Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Dear God,’ Murrell said from behind Emma.

  On a hunch, she crossed to the fridge and opened the door.

  Revealed in the actinic white glow, the fridge was stacked up with plastic take-out containers. Unlike the ones on the cooker, these were washed and clean. And unlike the ones on the cooker, they were all full.

  Emma felt her stomach lurch. Each plastic contained was filled with gobbets of dark red flesh.

  ‘Find him,’ she snarled. ‘And arrest him for murder.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was only when Lapslie got back to his Saab that he remembered he hadn’t paid the hospital’s extortionate parking toll. He looked around the car park, but there were no ticket machines – only a few well-disguised signs telling him that he had to pay in the hospital reception area. Grumpily, he walked back to the reception and found the only machine that seemed to have been fitted. There was a queue of people waiting in front of it, muttering to themselves in what was either irritation or the first indication of mental illness. The woman at the front of the line was rooting in her handbag for the right change. Judging by the look on her face she already knew that she hadn’t got it but was hoping either to locate a previously unknown hoard of 10p pieces underneath her knitting or that a kindly soul waiting in the queue would donate the money to her. Looking at the people in the line Lapslie thought they were more likely to mug her for the coins she already had than give her more.

  After a minute or so of fruitless waiting he turned and strode off to the reception desk. A middle-aged woman in a blazer was sitting behind it, scanning her computer screen and making notes on a sheet of paper with a ballpoint pen. She glanced up as he approached.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Police,’ Lapslie said, holding his warrant card up where she could see it. ‘I need my parking ticket validated.’

  Her face creased into what was obviously a well-used expression that encompassed regret, sadness and a slight hint of reproach. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s not hospital policy. Everyone using the car park needs to pay for a ticket. Our facilities cost money, you know.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘You could have come by public transport,’ she retorted. ‘It’s hospital policy to reduce our carbon footprint, and that means encouraging our visitors to leave their cars at home wherever possible.’

  ‘In that case,’ Lapslie replied, ‘I have reason to believe that a crime was committed at this hospital. I need to collect the evidence, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to charge you for my time.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ she protested.

  ‘Police time costs money, you know,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Our policy is to reduce crime by charging people if they let crimes happen on their premises. What can I do?’

  She just looked at him, obviously waiting for him to change his mind or tell her that he was only joking. Instead, he maintained a level gaze.

  ‘Would you like me to write you out an invoice?’ he asked eventually.

  She half-opened her mouth, realised that she didn’t know what she was going to say, and closed it again. She clicked her ballpoint a couple of times.

  ‘The longer I stand here, the higher the bill gets,’ he added when it became clear that she was still waiting for something to happen – a coincidental interruption, or divine intervention, or something. Anything.

  Her lips pursed tightly and she snatched the parking ticket from his hand. She fed it into a machine below the counter. ‘There,’ she said, poking it back at him in a way that would have led to a paper cut if he’d had his hand extended too far.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, smiling, ‘that when you purse your lips like that it makes your mouth look like a cat’s arse: all pink and scrunched up.’

  The sound of her pen snapping was something that Lapslie would remember for some time to come, and the memory would always bring a smile to his face.

  He walked back to his car, passing the queue of people still waiting behind the woman at the ticket machine. She seemed to have given up trying to find the last few coins, but didn’t know how to get the ones she had already deposited back from the machine, so she was pressing every button she could see in the hope that one of them would return her money.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Lapslie said, pausing at the queue. He pointed back at the reception desk. ‘The lady over there told me that the machine is faulty. She’s offering free parking tickets. All you have to do is to go and ask her.’

  The queue broke up into a rugby scrum of people all jostling to get to the reception desk first. Lapslie walked off, feeling a lot better than he had for a while.

  He pulled out of the car park, feeding his validated ticket into the machine and accelerating before the barrier was fully up. He had no clear idea of where he was going, but he knew he didn’t want to go back to his office at Chelmsford Police HQ. He wanted time to think about the sound file, and the girl who had sent it.

  Remembering the noodle bar he had seen at the junction of the A13 and the M25, he swung the car around and pointed it towards London. The thought of food unexpectedly made him feel hungry. It wasn’t a feeling he had got used to yet. The synaesthesia that usually flooded his mouth with inappropriate tastes at inappropriate moments had pretty much burned out his hunger over the years. Usually he just ate because he knew he had to in order to function. He was surprised to find that it was still there.

  The noodle bar was a single-storey building with a wide frontage, more like a tyre dealership than a restaurant, but when Lapslie pushed through the swing door that led inside he was confronted with an almost tangible wall of smells: garlic, ginger, hot oil and a hundred other things that he couldn’t immediately identify. For a moment – just a moment – his suppressed synaesthesia kick-started and went into reverse, turning the smells into a choir of angelic voices singing to him, some impossibly higher and some far, far deeper than ever a human voice could manage. He wasn’t sure whether they were singing in some unknown, ancient language, the first language that ever graced the Earth perhaps, or whether the sound they were making was bereft of meaning, like birdsong. The terrible, glorious sound made him catch his breath. It was what he imagined Heaven might sound like.

