Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  The door was ajar. Softly, he pushed it open.

  Nicholas Whittley was standing beside the table in the middle of the room, leaning on a cane. He turned as Carl entered the building.

  ‘Dad?’

  Nicholas turned. His face was … what? Thunderous, certainly, in a way that Carl hadn’t seen since the accident, but also sad.

  ‘I knew this would happen,’ Nicholas sighed.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Your mother’s books. Her files. Her photographs. I told her that letting you see them was going to have an effect on you, but she wouldn’t listen. She said you were stronger than that.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have insisted.’

  ‘Dad, you’re not making any sense. You should be in bed by now.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about the girl you mentioned, about getting some time to yourself, so I came down here to see whether you were still awake. You weren’t here, but the door was open, and I found …’ He waved the cane vaguely around at the shelves, and the dioramas of the rotting, unpreserved bodies of gulls and voles and badgers that lined them. ‘This – this sickness. What on earth have you been up to, Carl? And then I went into the other room, and …’ Words suddenly failed him.

  The other dioramas. The special ones. The ones Carl had constructed to commemorate his killings. Nicholas had found them.

  ‘I can only think,’ Nicholas choked, ‘that you were reconstructing something you’d seen in your mother’s work, but it’s wrong, Carl. You have to stop.’

  ‘I can’t stop,’ Carl found himself replying.

  ‘What woman is going to want you if she finds out that you’re obsessed with … with building these grotesque versions of murder scenes?’

  ‘The only one that matters,’ Carl said softly. He turned and walked out of the building.

  ‘Carl! Come back here! I’m not finished!’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Carl whispered, picking up the hosepipe from where it lay on the garden path and reaching out to turn the outside tap on. Water began to spill from the nozzle; hesitant at first, then gushing with more force.

  His father knew. Not about the murders, but about the models of the murders, and it wouldn’t be long before he worked the rest of it out. Nicholas was an intelligent man. He would work out that Carl was recreating current crimes rather than old ones, and then it was only a matter of time before it occurred to him that Carl was creating, rather than just recreating.

  Carl had to stop him. He could still get his mother back, but his father had to go.

  He walked back inside the outbuilding, still holding the hosepipe. Water began to splatter across the walls and ceiling and table, the shelves and the glass-fronted boxes.

  ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? Carl, you need help!’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Carl said, crossing the room to his father, ‘I’ve never needed any help.’

  He knocked the cane from his father’s hand and pushed him backwards. Nicholas stumbled to his knees. Carl bent and tugged his father’s shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, revealing the colostomy bag adhering to his father’s side. With one savage movement he tore it off. His father cried out. The revealed stoma, a hole of raw pink flesh, gaped in amazement like a tiny mouth.

  Carl thrust the gushing hosepipe into the wound and held it there while his father thrashed and screamed, watching as the water that backspilled out of the hole turned a muddy brown with the half-digested residue of Nicholas’s last meal, and then a foamy red as something inside his father ruptured, sending his lifeblood pulsing into and out of his twisting, writhing body.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The sound of drumming still blanked out all other sounds, including the ragged rasp of Lapslie’s own breathing. Blinded by the headlights of the car in front of him, he sat on the ground, grass cold and damp beneath his boxer shorts, waiting for the sharp pain that started just under his ribs and radiated through his entire body, and which flared up when he breathed, to subside. He was terrified that he might have to spend the rest of his life doubled over.

  The murderer had been in his house. In his bedroom! There was no doubt in his mind. He would never be able to convince a court of law of the fact, but the drumming noise in his head had woken him up, and when he turned over there was a hooded figure with a knife standing there. If he hadn’t lashed out with his feet then he would be dead. Whoever it was obviously wanted it to look like a burglary gone wrong, but it was clear to Lapslie that they wanted him out of the way. They must have been listening to the radio reports that he could smell the killer out, the one leaked by Dain Morritt, and decided to act.

  The ache was receding now, more the memory of agony than the agony itself.

  The slam of a car door made him look up, into the dazzling lights. Another door slammed. A bulky figure obscured the driver’s side headlamp, walking towards him.

