Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (33 page)

‘Great,’ she said, forcing the words out. ‘You never thought of just collecting stamps?’

He pushed her on to a third cloaked object. When he whipped the cloth off, she saw a large, flat sheet of metal about half the
height of a person, supported on a metal base. The top edge had been sharpened to a razor’s edge.

‘The Spanish Donkey,’ the voice whispered from beneath the metal mask. ‘Your legs are placed to either side of the sheet, and weights attached to your ankles. The weights pull your body down, letting the metal sheet slice upwards. The heaviness of the weights can be used to control how quickly, or slowly, you slide down it. How far do you think it might go before you would die? Do you think you could feel it, all the way up inside you? Your womb? Your intestines? Your lungs? What noises do you think you might make?’ He giggled. ‘Shall we find out?’

‘Let’s not and say we did.’ She felt hot, and breathless. The walls were closing in on her like a vice.

He whirled her around to another dust-sheeted object. This one was bulky, like a small car. He tugged the sheet off, but it snagged on something sharp and tore as he pulled it.

The thing underneath was like a single bed made out of rough wood with a revolving drum in the middle, its axis going from one side of the ‘bed’ to the other, but rather than being smooth the drum was covered in rusty metal barbs, like fishhooks. At one end of the ‘bed’ was a wooden barrier with a large hole in it. A hole about the size of a head, Emma noted sickly. At the other end was a similar barrier with two holes; one for each foot she guessed. The axis of the drum ended up in a handle, just to make it easy for rotating.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘I get to lie down across the drum, with my head and legs secured, and someone gets to turn the handle. My stomach is slowly ripped to shreds.’

‘The Spanish Drum,’ the voice whispered proudly. ‘Favourite of the Spanish Inquisition.’ He gestured off to one side. ‘I’ve even got an Iron Maiden over there. Opinions differ over
whether the Iron Maiden was ever used in anger, or was just a bit of gothic decoration, but the idea is sound. It’s a big metal coffin where the lid is hinged and the inside of the door is covered in spikes which can be gradually pushed further and further towards the middle.’

‘Torture devices,’ she said angrily. ‘Great. Well done. We have Tasers in the police, for stunning violent criminals with an electrical charge, but Amnesty International wants to get them reclassified as torture devices. You can torture a person with a ballpoint pen, if you want to. You can probably torture them with a sheet of paper.
Anything
can be used as a means of torture. The question is,
why
? Why do you want to torture people? For Christ’s sake, why do you want to torture
me
?’

She closed her eyes, waiting but not sure what for.

When she opened her eyes, she was looking down at her captor’s feet.

At the red Converse plimsolls he was wearing.

‘Gavin,’ she breathed, despite the voice in her head warning her to say nothing, give nothing away. ‘Gavin Stottart.’

The sound of the metal mask being pulled off made her open her eyes. Maybe, she thought, it would be better if she didn’t look, but it was probably too late for that now.

The face staring back at her was that of a nineteen-year-old, the same boy – man? – she’d seen in Stephen Stottart’s house the day before. His eyes were blue, and sad. So sad.

‘
Why?
’ she asked, putting all the urgency she could into the word.

‘My father has synaesthesia, you know that?’ he said, not bothering to whisper now that he knew that
she
knew who he was.

‘I know. He’s in the same therapy group as my boss.’

‘I inherited it.’

‘Gavin, there’s lots of people with synaesthesia. They’re not all murderers.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’ve also got something called achromatia. I can only see in shades of grey. Only shades of grey. No colours at all. Can you imagine that?’

‘I can’t,’ she said, trying to put some emotiveness into her voice, trying to make a connection, trying to make him see her as a
person
. ‘But Gavin, if you don’t know what a colour is, you don’t know what you’re missing. That’s not a reason to kill people.’

‘Killing people isn’t the point,’ he said. ‘As I was growing up, I used to hurt my sister. Chinese burns, that sort of thing. All kids do it, don’t they? But sometimes, sometimes when she screamed,
I could see colours
.’ His eyes were far away. ‘It was like seeing paradise! I’d never dreamed that things could be that beautiful. I just … I can’t describe it. I knew I would do
anything
to see those colours again. I couldn’t live without them.’

