Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (15 page)

‘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.’

‘Yakuza are Japanese, Dom. Tongs are Chinese. It’s like mixing up the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan.’

‘They’re both slant-eyes, aren’t they?’ McGinley asked calmly.

Lapslie stared at McGinley. McGinley stared back. There was a slight quirk to the corner of his mouth that told Lapslie he knew exactly what the tattoo was and what it signified, and that he’d either earned it or been awarded it for some action that was best not exposed to the light of day, but that he would never admit it and he would laugh if Lapslie ever raised the question.

‘So what can I do for you, Dom?’ Lapslie asked. ‘You’ve gone to all the trouble of tracking me down here when you could just have phoned my mobile and arranged to meet. You’re sending me several messages, but I’m too jet-lagged and too tired to decipher them. Just tell me. What do you want?’

A bowl of rice covered in strips of cooked beef was slid in front of McGinley by a waiter who quickly backed away. Another waiter dashed in with a teapot of green tea and another small cup without a handle. The smell of ginger and pineapple rose up with the steam from the food. McGinley gazed at it for a long moment.

‘It’s your sergeant,’ he said eventually. ‘Emma.’

Lapslie felt a wave of weariness wash over him. He’d known this conversation was coming, but he would rather have had it with Emma and on his own terms, than at a time and place of someone else’s choosing.

‘She’s shacked up with a villain, Dom. I can’t let that go unremarked.’

Dom glanced up at Lapslie. ‘Definitions are funny things,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve never been convicted for anything, and if you linked my name to any serious crime in public then I would sue your arse from Land’s End to John O’Groats. As far as justice is concerned, I’m as much a villain as Mother Teresa was a high-class call-girl.’

‘We both know what you’ve been responsible for. The beatings. The tortures. The deaths. Remember, you once told me that you cut Dave Finnistaire’s tongue out, back in the 1980s, and left him tied to a wooden pile holding up one of the piers on the Thames and bleeding down his shirt.’

‘Bluster, Mr Lapslie. Pure bluster. I was taking credit for someone else’s crime, as I have done on many occasions before.’ McGinley sighed, and poured himself a cup of green tea. ‘It’s a cliché, I know, but there’s less difference between the criminals and the police than there is between the police and the teaching profession. You go on about what I’ve done, but what about you? If I commit a robbery – which I never have – then I know which side of the dividing line between law and disorder I sit. But you and I both know that your hands are far from clean, Mr Lapslie. You’ve planted evidence from time to time to secure a conviction. Yes—’ He held his hand up to forestall Lapslie’s protest – ‘to secure a conviction against a criminal when you couldn’t find any real evidence. I know the verbals, but how did you know he was a villain in the first place? Because you did. Because you had a feeling about it. Because God told
you. It doesn’t matter. You ignored the law in order to enforce the law. And what about the times you’ve beaten a confession out of a suspect, just because it’s late at night and you know you’ll have to release him if you don’t get something out of him? I may be a villain, in your eyes, but I’m not a hypocrite. I know what I am.’

‘We all know what you are, McGinley,’ Lapslie said, nettled by what the man had said. ‘You’re a ponce and a thief and a killer.’

‘I could ask you where your evidence is,’ McGinley replied, ‘but we both know there’s two different kinds of evidence: the detailed facts and statements that you fellas collect in your little notebooks and your files, and the kind of rigorous scientific stuff that impresses juries and stands up in court. And when you say you know I’m a villain, you’re basing that on the first kind of evidence, not the second. But they’re like apples and apricots: they’re both kinds of fruit but you can’t turn the one into the other. You may
know
I’m a villain, you may have a thousand little facts that all add up to it, you may even feel it in your bones and the way your knee twinges in the rain, but it’ll never stand up in court. There’s no exchange rate between the two. So it doesn’t matter that Emma and I are an item; you can’t use that as leverage against her. You can’t discipline her or demote her or fire her. She’ll take it to appeal and she will win, because as far as justice is concerned I’m just an innocent member of the public without a blemish on my character.’ He sighed heavily. ‘And if you even try to take action against her then I will have you tied to a tree and I will personally pick up a large branch, stick it up your arse and hammer it upwards until you can taste it at the back of your throat.’

