Tooth and Claw (31 page)

Wincing, he kept going, scrubbing his hands, his scalp and the soles of his feet. The steam from the shower combined with the lemony odour to form a fragrant cloud that he could feel deep down in his lungs.

He put the lemon back on the soap dish and picked up the soap that sat beside it. Coal Tar soap, coloured a deep waxy yellow, like the skin of the lemon, but smelling of woodsmoke and tar. He quickly rubbed it all over his body, following the path of the lemon. The soap suds combined with the remnants of the lemon juice to form a scummy mess, but he kept going, rubbing it obsessively into his skin until he was covered from head to toe in dirty grey curds. And then he turned the shower
on again, full blast, took the shower head down from its hook and blasted it across his body again, washing everything off with scalding water. Finally, taking a deep breath, he directed the shower head between his legs, gasping at the pain but keeping the jet of water pointed straight up, then prised the cheeks of his buttocks apart with his thumb and forefinger and sluiced himself out. This time he nearly screamed at the pain.

To finish he put the shower back onto its hook and turned it onto its coldest setting. The water went from boiling to frozen within a few seconds. Carl gasped again as his skin seemed to flinch all over, forming goose-pimples from the top of his head down to his toes. The shock of the cold made him feel as if he had lost two inches off his waist and his height in as many seconds. He felt his scrotum shrivel and his testicles retreat back into the warmth of his body. He hung his head, letting the water course down over him, sheathing his body, closing the pores and washing the last remnants of the lemon juice and the soap suds away.

Carl turned the water off and stood there for a few minutes, feeling it all trickling away, letting his muscles relax. He sniffed cautiously, but he didn’t smell any different from the way he did after any shower or any bath, apart from the lingering scent of lemon. He didn’t know whether it had worked or not. He could only hope.

Stepping from the shower and towelling himself dry, Carl took a container of his father’s chlorhexidine antiseptic talc from the bathroom cabinet and shook it all over his body. He kept shaking until his body was white, like an alabaster statue, and surrounded by a cloud of floating dust. The sharp, medicinal smell got up his nostrils and he coughed, convulsively, but he couldn’t stop.

He saw a can of antiperspirant/deodorant on top of the cabinet, and reached for it, then pulled back. This was stupid. Where would it stop? Where would it all stop?

The drive to the farmhouse had taken Lapslie, Emma and Eleanor Whittley down a winding dirt track which seemed to peter out and restart several times and eventually ended in a patch of churned-up ground where they left their cars. They pushed through a gap in a hedge that looked natural rather than forced and across a bare patch of waterlogged ground. The forensic clinical psychologist hadn’t been too happy at the walk: she hadn’t said anything but she had a downward twist to her lips and she kept casting dark side-glances at Lapslie. Her high heels were unsuitable to the terrain. Lapslie’s leather shoes were hardly any better, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that.

Now the three of them stood in the shelter of a half-demolished barn, gazing at the farmhouse. The rain soaked into Lapslie’s hair and trickled down his cheeks, but he didn’t react to it. He had endured worse, in his time. Inside his waterproof jacket he was uncomfortably warm, sweat prickling his skin despite the coldness outside, but again he hardly even noticed.

The farmhouse was a ramshackle affair of mismatched bricks and old wood, apparently built in fits and starts over several generations. There was nothing about it that stood out against the marshy ground and the trees surrounding it. It was almost organic in its decrepitude: like some monstrous fungus that had grown gradually, incrementally, over time. Another few years and Lapslie felt that it might just fade away, still part of
the local topography but somehow separate from it, removed, abstracted.

‘Do we know who owns this place now?’ he asked Emma.

‘Apparently it’s in something of a legal limbo,’ she replied. ‘The only person with a claim to it is the old man lying dead in Dr Catherall’s mortuary – one Jeffrey Hawkins – but he’s in no position to do anything about it. He’s a widower with one daughter, apparently, but nobody could locate her during the investigation of the father’s death. The police wanted to track her down, partly to actually tell her that her father had been strangled and partly in case she was responsible, but she fell off the radar ten years ago and hasn’t been seen since. Drug problems, apparently, and a diagnosed schizophrenic. Her father always told the neighbours that he thought she was living rough in London.’

Lapslie looked at the desolation around the farmhouse. ‘Neighbours?’

