Tooth and Claw (12 page)

Emma nodded. ‘I spoke to the preferred profiler in this area yesterday evening. She’s happy to help. Former lecturer in criminology at Essex University, and she’s written a handful of books on the subject. Very competent, apparently, although a bit prickly to work with. I’m trying to set up a meeting with her.’

‘What’s her name?’ Lapslie asked, half his attention on Sean Burrows’s team.

Emma consulted her notebook. ‘Whittley,’ she said. ‘Eleanor Whittley.’

There was someone following him.

Carl Whittley was driving along a dual carriageway on the way back from Braintree and his successful explosion. Everything had gone perfectly, and he had felt warm and proud and aroused. He had deliberately chosen a route that took him in a wide curve, via several small towns and villages, in order to avoid being too direct about his final destination.

But now someone was following him. He knew it, for sure. It wasn’t as if he could see anyone who was taking more than a cursory amount of interest in him, but someone was out there. He was certain.

The police? He supposed it could be, but surely if they suspected what he had done then they would pull him over straight away and arrest him. They wouldn’t let him keep on going, would they? Perhaps it was someone else, but who?

His hands tightened on the wheel of his car, but he was careful not to let his foot press too heavily on the accelerator pedal. He didn’t want an unexpected change in speed to give away to his pursuer that they had been spotted.

He checked in his rear-view mirror, cautious not to move his head while he did so, just flicking his gaze upwards for a few seconds, scanning the road behind him.

There were five cars visible in his mirror. Quickly he memorised their key features; one was a black cab with its radiator grille partially blocked by a piece of white card, another had a
squarish bumper and an emblem that stuck up above the bonnet; a third had one wing mirror missing. It was unlikely that any pursuer would drive anything so noticeable, but at least he could factor those vehicles out of his calculations and concentrate on the remaining two, which had no distinguishing features and were new enough and painted that anonymous silver that usually meant they were hire cars.

Paradoxically, it would be easier at night to spot being followed. He’d noticed that many cars had headlights that were slightly offset or operated at different levels of brilliance. Taking away all the confusing factors of size, shape and colour, and just concentrating on the distinctive way the lights varied, it should be possible to pin down whether a particular car was spending too long behind you.

Carl’s hands were damp inside the gloves, the skin hot and itchy. He could feel a fluttering sensation in his stomach, and a flat, bitter taste in his mouth. The fight or flight response was kicking in; adrenalin was pumping around his system, making him jumpy.

He jerked his attention back to the road. There was a town coming up and he decided to take some evasive action, just to see whether anyone followed, or even gave themselves away by a momentary jerk of the wheel before they caught themselves and continued on their way. The road was heading for a roundabout, and the two lanes of the dual carriageway were marked separately; one for turning left only, one for continuing straight on or turning right.

There were no other cars near him; just the five that occupied his rear-view mirror. Gradually, Carl let his car drift so that it was straddling the white line marking the boundary between the lanes. The roundabout was getting closer and he looked in his mirror again. Two of the cars – the taxi and the
one with the square bumper – were moving into the outside lane. The car with the wing mirror missing and one of the two anonymous silver ones were drifting left, into the inside lane.

The fifth car, the other silver one, couldn’t make its mind up. Like Carl, it was straddling the white line. Perhaps its driver didn’t know which way to go at the roundabout. Or perhaps they were leaving their options open, waiting to see what he did.

As the roundabout loomed ahead, filling his windscreen, he turned the steering wheel left, letting his car slide across the road into the inside lane just as he hit the parallel yellow lines that marked the last few metres. He didn’t signal. Let them think he might still be going straight ahead, just from the wrong lane.

Behind him, the silver car did the same.

There was a red car entering the roundabout from his right, signalling to go right. He turned the wheel hard left, hearing his tyres screech as his car shot onto the roundabout in front of the approaching car. A horn blared behind him but he was concentrating on making sure that his own car came out straight on the left hand exit from the roundabout.

