Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (11 page)

‘Good thing too,’ Lapslie said, feeling a little flutter of anticipation in his stomach. ‘I haven’t got any further in identifying the victim.’ He stared expectantly at Burrows. ‘What have you found?’

‘Best I show you,’ Burrows replied. ‘Or, at least, let you listen. I’ve brought a copy with me. Have you access to a computer around here, by any chance?’

‘Funnily enough, I believe there are a couple in the building.’

Lapslie led Burrows up to his office. The forensic expert took
a memory stick from his pocket and plugged it into an empty USB socket on the computer.

‘I hope you’ve virus-checked that,’ Lapslie murmured. ‘Apparently, it’s regulations.’

Burrows glanced up at him with a raised eyebrow. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘our software checks against viruses that haven’t even been invented yet. My technicians have a game where they try to build computer viruses that can get past the software. None of them has succeeded yet.’

‘Have they ever considered going out and getting a life?’

Burrows grimaced. ‘Given what they know about murder and computer viruses, I’d rather they stayed in their offices for as long as possible. If I were allowed to make them sleep there, I would.’ He paused. ‘Sadly, they’d probably prefer sleeping there to going home.’

Turning back to the computer, he pulled up the Windows Player and located a file on the memory stick. Double-clicking it, he stood back.

Lapslie braced himself, waiting for the first scream, but it never came. Or, rather, it came but it was pushed so far into the background that it was hardly audible. In the foreground was static, a continuous hiss like a waterfall, and a sound like someone shifting around.

‘What’s this?’ Lapslie asked.

‘We’ve used a graphic equaliser to push the foreground sounds to the back and amplify the background sounds. It helps that the recording was in stereo, because that meant we could work out where the victim was standing at any moment and filter out sounds from that area as much as possible. You can hear that she’s still there, but faintly. What you’re hearing now is the killer.’

And as Lapslie listened, that’s exactly what he heard. Footsteps.
Breathing. The sound of clothes rustling. And then, chillingly, a voice whispering, ‘No, that’s gash. That’s just gash.’

And there was something about that voice he thought he recognised, although without the crutch of his synaesthesia he wasn’t sure. Just something about the tone, the timbre.

‘Can you amplify that voice?’ he asked urgently.

‘That’s as good as it gets,’ Burrows said. ‘We’ve run every technique we know, but anything more than that ends up distorting so badly that it’s unrecognisable.’

‘But it’s a man’s voice?’

‘Difficult to tell, with the whispering, but it sounds like a man, yes.’

Lapslie took a deep breath. It wasn’t exactly a case-breaking moment, but it was something. ‘Thanks, Sean.’

‘Not a problem, Mr Lapslie. We’ll keep on working, of course. Sara has some hopes that she can isolate the acoustic signature of the building. We might be able to tell you something about where it was recorded.’

‘Anything would be helpful at the moment,’ Lapslie said, shaking Burrows’ hand.

After the Head of Forensics had left, Lapslie played the file again, setting it on ‘loop’ so that it repeated over and over. That voice – ‘No, that’s gash. That’s just gash.’ Where did he know it from? Did he, in fact, know it at all? Was he just projecting the fact that the killer obviously knew Lapslie, or knew of him, onto a vague whisper and trying to reconstruct something that just wasn’t there?

The more he replayed the file, the more he found himself listening for the screams of the victim, now suppressed into near-silence in the background. He had listened to the original sound file so many times that he knew where the screams would come.

Listening to the killer and his victim in their dance of death, Lapslie found himself thinking about the hospital internet café where the sound file had been sent from. According to Burrows’ people there was no way of finding out from the file who had sent it, but as his mind drifted Lapslie found himself staring at the webcam that sat upon the top of the LCD monitor. It was switched off now, but Lapslie had used similar devices to conduct video-conferences with investigating officers from the silence of his cottage when his synaesthesia was particularly bad.

And he suddenly remembered that the computers in the internet café in the hospital had all had a little blue light glowing in the top-centre of their screens. Webcams? It was possible. And that meant an image of the killer might have been accidentally captured as they were sending the email – especially if the default setting of the computers was to have their cameras ‘on’. It was a long shot, but he’d taken longer shots before and hit the target.

