Tooth and Claw (21 page)

‘The perpetrator might have eaten her raw, of course,’ Eleanor mused. ‘Like sushi. But why the arm? Cannibals usually start either on the buttocks if the victim is female or, if the victim is male, on the genitalia. There’s a marked sexual element to anthropophagy, and also a kind of trophy-taking. It’s a way of truly possessing your victim, of owning them for ever, in the most personal way possible.’ She frowned. ‘I believe I asked about the weapon that was used.’

‘A knife.’ Lapslie paused, feeling faintly sick. ‘A
kitchen
knife. It was never recovered.’

‘But it came from the kitchen,’ Eleanor said, her tone more one of explanation than question.

‘How did you know?’ Lapslie asked.

‘Because of the builders’ ties,’ Eleanor explained. ‘The perpetrator found everything they needed here, in the house. That strongly implies that the murder was not premeditated, otherwise they would have prepared, brought their tools with them. A favourite knife, perhaps, or some rope that they had already
purchased. With premeditated murders, the preparation is almost as important to the perpetrator as the actual event. They get sexual satisfaction from a ritualistic anticipation of what is to come. With unpremeditated murders the event occurs almost by accident, perhaps as an escalation of an argument, or an experimental sexual session gone wrong. Something unexpected happens and they suddenly find themselves carrying out a murder using whatever comes to hand, almost acting as voyeurs of themselves. They typically say afterwards that they don’t know what made them do it, although looking back at their lives and what they had done in the days and weeks prior to the event it is often possible to discern a pattern, pointing to what is to come; a pattern which they cannot themselves see.’

‘Unpremeditated,’ Emma said. ‘The escalation of an argument or an experimental sexual session gone wrong. Using whatever comes to hand.’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Lapslie said. ‘The boyfriend. He comes home, he’s drunk, they get into a fight, and before he knows it he’s—’ He stopped, suddenly wordless. ‘Torturing her? Stripping the flesh from her arm? I still don’t buy it. Why the flesh? Why the arm?’

‘He’s the only suspect we have,’ Emma pointed out.

‘But that doesn’t mean he’s guilty,’ Lapslie rejoined. He turned to Eleanor. ‘What else can we do to help?’

‘There’s only so much I can do here,’ she said. ‘The next step would be to see the body and the crime scene photographs. Would it be possible to do that now?’

Lapslie looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a press conference on another case in an hour,’ he said. ‘That’s in Chelmsford as well. Did you want to follow me there?’

‘My … driver … is waiting outside in his own car. I wouldn’t
want to hold him up for too long. He needs to get back for … well, for other reasons. Could you give me a lift?’

‘Of course, and then I could get a police driver to drop you off at home afterwards. If that’s okay.’

‘That will be acceptable,’ she said, nodding. ‘I’ll tell him to go.’

Lapslie turned to Emma Bradbury. ‘You take her,’ he said as Eleanor walked over to her car which, Lapslie noticed for the first time, had a driver inside. ‘I want her to know that she works for me, not the other way around.’

On the drive to Chelmsford, Lapslie spent the time mulling over what he knew of the investigation so far, and of what he could say. Neither amounted to much. A man was dead, blown up at long range, and his killer was still at large. Various leads were being pursued. That was about as far as it went. The key, of course, was to sound positive and to try not to give the media anything they could use as the basis for panicky headlines or to lead with on the
Ten O’Clock News
. He’d held press conferences before, of course – it was almost impossible to rise to his rank without having some experience of dealing with the press or TV crews – but he never enjoyed the process the way that some of his contemporaries obviously did. Following a deliberately anodyne statement he always seemed to end up replying to every question with one of three standard phrases: ‘I’m afraid I can’t reveal that at the moment’, ‘We are pursuing all lines of enquiry’, and ‘We urge the public to come forward with any information’.

As he drove past the front of the Chelmsford police station and round to the gated back entrance, Lapslie could see a crowd of journalists milling around the steps. A couple of TV cameras were in evidence: probably local news, although that would change as time went on and the focus of the country turned
on Braintree – assuming he hadn’t caught the bomber by then. When he brought the car to a halt he stepped out, and was immediately accosted by an Asian woman in a nicely cut dark suit. From the corner of his eye he noticed Emma escorting Eleanor Whittley inside the building.

