Tooth and Claw (15 page)

‘Are you okay, boss?’ Grapefruit scented with an unnameable flavour of concern, like smoke and spice together.

The train was receding now, along with its noise. The horn sounded again; fresh bread soaking up the peach and the salt. The world came back into existence.

‘Yeah,’ he muttered. ‘I’m okay.’

Emma looked along the surface of the roof. ‘There’s a couple of areas where the stones have been disturbed on the tarmac. Might indicate that someone was crouched down there. And I can see a couple of places on the wall where there are some fresh scratches, or the moss has been disturbed. Nothing left behind, though.’

‘Again,’ said Lapslie, straightening up, ‘that indicates caution on the part of the bomber. If they did trigger the device, or at least watch it explode, from here, and I believe they did, then they cleaned up after themselves. They collected whatever traces they had left, and made sure there was no obvious sign of their presence.’

‘You’re beginning to profile them,’ Emma said. ‘I thought you wanted to hire in this Eleanor Whittley to do that?’

‘Only on the Charnaud case,’ Lapslie replied, ‘We probably
couldn’t afford to have her working on two cases simultaneously. And doing a bit of your own profiling is okay, as long as you don’t let the profile blind you to any evidence that doesn’t agree with your theories.’

He moved cautiously over to the wall and knelt down; trying to ensure that there was nothing of an evidential nature near him. He gazed again out at the distant station, trying to trace in his mind the killer’s point of view. What would have been going through their head. Did they know who Alec Wildish was: were they deliberately waiting, scanning the faces of the commuters until he arrived, then waiting until the right moment to press the button, or would anyone have done? Had they been scanning the faces of the commuters, but not so much looking for a familiar face as someone that fitted some insane criteria: a certain age, a certain weight, a certain hair colour, a certain brand of jacket?

Somewhere in the distance he could hear a drumming sound. For a few moments he thought it was just the thrum of the blood in his veins, the beat of his heart echoing through his chest, but gradually he realised that it was more complicated than a natural rhythm: a ritualistic beat in 4/4 time; three groups of four semi-quavers with a stress on the first, then four semi-quavers again with the stress on the first but with the following three beats deeper in tone and heavier.

It was the same sound he’d heard when he was in Catherine Charnaud’s bedroom, looking down on her dead, flensed body.

‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.

‘Hear what?’

‘That drumming sound?’

Emma looked around. ‘I can’t hear anything apart from traffic, and the sound of a station manager having a coronary nearby.’

‘Is someone playing a radio?’

She shrugged. ‘Not that I can tell.’

‘Wind in the power cables, perhaps?’

‘Not that I can hear.’

Lapslie straightened up and brushed his hands down his trousers to remove the moss and the dust. What the hell was happening to him? As if the overreaction to noise wasn’t enough, was he hallucinating now? Was his mind, unable to cope with the bizarre input it was getting, beginning to snap under the strain of the cross-wiring of his senses?

He had to talk to someone. Perhaps he could get an urgent appointment with his consultant. There had to be
something
he could do, some drug he could take, that would allow him to function properly as a police officer. If he had to retire early on medical grounds, or was even forced out, then all that remained for him was a barren expanse of future time in which he would be condemned to stand quietly in the centre of his cottage, not moving, not doing anything, until he went mad.

He would rather die.

‘Never mind,’ he said finally. ‘Let Burrows know to get his team up here. I need a full forensic sweep.’

‘No chance of getting fingerprints,’ Emma said dubiously, looking at the wall.

‘Unlikely, but there might be traces of something else. Tobacco, maybe, or saliva if they spat something out. Worth a go.’

After a few minutes, during which Emma used her BlackBerry to call the CSI team, Lapslie led the way back to the door where the security guard waited for them. As he moved away from the edge of the roof, the drumming sound seemed to fade away, until it was lost in the whistling of the wind and the distant sound of cars on the main road.

‘Are there any other doors leading up here?’ he asked the guard.

‘This is the only one I know of,’ the guard said.

