Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation

by Nigel McCrery

  ‘Does he ever let you loose?’ she asked. ‘I mean … to go to the bathroom. That kind of thing?’

  There was a long pause, broken by Mark saying ‘No,’ in a flat tone of voice that suggested he didn’t want the subject pursued any more.

  ‘Ah,’ Emma said. Something else to look forward to: pissing and crapping herself as if she were a baby. This day was just getting better and better.

  ‘Look on the bright side, Emma,’ she murmured. ‘At least there’s soup.’

  ‘What?’ Mark again.

  ‘Don’t worry. Talking to myself.’ She paused. ‘So he’s not … done anything to you?’

  ‘Like what?’ said Sara, her voice getting shriller. ‘Like torture? Like rape? Oh Christ, is he going to rape me and make Mark watch?’

  ‘No,’ Emma said. ‘He’s not going to do that. I can fairly confidently promise you that sexual assault isn’t why we’re here.’

  ‘He’s done this before?’ Mark was quick on the uptake. ‘When? What does he do? How often has this happened? Why haven’t you caught him yet?’

  ‘All good questions,’ Emma said. ‘I wish I had answers for you, but I don’t. I’m tied up here as well. Whatever happens, happens to me as well as you.’

  Silence, for a long while.

  A door slammed open somewhere off to Emma’s left. She could hear footsteps clicking on the linoleum. A shadow appeared, cast by a light behind the approaching figure.

  He stopped just the other side of the room divider. She could hear him breathing. Mark and Sara were so silent it was deafening. She couldn’t blame them. They didn’t want to attract attention to themselves.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said, trying to keep her voice level. ‘I want to see your face.’

  He walked forward, past the end of the divider, and turned to face her.

  Emma nearly screamed.

  He was wearing some kind of mask, she realised belatedly, a black metal thing made of various sections riveted together, with holes for the eyes and dominated by an exaggeratedly pointed and hooked nose. A medieval executioner’s mask.

  ‘Brave,’ he whispered, voice muffled by the mask. She tried desperately to recognise it, but failed. Was it Stephen Stottart? She couldn’t tell.

  ‘Braver than you. At least I can show my face.’

  ‘You don’t get the choice, girl.’ There was venom in the tone of voice. Hatred. She still couldn’t tell who it was, or even if she’d heard it before.

  ‘My name is Emma Bradbury,’ she said again. ‘I’m a detective with Essex Police. Release me right now.’

  Any hope that her status as a police officer would make him cower trickled away as he laughed. ‘I’ve killed so many people,’ he whispered hoarsely through the laughs. ‘Why do you think killing a policewoman would give me a moment’s unease?’

  And that was the moment she knew she was probably going to die. Nobody knew where she was, nobody knew who he was, and there was no rescue plan in motion. No reprieve. No hope.

  He walked towards her, and she flinched despite herself, but he walked round behind the wheelchair and pushed it forward.

  ‘Let’s take a little tour,’ he whispered, still chuckling.

  He took her left, back the way he had come, away from Mark and Sara Baillie, who were still being as silent as possible. He pushed her past a wooden stairway that led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Emma looked to her right as they passed a series of empty cubicles, like the one she’d woken up in, each with its own wheelchair sitting over by the wall, each with brown stains on the floor. Maybe blood; maybe shit. The thought of either was enough to terrify her.

  Past the last cubicle the room opened out into a much wider space. Weak light filtered in through high, narrow windows. The space was filled with objects under covers. Each object was about the size of a person; some lower, some higher. They looked as if they might have been statues, covered with dustsheets. Each one was lit by a spotlight above it. Wires had been attached to the ceiling, running from the spotlights to a junction box on the wall.

  ‘Some of these I found, some I bought,’ he said, pushing Emma up to the first shrouded object. ‘And some I made myself.’

  He pulled the sheet off with a flourish. Underneath was a table, a simple folding table, with an object resting on top. The object looked like a pear made of metal and covered with ornate scrollwork. Four nearly invisible seams ran down its length, spaced equally around the circumference. On top, where the stalk would be, was a metal hoop.

