The Thirteenth Coffin (31 page)

‘Someone shot at us. Look, you and Parkin need to get out of it. Plausible deniability. I don’t want you involved. No point dragging you down with me.’

‘We’ve already gone, sir. We’re about a mile away, just outside Great Chesterford. What do you want us to do with the guns?’

Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘Take them apart and throw the bits in various lakes and rivers.’

‘Understood.’

There was an awkward pause, which Lapslie picked up on. ‘Was there something else?’

‘I know this isn’t a good time to tell you, but we’ve just heard that the teacher, Tony Turner, has gone missing. It’s been reported on the radio.’

Lapslie was taken aback. ‘I thought he was surrounded by security. How the fuck has that happened?’

‘He ran.’

‘He
what
?’

‘Apparently he ran away from them, and the SOCO team lost him.’

‘Why the fuck did he run?’

‘No idea, boss. Sorry.’

Lapslie thought for a moment. Ideas and concepts shooting though his brain like shooting stars. Finally he came to a conclusion.

‘Okay, meet me at his place in thirty minutes. If I’m right, I think I know why he ran.’

‘Ten four, sir.’

Lapslie hadn’t quite finished. ‘One more thing.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Ignore my previous order. Hang on to the guns.’

*

It took Lapslie forty-five minutes to get to Tony Turner’s house. Carl Pearce and Dave Parkin were already there. He waved them across and they climbed into the back of his car. ‘So, how’s it looking?’

‘They’ve pulled off most of the security: just left a woodentop on the door.’

‘Can we get rid of him for fifteen minutes? I need time to get inside and have a quick look around.’

Pearce nodded. ‘Not a problem.’ Jumping from the car, he quickly disappeared around the front of the house.

‘Dave.’

‘Sir.’

‘I want you and Carl to search upstairs: there are only two bedrooms and a bathroom. I’ve been here before. Social occasion.’

‘Anything and everything, boss?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘Sort of. I’m looking for a note or a letter. It might not be there – he might have taken it with him – but I need to be sure.’

Parkin was a bit confused. ‘What kind of note?’

‘You’ll know it when you see it. Can you tell Carl?’

‘No worries.’

Carl Pearce suddenly appeared again by the side of the car. Lapslie looked up at him. ‘Got rid of him?’

He nodded. ‘Her, actually. Sent her to get me some fags. She was a Special. You know what they’re like: keen to please. Good news is, she gave me the key to the front door.’ He held the key up triumphantly.

‘How long do you think we have?’

Parkin looked at his watch. ‘Well, the shop is about half a mile away. I told her not to rush, but she probably will. She’s that eager. So I’d say twenty, maybe thirty minutes, tops.’

Lapslie nodded. ‘Well, let’s get on with it then. Carl will brief you.’

The three detectives made their way to the front door
and let themselves in. Pearce and Parkin made their way up to the bedrooms while Lapslie began his search downstairs.

He started with the waste-paper bins, and struck lucky. What he was looking for was sitting right on top of a pile of other disregarded papers. It was, he thought, some kind of sign.

Opening it out flat, he began to read:

It wasn’t signed, but Lapslie knew who had sent it.

Lapslie looked at his watch. Ten minutes to three. He knew he would have to do the last part himself. He couldn’t involve Parkin and Pearce any further. He had a feeling this was going to be the final act, one way or the other. If anyone was going to end this it had to be him, and he didn’t want anyone else to die with him.

Pushing the letter into his pocket, he slipped out of the house and back to the car, leaving his two colleagues still searching the upstairs rooms. Once in the car he checked Bradbury’s automatic before driving off in the direction of St Mary’s.

*

The church car park was empty when he arrived. Nobody about, not a single car there. Making sure his 9mm was not on safety, he made his way towards the church. The automatic made him feel more secure, but that was an illusion. If he was going to be killed then it would be from a mile away, and he wouldn’t even hear it coming. Still, he thought, there was something reassuring in being dead before you knew it.

