Scream

Book 3: DCI Mark Lapslie

by Nigel McCrery

Genres: Horror; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

In this chilling thriller from the creator of the hit BBC drama Silent Witness DCI Mark Lapslie is singled-out by a twisted killer. Perfect for fans of M.J. Arlidge and Angela Marsons. You will never have felt pain like it in your life. I want you to know...there's nothing you can do to stop it - nothing you can tell me, nothing you can offer me.... A woman screams in pain. Twenty-seven times, until she dies. The sound file was sent to DCI Mark Lapslie from an anonymous email address. Why is she screaming? Why would someone record that horrifying noise? And why send it to him? He soon learns that the file was sent from the hospital where he is being treated for synaesthesia - a neurological condition that cross-wires his senses so he tastes sound - and where his new girlfriend works. When a body is discovered, the most shocking murder scene Lapslie has ever encountered forces him to realise there is a violent killer out there, a killer whose method of choice is torture. Will Lapslie find the killer? Who will have to die before he does? Discover the other books in the DCI Mark Lapslie series: Core of Evil, Tooth and Claw, Thirteenth Coffin and Flesh and Blood.

Release date: September 3, 2013

Publisher: Audible Studios

Print pages: 352

Sample

The girl was sobbing uncontrollably now. It was the mask that had started her off—the macabre metal face looming suddenly out of the darkness of the cellar—but now, seeing the drill with its glinting brass bit coming toward her, she was on the verge of hysteria. Her upper lip and chin glistened with a combination of mucus, tears and saliva, and her jeans were soaked around her crotch where in terror she had voided her bladder.

Her captor’s hand hefted the weight of the cordless electric drill. The battery pack was fully charged. It would run for an hour at least, which should be more than enough time.

The girl’s jeans had been ripped across at the knees, exposing both kneecaps, and her legs were fastened to the metal chair with cable ties. There was no give in those ties. She wouldn’t be able to move her legs, even when her captor started drilling, no matter how hard she tried.

And she would try, that much was certain. She wouldn’t be able to stop trying. Within a few minutes she would be struggling so hard she would be tearing her muscle fibers in her attempts to get her legs out of the way of that drill bit. And she would be screaming so loudly that she would drown out the noise of the motor.

“I’m going to start drilling in a minute,” her captor whispered, feeling the tickle of breath hitting the inside of the mask and bouncing back to caress lips and chin. “I’m going to drill slowly and horizontally through your left kneecap and into your femur, right into the marrow. The pain will be phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. You will never have felt pain like it in your life. I want you to know two things. Firstly, there’s nothing you can do to stop it—nothing you can tell me, nothing you can offer me. Only I can stop it, and I’m only going to stop when the chuck holding the drill bit is grinding against your kneecap. Secondly, when that happens, when I’ve gotten as far up inside your bone as I possibly can, I’m going to repeat the entire process with your right knee. And after that, I’ll start work on your elbows and your humerus.”

Her breath was coming in short gasps now, and her pupils were dilated so wide there was virtually no iris visible: just black, terrified holes into the raging fear inside her head. She tried to say something, but she couldn’t force the words out past her choking sobs. Not that there was any point. Her words weren’t important.

Only her screams were important now.

A bright-red insect was hovering outside Mark Lapslie’s hotel room window. It was small and spindly, with a bulbous abdomen that doubled back underneath itself until it pointed in the same direction as its head. It was about an inch long, and it moved in short spurts so quickly that it almost disappeared from one spot and reappeared instantaneously in another, consciously or unconsciously dodging the fat drops of rain that fell monotonously past the window. Lapslie had never seen anything like it before. It looked to him like the insect equivalent of a hummingbird. He wondered idly if it was poisonous.

Beyond the insect lay the sprawling, low-rise buildings of Islamabad, capital city of Pakistan. Off to the left lay the diplomatic enclave, with its security guards and barriers. On his arrival in Pakistan Lapslie had visited the 1960s vintage concrete edifice of the British High Commission to get a briefing on the security situation and the “do’s” and “don’ts” of staying in a country which was about as close to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda heartlands as it was possible to get without actually being in a war zone—although the several bomb explosions that had occurred at various Army barracks in nearby Rawalpindi and Peshawar since his arrival made him wonder if the war had in fact actually moved to Pakistan without anyone admitting it. Almost straight ahead, on the horizon, he could see a triangular mosque, white with an inlay of colored tiles, stark against the ominously low gray morning sky.

