A few yards away was a barn-like structure of corrugated sheet metal. The doors were gaping open, and there was nothing inside but scatterings of hay and some rusty farm machinery which was painted in greens and reds, like fairground equipment. Carl jumped down off the road and into the field, straddling the stream at the point where it narrowed down to enter the culvert that would take it beneath the road.
No sign of Lapslie.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear the buzzing of a helicopter. Had the police called one out to look for him? It wouldn’t do them any good; he knew a thousand places to hide between there and the sea. He could outlast them, once he had got Lapslie out of the way, and then, when the hunt had died down, he could come back for his mother.
He gazed wildly around. There was nowhere else that Lapslie could have gone. Nowhere … except the barn. The policeman must have climbed up the side of the road while Carl’s attention was distracted.
He approached the barn slowly, cautiously. The moonlight pushed a few forlorn yards inside the doors and then petered out into cobwebby darkness, broken only by myriad rays of moonlight penetrating through rust holes and cracks in the corrugated metal structure. Dust motes and small insects, gnats or mosquitoes, circled in the silvery spotlights. He could smell mould, and beneath that a faint, unpleasantly rotten trace of old diesel.
He’d intended to call out something like ‘Make this easy on yourself!’, or ‘Come out where I can see you!’ but instead he heard the words ‘Is it true? Can you really smell where I’ve been?’ coming from his lips. They hung in the air, disturbing the paths of the insects and the dust, mocking him with their banality, their stupidity.
‘Yes,’ a voice called back. Carl couldn’t tell which direction it came from. The only thing he knew was that Lapslie was definitely inside the barn.
‘But how?’ he yelled. ‘How is that possible?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Lapslie called back tiredly. ‘I just live here.’ A pause, then, ‘Your dad’s dead, you know?’
‘I had to kill him. He’d found …’
‘Found what? Your sick little menagerie? Your collection of trophy cases?’
‘He would have told—’
‘Told who?’ Lapslie interrupted. ‘Your mother? And what would she have done? Realised how many murders you were responsible for?’
Carl edged forward into the barn, the rifle swinging from side to side, covering all the areas where Lapslie might rush at him. ‘It was all for her,’ he said, hearing with contempt the pleading note in his voice, as if he was standing outside himself and listening to what he was saying without being able to influence it.
‘Ah, “Mummy made me do it.” The next best excuse to “I was only following orders.”’
‘She did! She hurt my dad, left him crippled, and then she left us so she could concentrate on her career! If I could prove to her that she couldn’t manage, that she wasn’t the best forensic psychologist around, like she thought she was, then she would have to come back to us!’
‘Well that’s not going to happen now, is it?’ Lapslie taunted. ‘Your cosy little family has been destroyed. You’ve killed Daddy, and Mummy’s never going to speak to you ever again. Yes, you have destroyed her career, but it’s not going to do you any good. The best thing you can hope for is that she writes a book about you. My Son, the Psycho-Killer.’
‘I’m not mad,’ Carl warned. ‘I’m ill, and that makes me slightly paranoid, but I’m being treated for that.’
‘Ah,’ the voice came at him out of the darkness, barbed and harsh, ‘“I’m ill, that’s why I did it.” Even better than blaming Mummy.’
‘It’s true!’ he screamed. ‘I’m not mad! I just want my family back!’
‘I’ve seen your little models, remember? If you’re not mad, then explain them.’
Carl shook his head violently, feeling water spraying from his hair; either sweat or rain, he couldn’t tell. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, inside my head,’ he whispered. ‘I saw the photos from my mum’s work when I was eight. I can’t get those pictures out of my mind. Rape, torture, sexual perversion … I saw the insides of people’s heads and the inside of their bodies, and the things they do to each other. How do I get that out of me? How do I clean my mind of what I saw?’
‘You don’t,’ Lapslie said, and he sounded strangely sad to the part of Carl that was watching and listening from outside his own body. ‘You were screwed over by your mother a long time before you started returning the favour. But that doesn’t make it right. It only makes it understandable.’
