Tooth and Claw (14 page)

Carl stood back and critically examined his handiwork. A couple more touches, and he would be ready to proceed.

He headed downstairs again. In the kitchen – stark pine and tiles he now had time to notice – he found a pair of scissors obviously designed for shearing through meat. He also found a set of what looked like Japanese carbon-steel kitchen knives in a wooden block. He chose one which was small, fitting neatly in his hand, and viciously sharp. That would do nicely, he decided.

He headed back up the stairs, aware suddenly that his bladder was full. Instead of heading into the bedroom, he diverted into the bathroom.

Dropping his chinos he quickly emptied his bladder, noticing with dismay that the urine was dark purple in colour. There was no doubt about it. The illness was back again. He flushed the toilet, making sure he used a piece of toilet paper to hold the handle so as not to leave any fingerprints. The toilet paper was thrown into the bowl before the water had finished sluicing around the porcelain.

Back in the bedroom, Catherine was fully aware now, pupils dilated in shock. Her wrists and ankles were red where she had been trying to pull herself free.

Without saying anything, Carl leaned over the girl with the shearing scissors in his hand. Catherine froze, then shook her head violently. Carl smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘These scissors aren’t for hurting you.’

Catherine looked confused. A flash of hope crossed her face.

‘No,’ Carl said, ‘they’re just so I can remove your clothes.’ He held up the Japanese kitchen knife which he was holding in his other hand. ‘This is the one that’s going to hurt you,’ he said.

The car park of the retail centre was eerily deserted as Mark Lapslie and Emma Bradbury drove in. A few cars – cleaners probably, or security staff – were clustered close to the main doors. One car, further away, looked as if it had been abandoned by joy-riders; the tyres were under-inflated, and the paintwork had a layer of dust over it that suggested it had been sitting there for a few days. Lapslie thought he could just make out a yellow
Police Aware
sign stuck on the windscreen. Not that it meant anything; he remembered a case some years before where a police patrol had been called out to an abandoned car and dutifully stuck a
Police Aware
sign on the windscreen before driving off, blissfully unaware that the car’s owner was sitting, dead, in the driver’s seat, victim of a sudden heart attack.

A large sign by the entrance to the car park welcomed shoppers, and provided the information that the outlet would be open daily from 10:00 to 20:00 (16:00 on Sundays). Lapslie checked his watch as Emma drove her Audi diagonally across the empty bays. 09:00; still an hour to go before the shops opened: time enough to get a look up on the roof for evidence of an observer, possibly a bomber, before the crowds descended in search of a bargain; before their incessant chatter caused the taste of dried blood to settle like sediment in Lapslie’s mouth for the rest of the day.

He was still feeling nauseous from his reaction to the passing train earlier on. His joints were aching, and he could feel a
strange pulsing pain that seemed to radiate up his neck from his chest along the line of his carotid arteries. He’d never felt this bad before. He wasn’t even sure if this was the synaesthesia or some other problem – a virus, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was progressively stopping him from carrying on the investigation. Investigation
s
, plural, he reminded himself.

Emma pulled up in a disabled bay by the doors. Lapslie raised an eyebrow at her.

‘All those empty slots, and you have to choose the one that’s actually illegal to park in.’

‘You’re synaesthetic. That must count as a disability.’

He thought for a moment. ‘I might be missing a trick there.’

Together they walked to the entrance of the shopping centre. The automatic doors weren’t working, but Emma found that one of the ordinary doors to the side was unlocked. She opened it, and they walked in.

The interior of the centre was cavernous, echoing. The main thoroughfare stretched ahead of them like the nave of some modernistic cathedral, lined with shops and with other thoroughfares crossing it every hundred yards or so. Skylights in the roof let in a general glow of illumination that seemed to eradicate any shadows. Lapslie breathed in, wondering if there would be any trace of the crowds who had presumably thronged there for ten hours the day before, but he could detect nothing apart from an antiseptic pine scent, left over presumably by the cleaners who had scoured the place of chewing gum, sweet wrappers and shoe-scuffs on the polished tiles overnight. There was a sense of expectancy in the air, of waiting, of a place that had no meaning, no definition unless it was full of people milling around.

