‘Well, just a couple of things. First, I’ve checked with the firm who run that BeBo thing, and after a bit of prompting they confirmed that Tamara was using the site at round about the time she said she was.’
‘Round about the time?’
‘I got lost in the explanation. Something to do with “internet time” versus “real time”, and the lag in messages going around the world.’
‘Great. And secondly?’
‘Secondly, I’ve been back over the files, like you asked me to.’
‘Yeah?’
She paused before continuing. ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’m not sure I believe this, but I reckon there are another six missing people out there who connect to our case. Cases.’
‘Six?’ Lapslie was stunned.
‘Six people aged between sixteen and forty who have good singing voices and who have disappeared in Essex in the past six months with no obvious explanation or suspects. Each of them was either in a choir or a band or sang solo in a professional or semi-professional capacity. We’ve got a gospel singer, a cabaret artiste and a member of the chorus at the Royal Opera House, as well as two lead vocalists with jazz groups and a singing teacher. One soprano, two altos, a tenor, a counter-tenor and a bass. Not in the same order, obviously.’
‘Six?’ He still couldn’t believe it. ‘I asked you to check as a long shot, and I expected one or two, if any, but not this. My God, what’s he doing with them?’
‘Apart from preparing an entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, you mean?’
‘Emma!’
‘Sorry, boss.’ She looked contrite. ‘The surrealism of the situation is getting to me.’
‘He’s auditioning! That’s why Catriona Dooley and the other two were discarded. For some reason, they failed the audition.’
‘But the torture? The skewers and the ripping apart of the arm and the running through the wires? What’s that got to do with an audition?’
Lapslie’s brain was spinning. ‘That’s part of it, somehow. The torture is an integral part of the audition process.’ He felt a chill running up his neck and across his scalp as his brain caught up with what was going on. ‘There’s potentially six kidnap victims still out there. Still alive! We need to pull all the information together into one incident team. I’ll brief Rouse. You get us some real estate. Move!’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘I want you to follow up this genetically engineered wheat angle,’ Lapslie snapped.
‘What are you going to do?’ Emma asked him. The Essex Police HQ building loomed above them both. Cars drove past, their drivers looking for non-existent parking spaces.
‘I need to notify Rouse that we’ve got a multiple kidnap and multiple murder case on our hands. He’s going to require some convincing that this is all connected. I know what he’s like. Then I’m going to go and see Jane Catherall and get her to compare the autopsy reports on the three other dead bodies you picked up on. Now we know they’re part of a larger case there might be some similarities, some connections she can make.’
He was looking tired. There were grainy shadows under his eyes, and he kept running his hand through his hair. Emma didn’t think she’d ever seem him this distracted.
‘What’s the matter, boss?’ she asked.
He glanced at her with irritation. ‘We need to find out where the killer might have picked up genetically modified wheat and tracked it into the church where Catriona Dooley was killed.’
‘Yeah, that bit I know. What I meant was: what’s the matter with you? Is your medication causing side-effects?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I’m just … It’s Rouse. He’s told me there’s an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation started against me.’
‘That’s bollocks!’ Emma said, amazed. ‘What for?’
‘For the questioning of Tamara Stottart. The father reckons I was too heavy-handed. He’s raised a complaint.’
Emma cast her mind back to the interview, trying to remember what had happened. ‘He’s trying it on. Angling for some kind of compensation.’
‘Yeah, but how many decent officers do you know whose careers have been ruined by a baseless accusation from a member of the public? It’s too easy for them.’
‘Agreed. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.’
He grimaced. ‘I’m sure they’ll want to talk to you. You were there, weren’t you?’
‘Anything you’d like me to say, or not to say?’
He shook his head. ‘Just tell them what happened. That’s what I’m going to do.’
Emma resisted the urge to reach out and put a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘Listening to some of the stories that Dom’s told me about actual things you’ve done,’ she said, ‘it would be a tragedy if you were brought down by a spurious complaint from an irritated parent.’