  ‘It’s called the Pear of Anguish,’ he breathed. ‘Or the Poire d’Angoisser, if you prefer. Very popular in medieval times. It’s inserted into the mouth, or the rectum or the vagina. Wherever there’s an opening. There’s a screw running all the way down the inside, and when that loop on top is turned, the four segments – you can see the four segments, can’t you? – they open up. Each one is hinged at the top, and they just get forced further and further apart by the screw. Believe me, they can open up much further than the human body can without bursting.’ He paused. ‘I don’t put it in the throat,’ he added in a hushed voice. ‘That would ruin the effect I’m trying to achieve. I need people to be able to scream.’

  ‘Why?’ Emma said through teeth that were trying to clamp themselves together, but he was pushing her on to another shrouded treasure.

  ‘This one,’ he whispered, ‘is called the Scavenger’s Gyres, or sometimes Skeffington’s Daughter – named for Sir Leonard Skeffington, who was the Lieutenant of the Tower of London in the time of Henry the Eighth.’ He tugged the sheet away. This time the object underneath was a wooden board holding a strange metal device about half the height of a person and made up of loops and rods of metal with sections that looked like they could slide along each other. It looked innocuous, like some oversized kitchen implement, and yet something about it made Emma’s blood freeze. It actually seemed to radiate a sense of evil. ‘Your neck and wrists and calves are locked into those hoops, and then the whole thing is gradually compressed. Your whole body is forced into a tighter and tighter space until the skin of your fingers and your toes splits open to let the blood spurt out and it gushes out of your mouth and nose and rectum. The pressure just gets too much, and the blood has to escape.’

  ‘Great,’ she said, forcing the words out. ‘You never thought of just collecting stamps?’

  He pushed her on to a third cloaked object. When he whipped the cloth off, she saw a large, flat sheet of metal about half the height of a person, supported on a metal base. The top edge had been sharpened to a razor’s edge.

  ‘The Spanish Donkey,’ the voice whispered from beneath the metal mask. ‘Your legs are placed to either side of the sheet, and weights attached to your ankles. The weights pull your body down, letting the metal sheet slice upwards. The heaviness of the weights can be used to control how quickly, or slowly, you slide down it. How far do you think it might go before you would die? Do you think you could feel it, all the way up inside you? Your womb? Your intestines? Your lungs? What noises do you think you might make?’ He giggled. ‘Shall we find out?’

  ‘Let’s not and say we did.’ She felt hot, and breathless. The walls were closing in on her like a vice.

  He whirled her around to another dust-sheeted object. This one was bulky, like a small car. He tugged the sheet off, but it snagged on something sharp and tore as he pulled it.

  The thing underneath was like a single bed made out of rough wood with a revolving drum in the middle, its axis going from one side of the ‘bed’ to the other, but rather than being smooth the drum was covered in rusty metal barbs, like fishhooks. At one end of the ‘bed’ was a wooden barrier with a large hole in it. A hole about the size of a head, Emma noted sickly. At the other end was a similar barrier with two holes; one for each foot she guessed. The axis of the drum ended up in a handle, just to make it easy for rotating.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘I get to lie down across the drum, with my head and legs secured, and someone gets to tur
n the handle. My stomach is slowly ripped to shreds.’

  ‘The Spanish Drum,’ the voice whispered proudly. ‘Favourite of the Spanish Inquisition.’ He gestured off to one side. ‘I’ve even got an Iron Maiden over there. Opinions differ over whether the Iron Maiden was ever used in anger, or was just a bit of gothic decoration, but the idea is sound. It’s a big metal coffin where the lid is hinged and the inside of the door is covered in spikes which can be gradually pushed further and further towards the middle.’

  ‘Torture devices,’ she said angrily. ‘Great. Well done. We have Tasers in the police, for stunning violent criminals with an electrical charge, but Amnesty International wants to get them reclassified as torture devices. You can torture a person with a ballpoint pen, if you want to. You can probably torture them with a sheet of paper. Anything can be used as a means of torture. The question is, why? Why do you want to torture people? For Christ’s sake, why do you want to torture me?’