Lapslie looked out across the car park. Poles with lamps on top were spaced around on a regular basis, but every fourth one appeared to have a security camera attached to it. ‘Get copies of the security tapes,’ he said to Emma. ‘The angles are probably wrong – they’re looking down rather than up – but we might get lucky and catch the bomber silhouetted against the sky. Or even parking a car and walking across, although I suspect they’re too careful for that. They would have parked some distance away, and probably avoided the security cameras as they walked across.’

Back at the station, Lapslie noticed that the body had been removed.

‘Has the pathologist taken the body back to the mortuary?’ he called to Sean Burrows, who was examining something in the area between the platforms.

‘Yes.’

‘Which one?’

‘Small lady. Looks like there’s something wrong with her spine. Dr Catherall.’

He opened his mouth to say something, but his phone
beep
ed chocolate at him. He glanced at the screen. There was a text message waiting for him. He accessed it, and noticed that it was coincidentally from Jane Catherall.

I would be grateful if you could come to the mortuary
, it said.
I have more information on the Catherine Charnaud case.

‘We’re going to the mortuary,’ he said to Emma. ‘Something’s come up. Follow me.’

Walking over to his car, Lapslie noticed that a double-decker bus had pulled up, engine still running and pumping out a
mixture of diesel fumes and delicate lavender flavour, next to the station. Harassed commuters were climbing on board. The Station Manager was standing nearby, fielding angry comments. He didn’t look happy. Lapslie didn’t know what he was worried about. The task of looking after a station when everything was running fine must have been tedious in the extreme; he should have been pleased that he had a crisis to deal with.

Lapslie got into his car and pulled out of the station car park, priming the satnav with the postcode of the mortuary located on the outskirts of Braintree. The crunch of his tyres on gravel as he pulled away sent a cinnamon wave crashing across his tongue – complex, bitter and yet dry at the same time. Not for the first time he wondered, as he guided the car out towards the motorway, how tastes worked. Was it like colours, where any shade of paint could be made by combining red, blue and yellow? He had read somewhere that the taste buds on the tongue could only recognise five flavours – salt, sweet, bitter, sour and the mysterious
umami
, which normally got translated from the original Japanese as ‘savoury’. Could you really create any taste, from cinnamon through petrol to blue cheese, using just those five flavours? And did that explain how his synaesthesia worked – particular frequencies mapping onto particular building blocks of flavour so that any combination of sounds would create a matching mixture of tastes? Surely there must be more to it than that? But it did indicate that simple sounds – a single vibrating string perhaps, like a violin playing middle C – should relate directly to a simple taste, like pure salt, or pure sugar, while a multilayered sound – tyres crunching on gravel – would be a more complex combination. He couldn’t say that he’d noticed the connection, but it was a theory. He made a mental note to mention it to the consultant at the hospital the next time he had an appointment. Perhaps they could
conduct some experiments. It wasn’t as if they were going to come up with a cure any time soon.

He reached Chelmsford with Emma only seconds behind in her Audi. He had sensed her holding back all the way on the drive over, reluctant to overtake her boss.

He pressed the buzzer on the front door and waited for Dr Catherall’s assistant to let them in. The smell that wafted out of the building was the familiar combination of industrial strength cleaners and rotting flesh. He tried to tell himself that it was just salt, sweet, sour, bitter and savoury mixed together, nothing that should affect him, but he still found himself breathing through his mouth and imagining the foetid vapours coating his throat and his lungs like a thick scum.

He pushed through the swing doors that led into the post mortem room, feeling as if he was actively pushing them against the smell, Emma right behind him. Dr Catherall was bent over the corpse of Alec Wildish, examining the burned front of his skull with a magnifying glass. There was a smell of cooked meat in the air.

‘Dr Catherall,’ he said, his mouth watering in a way that made him feel sick.

She glanced sideways at him. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie, and so soon after the last time we met.’

He indicated the body on the table. ‘So, what can you tell me?’

‘I was just making my preliminary inspection when you arrived. As you will remember, I try never to speculate about the cause of death before I have solid evidence; however, in this case I would be surprised if it was anything but exsanguination and vascular shock due to a series of penetrating wounds, made almost certainly by fragments from the device and from the waste bin in which it was hidden entering the body.’

