Tooth and Claw

Book 2: DCI Mark Lapslie

by Nigel McCrery

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

From the creator of the hit BBC drama Silent Witness, comes the gripping second instalment in the acclaimed Mark Lapslie series, sees the DCI come under attack from all sides. Perfect for fans of M.J. Arlidge and Angela Marsons. By now he had knifed, strangled, blown up, drowned, bludgeoned and tortured ten people. Ten people that he had never even met, and had no knowledge of... Carl Whittley is seemingly a murderer without a motive. He's just tortured a beautiful, young TV presenter to death and now he's planning to blow an anonymous commuter to pieces. Who will be next? What is the motive behind the attacks? And how will he strike? DCI Mark Lapslie needs something to do. He suffers from a rare neurological condition that has forced him to leave his family and avoid the police station. For his superiors, he is nothing but a nuisance to be avoided - and the spate of unconnected murders is just what they need to send him into retirement. Carl wants every death to be different. More violent, bizarre and shocking. But as Lapslie gets on the scent and the force brings in a profiler, Carl makes a new plan. He hasn't killed a policeman yet . . . Discover the other books in the DCI Mark Lapslie series: Core of Evil, Scream, Thirteenth Coffin and Flesh and Blood.

Release date: December 22, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 321

Sample

‘Tip your head back and open your mouth.’

The voice was cultured, smooth, devoid of any obvious emotion. No anger, no hatred, no lust. Just the faintest tinge of academic curiosity; nothing else.

He shook his head. ‘Please,’ he begged, his voice cracking, ‘I don’t—’

‘I said, tip your head back and open your mouth.’

He could smell alcohol on his captor’s breath. The blindfold around his eyes meant he couldn’t see what was happening, so when fingers entwined themselves in his hair and pulled his head back until his face was pointed up towards the ceiling he gasped in shock at the pain. His hair felt as if it was being pulled out by the roots. While that hand was still entangling his hair another one took his chin and forced his mouth open. It let go, but before he could close his mouth something was pushed past his teeth: something that felt like a dental dam of some kind, a plastic plate with a hole in the centre, too rigid for him to crush between the roof of his mouth and his tongue. It kept his mouth gaping open in a silent, frozen scream. He wanted to fight against it, to push his captor away and rip the thing from his mouth, but his arms were tied to the chair and he couldn’t move.

His breath came in ragged gasps past the obstruction in his mouth. He wanted to gag. The insides of his cheeks and tongue were drying out as his saliva evaporated. Tears squeezed their way out of his closed eyelids and prickled their way down past his temples and into his hair. He felt a hot flush of shame across his skin. He wanted to be strong but helplessness made him feel faint.

‘I’m going to put something into your mouth,’ the voice said, as calm and as measured as if his captor was reading a set of instructions for some new beauty treatment. ‘It’s important that you don’t swallow. Close your throat up and breathe through your nose.’

He tried to shake his head but the grip on his hair intensified. Something smooth and warm touched his lower lip. He tried to pull away but the hand on the back of his head pushed him suddenly forward.

A tube pushed past his teeth and into his mouth through the hole in the dental dam. He nearly gagged on the plastic as it scraped his tongue. Before he could even take a breath, a warm, thick liquid invaded his mouth; trickling around between his teeth and his cheeks, infiltrating its way beneath his tongue, sending questing fingers down his throat until he blocked it. He felt his stomach rising up in protest. He had to breathe through his nose, but he was hyperventilating and his nostrils were closing and his breath wasn’t coming fast enough. He began to feel light-headed.

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ the voice said as a hand stroked his hair. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

And then, nothing. Nothing but the solidifying waxy mass in his mouth, and the increasingly difficult whistle of breath through his nostrils, and the red static that invaded the darkness of his blindfolded eyes, creeping in from the outside until everything was red and he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was going to die …

Dawn arrived in Mark Lapslie’s bedroom an hour before the sun rose.

The increasing blush of light brought him gradually from a dream in which sound, sight and touch were all melded together into a slippery mass of inchoate, abstract sensation, and where he knew, with increasing terror, that some clue, some vital piece of evidence, was slipping away from him, disguising itself as something else, although he had no idea what it was or what case he was investigating.

Eventually, awake, he scrunched himself over in the bed and looked at the display on the alarm clock: 05:00. Time to get up.

The clock was one of the many concessions he’d had to make to the synaesthesia that was increasingly ruling his life. For a while he had switched to a digital alarm clock with an LCD display, but he had found that the repeated beep of the alarm caused him to wake tasting crab apples. Eventually, in desperation his wife had bought him a sunrise alarm: a clock with a globe on top that gradually glowed brighter and brighter as it approached the time he set it for. No beeping, no clanging, no audible alarm at all; just a gradually false sunrise that brought his body gently out of sleep.