  ‘Well fuck me backwards,’ a voice boomed, dripping with vinegar and mustard seeds, ‘if it isn’t Mark Lapslie in his underwear. Very fetching kecks you have there.’

  ‘McGinley?’ Lapslie was stunned. ‘Dom McGinley? What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Someone told me you were dead,’ the voice said. ‘Or dying. Can’t remember which one it was. Thought I’d come and check, for a laugh.’

  A smaller figure cut into the bright splash of the passenger side headlights. ‘Boss? Are you okay?’ Mandarin and lemon and lime. ‘Who was that running away?’

  Lapslie felt as if his world had received a tremendous clout around the ear. What the hell was happening to him? Was he actually dreaming all this? ‘Emma? Is that you?’

  She came closer, crouching down so that her face was on a level with his. McGinley loomed above them both, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, breath pluming in front of him like cigar smoke, haloed by the light.

  ‘I saw a knife. Are you injured? Shall I call for an ambulance?’

  ‘I’m okay. I think you scared him off.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure it was a bloke. And young with it, judging by the way he ran off.’

  ‘Not Eleanor Whittley, then?’

  ‘No. And not Catherine Charnaud’s boyfriend, either. Not tall enough or muscular enough. We were wrong about him, too.’ He squinted into her face. ‘What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing in a car with Dom McGinley? The man’s a certified villain.’

  ‘And he’s my boyfriend, boss.’

  Lapslie’s world reeled from another clout to the side of the head. ‘Boyfriend? McGinley? Since when?’

  ‘Since about two years ago,’ McGinley said from above them. ‘Met at a wedding, of all things. Hit it off, and moved in together a few months later.’

  ‘Emma,’ Lapslie said urgently, ‘this man has more blood on his hands than a halal butcher. You’re risking your career just breathing the same air as him. Ask him about Dave Finnistaire.’

  ‘Your hands aren’t exactly clean, sunshine,’ McGinley countered. ‘There’s more than a few guys still have problems hearing or seeing because of you. And there’s at least one whose missus left him because he couldn’t have kids any more after you “questioned” him in the interview room. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, eh?’

  Lapslie sighed. ‘We’ll talk about this, Emma, but not right now. What I want to do right now is have a shower and get some clothes on, and then I want you two to tell me exactly what you’re doing here.’

  ‘Boss – you can’t have a shower. Evidence!’

  He shook his head tiredly. ‘One, I don’t care. Two, I only touched him once, and the duvet was between me and him. By all means let Burrows try his DNA tricks on my duvet. There won’t be much else to contaminate any samples, believe me.’

  He led the way back to the cottage and, while Emma put the kettle on downstairs, he went upstairs and had a long shower, letting the hot water sluice the dirt and the sweat and the tension from his body. After he’d finished, he dressed i
n the clothes he’d left hanging up in his bedroom. When he came down again Emma was sitting at the breakfast bar staring into her cup of tea and McGinley was prowling round the room looking at Lapslie’s photographs. His hair was greyer than Lapslie remembered, but his face still looked like a canvas bag full of rocks.

  ‘Where’s the little lady, Lapslie? She and the nippers are in all the pictures, but there’s no sign of them in the house.’

  Lapslie ignored him. ‘Talk,’ he said to Emma.

  ‘I got worried about you,’ she said, still not looking up from her cup of tea. ‘Dom and I were talking, and he said that if he was the killer, and he thought that you had a way of tracking him, he’d get you out of the way.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry, eh?’ McGinley interjected. ‘Doesn’t matter how Dagenham it all sounds – it’s worth getting you out of the way, just in case.’

  ‘Dagenham?’ Emma queried, looking up at McGinley.

  ‘Several stops past Barking,’ Lapslie explained tiredly. ‘You’ve been discussing the case with him? Jesus, this just gets better and better. They may have to invent an entirely new set of disciplinary offences just to cover it.’