‘DCI Lapslie? I’m Seiju.’ Her voice sent slivers of butterscotch and beetroot sliding down Lapslie’s throat. He could feel his stomach beginning to rebel already. He started walking towards the back entrance to the station. The woman kept pace, step for step. ‘I’m the PR rep for this area.’ She handed him a thin folder. ‘Here’s the statement we’ve come up with for today. Please read through it a few times: it’ll make it sound more natural when you come to read it out. Make sure you make eye contact as much as you can. When you’ve finished reading the statement I’ll ask for questions. We’ve allowed enough time for four or five, then we’ll call a halt and say you have to get back to the investigation.’

‘Which I do,’ he said. No point getting annoyed. This was how policing was done these days, and, who knew, perhaps someone watching might actually come forward with some usable information. Miracles did happen.

Emma came up beside them, having parked her car. ‘I’ve arranged to have an interview room freed up,’ she said, making meaningful eye contact with Lapslie. ‘So you can read the statement in … peace and quiet.’

He nodded at her, not able to bring himself to smile. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

‘Room eight, ground floor.’

‘Do you have another suit?’ Seiju demanded. ‘No. Hmm. With make-up—’

‘No make-up,’ he snapped. ‘I’m a policeman, not a sodding newsreader.’

He flicked through the folder’s contents as he walked through the station to the interview room, shedding Seiju and Emma as he went, trying to move at such a pace that he didn’t have time to register any noises. There was nothing that surprised him in the statement, and nothing that gave anything away. The position of the bomber was the only thing he was trying to keep within the investigation team at the moment, and it wasn’t referred to in the brief.

In the interview room he sat quietly for a moment, door closed, thinking. Thinking about the way his synaesthesia had suddenly become a problem, rather than just an obstacle. And thinking of Sonia.

They had been married for, what, twenty years, and separated now for three. There was still love there, he was sure of that, but they just couldn’t live together. His synaesthesia meant that he needed quiet, especially when he was at home. No radio, no TV, no CDs and no loud noises. The silence had almost driven Sonia to a nervous collapse, but the alternative was that the flood of cross-switched sensory impressions would have driven Lapslie the same way. And the arrival of the kids had just made things worse. Sonia had suggested that he wear earplugs around the house, and that had worked for a while, except that it cut him off from all the normal family activities. If anybody talked to him, he couldn’t hear them to answer, and if he asked anybody a question they told him to keep his voice down. He felt like an observer in his own life.

In the end, the only thing worse than living without his family was living with them.

‘“Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start,”’ he quoted softly to himself. ‘“In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”’

A knock on the door heralded the arrival of Seiju, the PR girl.

‘Time to go,’ she said brightly. ‘Ready?’

‘No,’ he replied quietly. ‘Does it matter?’

He strode out and down the corridor, psyching himself up for the confrontation with the press. On the way through the lobby he could see through the glass of the front doors to where they were silently congregating. They were already jostling for position, growling like a pack of dogs trying to get to a single bowl of food.

He pushed the door open at a fast trot. It was like emerging from the hermetically sealed calm of an airport terminal into a howling gale. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. He felt as if he was choking on a torrent of blood. The coppery warmth filled his mouth, his throat, his sinuses. He wanted to gag, but dared not. Not in front of everyone.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming,’ he said as he moved to the top of the steps. Journalists opened their mouths all around the crowd, ignoring what he said, ready to ask the first question that popped into their heads, but Lapslie pushed on, not giving them time to get anything out, overriding the nausea that wrenched at his stomach. He placed his hands behind his back, holding the statement folder, so that nobody would see the paper shaking. Sweat broke out across his forehead, but he couldn’t wipe it away. That would just draw attention to it. ‘I will read out a short statement, and then there will be time for questions afterwards. Please appreciate that we have an ongoing investigation, and every minute I spend briefing you is a minute I am not spending with my team of officers sifting through the evidence.’