  And then it was gone, leaving a void in his chest that made him catch his breath in shock. His synaesthesia settled into quiescence once again.

  ‘You wan’ a table?’ said a young waiter in a red T-shirt and black trousers as he walked up to Lapslie.

  ‘Yes,’ Lapslie said, looking around. For somewhere that wasn’t in the middle of a town or located at a convenient point on a major road, it was surprisingly busy. Long wooden tables stretched from one side of the restaurant to the other, with bench-like, backless seating arranged along them. The waiter led him to an empty space at one end of a table, opposite a bearded man in a dark suit who was just finishing a bowl of thick, fleshy rice noodles and vegetables drenched in a red sauce.

  Lapslie sat, nodding to the man opposite, and took the menu that the kid handed him. His gaze scanned the list.

  ‘You wan’ something to drink?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Green tea,’ Lapslie replied. ‘And I’ll have the fried noodles with pork, chicken and prawn in oyster sauce.’

  ‘You got it.’ The kid left. He must have waved an invisible signal at one of his colleagues, because a few moments later a small, handleless cup and a teapot with a wicker handle appeared at his elbow.

  Lapslie looked around at the mass of humanity represented in the restaurant: everyone from schoolkids in blazers and wide ties that barely made it past the third button on their white shirts to businessmen in suits, students in hoodies and mothers meeting up with friends for a chat. A true democratic melting pot of noodle-lovers.

  His plate arrived just as the man opposite him was paying for his finished meal. Lapslie looked down into the curved bowl. The smell rising from it was enough to make him salivate. The food had been ladled out ove
r a base of thin noodles that had been fried to a crisp. Since the synaesthesia had infiltrated itself into the nooks and crannies of his consciousness he’d got out of the habit of going to restaurants, of even enjoying food. For years now he had been deliberately eating things that didn’t have any taste, on the basis that he tasted too many things anyway, and now he wasn’t sure where to start.

  Eventually he slipped his chopsticks out from their paper wrapper, snapped them apart at the base and manipulated a chunk of chicken into his mouth.

  The taste was exquisite: a salty, dark and slightly burnt flavour that seeped over his tongue, seeming to change and deepen as it went. He bit softly into the chicken, feeling it break into fibres beneath the pressure of his teeth. Is this what he had been missing all these years, with his monotonous diet of mozzarella, white rice, boiled chicken, swede and potatoes? This was perfection, boiled down to a morsel of food.

  There were mushrooms mixed in with the meat and the noodles – some wide and flat, some smaller and more rounded. He took one of the small ones and bit experimentally into it. The taste was indescribable, so rounded and complicated that it was as if this mushroom was the Platonic precursor of which all other mushrooms were pale shadows, but the taste was complimented by the way the flesh of the mushroom squished between his molars, leaking hot liquid into his mouth. He quickly took one of the flatter, larger mushrooms between the prongs of his chopsticks and popped it into his mouth. The flavour was almost the same, but the texture was different: the flesh of the mushroom was almost slimy, slippery, like a mollusc. And then there were the bamboo shoots: fibrous in texture, like the chicken and the pork, but woody and dry to the taste.

  Unexpectedly, Lapslie’s mobile rang. He retrieved it from his jacket pocket. ‘Mark Lapslie,’ he said, mouth still full.

  ‘DCI Lapslie? Sean Burrows here.’

  ‘Mr Burrows.’ Lapslie could hear a faint echo of his voice a half-second behind the real one. It threw him, making him forget what he was saying.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’ Burrows said, his voice tinny.

  ‘Not at all. What can I do for you?’

  There was silence for a few seconds, apart from the ever-present static from whatever ether mobile phone messages pass through. ‘I just wanted to tell you that we’ve been carrying out some further analysis on that sound file. The one of the girl screaming.’

  Lapslie looked around at the other diners enjoying their noodles, oblivious to the horror that he was talking about. And yet, did he know what they were talking about, to each other or on their own phones? Each person was an island, separated from the others by a gulf of ignorance. ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’ve isolated some more background noise.’

  Lapslie’s attention suddenly snapped into sharp focus. ‘More stuff from the killer?’

  ‘No.’ Burrows’ voice sounded regretful. ‘No words. Just some noises.’

  ‘What kind of noises?’

  ‘That’s the thing; we’re not sure. Could be a musical instrument, like a glockenspiel, or a kid’s chime bar, if you remember them from school. Or a tubular bell. Like in the Mike Oldfield album.’

  ‘Okay.’ Lapslie paused for a moment, in case Sean Burrows was going to say something else. ‘Thanks. Can you send the new sounds through to me via email?’

  ‘Will do. Have a nice day, now.’

  Burrows rang off, leaving Lapslie wondering whether this new fact actually added to his store of knowledge in any useful way or whether it was just another distracting fact.

  Putting the phone away, he tried the pork next. The little cubes were coated on one side with a marinade of some kind: sharp and tangy. Like the chicken, they broke up in his mouth into fibres of meat, but the pork fibres were smaller and drier than the chicken ones. The prawns, by contrast, burst between his teeth, exploding into salty, fishy liquid.

