Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  Praise for Tooth and Claw

  ‘In Nigel McCrery’s highly impressive Tooth and Claw … these two damaged individuals are to meet in a lethal game, which will have a terrifying – and very final – outcome’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Gripping new series … a very sadistic murderer’ Daily Mirror

  Praise for Core of Evil

  ‘Interesting and enjoyable … an ingenious story’ Literary Review

  ‘Lapslie’s condition provides an interesting angle and the tight plotting and intriguing back story of the killer keep the reader hooked’

  Buzz

  ‘Nigel McCrery introduces an excellent new detective … in his highly original novel’

  Daily Mail

  ‘One of the most memorable monsters in modern crime fiction … as Lapslie and Bradbury tackle the highly disturbing mysteries, few readers will put the book down’

  Daily Express

  NIGEL MCCRERY worked in the Nottinghamshire Constabulary for several years, until he left the force to study at Cambridge University. He has created and written some of the most successful television series of the last ten years – his credits include Silent Witness, Born & Bred, New Tricks, All the King’s Men and Back-Up. He is also the author of five internationally bestselling Sam Ryan mysteries. Nigel lives in London.

  TOOTH AND CLAW

  Nigel McCrery

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Quercus This paperback edition first published in 2010 by

  Quercus

  21 Bloomsbury Square

  London

  WC1A 2NS

  Copyright © 2009 by Nigel McCrery

  The moral right of Nigel McCrery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84916 222 7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed and bound in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc.

  Ashley McCrery

  My brother and my friend

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Tip your head back and open your mouth.’

  The voice was cultured, smooth, devoid of any obvious emotion. No anger, no hatred, no lust. Just the faintest tinge of academic curiosity; nothing else.

  He shook his head. ‘Please,’ he begged, his voice cracking, ‘I don’t—’

  ‘I said, tip your head back and open your mouth.’

  He could smell alcohol on his captor’s breath. The blindfold around his eyes meant he couldn’t see what was happening, so when fingers entwined themselves in his hair and pulled his head back until his face was pointed up towards the ceiling he gasped in shock at the pain. His hair felt as if it was being pulled out by the roots. While that hand was still entangling his hair another one took his chin and forced his mouth open. It let go, but before he could close his mouth something was pushed past his teeth: something that felt like a dental dam of some kind, a plastic plate with a hole in the centre, too rigid for him to crush between the roof of his mouth and his tongue. It kept his mouth gaping open in a silent, frozen scream. He wanted to fight against it, to push his captor away and rip the thing from his mouth, but his arms were tied to the chair and he couldn’t move.

  His breath came in ragged gasps past the obstruction in his mouth. He wanted to gag. The insides of his cheeks and tongue were drying out as his saliva evaporated. Tears squeezed their way out of his closed eyelids and prickled their way down past his temples and into his hair. He felt a hot flush of shame across his skin. He wanted to be strong but helplessness made him feel faint.

  ‘I’m going to put something into your mouth,’ the voice said, as calm and as measured as if his captor was reading a set of instructions for some new beauty treatment. ‘It’s important that you don’t swallow. Close your throat up and breathe through your nose.’

  He tried to shake his head but the grip on his hair intensified. Something smooth and warm touched his lower lip. He tried to pull away but the hand on the back of his head pushed him suddenly forward.

  A tube pushed past his teeth and into his mouth through the hole in the dental dam. He nearly gagged on the plastic as it scraped his tongue. Before he could even take a breath, a warm, thick liquid invaded his mouth; trickling around between his teeth and his cheeks, infiltrating its way beneath his tongue, sending questing fingers down his throat until he blocked it. He felt his stomach rising up in protest. He had to breathe through his nose, but he was hyperventilating and his nostrils were closing and his breath wasn’t coming fast enough. He began to feel light-headed.

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ the voice said as a hand stroked his hair. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

  And then, nothing. Nothing but the solidifying waxy mass in his mouth, and the increasingly difficult whistle of breath through his nostrils, and the red static that invaded the darkness of his blindfolded eyes, creeping in from the outside until everything was red and he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was going to die …

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dawn arrived in Mark Lapslie’s bedroom an hour before the sun rose.

  The increasing blush of light brought him gradually from a dream in which sound, sight and touch were all melded together into a slippery mass of inchoate, abstract sensation, and where he knew, with increasing terror, that some clue, some vital piece of evidence, was slipping away from him, disguising itself as something else, although he had no idea what it was or what case he was investigating.

  Eventually, awake, he scrunched himself over in the bed and looked at the display on the alarm clock: 05:00. Time to get up.

  The clock was one of the many concessions he’d had to make to the synaesthesia that was increasingly ruling his life. For a while he had switched to a digital alarm clock with an LCD display, but he had found that the repeated beep of the alarm caused him to wake tasting crab apples. Eventually, in desperation his wife had bought him a sunrise alarm: a clock with a globe on top that gradually glowed brighter and brighter as it approached the time he set it for. No beeping, no clanging, no audible alarm at all; just a gradually false sunrise that brought his body gently out of sleep.

