Tooth and Claw (11 page)

After a while he looked out of the driver’s side window; Emma Bradbury was standing outside the car, looking back at him.

He wound the window down. ‘Hey—’ he started.

‘Synaesthesia,’ she said, wincing slightly at his breath. ‘I’m sorry – it should have occurred to me that the trains going through would have caused a problem. It was thoughtless of me.’

‘Not your fault,’ he said, smiling weakly. ‘It’s never been this bad before. I thought it was stable, but …’

She nodded. ‘We’ll have to think this through. If the chief really wants you to work these cases, and if you don’t want to play the sick leave card again, then we’ll have to find another way to do this. There must be
something
…’

Behind her, four army personnel were steering a large device of some kind back along the platform. It was about the size of an armchair, and moved on six balloon tyres. A huge arm with multiple joints sat on top, next to a mast bearing a set of video cameras. The arm was so large that it seemed in perpetual danger of overbalancing the entire thing.

‘What about that?’ Lapslie asked.

One of the army personnel, a young, fresh-faced major, caught sight of them looking and broke off what he was doing. He approached the car, glancing from Lapslie to Emma and back, seemingly unsure which one was in charge and whether or not he should salute.

‘Major McGhee,’ he snapped. ‘Eleven EOD Regiment.’

‘Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie; Essex Constabulary. What’s the story?’

‘One improvised explosive device, already detonated before we arrived. Basic explosive, no chemical or biological components. We’ve checked the area, and we’re declaring it safe. No other devices. Our job is finished now – over to you.’

‘What can you tell us about the bomb?’ Emma asked.

The Major shrugged. ‘It was small and it was hidden in a rubbish bin. We found fragments of what appeared to be a mobile phone. That was probably what triggered it. We’ve left everything as close to the way we found it as we could. Forensics should still be intact.’

Emma was watching the device trundling along the platform. ‘What’s that?’ she asked bluntly. ‘Some kind of robot?’

‘It’s called a CUTLASS,’ Major McGhee replied. ‘It’s a remote
control manipulator, rather than a robot. No inherent intelligence, you see? It allows us to get close to a suspected device, look at it and potentially do something about it with the manipulator arm without risking a man’s life. Replaced the old tracked Wheelbarrow systems that we used to have.’

‘CUTLASS?’ Emma frowned. ‘Is that meant to stand for something?’

The Major smiled condescendingly. ‘It’s a codename,’ he said. ‘All military projects have a codename of some kind. Okay if we peel away now? You have OpCon.’

‘OpCon?’ Lapslie asked blankly.

‘Operational Control,’ the Major smiled. ‘Sorry – army slang.’

‘Actually,’ Lapslie said, ‘hang around for a while. I want to borrow your robot.’

It only took a few minutes before he was alone inside one of the army vans, seated in front of a bank of monitors and holding a joystick in his hands. The van was air conditioned and soundproofed, which was just what Lapslie needed. The Major had explained the principles of guiding the robot around – although he kept insisting that it wasn’t a robot, it was a remote control device. As long as Lapslie didn’t want to move the arm, or deploy a device for a controlled explosion, it was just like a Nintendo Wii game.

The Major had offered to have one of his corporals help Lapslie out, but Lapslie had refused. He didn’t want anyone else near him at the moment. He could still taste the bitter vomit in his mouth.

On the monitors, relaying colour pictures from the remote control device, the station platform was long, and mostly deserted. To Lapslie’s left a footbridge led across the tracks to the north bound platform, which was also empty. A swing door
leading to what Lapslie assumed was the coffee bar was located a few feet away.

About two thirds of the way along a body lay sprawled face up on the tarmac surface. ‘Face up’ was a bit of a misnomer. The front of the head was, as far as he could judge through the device’s cameras, a raw mask of burned and bloody flesh draped across an expanse of singed bone. What had once been a suit was now a mass of shredded cloth.

Lapslie trundled the device along the platform towards the body. It was lying in front of a pillar which had previously been providing support to the platform roof, but was now twisted and blistered. The remains of what had probably been a waste bin looked like a large metal sunflower, the metal of its construction frozen into crystallised, razor-edged petals. An attempt had been made to separate the scene off with yellow bollards and yellow-and-black striped tape. They lent a curiously carnival air to the situation, set against the pedestrian mundanity of the station itself and the burned and tattered body.