‘Make sure all the fragments go to the CSIs. Sean Burrows might be able to reconstruct the bomb. But that wasn’t why you texted me, was it?’

‘Actually,’ Dr Catherall said, ‘there is something else I wanted to show you. Please – follow me.’

She led Lapslie and Emma out of the post mortem room through a rear door, and along a corridor that he had never been in before. The room at the end was cold enough for Lapslie’s breath to gust in front of his face, and the far wall was occupied by row upon row of metal-fronted drawers about a metre square, their faces battered and scratched through years of use.

‘This is the long-term storage area,’ Jane said. ‘It’s refrigerated to a lower temperature than the transient holding area – about four degrees centigrade. We can keep bodies here for months, if necessary.’ She indicated a drawer on the second level up, at about eye-height. Lapslie’s eye-height. ‘Would you be so kind as to pull that open for me?’ she asked. ‘I am afraid my upper body strength is barely enough to open my front door in the morning.’

Lapslie reached out and took hold of the handle. The metal was cold against his skin. He pulled, and the drawer slid out on metal runners. He had been bracing himself for some kind of squealing or squeaking of metal against metal, provoking who knew what reaction in his taste buds, but the slides had been oiled and were noiseless. As quiet as the grave.

Inside, lying on bare metal, was the body of Catherine Charnaud.

Her skin was mottled with a blue-green discoloration, and her muscles had slackened to the point where her skin looked as if it was gradually sliding off her bones. Lapslie could see the sharp angles and hard curves of her skull beneath her flaccid face.

‘What have you found?’ he asked, trying not to look at the wreck of her forearm in the shadows within the drawer.

‘Look here,’ Jane said, leaning over the body and indicating the right shoulder with a thin, elegant hand. ‘I found it when I was re-examining the body this morning.’

Lapslie followed the line of her finger. There, in the skin of the shoulder, just in the curve of the neck, were two small pinholes.

‘Do you always re-examine your bodies?’ Emma asked, curious.

‘I do. There are certain signs that only appear several days after death, such as deep internal bruises caused shortly before the time of death, and minor marks that need some shrinkage of the skin and some relaxation of the musculature before they become evident.’

‘So what am I looking at here?’ Lapslie inquired. ‘The bite of a midget vampire?’

‘Nothing so abstruse. No, I believe these marks were caused by a stun gun. There are indications of small subcutaneous burns in the area, consistent with an electrical current having been applied.’

‘A stun gun? Like a police taser?’ Emma was frowning. ‘There was no record of her having been subdued by police at any time in her life, let alone recently.’

‘Indeed, but it was not a police taser. As you know, they fire small needles attached to wires. The needles penetrate the skin, through the clothing, and an electrical current flows down them, resulting in a tetanising effect on the victim. Their muscles immediately clench tight and they fall to the ground, paralysed. Judging by the size of the marks here, and the spacing between them, I would estimate that she came in contact with a small, hand-held stun gun. A self-defence weapon. They are
freely available in America, I believe. Apparently you can even buy them in larger supermarkets.’

Lapslie rubbed a hand across his chin. ‘That would explain how she came to be immobilised,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There were no marks of violence on her body, other than the obvious mutilation of the arm. I’d wondered how her assailant managed to subdue her and tie her to the bed.’

‘Does it help find her killer?’ Jane asked.

‘It’s a new lead,’ Lapslie replied. ‘And we’re very short of new leads.’ He glanced at Emma. ‘What do you think?’

‘We were thinking that someone strong and well-built, almost certainly a man, was responsible for her torture and death,’ she replied. ‘The use of a stun gun suggests someone smaller, someone who couldn’t rely on their own muscles to subdue her. On the other hand, if stun guns are that easily available then we might have problems in tracking down an individual sale.’

‘If it helps, I can measure the distance between the barbs. That might help narrow down the make and model that was used.’

‘At this point in the investigation,’ Lapslie said, ‘I’ll take anything I can get. Thanks, Jane.’