‘Based where?’
‘Typically we rent some space from an existing landowner. All we need is a box on a pole. It’s—’
‘Do you have a list of your sample sites on that little CrackBerry thing?’ Lapslie interrupted.
‘I think so.’ He clicked and scrolled away. ‘Yes, here.’
He handed the device over again. This time there was a map on the high-resolution colour display, covered with red dots. Lapslie spent a few seconds mapping the locations onto what he already knew. ‘A kids’ play area in Canvey Island,’ he said. ‘A deconsecrated church in Bishop’s Stortford. A car garage. A bakery. A holistic therapy centre.’
‘That’s right!’ Standish frowned. ‘But how do you know? That map just has dots on. How do you know what’s at the sites?’
‘Because I know what else is at the sites. Crime scenes and dead bodies.’
He cursed himself for being so stupid. It wasn’t Stephen Stottart. It never had been. And it hadn’t been his daughter either. They were both just innocent parties caught up in the machine. It had been the son all along – Gavin. Lapslie didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but at least he knew who.
‘I’m taking this thing,’ he said, slipping the BlackBerry into his pocket.
‘You can’t!’
‘I can. It’s … oh, I don’t know. Evidence, or something.’
He ran over to his car just as Jane Catherall was leaving the Eco-Dome. Dan was pushing a stretcher trolley behind her. There were two body bags on the stretcher. They’d been folded over because their contents were so small, and so that both of them could be fitted on the same stretcher.
Lapslie felt his breath catch in his throat. He’d been pushing it to the back of his mind, but he had two kids, roughly the same age.
No. No time for that.
‘Jane, with me!’ he shouted. ‘I need your help.’
To her credit she didn’t complain. Turning to Dan, she said something that Lapslie assumed was along the lines of ‘Take these bodies to the mortuary and wait for me,’ and then she scurried across the ground as fast as her spindly, polio-emaciated legs would carry her.
‘A day trip,’ she said, strapping herself in. ‘How wonderful.’
‘I need you to do some analysis,’ he said, handing her the BlackBerry and starting the car. ‘You’ve seen the files of the other torture cases, and you know about the locations in the Catriona Dooley case. Filter out all of those locations, and tell me what’s left.’
‘And where are we going while I’m doing that?’
‘Stephen Stottart’s house.’
The drive took less than fifteen minutes, and Lapslie nearly caused five major incidents on the way. He screeched to a halt outside the Stottart house with the sound of sirens in the background, heading his way.
‘Here,’ he said, tossing his warrant card into Jane Catherall’s lap. ‘Tell them I’m on official business.’
He strode up the path to the front door. It looked as if the police presence from the day before had been withdrawn. He rang the doorbell.
Stephen Stottart opened the door. He was haggard, pale, worn. He looked to Lapslie like he was gradually fading out of life, becoming a ghost in small steps.
‘You,’ he said, but there was no venom in his voice. There was no venom left. ‘How dare you come here.’
‘Mt Stottart, I need to see your son. Is he in?’
‘You bastard!’ he spat. ‘Haven’t you done enough damage? What’s the matter – can’t persecute Tamara any more so you’re turning your attention to our son now?’
Lapslie sighed. There was no easy way to do this. ‘Mr Stottart, under the terms of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Section 17, I have reason to believe that you are harbouring a known fugitive. I therefore have a right to enter this house and search it.’
‘You can’t! My wife’s upstairs, asleep!’
‘I’m sorry, but I have to insist.’
‘You bastard!’ Stottart cried. He lashed out at Lapslie, but Lapslie stepped past the blow and Stottart’s fist struck the doorframe. Lapslie left him behind and headed for the stairs, and Gavin’s bedroom.
‘I’m going to phone my solicitor!’ Stottart cried after him. ‘I’m going to phone the IPCC! They’ll crucify you!’
‘They can join the queue,’ Lapslie muttered. He chose the door with the biohazard sticker on it, realising that it was Gavin’s idea of an ironic joke considering where he and his father worked; evidence of his twisted sense of humour.