He glanced warily at her. ‘What kind of stories?’ he asked.
‘Well, to hear the way he talks, there wasn’t a lot to choose between the police and the criminals back in the 1980s, apart from which side you were on. It was like a game.’
‘We did what we had to do to get a result,’ he admitted. ‘As A. E. Housman said: “Let God and man decree / Laws for themselves and not for me.”’ He shrugged. ‘Some of the guys took it too far. As far as most of us were concerned, getting a result meant arresting the guilty party, even if we had to do something … unorthodox to make it stick. There was always a minority for whom getting a result meant arresting anybody at all, as long as the evidence could be twisted to match. I could never be a part of that. As far as I’m aware, everyone I ever arrested needed to be arrested.’
Emma nodded. ‘Dom once told me,’ she said cautiously, ‘that he’d heard you were after a paedophile, back when he first knew you. A really nasty one. Did some things to kids that left them … physically wrecked, not just psychologically injured. He said you were just about to arrest this guy when he skipped across the Channel to a cottage he had in France, knowing that it would take you months, if not years, to get the extradition paperwork done, and even then there was a strong chance it would get turned down. So he said you hired an actor who looked like this guy, and set him up in a flat in Barking, and told him to be as obvious as he could. Get seen in the pubs and the shops locally. And you waited for a couple of weeks, then went across on the ferry to France with a couple of friends. You took this guy from his cottage while he was asleep and drove him back to the ferry, and you told him that if he said a single word to the gendarmes or the customs people at Cherbourg you would cut his balls off. And he said, “You can’t take me back – I’m living in France now! You need extradition papers!” And you said; “No you’re not – you’re living in a flat in Barking, and we can prove it. And the great thing about Barking is that I don’t have to get extradition papers.”’
Lapslie’s face creased into an unintended smile, the kind you get when you’re reminded of a happy memory. ‘He kept telling anyone who’d listen that we’d taken him all the way from France back to England, but he couldn’t prove it, and we had piles of surveillance photos of the actor we’d hired reading newspapers with obvious headlines in the park. Nobody believed him. Not the barristers, not the solicitors, not the journalists and certainly not the Crown Prosecution Service. He was sent down for twenty years, and I don’t regret what I did for a moment. He needed to be put away before he hurt anyone else. Some of those kids … they couldn’t even shit properly afterwards, because of what he’d done. They had to have surgery to repair the damage. I’ve always taken the position that it’s easier to seek forgiveness afterwards than to seek permission beforehand, and if you can avoid having to seek forgiveness then that’s best of all.’ He glanced over at her. ‘Probably best you don’t repeat that story,’ he said mildly.
‘Worried he’ll get out on appeal?’
‘No – he died in prison a few years into his sentence,’ Lapslie said levelly. ‘He was anally raped with a length of scaffolding pole
by an inmate who found out that he had a history of hurting kids. Died of blood loss and shock. No, it’s just that times have changed. Some people just wouldn’t understand that story.’
‘Okay.’ Emma started to turn away, then looked back at him. ‘I don’t suppose it was you that told the other inmates that he was a paedophile?’
‘I didn’t tell them anything,’ Lapslie replied.
Emma walked away, leaving Lapslie behind her. As she went, he was already making a phone call. Sometimes she just didn’t know what to make of him. There was a part of him that was so strict about enforcing the rules, and another part which refused to acknowledge that the rules applied to him at all. It was a dangerous combination. It made him one of the best police officers she’d ever worked with, but he was only a step away from being one of the worst. Perhaps it was just a matter of perspective.
For a while Emma wasn’t even sure where she was going. Lapslie had asked her to check into genetically engineered wheat, but how? Where? After she’d spent a few minutes in the car debating whether to head for the nearest library and spend the rest of the day with her head buried in books, it occurred to her that Essex University was bound to have a biology department, and they were bound to have someone who would know about genetically engineered wheat.
