Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (3 page)

He quickly packed his suit carrier and his carry-on bag – taking one of his thorazitol tablets before he packed his toiletry bag away – and headed down to the lobby with a new spring in his step. He had a purpose in life, and a reason not to give his presentation. And by the time Assistant Chief Superintendent Rouse found out about it, he would be on an aircraft and heading home. And who could fault him: he had a murder to solve. An apparent murder, at least.

‘I’m afraid I have to check out early,’ he told the desk clerk, sliding the chunky brass key across the marble counter to her.

Her gaze slid down to the computer screen beneath the counter. ‘That’s fine, Mr Lapslie. Your room is pre-payed. Thank you for staying at the Serena Hotel.’

‘Can I get a taxi to the airport?’

She smiled and nodded. ‘I’ll organise that. If you would care
to wait in the lobby, I’ll make sure you are called.’ She glanced towards the revolving doors that led outside. ‘Assuming the rain doesn’t get much worse.’

‘Is that likely?’

She shrugged: a graceful movement of her shoulders and neck. ‘Who knows?’

Lapslie found a comfortable chair and waved away the ever-present green tea. Delving into his carry-on bag, he found a brown A4 envelope. Inside was a USB stick containing his PowerPoint presentation and a copy of his script. He crossed back to the desk.

‘Could you make sure these get to another of your guests – a Mr Dain Morritt?’

‘Of course. Is there a message?’

‘Just tell him …’ Lapslie paused. ‘Tell him: “It’s over to you. I have some real work to do.”’

She nodded, looking serious. ‘I’ll make sure he gets the message.’

It was a good twenty minutes later that he looked up to find the clerk standing in front of him. ‘Your taxi is waiting just outside the security checkpoint,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to have your luggage taken down?’

‘Thanks, but I’ll carry it myself.’

Leaving the hotel, he was amazed to find that in the time since he had been in his room, gazing out of his window, the rain had intensified to a continuous torrent, and the road outside was awash. Passing cars were up to their hubcaps in water.

‘Is that normal?’ he asked the doorman: a seven-foot-tall and stick-thin Pashtun whose peaked white headwear made him look even taller.

The man shrugged. ‘Ground is dry and hard,’ he said in good English. ‘Water hits it and rolls off. Comes down from the foothills. Turns the roads into rivers. Not good for traffic.’

He was right. By the time the beaten-up BMW taxi had made a couple of turns and made it onto the Islamabad Highway, leading out towards Rawalpindi, where the airport was located, it really was as if they were driving down the centre of a river. The sides of the highway were lined with concrete blocks which served only to funnel the water, and the ground was indeed baked so hard that it wouldn’t absorb a spilled bottle of Evian, let alone a full-scale rainstorm.

Lapslie gazed incredulously at the passing cars, most of which were submerged up to their door handles and pushing water ahead of them so that a v-shaped wake led back from an aqueous bulge ahead of their bonnets. He couldn’t work out how they kept moving without their engines flooding. And incredibly, nobody batted an eyelid. He’d only ever seen flooding on this scale in the UK in news broadcasts about Cornish villages, but there it counted as a national emergency. Here it was apparently just a fact of life. Drivers kept on driving in conditions where, if they opened their doors, water would swamp the inside of their cars. And he could swear that there were people still standing around on corners and on the central reservation, waiting patiently for something that might never come.

What a country.

He was flying Club, which meant that he could slip inside the executive lounge after he had cleared the various levels of security at the airport. He had been pre-warned by the Security Officer at the British High Commission that leaving Pakistan required collecting various stamps on tags and documents which were variously attached to his hand luggage or left to him to carry, and if he didn’t have all of these stamps intact when he got to the steps of the aircraft then he would be sent back to start the process all over again, and never mind the fact that the aircraft would be leaving soon.

The main advantages of the executive lounge appeared to be actual seating, internet access and the absence of milling crowds of toothless tribesmen who, as far as Lapslie could see, were one step away from leading camels through the terminal. Lapslie connected his laptop to the internet, just to see whether there had been any replies to his email, but there was nothing. Perhaps Emma Bradbury wasn’t in the office. Perhaps she was on leave. Perhaps she just wasn’t taking his email seriously.