  It had been the most thoughtful present his wife had ever bought him. Shortly after that – bolstered, perhaps, by the thought that she had done her duty and made sure he was all right despite his health problems – she moved out, taking the children with her.

  Things could have been worse. At least they still saw each other, even slept together from time to time.

  Lapslie sat up in the bed and ran a hand through his hair. He glanced across at the windows. They were double-glazed to screen out the taste of the foxes that screamed in the night and the dawn chorus of birds that greeted the real sunrise. It was still dark outside, but he wanted to get started on his paperwork before the world outside his cottage began to wake up. After a period of relative stability his synaesthesia had been getting progressively worse over the past year. It had gone from a state where he could just about bear to be in an office environment, as long as he had a quiet room to which he could retreat when things got too much, to the point where the background hum of casual conversation would
make him feel as if he was travel-sick, throwing up every half hour or so, despite wearing earplugs. Only his cottage, isolated in the countryside near Saffron Walden, allowed him some respite, and so Chief Superintendent Rouse had grudgingly shifted his responsibilities to allow him to work from home, writing a series of reports on potential restructurings of the Essex Police Constabulary. Rouse wasn’t happy about it, demanding a medical report from Lapslie’s consultant before he would put anything in writing, but in the end he had to accept that Lapslie could either work at home or resign. The choice was that stark.

  If Lapslie was lucky then he could crack a couple more sections of the report before noises from outside intruded too much and he had to retreat to his bedroom and try to sleep through the afternoon before starting work again in the evening. The cottage was isolated from main roads – standing alone in the middle of several acres of trees – but there were still the sounds of tractors and chainsaws and every passing aircraft to contend with. He had even considered switching to a nocturnal cycle, but the mainstream of police activity still took place during the day and there were phone calls to field and emails that needed responding to urgently. Headphones or earplugs blocked out the noise, but stopped him from hearing the phone if it rang, and he found the artificial absolute silence unnerving and oppressive if he was alone in the house and working on something.

  The sunrise alarm clock was at full illumination now, casting a bright yellow glow across the room. He threw the duvet off, stood up and padded naked across the bedroom towards the bathroom. He showered quickly, the hiss of the water sending torrents of cauliflower down his throat, and dressed for the office – a light blue, French-cuff cotton shirt, a dark blue tie whose pattern of an interlocking grid of golden rings and chains made senior officers think he might be a Freemason without actually confirming it, and dark suit with a subtle blue pinstripe effect. If he was going to work while he was at home then he wanted to feel like he was working.

  But even the solitary refuge of his cottage was turning slowly but inexorably into a prison of noise.

  Sometimes, if he turned a tap off too quickly, the pipes would bang and clatter as if someone was hammering them with an iron bar. For an hour or so after the central heating came on the house would creak as the joists expanded slightly. The wind, blowing around the walls, caused the air vent in the bathroom to vibrate if it caught them at the wrong angle. And sometimes there were noises behind the walls or in the ceiling that might have been mice scurrying past, or might just have been fragments of plaster falling down gaps between the bricks. The sounds caused a continual and unpleasant background taste in his mouth when he was in the house; a strange combination of lime juice and walnuts that had been allowed to rot.

  His office was at the back of the cottage, but he hesitated before heading there to pick up work on the report where he had left it the night before. He had to brace himself. He had to prepare himself for the task. He hated using a keyboard – the repetitive click of the keys made him taste hot pilchards in tomato sauce – so whenever possible he tried to write longhand using a biro and then drive the pages to a woman in Saffron Walden who would type them up for him and put them on a CD-ROM. It was old fashioned – Victorian, even – but it was the only way he could manage. Even then, however, while writing he had to try not to shift his position in case the chair creaked or the stuffing in the cushions shifted.

  He felt sometimes as if he was spending his time standing perfectly still, perfectly quiet, while life slid past him like water past a rock. Other people could enjoy themselves in bars and pubs, restaurants and cinemas, but he was condemned to a monastic life of near-silence and contemplation. There were times when he wished he could just ask a surgeon to slice through the nerves that transmitted sensation from his mouth to his brain, but even then he thought he would probably still experience the unwanted tastes. After all, they weren’t real – merely phantoms originating somewhere in his brain. He knew that because, in the early days of the synaesthesia, he had sometimes tried to numb his taste buds, either with an oral anaesthetic gel that he had found in a pharmacy or, in desperation, with the hottest murgh phall curry that he could order in the takeaway nearest his cottage. Neither option worked. With the oral anaesthetic he found he could still experience sounds as tastes, although they were unpleasantly muted and distorted, while the phall just gave him heartburn for two days.

