Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘I think you look very professional,’ Sonia added. ‘What case are you working on?’

  She hadn’t seen the news or watched Newsnight. Lapslie felt his heart loosen a little. At least they wouldn’t spend the meal talking about his condition, and whether he was okay. She’d hear about it eventually, but not now. Not from him, at least.

  ‘It’s the newsreader murder. Alan Rouse put me on it. In fact, he’s put me on two cases. You remember Alan?’

  She nodded. ‘You were at Brixton together, back in the eighties, weren’t you? I think we had dinner at his house, once. His wife got drunk and made a pass at you.’

  ‘And you,’ Lapslie countered, smiling. ‘She ended up making a pass at Rouse as well, forgetting that she was married to him.’

  Sonia caught herself. ‘Sorry – please, sit down. Did you want something to drink? I ordered water already.’

  ‘Water’s fine. Have you ordered food?’

  ‘I thought I’d wait until you arrived.’ She offered him a menu, then took one herself. ‘How’s the cottage?’

  ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘And the … the tastes?’

  ‘The synaesthesia?’ he shrugged. ‘It’s there, all the time, in the background. Some people get a constant ringing in their ears, some get a constantly irritable bowel. I get tastes. It could be a lot worse. At least some of them are pleasant.’ He glanced at the menu. It was full of things he seemed to spend most of every day tasting anyway. What was the point of paying money for it?

  A waitress arrived with a tall blue bottle of water, and then hovered with her notebook ready.

  ‘Salmon linguine, please,’ Sonia said.

  Lapslie eventually selected the most tasteless thing he could find. ‘I’ll just have the chicken and mozzarella salad,’ he said, closing the menu and putting it back in the centre of the table. The girl collected the menus and left, with a smile.

  ‘How about you?’ Lapslie asked. ‘How’s the holistic therapy business?’

  ‘You can always tell when you’re in an economic slump. Aromatherapy massages are the first to go.’

  ‘Business bad?’

  She nodded. ‘Across the board. The whole therapy centre is feeling the pinch.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Do you need some more money?’ he asked tentatively.

  Sonia shook her head, a pained expression on her face. ‘No, we’re managing okay. That’s not why I wanted to meet.’

  Then why?

  ‘Kids okay?’ He twisted the cap off the bottle of water and poured two glasses.

  ‘Yes. Robbie’s had a cold over the summer which never quite seemed to go away, but I think he’s just about rid of it now. Jamie’s been going through one of those testosterone surges that kids seem to get. He’s suddenly grown out of every single pair of trousers and pair of shoes he has, and everything I ask him to do provokes a massive strop.’ She smiled. ‘It’s almost funny. His favourite phrase at the moment is, “This is the worst day of my life!” I’ve heard him say it five days in a row.’

  ‘You’ve got to remember that at their age, everything is exaggerated,’ Lapslie said. ‘It probably feels like the worst day of his life, given that he hasn’t got anything much to compare it with. Not the way that we do.’

  She winced, and looked away. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Did you look after them all summer?’

  ‘No – I booked them into one of those kids’ play places. They did swimming, archery, games, crafts … all kinds of things. Why didn’t they have places like that when we were growing up? All I remember is a chess club at the local library during the summer holidays.’

  ‘Aye,’ Lapslie said in a fake Yorkshire accent. ‘We had to make our own entertainment in them days.’

  She laughed, genuinely, then caught herself. ‘They seem to enjoy it,’ she said, almost apologetically. ‘And it gives me time to see whatever clients I still have left.’

  The waitress returned with her salmon and his chicken salad. For a few moments neither spoke as they each took a forkful of food.

  ‘Mark …’ she said, breaking the silence.

  ‘Yes.’ He noticed she kept her gaze fixed on her plate as if there was something intrinsically fascinating about the way the salmon was flaking into the buttery coils of pasta.

  ‘I know we never really talked about the long term, when the kids and I moved out. We never said that it was permanent, but we never said that it was temporary, either. We just ducked the issue.’

  His heart felt as if it had just doubled in weight. He could feel it dragging downwards within his chest, a hard lump that was pumping harder and harder to keep his sluggish blood flowing. ‘I think we were hoping that the synaesthesia would go away, or that there would be some kind of treatment …’

  ‘But it didn’t. And there wasn’t. Mark, we have to make some kind of decision about the future. We can’t – I can’t – keep going on in this state of uncertainty.’

  Which was the point at which Mark Lapslie found himself saying the words that he thought he’d never have to say, the words that he knew too many of his colleagues had used over the years, the words that occurred more often than he could count in witness statements from domestic disputes that he’d been called out to.

  ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’

  Her fork, which was half way to her mouth, was lowered, as if there was something suddenly distasteful about the food. ‘It’s not … serious. Not yet. But I need to know whether I can … move on. Or not.’

  ‘Do you feel like you need my permission?’

  There was something so endlessly fascinating about her forkful of salmon which meant that Sonia couldn’t tear her gaze away from it. ‘You and I were together a long time,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Were?’

  ‘Mark, we’re neither one thing nor the other at the moment. Not a couple and not individuals. We’re in a halfway house, and we need to choose which way we go.’