He boarded the flight without incident, and sank back into the comfortable leather seats, fishing inside his jacket pocket for his ear plugs. Despite the CBT and the drugs, he didn’t want to subject his quiescent synaesthesia to the stress of a full takeoff and a five-hour flight.

Flicking through the Club Class magazine, he discovered that one of the films available for viewing by customers on personal DVD players was
Saw VII
: another episode in a continuing story about a serial killer and his protégés who tortured members of the public in various ironic ways depending on the sins they had committed in their lives and the bad choices they had made.

Remembering the sound file, he didn’t think that was funny.

The flight back to the UK took six hours. Lapslie slept for most of it, but he woke abruptly three times, hearing the screams echoing in his head.

The sound of a text message arriving on her mobile phone dragged Emma Bradbury from a deep, dreamless sleep. Beside her, Dom McGinley’s bulk made a small mountain range out of the duvet. He didn’t react to the sound of the text.

The sun was shining horizontally through the window of McGinley’s bedroom, casting an orange light across the far wall. His house was in Chigwell; just about on the boundary between the Metropolitan Police and the Essex Constabulary. He often joked that he’d chosen it deliberately, just to increase the paperwork burden if he was ever arrested and to make sure that if he ever had to he could make a run for it into two different administrative areas, depending on who was battering the front door down. She suspected he was thinking more about Americanstyle state lines, and sheriffs skidding to a halt on the interstate before they infringed someone else’s territory, but she hated to disillusion him. For a man who’d seen more than his fair share of the seamy side of life, he had a romantic streak a mile wide.

Listening to McGinley snore, Emma wondered yet again what it was that she saw in him. Was it a father thing? He was nearly twice her age, and had the authority of a man who was used to being listened to. Was it a rebellion thing? The last person a detective sergeant ought to choose as a lover was a man who
had been involved with half the criminal activity in London over the past four decades, although to be fair he’d never been convicted for anything. Or was it just that he was the most
alive
man she’d ever known: a man who had experienced more than any of the callow, hair-gelled guys who regularly chatted her up in nightclubs and still wanted more?

And he was a fantastically imaginative lover as well. That helped.

She rolled out of bed without disturbing him and padded naked towards the bathroom, retrieving her mobile phone from the dresser as she went. She checked the message, guessing as she waited for the phone to display it that it might be from Mark Lapslie. He was in Pakistan, at a conference, but he’d texted or emailed a couple of times since he’d flown out, about various cases they had that were either stalled or wending their way towards trial. The Whittley case was causing problems, for instance, with the psychiatric community saying that Carl Whittley was obviously insane and the Crown Prosecution Service, backed by Carl’s mother Eleanor, maintaining that his actions were complex and covert, and thus showed obvious evidence that he was sane enough to make careful plans and cover his tracks. Lapslie, as far as Emma could tell, was on the sidelines; he just wanted the bastard punished for what he’d done.

The text wasn’t from Lapslie. It was from the incident room at Chelmsford Police Station.
Body discovered on Canvey Island. Foul play suspected. Local police request assistance from murder squad. You are the senior officer until you establish that a more senior officer should take charge.
There followed a postcode which Emma could type straight into her satnav in order to get her straight there, then the words
Please confirm receipt
. She quickly typed a response and sent it off.

It was the new way of doing things. Rather than phone up
and give her instructions, the Chelmsford Police HQ computer could send her a text with all the salient details. It was a cost-saving measure, apparently; one brought in by the management accountants who were convinced that millions of pounds could be saved each year by shaving small amounts off lots of separate budgets and doubling the price of the coffee in the machines. Emma favoured the opinion that the easiest way to save millions of pounds each year would be to sack the management accountants, but nobody had asked her.

