Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (31 page)

He pushed down on the wave of gratitude and warmth that threatened to swamp him, in the same way that he had pushed down on the sob that had threatened to overwhelm him earlier. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

‘As soon as you can, please.’

His mobile beeped at him as Jane Catherall’s call disconnected, telling him that someone else had tried to get in touch while he was on the phone and had left a voicemail message. He checked the ‘Missed Calls’ tab. It was Rouse, probably demanding he come back. He’d check it later, once he was far enough away.

The drive to the mortuary didn’t occupy his mind anywhere near enough. He knew the route so well that his thoughts were free to wander, and inevitably they kept coming back to Emma, kidnapped and at the mercy of an insane murderer. He remembered what had been done to the other victims – Lorraine Gregory, Alison Traff, David Cave and Catriona Dooley. The first one slowly pulled apart, the second one stuck through with skewers again and again, the third one with his skin stripped off and the fourth cut to pieces with wires. What was in store for Emma? And how long could she last?

His hands suddenly spasmed on the steering wheel, nearly sending him into the path of an oncoming truck. He swerved out of the way, getting a
blast
from the truck driver’s horn. He could feel a tightness in his chest, a panicky sensation of breathlessness. His hands were shaking. His heart was hammering. What if he were too late?
What if she died?

Pulling up at the mortuary, he had to spend a minute with his eyes closed, getting his breathing under control. He would get Emma back. He had to.

The ever-reliable Dan let him in and escorted him to Jane Catherall’s laboratory. She was dressed in a white lab coat, and was standing over a metal autopsy table with a gutter and a thick metal rim running around the edge. His stomach turned over when he saw what was on the table. It was Tamara Stottart’s extensively burned body.

On the grass in front of Charlotte’s flat, the body had appeared to be almost completely carbonised, at least on the surface. Now, seeing it under the stark lighting of Jane Catherall’s mortuary, Lapslie could see that there were areas on the backs of her legs and the insides of her forearms that were blistered rather than burned, and that the cuts Jane had made during the course of her autopsy had revealed vivid red flesh just beneath the blackened areas.

‘Ah, Mark. I won’t keep you more than a few moments. Come over here.’

Reluctantly, he complied. He could feel an acidic burning at the back of his throat as his stomach contents rebelled at the sight and the smell of the girl’s body.

‘Obvious fourth degree burns covering at least seventy-five per cent of the surface area,’ Jane murmured. ‘As expected, the histological tests indicate that the cause of death was respiratory failure, and I have discovered no other wounds on the body that might have caused her death, but look here.’

She indicated the inside of Tamara’s left forearm. Lapslie leaned closer. It looked as if there were cuts along the skin. The heat and the blistering had reddened them, making them more visible.

‘Self-harm?’ Lapslie asked.

‘I don’t think so. Look at the other arm.’

Lapslie moved around the table. The right forearm had similar marks.

‘So she self-harmed symmetrically. You’re losing me.’

‘You’re not thinking properly,’ Jane said critically. ‘Typically, self-harmers tend to concentrate on the arm opposite to the one with which they are dominant. Right-handed girls – and they are usually girls, by the way – will cut into their left arms, and left-handed girls will cut into their right arms. The
scarring here is symmetrical, indicating to me that the cuts were inflicted by somebody else.’

Lapslie straightened up, his mind a whirl of thoughts. ‘She was tortured?’

‘She was brutalised, at the very least, and over a long period of time, if the scarring is to be believed. There is evidence of scars over scars which themselves lie over scars.’

‘So even if she did commit suicide, it could well have been more to escape the torture being inflicted on her than because she thought I was harassing her.’

‘That would be a reasonable assumption, based on the evidence.’

‘And that torture is likely to have been inflicted by a family member?’

‘Statistically,’ Jane agreed, ‘most physical abuse occurs within the family.’

‘Stephen Stottart,’ Lapslie muttered. ‘It keeps coming back to him.’ He reached out to squeeze Jane Catherall’s shoulder. ‘Thanks, Jane.’

‘Bring her back. Just … bring her back.’

He nodded. ‘I will.’

