Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Ah,’ Lapslie said, disappointed. ‘Elevator music.’

  ‘Exactly the opposite,’ she said, smiling. ‘Elevator music is the equivalent of painting everything beige. It’s just music to fill a gap. Ambient music is designed to be more like an aural sculpture. You can listen to it, you can ignore it, or you can let your mind shift between the two. There’s going to be nothing in the music to offend or surprise the listener, but it shouldn’t bore them either.’

  ‘I’ll give it a whirl,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘You haven’t got a choice. If you try to leave, I’ll scream.’ She squeezed his arm gently. ‘If we’re going to get you going out more, we need to ease you gently into the real world. So – no Wagner, no Mahler. Something soft and inoffensive, but still interesting, to start.’

  Inoffensive, but still interesting. Okay, he’d have a go.

  Before he could ask anything else, the lights dimmed in the auditorium and a group of musicians entered and crossed the stage, to a subdued but still warm round of applause. Without acknowledging the audience, the musicians sat, sorted out their music scores, paused for a moment, and then started to play.

  And Lapslie was entranced.

  The piano player led the piece, with the keyboards and vibraphones providing accompaniment, but the piano appeared to be playing the same few notes over and over again in different ways rather than an actual melody, while the accompaniment was a background of what appeared to be randomly played notes which melded together to form a rippling surface upon which the piano floated gently. It should have been boring, but it wasn’t. Each moment was different from the previous ones, but linked to them. It wasn’t so much a musical journey as a musical drift through a fascinating aural landscape. There was no destination in mind, as Lapslie would have expected with most music, no rush to get to the climax, just an appreciation of the moment. Of every moment.

  He sneaked a glance at Charlotte. Her eyes were closed and her lips were curved into a secret smile. She was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and he realised at that moment that, yes, he did love her. For years he had been at war with himself, trying to be what he thought Sonia and the rest of his family wanted him to be. Not only did Charlotte want him to be himself; she wanted him to find out what ‘himself’ actually was. And he wanted to let her.

  His mind drifted back to the music. It seemed to be exactly where it had started, and yet at the same time it had moved on to other, mysterious places. In a strange way it wasn’t music at all, but highly structured noise. Abstract music, paralleling abstract art. There was no development, but there was a sense that it was building, growing, developing organically.

  When the music finally drifted to a close Lapslie found that he had lost all sense of time. It might have been playing for ten minutes or an hour. As the last notes faded away, and just before the audience applauded, he felt a sense of loss. Something beautiful had been present, and it had gone, and he couldn’t even put a name to it.

  ‘Let’s get a drink,’ Charlotte said. She seemed nervous.

  He squeezed her hand, and smiled. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was incredible. I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  She gazed up at him. ‘Are you sure? We could leave now …’

  ‘No, let’s stay. What happens next? More of the same?’

  ‘Some more Brian Eno music. I think they’re doing his set of variations of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”. You’ll like it.’

  ‘You know, I think I will.’

  They headed out of the auditorium to the bar. Lapslie, uncharacteristically, ordered a glass of red wine. Charlotte had the same.

  They moved out onto the terrace, overlooking the Thames. The lights of the distant City of London glittered in the choppy waters. He sipped at his wine. It tasted of summer fruits, vanilla, oak.

  Something dark drifted past in the water. The policeman part of Lapslie’s brain wondered if it might be a body, but he pushed that to one side. Tonight wasn’t the time for him to be a policeman. Tonight was an opportunity for him to see if he could be a complete human being.

  He slipped an arm around Charlotte’s waist. She nestled against his side and said, ‘I’m looking forward to getting you back to my place later on.’

  ‘DCI Lapslie?’

  The voice broke into his contemplative state of mind. He recognised it before he turned around.

  ‘Mr Stottart.’

  ‘I thought it was you.’ The man’s face was flushed. Behind him, Lapslie spotted his daughter, Tamara, along with a woman of about Lapslie’s age and a son of about nineteen or twenty. The girl was glaring at Lapslie. Her mother was looking embarrassed, and her brother was looking bored, as all teenage boys did.

