Pouring out another cup of tea, the logical corollary to Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie’s preternatural abilities struck him with the force of a fist in his gut; if Lapslie could smell Carl, then there was something about Carl that he could smell, something that was different to everyone else. Perhaps the porphyria meant that he was secreting some chemical in his perspiration, something that the policeman could detect. Carl bent his head and sniffed his armpit as best he could. Nothing. He ran a finger across his forehead and smelled it. Still nothing. But then, people got used to smells, didn’t they? If you lived with a smell, like damp and mould, for enough time then you stopped smelling it; just as your mind automatically filtered out the sounds of traffic if you lived near a road. Did he smell of something, but just couldn’t detect it himself?
The haematin tablets he was on – would they help mask the smell or just add to it? Either was possible, but he just didn’t know enough about biochemistry to be able to tell, and it wasn’t like he could go and ask the doctor.
Carl cast his mind back. Nobody had ever mentioned that he smelled. His mother or father had never said anything. No doctor had ever raised it as a symptom. Nobody had ever bought him a deodorant as a way of telling him that he stank. Some of the men that he’d met in the Essex Hunt had smelled like polecats, and were taunted about it on a daily basis. There was certainly no holding back of opinions in the countryside. No animal that he’d watched, or stalked, had ever become spooked and run off because they had smelled him in the area. No, if there was something about him that Mark Lapslie was picking up on, then it was something subtle. Something that nobody else could sense, or scent. Only him.
Which meant that Lapslie, not Emma Bradbury, should be his next victim.
Carl’s main safety net at the moment was the fact that each of his murders was completely separate from the others. He needed to get to Lapslie before he convinced anyone senior in the police that he was right, that the murders were connected. He still had to humiliate his mother; ensure that she was never approached by the police again and had to come back to the house, complete the family again. But if the news report could be believed then Lapslie had been marginalised within the force. Removed. Sidelined.
As he leaned against the kitchen counter, thinking his way through the maze of logic and speculation, something else occurred to him. The story on the BBC hadn’t been based on a press release or anything formal. It had been an anonymous accusation; something only slightly more than gossip. It indicated that there was some tension within the police; that Lapslie had enemies who were trying to blacken his name, discredit him in the eyes of the public and thus in the eyes of his superiors. And that meant there was an inbuilt desire within the police to not believe him. If he was out of the way, if he could not fight his own corner, then his beliefs would be rubbished by whoever it was that had released the anonymous statement. And Carl would be safe to keep killing until his mother came back.
That meant his plan to use the rifle to shoot Emma Bradbury couldn’t be transferred across to Mark Lapslie. Shooting her would have looked like a bizarre, apparently motiveless crime; shooting him would vindicate his theory about the murders being connected. He would have to make his death look accidental. His mind raced. A car accident, perhaps – a hit-and-run where he ran him over in some country lane or forced his car off the road and into a crash barrier. Tricky to arrange, and fraught with the risk that he might be seen, followed, caught. A fire at his house: Carl could break in and fray an electric cable to the point where it would catch light, or remove the screws that retained the bare wires inside an electrical plug and then pull the cable so that the wires touched and would spark when the socket was switched on. He could do it. Or perhaps just the simplest thing possible – a mugging, crushing his skull from behind with a crowbar and then taking his wallet. It happened all the time to people. Especially in Essex.
Carl thought for a moment. If there was something about his biology that this policeman was able to home in on then he needed to do something about it in a hurry. He couldn’t take the risk that there might be some small scrap of evidence linking him to one of the murders that could result in him being questioned by the police, if only as a potential witness, and if that happened and the man questioning him was Mark Lapslie then he might suddenly find himself in the frame for all the murders that the police knew about, and more besides. Or worse; if Carl was following Lapslie, waiting for an opportune moment to push him under a train or smash his head in, then Lapslie might be able to tell that he was in the vicinity, and stop him.
The first thing he needed to do was take a shower. A long shower. He looked around the kitchen for something that might help deodorise him. He remembered that he had half a lemon in the fridge, kept for squeezing over chips instead of vinegar, which always caused his father’s digestion problems since the operation. He could rub it all over himself, couldn’t he? Cleaning products often advertised themselves as having lemon in them. ‘Nature’s cleaning agent’, they called it. The citric acid should cut through grease and dirt, and hopefully whatever substance it was that Mark Lapslie was able to detect. Or at least cover it up with a stronger smell.
He felt soiled. Dirty. And the worst thing was that he couldn’t even tell what was wrong. He felt like a dog that had been told it was a bad boy but didn’t understand why. He wanted someone to take him to one side and explain it to him, but there wasn’t anyone. He was on his own.
He grabbed the lemon and slipped it into his pocket, then carried his father’s cup of tea through to the living room.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Fine,’ he lied. ‘I’m just … tired. I’m heading up for a shower. I’ll do some lunch when I come down.’
