Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘So we can surmise,’ Lapslie said, ‘that her captor was concerned for her welfare, so he made sure she was eating properly – at least, as properly as she could, under the circumstances – and was worried about her attempting to escape and overpowering him, which means that he is likely to be physically weak.’

  ‘Or not a him at all,’ Jane murmured.

  ‘Statistically, almost all abductors of women are men,’ Lapslie pointed out.

  ‘But there was no sign of sexual interference in this case.’

  Reluctantly, Lapslie nodded. ‘Point taken. I’m using the words “him” and “he” as shorthand, but we might be looking for a woman.’

  ‘You’ve made another unwarranted assumption,’ Jane Catherall pointed out.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’re assuming that the care taken in the feeding indicates a degree of empathy. Of concern.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It might alternatively indicate that he – or she – wanted her alive and in relatively good health in order that she be able to do something.’

  ‘Like run a lethal maze?’ Lapslie asked, looking around the church.

  ‘Oh, I think this was just a means to an end,’ Jane said. ‘Not an end in itself.’ She shivered. ‘I should get going. These DNA samples aren’t going to analyse themselves.’

  Jane Catherall left, clutching her evidence bags, and Lapslie made his way to his Saab. He checked his watch. If he started out now he could get to Chelmsford in time to grab a bite to eat before seeing Chief Superintendent Rouse.

  His mobile rang as he was driving. He touched the side of the Bluetooth earpiece – a new innovation in his life that Charlotte had persuaded him to try, now that his synaesthesia was quiescent.

  He expected it to be Emma Bradbury on the line, but it was Charlotte calling.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, surprised.

  ‘Hi yourself. I thought I saw you in the corridor of the hospital last night. I waved, but you were talking to someone and you didn’t see me. You weren’t looking for me, were you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, feeling vaguely embarrassed at being watched without knowing it. ‘I needed to find a psychiatrist in a hurry.’

  ‘You’ve got me worried now.’

  He laughed. ‘Not for myself. I’ve got a case on, and I needed some advice. And for someone to look at a photograph and see if they recognised it.’

  ‘Never ask a psychiatrist what they see in a photograph,’ Charlotte said mock-seriously. ‘They spend so long asking patients to look at black and white patterns and tell them what they see that their perceptions are permanently biased.’

  ‘If I’d known you were there I would have bought you a coffee.’

  ‘That time of night the cafeteria is closed. It’s machine coffee or nothing. And besides, you were with another woman.’

  ‘Jealous, much?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘Funnily enough, no. Do you want me to be?’

  ‘Absolutely not. That was Emma. She works for me, and she’s going out with an old East End villain of my acquaintance.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a whole story there that you can tell me about tonight.’

  ‘You’re not working?’

  ‘No. You want to come over to my place? I’ve got concert tickets for tonight, remember?.’

  He felt the colour drain from his face. Good thing she wasn’t there to see it. ‘Yes, of course I remembered.’

  ‘You’ve got a key. Just let yourself in.’

  ‘I will.’ He paused, wanting her to say ‘I love you’, wanting to say it himself, but the moment passed, and he said, ‘I’ll see you later. Take care.’

  ‘You too.’

  The rest of the drive to Chelmsford Police HQ went without incident. He coasted over the raised entry road into the centre of the town just before noon and parked in the HQ car park. He walked away from the building, into the town, following a route that his feet remembered better than his mind did. After a few minutes he found himself standing outside a Café Rouge. It was the last place he’d had anything more than a passing conversation with his wife. Ex-wife. On a whim he went in, found the same table was free, and ordered the same chicken salad that he’d had last time. While he ate, part of his mind wondered exactly what he was doing. Trying to recapture a memory? Exorcising ghosts? The chicken salad which had been as adventurous as he could push himself last time he’d been there was now bland and nearly tasteless. He remembered the rice noodles and prawns and chicken that he’d eaten at the noodle house by the M25. In comparison with what he was eating now, they were bursting with taste.

  He was a different person now.

  ‘“That is the land of lost content,”’ he said softly, ‘“I see it shining plain; the happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.”’

