Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  It was the same sound he’d heard when he was in Catherine Charnaud’s bedroom, looking down on her dead, flensed body.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘That drumming sound?’

  Emma looked around. ‘I can’t hear anything apart from traffic, and the sound of a station manager having a coronary nearby.’

  ‘Is someone playing a radio?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not that I can tell.’

  ‘Wind in the power cables, perhaps?’

  ‘Not that I can hear.’

  Lapslie straightened up and brushed his hands down his trousers to remove the moss and the dust. What the hell was happening to him? As if the overreaction to noise wasn’t enough, was he hallucinating now? Was his mind, unable to cope with the bizarre input it was getting, beginning to snap under the strain of the cross-wiring of his senses?

  He had to talk to someone. Perhaps he could get an urgent appointment with his consultant. There had to be something he could do, some drug he could take, that would allow him to function properly as a police officer. If he had to retire early on medical grounds, or was even forced out, then all that remained for him was a barren expanse of future time in which he would be condemned to stand quietly in the centre of his cottage, not moving, not doing anything, until he went mad.

  He would rather die.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said finally. ‘Let Burrows know to get his team up here. I need a full forensic sweep.’

  ‘No chance of getting fingerprints,’ Emma said dubiously, looking at the wall.

  ‘Unlikely, but there might be traces of something else. Tobacco, maybe, or saliva if they spat something out. Worth a go.’

  After a few minutes, during which Emma used her BlackBerry to call the CSI team, Lapslie led the way back to the door where the security guard waited for them. As he moved away from the edge of the roof, the drumming sound seemed to fade away, until it was lost in the whistling of the wind and the distant sound of cars on the main road.

  ‘Are there any other doors leading up here?’ he asked the guard.

  ‘This is the only one I know of,’ the guard said.

  Lapslie looked out across the car park. Poles with lamps on top were spaced around on a regular basis, but every fourth one appeared to have a security camera attached to it. ‘Get copies of the security tapes,’ he said to Emma. ‘The angles are probably wrong – they’re looking down rather than up – but we might get lucky and catch the bomber silhouetted against the sky. Or even parking a car and walking across, although I suspect they’re too careful for that. They would have parked some distance away, and probably avoided the security cameras as they walked across.’

  Back at the station, Lapslie noticed that the body had been removed.

  ‘Has the pathologist taken the body back to the mortuary?’ he called to Sean Burrows, who was examining something in the area between the platforms.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Small lady. Looks like there’s something wrong with her spine. Dr Catherall.’

  He opened his mouth to say something, but his phone beeped chocolate at him. He glanced at the screen. There was a text message waiting for him. He accessed it, and noticed that it was coincidentally from Jane Catherall.

  I would be grateful if you could come to the mortuary, it said. I have more information on the Catherine Charnaud case.

  ‘We’re going to the mortuary,’ he said to Emma. ‘Something’s come up. Follow me.’

  Walking over to his car, Lapslie noticed that a double-decker bus had pulled up, engine still running and pumping out a mixture of diesel fumes and delicate lavender flavour, next to the station. Harassed commuters were climbing on board. The Station Manager was standing nearby, fielding angry comments. He didn’t look happy. Lapslie didn’t know what he was worried about. The task of looking after a station when everything was running fine must have been tedious in the extreme; he should have been pleased that he had a crisis to deal with.

