A knock on the door heralded the arrival of Seiju, the PR girl.
‘Time to go,’ she said brightly. ‘Ready?’
‘No,’ he replied quietly. ‘Does it matter?’
He strode out and down the corridor, psyching himself up for the confrontation with the press. On the way through the lobby he could see through the glass of the front doors to where they were silently congregating. They were already jostling for position, growling like a pack of dogs trying to get to a single bowl of food.
He pushed the door open at a fast trot. It was like emerging from the hermetically sealed calm of an airport terminal into a howling gale. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. He felt as if he was choking on a torrent of blood. The coppery warmth filled his mouth, his throat, his sinuses. He wanted to gag, but dared not. Not in front of everyone.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming,’ he said as he moved to the top of the steps. Journalists opened their mouths all around the crowd, ignoring what he said, ready to ask the first question that popped into their heads, but Lapslie pushed on, not giving them time to get anything out, overriding the nausea that wrenched at his stomach. He placed his hands behind his back, holding the statement folder, so that nobody would see the paper shaking. Sweat broke out across his forehead, but he couldn’t wipe it away. That would just draw attention to it. ‘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 took a quick breath while he was bringing the folder up and opening it, doubling the cover back so that he could hold it easily in one hand. Seiju had printed the words in a large, clear font so that he could read it without squinting. The words came automatically, passing straight from his eyes to his mouth without engaging his brain. He tried to make them sound at least partially spontaneous as he spoke.
He paused fractionally after a few sentences, eyes scanning the text, before continuing with the next paragraph. His shirt was sticky against his armpits, and he hoped to God that the sweat stains weren’t blooming through the material of his suit. He swallowed back on the blood that he could taste and yet not feel in his mouth.
As he finished the written statement Lapslie looked around, trying to hold his hands steady. Although most of the journalists present were recording what he said by various means, some of them were still taking written notes.
Seiju stepped forward, ready to act as Master of Ceremonies for the question session, but one of the journalists at the front of the pack got in first, asking a question about suspects.
Lapslie replied with something anodyne and non-committal. He could hear the waver in his voice. Was it obvious? Could anyone else hear it?
Another voice called out from the back asking where the victim died. As if that was important. Lapslie gave a short, factual answer, trying to keep the anger and the pain out of his voice. Jesus, he couldn’t take too much more of this.
A man in the front of the pack asked a semi-intelligent question about threat levels and the public. From his suit, and the way he had managed to maintain his position, Lapslie guessed he was from the BBC. Lapslie told him that the explosion was being treated as an isolated incident, trying to keep to short sentences so that his voice wouldn’t trail off. His stomach kept rebelling against the tight control he was exerting. He desperately wanted a glass of water.
Someone towards the back – possibly the person who had yelled the question about where the victim had died – called out another question, but Lapslie’s attention was distracted by a sound. It had been going on for some time, just below the level of his conscious attention, but something about it was clamouring for him to notice it; a drumming, like a rapid heartbeat, or someone slapping their hands against the metal of a car roof. There was something primal about it, something that shook Lapslie to his very core. It was so loud that he expected the ground to be shaking. Why wasn’t anyone turning to see where it was coming from? They were asking questions, mouths flapping like fish, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. All he could hear were the drums.
And then he couldn’t even hear the drums, as he mercifully slipped into unconsciousness and crumpled onto the steps of Chelmsford police station.
CHAPTER TEN
Carl woke up stifling a scream, the back of his hand pressed against his mouth. Light from the streetlamps outside reflected off pools of rainwater on the pavements and in the gutters, stippling his ceiling with inconstant light.
In the bedroom next door his father snorted, then turned over in bed and started snoring.
He only remembered flashes of the dream. Animals, all dry and dusty, their eye sockets empty black voids, scurrying towards him over the bedspread; pinning his arms and legs, winding wire around them and twisting him into a painful pose, then watching from the edges of the room as he struggled against the wire and the blood trickled from the wounds where its sharp ends cut into his flesh.
Eventually he got up and made himself some breakfast: two slices of toast with a thin scraping of margarine and some peanut butter. It was still early, but he poured out a bowl of cereal for his father and put the kettle on, ready for a cup of tea.
He hadn’t got much of an appetite any more. He ate to keep his strength up, but he didn’t enjoy eating, and he could hardly taste the food. It was fuel, nothing more. He knew why. Back when his mother and father had been together, before the accident, he had sometimes sneaked a look at his mother’s textbooks and the forensic reports she had brought home to read, and the things he had seen there had put him off food for days at a time. They still made his stomach churn when they unexpectedly surfaced in his mind like a rotten log in a stagnant pond. He still remembered the photographs of a man who had committed suicide by sticking a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. His head looked like it had split open at the top and the sides pushed apart like a smashed melon. His eyes had burst under the pressure of the shot and deflated, leaking fluid onto his cheeks. That image had haunted him through a whole year of school. There had been times at parties, when he was tanked up on alcohol and slow-dancing with a girl, that his mind suddenly flashed to those photographs and he had to run outside and throw up. And there were the photos of various Iraqi suicide bombers. His mother had consulted for the Ministry of Defence on profiling them, and some of the images she had been sent had showed what had happened to them during the explosions. One, he remembered, had been of a man’s head and shoulders, blackened skin split like a jigsaw puzzle to reveal raw red flesh beneath, detached from the rest of his body, one arm hanging loose, the other ripped at the joint. That one had haunted him for months.