  The adrenalin was only now fading out of his system, leaving behind it a sick realisation that he might have died, less than an hour ago, with only him and his killer knowing what had happened. He might have become just another of the killer’s ‘horizontal murders’; a stabbing in a bedroom, following on from a bombing on a station, a torture in a bedroom, a strangling in a farmhouse and God alone knew what else before. He didn’t know whether he had been saved by luck or by design, but he knew for sure that he couldn’t just sit there.

  The taste. He kept tasting the sound of the knife as it hissed through the air in front of him. It was the coldest taste in the world.

  Emma’s mobile rang. While she took the call his eyes settled on the back door. The lock had been jimmied open, but it didn’t look too damaged.

  ‘Boss,’ she said, closing the phone up, ‘that was the local police in the Dengie Hundreds area. They were called to a disturbance a few minutes ago and found a dead body.’

  ‘Another one,’ Lapslie murmured. ‘Just what we need.’

  ‘But this one is Eleanor Whittley’s husband. Someone in the incident room made the connection and notified me.’

  Lapslie nodded. He felt no emotion: no shock, no surprise. Nothing could surprise him tonight. ‘Here we go again. We’ll go in your car. You’ve got the directions.’ He glared at McGinley. ‘And I’m sitting in the front.’

  ‘You trust me sitting behind you?’ McGinley waggled his huge, sausage-like fingers at Lapslie. ‘Remember Toby Rumford?’

  They walked out towards the car, Lapslie locking the cottage behind him. ‘Christ knows why I’m doing this,’ he muttered. ‘The back door’s wide open. I’ll get it fixed tomorrow, I suppose.’

  ‘Should we tell DI Morritt about the attack on you? After all, it is his case.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ Lapslie said grimly. ‘After all, let’s not jump to conclusions too early. Let’s wait for the results of the forensic examination before we say anything.’

  Emma smiled. ‘I understand. After all, there is a process we have to go through, isn’t there?’

  During the drive, Lapslie found himself obsessing about Dom McGinley and Emma Bradbury, and why he hadn’t seen it coming. But what the hell did Emma see in the man? He was a London villain, as old-time East End as pie, mash and parsley liquor, or jellied eels in waxed cardboard cartons. Not that the East End was like that any more, apart from the odd, self-conscious, ‘Authentic Pie & Mash’ shop. Dom McGinley had started off as a runner for an East End gang that mainly dealt in protection rackets amongst small shopkeepers ranging from Canning Town, Plaistow and Stratford out to Ilford, Barking and Romford, extending into prostitution and drugs as time went on. He had beaten and killed his way up through the ranks until, when Lapslie and Rouse had been at Brixton, he had been in charge of all crime from the edge of the City of London out to the Essex borders. In those days the police spent more time preventing, or tidying up after, the internecine gang-warfare that erupted between the resident villains – who, incidentally, had no creed or colour bars – and the various immigrant gangs who tried to muscle in on their territories. Then it was the Yardies that were trying to wrest control away from them; somewhere in the middle it had been the Turkish and Cypriot gangs and now it was the Russian Mafia. In ten years time – who could tell?

  The last time Lapslie had seen Dom McGinley had been about a year before, when McGinley had given him some information about a secretive Home Office organisation that rehomed notorious murderers whose sentences were up but who would have attracted physical attacks and arson if they had moved into an area under their own names. Since then, the two men had not been in contact. And now McGinley turned up outside Lapslie’s cottage at some unearthly time in the morning, apparently shacked up with Lapslie’s sergeant. What kind of world was it where things like that were allowed to happen?

