Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘With me,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘things that I hear get translated into tastes in my mouth. It’s not everything, but most things I come across in everyday life cause me to have a reaction of some kind. Lorries are flavoured like asparagus. A fountain or a shower taste of cauliflower.’

  ‘Both of them vegetables,’ Jane observed.

  ‘Badly chosen examples. My mobile phone makes me taste coffee when it rings. And, before you ask, your voice tastes of brandy and soda.’

  ‘There are worse things,’ she said, smiling. ‘You must have been asked that question so many times before.’

  ‘I have, but don’t let that stop you asking anything you want. I realise it’s an interesting subject for anyone who doesn’t suffer from it.’

  ‘What does your voice taste of?’ she asked.

  Lapslie found himself frowning. Nobody had ever asked him that before. In fact, he’d never even thought about it before. ‘I don’t think it tastes of anything,’ he said slowly, savouring the words as they came out and finding them lacking any flavour.

  ‘That’s instructive. What about your parents?’

  ‘I don’t remember. They died when I was quite young.’

  ‘Have you always been synaesthetic?’

  ‘No – it seemed to develop when I was a teenager, in a mild form, and it suddenly deteriorated about seven years ago. It’s been stable since then, but over the past few days it’s suddenly got a lot worse, to the point where it’s stopping me from carrying out my investigations properly.’ Now that he had started speaking, he couldn’t seem to stop. The words came spilling out of him. ‘And I think I’m beginning to hallucinate. I keep hearing drums. Loud drums.’

  She frowned. ‘But this is happening in reverse, surely? You are hearing a noise which is not there, implying that it is being triggered by something else. Does that happen?’

  ‘Occasionally,’ he admitted. ‘There are one or two tastes or smells that cause the synaesthesia to go into reverse. Seafood that’s going off makes me hear high-pitched violins, for some reason. And when I first entered this mortuary, a year or so ago, the smell of the bodies and the bleach made me hear church bells.’

  Jane nodded. ‘And is that what’s happening now? You’re smelling something, and it’s causing you to hear the sound of drums?’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose, but what is it?’

  ‘You said you had heard the sound before. When was that?’

  Lapslie considered for a moment. ‘The first time was in Catherine Charnaud’s house in Chigwell; the second time was on a roof used by the bomber in Braintree.’

  ‘And the cases are not connected?’

  ‘We have no evidence that they are.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Jane said, ‘and you usually do, I would suggest that there is a connection between the murders. They each have a certain smell about them that only you can pick up, and I don’t mean the smell of death. Somehow, I believe you are smelling the murderer.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Water trickled down the inside of Carl Whittley’s collar, cold and irritating against the skin of his neck but growing into a warmer tickle as it made its way round his collar bone and across his chest. He ignored it as best he could. Intermittent rain was hitting the waterproof groundsheet above his head like fingers impatiently tapping a table, and despite his best attempts to string the sheet between two bushes so that it kept him dry, whilst allowing folds and channels for the water to drain away safely, some of it was collecting underneath and hanging in bulbous, quivering drops before falling onto him.

  The only good thing about the fact that the sun wasn’t shining was that the rash on his arms and hands had subsided. The itching was barely noticeable now, and he was grateful. He’d been slathering it with his father’s chlorhexidine antiseptic talc, just in case it was an infection of some kind, but it hadn’t helped. He really needed to make another appointment at his local surgery. He’d been putting it off for weeks, if not months, but things were starting to slide out of control.

  Time passed slowly when you were watching a fixed spot and waiting for a bird to fly back to its nest or an animal to emerge from its burrow, the seconds trickling past like drops of water and puddling into minutes, hours, days. Lying there between the groundsheets, feeling the dampness beneath his stomach and the trickles of water investigating his body like fingers, Carl shifted position slightly and reached out his hand to pat the rifle beside him reassuringly. It was an old Lee Enfield; light and still fully functional despite the number of years since it had been made. He had stripped it down, oiled all the components and put it back together again that morning, gaining immense satisfaction from the way that each part fitted perfectly against the others. He’d bought it from a man he’d met through the Essex Hunt, when he was younger and used to attend the meets.