Or perhaps it was the disease that was causing his lack of hunger, the blisters on his hands and the frequent desire to empty his bladder. He needed to make an appointment with the doctor’s surgery. They opened at eight o’clock; he could ring them in less than an hour.
To waste some time until his father was awake or he could make the phone call, Carl turned the TV on. Unless his father was downstairs, the Freeview box was permanently set to BBC News 24. Carl had little time for the endless round of medical dramas, vacuous celebrity interviews and programmes in which ordinary people either found some expensive antique in their attics or at a boot sale and then had to pretend not to care about how much it was valued at. The only thing Carl was interested in was fact, and he was hoping that the broadcasts today would have something to say about the bomb at the railway station, as well as the continuing coverage of the stalled investigation into the murder of Catherine Charnaud.
It gave Carl a sense of power to know that he, and only he, knew that those two events were linked.
After the inevitable pieces about the Prime Minister dealing with terrorism, which just seemed to cycle around, day after day, the newsreader mentioned the bomb explosion. Carl’s ears pricked up.
‘Adam Till is at the Essex Police Headquarters in Chelmsford now. Adam, what’s happening?’
The picture changed to a young man wearing a suit with a padded coat over the top. He was standing in front of a 1970s-style building that continued up out of the frame. People with cameras were milling around between him and the building. He was holding a microphone and staring out of the screen. There was a momentary pause before he responded.
‘Dominic, I’m here in Chelmsford, where the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector, Mark Lapslie, yesterday gave a press conference about the explosion. The police are not giving much away at the moment, but the strong message is that they do not think that this is part of a terrorist campaign. Instead, they are working on the theory that this is an isolated incident. DCI Lapslie was unexpectedly taken ill during the press conference, which had to be cut short. Police sources say that he has been admitted to hospital for tests. Nobody has yet said who is heading up the investigation in his absence.’
The reporter was replaced by a recorded shot of the policeman answering questions yesterday. The camera had been off to one side of where Carl had been standing, and had captured perfectly the moment when Lapslie had collapsed to the ground, but as he did so Carl found himself watching the woman standing behind him. Her hair was dark and cut close to her scalp; she wore a silk blouse in a golden orange colour and a black tailored jacket. She had a small golden stud in one ear.
Carl found himself increasingly fixated by the policewoman. Her eyes, her hair, the way she carried herself … A thought suddenly struck him, and it was as if there was electricity suddenly playing across his skin from the nape of his neck to the tips of his fingers.
What if he killed her? What if he actually killed one of the police team investigating the crime he had previously committed?
That would be different, he thought, his heart racing and sweat breaking out across his forehead. That would be very different.
There had to be something new, something different about the murder he wanted to commit next, and having the victim linked to a previous crime would be perfect. The police would be frantically assuming that the policewoman had been shot because she was involved with this investigation, whereas it would in fact be a complete coincidence. Carl wouldn’t just be deliberately not setting a pattern; he would be setting a fake pattern.
Carl leaned back in the sofa, studying his prey with concentrated intensity. He would still go for a long-range head shot using the rifle, but now he had a target he could start to reconnoitre the best locations. He could shoot the woman through a window of her house or flat, for instance, assuming that there was a clear few hundred yards and a place from where he could take the shot without being disturbed. Or even better, could he shoot the woman through the window of her office, wherever that was, or as she left the police headquarters?
And what about the policeman – Mark Lapslie? Did Carl want him to be there when his assistant was gunned down? Did Carl want to watch him cradle her lifeless body in his arms?
He shivered. How perfect would that be?
The first thing to do would be to find out the woman’s name, where she lived and what her habits were. That would then lead to a location and a plan. And then there was the question of when. Carl always varied the time between killings so that there was no discernible pattern, and the last two had been very close together. Should he leave a decent amount of time before he shot the police woman, or would that actually be setting a pattern in itself?
He decided to leave it up to chance. The next number he saw, that would be the number of days before he killed the policewoman.
Turning off the TV, he called the doctor’s surgery and was lucky enough to get an appointment later that morning. He took his father’s breakfast up and, before he would let his father eat, he checked the colostomy bag. Rather than a strap-on type, it was attached to his father’s skin with a small circle of wax and a sticky paste. The bag was less than half full; Carl had changed it the night before, and it looked as if he could wait a few hours before changing it again. It wasn’t something he looked forward to.
‘Dad,’ he said, after checking the bag, ‘I’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s. I’ll be gone for an hour or so. When I come back, I’ll make your lunch. Are you okay for books? Do you want me to pick something else up from the library for you?’
Nicholas Whittley shook his head. ‘I think I’ll watch TV for a while,’ he said in his thin, reedy voice. ‘Could you pick up a newspaper for me?’
‘No problem.’
