Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘I take it the boyfriend’s not living here?’ Lapslie asked.

  Emma shook her head. ‘It’s apparently in her name, and we’re still processing the crime scene. He’s living with a friend at the moment.’

  Lapslie grimaced. ‘I still reckon him for this. If your profiler tells us that the killer is likely to be a young, muscular sportsman of low intelligence then I reckon we’ve wasted our money.’

  ‘You can find out for yourself,’ Emma rejoined, looking out of the door. ‘I think she’s arrived. I’ll go and make sure the room is clear.’

  Lapslie exited the house just as Eleanor Whittley was walking up to the porch. She was tall and elegant, in her mid-fifties, he estimated. Her grey hair was worn long, and her eyes were bright and clear.

  ‘I am Eleanor Whittley,’ she said before he could say anything. He tasted celery and pepper in her voice, and a tinge of juniper berries.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Lapslie extended his hand. ‘I’m DCI Lapslie.’

  Eleanor Whittley looked at Lapslie’s hand as if it was a previously unknown species of fish. ‘I never shake hands,’ she said. ‘I’m not being rude, just practical. It’s a fetishised custom dating back to the days when warriors extended their right hands to prove they were not holding weapons. It has no meaning these days.’ She frowned, as if remembering something. ‘You were responsible for the Madeline Poel case, weren’t you?’

  The name caught Lapslie by surprise. He’d not thought about Madeline Poel for a while. ‘Insofar as we didn’t know we had a case for some time, yes, I was.’

  ‘An interesting character, as far as I can tell from the reports I have read. A shame you let her die. I would have enjoyed finding out more about her and what caused the aberrant personality that you and others observed.’

  A spike of anger flashed across his mind. ‘I didn’t “let” her die.’

  ‘You failed to stop her, despite the fact that you knew she had a preparation of cyanide nearby.’ Eleanor gazed up at him with the kind of expression Lapslie had seen Jane Catherall use when looking at a particularly problematic corpse. ‘Did you want her to die? She had, after all, attempted to poison you, and had been responsible for at least eight deaths beforehand and probably more.’

  The flash of anger threatened to explode into a full-scale thunderstorm. ‘Nevertheless, it was my responsibility to arrest her, not kill her.’

  ‘The psychologist whose report was attached to the file wrote that she was a classic example of someone suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, but I disagree.’ Eleanor looked away, back towards her car. ‘It seems to me that the various personalities she exhibited were not alternative to one another, but sequential. She was not switching from identity to identity, but moving from one to the next, as if she was mentally fleeing from some traumatic event buried far in her past.’

  ‘I tend to agree,’ Lapslie said. He was beginning to feel some respect for Eleanor. She seemed to have nailed Madeline Poel’s complex psychology in a way that the police psychologists had failed to do. ‘From what little I could tell when I talked to her, and what evidence of her past activities I could dig up, she could still access memories from her previous identities. She not only knew who she was, but who she had been.’

  ‘Instructive. We will talk further about that.’ It was less of a request and more of an instruction. ‘Now I will need to start at the scene of the crime.’

  ‘What exactly are you looking for?’ Lapslie asked, trying to regain at least some control over the conversation.

  ‘My field of expertise is personality disorders.’ At Lapslie’s raised eyebrow she explained: ‘The phrase “personality disorders” is generally taken to mean psychological problems arising from personal dispositions, rather than a breakdown or discontinuity in psychological functioning.’

  Lapslie knew what she meant, but decided to push her a bit. ‘Can you develop that for me?’ he asked, using a phrase that a particular chief constable, now retired, had been well known for using when he wanted something explained.

  ‘I mean an underlying problem that has been present for some time, rather than a problem that has suddenly occurred.’

  ‘What kind of problems? Can you give me some examples that I might recognise?’