  And then there were the noodles. By the time he’d got down to them they had absorbed the tastes of all the food above them and were beginning to lose their crispness. The ends, projecting out of the sauce, were still breakable, but the middles were soft. The contrast was incredible.

  By the time he was chasing the last bits of chicken and prawn around the bowl his stomach was full and satisfied and his mind was quietly content. He couldn’t remember having felt like this since he had been young. It was as if he had never tasted anything properly before. And as if he had never realised how much of the simple enjoyment of a meal was due to factors other than the flavours: the way the food felt in the mouth, whether it broke apart or stayed intact, whether it was dry or moist or coated in sauce, whether it was hot or cold. Looking around he couldn’t help but wonder whether the other people in the restaurant appreciated the true variety of experiences that were held in their bowls. Or were they, like him when the synaesthesia had his mind in its tight grip, just concentrated on one thing in particular – in his case, texture over taste, in theirs taste over texture?

  ‘Mind if I join you?’

  The voice was familiar. For some reason Lapslie thought of vinegar and mustard seeds, although he couldn’t actually taste them. He looked up to find Dom McGinley towering over him like a cliff that might give way to an avalanche at any moment.

  ‘It’s a free country,’ he growled.

  ‘If it’s free, why does everything costs so much?’ McGinley asked rhetorically, slipping his bulk between the bench and the table opposite Lapslie. His stomach pushed against the wood, forming a horizontal crease in his shirt from one side to the other.

  ‘I’m surprised you even know how much things cost,’ Lapslie found himself saying, ‘given the amount of stolen cash you’ve squirrelled away over the years.’

  ‘Now, now,’ McGinley chided. His voice had tasted of piccalilli for many of the years that Lapslie had known him, but now Lapslie found that there was no taste to it at all, and it seemed to rob McGinley of a dimension, reducing him to something less substantial than he should have been. ‘What with bribes and depreciation I’m not worth anywhere near as much as you’d think. And I’ve offered to give you some chunks of it over the years, but you’ve always turned me down. Don’t get sniffy about it now.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ Lapslie asked. ‘It’s not like this place is one of my regular haunts. Or is it true that you pay people in each of the mobile phone providers to tell you where any person is based on the regular update signals their mobiles send, just so long as you know their number?’

  ‘Don’t even need to know their number,’ McGinley rumbled. ‘As long as I know their name my people can track down their mobile number, then find out which phone mast their mobile is currently registered with. Depending on the size of the cell around the mast, it’s child’s play to work out their actual location. Once your phone had stopped moving from cell to cell I had you pegged down to about two hundred metres. You probably weren’t browsing porn magazines in the petrol station shop, not for that long. They would have thrown you out after ten minutes. This place was the next best bet.’

  ‘With all that drive and energy,’ Lapslie said, ‘you could have been a world-class politician or something big in the City of London.’

  ‘What,’ McGinley said, sounding genuinely affronted, ‘and work for a living?’

  ‘McGinley,’ Lapslie chided gently, ‘if you’d dedicated the same amount of time to honest work as you had on planning bank robberies, insurance scams, blackmail plots and confidence tricks then you’d have just as much money as you do now without running the constant risk of arrest or being killed at the hands of some underworld rival.’

  ‘Yeah, but where would the fun be in that?’

  Lapslie shrugged. ‘You have a point there.’

  ‘After all, you could have gone into teaching, but instead you went into a job that paid the same but with a higher chance of being bottled breaking up a nightclub fight or hit in the face by a flying chunk of concrete at a riot.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that
you and me, we’re not so different. We’re both thrill seekers. We both hate the nine-to-five routine. We both like getting up in the morning and not knowing what problems the day has in store for us.’

  ‘You’ve never liked getting up in the morning.’

  ‘I was speaking metaphorically.’

  Before Lapslie could laugh, the young waiter turned up by the side of the table.

  ‘You want a menu?’ he asked.

  ‘Get me something with beef and rice,’ McGinley said without looking away from Lapslie.

  ‘We don’ do beef,’ the kid said.

  ‘You do,’ McGinley corrected gently, ‘for me.’

  The kid drew a breath, ready to argue, but McGinley just reached across with his left hand and pushed his right cuff up. On the skin of his wrist Lapslie could see a tiny tattoo of a fish; pink and blue scales and an uplifted tail, barely the size of a 1p piece.

  The waiter seemed to stiffen. ‘I go get something with beef,’ he said, and backed away.

  ‘You’ll be lucky if it’s not a cup of Bovril,’ Lapslie said to break the silence after the kid had left.

  ‘I like Bovril,’ McGinley replied as if nothing untoward had happened.

  ‘Don’t mind me asking, but what is that tattoo?’

  McGinley shrugged. ‘Never found out. I got it in Kowloon, in a backstreet parlour some years ago in an alley that smelled of rotting cabbage and fish. I was blind drunk and I asked the bloke for something scary. I was expecting him to do a dragon, or a snake, or a tiger, or something. Instead, when I woke up, I found this pansy fish on my wrist. I was ready to take exception to it, but someone came into his parlour, saw my tattoo, and left in a hurry. I assume it’s some Tong or Yakuza symbol.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe it marks me out as a ninja assassin or something.’