Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  Now that she had access, Dr Catherall removed each organ from the body cavity and examined it carefully, made verbal notes into her recorder, then handed it to Dan for weighing and sealing in a transparent plastic bag. The heart especially came in for detailed scrutiny, and several photographs. She then made a deep incision across the top of the corpse’s head, cutting right down to the bone, and then tugged at the exposed edge of the skin with all her strength, pulling the scalp down like a flap to cover the face from brow to lips with a raw mask of flesh. The crunch of gristle and flesh separating made Lapslie’s mouth tingle with sparkling wine; not Champagne, but something sweeter, like Asti Spumante. Stepping back and resting for a while, Jane allowed Dan to use a power saw to make two cuts through the exposed bones of the skull; one across the top, paralleling the first cut she had made, and the second lower down, above the forehead. Lapslie winced as the dentist-whine of the saw biting into bone sent a torrent of savoury meat across his tongue. The two cuts intersected above and forward of the ears, allowing Dr Catherall to delicately remove the wedge of skull, and expose Catherine Charnaud’s brain tissue.

  Lapslie was surprised at how easily the brain could be lifted out of the cup of the skull. Only a few cuts were necessary, and it came free, small enough to nestle in the palm of Dr Catherall’s hand as she talked into the minidisc recorder. Bizarrely, he was reminded of delving inside the engine of his Saab, undoing the bolts on the alternator and lifting it free so he could replace it. No replacements here, however. The brain too was examined, weighed, bagged and placed to one side.

  And then, as meticulously as she had taken the body apart, Dr Catherall put it back together again. The segment of skull was replaced, the flap of skin covering the face was eased back into its original location and stitched to stop it coming loose, and the chest cavity was stitched back with thick, heavy strokes, leaving the corpse looking as if it had a Y-shaped zip running up its front. And then, while Dan washed it again, Dr Catherall dictated her final notes.

  ‘So what can you tell me?’ Lapslie asked as Dr Catherall wearily pulled her rubber gloves off and dropped them into a bin marked Waste.

  ‘I can tell you that she was young and fit, that she smoked occasionally, that she was not a virgin and that she had never had a baby, although she had been through several abortions.’

  ‘We could have got that from the pages of Hello magazine. What else?’

  Dr Catherall glanced over at the body on the table. ‘Was she a celebrity of some kind?’ she asked, puzzled.

  ‘Of some kind, yes.’

  ‘Hmm. I do not watch television, or read the more celebrity-obsessed newspapers.’

  ‘Signs of drug abuse?’ Emma asked.

  ‘No signs of intravenous introduction of drugs, ruling out heroin, and her nasal cavity is in good condition so I can say with some certainty that she has not been sniffing cocaine either, at least not for any length of time. I will send blood samples off for testing.’

  Emma nodded. ‘Any sign of rape or other sexual interference?’

  ‘There is no obvious trauma. I will send samples of her vaginal fluids off for testing as well. There may be some traces of semen, or lubricant from a condom.’

  ‘Make sure we get a DNA sample from the boyfriend,’ Lapslie said to Emma. ‘We’ll need to screen him out.’ Turning back to Jane, he asked: ‘The mutilation that was committed on her arm – was it done while she was still alive or finished after she died?’

  ‘She died while it was being committed,’ Jane told him.

  Lapslie took a moment to consider the information. ‘So what killed her? The shock?’

  ‘Yes. That and the loss of blood. If you want me to be truly accurate then I would say that she died due to a lack of oxygen to the brain, but then almost every death that occurs in the world is ultimately due to a lack of oxygen to the brain. It can either happen quickly, when the heart stops for some reason, or slowly, as when a developing tumour gradually chokes off the blood supply, but it all comes down to oxygen starvation in the end.’

  ‘However …’

  ‘However, in layman’s terms the sheer agony of the mutilation caused her heart to fibrillate.’

  ‘She had a heart attack?’ Emma asked.

