Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Then why are we here?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘How was the body discovered?’

  ‘Apparently the boyfriend is a professional footballer. He was out last night with friends. Got back about four o’clock this morning, let himself in and …’

  Lapslie grimaced. ‘Not nice. Where is he now?’

  ‘One of the uniforms is taking his statement. Outside, in the fresh air.’

  ‘We’ll question him later. What do you make of the state the body’s in?’

  Emma frowned. ‘At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s a mess. On the one hand, torture is usually a personal thing: pain and mutilation inflicted in spades in return for some previous slight – some insult or injury that the torturer has blown out of all proportion. But that kind of goes against the meticulous nature of the torture here. Cutting that much flesh away that precisely takes time and care. It’s not something you do in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘It looks to me more like a message of some kind,’ Lapslie said.

  ‘What kind of message?’ she asked, obviously intrigued at the idea.

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? It might be the kind of message that only makes sense to someone who’s clinically insane, or refers to something that only one or two other people know about.’

  ‘Or perhaps the killer was removing something or obliterating something?’

  ‘What, like a tattoo?’

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘There are easier ways. And besides, women don’t usually get tattoos done on their arms. They normally opt for the ankle, the shoulder blade or the small of the back.’

  ‘I’ve got a—’ Emma stopped abruptly. ‘I’ve got a feeling you’re right,’ she continued, rubbing the fabric of her left sleeve with her right hand.

  Lapslie gazed around the kitchen. ‘Nice place. She must be doing well.’

  ‘With a job fronting the TV news and a footballer boyfriend, I guess she’s not short of a few bob.’

  ‘Any tensions with the boyfriend? Is he playing away, metaphorically as well as literally?’

  ‘We’ll look into his background.’

  He remembered the Jill Dando case, and the possibility – strong at the beginning but then progressively replaced by a belief that a stalker was responsible – that she’d been targeted by Serbian hitmen. ‘Check her recent broadcasts for anything contentious.’

  ‘Define contentious.’

  ‘You know the kind of thing. Suggestions of illegal activities involving Russian billionaires. Investigations into people-smuggling gangs in Eastern Europe. Hard-hitting exposés of corruption in the building work for the 2012 Olympics. Anything that might have made her a target in the eyes of someone willing to have her killed and ruthless enough to want to do it in a way that dissuades anyone else from following the same leads.’

  ‘She was a figurehead, boss, not a reporter. Her job was pretty much to read what was on her autocue as naturally as she could and look gorgeous while she did it.’

  Lapslie smiled as a stray thought tugged at a corner of his brain: something Sonia had told him, years before, when she was doing an MA in Fine Art. ‘You know the difference between naturalism and realism?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ Emma’s voice was wary.

  ‘Naturalism is showing the world the way it is, and realism is showing it the way it really is.’

  ‘Hmm. You need to work on your delivery, boss. Anything else?’

  Before he could answer, a uniformed constable entered the kitchen and approached them. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but the pathologist’s people are here. They’re asking if you can release the body.’

  ‘Check with the CSIs and the photographer. If they’ve all got everything they need then I’m happy the body gets taken.’

  The constable nodded, turned on his squeaky rubber heels and left.

  ‘Where was I?’ he continued.

  ‘Adding to my “to do” list,’ Emma replied sourly.

  ‘Okay. If she was in the media then there’s a fair to middling chance that she was doing recreational drugs: probably cocaine. That’s the drug of choice in TV and journalism. The post mortem will throw up any traces of the stuff in her system, but it’s worth making some preliminary inquiries. Find out if she’s ever been in trouble with the local police. It could be that she’s fallen foul of some kind of drug deal gone wrong. Perhaps she couldn’t pay for her last delivery.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  ‘Coordinate a search of the house, inside and out, paying particular reference to footprints in the soil outside; get statements from the neighbours; talk to the girl’s friends, relatives and co-workers to see whether there was any strain in her relationship with her boyfriend; get someone to check through her fan-mail for evidence of obsessive behaviour or stalking; get details on whatever security system the house has; and then get an incident room set up in the nearest police nick.’