  ‘The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders entry on personality disorders – which I helped draft for the American Psychiatric Association, lists a number of different categories such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive, passive-aggressive, sadistic and self-defeating. These are all enduring patterns of perceiving, and relating to, the environment. Criminals falling into one of these categories will commit crimes with distinct “signatures”, and it is my job to recognise these signatures and tell you what kind of criminal you are looking for.’

  Eleanor seemed weighed down with the theory and rather light on putting it into practice. ‘Not sure how this is going to help,’ Lapslie murmured.

  ‘Let me try and make it more clear. The process of “profiling” draws on both physical and non-physical information. This includes the layout of the crime scene, the disposition of the victim, the presence or absence of significant items and evidence not just of what was done to the victim but also what the perpetrator did before and after the crime. The goal is for me to narrow your field of investigation down, the basic assumption being that the perpetrator’s behaviour at the crime scene reflects a consistency of personality which might enable them to be identified.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lapslie said. He’d tweaked her enough. ‘Let’s get up there and see what we can see.’

  Emma Bradbury was just emerging from the kitchen when Lapslie led Eleanor into the house. He introduced them. Emma, picking up perhaps on some subtle signal, didn’t try to shake hands.

  The bedroom was more or less the way Lapslie remembered it, minus Catherine Charnaud’s corpse, of course, which was still in storage at the mortuary and would remain so until the case was either complete or closed. Her blood had dried to a dark maroon colour, with a void of unstained material on the blue bedspread the exact width of her body. It looked to Lapslie strangely like an ancient map, with two continents bisected by an ocean. The smell in the room was mustier now than it had been, less metallic and more unpleasant, but the wall-wide window and the pillows and even the trainers under the chair were exactly the same.

  They all stood just inside the doorway; stationary and expectant, attention focused on the bed as though they were all waiting for a show to begin. Eleanor leaned forward slightly, head cocked to one side.

  ‘This is—’ Emma began.

  ‘Please!’ Eleanor held up a hand. ‘I prefer to start with no preconceptions.’ Closer to her now, Lapslie thought for a moment that her voice was tasting more and more of juniper berries, but he suddenly realised that she actually did smell of gin. She’d been drinking.

  She moved forward slowly, sweeping her head from side to side, taking in everything in the room.

  As she worked, Lapslie closed his eyes and listened. He could hear the rustling of Emma’s clothes as she moved. He could hear the distant snarl of traffic on the main road. He could hear birds chirping and singing to one another.

  And he could hear drums, very faintly, almost as if he was several miles away from a rock concert – the same drums he’d heard the last time he was there, when Catherine Charnaud’s body had been splayed across the bed. The kind of rock concert that Emma apparently went to, he thought, smiling.

  ‘You have comprehensive photographs of the scene as you found it?’ Eleanor asked, interrupting.

  ‘Of course,’ Lapslie replied, opening his eyes. ‘They’re all back at the incident room in Chelmsford.’

  ‘Why Chelmsford? Surely the investigation should have been run from Chigwell?’

  Lapslie shrugged. ‘Our Chief Superintendent wanted direct control over the case, given the high profile of the victim. And I think he
also wanted to send a message to the media that he was taking this seriously, not just letting the local coppers run with it.’

  ‘I’ll need to see the photographs. And the body, of course.’

  ‘I’ll arrange all that. Does anything strike you immediately?’

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘It’s too early to make a snap judgement. I take it the girl was restrained in some way?’

  ‘Plastic builders’ ties.’

  ‘And did the perpetrator bring these ties with them, or find them here?’

  ‘Here. They were in a kitchen drawer.’

  ‘And the weapon that was used to torture and kill her?’

  Emma frowned. ‘Torture? You’re sure it was torture? Isn’t that a … preconception?’

  Eleanor glanced at her superciliously. ‘It doesn’t take a forensic clinical psychologist to know that slicing a victim’s flesh off while they are still alive takes a lot more effort then when they are dead. There has to be a balancing gain to set against the loss of time and energy; the perpetrator has to be getting something from it, something psychological. This implies that they are enjoying themselves; gaining pleasure from the suffering they are inflicting. Torture, in short.’ She glanced back at the bed. ‘And the flesh from the arm – did you ever find it?’