It had been the most thoughtful present his wife had ever bought him. Shortly after that – bolstered, perhaps, by the thought that she had done her duty and made sure he was all right despite his health problems – she moved out, taking the children with her.

Things could have been worse. At least they still saw each other, even slept together from time to time.

Lapslie sat up in the bed and ran a hand through his hair. He glanced across at the windows. They were double-glazed to screen out the taste of the foxes that screamed in the night and the dawn chorus of birds that greeted the real sunrise. It was still dark outside, but he wanted to get started on his paperwork before the world outside his cottage began to wake up. After a period of relative stability his synaesthesia had been getting progressively worse over the past year. It had gone from a state where he could just about bear to be in an office environment, as long as he had a quiet room to which he could retreat when things got too much, to the point where the background hum of casual conversation would make him feel as if he was travel-sick, throwing up every half hour or so, despite wearing earplugs. Only his cottage, isolated in the countryside near Saffron Walden, allowed him some respite, and so Chief Superintendent Rouse had grudgingly shifted his responsibilities to allow him to work from home, writing a series of reports on potential restructurings of the Essex Police Constabulary. Rouse wasn’t happy about it, demanding a medical report from Lapslie’s consultant before he would put anything in writing, but in the end he had to accept that Lapslie could either work at home or resign. The choice was that stark.

If Lapslie was lucky then he could crack a couple more sections of the report before noises from outside intruded too much and he had to retreat to his bedroom and try to sleep through the afternoon before starting work again in the evening. The cottage was isolated from main roads – standing alone in the middle of several acres of trees – but there were still the sounds of tractors and chainsaws and every passing aircraft to contend with. He had even considered switching to a nocturnal cycle, but the mainstream of police activity still took place during the day and there were phone calls to field and emails that needed responding to urgently. Headphones or earplugs blocked out the noise, but stopped him from hearing the phone if it rang, and he found the artificial absolute silence unnerving and oppressive if he was alone in the house and working on something.

The sunrise alarm clock was at full illumination now, casting a bright yellow glow across the room. He threw the duvet off, stood up and padded naked across the bedroom towards the bathroom. He showered quickly, the hiss of the water sending torrents of cauliflower down his throat, and dressed for the office – a light blue, French-cuff cotton shirt, a dark blue tie whose pattern of an interlocking grid of golden rings and chains made senior officers think he might be a Freemason without actually confirming it, and dark suit with a subtle blue pinstripe effect. If he was going to work while he was at home then he wanted to feel like he was working.

But even the solitary refuge of his cottage was turning slowly but inexorably into a prison of noise.

Sometimes, if he turned a tap off too quickly, the pipes would bang and clatter as if someone was hammering them with an iron bar. For an hour or so after the central heating came on the house would creak as the joists expanded slightly. The wind, blowing around the walls, caused the air vent in the bathroom to vibrate if it caught them at the wrong angle. And sometimes there were noises behind the walls or in the ceiling that might have been mice scurrying past, or might just have been fragments of plaster falling down gaps between the bricks. The sounds caused a continual and unpleasant background taste in his mouth when he was in the house; a strange combination of lime juice and walnuts that had been allowed to rot.

His office was at the back of the cottage, but he hesitated before heading there to pick up work on the report where he had left it the night before. He had to brace himself. He had to prepare himself for the task. He hated using a keyboard – the repetitive click of the keys made him taste hot pilchards in tomato sauce – so whenever possible he tried to write longhand using a biro and then drive the pages to a woman in Saffron Walden who would type them up for him and put them on a CD-ROM. It was old fashioned – Victorian, even – but it was the only way he could manage. Even then, however, while writing he had to try not to shift his position in case the chair creaked or the stuffing in the cushions shifted.

He felt sometimes as if he was spending his time standing perfectly still, perfectly quiet, while life slid past him like water past a rock. Other people could enjoy themselves in bars and pubs, restaurants and cinemas, but he was condemned to a monastic life of near-silence and contemplation. There were times when he wished he could just ask a surgeon to slice through the nerves that transmitted sensation from his mouth to his brain, but even then he thought he would probably still experience the unwanted tastes. After all, they weren’t real – merely phantoms originating somewhere in his brain. He knew that because, in the early days of the synaesthesia, he had sometimes tried to numb his taste buds, either with an oral anaesthetic gel that he had found in a pharmacy or, in desperation, with the hottest murgh phall curry that he could order in the takeaway nearest his cottage. Neither option worked. With the oral anaesthetic he found he could still experience sounds as tastes, although they were unpleasantly muted and distorted, while the phall just gave him heartburn for two days.