He took a quick breath while he was bringing the folder up and opening it, doubling the cover back so that he could hold it easily in one hand. Seiju had printed the words in a large, clear font so that he could read it without squinting. The words
came automatically, passing straight from his eyes to his mouth without engaging his brain. He tried to make them sound at least partially spontaneous as he spoke.

He paused fractionally after a few sentences, eyes scanning the text, before continuing with the next paragraph. His shirt was sticky against his armpits, and he hoped to God that the sweat stains weren’t blooming through the material of his suit. He swallowed back on the blood that he could taste and yet not feel in his mouth.

As he finished the written statement Lapslie looked around, trying to hold his hands steady. Although most of the journalists present were recording what he said by various means, some of them were still taking written notes.

Seiju stepped forward, ready to act as Master of Ceremonies for the question session, but one of the journalists at the front of the pack got in first, asking a question about suspects.

Lapslie replied with something anodyne and non-committal. He could hear the waver in his voice. Was it obvious? Could anyone else hear it?

Another voice called out from the back asking where the victim died. As if that was important. Lapslie gave a short, factual answer, trying to keep the anger and the pain out of his voice. Jesus, he couldn’t take too much more of this.

A man in the front of the pack asked a semi-intelligent question about threat levels and the public. From his suit, and the way he had managed to maintain his position, Lapslie guessed he was from the BBC. Lapslie told him that the explosion was being treated as an isolated incident, trying to keep to short sentences so that his voice wouldn’t trail off. His stomach kept rebelling against the tight control he was exerting. He desperately wanted a glass of water.

Someone towards the back – possibly the person who had
yelled the question about where the victim had died – called out another question, but Lapslie’s attention was distracted by a sound. It had been going on for some time, just below the level of his conscious attention, but something about it was clamouring for him to notice it; a drumming, like a rapid heartbeat, or someone slapping their hands against the metal of a car roof. There was something primal about it, something that shook Lapslie to his very core. It was so loud that he expected the ground to be shaking. Why wasn’t anyone turning to see where it was coming from? They were asking questions, mouths flapping like fish, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. All he could hear were the drums.

And then he couldn’t even hear the drums, as he mercifully slipped into unconsciousness and crumpled onto the steps of Chelmsford police station.

Carl woke up stifling a scream, the back of his hand pressed against his mouth. Light from the streetlamps outside reflected off pools of rainwater on the pavements and in the gutters, stippling his ceiling with inconstant light.

In the bedroom next door his father snorted, then turned over in bed and started snoring.

He only remembered flashes of the dream. Animals, all dry and dusty, their eye sockets empty black voids, scurrying towards him over the bedspread; pinning his arms and legs, winding wire around them and twisting him into a painful pose, then watching from the edges of the room as he struggled against the wire and the blood trickled from the wounds where its sharp ends cut into his flesh.

Eventually he got up and made himself some breakfast: two slices of toast with a thin scraping of margarine and some peanut butter. It was still early, but he poured out a bowl of cereal for his father and put the kettle on, ready for a cup of tea.

He hadn’t got much of an appetite any more. He ate to keep his strength up, but he didn’t enjoy eating, and he could hardly taste the food. It was fuel, nothing more. He knew why. Back when his mother and father had been together, before the accident, he had sometimes sneaked a look at his mother’s textbooks and the forensic reports she had brought home to read, and the things he had seen there had put him off food for days
at a time. They still made his stomach churn when they unexpectedly surfaced in his mind like a rotten log in a stagnant pond. He still remembered the photographs of a man who had committed suicide by sticking a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. His head looked like it had split open at the top and the sides pushed apart like a smashed melon. His eyes had burst under the pressure of the shot and deflated, leaking fluid onto his cheeks. That image had haunted him through a whole year of school. There had been times at parties, when he was tanked up on alcohol and slow-dancing with a girl, that his mind suddenly flashed to those photographs and he had to run outside and throw up. And there were the photos of various Iraqi suicide bombers. His mother had consulted for the Ministry of Defence on profiling them, and some of the images she had been sent had showed what had happened to them during the explosions. One, he remembered, had been of a man’s head and shoulders, blackened skin split like a jigsaw puzzle to reveal raw red flesh beneath, detached from the rest of his body, one arm hanging loose, the other ripped at the joint. That one had haunted him for months.