Tooth and Claw (20 page)

‘If you’re ever on
Mastermind
,’ Emma said, ‘make sure you choose “Explosives” as your specialist subject.’

‘Funny you should mention that,’ Burrows continued, unfazed. ‘I do know quite a lot about Semtex. The stuff manufactured since 2002 has been deliberately adulterated with ethylene glycol dinitrate, making it easier to detect by security agencies. It’s also been coloured with a reddish-orange food dye named Sudan 1 to make it easier to spot. Chemical analysis confirms that the explosive used at Braintree is the original stuff, not the new adulterated version.’

‘No point checking manufacturers or suppliers, then,’ Lapslie said. ‘What about the potential triggering point up on the roof of the retail centre? Anything there?’

‘Nothing useful,’ Burrows said sorrowfully. ‘There was evidence of someone having been there. We discovered a small pool of urine a little way away: looks like whoever it was got caught short and had to take a piss. I’m assuming it wasn’t a dog; not up on the roof. Probably did it into an empty bottle – it’s the kind of thing these survivalist types love doing – but a little spilled.’

‘Survivalist types?’ Emma questioned.

‘It’s a particular mindset,’ Burrows said. ‘I’ve been reading up on it. Military wannabes, ex-army blowhards. All wanting to prove themselves. That’s the appeal of a bomb: they can convince themselves that they’re hunters tracking their prey, not just common or garden murderers.’

‘Duly noted,’ Lapslie said. ‘Can you get anything from the urine?’

‘There’s little or no DNA in urine,’ Burrows answered, ‘and even if we isolated some it wouldn’t be much use unless you had something to compare it with. We’re running a check of the hormone levels now: should be able to tell you whether it was a man or a woman, at least, but chances are it’s a man. Most bombers are.’

‘That’s the mindset thing again, isn’t it?’

‘I’m just a frustrated profiler,’ Burrows admitted. ‘You get that way, poring over samples of hair and semen every day. You wonder: whose hair is this? Why did they dye it blond and then red a few days later? Are they unhappy with the way they look, or are they disguising themselves? And this semen: does the donor know he’s deficient in the sperm department? Is that why he raped so many women so brutally – just a repressed inferiority complex?’ He shook himself. ‘Evidence without context is just data; that’s what I say.’

‘Okay,’ Lapslie said, taken aback by Burrows’s sudden flash of … of what? Was it a deep-seated dissatisfaction with his job? Or was it just his underlying humanity shining through the scientific veneer? ‘Thanks. Let me know if anything else turns up.’

Burrows paused thoughtfully. ‘There is something unusual about the urine, though, and that’s why I thought you ought to come over. It had a marked purple colour. Might be a result of something the bomber ate or drank, but it might also indicate some kind of metabolic problem. I’m doing some background research on that.’

‘Okay – let me know what you find.’

Leaving the forensics laboratory, Lapslie said to Emma, ‘Did you manage to get me out of that press conference?’

She shook her head. ‘No joy, boss. Rouse’s office were insistent
It goes ahead, and you do it. We’ve got two hours to get back and prepare.’

‘Fuck,’ he said bleakly. There was no way out.

‘On the bright side, I arranged to see the profiler this afternoon at Catherine Charnaud’s house. There’s just enough time to fit it in before the press conference. I assume you want to come along?’

‘You assume right,’ he growled.

The drive back to Catherine Charnaud’s place in Chigwell was familiar now, and Lapslie found his mind wandering while he drove, wondering about the drumming sound that he kept on hearing, and whether Jane Catherall was right about it signifying a connection to the murderer. And if so, was it something that only he could smell, or was there some distinct odour that the killer was giving off that anyone could detect, if they got close enough?

The profiler wasn’t there when they arrived, so Lapslie and Emma went straight into the house.

‘I take it the boyfriend’s not living here?’ Lapslie asked.

Emma shook her head. ‘It’s apparently in her name, and we’re still processing the crime scene. He’s living with a friend at the moment.’

Lapslie grimaced. ‘I still reckon him for this. If your profiler tells us that the killer is likely to be a young, muscular sportsman of low intelligence then I reckon we’ve wasted our money.’

