Tooth and Claw

by Nigel McCrery

  The journey to Chelmsford Hospital took forty-five minutes. He turned his phone back on and as every minute went past he expected it to ring, with Chief Superintendent Rouse on the other end, but it stayed resolutely silent.

  He strode into the hospital and through the corridors and wards, looking for the doctor that he’d seen before. If she was off duty then he was out of luck, but he found her eventually talking to a nurse in a rest area.

  ‘I need to ask you a question about that woman,’ he snapped.

  ‘What woman?’ Her voice was still menthol, but sweeter than he remembered. More like toothpaste. She stared at his face. ‘You were in the lift. You’re a policeman.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s very important that I know what was wrong with the woman in the bed, the one you were moving. You said she was ill. I need to know what that illness was. If necessary, I can get a warrant, but I’m appealing to you as someone who can stop a murderer from committing any more crimes.’

  ‘I’ll tell you.’

  Lapslie was taken aback. ‘What?’

  ‘She died. Heart attack – not directly caused by the illness, but linked to it. Whatever human rights she had have been revoked now.’

  He breathed out, trying to calm his racing heart. ‘I’m genuinely sorry to hear that, but I’d be grateful if you can explain what was wrong with her in the first place.’

  The doctor thawed slightly. ‘The patient wasn’t suffering from a disease caused by bacteria or viruses; she had a hereditary malfunction in the way her body actually worked. Erythropoietic protoporphyria it’s called – or just porphyria.’

  ‘What are the symptoms?’

  ‘Take your pick. Hallucinations, depression, anxiety and paranoia. Cardiac arrhythmias and tachycardia. Severe acute and chronic pain. Constipation is frequently present.’ She closed her eyes, as if recalling notes memorised some time ago. ‘Excessive urination, sometimes of a dark colour due to the chemicals being excreted. Photodermatitis, blisters, necrosis of the skin and gums, itching, and swelling, and increased hair growth. Basically, anywhere that has nerves can see an effect.’

  ‘What’s the treatment?’

  ‘Haem or haematin, taken intravenously or in tablet form, can both reduce the symptoms. If that doesn’t work then direct blood transfusions can help. Painkillers, antidepressants – basically, we treat the symptoms while we replace the material that the body can’t make properly.’

  ‘And is it … always fatal?’

  The doctor glanced down at the floor. ‘Not directly,’ she said, voice quieter, ‘but if left untreated, it can lead to other conditions such as liver failure or hepatocellular carcinomas. But the extreme pain and the mental confusion can also lead to suicidal behaviour.’ She smiled. ‘I should charge a tutoring fee. Have I helped?’

  Lapslie nodded. ‘More than you know. What can I do to thank you?’

  She glanced up into his face quizzically. ‘Buy me dinner, if you can find a time when your schedule and mine coincide. I’m intrigued to know what porphyria has to do with murder, but you look like a man in a hurry.’

  ‘Matching schedules might be easier in my case than you might expect. Thank you.’ She moved away, smiling, but he reached out to hold the doctor back. ‘Two more questions, if I may.’

  The doctor glanced up at him. ‘Be quick.’

  ‘Could the chemicals building up in the body be released in sweat as well as urine?’

  ‘Easily. Perspiration, like urination, is one of the mechanisms by which the body rids itself of toxins.’

  ‘And how do I get out of this place again?’

  ‘I can’t help you there,’ she said as she turned away. ‘I already feel like I spend my entire life in here.’

  Lapslie returned to the ground floor, thinking furiously. Porphyria. He’d heard of it before. ‘The vampire disease’, they called it, due to the way it sometimes coloured the eyes and the fingernails red. George III was supposed to have suffered from it. Was it possible that the murderer of Catherine Charnaud and Alec Wildish suffered from porphyria? Was that why Lapslie could smell them?

  He drove furiously back to Sean Burrows’s laboratory, on the assumption that at least some of the answers could be found there. In fact, Emma Bradbury and Jane Catherall were already waiting in Burrows’s lab. Burrows himself entered just after Lapslie, holding a transparent plastic bag with what looked like Emma’s handbag inside. It was dusty with fingerprint powder.