A flicker in the corner of one screen caught Lapslie’s eye. He adjusted the angle of the camera to cover the area. In the distance a train was rushing through the station; just a blur of motion on the monitor. No sound, no taste. No problem.

Lapslie stopped the device at the yellow-and-black tape, reluctant to violate the area that it enclosed, as if it was a separate world, a discrete space in which the normal rules of commuter life didn’t apply. This kind of thing was not meant to happen to people, he reflected; not on a routine work day.

Close up, the body was a faceless wreck, hardly human any more. For a disconcerting moment Lapslie was thrown back to Catherine Charnaud’s bedroom, where her body had been pristine, untouched except for the scouring of her arm. Here the damage was everywhere. The nameless commuter had obviously
been facing the rubbish bin when the bomb inside exploded. Everything from the knees up was burned, blasted and blistered. The skin was crisped in places, and some of the body fat on the chest and arms had melted, slowed and then solidified again in yellow rivulets, like candle wax.

The man’s shoes were, bizarrely, untouched. He had polished them recently, and they gleamed in the early morning light. His throat had been ripped from front to back by a sharp piece of metal debris. Inside, Lapslie could see the bruised wetness of the tissue, saliva still glistening against bubbles of blood.

His hair was still wet from the shower.

Lapslie used the controls to move the device round in a circle, angling the cameras up and down so that he could see the vicinity. He moved it closer to the platform edge and used the cameras to look over on to the track. The stones were black with diesel and dirt. Wads of greying tissue paper splattered across them showed where passengers had failed to heed the notice to wait until the train had left the station before flushing the toilet. Cigarette filters were scattered everywhere. It wouldn’t be long before they outnumbered the stones. Lapslie had a feeling they might last almost as long.

He pulled back and looked around again: not at the station, but at the surrounding locality. From the place where the victim had stood there was no line of sight to anything except the tops of houses and the distant retail centre. ‘There are three possibilities,’ he murmured to himself, using the monologue to structure his thinking. ‘Either the bomb was on a timer, or it was triggered by a sensor of some kind, or the bomber triggered it remotely, using a control. If it was remote controlled then the bomber needed to be watching from somewhere that provided a good view. Even if it wasn’t remotely controlled then the bomber might well have wanted to watch what happened.
And if I were them, I’d have watched from—’ he zoomed the camera in on the corner of a distant building until it filled the monitor ‘—the roof of that shopping centre …’

He left the remote control device where it was and got out of the van. Emma was waiting outside for him. As the two of them moved off towards Lapslie’s car, the army moved in to recover their device and close the equipment down.

‘According to witnesses who knew him, his name is Alec Wildish,’ Emma said. ‘He lives about fifteen minutes’ walk away. I’ve dispatched a constable to the house.’

‘Witnesses?’

Emma gestured towards the coffee bar. ‘Taking statements now, but so far nobody has told us anything useful. Apparently he was a regular commuter: used to smile and say “Good morning” to a few of the others, but nothing more social than that. He’d arrived a few moments before, and he was standing by himself near the edge of the platform. There was a sudden blast and a ball of flame, and he was thrown backwards. People thought it was a firework at first: apparently the kids around here sometimes throw bangers at the houses. He hit the ground hard. Some of the witnesses tried to help him, but he died within a few moments. Not a nice way to go.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Nothing anybody could understand. Apparently every time he opened his mouth he sprayed blood everywhere. I wouldn’t mind having shares in the dry-cleaning business around here: I’d clean up. As it were.’ Emma suddenly looked shocked. ‘Listen to us,’ she said. ‘Are we really talking about someone setting off bombs on a station platform? This isn’t Basra or Islamabad, this is Braintree!’

‘Until we’ve got a better explanation, that’s the one we work on.’ He paused. ‘The question we have to answer, of course, is:
was he a specific target, or was he chosen randomly?’ He was partly talking to Emma, but partly also talking to himself. ‘A search of his house will help establish that. Evidence of a stalker, connections to organised crime, anything to do with animal research that may have attracted the attention of the Animal Liberation Front … We need to check with SOCA that he’s not on their radar as well. Check his bank account for suspicious payments going out or coming in … Need to find out where he worked, as well, just in case there’s a connection. If he was in a position of financial responsibility in a bank or a financial organisation of some kind then there might be some connection to extortion or a theft of some kind. Perhaps he was facilitating some kind of white-collar crime and fell foul of the gang he was working with …’

‘Grasping at straws, aren’t we, boss?’