  Charlotte moved away from Lapslie slightly, straightening up. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Charlotte. Charlotte Meyer.’

  ‘Steve Stottart. I’m in a therapy workshop with your husband.’

  ‘Partner,’ she corrected.

  ‘At least, I thought that was the only contact we had. Turns out he’s also been investigating my daughter behind my back. He thinks she’s a murderer.’

  Behind him, his daughter flushed and turned her head away. Her mother put an arm around her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

  ‘Mr Stottart,’ Lapslie said calmly, but with a warning tone in his voice, ‘I’m off duty. I can’t talk about anything to do with the case.’

  ‘I put in a complaint,’ Stottart said. He’d been drinking. It made his Mancunian accent seem thicker.

  ‘I know,’ Lapslie said. ‘You have that right.’

  ‘Damn straight I do. I hope they crucify you. Disrupting our lives like that: it’s just gash. Tamara is distraught.’

  The word flashed across his mind like a firework fired into the night. Gash. The voice on the sound file had said, ‘No, that’s gash. That’s just gash.’ Lapslie had presumed the voice was referring disparagingly to the woman who was blundering through the wire maze, slowly bleeding to death. Referring to her in terms of her genitalia. But Steve Stottart had used the word in a different context. Gash, as in wrong. Some kind of northern slang that Lapslie hadn’t come across before. But what if the voice on the sound file had meant there was something wrong with the sound of the woman’s voice – something ‘gash’? The fact that the killer and Stephen Stottart had used the same unusual word wasn’t evidence that he was involved, but it was indicative of a connection.

  ‘Dad!’ Tamara Stottart hissed, instantly breaking Lapslie’s chain of thought.

  ‘She’s got exams! If she fails, it’s all your fault!’

  For some reason, the sheer pathetic nature of Stottart’s accusation needled Lapslie. Exams, for God’s sake! Lapslie had murders to deal with. Murders and kidnappings!

  ‘Mr Stottart, I’ve not got time for this,’ he snapped. ‘Your daughter is a material witness in a murder and kidnapping investigation. She knows something, and both you and she are obstructing my investigation. If you want to raise a complaint, that’s up to you, but I’m trying to stop four more murders.’

  Stottart’s lip curled, and he looked like he was going to say something else, but his wife grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back. Lapslie turned away too, aware of a heated argument going on within the family.

  ‘That was interesting,’ Charlotte said drily. ‘You didn’t tell me you were under investigation.’

  ‘I’m always under investigation. It comes with the territory.’

  ‘Same if you’re a doctor. There are always people who think you’re like a plumber, and can fix anything within half an hour. They don’t understand that some things can’t be fixed, and it’s nobody’s fault. It just is.’ She paused. ‘Is that girl really a murder suspect?’

  ‘She certainly knows something about a murder: I just don’t know what it is. And I have strong suspicions about her father.’

  The crowd on the terrace was beginning to thin out, and somewhere in the auditorium a bell rang. ‘Let’
s go back in,’ Charlotte suggested.

  The remainder of the concert was as endlessly fascinating as the first half, with the keyboards now providing electronic vocals that shifted up and down in a ribbon of sound: never clashing, never discordant, but always moving along the boundary between structure and randomness. Lapslie found that he couldn’t focus, however. He kept scanning the audience, looking to see where Stephen Stottart and his family were sitting. The confrontation had unnerved him. He wouldn’t have thought that the concert was the kind of thing they would have liked, but a family trip out indicated something more than just casual interest.

  At the end, as the performers stood for the applause, Lapslie said: ‘Let’s go before the encore, if there is one. We’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of us, and we’re both working tomorrow.’

  ‘And you’ve got a stalker in the audience you want to avoid,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  They spent the walk along the Thames Embankment, past the London Eye and County Hall, with Charlotte telling Lapslie more about Brian Eno and about ambient music in general. She promised to take him to some more upcoming concerts of music by someone called Philip Glass. Apparently he wasn’t ambient but minimalist, although Lapslie wasn’t sure he could explain the difference to anyone.