  The rifle had been buried near the estate, like the Semtex and the detonators, but not with them. There were caches of equipment all around the salt marshes, and Carl carried with him a mental map of where everything was, just in case he needed it.

  The rain shouldn’t affect the rifle; the film of oil that covered it should protect it against damp, and as long as he kept the barrel pointed slightly downwards then water wouldn’t trickle inside. He would strip it down and clean it again when he had finished with it, but for the moment he trusted it.

  A movement out in the salt marshes attracted his attention. It was midday, and the weak sunlight filtering through the clouds cast no discernible shadows, making everything appear flat and slightly unreal. A bush moved slightly, although there was little breeze, and a head poked out. Short, reddish muzzle with white patches, little eyes that looked black from that distance and pointed ears that twitched from side to side, targeting slight disturbances. A fox; barely more than a cub. Probably female, judging from the shape of the muzzle. It was alert, hesitant, aware that something was amiss but unsure what it was.

  Carl slid the rifle closer to his body and used his right arm to bring it up in front of him. The stock fitted perfectly into the curve of his shoulder. He slid his forefinger around the trigger and moved his head slightly to one side so he could see through the sights on top.

  The fox trotted a few more steps out into the open. Its fur was a rich reddish-brown. It raised its head, scenting the air, and something seemed to spook it. Carl had taken pains to make sure he was downwind, but the fox could sense that he was there, somewhere.

  He centred the sights on the fox’s neck, just below the ears and on a level with the eyes. A shot there would sever the fox’s spinal cord, killing it instantly. If it had been a stag he would probably have gone for a chest shot – larger animals like stags moved their heads more than they moved their bodies, and there was always the chance that a shot might miss because the target shifted position suddenly – but the fox was standing stock still and Carl was at the wrong angle to get the heart.

  He squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked against his shoulder, pulling smoothly backwards rather than kicking up. He absorbed the impact, hearing the deafening crack of the bullet as it broke the sound barrier. Smoke momentarily drifted across the sight, obscuring the fox, but when it cleared he saw the fox’s body collapse gracelessly to the wet earth, its neck gashed open and head lolling forward. A spray of blood was caught in the air, drifting like smoke.

  The fox lay still. Beads of blood caught on the blades of grass around it, carmine on green.

  Silence rolled across the salt marshes like the antithesis of thunder. Birds fell silent. Even the rain seemed to cease, waiting. Then, after a few moments, the birds started to sing again; first one and then, gradually, more and more.

  Carl waited for twenty minutes before emerging from his hide.

  While he lay there, he replayed the details of the fox’s death in his head. The bullet had struck exactly where he had been aiming. The sight appeared to be perfectly aligned with the barrel of the rifle. He had zeroed it years before, when he used to dr
eam about hunting and rehearse all the actions, but he had been worried that the time in the ground had caused it to drift as the metal expanded in summer and contracted in winter. Fortunately, the soil had acted as an insulating blanket. He would fire a few more shots at different ranges, just to check, but it looked as if the bullets would still go where he wanted them to.

  Eventually, when he was sure that nobody was coming to investigate, he slid out from between the groundsheets. Water that had pooled in the hollow of his spine suddenly spilled down his buttocks; warm, like blood. He stood, muscles and joints complaining at the sudden movement, and stretched, easing the kinks in his body. The gentle breeze was beautifully cool on his forehead and on his damp scalp. He looked around, checking that there was nobody else within sight. Shots were not uncommon on the Essex marshes – farmers hunting rabbits or shooting at birds – but a man with a rifle was unusual.

