Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  He slammed the bathroom door shut and yanked his trousers down, then pissed a long torrent of dark liquid into the toilet bowl. The sudden relief was almost more painful than the pressure had been.

  Washing his hands after he had finished, he noticed that there were two toothbrushes by the sink. One red; one green. What was the deal? Was there someone else living in the house? He felt another pressure building, this time in his chest. In his heart. How could she just move someone else in like that to replace his father? His fingers clenched on the cold enamel of the sink’s rim. He had to move quickly. He had to overload her with cases she couldn’t solve.

  ‘What are you taking?’ she inquired as he came down the stairs and entered the kitchen. She was chopping onions. A pan of pasta was bubbling on the cooker, and a glass of some clear liquid was sitting on the table beside her.

  ‘Haematin,’ he said. ‘Just started.’

  ‘Intravenous?’

  ‘Tablets. New form, apparently.’

  ‘Okay.’ She wouldn’t meet his gaze. ‘You can’t stay. I’m expecting company.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. I have to get back. To Dad.’ No reaction. ‘How’s the case coming along?’ he asked.

  Eleanor dismissed the question with a shake of her head. ‘I can’t talk about it; you know that. All of the details are confidential.’

  ‘I don’t want to know the details,’ he pressed. ‘They’re all over the news. I just wanted to know whether you were making any progress. I’m …’ He paused, artfully. ‘I’m interested in your work. I always have been.’

  Her expression softened. She reached out to ruffle his hair. ‘It’s odd, but I keep forgetting how much you wanted to know what I was doing when you were young. I used to find you in your bedroom or down in the lounge, reading my textbooks, looking at my photographs. I did worry for a while that they would affect you, but you’ve grown up into a good boy. I’m proud of you, and of what you’re doing to look after your father. I know how much of a sacrifice you’re making.’

  ‘I miss you,’ he said simply. ‘I wish you’d come home.’

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘It’s not going to happen, Carl; you know that. Your father and I … we’ve moved too far apart now. I know this sounds harsh, but he is not a husband any more. He’s an invalid. There is nothing left for us to share – no conversations left to have, no new memories to build on. I have moved on, and he never will. He’s trapped by the accident, and by his illness.’ She sighed. ‘In many ways, we’ve all three of us switched roles. Nicholas was always a very traditional man. He wanted to be the breadwinner, while I was meant to be the one who looked after the family and you were the child who had to be cared for. Now I’m the breadwinner, you’re doing the caring and he’s the child. It’s not what he would have wanted.’

  But it’s what you love, Carl thought, and immediately tried to call back the thought. But it was out there now, and he couldn’t help but think about it. His mother was successful and independent. She was in her element.

  ‘You never ask how he is,’ he blurted.

  She winced. ‘Carl, I know how he is. He’s crippled, in mind and body, and he’s going to require constant care until he dies.’

  He realised that he could use her discomfort at the direction the conversation had taken to manoeuvre her back to the subject he really wanted to talk about. He decided to come at it sideways. Looking across the kitchen, he noticed a business card on top of his mother’s handbag, which was sitting on the kitchen counter, beside the microwave oven. ‘I saw that policemen you met. Is that his card? He was on the news. It looked like he’d had an attack of some kind.’

  His mother shook her head in irritation. ‘I don’t know what was happening there,’ she said. ‘One minute he was talking to me about the Catherine Charnaud case and the next he’s popping up on the news holding a press conference about a bombing. Is it too much to ask that he dedicates himself to one case at a time? And then he collapses. I was watching from an office on the second floor. I’ve not heard from him since, and where does that leave me?’

  ‘The two cases,’ Carl said carefully. ‘They’re not connected, are they?’

  Eleanor frowned. ‘Why should they be?’

  He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or annoyed that his two most recent murders hadn’t been brought together. Still, there was plenty of time. ‘I just thought, if the same detective was in charge …’

  ‘That’s more to do with short staffing in the police force, I suspect.’

