Tooth and Claw (3 page)

Two uniformed coppers patrolled the grounds, looking for intruders rather than evidence. Given the celebrity status of the victim, those ash trees would be populated more by photographers than by birds unless the police were careful.

Bringing his attention reluctantly back inside the bedroom, the next thing he saw was a pile of clothes thrown onto a chair: jeans, a hooded blue tracksuit top, woollen socks, and a black bra and pants set on top. A pair of trainers sat beneath the chair. Unlike the clothes, which looked as though they had been abandoned in haste, the trainers were set neatly together, heels and toes, with the laces pushed inside. They were silver, with pink stripes. Nike. Small. There was something about them that struck a chord in Lapslie’s mind; they were almost unknowingly erotic in their innocence, their abandonment, their careless statement about the youth and the nakedness of their owner.

His attention was drawn to the group of people clustered around the body, standing on rubber pads that had been scattered around the floor so that traces of evidence were not trampled underfoot. Usually, in cases where someone was found dead, either by natural causes or otherwise, the body quickly became part of the background: a piece of evidence, like a discarded cigarette filter or a used tissue; something to be examined and exploited rather than agonised over. The usual mixed group of police, forensic investigators and photographers went about their normal business without even acknowledging that
the victim was once a person like them. Jokes were made, conversations occurred about what they’d done the night before or intended to do over the weekend, and life went on as normal.

Here, however, it was different. Hushed by the silence of the headphones, the attending personnel were moving slowly and deliberately, as though they were in church or under water. Lapslie had never attended a scene quite like it. Standing in the doorway, he was put in mind of a Renaissance painting of relatives and servants gathered around the body of a consumptive patriarch, illuminated by a hundred flickering candles. Here the servants were the uniformed police, standing with their backs against the walls, faces in shadow, while the relatives, closer in, on their knees around the bed and with their heads bent as if in prayer, were the Crime Scene Investigators, each dressed in a papery white coverall. And standing off to one side, offering benison with her camera hanging around her neck was the photographer. She, like a priest, had the look of someone who had seen too much, and could forgive but not forget.

Sean Burrows was leading the CSIs. Lapslie recognised his small frame, almost dwarfed in the folds of his coverall, and the quiff of white hair that stuck up from his forehead.

Next, it was the bed that Lapslie noticed. Huge – king size at least, and probably larger – covered with a duvet whose cover had probably once been blue but now glistened a rusty red. Tassels hung off it all around. Thin threads of congealing liquid linked some of the tassels to the carpet, like glutinous spiders’ webs.

Lapslie was perversely grateful for the absence of cuddly toys. In his experience, young women tended to keep reminders of their girlish past around as they grew into adulthood, and some of the memories of previous cases that kept him awake at night
were of teddy bears and velvety lions whose plush fur was matted with sticky red blood, whose eyes hung by threads and whose smiling faces were disfigured with slashes and gouges where white stuffing bulged through. But not here. The only things on the bed apart from the body of Catherine Charnaud were a circular pillow and a hardback book, cast cover upwards to one side up by the headboard. It had fallen open, or been placed that way to keep a particular page. Whatever the book was, wherever Catherine Charnaud had paused, it would never be completed. The story had ended too soon.

And then there was the body, posed in the centre of the bed like someone posing for a painting.

Catherine Charnaud had been beautiful, once upon a time. Looking at her now, her eyes wide in terror and pain and dulled by death, her mouth unnaturally wide, Lapslie remembered the times he had seen her on TV and in the gossip pages of newspapers and magazines. She had been one of those minor celebrities more famous for what she did in her private life than on screen. He had a vague memory that she had started out in children’s TV programmes before moving onto fronting news updates; one of those incessantly bright and bouncy blondes who tried to show that they were ‘down’ with the kids even as they went out and got wasted every night. ‘Ladettes’ – wasn’t that how they were referred to? She was thin – perhaps anexorically so, judging by the way her stomach fell away from the sharp edge of her ribcage and the corners of her hips stuck up like mountains rising from the plains of her groin. Her breasts were small, the nipples dark and raised now into tiny berries by rigor mortis; the tissue of the breasts themselves pulled downwards and sideways against her ribs by gravity. Her skin was porcelain-white on top, but what little blood remained in her body had pooled where her skin touched the duvet,
looking like a bizarre tidemark all the way up her legs and body. Her arms were outstretched in a parody of crucifixion. They were tied to the bedhead by bands of some kind, like the plastic ties that builders and gardeners used sometimes, where a corrugated plastic tongue loops back through a slit in the top of the tie and is pulled tight, the zigzag corrugations engaging with the sides of the slit to hold the whole thing tight.

