Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  Thoughts of his past, and of the East End, reminded him of Dom McGinley. The two of them had first met in the warren of back streets between Plaistow and East Ham tube stations: in pubs like the Green Man, the Boleyn and the Black Prince. Pubs where tough men in leather jackets and women with Essex facelifts – hair scraped back into ponytails so severe that their skin was stretched – drank for hours on end, and the smell of stale urine from the toilets drifted out to mix with the spilled beer and the cigarette smoke in the bars. Lapslie had been a police constable, McGinley a runner for the Clerkenwell Syndicate, run by the legendary Adams family. And now Lapslie was a detective chief inspector, McGinley was emotionally involved with his sergeant, Emma Bradbury, and the Adams family still controlled half the crime in London. It was, as someone had once observed, a funny old world.

  Which reminded him: in the time since they’d caught the serial killer Carl Whittley, Emma had avoided being alone with him for more than a few moments at a time. Lapslie had promised her that they would talk about her new relationship, but she had made sure that the chance had never presented itself.

  That would change, when Lapslie got back.

  The symposium was scheduled to run for another two days, and Lapslie was down to give a presentation on the Braintree Parkway bomb and the subsequent forensic investigation. He hated public speaking – a feeling that had multiplied exponentially since his collapse at the news conference a few months back – and he wasn’t looking forward to it. The problem was that Inspector Dain Morritt – a supercilious police officer in a sharp suit and Masonic cufflinks who had taken a dislike verging on hatred to Lapslie – would be in the audience. He was giving a presentation on how computer profiling could separate dangerously extremist Muslims from the broad sweep of perfectly innocuous ones. Lapslie knew that he would be able to feel Morritt’s eyes on him all the time, just waiting for him to falter, to fall. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

  Lapslie’s police laptop, open on the bed and connected to the Serena’s broadband internet service by a bright blue cable, went ‘ping’, indicating that he had an email. Turning away from the window, and the endlessly fascinating vista of Islamabad, he crossed to the bed to check on who was trying to communicate with him. The odds were that it was either spam offering to help him satisfy his partner in bed by the use of various herbal concoctions or a Nigerian criminal gang pretending to be an innocent banking official who had control of some money from the estate of a recently deceased long-lost relative to send to him once they had received a goodwill payment of £100; but there was always the chance that it might be Charlotte, making contact. He did a quick calculation in his head, subtracting five hours and getting to some ungodly time in the morning in the UK, but Charlotte kept doctors’ hours, and therefore could be awake at any time. Much like a policeman.

  The subject line wasn’t encouraging: You Need To Listen To This; and the sender’s address was an anonymous Hotmail account consisting of a hash of numbers and letters. Lapslie nearly deleted it unread, but decided at the last moment to take a quick look. He was bored, and there was always the chance that it was a communication from one of the various informants that he had kept with him over the years. And his computer was installed with the latest anti-virus software and internet firewalls.

  He opened the email.

  There was no message, no signature; just an attached file. Judging by the . wav file extension it was a sound file. A recording.

  Who would be sending him a sound file? And why?

  He double-clicked on the icon representing the sound file.

  The Microsoft Sound Recorder program opened up in a separate window and started to play the sound file, representing its volume graphically as a series of green mountain peaks against a black background. For a few moments the file was silent, and then the sound started.

  It was someone screaming.

  Lapslie flinched at the raw agony in the sound. Shocked, his synaesthesic brain pushed back against the drugs and the coping strategies to flood his mouth with beetroot and salt. He almost vomited. Swallowing hard, he hit the pause button on the laptop screen.

  The sound cut out. Peace and quiet filled the hotel room.

  Lapslie took a deep breath, settling himself. He used the laptop’s touchpad to move the slider showing the progress of the sound file back to the beginning.

  This wasn’t spam, and it wasn’t a casual message from a friend or a colleague. It sounded like someone being tortured.

  Sliding the volume control down to a lower level, he pressed the ‘Play’ button on the Sound Recorder window. The file began mindlessly to play again.

  Now he was concentrating, he heard something in the opening seconds: the ones he thought had been silent on first hearing. Behind the hiss of the recording process, almost hidden, was the sound of someone breathing. Ragged, hoarse, on the verge of panic. And sobbing, muffled as if the person didn’t want anyone to hear them, or to know how close to complete nervous collapse they were. Then there was a scuffling, as someone moved. Footsteps, dragging on a dusty surface.

  Then the screaming. First a sudden, shocked sound, as if the person had run into something hard, or sharp and quickly pulled themselves away. Then another scream, followed by rapid scuffling. Whoever was making the noise wasn’t moving carefully any more; they were running. Running fast. More screaming, continuous now, driven by fear rather than pain, but punctuated by occasional sharper screams. Something was happening, but it was impossible to tell what it was.

  The screams were getting weaker now, more desperate, and there was a sense from the scuffling noise that whoever was there was blundering around blindly and hitting things, or getting caught by things.

  And then there was another scream, sharp and shocked.

  Then sobbing, as heartfelt as if it was being pulled from a soul who had just found out that God did not exist, salvation was a joke and all was darkness.

