Listening to the killer and his victim in their dance of death, Lapslie found himself thinking about the hospital internet café where the sound file had been sent from. According to Burrows’ people there was no way of finding out from the file who had sent it, but as his mind drifted Lapslie found himself staring at the webcam that sat upon the top of the LCD monitor. It was switched off now, but Lapslie had used similar devices to conduct video-conferences with investigating officers from the silence of his cottage when his synaesthesia was particularly bad.
And he suddenly remembered that the computers in the internet café in the hospital had all had a little blue light glowing in the top-centre of their screens. Webcams? It was possible. And that meant an image of the killer might have been accidentally captured as they were sending the email – especially if the default setting of the computers was to have their cameras ‘on’. It was a long shot, but he’d taken longer shots before and hit the target.
He pulled Burrows’ memory stick from the computer, turned it off with a brutal press of the power switch and headed for the car park. Within five minutes he was in his Saab 9-3 and heading again for the hospital that, for various reasons, was playing a more and more important role in his life.
As was becoming more and more common these days, it was eye-wateringly expensive to use the car park at the hospital. Lapslie assumed that the intention was to dissuade hundreds of people from parking there for hours on end while visiting relatives, but the problem was that people often turned up at Accident and Emergency, or Obstetrics, or some other part of the hospital for treatment or with a partner and not knowing how long they were likely to be there. And the shock of paying for parking while you spent twelve hours in A&E would be enough to trigger another heart attack, if that’s what they were in for in the first place.
He put two hours on the car and strode into the hospital. He knew the place well enough now to head straight through the wide white corridors, past the abstract paintings and sculptures that were meant to soothe the patients and their visitors, to where the internet café was located. Part of him missed the choking smell of antiseptic cleaner that he associated with hospitals from his childhood. Science had obviously moved on since then, and come up with something that probably smelled faintly of pine or lemon. Or, God help the world, lavender.
Three computers were occupied – two by patients in dressing gowns and one by a bored kid who had probably been forced to accompany his mother on a visit to her bed-ridden aunt – and Lapslie walked across to the counter where a girl with pink foam swirls in her hair was chatting on a mobile phone. Her nametag said ‘Kari’. She raised her eyebrows at him and smiled. He just stared at her until she whispered into her mobile, ‘Got to go – call you later,’ and cut short her call.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie,’ he said quietly, holding his warrant card out towards her. ‘I’m investigating a murder. I need to know about the webcams on your terminals.’
‘Wow – a real policeman. Okay, yeah, what do you need to know?’
‘Are they switched on all the time?’
She shook her head. ‘No way. That would be an invasion of privacy. We have strict rules.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘It’s to do with, you know, perverts. We don’t want people thinking they can hack into the computers, turn the cameras on and watch the kids. We have to activate the webcams from the desk here.’
‘Okay.’ He thought for a moment. The chances of the killer having switched the webcam on while they were sending Lapslie the email was, while superficially attractive, almost laughably improbable, but he had to try. ‘If I give you a date, a time and an IP address, can you see whether a particular terminal had its webcam switched on?’
‘Sure.’
He handed across the information that Sean Burrows’ team had given him and watched as she typed it into her terminal and frowned at the screen. ‘Yeah,’ she said, pointing. ‘It’s that one over there. Looks like we had one camera switched on at that time, but it wasn’t that one.’
‘Thanks.’ He turned away, disappointed, then turned back as a sudden thought occurred to him.
‘Do you log the images from the webcams?’
‘Yeah. We have to. As proof in case, you know, people are doing something inappropriate.’ She looked around at the ranks of terminals. ‘Although you’d have to be pretty weird to want to touch yourself up or whatever in the middle of a hospital.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lapslie found himself saying. ‘Nurses’ uniforms – you know?’
She gazed at him blankly.
‘Okay. Anyway, any chance you still have the images from the webcam that was on at the time?’
‘Yeah. I guess.’ She turned back to the terminal, typed and clicked away, then swivelled the screen around to face him. ‘Hey, look,’ she said. ‘It’s me!’
Lapslie stared at the boxed image on the screen. The person using the terminal was a middle-aged lady, and she was talking away nineteen to the dozen. A time-stamp and date-stamp had been inserted at the bottom of the image. There was no sound, but Lapslie felt fairly sure that she was updating some family member in Australia or South Africa on the medical condition of some relative in the hospital. The image was updating several times a second; not quite movie quality, but enough to be able to see what she was doing. Better than a still image, certainly. Behind her was a reverse angle back to the counter. Kari was, indeed, sitting behind the counter. The swirls in her hair had been purple that time. Lapslie spent a couple of seconds orienting himself, trying to work out which terminal the images had been sent from.
And the terminal that Lapslie was interested in – the one from which the scream sound file had been sent – was located directly between the middle-aged woman and the desk with Kari behind it.
Lapslie’s breath caught in his throat. Someone was sitting at that terminal. The image quality wasn’t perfect, but he could make out enough to tell sex, age and colour of hair.
Lapslie checked the time-stamp and the date-stamp again in disbelief. There was no doubt. The images had been captured at the exact time that the sound file had been sent. And the person at the terminal was the person who had sent the file.