A street ran past the hotel’s main entrance. Despite the rain it was full to bursting with dusty cars of uncertain age, weaving mopeds, small buses that could take only six or seven people inside, with another two holding on to the outside, and the ever-present “jinglies”—trucks whose back ends had been enclosed with wooden panels painted with landscapes, abstract designs, jet fighters, tigers and anything that caught the painters’ fancy with the obvious exception of people’s faces, the artistic representation of which was forbidden by Islam on the basis that it verged on idolatry. And then, of course, there was the reason the trucks were called “jinglies”—the curtains of chains and pewter disks that hung from any available edge and swung back and forth as the trucks stopped and started in the heavy traffic. According to the security officer in the High Commission, the “jinglies” had nothing to do with religious custom—they were the Pakistani equivalent of fluffy dice hanging from the rearview mirror or a stuffed toy pressed against the back window.

And everywhere there were men and boys dressed in the standard salwar kameez—baggy pants worn under a tunic, invariably in brown or cream—along with jarringly Western black leather shoes, highly polished. Some of them were strolling in a particular direction, but many of them were just standing on corners or on the strips of grass that ran down the center of the roads, singly or in small groups, despite the rain. It didn’t look to Lapslie as if they were waiting for anything in particular. They were just … standing. Passing time.

According to the security officer at the High Commission, some of those loiterers were almost certainly working for the ISI, the Pakistan intelligence service, and were “dicking” Westerners who arrived and left—making a note of who they were and where they were going. Looking at them Lapslie was convinced that they were either particularly naturalistic actors or they were taking the opportunity to just stand around and star vacantly at the passing traffic like their brethren.

The Serena Hotel was one of the only two hotels whose security was rated by the British High Commission as high enough for diplomats and government-sponsored visitors to stay at; as the other was the Marriott, which had been seriously damaged by a car bomb a year or two back, the Serena was where Lapslie had been put. He was taking part in a symposium involving law enforcement officials from the UK and America and their Pakistani equivalents, discussing ways of making the country safer. It had been Chief Commissioner Rouse’s idea to send Lapslie, despite his medical history, but Lapslie had been surprised to find that he was enjoying himself. The Serena was like something out of the Arabian Nights, with marble floors and stairs, pointed arches, intricately carved wooden screens, musicians playing traditional instruments and men who would appear by your side with pots of green tea if you stood still for more than ten seconds. And it was quiet. No piped background music coming out of speakers everywhere, no raised voices. Even the musicians, with their tablas and sitars and dholaks, caused his synesthesia to make his brain taste a subtle pistachio flavor rather than anything more intrusive, although that may have had more to do with the thorazitol he was taking to control it and the workshop that he had started back in the UK than anything intrinsic to the music.

Now, standing in his thickly carpeted hotel room, looking out of the double-glazed and probably blast-resistant window, Lapslie could hardly hear anything. It was as if he were cocooned inside a bubble of silence. And he loved it. For the first time in ages he felt completely at peace with the world and with himself. And, strangely, he felt at home.

There was something familiar about the bits of Pakistan that he had seen since he had arrived. On the first day of the symposium the delegates had been taken by minibus on a tour of the capital, taking in the Faisal Mosque, Parliament House and the Pakistan Monument and finishing with a buffet reception at a Pakistan Army base in Rawalpindi. Lapslie had been to a number of British Army bases back in England, either on duty or attending a ball at the invitation of a friend, and the base in Rawalpindi seemed to him to be modeled exactly on the English design, down to the regimental regalia and the photographs on the walls. He had mentioned this to one of his hosts, who had said: “What you have to remember is that you British built all this for us. We took it over when you left, and we kept the traditions going.” He paused, smiling. “Even when you abandoned most of them yourself.”

On the way back, looking out of the grimy minibus window, Lapslie had seen children on almost every street playing impromptu games of cricket, just as he imagined it had been like in England in the 1950s.