  ‘Here,’ he said, passing the bag to her. She put it beside her on a bench, grimacing. ‘There’s several sets of prints on it, but until we’ve got something to compare it to we’re at a bit of a loss. Sorry.’

  ‘Forget the bag,’ Lapslie barked. ‘What about that chemical toilet from the cottage?’

  ‘That was a messy job,’ Burrows said, ‘but I’ve got something. I’ve not only managed to detect the same chemical in that toilet as at the two previous crime scenes, but I’ve also isolated enough of a sample so that I could determine what it was.’

  ‘Try protoporphyrin.’ Lapslie took some pleasure in the look of surprise on Burrows’s face.

  ‘Protoporphyrin …’ Jane murmured, looking away into the corner of the room, still perched on the lab stool like a garden gnome. Part of Lapslie’s mind registered the soft cadence of her voice, while another part told him that it tasted of warm brandy. ‘Precursor to haem, which is a precursor to haemoglobin. You think the murderer has porphyria, then?’

  ‘I’m almost certain of it. I found someone in hospital who suffered from the disease, and who triggered very nearly the same reaction in me.’

  ‘You’re sure they’re not the killer?’ Emma asked dubiously.

  ‘She was in her seventies, and she’s dead now. I’m pretty sure it’s not her.’

  ‘What’s porphyria?’ Emma asked. ‘I’ve never heard of it before.’

  Jane shifted on her stool. ‘It’s caused by a deficiency of an enzyme called ferrochelatase which leads to an accumulation of protoporphyrin in the bone marrow, red blood cells, blood plasma, skin, and liver.’ Seeing Lapslie’s incomprehension, she smiled. ‘I spent years at medical school memorising this kind of thing. It’s nice to be able to regurgitate it all again. Those chemicals are both what we call “precursors” in the production of haem. It’s a substance which is important for the production of haemoglobin in the blood – hence the name. The disorder can be inherited due to a single abnormal gene from one parent, but in these cases the normal gene from the other parent keeps the deficient enzyme at half-normal levels, which is sufficient to stop any symptoms from occurring. Very rarely, the disease is inherited from both parents, and in this case symptoms may then appear in childhood and include developmental abnormalities.’

  Emma sighed. ‘This is really doing my head in,’ she said. ‘The idea that you can actually smell somebody’s illness, and the smell persists for months after they’ve gone. That’s just … just so Harry Potter.’

  ‘You know, I have come across several people in my career who have a distinctive odour,’ Jane said. ‘One of them showered night and morning, but he still smelled like a rotting fish. His body excreted a chemical called methylmercaptopurine because he was deficient in the enzymes necessary to break down certain ingredients of normal food. Without these enzymes this chemical accumulated in his body and was then excreted through the glands in his skin.’

  ‘And it’s pretty well established that diseases can cause changes in body odour,’ Burrows added in his blackberry-wine voice. ‘Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is generally regarded as the father of modern medicine, recommended sniffing patients’ body odour as an effective means of identifying their ailments.’

  ‘The average human can distinguish between thousands of different scents,’ Jane continued, undeterred. ‘Women generally score better than men, by the way, and the differences there can be quite remarkable. Female sensitivity to smell alters dramatically during the menstrual cycle, for instance. Tests have shown that
female sensitivity to male pheromones is approximately 10,000 times stronger during ovulation than during menstruation.’

  ‘How do you know all this stuff?’ Lapslie asked, astounded.

  ‘I read a lot,’ she replied.

  Lapslie shook his head. ‘But we’re not talking about the general sensitivity of the human race to smells; we’re talking about me being able to distinguish a scent that apparently nobody else is able to. How can that be possible?’

