After all, what else was he going to do with his time?
He felt a weight lift from his shoulders as the door of the house closed behind him. The house was his refuge, the hide from which he watched the world going by. He felt safe there.
His father was watching TV in the living room when Carl entered. He was even dressed, although his feet were still bare.
‘Dad? Are you all right?’
‘I felt like getting up. I don’t want to end up a complete invalid.’ His eyes were watery, defensive.
‘That’s fine. What about … your colostomy bag?’
‘I changed it myself. And cleaned everything.’
‘With antiseptic powder?’
Nicholas nodded. ‘With antiseptic powder. I’m not stupid.’
‘I know,’ Carl said gently. Reassuringly. ‘I know. Would you like some food? I’m going out later for a while, but we can have lunch together.’
Nicholas smiled. ‘I’d enjoy that. Where are you going?’
Carl hesitated. He didn’t want to tell his father that he was going to be driving his mother around. Nicholas still clung to the increasingly unlikely belief that Eleanor was going to come back to them, once she had got her work life into balance. Carl didn’t have the heart to tell him that it wasn’t going to happen. Not unless Carl’s plans worked out, and that could take a while.
‘Just to see some friends,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll have my mobile on. You can call me if there’s a problem. I’ll be back for dinner.’
‘Is it a girl?’ his father asked, eyes twinkling. ‘You could stay out later. Take her out for a meal.’
Carl felt his stomach clench. When would he ever get a chance to meet a girl, let alone go out with one? ‘It’s just some friends,’ he repeated, controlling the sudden flush of anger. ‘From the Hunt. We’re having a coffee. Nothing special.’
He prepared soup and some sandwiches, then left his father watching TV and got changed into something at least reasonably smart. Then he drove across to his mother’s house, in Maldon. It was an old house, probably dating back to Victorian times, if not earlier. Carl had never been inside. Eleanor had never invited him or Nicholas in. He wasn’t even sure if she shared it or lived alone. She kept her life shrouded.
She was waiting in the doorway as he pulled up in her driveway: a tall woman with a shock of grey hair, kept long and styled but never dyed. She had always hated pretence of any kind. She was wearing a loose jacket over a long, rather formal dress. No necklace, no earrings. No rings of any sort. The afternoon sun cast a roseate glow over her papery skin.
‘I expected you to be late,’ she said, opening the rear passenger door and sliding a large briefcase in, then following it. Anger sparked in Carl’s chest at the automatic assumption that he was a chauffeur and she was a passenger, rather than he her son and she his mother and both of them in the front seats, but he snuffed it out. He couldn’t alienate or irritate her tonight. He had to be there with her, at the scene.
‘I said I’d be here at three o’clock, and I am,’ he replied quietly. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Drive to Chigwell. I will direct you when we get there.’
Chigwell. A small, dark bud of pleasure began to unfold in Carl’s chest. Chigwell, where he had tortured and murdered Catherine Charnaud. Back to the scene of the crime!
The thought kept him warm all the way through the journey, just about compensating for the fact that his mother didn’t exchange another word with him. Instead, she pulled a set of folders out of her case and sat reading them while he drove.
Although Carl knew the way, he made sure that he waited until his mother indicated right or left without saying anything as they entered Chigwell. Soon they were pulling into the road where he remembered parking his car. This car. A momentary chill ran up his back, and he shivered. Would anyone remember it? The licence plates were different, but the colour and the shape were the same. Had anyone been looking out of their window that night?
Goose-pimples rose up on his forearms, and he could feel sweat trickling down his ribs from the warmth of his armpits. This was the moment he’d been dreaming of for years, and now it was here he didn’t know what to do, how to react.
‘Just keep quiet,’ his mother said suddenly. ‘Leave all the talking to me.’
Quelling his sudden panic, Carl pulled the car up to the gate of the house. A crowd of journalists jostled forward to see who was in the car, then subsided when they saw that it was nobody special.
‘Eleanor Whittley,’ Carl’s mother said to the policeman on duty. ‘I am expected.’
The constable consulted a clipboard, then nodded. ‘DCI Lapslie is waiting for you,’ he said wearily. ‘Park in front of the house. I’ll notify him you’re here.’
Gravel crunched beneath the tyres of the car as the gate closed behind them. The house looked less imposing by daylight; the cornices and the portico obviously mass-produced plaster.
‘Stay here until I come back, Carl.’
‘But—’ Carl hesitated. He wanted to see the bedroom again. He wanted to see the blood. ‘You might need someone to carry your case. Or take notes.’
‘I’ll manage.’ Eleanor pushed the car door open and got out.
The front door opened and a man emerged.
‘DCI Lapslie,’ the man said, walking towards the car. His voice was attenuated by the car window. He was tall, and thinner than Carl would have expected. The skin around his eyes looked creased, as though he spent a lot of time wincing.
Eleanor and Lapslie moved out of earshot, closer to the house. Carl strained to hear them, but in vain. Lapslie seemed to be growing irritated, and after a few minutes he led the way back into the house.
