‘A year ago.’
‘And has your condition changed in that time – got worse or got better?’
‘It’s stayed at the same level.’
‘Hmm.’ He tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘I presume that Doctor Lombardy told you there is no treatment and no cure for synaesthesia? It’s something you just have to live with.’
Lapslie nodded. ‘He did tell me that. We decided that it was worth me coming back once a year or so to check whether there had been any major advances in the research.’
Dr Considine shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge. It’s still pretty much a puzzle. We know from magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, for instance, that synaesthetes such as yourself show patterns of activity that are different from people who are normal – for want of a better word – but we are still trying to work out what that difference means. It’s still a puzzle.’
‘One that’s affecting my career and my personal life,’ Lapslie said bitterly. ‘It’s easy to say there’s no treatment, but you don’t have to live with it. My career has stalled because I can’t socialise the way the others do. I’ve separated from my family because I can’t bear the continual taste in my mouth when they’re around. And I can’t watch television, or go to see a film or a concert, for fear of suddenly throwing up. Runny egg yolks and chalky antacid tablets are bad enough, but a sudden rush of raw sewage or vomit down your throat can spoil your entire evening.’
‘I see.’ The doctor wrote a few notes on a pad in front of him. ‘And forgive me for asking this, but is there an up-side? Does the synaesthesia bring any benefits with it?’
‘I have a very good memory for people – I suspect that’s because I can associate their voices with particular flavours.’
‘Which makes me wonder – does my voice have a flavour to it?’
Lapslie laughed. ‘You’d be surprised how many people ask me that question, when they hear about my problem. No – not all sounds trigger flavours. I don’t know if it’s to do with pitch, or timbre, or what. Some voices do, but yours doesn’t. Sorry.’
‘Anything else? Any more benefits?’
Lapslie considered for a few seconds. ‘Strangely,’ he said, ‘I can usually tell when people are lying to me. It’s an unusual taste. Dry and spicy, but not in a curry way. More like nutmeg. It’s helped me investigating crimes before.’ To Considine’s raised eyebrow, he added: ‘I’m in the police.’
Considine frowned. ‘I can just about understand how sounds can be mistranslated into flavours somewhere in the brain,’ he said, ‘but lying isn’t a sound, it’s got to do with the content, the meaning of what’s being said. That’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘The way I rationalise it,’ Lapslie said, ‘when people lie, there’s a certain amount of stress in their voice, changing the way it sounds in subtle ways. Somehow, I’m picking up on that stress and tasting it.’
‘I presume you’ve been asked to take part in research projects? There are labs all over the country becoming interested in synaesthesia.’
‘I’ve been asked, and I’ve occasionally taken part in experiments, but it usually turns out that I’m just some glorified lab rat. I want to understand and control my problem, but the trouble is that most researchers want something else. They want to use the synaesthesia as a window into the way the brain operates.’
Considine nodded. ‘I can sympathise. There are psychiatric techniques you could use to try and help control the flood of sensations you are getting. Cognitive behaviour therapy, for instance, could help you weaken the connections between stimuli such as particular sounds and your habitual reactions to them. The tastes might stay, but your reactions could be modified. If you want, I can recommend you to a therapist.’
Therapy. Lapslie shook his head. It wasn’t for him.
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I think the problem is more deeply rooted than that. Changing the way I think won’t affect it.’
‘Then you’re just going to have to live with it.’
‘Thanks for your time.’
‘Come back in another year,’ Dr Considine said as Lapslie stood up to leave. ‘Who knows? By then we might actually know what synaesthesia is and how to suppress it.’
‘Who knows?’ Lapslie said as he left.
It had rained whilst he was in the hospital. Pools of water congregated along kerbs and in dips in the road. Driving out of the hospital grounds, he headed for the A120, but a small voice in the back of his mind told him that he wasn’t too far away from where Violet Chambers’ body had been discovered in the forest outside Faulkbourne. Abruptly he turned right instead of left at a roundabout and quickly typed a new destination into his satnav system. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to take another look at the area. Get a feel for it during the daytime, rather than the early morning. See it when nobody else was there, rather than having it filled with policemen and Crime Scene Investigators.
Accelerating along the road, he let his mind drift, trying to analyse why he wanted to spend what remained of his day off investigating a murder. There was something unsatisfying about the crime. Something slightly out of the ordinary. He had investigated so many murders over the years that he was inured to them, to the sights and the smells, the reasons and the rationales, but this one didn’t seem to fit into the usual channels. Partly it was too mannered, too organised. Poisoning was not a crime of passion, but one of meticulous planning. But then there was the blow to the back of the head and the dumping of the body, apparently still alive, in the forest. That spoke of haste, of the murderer panicking and leaving the body behind. The two just didn’t go together.
Unless …
Unless the murderer had been interrupted on their way to dump the body. Perhaps they had chosen a site where they could abandon it with no fear of detection, but something had happened on the way. The poison hadn’t worked properly: the supposed body had come back to life again. Lapslie felt his pulse pumping as the thoughts all tumbled together in his mind. The murderer – or, rather, the attacker at this point – pulls over on a deserted road to finish the job with a quick blow to the back of the skull with a handy tool – a spanner, or a wrench, or something – but why not keep on going once the victim was dead? Why dump the body there?
