Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (7 page)

Lapslie took his place in the half-circle, nodding to the others but not engaging in their conversations. He was too worried about Charlotte to want to chat, but even on a good day he knew he came over as stand-offish. He couldn’t help it. He found small-talk to be a chore. If he talked about something, he wanted it to have meaning, otherwise he was just wasting his breath.

Was that where it had gone wrong with Sonia? he wondered. Even before the synaesthesia had hit home, she’d been the one who wanted to chat while he wanted to talk, and she didn’t realise there was a difference.

A door on the far side of the room opened and Doctor Garland walked in purposefully, almost as if he had been waiting for Lapslie to appear. His face was dominated by a bristling moustache, beneath which his skin always seemed slightly flushed, as if he’d had a couple of glasses of wine. Maybe he had. Apart from a band of bristles around the back of his scalp, he was bald.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said as he entered the half-ring and sat down. He was holding a clipboard. His voice had once tasted to Lapslie like the rubber that children’s balloons were made out of, but that was before his synaesthesia had become quiescent. Now, however, Lapslie found that looking at Doctor Garland made him think of a red balloon, floating in the air, with a moustache drawn on it in felt-tip pen ‘Thank you all for making the effort to be here today. Glad you could all attend.’

The people sitting around him murmured their greetings.

‘We’ve got a new member of the group today,’ Garland continued, ‘so I’d like you all to introduce yourselves. Give us a quick résumé of the particular form of synaesthesia you suffer from.’ He glanced good-humouredly at Lapslie. ‘Starting with the last one in.’

Lapslie glared at Doctor Garland. ‘Mark Lapslie,’ he said, still
trying not to let his thoughts turn back to Charlotte. ‘My brain turns sounds into tastes.’

The person next to Lapslie was a man in his forties. He was wearing a corduroy jacket over a blue denim shirt and chino trousers. His hair was long at the back, but his hairline was receding at the front. ‘I’m, uh, Steve Stottart,’ he said in a voice tinged with a Mancunian accent. ‘I’m the new bloke, although you’d probably already worked that out. Like Mark, I hear sounds and I can taste them.’ He glanced sideways at Lapslie. ‘We ought to compare notes – see if we taste the same things when we hear the same noises. Might be interesting for the researchers here.’

Lapslie shrugged. ‘What do you taste when the good doctor here talks?’

Stottart frowned. ‘Coffee grounds,’ he replied. ‘Old coffee grounds. Bitter.’

‘Ah,’ Lapslie said. ‘Not the same then’

‘Why – what do you taste?’

‘Squeaky rubber balloons.’ Lapslie smiled at Doctor Garland. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken,’ Garland sad, smiling tolerantly back. He switched his gaze to the girl sitting beside Stottart, a teenager whose cheeks were flushed and who couldn’t meet anyone else’s eyes. ‘Arlene – you next.’

‘Arlene Waverley. I … hear things. Like someone is whistling, but it’s really high pitched. It happens when I see bright colours and bright lights. Only then.’

‘Thank you,’ Garland said, reassuring her. ‘And you, Jeanette?’

A middle-aged black woman, whose hair was plaited in a complex pattern, followed on. ‘Jeanette Sanderson. I … I see colours when I hear … musical notes. Boring, I know. Sorry.’

The man on her left was in his thirties, with a leather jacket
and jeans. He had a ponytail. ‘Hi, everyone. I’m Chris. Chris Furlong. If I taste something in my mouth I can also feel it like shapes on my skin. Like, chicken makes me feel sharp spikes, and coffee makes me feel round, warm, soft things like –’ he blushed – ‘well, you know. Like … skin. Women’s skin.’

Garland glanced at the person in the last chair. ‘And finally …’

‘Dave Ferbrack,’ the last man said. He looked like a truck driver, somewhere indeterminate between thirty and fifty. ‘I smell shapes. I mean, when I touch things, like rough surfaces or smooth surfaces and stuff, I smell things that aren’t there, like cigar smoke and perfume and stuff. You know.’

‘Great. Thank you. You’re all here, of course, because you are looking for ways to control your synaesthesia. Rare condition. You six are the only people in Essex who suffer from it enough that it affects your lives, so far as I know. The most frequent occurrence is people who associate colours with words, or numbers, but that doesn’t work to the detriment of their lives. In fact, they quite like it.’

‘There are artists and musicians who depended on their synaesthesia as their muse,’ Arlene said quietly. ‘Oliver Messiaen and Alexander Scriabin are the best known composers, and Wassily Kandinsky the best known artist.’ She looked around nervously, as if afraid someone was going to contradict her, then continued. ‘Beethoven called B minor the black key and D major the orange key, but he might just have been being metaphorical. Same with Schubert, who said that E minor was “a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her chest”.’ She blushed. ‘When I found out I had synaesthesia I spent a long time on the internet, learning all about it.’

‘Very good,’ Garland said warmly. ‘You’ve obviously done your homework, Arlene. Yes, some artists depended on synaesthesia,
but with you, it’s different. You’ve all lost jobs, or had accidents, or suffered some form of nervous collapse because of it.’

‘I crashed me car,’ Steve Stottart muttered to Lapslie, but loud enough for the others to hear. ‘I were driving and someone was singing out of tune on the radio. I suddenly tasted something like rotting fish. I swerved and crashed into a parked car.’

Arlene shivered, and a couple of others grimaced in sympathy. Lapslie just nodded. He’d had much the same experience a few times.

‘Last time,’ Garland continued, ‘we discussed the history and the possible causes of synaesthesia. I’ll quickly go over what we said then, just to remind you – and for the benefit of Stephen.’