The bed was rumpled, unmade. Books and CD covers were scattered around. A large gaming computer was sat beneath a table by the window. On the table was a widescreen high-definition LCD monitor surrounded by a Creative Labs 5.1 surround sound audio system, including a sub-woofer the size of a beer-cooler. Evidence that Gavin cared about the quality of the sounds he listened to.
Lapslie booted the machine up and scanned through the hard drive’s contents. A folder labelled ‘Colours’ caught his eye, more because of the discrepancy between its name and the more system-related names around it than for any other reason.
He was right. It was full of sound files. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each was labelled with a name like: ‘blue054’ or ‘green-purple121’, or sometimes ‘warm-fuzzy339’ or ‘sharp-twitchy983’. Sensory impressions. Something connected with synaesthesia, perhaps?
He clicked on one of the sound files at random. Microsoft Media Player booted up. A pair of headphones that Lapslie hadn’t noticed – Sennheiser, of course – crackled. He slipped them on.
He was listening to a woman screaming herself hoarse. Begging to be killed.
He clicked on another file, sickened.
A man, this time, but screaming in a high-pitched tone of disbelief and sheer agony.
Another file.
Sobbing, punctuated by occasional cries of pain. Lapslie imagined sharp skewers being plunged into soft flesh and then pulled out.
The door to the room burst open. Stephen Stottart was standing there, shaking with fury.
‘Get out, you bastard! Get out!’
Lapslie pulled the headphone jack out of the socket on the computer. The system defaulted back to the speakers, and the sound of a woman being tortured filled the room with a pressure that Lapslie could almost feel pushing in on his skin.
‘What – ?’ Stottart asked, dumfounded.
‘Your son’s hobby,’ Lapslie shouted over the noise. ‘You should ask him about it. If you want to know why your daughter killed herself, this is why. I think she was using his machine. I think she found these files.’
‘She wanted to download some music from the internet,’ Stottart breathed. ‘Her network adaptor was playing up. I said she could use Gavin’s machine. He wasn’t around. But …’
‘Didn’t you see those cuts on your daughter’s arms?’ Lapslie knew he was taunting Stottart now, but he couldn’t help himself. The man must have known. Somehow, he must have known that something was wrong. How could he not? ‘Didn’t you ever ask her how they got there?’
‘She said … she said she cut herself. She said all her friends did it. We were … taking her to a counsellor. She stopped …’
‘It was Gavin,’ Lapslie said, sliding the words in like a knife. ‘And when she wouldn’t let him cut her any more, he moved on. To others. And when she discovered the sound files, she sent one to me. She’d probably looked up “policeman” and “synaesthesia” on the internet and found some reference to me – God knows I’ve attracted enough journalistic interest over the past year. She must have thought I was the only person who would understand. And when I didn’t, when it looked like I was going to be taken off the case, she couldn’t face it any more, and she set herself on fire. In front of me, Stephen! In front of me!’
Stottart slumped to his knees, eyes wide and mouth open in a silent anguished scream. Lapslie stepped past him as Stottart fell to the carpet, went out onto the landing, leaving the sound file still playing behin
d him. Mrs Stottart was just coming out of her bedroom, hair awry and eyes wild. She saw Lapslie and started screaming.
Lapslie walked away, leaving a shattered house behind him.
‘Tell me you have something,’ he asked as he slid back behind the steering wheel of his car.
‘I think I do,’ Jane Catherall replied. ‘I presume you are looking for a location large enough to hold several people in, including dear Emma, and remote enough that screams would not be heard by anyone nearby. The best bet is a boat house located along the coast, out past Felixstowe, on the way to Aldeburgh. It belongs to a yacht club, but the club itself has gone bankrupt and the house is disused. I’ll direct you.’
‘Right.’ Lapslie gunned the engine into life. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Mark – ’ she said warningly, ‘Felixstowe is in Suffolk, not Essex. We’re going into another Force area. Shouldn’t you … well, tell someone? Ask permission?’
‘There’s lots of things I should do,’ Lapslie growled. ‘That one is low on the list.’
He drove at frantic speeds up through Essex and into Suffolk, his mind tumbling with images of Emma being sliced open, hung from meat hooks, impaled, disembowelled. Sweat trickled down his ribs and stuck the back of his shirt to the leather car seat. He kept feeling that he couldn’t breathe in enough air, that something was sitting inside his chest and taking up all the room.