Was there an interruption? Did someone see the car, parked by the side of the road, and pull over to see whether the murderer needed any help? Did the murderer have to leave the body where it was in order to deal with this interruption?
The rain-laden clouds were dark overhead but there was blue sky off to one side. The sun shone diagonally across the landscape, lighting it with a strange golden glow against the dark backdrop. It looked more like a stage set than a real place. Lapslie pushed the problem back in his mind, where his subconscious could chew on it, and set about enjoying the quietness of the drive.
Within half an hour he was heading along the same tree-lined road that he’d been on just a few weeks before. The rain had sluiced the air of dust, and the leaves seemed to glow with a preternatural light as the sun caught them. Shafts of brightness lanced through gaps in the trees, picked out by the moisture in the air. He slowed as he approached the bend in the road where the crash had occurred, pulled over and parked under the trees, his tyres biting deep into the loam.
Lapslie got out of the car and stood for a moment, breathing in the earthy dampness of the air. The CSI team had cleared up and left. Nothing remained of their presence apart from a churned-up area of ground where their tent had been, and some small scraps of yellow tape.
Turning, Lapslie gazed back along the length of the road he had just driven along. If he was right – and it was less of a theory, more of a hypothesis at the moment – the murderer had been driving along that road on their way to dump the body of their victim somewhere. For some reason they had stopped and their victim – who was not quite dead – had taken the opportunity to attempt an escape. A quick tap to the back of the head, and the victim really was dead. The murderer wrapped her in p
lastic and left her there, rather than drive on to the spot where they actually wanted to leave the body.
First question – why did the murderer stop the car? Three immediate possibilities occurred to him – either the victim had shown signs of life and had to be dealt with immediately, or there had been something at the scene already that had forced the murderer to stop, or the car had developed a fault. Now, which of those possibilities was the most likely? If the victim had shown signs of life while the murderer was driving the car then they might have stopped and hit them hard enough to finish the job, but why dump the body there? Why not keep on driving to the place they had originally intended to dump it? Scratch that idea. If there had been something on the road – a car in trouble perhaps, then why stop? Or, if the murderer had been forced to stop – by a police presence clearing the scene, perhaps – then why dump the body in a place where there were people around? Again, why not just keep going? No, the more Lapslie thought about it, the more he believed that the murderer’s car had developed a fault.
In his mind’s eye, he could see it happening, playing out against the picturesque setting of the misty road. A lone car, driving carefully, trying not to attract attention. A puncture, perhaps, or steam coming out of the radiator. The car draws quickly to a halt. The driver – a shadowy figure – gets out and checks the tyre, the bonnet, wherever the problem is. Unseen, the back door opens and a form crawls out, heading into the safety of the trees. The driver sees it, follows it across the bracken. A branch is picked up and descends abruptly: once, twice. The driver returns to the car and reluctantly makes a call to the emergency services. Before they can arrive, the driver takes a roll of plastic out of the back of the car and wraps the body up, piling bracken and earth on top to the best of their ability in order to keep it from being discovered. And then they wait for the AA, or the RAC, or whoever to arrive.
It made sense. It was only a possibility, of course, but it made sense. Which meant that the question was: what evidence might there be confirming or denying it?
Lapslie took his mobile from his jacket and held down the button that allowed him to voice-dial. ‘Emma Bradbury,’ he said, and the phone ransacked its memory for her number. Within a few moments, she answered.
‘Sir? I thought it was your day off?’
‘It is. I got bored. Emma, I need you to do something for me. I’m at the site where the body was found. I want you to check whether any recovery services or mechanics were called out to a broken down car on this spot between, say, nine and eleven months ago. Check the police as well: they may have a record of something having happened. Give me a ring back when you have it.’
‘Will do. What’s this all—’
He cut her off abruptly, not wanting to talk, concerned somehow that if he was to explain his theory – his hypothesis – then it would all crumble to dust and Emma would laugh at him. He would wait until she called back with actual evidence – one way or the other – before he told her what he thought. And while he waited, he decided to take a walk in the woods.
The leaf mulch gave spongily beneath his feet as he walked. All around there was a slight crackle of vegetation drying out after the rain, and the occasional flurry of activity as a bird or a fox moved in the underbrush, but the smell of damp leaves rising from the ground covered any other taste that might have been triggered in Lapslie’s mouth. There were no trails, no paths through the bushes to follow. He found himself having to step carefully over fallen trees and skirt around hawthorn bushes in order to make any progress.
Within a few moments he couldn’t see the road, or his car. He might just as well have been in the middle of the forest as at its edge, and if he wasn’t careful he might just keep walking until he was in the middle. There was no way to check direction, and although he tried to catalogue the shapes of trees that he passed, he found they all ended up looking the same.
