Tooth and Claw (34 page)

Time seemed to catch up with him, and he suddenly realised that it was all true. The way Lapslie had turned to see him, head tilted and a puzzled look on his face. Somehow he had known Carl was there. He had sensed his presence.

Carl didn’t know what to do. For the first time in years his plans had unravelled. There was nothing ahead of him but blankness.

He bolted around the cottage to the front, past Lapslie’s car.

Behind him the front door was wrenched open and Lapslie burst out, dressed only in boxer shorts. His hair and his eyes were wild, but he caught sight of Carl and let out a roar.

Carl accelerated as fast as he could down the driveway, hearing the pounding of Lapslie’s footsteps behind him. He twisted, expecting a hand to come down on his shoulder any second, but bright headlights suddenly blinded him from the road as a car pulled in. He jerked to one side, heading for a gap in the trees. Risking a glance over his shoulder he saw Lapslie with a hand raised to his face, shielding his eyes from the light as the car skidded to a halt just in front of him. And then the trees were covering the scene and Carl was away, racing through the darkness, avoiding holes and fallen tree trunks more through luck than instinct but still feeling thin branches whipping across his face as he ran.

He had taken a roundabout route back to his car, checking all the time for signs that he was being followed, or that somehow Lapslie had got ahead of him and was staking the car out, but it was safe and alone when he got there. He could feel the tension draining away from his muscles, leaving them weak and trembly. He’d screwed up. He’d screwed up
really
badly. The only saving grace was that Lapslie didn’t know who he was, so as long as he stayed out of the detective’s way he might be safe. He didn’t stop until he got back to his car. His breath was volcanic in his lungs, and he didn’t seem to be able to suck in enough air. He was sure he was going to suffocate. Eventually, however, his chest stopped burning and the pounding in his neck, his temples and behind his eyes subsided.

He’d escaped.

Perhaps he should stop murdering for a while.

But things were just coming to a head with his mother. She was investigating one of his crimes, and if he was lucky she
would get sucked into at least one of the others. He just needed her to admit that she was defeated, and he could stop. She just needed to come home.

Lapslie would be on the lookout for Carl now. He should go back to his original idea – killing Lapslie’s sidekick, Emma Bradbury. His mother would almost certainly still get involved.

He drove home slowly, through darkened streets, calmer now than he had been. Things could still work out all right.

He parked the car outside the house, and glanced up at the bedroom where his father slept. The light was off. He’d probably put himself to bed.

Carl went inside.

The lights were on downstairs, which was strange, and Carl could feel a breeze through the house. Had he left the back door open? He paused for a second, glancing back and forth between the stairs and the doorway into the kitchen. Should he check on Dad, or shut the door? He decided to shut the door first. If his dad was in trouble, or if his colostomy bag needed changing, then Carl might be up there for some time, and a cat or a fox could get into the house.

He walked through into the kitchen and was just about to shut the back door when he noticed a light down at the bottom of the garden.

The light in his outbuilding.

A chill flushed across his chest and back, bringing out goose-pimples. He knew –
knew
– that he had turned the light off before he had left the house. He always did.

But had he locked the door?

He moved rapidly down the garden path towards the outbuilding, stepping across the green curls of the hosepipe.

The door was ajar. Softly, he pushed it open.

Nicholas Whittley was standing beside the table in the middle
of the room, leaning on a cane. He turned as Carl entered the building.

‘Dad?’

Nicholas turned. His face was … what? Thunderous, certainly, in a way that Carl hadn’t seen since the accident, but also sad.

‘I knew this would happen,’ Nicholas sighed.

‘Knew what?’

‘Your mother’s books. Her files. Her photographs. I told her that letting you see them was going to have an effect on you, but she wouldn’t listen. She said you were stronger than that.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have insisted.’

‘Dad, you’re not making any sense. You should be in bed by now.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about the girl you mentioned, about getting some time to yourself, so I came down here to see whether you were still awake. You weren’t here, but the door was open, and I found …’ He waved the cane vaguely around at the shelves, and the dioramas of the rotting, unpreserved bodies of gulls and voles and badgers that lined them. ‘This – this
sickness
. What on earth have you been up to, Carl? And then I went into the other room, and …’ Words suddenly failed him.