  Sean Burrows said: ‘One possibility is that your synaesthesia has somehow resulted in the part of your brain that deals with taste becoming more developed, more sensitive, and that has had a knock-on effect on your sense of smell. Taste and smell are linked quite closely in neurological terms.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lapslie closed his eyes and pinched the top of his nose, trying to think his way through this morass of scientific speculation. ‘Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that I can detect certain smells that other people cannot, and that they trigger my synaesthesia in reverse, as it were. Let’s also accept that the killer produces a distinctive smell in their urine, due to the fact that they are ill. How does this help us? It’s going to be hard to convince Rouse to let me back onto the case, let along convince a jury if it ever comes to trial. And while I can just about accept being able to detect the smell of the murderer in the cases of Catherine Charnaud and Alec Wildish, the old man had been dead for nearly a year. How could a smell persist for so long?’

  ‘The only thing I can suggest,’ Jane said, ‘is that because the body was held at a very low temperature for all of that time, low enough to prevent any decomposition, the chemical basis of the smell was preserved on the body. Somehow – and I have trouble working out how – you are able to detect trace amounts of that smell.’

  ‘Okay, I reiterate,’ Lapslie said with more force. ‘How does this help us catch the murderer? I have no intention of sniffing every person in Essex just on the off chance.’

  There was, uncharacteristically, a silence in the laboratory. Both Jane and Sean Burrows looked pensive.

  ‘Assuming there’s a treatment for porphyria,’ Emma mused, ‘check with pharmacists to see how many prescriptions they fill.’

  ‘There is a treatment. Do it,’ Lapslie snapped. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The best alternative I can offer is that if you have a suspect then you can see how they smell,’ Jane ventured timidly. ‘It may be an unconventional investigative technique, but it may be all you have in the end.’

  ‘Thanks,’ was all that Lapslie could think of to say. ‘That brings us back to the crimes themselves, and looking for connections.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose again. ‘The only common element in these crimes is the fact that there is no common element,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What is it that gets a murderer caught, in the end? I mean someone who kills several times. A serial killer.’

  Emma mused for a moment. ‘It’s usually either an accident, or they set up a pattern which gets spotted. David Berkowitz, the so-called “Son of Sam” in New York in the nineteen seventies killed his victims either just before or just after a full moon. Doctor Harold Shipman killed probably two hundred and fifty of his patients over the years, the vast majority of whom were elderly, in poor health and female. Dennis Rader, in the US, blinded, tortured and killed at least ten people, leading to him being referred to as the BTK killer before he was caught. Dennis Nilsen picked up young men for sex in bars and on streets and then either strangled or drowned them, then kept their bodies around his flat for months at a time as company before disposing of them. There’s always a pattern, always something obsessive they do every time. A signature. A statement of some kind.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re scaring me now. How come you know so much about serial killers?’

  She looked away. ‘I’m working on a Masters Degree in Criminology, okay? My dissertation is on psychological profiling of serial killers. It’s not a crime. Well, technically it is, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘The point is,’ Lapslie said, ‘that most killers are obsessive, and that means they obsessively repeat the same thing again and again. They can’t help themselves. But what if we have a serial killer here whose obsession is never to repeat themselves? What if their signature is that they have no signature?’

  ‘Boss, that’s …’ She paused. ‘It’s either mad or it’s genius. You’re suggesting that there’s a killer out there who makes a point of never doing the same thing twice. No two means of death the same. No two victims the same. No two scenes of crime the same. That’s …’ She paused, stunned. ‘Almost perfect. How could we investigate that?’

  ‘We look for the pattern outside the pattern,’ Lapslie said, gazing into the depths of the whiteboard. ‘Whoever the killer is, they have to choose their victims somehow. They can’t just pick them at random – they have to actually go out and make sure they’re not repeating themselves. That means they are actively making choices, avoiding things rather than choosing things, and that’s what will trip them up in the end. They are running out of options.’

  Emma looked dubious. ‘If you’re suggesting we make a list of all the places they haven’t killed in yet, or all the ways they haven’t killed, then we could be here for some time. Nobody’s been stabbed with a swordfish yet, as far as I know.’

  Lapslie laughed. ‘Fair point, but let’s work with what we’ve got.’

  ‘There’s an alternative approach,’ Emma said seriously.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘How does the killer come to know so much about the investigative process?’

  Lapslie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re deliberately avoiding the kinds of things that we would latch onto in order to catch them. Doesn’t that indicate some knowledge of forensic techniques and profiling?’