  Lapslie shook his head. ‘No. The murderer … the perpetrator … must have taken it with them and either disposed of it or kept it as some kind of grisly trophy.’

  ‘Or eaten it,’ Eleanor murmured.

  ‘Eaten it?’

  ‘Anthropophagy is a reasonably common obsession with serial killers. In Kazakhstan they had Nikolai Dzhumagaliev; in America Jeffrey Dahmer; in France Issei Sagawa; in Germany Karl Denke … The list goes on.’

  ‘And Dennis Nilsen here in the UK,’ Emma murmured.

  ‘Not so,’ Eleanor disagreed. ‘Although Dennis Nilsen cut up and boiled his victims, he was doing so to dispose of the remains, not to eat. You see the difference? By the way, I presume your forensics experts checked the kitchen for signs of activity?’

  Lapslie looked questioningly at Emma. She nodded. ‘No dirty plates or cooking utensils, and no signs that anything had been washed up that night.’

  ‘The perpetrator might have eaten her raw, of course,’ Eleanor mused. ‘Like sushi. But why the arm? Cannibals usually start either on the buttocks if the victim is female or, if the victim is male, on the genitalia. There’s a marked sexual element to anthropophagy, and also a kind of trophy-taking. It’s a way of truly possessing your victim, of owning them for ever, in the most personal way possible.’ She frowned. ‘I believe I asked about the weapon that was used.’

  ‘A knife.’ Lapslie paused, feeling faintly sick. ‘A kitchen knife. It was never recovered.’

  ‘But it came from the kitchen,’ Eleanor said, her tone more one of explanation than question.

  ‘How did you know?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘Because of the builders’ ties,’ Eleanor explained. ‘The perpetrator found everything they needed here, in the house. That strongly implies that the murder was not premeditated, otherwise they would have prepared, brought their tools with them. A favourite knife, perhaps, or some rope that they had already purchased. With premeditated murders, the preparation is almost as important to the perpetrator as the actual event. They get sexual satisfaction from a ritualistic anticipation of what is to come. With unpremeditated murders the event occurs almost by accident, perhaps as an escalation of an argument, or an experimental sexual session gone wrong. Something unexpected happens and they suddenly find themselves carrying out a murder using whatever comes to hand, almost acting as voyeurs of themselves. They typically say afterwards that they don’t know what made them do it, although looking back at their lives and what they had done in the days and weeks prior to the event it is often possible to discern a pattern, pointing to what is to come; a pattern which they cannot themselves see.’

  ‘Unpremeditated,’ Emma said. ‘The escalation of an argument or an experimental sexual session gone wrong. Using whatever comes to hand.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Lapslie said. ‘The boyfriend. He comes home, he’s drunk, they get into a fight, and before he knows it he’s—’ He stopped, suddenly wordless. ‘Torturing her? Stripping the flesh from her arm? I still don’t buy it. Why the flesh? Why the arm?’

  ‘He’s the only suspect we have,’ Emma pointed out.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean he’s guilty,’ Lapslie rejoined. He turned to Eleanor. ‘What else can we do to help?’

  ‘There’s only so much I can do here,’ she said. ‘The next step would be to see the body and the crime scene photographs. Would it be possible to do that now?’

  Lapslie looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a press conference on another case in an hour,’ he said. ‘That’s in Chelmsford as well. Did you want to follow me there?’

  ‘My … driver … is waiting outside in his own car. I wouldn’t want to hold him up for too long. He needs to get back for … well, for other reasons. Could you give me a lift?’

  ‘Of course, and then I could get a police driver to drop you off at home afterwards. If that’s okay.’

  ‘That will be acceptable,’ she said, nodding. ‘I’ll tell him to go.’

  Lapslie turned to Emma Bradbury. ‘You take her,’ he said as Eleanor walked over to her car which, Lapslie noticed for the first time, had a driver inside. ‘I want her to know that she works for me, not the other way around.’