A swathe of green grass edged with flagstone walkways led away from the base of the hotel toward the security barriers separating it from the road. Guards in loose white two-piece uniforms walked around the perimeter of the hotel, keeping to the walkways, their shoulders and backs dark from the rain. Each of them held a rifle or a shotgun. As a police officer the thought that a country was so lawless that even the hotels had to be protected by armed guards horrified him, but as a Westerner staying in one of those hotels, he found it reassuring.

A marquee was being erected on the grass. One of the doormen had told Lapslie that a wedding was being held the next day. Lapslie had a strong feeling that, no matter how innocuous it was, even the wedding would be guarded by armed men.

Even the wedding? he thought wryly. In the topsy-turvy world of national terrorism, perhaps it should be especially the wedding. A high-profile gathering of important people at a hotel associated with Western visitors … in some twisted way, it was an obvious target, one guaranteed to cause headlines around the world if it were disrupted.

Down on the road, on the other side of the security barriers, a car went past towing a flatbed trailer. A donkey stood on the trailer, idly looking around as if being driven through traffic were an everyday occurrence. And that, Lapslie thought, summed up Islamabad to him: unusual sights taken for granted everywhere you looked.

The insect flickered and then vanished, presumably having relocated itself somewhere outside of Lapslie’s line of sight. He made a note to email Charlotte about it. She had the same kind of mind that Lapslie had: interested in passing oddities. She would probably have time to search on Google and find out what kind of insect it was: how rare, how poisonous.

They’d met at Braintree Hospital, where Lapslie was briefly being cared for having passed out very publicly during a press conference: a side-effect of the synesthesia that was increasingly controlling his life at that point. The cross-wiring of his senses that led to things that he heard manifesting themselves as tastes in his mouth—or, rather, in his mind—had led to him becoming a virtual recluse. The most innocuous sounds—the wind in the leaves, passing traffic, the murmuring of people in a restaurant—would sometimes cause Lapslie to taste things so nauseating that he would be sick, or collapse. It had been getting worse, to the point where he was failing in his duties as a police officer, but meeting Charlotte—a resident doctor specializing in anesthesiology—was a turning point in his life. She had persuaded him to join a cognitive behavioral therapy group at the hospital in an attempt to develop what she called “coping strategies.” She had also researched some drugs that were undergoing clinical trials and managed to get him allocated to one of the test groups. Between them the CBT and the drugs had suppressed his synesthesia to a point where he could function almost as a normal human being. To celebrate, he had bought her dinner—the first time he’d been able to stand being in a crowded restaurant with other people for more than a few moments. One thing had led to another and now they were a couple, much to Lapslie’s wonderment. He hadn’t expected, at this time in his life, to find love again.

It was a shame that Charlotte hadn’t been able to take time off from her hospital routine and join him in Pakistan. She would have loved the combination of exotic and familiar, despite having to cover herself up with a thin scarf and long-sleeved blouses. He’d felt alone, disconnected from humanity, for longer than he cared to remember, but loneliness was a new and uncomfortable feeling for him.

Still, Charlotte had said in her last email that she had a surprise for him when he returned: tickets for a concert. The thought made him nervous—all those people, all that noise—but he trusted her. And the nervousness was tinged with expectation: it was like being a teenager again, exposed to new sounds, new experiences.

Lapslie had bought her some presents during an escorted trip to a local flea market: a couple of pashminas and a necklace that the vendor said was jade, but was probably something less unusual. It didn’t matter: it was the look that Charlotte loved, not the knowledge that whatever it was he had bought her was expensive or rare. She was sensual in the literal sense of the word: she had a direct connection to her senses in a way that other people seemed to have backed away from. Perhaps that’s why he had fallen for her. Perhaps that’s why she had initially been interested in him. No matter—now they were a couple for all the complex reasons that pulled people together, not just one.

The flea market had been fascinating for Lapslie. He’d been brought up in East London during the 1960s and 1970s, a stone’s throw from the West Ham United soccer stadium, and there was something about the arrangement of the stalls in the market, the way it was squeezed between the walls of nearby buildings, the combination of exotic fruits and household items like light bulbs for sale, and the Urdu language that was in use everywhere, that reminded him with a bizarre but unexpected jab of nostalgia of the Queen’s Market, just outside Upton Park tube station. He’d often wandered through the Queen’s Market as a child, initially with his mother as she shopped for food, and then later by himself. The smells were imprinted in his mind: rotting vegetables, sawdust, incense. And now, thousands of miles and tens of years from home, he’d found it again.