Lapslie walked around to the far side of the church, away from the main door. There he found the small door that must lead into the vestry. He tried it, but it was locked. Walking back to the front of the church would make him an easy target, so the only safe way now was through that door, and damn the blasphemy. Stepping back, he kicked hard at the lock. After three or four heavy kicks, the door finally gave way, and he could step inside.

Walking through the vestry to the main door into the church, which was also locked, he slid the large bolts
across and managed to push it open. He didn’t want to open it fully: just enough for him to squeeze through and still remain low enough not to make an easy target. The door creaked slowly open.

Lapslie looked outside. At first it seemed clear, but then he noticed, slightly to the right of the door, a shoe, or rather a Doc Martin boot. He crawled out slowly and pulled at the boot. It was heavy, and Lapslie quickly realized it was attached to a body. He had a good idea whose body it was.

Keeping low to the ground, he crawled out through the nave of the church until he was fully over the body. When he got level with the head, he twisted to face it. Any hope he had of identifying the body was quickly dispelled. What was left of the face was just a bloody mess, with few, if any, discernible features to go by. Near the top of the head was one of the small coffins. Lapslie reached out and grabbed it, pulling it to him and opening it. Inside was the doll of the teacher. It was either the same as, or identical to, the one he had seen in the bunker. If there had been any doubts in his mind before that this body, or what was left of it, was Tony Turner, then this doll quickly dispelled those.

It struck Lapslie with crushing force that with the death of Turner he was the only one left. He was to fill the thirteenth coffin.

Keeping hold of both the doll and the coffin, Lapslie began to crawl back towards the vestry and the protection it allowed. As with the concept of medieval sanctuary, part of him felt that once inside the vestry he would be safe.

As he was still crawling across the nave of the church, only yards from the vestry door, he suddenly felt an object being pushed into his back.

‘That’s far enough, Mark. No sanctuary for you, I’m afraid.’

Lapslie rolled over, and came face to face with Doctor Jeffrey Whitefoot. The police surgeon was holding a sniper’s rifle, the barrel pointed at Lapslie’s face. For some reason, Lapslie didn’t feel afraid. If anything, he felt a strong sense of calm. Like a man coming to the end of a long journey of discovery to find the truth. Despite the calm, he carefully felt the outside of his pocket to make sure he could feel the shape of the automatic pistol. As the Arabs say: trust in Allah, but always tie up your camel.

‘So, it
was
you. I was hoping it wasn’t.’

Whitefoot nodded. ‘It was me. It always was. You came very close, Mark, very close, but God just wasn’t on your side.’

Lapslie knew he was finished. He just hoped that, given the information they already had, even fools like Rouse and Shaw would be able to track Whitefoot down.

‘So why the children, Jeff? Why not the jury members themselves?’

‘Two reasons. First, if I had gone after the jury members themselves then someone would have realized pretty quickly what the connection was between the victims. Going after their children muddied the waters a bit, especially since some of them had married or otherwise changed their names. And second, of course, I wanted them to suffer as I had. I wanted them to know what it was like to lose a child.’ Whitefoot smiled, but there was no humour in his expression. ‘ “Suffer the little children”,’ he said quietly.

‘You’re misapplying the quotation,’ Lapslie pointed out.

‘It’s not a quotation,’ Whitefoot said, ‘it’s the actual Word of God. And believe me, I know what God wants me to do, much as it might pain me from a personal point of view.’

‘Those people were pure innocents; nothing to do with the death of your daughter . . .’

‘Nothing to do with it!’ Whitefoot screamed. ‘Their parents released a man who murdered my daughter! He raped her, he tortured her, then he killed her! He made her suffer for as long as he could, then he killed her as if she was
nothing
!’

‘And you did the same to their children.’

His voice had regained its eerie calmness. ‘I didn’t torture them or rape them. They died quickly, and mostly painlessly. I made sure of that.’

‘You’re as bad as the man who killed your daughter. Do you think she would have wanted that?’

‘She was dead, Mark. I don’t think she wanted anything any more.’

‘So you killed twelve innocent children out of your own warped sense of justice.’

‘Yes, justice. That’s a very good word, Mark. Justice. The parents felt what I did. They were as responsible for the death of my daughter as the evil bastard that killed her.’