  ‘In other words, all the standard stuff that I was already going to do.’

  ‘Of course. When in doubt, fall back on routine. That’s why it’s there. Find out if she had a computer in the house and impound it. Check for emails, blogs, anything that might give an insight into any odd relationships she’s developed. Do the same for her mobile phone as well. And check to see how many mobiles she has: sometimes celebrities have two; one for work and one for home. I’d hate to find out in a month’s time that we’d completely ignored a mobile phone that was almost in our laps.’

  ‘A month’s time? Do you really think the case will last that long?’

  ‘The Jill Dando case lasted over a year before they arrested someone, and even then they got it wrong.’ He glanced around the kitchen. ‘Do you think it’ll compromise the evidence chain if I use that percolator over there to make a jug of coffee?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll get something sent in from outside.’

  Something that tasted very much like a pork pie invaded his mouth. He grimaced involuntarily as saliva pinpricked his cheeks and flooded his tongue. Something out in the hall was making a noise. He stood, and headed for the kitchen door.

  Two figures in coveralls were manoeuvring a black body bag down the stairs. Each held one end, and the bag sagged in the middle. The sound he had heard had been the hem of the bag scraping against one of the pictures hanging on the wall. To Lapslie’s eyes the whole thing looked grotesquely like the start of a comedy sketch: two men with a piano, on the verge of dropping it or letting it slip, to zany comic effect; that 1960s Bernard Cribbins song ‘Right, Said Fred’ recast as a black comedy.

  ‘Careful,’ he snapped, aware of a dull headache forming behind his eyes. ‘That used to be a person.’

  One of the men looked sorrowfully at him. ‘No need to be like that, mate,’ he remonstrated. ‘We’re doing the best we can.’

  Lapslie watched them go, then wandered into the lounge, relishing the comparative silence. Two of the CSIs were dusting for prints, their gestures causing no more noise than a butterfly landing, and he stood in the centre of the room watching them for a while. There was a slight scent of perfume in the air, evident even above the smell of the fingerprint powder; Eau Jeune, he thought. Catherine Charnaud’s presence would take a while to fade away.

  Emma brought him a coffee after a few minutes, scared up from somewhere outside, and he sipped at it, letting his brain sort out the various impressions it had absorbed over the past hour or so. He had a feeling that this would be a tricky one. A straight crime of passion and he would have put a pony on it being the boyfriend, but torture and mutilation on the scale that he had witnessed up in the bedroom? That took it into a different world entirely.

  ‘Let’s follow the body to the mortuary,’ he said eventually. ‘If nothing else, it’s quiet there.’

  Emma looked around. ‘I should keep an eye on what’s happening here,’ she said dubiously.

  ‘They know their jobs, and I need you to drive me.’

  Emma shrugged. ‘An
d I know my job,’ she muttered.

  The drive took two hours, a good half hour of which was due to a burst water main, and Lapslie spent most of the time with the headphones on, drifting in a world of his own breath and blood. The mortuary was located on one side of Braintree, next to a park; a low, anonymous building that could have been mistaken for a nursery, an accountant’s practice or the offices of a rather down-at-heel architect if it hadn’t been for the industrial-size air conditioning pipes that plunged in and out of the side walls, and the metal chimney that towered over it from the rear.

  While Emma parked near to the door, Lapslie walked over and pressed the button on the intercom. ‘DCI Lapslie to see Dr Catherall,’ he said crisply. He had to bend down to do it. For a while he had toyed with the idea that the security intercom had either been fitted by midgets or the workmen had misread imperial measurements for metric when they were measuring up. Having met Jane Catherall, he now had an alternative explanation. He strongly suspected that she had browbeaten them into fitting it at a height convenient to her, and bugger anyone else.

