Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (26 page)

‘—following which captor and victim vanished into the night—’

‘—which tells us that he has a car.’ Lapslie snorted explosively. ‘We’ve got nothing!’

A uniformed constable entered the bare room and walked up to Lapslie. He handed over a sheet of paper. Lapslie scanned it quickly, then again more slowly. He rubbed his chin, considering, then nodded at the constable. ‘Okay, tell them we’ll be there right away. And tell them that I’m the senior investigating officer. Make sure they understand that although their investigation is already under way, they’re reporting to
me
now.’

The constable nodded and left. Emma frowned up at Lapslie.

‘What’s happened?’

He was gazing straight ahead, out of the windows. ‘It’s happened again,’ he whispered. ‘A family, this time. An entire family. Father, mother and two sons, all abducted from their house in Loughton last night. The police were alerted by the cleaner this morning. She found the dog dead in the kitchen and the family missing.’ He seemed to come to a decision. ‘Right,
let’s get over there before the local plod tread dirt all the way through and wipe any fingerprints away with their fat arses as they rest themselves against all the work surfaces. Get Burrows and Catherall down there straight away.’

‘Doctor Catherall? I thought you said the family were kidnapped, not killed?’

‘They were. I want Jane to take a look at the dog.’ At her questioning gaze, he explained: ‘It’s like that Sherlock Holmes thing – the strange case of the dog in the night time. The strange thing was that the dog didn’t bark, suggesting that it knew the criminal. Well, here we have another strange case of a dog in the night time. The strange thing here is that the dog has died, and we don’t know why. Not a mark on it.’

‘One question, Sir?’

He glanced at her in irritation. ‘What? Time’s ticking away.’

‘How do we even know that this case is connected to ours?’

‘Didn’t I say?’ He swung back. ‘They’re a folk group evenings and weekends. They call themselves the Singing Baillies.’

The Baillie house was located at the end of a narrow and winding road in the area of Loughton known locally as Little Cornwall. The drive through the town took Lapslie and Emma up and down steep hills and past weatherboard houses, along narrow lanes and past high holly hedges, as well as occasional outthrusts of the nearby brooding mass of Epping Forest. It also took them past Loughton Underground station, which was overground at this point. The station was located four stops from the end of the Central Line and a reminder that despite the ever-present trees and the bushes they were less than fifteen miles from the centre of London. Every now and then, as they crested another hill, Lapslie could see past the houses and across the tops of the forest: a sea of bubbling green canopies.

The house was huge: two wings either side of a central block, the whole thing a relic of the Victorian era updated with a satellite dish on the roof and a garage off to one side. Creepers covered most of the sides. The house sat in its own small grounds, walled around and connected to the road by a short gravel drive. The gravel crunched under Lapslie’s wheels as he brought the car to a halt in front of the main portico, next to a set of other police cars and a CSI van. People were moving back and forth between the vehicles and the house like bees foraging for pollen and then returning to the hive.

‘Nice place,’ Emma said as she got out of the passenger side. ‘I might get Dom to buy me one like this for my birthday.’

Lapslie scowled at her. He knew she was winding him up, but he wasn’t in the mood. ‘Paid for by the blood money he’s obtained as the unjust gains from a hundred armed robberies?’

‘He told me he won the lottery,’ she said, smiling. ‘Numerous times in a row.’

Lapslie didn’t reply.

‘What’s the background here?’ she went on when it was clear that Lapslie wasn’t going to rise to the bait. ‘What does this bloke do for a living?’

‘Mark Baillie is an investment banker,’ Lapslie replied, remembering the scant facts on the sheet of paper that the constable had brought in to him. ‘Works in Canary Wharf for one of the big Japanese clearing houses. Probably brings home in excess of a million pounds a year, when you factor in bonuses.’

‘So could this kidnapping have a financial motive?’ Emma asked.

Lapslie shook his head. The thought had occurred to him already, but he’d dismissed it. ‘If a ransom had been demanded they’d have taken the wife or the daughter and left the husband. Taking him means there’s nobody to organise getting the money to pay the ransom.’

‘There’s his company,’ Emma pointed out.