  The cold and the wet meant that there were no insects around, and the fox’s body was lying undisturbed. Crows would eventually pick at it, badgers and foxes and polecats would tear at it, but the cold would hold back the decay. It was too wrecked for him to take home and use in one of his dioramas. Too mutilated.

  After torture and mutilation, and then a bomb, not to mention all the ones that had gone before, Carl had decided to try something more traditional for his next victim. The thought had come to him the night before, lying in bed, wide awake, gently masturbating, excited by the fact that his mother would finally be investigating one of his crimes. He was going to shoot someone. He was going to do it at long range, using the rifle, but to distinguish it from the bomb on the station platform, which was arguably a similar form of long-range murder, he had decided that he was going to shoot someone in their own living room. He would probably choose a block of flats rather than a house, and fire from an unoccupied flat in another, nearby block. Finding the location to shoot from was going to be protracted, if not actually difficult – he would have to conduct surveillance of a likely block of flats that was one of a pair, or a group, and look for windows that were not lit up for several nights on end, then compare their addresses with the register of voters to ensure that they were actually unoccupied rather than just the homes of people who were on holiday – but once he had located a good candidate, facing another block, he would be able to break in easily as long as the doors were not actually boarded up. Then he could take his time, scanning the windows opposite with his sniper scope until he found someone to kill. Someone old, he had decided. Or very young. Most of his victims so far had been between twenty and fifty, although he had done the best he could to ring the changes on social standing, sex and appearance. The rule was that no two murders could share any characteristic in common, save for the fact that someone was dead who had been alive, and that death had been violent and unexpected. So – perhaps a child, shot in their bedroom by the glow of a nightlight as they stared in wonder out at the world below. Hit in the throat so that they choked on their own blood as they died, parents running into the room and trying to make sense of the carnage; the broken glass, the gore and the thrashing limbs. And Carl could watch it all from the safety of his firing position, secure in the knowledge that he was safe until the police arrived, and even then it would take them hours to work out where the shot had come from.

  It would be like looking into a glass-fronted display case, where stuffed animals acted out a private tragedy for his sole benefit.

  Something moved in his peripheral vision. He turned his head gradually, trying not to make any sudden movements that might alert someone to his presence, always assuming they hadn’t already seen him.

  A hiker was making their way across the open ground of the salt marshes. Carl couldn’t tell whether it was male or female – the figure was too far away – but it was wearing a bulky waterproof parka in a violent lime green, jeans, a black rucksack and a thermal hat. The boots that the figure was wearing were good, ankle-protecting hiking boots rather than the trainers that he saw some people walking across the salt marshes in. The figure was heading at an angle to where Carl stood, and wasn’t looking in his direction. If they had heard the shot, they had just put it down to farmers.

  Without thinking, Carl cocked the rifle and brought it up to his shoulder, settling the butt comfortably into the curve of his collarbone. His left hand supported the stock, the cross-hatching rough under his fingers. His right hand curled around the grip, his right forefinger sliding naturally inside the trigger guard and around the cold metal of the trigger. He gazed through the sights at the hiker, brought so close by the magnification that he could see the North Face logo on the jacket and the Kangol logo on the thermal hat.

  The hiker was a man in his early thirties, Carl judged. He had fair hair, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His eyes were green. Unaware that he was being watched, he reached up and picked at his nose as he walked. He gazed around at the landscape of the Essex salt marshes and smiled in simple pleasure. Carl could see the glistening of a light sweat on his forehead.

  The notch of the sights was centred on the bridge of his nose. As he walked, Carl moved the rifle to track him.

  He had no idea that Carl was watching him. He had no idea that Carl could just move his right forefinger a few millimetres and send a bullet spinning towards him at 1500 metres per second. He wouldn’t even hear the shot before the bullet entered his skull and tumbled end over end through his brain tissue, scrambling everything in its path in an expanding cone of destruction before exiting through the back of his head in a fist-sized hole and a cloud of vaporised blood and bone.