  The door clicked open, and Lapslie entered, with Emma following. The foyer was as he remembered it: reminiscent of a dentist’s surgery, what with the worn floor tiles, the plaster-board ceiling tiles, the chairs that looked like they dated from a decade before and the slight smell of disinfectant. The only thing indicating that the medical procedures that went on behind the closed doors was done to dead bodies, not live ones, was the underlying smell of blood and faecal matter that the disinfectant couldn’t quite hide.

  Dr Catherall’s assistant, Dan, stepped out from a side room. Lapslie had met him before, but still couldn’t quite remember his name.

  ‘DCI Lapslie – Dr Catherall said you’d probably be popping in. Please, come this way.’ Dan led him through a set of double doors edged in plastic, to keep the sounds and the smells from drifting too far. ‘Dr Catherall? You’ve got visitors.’

  The room was large, and so cold that Lapslie and Emma’s breath misted in front of their mouths as they breathed out. Lapslie tried not to breathe in through his nose: the smell was more marked in here.

  The stench of the mortuary was worse than he remembered, despite the number of times he’d been there over the years. It was something like the sweet, cloying odour of rancid meat underpinned with a fouler reek, all of it covered but not hidden by the nostril-grating tang of bleach and detergent. Somehow his brain managed to edit out the sheer visceral reaction that it always engendered in him; he could recall that it was bad, but not how it was bad. It was like Sonia had once told him about having children; if women remembered how painful it was the first time they’d never go through it again. And Sonia had borne two children for him, which probably went to prove her point.

  ‘How do the people who work here stand it?’ Emma muttered. ‘Surely the smell must get into their clothes, their hair and their skin? What do their families say? It’s like people who work in fish-and-chip shops always smell of hot oil, no matter how many showers they take.’

  ‘You’re supposed to get used to anything,’ Lapslie replied.

  ‘I know, but there are limits.’

  When he had first been diagnosed with synaesthesia, some years back, Lapslie had gone along to a support group of similar sufferers. It had been Sonia’s idea. She had somehow thought that sharing his experiences with others, and sharing theirs, would help him come to terms with his problem. It hadn’t, and he had soon left, dismayed by the whole touchy-feely experience, but one thing did stay with him. One of the men in the group, a taxi driver named Andy, had suffered from a form of synaesthesia where smells were associated in his mind with particular colours. Lapslie sometimes felt as if he understood how that might work. And to him, the smell of the mortuary was khaki: dark brown and dark green mixed together into a deep, unpleasant mess.

  Three large post-mortem tables dominated the room, air conditioning vents hovering over each one like big metal snakes about to strike. Either they were switched off or the fans were so quiet that he could neither hear nor taste them. The sides of the tables were lipped to prevent bodily fluids from dripping over the edge and their surfaces slanted to allow the same bodily fluids to trickle down to a drain at the bottom, from where they were presumably whisked away and stored for future disposal. Whatever happened to them, Lapslie didn’t want to know. He just hoped they weren’t dumped straight into the sewers.

  Jane Catherall was standing over the middle table, where a naked body was laid out. She had a minidisc recorder in her hand, and was dictating notes on her first, visual examination of the body.

  Standing over it? No, standing beside it. Jane Catherall was, as she had once told Lapslie, a survivor of poliomyelitis, a disease that attacked the nervous system and could have been cured, or at least treated, if she had been born a few years later when the vaccine was widely available. As it was, she had spent a number of formative years incarcerated in an iron lung, and now, in her middle age, she was just over five feet tall: enough to reach the table, but not to reach over it. Her spine was twisted, her stomach distended – a sign that her internal organs were swollen and misplaced – and her eyes protruded further than normal, giving her a perpetually surprised look. She was also the sweetest person that Lapslie had ever met, although he would never tell her so. Her character was pugnacious enough already.

  ‘Lemons,’ she said in her warm brandy voice without looking up.

  ‘Dr Catherall. You startled me.’

  ‘I’m pleased that my elfin ability to surprise has not waned with the passing years.’ She smiled up at him.

