Tooth and Claw (33 page)

His thoughts were spinning in circles. He felt a tightness across his chest. Despite the haematin tablets he was taking, which had cleared up the skin rash, he was feeling more panicky than he ever had before. Was this the porphyria making him paranoid, or was he just losing it? Going to pieces?

He started the car, and the ventilation system blew hot air
into his face. He passed a hand across his forehead. What was he going to do? What
was
he going to do?

He’d have to change his diet as well. The sudden thought made him flinch, as if a bucket of water had been thrown at his chest. Perhaps something in his diet was leaking through into his perspiration, like garlic was supposed to do. He should start eating bland food, like cauliflower and rice. Nothing with any taste, just in case.

No, get a grip, he thought. It’s just one man; some kind of freak. Take him out, erase him, and you’ll be safe.

But killing the policeman, Lapslie, only made sense if Lapslie could somehow track Carl. If the story about the man being able to sniff him out was true then he was the weak link; the wild card that the enemy had on their side. It was a risk – by killing him unplanned, by improvising in order to get him out of the way, he would be exposing himself – but it would be worth it if he could walk away from it with the certainty that he was back in control again. That they had no handle on him any more. And surely that would bring his mother even closer to the investigation, if the man who was employing her was killed. How helpless would she feel then? How much longer would her career last if she couldn’t even track down the killer of the detective who had hired her? She would have to come back to the family home, tail between her legs, beaten and humiliated.

Thoughts of his mother triggered a memory of the last time he’d seen her, in her kitchen, when she was preparing dinner for a guest. A boyfriend. A lover. Alongside the impotent rage that welled up within him was something else – a rogue memory, clamouring for his attention.

The card. The business card he’d slipped off her kitchen table and into his pocket.

He’d left it on the passenger seat of the car. He turned to look. It was still there; a little rectangle of cardboard. Picking it up, hardly breathing, he examined it.
Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie
it said, followed by the words
Essex Constabulary
and a phone number and email address.

And, scrawled on the back in an untidy hand, was an address.
Thyme Cottage, Moss Lane, Saffron Walden, CB10 4ZT
, along with a mobile phone number.

Lapslie’s address. Lapslie’s home address.

The sun was setting outside, casting long shadows along the road. Street lights were glowing dimly. A cat curled its way around a gateway and into the driveway of Kev Dabinett, next door. Carl clenched his fist and banged it against his thigh. This was his chance. If he wanted to get the policeman out of the way quickly, he could just drive over there now, take the man by surprise and slice him up. Nothing clever, nothing sophisticated – just get in there, kill him and get out again.

Tearing his gaze away from the house, Carl drove away.

It took him nearly forty-five minutes to get there. It was dark when he arrived, and the moon was rising above the trees. Lapslie’s house was actually a cottage out on the edge of Saffron Walden, away from other houses and set back from the road, behind a screen of trees. Carl parked half a mile away and then, having checked there was nobody around, sprayed himself with an odour neutraliser that he’d bought from the supermarket on the way. According to the blurb on the side of the tin it neutralised smells on bins, around toilets and in areas used by dogs and cats and other animals. Having showered until his skin was red and raw, it was the only other thing he could think of to mask his smell. And then, having done that, he walked along the edge of the road to a position where he could see the entrance to Lapslie’s driveway, then cut through the trees until
he could see the front door. There was no car around. Wherever Lapslie was, he wasn’t at home.

Carl settled down to wait, lying in a pile of dead leaves behind a bush. He chose a position where what little wind there was blew from the cottage towards him, rather than the other way around. Even if Lapslie
could
smell him, the scent would be carried away from where Lapslie would be standing.

The rising moon cast a silvery light over the cottage and the surrounding ground.

His heart was pounding, and he was having difficulty catching his breath, even though he was lying still. Despite the cold nip in the air there was a warm dampness across his forehead and across his shoulder blades. He could feel sweat trickle down his ribs, down his cheeks, down his spine, and the thought of the sweat made him panic again about Lapslie being able to smell him, which made him sweat even more. He imagined the smell as being like a cloud of green vapour emerging in spirals and gusts from his collar. He imagined it trailing above him like greasy smoke from a burning tyre before evaporating away into the atmosphere.

