Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  At the mortuary, Doctor Catherall’s assistants laid the body carefully on one of the massive, lipped, stainless-steel tables. After they had washed it and catalogued it with a series of photographs, Jane stepped forward, moving slowly around the table and examining each wound, each slash, each exposed area of muscle, tissue and bone with equal care, murmuring all the time into a digital voice recorder. It occurred to Emma that it was like some strange modern dance, with all the participants knowing their motions but where the audience had to interpret the meaning of what was being done on stage.

  After opening up the body she cut through the ribs with a pair of medical shears, then moved forward again and lifted the breast bone free. The remnants of the ribs hung down from her hand like the legs of some stark, white spider. Putting the breast bone to one side, she proceeded to remove every organ from the body cavity, meticulously weighed it and then put it to one side for later analysis.

  She paused when she came to the liver. At least, Emma assumed it was the woman’s liver. Whatever it was, it was dark red and glistening, and it flopped over both of Jane Catherall’s hands. The pathologist gazed at it for a few moments, weighing it in her hands before placing it to one side. She spoke quietly into the digital recorder for a minute or so before continuing with the autopsy.

  After finishing with the organs in the chest cavity she moved to the head and made a cut all the way around the back of the skull, following the hairline, and then with a grotesque crackling sound she pulled the scalp forward, exposing the bony, bloody plates of the skull and leaving the flesh resting on the face like an eyeless, mouthless mask of raw meat. Cutting through the skull, she eased the brain free of its bony confines, lifting it up so she could cut through the spinal cord. The brain went with the rest of the internal organs, and Jane stepped back, examining her handiwork.

  Jane glanced at her watch. ‘Fancy some lunch?’ she said to Emma. ‘It’s getting late. There’s a decent little bistro just across the road.‘’

  ‘Thanks,’ Emma said, dry-mouthed, ‘but I don’t really fancy anything at the moment. I’m happy to have a glass of water while you eat, though, if you promise not to have anything with beef or pork it in.’

  ‘Just pasta,’ said Jane, ‘I promise.’ She turned to where her assistant, Dan, was standing against the far wall, waiting. ‘Close this lady up,’ she said, ‘and then take samples from the organs and send them to Mr Burrows for analysis. And see if you can reconstruct what her face looked like before the cuts were made, based on the photographs and the remaining skin and subcutaneous fat. I’ll be back in an hour or so.’

  Emma and Jane left the mortuary and walked across to the Italian restaurant. Emma found herself having to slow down, just like she’d done in the car, to make sure that she stayed with the pathologist.

  Sitting down with a bottle of sparkling mineral water in front of them and Jane’s order being prepared, Emma voiced the question she’d been wanting to ask for hours.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Difficult to say at the moment,’ Jane replied judiciously. ‘There are traces of chafing on the wrists and the ankles, so I suspect that she was bound tightly for a period of time. The skin is bruised but not broken, suggesting that whatever was used to restrain her was soft and flexible, not hard and unyielding. My initial findings are that there is some chafing over chafing, which leads me to believe that she was unbound and then bound again several times—’

  ‘—Suggesting that she was tied up for a while.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jane Catherall paused for a moment, thinking. ‘At the risk of being indelicate, the area around the anus and the perineum shows signs of staining and blistering.’

  ‘I don’t like where this is going,’ Emma sighed, feeling her stomach briefly clench.

  ‘She has been forced to sit in her own bodily waste for some time before being cleaned up, poor child. Part and parcel of the process of restraint, I would venture.’

  ‘All of this is sounding more and more like sexual perversion,’ Emma said grimly.

  Jane made a tch sound through her teeth. ‘Perhaps, but my initial examination of her labial area showed no obvious tears or bruises. The sexual assault tests will tell us more.’

  ‘And what about the obvious wounds on the body?’

  ‘At first sight, I thought the various cuts and slices were inflicted by some sharp-edged instrument such as a machete or a samurai sword, but if that were true then you would expect some directionality to the cuts.’ She took her knife off the table and leaned over towards Emma, tracing cuts across her face, shoulders and chest. ‘If the killer had been standing in front of her then cuts on one shoulder should have been pointing in a different direction to the cuts on the other shoulder, and I should have been able to trace all the cuts back to a point directly in front of her – ’ she tapped her right shoulder with her left hand – ‘like so.’ She heaved herself back to her seat, and started hacking at the white tablecloth instead. ‘Or if the perpetrator had been standing over the victim, if she was tied to a table perhaps, being tortured, then the cuts should have been similarly traceable back to a different point, off to one side, like this.’ She stopped, frowning. ‘But the cuts appear to me to be inflicted from random directions – from the sides, from the top, from the back, but not as far as I can tell from below.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. I can’t yet tell what kind of weapon was involved. I’m not even sure it was a bladed instrument, in the classic sense.’

  ‘Were the wounds inflicted before death?’

  Jane nodded. ‘Oh yes. But not long before.’

  ‘And they were the cause of death?’

  ‘I’ll have to wait for the results to come back on the organs and tissues, but a few of these cuts intersected arteries. The poor girl would have bled to death.’ She shook her head. ‘It would have been painful, and it would have been slow, but it would have been certain. This was not an accident. This was deliberate and sadistic murder.’