He went up to the bathroom and turned the shower on as hard and as hot as he could stand, then undressed. Steam wreathed the bathroom and his naked body. Gingerly, he climbed in. The water was like scalding needles impacting all over his chest and neck. His skin turned instantly scarlet and blotchy. Bracing himself, Carl turned around, letting the water scour every square inch of his body, raising his arms so that his armpits were washed clean and then, taking a deep breath of the tropical air, he shoved his head under the streaming water. It burned. Jesus Christ, it burned. He cried out, despite himself, feeling blisters rising all across his scalp but knowing that the water wasn’t quite that hot. He stuck it out for as long as he could, then jerked his head back, gasping. The relatively cooler air on his skin stung even worse for a moment. He felt dizzy, and had to grab hold of the edge of the shower to stop himself falling.
He turned the shower off and stood there for a moment, feeling the water running off his skin. Cool air infiltrated its way across his body, making him shiver suddenly. He felt like crying. Before his resolve crumbled he grabbed the lemon half from where he had left it in the soap dish and rubbed it over his chest, his shoulders, his arms, his scalp, his buttocks and legs, and then between his legs, around his scrotum, squeezing the lemon harder and harder as he went. The shower filled with the sharp, aromatic smell of lemon oil. His skin stung where the oil penetrated the pores opened by the steaming water or the small cuts that he had on his hands from building the explosive devices for the bombing.
Wincing, he kept going, scrubbing his hands, his scalp and the soles of his feet. The steam from the shower combined with the lemony odour to form a fragrant cloud that he could feel deep down in his lungs.
He put the lemon back on the soap dish and picked up the soap that sat beside it. Coal Tar soap, coloured a deep waxy yellow, like the skin of the lemon, but smelling of woodsmoke and tar. He quickly rubbed it all over his body, following the path of the lemon. The soap suds combined with the remnants of the lemon juice to form a scummy mess, but he kept going, rubbing it obsessively into his skin until he was covered from head to toe in dirty grey curds. And then he turned the shower on again, full blast, took the shower head down from its hook and blasted it across his body again, washing every
thing off with scalding water. Finally, taking a deep breath, he directed the shower head between his legs, gasping at the pain but keeping the jet of water pointed straight up, then prised the cheeks of his buttocks apart with his thumb and forefinger and sluiced himself out. This time he nearly screamed at the pain.
To finish he put the shower back onto its hook and turned it onto its coldest setting. The water went from boiling to frozen within a few seconds. Carl gasped again as his skin seemed to flinch all over, forming goose-pimples from the top of his head down to his toes. The shock of the cold made him feel as if he had lost two inches off his waist and his height in as many seconds. He felt his scrotum shrivel and his testicles retreat back into the warmth of his body. He hung his head, letting the water course down over him, sheathing his body, closing the pores and washing the last remnants of the lemon juice and the soap suds away.
Carl turned the water off and stood there for a few minutes, feeling it all trickling away, letting his muscles relax. He sniffed cautiously, but he didn’t smell any different from the way he did after any shower or any bath, apart from the lingering scent of lemon. He didn’t know whether it had worked or not. He could only hope.
Stepping from the shower and towelling himself dry, Carl took a container of his father’s chlorhexidine antiseptic talc from the bathroom cabinet and shook it all over his body. He kept shaking until his body was white, like an alabaster statue, and surrounded by a cloud of floating dust. The sharp, medicinal smell got up his nostrils and he coughed, convulsively, but he couldn’t stop.
He saw a can of antiperspirant/deodorant on top of the cabinet, and reached for it, then pulled back. This was stupid. Where would it stop? Where would it all stop?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The drive to the farmhouse had taken Lapslie, Emma and Eleanor Whittley down a winding dirt track which seemed to peter out and restart several times and eventually ended in a patch of churned-up ground where they left their cars. They pushed through a gap in a hedge that looked natural rather than forced and across a bare patch of waterlogged ground. The forensic clinical psychologist hadn’t been too happy at the walk: she hadn’t said anything but she had a downward twist to her lips and she kept casting dark side-glances at Lapslie. Her high heels were unsuitable to the terrain. Lapslie’s leather shoes were hardly any better, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that.
Now the three of them stood in the shelter of a half-demolished barn, gazing at the farmhouse. The rain soaked into Lapslie’s hair and trickled down his cheeks, but he didn’t react to it. He had endured worse, in his time. Inside his waterproof jacket he was uncomfortably warm, sweat prickling his skin despite the coldness outside, but again he hardly even noticed.
The farmhouse was a ramshackle affair of mismatched bricks and old wood, apparently built in fits and starts over several generations. There was nothing about it that stood out against the marshy ground and the trees surrounding it. It was almost organic in its decrepitude: like some monstrous fungus that had grown gradually, incrementally, over time. Another few years and Lapslie felt that it might just fade away, still part of the local topography but somehow separate from it, removed, abstracted.
‘Do we know who owns this place now?’ he asked Emma.