The other dioramas. The
special
ones. The ones Carl had constructed to commemorate his killings. Nicholas had found them.

‘I can only think,’ Nicholas choked, ‘that you were reconstructing something you’d seen in your mother’s work, but it’s
wrong
, Carl. You have to
stop
.’

‘I can’t stop,’ Carl found himself replying.

‘What woman is going to want you if she finds out that you’re obsessed with … with building these grotesque versions of murder scenes?’

‘The only one that matters,’ Carl said softly. He turned and walked out of the building.

‘Carl! Come back here! I’m not finished!’

‘Yes, you are,’ Carl whispered, picking up the hosepipe from where it lay on the garden path and reaching out to turn the outside tap on. Water began to spill from the nozzle; hesitant at first, then gushing with more force.

His father knew. Not about the murders, but about the models of the murders, and it wouldn’t be long before he worked the rest of it out. Nicholas was an intelligent man. He would work out that Carl was recreating current crimes rather than old ones, and then it was only a matter of time before it occurred to him that Carl was creating, rather than just
re
creating.

Carl had to stop him. He could still get his mother back, but his father had to go.

He walked back inside the outbuilding, still holding the hosepipe. Water began to splatter across the walls and ceiling and table, the shelves and the glass-fronted boxes.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? Carl, you need help!’

‘It’s okay,’ Carl said, crossing the room to his father, ‘I’ve never needed any help.’

He knocked the cane from his father’s hand and pushed him backwards. Nicholas stumbled to his knees. Carl bent and tugged his father’s shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, revealing the colostomy bag adhering to his father’s side. With one savage movement he tore it off. His father cried out. The revealed stoma, a hole of raw pink flesh, gaped in amazement like a tiny mouth.

Carl thrust the gushing hosepipe into the wound and held it there while his father thrashed and screamed, watching as the water that backspilled out of the hole turned a muddy brown with the half-digested residue of Nicholas’s last meal, and then a foamy red as something inside his father ruptured, sending his lifeblood pulsing into and out of his twisting, writhing body.

The sound of drumming still blanked out all other sounds, including the ragged rasp of Lapslie’s own breathing. Blinded by the headlights of the car in front of him, he sat on the ground, grass cold and damp beneath his boxer shorts, waiting for the sharp pain that started just under his ribs and radiated through his entire body, and which flared up when he breathed, to subside. He was terrified that he might have to spend the rest of his life doubled over.

The murderer had been in his house. In his
bedroom
! There was no doubt in his mind. He would never be able to convince a court of law of the fact, but the drumming noise in his head had woken him up, and when he turned over there was a hooded figure with a knife standing there. If he hadn’t lashed out with his feet then he would be dead. Whoever it was obviously wanted it to look like a burglary gone wrong, but it was clear to Lapslie that they wanted him out of the way. They must have been listening to the radio reports that he could smell the killer out, the one leaked by Dain Morritt, and decided to act.

The ache was receding now, more the memory of agony than the agony itself.

The slam of a car door made him look up, into the dazzling lights. Another door slammed. A bulky figure obscured the driver’s side headlamp, walking towards him.

‘Well fuck me backwards,’ a voice boomed, dripping with
vinegar and mustard seeds, ‘if it isn’t Mark Lapslie in his underwear. Very fetching kecks you have there.’

‘McGinley?’ Lapslie was stunned. ‘
Dom
McGinley? What the
hell
are you doing here?’

‘Someone told me you were dead,’ the voice said. ‘Or dying. Can’t remember which one it was. Thought I’d come and check, for a laugh.’

A smaller figure cut into the bright splash of the passenger side headlights. ‘Boss? Are you okay?’ Mandarin and lemon and lime. ‘Who was that running away?’

Lapslie felt as if his world had received a tremendous clout around the ear. What the hell was happening to him? Was he actually dreaming all this? ‘Emma? Is that you?’