  ‘But even so,’ he pressed, ‘that must make it difficult for him to do a good job.’

  ‘That’s obviously why he needs a forensic clinical psychologist,’ Eleanor said. ‘To help out. And, given the nature of the killing, I think he is out of his depth. But I really can’t discuss it any more.’

  ‘I understand. I’d better get going, anyway,’ he said, turning to leave. ‘Dad will be worried.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you for popping around. Oh, can you just do me a favour before you go?’

  He turned back, surprised. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Eleanor walked across the kitchen and retrieved something from on top of the fridge. While her back was turned, Carl reached out and took the business card from on top of her handbag. He wasn’t sure why, but he thought it might come in useful, and at the very least it might make it more difficult for his mother to communicate with the policeman.

  When she turned back she seemed almost girlish, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Could you help me put this necklace on? I haven’t worn it for a long time, and I can never manage the catch properly.’

  She placed the necklace in his hand and turned around, running her hands beneath her abundant grey hair and leaning forward, exposing her smooth neck.

  Carl gazed at the necklace. It consisted of numerous small glass beads in an iridescent, peacock’s tail colour, all strung together. Rather than the kind of sprung hook-and-eye clasp that he was used to, this one had a kind of double-cylinder screw arrangement that he’d never come across before.

  He looped it around his mother’s neck and held the two ends for a moment, trying to figure out how they fitted together. The position suddenly reminded him of something, and it took him a moment to work out what it was.

  Oh yes. The taxi driver.

  ‘Carl?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He fastened the catch and then stood awkwardly, hands gently resting on her shoulders, remembering.

  He’d taken the train to Gants Hill and then called a local taxi company at just past midnight from a prepaid mobile phone bought especially for the purpose. He was standing in front of the randomly-chosen address that he had given in the call when the taxi turned up. He had got in the back and then said: ‘Can you take me to Barking Station?’ From there he could get the train home again.

  He had felt in his pocket for the 0.35mm, 20lb breaking-strain monofilament fishing line that he had slipped into his pocket that morning. It was camouflaged; coloured in random green, brown and black sections so that the fish couldn’t see it in the water. Carl had used it many times, fishing in the creeks of the salt marshes. The fishing line was held on a spool, and he had pulled a metre or so off, wrapping it around each hand while holding them low so that the driver couldn’t see what he was doing. There were ten metres on the roll, giving him plenty of spare if he needed it.

  The car had sped through the streets of east London, past all-night kebab shops and Chinese restaurants, past pubs that looked like they had been there since the 1700s and pubs that looked like they had been converted from flat-roofed 1950s bungalows, past night-clubs and rows of terraced houses – often side by side. Carl had tested the fishing line in his hands as they drove, pulling it tight and checking for any give or slack in it.

  As they entered Barking, the taxi had taken a curved route through the one-way system. Carl had waited until they were heading up the rise which marked the progress of the Underground system, and said, ‘Take a left just past the stat
ion. My place is halfway down.’

  The side street had been dark; most of the street lights had been broken at some time in the past and never replaced. The driver had tucked the car into a space between a BMW and a Volkswagen, keeping the engine running.

  ‘Eight quid, mate,’ he had said, gazing casually out of the window.

  In response, Carl had leaned forward and looped the fishing line over his head, pulling it tight as hard and as quickly as he could. The driver had jerked, spasmed, hands clawing at his throat. The line had sunk deeply into his flesh. His body had bucked and jerked violently but Carl had kept the line taut, imagining the blood thumping in the driver’s temples and the encroaching darkness.

  The driver’s body had slumped slowly into immobility. Carl had kept up the tension for another minute, just in case he was faking, but he wasn’t clever enough for that. The car had filled with the stench of faeces and urine as the man’s sphincters relaxed in death.

  And when he had finished moving, when his hands had fallen to his sides and his body had slumped into ungracious limpness, Carl had left him, lying there in his car with the engine still running, and he had walked away. Almost a year ago now. That was his origanised, premeditated, one.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ his mother said, glancing over her shoulder.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just memories.’