No, this was stupid. Stupid! He had to get a grip! Nobody could smell him, apart possibly from Mark Lapslie, and Lapslie wasn’t here.

Events were spinning out of his control. Carl was used to having a plan, knowing what he was doing and why. Now he was trailing someone with no clear aim; just an overwhelming desire to kill him quickly.

He slipped his hand in his pocket, where he kept a knife. It was a Sheffield steel rabbiter’s knife with a five-inch blade and a rosewood handle. It was the same knife he used to prepare his dioramas: cutting the wire that held the animals in their positions and slicing through their flesh where he needed to
sculpt them into particular shapes to match the killings he had committed. Carl’s thumb and fingers caressed its surface, imagining how easily it would slide between Mark Lapslie’s ribs, cutting through the muscle and the fat, slicing through gristle, tendons and ligaments, plunging through the walls of the heart and letting his blood spill out so that it filled his abdomen, coating the other organs with its warm stickiness. It wasn’t the same knife he had used to strip the flesh from Catherine Charnaud’s forearm – that knife he had deliberately taken from her kitchen, knowing that his mother, if she was ever called in to help with the murder, would make a big thing of all the implements having been found in the house rather than brought with the murderer. The gleam of moonlight on the blade, however, reminded Carl of how Catherine’s eyes had widened until Carl thought they might explode with the strain as Carl had cut deeply through the skin, firstly around the elbow joint, then down the arm following the line of the bone, and then around the wrist, and how the ball that Carl had shoved in the girl’s mouth had bulged against her teeth as she tried to scream while Carl had taken hold of the blood-slicked flesh with his left hand and gradually prised it off, using the knife in his right hand to ease it away from her bones. Carl shivered as he recalled scraping the last remnants of flesh from Catherine’s elbow joint with the flat knife blade, and using the knife point to score gristle from in between the bones of the wrist, while the girl’s body writhed and spasmed on the bed. It was the murder that had taken him the longest but, like a good workman, he was proud of the final result.

Headlights spilled light across the ground as a car swept around the curve of the drive and up to the front door of the cottage. Carl watched, breathless, as the driver cut the engine, opened the door and stepped out.

It was Lapslie.

He locked the car door behind him and walked towards his front door, then turned and looked around, his gaze flashing across the bushes and trees like a searchlight. Carl was struck by the way he held himself; like a man who was bracing his body against a continuous battering. He seemed to raise his head slightly, sniffing. Carl held his breath. Had Lapslie
smelled
him, even at this range, even with the wind blowing in his direction and carrying whatever scent he had away from Lapslie? The world seemed to spin around him. It was like being trapped in an earthquake. His feet felt like they were wrapped in cloth; unable to feel the ground properly. His hands began to shake, and saliva flooded his mouth. He could feel the burning of vomit at the back of his throat, and the surge of muscles in his abdomen trying to expel the lunch he had eaten. Despair washed over him, making his muscles weak and his joints ache. How could he fight against this witchcraft?

After an eternity of waiting, Lapslie turned back to his cottage and let himself in.

Carl waited for hours, while Lapslie – occasionally visible through one or other of the windows in his cottage – made a couple of phone calls and then cooked himself some dinner and ate it, alone, in silence. He waited while Lapslie turned the lights off downstairs and while he apparently had a shower, judging by the steam that drifted out of the open bathroom window. He waited until all of the lights were turned off, and then waited while Lapslie drifted off to sleep. The moon rose higher and higher over the cottage, illuminating it with a flat light, like a stage set. Small animals scurried through the leaves and across Carl’s prone body, but he didn’t mind. They didn’t mean him any harm.

Eventually, when he was sure that Lapslie had to be asleep,
Carl unfolded himself from the pile of dead leaves and stretched to get the kinks out of his muscles.