  Lapslie got into his car and pulled out of the station car park, priming the satnav with the postcode of the mortuary located on the outskirts of Braintree. The crunch of his tyres on gravel as he pulled away sent a cinnamon wave crashing across his tongue – complex, bitter and yet dry at the same time. Not for the first time he wondered, as he guided the car out towards the motorway, how tastes worked. Was it like colours, where any shade of paint could be made by combining red, blue and yellow? He had read somewhere that the taste buds on the tongue could only recognise five flavours – salt, sweet, bitter, sour and the mysterious umami, which normally got translated from the original Japanese as ‘savoury’. Could you really create any taste, from cinnamon through petrol to blue cheese, using just those five flavours? And did that explain how his synaesthesia worked – particular frequencies mapping onto particular building blocks of flavour so that any combination of sounds would create a matching mixture of tastes? Surely there must be more to it than that? But it did indicate that simple sounds – a single vibrating string perhaps, like a violin playing middle C – should relate directly to a simple taste, like pure salt, or pure sugar, while a multilayered sound – tyres crunching on gravel – would be a more complex combination. He couldn’t say that he’d noticed the connection, but it was a theory. He made a mental note to mention it to the consultant at the hospital the next time he had an appointment. Perhaps they could conduct some experiments. It wasn’t as if they were going to come up with a cure any time soon.

  He reached Chelmsford with Emma only seconds behind in her Audi. He had sensed her holding back all the way on the drive over, reluctant to overtake her boss.

  He pressed the buzzer on the front door and waited for Dr Catherall’s assistant to let them in. The smell that wafted out of the building was the familiar combination of industrial strength cleaners and rotting flesh. He tried to tell himself that it was just salt, sweet, sour, bitter and savoury mixed together, nothing that should affect him, but he still found himself breathing through his mouth and imagining the foetid vapours coating his throat and his lungs like a thick scum.

  He pushed through the swing doors that led into the post mortem room, feeling as if he was actively pushing them against the smell, Emma right behind him. Dr Catherall was bent over the corpse of Alec Wildish, examining the burned front of his skull with a magnifying glass. There was a smell of cooked meat in the air.

  ‘Dr Catherall,’ he said, his mouth watering in a way that made him feel sick.

  She glanced sideways at him. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie, and so soon after the last time we met.’

  He indicated the body on the table. ‘So, what can you tell me?’

  ‘I was just making my preliminary inspection when you arrived. As you will remember, I try never to speculate about the cause of death before I have solid evidence; however, in this case I would be surprised if it was anything but exsanguination and vascular shock due to a series of penetrating wounds, made almost certainly by fragments from the device and from the waste bin in which it was hidden entering the body.’

  ‘Make sure all the fragments go to the CSIs. Sean Burrows might be able to reconstruct the bomb. But that wasn’t why you texted me, was it?’

  ‘Actually,’ Dr Catherall said, ‘there is something else I wanted to show you. Please – follow me.’

  She led Lapslie and Emma out of the post mortem room through a rear door, and along a corridor that he had never been in before. The room at the end was cold enough for Lapslie’s breath to gust in front of his face, and the far wall was occupied by row upon row of metal-fronted drawers about a metre square, their faces battered and scratched through years of use.

  ‘This is the long-term storage area,’ Jane said. ‘It’s refrigerated to a lower temperature than the transient holding area – about four degrees centigrade. We can keep bodies here for months, if necessary.’ She indicated a drawer on the second level up, at about ey
e-height. Lapslie’s eye-height. ‘Would you be so kind as to pull that open for me?’ she asked. ‘I am afraid my upper body strength is barely enough to open my front door in the morning.’

  Lapslie reached out and took hold of the handle. The metal was cold against his skin. He pulled, and the drawer slid out on metal runners. He had been bracing himself for some kind of squealing or squeaking of metal against metal, provoking who knew what reaction in his taste buds, but the slides had been oiled and were noiseless. As quiet as the grave.

  Inside, lying on bare metal, was the body of Catherine Charnaud.

  Her skin was mottled with a blue-green discoloration, and her muscles had slackened to the point where her skin looked as if it was gradually sliding off her bones. Lapslie could see the sharp angles and hard curves of her skull beneath her flaccid face.

  ‘What have you found?’ he asked, trying not to look at the wreck of her forearm in the shadows within the drawer.

  ‘Look here,’ Jane said, leaning over the body and indicating the right shoulder with a thin, elegant hand. ‘I found it when I was re-examining the body this morning.’

