Tooth and Claw (6 page)

The smoke drifted away on the breeze. Where the polecat and the bomb had been, there was just a rough circle of churned and bloody earth.

When Emma Bradbury re-entered Catherine Charnaud’s bedroom, she was looking even more doubtful than when she left. ‘Nobody’s playing a radio, boss,’ she said. ‘And there’s no noise from the neighbours. Is it possible you heard a car radio going past?’

Lapslie shook his head, fighting against a wave of nausea. With the sound-deadening headphones off he was subject to the noise of the Crime Scene Investigators in the room talking to one another and the intermittent
click
as the photographer’s digital camera captured another image. His salivary glands were spasming with the overload of unexpected, unwelcome tastes, and he kept having to swallow. ‘It was louder than that,’ he said eventually, ‘and there was none of the distortion you get from overloaded speakers.’

‘This is Essex, remember? There’s kids driving round Southend seafront with speakers in the back more powerful than anything the Ozric Tentacles ever had.’

‘The Ozric Tentacles?’ he asked, intrigued enough at this sudden, unexpected insight into Emma’s musical preferences that he could push the melange of tastes in his mouth to one side for a moment. But just for a moment.

‘Er … they’re a group. They do a lot of festivals. Sort of acid-folk-jazz, if you know what I mean.’ She paused, embarrassed. ‘And you obviously don’t.’

Lapslie let a smile pull at the corners of his mouth. ‘Let’s be
charitable and assume you were undercover at the time.’ He swallowed a mouthful of saliva again. ‘But even so – it didn’t sound like a car.’

‘Is it that thing you get? The synaesthesia?’

He shrugged. ‘It usually works the other way around. Sounds cause tastes for me; it’s very rare that it goes into reverse and other sensory input causes sounds. Although it’s not unheard of.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And I was wearing the headphones. I wasn’t hearing anything apart from my own body, and that’s never affected me so badly before.’ Gazing back at the ruin of Catherine Charnaud’s arm, he said, ‘Oh, let’s get out of here. I’ve had about all I can take.’

The two of them headed downstairs. Rather than move into the lounge, which would probably be too personal, too much imprinted with Catherine Charnaud’s personality, Lapslie led the way into the kitchen. It was a large, square room with various cupboards, fridges, cookers and dishwashers around the edges, all furnished in a kind of plain Amish style, and a freestanding unit in the centre which could either be used for preparing food or, with a couple of place mats, as a breakfast bar. Lapslie hoisted a couple of stools across to the unit and he and Emma sat.

‘What have we got?’ he asked simply.

She shrugged. ‘Apart from a dead body, very little. No signs that anyone else was here, like two wine glasses; no indications of forced entry, either on the house or the body, as far as I can tell; and no reports from the neighbours that anything was amiss – no prowlers, screams in the night, or anything else.’

‘Then why are we here?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How was the body discovered?’

‘Apparently the boyfriend is a professional footballer. He was
out last night with friends. Got back about four o’clock this morning, let himself in and …’

Lapslie grimaced. ‘Not nice. Where is he now?’

‘One of the uniforms is taking his statement. Outside, in the fresh air.’

‘We’ll question him later. What do you make of the state the body’s in?’

Emma frowned. ‘At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s a mess. On the one hand, torture is usually a personal thing: pain and mutilation inflicted in spades in return for some previous slight – some insult or injury that the torturer has blown out of all proportion. But that kind of goes against the meticulous nature of the torture here. Cutting that much flesh away that precisely takes time and care. It’s not something you do in the heat of the moment.’

‘It looks to me more like a message of some kind,’ Lapslie said.

‘What kind of message?’ she asked, obviously intrigued at the idea.

He shrugged. ‘Who knows? It might be the kind of message that only makes sense to someone who’s clinically insane, or refers to something that only one or two other people know about.’

‘Or perhaps the killer was removing something or obliterating something?’

‘What, like a tattoo?’

‘Might be.’

‘There are easier ways. And besides, women don’t usually get tattoos done on their arms. They normally opt for the ankle, the shoulder blade or the small of the back.’

