Tooth and Claw (35 page)

Lapslie nodded. He felt no emotion: no shock, no surprise. Nothing could surprise him tonight. ‘Here we go again. We’ll go in your car. You’ve got the directions.’ He glared at McGinley. ‘And I’m sitting in the front.’

‘You trust me sitting behind you?’ McGinley waggled his huge, sausage-like fingers at Lapslie. ‘Remember Toby Rumford?’

They walked out towards the car, Lapslie locking the cottage behind him. ‘Christ knows why I’m doing this,’ he muttered. ‘The back door’s wide open. I’ll get it fixed tomorrow, I suppose.’

‘Should we tell DI Morritt about the attack on you? After all, it is his case.’

‘Let’s not,’ Lapslie said grimly. ‘After all, let’s not jump to conclusions too early. Let’s wait for the results of the forensic examination before we say anything.’

Emma smiled. ‘I understand. After all, there
is
a process we have to go through, isn’t there?’

During the drive, Lapslie found himself obsessing about Dom McGinley and Emma Bradbury, and why he hadn’t seen it coming. But what the hell did Emma see in the man? He was a London villain, as old-time East End as pie, mash and parsley liquor, or jellied eels in waxed cardboard cartons. Not that the East End was like that any more, apart from the odd, self-conscious, ‘Authentic Pie & Mash’ shop. Dom McGinley had started off as a runner for an East End gang that mainly dealt in protection rackets amongst small shopkeepers ranging from Canning Town, Plaistow and Stratford out to Ilford, Barking and Romford, extending into prostitution and drugs as time went on. He had beaten and killed his way up through the ranks until, when Lapslie and Rouse had been at Brixton, he had been in charge of all crime from the edge of the City of
London out to the Essex borders. In those days the police spent more time preventing, or tidying up after, the internecine gang-warfare that erupted between the resident villains – who, incidentally, had no creed or colour bars – and the various immigrant gangs who tried to muscle in on their territories. Then it was the Yardies that were trying to wrest control away from them; somewhere in the middle it had been the Turkish and Cypriot gangs and now it was the Russian Mafia. In ten years time – who could tell?

The last time Lapslie had seen Dom McGinley had been about a year before, when McGinley had given him some information about a secretive Home Office organisation that rehomed notorious murderers whose sentences were up but who would have attracted physical attacks and arson if they had moved into an area under their own names. Since then, the two men had not been in contact. And now McGinley turned up outside Lapslie’s cottage at some unearthly time in the morning, apparently shacked up with Lapslie’s sergeant. What kind of world was it where things like that were allowed to happen?

They drove out of Saffron Walden and along the A roads leading towards Thorpe-le-Soken, then looped up above the seaside town and headed out through crooked roads and past small villages and fields bordered by raised banks in the direction of the ancient Essex district of the Dengie Hundreds. Sand began to appear on the edges of the roads where it had been blown in by the wind and then trapped in corners by grass and mud. The sky took on a translucency that spoke of a nearby sea, just over the horizon. The roads were lined with industrial estates surrounded by high chain-link fences and they were so narrow that two cars couldn’t pass each other unless one steered off the road and onto the grass verges that dropped away towards the fields and the stretches of marshy earth.
Every now and then a road came to a dead end and a sign that warned of private property, and they had to backtrack to the nearest junction. Once or twice as they drove, Lapslie caught sight of a questing finger of water that had pushed inland from the North Sea, with small tarpaulined boats bobbing on the surface, tied to a block or a pole on the bank. They might have been there for years, abandoned to the elements. They missed the turn-off to Creeksea the first time they passed it, and ended up in Burnham-on-Crouch, which seemed, with its coffee shops and delicatessens, like the last outpost of civilisation before the world ended. It even had a marina of jaunty sailing boats, sails furled, masts like a forest stripped of leaves and branches, although Lapslie found himself wondering where there was to sail to. Off the edge and into the abyss, perhaps?

Backtracking, Emma stopped the car on a stretch of road that separated a rutted field from a deserted railway station and a new housing estate, all orange brick and UPVC window frames. Emma and Lapslie got out of the car. McGinley stayed where he was, probably guessing that Lapslie would have told him to do that anyway.