  Lapslie followed the line of her finger. There, in the skin of the shoulder, just in the curve of the neck, were two small pinholes.

  ‘Do you always re-examine your bodies?’ Emma asked, curious.

  ‘I do. There are certain signs that only appear several days after death, such as deep internal bruises caused shortly before the time of death, and minor marks that need some shrinkage of the skin and some relaxation of the musculature before they become evident.’

  ‘So what am I looking at here?’ Lapslie inquired. ‘The bite of a midget vampire?’

  ‘Nothing so abstruse. No, I believe these marks were caused by a stun gun. There are indications of small subcutaneous burns in the area, consistent with an electrical current having been applied.’

  ‘A stun gun? Like a police taser?’ Emma was frowning. ‘There was no record of her having been subdued by police at any time in her life, let alone recently.’

  ‘Indeed, but it was not a police taser. As you know, they fire small needles attached to wires. The needles penetrate the skin, through the clothing, and an electrical current flows down them, resulting in a tetanising effect on the victim. Their muscles immediately clench tight and they fall to the ground, paralysed. Judging by the size of the marks here, and the spacing between them, I would estimate that she came in contact with a small, hand-held stun gun. A self-defence weapon. They are freely available in America, I believe. Apparently you can even buy them in larger supermarkets.’

  Lapslie rubbed a hand across his chin. ‘That would explain how she came to be immobilised,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There were no marks of violence on her body, other than the obvious mutilation of the arm. I’d wondered how her assailant managed to subdue her and tie her to the bed.’

  ‘Does it help find her killer?’ Jane asked.

  ‘It’s a new lead,’ Lapslie replied. ‘And we’re very short of new leads.’ He glanced at Emma. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘We were thinking that someone strong and well-built, almost certainly a man, was responsible for her torture and death,’ she replied. ‘The use of a stun gun suggests someone smaller, someone who couldn’t rely on their own muscles to subdue her. On the other hand, if stun guns are that easily available then we might have problems in tracking down an individual sale.’

  ‘If it helps, I can measure the distance between the barbs. That might help narrow down the make and model that was used.’

  ‘At this point in the investigation,’ Lapslie said, ‘I’ll take anything I can get. Thanks, Jane.’

  ‘Make sure you tidy up after yourselves,’ Jane said over her shoulder as she walked off. ‘Don’t forget – perishable goods!’

  Lapslie turned to Emma. ‘How are we doing with the investigation.’

  Emma shrugged. ‘It’s currently stalled like an old Austin Metro in a puddle,’ she admitted. ‘You heard the interview with the boyfriend?’

  ‘Yeah – I was listening to it when you came to pick me up.’

  ‘His alibi checks out, and I didn’t pick up anything in his attitude that made me wonder. He’s obviously as thick as pig shit, but equally obviously he felt something for her as close to love as his Neanderthal mind could manage. Oh, and he did confirm that she’d not got any tattoos, which means we still have no real explanation for the flesh being removed from the arm.’

  ‘Okay. Check on his alibi in more detail. I want to know if his friends might have any reason to lie for him. Maybe he’s supporting them financially or something. I’m not convinced he’s innocent. What about the security cameras around the house?’

  ‘They were connected up to a home computer system with a humungous hard disc. They must have got someone in to set it up; I can’t see either the victim or loverboy having the technical nous to do it. Sean Burrows took the hard disc away for analysis, but the video for the past two days has been wiped and he can’t get it back.’

  Lapslie considered for a moment. ‘Would it take a lot of expertise to wipe the files?’

  ‘Nah.’ Emma shook her head. ‘Just click on a few files and say “OK” when it asks if you’re sure. One day, the world is going to end like that.’

  Lapslie let his mind wander across the other parallel aspects of the investigation. ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘Hers, loverboy’s, the cleaner’s, and that was it. The last time the cleaner did a thorough scrub was Monday, and it looks like nobody unexpected has been in the house since then.’