She dressed quickly. Canvey Island could get cold, she’d heard, so she pulled on tights and then jeans, and then topped the ensemble off with a T-shirt covered with a sweatshirt and a Napa leather jacket. Screw the fact that she’d probably be the most casually dressed person there; she could be there for a while and she wanted to be comfortable. The first time she’d worn a pencil skirt and high heels to a murder scene in the middle of a field she’d vowed that practicality had to win over style every time.

Which was probably why she’d failed her Inspector’s Exam last time she’d taken it. And the time before.

She debated writing a note for Dom, but he’d never read it. He’d ring her if he wanted to know where she was.

Actually, if he really wanted to know where she was he’d probably get some criminal crony to trace which mobile phone mast her mobile was currently registered with. He’d done it before.

She slipped out of the house and started up her Vauxhall Tigra: a present from Dom to replace the Audi that she’d previously owned and lost in a motorway crash which had left her shaken but uninjured but which had totalled the car and several others. Punching the postcode in, she pulled away, peppering Dom’s Jaguar with gravel.

The drive took just over an hour, including a pit-stop for a pee and a takeaway coffee at a Starbucks, and she spent the time trying to remember what she’d picked up about Canvey Island during the course of her time stationed in Essex. It turned out to be virtually nothing, with the exception that there was a track called ‘Canvey Island’ on an album by British Sea Power: one of her current favourite indie bands.

Dom didn’t like British Sea Power. He didn’t like her taste in music full stop. He was stuck back in the 1970s, with Jethro Tull, Tangerine Dream and Yes. The only band that sat in the area where their tastes overlapped was the Ozric Tentacles.

Eventually, Emma found herself on a long, curving, elevated causeway that led across a landscape of creeks, fields and banks of mud. Off in the distance to her right was a series of thin metal chimneys and fat storage tanks – an oil refinery looming like some science fiction cityscape over the tiny houses that surrounded it.

By the time she left the causeway she was part of a steady stream of commuter traffic and school-run people-carriers on the roads. Canvey Island looked just like any of the more modern conurbations in Essex: tacky 1970s houses all based on the same design, built with the same bricks and tiled with the same red tiles.

With less than half a mile to go she found herself driving through a small industrial estate. The satnav directed her to turn into what appeared to be a disused petrol station; the lack of an obvious police presence caused her to keep driving until she saw the collection of police cars, unmarked vans and people standing around aimlessly that generally marked a focus of police activity. She parked in the shadow of a strangely shaped yellow plastic box on a grey metal pole, about ten feet above the ground. The box looked a bit like a beehive: slatted, with openings all around.

‘DS Bradbury,’ she said to a young constable who approached her car with the obvious intent of shooing her away with as much condescension as his twenty-two-year-old frame could muster. He nodded, as if he’d known that all along, and gestured her towards an open gate in a ten-foot-high wire fence that led into a car park.

The building in whose shadow she left her car was large, warehouse-shaped, made out of metal and painted in bright pink with large yellow spots: the kind of thing she expected to see at three a.m. on a Saturday after an evening drinking a combination of absinthe and Red Bull, not at nine a.m. on a weekday. Stuck to the front of the building was a large cut-out sign featuring a meerkat-like creature wearing a waistcoat in the same colours and winking at any passers-by. A sign to one side of the meerkat proclaimed: ‘Marty Meerkat’s Maniac Playground!’

‘What the hell?’ she said, getting out of the car.

A passing constable nodded at her, probably thinking that she was with Forensics, rather than the ranking officer. ‘Psychedelic, isn’t it?’ he said chummily.

‘Disturbingly so. What is it?’

‘Children’s play area. Place for the mums to bring their kids and sit around having coffee and cake while the carpet-crawlers tire themselves out. It’s filled with padded climbing frames and slides and stuff. All perfectly safe.’

‘What’s wrong with a patch of waste ground and a rusty bicycle?’ Emma wondered.

‘Or a street corner and a vial of crack cocaine?’ the constable replied with a smile.

‘Point taken. If you don’t provide them with somewhere to go, they’ll make their own entertainment.’

‘Can I help?’ he said, emboldened and changing direction
towards her. She’d seen that smile, and that body language, so many times before.