Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘Right. Yes. Let’s go.’

  They took his car, giving Emma a chance to do some more sightseeing as they drove out past the caravan park and the tall metal chimneys of the refinery, past the large supermarket and the several small roundabouts, along the long, curving causeway that carried cars over the marshes and which, Emma noticed, was called Memorial Way, presumably in remembrance of the people who had died in the floods of the 1950s. Murrell was quiet as they drove, and Emma couldn’t help wondering about his reluctance to leave the island. It was almost medieval; but then, she reflected, so much of what she had seen on the island made it feel like a village walled off against the barbarian hordes that roamed the marshes. Some kind of race memory? Who could tell?

  Once across the causeway it was about a forty-minute drive to Maldon. The first twenty minutes took them along wide A-roads built up above the Essex countryside as if by architects who were frightened of letting their roads touch the soil; the second half of the journey was along minor B-roads through small villages and past farms and industrial parks. Eventually they got to the outskirts of the town. The mortuary was on the other side, and Murrell had to drive right through the centre of town to get there. Maldon’s town centre seemed to consist of one very long High Street that was a mix of nondescript buildings, old churches and new flat-fronted shops. They passed a particularly impressive hotel named the Blue Boar, and Emma made a mental note to look it up with a view to staying there if work or play ever brought her back to the Maldon area.

  The mortuary was part of the new local hospital. Murrell parked in the hospital’s car park, and together they walked through the large sliding doors at the entrance and on through the central spine corridor following the cryptic signage and the equally cryptic instructions given to them by the woman on the reception desk.

  A tastefully furnished waiting room was set to one side of the doorway that led into the main mortuary area. Three people were waiting there: a small man whose tanned skin was almost as leathery as his coat, but not quite as scuffed, a woman who probably massed twice his body weight but who was leaning on him for comfort, and a large man in a tight police uniform whose hair was sandy turning white. He walked over to them. ‘George Rossmore,’ he said, hand outstretched.

  ‘Keith Murrell,’ said Emma’s companion, shaking hands.

  Emma did likewise, murmuring ‘Emma Bradbury.’ She looked across to the man and the woman. ‘Mr and Mrs Dooley, I presume?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Rossmore said.

  ‘Boyfriend not here?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Shame,’ Emma said. ‘I wanted to talk to him.’ Something about the voices of the parents caught her attention. After a few moments he realised that the tearful wailing and the muttered reassurances were being said in another language. ‘They’re not British?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re Travellers,’ Rossmore answered; ‘a people without a land, if you believe them. Even the ones who have settled down, or who have been settled down against their will, and don’t actually move around any more. They have their own traditions, their own ways of doing things and their own language.’

  ‘Just like the people of Canvey Island,’ Emma murmured, ‘apart from the language bit.’ She thought for a moment. ‘What language do they speak? Romany?’

  ‘No, you’re thinking of true Gypsies: the Roma. They have a bit of a downer on the Travellers. They called them “Didicoy”, which is the same word they use for the half-breed children of Roma and ordinary people. That language they’re speaking is Shelti. It comes in two dialects – Gamin and Cant. These two are speaking Gamin, unless I miss my guess.’

  ‘Wow.’ Emma was impressed. ‘A whole culture that I wasn’t even aware of.’

  ‘They don’t integrate,’ Rossmore agreed, ‘but they don’t set up an obvious counter-culture of Traveller shops, Traveller churches and Traveller community centres either. They’re the perfect neighbours, as long as you ignore the petty crime and the caravan sites.’

  Emma walked across to the two grieving parents. ‘Mr and Mrs Dooley? I’m Detective Sergeant Emma Bradbury. Thank you for being here.’

  ‘Can we get this over with?’ the husband said gruffly. He wouldn’t look Emma in the eyes.

  ‘Of course.’ She paused, trying to work out how to phrase the necessary qualification. ‘We don’t know for sure that this is your daughter, but we strongly suspect it is. We need you to confirm it for us. Is that okay?’ She tried to meet their gaze, to gauge whether they understood what she was trying to tell them, but they were both looking away: Mr Dooley towards the window and his wife at the floor. Emma looked towards the door. A hospital worker was standing there. He nodded to her solemnly. ‘Please – come this way.’