  A low, indistinguishable noise, over as soon as it began.

  Then silence. No sobbing, no breathing, no scuffling. Nothing.

  The sound of someone who had just died.

  Lapslie leaned back until he was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  It could be a con: an actor making noises to convince the listener that they were being killed. But why the mystery? Why not make the cause of death obvious: the repeated sounds of stabbing, a gunshot, the choking as they were strangled? Or it could have been an extract taken from the soundtrack of a horror movie; one of the so-called ‘torture porn’ movies: Saw and its sixodd sequels, Hostel and its two sequels, plus various others with one- or two-word titles and stark posters. But didn’t films usually have some kind of soundtrack music to emphasise what was on the screen: ominous chords or heavy rock? No, Lapslie kept coming back to the same thing. This was real. Someone had died, and their death was recorded in that sound file.

  A ‘snuff’ recording.

  But why send it to him? Did they expect him to do something about it? Then why not send something more obvious: something pointing him to where the death occurred, or who it was that had died?

  He rubbed his eyes and sat up again, the taste of beetroot and salt still spiking his tongue. Questions like that would just lead him around in circles. There was an obvious course of action. Either other clues would fall out of that course of action, or they wouldn’t. He could only take one step at a time.

  Working quickly, Lapslie composed a quick email to Emma Bradbury asking her to forward the sound file on to the Essex Police Forensics Laboratory for analysis, and also to notify the hierarchy within the police that a new incident needed to be recorded and a team formed up to investigate it. He hesitated before pressing ‘send’, wondering how quickly Emma would get it. If she was on leave for a few days, or engaged on a case, it might just hang around in cyberspace like a lonely orphan. He copied in Sean Burrows, the Head of Forensics, on the email and changed the text slightly to reflect the new instructions. Then, having finally consi
gned the email to its electronic fate, he phoned British Airways to check whether his flight could be brought forward to that evening. It turned out that it could: he had an open ticket, and there were empty seats on the flight.

  He quickly packed his suit carrier and his carry-on bag – taking one of his thorazitol tablets before he packed his toiletry bag away – and headed down to the lobby with a new spring in his step. He had a purpose in life, and a reason not to give his presentation. And by the time Assistant Chief Superintendent Rouse found out about it, he would be on an aircraft and heading home. And who could fault him: he had a murder to solve. An apparent murder, at least.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to check out early,’ he told the desk clerk, sliding the chunky brass key across the marble counter to her.

  Her gaze slid down to the computer screen beneath the counter. ‘That’s fine, Mr Lapslie. Your room is pre-payed. Thank you for staying at the Serena Hotel.’

  ‘Can I get a taxi to the airport?’

  She smiled and nodded. ‘I’ll organise that. If you would care to wait in the lobby, I’ll make sure you are called.’ She glanced towards the revolving doors that led outside. ‘Assuming the rain doesn’t get much worse.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  She shrugged: a graceful movement of her shoulders and neck. ‘Who knows?’

  Lapslie found a comfortable chair and waved away the ever-present green tea. Delving into his carry-on bag, he found a brown A4 envelope. Inside was a USB stick containing his PowerPoint presentation and a copy of his script. He crossed back to the desk.

  ‘Could you make sure these get to another of your guests – a Mr Dain Morritt?’

  ‘Of course. Is there a message?’

  ‘Just tell him …’ Lapslie paused. ‘Tell him: “It’s over to you. I have some real work to do.”’

  She nodded, looking serious. ‘I’ll make sure he gets the message.’

  It was a good twenty minutes later that he looked up to find the clerk standing in front of him. ‘Your taxi is waiting just outside the security checkpoint,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to have your luggage taken down?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll carry it myself.’

  Leaving the hotel, he was amazed to find that in the time since he had been in his room, gazing out of his window, the rain had intensified to a continuous torrent, and the road outside was awash. Passing cars were up to their hubcaps in water.

  ‘Is that normal?’ he asked the doorman: a seven-foot-tall and stick-thin Pashtun whose peaked white headwear made him look even taller.

  The man shrugged. ‘Ground is dry and hard,’ he said in good English. ‘Water hits it and rolls off. Comes down from the foothills. Turns the roads into rivers. Not good for traffic.’

  He was right. By the time the beaten-up BMW taxi had made a couple of turns and made it onto the Islamabad Highway, leading out towards Rawalpindi, where the airport was located, it really was as if they were driving down the centre of a river. The sides of the highway were lined with concrete blocks which served only to funnel the water, and the ground was indeed baked so hard that it wouldn’t absorb a spilled bottle of Evian, let alone a full-scale rainstorm.

  Lapslie gazed incredulously at the passing cars, most of which were submerged up to their door handles and pushing water ahead of them so that a v-shaped wake led back from an aqueous bulge ahead of their bonnets. He couldn’t work out how they kept moving without their engines flooding. And incredibly, nobody batted an eyelid. He’d only ever seen flooding on this scale in the UK in news broadcasts about Cornish villages, but there it counted as a national emergency. Here it was apparently just a fact of life. Drivers kept on driving in conditions where, if they opened their doors, water would swamp the inside of their cars. And he could swear that there were people still standing around on corners and on the central reservation, waiting patiently for something that might never come.