Carl sat there for just under an hour, watching the house and remembering what had happened inside. Eventually Eleanor emerged from the porticoed door and crossed to the car.
‘DCI Lapslie has offered to drive me into Chelmsford to see the crime scene photographs,’ she said. ‘He’s going to arrange a car for me later to get me home.’ She opened the rear passenger door and retrieved her case. ‘You can go now.’
‘Okay,’ he said meekly. He started the car and drove out of the gateway, then around the corner, where he parked. He wasn’t willing to go home just yet.
Ten minutes later, a black Saab and a red Audi left, one after the other. Catching sight of his mother’s face in the front seat of the Audi – the front seat, he noted with a twinge of boiling anger – he pulled out behind them and followed them out of Chingford at a discreet distance.
Knowing they were heading for Chelmsford, Carl overtook the cars once he knew which route they were taking, being careful not to exceed the speed limit by enough to make them pull him over, or report him to someone who would. He then waited in a lay-by on the outskirts of Chelmsford until they came by and followed them to an anonymous seventies building near the centre of town that he guessed must be the police station. He parked across the road and watched as they drove in the back, through an automatic barrier operated by a code that Lapslie typed in to a keypad on a pole.
Leaving his car, Carl crossed the road to the front of the police station. A gaggle of cameramen and reporters were standing in the car park outside the building, huddled together against the cold, chatting and drinking coffee from paper cups. They didn’t seem so much to be waiting for some breaking news story as just hanging around because nobody in the news room had told them where to go next. For a moment Carl considered joining them, pretending to be a reporter from a local radio station, but he quickly dismissed the idea. The chances were that most of the reporters knew one another – they probably turned up to the same press conferences and roped-off crime scenes – and he would stand out as a newcomer. And he didn’t know enough about the particular language that the reporters used – the slang, the specialised technical vocabulary – to carry it off. Instead he just tried to look like a bored onlooker, the kind of person who would join the edges of any crowd just to fi
nd out what was going on.
He was hoping to pick up some fragment of conversation about the two cases, about the progress the police might or might not have been making, but the cases were the last thing that any of the journalists seemed inclined to talk about. Football, girlfriends, gossip, politics … anything except what Carl wanted to hear.
He was just about to go home when a ripple of excitement ran through the crowd.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked a cameraman in a leather jacket standing in front of him.
‘Press conference,’ the man replied, hefting his camera onto his shoulder like a rocket launcher. ‘’Bout bloody time too. I’ve been freezing my bollocks off here all day.’
A few minutes later, DCI Lapslie appeared through the doors of the police station. He stopped on top of the steps. Behind him was a woman. Carl looked anxiously for his mother, but she was absent. Perhaps Lapslie had already arranged for a car to take her home.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming,’ Lapslie said in a loud, commanding voice that brooked no interruption. ‘I will read out a short statement, and then there will be time for questions afterwards. Please appreciate that we have an ongoing investigation, and every minute I spend briefing you is a minute I am not spending with my team of officers sifting through the evidence.’ He paused momentarily, then continued against a background of clicking cameras: ‘As you will know, a commuter was murdered on his way to work this morning. He died as a result of a deliberate explosion at Braintree Parkway station at approximately five-thirty a.m. The victim’s name … the victim’s name was Alec Wildish, and I can inform you that his family have been notified.’
Carl felt warmth spread through his body. It wasn’t the Charnaud murder, which his mother was now working on, but it was almost as good. It was the more recent killing, the one in Braintree.
Alec Wildish. At least he now had a name for his victim. He’d never killed an Alec before.
‘This is a traumatic time for them, of course,’ Lapslie continued, ‘and we ask you to leave them in peace whilst they come to terms with their loss.’
Carl craned his neck for a better look at the girl. She was watching Lapslie with a concerned expression on her face.
‘We have conducted a full forensic examination of the area,’ Lapslie went on, ‘and taken comprehensive statements from everyone who was present. We are pursuing several critical lines of enquiry, and we expect to have results in the near future. I have been asked to stress to you that we do not, at the moment, have any reason to believe that this tragic incident is related to either gang activity or terrorism.’ He seemed to Carl to be sweating more than he should. Perhaps he got nervous talking to the press. ‘Please understand that, were I to say any more, I might prejudice the progress of the ongoing inquiry. I ask you to respect that, and to phrase your questions accordingly.’
Another girl – an Asian girl with a clipboard – stepped forward from where she had been hidden behind Lapslie, but one of the journalists at the front of the pack called out: ‘Do you have any suspects?’
‘We are pursuing multiple lines of inquiry, and it would be inappropriate of me to go into details at the moment,’ Lapslie said.
‘Did the victim die at the scene, or at hospital?’ This from someone unshaven, in jeans and a checked shirt, beside Carl. He tried to shrink down so that he wouldn’t be noticed.
‘The victim died at the scene,’ Lapslie said firmly.