  He led them through the door into the mortuary itself. The air was chillier there, and it smelled of pine and lavender. Vases of flowers were placed on tables and shelves; anything to disguise the fact that this was a place of death within a place of illness and disease: the final destination for some of the patients who passed through its large sliding doors. He stopped at a doorway. The room inside was darkened. He gestured inside. ‘Please – whenever you are ready.’

  Inside, on a table, a body lay. It couldn’t be anything else. The smell of pine and lavender was almost overpowering. Mr and Mrs Dooley, Emma and Murrell all shuffled in, like actors walking on stage but unsure of their lines or their stage directions. The hospital worker walked over to the body, took hold of a corner of the sheet nearest the head, and folded it back, exposing the face.

  It was the woman whose body Emma had seen in Doctor Catherall’s mortuary, but someone had done a lot of good work on her. Emma remembered with a shudder how the woman’s scalp had been peeled forward by the pathologist, exposing her skull and covering her face, but none of that was evident now. Her face was composed, her eyes peacefully closed, her forehead unwrinkled, her hair carefully brushed, A dressing had been applied at the place where Emma remembered that the flesh had been sliced away. It would have been possible to believe that she was just asleep, pale and cold and asleep, if Emma hadn’t seen her with her chest and skull opened up and her organs being removed and weighed with no more ceremony than a load of groceries.

  Mrs Dooley let out a shocked wail, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and disbelieving. Her husband’s face seemed to age ten years in as many seconds.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as flat and as hard as concrete. ‘That’s me daughter.’

  Emma led the parents out of the room where their daughter lay and back to the waiting room. It seemed like a different room now. The flowers that had previously been vibrant looked artificial, and the soothing paint scheme pointed up the scuffs and cracks in the walls. Even the neon light strips were buzzing more than they had before.

  ‘’Ow did it ’appen?’ Mr Dooley asked, still with his arm around his wife’s shoulders.

  Emma knew the police code: never answer a question except with another question if you’re interviewing witnesses or suspects, in case you give something away that could later prove critical to the investigation, and this was still a murder investigation. She shook her head. ‘We’re still in the process of establishing exactly what happened,’ she said. ‘But please accept my condolences.’ She paused for a heartbeat. ‘When did you realise that your daughter was missing?’

  ‘She didn’t come ’ome,’ Mrs Dooley said; the first words Emma had heard her utter in English. Her voice was raspy, roughened by too many years of smoking, Emma assumed. ‘Normally we wouldn’t bovver about that, but we knew ’er boyfriend weren’t around.’

  Mr Dooley’s hand tightened on his wife’s shoulder. Emma noticed the flesh beneath the blouse bulge beneath his thin fingers.

  ‘’E were out wiv ’is mates,’ Mrs Dooley amplified. ‘Cat hadn’t said she was goin’ to be out, so we phoned a few of ’er mates. They ’adn’t seen ’er. Nobody ’ad seen ’er.’

  ‘So you called t
he police,’ Emma said, not so much a question as an anticipation of the next statement.

  ‘No,’ Mr Dooley said. ‘We went out lookin’. Me an’ some others. We checked all the usual bars an’ clubs, but she weren’t there. We phoned ’er bloke, just in case, but she weren’t wiv ’im either. We drove around lookin’, but she weren’t nowhere.’

  ‘And then you notified the police?’ Emma asked.

  Mr Dooley looked away. His expression suggested that he wanted to spit on the floor, but was restraining himself. ‘After some … discussion, yeah.’

  ‘The Parve usually try to sort things out themselves,’ Sergeant Rossmore said from the other side of the room. ‘They don’t like bothering the police with trivialities like missing people.’

  ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ Mrs Dooley offered when her husband said nothing. She looked up at him. ‘And look where it got us.’

  He remained silent, but his fingers clamped hard enough on her shoulder that she winced.

  ‘Are you sure her boyfriend couldn’t have seen her?’ Emma asked.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Mr Dooley said. ‘I know the blokes who was with ’im.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Emma asked.