He drove away from the mortuary, setting his satnav for the postcode of the area where Tolla had its field sites for genetically modified wheat. If the pollen had been transferred from there to the clothing or the shoes of whoever had killed Catriona Dooley – Lapslie’s brain managed to think ‘Stephen Stottart’ at the same time as it was thinking ‘whoever had killed Catriona Dooley’ – then he needed to find out how far the pollen could drift. And Emma hadn’t managed to do that before she had been abducted, although she had at least established that Tolla was the only company experimenting with GM wheat in Essex.

The site was a few miles outside Billericay, along a straight,
single-track, tarmac lane that led off a main road with no sign to say where it went. On either side the ground was uncultivated, running to long grass. He passed a handful of tents a few hundred yards down, but couldn’t see anyone in them. Strange place for a campsite, he thought.

Far enough away from the road that it wasn’t obvious, a fence separated the Tolla site from the rest of the world. A gate set into the fence bisected the road. A small Portakabin had been concreted into the ground beside the gate, and as Lapslie pulled up a security guard stepped out.

‘Private property,’ he said, scanning Lapslie’s dashboard for a car pass. ‘No entry, Sir.’

‘Police,’ Lapslie said, flashing his warrant card. ‘I need to see whoever is in charge.’

‘Wait one moment.’

The guard retreated back into his cabin. Lapslie could hear a one-sided conversation as he phoned through for instructions. After a minute or so he came back. ‘Mr Standish will see you by the main car park. Straight down the road, and you’ll see the car park to your left, just by the main enclosures.’

‘Enclosures?’

‘You’ll see.’ He vanished back inside the cabin. A few seconds later, the gate rolled open.

Lapslie continued down the road. Ahead he could see what appeared to be huge white balloons, half-inflated, lying on the ground. It was only as he got closer, and saw the car park which had been built off to one side of the road, that he realised that these were the ‘enclosures’ he had been told about: massive plastic tents built above what he presumed were the fields where the GM wheat was being grown.

The car park was half-filled with cars, but only one of them had a man standing beside it. He was wearing a three-piece suit,
rather surrealistically given the circumstances. His hair was close-cropped and his face had a weatherbeaten, outdoors look to it.

‘Dave Standish,’ he said, walking across and extending his hand as Lapslie got out of his car. ‘Site security. May I see your warrant card? Apologies, but we have to be sure of who we’re dealing with around here.’

Taking Lapslie’s card, he scrutinised it thoroughly while still talking. ‘I suppose this is about the protest camp. Well, I say “camp”. As far as I can see there’s never more than ten people there at any one time.’

‘It’s not about the camp,’ Lapslie said.

‘Oh.’ He seemed taken aback. ‘Then it must be about Steve’s kid. Not sure there’s anything we can tell you.’

Lapslie felt the back of his neck tingle. ‘Steve’s kid?’

‘Steve Stottart. His daughter died. I assumed you wanted to talk about it.’ He shrugged. ‘We heard it was suicide, but I guess there must be suspicious circumstances, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Stephen Stottart works
here
?’

Standish frowned. ‘He’s one of our biologists, but he’s not in today. Obviously. He’s looking after his family. We understand that.’

Lapslie shook his head, trying to get his thoughts straight. He wasn’t expecting to find such a direct connection. ‘Where exactly does Mr Stottart—’

‘
Doctor
Stottart.’

‘ – Doctor Stottart work?’

Standish pointed towards the furthest of the white plastic enclosures. ‘Eco-Dome Eight. That’s where his particular strain of wheat is being grown.’

‘I need to see inside.’

Standish shook his head. ‘No can do. There’s all kinds of confidentiality issues here. If our competitors got to know what we were doing, it could be disastrous for Tolla Limited.’

‘I’m in the middle of a murder investigation,’ Lapslie snapped. ‘If I have to come back with a search warrant, I will. I’ll also come back with a convoy of fifty police cars and Crime Scene Investigation vans, and I’ll make sure that your main gate is left open for so long that the entire protest camp can just walk through without anyone noticing.’

Standish smiled tightly. ‘Well, if you put it that way,’ he said. ‘Let me show you to Eco-Dome Eight.’

They walked past the other Eco-Domes, each one labelled with a big number on the front, to Number Eight. Standish led Lapslie to an airlock attached to the side.

‘We’ll both have to put on protective coveralls,’ he said.