‘She means that much to you?’ Lapslie asked, mouth dry.

‘I love her. Strange as it sounds from a man of my age and
character, I love her. And believe me, I’m as surprised as you are. I can’t remember loving anyone before; not even my mother, God bless her alcohol-rotted soul.’

‘And she loves you?’

‘So she says. So she says.’

Lapslie sighed. McGinley had a point. Several of them.

‘Okay then, McGinley. I say this as her boss and her friend, and also as the man who probably knows the black depths of your character better than anyone else apart from your alcohol-rotted mother: you’re right, I can’t do anything apart from try to persuade her that you are bad for her. I can’t, and I won’t. I don’t care about any threats that you make: I’ve been threatened by people who make you look like a lollypop lady. The trouble is that any action I take is doomed to failure; the system just won’t pick it up and run with it with any enthusiasm and the Police Federation will back her to the hilt. But I swear this: if you hurt her in any way, mental or physical, then one dark night I will cut your prick and your balls off and feed them to the foxes outside my cottage.’

McGinley smiled. ‘Then we understand each other.’

‘Like an old married couple.’

McGinley gazed at Lapslie curiously. ‘I don’t suppose you’re in love with her as well, are you?’

Lapslie raised his eyebrows. The thought had never occurred to him. ‘I’m divorced, but I’m still trying to fall out of love with my ex-wife,’ he said, ‘and I think I’m falling in love with the woman I’m currently seeing.’

‘The pretty blonde doctor,’ McGinley murmured. ‘Charlotte, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t push it,’ Lapslie snapped. He took a deep breath. ‘But no – I respect Emma’s tenacity, and her intuition, but I’m not in love with her.’

McGinley picked up his green tea and clinked it against Lapslie’s. ‘And long may that continue,’ he said.

There was a silence for a few moments as Lapslie and, presumably McGinley, tried to work out how to have a normal conversation after the mixture of threats and bluster that had gone before.

‘Emma didn’t say you were back from Pakistan,’ McGinley said finally.

‘Do I often crop up in your bedroom talk?’ Lapslie asked sourly.

‘She has a lot of respect for you,’ McGinley replied. ‘So she talks about you. And, sad to say, old son, I like listening to stories about you. Even the ones that don’t involve you castrating some petty criminal somewhere.’

‘He was a paedophile,’ Lapslie corrected, ‘and I didn’t castrate him. Not technically.’

‘He spent the rest of his life peeing out of a hole that the surgeons had to cut for him. I think that counts.’

‘I got sent something.’ Lapslie found himself explaining what had happened to McGinley without quite knowing why. ‘It was a sound file of a woman screaming while she was being murdered.’

‘Nasty,’ McGinley agreed. ‘Why was it sent to you?’

‘No idea. I thought at first it might be someone I knew – Sonia, Charlotte, maybe even Emma – but I checked and they were all still alive. I thought maybe it was sent to me by accident, but the forensics people found out it was sent from the hospital where I’m being treated.’

‘Ah, the one where your girlfriend works.’

‘I told you, McGinley – don’t push it. Anyway, I’m at a loss. I know who sent the file – it was a teenage girl, and I’ve got a photo of her – but given the nature of the murder itself I can’t believe the girl was responsible. Or even involved.’

‘How was the woman killed?’ McGinley asked.

‘Morbid curiosity?’

‘More like professional expertise. I might be able to help.’

Lapslie gazed at McGinley for a long moment, trying to work out whether he could trust the man or not. Eventually he said, ‘We’re not sure what happened, exactly. There’s no body. But she screams twenty-seven times, so I’m guessing that maybe she was cut, perhaps, or stabbed or burned, twenty-seven times before she died. There aren’t that many options. Strangling, for instance, wouldn’t have enabled her to scream properly, and poisoning would have been a one-off event.’