‘You can find out for yourself,’ Emma rejoined, looking out of the door. ‘I think she’s arrived. I’ll go and make sure the room is clear.’

Lapslie exited the house just as Eleanor Whittley was walking up to the porch. She was tall and elegant, in her mid-fifties, he estimated. Her grey hair was worn long, and her eyes were bright and clear.

‘I am Eleanor Whittley,’ she said before he could say anything. He tasted celery and pepper in her voice, and a tinge of juniper berries.

‘Pleased to meet you.’ Lapslie extended his hand. ‘I’m DCI Lapslie.’

Eleanor Whittley looked at Lapslie’s hand as if it was a previously unknown species of fish. ‘I never shake hands,’ she said. ‘I’m not being rude, just practical. It’s a fetishised custom dating back to the days when warriors extended their right hands to prove they were not holding weapons. It has no meaning these days.’ She frowned, as if remembering something. ‘You were responsible for the Madeline Poel case, weren’t you?’

The name caught Lapslie by surprise. He’d not thought about Madeline Poel for a while. ‘Insofar as we didn’t know we had a case for some time, yes, I was.’

‘An interesting character, as far as I can tell from the reports I have read. A shame you let her die. I would have enjoyed finding out more about her and what caused the aberrant personality that you and others observed.’

A spike of anger flashed across his mind. ‘I didn’t “let” her die.’

‘You failed to stop her, despite the fact that you knew she had a preparation of cyanide nearby.’ Eleanor gazed up at him with the kind of expression Lapslie had seen Jane Catherall use when looking at a particularly problematic corpse. ‘Did you
want
her to die? She had, after all, attempted to poison you, and had been responsible for at least eight deaths beforehand and probably more.’

The flash of anger threatened to explode into a full-scale thunderstorm. ‘Nevertheless, it was my responsibility to arrest her, not kill her.’

‘The psychologist whose report was attached to the file wrote
that she was a classic example of someone suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, but I disagree.’ Eleanor looked away, back towards her car. ‘It seems to me that the various personalities she exhibited were not alternative to one another, but sequential. She was not switching from identity to identity, but moving from one to the next, as if she was mentally fleeing from some traumatic event buried far in her past.’

‘I tend to agree,’ Lapslie said. He was beginning to feel some respect for Eleanor. She seemed to have nailed Madeline Poel’s complex psychology in a way that the police psychologists had failed to do. ‘From what little I could tell when I talked to her, and what evidence of her past activities I could dig up, she could still access memories from her previous identities. She not only knew who she was, but who she had been.’

‘Instructive. We will talk further about that.’ It was less of a request and more of an instruction. ‘Now I will need to start at the scene of the crime.’

‘What exactly are you looking
for
?’ Lapslie asked, trying to regain at least some control over the conversation.

‘My field of expertise is personality disorders.’ At Lapslie’s raised eyebrow she explained: ‘The phrase “personality disorders” is generally taken to mean psychological problems arising from personal dispositions, rather than a breakdown or discontinuity in psychological functioning.’

Lapslie knew what she meant, but decided to push her a bit. ‘Can you develop that for me?’ he asked, using a phrase that a particular chief constable, now retired, had been well known for using when he wanted something explained.

‘I mean an underlying problem that has been present for some time, rather than a problem that has suddenly occurred.’

‘What kind of problems? Can you give me some examples that I might recognise?’

‘The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
entry on personality disorders – which I helped draft for the American Psychiatric Association, lists a number of different categories such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive, passive-aggressive, sadistic and self-defeating. These are all enduring patterns of perceiving, and relating to, the environment. Criminals falling into one of these categories will commit crimes with distinct “signatures”, and it is my job to recognise these signatures and tell you what kind of criminal you are looking for.’

Eleanor seemed weighed down with the theory and rather light on putting it into practice. ‘Not sure how this is going to help,’ Lapslie murmured.

‘Let me try and make it more clear. The process of “profiling” draws on both physical and non-physical information. This includes the layout of the crime scene, the disposition of the victim, the presence or absence of significant items and evidence not just of what was done to the victim but also what the perpetrator did before and after the crime. The goal is for me to narrow your field of investigation down, the basic assumption being that the perpetrator’s behaviour at the crime scene reflects a consistency of personality which might enable them to be identified.’