  ‘Anything else I need to know?’

  Jane put her head on one side for a long moment. ‘The liver was unusually large. Hepatomegaly is the technical term. I will need to do some further tests to identify the reason.’

  A waiter appeared to one side and slid a plate of pasta in front of Doctor Catherall. It was coated in a red, creamy sauce that glistened just like the liver that she had been holding in her hands just an hour or so earlier. The pathologist hesitated, her fork poised. She glanced, bird-like, at Emma.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Emma said. ‘If I wasn’t hungry before, I’m definitely not hungry now.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Landing at Heathrow in the middle of the afternoon, Lapslie felt strangely displaced in time. He’d slept on the flight, and his body wasn’t sure what it should be doing: eating, sleeping or moving around.

  The light from outside was grey, and England was surprisingly noisy, smelly and dirty compared with Islamabad. The terminal at Heathrow, which had once looked so clean and cutting-edge, was dirty and frayed around the edges, and the walk from the disembarkation point to the luggage claim area was a long trek past threadbare seating, faded signs and stationary moving walkways. The place had an air of uncertainty and anxiety about it, absorbed into the walls and furniture from the millions of passengers who passed through every year. It didn’t advertise Britain well.

  The general low murmur of voices would normally have provided Lapslie with a running trickle of blood in his mouth, shot through with spikes of caramel when the tannoy announcements cut across everything, but the drugs and the coping strategies he was employing pushed everything to the edge of his awareness so that it was only there if he thought about it. He still wasn’t quite used to the freedom of being able to experience noise.

  He’d left his Saab in the long-term parking. While he waited in a dank concrete underpass for the coach to arrive to take him on the five-minute journey to where it sat, he turned his mobile phone on. No messages f
rom Emma, but one from Charlotte saying she was working unexpectedly until early the next morning, and a text from Sean Burrows at the forensics laboratory asking him to pop in when he had a moment. He made a flash decision to head across straight away. With Charlotte working he had little reason to go home. He had a Synaesthesia Therapy Group meeting that afternoon at Chelmsford Hospital which he’d already said that he couldn’t attend, but now he might just be able to make it after seeing Sean Burrows.

  From Heathrow he drove counter-clockwise around the M25 towards Dartford. He briefly considered diverting to visit his old stamping grounds in Tower Hamlets and East Ham, but the flight and the wait at Heathrow had depressed his spirits and he didn’t want to lower them any more by seeing all the changes that time and the local council had wrought. Instead he kept driving towards the wooded and secluded location of the Essex Forensics Laboratory. By the time he parked his car outside the perimeter fence at around four-thirty he had a low-grade buzz in the back of his head that told him his body needed food and sleep in order to reset itself.

  The police officers on the gate were armed with Heckler and Koch semi-automatic carbines. They watched him as he crossed to the reception cabin; muzzles pointed at the ground, left hands locked around the stock, right hands protectively caressing the grip. He wondered briefly when, if ever, they had last fired those guns for real. It was something like an insurance policy, he supposed. You armed your guards in case of terrorist attack, hoping that the attack would never come.

  There used to be a joke, he recalled, that the armed police on gate duty at these establishments were issued with guns if the alert level went up to ‘Amber’, and then given the bullets if it went up to ‘Red’. That was before the Al Qaeda bombs in London in 2005. Now, Lapslie suspected, those guns were fully loaded at all times.

  Despite the fact that he was a familiar face to the ladies on reception, he still had to be given a plastic pass incorporating his photograph, taken by a webcam above the head of the receptionist. He left his car in the external car park and walked through the trees towards the single-storey blocks that housed Sean Burrows’s team.

  The forensics laboratory was built on the site of an old Napoleonic fort, and Lapslie soon found himself passing a grassy mound to his left that he’d been told had once been the location of a local militia armed with flintlock rifles, eager to give Napoleon a bloody nose if he dared invade. As he walked he considered the ironic counterpoint between the original explosives in use on the site – gunpowder – and the kind of hightech experimental explosives being developed by terrorist groups and tested here on site by Burrows’s people.

  He found Burrows sitting in his office, sleeves rolled up, reading something off his computer screen. He refocused his eyes on Lapslie and smiled.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector,’ he said in his warm Irish brogue. Previously it had tasted of blackcurrant wine, but now Lapslie could detect no taste within the words. ‘Most people wait until they come back from a foreign trip before they give out their presents. You sent me one while you were still away.’

  ‘I thought you probably wouldn’t appreciate a pashmina, which is about all they had at Islamabad Airport.’

  ‘Quite right too. How was Pakistan?’

  ‘An odd combination of the very familiar and the rather unusual. Have you ever been?’