‘About a mile down the track,’ Emma confirmed. ‘It was them who found the body. They used to check on him every few days; when he didn’t open the door they went in. He was in the front room, dead. The council will repossess it at some stage and then auction it, but for the moment we still have the key.’

Eleanor Whittley snorted. ‘Really, I don’t know why I am here. The two crimes are patently completely divergent. The Catherine Charnaud case is clearly the work of a sexual sadist with a deep-seated hatred of women, whereas this may well not be a murder at all but simple suicide. There’s no sexual element here, no torture, nothing that relates to the Charnaud case.’

‘Trust me,’ Lapslie ground out, ‘it’s the same killer.’

She shook her head. ‘Why consult me if you’re not going to accept what I say?’

‘Consultancy is like a birthday present,’ Lapslie replied. ‘It should be accepted with good grace, but you’re not obliged to actually make use of it.’ He nodded towards Emma. ‘Come on; let’s go in.’

Emma slid the key into the lock. The key
snick
ed into the mechanism and she pushed the door open.

Lapslie waited in the doorway for a moment, sniffing in the stale air of the house. Nothing … nothing … and there it was, faintly, as if someone were playing bongos in the far distance. The murderer had been there.

‘Spread out,’ he instructed. ‘Emma, take upstairs. I’ll take downstairs. Mrs Whittley – stay in the front room. You’ve got a copy of the case file. See if you can pick anything up that we miss.’

‘Yeah, on that subject, boss – what is it that we’re actually looking for? This place was searched when the body was discovered. There was nothing.’

‘At the time they didn’t know this was part of a series of deaths. Sean Burrows has confirmed that the same long-chain molecule was found on the body, but he’s not got enough of a sample to do a chemical analysis. We need more.’ He met her sceptical glance. ‘Look, if I knew where to find it, I’d tell you.’

They went off in different directions. Lapslie’s search of the upper floor only took ten minutes or so, and was underpinned all the time with drumming, like a rapid fluttering pulse. The place was cluttered with clothes and cardboard boxes, but there wasn’t any evidence of a murder, let alone a murderer. He’d reserved his best hopes for the bathroom, but when he saw the state of it – the mould in the corners, the stained tub, the toilet bowl so encrusted with limescale and dried clumps of stuff he didn’t even want to think about that it was probably near-asdammit blocked – he gave up. This was a stupid idea to begin
with. He wasn’t even on the case, and he was grasping at straws so thin they were just fading away in his hand.

He walked heavily down the creaking wooden stairs. Eleanor Whittley was standing in the centre of the living room – more clutter, along with a sofa whose stuffing was emerging from several holes and a TV so old that it had a tuning dial rather than a remote – looking completely lost. She glanced at him darkly. ‘You realise I charge by the hour,’ she snapped. ‘I’m costing you money just standing here doing nothing.’

‘Not my money,’ he murmured.

Emma came into the living room. She had an odd expression on her face.

‘Got something?’ Lapslie asked, momentarily excited. ‘The kitchen?’

‘No – the chemical toilet.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a chemical toilet in what was probably a pantry. It looks in pretty good nick.’

Lapslie followed her out while she was still talking. ‘The toilet upstairs is nearly unusable,’ he said. ‘He probably bought a chemical toilet in order to—’

‘Yea, I get the picture.’

‘Or someone bought it for him. A neighbour, perhaps.’

‘If you haven’t found anything upstairs …?’

‘Which I haven’t.’

‘And if we still think that the murderer has some kind of bladder problem …?’

‘Which we do.’

‘Then there’s a chance that they took a slash in the chemical toilet before they left.’ She led him through the kitchen – piled with unwashed pans and plates – to a side door. In the small room beyond there was a plastic pedestal toilet with a
large base standing isolated in the centre. It looked absurdly modern in the clutter and mess of the rest of the house.

‘And there’s a chance that there might still be traces of the sample we need still inside. Good work.’

She nodded. ‘You want me to get Sean Burrows out to take samples?’

‘No, I want you to dismantle this toilet and take the reservoir directly to Burrows.’

‘But—’

‘No arguments. We’re up against a time constraint here.’

‘What time constraint?’

He gazed levelly at her. ‘We’ve got until Rouse finds out I’m still working the case, and then everything stops. Do you think Dain Morritt will have any time at all for this theory?’

