Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  He nodded. ‘I will.’

  He drove away from the mortuary, setting his satnav for the postcode of the area where Tolla had its field sites for genetically modified wheat. If the pollen had been transferred from there to the clothing or the shoes of whoever had killed Catriona Dooley – Lapslie’s brain managed to think ‘Stephen Stottart’ at the same time as it was thinking ‘whoever had killed Catriona Dooley’ – then he needed to find out how far the pollen could drift. And Emma hadn’t managed to do that before she had been abducted, although she had at least established that Tolla was the only company experimenting with GM wheat in Essex.

  The site was a few miles outside Billericay, along a straight, single-track, tarmac lane that led off a main road with no sign to say where it went. On either side the ground was uncultivated, running to long grass. He passed a handful of tents a few hundred yards down, but couldn’t see anyone in them. Strange place for a campsite, he thought.

  Far enough away from the road that it wasn’t obvious, a fence separated the Tolla site from the rest of the world. A gate set into the fence bisected the road. A small Portakabin had been concreted into the ground beside the gate, and as Lapslie pulled up a security guard stepped out.

  ‘Private property,’ he said, scanning Lapslie’s dashboard for a car pass. ‘No entry, Sir.’

  ‘Police,’ Lapslie said, flashing his warrant card. ‘I need to see whoever is in charge.’

  ‘Wait one moment.’

  The guard retreated back into his cabin. Lapslie could hear a one-sided conversation as he phoned through for instructions. After a minute or so he came back. ‘Mr Standish will see you by the main car park. Straight down the road, and you’ll see the car park to your left, just by the main enclosures.’

  ‘Enclosures?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ He vanished back inside the cabin. A few seconds later, the gate rolled open.

  Lapslie continued down the road. Ahead he could see what appeared to be huge white balloons, half-inflated, lying on the ground. It was only as he got closer, and saw the car park which had been built off to one side of the road, that he realised that these were the ‘enclosures’ he had been told about: massive plastic tents built above what he presumed were the fields where the GM wheat was being grown.

  The car park was half-filled with cars, but only one of them had a man standing beside it. He was wearing a three-piece suit, rather surrealistically given the circumstances. His hair was close-cropped and his face had a weatherbeaten, outdoors look to it.

  ‘Dave Standish,’ he said, walking across and extending his hand as Lapslie got out of his car. ‘Site security. May I see your warrant card? Apologies, but we have to be sure of who we’re dealing with around here.’

  Taking Lapslie’s card, he scrutinised it thoroughly while still talking. ‘I suppose this is about the protest camp. Well, I say “camp”. As far as I can see there’s never more than ten people there at any one time.’

  ‘It’s not about the camp,’ Lapslie said.

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed taken aback. ‘Then it must be about Steve’s kid. Not sure there’s anything we can tell you.’

  Lapslie felt the back of his neck tingle. ‘Steve’s kid?’

  ‘Steve Stottart. His daughter died. I assumed you wanted to talk about it.’ He shrugged. ‘We heard it was suicide, but I guess there must be suspicious circumstances, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Stephen Stottart works here?’

  Standish frowned. ‘He’s one of our biologists, but he’s not in today. Obviously. He’s looking after his family. We understand that.’

  Lapslie shook his head, trying to get his thoughts straight. He wasn’t expecting to find such a direct connection. ‘Where exactly does Mr Stottart—’

  ‘Doctor Stottart.’

  ‘ – Doctor Stottart work?’

  Standish pointed towards the furthest of the white plastic enclosures. ‘Eco-Dome Eight. That’s where his particular strain of wheat is being grown.’

  ‘I need to see inside.’

  Standish shook his head. ‘No can do. There’s all kinds of confidentiality issues here. If our competitors got to know what we were doing, it could be disastrous for Tolla Limited.’

  ‘I’m in the middle of a murder investigation,’ Lapslie snapped. ‘If I have to come back with a search warrant, I will. I’ll also come back with a convoy of fifty police cars and Crime Scene Investigation vans, and I’ll make sure that your main gate is left open for so long that the entire protest camp can just walk through without anyone noticing.’