It was a girl. A teenage girl with red hair pulled back into a ponytail.
CHAPTER SIX
Emma Bradbury slept fitfully, bothered by the constant traffic outside her window and what sounded like a wedding reception being held in a room below her. Seventies and eighties dance hits – the one thing musically that she and Dom McGinley could agree that they both hated.
She’d eaten at the hotel, after leaving Sergeant Murrell at the police station. The restaurant had been decorated in faux-baronial style, with shields and crossed swords hung on walls painted a deep-red which, reflected in the windows looking out into the darkness, made it appear that the sunset outside had been forever frozen in time. A bit like Canvey Island itself, she thought. The menu, like the music that she would spend the next few hours lying awake and listening to, was also frozen in more ways than one: trapped in the 1970s: prawns in Marie Rose sauce, pâté on toast triangles, beef tournedos, mushroom stroganoff … She ordered a pint of gassy keg beer from the bar: she had a feeling that if she’d looked at the wine list it would have been filled with Blue Nuns and Black Towers and rosé wines in bulbous bottles nestled within wicker baskets. Naff. The whole place was naff, as if civilisation lapped out in slow waves from London, and Canvey Island was the point where the tide washed up the old, faded flotsam and jetsam of history.
Having said that, the food was actually nicely cooked, and the beer relaxed her enough that she started enjoying herself despite her surroundings. Listening to the conversations of the diners around her – mainly middle-aged or elderly couples, with a smattering of youngsters on what was probably their first date – she kept dropping in and out of parallel conversations along the lines of: ‘You remember ’er, she used to live on Arnely Avenue. Had ’er, you know, ’er tubes tied at the ’o
spital two years ago, but it all went wrong and she got an infection. She went to live wiv ’er mum and ’er mum’s boyfriend in the end …’ Not so much a conversation as a stream of consciousness interrupted by the occasional ‘Yeah’ and ‘Uh?’ from the other person.
Eventually the wedding reception degenerated into what sounded like a fight, and from there into silence. Emma drifted off to sleep, and woke hours later to find weak sunlight washing in through the double-glazed window.
She showered, dressed and went downstairs to find that the restaurant had been rearranged as a breakfast buffet. She loaded her plate up with scrambled egg, hash browns and bacon, and washed the lot down with a pot of strong coffee, then went out for a walk in the cold and damp morning air.
The Cocklecatcher had its own car park which opened out onto a small shopping centre of the Euronics and Iceland variety. A mist had drifted in from the estuary, muffling sounds and making people appear like ghosts as they walked. She located a cashpoint and got out some money, just to keep herself going.
She returned to the hotel and got into her car. Checking her watch she found that it was heading towards nine o’clock, but she was in no rush to get to the police station. The main event of the morning was getting the body formally identified by the Dooley family, and she wasn’t particularly looking forward to that. It was the part of the job she hated most. So instead she started her car and drove out along one of the main roads, keeping going past more Dutch-sounding road names, like Ziderbeck, Wilrich, Baardwyk and Vanderwilt, past the strangely inappropriate and deserted Canvey Island Transport Museum, until the road stopped dead at a scrappy grass bank topped with a grey concrete sea wall. She parked her car and got out, feeling the chill wind run its fingers through her hair. Climbing the bank, she found herself gazing out across the Thames Estuary. Away in the distance a bird was calling, a repeated ‘tueep, tueep, tueep’, and somewhere else she could hear the whine of power saws and the ‘beep, beep, beep’ of a reversing forklift truck. The breeze pushed the otherwise waveless water this way and that, causing small ripples that criss-crossed each other like the grey, reticulated hide of an elephant. The grey, damp mist hung low, obscuring the horizon and giving the impression that reality just faded out into grey nothingness a few hundred yards away. What with that and the sea wall that ran all the way around the island, Canvey felt more and more to her like a fortified castle desperately clinging on to civilisation while surrounded by the besieging forces of chaos.
On the other side of the sea wall was an algae-covered concrete lip, some four feet wide. It was accessible via gaps in the wall every hundred yards or so that could be closed off with thick metal gates if there was a particularly high tide. Sloped down into the water beyond was the sea wall, built from massive blocks of stone that had been coated in thick black bitumen. Decades of hot summers had caused the bitumen to soften and run like ancient wrinkled skin.
Looking down onto the concrete lip, Emma could see three men in parkas and woollen hats clustered around a telescope mounted on a tripod. The other two had binoculars slung around their necks. The telescope was pointed sideways, along the wall, and following its line Emma could see in the distance a marshy area where banks of mud emerged from the rippling water like the backs of wallowing animals. Small wading birds scurried across the mud with splayed feet, probing for worms. The men ignored them, spending their time instead chatting and sipping tea from thermos flasks held in gloved fingers. They were obviously waiting for rarer prey.
‘Morning!’
Emma turned, surprised, to find a woman in a green Barbour jacket and a headscarf wandering past. She had a chocolate Labrador at heel.
‘Good morning,’ Emma replied.
The woman smiled and walked on. The dog sniffed at Emma’s trousers, waited for a moment to see whether it might be stroked, then wandered off.