He risked a glance at his rear-view mirror. The driver of the red car was making a gesture at him. More importantly, the silver car had slotted in behind it and was signalling left.

The left hand exit from the roundabout led onto a single carriageway road. A hundred yards further on, a side road was signposted for a superstore. He turned late, without signalling, into the superstore’s car park, aware that the silver car was behind him again. It signalled late to peel off into the car park, after him.

The car park was about two thirds full. Carl drove slowly but steadily past rows of cars, past the wider parking slots for
families with toddlers and for disabled drivers, right up to the pick-up point in front of the store, and then past it, turning right to head out of the car park again, past the inevitable petrol station, dividing his gaze equally between the view through the windscreen and the reflection in his rear-view mirror. If the silver car followed him all the way out of the car park then he would know that it was following him.

It slowed, and darted in to the pick-up point. A woman standing in front of the store with a trolley full of shopping started forward, signalling to the driver.

Carl felt the itch on the back of his neck fade away to a tickle, and then to just a memory. Perhaps the car had been following him and its driver had quickly arranged a fall-back story to reassure him when they realised that he had seen them. Or, more likely, it had all just been a misapprehension on his part.

He was getting jumpier and jumpier recently. Little things were setting him off – people looking away when he glanced towards them, curtains that twitched as he walked past houses, conversations that suddenly went quiet or obviously switched topic when he walked into shops. Part of his mind knew that he was being spooked by nothing, that he was building innocent events into an edifice of fantasy, but another part, an older, more primal part, kept jumping at every shadow and flickering flame.

He drove cautiously out of the superstore car park, still peripherally aware of the cars around him. He headed back to the dual carriageway. Time to go back to the house. He felt safer there than he did anywhere else. And once there, he could start planning the next operation; the next death. Not an explosion this time, but something else. Something different.

The drive back to Creeksea took him along increasingly isolated roads and through scattered villages consisting of a few
houses and the occasional shop. The roads were raised on banks a foot or so above the level of the surrounding fields, and every so often they turned in the middle of nowhere where the car diverted around the corner of something that had existed, years before, but had been lost to nature. Some of the fields lining the roads were overgrown, some were barren, and some had big, rectangular bales of hay piled up at their edges in blocks the size of houses. And always, as he drove, there was a quality of light in the sky indicating that somewhere just out of sight was the relentless expanse of the North Sea.

He knew he was getting close to Creeksea when the road began to parallel the single rail track that led from Colchester towards the coast and the ferry port. Just before the slip road leading off to the estate was a side road that led to a chain-link fence. Behind the fence was an area of ground that had been bought for a planned expansion by the company who built the estate, but never used. Carl parked out of sight of the road, just in front of the chain-link fence. Retrieving his own licence plates from where he had left them, wrapped in plastic bags beneath a pile of bricks, he took a screwdriver from the boot of his car, removed the fake number plates that he had been using and substituted his own. Rumour had it that there were digital number-plate recognition systems being installed on all major roads that could identify passing cars, checking them against a database of suspect vehicles, and could count the number of times a particular car passed the same point in a short period of time and send a warning out that someone might be conducting a reconnaissance for a planned terrorist atrocity. With a bomb planted in a Braintree station the police would probably consult all the records they could get to, looking for cars acting suspiciously. If they found his car on a frame of video, Carl didn’t want them tracing it back to him.

Just because he was paranoid it didn’t mean that they
weren’t
out to get him, after all. And they did have good reason. At least ten good reasons.

The fake plates he rewrapped in the plastic bags and placed beneath the bricks, just in case he might need them again. Then he removed the tax disc from the holder on the windscreen and replaced it with one that was identical apart from the fact that the licence number matched his own, not the fake one. That one was registered to Chris Ashwell – a fake identity that he had created for himself some years before, and still periodically updated.

His father called down the stairs immediately the front door closed.

‘Carl? At last! I need to talk to you.’