She drove out to the university campus, parked in a car park that seemed full of cars too expensive for students to own, and followed the signs to the Biology Department. Once there she asked a passing student with a little patch of beard just below his lower lip and nowhere else, who was the best person to talk to about genetically modified food. He directed her to an office with a sign on the door saying ‘Professor Peter Wilkinson’.
Professor Wilkinson was sitting behind a desk reading a report. Despite her preconceptions, he wasn’t wearing a corduroy jacket and he didn’t have a beard. He was about Emma’s age, and wore jeans and a T-shirt that showed off a muscled abdomen. She guessed, from the relative width of his shoulders and the narrowness of his hips, that he was a swimmer, and a very good one. She felt herself flushing slightly as she introduced herself. He probably drove the female students wild. And some of the male ones as well.
‘Hi,’ she said hurriedly, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Emma Bradbury, Essex Police. I need some professional advice about genetically engineered wheat for a case I’m working on. Are you the right person to speak to, and do you have a few minutes?’
‘Yes and yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘I lecture here on genetic engineering. Sit down. Can I get you a coffee?’
She shook her head. ‘Thanks, but no. Time’s pressing.’
‘Okay.’ He frowned. ‘Is this about the protests? Because if it is, you need to know that I’m providing consultancy services to Greenpeace.’
‘Protests?’
‘A camp has been set up next to a field where genetically modified wheat is being grown. There have been some alleged incidents of vandalism, as well as harassment of the protestors by security guards working for the company who provided the wheat.’
‘Interesting that the vandalism is alleged while the harassment is apparently real,’ Emma pointed out.
He had the grace to smile. ‘Fair point. You can see where my sympathies lie.’
‘Actually, we’ve found traces of GM wheat at a crime scene. I’m trying to determine how it might have go there.’
‘Okay.’ He paused, obviously trying to compress all his knowledge and experience down into a few well-chosen sentences. ‘I won’t ask you about the case, but what do you know about genetically modified food in general?’
She shrugged. ‘I know what’s been on the Channel 4 news and in the papers. Some people say that it’s the solution to world hunger; other people say it’s dangerous. More than that, I’m not sure.’
‘Do you know how the modifications are done?’
‘Altering the DNA …?’ she ventured hopefully.
He smiled tolerantly. ‘Okay. Let me give you the condensed lecture version. Genetically modified foods are foods which are created using genetically modified plants or animals as ingredients. Let’s call them “organisms”. Genetically modified organisms have had specific changes introduced into their DNA. You’re familiar with DNA, obviously?’
‘The genetic blueprint.’
‘Yes. It’s the complex molecule found in the nucleus of every cell that describes and defines what the animal is: what it looks like and how it is put together. It’s the plan, the knitting pattern, the music score, whatever you like to call it. There’s actually no direct equivalent, but calling it the blueprint of life is probably as good as anything. It’s the thing that the organism uses to build itself.’
He stood up, and started to walk back and forth across the office. Emma smiled at the way he so quickly slipped into lecturing mode.
‘There are various ways that DNA can get altered,’ he continued. ‘It can happen by mutation, for instance, where a bit of the molecule is changed by radiation, or by chemical action. This is pretty hit-and-miss, of course. Most of the changes made to DNA by radiation or by chemical action are just random damage which cause whatever creature is built from it to not work properly – like a building blueprint where the concrete stairs have been rubbed out and replaced with slides made of peanut butter – but every now and then the DNA is changed in a way that makes it work better.’
‘Can you give me an example?’
‘Okay. Some ten thousand years ago, for instance, one particular person in northern Europe had their DNA accidentally mutated by stray radiation from the sun in a way that meant their digestive systems produced new proteins that could digest lactose. Up until then, drinking cows’ milk would cause people to have digestive problems. We just weren’t built for it. The mutation spread rapidly, because it helped people to survive in the cold northern latitudes if they had something else to eat when the crops were frozen in the ground and game animals were scarce. Now it’s spread over a large chunk of the world, with the exception of Asia, to the point where it’s generally assumed that humans have always been able to tolerate lactose—’
‘And that’s evolution,’ Emma interrupted. ‘Happy with that.’