Turning back to the estuary, Emma noticed that the birdwatchers’ attention had been gripped by something out on the mudbanks. The man with the telescope was bending over with his face pressed up against the eyepiece, while his two friends had their binoculars clamped to their eyes with an eagerness that Emma would have considered suspicious if she had seen it displayed in a park near a children’s playground. Following their rapt gaze she couldn’t see anything different about the mud banks. The birds looked exactly the same to her. People were strange.
She looked back out across the water. The mist was beginning to clear now, pushed off by the stiffening breeze. A weak sun was now visible as a white circle the size of a penny held at arm’s length in the sky. Beneath the rippling, wind-blown water Emma could see the dark shadows of sunken mud banks. The ripples seemed to change shape as they crossed the shadows. Further out, where the angle of the light on the water meant that the mud banks were invisible beneath its surface, Emma found that she could still tell where they were from the patterns of ripples. The estuary had a geography all its own, if you knew what you were looking for.
She was avoiding having to get the body identified. She knew that, but her willpower appeared to have evaporated. All she wanted to do, for the moment, was stand there and look out across the water, like the birdwatchers, waiting for something meaningful to happen. She didn’t know what it might be, but she would recognise it if she saw it.
Emma wandered along the wall towards where the mud banks lay, heading in the same direction as the lady with the Labrador. She tried to work out which of the birds had got the birdwatchers all of a twitter, but they still all looked the same to her: dun-coloured little bundles with thin beaks and wide feet. Surely, if you were going to go to all the trouble of spending hours standing in the cold and the rain you would do it for something bright and tropical, or at the very least something bigger than the average, but to Emma it seemed that all the men were getting excited about was a bird the same size and shape as the rest of them but with a black edge to its wing feathers, or an extra toe, or something.
Past the mud banks, Emma saw a forest of slender wooden poles pointed towards the sky. For a few moments she couldn’t work out what they were, then she realised. Masts. As she got closer she saw that they were all attached to boats that were drawn up on a concrete causeway that sloped down towards the water. And not just any boats. These were all small one- or two-person catamarans – two narrow hulls like canoes linked by narrow struts with a mast projecting right from the centre. A sign on a building nearby said: ‘Canvey Island Boat Club’. Obviously there was more going on here than just birdwatching.
Her way forward was blocked by a fence that marked the boundary of the Boat Club. The Labrador woman had headed down the slope to where she had parked her car. Emma turned around and headed back along the wall.
The mist had rolled back now, revealing more of the water. Faintly, in the far distance, Emma thought she could make out a mass of land: sketchy suggestions of hills and dips across on the Kent side of the estuary. Gravesend, perhaps? Years ago, centuries before the Dartford Tunnel had been dug, and before the Queen Elizabeth Bridge had been built, both of them ten miles or so upstream, the only way from one bank to the other would be by boat. To make the trip by cart or by foot would require you to go all the way up to – where? Walton-on-Thames, perhaps? Or further?
This was stupid. She couldn’t keep putting it off. The body would have been transferred from Jane Catherall’s care to the mortuary nearest to the parents by now. It, and they, were waiting for her.
Reluctantly, she headed down the grassy bank towards her car.
She arrived at the police station just before nine o’clock. Murrell was in his office sifting through a pile of papers. He glanced up as she walked in.
‘Morning. Sleep well?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice.’
He nodded. ‘Wedding party?’
‘You guessed. You weren’t there, were you?’
‘No, but there’s a wedding party on there most nights. Which is odd, considering there aren’t that many weddings occurring on the i
sland. Someone ought to look into that.’
‘You ready to go?’
His eyes narrowed for a second, as if he’d just been told he was being taken to the vet to be neutered. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Problem?’ Emma asked.
‘No.’ He stood up, but hesitated before coming out from behind his desk. ‘Well, yes. In a way.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s …’ He paused, and swallowed. ‘Look, this is going to sound pathetic.’
‘What?’
‘We’re going off-island, aren’t we?’
Emma sighed. ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’
Murrell raised his hands defensively. ‘Not as such, but a lot of us are kind of tied to Canvey Island. It’s more than our home; it’s like it’s separate from the rest of Essex and the rest of England. We feel comfortable here, and we’ve got everything we need – shops, pubs, nightclubs, cinemas. And apart from a few weeks in the summer we get the beaches as well.’ He made a vague gesture with his hands. ‘Most of the men who live on Canvey marry women from Canvey. What does that tell you?’
‘That the incidence of people with six fingers is higher than the national average?’
He had the grace to laugh. ‘Well, yeah, in-breeding is certainly possible, judging by some of the people that I see out on the streets – but no, what I mean is, it’s a community in the true sense of the word, with the kind of ties that bind a community together. Off-island, in Essex, over the course of centuries, little villages joined together to form larger villages, and then towns. Here, on Canvey, we didn’t. We’re still separate from the rest. In our minds we’re still that little village, bounded by the sea.’
‘Look,’ she said patiently, ‘I didn’t need a passport to get here. There’s no customs at the border and you’re not going to be cavity-searched when you leave. The people in Essex still talk the same language, and they don’t have nits. Just take a deep breath and force yourself.’
Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation Page 9