  She closed her eyes, waiting but not sure what for.

  When she opened her eyes, she was looking down at her captor’s feet.

  At the red Converse plimsolls he was wearing.

  ‘Gavin,’ she breathed, despite the voice in her head warning her to say nothing, give nothing away. ‘Gavin Stottart.’

  The sound of the metal mask being pulled off made her open her eyes. Maybe, she thought, it would be better if she didn’t look, but it was probably too late for that now.

  The face staring back at her was that of a nineteen-year-old, the same boy – man? – she’d seen in Stephen Stottart’s house the day before. His eyes were blue, and sad. So sad.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, putting all the urgency she could into the word.

  ‘My father has synaesthesia, you know that?’ he said, not bothering to whisper now that he knew that she knew who he was.

  ‘I know. He’s in the same therapy group as my boss.’

  ‘I inherited it.’

  ‘Gavin, there’s lots of people with synaesthesia. They’re not all murderers.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’ve also got something called achromatia. I can only see in shades of grey. Only shades of grey. No colours at all. Can you imagine that?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, trying to put some emotiveness into her voice, trying to make a connection, trying to make him see her as a person. ‘But Gavin, if you don’t know what a colour is, you don’t know what you’re missing. That’s not a reason to kill people.’

  ‘Killing people isn’t the point,’ he said. ‘As I was growing up, I used to hurt my sister. Chinese burns, that sort of thing. All kids do it, don’t they? But sometimes, sometimes when she screamed, I could see colours.’ His eyes were far away. ‘It was like seeing paradise! I’d never dreamed that things could be that beautiful. I just … I can’t describe it. I knew I would do anything to see those colours again. I couldn’t live without them.’

  ‘So what – you abducted people? And you tortured them to make them scream for you?’

  He looked away, unable to meet her gaze. ‘You don’t understand. It’s like a drug. I need to see those colours. Those glorious, incredible colours. The trouble is, not everyone makes the right noises. Some people, it’s like I see jagged shapes; vicious, sharp things, dark and muddy. Other people it’s like everything is smooth and round and soft, and glowing in such incredible warm shades. It makes me feel – complete. Real.’

  ‘Lorraine Gregory? She was real, Gavin.’

  ‘She couldn’t give me what I wanted. What I needed. I tried. God knows, I tried. The things I did to her body to get her to scream as loud and as long as she could, but all I got was tinges. Hints of colour. Not the real thing.’

  ‘Alison Traff?’

  He smiled. ‘Close. There was something there. I kept shoving meat skewers through her skin. The noises she made – I don’t know what you’d call them, maybe red, maybe blue, maybe some colour that nobody apart from me has ever seen, but she was good. I tried to keep her alive, I really did. I fed her and everything, but I think she got an infection. One day I came in, and she’d just died.’

  ‘David Cave?’

  ‘Very different. The colours were much darker with him. Much more serious. I wanted something brighter.’

  ‘Catriona Dooley, then? Was she the right one?’

  He shook his head. ‘The sounds she made were all wrong. All mixed up. The colours were running together and getting murky. I had to get rid of her. None of them were what I needed.’

  ‘And now you have Mark and Sara Baillie. Do you think you’re going to get something different from them? You’re wrong, Gavin. You’re on the wrong track. Pain is not the way to get the colours you want.’

  ‘It is,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve just not found the right kind of pain yet.’ He gestured around with a wave of his arm. ‘But with these things … the medieval torturers knew what they were doing. They took the causing of pain to a fine art. They could keep people alive for days. Weeks! Based on what they did, and what I know, I think it can do it. I think a duet, rather than a solo, is what I need. Two voices – one male, one female, screaming together. I think that’ll take me to paradise.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’ Emma asked. ‘Where next? How far do you go, Gavin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. He switched his gaze back to her, and smiled. ‘Maybe a trio …’ he said thoughtfully.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘The locations change, but the faces remain the same,’ Jane Catherall said grimly.