  ‘Sorry, Sir?’ The waiter had paused by his table.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He left the meal half-eaten and walked back to the Police HQ. He got to Rouse’s office, and the redoubtable PA Patricia, just on the stroke of one o’clock.

  ‘Mark!’ Rouse’s voice boomed from inside. ‘Come in! Come in!’

  Rouse wasn’t alone in the office. A woman was sitting at his meeting table. She was wearing a maroon jacket with a rough hessian weave over a white silk blouse, and trousers matching her jacket. Rouse, of course, was in uniform, with his jacket off.

  ‘Mark, this is Margarita Haringay. She’s with our legal services department.’

  ‘That’s a bit premature, isn’t it?’ Lapslie rejoined. ‘We’ve not even got a proper suspect yet.’

  ‘I said “legal services”, not “Crown Prosecution Service”. Margarita is here to give me some advice.’ He scowled at Lapslie. ‘Oh, sit down, for Heaven’s sake. You’re making the place look untidy.’ As Lapslie sat, he continued blithely: ‘We’ve had a complaint about your conduct.’

  ‘Do I need a Police Federation representative present?’ Lapslie asked mildly, although he could feel a small worm of concern start to twist and turn within his gut.

  ‘Do you need a rep?’ Rouse asked.

  ‘Don’t be cute,’ Lapslie snapped, getting to his feet again. The woman’s head lifted and she glanced at him, surprised at the tone of voice he was taking with a senior officer. ‘Given that I don’t know why I’m here, only you know whether I need representation or not. That’s the kind of cheap psychological trick you and I used to play on suspects who asked to see a solicitor the moment they were brought in for questioning.’

  Rouse spread his hands wide on the desk. ‘Calm yourself, Mark. Calm yourself. This is just a preliminary—’

  ‘Hearing?’

  ‘—meeting. Please, sit down.’

  As Lapslie sat once more, Rouse levered himself up from behind his desk and joined them at the meeting table. Sitting, he said, ‘You interrogated a girl named Tamara Stottart in the presence of her father, Stephen Stottart.’

  ‘I interviewed a girl who I believed had evidence in a murder investigation, yes. The interview took place in a family room, in the presence of another police officer as well as the girl’s father, and was videotaped as per standard procedure.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen the video.’ Rouse sniffed. ‘You don’t think you were a little … overbearing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The girl’s father does. He’s raised a complaint with the IPCC. We need to work out how to respond.’

  ‘Firmly,’ Lapslie said, ‘and quickly. This is rubbish. An over-protective father and a clever daughter who knows more than she’s letting on. If we let them get the upper hand we’ll never get any traction on this case.’

  ‘And if the IPCC agrees with the father that you were intimidating his daughter then I’ll have to remove you from the case and get someone else to take over.’ He paused, and pursed his lips. ‘I hear that Dain Morritt is free at the moment.’

  The worm in Lapslie’s gut began to wriggle more strongly, as if it were trying to get itself off a hoo
k the size and nature of which it could barely comprehend. ‘Sir …’ He took a breath, aware that he didn’t even know what to say. What might get him off the hook.

  ‘This drug you’re on to control your mental problem … could it be affecting your judgement?’

  ‘Sir, as you are well aware, it’s not a mental problem in the same way that depression or bipolar disorder is a mental problem, it’s a condition. That’s number one. And number two, no, the drug I’m on does not cause confusion, aggression, paranoia or any other issue that might have made me act strangely in the interview.’

  ‘These are the kinds of questions that the IPCC will have to consider,’ Rouse said as if Lapslie hadn’t spoken. ‘We’ll need an independent medical statement, of course. You need to tell us your side of the story, Mark. We know what you said, but we need to know what you felt. What you were thinking. What you were trying to elicit from the girl. Margarita will take you through it.’

  Lapslie spent the next hour going over the entire interview, once from memory, then again from a transcript of the videotape that the woman had with her. Rouse, bored, moved back to his desk after ten minutes and buried himself in paperwork. In her calm, repetitive, uninvolved way she made Lapslie feel like a suspect, like he was saying things that she didn’t believe, and all she was doing was looking for holes in his story that she could use to break it apart. By the time she’d finished, and was packing the transcript and her notes away in her bag, he felt drained. Tired. Old.