‘So what – you abducted people? And you tortured them to make them scream for you?’

He looked away, unable to meet her gaze. ‘You don’t understand. It’s like a drug. I
need
to see those colours. Those glorious, incredible colours. The trouble is, not everyone makes the right noises. Some people, it’s like I see jagged shapes; vicious, sharp things, dark and muddy. Other people it’s like everything is smooth and round and soft, and glowing in such incredible warm shades. It makes me feel – complete. Real.’

‘Lorraine Gregory?
She
was real, Gavin.’

‘She couldn’t give me what I wanted. What I needed. I tried. God knows, I tried. The things I did to her body to get her to scream as loud and as long as she could, but all I got was tinges. Hints of colour. Not the real thing.’

‘Alison Traff?’

He smiled. ‘Close. There was something there. I kept shoving meat skewers through her skin. The noises she made – I don’t know what you’d call them, maybe red, maybe blue, maybe some colour that nobody apart from me has ever seen, but she was good. I tried to keep her alive, I really did. I fed her and everything, but I think she got an infection. One day I came in, and she’d just died.’

‘David Cave?’

‘Very different. The colours were much darker with him. Much more serious. I wanted something brighter.’

‘Catriona Dooley, then? Was she the right one?’

He shook his head. ‘The sounds she made were all wrong. All mixed up. The colours were running together and getting murky. I had to get rid of her. None of them were what I needed.’

‘And now you have Mark and Sara Baillie. Do you think you’re going to get something different from them? You’re wrong, Gavin. You’re on the wrong track. Pain is not the way to get the colours you want.’

‘It is,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve just not found the right kind of pain yet.’ He gestured around with a wave of his arm. ‘But with these things … the medieval torturers knew what they were doing. They took the causing of pain to a fine art. They could keep people alive for days. Weeks! Based on what they did, and what I know, I think it can do it. I think a duet, rather than a solo, is what I need. Two voices – one male, one female, screaming together. I think that’ll take me to paradise.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ Emma asked. ‘Where next? How far do you go, Gavin?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. He switched his gaze back to her, and smiled. ‘Maybe a trio …’ he said thoughtfully.

‘The locations change, but the faces remain the same,’ Jane Catherall said grimly.

Lapslie could only nod in agreement. In front of them the Tolla site spread away towards the horizon; Eco-Dome after Eco-Dome, each containing who knew how many varieties of genetically enhanced wheat. And behind them, one particular Eco-Dome which contained more than just wheat. It contained two dead bodies.

‘What can you tell me?’ he asked.

‘They’re children,’ she said. ‘Just children. Two boys.’

‘The Baillie sons.’ He felt his heart calcify just a little more than it already had.

‘I can’t tell yet,’ Jane pointed out. ‘I will have to compare dental and medical records before I can form a proper judgement. But I can tell you they died within the past thirty-six hours, and they were buried comparatively recently. Rigor mortis has fully set in.’

‘I’m not exactly in a position to tell their parents they’re dead,’ he said. ‘I just … Never mind.’ He paused, not wanting to ask the next question, but forced the words out. ‘What was done to them?’

‘Nothing.’

He cast a questioning glance in her direction. ‘Nothing? No torture?’

‘No torture. Because it’s you, I’m going to go out on a limb and say either asphyxiation or poisoning. Not strangulation. There are no other marks on the body.’

‘Ether poisoning?’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘I wish I could tell you that their blood is bright red, or their lips are purple, and that means it’s ether poisoning, but I can’t. There
are
no obvious physiological markers. I’ll have to test their livers to know for sure. But given the timescale, and given that we know ether was used to abduct them and their parents, one could speculate that the abductor used just enough for the parents but too much for the kids, and he had to dispose of the bodies.’

Lapslie looked around. ‘Dammit, we’ll have to search every one of these Eco-Domes to see if there are any more bodies. I’m going to have to have people crawling over this place for months.’

His phone rang. He checked the display.

‘It might be important,’ Jane pointed out.

‘It’s Rouse,’ he said. ‘He’ll have heard that I’ve just discovered two more bodies even though I’m off the investigation.’

‘What can he do?’ she asked. ‘Take you off again?’

He smiled thinly. She was right. He was close to rock bottom now.