‘I’ve got a—’ Emma stopped abruptly. ‘I’ve got a feeling you’re right,’ she continued, rubbing the fabric of her left sleeve with her right hand.

Lapslie gazed around the kitchen. ‘Nice place. She must be doing well.’

‘With a job fronting the TV news and a footballer boyfriend, I guess she’s not short of a few bob.’

‘Any tensions with the boyfriend? Is he playing away, metaphorically as well as literally?’

‘We’ll look into his background.’

He remembered the Jill Dando case, and the possibility – strong at the beginning but then progressively replaced by a belief that a stalker was responsible – that she’d been targeted by Serbian hitmen. ‘Check her recent broadcasts for anything contentious.’

‘Define contentious.’

‘You know the kind of thing. Suggestions of illegal activities involving Russian billionaires. Investigations into people-smuggling gangs in Eastern Europe. Hard-hitting exposés of corruption in the building work for the 2012 Olympics. Anything that might have made her a target in the eyes of someone willing to have her killed and ruthless enough to want to do it in a way that dissuades anyone else from following the same leads.’

‘She was a figurehead, boss, not a reporter. Her job was pretty much to read what was on her autocue as naturally as she could and look gorgeous while she did it.’

Lapslie smiled as a stray thought tugged at a corner of his brain: something Sonia had told him, years before, when she was doing an MA in Fine Art. ‘You know the difference between naturalism and realism?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Emma’s voice was wary.

‘Naturalism is showing the world the way it is, and realism is showing it the way it
really
is.’

‘Hmm. You need to work on your delivery, boss. Anything else?’

Before he could answer, a uniformed constable entered the kitchen and approached them. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but the pathologist’s people are here. They’re asking if you can release the body.’

‘Check with the CSIs and the photographer. If they’ve all got everything they need then I’m happy the body gets taken.’

The constable nodded, turned on his squeaky rubber heels and left.

‘Where was I?’ he continued.

‘Adding to my “to do” list,’ Emma replied sourly.

‘Okay. If she was in the media then there’s a fair to middling chance that she was doing recreational drugs: probably cocaine. That’s the drug of choice in TV and journalism. The post mortem will throw up any traces of the stuff in her system, but it’s worth making some preliminary inquiries. Find out if she’s ever been in trouble with the local police. It could be that she’s fallen foul of some kind of drug deal gone wrong. Perhaps she couldn’t pay for her last delivery.’

‘I’m on it.’

‘Coordinate a search of the house, inside and out, paying particular reference to footprints in the soil outside; get statements from the neighbours; talk to the girl’s friends, relatives and co-workers to see whether there was any strain in her relationship with her boyfriend; get someone to check through her fan-mail for evidence of obsessive behaviour or stalking; get details on whatever security system the house has; and then get an incident room set up in the nearest police nick.’

‘In other words, all the standard stuff that I was already going to do.’

‘Of course. When in doubt, fall back on routine. That’s why it’s there. Find out if she had a computer in the house and impound it. Check for emails, blogs, anything that might give
an insight into any odd relationships she’s developed. Do the same for her mobile phone as well. And check to see how many mobiles she has: sometimes celebrities have two; one for work and one for home. I’d hate to find out in a month’s time that we’d completely ignored a mobile phone that was almost in our laps.’

‘A month’s time? Do you really think the case will last that long?’

‘The Jill Dando case lasted over a year before they arrested someone, and even then they got it wrong.’ He glanced around the kitchen. ‘Do you think it’ll compromise the evidence chain if I use that percolator over there to make a jug of coffee?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll get something sent in from outside.’

Something that tasted very much like a pork pie invaded his mouth. He grimaced involuntarily as saliva pinpricked his cheeks and flooded his tongue. Something out in the hall was making a noise. He stood, and headed for the kitchen door.

Two figures in coveralls were manoeuvring a black body bag down the stairs. Each held one end, and the bag sagged in the middle. The sound he had heard had been the hem of the bag scraping against one of the pictures hanging on the wall. To Lapslie’s eyes the whole thing looked grotesquely like the start of a comedy sketch: two men with a piano, on the verge of dropping it or letting it slip, to zany comic effect; that 1960s Bernard Cribbins song ‘Right, Said Fred’ recast as a black comedy.