A soft knock on the cottage door caused smoked herrings to chase themselves around his teeth and tongue. He checked his watch. Five thirty a.m. – far too early for the postman.

It was work. It had to be work.

He opened the door. Detective Sergeant Emma Bradbury was standing outside. Her car was a hundred yards away, considerately parked so that the noise of her idling engine wouldn’t bother him too much. The glow from the headlamps combined with the faint mist in the air silhouetted her, haloing her body in grainy light. She was wearing a grey silk blouse with a black bolero jacket over the top and black jeans.

‘Emma?’

She acknowledged Lapslie with a nervous nod of her head. ‘Boss – sorry to disturb you.’ Her voice held a citrus tang. ‘I was going to ring from the car, but I saw your bedroom light was on.’

‘I wanted to make an early start. Rouse has got me writing reports for him.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, he said.’ She looked towards the side of the doorframe, where the nameplate for the house was attached. ‘Thyme Cottage? I’d never noticed that before. Rather twee, isn’t it?’

He took a deep breath, feeling the vestiges of sleep still tugging at the corners of his vision, making his head heavy and his eyes gritty. ‘My wife’s idea. She’s a holistic therapist. Look, I take it this isn’t a social call? I haven’t seen you for months.’

‘No, we’ve – we’ve got a case. You and me.’ She kept raising her fingers to her mouth as though she wanted a cigarette, then rubbing her upper lip nervously when she realised that she wasn’t holding anything in her hand.

‘I don’t do cases any more, Emma,’ he said gently. ‘They’ve put me out to pasture. And I thought you were working with someone else now.’

‘I am. I was. Chief Superintendent Rouse told me specifically to come and get you. He said he needed you. He was very insistent.’

‘I don’t care.’ Lapslie took a deep breath. ‘Emma, I just can’t. It’s physically impossible. Rouse knows that.’

‘He told me to tell you that he needs you on this one. He called me from home.’

‘Tell him I refuse. No, I’ll call him and tell him myself.’

Again, that nervous lift of the hand to the mouth. ‘He told me to tell you that he’s got another report for you to write. It’s an analysis of the way police witnesses give evidence in court. He said you’d have to spend the next three months attending hearings and cases at Southend, making sure you had all the evidence you needed.’

Lapslie closed his eyes and shook his head. He could feel his pulse beating fast in the arteries of his neck. ‘That’s blackmail.’

‘Yeah, he said you’d say that. And he told me to tell you that you’re right – it is blackmail.’

‘Okay. All right. Give it to me in as few words as you can manage.’

Emma paused for a few seconds, marshalling her thoughts. ‘A young and beautiful TV newsreader found stark naked and mutilated on her bed, to which she had been secured with plastic builders’ ties.’

‘Jesus.’ Jerked out of the ruts of self-pity that it had been trapped in, Lapslie’s mind skittered across the various potentials for trouble a case like that could bring. ‘Is she dead?’

‘I hope so,’ Emma said sombrely. ‘I really wouldn’t like to think that she might still be alive looking like she does now.’

‘You’ve been there already?’

‘I was on duty when the call came in. As soon as I found out who the victim was, I informed my superiors. They ran it right up the chain of command, and Chief Superintendent Rouse called me back and told me to get you on the case.’

‘Who was the victim?’ Lapslie asked, remembering with a visceral clench of his stomach muscles the investigation into the shooting of the BBC newsreader Jill Dando ten years before.

‘Her name was Catherine Charnaud,’ Emma said. ‘She read the news on one of the satellite channels.’

Lapslie wasn’t really listening. He was remembering, instead, those days, weeks, months of the Jill Dando investigation, and how the microscope of publicity had caused a calamitous buildup of errors and assumptions in the investigation. When a policeman was killed, the police pulled out all the stops to find the killer. It was an immediate, instinctive response. Nobody took leave; everyone did what they had to, no matter how small. When Jill Dando was killed her colleagues reacted in a similar way. The subsequent investigation was probably the most scrutinised, the most discussed, the most journalistically dissected that the police had ever undertaken.

And now it was going to happen again. He could feel it.

No wonder Rouse wanted him on the case. He almost forgave the man. Almost.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘where do we need to go?’

‘Chigwell: Holy Cross Road. The house is called “Manor Farm”, but I can’t see much evidence of farmland around there. Right in the Footballers’ Wives and Girlfriends’ belt.’