  On the drive to Chelmsford, Lapslie spent the time mulling over what he knew of the investigation so far, and of what he could say. Neither amounted to much. A man was dead, blown up at long range, and his killer was still at large. Various leads were being pursued. That was about as far as it went. The key, of course, was to sound positive and to try not to give the media anything they could use as the basis for panicky headlines or to lead with on the Ten O’Clock News. He’d held press conferences before, of course – it was almost impossible to rise to his rank without having some experience of dealing with the press or TV crews – but he never enjoyed the process the way that some of his contemporaries obviously did. Following a deliberately anodyne statement he always seemed to end up replying to every question with one of three standard phrases: ‘I’m afraid I can’t reveal that at the moment’, ‘We are pursuing all lines of enquiry’, and ‘We urge the public to come forward with any information’.

  As he drove past the front of the Chelmsford police station and round to the gated back entrance, Lapslie could see a crowd of journalists milling around the steps. A couple of TV cameras were in evidence: probably local news, although that would change as time went on and the focus of the country turned on Braintree – assuming he hadn’t caught the bomber by then. When he brought the car to a halt he stepped out, and was immediately accosted by an Asian woman in a nicely cut dark suit. From the corner of his eye he noticed Emma escorting Eleanor Whittley inside the building.

  ‘DCI Lapslie? I’m Seiju.’ Her voice sent slivers of butterscotch and beetroot sliding down Lapslie’s throat. He could feel his stomach beginning to rebel already. He started walking towards the back entrance to the station. The woman kept pace, step for step. ‘I’m the PR rep for this area.’ She handed him a thin folder. ‘Here’s the statement we’ve come up with for today. Please read through it a few times: it’ll make it sound more natural when you come to read it out. Make sure you make eye contact as much as you can. When you’ve finished reading the statement I’ll ask for questions. We’ve allowed enough time for four or five, then we’ll call a halt and say you have to get back to the investigation.’

  ‘Which I do,’ he said. No point getting annoyed. This was how policing was done these days, and, who knew, perhaps someone watching might actually come forward with some usable information. Miracles did happen.

  Emma came up beside them, having parked her car. ‘I’ve arranged to have an interview room freed up,’ she said, making meaningful eye contact with Lapslie
. ‘So you can read the statement in … peace and quiet.’

  He nodded at her, not able to bring himself to smile. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Room eight, ground floor.’

  ‘Do you have another suit?’ Seiju demanded. ‘No. Hmm. With make-up—’

  ‘No make-up,’ he snapped. ‘I’m a policeman, not a sodding newsreader.’

  He flicked through the folder’s contents as he walked through the station to the interview room, shedding Seiju and Emma as he went, trying to move at such a pace that he didn’t have time to register any noises. There was nothing that surprised him in the statement, and nothing that gave anything away. The position of the bomber was the only thing he was trying to keep within the investigation team at the moment, and it wasn’t referred to in the brief.

  In the interview room he sat quietly for a moment, door closed, thinking. Thinking about the way his synaesthesia had suddenly become a problem, rather than just an obstacle. And thinking of Sonia.

  They had been married for, what, twenty years, and separated now for three. There was still love there, he was sure of that, but they just couldn’t live together. His synaesthesia meant that he needed quiet, especially when he was at home. No radio, no TV, no CDs and no loud noises. The silence had almost driven Sonia to a nervous collapse, but the alternative was that the flood of cross-switched sensory impressions would have driven Lapslie the same way. And the arrival of the kids had just made things worse. Sonia had suggested that he wear earplugs around the house, and that had worked for a while, except that it cut him off from all the normal family activities. If anybody talked to him, he couldn’t hear them to answer, and if he asked anybody a question they told him to keep his voice down. He felt like an observer in his own life.

  In the end, the only thing worse than living without his family was living with them.

  ‘“Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start,”’ he quoted softly to himself. ‘“In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”’