He pulled Burrows’ memory stick from the computer, turned it off with a brutal press of the power switch and headed for the car park. Within five minutes he was in his Saab 9-3 and heading again for the hospital that, for various reasons, was playing a more and more important role in his life.

As was becoming more and more common these days, it was eye-wateringly expensive to use the car park at the hospital. Lapslie assumed that the intention was to dissuade hundreds of people from parking there for hours on end while visiting relatives, but the problem was that people often turned up at Accident and Emergency, or Obstetrics, or some other part of the hospital for treatment or with a partner and not knowing how long they were likely to be there. And the shock of paying for parking while you spent twelve hours in A&E would be
enough to trigger another heart attack, if that’s what they were in for in the first place.

He put two hours on the car and strode into the hospital. He knew the place well enough now to head straight through the wide white corridors, past the abstract paintings and sculptures that were meant to soothe the patients and their visitors, to where the internet café was located. Part of him missed the choking smell of antiseptic cleaner that he associated with hospitals from his childhood. Science had obviously moved on since then, and come up with something that probably smelled faintly of pine or lemon. Or, God help the world, lavender.

Three computers were occupied – two by patients in dressing gowns and one by a bored kid who had probably been forced to accompany his mother on a visit to her bed-ridden aunt – and Lapslie walked across to the counter where a girl with pink foam swirls in her hair was chatting on a mobile phone. Her nametag said ‘Kari’. She raised her eyebrows at him and smiled. He just stared at her until she whispered into her mobile, ‘Got to go – call you later,’ and cut short her call.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie,’ he said quietly, holding his warrant card out towards her. ‘I’m investigating a murder. I need to know about the webcams on your terminals.’

‘Wow – a real policeman. Okay, yeah, what do you need to know?’

‘Are they switched on all the time?’

She shook her head. ‘No way. That would be an invasion of privacy. We have strict rules.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘It’s to do with, you know, perverts. We don’t want people thinking they can hack into the computers, turn the cameras on and watch the kids. We have to activate the webcams from the desk here.’

‘Okay.’ He thought for a moment. The chances of the killer
having switched the webcam on while they were sending Lapslie the email was, while superficially attractive, almost laughably improbable, but he had to try. ‘If I give you a date, a time and an IP address, can you see whether a particular terminal had its webcam switched on?’

‘Sure.’

He handed across the information that Sean Burrows’ team had given him and watched as she typed it into her terminal and frowned at the screen. ‘Yeah,’ she said, pointing. ‘It’s that one over there. Looks like we had one camera switched on at that time, but it wasn’t that one.’

‘Thanks.’ He turned away, disappointed, then turned back as a sudden thought occurred to him.

‘Do you log the images from the webcams?’

‘Yeah. We have to. As proof in case, you know, people are doing something inappropriate.’ She looked around at the ranks of terminals. ‘Although you’d have to be pretty weird to want to touch yourself up or whatever in the middle of a hospital.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Lapslie found himself saying. ‘Nurses’ uniforms – you know?’

She gazed at him blankly.

‘Okay. Anyway, any chance you still have the images from the webcam that
was
on at the time?’

‘Yeah. I guess.’ She turned back to the terminal, typed and clicked away, then swivelled the screen around to face him. ‘Hey, look,’ she said. ‘It’s me!’

Lapslie stared at the boxed image on the screen. The person using the terminal was a middle-aged lady, and she was talking away nineteen to the dozen. A time-stamp and date-stamp had been inserted at the bottom of the image. There was no sound, but Lapslie felt fairly sure that she was updating some family member in Australia or South Africa on the medical condition
of some relative in the hospital. The image was updating several times a second; not quite movie quality, but enough to be able to see what she was doing. Better than a still image, certainly. Behind her was a reverse angle back to the counter. Kari was, indeed, sitting behind the counter. The swirls in her hair had been purple that time. Lapslie spent a couple of seconds orienting himself, trying to work out which terminal the images had been sent from.

And the terminal that Lapslie was interested in – the one from which the scream sound file had been sent – was located directly between the middle-aged woman and the desk with Kari behind it.