  What a country.

  He was flying Club, which meant that he could slip inside the executive lounge after he had cleared the various levels of security at the airport. He had been pre-warned by the Security Officer at the British High Commission that leaving Pakistan required collecting various stamps on tags and documents which were variously attached to his hand luggage or left to him to carry, and if he didn’t have all of these stamps intact when he got to the steps of the aircraft then he would be sent back to start the process all over again, and never mind the fact that the aircraft would be leaving soon.

  The main advantages of the executive lounge appeared to be actual seating, internet access and the absence of milling crowds of toothless tribesmen who, as far as Lapslie could see, were one step away from leading camels through the terminal. Lapslie connected his laptop to the internet, just to see whether there had been any replies to his email, but there was nothing. Perhaps Emma Bradbury wasn’t in the office. Perhaps she was on leave. Perhaps she just wasn’t taking his email seriously.

  He boarded the flight without incident, and sank back into the comfortable leather seats, fishing inside his jacket pocket for his ear plugs. Despite the CBT and the drugs, he didn’t want to subject his quiescent synaesthesia to the stress of a full takeoff and a five-hour flight.

  Flicking through the Club Class magazine, he discovered that one of the films available for viewing by customers on personal DVD players was Saw VII: another episode in a continuing story about a serial killer and his protégés who tortured members of the public in various ironic ways depending on the sins they had committed in their lives and the bad choices they had made.

  Remembering the sound file, he didn’t think that was funny.

  The flight back to the UK took six hours. Lapslie slept for most of it, but he woke abruptly three times, hearing the screams echoing in his head.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sound of a text message arriving on her mobile phone dragged Emma Bradbury from a deep, dreamless sleep. Beside her, Dom McGinley’s bulk made a small mountain range out of the duvet. He didn’t react to the sound of the text.

  The sun was shining horizontally through the window of McGinley’s bedroom, casting an orange light across the far wall. His house was in Chigwell; just about on the boundary between the Metropolitan Police and the Essex Constabulary. He often joked that he’d chosen it deliberately, just to increase the paperwork burden if he was ever arrested and to make sure that if he ever had to he could make a run for it into two different administrative areas, depending on who was battering the front door down. She suspected he was thinking more about Americanstyle state lines, and sheriffs skidding to a halt on the interstate before they infringed someone else’s territory, but she hated to disillusion him. For a man who’d seen more than his fair share of the seamy side of life, he had a romantic streak a mile wide.

  Listening to McGinley snore, Emma wondered yet again what it was that she saw in him. Was it a father thing? He was nearly twice her age, and had the authority of a man who was used to being listened to. Was it a rebellion thing? The last person a detective sergeant ought to choose as a lover was a man who had been involved with half the criminal activity in London over the past four decades, although to be fair he’d never been convicted for anything. Or was it just that he was the most alive man she’d ever known: a man who had experienced more than any of the callow, hair-gelled guys who regularly chatted her up in nightclubs and still wanted more?

  And he was a fantastically imaginative lover as well. That helped.

  She rolled out of bed without disturbing him and padded naked towards the bathroom, retrieving her mobile phone from the dresser as she went. She checked the message, guessing as she waited for the phone to display it that it might be from Mark Lapslie. He was in Pakistan, at a conference, but he’d texted or emailed a couple of times since he’d flown out, about various cases they had that were either stalled or wending their way towards trial. The Whittley case was causing problems, for instance, with the psychiatric community saying that Carl Whittley was obvi
ously insane and the Crown Prosecution Service, backed by Carl’s mother Eleanor, maintaining that his actions were complex and covert, and thus showed obvious evidence that he was sane enough to make careful plans and cover his tracks. Lapslie, as far as Emma could tell, was on the sidelines; he just wanted the bastard punished for what he’d done.

  The text wasn’t from Lapslie. It was from the incident room at Chelmsford Police Station. Body discovered on Canvey Island. Foul play suspected. Local police request assistance from murder squad. You are the senior officer until you establish that a more senior officer should take charge. There followed a postcode which Emma could type straight into her satnav in order to get her straight there, then the words Please confirm receipt. She quickly typed a response and sent it off.

  It was the new way of doing things. Rather than phone up and give her instructions, the Chelmsford Police HQ computer could send her a text with all the salient details. It was a cost-saving measure, apparently; one brought in by the management accountants who were convinced that millions of pounds could be saved each year by shaving small amounts off lots of separate budgets and doubling the price of the coffee in the machines. Emma favoured the opinion that the easiest way to save millions of pounds each year would be to sack the management accountants, but nobody had asked her.

  She dressed quickly. Canvey Island could get cold, she’d heard, so she pulled on tights and then jeans, and then topped the ensemble off with a T-shirt covered with a sweatshirt and a Napa leather jacket. Screw the fact that she’d probably be the most casually dressed person there; she could be there for a while and she wanted to be comfortable. The first time she’d worn a pencil skirt and high heels to a murder scene in the middle of a field she’d vowed that practicality had to win over style every time.