He quickly checked himself over. Nothing that would give away what he’d been doing.

He took the stairs two at a time. His father was sitting up in bed, yesterday’s newspaper beside him on the bed.

‘Dad, are you okay?’

His father looked at him quizzically. ‘I was dozing. Before that I was reading the paper. There’s nothing happening in the world. It’s all old news.’

‘Can I get you anything? A cup of tea?’

Nicholas thought for a moment. ‘I’d like to come downstairs later, if that’s all right. I feel like watching TV for a while.’

‘Okay, I’ll help you. Can I have a bath first?’

‘Of course.’

‘And I’ll prepare dinner while you’re watching TV.’

A hesitant expression crossed Nicholas’s face. ‘Is your mother still coming to dinner? That is tonight, isn’t it?’

‘It is, and she is. In fact, I’ll give her a quick ring while the kettle’s boiling to check what time she’s planning on coming over.’

Downstairs, Carl picked up the handset and pressed the memory button for his mother’s number.

‘Eleanor Whittley, hello?’

‘Mum, it’s Carl. I wanted to check what time you were coming round.’

A pause. ‘Coming round?’

Carl began to get a cold feeling around his stomach. She was going to cancel. Again. ‘Coming round for dinner. You said you were going to. Dad’s been looking forward to it.’

‘Sorry, I meant to let you know. I had a call earlier from the police.’

Carl took a deep breath. ‘You’ve got a job?’

‘With Essex Constabulary. They want me to consult on a murder case. You may have heard about it on the news: a girl, a newsreader of some kind. There are details about the case that mean they need an expert in abnormal psychology.’

Carl felt light-headed. Finally, after all this time, it had happened. His mother would be examining one of the murders that he had committed! He felt as if he had been wrapped in cotton wool, as if he were detached from the world and everything around him was slowly tilting to one side.

‘Carl?’

He snapped back. ‘Sorry. I was just … just thinking how good it is that you’ve got something to interest you.’

‘It’s not just interest; it’s a great deal of money. Money we need.’

‘Yeah, sorry. When are you seeing them?’

‘I will be meeting the investigating officer at the crime scene this afternoon. After that I’m going to have to spend several hours going over my notes and my first impressions, transforming them into a potential psychological profile of the killer. It’s going to take some time, and I can’t afford any distractions. I’m sure you understand how important this is to me.’

‘Of course I do.’ He paused. ‘You could pop round later. For supper.’

‘I need to make my notes as soon as possible after seeing the crime scene, otherwise I might lose those precious vital first impressions. I’ll ring tomorrow. We’ll reschedule.’

‘Okay.’ He paused, wanting to find out more but uncertain how to proceed without raising her suspicions. Then it struck him. ‘Hey – why don’t I drive over and pick you up this afternoon, then drive you down to Chigwell? It’s a longish drive, and it’ll give you a chance to catch up on the details of the case and think it through, rather than tire yourself out driving. You know how you hate wasting time behind the wheel.’

He wanted to go on, reinforcing the point, but he held himself back. His mother hated to feel as if she was being pushed into anything.

Her voice was cautious. ‘Are you sure you can spare the time?’

‘Of course. I haven’t seen you for weeks, and I was expecting to see you tonight anyway.’

‘What about your father?’

Your father
. Not
Nicholas
. Not
my husband
. ‘I’ll make sure he’s got food and water. He’ll be fine watching TV.’

A pause. ‘Well, it would give me a chance to review the facts. And I wasn’t looking forward to driving.’

‘Okay, it’s a date,’ he said, not giving her a chance to talk herself out of it. ‘Pick you up about three o’clock?’

‘Okay. Thank you, Carl.’

With a bath run, his father’s tea and the news about his mother delivered and a mug of coffee perched on the edge of the tub, he stripped off and stepped into the steaming water. Warmth spread like a slow death through his body, and he sank deeper in the water until just his face and his knees were exposed to the cold air.