‘Animals don’t torture each other. They just fight and eat and die. Not like people.’
Lapslie laughed. ‘Ever seen a cat throw a bird up in the air and catch it in its mouth, or bat a mouse around with its claws? Don’t tell me that animals are any more pure than humans. We’re all in the cesspool together, son.’
Carl took another step into the barn. Neither the ‘he’ who was holding the gun or the ‘he’ who was standing back and watching the whole drama unfurl could tell yet where Lapslie was hiding.
Outside the barn, the clouds building from the east, over the North Sea, covered the moon. The thin wands of light that penetrated the holes in the corrugated metal like so many parallel flying buttresses abruptly vanished. The barn fell into darkness.
And Carl heard behind him the sound of the barn doors being pushed closed.
He whirled, firing at where he guessed Lapslie had to be, behind the door. His bullet tore a long, silver scratch in one of the painted farm implements, and then the door closed fully and the barn was completely and utterly black.
Carl whipped to one side, so that he wasn’t where Lapslie remembered. He laid the rifle down, then crouched on all fours and scurried across the hay-covered barn floor, stopping just before where he thought the wall was. Slipping his hand in his pocket, he retrieved the rabbiter’s knife and slipped it from its scabbard. He tried to still his breathing. Lapslie would make a move eventually. Carl could wait. He could wait for ever. He’d lain in the cold and wet for hours, just to get a glimpse of a badger and its cubs. He could do this. All he had to do was to be patient. Lapslie didn’t know where he was.
An arm encircled his neck, crushing his windpipe. He tried to slash backwards with the knife, but another hand caught his wrist and twisted it savagely, forcing him to drop it.
‘You forgot,’ Lapslie hissed in his ear. ‘I can smell where you are, even in the dark.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘She still hasn’t been in to see him?’ Emma asked. ‘I know she’s as cold as a witch’s tit, but that’s just … wrong.’ She moved closer to the mirrored glass between the interrogation room where Carl Whittley sat and the observation room from which she and Lapslie were watching. ‘How can she treat her own son like that?’
‘Eleanor?’ Lapslie glanced at Carl through the window. He was alone in the room, apart from a uniformed constable who was standing by the door and avoiding eye contact. ‘She hasn’t even asked after him. I’m beginning to think he was right. All his problems started and finished with her.’
‘And yet he’s the one we have to punish.’ She shivered. ‘Was he right when he told you that she’d been responsible for his dad’s condition?’
Lapslie shrugged. ‘I asked Jane Catherall to check into it for me. This is just rumour, mind you, but the story goes that she used to act out some of her cases using her husband. He was an architect or something. If she had a situation where someone had been tied to a bed or gagged in a particular way then she used to do it to him so that she could actually see what it was like, feel what the killer felt.’
‘And he went along with it?’
‘Apparently. Maybe he got a kinky thrill from it. Anyway, it all went wrong on one occasion. She was consulting on a case in Norfolk where the killer used to kidnap women, tie them up and then pour wax into their mouths, suffocating them. She had a theory that it had to do with breast feeding, and the ki
ller being nearly stifled by his own mother when he was a baby.’
‘How very Freudian,’ Emma said. She glanced again at Carl, staring at his hands in the interrogation room.
Lapslie snorted. ‘That’s what Jane Catherall said. Apparently Eleanor was known as a bit of a drinker, and she’d been knocking back the gin and tonics. More gins than tonics, by all accounts. She’d just poured the wax into his throat, but she left it too long to untie him and help him lean forward to spit it out. He swallowed some, and choked. By the time she called an ambulance he’d suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen, and some of the wax had solidified in his throat and stomach and intestines. Impacted bowel, they call it. They had to operate to get it out, but there was damage: perforations, and obstructions. In the end they had to perform a colostomy, and attach what was left of his bowel to a hole in his stomach. Jane’s theory is that Eleanor felt so guilty, confronted every day with the evidence of what she had done, that she had to get out, leaving Carl holding the baby, caring for his crippled father.’
‘And sowing the seeds for what happened later.’ Emma’s voice was grim.