‘And what about all the other people you murdered along the way? The police officers, Major Thomas’s girlfriend . . . Elizabeth Turner?’

‘That’s the fault of the jury members. If they had made the right decision then none of this would have happened. I would have been happy with life. I would have accepted what had happened. But no: they let him go to kill again. People should realize that they can’t make those kinds of decisions without being responsible for the outcomes.’ He looked around. ‘It happened in a church, Mark, did you know that? She’d run there for sanctuary, for protection, but there wasn’t any. He raped and tortured and killed her on the altar. On the
altar
!’

Lapslie moved his hand down towards his automatic. He knew there was no chance of pulling it out of his pocket; he would just have to try and fire it while it was still there and trust to luck, and whatever divine influence happened to be pointing his way.

‘What about me? Why do I get a coffin?’

‘The evidence you gave in the case was pathetic.’

‘I told the truth. We didn’t have a lot, Jeff. It was a risky prosecution at best.’

‘You could have stitched him up if you had wanted to. I know you’ve done it before. You’ve gone as soft as those bastards in Parliament. If you’d said he had admitted it then he’d have gone down . . .’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘Maybe not, Mark, but you could have
said
he did. The police used to do that. They kept the scum off the street any way they could.’

‘And put a lot of innocent people in the nick, who then got off on appeal and undermined the honesty of the police. Not a good policy in the long term, Jeff. It only leads to more killers being released.’

‘I couldn’t give a damn about other killers, I only care about this one, and you helped to let him go.’

Lapslie finally managed to get his hand around the butt of his gun in his pocket. All he had to do now was get his finger even partially around the trigger and he would be in with a chance. Or maybe just blow his balls off, depending on the orientation of the gun. It was difficult to tell.

‘Take your hand away from the pistol in your pocket.’

Whitefoot pulled his rifle up to his shoulder and pointed it directly at Lapslie’s head. Lapslie’s last chance had gone.

‘Why the dolls?’ he asked quickly. ‘What was the point of that?’

Whitefoot stared at Lapslie for a long moment. ‘That’s
what she looked like, when I saw her in the mortuary in Sydney. Like a doll. Not like my daughter at all. Like a broken doll.’

As Lapslie watched, Whitefoot’s finger begin to tighten around the trigger. Lapslie closed his eyes convulsively. His final thoughts were of his children.

He heard the shot: a deafening report. A salty, syrupy wash of flavour flooded his mouth. He was drowning in it. Everything they had said about being shot at close range was wrong. You
do
hear the shot that kills you.

It took a moment, but Lapslie suddenly realized he was still alive. He opened his eyes. Standing before him now was not Jeff Whitefoot, but Colonel Andrew Parr. He was standing over Whitefoot’s body, and he had a gun in his hand.

‘He wasn’t as good as he thought he was,’ Parr said calmly. ‘But then, none of us are, I suppose.’

Lapslie was speechless.

‘Cat got your tongue, Chief Inspector?’

Lapslie began to pull himself to his feet, unsure what to say, and still in shock. ‘Thanks?’

Parr smiled. ‘My pleasure. Won’t be able to take the credit though, old boy. I shot him at close range, so we
can mark it off as a suicide. Man kills his last victim and then, his task completed, kills himself. Police arrive late at the scene . . . I think you can fill in the gaps.’

As he was speaking two men arrived, dressed in white overalls. Lapslie was confused. What the hell were they doing there?

Parr read his thoughts. ‘It’s okay, old boy; they’re not SOCOs. They’re with me. They should have the scene sorted in a few minutes. In the meantime, I think you had better come with me.’

As they walked away, Parr took Lapslie’s arm. ‘Are you okay?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘A bit shaken up, but fundamentally okay. How did you know?’

‘We had our concerns about Whitefoot for a while. He trained with the regiment, you know? Spent fifteen years with us before leaving and retraining as a doctor. It was your Sergeant Bradbury that finally put us onto him. She called me. Anyway, he took some tracking down, but we finally got on to him.’