Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Story of my life,’ Carl said quietly.

  She typed more notes into the computer, and the printer by her side suddenly disgorged a sheet of paper. She passed it across. ‘Here’s the prescription for the haematin. If you’ve had it before you probably had injections, but there’s a new tablet form. It’s absorbed quickly through the gut and into the bloodstream. Take one in the morning and one in the evening.’

  ‘Can I ask a question?’ he said.

  ‘Of course. What is it?’

  ‘Porphyria. Is it likely to make me any more … aggressive? Violent?’

  She looked at him cautiously. ‘Are you feeling any of those symptoms?’

  ‘I mentioned I was feeling twitchy, earlier. I just wanted to check whether I could expect it to get worse.’

  ‘Okay.’ She seemed to relax slightly in her chair. ‘There can be neurological effects. Paranoia is one of them, and that can lead to the feeling that you’re being watched, or followed, or that people are talking about you. In some cases that can cause possible anxiety or argumentative behaviour. If you think you might be feeling like that, I can prescribe something: a sedative like benzodiazepine, or a beta-blocker like propranolol. If you’re feeling like that …’

  He shuddered, and tried to suppress the movement. Take sedatives? That was what she wanted him to do, obviously, but where would that leave him? Doped up to the eyebrows and unable to function. ‘Thanks, anyway,’ he said, ‘but I’m okay at the moment. If I start feeling strange then I’ll come back.’

  ‘Make another appointment a week from now,’ she said. ‘I want to check on how you’re doing.’

  After leaving his urine sample with the nurse, he stopped off at the receptionist’s hatch on the way out to make an appointment for the next week, and again at the pharmacy hatch to get his tablets. They were a rust-red colour, and there were thirty of them in the bottle. He swallowed one straight away, using saliva to wash it down.

  Back at the house he made lunch for his father, but he could feel the edginess bubbling away within him. He needed to get out, do something, start planning.

  He gave his father the newspaper and lunch, and checked the colostomy bag again. It was fuller than it had been that morning, but he could tell from the pressure that at least some of that was abdominal gas. He could afford to leave it for a few hours before emptying it.

  Half an hour later Carl was on his way to Chelmsford in his car, dressed in tracksuit bottoms, a hooded top and a light jacket, with the earbuds of an iPod in his ears. His mind was humming with possibilities as he drove. The thrill of the chase sent adrenalin pulsing along his blood vessels and made his scalp tingle.

  He parked in a side street in Chelmsford, just around the corner from the police HQ, the same one he’d been at the day before, and walked past the building to get a sense of it. There was still a gaggle of cameramen and reporters standing in the car park outside the building. Some of them might remember him from the day before, so he needed to find somewhere to observe from. Catching sight of a café across the road he went inside, found a table and ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of carrot cake. He could spin them out for half an hour or so before moving on and finding another location.

  After the café, Carl moved to a bench in a park within sight of the building, slumping himself down like a drunk or drug addict and pulling the hood of his top up to conceal his face. He watched as the gaggle of reporters waxed and waned as some of them left to follow up other leads and new ones joined. From the park he relocated to the second floor balcony of a block of flats that overlooked the police HQ – a possible vantage point for him to fire from, if he could break into an unoccupied flat and if the policewoman’s office was on this side of the HQ. He didn’t spend too long on the balcony; a stranger would quickly be spotted by the locals, and he would probably be tagged either as an undercover policeman – ironically – a dealer or a junkie looking for a fix. He just hung around for long enough that when he went back to the café it would look as if he had been off somewhere shopping and was now on his way back. He even popped into a petrol station near the park and bought some sandwiches and a bottle of water, more so that he would have an obvious bag of shopping when he went back to the café than because he actually needed to eat or drink.

  It was during his second stint in the café that he saw the policewoman emerge from the HQ.

  She was alone, which helped. Carl had half expected her to be with the senior policeman – Lapslie – assuming he’d been released from hospital, but she seemed to be on her way somewhere. Carl watched as she walked quickly to her car – a red Audi with customised plates. Carl memorised the number quickly, but all the woman did was retrieve a coat from the back seat and then lock up the car again before walking off. For a second Carl thought she was going back inside the HQ, but instead she set off on foot towards the centre of Chelmsford.

  Carl followed, hanging back so that he wouldn’t be seen.

  The woman seemed constitutionally unable to move at anything slower than a fast trot, and Carl got out of breath following. She led him past the entrance to a large Tesco’s and then down a side street. Carl hung back at the corner, letting her get further ahead, not wanting to have her turn around and see Carl isolated in the middle of an otherwise empty street. When she turned into a larger road at the end, Carl rushed to catch up.

  Coming into the larger road, which was lined with bars and places to eat, Carl saw her entering an Italian restaurant. He slowed down as he passed the window. Inside, she was approaching a table where a man was rising to greet her. He was tall, burly, with a leather jacket and a face that was hard-edged, grainy, looking like it had been carved into the bark of a tree. He wore a gold stud in his right earlobe. They hugged briefly, and he kissed her on the lips.