‘Which is about as far from a chastity belt as it’s possible to get.’ His mind raced through options and plans that he’d thought were behind him now and receding in the rear-view mirror of his career. ‘Get on the phone. Keep sightseers away and make sure whoever’s manning the boundary of the crime scene doesn’t talk to reporters. And I mean doesn’t talk at all. Not even a “No comment”. If I hear anything apart from informed guesswork from the reporters I’ll have someone’s skin as a seat cover.’

‘Understood. You want the Crime Scene Investigators to get to work before you get there?’

‘Time is always of the essence in these cases. Make sure they get access as soon as they arrive.’

‘Got it.’

‘And make a point of reminding the Crime Scene photographer that the pictures taken by police cameras are all digitally watermarked, so if they try and sell them to the Sun we’ll have them up on a charge before they can even book their one-way ticket to St Lucia.’

‘Understood. You want me to drive you down, or are you going to drive yourself?’

He thought for a moment. ‘You drive. I need to think.’

He followed her towards the car. It was an Audi A4. He was surprised – he seemed to remember that she’d had a Mondeo the last time they had worked together.

‘New car?’ he asked.

‘A present from a friend,’ she said, opening the door for him. From the tone of her voice he guessed that she didn’t want to discuss it.

Emma handled the car with the skill and the verve that he remembered from the brief time they had worked together on the Madeline Poel case. The drive towards Chigwell took them up through the centre of Saffron Walden before Emma could veer off and head south on the M11. The roads were lightly occupied. Aware of his condition, Emma kept the radio off, but the drone of the engine and the occasional raucous beep of horns or the rasp of an over-torqued engine as a car accelerated past them caused spasms of indescribable flavour across his tongue.

Lapslie gazed blankly at a low ground mist lying on the fields as they drove, concealing the rutted ground beneath. Bushes and hedges emerged from it like islands in a milky sea.

He spent the drive bitterly cursing the chief for riding roughshod over his medical condition and throwing him this case like you would a scrap to a dog. God alone knew that Lapslie hated the place to which his illness had brought him, but at least it was preferable to the constant sensory anguish of an investigation. Now, however, it looked as though he was being forced back into the fray whether he liked it or not, and regardless of the consequences to his mental and physical health.

Or perhaps, he thought darkly, there was more to it than that. Perhaps Rouse had decided it was time to push Lapslie out of the Force, but rather than do it directly and lay the police open to being sued Rouse was trying to put Lapslie into a position where he would have to resign. Either that or suffer a complete mental collapse. Would Rouse do something that devious? Remembering back to their time together as colleagues in Brixton, years before, Lapslie decided that he would, and he’d do it without a trace of angst.

The sun came up as they sped onto the M25: a pale wash of indeterminate colour across the sky, against which the branches of the trees stood out starkly, although they had been invisible against the darkness just moments before. The ground mist burned off rapidly as the temperature began to rise. Emma stayed on the M25 for only a few minutes, enough time to travel from Junction 27 to Junction 26, then she came off onto the A121.

Chigwell arrived like a bad smell: industrial estates, travel hotels and identikit housing replacing the fields of hay and stretches of woods that had been the backdrop to most of the drive. Civilisation, pushing nature to one side.

Emma guided the car through the last few turns and into Holy Cross Road. A small knot of gawkers, undeterred by the cold or by the early hour, had already gathered by the police tape that segregated the house at the end. She let the car coast towards them, waiting until she was within a few seconds of hitting them in the back before beeping her horn. Lapslie braced himself against the sudden stab of salmon and caramel. The small crowd parted for them; Emma let the car roll forward while she lowered the window and held her warrant card out to the constable who, wrapped-up against the weather, approached the car from beside the gateposts that separated the house from the road.

‘DS Bradbury and DCI Lapslie,’ she said. ‘We’re expected.’

‘Go right in ma’am, sir,’ the constable said, lifting the yellow and black striped tape from where it had been looped around a projection on the open gate and ushering Emma’s car through.

‘Surprised the gate isn’t closed,’ Lapslie called across Emma. ‘A bit of tape’s not going to stop a determined rush.’

The constable shrugged. ‘We had the gate closed for a while, sir,’ he said, ‘but there was so much traffic through, what with the investigating officers, the CSIs, the photographer and whatnot, that I decided it wasn’t worth it. Tape’s a lot faster.’

‘Fair point.’

Emma accelerated towards the house; a rectangular pile of red bricks with a cream portico stuck on the front and tall, fake-Edwardian windows. Gravel crunched beneath her tyres. Lapslie could taste something bitter and watery, like lettuce, washing around his tongue.

Several police cars were parked up in front of the portico, along with two vans that presumably had brought the CSIs from their usual lair; all were watched over by a couple of security cameras attached to the front of the house. Emma parked up alongside them and Lapslie headed towards the open front door. Another uniformed constable examined his warrant card before letting him inside.