After washing up the breakfast bowls and cutlery, he set off for the surgery. He only had to wait a few minutes before his name appeared on the LED sign. Carl Whittley – please see Dr Scotter in Room 5.
Room 5. He suddenly remembered that he was looking for a number. He’d probably seen all kinds of numbers on road signs and car number plates on the way to the surgery, but this was the first one he’d actually noticed.
Five. Five days until he killed the policewoman. So be it.
Dr Scotter was a blonde woman in her twenties. Carl had never seen her before.
‘So, Mr Whittley – what can I do for you?’ she asked. Her face was receptive, but detached. Politely professional.
He pulled the gloves off his right hand, then off his left. The doctor leaned forward, eyebrows raised at the sight of the blistered flesh. ‘Do you know how this happened?’ she asked.
‘It’s happened before,’ he replied simply.
She turned her attention to the computer screen on her desk, scrolling through the text of his medical records. ‘Ah, yes. You’ve got quite a history with us. Porphyria is a pretty uncommon disease. I remember covering it at medical school, but I’ve never actually seen a patient present with it. And you think you’re having another attack?’
He shrugged. ‘It usually starts like this.’
‘Any other symptoms? Abdominal pain, for instance?’
He winced. ‘Not yet. I remember how bad it got last time.’
‘Any problems going to the toilet?’
‘You mean like constipation or diarrhoea? Nothing like that. I seem to need to urinate quite a bit, and it’s a different colour. Darker. That’s the first thing that made me realise there was a problem.’
‘Have you noticed any … mood changes?’
He shrugged. ‘Difficult to tell. I think I’m getting twitchier.’
‘Okay.’ She paused for a moment, thinking. ‘I’ll need you to leave a urine sample for testing, just so we can be sure. As you probably know, acute attacks of porphyria can be dangerous. If possible, I’d like to get you into hospital for a few days for monitoring. Just in case.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s my dad,’ he explained. ‘He’s got a long-term bowel condition. He’s been fitted with a colostomy bag. He really needs someone to look after him full time. I can’t spend more than a few hours away from home. Is there anything you can do that means I can stay at home?’
‘Is it just the two of you?’
He paused. Swallowed. ‘Mum moved out. She couldn’t cope.’
‘Hmm.’ Disapproval. Carl found himself bristling on his mother’s behalf, and forced himself to stay calm. ‘I could probably arrange for a carer to visit,’ Dr Scotter said. ‘I could even get a nurse to check on him once a day.’
Carl shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s going to work,’ he said. ‘Dad’s quite … needy. He gets nervous when there are people he doesn’t know looking after him. The colostomy bag is bad enough for family. Having strangers fiddling about with it … he’d do his nut. He really would.’
‘Is there no chance your mother might move back in for a while? Even just temporarily.’
He glanced away. ‘I’m working on it,’ he said quietly. ‘But it’ll take a while.’
‘Okay. In that case,’ she said, typing notes as she spoke, ‘we need to start treatment straight away. ‘I want you to change your diet to begin with. Increas
e the amount of carbohydrates that you eat – rice, potatoes, pasta … that kind of thing. If the symptoms keep presenting then try glucose drinks – anything carbonated, but obviously avoid the diet ones. I can give you a topical cream for the skin irritation, and I’ll prescribe a course of haematin. It’s not a complete cure, obviously, but it’s an iron-carrying molecule that can help reduce the severity of the symptoms and the length of the attack. Sometimes it can be affected by an individual’s metabolism, so if there’s no reduction in symptoms within a few days make another appointment with me and I’ll prescribe haem instead of haematin. If the one doesn’t work then the other often does. Okay so far?’
‘I’m still with you.’
‘Good. There’s a chance that you might experience nausea, vomiting, anxiety, and restlessness, in which case I can prescribe phenothiazine for a short time. If you start suffering from insomnia then I can prescribe chloral hydrate or low doses of benzodiazepine, but not a barbiturate. That’ll just make things worse. Are you experiencing any of those symptoms yet?’
‘Not yet. Bad dreams, but that’s about all.’
‘Most people with porphyria never develop symptoms. In some people, however, certain factors such as drugs, hormones, or diet can precipitate symptoms, producing an attack.’
‘Drugs?’ he repeated. ‘I don’t … I mean, I’ve never …’
She smiled, and half raised a placating hand. ‘I don’t mean cannabis or cocaine or heroin,’ she said, ‘although they won’t help. I mean drugs in the wider sense: barbiturates I’ve mentioned already, anticonvulsants, and sulfonamide antibiotics for instance. Steroids can have the same effect, as can low-calorie and low-carbohydrate diets, large amounts of alcohol, or smoking. Stress is also a strong provoking factor, and with your father ill and your mother absent I imagine there’s a lot of stress in your life. Usually a combination of factors is involved. Sometimes we just don’t know what the causative factor is. There’s a lot we don’t know about porphyria.’ She glanced at his hands again, and frowned. ‘The odd thing is that skin sensitivity is usually a symptom of a different kind of porphyria than the one you have been diagnosed with. It’s unusual to have two different types of porphyria occurring at the same time, although it’s not impossible. Just very unlucky.’
Tooth and Claw Page 17