‘Look,’ Emma said, turning to face him, ‘do you want me to go and do this? You can wait in the car. Keep in touch via your
mobile, if you need to. If there’s anything I think you need to see I can take a photo on my BlackBerry and send it through to you.’

Her voice reverberated in the empty halls, the grapefruit essence of it doubling and redoubling until Lapslie’s entire world seemed tainted by it and his mouth screwed up against the bitterness. He was tempted to accept her offer. Tiredness was hampering his movements, and a headache was settling just behind his eyes and looked like it was there to stay for a while. He thought longingly of the headphones back in his car.

‘Thanks,’ he said eventually, ‘but I’m not completely disabled yet. I can still climb stairs and look around. If things get too bad I’ll just come back and let you get on with it.’

A security guard turned a corner ahead of them. ‘Sorry!’ he called, ‘but we’re not open for another hour.’ His voice was dry ash and candy-floss.

‘You are for us,’ Emma said loudly. ‘Police.’

The guard came closer, frowning. He had the look of someone who loved being in uniform but wasn’t fit enough or disciplined enough to join the army or the police. ‘I didn’t hear no alarms go off. Has one of the shops been broken into? Or is it that car outside? We keep reporting it, but nothing happens.’

‘It’s not the shops and it’s not the car. We need access to your roof.’

He shook his head automatically. ‘No access to the roof.’.

‘Let me repeat myself,’ Emma said patiently. ‘Police. We need access to the roof. Which part of that wasn’t clear?’

‘I don’t have no keys,’ the guard said, surly and obviously uncomfortable that the conversation had deviated from the set patterns of his usual interchanges with the public.

‘Then find out who does, and get them here.’ Emma looked at her watch. ‘Twenty minutes, then I’m going to find the
door to the roof myself and break it down with a crowbar if I have to.’

In the end it took five minutes and a furtive radio conversation between the guard and his supervisor to locate the keys in a cupboard in the grandly named ‘security suite’ – actually a whitewashed room with a coffee-stained carpet, a kettle and a bank of TV monitors showing different black-and-white views of the empty thoroughfares. The cameras had been fixed in place for so long that the straight lines of the shop fronts – their windows, their doors and the edges where they butted up against the floor tiles – had become etched by cathode rays into the phosphor of the monitors, and the occasional passing security guard or cleaner looked like a ghost drifting past. It occurred to Lapslie that when the thoroughfares were full of shoppers it must look like a river flowing between ancient and immovable banks.

His nose tickled with the smell of coffee. For a moment Lapslie thought it was drifting across from a cafeteria somewhere inside the shopping complex, but when he heard the violin solo from Bruch’s 1st Violin Concerto echoing tinnily through the empty halls he realised that his mobile was ringing.

‘Lapslie,’ he said, flipping it open.

‘Inspector Lapslie, this is Sancha Starkey from the BBC.’ Her voice was honey and cigarette smoke combined. ‘Do you have any leads in the Catherine Charnaud murder?’

Lapslie felt his fists clenching. ‘How the
hell
did you get this number?’

‘But you
can
confirm that Catherine Charnaud was murdered—’

‘Investigations are ongoing,’ he said, wanting to swear down the phone but aware that would do him no good at all. He might need the media on his side, if he wanted to make an
appeal for information later, or if the case dragged on with no resolution and people began to demand that he be replaced. ‘That is all I can confirm at the moment.’

‘Do you have any suspects?’

Bizarrely, he wanted to quote Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau in
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
– ‘I suspect everyone, and no one,’ but he stopped himself just in time. There was a time and a place for humour, and he knew how easily a throw-away statement could be used against him. ‘A press conference will be arranged in due course,’ he said instead. ‘Until then, I cannot confirm or deny any matters pertaining to this investigation. I’m sure you understand.’

‘Is it true that you’ve arrested Catherine Charnaud’s boyfriend?’

‘I can neither confirm nor deny that. I’m sorry.’

He clicked the phone off as she was halfway through her next question, bitterly aware that the next BBC news report on the Charnaud case would probably contain the words ‘Essex Police refused to comment on the case’, turning what was his simple unwillingness to speculate in the absence of evidence into something conspiratorial and suspicious. And so it began.