  He could do it. He could kill him now, add another body to his growing list, another case for his mother to potentially get called in to investigate. He felt his finger twitch as contradictory messages were sent to it – shoot, don’t shoot. Shoot, don’t shoot.

  Carl abruptly relaxed the pressure on the trigger. He was the wrong age, and his eyes were the wrong colour. Carl had already killed a man in his early thirties with green eyes. It had been a few years ago, but he distinctly remembered. Carl had been sitting behind him in a cinema in Ilford, watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and while the man had been concentrating on the scene where the sea monster was pulling the pirate ship beneath the waves Carl had slid a thin knife into the junction of his spine and his skull. He had died instantly, jerking in his seat and fouling himself as his body shut down. Carl had left the cinema quickly, before the smell of faeces drifted too far and people complained.

  He couldn’t kill another thirty-year-old with green eyes. It would break the rules, and the rules were the only thing keeping him going. Blue eyes he could have accepted. The same for brown, as long as their owner wasn’t Asian, because he had once strangled an Asian man with brown eyes. Green, however, was out of bounds now.

  Reluctantly he let the rifle drop. In the distance the hiker carried on, oblivious to the fact that his life had been spared thanks to a genetic quirk.

  The blood on the fox was congealing in the cold. He debated briefly whether he should dispose of it himself, but decided in the end that the local wildlife would do it for him. He rewrapped the rifle and then detached the elasticated cords from the bushes and rolled up the groundsheets. Within ten minutes there was no sign that he had been there at all; no sign except, of course, for the rapidly stiffening corpse of a fox and the shell casing lying in the mud.

  As he trudged back to the house, his mind ranged over the people that he had killed. He had notched up quite a tally, to the extent that he was running out of variations. The thought depressed him and filled him with a vague sense of panic. He couldn’t stop now – the game wasn’t over yet. His mother had only just started playing the game, and was a long way from admitting defeat. The long range rifle shot he had been saving up, but 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 apart from what little he had been able to glean from watching th
em for a few hours or a few days. Ten people who had not caused him any pain or inconvenienced him in any way. Ten people who differed from each other in almost every way – height, weight, sex, age, social class and sexual preference.

  His route took him away from the direction of the Creeksea estate and towards where he had buried the rifle previously. Part of him, the lazy part, wanted to keep it in the house until he needed it, but the other part of him, the part that would go to almost infinite pains to assure his own safety, told him that having a rifle in the house was inviting trouble. Best to bury it again, even if he dug it up two days later.

  As he placed the rifle back in its hole and scooped the disturbed earth back over it, then covered the earth with moss and bracken, he considered when he should kill his next victim. Serial killers, if you believed the television programmes and films, either killed at fixed intervals – every twenty-third of November, for instance, or on a full moon – or with increasing frequency as their obsessions got a tighter and tighter grip of them. That seemed to be mostly how they got caught – they were predictable. From the start, Carl had striven to be unpredictable, not only in his choice of victim but also in when he killed them. The longest he had gone between murders was almost a year; the shortest – between the torture of the TV presenter and the blowing up of the commuter – was two days. In between were gaps of weeks and months. No pattern, therefore no predictability. The trouble was that the more people he killed, the more there was that he couldn’t repeat. He might, at some stage, even be forced to go for two or three years between killings.

  It would be just like lying still in a hide and watching some animal. He would cope.

  After the next murder, he decided, he was going to have to be more creative. Poison was still an option. Perhaps he could run somebody down with a car – not his own car, obviously, but one that he would have to steal. Maybe he could push a victim under a train, or from the top of a building. After that he might have to relax the rules a little bit – rather than just killing one person in their thirties and then moving on, he could actually narrow it down to years and assume that a 32-year-old who was knifed counted separately from a 33-year-old. The thought made him uneasy, as if he was nearing a line that should not be crossed, but he couldn’t see any other way around it. Not if he wanted to keep going, and he did. He really did.