Carefully he edged around to the back of the cottage, keeping himself in the shadows of the trees. The back garden seemed to have been laid out as a herb garden, but the sage and lavender bushes were overgrown and had gone to seed, while the chives were patchy and stunted. The cottage was obviously pretty old, and the window frames and doors were made of wood. The back door from the kitchen into the garden was locked, but Carl knew how to deal with that. He took the rabbiter’s knife from his belt and slipped it between the door and the frame, just above the tongue of the lock. He threw the whole weight of his body behind the knife’s handle, exerting as much pressure as he could. The frame audibly creaked as the wood bent. The tongue popped out of the lock and the door opened.

There was no cat flap in the door, and no dog came to investigate the noise. No pets to raise the alarm. Things were looking good.

He waited for ten minutes, silent and motionless, until he was sure that Lapslie hadn’t heard him breaking in.

Keeping the door open, he moved cautiously into the kitchen. Moonlight poured through the window, illuminating a neatness that belied the way the garden had been left alone. Everything was washed, everything had been put away.

Carl glanced around the corners of the room. No obvious motion detectors. He kept the door open anyway, just in case he had to make a rapid escape.

He moved silently from the kitchen into the hall. The living room was off to his right; dark and still.

Carl slipped to the foot of the stairs, and listened. Nothing. He was so used to the sound of his father constantly tossing and turning, snoring and sighing, that he’d almost forgotten
that some people could sleep without making a noise.

He put his weight gradually onto the first step. It didn’t creak. Steadily he made his way up the stairs, always putting his weight on the sides rather than the centre to minimise the chance of any noise. He kept the knife clutched in his hand, ready for action.

He paused again on the upstairs landing, orienting himself. The bathroom was at the front of the cottage; he could feel the humidity of Lapslie’s recent shower still radiating from the half-open door. There was a front room and a back room. Which one would Lapslie be sleeping in?

The door to the back bedroom had stickers on it: kids’ stickers – a mixture of dinosaurs and superheroes; Batman and Superman and a couple that Carl didn’t recognise. For a second he almost freaked, thinking that there were kids in the cottage, but he calmed himself down. If there were kids in the cottage then there would have been signs in the kitchen, and a lot more mess than there actually was. There had been kids, but they weren’t there any more.

He moved towards the front room and edged his head around the door.

Moonlight flowed across the duvet and onto the floor, revealing a long lump on the bed where Lapslie had to be lying. His face was turned away from the door. Carl could just make out a slow susurration as Lapslie breathed.

Someone was standing over by the wardrobe. Carl spun around, knife held high and ready, but the figure didn’t move. Carl took an unsteady breath. Now that he was looking directly at it, he realised the figure was just Lapslie’s suit, carefully hung up in front of the wardrobe, along with a fresh shirt and tie.

He turned back to the bed. A quick slash across the throat and then a step back, watching as Lapslie woke up to find his life waterfalling out of him.

He stepped forward, knife raised.

‘Drums …’ murmured the man in the bed, and turned over, eyes open, staring at Carl.

For a suspended moment the two men locked gazes. Carl jabbed the knife forward but Lapslie’s feet crashed out under the duvet, knocking Carl backwards. The element of surprise was lost. Lapslie would fight like a cornered animal to survive, and he was bigger than Carl. Bigger and stronger.

Carl turned and ran out of the bedroom. He heard Lapslie blundering out of the duvet and across the floor behind him. Carl thundered down the stairs, two at a time, skidding on some loose carpet at the bottom and almost losing his footing but turning and heading back towards the kitchen. For a split second he had thought about heading directly for the front door and getting out that way, but the door might be locked, barred, bolted, and while he struggled with it Lapslie would be heading down the stairs towards him. Instead he pounded through the hall and out into the kitchen, heart thudding within his chest.

He raced through the kitchen and out into the cold night air, pulling the door closed behind him. He was running but he didn’t know where he was running to. Panic burned corrosively through his veins. Not only did Lapslie apparently know how he smelled, now he knew what he looked like!