  Standish smiled tightly. ‘Well, if you put it that way,’ he said. ‘Let me show you to Eco-Dome Eight.’

  They walked past the other Eco-Domes, each one labelled with a big number on the front, to Number Eight. Standish led Lapslie to an airlock attached to the side.

  ‘We’ll both have to put on protective coveralls,’ he said.

  ‘Why – what’s so dangerous about the GM wheat?’

  ‘We’re not protecting us from it, we’re protecting it from us,’ Standish said.

  Lapslie’s mobile beeped, indicating there was a text message for him. He opened the message, hoping against hope that it would be something saying that Emma had been recovered safely.

  It wasn’t. The message was from an unknown number. All it said was: ‘Look for a gift in your glove box. Use it. From a well-wisher.’

  Odd. Some kind of junk text, or a sister message to the email he’d been sent that had started this whole thing off? He saved it, just in case, making a mental note to check the glove box of his car later, just in case. There were some crazy people around. He’d arrested quite a few of them.

  Five minutes later they were both dressed in hooded white paper coveralls strangely like the ones Sean Burrows and his people always wore at crime scenes. Elasticated cuffs at the wrists and ankles and around the edge of the hood maintained integrity. Standish also insisted on gloves and on plastic bags over their shoes.

  ‘I don’t know what you expect to find,’ he grumbled as he led Lapslie through the second part of the airlock and into the Eco-Dome proper.

  The inside was like a massive high-tech greenhouse. The plastic material of the Dome which had been white from the outside was almost transparent from the inside, and Lapslie could see the tracery of struts and stanchions that held it up. Rows of wheat led away from him in perspective lines, divided up into sections that were labelled with signs and surrounded with atmospheric sensors. The soil in which they were growing looked strange: orange rather than brown, more like sand or gravel.

  Standish led the way down a central aisle. ‘Doctor Stottart is evaluating the growth rates of numerous different varieties of GM wheat,’ he confided over his shoulder. ‘There’s something like fourteen or fifteen main diseases that are endemic to wheat, which means a lot of pesticide has to be used to keep it healthy. Our aim is to reduce the use of those pesticides by creating breeds of wheat which are resistant to most, if not all, of those diseases. The soil here is artificial. It’s been sterilised of all bacteria and fungi, and the Eco-Domes are kept free of all insect life.’ He stopped by a batch of wheat that was growing particularly straight and strong. ‘As you can see, some of the varieties do better than others. That’s what Doctor Stottart is evaluating.’

  ‘He’s doing more than that,’ Lapslie said darkly. The soil beneath the wheat was lumpy in a way that Lapslie was familiar with from so many previous cases. He bent and plunged his hand into it.

  ‘Hey!’ Standish cried. ‘You’ll contaminate it!’

  Lapslie pulled his hand out. Grasped in it was another hand: the skin splitting apart and mottled in green and black.

  ‘Too late,’ Lapslie replied. ‘It’s already contaminated.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Emma’s head felt as if it was half-full of some heavy liquid, like mercury. Every time she moved, the liquid sloshed slowly from side to side, rocking her head back and forth against her will and maki
ng her feel nauseous; it still shifted around for minutes even when she held her head still. Even when she didn’t move, the liquid weighed her head down, forcing it towards her chest and making it hard to breathe properly.

  Her head ached as well. It ached like the worst hangover she’d ever had. Like a port and whisky hangover. Spikes of pain were drilling into her temples, and there was a sharp ache just behind her eyes. Her mouth was full of saliva, and every time she swallowed her salivary glands pumped more in, accompanied by sharp pangs.

  She tried to work out where she was. It wasn’t in bed, that much was for sure. If she was in bed then she would be lying down, not sitting up with her head bowed forward. Had she fallen asleep in her car? It’s wouldn’t be the first time, but her back didn’t feel like it was nestling into curved leather seats. It felt more like it was pressed up against a padded board.