  ‘And do we make that choice together?’

  This time she did look up at him. ‘We have to,’ she said simply. ‘We can’t have one of us thinking the marriage is still staggering on and the other thinking it’s dead. It has to be a mutual decision.’

  Lapslie found his gaze attracted away, towards the window and the sunlit world outside. Two teenagers walked past. Despite the cold wind the boy was wearing a T-shirt and cargo pants; the girl had on baggy shorts and a strappy yellow top. They were holding hands as if it was the most natural thing in the world. The whole of their lives stretched in front of them – the pain, the misery and the grief – and they were blithely indifferent. Which was as it should be, he reflected. If kids knew what was to come they would just give up now. Evolution knew what it was doing when it gave them a short attention span and a complete inability to learn anything from what their parents said or did.

  ‘I remember,’ he said, surprising himself with how harsh the words sounded in the bright surroundings of the café, ‘when we used to make love, the sounds you used to make—’

  ‘Mark. Don’t.’

  ‘I could taste your cries, and it was the most perfect taste in the world. There’s nothing I could ever compare it to: no taste in the real world that was anything like it. People would die for that taste.’

  ‘Please.’ She sounded like she could only get one or two syllables out before the tears would start to come.

  ‘I guess that’s the definition of getting old,’ he said. ‘When you suddenly realise that you’ve already made love for the last time in your life.’

  ‘You’re not that old. There’ll be other … there’ll be others in your life.’

  He had to bite back on his automatic response: I don’t want any others: I want you. Instead, he asked: ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Someone from the holistic centre. He lives in Ipswich.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Why? Are you going to have h
im checked out?’ She raised a hand to her lips. ‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.’

  ‘Have the kids met him? What do they think?’

  ‘I haven’t brought him home yet. I haven’t even been out with him yet. I just want to know what to say when he asks me. If he asks me.’

  ‘Say yes.’ The words were the right ones, for her and for him, but they felt like ashes in his mouth. ‘Say yes,’ he said again, just to see whether he could. Whether the decision would stick.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Let’s think about this logically,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured. ‘Let’s.’

  ‘The synaesthesia isn’t going to get any better. Actually, I think it’s getting worse. And it’s already at a level where I can’t stand to be around people for very long. I need absolute quiet in my life somewhere, and if I can’t get it at work then it has to be at home. I wish that didn’t exclude you and Jamie and Robbie, but it does. And it’s unfair on you for me to expect you to be there as a kind of long-distance partner.’

  ‘I’ll always be your partner,’ she said, eyes wet. ‘If not for the memory of what we had then for the kids at least. I just won’t be your wife any more.’

  ‘Are we talking about a separation or a divorce?’

  ‘I’ve always assumed that they were two stages on the same journey,’ she said. ‘And we’re already separated.’

  He sighed. ‘I’ll contact a solicitor. It should be easy enough as it’s uncontested, and we’ve been living apart for long enough. Irreconcilable differences?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sonia pushed her plate away. ‘I don’t think I can …’ She suddenly stood up. ‘I’ll be back,’ she said, and headed off towards the back of the café.

  Lapslie pushed the remnants of the chicken salad around his plate, trying to analyse his reactions and finding only a mixture which, although it contained bright elements of several emotions, had ended up as a dull mish-mash of feelings, just like bright paints when mixed together just produce a brown mess, or strong flavours made something muddled and unpleasant.

  By the time Sonia returned he had signalled to the waitress for the bill, and paid it.

  Sonia didn’t even sit down. She hovered behind her chair, cheeks pale and hair still slightly damp where she had washed her face. Even now, he couldn’t help analysing evidence and drawing conclusions. He supposed it was what he fell back on when all else failed.

  ‘I need to go,’ he said, making it easier for her. ‘I’ve already paid.’

  She moved a hand towards her handbag. ‘Do you want me to … ?’

  ‘No. Thanks, but no. I’ll be in touch.’ He caught her eye. ‘Good luck. And don’t be a stranger.’

  ‘Don’t become a recluse,’ she said. ‘I know how easy it would be for you to just curl up in your cottage. Make sure you have a life.’

  She walked around the table and reached up to kiss him. He kissed back, savouring the taste of her lips for that brief moment. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘And thank you.’

  Lapslie watched her leave: that body that he knew so well, hidden and yet emphasised by her clothes, now separated from him for ever.

  He sat there for a while, nursing a glass of water. The waitress progressively cleared the remains of the two meals and hovered in case he ordered something else, but the café wasn’t busy enough for them to want him to leave. As customers and staff ebbed and flowed around him he felt himself slipping into an isolated bubble where time did not pass and emotions did not register; where his synaesthesia had somehow become passive, so that sounds were for a while just sounds and not tastes, where he could flit back and forth over memories and take elements of them, recreating for himself a perfect summer’s day with a perfect wife and perfect children. A perfect day that had never happened, but which symbolised for him all that he had lost.

