Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘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 h
im 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.

  Here, however, it was different. Hushed by the silence of the headphones, the attending personnel were moving slowly and deliberately, as though they were in church or under water. Lapslie had never attended a scene quite like it. Standing in the doorway, he was put in mind of a Renaissance painting of relatives and servants gathered around the body of a consumptive patriarch, illuminated by a hundred flickering candles. Here the servants were the uniformed police, standing with their backs against the walls, faces in shadow, while the relatives, closer in, on their knees around the bed and with their heads bent as if in prayer, were the Crime Scene Investigators, each dressed in a papery white coverall. And standing off to one side, offering benison with her camera hanging around her neck was the photographer. She, like a priest, had the look of someone who had seen too much, and could forgive but not forget.

  Sean Burrows was leading the CSIs. Lapslie recognised his small frame, almost dwarfed in the folds of his coverall, and the quiff of white hair that stuck up from his forehead.

  Next, it was the bed that Lapslie noticed. Huge – king size at least, and probably larger – covered with a duvet whose cover had probably once been blue but now glistened a rusty red. Tassels hung off it all around. Thin threads of congealing liquid linked some of the tassels to the carpet, like glutinous spiders’ webs.

  Lapslie was perversely grateful for the absence of cuddly toys. In his experience, young women tended to keep reminders of their girlish past around as they grew into adulthood, and some of the memories of previous cases that kept him awake at night were of teddy bears and velvety lions whose plush fur was matted with sticky red blood, whose eyes hung by threads and whose smiling faces were disfigured with slashes and gouges where white stuffing bulged through. But not here. The only things on the bed apart from the body of Catherine Charnaud were a circular pillow and a hardback book, cast cover upwards to one side up by the headboard. It had fallen open, or been placed that way to keep a particular page. Whatever the book was, wherever Catherine Charnaud had paused, it would never be completed. The story had ended too soon.

  And then there was the body, posed in the centre of the bed like someone posing for a painting.

  Catherine Charnaud had been beautiful, once upon a time. Looking at her now, her eyes wide in terror and pain and dulled by death, her mouth unnaturally wide, Lapslie remembered the times he had seen her on TV and in the gossip pages of newspapers and magazines. She had been one of those minor celebrities more famous for what she did in her private life than on screen. He had a vague memory that she had started out in children’s TV programmes before moving onto fronting news updates; one of those incessantly bright and bouncy blondes who tried to show that they were ‘down’ with the kids even as they went out and got wasted every night. ‘Ladettes’ – wasn’t that how they were referred to? She was thin – perhaps anexorically so, judging by the way her stomach fell away from the sharp edge of her ribcage and the corners of her hips stuck up like mountains rising from the plains of her groin. Her breasts were small, the nipples dark and raised now into tiny berries by rigor mortis; the tissue of the breasts themselves pulled downwards and sideways against her ribs by gravity. Her skin was porcelain-white on top, but what little blood remained in her body had pooled where her skin touched the duvet, looking like a bizarre tidemark all the way up her legs and body. Her arms were outstretched in a parody of crucifixion. They were tied to the bedhead by bands of some kind, like the plastic ties that builders and gardeners used sometimes, where a corrugated plastic tongue loops back through a slit in the top of the tie and is pulled tight, the zigzag corrugations engaging with the sides of the slit to hold the whole thing tight.

  And that led his gaze to where it had always been heading, even while he had tried to distract it by looking at the garden, the room, the clothes, the people, the bed and the body. Her arm. The terrible, impossible ruin that was her left arm.

  The flesh had been stripped from the radius and ulna from bicep down to wrist. The bones themselves were yellow and waxy; not the matt ivory of skeletons in museums. Pockets of gristle and bubbly fat surrounded the complexity of the elbow joint and the numerous small bones of the wrist where the killer’s tools, whatever they were, hadn’t been able to gouge all of the surrounding flesh away. It was clear that they had gone to some trouble to remove as much flesh as possible, and clean the bone back to its natural state – if the word ‘natural’ could be applied to what had been done here. Artfully distressed, rather than disintegrating due to nature.

  Looking closer, Lapslie could see that the skin above Catherine’s bicep and below her wrist was compressed by plastic ties, similar to those that were securing her limbs. The aim had obviously been to stop blood pumping from the exposed flesh as the murderer worked, but that hadn’t stopped blood from the arm itself splashing across the duvet, the headboard and the pillow. And judging by the way the blood was smeared, Catherine Charnaud had been alive when the painstaking work of stripping tissue from underlying bone was started, although only time would tell whether she had been alive when it was finished.

  It occurred to Lapslie that there was no sign of the flesh that had been removed from the arm anywhere in the bedroom. Catherine Charnaud was a small girl, but even so there was enough meat on her right arm to fill a decent-sized dinner plate. The murderer had taken the stripped flesh with them, or disposed of it somewhere else in the house.

  There was something about the way that Catherine’s hand lay, palm upwards, thin fingers curled inwards like the legs of a dead and desiccated spider, that dragged Lapslie’s attention away from thoughts of evidence, motive and personalit
y profile and kept it pinned. Terrible in the silence, the hand lay at the gravitational centre of the room, pulling everything towards it. Somehow the hand had avoided any splashes of blood. Perhaps the killer had accidentally shielded it with their own body as they flayed Catherine’s flesh away from her bone like a butcher preparing a joint of lamb for a casserole. Perhaps they had deliberately covered it for reasons that made sense only to them. Whatever the reason, it rested like a surreal joke; a perfect and untainted hand, fingernails painted pink, at the end of two lengths of yellow bone. And on the third finger of the hand, the golden band of an engagement ring glittered in the light of the dawn.

  Somewhere off in the distance, Lapslie thought he heard something: a pulse, a rhythm, a pounding of drums. For a moment he thought that he was hearing the sound of his own blood, thudding in his ears, but the rhythm was too complicated for that. He pulled the headphones off, thinking for a moment that they were somehow bizarrely picking up a radio station, despite the absence of any electronics inside. The sudden drone of conversation and the whisper of the papery coveralls flooded his mouth with salt and metal, but the drumming noise became neither quieter nor louder. His brain began to split it up, classify it into its constituent parts: four sets of four beats, the accent on the first beat of each quartet for the first three quartets, then the emphasis on the second, third and fourth beats for the last quartet. It was precise, organised, almost primal: like African tribal drumming. He’d heard something like it before: on the radio perhaps. He didn’t have any CDs – the music caused too many unplanned sensations – and he didn’t watch television for the same reason, but sometimes radios were hard to avoid.

  ‘Has someone got a radio on?’ he snapped, breaking the macabre silence.

  Faces turned towards him. Emma Bradbury frowned.

  ‘I asked if anyone’s got a radio on.’

  Several CSIs shook their heads.

  ‘I can’t hear anything, boss,’ Emma said, detouring around the bed and towards him.