  And she couldn’t move her hands. They were resting on a cold, plastic surface. She could wriggle her fingers, but she couldn’t move her hands.

  Maybe she was in hospital. The thought brought with it a momentary giddy relief. If she was in hospital it would explain why she was sitting up: she was probably propped up so that the nurses could monitor her. She’d seen other people like that, usually when they’d just come out of surgery, or were in intensive care. The reason she couldn’t move her arms was obviously that they were attached to the bed so that she couldn’t turn over and pull out whatever intravenous drip was in her arm. She was feeling like shit because she’d had an accident of some kind. Maybe a car had hit her while she was trying to fix the tyre on her own car! She was injured, but she wasn’t quadriplegic because she could wriggle her fingers.

  A sudden panicky thought occurred to her, and she tried wriggling her toes. Yes, they moved too! Her legs didn’t seem to want to cooperate, but that would come back with time.

  An uncomfortable idea wriggled up into her conscious mind like a worm emerging from dank earth. People with amputations often said they thought they could still feel their missing limbs. What if she only thought she was moving her fingers and toes? What if they weren’t moving at all? What if they weren’t even there?

  Time to open her eyes. She didn’t want to, afraid of what she might see, but she did it anyway.

  She wasn’t in bed. That was the first thing. And if she wasn’t in bed then she probably wasn’t in hospital. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Through smeary eyes she thought she could see her hands resting on the arms of a chair: blue vinyl over soft padding which had been wrapped around a metal frame. She blinked a couple of times to clear her vision. Yes, her hands were indeed resting on what looked like the arms of a metal chair.

  And they were fixed there with plastic cable-ties which had been tightened around her wrists and forearms.

  Emma was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

  Somewhere, through the sick throbbing in her head, she remembered a hand clamping around her face and a sharp, medicinal smell in her nostrils and catching at her throat as she breathed it in. Experimentally, she sniffed. She could still just about detect the residue of that chemical, whatever it was, on her skin, or possibly on her clothes from where it had dripped and soaked in.

  Her clothes! Quickly she looked down. Yes, she was still dressed. Thank Christ! Whoever had done this to her, they’d left her dressed. Somehow, that was important.

  She closed her eyes as that heavy mercury in her head swirled around, feeling her head nodding as the mercury pushed forwards and backwards, like an inexorable tide. Gradually it ebbed back to stillness, and she opened her eyes again.

  She could see her knees, but not her legs. Judging by what had happened to her arms, they were probably tied to the chair as well. It was hard enough to break plastic cable ties at the best of times, when you had purchase and leverage. Trying to snap them by flexing her muscles was going to be impossible.

  Which wasn’t going to stop her from trying, but she’d wait until she knew more about the situation, and panic seemed more of an attractive option. For now, her best course of action was to wait and watch and listen.

  Something caught her attention. Beside each leg she could see a curved section of grey rubber. It took her a good few minutes to work out that they were tyres. At the end of the day, her only consolation was that the angle was unusual. She hadn’t expected to be looking down on tyres. But these were not from a car.

  She was in a wheelchair. The knowledge took a little while to filter through her drug-slowed mind. A wheelchair.

  Back to the hospital idea again?

  No, she was fastened to the wheelchair. She wasn’t in a hospital. She’d been abducted. Imprisoned.

  That smell was still just about discernible. Ether – wasn’t that what had been used as an accelerant on Tamara Stottart? If it was then Emma was lucky to be alive. A slight miscalculation with the amount of ether on the cloth that had been pressed against her face, or the length of time she had been forced to breathe the fumes, and she’d be brain damaged or dead. Assuming she wasn’t already brain damaged and just didn’t know it.

  The fog was beginning to clear from her mind, and she didn’t think she was going to throw up. Not immediately, at any rate. The best thing she could do was make an evaluation of her environment. See if there was any opportunity for escape.

  Without moving her head Emma lifted her gaze until she was looking out from beneath her eyelashes. Her eyelids and eyebrows were massed like a dark cloud above her. The movement sent fresh spikes of hot agony back through her eye sockets, but she swallowed hard and tried not to cry out.