Emma turned towards him before he could enter the house. The expression on her face was a mixture of embarrassment and pity. She reached into a pocket and pulled something small and green out, which she gave to him. It was cold in his hand.

‘Look, I thought you might need these,’ she said.

He looked at the object she had handed him. It was a pair of headphones: plastic hemispheres lined with black foam rubber and linked by a metal wire headband. For a moment he wondered what the punchline was going to be – was she proposing giving him an audio tour of the crime scene, like some macabre tourist guide? – and then he realised that there was no flex dangling from the headphones.

‘Industrial strength noise suppressors,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘Tell me if I’m being stupid, but I thought—’

‘You’re not being stupid,’ he said gently. ‘You’re being considerate. Thank you.’

Lapslie slipped the headphones on, and the world seemed to take a step backwards. It wasn’t completely silent – he could still hear the regular thudding of his heart, the occasional wheeze in his chest, the rush of blood through the arteries of his neck and the squeak of shifting mucus in his nose – but it was better. A lot better.

Feeling energised, he stepped into the house.

The first thing that he noticed was the smell. It was an old, familiar smell; one that had greeted him so many times over the years that he’d lost count, and yet still had the power to close up his throat and make him wince; old and musty and coppery, the kind of smell that was sometimes provoked as a taste in his mouth by background conversations in bars and restaurants. But this time it was real. Blood. Lots of blood.

The house was surprisingly well furnished: walls painted in faded pastel greens and blues, natural cotton throws over the furniture, wooden skirting boards and doorframes bleached to look as if they had been left out in the sun, shallow glass bowls of pebbles left scattered around in strategic locations. The overall effect was of something old and comfortable that sat amongst sand dunes, near a beach. Several sculptures were set on bookshelves: driftwood twisted either by accident or design into shapes like dancing figures. Paintings on the wall looked like originals: ripples of light on water, captured in time for ever.

The main focus of activity seemed to be upstairs. Followed by Emma, Lapslie walked up to the first floor. Three uniformed officers were clustered together in a doorway. A sudden actinic flash silhouetted them, black against white. Lapslie blinked, then coughed gently. ‘Any chance of a senior officer getting past?’ he asked. His voice sounded flat and thunderous in his head.

One of the men turned. ‘Sorry, sir.’ He moved to one side, letting Lapslie into the room, staring at the headphones in puzzlement.

It was one of those moments when the totality of a crime scene built itself up incrementally in Lapslie’s mind, element by element, as if the complete effect was too stark, too terrible for him to absorb in one go.

Firstly, Lapslie took in the room itself, as though his brain were shying away from the horror that lay on the bed and taking refuge in details, fripperies, inconsequentialities.

The room was large and airy, and one side was almost entirely taken up with a window. Outside Lapslie could see the back garden, lit from one side by the rising sun shining through the ash trees that lined the boundary. Each blade of grass seemed distinct from the others, and cast a straight-line shadow. A metal sculpture sat in the centre of the lawn: an orrery of some kind, with a globe on a plinth surrounded by rings; the whole thing suggested by lengths of straight or curved metal wire. It was rusted and pitted, but it looked as though it was meant to be that way. Artfully distressed, rather than disintegrating due to nature.

Two uniformed coppers patrolled the grounds, looking for intruders rather than evidence. Given the celebrity status of the victim, those ash trees would be populated more by photographers than by birds unless the police were careful.

Bringing his attention reluctantly back inside the bedroom, the next thing he saw was a pile of clothes thrown onto a chair: jeans, a hooded blue tracksuit top, woollen socks, and a black bra and pants set on top. A pair of trainers sat beneath the chair. Unlike the clothes, which looked as though they had been abandoned in haste, the trainers were set neatly together, heels and toes, with the laces pushed inside. They were silver, with pink stripes. Nike. Small. There was something about them that struck a chord in Lapslie’s mind; they were almost unknowingly erotic in their innocence, their abandonment, their careless statement about the youth and the nakedness of their owner.

His attention was drawn to the group of people clustered around the body, standing on rubber pads that had been scattered around the floor so that traces of evidence were not trampled underfoot. Usually, in cases where someone was found dead, either by natural causes or otherwise, the body quickly became part of the background: a piece of evidence, like a discarded cigarette filter or a used tissue; something to be examined and exploited rather than agonised over. The usual mixed group of police, forensic investigators and photographers went about their normal business without even acknowledging that the victim was once a person like them. Jokes were made, conversations occurred about what they’d done the night before or intended to do over the weekend, and life went on as normal. . .