‘Apparently it’s in something of a legal limbo,’ she replied. ‘The only person with a claim to it is the old man lying dead in Dr Catherall’s mortuary – one Jeffrey Hawkins – but he’s in no position to do anything about it. He’s a widower with one daughter, apparently, but nobody could locate her during the investigation of the father’s death. The police wanted to track her down, partly to actually tell her that her father had been strangled and partly in case she was responsible, but she fell off the radar ten years ago and hasn’t been seen since. Drug problems, apparently, and a diagnosed schizophrenic. Her father always told the neighbours that he thought she was living rough in London.’
Lapslie looked at the desolation around the farmhouse. ‘Neighbours?’
‘About a mile down the track,’ Emma confirmed. ‘It was them who found the body. They used to check on him every few days; when he didn’t open the door they went in. He was in the front room, dead. The council will repossess it at some stage and then auction it, but for the moment we still have the key.’
Eleanor Whittley snorted. ‘Really, I don’t know why I am here. The two crimes are patently completely divergent. The Catherine Charnaud case is clearly the work of a sexual sadist with a deep-seated hatred of women, whereas this may well not be a murder at all but simple suicide. There’s no sexual element here, no torture, nothing that relates to the Charnaud case.’
‘Trust me,’ Lapslie ground out, ‘it’s the same killer.’
She shook her head. ‘Why consult me if you’re not going to accept what I say?’
‘Consultancy is like a birthday present,’ Lapslie replied. ‘It should be accepted with good grace, but you’re not obliged to actually make use of it.’ He nodded towards Emma. ‘Come on; let’s go in.’
Emma slid the key into the lock. The key snicked into the mechanism and she pushed the door open.
Lapslie waited in the doorway for a moment, sniffing in the stale air of the house. Nothing … nothing … and there it was, faintly, as if someone were playing bongos in the far distance. The murderer had been there.
‘Spread out,’ he instructed. ‘Emma, take upstairs. I’ll take downstairs. Mrs Whittley – stay in the front room. You’ve got a copy of the case file. See if you can pick anything up that we miss.’
‘Yeah, on that subject, boss – what is it that we’re actually looking for? This place was searched when the body was discovered. There was nothing.’
‘At the time they didn’t know this was part of a series of deaths. Sean Burrows has confirmed that the same long-chain molecule was found on the body, but he’s not got enough of a sample to do a chemical analysis. We need more.’ He met her sceptical glance. ‘Look, if I knew where to find it, I’d tell you.’
They went off in different directions. Lapslie’s search of the upper floor only took ten minutes or so, and was underpinned all the time with drumming, like a rapid fluttering pulse. The place was cluttered with clothes and cardboard boxes, but there wasn’t any evidence of a murder, let alone a murderer. He’d reserved his best hopes for the bathroom, but when he saw the state of it – the mould in the corners, the stained tub, the toilet bowl so encrusted with limescale and dried clumps of stuff he didn’t even want to think about that it was probably near-asdammit blocked – he gave up. This was a stupid idea to begin with. He wasn’t even on the case, and he was grasping at straws so thin they were just fading away in his hand.
He walked heavily down the creaking wooden stairs. Eleanor Whittley was standing in the centre of the living room – more clutter, along with a sofa whose stuffing was emerging from several holes and a TV so old that it had a tuning dial rather than a remote – looking completely lost. She glanced at him darkly. ‘You realise I charge by the hour,’ she snapped. ‘I’m costing you money just standing here doing nothing.’
‘Not my money,’ he murmured.
Emma came into the living room. She had an odd expression on her face.
‘Got something?’ Lapslie asked, momentarily excited. ‘The kitchen?’
‘No – the chemical toilet.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a chemical toilet in what was probably a pantry. It looks in pretty good nick.’
Lapslie followed her out while she was still talking. ‘The toilet upstairs is nearly unusable,’ he said. ‘He probably bought a chemical toilet in order to—’
‘Yea, I get the picture.’
‘Or someone bought it for him. A neighbour, perhaps.’
‘If you haven’t found anything upstairs …?’
‘Which I haven’t.’
‘And if we still think that the murderer has some kind of bladder problem …?’
‘Which we do.’
/>
‘Then there’s a chance that they took a slash in the chemical toilet before they left.’ She led him through the kitchen – piled with unwashed pans and plates – to a side door. In the small room beyond there was a plastic pedestal toilet with a large base standing isolated in the centre. It looked absurdly modern in the clutter and mess of the rest of the house.
‘And there’s a chance that there might still be traces of the sample we need still inside. Good work.’
She nodded. ‘You want me to get Sean Burrows out to take samples?’
‘No, I want you to dismantle this toilet and take the reservoir directly to Burrows.’
‘But—’
‘No arguments. We’re up against a time constraint here.’
‘What time constraint?’
He gazed levelly at her. ‘We’ve got until Rouse finds out I’m still working the case, and then everything stops. Do you think Dain Morritt will have any time at all for this theory?’
Emma gazed at the chemical toilet. ‘I’ll need a screwdriver and a pair of gloves,’ she muttered. ‘What about you? Where are you going?’
‘Hospital,’ he snapped. ‘Get a squad car out here to drive Mrs Whittley home.’
Tooth and Claw Page 24