Emma gazed at the chemical toilet. ‘I’ll need a screwdriver and a pair of gloves,’ she muttered. ‘What about you? Where are you going?’

‘Hospital,’ he snapped. ‘Get a squad car out here to drive Mrs Whittley home.’

The journey to Chelmsford Hospital took forty-five minutes. He turned his phone back on and as every minute went past he expected it to ring, with Chief Superintendent Rouse on the other end, but it stayed resolutely silent.

He strode into the hospital and through the corridors and wards, looking for the doctor that he’d seen before. If she was off duty then he was out of luck, but he found her eventually talking to a nurse in a rest area.

‘I need to ask you a question about that woman,’ he snapped.

‘What woman?’ Her voice was still menthol, but sweeter than he remembered. More like toothpaste. She stared at his face. ‘You were in the lift. You’re a policeman.’

‘That’s right. It’s very important that I know what was wrong
with the woman in the bed, the one you were moving. You said she was ill. I need to know what that illness was. If necessary, I can get a warrant, but I’m appealing to you as someone who can stop a murderer from committing any more crimes.’

‘I’ll tell you.’

Lapslie was taken aback. ‘What?’

‘She died. Heart attack – not directly caused by the illness, but linked to it. Whatever human rights she had have been revoked now.’

He breathed out, trying to calm his racing heart. ‘I’m genuinely sorry to hear that, but I’d be grateful if you can explain what was wrong with her in the first place.’

The doctor thawed slightly. ‘The patient wasn’t suffering from a disease caused by bacteria or viruses; she had a hereditary malfunction in the way her body actually worked. Erythropoietic protoporphyria it’s called – or just porphyria.’

‘What are the symptoms?’

‘Take your pick. Hallucinations, depression, anxiety and paranoia. Cardiac arrhythmias and tachycardia. Severe acute and chronic pain. Constipation is frequently present.’ She closed her eyes, as if recalling notes memorised some time ago. ‘Excessive urination, sometimes of a dark colour due to the chemicals being excreted. Photodermatitis, blisters, necrosis of the skin and gums, itching, and swelling, and increased hair growth. Basically, anywhere that has nerves can see an effect.’

‘What’s the treatment?’

‘Haem or haematin, taken intravenously or in tablet form, can both reduce the symptoms. If that doesn’t work then direct blood transfusions can help. Painkillers, antidepressants – basically, we treat the symptoms while we replace the material that the body can’t make properly.’

‘And is it … always fatal?’

The doctor glanced down at the floor. ‘Not directly,’ she said, voice quieter, ‘but if left untreated, it can lead to other conditions such as liver failure or hepatocellular carcinomas. But the extreme pain and the mental confusion can also lead to suicidal behaviour.’ She smiled. ‘I should charge a tutoring fee. Have I helped?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘More than you know. What can I do to thank you?’

She glanced up into his face quizzically. ‘Buy me dinner, if you can find a time when your schedule and mine coincide. I’m intrigued to know what porphyria has to do with murder, but you look like a man in a hurry.’

‘Matching schedules might be easier in my case than you might expect. Thank you.’ She moved away, smiling, but he reached out to hold the doctor back. ‘Two more questions, if I may.’

The doctor glanced up at him. ‘Be quick.’

‘Could the chemicals building up in the body be released in sweat as well as urine?’

‘Easily. Perspiration, like urination, is one of the mechanisms by which the body rids itself of toxins.’

‘And how do I get out of this place again?’

‘I can’t help you there,’ she said as she turned away. ‘I already feel like I spend my entire life in here.’

Lapslie returned to the ground floor, thinking furiously. Porphyria. He’d heard of it before. ‘The vampire disease’, they called it, due to the way it sometimes coloured the eyes and the fingernails red. George III was supposed to have suffered from it. Was it possible that the murderer of Catherine Charnaud and Alec Wildish suffered from porphyria? Was
that
why Lapslie could smell them?

He drove furiously back to Sean Burrows’s laboratory, on the
assumption that at least some of the answers could be found there. In fact, Emma Bradbury and Jane Catherall were already waiting in Burrows’s lab. Burrows himself entered just after Lapslie, holding a transparent plastic bag with what looked like Emma’s handbag inside. It was dusty with fingerprint powder.