  ‘Did you say “lemons”?’

  ‘Yes. Your sergeant was wondering about the smell, and how we get it out of our hair and our skin. The answer is lemons.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Emma said, discomfited. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘No offence taken. Everyone asks, at some stage. It’s usually the first question asked by journalists and by the new lab assistants who start work here. We get through quite a few, as you can probably imagine.’

  ‘So what is it about lemons?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘The citric acid and the essential oils are excellent at dissolving the odour of decay that surrounds us during the course of our work. There are various products on the market that are meant to do the trick, and there is not a week goes past when I do not receive a telephone call or an email from some company who claim to have developed the perfect solution, but the fact remains that half a lemon rubbed all over the body does the trick.’

  ‘You live and learn,’ Lapslie said.

  ‘I heard that you had been assigned to this case. It’s a pleasure to be working with you again.’

  ‘And you, Jane,’ he replied.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Emma shook her head too, and Lapslie indicated the body on the table. ‘I’m keen to see what you make of it.’

  It. Lapslie suddenly wondered when Catherine Charnaud had changed from her to it. Back at the house, when the body had been only an hour or so from warmth and vitality, back when the blood and the saliva had still been wet, both Lapslie and Emma had regarded her as a person. Now, spread out naked on the metal table, the blood making the back of her torso and legs noticeably darker than the front as it drained downwards under the force of gravity, she was just meat. Just flesh. Despite the fact that she was young, attractive and naked, lying with her breasts and pubic area exposed, Lapslie could feel nothing for her apart from a diffuse sympathy. Whatever had been there, whatever had provided the vital spark, had drained away from her in the same way that her bodily fluids would shortly drain away as Dr Catherall cut her open and scooped out her internal organs for examination.

  ‘Mark?’

  ‘Sorry. Just thinking.’

  Dr Catherall smiled gently at him. ‘This place is very conducive to deep questions about mortality and the nature of life. Questions, but no answers. I can tell you why people died – that I
can do very well. What I can’t tell you is why they lived in the first place.’

  Lapslie nodded. ‘“Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say,”’ he quoted softly. ‘“Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day. The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.”’

  ‘Yeats, I do believe. From Oedipus at Colonus.’ She glanced over at Emma. ‘Mark quoted Robert Browning at me when we first met. His erudition is showing.’

  ‘I apologise,’ Lapslie said. ‘I realise that all policemen are meant to reach for their guns when they hear the word “culture”. I’ll try to control myself in future. Are you ready to carry out the post mortem?’

  ‘As ready as I will ever be,’ Dr Catherall replied. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,’ she murmured, turning to the tables.

  ‘Dante,’ Emma muttered. At Lapslie and Jane’s surprised glances, she flushed. ‘GCSE,’ she said. ‘We did it at school. “All hope abandon ye who enter here”, it means.’

  ‘There’s hope for the police force after all,’ Jane said quietly, and smiled.

  Lapslie and Emma pulled up stools and watched, for the next hour, as Jane deconstructed the body of Catherine Charnaud as expertly and as dispassionately as a chef jointing a chicken. She started by washing it, checking the skin carefully as she did so. Next she made a Y-shaped incision, starting at each shoulder and moving above the nipples to join up between the breasts, above the sternum, and then progressing down the stomach and further, down the pubis. Dan moved in with a pair of shears, similar to those Lapslie had seen used by firemen at car crashes to cut through sections of the car body in order to reach someone inside. ‘The jaws of life’, they were called. These were the jaws of death, and Dan used them to cut his way up Catherine Charnaud’s ribcage so that the entire front of the chest could be removed and set to one side.

  Emma was shifting on her stool, edgy at the enforced stillness. She liked to keep moving, Lapslie had noticed. Even when she was sitting still her legs were quivering or her fingers twitching. On the drive over, divorced from the sound, Lapslie had been fascinated by the way her fingers kept tapping out complicated rhythms on the steering wheel.