‘Aldeburgh,’ Jane mused at one point in the wild ride. ‘Benjamin Britten used to live there, you know.’
‘Fascinating,’ he snapped back. ‘If you can access the internet on that thing, can you see if you can get into Gavin Stottart’s medical files. I think he’s synaesthesic.’
‘You can’t just access confidential medical records via the internet,’ she chided.
‘Then phone a friend! I don’t care how you do it!’
He was heading out past Ipswich and towards Woodbridge when Jane said, ‘I think I’ve got something. I called in a favour from a colleague, and he emailed me a summary.’
‘Go on.’
‘Gavin Stottart suffers from achromatia, or achromia as it’s sometimes known. It’s a neurological deficit that causes a type of sensory deprivation in which the brain can’t process colour. He literally only sees in shades of grey.’
‘Okay,’ Lapslie said, slewing the car around a roundabout and cutting up another car. ‘More.’
‘According to his notes, it’s linked to a form of synaesthesia – ah, you were right! – in which sudden loud noises overload the part of his brain that processes visual signals and cause his vision to completely “grey out”. He literally goes blind!’
‘Thanks.’
Five minutes later, they were pulling up in front of the defunct yacht club’s disused boat house. It was an ugly building in an ugly location: painted breeze blocks set against scrubby grasses and shingle, a single storey at the side adjoining the car park area, but it was built on a slope leading down towards a grey beach where listless waves deposited grey scum on the stones, and the side closest to the beach was two storeys. Gulls cried forlornly in the distance. Tiny black shapes crawled along the horizon: long and low, with built up superstructures at one end. Ocean-going tankers.
Lapslie was just about to get out of the car when he remembered something. The text message from earlier. He suddenly had an idea what it meant.
He reached across Jane’s knees and opened the glove compartment.
There, inside, was a gun. An automatic. A SIG Sauer Mosquito, if he didn’t miss his guess.
A little present from Dom McGinley.
Part of Lapslie’s brain was screaming, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t get your fingerprints on it, there’s probably ten separate murders linked to that gun,’ but another part, the dominant part, said, ‘Oh fuck it,’ and reached out to take the weapon.
‘Oh my,’ Jane said. ‘Normally I disapprove of weapons such as that, having seen their effects at close range, but in this case – lay on, Macduff.’
Lapslie smiled. It felt like a death’s-head grin, like something that could have been carved on a pumpkin. ‘Call it in,’ he said. ‘Call it in to DCS Rouse directly. Tell him everything.’
He walked forward, towards the door of the boat house.
If he’d been on duty, if he’d been on his own patch, if he’d not been removed from the case, he would have stood back and declared loudly that he was with the police. Instead, he reached out and opened the door.
The darkness inside seemed to glow of its own accord. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
Shadows, and the faint rusty tang of blood. A sense that there was open space to his left and right, and some obstructions ahead. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the meagre illumination.
The building stretched out to either side of him. The roof was exposed, with metal rafters criss-crossing the space. He was in a large, open space that was probably used as a bar or a social area, judging by the chairs and tables scattered around. No sign of Emma. No sign of anyone.
Off to one side he saw a trapdoor. Bloodstains surrounded it: splashes and splatters and droplets, some old and some fresh.
He moved over quietly and raised the trapdoor.
Voices in the distance; ladder-like stairs heading down. He descended, gun ready.
The ladder led down into a dark corridor. Barriers of some kind reached up to a point over his head, separating the space into a series of cell-like enclosures.
The voices were coming from his right, so he went left; SIG Mosquito raised so that the barrel lay alongside his cheek.
The first few cells he came to had brown stains on the concrete floor, and wheelchairs sitting in the middle of the stains like surreal sculptures. Objets trouvés – wasn’t that the phrase? Found art.
The next cell was empty, but scuff marks in the dirt on the concrete floor indicated that a wheelchair had been wheeled away.