  They sat, and Carl had to make a sudden decision. There was nowhere nearby where he could watch them from, except inside the restaurant. Should he keep on going, and risk losing track of his victim, or enter the restaurant despite the possibility that he might be idly noticed and then spotted again later, somewhere else?

  Deciding quickly, he pushed open the door of the restaurant. Warm air laden with the sweet, smoky fumes of cooked garlic greeted him. Despite himself, he suddenly realised that he was hungry. He let a waitress guide him through the half-full room, where the tables were clustered tightly together, over to a small table partly hidden by a pillar. He sank gratefully into the chair.

  ‘Would you like to order a drink?’ the waitress asked, placing a menu on the table in front of him.

  ‘Just a still mineral water, please.’

  The waitress walked away and Carl made a big play of consulting the menu, whilst keeping an eye on his quarry over the top edge. The woman was talking to her brutal companion, resting her hand on top of his. He looked uncomfortable squeezed into the small chair, as if he was worried that it might come up with him, the arms trapped against his hips, when he stood up.

  The man said something and she shook her head. His face was turned away from Carl; his voice was so deep that he couldn’t hear the words and he couldn’t see his mouth to lip-read. He said it again, more insistently. Reluctantly she took her BlackBerry phone out of her handbag and pressed the ‘call’ button. After a few seconds, she said, ‘Hi, it’s Emma Bradbury …’

  Emma Bradbury! Exultant triumph waterfalled through his body. That was who his next victim would be in five days! Emma Bradbury!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lapslie woke abruptly from a blur of sensation where the colour green was smooth and glassy while blue yielded like marshmallow beneath his questing fingers, to find himself in bed, wearing a gown that didn’t fit him properly. It took him a few moments to remember that he wasn’t at home; he was in hospital.

  He sat up, pulling his arms from where they had been left under the covers, and looked around the room. It was larger than the one he’d first been assigned in the station house when he was a constable, all those years ago. And it had
an en suite bathroom, which his room in the station house hadn’t. There was space for two beds, but although the medical paraphernalia remained the other bed seemed to have been removed. Perhaps the occupant was currently undergoing surgery.

  He concentrated on the noises around him: the hushed conversations, the beep of monitoring equipment, the occasional clang of a dropped tray. Apart from a faint salty backwash in his mouth he couldn’t taste any of it. Perhaps it was the tranquillisers, or perhaps his senses had been temporarily overloaded by events, but he felt like he remembered feeling when he was a child, before the synaesthesia had begun to creep up on him. Normal.

  He leaned back against the pillows, letting the memories of what had happened come floating back like fragments of flotsam pushed by the tide onto the empty beach of his consciousness. He tried to recall the faces of the journalists at the press conference but they had all blurred together, as they always did, into a pack of eager-eyed, open-mouthed, voracious carrion-eaters; predators who would cluster around witnesses or investigators and tear off bleeding chunks of the truth, fighting each other for the choicest morsels. He couldn’t remember their features. All he could remember was himself, clutching at his head. Himself, falling unconscious to the floor.

  He felt a metallic tang in the back of his throat, but this time it wasn’t anything to do with what he was hearing. This was panic, raw and elemental.

  His career was effectively over. Rouse’s ploy had worked. There was no way he could think of that he could recover from this. His actions had brought the force into disrepute, not because he was taking drugs, accepting backhanders or seeing prostitutes but because he had shown weakness in front of the press. He could only imagine what the headlines were saying about him. What they were speculating. Rouse would have no option but to dismiss him on medical grounds. A lot of things could be hidden when you were a senior officer, many of them with the silent collaboration of your peers and superiors, but once they were out in the open there was nothing you could do. Your friends became strangely ambivalent, and those people who had previously been ambivalent were suddenly calling for your resignation.

  He emerged from his dark depression to find Emma Bradbury sitting by the side of his bed.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling wanly.

  ‘They kept me in overnight,’ he said, voice scratchy. He ran a hand over his chin and could feel stubble, like sandpaper beneath his fingers. ‘For observation, they said, although I don’t know what they were expecting to observe.’

  ‘They probably didn’t either,’ Emma said quietly. ‘Doctors are like policemen; if they haven’t got a likely suspect then they wait for more evidence to come in. Still, at least you’ve got your own room. And I’ve had your suit and shirt cleaned. They’re in the cupboard over there.’ She paused. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Embarrassed. And pleasantly tranquillised. They’ve got me on a mixed dose of sedatives and anti-stress medication; I can’t remember what.’

  ‘You told them about the synaesthesia?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, but I’m not sure it helped them much. They’re treating it like a mixture of hallucination and panic attack. They’ve had me hooked up to a heart monitor to check for anomalies, and they’ve done an MRI scan to look for brain tumours, but they haven’t found anything, which I guess is some kind of blessing.’ He paused, listening to the background noise of the hospital. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Is it as bad as I think it is?’

  Emma’s smile was indistinguishable from a grimace. ‘It could be better. You just fell down in front of everyone. It was chaos. Someone called an ambulance, but the journalists just stood around taking photographs and filming the whole thing while we waited for it to turn up. You’re on the front page of all the papers, and Newsnight had a piece about it as well.’