  She patted his hand. ‘Good memories, I hope.’

  ‘The best,’ he said. ‘The best.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  By late morning Lapslie was fully dressed and ready to leave the hospital. No concussion, no lasting damage, no issues with blood pressure. The nurse confirmed that there was a note on his file from Dr Garland specifying a follow-up appointment with the Psychiatric Department. Seeing it written down made him feel slightly scared. He knew he wasn’t mentally ill; Dr Garland said he didn’t think Lapslie was mentally ill; and yet the words ‘Psychiatric Department’ were there, on his medical notes, for everyone to see.

  He felt low, empty, but that wasn’t something that the doctors could do anything about. His career was effectively over. The arid plain of his life stretched before him up to the horizon of his death: no landmarks, nothing interesting or unknown to look forward to, just a flat and featureless stretch of ground that could only be trudged across, step by step, until the end.

  He was off the case. Off the cases. Off all cases, as far as he could see. He still had to work out what that really meant as far as his life was concerned. He had to talk to Emma Bradbury and Jane Catherall to see whether there was any way he could still get a window on what was going on without Dain Morritt knowing about it.

  But first he had a lunch to go to.

  He got lost on his way out of the hospital. He followed the signs for the exit and ended up walking through a large hall that was a combination of a café, a travel office for those patients who needed assistance getting home and the Phlebotomy Department.

  As he pushed through the three different queues that snaked across the room, looking for the way out, he suddenly heard a distant drumming. His head jerked around, eyes darting left and right, looking for anyone watching, anyone familiar from the press conference. Panicking, he wondered if he was about to pass out again. It took a few seconds for his mind to catch up with his senses; the drumming was dissimilar to the one he’d heard before, lighter, with a different beat. It grew fainter, and he stopped; turned around. The drumming got louder again. He pushed his way through the crowd; crossing and criss-crossing the queues, ignoring the complaints and the glares that followed in his wake, always seeking to make the drumming louder and louder, until he was outside the hall and in a lobby lined with large lift doors. One of the doors was open, and a bed was being wheeled inside by a porter in blue medical shirt and trousers. In the bed was a woman. She was obviously ill; head slumped to one side and barely conscious. For a moment he thought that the fingernails clutching onto the bed sheet were painted, but then he realised that the blotchy redness was something natural, not applied. She turned her head to glance incuriously at him, and he recoiled slightly at the fierce redness of her eyes. She turned away again and gazed at the floor.

  A young doctor was standing behind the bed. Her hair was dark, tied back with a band, and she looked thin and intense. ‘Family?’ she asked. ‘Or just lost?’ Appropriately for a hospital, her voice was strongly tinged with menthol.

  ‘Police,’ he replied, stepping into the lift and showing her his warrant card. ‘Can you tell me what’s wrong with this lady?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’ Her stare was challenging.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said as the doors closed and the lift set off slowly upwards. ‘I don’t mean to be rude.’

  The doctor’s gaze didn’t soften. ‘If she’s a suspect in some investigation, I have to tell you that she’s been here for two weeks now, and she’s not capable of moving out of the bed. We’re just transferring her to another ward. Any more than that and you’ll need a warrant.’

  He raised his hands placatingly. ‘It’s okay. She’s not in any trouble, and neither is the hospital. It’s just …’ His brain raced, looking for some explanation saner than ‘I think I recognise the sound of her smell’, and he noticed again her eyes and her fingernails. That would do. ‘It’s just there’s something about that reddish coloration that I’ve seen before. It might help me with a case I’m working on. Is it some kind of infection?’

  ‘If you’re not family and she’s not under arrest then she has a right to privacy. If she doesn’t want to tell you what’s wrong with her, then I’m not about to violate that right.’

  Lapslie looked down at the woman. She was staring at the light in the lift’s roof with no change of expression on her face. ‘She’s not actually refusing,’ he said carefully.

