Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Hello?’ he said, dreading the next few seconds.

  ‘Mark?’

  His world tilted again, then righted itself. It was her. She was alive.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. You sounded strange on your message. Everything okay?’

  ‘Yeah, just … jet-lagged.’

  ‘Good. Can’t stop on – I’m in surgery in fifteen minutes. I just wanted to check everything was all right.’

  ‘No problem. Talk soon.’

  ‘Bye.’ She hung up.

  He leaned back in his chair and let his breath return to normal.

  The dead woman wasn’t Charlotte. Which left the question; who was it?

  Knowing that the file had been sent directly to him, Lapslie had done a quick phone-around of the few friends and relatives he had left, on the off-chance the case was more targeted against him than he had thought. His parents were dead but he still had a sister with whom he exchanged phone calls twice a year and Christmas cards in December. She was alive and well, and surprised to hear from him out of sequence. He’d texted Jane Catherall, his favourite pathologist, and received a response, so she was fine, and she’d told him that she was working on a case with Emma Bradbury, so she was okay too. Sonia, his ex-wife, was happy in her new relationship, and the kids were fine. A female colleague with whom he had once had a short and intense affair was also in good health – now a detective superintendent in the north of England. She had been icy and distant on the phone, and it was only during the call that Lapslie remembered that the break-up had been brutal and unpleasant. Presumably that was all buried now, and she didn’t want to be reminded of it.

  He’d also checked the records of any bodies of women who had died in acts of violence and which had been discovered over the past year, but even restricting the age range and specifying multiple injuries threw up too many to investigate. The world was an unsafe place, especially for women. And he had no idea when the woman had died, of course. The file could be years old. Sound files did not degrade with the passing of time.

  No, Lapslie was at a loss. He didn’t know what his next move should be. If there even was a next move.

  Perhaps he should have a chat with Jane Catherall. The pathologist might be able to spot something in the sound file that nobody else had noticed. That was the kind of thing she was good at.

  On a sudden impulse, he pushed himself up from the desk and left the office. The corridor outside ran past an open-plan office of the kind he had always hated, this one set aside for civilian support staff who were doing all the administrative work for Essex Police, but the small offices were set aside for meetings, video-conferences and confidential work. Through the plate glass windows on the far side of the open-plan office he could see the uninspiring grey architecture of Chelmsford, where the Essex Force was headquartered. Not the most appealing town in the world, even in the bright winter sunlight.

  He felt several pairs of eyes tracking him as he walked towards the stairs. Obviously the sound of the screams had drifted further than he had thought.

  He sprinted up the stairs, two at a time, until he reached the fifth floor. Previously he would have used the lift and thought nothing of it, but two things had changed. First, being with Charlotte had made him aware of his weight in a way that he hadn’t thought about for years, and he was determined to shed a stone or two. And secondly, his synaesthesia combined with the echoing stairwell had previously caused him to taste something unpleasantly like india rubber and vinegar whenever he used the stairs, but now, with the drugs and the therapy, he could happily run up and down them all day with nothing more than a tingle in his mouth.

  Chief Superintendent Alan Rouse’s office was based at the end of a long, wide corridor lined with photographs of previous chief superintendents and assistant chief constables in various artificial poses, either standing out in the open and shaking hands with someone, fixed smiles on their faces, or carefully posed against a wooden panel and lit to make them look ten years younger. Rouse appeared in the background of most of the open-air ones. He had been a fixture of the Force for more years than Lapslie could happily count. For a while they had been assigned together to Brixton, but Rouse’s career trajectory had climbed up and up while Lapslie’s had flattened out, due to his medical problems and his general attitude.

  ‘Is he in?’ Lapslie asked Rouse’s personal assistant, a large lady named Gill.

  She looked up at him from her desk, which was adjacent to the frosted-glass frontage of Rouse’s office. Behind her Lapslie could see Rouse’s silhouette at the desk.

  Her mouth twisted sceptically. ‘You know there’s an electronic diary on the system? You know you can book appointments with a few clicks of a mouse?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and I also know that Rouse rations his open diary slots to a couple a day and most of them are booked three months in advance.’

  ‘I’ll see if he’s in,’ she said.

  ‘I can see he’s in – he’s sitting just the other side of the glass. And he’s alone.’

  ‘Yes, but he might not be in to you,’ she said, raising an eyebrow.

  She levered herself from her ergonomically designed chair and moved towards Rouse’s door. She knocked gently, opened it just enough to poke her head through and said something Lapslie couldn’t hear. Rouse replied in his guttural growl. She pulled her head back and turned to Lapslie, smiling sweetly.

  ‘Chief Superintendent Rouse will see you now,’ she said.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ Lapslie murmured as he squeezed past her. ‘No coffee, thanks, although it’s nearly time for his post-lunch whisky.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ She sat heavily in her chair.

  ‘Everyone knows about that,’ Lapslie said, entering the office.

  Rouse looked up. His face looked even more swollen than usual: his jowls heavy and his eyelids dipping low over his eyes. He was in uniform, but his jacket was slung across the back of his chair.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Lapslie said undiplomatically.