  ‘What – more than they might pick up from watching Law and Order or CSI?’

  ‘It’s just a theory,’ Emma said defensively. ‘If there was a series of murders in swimming pools, we’d be profiling lifeguards. If there were a series of murders in army barracks we’d be profiling soldiers. We’ve got a series of murders that don’t fit any pattern we can see. Maybe that means we ought to be looking for a profiler …’

  Lapslie laughed, thinking she was joking, then choked back on the laughter. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that Eleanor Whittley might be the killer?’

  Emma shrugged. ‘She’s not come up with anything useful so far.’

  ‘What possible motive could she have?’

  ‘Maybe she’s setting up murders so that she can be brought in as a consultant and charge us for the privilege. Greed is a powerful motive.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry, this is stupid. I have no reason for thinking that Eleanor Whittley might be a killer apart from the fact that I don’t like her very much, and she’s taking our money without giving very much back. Forget I said anything.’

  Lapslie thought for a moment. ‘Let’s say you might be correct,’ he said. ‘The first time I met her was at Catherine Charnaud’s house, where I had already suffered an attack and where I heard drums again. When we left, we went to Chelmsford police station, where I suffered another attack – the worst one so far. Then we went to the house where Jeffrey Hawkins had lived, where I heard drums again, although very quietly. She was there every time.’ He rubbed his chin, thinking. ‘Although I would expect the attacks to be louder the closer she got, but that’s not the way it worked.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s been trying to cover the smell up with perfume, or deodorant,’ Emma mused, ‘and you’ve been registering it very dimly, in the background. Perhaps the worst attack happened when she got stressed, and the smell, whatever it is, overwhelmed whatever she was using to mask it. Not that I can smell anything, of course.’

  They looked at each other for a long moment.

  ‘Stupid though this is,’ Lapslie continued, ‘and it is stupid, check into her history. Find out where
she lives and what she does in her spare time. Talk to people who’ve used her before as a consultant. Talk to her family. If she finds out, tell her we’re running background checks. Standard procedure.’ He shook his head. ‘Jesus, we’ll be investigating the chief next. Let me know if anything comes up on the prescriptions, by the way.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Holding Dain Morritt’s head down a toilet bowl in the gents’ loos.’

  ‘Hang on – I’ll head out with you.’ She retrieved her handbag from the bench, taking it out of the plastic evidence bag as she crossed back towards Lapslie. He became aware of a distant noise when the evidence seal was broken, a pulse, a drumbeat that got suddenly louder as she pulled the bag free. And this time he recognised it; the sound was, bizarrely, identical to the first few bars of a Paul Simon song he had on CD back at his cottage.

  ‘Can you hear it?’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘The drums again. Where … ?’ Lapslie paused, trying to work out why the drums had suddenly started. Then he looked at Emma with her handbag in one hand, the evidence bag in the other. ‘Put that handbag down,’ he snapped. ‘Burrows – get your team up here. I want that handbag checked from top to bottom! And get those fingerprint records here now!’

  Emma’s face was a mask of puzzlement. ‘Boss – why?’

  ‘I think the smell is on your handbag. Which means the killer stole it; he must have been watching you.’

  Understanding suddenly hit Emma and her face went pale. ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘You could be the killer’s next victim!’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Slamming the car door behind him, Carl Whittley took a deep breath through his nose. The familiar smells of the car assailed his nostrils: the comforting undertone of leather upholstery, the slight stuffiness, the sharp trace of petrol vapour, the dampness of the Essex wetlands outside drifting in through the ventilation system. And overlaid on that was the citrus scent of lemons rising from his pores as the heat of his body evaporated the essential oils, the tarry smell of the soap with which he had scrubbed himself and the medicinal tang of the antiseptic powder. Nothing else. He sniffed again. No body odour, nothing. Jesus, he had been out in the salt marshes stalking animals, and they hadn’t smelled him. The polecat he had blown up with the bomb hadn’t taken fright and run. Neither had the fox that he had shot with the rifle. They were animals, for God’s sake. If they couldn’t detect him, how could a person?