People talked about cities having personalities, and in his time stationed in London as a Detective Sergeant he had come to know the comfortable excesses of the capital – a raddled old whore who still managed to attract clients – but there was a different kind of personality here in the woods. Something timeless and dark. Whatever it was, it had seen the murder of Violet Chambers and it didn’t care, just as it hadn’t cared about any of the hundreds, thousands, millions of deaths it had witnessed over the millennia.
Turning back, with some effort, Lapslie retraced his steps as best he could. That tree on the edge of a dip, its roots exposed by storms and animals – he was sure he had seen it before on his way in. That parasitic gall, curled about the trunk of an oak – he surely recognised that. And within ten minutes, he was back at his car again, and it was as if the forest had been a dream.
His mobile rang as he returned to his car: Bruch’s 1st violin concerto, and a burst of chocolate.
‘Sir? Emma. I’ve phoned all the recovery and car mechanics firms covering the area. It’s something of a blackspot, that curve. Quite a few cars end up coming off it in the wet or if it’s icy.’
‘How many?’
‘In the timeframe in question, there were … ’She paused, consulting whatever notes she had made.
‘… five incidents where someone was called out to repair or recover a car. Three of them involved families, so I think we can rule them out. One was breathalysed at the scene by police and taken into custody. His car was impounded. I guess we can forget that one as well.’ There was something creeping into Emma’s voice that made Lapslie pay attention. It wasn’t quite nutmeg, but there was something definitely odd about it. She was holding something back. ‘The last one was a lady. No age given. Volvo 740, bronze, it says here. Car was repaired, and she went on her way.’
Lapslie thought for a moment. More poisoners turned out to be women than men, and the people living opposite Violet Chambers’ house had mentioned seeing a woman going in and out shortly before she left – or disappeared. It was worth following up. ‘Did they get a name?’ he asked.
‘You’re going to like this, sir. The woman gave her name as Violet Chambers.’
And that was it. His hunch had paid off. ‘Right. It’s too much of a coincidence that the real Violet Chambers broke down here shortly before her body was discovered. It’s much more likely that whoever dumped her body used her name as well. Get copies of their report form, check the registration number of the car and trace the owner. And, just in case, check whether the real Violet Chambers owned a car.’
‘Will do. Anything else?’
‘Yes. Put out a general request for assistance. I want to know where that car is now. I’ll ring you later.’
He rang off, then pressed the redial button as something else occurred to him. Emma answered, sounding surprised. ‘Boss? Something else?’
‘Yes. Phone around as many garages and mechanics as you can find within a fifty-mile radius of this forest. I want to know if anyone else has ever been called out to that car, and where it was at the time. If we get lucky, we might be able to tie it down to wherever our murderer lives. Or lived.’
‘But there must be hundreds of car mechanics in the area, if not thousands. That’s going to take—’
‘A significant slice of your time, I know. Just think of the overtime.’
‘Any chance you can get a constable assigned to this case, sir?’ she said sourly. ‘I could use the help.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Lapslie said, ringing off.
The sky was getting darker again, and there was a chill in the air that suggested more rain was on its way. He needed to get away: he had an appointment in London to go to. But for the moment, he found he could not leave. There was something about the spot where he was standing. A person had died there, and yet there was no acknowledgement. No sign. Nothing to mark the passing.
Perhaps that was the state of the world, and the human need to place crosses and markers was just a futile attempt to battle against the tide. The woodlands he was standing in had been there for hundreds, perhap
s thousands of years. Possibly they had been there before human beings had moved into the area. If every person’s death that had occurred in those woods over the past two thousand years or more was marked by a red spot, would there be any greenery left?
Morbid thoughts. He climbed into his car and drove away, leaving the woodlands and their ghosts behind him.
He left his car at Audley End station, then caught a train to London, grabbing a quick sandwich on the way. The journey took less than an hour, and during the time he looked out of the window at the passing fields and factories and let his thoughts drift. Earplugs cut out the noise of the people talking around him, replacing them with blessed silence. Every time he found his thoughts turning toward Sonia and his children, he stopped and deliberately thought about something else. The pain of that scar throbbed enough; there was no point picking at it any more.
He called DCS Rouse’s office from the train. The DCS wasn’t available, so he left a message with his PA asking for some extra resources to help Emma Bradbury with her inquiries. He didn’t hold out much hope – the top brass didn’t seem to want to provide any more resources, despite the interest that DCS Rouse was showing in it – but he had to try.
The train left him at Liverpool Street, and he used the Underground to get across the river to Rotherhide. The earplugs were less effective at blocking out the constant rattling and roaring of the train through the tunnels, and he had to keep swallowing to wash the taste of gorgonzola away. Eventually he slipped a mint into his mouth, just to cover it up with something else.
At Rotherhide he left the station and made his way through cobbled back streets to an old, familiar public house perched on the edge of the Thames. The Golden Hind was tall and thin, slightly lopsided, constructed from blackened timbers and white-plastered brickwork. It looked at first glance like any one of a thousand faux-Tudor inns scattered about England, until you realised that it really did date from Tudor days. Things had been added and subtracted since that time, but it gave off an air of permanence at odds with the buildings around it.
Core of Evil Page 16