  She was in a shadowed room with breeze-block walls that had been painted white – an attempt at covering up the unpalatable truth, similar, as far as Emma was concerned, to spraying perfume on a corpse. She regretted the analogy as soon as it passed through her mind. She didn’t want to be thinking about corpses. Not here. Not now.

  The room seemed to extend for some distance left and right, but her eyeline was cut off by two mobile room dividers, the kind Emma was familiar with from open-plan police offices. They had been placed about six feet to either side of her wheelchair, extending from the breeze-block wall out to about two-thirds the width of the room. This left an open space running down the building on the wall opposite where she was parked – a little like a corridor. The dividers were probably at least six feet high; more than enough to stop her from seeing down the length of the room, even if she’d been standing up.

  There was nobody in sight, so she raised her head and looked around. No point in still pretending she was unconscious.

  The floor was covered in old linoleum marked in green and black triangles. It was cracked in places, and the edges were curling up, and there were brown stains splattered across it that made her feel like she wanted to simultaneously curl up and empty her bowels.

  Frankly, if she was going to have to die, there were more attractive places to do it.

  ‘Either this lino goes or I do,’ she muttered to herself, trying to keep her spirits up.

  ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice from her left.

  She kept silent.

  ‘Hello? Are you awake?’

  ‘We saw you being brought in,’ another voice said. This time it was a woman. She was also on Emma’s right, but sounded further away.

  Analysing their tone of voice, Emma decided that they sounded scared. Maybe it was a come-on, a trick on the part of her abductor, but she might as well play along. Take nothing for granted; learn what you can.

  ‘My name is Emma Bradbury,’ she said, loudly and clearly. ‘I’m a sergeant in Essex Police.’

  ‘You’re with the police?’ the man said, surprised. ‘But you’re tied up.’

  ‘Yeah, funny old thing,’ Emma said quietly; then, more loudly, added, ‘We were looking for you, but I hadn’t planned on finding you quite like this. You are Mark and Sara Baillie, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Oh God, yes.’ The woman sounded relieved. Relieved and yet terrified. ‘Where
are we? Why are we here?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Emma said. ‘I was hoping you might know.’

  ‘We woke up here,’ Mark Baillie said. ‘We’re tied to wheelchairs, just like you.’

  ‘What happened?’ Emma asked.

  ‘We don’t know!’ That was Sara again. Her voice sounded raw, as if she’d been crying. Or screaming. ‘We were in bed. Asleep. I remember smelling something funny, and then it was like I was falling down a dark hole in the ground. When I woke up, I was here. And so was Mark.’

  ‘What about our children?’ Mark asked urgently. ‘Are they all right? Have you seen them?’

  Emma’s mind raced. The boys weren’t here? They certainly hadn’t been left in the house. That meant one of several things, none of which she wanted to share with Mark and Sara. Either the boys had breathed in too much ether and were dead, or they were being kept somewhere else, by themselves, or whoever had kidnapped them was already … already what? Torturing them as an audition for some insane choir? What was all this about? And what was she going to tell the parents?

  ‘I wasn’t at the crime scene – at your house, I mean,’ she lied. ‘I’m not sure where they are right now but … I’m sure they’re fine.’ Quickly, she moved on. ‘Did you see the person who wheeled me in? What did he look like?’

  ‘Male,’ Mark said, ‘quite muscular. He was wearing something over his face.’

  ‘Has he said anything to you?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Judging by her voice, Sara was on the verge of emotional collapse.

  ‘He brings us stuff to eat and drink,’ Mark said. ‘Soup in a thermos. He holds it up while we drink it. And water, every few hours.’

  ‘Like he’s keeping us fresh for … something,’ Sara added dully. Then: ‘Oh my God, where are Corwin and Duncan?’

  ‘It’s going to be okay, Sara,’ Mark said. Emma could hear him suppressing his own hysteria so he could comfort his wife, if only from behind a barrier. ‘It’s going to be okay, love.’

  It’s not, Emma thought bleakly. It’s really not.