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Mark,’ Rouse said without looking up from his paperwork. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  Feeling like he wanted to lash out at someone, but aware that he’d only be making things worse for himself, Lapslie headed out to the car park. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to go back to All Hallows Church, drive out to the incident room on Canvey Island to see where the other strands of the Catriona Dooley investigation had got to, head across to the hospital and prowl around the internet café or sit on Sean Burrows’ desk until Forensics came up with something. A dark, primal part of his mind even wanted to go to Stephen Stottart’s house and goad the man into taking a swing at him, just so he’d have the satisfaction of breaking his nose, but he managed to keep that desire in check by turning it into a daydream that he could console himself with if he got too tense. In the end he decided to go and bother the forensics lab staff, if only because it was on the way home, and he wanted to get changed out of his suit before he headed over to Charlotte’s flat.

  The drive to the isolated, fenced-off area of land that marked out Sean Burrows’ fiefdom did nothing to relax him, and he found himself stomping up the path that led past the small hills of the old Napoleonic fort to where the single-storey buildings of the laboratories were set. He felt ready for a confrontation. A squirrel ran across his path, breaking his concentration for a moment. He stopped and looked around. The mid-afternoon sun was filtering through the trees, casting dappled patterns on the path. Moss was growing up the sides of the oak trees. There was no traffic around, and the hush was suddenly magical. An acorn dropped at his feet, startling him.

  He took in a deep breath of the nature-scented air, feeling it penetrating deep into his lungs and driving out the diesel and petrol fumes that characterised Chelmsford town centre; driving out also the feelings of impotence that a meeting with Rouse always managed to engender in him. Fuck the man. Lapslie had a job to do.

  He was smiling when he knocked on the door of Sean Burrows’ office. Unexpectedly, Jane Catherall was there as well.

  ‘Mark,’ she said, ‘we were just talking about you.’

  ‘I came looking for a fight,’ he admitted, ‘but the walk up from the main gates calmed me down.’

  ‘Then can I pour you a small Irish whiskey, to improve your mood even further?’ Burrows suggested. ‘I was just about to offer Jane one as well.’

  ‘That would be … most welcome. What’s the occasion?’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s my birthday and leave it there.’

  As Burrows poured three tumblers of soft, golden liquid from a bottle that he kept in a filing cabinet, Lapslie took his coat off and sat down. ‘I know it’s early days,’ he said, ‘but are there any initial results from the All Hallows Church crime scene?’

  ‘We pushed it through as a rush job,’ Burrows said, ‘knowing that you would probably be up here asking that very question. I’ll let Jane go first.’

  Doctor Catherall sipped at her whiskey first. ‘Very smooth,’ she said judiciously, ‘but without much depth. The alcoholic equivalent of the music of Ludovico Einaudi.’

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ Burrows said, ‘I’ll take it back.’

  ‘Not at all. There are times when a lack of complexity is exactly what is needed.’ Turning to Lapslie, she continued, ‘DNA tests on the blood and the scraps of flesh indicate that they all came from the same person. It will be a while before I can actually compare the DNA to that of Catriona Dooley, but the blood is certainly of the same type. I am minded to say that she was the only person who was either injured there or died there.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lapslie took his tumbler and sipped cautiously at the liquid inside. For years now he’d drunk mainly water for its simplicity of taste. Now that the thorazitol was apparently suppressing his synaesthesia, he was gradually introducing flavours back into his life. With alcohol he’d started off with fairly subtle white wines like Chenin Blancs, Pouilly-Fuissé and Pouilly-Fumé, then moving on to similar reds, but he hadn’t risked spirits yet, let alone beer. The Irish whiskey that Sean Burrows had poured for him seeped into his mouth like a spreading warmth flavoured with orange, leather and linseed, with a peppery aftertaste. Odd, and yet the disparate flavours blended together to form something rich and vibrant that left a line of fire behind it as it slipped down his throat. ‘I’ll await the DNA comparison. Sean, what about you? Any forensic samples you could retrieve from the church?’