‘Are you warning the public to stay away from public transport?’ Another voice, more cultivated this time.
‘We are treating this explosion as an isolated incident. The rail networks have been asked to increase their security measures, but I would stress that we are not expecting this to be the first in a campaign of bombings directed against railway stations, or anywhere else.’
‘Does the fact that you’ve been assigned to this case mean that the Catherine Charnaud investigation is stalled?’
Carl tried to work out what the expression was on Lapslie’s face, to see whether there was any evidence, anything his mother could work with, but Lapslie was just looking as if he could hear something far off that nobody else could hear. His head was cocked to one side and he was frowning.
And then, without any warning, DCI Lapslie collapsed to his knees and pitched forward, onto his face, sprawled on the steps of Chelmsford police HQ.
CHAPTER NINE
When he had been first assigned to Essex Constabulary, Lapslie had done some quick research on the Internet to see what he was getting into. Although he could have checked a lot of the details within either his local library or the specialist information resource where he was then assigned, both courses of action would have meant he would have been sitting in a room for some time with other people, and no matter how quiet a library or an information resource is meant to be, there’s always something disturbing the peace – the turning of pages, the clicking of keys, the gentle snoring of someone who has fallen asleep while reading the newspaper – and that translated for Lapslie into an unwelcome taste in his mouth: a metallic tang that tainted every glass of water or can of Coca Cola that he tried to flush it away with. So he chose to do most of his research at home or in an empty office somewhere. Having first found out whatever he could about the constabulary at the top level (it covered about 3600 square kilometres of ground and around one and a half million people with fewer than three thousand officers from its base in Chelmsford), he then delved into the ten territorial divisions for which the Chief Constable was responsible. Braintree was one of them, but having typed ‘Braintree Police Station’ into the search engine he was surprised to see a photograph of an imposing, square building tiled in beautiful iridescent blue. The sign above the wide doors said ‘Braintree Police Department’, which was a little strange, but it took him a few minutes to work out that he was looking at the Police Department for the Town of Braintree in Massachusetts, USA, not Braintree in Essex. Needless to say, when he finally discovered a picture of the Braintree Police Station that he was looking for, and then finally saw it in the flesh, it left something to be desired compared with its American counterpart. Built in that peculiar 1970s style of architecture that seemed to major on layers, horizontal lines and terraces, it stuck out like a sore thumb in its location in the centre of town.
And now he was sitting again at a computer screen watching Braintree Police Station at work, although this time he was based in an otherwise bare office in Jane Catherall’s mortuary and he was watching the inside, not the outside, of the building.
Emma Bradbury had set up a temporary incident room to investigate the bombing at Braintree Parkway station where the various police officers and civilian support staff assigned to the case could work. Half the room was set up with desks, phones and computers, while the other half was kept clear for team briefings and for the various whiteboards, map boards and pinboards that would proliferate as the investigation widened. She had also managed to set up a videoconference facility, with a webcam sitting on one side of the incident room relaying everything it saw back to Lapslie in the mortuary, and a similar webcam sitting on top of the computer screen in front of him relaying his picture back to a screen in the incident room. Microphones at both ends relayed sounds back and forth, but, unlike real life, they came with mute buttons and volume controls.
Lapslie felt awkward, trying to run an investigation at one step removed, but he had no choice. If the background noise in a library caused him to experience a faint metallic tang then the sound of several officers making phone calls and talking to each other was like a continuous nose bleed. And that was before the recent and sudden escalation in his condition. Incident rooms tended to be noisy places at the best of times. It would do him and the investigation no good at all if he kept having to rush out of meetings to throw up. He could have worn the earphones that Emma had considerately provided, but what kind of message would that send? Leaders had to be engaged with the team; and if he sat there, isolated fro
m them all, they would begin to talk. Rumours about his condition would grow. No, best to let Emma be the visible head of the team while he sat back in the shadows.
A still, small voice in the back of Lapslie’s mind kept telling him that he was overreacting, but the racing of his heart and the trembling of his hands told him that he was just being sensible. He could feel a sheen of sweat cold against his forehead. He had to get this sorted. He couldn’t live the rest of his life like this, holding the world at arm’s length, spectating at his own job.
Over to one side of the incident room, Lapslie saw Emma in deep conversation with a uniformed constable. He pressed a button on his keyboard that caused a light to come on next to the computer screen in the incident room. Emma saw it, and he could tell from her body language that she was disengaging herself from the conversation.
‘Boss?’ she said, sitting down in front of her screen and camera. ‘Is this thing working okay?’ Stripped of many of its frequencies, her voice was still tinged with citrus but it was like a memory of a taste, rather than the real thing.
‘Seems to be. First thing: well done on securing the space there. It can’t have been easy.’
‘It wasn’t. I think DI Morritt had an eye on this office for himself. He’s squeezed into a corner next to the coffee machine at the moment. Every time I see him, he tells me to sort out something where he can shut the door and be alone. I’m thinking of having his desk moved into the goods lift.’
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