And that led his gaze to where it had always been heading, even while he had tried to distract it by looking at the garden, the room, the clothes, the people, the bed and the body. Her arm. The terrible, impossible ruin that was her left arm.

The flesh had been stripped from the radius and ulna from bicep down to wrist. The bones themselves were yellow and waxy; not the matt ivory of skeletons in museums. Pockets of gristle and bubbly fat surrounded the complexity of the elbow joint and the numerous small bones of the wrist where the killer’s tools, whatever they were, hadn’t been able to gouge all of the surrounding flesh away. It was clear that they had gone to some trouble to remove as much flesh as possible, and clean the bone back to its natural state – if the word ‘natural’ could be applied to what had been done here. Artfully distressed, rather than disintegrating due to nature.

Looking closer, Lapslie could see that the skin above Catherine’s bicep and below her wrist was compressed by plastic ties, similar to those that were securing her limbs. The aim had obviously been to stop blood pumping from the exposed flesh as the murderer worked, but that hadn’t stopped blood from the arm itself splashing across the duvet, the headboard and the pillow. And judging by the way the blood was smeared, Catherine Charnaud had been alive when the painstaking work of stripping tissue from underlying bone was started, although only time would tell whether she had been alive when it was finished.

It occurred to Lapslie that there was no sign of the flesh that had been removed from the arm anywhere in the bedroom. Catherine Charnaud was a small girl, but even so there was enough meat on her right arm to fill a decent-sized dinner plate. The murderer had taken the stripped flesh with them, or disposed of it somewhere else in the house.

There was something about the way that Catherine’s hand lay, palm upwards, thin fingers curled inwards like the legs of a dead and desiccated spider, that dragged Lapslie’s attention away from thoughts of evidence, motive and personality profile and kept it pinned. Terrible in the silence, the hand lay at the gravitational centre of the room, pulling everything towards it. Somehow the hand had avoided any splashes of blood. Perhaps the killer had accidentally shielded it with their own body as they flayed Catherine’s flesh away from her bone like a butcher preparing a joint of lamb for a casserole. Perhaps they had deliberately covered it for reasons that made sense only to them. Whatever the reason, it rested like a surreal joke; a perfect and untainted hand, fingernails painted pink, at the end of two lengths of yellow bone. And on the third finger of the hand, the golden band of an engagement ring glittered in the light of the dawn.

Somewhere off in the distance, Lapslie thought he heard something: a pulse, a rhythm, a pounding of drums. For a moment he thought that he was hearing the sound of his own blood, thudding in his ears, but the rhythm was too complicated for that. He pulled the headphones off, thinking for a moment that they were somehow bizarrely picking up a radio station, despite the absence of any electronics inside. The sudden drone of conversation and the whisper of the papery coveralls flooded his mouth with salt and metal, but the drumming noise became neither quieter nor louder. His brain began to split it up, classify it into its constituent parts: four sets of four
beats, the accent on the first beat of each quartet for the first three quartets, then the emphasis on the second, third and fourth beats for the last quartet. It was precise, organised, almost primal: like African tribal drumming. He’d heard something like it before: on the radio perhaps. He didn’t have any CDs – the music caused too many unplanned sensations – and he didn’t watch television for the same reason, but sometimes radios were hard to avoid.

‘Has someone got a radio on?’ he snapped, breaking the macabre silence.

Faces turned towards him. Emma Bradbury frowned.

‘I asked if anyone’s got a radio on.’

Several CSIs shook their heads.

‘I can’t hear anything, boss,’ Emma said, detouring around the bed and towards him.

‘I can hear music,’ he said. ‘Like drums. Can’t you hear it?’

She tilted her head slightly, listening. ‘Nothing.’