  ‘You’re no oil painting yourself,’ Rouse rumbled. ‘Pull up a chair, Mark. Tell me why you wasted a couple of thousand pounds of Her Majesty’s money flying to Pakistan and then flying back again.’

  ‘Ah. Dain Morritt has been in touch.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Morritt has indeed been in touch. And he’s not happy.’

  ‘Did the presentation not go very well?’

  Rouse tried not to smile. ‘Apparently the presentation went very well. Your script and your viewfoils were immaculate. It was the question session that went badly.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yes, he’d concentrated so much on getting the presentation right that he forgot he didn’t have any background. The first couple of questions were so technical they floored him completely. After that the audience scented blood, and they were coming at him thick and fast. He eventually had to call the whole thing short and retreat to lick his wounds.’ He glanced at Lapslie over the top of his spectacles. ‘What happened – that health issue of yours suddenly get worse? I thought you had it under control.’

  ‘I do,’ Lapslie replied. ‘I’m on a drug regime to control the synaesthesia, with therapy to help me deal with the residual effects. It seems to be working.’

  ‘Good.’ Rouse nodded approvingly. ‘You’re a good officer. Too good to lose.’

  ‘That’s not what you said when we were investigating the murder of Catherine Charnaud.’

  Rouse’s fleshy lips twitched in the nearest his face ever got to a smile. ‘No, you were a liability then. Fortunately you’ve pulled yourself together since.’

  ‘Still got a result, though.’

  ‘And not through standard police work. You sniffed the killer out, as I recall. Literally in that case, although it’s something of an old copper’s metaphor.’ Rouse leaned back in his chair. ‘I remember what you were like when we were on the beat together. You had an instinct for police wor
k that officers today seem to have lost. It’s something that can’t be trained or taught.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘I suppose it’s occurred to you that your instincts back then might have been the synaesthesia, just starting up in your head and giving you that competitive edge. I do wonder if you’ll still be as good with it suppressed.’

  Lapslie shook his head. ‘Don’t go there. I never relied on the synaesthesia. I tried to ignore it for years. I never really came to terms with it.’

  ‘Do you know yet how it started?’

  Lapslie sighed. Thinking about the synaesthesia inevitably threw him back to the days when he and Sonia were together and things were different. Not necessarily better; just different. ‘I think it started when Jamie was born. He was one of those babies who would cry all the time. Not because he was hungry, or because he was cold, or in pain, but just because. And after a while, when he used to cry, I could taste something coppery in my mouth. I thought it was just the sleeplessness of having a baby, but it kept on going, and bit by bit I started tasting different things. It took a while before I connected the tastes up to noises I was hearing, which was when I started researching the condition.’

  ‘It was a difficult birth, as I remember,’ Rouse said softly. Lapslie nodded. The memory caused a shiver to run through his shoulders.

  ‘But synaesthesia isn’t caused by stress, is it? Otherwise everyone would get it. There must be another component.’

  ‘I guess.’ Lapslie shrugged, and looked past Rouse, out of the window at the deep-blue sky. ‘Perhaps it’s genetic, although I don’t recall my parents or my sister ever mentioning it. Perhaps it’s just a malformation of the brain, the neurological equivalent of a club foot or a hair lip. All I know is that it was more or less quiescent in me until Jamie’s birth, and then it just revved up.’

  ‘And it’s got worse, hasn’t it? I don’t mean gradually – I mean suddenly, every now and then.’

  Lapslie nodded. ‘The first time was when my mother and father died. Car crash. It got worse then. And later – you know I had a relationship with another police officer a few years after Robbie was born?’

  Rouse was inscrutable. ‘I heard.’

  ‘When that relationship ended, and it ended badly, the synaesthesia escalated. And then again, when Sonia and I first separated and I moved out, it escalated again. So yes, it’s obviously related to things that are going on in my life, but I don’t think it’s directly caused by them.’ He blinked, taking a deep breath as if waking from a dream. ‘How the hell did we end up talking about this?’

  Rouse steepled his fingers in front of him. ‘I think we needed to. I think we’ve been needing to for a while. And perhaps we couldn’t until you were actually in treatment.’

  ‘You know that’s not why I popped in?’

  Rouse shrugged. ‘My door is always open to you, Mark. Doesn’t matter what you want.’ He paused. ‘So – if it wasn’t your state of health that made you fly back, what was it?’

  ‘I got sent something. An email.’

  ‘Bad news?’

  ‘For someone. It was a recording of a woman being murdered.’

  ‘Ah, that. Yes, I seem to remember seeing something about it from Forensics. I would rather have expected to hear about it from you first.’

  ‘And here I am. I wanted to make sure it was a crime before bothering you.’

  Rouse pursed his lips and hesitated for a moment before saying: ‘Did it happen on our patch? In Essex?’

  Lapslie stared at him. ‘Does that matter? A woman is dead.’

  ‘If one of my officers is investigating a murder using my budget, I’d at least like to know that the murder occurred on my patch.’

  ‘The email was sent to me from a hospital in Essex. Is that enough?’

  ‘For now.’ Rouse frowned. ‘Sent to you directly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By somebody that knows you?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  ‘So this is personal.’