  Mr Dooley glanced at her, briefly, suspicion in his eyes. ‘I told you, it ain’t ’im.’

  ‘None the less, we need to talk to him.’

  ‘Why?’ Blunt, flat.

  Emma thought quickly. She wanted to talk to the boyfriend because he was probably her chief suspect, but the Dooleys were convinced he was innocent. ‘Because he might have talked to her on the phone, and he might be able to narrow down the time when she was … when she died.’

  ‘Donal,’ Mrs Dooley said, after glancing at her husband. ‘Donal O’Riordan. ’E’s a decent enough lad.’

  ‘And where does he live?’

  Mrs Dooley glanced at her husband again, but this time he shook his head briefly. ‘I dunno,’ she said lamely.

  ‘If she was attacked,’ Mr Dooley said before Emma could follow up the question, ‘if my baby girl was assaulted, I want to know about it. I got a right to know about it.’

  ‘And then what?’ Rossmore asked. ‘You round up a lynch mob? You hunt down someone you think might be guilty and you cut their bollocks off?’

  ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ Mr Dooley said as if reciting a mantra. ‘We sort out our own problems in our own ways.’

  ‘Which would be all fine and dandy,’ Rossmore said, ‘if you always get the right bloke. But you don’t. You just choose someone you don’t like the look of, usually an outsider, and you set on them like you set those lurchers you keep on hares. And, of course, if one of you has raped or assaulted an outsider then you close ranks. You let them get away with it.’

  Mr Dooley shrugged, as if he wasn’t interested.

  ‘Mrs Dooley,’ Emma said, calming her, ‘can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against Catriona? Did she mention anyone bothering her, or following her around? Had she been in any fights?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Mrs Dooley shook her head violently. ‘She were a good girl. Everone loved ’er.’

  ‘Did she work?’

  ‘She was on the tills at Sainsbury’s. Just to get by ’til the summer, when she could get a job at the amusements.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Sergeant Rossmore muttered from the other side of the room.

  ‘Have either of you seen anyone round the area, anyone you didn’t recognise, or who looked out of place?’

  ‘Not a soul.’

  Mr Dooley made a little gesture with his head. ‘We know what goes on in our manor. If there was a stranger around, we’d know about it. People would call other people, and pretty soon we’d ’ave someone checkin’ ’em out.’

  Emma shook her head. ‘I won’t keep you any longer. Thank you for your help, and once again – I’m sorry for your loss. Sergeant Rossmore will assign a police officer to act as family liaison, keeping you abreast of developments and making sure you know what’s going on.’

  ‘We don’t need no family liaison,’ Mr Dooley snarled. ‘All we need is a name. Just a name.’

  ‘And we need our daughter back,’ Mrs Dooley said, almost apologetically. ‘For the funeral.’

  ‘It may be a few days,’ Emma said, ‘depending on the state of the investigation, but I’ll get your daughter’s body released as soon as possible. Can we give you a lift back to your home?’

  ‘We’ll make our own way.’ Mr Dooley took his wife’s elbow and guided her away, towards the door.

  She watched them go, thinking about how little she’d actually got from them, and how tight-knit the Traveller community appeared to be. She’d never really had any dealings with them before. From the outside they looked just like anyone else, but scratch the surface and there was a whole set of beliefs, habits, traditions and customs there that marked them out from the rest of the society whose boundaries they lived so quietly within.

  ‘This Donal O’Riordan,’ she said, looking at Rossmore. ‘Is he known to you?’

  ‘Local Jack-the-Lad,’ Rossmore replied. ‘We’ve had him up for joyriding on too many occasions to mention, plus we’ve suspected him of some minor burglaries, a bit of breaking and entering. He likes his beer and he likes to get into a fight on a Saturday night. We know where he lives. Council house on the same estate as the Dooleys.’

  ‘Then let’s go there,’ Emma said. ‘Before the Dooleys warn him off.’

  ‘We’ll need backup,’ Rossmore declared, scrawling the address on a scrap of paper. ‘The old boy was right – if we turn up there’ll be a flashmob surrounding us within ten minutes, and they’ll be bringing bricks and baseball bats to the party.’