  ‘We’ve ruled the cleaner out, have we? Please tell me we’ve ruled the cleaner out.’

  Emma laughed. ‘Next best thing to the butler doing it, you mean? Yeah, she was at home with her husband and her unfeasibly large family. Eight kids. And all she can do for a living is go out and clean someone else’s house. Weird.’

  The skin on Emma’s arms was turning to goose-flesh, and Lapslie could feel the chill seeping into his bones too. ‘Okay,’ he said with finality. ‘It looks like we’re stymied unless this stun gun lead takes us further forward. Are there any other lines of enquiry we’re following?’

  ‘The usual,’ Emma replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest to ward off the cold. ‘I’ve got guys going through her fan mail and her emails, but there’s nothing there obviously weirder than celebrities normally get. No death threats. People seemed to genuinely like her. And we did check on whether she’d been involved in any contentious reports or investigations, but the riskiest one we could find was a voice-over she did for a documentary on growth hormone abuse by athletes in the run-up to the Olympics. And if someone was going to take exception to that, they’d have gone for the reporter or the director first, not the voice-over artist.’

  ‘Mobile phone?’

  ‘All of the calls have explanations.’ She frowned. ‘Apart from one. She called a garage in Chingford shortly after she got home. They were closed, but the call seemed to go on for a minute or so.’

  ‘Get her car checked over for problems. And make sure there was nobody working late at the garage – maybe she’s got a bit of rough on the side, and she was arranging an assignation when her boyfriend arrived home unexpectedly and overheard.’

  She frowned. ‘It’s a stretch, boss.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s the only theory we have at the moment. You’ve checked her bank records?’

  ‘Yes. Apart from the fact that she was being paid an obscene amount of money for having make-up slapped all over her and reading off an autocue every night, nothing. No strange payments to drug dealers or blackmailers. She did have a direct debit to Save The Children every month, which made me feel slightly better towards her. Then again, she could afford it.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lapslie sighed. ‘Keep the team working on it, but it looks like we’re going to need a miracle to progress this case along.’ He exerted himself, and slid the metal tray containing Catherine Charnaud’s body back into the wall. �
�You and I might as well apply ourselves to this bombing for a while, if that’s what Rouse wants. You head back to Chelmsford; I’m going to hang around here for a while.’

  Emma eyed him curiously. ‘Some other lead you’re not telling me about?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s just quiet here. Very, very quiet.’

  ‘That’s because they’re all dead, apart from Dr Catherall and Dan.’

  ‘I don’t care what the reason is – I just appreciate the peace.’

  Once Emma had gone, Lapslie wandered back to where Jane Catherall was working on Alex Wildish’s blasted body.

  ‘This may seem like a stupid question,’ he said, ‘but do you have any spare office space around here?’

  Jane looked over at him, head on one side like a sparrow. ‘We have a couple of empty rooms with desks,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  Lapslie sighed. He always felt awkward, having to explain his neurological condition to people, although he suspected that Jane would be more understanding than most. ‘I’m having some … problems … that mean I need somewhere quiet to work,’ he said. ‘This mortuary is one of the most peaceful places I’ve found. I’d like to use it as a refuge, if I may.’

  ‘Problems as in medical problems?’

  He sighed. ‘It’s called synaesthesia—’ he began.

  ‘Ah, the rare case where cross-wiring in the brain means that inputs from one sense can trigger responses in another sense,’ she said, straightening up from the corpse.

  Lapslie was taken aback. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

  ‘It’s a fascinating illustration of how the brain works,’ she replied. ‘I have read several articles in neurology magazines concerning the things synaesthesia can teach us about the way we interpret the vast flood of data that enters the brain every moment. Tell me, Mark – what form does your synaesthesia take? The most common, I believe, is where sounds give rise to the sensation of colour, although one of the more interesting ones I have come across is the man who can actually feel tastes on his skin. Chicken, apparently, is spiky, while wine is spherical and cold.’