A man was strapped into another of the wheelchairs in the next cell. His eyes widened when he saw Lapslie. He was just about to say something when Lapslie touched the slide of the gun to his lips, indicating silence. The man nodded. His skin was grey with fatigue or shock, and his hair was dishevelled.
‘Mark Baillie?’ Lapslie mouthed.
The man nodded.
‘Mrs Baillie?’
He jerked his head to his left; Lapslie’s right.
‘Is the man who kidnapped you here?’ Lapslie mouthed.
The man frowned.
‘Is the man who kidnapped you here?’ Lapslie mouthed again, emphasising the words.
Comprehension dawned. The man nodded, then jerked his head in the other direction – the one that led off to the right from the door where Lapslie had come in.
‘Emma Bradbury?’ Lapslie questioned silently.
The man nodded.
‘Alive?’
Something about his face changed. Lapslie couldn’t read the expression. Was it regret? A warning? Or just an indication that he didn’t know?
Lapslie moved on, past Mark Baillie, to the next cell. Sara Baillie was in the same situation as her husband: fastened to a wheelchair. Her head was resting on her chest. Lapslie hoped she was unconscious, rather than dead, but either way he was glad that she wasn’t in a position to make a surprised noise when she saw him.
The next cell was the last one before the wall. In it, proudly displayed in the centre, was a wheelchair with a third occupant.
This one was dead.
She was slumped in a wheelchair, head lolling unnaturally over the hard, vinyl-covered back. Her face and arms were marble-white with streaks marking where her veins were buried beneath the skin, and the bindings which tied her down were cutting into the swollen flesh. Putrefaction had swollen her lips, mouth and tongue to grotesque proportions. Her blood-soaked jeans were ripped at the knee, and the knees themselves looked like someone had drilled their way inside: dark holes, edged with dried blood and torn tissue.
Whoever she was, she was beyond help now.
Slowly, quietly, he moved back down the building, past Sara Baillie, past Mark Baillie, past the cell where he suspected Emma had been held captive, past the empty cells and past the door where he had entered the building. The weight of the gun was making his wrists ache.
Moving in the other direction, along the wall of the building, he entered a vision of hell.
That part of the building was a large area filled with misshapen objects under sheets. In the centre, strapped in a wheelchair, Emma Bradbury was shaking from side to side, trying to free herself. The wheelchair rocked from side to side, but it didn’t fall over. Even if it had, she had nowhere to go.
A microphone on a stand had been set up a few feet in front of her. A cable led away from the microphone to a mixing desk.
Gavin Stottart stood in front of Emma. He had something in his hand; something big. Lapslie recognised him from the Festival Hall, where he had been standing behind his father. Now, alone, he seemed larger, more in control.
He brought his hands around in front of him. He was holding a conical clown’s hat in one hand, bizarrely coloured in candy-coloured red and white stripes. In the other he had a saucepan. Whatever was inside steamed, and smelled like road works.
‘I’d thought about infecting you with necrotising fasciitis,’ he was saying in a very quiet, distressingly sane voice. ‘It’s surprisingly easy. All I have to do is take a swab from inside my throat, make a cut in your stomach and stick the swab in the cut. The bacteria will just … eat away at your skin. It’s so fast you can watch it happening, watch your fat and muscle just … disappearing. The pain is apparently phenomenal. But it’s too fast, and once it’s started it can’t be controlled, so I chose something else for you. It’s called ‘pitch-capping’. It was developed by the British Army in Ireland in the eighteenth century. It’s a pretty simple concept. I pour melted tar into the hat, like so.’ and he tipped the saucepan up, pouring the tar into the hat in a black, glutinous stream. The hat sagged under the weight and the heat. ‘And then I put the hat on your head. The tar will settle into your hair. The burns will be – oh, indescribably painful. I’ll be recording the sounds you make all the time. Every scream, every cry, every whimper. It will all be captured. And then, when the tar has solidified, I’ll pull the hat off. Apparently, according to the historical records, it’ll pull your scalp off with it, and I’ll be recording that as well. I’ll be interested in seeing whether the noises you make then will be different. And the beautiful thing is, you’ll probably survive, and then we can try something else. Maybe the Iron Maiden.’
Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation Page 27