‘That is indeed evolution. And it takes time. A lot of time. Lots of bad or meaningless mutations have to occur before a useful one does. But humans, in their infinite wisdom, have found ways of increasing the odds that a beneficial mutation will occur. The earliest, of course, was selective breeding, which is really just speeded-up evolution. If an animal or a plant shows signs of something useful, breed from it and prevent the others from breeding, and pretty soon it will spread. More recently, we’ve been able to actually get into the DNA itself using processes like cisgenesis or transgenesis. With me so far?’
‘I was until the last few words,’ she said.
‘Stay with me. These are ways of introducing a new gene into a living organism so that the organism will exhibit a new property and transmit that property to its offspring.’
‘Okay, stop. A gene?’
‘A gene is a portion of DNA that contains both “coding” sequences and “non-coding” sequences. The “coding sequences” are the bits that that determine when the gene is active. The “non-coding sequences” are the bits that determine what the gene actually does. A gene is like a self-contained little unit of DNA. A piece of the blueprint that can be built in isolation.’
‘And introducing these genes into other living organisms: does that work?’
‘Oh yes. Transgenic and cisgenic organisms are able to express, or use, the foreign genes that have been introduced into their DNA because the genetic code is similar for all organisms. Although they’re all built using different plans, different DNA, the plans are all written in the same language. This means that a specific DNA sequence will do the same thing in all organisms.’ Seeing her sceptical expression, he went on: ‘For instance, there’s a specific protein called the green fluorescent protein, or GFP. Unsurprisingly, it exhibits bright green fluorescence when
exposed to blue light. It was first isolated from a particular type of jellyfish. The gene that causes the jellyfish to produce the GFP has been introduced into other animals as a kind of proof-of-concept that a gene can be expressed throughout a given organism. There’s a fluorescent rabbit that was created partly as a work of art and partly as a talking point for social commentary. A US company markets green fluorescent mice to the pet industry. And green fluorescent pigs have been created in Taiwan.’
‘And this doesn’t hurt the animals?’ Emma asked, aghast.
‘Apparently not. They go about their business unconcerned.’
‘I’m probably going to regret this, but how does this transgenesis work? How do you move genes around and splice them in wherever you want?’
‘There’s a number of ways. In ballistic DNA injection, for instance, genes are fired at a sample of target tissue.’
‘Fired? Like, from a gun?’
He laughed. ‘Trust a policeman to think of that. No, the genes are coated onto gold or tungsten particles which are then accelerated by an electrical field until they reach sufficient velocity to cross a gap and hit the target tissue, where they embed themselves.’
It sounded less like science and more like a fairground to Emma. ‘All pretty hit and miss, isn’t it? And what about the others?’
‘Pronuclear injection involves the injection of fragments of DNA into a fertilised embryo at the pro-nuclear stage. The fragments become incorporated into the genome of the embryo. Plasmid vectors are little circular loops of DNA that can become integrated into a larger DNA molecule … I could go on.’
‘Please don’t.’ She took a breath. ‘I’m with you on the mechanisms for genetic engineering. What about the genetically modified food itself?’
‘GM foods were first put on the market in the early 1990s,’ he said. ‘Typically, genetically modified foods are the products of transgenic plants like soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seed oil – plants which have had genes added to give them resistance against weedkillers, or to make them less attractive to insects that might otherwise eat them. But animal products have also been developed. A few years ago a pig was genetically engineered to produce omega-3 fatty acids. The way it was done was to snip out a section of DNA from a roundworm that is known to produce omega-3 fatty acids and introduce that section into the pig’s DNA. The pig goes on being a pig, because none of its original DNA has been removed – the plan to build a pig is still intact – but another page has been added to the plan. It’s a pig-plus.’
Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation Page 19