‘Careful,’ he snapped, aware of a dull headache forming behind his eyes. ‘That used to be a person.’

One of the men looked sorrowfully at him. ‘No need to be like that, mate,’ he remonstrated. ‘We’re doing the best we can.’

Lapslie watched them go, then wandered into the lounge, relishing the comparative silence. Two of the CSIs were dusting for prints, their gestures causing no more noise than a butterfly
landing, and he stood in the centre of the room watching them for a while. There was a slight scent of perfume in the air, evident even above the smell of the fingerprint powder;
Eau Jeune
, he thought. Catherine Charnaud’s presence would take a while to fade away.

Emma brought him a coffee after a few minutes, scared up from somewhere outside, and he sipped at it, letting his brain sort out the various impressions it had absorbed over the past hour or so. He had a feeling that this would be a tricky one. A straight crime of passion and he would have put a pony on it being the boyfriend, but torture and mutilation on the scale that he had witnessed up in the bedroom? That took it into a different world entirely.

‘Let’s follow the body to the mortuary,’ he said eventually. ‘If nothing else, it’s quiet there.’

Emma looked around. ‘I should keep an eye on what’s happening here,’ she said dubiously.

‘They know their jobs, and I need you to drive me.’

Emma shrugged. ‘And I know
my
job,’ she muttered.

The drive took two hours, a good half hour of which was due to a burst water main, and Lapslie spent most of the time with the headphones on, drifting in a world of his own breath and blood. The mortuary was located on one side of Braintree, next to a park; a low, anonymous building that could have been mistaken for a nursery, an accountant’s practice or the offices of a rather down-at-heel architect if it hadn’t been for the industrial-size air conditioning pipes that plunged in and out of the side walls, and the metal chimney that towered over it from the rear.

While Emma parked near to the door, Lapslie walked over and pressed the button on the intercom. ‘DCI Lapslie to see Dr Catherall,’ he said crisply. He had to bend down to do it. For a
while he had toyed with the idea that the security intercom had either been fitted by midgets or the workmen had misread imperial measurements for metric when they were measuring up. Having met Jane Catherall, he now had an alternative explanation. He strongly suspected that she had browbeaten them into fitting it at a height convenient to her, and bugger anyone else.

The door clicked open, and Lapslie entered, with Emma following. The foyer was as he remembered it: reminiscent of a dentist’s surgery, what with the worn floor tiles, the plaster-board ceiling tiles, the chairs that looked like they dated from a decade before and the slight smell of disinfectant. The only thing indicating that the medical procedures that went on behind the closed doors was done to dead bodies, not live ones, was the underlying smell of blood and faecal matter that the disinfectant couldn’t quite hide.

Dr Catherall’s assistant, Dan, stepped out from a side room. Lapslie had met him before, but still couldn’t quite remember his name.

‘DCI Lapslie – Dr Catherall said you’d probably be popping in. Please, come this way.’ Dan led him through a set of double doors edged in plastic, to keep the sounds and the smells from drifting too far. ‘Dr Catherall? You’ve got visitors.’

The room was large, and so cold that Lapslie and Emma’s breath misted in front of their mouths as they breathed out. Lapslie tried not to breathe in through his nose: the smell was more marked in here.

The stench of the mortuary was worse than he remembered, despite the number of times he’d been there over the years. It was something like the sweet, cloying odour of rancid meat underpinned with a fouler reek, all of it covered but not hidden by the nostril-grating tang of bleach and detergent. Somehow
his brain managed to edit out the sheer visceral reaction that it always engendered in him; he could recall that it
was
bad, but not
how
it was bad. It was like Sonia had once told him about having children; if women remembered how painful it was the first time they’d never go through it again. And Sonia had borne two children for him, which probably went to prove her point.

‘How do the people who work here stand it?’ Emma muttered. ‘Surely the smell must get into their clothes, their hair and their skin? What do their families say? It’s like people who work in fish-and-chip shops always smell of hot oil, no matter how many showers they take.’

‘You’re supposed to get used to anything,’ Lapslie replied.