. I bet he’s adored by his dear old mum. He’ll use and abuse women until he finds one who’ll adore him the same. How can we be certain he didn’t goad Karen into doing it?’

‘If we can work out for certain that he genuinely loved Marion, then I think he’s innocent,’ said Mick, ‘but how do we do that?’

‘Come on fellas,’ urged Shep, ‘he’s Irish Catholic for Christ’s sake, there’s a reservoir of guilt in there. Tap it. Ask him if he went to see Marion’s body in the morgue. That’ll open him up.’ He was interrupted mid-flow by the sound of his pager. ‘Shit,’ he said inspecting the message, ‘we’ve got to go.’

‘What?’ we all asked.

‘The Commissioner’s PA just paged me. He’s in a right flap. They’ve found a woman stabbed to death in her home in Woolwich.’

My heart plummeted through my arse.

‘We’ve got to get there before the press. He wants to know if Marion’s killer has struck again.’

Then he turned to me: ‘You better not have fucked up, Lynch.’

Chapter 28

Woolwich, South East London

Wednesday, August 14, 1991; 12:30

Shep drove fast while I raged silently.

Until now, he’d refused to even consider possible links between Marion’s murder and other crimes. When I brought up Napper, he had humiliated me in front of the team. Now suddenly, if I’d missed a clue or a connection in the ‘unsolved stranger attack’ paperwork, it would all be on my shoulders.

I should have been thinking about the victim. I should have been hoping and praying that this poor innocent woman didn’t die on account of my failings. But I was too overwhelmed by the fear of exposure, humiliation, punishment to think about anyone but myself.

The injustice of it all! I’d been Acting Detective Constable for six days. Maybe that was the problem: I’d been just acting. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I had ground through all of the ‘unsolved stranger attack’ paperwork with painstaking zeal. But did I really know what I was looking for? Of course I didn’t fucking know! That’s why Shep picked me for the task. As a rookie, he could dismiss any of my findings, leaving him free to focus the team on Peter and Karen.

He pulled up abruptly outside a four-storey block of flats on Heathfield Terrace. A crowd of people stood on one side of the billowing police tape, gaping and gossiping while two paramedics leaned against their ambulance, awaiting instruction. We lifted the tape and strolled right through, just like they do in the movies. I hated myself for enjoying the moment.

‘What’s the score?’ Shep asked the officer at the front door of the basement flat.

The officer stood to one side: ‘Hope you haven’t eaten in a while.’

The walls of the hallway were spattered bright red.

‘Oh great,’ said an older officer, eyeing us bitterly.

‘It wasn’t my idea, Kenneth,’ drawled Shep, ‘we’ve both got enough to do.’

Kenneth was shaking his head: ‘Why do we constantly have to dance to the media’s tune? We should tell them the truth: we can’t link cases until we’ve got all the reports in.’

‘You know how it goes, Ken. The Commissioner’s primary concern is that we don’t get another savaging in the Sunday papers.’

‘Okay,’ said Ken, snapping into senior cop mode, ‘the killer stabbed the woman, Samantha Bisset, twenty-eight, to death here in the hallway. You’d better come into the bedroom.’