  Lapslie could only nod in agreement. In front of them the Tolla site spread away towards the horizon; Eco-Dome after Eco-Dome, each containing who knew how many varieties of genetically enhanced wheat. And behind them, one particular Eco-Dome which contained more than just wheat. It contained two dead bodies.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re children,’ she said. ‘Just children. Two boys.’

  ‘The Baillie sons.’ He felt his heart calcify just a little more than it already had.

  ‘I can’t tell yet,’ Jane pointed out. ‘I will have to compare dental and medical records before I can form a proper judgement. But I can tell you they died within the past thirty-six hours, and they were buried comparatively recently. Rigor mortis has fully set in.’

  ‘I’m not exactly in a position to tell their parents they’re dead,’ he said. ‘I just … Never mind.’ He paused, not wanting to ask the next question, but forced the words out. ‘What was done to them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He cast a questioning glance in her direction. ‘Nothing? No torture?’

  ‘No torture. Because it’s you, I’m going to go out on a limb and say either asphyxiation or poisoning. Not strangulation. There are no other marks on the body.’

  ‘Ether poisoning?’

  She nodded reluctantly. ‘I wish I could tell you that their blood is bright red, or their lips are purple, and that means it’s ether poisoning, but I can’t. There are no obvious physiological markers. I’ll have to test their livers to know for sure. But given the timescale, and given that we know ether was used to abduct them and their parents, one could speculate that the abductor used just enough for the parents but too much for the kids, and he had to dispose of the bodies.’

  Lapslie looked around. ‘Dammit, we’ll have to search every one of these Eco-Domes to see if there are any more bodies. I’m going to have to have people crawling over this place for months.’

  His phone rang. He checked the display.

  ‘It might be important,’ Jane pointed out.

  ‘It’s Rouse,’ he said. ‘He’ll have heard that I’ve just discovered two more bodies even though I’m off the investigation.’

  ‘What can he do?’ she asked. ‘Take you off again?’

  He smiled thinly. She was right. He was close to rock bottom now.

  ‘Find her, Mark,’ Jane said softly. ‘Find her.’

  And she turned to go back inside the Ec
o-Dome, to the two children who now claimed her sole attention.

  Lapslie grabbed hold of the security guy, Standish, as he passed by talking worriedly on his BlackBerry. ‘I need your security records,’ he said. ‘I need to know when Stephen Stottart was last on this site.’

  Standish waved his BlackBerry. ‘I had them downloaded into here,’ he said. ‘I guessed you’d want to see them.’ He glanced at the display and scrolled down with the thumbwheel. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it over. ‘These are the records of who’s swiped their cards in and out over the past three days. Like I told you, Steve Stottart’s not been in.’

  Lapslie slid his gaze down the list. Lots of names, none of them meaning anything.

  Apart from one.

  ‘Look – he’s just here. He came in yesterday.’

  Standish grabbed the BlackBerry back and scanned it. ‘No, that’s not Steve. That’s Gavin.’

  ‘Gavin?’

  ‘Gavin Stottart. His son.’

  Lapslie felt like the world had just tipped sideways on him. ‘His son? His son works here?’

  Standish nodded. ‘It’s a casual job. We prefer to employ relations of our staff – it keeps everything in-house, and it reduces our carbon footprint because they can give each other lifts in to the site. Gavin Stottart works in the quality assurance area. He has to drive out to the remote sample sites every few days and collect the pollen traps. He has keys so he can get into sites – they’re usually owned by someone else, but they allow us to site our traps on their property.’

  ‘What are the traps for?’

  ‘We need to know if any of our pollen escapes from the Eco-Domes. It’s part of the legal agreement that allows us to operate, but it’s good business practice as well. Of course, the protesters claim that because we have these remote sample sites it implies that we’re already admitting the pollen might escape, but—’

  ‘Focus!’ Lapslie snarled. ‘Two dead kids. Missing sergeant. Not interested in protesters or legislation.’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ He was flustered. ‘We have sample boxes spaced out around the site here, up to thirty miles away.’