Back in the 1970s, the Queen’s Market had been located on the border of three different gang areas. South of the market had been the largely white area dominated by soccer thugs and the National Front. Northwest up to Stratford had been the preserve of the Pakistani and Indian immigrants to the East End, some of whom had been around for several generations; indivisible to the outsider but riven by political and tribal affiliations internally. Northwest of East Ham had been African-Caribbean territory: with the sound of reggae music drifting from windows and parties that seemed to go on for days. The Queen’s Market had been a neutral meeting point, a fulcrum around which the area revolved.

It was all different now. The Urdu and Punjabi lettering on the shop-fronts in his old stamping grounds had been replaced by Cyrillic now: the Pakistanis, Indians and African-Caribbeans supplanted by Poles, Chechens, Balkans and Russians. And every second shop was selling codes to unlock cell phones.

Lapslie remembered patrolling the Queen’s Market, back in the early 1980s, and passing a dozing West Indian boy with dreadlocks emerging from beneath a towering leather cap. He was slumped against a stall selling Scotch bonnet peppers and chunks of goat. Partially aware of something passing in front of him, he jerked awake, saw Lapslie and performed a perfect double-take, then jumped to his feet and raced off, presumably to warn his brethren that the police were around. Almost exactly the same thing had happened in the Islamabad market. The Western policemen, shepherded by their Pakistani bodyguards, had passed by a stall selling chunks of chicken and fresh mangoes. A local man, small and unshaven with a random scattering of teeth in his mouth, sleeping with his head on his knees, had suddenly jerked awake and seen the parade of Westerners passing by. He too took off, the difference being that he had been pulling a cell phone from his kameez as he ran. ISI or Taliban? Lapslie didn’t know, but the tour of the market was abruptly cut short and they were bussed back to the Serena. Strange how things at opposite ends of the world could be so similar.

Thoughts of his past, and of the East End, reminded him of Dom McGinley. The two of them had first met in the warren of back streets between Plaistow and East Ham tube stations: in pubs like the Green Man, the Boleyn and the Black Prince. Pubs where tough men in leather jackets and women with Essex facelifts—hair scraped back into ponytails so severe that their skin was stretched—drank for hours on end, and the smell of stale urine from the toilets drifted out to mix with the spilled beer and the cigarette smoke in the bars. Lapslie had been a police constable, McGinley a runner for the Clerkenwell Syndicate, run by the legendary Adams family. And now Lapslie was a detective chief inspector, McGinley was emotionally involved with his sergeant, Emma Bradbury, and the Adams family still controlled half the crime in London. It was, as someone had once observed, a funny old world.

Which reminded him: in the time since they’d caught the serial killer Carl Whittley, Emma had avoided being alone with him for more than a few moments at a time. Lapslie had promised her that they would talk about her new relationship, but she had made sure that the chance had never presented itself.

That would change, when Lapslie got back.

The symposium was scheduled to run for another two days, and Lapslie was down to give a presentation on the Braintree Parkway bomb and the subsequent forensic investigation. He hated public speaking—a feeling that had multiplied exponentially since his collapse at the news conference a few months back—and he wasn’t looking forward to it. The problem was that Inspector Dain Morritt—a supercilious police officer in a sharp suit and Masonic cufflinks who had taken a dislike verging on hatred to Lapslie—would be in the audience. He was giving a presentation on how computer profiling could separate dangerously extremist Muslims from the broad sweep of perfectly innocuous ones. Lapslie knew that he would be able to feel Morritt’s eyes on him all the time, just waiting for him to falter, to fall. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Lapslie’s police laptop, open on the bed and connected to the Serena’s broadband internet service by a bright blue cable, went “ping,” indicating that he had an email. Turning away from the window, and the endlessly fascinating vista of Islamabad, he crossed to the bed to check on who was trying to communicate with him. The odds were that it was either spam offering to help him satisfy his partner in bed by the use of various herbal concoctions or a Nigerian criminal gang pretending to be an innocent banking official who had control of some money from the estate of a recently deceased long-lost relative to send to him once they had received a goodwill payment of £100; but there was always the chance that it might be Charlotte, making contact. He did a quick calculation in his head, subtracting five hours and getting to some ungodly time in the morning in the UK, but Charlotte kept doctors’ hours, and therefore could be awake at any time. Much like a policeman.