  ‘That’s what I will be putting on the death certificate.’

  Lapslie grimaced. ‘And could that have been predicted by the person who mutilated her?’

  Dr Catherall smiled mirthlessly. ‘Her death was not unintentional, if that is what you are getting at. Whoever did this to her would have known that if the shock didn’t kill her then blood loss would, and if blood loss didn’t kill her then whatever infection got into her bloodstream would have. She could not have lived long like that. Nor would she have wanted to.’

  Lapslie walked over to the body and stared down at it, trying to make sense of what had been done. Now that the body had been washed and the blood splatter coating the limbs laved away the injuries were starker, more like something from a medical textbook. Dr Catherall had removed the tight bands that had closed off the arm above the elbow and below the wrist, and the flesh had plumped out again to the point that Lapslie could draw, in his mind, two smooth lines to close up the missing skin and muscle and tendon. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked. ‘You know more about bodies and the way they are constructed than anyone else I know. Why would anybody do this?’

  Jane took a few small, precise steps across to join him. ‘My initial reaction was that someone was practising their anatomy skills,’ she said, sighing. ‘But there’s no mystery about the way the muscles are laid out in the arm, and separating them out is hardly something that requires a great deal of skill. Any competent butcher could do it. If someone had taken the immense risk of immobilising a living specimen, they would surely want more of a challenge – getting into the chest cavity, for instance, or the skull. And why keep the person alive while you are doing it? The noise and the agonised thrashing around just makes it much more difficult. No, we have to assume that having her aware of what was being done was a necessary part of the process, which just brings us back to the same point – why?’

  ‘Torture, perhaps?’

  Dr Catherall pursed her lips dismissively. ‘If I wanted to torture someone,’ she said, ‘then I wouldn’t do it this way. Bones don’t have any nerves; not on the outside, anyway, although there are nerves within the marrow, along with blood vessels. There are parts of the body that have a much higher concentration of nerve endings than the forearm. I would probably start with the soles of the feet and work my way up. The genitalia would be next, of course, and then the inside of the mouth and nose—’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lapslie said rapidly. ‘That’s very clear. Remind me never to make you angry.’

  ‘My knowledge is entirely theoretical,’ she giggled unexpectedly. ‘You should have no worries about me becoming a rogue pathologist, stalking my prey through the shadowy streets of the city.’

  ‘That’s … reassuring.’ He paused for a moment, thinking.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can tell us anything about the tools that were used or the technique that the killer displayed?’ Emma asked from behind them.

  Dr Catherall laughed lightly. ‘You are hoping that I will say “The killer used a number five surgical scalpel, and displayed a great deal of medical knowledge”, aren’t you?’

  ‘A girl can hope.’

  ‘This isn’t the Jack the Ripper investigation, Detective Sergeant Bradbury. No, whoever did this could have used any small knife, from a common kitchen knife to the kind a fisherman uses to gut and descale a fish. There are no defined marks on the bones, apart from some indeterminate scratches. I am afraid you will not be able to classify your killer thanks to some unusual weapon. And cutting through skin and muscle tissue until you find the bone and then scraping it away takes no more skill than de-boning a chicken carcass.’

  ‘Make sure Sean Burrows and the CSIs check the knives in the kitchen,’ Lapslie said to Emma. ‘T
here’s always the chance the murderer used whatever was at the scene to commit the crime with. Same goes for those plastic ties – they might be from the garden or a toolbox. And let’s see if we have a budget to call a profiler in. Find out for me who the current favourite is within the department – I think we’re going to need an expert view on the psychology of the killer. This murder has all the hallmarks of something very simple and domestic, with the exception of the way it was done, and that worries me.’

  ‘There is one thing that occurs to me,’ Dr Catherall said tentatively.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The meticulous way that the mutilation was done, associated with the way it has been almost presented to us, makes me think of an artist working on a canvas. Is it possible that whoever did this regarded it as a work of art?’