  A soft knock on the cottage door caused smoked herrings to chase themselves around his teeth and tongue. He checked his watch. Five thirty a.m. – far too early for the postman.

  It was work. It had to be work.

  He opened the door. Detective Sergeant Emma Bradbury was standing outside. Her car was a hundred yards away, considerately parked so that the noise of her idling engine wouldn’t bother him too much. The glow from the headlamps combined with the faint mist in the air silhouetted her, haloing her body in grainy light. She was wearing a grey silk blouse with a black bolero jacket over the top and black jeans.

  ‘Emma?’

  She acknowledged Lapslie with a nervous nod of her head. ‘Boss – sorry to disturb you.’ Her voice held a citrus tang. ‘I was going to ring from the car, but I saw your bedroom light was on.’

  ‘I wanted to make an early start. Rouse has got me writing reports for him.’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah, he said.’ She looked towards the side of the doorframe, where the nameplate for the house was attached. ‘Thyme Cottage? I’d never noticed that before. Rather twee, isn’t it?’

  He took a deep breath, feeling the vestiges of sleep still tugging at the corners of his vision, making his head heavy and his eyes gritty. ‘My wife’s idea. She’s a holistic therapist. Look, I take it this isn’t a social call? I haven’t seen you for months.’

  ‘No, we’ve – we’ve got a case. You and me.’ She kept raising her fingers to her mouth as though she wanted a cigarette, then rubbing her upper lip nervously when she realised that she wasn’t holding anything in her hand.

  ‘I don’t do cases any more, Emma,’ he said gently. ‘They’ve put me out to pasture. And I thought you were working with someone else now.’

  ‘I am. I was. Chief Superintendent Rouse told me specifically to come and get you. He said he needed you. He was very insistent.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Lapslie took a deep breath. ‘Emma, I just can’t. It’s physically impossible. Rouse knows that.’

  ‘He told me to tell you that he needs you on this one. He called me from home.’

  ‘Tell him I refuse. No, I’ll call him and tell him myself.’

  Again, that nervous lift of the hand to the mouth. ‘He told me to tell you that he’s got another report for you to write. It’s an analysis of the way police witnesses give evidence in court. He said you’d have to spend the next three months attending hearings and cases at Southend, making sure you had all the evidence you needed.’

  Lapslie closed his eyes and shook his head. He could feel his pulse beating fast in the arteries of his neck. ‘That’s blackmail.’

  ‘Yeah, he said you’d say that. And he told me to tell you that you’re right – it is blackmail.’

  ‘Okay. All right. Give it to me in as few words as you can manage.’

  Emma paused for a few seconds, marshalling her thoughts. ‘A young and beautiful TV newsreader found stark naked and mutilated on her bed, to which she had been secured with plastic builders’ ties.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Jerked out of the ruts of self-pity that it had been trapped in, Lapslie’s mind skittered across the various potentials for trouble a case like that could bring. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Emma said sombrely. ‘I really wouldn’t like to think that she might still be alive looking like she does now.’

  ‘You’ve been there already?’

  ‘I was on duty when the call came in. As soon as I found out who the victim was, I informed my superiors. They ran it right up the chain of command, and Chief Superintendent Rouse called me back and told m
e to get you on the case.’

  ‘Who was the victim?’ Lapslie asked, remembering with a visceral clench of his stomach muscles the investigation into the shooting of the BBC newsreader Jill Dando ten years before.

  ‘Her name was Catherine Charnaud,’ Emma said. ‘She read the news on one of the satellite channels.’

  Lapslie wasn’t really listening. He was remembering, instead, those days, weeks, months of the Jill Dando investigation, and how the microscope of publicity had caused a calamitous buildup of errors and assumptions in the investigation. When a policeman was killed, the police pulled out all the stops to find the killer. It was an immediate, instinctive response. Nobody took leave; everyone did what they had to, no matter how small. When Jill Dando was killed her colleagues reacted in a similar way. The subsequent investigation was probably the most scrutinised, the most discussed, the most journalistically dissected that the police had ever undertaken.

  And now it was going to happen again. He could feel it.

  No wonder Rouse wanted him on the case. He almost forgave the man. Almost.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘where do we need to go?’

  ‘Chigwell: Holy Cross Road. The house is called “Manor Farm”, but I can’t see much evidence of farmland around there. Right in the Footballers’ Wives and Girlfriends’ belt.’

  ‘Which is about as far from a chastity belt as it’s possible to get.’ His mind raced through options and plans that he’d thought were behind him now and receding in the rear-view mirror of his career. ‘Get on the phone. Keep sightseers away and make sure whoever’s manning the boundary of the crime scene doesn’t talk to reporters. And I mean doesn’t talk at all. Not even a “No comment”. If I hear anything apart from informed guesswork from the reporters I’ll have someone’s skin as a seat cover.’

  ‘Understood. You want the Crime Scene Investigators to get to work before you get there?’