  Back at Charlotte’s maisonette Lapslie was about to make his apologies and leave when she took his hand and, without a word, led him upstairs. They made love with a passion and yet a tenderness that eclipsed anything he’d previously experienced in his life. No direction, no aim, just a growing, developing intensity; an exploration of every moment in time and every square inch of each other’s bodies.

  Later, lying awake in the darkness with Charlotte’s arm around him, he whispered to himself: ‘“… And my heart beneath your hand, quieter than a dead man on a bed”,’ and then shivered.

  He must have fallen asleep, although he never actually marked the moment when it happened, because some indeterminate time later he was jerked awake by a woman screaming.

  For a moment he thought he was listening to the sound file again. In his half-conscious state he thrashed around, trying to find the controls to turn it off. At the same time he realised that the sound wasn’t recorded, but real, he became aware of a light outside, flickering through the curtains.

  Charlotte stirred beside him. ‘What the hell is that?’ she slurred.

  Lapslie slid from under the duvet and ran to the window. Regardless of his nakedness, he pulled the curtain back.

  Down on the grass outside Charlotte’s flat, beside his Saab, a woman was on fire.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When Emma screeched up in front of the block of flats it looked like the circus had come to town. A large white tent had been set up, with guy ropes holding it stable, and various cars and vans had been parked in a circle around it. People were moving purposefully to and fro, obviously part of the environment, while other onlookers were held back by cordons from entering the area. But unlike the circus, the people who were working inside the barrier were police and crime scene investigators, not roustabouts, and the people gawping from outside were intrigued locals rather than potential customers.

  Emma showed her warrant card to get through the cordon. She could smell the roast-pork odour of burnt human flesh from outside the tent. She had an atavistic urge to turn away now and run, but she overcame her revulsion and kept on going.

  She had to flash her warrant card again to get inside the tent. It had been erected over a patch of grass which had become muddy and flat now because of the traffic of so many feet. The white plastic was lit up by the rising sun outside, making it glow with a directionless effulgence. The air inside the tent was humid as the ground warmed up inside the tent, releasing water vapour which had nowhere to go. Rather than a circus, it now looked and felt more to Emma like somewhere a preacher might have addressed his flock at a revivalist meeting in the American Deep South. The various police constables inside were already sweating. God knew what the CSIs in their white coveralls and hoods and blue plastic gloves were feeling. They were even wearing facemasks, just to add insult to injury.

  She saw Lapslie standing just off-centre, beside a huddle of activity. Now that the thought of a revivalist meeting had occurred to her, she saw the huddle as being like the group of supporters you might expect around someone being cured of lameness with a laying-on of hands by a charismatic preacher. At any moment she expected everyone to spring back with a cry of ‘Hallelujah!’

  Shrugging off the uncomfortable simile, she went across to join Lapslie. He glanced at her, and she was shocked at the evident strain on his face. His eyes looked wary and pained, like those of a hunted animal.

  And beside him, at the focus of attention of the various CSIs and forensics experts, was a patch of scorched grass with a collection of charred branches and a burned tree trunk in the centre. Except that they weren’t branches: they were limbs, and the tree trunk was a torso, with a cracked and blackened skull on top.

  No revivalist preacher was going to bring this body back from the dead, no matter how charismatic they were.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked in a hushed voice. ‘And why are we here? This isn’t a part of our case, is it?’

  ‘That block of flats is where my … girlfriend lives,’ Lapslie said quietly, obviously stumbling over the word ‘girlfriend’. ‘I saw flames. I looked out of the window and there was a woman down here. She was on fire.’ His eyes were fixed now not on what was in front of him, but what was in the past. ‘She was looking straight up at me. I swear she was looking straight up at Charlotte’s window.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Emma said forcefully. Lapslie looked like he was on the verge of coming apart. ‘Sheer coincidence. It was some Asian girl forced into an arranged marriage who set herself on fire. It always is. We’ll find out that her husband, or her family, live somewhere in this block, and she was staring up at them, not you.’