He smiled. ‘Well it’s not going to be a fight over a parking space at the local sports centre, is it?’

‘According to the stuff in his rucksack, he was apparently the manager at an electronics retailer in Oxford Street. I can’t see a connection coming out of that.’

‘Neither can I. That probably puts paid to the Animal Liberation Front theory.’

A disturbance near the entrance made him glance in that direction. A small group of people dressed in papery white coveralls was approaching. They all held bags or toolkits of various kinds. The man in the lead was small, in his fifties, with a quiff of hair that stuck straight up above his head.

‘DCI Lapslie,’ he called, his voice like some musty fruit wine in Lapslie’s mouth. ‘A pleasure to see you again. Busy few days, isn’t it? Got an interesting one here, I understand. It’ll make a change from the late night bottle fights outside nightclubs.’

‘Mr Burrows.’ Lapslie gestured to the station. ‘Not quite up
to the peculiar standards set by the Catherine Charnaud murder, but you might find some elements of interest. There’s a potential crime scene elsewhere as well, but we’re trying to pin it down now. I’d offer breakfast, but there’s a coffee bar just over there. Get whatever you need to keep yourselves going and submit an invoice later.’

Burrows nodded. ‘Talking of the Charnaud murder,’ he said, ‘the knife that was used came from the kitchen. It’s an
Usuba bocho
: a Japanese vegetable knife – carbon steel blade. And the ties that were used to secure her and cut off the blood supply to her arm were taken from the kitchen as well. There was a pile of them in a drawer. The report’s on your desk.’

‘Thanks,’ Lapslie said. While Burrows’s people knelt around the taped-off area and started to unpack their kit, the lead CSI himself stood back and took in the whole scene.

‘You want breakfast?’ Emma asked Lapslie. ‘They were running short of bacon the last time I looked. Surprising how much a group of coppers can get through, given half a chance.’

‘Why do you think they call us Pigs? No, I don’t think I fancy it now. Thanks anyway. I think I’ll head off. This place – I don’t think I can stand it much longer. I’m not sure I can stand anything much longer.’

As Sean Burrows and his team were entering the station, a tall man with dark hair brushed straight back off his forehead appeared. He was wearing a suit that looked better than Lapslie’s. Seeing Lapslie, he crossed the forecourt towards him.

‘DI Morritt,’ he said. His voice, strangely, had no taste to it. None at all. ‘And you are?’

‘DCI Lapslie,’ Lapslie said quietly.

‘Ah. I heard you were taken ill. Not used to seeing dead bodies at your rank?’

Lapslie refused to rise to the bait. ‘You’ve met my sergeant?’

Morritt nodded. ‘She apprised me of the situation earlier. I’ve got to say that I don’t think we need any help on this one.’

Lapslie shrugged. ‘We can dance around like this all night. It doesn’t get us anywhere. Chief Superintendent Rouse assigned me to this case. You can get on with the process; I’ll get on with the investigation. That way we’ll both be happy.’

Dismissing an indignant Morritt from his thoughts, Lapslie gazed along the side of the station to where the platform projected out, protected by a wire. Some of Burrows’s Crime Scene Investigators were still clustered around the body, but two of them had crossed to the other platform via the footbridge and were crouched on the blackened stones, examining the area between the platform and the tracks, beneath where travellers would normally stand. One of them turned, waving to Burrows.

‘We’ve got fragments,’ he shouted.

‘Bag ‘em and tag ‘em,’ Burrows called back. ‘We’ll identify them later. And keep looking. I want to be able to recreate that bin and everything in and around it.’

Everything save Alec Wildish
, Lapslie mused.

He turned back to Emma. ‘If Burrows is right, and all the equipment used to torture and murder Catherine Charnaud was present at the scene, that tells us something about the killer. It implies that they came unprepared, that they just made use of whatever was at hand. I need that criminal profiler on board as soon as possible. Any joy on that?’