  As Emma walked with Murrell back to his car, Rossmore was talking on his mobile behind them. The drive from the hospital took less than twenty minutes, heading out of the centre of Maldon and into an estate that grew out of it like a cancer, its cells being hundreds of houses made out of grey breeze-blocks and discoloured PVC cladding, the only thing distinguishing one from another being the various different kinds of weather damage and the remains of old Christmas decorations clinging like dead vines to the gaps between the masonry blocks. By the time they got to O’Riordan’s house they were part of a convoy of five police cars. It wasn’t quite a raid, but the speed with which the police got out of their cars and formed a protective barrier against the rapidly developing crowd of locals made it feel like one.

  Emma strode up the cracked path towards the front door, past the rusted carcass of an old Ford Mondeo that sat in the front garden. She could sense Murrell sprinting to keep up. She banged hard on the door, trying to ignore the mutterings from the growing mob behind her. ‘Donal O’Riordan? This is the police. Please answer the door – we need to talk to you.’ She paused, then added, ‘It’s about your girlfriend – Catriona Dooley,’ just in case he had more than one girlfriend.

  Two constables headed around the back to intercept O’Riordan if he tried to make a run for it. Either Rossmore had sent them or they’d been on enough encroachments into Traveller territory that they knew how it worked.

  No sound from within. Emma turned to Murrell. ‘What do you reckon?’ she asked. ‘We’ve got no grounds to go in, even if we suspect he’s inside, and the locals aren’t going to be much help. We’ll never find a local gossip who can tell us where he’s gone around here.’

  ‘Actually,’ Murrell said, ‘I think we have got grounds to go in.’ He pointed to the white PVC door. ‘Look.’

  Emma looked closer at the area Murrell was indicating, beside the Yale lock. What she had at first taken to be a grease mark looked more like a smear of blood, as if someone with bloody fingers had pulled the door too and left a thumbprint.

  ‘Right,’ she said, beckoning two constables. ‘I want this door open, pronto.’

  The constables looked at each other uncertainly, then back at the car.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got the door-breaking equipment with us,’ one of
them, a lad with ginger hair and freckles, said.

  Emma tried not to imagine what Mark Lapslie would say at that point. ‘Policemen have been breaking doors down for hundreds of years,’ she said patiently. ‘Use your initiative.’

  ‘Are we allowed to do that?’ the other one asked. He was shorter, with spiky dark hair. ‘Health and safety, like.’

  ‘Just do it,’ Murrell said before Emma could explode at them. ‘I’ll make sure you’re covered. And whatever you do, don’t try and kick it in like they do on TV. You’ll just injure yourself. Brace yourself and use your shoulders.’

  ‘That was my point,’ the ginger-haired constable murmured, but he took a step back and threw himself against the door. It shuddered under his weight, and bowed at the top, but the lock stayed intact. He stood back further and took two steps this time before hitting the door. This time the wood holding the lock splintered and the door flew open.

  ‘Get in and look for O’Riordan,’ Emma instructed. The constables piled inside; one heading left and up a set of stairs that were all but invisible in the shadows of the hall, the other heading right. She and Murrell followed on.

  The living room, directly off the hall, was dark; curtains drawn against the afternoon sunshine. It smelled of unwashed clothes and takeaway Chinese food. Emma looked around the living room: leather sofa, massive LCD TV, Xbox 360. No sign of O’Riordan.

  One of the constables thudded down the stairs and into the living room. ‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘Place is a mess, though. Don’t reckon he’s got a cleaner.’

  ‘I think you need to see this,’ the other constable called from the hall. He appeared in the doorway, face white and adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. ‘I really think you both need to see this.’

  Emma glanced over at Murrell. He was frowning. Together, they headed towards the kitchen. Emma got through the door first.

  The cooker was covered in half-empty plastic take-out containers with snap tops, and the dried remains of spilled meals, but it was the kitchen table that her gaze was drawn to. It was covered in dark red blood. Smears and tracks on the centre of the table indicated that something had been dragged across it. Trickles of blood had made their way to the edge and hung like glutinous stalactites down towards the floor.