The air had a tang of salt in it, and the crying of the seagulls was bitter, like herbs, on Lapslie’s tongue. He breathed in slowly.

Several police cars and a forensics van were drawn up in front of one house in particular, their flashing blue lights illuminating the street like a cheap mobile disco. Bedroom lights were on all down the street, and Lapslie could see figures silhouetted in the windows, watching them with fervid curiosity.

Emma led him through a side gate and round the back of the house, to a wooden outbuilding in the back garden. A green hosepipe led from a tap on the wall of the house to inside the
outbuilding. More police were clustered there, along with several white-suited crime scene investigators. Sean Burrows was just emerging from the outbuilding. His face was set in stone.

‘Nasty,’ he said, seeing Lapslie and shaking his head. ‘Very nasty.’

Emma stepped to one side and allowed Lapslie to go in.

The body of an elderly man lay on the floor in a foul-smelling pool of watery blood that spread from one wall to the others. His abdomen was bloated, and his face was contorted in a rictus of agony. His clothes were in disarray, and it took Lapslie a few moments to realise that he wasn’t lying
on
the hosepipe, but was somehow connected
to
it.

The sound of tribal drumming was stronger there than Lapslie had ever heard it before. It seemed to be imbued into the very walls, the air itself.

On the other side of the room, a doorway led off into darkness. The walls were lined with shelves containing what Lapslie thought at first were stuffed animals in various poses, until he realised that they weren’t stuffed but were dry, desiccated corpses with dowdy feathers or dull fur.

Jane Catherall was bending over the body. She was wearing wellington boots.

‘What can you tell me?’ Lapslie asked.

‘You are looking at Nicholas Whittley,’ she said without looking up. She appeared to be examining the wound where the hosepipe had been shoved into the body. ‘My initial diagnosis is massive internal trauma to multiple organs following the insertion of a high-pressure jet of water into a pre-existing colostomy stoma. At first glance the pressure of the water has burst his intestines. Suffice it to say that in all my years of pathology I have never seen anything as sick and as twisted as this. Never.’

Lapslie shook his head and glanced back at Emma. ‘Has anybody notified Eleanor Whittley?’

‘Uniform’s over at her place now. Apparently she’s in shock. She was asking after her son, Carl. He’s meant to be here, but we can’t locate him.’

‘Young?’ Lapslie asked. ‘Stocky? Relatively small in stature?’ His pulse started racing in time with the pounding of the drums that only he could hear. ‘Check his bedroom and the medicine cabinet for any drugs that might be used to treat porphyria!’

‘Right, boss.’ She vanished out of the doorway. ‘Oh, you might want to check the back room,’ she called from the darkness.

Stepping cautiously through the diluted blood covering the floor, Lapslie entered the second room. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness, but when they had he noticed a large central table with a computer and printer on it. Apart from that the walls, like those of the first room, were lined with shelves, and on the shelves were cases with dead birds and animals in. Lapslie was about to dismiss them from his mind as being the same as the ones in the first room, but something made him look again.

They were not the same.

These scenes were posed as if the animals were human, their limbs and heads wired into poses of horror, terror and despair. Some of them had been stabbed repeatedly; others had wire biting into their necks.

One was lying on a fake bed, with the flesh of its left arm stripped away.

Another was lying on a patch of what looked like tarmac with its head and chest burned away.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Lapslie whispered. ‘It’s a catalogue of all the crimes that the killer has committed. A museum of murders.’

Emma came rushing in, her feet splashing in the red-tinged
water. She was holding a plastic evidence bag containing a plastic pill bottle. ‘Haematin,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Treatment for porphyria. In the son’s bedroom.’

‘Find him,’ Lapslie snapped, turning to go. ‘I want teams with dogs all around the area.’

‘Car’s still outside,’ Emma pointed out. ‘He may be on foot.’

‘This estate backs onto the salt marshes,’ Lapslie mused. ‘If these abortions are any indication, the sick fuck has a thing about wildlife. He may have gone to ground out there.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘I need to get out of here. The noise is too much.’

He and Emma walked out, past Jane Catherall and Sean Burrows, to a position outside the front door of the house. Lapslie noticed that Dom McGinley had left the car and was talking to one of the uniformed constables.