  ‘But why keep her alive while he was doing it?’ Emma asked.

  Dr Catherall gazed up at Lapslie, her eyes filled with something dark and sad. ‘Because every artist needs an audience,’ she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The darkness outside the house was something oppressive, palpable. It seemed to press against the walls and windows like some rough beast trying to infiltrate its shadowy claws through any cracks. The sounds of the wind gusting against the exposed sides of the house were the sounds of the beast moving, adjusting its position, trying to get a better grip on Carl’s home and find a different way in, testing the strength of the walls, wondering if it was strong enough to just tighten its hold and break the house into fragments and let the darkness spill in everywhere, victorious.

  Carl Whittley sat hunched up on the sofa of his darkened living room, listening to the beast outside. In his mind the beast was as black as tar, and its skin was rough and covered in warts. In his mind the beast’s skin erupted in blisters, and each blister was an eye, the pupil slotted like a goat’s. He knew he was being foolish, that he was ascribing sentience and purpose to something as natural as rain and sun, but he couldn’t help himself. The beast was out there, and it wanted him.

  Sometimes he feared that he was going mad. He worried that the loneliness was gradually etching away at his sanity like rain washing away the mortar between the bricks of his mind, leaving the whole edifice unsteady and ready to topple. It was the darkness that did it; in the daylight he could push the fears to one side but at night they clustered in, crowding him and making him jump at the slightest sound.

  In the bedroom above, he could hear his father shifting position. The colostomy bag made sleeping on his side awkward, but when he slept on his back he started snoring and kept waking himself up. As far as Carl could tell, his father hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for years. That was the trigger that had driven his mother away: first to a separate bedroom, and then to a separate house. And all Carl had to lure her back with was guilt, and the promise of a family dinner.

  After testing his bomb in the wilds of the Essex salt marshes, Carl had driven into the nearest town to stock up on food and bottled water. No alcohol and no dairy or wheat products. They all aggravated his father’s condition, and it wouldn’t be fair of Carl to buy those things and then keep them to himself. No, he had promised himself years ago that whatever his father ate, he would eat. He didn’t want his father to feel as if he was being treated as anything special.

  Standing in the checkout queue, waiting for the stupid woman ahead of him to separate her shopping into various plastic bags – one for frozen items, another for fruit, a third for cans and dry goods – and then delve around in her handbag for her debit card and then again for her loyalty card, Carl began to feel a prickling on the back of his neck. Someone was watching him. He turned his head, slowly, taking in the people in the queues to either side of him. Nobody was looking in his direction, but they seemed poised, edgy, as if they’d only just turned away as his gaze scanned across them. He tried looking down and then back again quickly, trying to catch them out, but they were too quick for him. He glanced behind him, at the people in his own queue. One or two of them were looking at him and frowning. He glared back and they lowered their gaze, flushing.

  He felt like calling them out, asking them why they were watching him, following him, but he knew they would deny everything and pretend they were just there to do their shopping. It wouldn’t do any good, and they knew he was on to them now, which meant they would be doubly careful in future. He would just have to make sure he was even more watchful.

  There was a travel agent’s concession in the supermarket; an area just past the checkouts where a woman sat at a desk surrounded by brochures and posters showing blue skies and white beaches. While waiting for the incompetent checkout girl to find the barcodes on his items, Carl had found himself mesmerised by the posters. What chance did he have to take a holiday with his father the way he was? If he was out of the house for more than an hour his father would complain loudly and bitterly about what might have happened.

  And there was the woman at the desk; crisp white blouse and navy blue jacket, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her fingers were thin, he noticed, the nails lacquered in blue, and she wasn’t wearing a ring.

  After he had paid, he walked over and pretended to be interested in one of the brochures.

  ‘Thinking of a holiday?’ she asked brightly.

  He smiled back. ‘I could do with one right now,’ he said.