  ‘Nice try. No deal. Come back with a warrant.’

  He shook his head. ‘I hate it when people say that. There’s too much crime drama on TV these days. One more question, if I may?’

  ‘Is it about the patient?’ the doctor challenged.

  He shook his head. ‘No – I just want to know how to get out of this hospital.’

  With the doctor’s help he finally found the exit. The Café Rouge wasn’t far from the hospital. Rather than get a taxi back to the police HQ where he’d left his car, Lapslie decided to walk. The overcast cloud from earlier had burned away, and now the sky was a pale eggshell blue marked by stipples of cloud. He slipped his jacket off and slung it over his shoulder as he left, taking in the surroundings that he usually only glimpsed through his car windscreen.

  Chelmsford was an ancient town, dating back over eight hundred years, and indeed there were signs everywhere of its history. As he cut through the town’s central park he noticed, through the trees, an eighteen-arch red-brick viaduct crossing over a river, carrying trains to and from the central station as it presumably had for a hundred years or more. Nearby, a single lane flyover delivered the A12 into the centre of the town, although bizarrely it didn’t seem to take it out again. Maybe they just reversed the priorities on the lane at some point during the day. Everywhere, modern glass shopfronts jostled shoulder-to-shoulder with wooden beams and whitewashed exteriors, while in the town’s centre a small cathedral, barely larger than a church, sat surrounded by office blocks, crouched like a nervous cat.

  Somewhere, probably while researching the Essex Police, Lapslie had come across the information that Chelmsford had, for a short while, been declared the capital city of England during the Peasants Revolt of 1381. That, he mused, was a time well before any formalised system of policing in the country. In those days, the lords of the manor had effectively policed their areas themselves. Was that why policemen, especially in London, still referred to the area covered by the local police station as their ‘manor’?

  He found the Café Rouge set off to the side of the main shopping area. Seeing it, he paused, feeling a sudden breathlessness. When was the last time he had seen Sonia? Probably a month bef
ore, when he had attended a parents’ evening at the school where the kids were based. Sonia had been very good at not insisting that he take the kids every second weekend or whatever. Given his medical condition, that would have pretty much negated the whole point of them separating in the first place: to give him a quiet space in which to live his life. The quid pro quo was that he paid as much as he could to her to keep them going, which he did gladly, and that he still tried to be a part of the kids’ lives. Which, again, he did gladly.

  The frontage of the café was a large sheet of plate glass, stencilled with its name in ornate, almost art-deco script. Through it he could see small tables dotted around the floor space. It was reasonably crowded, given that it was lunchtime, but he had no problem picking Sonia out of the crowd. Her red hair cascaded across her shoulders, and her rather sharp features were pinched in an irritated expression. She checked her watch; a quick, reflex movement that probably didn’t even register the time in her mind for more than half a second before it slipped away.

  And Lapslie knew that even if she was facing the other way, with her back to him, even if she had been wearing a hat or a scarf to cover her hair, he would have felt the same catch in his breath, the same faltering in his heartbeat, as his gaze had swept over her. Staring into his wife’s face, he felt the sacrifices that he had been forced to make weighing him down. Even before his career had been shattered, his life had been ruined. He’d just refused to admit it.

  Sonia looked up at him with a smile on her face and trepidation in her eyes.

  ‘Hi, Mark,’ she said. ‘You’re looking well.’

  He forced a smile that felt too tight on his face. ‘I’m feeling well. I’m back at work full time.’

  ‘I know.’ She looked him up and down. ‘You need a new suit. I remember that one from … before.’

  Before we split up. Self-consciously he ran a hand down the lapel of his jacket: the same one he’d been wearing yesterday. He remembered the PR girl – what was her name? Seiju? – being vaguely critical about it. Lapslie tended to wear suits until they gave out on him and then buy a replacement. DI Morritt probably bought a batch of three suits every year, just to keep current: two for use on alternate days during the week and one spare for press conferences, if he ever had to give one.