‘Why – what’s so dangerous about the GM wheat?’

‘We’re not protecting us from it, we’re protecting it from us,’ Standish said.

Lapslie’s mobile beeped, indicating there was a text message for him. He opened the message, hoping against hope that it would be something saying that Emma had been recovered safely.

It wasn’t. The message was from an unknown number. All it said was: ‘
Look for a gift in your glove box. Use it. From a well-wisher.
’

Odd. Some kind of junk text, or a sister message to the email he’d been sent that had started this whole thing off? He saved it, just in case, making a mental note to check the glove box of his car later, just in case. There were some crazy people around. He’d arrested quite a few of them.

Five minutes later they were both dressed in hooded white paper coveralls strangely like the ones Sean Burrows and his people always wore at crime scenes. Elasticated cuffs at the
wrists and ankles and around the edge of the hood maintained integrity. Standish also insisted on gloves and on plastic bags over their shoes.

‘I don’t know what you expect to find,’ he grumbled as he led Lapslie through the second part of the airlock and into the Eco-Dome proper.

The inside was like a massive high-tech greenhouse. The plastic material of the Dome which had been white from the outside was almost transparent from the inside, and Lapslie could see the tracery of struts and stanchions that held it up. Rows of wheat led away from him in perspective lines, divided up into sections that were labelled with signs and surrounded with atmospheric sensors. The soil in which they were growing looked strange: orange rather than brown, more like sand or gravel.

Standish led the way down a central aisle. ‘Doctor Stottart is evaluating the growth rates of numerous different varieties of GM wheat,’ he confided over his shoulder. ‘There’s something like fourteen or fifteen main diseases that are endemic to wheat, which means a lot of pesticide has to be used to keep it healthy. Our aim is to reduce the use of those pesticides by creating breeds of wheat which are resistant to most, if not all, of those diseases. The soil here is artificial. It’s been sterilised of all bacteria and fungi, and the Eco-Domes are kept free of all insect life.’ He stopped by a batch of wheat that was growing particularly straight and strong. ‘As you can see, some of the varieties do better than others. That’s what Doctor Stottart is evaluating.’

‘He’s doing more than that,’ Lapslie said darkly. The soil beneath the wheat was lumpy in a way that Lapslie was familiar with from so many previous cases. He bent and plunged his hand into it.

‘Hey!’ Standish cried. ‘You’ll contaminate it!’

Lapslie pulled his hand out. Grasped in it was another hand: the skin splitting apart and mottled in green and black.

‘Too late,’ Lapslie replied. ‘It’s already contaminated.’

Emma’s head felt as if it was half-full of some heavy liquid, like mercury. Every time she moved, the liquid sloshed slowly from side to side, rocking her head back and forth against her will and making her feel nauseous; it still shifted around for minutes even when she held her head still. Even when she didn’t move, the liquid weighed her head down, forcing it towards her chest and making it hard to breathe properly.

Her head ached as well. It ached like the worst hangover she’d ever had. Like a port and whisky hangover. Spikes of pain were drilling into her temples, and there was a sharp ache just behind her eyes. Her mouth was full of saliva, and every time she swallowed her salivary glands pumped more in, accompanied by sharp pangs.

She tried to work out where she was. It wasn’t in bed, that much was for sure. If she was in bed then she would be lying down, not sitting up with her head bowed forward. Had she fallen asleep in her car? It’s wouldn’t be the first time, but her back didn’t feel like it was nestling into curved leather seats. It felt more like it was pressed up against a padded board.

And she couldn’t move her hands. They were resting on a cold, plastic surface. She could wriggle her fingers, but she couldn’t move her hands.

Maybe she was in hospital. The thought brought with it a
momentary giddy relief. If she was in hospital it would explain why she was sitting up: she was probably propped up so that the nurses could monitor her. She’d seen other people like that, usually when they’d just come out of surgery, or were in intensive care. The reason she couldn’t move her arms was obviously that they were attached to the bed so that she couldn’t turn over and pull out whatever intravenous drip was in her arm. She was feeling like shit because she’d had an accident of some kind. Maybe a car had hit her while she was trying to fix the tyre on her own car! She was injured, but she wasn’t quadriplegic because she could wriggle her fingers.