  They drove out of Saffron Walden and along the A roads leading towards Thorpe-le-Soken, then looped up above the seaside town and headed out through crooked roads and past small villages and fields bordered by raised banks in the direction of the ancient Essex district of the Dengie Hundreds. Sand began to appear on the edges of the roads where it had been blown in by the wind and then trapped in corners by grass and mud. The sky took on a translucency that spoke of a nearby sea, just over the horizon. The roads were lined with industrial estates surrounded by high chain-link fences and they were so narrow that two cars couldn’t pass each other unless one steered off the road and onto the grass verges that dropped away towards the fields and the stretches of marshy earth. Every now and then a road came to a dead end and a sign that warned of private property, and they had to backtrack to the nearest junction. Once or twice as they drove, Lapslie caught sight of a questing finger of water that had pushed inland from the North Sea, with small tarpaulined boats bobbing on the surface, tied to a block or a pole on the bank. They might have been there for years, abandoned to the elements. They missed the turn-off to Creeksea the first time they passed it, and ended up in Burnham-on-Crouch, which seemed, with its coffee shops and delicatessens, like the last outpost of civilisation before the world ended. It even had a marina of jaunty sailing boats, sails furled, masts like a forest stripped of leaves and branches, although Lapslie found himself wondering where there was to sail to. Off the edge and into the abyss, perhaps?

  Backtracking, Emma stopped the car on a stretch of road that separated a rutted field from a deserted railway station and a new housing estate, all orange brick and UPVC window frames. Emma and Lapslie got out of the car. McGinley stayed where he was, probably guessing that Lapslie would have told him to do that anyway.

  The air had a tang of salt in it, and the crying of the seagulls was bitter, like herbs, on Lapslie’s tongue. He breathed in slowly.

  Several police cars and a forensics van were drawn up in front of one house in particular, their flashing blue lights illuminating the street like a cheap mobile disco. Bedroom lights were on all down the street, and Lapslie could see figures silhouetted in the windows, watching them with fervid curiosity.

  Emma led him through a side gate and round the back of the house, to a wooden outbuilding in the back garden. A green hosepipe led from a tap on the wall of the house to inside the outbuilding. More police were clustered there, along with several white-suited crime scene investigators. Sean Burrows was just emerging from the outbuilding. His face was set in stone.

  ‘Nasty,’ he said, seeing Lapslie and shaking his head. ‘Very nasty.’

  Emma stepped to one side and allowed Lapslie to go in.

  The body of an elderly man lay on the floor in a foul-smelling pool of watery blood that spread from one wall to the others. His abdomen was bloated, and his face was contorted in a rictus of agony. His clothes were in disarray, and it took Lapslie a few moments to realise tha
t he wasn’t lying on the hosepipe, but was somehow connected to it.

  The sound of tribal drumming was stronger there than Lapslie had ever heard it before. It seemed to be imbued into the very walls, the air itself.

  On the other side of the room, a doorway led off into darkness. The walls were lined with shelves containing what Lapslie thought at first were stuffed animals in various poses, until he realised that they weren’t stuffed but were dry, desiccated corpses with dowdy feathers or dull fur.

  Jane Catherall was bending over the body. She was wearing wellington boots.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘You are looking at Nicholas Whittley,’ she said without looking up. She appeared to be examining the wound where the hosepipe had been shoved into the body. ‘My initial diagnosis is massive internal trauma to multiple organs following the insertion of a high-pressure jet of water into a pre-existing colostomy stoma. At first glance the pressure of the water has burst his intestines. Suffice it to say that in all my years of pathology I have never seen anything as sick and as twisted as this. Never.’

  Lapslie shook his head and glanced back at Emma. ‘Has anybody notified Eleanor Whittley?’

  ‘Uniform’s over at her place now. Apparently she’s in shock. She was asking after her son, Carl. He’s meant to be here, but we can’t locate him.’

  ‘Young?’ Lapslie asked. ‘Stocky? Relatively small in stature?’ His pulse started racing in time with the pounding of the drums that only he could hear. ‘Check his bedroom and the medicine cabinet for any drugs that might be used to treat porphyria!’

  ‘Right, boss.’ She vanished out of the doorway. ‘Oh, you might want to check the back room,’ she called from the darkness.

  Stepping cautiously through the diluted blood covering the floor, Lapslie entered the second room. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness, but when they had he noticed a large central table with a computer and printer on it. Apart from that the walls, like those of the first room, were lined with shelves, and on the shelves were cases with dead birds and animals in. Lapslie was about to dismiss them from his mind as being the same as the ones in the first room, but something made him look again.