  ‘And everyone’s probably accusing me of being an alcoholic?’

  ‘Not yet, but the rumour mill has started up. Someone told the press about what happened at Braintree Parkway as well. I think it was Dain Morritt; he seems to have friends in the media that he schmoozes on a regular basis. The chief has issued a statement giving you his full support—’

  ‘God help me, I’m finished.’

  ‘— But the media’s split between using you as a clear example that all policemen are suffering from increasing levels of stress, and claiming that you’re a drink-sodden relic from the 1980s who’s unable to carry on with one high-profile investigation, let alone two.’

  ‘Apart from ruining my reputation, did the press conference have any other effect? Anybody’s mind loosened, any calls from witnesses who saw something we could use?’

  Emma shook her head. ‘The usual crank calls. There was one guy who swore blind that the bomb was planted by the Freemasons, but he apparently does this for all high-profile cases. He’s convinced that Michael Todd – the Chief Constable who died in mysterious circumstances in the Lake District a few years back – was secretly assassinated by the Freemasons. Dr David Kelly, that Government scientist, as well. Apparently the Freemasons are the root of all evil from Jack the Ripper onwards.’

  ‘And when we have a witness who says they saw someone running away from the scene of the crime with their left trouser leg rolled up then I’ll believe it. Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing from the security cameras in the car park, and we’ve not been able to trace the explosive back to a seller either. Nobody’s claimed responsibility, apart from the Scottish Liberation Front, but they claim responsibility for everything, just on the off-chance that someone might believe them. In any case, the lack of any credible claims of responsibility pretty much confirms the fact that it’s not any terrorist organisation behind it. I’m more and more of the opinion that we’re dealing with a one-off incident that wasn’t aimed at anyone or anything in particular. A gratuitous act of vandalism writ large, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t like,’ Lapslie growled. ‘I don’t like at all. People want there to be a reason for something like this. Rouse wants there to be a reason for something like this. What does it say about society if we accept that there are people just going around placing bombs at random for kicks?’

  ‘As opposed to throwing a paving slab off a motorway bridge and causing a driver to swerve into a crash barrier, leading to a twenty car pile-up? We’re already there, boss. Society is disintegrating around us.’

  ‘Okay.’ He sighed. ‘Thanks for that cheery thought. We’re pretty much at a dead end, then.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Give me some better news. What’s happening on the Catherine Charnaud murder case?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Is that “ah” as in “we have a lead!” or “ah” as in “there’s no progress in that case either”?’

  ‘It’s the latter. The forensic profiler, Eleanor Whittley, has been all through the evidence and the case files, and I believe she’s seeing the body down at the mortuary today. I’ve passed on the statement given by the boyfriend, Darren Barlow, and she’s going to give us an opinion on whether he meets her profile. Otherwise, we’re at a standstill.’

  ‘What about the boyfriend’s alibi? Have you managed to break it yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Emma sighed. ‘His teammates confirm that he was out drinking with them all night, but I think there’s some laddishness going on there. They aren’t going to grass him up.’

  ‘What about that phone call from her mobile to the garage in Chingford?’

  ‘Yeah; that’s still an oddity. I had the car checked over and there’s no damage that would require servicing. Some scratches to the paintwork, and the wheels needed realigning, but not the kind of thing you worry about at that time of night. I sent someone down to talk to the garage owner, but there’s no sign he’d ever talked to Catherine Charnaud or ever had anything to do with her.’

  ‘Do they have an answerphone? Did they record the message?’

  ‘No. They switch it off at night, he said, otherwise they’d get fifteen messages fr
om drivers requiring urgent attention, which they couldn’t do anything about, and half a dozen orders for an Indian takeaway.’

  ‘Dead end then?’ he said, feeling the medication turn what would otherwise have been a burning frustration into a mild irritation.

  ‘Dead end,’ Emma confirmed. She looked at him. ‘Unless you know something I don’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She was still scrutinising his expression. ‘When I phoned Dr Catherall to make an appointment for Eleanor Whittley to go down to the mortuary, she asked how you were. When I told her what had happened, she strongly suggested that I ask you about your synaesthesia. Her exact question was: “Ask Mark whether he thinks the murderer was at the press conference.” She wouldn’t say anything else – said you’d have to tell me. Am I missing something? I thought you just had another attack, like you did at Braintree Parkway station.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s more to it than that.’ He gazed back at her, evaluating her the way she had evaluated him. Things were bad enough already. If he told her the truth about what had happened, would he find it used against him one day?

  Whatever. Nobody could really predict the outcome of even the simplest set of events. The only proper way to live your life was to stick to a simple set of rules, and one of his was: ‘Tell the truth whenever you can.’ Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly cynical, he would add: ‘If for no other reason than it really confuses your enemies.’ ‘You remember in Catherine Charnaud’s bedroom, when we were there with the body, I thought I heard drumming? Loud drumming?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘You thought there was a radio playing.’

  ‘And again on the rooftop of the shopping mall in Braintree Parkway, where we think the bomber was positioned?’