  ‘She held her arms away from her body,’ he whispered as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Like she was appealing to me.’ He shuddered. ‘I phoned for an ambulance. We got down here just as the crowd was gathering. Charlotte started treating her, but it was too late.’

  ‘Where is Charlotte?’

  ‘Gone to clean up and get properly dressed.’

  A thought struck Emma. ‘You didn’t see anyone else here, did you? Someone running away? I mean, I’m presuming this was a suicide, not murder by arson.’

  He shook his head, more to rid himself of the memories of what he’d seen than to answer her question. ‘Just her,’ he said eventually. ‘Just her.’

  ‘Sir?’ One of the constables approached them. He was holding a handbag.

  ‘Found this over in the bushes.’

  Emma took it before Lapslie could react; not sure why, but aware in some dark recess of her mind where her instincts resided that it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to look inside, that there was something in there that he shouldn’t see. ‘Thanks,’ she said to the constable. She opened the handbag and glanced inside, angling it away from Lapslie. A pink Hello Kitty mobile phone. Hairbrush and make-up. Lots of bits of tissue paper. And a purse. She fished the purse out, feeling uneasy. A Hello Kitty mobile phone did not suggest they were dealing with a mature woman. More like a teenager.

  She opened the purse and looked inside. The first thing she found was a student ID card.

  Her heart thudded heavily in her chest. For a second, a long second, she debated putting the ID back in the purse, the purse back in the handbag, the handbag back in the bushes, and pretending that nothing had changed, but she knew that it had. In some ineffable way, the very atmosphere inside the tent had altered, become heavier. They were on a different road now. The atomic bomb could not be uninvented, and the handbag could not be unfound.

  ‘It’s Tamara Stottart,’ she said levelly. ‘Stephen Stottart’s daughter. She’s killed herself.’

  She forced herself to look into Lapslie’s face, and saw the
re, in his eyes, that he had already known. Part of him had already known.

  ‘I saw her face,’ he confirmed. ‘I’d hoped I’d imagined it, still half-dreaming, but I did see her face.’ He paused; swallowed. ‘Maybe she saw Charlotte and me together at the hospital, realised Charlotte was working there and got her address from the hospital files, or something.’

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We tell her father. Her family.’

  ‘No!’ The forcefulness of Emma’s response shocked even her. ‘I mean, not you. You’re already under investigation for harassing her. The last thing you should do is go anywhere near them right now. You’ll only make matters worse. I’ll send a constable to do it. And leave the investigation here to someone else. We’ve got a killer to catch.’

  She gestured to the constable to come back. ‘Take a WPC with you,’ she said to him. ‘Go to the address on this ID. Ask them if their daughter is home. If she isn’t tell them that we discovered the ID in a handbag beside a body, and ask them if it belongs to their daughter. For God’s sake, make sure you check first that their daughter is missing – we don’t want to find that she’s been at a sleepover and this is some mugger who took her bag. Oh, and tell them that I will be there soon.’

  As the constable retreated, the group of CSIs around the body edged away to allow someone to step back. Emma wasn’t surprised to find that it was Jane Catherall, the pathologist.

  ‘Doctor Catherall.’

  ‘DS Bradbury.’ Her face was grim. ‘I do so hate death by fire. So messy, and so much evidence just burned away.’

  Emma left space for Lapslie to ask a question, but he was silent so she said: ‘What can you tell us?’

  ‘The body is pretty well destroyed, which indicates to me the presence of an accelerant. The poor girl’s clothes were probably soaked in something like petrol or paint thinner. Bodies, of their own volition, don’t burn very well. No doubt Mr Burrows will be able to tell you what kind of accelerant was used.’ She glanced back at the body. ‘You will note the characteristic pugilistic pose: legs tucked up beneath the body, arms held tight in, hands curled into fists. It was thought for a long time that this was caused by the person curling up into a ball because of the pain, but it actually occurs after death when the muscles dehydrate and contract in the fire. As to cause of death—’