  ‘Not as yet. There’s a possibility that I might fly out later in the year to set up a training course on forensic examination of bomb debris. A recurrent problem, if the media reports are to be believed.’ He shook his head. ‘A friend of mine in the Army was over there last year to evaluate their bomb disposal methods. He told me over a couple of pints one night that they picked him up at the airport and drove him straight to a Pakistan Army base where they’d proudly laid out on the parade ground all the fragments of terrorist bombs they’d collected over the past year, and all the material they’d recovered in raids. He said he stood there looking at live packs of explosive with fuses hanging out and drums of what appeared to be unstable ammonium nitrate, while Pakistan Army personnel wandered past him with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and small children played in an Army nursery across the road. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end he spent an hour rendering safe everything he could see.’

  ‘Lovely. We didn’t get that far, although I did get the impression that their evidence collection technique was little better than picking stuff up and having a close look at it.’

  ‘And how are you feeling now? Jet-lagged?

  Lapslie smiled. ‘“The enormous wheels of will drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet,”’ he quoted. ‘That about sums it up, I think.’

  Burrows looked at Lapslie over the top of his glasses. ‘Meanwhile, that sound file you sent me. How did you get hold of it?’

  ‘It was sent to me,’ Lapslie said. ‘I have no idea who by.’

  ‘An anonymous gift. Beware of strings attached.’

  ‘So what can you tell me about it?’

  Burrows stood up. ‘Take a walk with me,’ he said. ‘We’ll head down to the audio lab.’

  The building, one of many scattered across the site, took the form of a central spine corridor from which spur corridors radiated at right angles. Burrows led Lapslie down the main corridor and then diverted off, having to type a four-figure code into a keypad before the door would unlock for him. Doorways to either side gave access to white-painted laboratories lined with wooden benches and computer screens. Burrows led the way into one such laboratory which looked to Lapslie little different from the others.

  ‘Sara,’ he said to the blonde-haired girl who was sitting at a bench wearing a white coat. ‘Do you have that sound file up?’

  ‘Just working on it now,’ she said, glancing from Burrows to Lapslie and back. She looked barely older than Lapslie’s sons.

  ‘Mark, this is Sara Hawkins. Sara, this is DCI Lapslie. Can you give him an update on where we are?’

  ‘Sure.’ She thought for a moment, then indicated the computer sitting on the bench in front of her. It was flanked by two large speakers, and the screen indicated what looked to Lapslie like images of two long, white mountain ranges reflected in lakes, one above the other. ‘This is a pictorial representation of the amplitude of the sound file over time,’ she started. ‘As you can see, it’s a stereo signal – two channels, slightly different from one another – so it was recorded with two microphones. The sampling rate is 44.1 kilohertz, with 16-bit resolution for each channel, which means that the sound is sampled 44,100 times per second. That’s CD-level quality.’

  She smiled at Lapslie’s blank expression. ‘It’s okay. Look, any sound that’s been recorded and then translated into digital format exists as a series of numbers. The numbers represent the characteristics of the sound, like volume and frequency – taken a number of times per second. If you think of the original sound as a smooth curve then the digital representation is a series of steps which try to match the curve. The more steps you have per second, the smoother the resulting profile looks. So, 44,100 samples per second, with 16 bits per channel, and two channels, will result in a bit-rate of 1,411,200 bits per second. That’s almost perfect sound quality. A sample recorded at a rate of, say, 320,000 bits per second is listenable. Even 190,000 bits per second is more than acceptable for most purposes. By the time you get down to 128,000 bits per second then you can hear a noticeable degradation in quality, something like a radio broadcast, and 64,000 bits per second is more like listening to something over a phone than anything else. Clear?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Lapslie said in a heartfelt voice.

  She smiled. ‘Don’t worry. If you take one thing away from this, take away the fact that the sound file was recorded to preserve as much information from the source as possible, given the constraints of data storage.’ She paused, and fixed him with a piercing gaze. ‘Whoever recorded it wanted it to sound good. They cared about the sound quality.’

&nbs
p; Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘You’ve indicated that there’s a trade-off at work there – sound quality versus size of file. Would it be possible to record it in a way that preserved as much of the sound as was technically possible?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘But that would take up a huge amount of hard disk space, assuming it was being stored on a computer.’

  ‘So why would this person compromise on the sound quality?’

  ‘So they could store more sound files,’ she said brightly. Her face fell. ‘Oh. That means—’

  Lapslie finished the thought for her. ‘That means whoever recorded this sound file probably has so many files that they have problems with the storage, so they have to compromise the sound quality.’

  ‘So whoever is doing the screaming—?’

  ‘—is either not the only screamer—’

  ‘—or they’ve done a lot more screaming than just this.’

  The lab was silent for a while as the three of them absorbed the implications of what they had just worked out.

  ‘What else can you tell me?’ Lapslie asked quietly.

  Sara was considerably less bubbly now than when Lapslie and Burrows had come in. ‘I ran the file through a series of filters to reduce hum and static and to enhance the audio frequencies. First, judging by the slight echo on the screams, she’s in a large and relatively open space.’

  ‘She?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘It’s definitely a woman’s voice. Analysis of timbre confirms that. Whatever it is that’s happening to her to cause her pain happens twenty-seven times. That’s the number of cries there are. And thanks to the fact that it’s a stereo recording we know that either she was moving around while the recording was being made or the person that made the recording was moving around.’