‘But who do you phone if you’ve taken one of the employees captive and want a ransom? There’s no hotline for that. You could try the managing director, but there’s scant chance he’ll take the call, and all the while you’re wasting time telling more and more people what you’ve done. No, I maintain that a ransom attempt is based on leaving the person who has the money and taking the most precious thing in his world, not the other way around.’

The door opened as Lapslie ran up the front steps. A constable stepped back to let him and Emma in. ‘DCI Lapslie?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Who’s in charge here?’

‘Er, you are, Sir.’

Lapslie glared at the man. This wasn’t the time for anybody to be funny. ‘Who was in charge fifteen seconds ago?’

‘Inspector Barnes, Sir.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Conservatory, last time I looked, Sir.’

Lapslie led the way through the house towards the back, where he guessed the conservatory would be. There was a smell hanging in the air: a sweetish, slightly medicinal odour. He filed that away for later consideration. The paintings on the walls were originals: mainly vibrant abstracts in reds and oranges that looked, from the corner of the eye, like landscapes but which, on closer inspection, were just collections of horizontal and vertical lines. The thick white carpet covering the floor would, Lapslie estimated, have to be vacuumed twice a day to keep it from going grey. The furniture was Swedish in its simplicity, but it certainly wasn’t from Ikea.

‘Inspector Barnes?’

There were five or six people in the conservatory, but the man who turned around was the smallest. His eyes were set deep on either side of a sharp nose, giving his face a rodentlike appearance. His blond hair was brushed straight back from his forehead.

‘DCI Lapslie? Glad to have you here.’

‘What have you got?’ Lapslie asked.

Barnes indicated the conservatory window behind him. It had a large hole cut in the centre, about the right size for a man to put his arm through. ‘All the windows and glass doors in the house are protected with metal foil around the frames.
There’s a current runs through the foil. If the glass is broken, the electrical current is disrupted and the alarm goes off. Problem is, if you cut a hole in the centre of the glass big enough to get a hand through, like chummy did here with what I reckon was a carborundum-tipped cutter, the electrical current remains undisturbed.’

‘Surely that’s not the only alarm system?’ Lapslie questioned. ‘The man was loaded.’

‘Indeed,’ Barnes said, nodding eagerly. ‘There’s also sensors on the frames.’ He indicated two small boxes on the window: one attached to the window itself and the other, just above it, to the frame. The box attached to the frame had thin wires leading away from it, along the line of the wood. ‘The magnet in one of those boxes pulls a contact away from a circuit in the other. If the boxes are separated the contact closes again and the resulting signal sets the alarm off. Except that in this case chummy reached in through the hole he’d cut with the aforementioned carborundum-tipped cutter and introduced a thin magnetic strip between the two boxes. When he then opened the window from the inside the strip stayed attached to the upper box and kept the contact from closing.’

Lapslie sighed. They were dealing with a professional, that much was for sure. Not your bog-standard breaking and entering merchant. ‘And I’m guessing the locks I can see on the window catches were bypassed with equal ease?’

‘There’s only so many designs of window catch,’ Barnes said, shrugging. ‘If you have enough keys, you can usually find one that fits. Even more likely if you’ve cased the joint beforehand and sussed out the type of locks you’re dealing with.’

‘Any other invalid security precautions?’ Lapslie growled.

Barnes pointed towards a corner of the conservatory, where Lapslie noticed a small white box had been attached to the wall.
‘Each room is apparently protected by a passive infra-red sensor which detects body heat. I say “apparently” because a prospective burglar can see the sensors and should be scared off, but in this case the sensors were turned off because the dog had the run of the house. The family only turn the sensors on when they’re all on holiday and the dog’s either with them or in kennels.’

‘Anything else?’ Lapslie sighed.

‘Just in case he’d set anything off without realising it, the burglar went straight to the main alarm box and injected it full of liquid nitrogen, freezing all the circuits. He knew he’d have about thirty seconds before an alarm went off, if he
had
tripped one, because that’s how long the alarm company usually allow householders to type in their key code, get it wrong and type it again when they get in the house at night.’