  He surfaced from the half-dream to find that somehow he had finished the water and that two hours had passed. His mobile, which sat on the table in front of him, had received a text message at some stage; a message that he had neither heard nor tasted. It said: Developments in Charnaud / Wildish cases – please phone Sean Burrows. Instead, wanting to delay the moment that he had to return to his desk, Lapslie walked back to the police HQ and retrieved his Saab from the car park. Whatever Sean Burrows wanted to tell him, he wanted to hear it first hand, and not over the phone.

  Thoughts of Sonia and the kids occupied his mind fruitlessly until he arrived at the forensic laboratory. As before, he had to leave his car in a car park outside the wire fence and book in at the security portacabin, where he was issued with a pass with his photograph grainily printed on it on a green lanyard, which he had to hang around his neck.

  Eventually, someone came down to escort him up the slope to the 1950s red-brick building that housed Burrows’s laboratory. A cold wind tugged dry leaves across the road as they walked. Piles of leaves were building up against the wire fence that surrounded the site.

  Lapslie found Burrows perched on a corner of a bench in his starkly white lab. A large computer screen had been placed on the bench behind him. Disconcertingly, Jane Catherall was sitting on a lab stool next to him, her short legs crossed demurely a foot or so above the tiled floor, and Emma Bradbury stood, arms crossed, behind her. Emma nodded at him. ‘Boss,’ she murmured, face grim.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got a face like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle.’

  She scowled. ‘Some fuckwit stole my handbag in a restaurant. They took the purse but abandoned the handbag in the gents’ toilet. Why are gents’ toilets so smelly, by the way? Women’s ones don’t get that bad.’

  Lapslie shook his head. ‘It’s like dogs,’ he said. ‘Pheromones in the urine. We have to mark our territory. Did the thief get anything?’

  ‘Just some cash and my credit cards. Fortunately my warrant card was in my jacket. Mr Burrows here has kindly offered to have the handbag checked for fingerprints. It’s a long shot, but it’ll make me feel like something’s being done.’

  ‘Make sure you cancel the cards.’ He turned to Jane. ‘And Dr Catherall, I didn’t expect to find you here.’

  ‘I realise that I do appear to be something of a cross between a hermit crab and Dr Frankenstein,’ she replied, her voice as smooth and as tingly on Lapslie’s tongue as aged brandy, ‘never leaving the mortuary except to collect fresh cadavers, but I do occasionally get out for other reasons. Sean and I often chat about the cases that we are working on, and there was something about the confluence of these two cases that caused us to start thinking.’

  ‘Jane mentioned your reaction at both crime scenes,’ Sean Burrows said, his Irish brogue reminding Lapslie, as always, of wild fruit and strong gin. ‘And she also mentioned your medical condition. Synaesthesia, is it? A fascinating and little-researched condition.’

  ‘I hope I was not breaking a confidence …’ Jane ventured, a cloud crossing her face.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lapslie said wryly. ‘Everyone else seems to know.’

  ‘Jane mentioned that there was something to do with both murders that triggered the same synaesthetic response in your brain,’ Burrows continued. ‘Something to do with the crime scenes.’ He nodded over at Emma. ‘When your sergeant pitched up and asked me to put a rush on the urine sample from Braintree Parkway, and to take more samples from the toilet at the Charnaud house, I put two and two together. So I ran them through a gas chromatograph.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Emma asked.

  ‘It’s a piece of equipment that takes a vapour sample, heats it up and then pushes it into a column packed with capillary columns made of fused silica with a polyimide outer coating. The molecules are absorbed or deposited on the capillaries at different rates, because they all have different weights and sizes. We monitor the time it takes them to emerge—’

  ‘The proper word is “elute”,’ Jane murmured.

  ‘—And then identify them by their position.’
<
br />   ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Lapslie said. ‘What’s the result?’

  Instead of answering, Burrows used the computer mouse to click on a couple of buttons on the computer screen. A picture appeared: two graphs, stacked on top of each other. Each graph displayed a jagged line that was flat in places and spiked in others, like a representation of the value of the pound against three currencies over a ten-year period.

  ‘These are the spectra of the two traces,’ Burrows murmured, still fiddling with the mouse. ‘As you can see, there are several common elements in each of the spectra – chemical compounds that occur in both samples.’

  And Lapslie could see it. The two traces had several peaks in common, albeit at different heights.

  ‘Would we not expect that?’ he mused, almost to himself. ‘After all, one trace is from a pool of urine and one from a toilet bowl. Both areas would have traces of urine, surely?’

  ‘Yes, but we know the chemical signature of the various components of urine,’ Burrows said. ‘We can factor them out. And that still leaves us with one peak that’s common to the two samples.’ He used the mouse to draw a straight line down the screen, highlighting a peak that appeared in the same place on both graphs. ‘This molecule does not occur naturally in urine, but is present in both samples.’

  ‘Which means it is probably the molecule you smelled at both crime scenes,’ Jane said. ‘Not smelled, perhaps, but heard.’

  ‘So what is it?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘Difficult to be sure,’ Burrows relied. ‘It’s a high molecular mass, long-chain, aromatic compound of some kind. The trouble is that I’ve not got enough of a sample from either crime scene to be able to run chemical tests. I know something’s there, but I can’t work out what it is without destroying the samples, and even then there’s no guarantee. And you’ve also lost your evidence.’