  ‘Interestingly,’ Burrows replied, ‘although the perpetrator of the crime had done a good job of cleaning up after himself, we did manage to retrieve some soil samples from where he had set up his recording and mixing desk. The soil is inconsistent with the local soil in Bishop’s Stortford, so our working assumption is that the perpetrator tracked the soil in himself, possibly from wherever he’d been keeping the girl captive, or from where he lives.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Lapslie asked, ‘that you can identify where the soil comes from, like Sherlock Holmes always could?’

  ‘It would be nice,’ Burrows said, ‘but there’s nothing particularly distinctive about it. Except – ’ he paused, obviously enjoying their reaction – ‘that the soil contains traces of pollen. We did a quick scan to identify the plants that produce that pollen, in case that could help narrow down the location, and it turns out that the plants aren’t indigenous to the UK.’

  ‘So, what?’ Lapslie asked. ‘The murderer works in a garden centre where they sell exotic plants?’

  ‘Not quite. It’s actually a wheat. Garden centres don’t sell wheat.’

  Lapslie shook his head, still puzzled. ‘Okay, so he’s a farmer or farmworker. That helps narrow it down, but there’s still a lot of farmland in Essex to check.’

  Burrows had an irritatingly superior smirk on his face. ‘Actually, it’s better than that. We checked in the reference books, and this particular variety is actually part of an experimental batch of genetically modified plants.’

  ‘Genetically modified?’

  ‘They’ve had a DNA sequence artificially spliced into them that’s supposed to make them resistant to frost and snow. Good thing, given last winter. And that—’

  In an attempt to actually get control of the conversation back from Burrows, Lapslie interrupted, saying: ‘Okay, so what you’re going to tell me is either that a British company based in Essex is marketing the wheat across the UK, or that a company based somewhere in the UK has sold this wheat to a farm, or a number of farms, in Essex, yes?’

  ‘On
e or the other,’ Burrows replied with a trace of sulkiness. ‘We’re still trying to find out.’

  ‘Well, let me know when you do.’ Lapslie got up and reached for his coat. ‘Oh, and happy birthday.’

  Back at Chelmsford Police HQ, Lapslie heard someone call his name in the car park. ‘Yes?’ he snapped.

  ‘Boss?’ It was Emma Bradbury.

  ‘Emma. Sorry – I was expecting it to be someone else.’

  ‘I’m guessing Chief Superintendent Rouse, judging by your tone of voice.’

  ‘You’re right, which means it wasn’t a guess, it was a deduction. You’ll never make inspector if you don’t understand the difference a word can make. Did you manage to grab some sleep?’

  ‘A couple of hours. I’m feeling better now.’

  ‘So – what’s up?’

  ‘Well, firstly you asked me to check up on where Stephen Stottart and his daughter were at the time Catriona Dooley’s body was dumped at the kids’ play area.’

  ‘Go on – amaze me,’ he growled.

  ‘Turns out the father was rehearsing. He’s in a band – a load of middle-aged men getting together to relive their youth and pretend they’re fifteen. “Weekend Warriors”, I think you’d call them.’

  He felt his heart sink like a stone. Yes another potential lead cut off.

  ‘He’s in a band?’

  ‘Plays bass guitar, apparently.’

  ‘What do they call themselves?’

  There was a pause, as Emma consulted her notes. ‘‘“Blue Croak”, apparently.’

  Lapslie laughed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a reference to the title of a book about synaesthesia,’ he explained. ‘The Frog Who Croaked Blue, by a guy called Jamie Ward. Must have been Stephen Stottart’s idea.’ He shook his head. ‘The murder victims are singers, the church is strung up with piano wire and Stottart’s a wannabe rock star. This must be making sense, but I can’t see how.’ He took a breath. ‘What about the daughter?’

  ‘She plays on the school netball team. They had a match that evening. She was definitely there.’

  ‘Okay. This is all very depressing. What else can you say to ruin my day?’