The subject line wasn’t encouraging: You Need To Listen To This; and the sender’s address was an anonymous Hotmail account consisting of a hash of numbers and letters. Lapslie nearly deleted it unread, but decided at the last moment to take a quick look. He was bored, and there was always the chance that it was a communication from one of the various informants that he had kept with him over the years. And his computer was installed with the latest anti-virus software and internet firewalls.

He opened the email.

There was no message, no signature; just an attached file. Judging by the .wav file extension it was a sound file. A recording.

Who would be sending him a sound file? And why?

He double-clicked on the icon representing the sound file.

The Microsoft Sound Recorder program opened up in a separate window and started to play the sound file, representing its volume graphically as a series of green mountain peaks against a black background. For a few moments the file was silent, and then the sound started.

It was someone screaming.

Lapslie flinched at the raw agony in the sound. Shocked, his synesthesic brain pushed back against the drugs and the coping strategies to flood his mouth with beetroot and salt. He almost vomited. Swallowing hard, he hit the pause button on the laptop screen.

The sound cut out. Peace and quiet filled the hotel room.

Lapslie took a deep breath, settling himself. He used the laptop’s touchpad to move the slider showing the progress of the sound file back to the beginning.

This wasn’t spam, and it wasn’t a casual message from a friend or a colleague. It sounded like someone being tortured.

Sliding the volume control down to a lower level, he pressed the “Play” button on the Sound Recorder window. The file began mindlessly to play again.

Now he was concentrating, he heard something in the opening seconds: the ones he thought had been silent on first hearing. Behind the hiss of the recording process, almost hidden, was the sound of someone breathing. Ragged, hoarse, on the verge of panic. And sobbing, muffled as if the person didn’t want anyone to hear them, or to know how close to complete nervous collapse they were. Then there was a scuffling, as someone moved. Footsteps, dragging on a dusty surface.

Then the screaming. First a sudden, shocked sound, as if the person had run into something hard, or sharp and quickly pulled themselves away. Then another scream, followed by rapid scuffling. Whoever was making the noise wasn’t moving carefully anymore; they were running. Running fast. More screaming, continuous now, driven by fear rather than pain, but punctuated by occasional sharper screams. Something was happening, but it was impossible to tell what it was.

The screams were getting weaker now, more desperate, and there was a sense from the scuffling noise that whoever was there was blundering around blindly and hitting things, or getting caught by things.

And then there was another scream, sharp and shocked.

Then sobbing, as heartfelt as if it was being pulled from a soul who had just found out that God did not exist, salvation was a joke and all was darkness.

A low, indistinguishable noise, over as soon as it began.

Then silence. No sobbing, no breathing, no scuffling. Nothing.

The sound of someone who had just died.

Lapslie leaned back until he was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

It could be a con: an actor making noises to convince the listener that they were being killed. But why the mystery? Why not make the cause of death obvious: the repeated sounds of stabbing, a gunshot, the choking as they were strangled? Or it could have been an extract taken from the soundtrack of a horror movie; one of the so-called “torture porn” movies: Saw and its six-odd sequels, Hostel and its two sequels, plus various others with one- or two-word titles and stark posters. But didn’t films usually have some kind of soundtrack music to emphasize what was on the screen: ominous chords or heavy rock? No, Lapslie kept coming back to the same thing. This was real. Someone had died, and their death was recorded in that sound file.

A “snuff” recording.

But why send it to him? Did they expect him to do something about it? Then why not send something more obvious: something pointing him to where the death occurred, or who it was that had died?

He rubbed his eyes and sat up again, the taste of beetroot and salt still spiking his tongue. Questions like that would just lead him around in circles. There was an obvious course of action. Either other clues would fall out of that course of action, or they wouldn’t. He could only take one step at a time.

Working quickly, Lapslie composed . . .