‘Find her, Mark,’ Jane said softly. ‘Find her.’

And she turned to go back inside the Eco-Dome, to the two children who now claimed her sole attention.

Lapslie grabbed hold of the security guy, Standish, as he passed by talking worriedly on his BlackBerry. ‘I need your security records,’ he said. ‘I need to know when Stephen Stottart was last on this site.’

Standish waved his BlackBerry. ‘I had them downloaded into
here,’ he said. ‘I guessed you’d want to see them.’ He glanced at the display and scrolled down with the thumbwheel. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it over. ‘These are the records of who’s swiped their cards in and out over the past three days. Like I told you, Steve Stottart’s not been in.’

Lapslie slid his gaze down the list. Lots of names, none of them meaning anything.

Apart from one.

‘Look – he’s just
here
. He came in yesterday.’

Standish grabbed the BlackBerry back and scanned it. ‘No, that’s not Steve. That’s Gavin.’

‘Gavin?’

‘Gavin Stottart. His son.’

Lapslie felt like the world had just tipped sideways on him. ‘His
son
? His son works
here
?’

Standish nodded. ‘It’s a casual job. We prefer to employ relations of our staff – it keeps everything in-house, and it reduces our carbon footprint because they can give each other lifts in to the site. Gavin Stottart works in the quality assurance area. He has to drive out to the remote sample sites every few days and collect the pollen traps. He has keys so he can get into sites – they’re usually owned by someone else, but they allow us to site our traps on their property.’

‘What are the traps for?’

‘We need to know if any of our pollen escapes from the Eco-Domes. It’s part of the legal agreement that allows us to operate, but it’s good business practice as well. Of course, the protesters claim that because we have these remote sample sites it implies that we’re already admitting the pollen might escape, but—’

‘Focus!’ Lapslie snarled. ‘Two dead kids. Missing sergeant. Not interested in protesters or legislation.’

‘Okay. Okay.’ He was flustered. ‘We have sample boxes spaced out around the site here, up to thirty miles away.’

‘Based where?’

‘Typically we rent some space from an existing landowner. All we need is a box on a pole. It’s—’

‘Do you have a list of your sample sites on that little CrackBerry thing?’ Lapslie interrupted.

‘I think so.’ He clicked and scrolled away. ‘Yes, here.’

He handed the device over again. This time there was a map on the high-resolution colour display, covered with red dots. Lapslie spent a few seconds mapping the locations onto what he already knew. ‘A kids’ play area in Canvey Island,’ he said. ‘A deconsecrated church in Bishop’s Stortford. A car garage. A bakery. A holistic therapy centre.’

‘That’s right!’ Standish frowned. ‘But how do you know? That map just has dots on. How do you know what’s at the sites?’

‘Because I know what else is at the sites. Crime scenes and dead bodies.’

He cursed himself for being so stupid. It wasn’t Stephen Stottart. It never had been. And it hadn’t been his daughter either. They were both just innocent parties caught up in the machine. It had been the son all along – Gavin. Lapslie didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but at least he knew who.

‘I’m taking this thing,’ he said, slipping the BlackBerry into his pocket.

‘You can’t!’

‘I can. It’s … oh, I don’t know. Evidence, or something.’

He ran over to his car just as Jane Catherall was leaving the Eco-Dome. Dan was pushing a stretcher trolley behind her. There were two body bags on the stretcher. They’d been folded over because their contents were so small, and so that both of them could be fitted on the same stretcher.

Lapslie felt his breath catch in his throat. He’d been pushing it to the back of his mind, but he had two kids, roughly the same age.

No. No time for that.

‘Jane, with me!’ he shouted. ‘I need your help.’

To her credit she didn’t complain. Turning to Dan, she said something that Lapslie assumed was along the lines of ‘Take these bodies to the mortuary and wait for me,’ and then she scurried across the ground as fast as her spindly, polio-emaciated legs would carry her.

‘A day trip,’ she said, strapping herself in. ‘How wonderful.’

‘I need you to do some analysis,’ he said, handing her the BlackBerry and starting the car. ‘You’ve seen the files of the other torture cases, and you know about the locations in the Catriona Dooley case. Filter out all of those locations, and tell me what’s left.’