  ‘We have some good last-minute deals on at the moment. What kind of thing were you looking for? Complete rest on a Caribbean beach, cultural excursions to historical sites in Europe or all-out adventure holiday in Asia?’

  ‘I’m flattered you think I’m capable of an all-out adventure holiday.’ He grinned to take the cheesiness out of the words.

  Unconsciously her gaze flickered up and down his body, taking in the flat stomach that he took so much pride in and the way his T-shirt exposed his muscular arms, then frowning slightly when she saw the leather driving gloves he was wearing. He felt himself blush. ‘I don’t think you’d have any problems surviving,’ she said after a moment, smiling slightly and brushing the hair from her forehead. ‘Paragliding? Snorkelling perhaps? I think I’ve got a caving expedition in Borneo in here somewhere, although you’d need extra insurance for that one, and you probably need some previous experience of caving as well.’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was thinking more of a relaxing break. Suitcase full of books, iced coconut milk and lots of sun cream, followed by long dinners and cocktails as the sun goes down.’

  She seemed to shiver slightly, and straightened up in her swivel chair. ‘I’m sure we can find something like that. Holiday for two, is it? Or are you on your own?’ Her gaze was challenging.

  He was so caught up in the dream that he almost went along with it, but somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear his father’s voice, asking what he thought he was doing. He sighed, and closed his eyes for a long moment. ‘Actually, I’m looking after my father. He’s … unable to do anything for himself. I’d need something that I could take him on as well.’

  She retreated abruptly behind a transparent sheet of professionalism. ‘Well,’ she said primly, ‘we don’t do many holidays for invalids and their carers. It’s not really our core business. I’m sure you could find something on the internet, if you tried.’ She wouldn’t even meet his gaze. He could feel the disappointment and the contempt she felt for him, bitter and corrosive. He wanted to slap her, but he knew it wouldn’t change anything. What was he thinking, anyway? It wasn’t as if he could ask her out, take her for dinner, spend evenings and even nights with her, not when he had to go home and make sure that his father was safe, and that his colostomy bag didn’t need changing. He was tied to home by invisible chains. Dragged down by the stone.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ he said, and left.

  In the car, on the way home, Carl had noticed that his arms and cheeks were itching. It got so bad that he pulled the car over and parked in a lay-by, then checked his face carefully in the mirror. His first thought wa
s that he’d been bitten by insects out in the salt marshes, but there were no raised red areas. He slipped his gloves off. The skin from the backs of his hands to his elbows was blotchy, red and hot to the touch. The illness that was affecting his fingers was starting to spread up his arms now. He made a note to go and see his doctor again. The man would lie to him – that’s what doctors did – but Carl could force him to prescribe something.

  He had started the car and driven back home, wondering all the time what was happening. It hadn’t been this bad before. Maybe it was a reaction to the chemicals in the Semtex. Or perhaps this wasn’t just a relapse, but a worsening of the symptoms. It could be a chemical reaction to something in the house – washing powder perhaps, or a cleaning product, or the disinfectants he had to use when he was helping to empty his father’s colostomy bag.

  In the house, Carl pulled himself into a smaller bundle on the sofa, feeling the burn on his arms where the rash was still throbbing. He knew that he should be planning his next move, deciding where to put the bomb that he would build, but he couldn’t find the energy. Inertia pressed his back into the sofa. Moving required too much effort.

  The bomb led him back to the TV presenter, and before that to the taxi driver, and before that … His mind drifted backwards, over the various murders that he had committed, back to the first one at a Countryside Alliance demonstration. He’d not planned it – the murder had been a spur of the moment action, violence created by the energy and aggression of the riot going on around him. Carl had never forgotten that energy. The screaming, the crack of the guns as the police released their plastic bullets into the crowd, the smell of the boy who’d set himself alight with the petrol bomb. The sheer exhilarating sense of unleashing the violence that bubbled within him, of letting himself go, of finding an expression for the anger that gnawed at him, and nobody noticing.