‘We have to tell Rouse about this,’ Lapslie said to Emma, thinking as he spoke. ‘We’ve no choice. He’ll pull me off and put Dain on, but there’s no way we can keep this to ourselves while we look for the kid, Carl.’

Dom McGinley caught sight of Emma and started to make his way up the garden path towards the two of them.

‘We should go and talk to Eleanor Whittley. I want to know how she can claim to be profiling the murderer when it’s actually her own son. How much did she know?’

McGinley reached the door, and opened his mouth to say something.

The first shot splintered the wood of the front door, spraying Lapslie with splinters that stung like sparks against his skin. He closed his eyes involuntarily and stepped back, catching his calves against a low fence that ran along the side of the garden path. He fell backwards. The second shot hit one of the stones of the house, beside the door, and ricocheted away with a scream
of mindless frustration, sending stone scabs flying in all directions. The sound of the shots caught up with their actions, and to Lapslie they were like biting into red hot chilli peppers. He rolled away across the dirt of the garden, careless of his suit.

The third shot hit Dom McGinley in the chest, lifting him off his feet and knocking him back into the door, splashing blood across the white of his shirt. Emma cried out in shock.

Lapslie climbed to his knees and scanned the area. Policemen were either standing around in confusion or diving for cover. There weren’t many places where the shots could have been coming from. Narrowing the possibilities down, he concentrated on the end of the road, where the estate gave way to the Essex wetlands, the salt marshes that had been reclaimed for housing and farmland and industrial areas. He knew from the maps that part of the area out there extended into the sea, but the rest of it covered several villages and small outcrops of buildings, plus a great deal of marshy ground intersected by rivers and tributaries. It wasn’t going to be easy, searching.

A flicker of motion caught his eye. A figure, darting through a hole in the fence that surrounded the estate. Heading into the wetlands.

Without thinking, Lapslie gave chase, feet pounding across the tarmac, pushing through the crumbling wood and suddenly finding himself in the open, in darkness, with all the streetlights behind him and only the moon for illumination. The back of the estate faced onto a field that stretched out towards a distant raised bank, part of the ancient defences that held the sea back from the land. The field was muddy and rutted with parallel grooves. There was no sign of Carl Whittley. Had he made it to the bank? It seemed like the only possibility.

Lapslie ran in the direction he assumed Carl must have taken. The mud stuck to his shoes, clumping onto the soles and making
his feet heavy and difficult to move. He had to raise them up higher than normal to get them over the ruts, and he could feel his energy flagging as he ran. It was like some deadly form of circuit training.

He looked behind, at the estate. There was no sign of Carl Whittley. No sign of anyone.

Weeds and grasses caught at his feet as he laboriously ran. Once he miscalculated and caught the top of one of the ruts with his right foot, and went sprawling into the mud. He pushed himself back up, one hand in a pothole full of cold, brackish water, and kept going.

His breath wheezed in his chest. Black spots were swimming in front of his eyes. He glanced back over his shoulder, but his eyes were watering in the cold and he couldn’t see for sure whether Carl was coming for him or he was coming for Carl.

And then there was suddenly no ground beneath his feet. He fell, landing in a stream that meandered across the field and which had been hidden from him by the roughness of the rutted surface. It was only a few feet across, and less than a foot deep, but it was cold and the salty water made his eyes sting.

Lapslie crouched there for a few moments, catching his breath. The air burned in his lungs, and he couldn’t suck enough in. Desperately he glanced along the stream. On his left it was straight for a hundred yards or so, then curved towards where he imagined the sea to be. On his right it curved back towards the estate.

And that gave him an idea.

Staying crouched, he splashed his way along the stream. He had to navigate based on what he could remember of the layout of the field. As far as he could tell the stream was bringing him around to the back of the bank. If it went all the way, if there
was a break, or a culvert of some kind, then he could possibly get behind Carl.

The stream suddenly hooked right along the edge of a bank. Lapslie couldn’t tell whether it was the one that had been ahead of him, or another one that was edging the field. He risked raising his head up and looked around, hoping that he would be disguised against the grass and the earth of the bank. Somehow he appeared to have doubled back on himself; the estate was closer than he had thought, and he was looking sideways at a corner where the fence suddenly turned ninety degrees around someone’s garden.