‘Odd,’ McGinley mused.

‘What’s odd?’

‘The way you say that whatever made her scream happened twenty-seven times.’

Lapslie frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Emma’s currently in charge of a case on Canvey Island. The cops there discovered the body of a woman.’

‘I know that.’

‘What you don’t know is that according to Emma she’d been cut twenty-seven times, all over her body.’

Emma Bradbury was glancing through Donal O’Riordan’s criminal record on the police database when the warning came through. Crumbs from her sandwich lunch were scattered across the table.

The phone on her desk rang. ‘DS Bradbury – this is Lucy on reception. I’ve got a DCI Lapslie here—‘ She broke off. ‘Sir – you can’t just …’ and then her she was talking to Emma again: ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am, but he just barged right past me.’

‘It’s okay, Lucy – he does that. A lot.’

While she waited for Lapslie to locate her incident room, she browsed through O’Riordan’s record on the screen. As DS Rossmore had indicated, he was what judges liked to call ‘an habitual criminal’, albeit dealing in small things like breaking and entering, theft, assault and battery, possession of stolen goods, joy-riding and a whole litany of other minor crimes. They were what Emma tended to think of as survival crimes – the kinds of things a man without a conscience and without a job did to get money and to pass the time. No drug dealing, no fencing, nothing that indicated any connections to organised crime. Two incidents of possession of a small amount of a Class C drug. No incidents of violence towards women, interestingly, although DS Rossmore had re-emphasised to her the tendency
of the Traveller community to assume that violence was a standard part of a long-term sexual relationship.

‘You’re on a case,’ Mark Lapslie’s voice barked from the door.

Emma looked around the incident room – the newly fitted whiteboards and computers, the phones and the staff – as if she’d never seen it before. ‘Good God – you’re right. Where did all this stuff come from?’

‘You need to tell me all about it.’

‘No, Sir,’ she said patiently, ‘I need to get on with solving the case.’

‘It’s
my
case,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I got the original call. I distinctly remember being at the location where the body was discovered. I also have a pretty good recollection of arresting a man for murder this morning in a local public house. I may have a low attention span, but I don’t remember you being there at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re meant to be in Pakistan on a law enforcement conference.’

‘I came back early,’ he said defensively.

‘Obviously. I was surprised you ever agreed to go in the first place.’

‘That’s not important.’

‘Then what is? Don’t tell me ACC Rouse has parachuted you in on top of my murder investigation? It’s not as if it’s particularly high-profile or sensational. The dead girl isn’t a TV reporter, and the killer didn’t use some obscure poison. Apart from what looks like marks of torture on the girl’s body, there isn’t anything that would warrant the presence of a detective chief inspector. I don’t
need
top cover on this one, Sir.’

‘That’s what you think,’ he said grimly. ‘Your dead girl was cut, what, twenty-seven times?’

‘Yes,’ she answered cautiously, ‘although we’re keeping the
exact number from the press at the moment, just in case we can use it against a suspect. We’re just saying that she was cut repeatedly.’

‘The reason I came back from Pakistan is that I was sent an email containing a sound file of a woman screaming. She screams twenty-seven times before dying.’

Emma leaned back in her chair, trying to fit this new information in to the context of what she already knew. ‘She screams twenty-seven times, exactly?’

‘Over the course of three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.’

‘Was the time between the screams constant, or did it vary?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘Good question. It was variable.’

‘And this file was sent to you personally?’

‘Yes.’

‘By who?’

‘You mean, “by
whom
?”’

Emma suppressed a twinge of irritation. Lapslie could be infuriatingly pedantic at times. She had occasionally wondered if his synaesthesia came with additional baggage – such as a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. ‘By
whom
?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure. I know the email was sent from Chelmsford Hospital, and I have video images of a girl sitting at the computer terminal it was sent from at the same time it was sent, but I haven’t been able to track her down yet.’