Lapslie shook his head, remembering the despair in Carl’s voice back in the barn when he had talked about seeing the things his mother was working on. ‘I think the damage was done earlier than that. I don’t particularly like seeing autopsies myself. Think what it would do to an eight-year-old, even just seeing the photographs. He was warped for life, and it was her fault. She destroyed the family; more through carelessness than deliberate action, but it’s still her fault.’
‘I’m having a hard enough time helping Dom change his dressings,’ Emma confided. ‘Blood and stuff like that just doesn’t appeal to me.’
The ghost of his old life brushed across the back of Lapslie’s neck, but he pushed it away. ‘We still need to have that chat,’ he said, ‘but not now. Not here.’
‘Oh,’ Emma said suddenly. ‘Jane Catherall called while you were taking the kid’s statement.’
‘If it’s more evidence, she can keep it. I think we’ve got enough to convict him many times over. He’s admitted everything.’
Emma grimaced. ‘Did he mention what he did with the flesh from Catherine Charnaud’s arm?’
Lapslie frowned, remembering. ‘I didn’t ask,’ he said. ‘It seemed … incidental … to the fact that he killed her. He said that he didn’t want to torture her; it was just another tick in the box, another thing to distinguish it from his previous murders. And, I suspect, to attract his mother’s attention. I presumed he’d just disposed of it somewhere.’
‘In a sense,’ Emma said. ‘Dr Catherall found traces of food in Nicholas Whittley’s stomach, and in the discarded colostomy bag. Something about it bothered her, so she ran some tests. She says it’s human flesh – cooked. Carl Whittley fed Catherine Charnaud’s arm to his father.’
‘And presumably ate it himself,’ Lapslie said. ‘It’s one way to dispose of the evidence, I suppose.’ He felt as if the world was bearing down on his shoulders. He should feel triumphant, having solved two current cases and so many old ones, but he just felt tired and old. He wanted to go home and never come back. Somehow, spending the rest of his life in stillness and silence seemed appealing now. In that sense, perhaps Alan Rouse had won after all.
‘And what about you?’ Emma asked, somehow picking up on his thoughts. ‘How’s things with the Chief Super?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lapslie confided. ‘I keep making appointments and he keeps cancelling. I may have to pretend to be Dain Morritt to get in through the door. If I can be bothered any more.’
He glanced again at the one-way mirror that showed them what was going on in the interrogation room. Carl Whittley looked to him like an animal in a glass-fronted box; part of a tableau that would never change apart from the gradual ageing of its motionless central character. Tortured by his memories of straight horizons and blue skies which he would never, ever see again.
His voice had tasted of grass. Grass and salt water.
Without saying goodbye, Lapslie left the interrogation suite and walked out of the police station. Gulls wheeled in the air above him. He started walking, not caring where he went, and was surprised to find himself eventually outside the hospital where he had been taken after his fit, and where he had returned to try and find the old lady with porphyria.
He walked up to the reception desk. The receptionist turned a professionally blank face towards him. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘I’m trying to find one of your doctors,’ he said, the words surprising him as he said them, ‘but I don’t actually know her name.’
‘Can I ask what this is concerning?’
He smiled, for what felt like the first time in a long while. ‘I was hoping to ask her out to dinner,’ he said.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With grateful thanks to: Steve Gallagher, David Morrell, Jack Curtis and the late Kenneth Royce and Geoffrey Household, excellent thriller writers all, and the ones who I keep going back to, time and time again. Thanks also to: Andrew Lane, for editorial assistance; Nic Cheetham and Gillian Holmes for detailed comments and lots of patience; John Catherall, for allowing me again to use him as a template; and Dain Morritt, Katherine Charnaud, Alex Wildish, Sancha Starkey, Toby Rumford and Seiju Desai for use of their wonderful names (but not, of course, their wonderful characters …)
Acknowledgements also to the Social Issues Research Centre for their fascinating smell report (http://www.sirc.org/publik/smell_human.html) and to Ronald Blackburn for his instructive The Psychology of Criminal Conduct (Wiley, 1993)
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