Lapslie’s breath caught in his throat. Someone was sitting at that terminal. The image quality wasn’t perfect, but he could make out enough to tell sex, age and colour of hair.

Lapslie checked the time-stamp and the date-stamp again in disbelief. There was no doubt. The images had been captured at the exact time that the sound file had been sent. And the person at the terminal was the person who had sent the file.

It was a girl. A teenage girl with red hair pulled back into a ponytail.

Emma Bradbury slept fitfully, bothered by the constant traffic outside her window and what sounded like a wedding reception being held in a room below her. Seventies and eighties dance hits – the one thing musically that she and Dom McGinley could agree that they both hated.

She’d eaten at the hotel, after leaving Sergeant Murrell at the police station. The restaurant had been decorated in
faux-
baronial style, with shields and crossed swords hung on walls painted a deep-red which, reflected in the windows looking out into the darkness, made it appear that the sunset outside had been forever frozen in time. A bit like Canvey Island itself, she thought. The menu, like the music that she would spend the next few hours lying awake and listening to, was also frozen in more ways than one: trapped in the 1970s: prawns in Marie Rose sauce, pâté on toast triangles, beef tournedos, mushroom stroganoff … She ordered a pint of gassy keg beer from the bar: she had a feeling that if she’d looked at the wine list it would have been filled with Blue Nuns and Black Towers and rosé wines in bulbous bottles nestled within wicker baskets. Naff. The whole place was naff, as if civilisation lapped out in slow waves from London, and Canvey Island was the point where the tide washed up the old, faded flotsam and jetsam of history.

Having said that, the food was actually nicely cooked, and
the beer relaxed her enough that she started enjoying herself despite her surroundings. Listening to the conversations of the diners around her – mainly middle-aged or elderly couples, with a smattering of youngsters on what was probably their first date – she kept dropping in and out of parallel conversations along the lines of: ‘You remember ’er, she used to live on Arnely Avenue. Had ’er, you know, ’er tubes tied at the ’ospital two years ago, but it all went wrong and she got an infection. She went to live wiv ’er mum and ’er mum’s boyfriend in the end …’ Not so much a conversation as a stream of consciousness interrupted by the occasional ‘Yeah’ and ‘Uh?’ from the other person.

Eventually the wedding reception degenerated into what sounded like a fight, and from there into silence. Emma drifted off to sleep, and woke hours later to find weak sunlight washing in through the double-glazed window.

She showered, dressed and went downstairs to find that the restaurant had been rearranged as a breakfast buffet. She loaded her plate up with scrambled egg, hash browns and bacon, and washed the lot down with a pot of strong coffee, then went out for a walk in the cold and damp morning air.

The Cocklecatcher had its own car park which opened out onto a small shopping centre of the Euronics and Iceland variety. A mist had drifted in from the estuary, muffling sounds and making people appear like ghosts as they walked. She located a cashpoint and got out some money, just to keep herself going.

She returned to the hotel and got into her car. Checking her watch she found that it was heading towards nine o’clock, but she was in no rush to get to the police station. The main event of the morning was getting the body formally identified by the Dooley family, and she wasn’t particularly looking forward to that. It was the part of the job she hated most. So instead she started her car and drove out along one of the main roads,
keeping going past more Dutch-sounding road names, like Ziderbeck, Wilrich, Baardwyk and Vanderwilt, past the strangely inappropriate and deserted Canvey Island Transport Museum, until the road stopped dead at a scrappy grass bank topped with a grey concrete sea wall. She parked her car and got out, feeling the chill wind run its fingers through her hair. Climbing the bank, she found herself gazing out across the Thames Estuary. Away in the distance a bird was calling, a repeated ‘tueep, tueep, tueep’, and somewhere else she could hear the whine of power saws and the ‘beep, beep, beep’ of a reversing forklift truck. The breeze pushed the otherwise waveless water this way and that, causing small ripples that criss-crossed each other like the grey, reticulated hide of an elephant. The grey, damp mist hung low, obscuring the horizon and giving the impression that reality just faded out into grey nothingness a few hundred yards away. What with that and the sea wall that ran all the way around the island, Canvey felt more and more to her like a fortified castle desperately clinging on to civilisation while surrounded by the besieging forces of chaos.