‘So, what do we learn from that?’ Lapslie asked, looking at Emma. She’d been cheeky enough earlier that he wanted to bring her back down to Earth for a while.

‘That we’re dealing with someone who is methodical and cautious, someone who conducts a detailed reconnaissance before making a move.’

‘What leads you to that conclusion?’

‘Whoever it was couldn’t know about the metal foil in the window frames, because it’s not visible after the frame’s put together, so he assumed the worst and planned for it. He also came prepared with a glass cutter and a thin magnetic strip, and had worked out that the presence of the dog meant that the passive infra-red sensors would be switched off. Oh, and he must have known exactly where the main alarm box was, because he got to it and neutralised it within thirty seconds. That probably means he’s been in the house before, or at least spent time prowling around the outside and looking through the windows. Does that cover it?’

‘Pretty much,’ he conceded. Turning to Barnes again, he asked; ‘What about the family? How did he manage to subdue them?’

‘It’s looking like an anaesthetic gas,’ Barnes replied. ‘Like the stuff that thieves use on French caravan sites to rob tourists: they find a caravan parked up then pump gas in through the window to make sure the people are completely knocked out, then go in with face masks and rob them of their cash and jewellery. Here it looks like chummy pumped something similar through the hole in the window and waited for long enough that he could be sure they were all unconscious.’

‘What gave away the fact that it was a gas?’

‘You heard about the dog?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘I heard the dog was found dead.’

‘Respiratory failure, it looks like. It just lay down and died. That, and a slightly sweet smell in the air when we arrived, led us to that initial conclusion. We’re awaiting forensic tests on the air in the house and the pathologist’s view on the dog.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘Had to send one of my constables home earlier. Whatever the stuff is, there was enough of it lingering around to make him feel woozy.’

‘And the entire family were taken. How the hell did the kidnapper get them all out?’

‘No,’ Barnes said simply.

Lapslie wasn’t sure he’d heard properly. ‘No what?’

‘No, the entire family weren’t taken. One of them was left behind.’

Lapslie was aghast. ‘Which one?’

‘The daughter. Still asleep upstairs when we arrived.’

‘Let me get this straight – the husband, wife and two sons were kidnapped, but the daughter was left behind?’

Barnes nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘But why?’

‘Don’t know. Maybe he didn’t have time to carry her to the car after taking the other four. Maybe he just didn’t like the look of her. Maybe …’ He trailed off. ‘Actually, I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

‘Where’s the girl now?’ Emma asked.

‘She’s been taken to hospital for a check-up, just to make sure there’s no health problems from breathing in the anaesthetic. Social Services will look after her until we find her parents.
If
we find her parents.’

‘We will,’ Lapslie promised. And he meant it. ‘You’ll be questioning her? See whether she saw anything or heard anything?’

‘I’ll make sure she’s interviewed when the doctors say we can. Unless you want to talk to her instead?’

Lapslie shook his head. Given what was happening with the IPCC, it probably wasn’t a good move for him to question another vulnerable girl just yet. ‘Thanks, but I’ll let you cover that. Forensics here?’

‘Yes. And we’re moving the dog’s body to the mortuary. I must admit, I don’t know whether there’s a special pet pathologist, or whether the normal pathologist can handle it.’

‘Oh, I think she’ll enjoy the challenge,’ Lapslie murmured.

He glanced at his watch. Just shy of five o’clock. ‘Can I leave you to liaise?’ he asked Emma. ‘I have somewhere I need to be. It looks like we’re dependent on the CSIs for the time being to process the scene. Do all the usual things: set up a tap on the home phone and so on, but I really don’t expect a ransom demand. Then go and get some sleep.’

She nodded. ‘Leave it to me. You go and enjoy yourself.’

He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Sarcastic?’

‘Not at all. It’s nice to be able to do something for myself rather than stand behind you and watch you do it.’

Rather than reply, he just nodded and left.

It was dark when he got to Charlotte’s flat.

‘Don’t take your jacket off,’ she said as she opened the door. ‘We’re going out.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘It will all become clear.’ She smiled quizzically at him. ‘For a man who spends his life conducting interrogations, you’re surprisingly slow on the uptake when it comes to assimilating information.’