She came closer, crouching down so that her face was on a level with his. McGinley loomed above them both, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, breath pluming in front of him like cigar smoke, haloed by the light.

‘I saw a knife. Are you injured? Shall I call for an ambulance?’

‘I’m okay. I think you scared him off.’

‘Him?’

‘I’m pretty sure it was a bloke. And young with it, judging by the way he ran off.’

‘Not Eleanor Whittley, then?’

‘No. And not Catherine Charnaud’s boyfriend, either. Not tall enough or muscular enough. We were wrong about him, too.’ He squinted into her face. ‘What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing in a car with Dom McGinley? The man’s a certified villain.’

‘And he’s my boyfriend, boss.’

Lapslie’s world reeled from another clout to the side of the head. ‘Boyfriend? McGinley? Since when?’

‘Since about two years ago,’ McGinley said from above them.
‘Met at a wedding, of all things. Hit it off, and moved in together a few months later.’

‘Emma,’ Lapslie said urgently, ‘this man has more blood on his hands than a halal butcher. You’re risking your career just breathing the same air as him. Ask him about Dave Finnistaire.’

‘Your hands aren’t exactly clean, sunshine,’ McGinley countered. ‘There’s more than a few guys still have problems hearing or seeing because of you. And there’s at least one whose missus left him because he couldn’t have kids any more after you “questioned” him in the interview room. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, eh?’

Lapslie sighed. ‘We’ll talk about this, Emma, but not right now. What I want to do right now is have a shower and get some clothes on, and then I want you two to tell me exactly what you’re doing here.’

‘Boss – you can’t have a shower. Evidence!’

He shook his head tiredly. ‘One, I don’t care. Two, I only touched him once, and the duvet was between me and him. By all means let Burrows try his DNA tricks on my duvet. There won’t be much else to contaminate any samples, believe me.’

He led the way back to the cottage and, while Emma put the kettle on downstairs, he went upstairs and had a long shower, letting the hot water sluice the dirt and the sweat and the tension from his body. After he’d finished, he dressed in the clothes he’d left hanging up in his bedroom. When he came down again Emma was sitting at the breakfast bar staring into her cup of tea and McGinley was prowling round the room looking at Lapslie’s photographs. His hair was greyer than Lapslie remembered, but his face still looked like a canvas bag full of rocks.

‘Where’s the little lady, Lapslie? She and the nippers are in all the pictures, but there’s no sign of them in the house.’

Lapslie ignored him. ‘Talk,’ he said to Emma.

‘I got worried about you,’ she said, still not looking up from her cup of tea. ‘Dom and I were talking, and he said that if he was the killer, and he thought that you had a way of tracking him, he’d get you out of the way.’

‘Better safe than sorry, eh?’ McGinley interjected. ‘Doesn’t matter how Dagenham it all sounds – it’s worth getting you out of the way, just in case.’

‘Dagenham?’ Emma queried, looking up at McGinley.

‘Several stops past Barking,’ Lapslie explained tiredly. ‘You’ve been discussing the case with him? Jesus, this just gets better and better. They may have to invent an entirely new set of disciplinary offences just to cover it.’

The adrenalin was only now fading out of his system, leaving behind it a sick realisation that he might have died, less than an hour ago, with only him and his killer knowing what had happened. He might have become just another of the killer’s ‘horizontal murders’; a stabbing in a bedroom, following on from a bombing on a station, a torture in a bedroom, a strangling in a farmhouse and God alone knew what else before. He didn’t know whether he had been saved by luck or by design, but he knew for sure that he couldn’t just sit there.

The taste. He kept tasting the sound of the knife as it hissed through the air in front of him. It was the coldest taste in the world.

Emma’s mobile rang. While she took the call his eyes settled on the back door. The lock had been jimmied open, but it didn’t look too damaged.

‘Boss,’ she said, closing the phone up, ‘that was the local police in the Dengie Hundreds area. They were called to a disturbance a few minutes ago and found a dead body.’

‘Another one,’ Lapslie murmured. ‘Just what we need.’

‘But this one is Eleanor Whittley’s husband. Someone in the incident room made the connection and notified me.’