Seconds later, the mobile began to ring again. He switched it off entirely, cursing.

‘Problem, boss?’ Emma was standing beside him. The grapefruit of her voice sluiced the mixed coffee, honey and nicotine of the phone call from his mouth.

‘Bloody journalists. Somehow they’ve got hold of my mobile number. They’re asking about the Charnaud case.’

‘Amazing what you can get with a few minutes’ research these days,’ she sympathised. ‘Someone probably took your business card somewhere along the line and put the number up on the internet for some reason, or you were at a conference
and your details got amalgamated into an address list with everyone else’s. Or someone’s got a friend working for your service provider who passed the info on. There’s no privacy any more.’

‘Yeah, everything is available except the stuff that we need to crack the case, like the name of the killer. Even their motive would do.’ He sighed heavily. This was just the start. It was all going to snowball from here – the press would soon be crawling like cockroaches over every aspect of the investigation. ‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s crack on.’

The door to the roof was hidden down a service alley where Filipino cleaners went about their business without looking at Lapslie, Emma or the guard, as if they were in a separate but intersecting world. It was fitted with an alarm which the guard disabled by typing a code into a keypad set on the wall to one side. Stairs led up to another locked door at the top. He opened the door and gestured them through.

Out on the tarmac roof, punctuated by long, greenhouse-like stretches of skylights, the wind was fresh and strong. Lapslie walked across to the nearest edge, bounded by a low wall. He felt like he was standing on the edge of a cliff. Somewhere in the back of his mind he expected to hear the crying of sea gulls. The car park stretched away from him like an impossibly flat ocean: the geometric lines of the bays receding like strangely straight wave tops. Off in the distance he could see the red tiled roofs of houses on the nearby estate, each looking the same but artfully curved along their roads so that no house had quite the same view and each could claim some morsel of individuality. He orientated himself. If the houses were over
there
, and the car park was
there
…

‘The station is on that side,’ he said, gesturing to Emma. ‘Let’s go,’

Leaving the guard standing uncertainly by the door, they walked together around one of the raised skylights. Through it, Lapslie could pick out lit signs for the shops beneath: Superdrug, Game, HMV. Stones loosely embedded in the tarmac of the roof crunched and skittered like ginger underfoot. Lapslie stopped, ten feet or so away from the edge; close enough that he could see the loading and unloading area beneath them, the station platforms in the distance and the railway lines that led away to either side – not visible themselves, but marked by unnaturally straight hedgerows – far enough away that neither he nor Emma would disturb any evidence.

He quickly scanned the tarmac near to the edge. ‘If our bomber was up on this roof,’ he said, ‘they must have been somewhere along here. It provides the best vantage point for the station.’

‘How would they get up here?’ Emma asked.

‘They could get through the doors with lock-picking equipment, if they knew what they were doing. Or they could have stolen the keys and made copies. I wasn’t too impressed with the security inside the shopping centre.’

‘What about the code on the alarm?’

‘It’s always possible they could have watched someone type the number in and memorised it. I don’t know how often anyone comes up to the roof. Get someone to look into the guards and the cleaners, just in case it’s an inside job. I don’t think it is – something smacks of careful planning and cautiousness here – but it’s worth checking, just in case.’

A mournful train horn sent tendrils of yeast worming their way through his mouth. Lapslie braced himself and raised his hands to cover his ears. Too late. The rush of the train pushing the air away in front of it, and the metallic clattering of wheels on rails caused his mouth to fill up with the improbable taste
of syrupy peaches and salt again. He felt his stomach rise, and he clenched the muscles of his throat and chest against it. Bile burned at the back of his throat. He leaned forward, dropping his hands to steady himself on the wall running along the edge of the roof. If he threw up here he might be compromising evidence. He couldn’t afford to do that.

The roof and the wall were fading away from him. Only the tastes were real. He could hardly feel the rough edges of the stone wall biting into the tender undersides of his fingers. His body appeared to be toppling, falling from the high roof to plummet into the car park, but he couldn’t stop himself.