‘Check downstairs. And see if anyone else can hear it. Might be neighbours.’

‘Unlikely,’ Emma said. ‘It’s a detached house, and the nearest neighbour is quite a way away. But I’ll check.’ She left the room, looking dubious. Everyone else returned to whatever they had been doing before he arrived.

Lapslie found his gaze drawn again to the body on the bed. The flensed arm. The hand.

‘“Cover her face,”’ he quoted softly; ‘“mine eyes dazzle; she died young”.’

‘What was that?’ Sean Burrows said from his position bending over the body. His voice still had the blackberry wine taste that Lapslie remembered of old.

‘It’s a tragedy,’ Lapslie replied, but he wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the quotation or the scene in front of him.

There was a fine suspension of rain in the air. It coated every surface that it touched, leaving a slick and slightly oily residue on leaves, grass, tree trunks and the brickwork of Carl Whittley’s house.

He stood in the shelter of the bus stop across the road, gazing over at the house. The rain soaked into his hair and trickled down his cheeks but he didn’t react to it. Inside his waterproofs he was uncomfortably warm, sweat prickling his skin despite the coldness outside, but again he hardly even noticed.

He held a package, wrapped in plastic, in his hand. It was the size of two hardback books, and the plastic around it was secured with thick rubber bands. Mud smeared its surface, a remnant of the hole in the ground where he had buried it, months ago. It had lain, undisturbed, from then until he had dug it up, just an hour ago.

His waterproofs were a muddy khaki colour, and years of use had left them faded and blotchy. He had deliberately removed the metal tips that terminated the tie-cords around the waist and neck. Those tips could brush against material, or brick, and the sound, slight though it might have been, could warn birds and animals of his presence and frighten them away when he was trying to catalogue them. The frayed ends of the tie-cords would not give him away.

The sky was a uniform nothingness, a neutral tone that had no depth to it. Somewhere behind the clouds that blanketed
everything was a dim, hot sun, but it was impossible to tell where it was located. Its rays refracted through the cloud, making them glow with a sickly, pearlescent light that cast no shadows and made everything appear dimensionless, timeless.

He had been watching the house for nearly fifteen minutes, the package held unfeelingly in his gloved hands, ever since returning from his walk across the Essex salt marshes to the place where he had buried it.

The house was semi-detached; separated from the neighbours on one side but connected on the other, like one larger house split into two. The neighbours on the side that was separated from his home by a narrow alley both worked in financial services in Chelmsford; they were out most of the time, and he hardly ever heard them when they were in. Sometimes, in the summer, they left their windows open while they were in the garden, blasting the noise of their stereo everywhere while they sunbathed, and he had to walk around and ask them to turn it down, but most of the time they were okay.

The ones in the connecting house, however …

Kev Dabinett was out of work, his wife Donna was a slut and the kids ran round the estate uncontrolled. The garden had three different cars in it, and Carl had noticed that the makes and models changed every few weeks. He was keeping a list, so that he could inform the council when he was absolutely sure that the husband was illegally running a second-hand car business from what was a residential property. The garden was a mess of churned-up grass and cracked paving slabs, with bits of engines and two car doors scattered along the edges. It was a disgrace, and every time he looked at it Carl could feel his blood boiling. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to live in houses; they should be restricted to blocks of flats with others
of their kind. With the evidence he was collecting, he could get them evicted. He was sure of it.

He had planted
leylandii
hedges along the perimeter of the garden, just so he didn’t have to see the cars and the mess every time he left the house, but he still knew. It still burned at his heart, day after day.

Carl walked every morning and every afternoon, although he chose a different route every time. As well as providing him with the opportunity to catalogue the birds and animals of the salt marshes, it also gave him time to think. Time, but not necessarily the impetus, and he often found his mind blank for the entire walk, fixated entirely on the moment and ignorant of both the memories of the past and the predictions of the future that constituted a stream of consciousness. There were occasions, while he was out, when he imagined walking up next door’s path, knocking on the front door and, when it opened, smashing in the face of whoever opened the door with a tyre lever. Sometimes, in his imagination, it was Kev, sometimes it was Donna. Sometimes it was one of the kids, but it didn’t matter. Removing them from his nicely ordered life was the only thing that mattered.