  ‘At first blush, yes. I’ve sent the file to Forensics, as you know, and they’ve analysed it for me. They can confirm that it’s a genuine killing, but that’s about all at the moment. I’ve checked recent discoveries of dead bodies of women but there are too many to narrow down without further evidence. And that’s where I am at the moment.’ He paused and grimaced. ‘I’ll need to set up an incident room. Would Emma Bradbury be available to help?’

  ‘Actually,’ Rouse said, ‘she’s been assigned to another case. You weren’t around, and besides, it’s apparently a straight murder, although there are some odd details. You’ll have to run with it by yourself for a while. Make sure you keep me informed. This has the hallmarks of something that could come back and bite us on the arse if we don’t get a grip of it.’

  ‘Do you ever think about anything apart from budgets and publicity?’ Lapslie asked, standing.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Rouse asked, apparently without irony.

  Rather than head back to the office and spend the rest of the afternoon listening to the sound file, over and over, Lapslie headed down to the canteen on the first floor and grabbed a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The sandwich was actually a muffuletta with a marinated olive salad and layers of capicola, salami, mortadella, emmental and provolone, while the coffee was a medio Americano with an extra shot, but to him it was still a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He had almost finished it when a figure loomed up beside his table. He looked up to find the diminutive Sean Burrows staring at him. ‘DCI Lapslie,’ Burrows said. ‘They said I could find you down here.’

  ‘Mr Burrows. Please, join me.’ Burrows sat down, and Lapslie added, ‘Can I get you a coffee?’

  ‘Thanks, but no. I was up for another meeting, and I wanted to tell you that my people have been able to extract some more information from that sound file.’ He smiled. ‘They’re like terriers, that lot. They just don’t give up.’

  ‘Good thing too,’ Lapslie said, feeling a little flutter of anticipation in his stomach. ‘I haven’t got any further in identifying the victim.’ He stared expectantly at Burrows. ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Best I show you,’ Burrows replied. ‘Or, at least, let you listen. I’ve brought a copy with me. Have you access to a computer around here, by any chance?’

  ‘Funnily enough, I believe there are a couple in the building.’

  Lapslie led Burrows up to his office. The forensic expert took a memory stick from his pocket and plugged it into an empty USB socket on the computer.

  ‘I hope you’ve virus-checked that,’ Lapslie murmured. ‘Apparently, it’s regulations.’

  Burrows glanced up at him with a raised eyebrow. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘our software checks against viruses that haven’t even been invented yet. My technicians have a game where they try to build computer viruses that can get past the software. None of them has succeeded yet.’

  ‘Have they ever considered going out and getting a life?’

  Burrows grimaced. ‘Given what they know about murder and computer viruses, I’d rather they stayed in their offices for as long as possible. If I were allowed to make them sleep there, I would.’ He paused. ‘Sadly, they’d probably prefer sleeping there to going home.’

  Turning back to the computer, he pulled up the Windows Player and located a file on the memory stick. Double-clicking it, he stood back.

  Lapslie braced himself, waiting for the first scream, but it never came. Or, rather, it came but it was pushed so far into the background that it was hardly audible. In the foreground was static, a continuous hiss like a waterfall, and a sound like someone shifting around.

  ‘What’s this?’ Lapslie asked.

  ‘We’ve used a graphic equaliser to push the foreground sounds to the back and amplify the background sounds. It helps that the recording was in stereo, because that meant we could work out where the victim was standing at any moment and filter out sounds from that area as much as possible. You can hear that she’s still there, but
faintly. What you’re hearing now is the killer.’

  And as Lapslie listened, that’s exactly what he heard. Footsteps. Breathing. The sound of clothes rustling. And then, chillingly, a voice whispering, ‘No, that’s gash. That’s just gash.’

  And there was something about that voice he thought he recognised, although without the crutch of his synaesthesia he wasn’t sure. Just something about the tone, the timbre.

  ‘Can you amplify that voice?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘That’s as good as it gets,’ Burrows said. ‘We’ve run every technique we know, but anything more than that ends up distorting so badly that it’s unrecognisable.’

  ‘But it’s a man’s voice?’

  ‘Difficult to tell, with the whispering, but it sounds like a man, yes.’

  Lapslie took a deep breath. It wasn’t exactly a case-breaking moment, but it was something. ‘Thanks, Sean.’

  ‘Not a problem, Mr Lapslie. We’ll keep on working, of course. Sara has some hopes that she can isolate the acoustic signature of the building. We might be able to tell you something about where it was recorded.’

  ‘Anything would be helpful at the moment,’ Lapslie said, shaking Burrows’ hand.

  After the Head of Forensics had left, Lapslie played the file again, setting it on ‘loop’ so that it repeated over and over. That voice – ‘No, that’s gash. That’s just gash.’ Where did he know it from? Did he, in fact, know it at all? Was he just projecting the fact that the killer obviously knew Lapslie, or knew of him, onto a vague whisper and trying to reconstruct something that just wasn’t there?

  The more he replayed the file, the more he found himself listening for the screams of the victim, now suppressed into near-silence in the background. He had listened to the original sound file so many times that he knew where the screams would come.