‘Okay,’ Lapslie said. He’d tweaked her enough. ‘Let’s get up there and see what we can see.’

Emma Bradbury was just emerging from the kitchen when Lapslie led Eleanor into the house. He introduced them. Emma, picking up perhaps on some subtle signal, didn’t try to shake hands.

The bedroom was more or less the way Lapslie remembered it, minus Catherine Charnaud’s corpse, of course, which was
still in storage at the mortuary and would remain so until the case was either complete or closed. Her blood had dried to a dark maroon colour, with a void of unstained material on the blue bedspread the exact width of her body. It looked to Lapslie strangely like an ancient map, with two continents bisected by an ocean. The smell in the room was mustier now than it had been, less metallic and more unpleasant, but the wall-wide window and the pillows and even the trainers under the chair were exactly the same.

They all stood just inside the doorway; stationary and expectant, attention focused on the bed as though they were all waiting for a show to begin. Eleanor leaned forward slightly, head cocked to one side.

‘This is—’ Emma began.

‘Please!’ Eleanor held up a hand. ‘I prefer to start with no preconceptions.’ Closer to her now, Lapslie thought for a moment that her voice was tasting more and more of juniper berries, but he suddenly realised that she actually did smell of gin. She’d been drinking.

She moved forward slowly, sweeping her head from side to side, taking in everything in the room.

As she worked, Lapslie closed his eyes and listened. He could hear the rustling of Emma’s clothes as she moved. He could hear the distant snarl of traffic on the main road. He could hear birds chirping and singing to one another.

And he could hear drums, very faintly, almost as if he was several miles away from a rock concert – the same drums he’d heard the last time he was there, when Catherine Charnaud’s body had been splayed across the bed. The kind of rock concert that Emma apparently went to, he thought, smiling.

‘You have comprehensive photographs of the scene as you found it?’ Eleanor asked, interrupting.

‘Of course,’ Lapslie replied, opening his eyes. ‘They’re all back at the incident room in Chelmsford.’

‘Why Chelmsford? Surely the investigation should have been run from Chigwell?’

Lapslie shrugged. ‘Our Chief Superintendent wanted direct control over the case, given the high profile of the victim. And I think he also wanted to send a message to the media that he was taking this seriously, not just letting the local coppers run with it.’

‘I’ll need to see the photographs. And the body, of course.’

‘I’ll arrange all that. Does anything strike you immediately?’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘It’s too early to make a snap judgement. I take it the girl was restrained in some way?’

‘Plastic builders’ ties.’

‘And did the perpetrator bring these ties with them, or find them here?’

‘Here. They were in a kitchen drawer.’

‘And the weapon that was used to torture and kill her?’

Emma frowned. ‘Torture? You’re sure it was torture? Isn’t that a … preconception?’

Eleanor glanced at her superciliously. ‘It doesn’t take a forensic clinical psychologist to know that slicing a victim’s flesh off while they are still alive takes a lot more effort then when they are dead. There has to be a balancing gain to set against the loss of time and energy; the perpetrator has to be getting something from it, something psychological. This implies that they are enjoying themselves; gaining pleasure from the suffering they are inflicting. Torture, in short.’ She glanced back at the bed. ‘And the flesh from the arm – did you ever find it?’

Lapslie shook his head. ‘No. The murderer … the
perpetrator
… must have taken it with them and either disposed of it or kept it as some kind of grisly trophy.’

‘Or eaten it,’ Eleanor murmured.

‘
Eaten
it?’

‘Anthropophagy is a reasonably common obsession with serial killers. In Kazakhstan they had Nikolai Dzhumagaliev; in America Jeffrey Dahmer; in France Issei Sagawa; in Germany Karl Denke … The list goes on.’

‘And Dennis Nilsen here in the UK,’ Emma murmured.

‘Not so,’ Eleanor disagreed. ‘Although Dennis Nilsen cut up and boiled his victims, he was doing so to dispose of the remains, not to eat. You see the difference? By the way, I presume your forensics experts checked the kitchen for signs of activity?’

Lapslie looked questioningly at Emma. She nodded. ‘No dirty plates or cooking utensils, and no signs that anything had been washed up that night.’