He paused, glanced around, then continued: ‘You’ll recall that it’s been generally accepted that the condition arises when extra connections in the brain cross between regions responsible for separate senses, but researchers at the University of Oxford have pinned down four chromosomal regions where gene variations seem to be linked to the condition. All of which means that it may be caused genetically, rather than by a problem in the brain’s wiring. One of those regions has also been associated with autism, so there may be a common genetic mechanism underlying the two. For that reason there’s unlikely to be a cure, but there are ways of reducing the symptoms. Most of you are already taking a new drug called thorazitol, which was originally developed as an antidote to LSD but which is believed to help suppress the cross-wiring in the brain, but it’s best used in conjunction with techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy, neuro-linguistic programming or good old-fashioned meditation. That’s what this group is here to do – learn some of these techniques so that you can at least live with your synaesthesia, if not actually beat it.’

He paused again, and smiled beneath his huge moustache. ‘And today we’ll be learning about cognitive behavioural therapy.’

‘Brilliant,’ Steve Stottart murmured to Lapslie. ‘We’re going to have a buzz!’

On her way back from lunch with Jane Catherall to set up her incident room in Canvey Island, Emma Bradbury took the opportunity to drive around the various streets, roads and avenues of the area, familiarising herself with the locality. After all, she might be there a while, depending on how the investigation went.

If she was being honest with herself – which frankly didn’t happen very often – then Emma was nervous. She’d never really handled a big murder investigation before. Stabbings outside nightclubs, yes; bottles suddenly smashed over the heads of wives or girlfriends in the kitchen after a domestic row, yes; but premeditated and sadistic murder – not with her in charge. She’d worked on that scale of investigation before, of course, but playing second fiddle to a more senior officer. In the past year or so that officer had been Mark Lapslie, and she’d learned a lot from him about how to project authority without making it look like you were doing so. Now she had to put those lessons into practice.

Canvey Island, she thought as she drove around, was one of those places that you had to be deliberately going to in order to find it – you couldn’t just drive through on your way somewhere else – and for that reason Emma had managed to inadvertently avoid it for her entire time in Essex. She realised, as
she cruised around, that she had actually missed something rather special. It was charming, in its own 1950s way. Isolated, but thriving and full of energy. Something about it reminded her of the early
Carry On
films, although she couldn’t quite place what it was.

Part of her brain was flagging street names as she drove – a habit she’d got into years ago, before satnavs, so that she always knew roughly where she was if she had to check a street map. After five or six strange names her conscious mind picked up on the anomaly, and she found herself reviewing the names without quite knowing why. Paahl Road, Waarem Road, Vaagen Road, Delfzul Road … she decided that there must have been some kind of Dutch influence in Canvey Island, years ago. Passing Cornelius Vermuyden School a few minutes later she was pretty much convinced about it.

She passed a church as she was driving: a squat, white tower with an oddly styled roof, set behind a black ranch-style fence. The church was attached to what looked like a hall and a house – perhaps the vicarage – both of them white-plastered as if they had all come as part of a job lot. The tower had a massive cross set into it, large enough to crucify a giant. Emma’s hand crept up to cross herself, shoulder to shoulder and forehead to chest and she had to repress a twist of guilt within her heart.

The board outside the church named it as ‘Our Lady of Canvey and the English Martyrs’. There had to be a story behind that, she thought, and made a note to look into it. Who could possibly have been martyred at Canvey Island, and for what?

A little further on, she passed a pub with the appealing name of the Lobster Smack. It was freshly painted a gleaming white, but beneath the paint it looked old, as if it dated back hundreds of years. It sat in the shadow of one of the concrete sea walls that appeared to line the island, protecting it against high tidal
floods. A row of wooden cottages sat beside it, looking equally venerable. She wondered briefly if the pub had rooms. This case might require her to stay around for a while, and it wasn’t as if she’d passed a Travelodge or a Premier Inn while she was driving.

She kept going alongside the sea wall for a while, then got bored and turned around, taking a different route back and passing a surprisingly modernistic building looking out onto the Thames Estuary that appeared to have been designed to mimic the bridge of some ocean-going liner, with a curved central portion and wings to either side. In contrast to the Lobster Smack, which looked Victorian, this place was built in a style reminiscent of the 1930s. Again, it was a stark white against the leaden sky. White seemed to be a favoured colour around Canvey Island. Perhaps all the other colours kept getting used up by the time the deliveries got this far. Signs attached to the central drum-shaped portion identified it as a restaurant and bistro, and Emma made a note to check it out. Chances were, this close to the Thames fishing grounds, she might be able to get a decent seafood linguine. Well, seafood at least. Linguine, like coloured paint, might not have got this far.

Finally, she found Canvey Island Police Station. It was a two-storey red-brick building – thankfully, not whitewashed – although it did have white-framed windows. Two police cars and what looked like several cars belonging to the staff were parked outside the front. Security appeared to Emma Bradbury to be non-existent. She was used to sealed-off parking areas around the back of the nick, accessible only with a security code or a swipe card. This was almost civilised.

She parked up and looked around. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying out like abandoned babies, their eyes scanning for rubbish
bins and discarded chip packets. She could swear that their eyes tracked the back of her neck as she walked towards the front door of the police station.

‘DS Bradbury to see Sergeant Murrell,’ she said, flashing her warrant card. The youth on the front desk – Police Community Support Officer, rather than a ‘
real
’ police constable – visibly gulped, tried not to look at her chest and said, ‘Certainly, ma’am. Would you like to come inside?’ He buzzed her in through the door – the only sign of security that she’d noticed so far – and led her down a short corridor to a small office.

Sergeant Murrell was scanning what looked, upside down, like staff reports. He turned the top one over and stood up as she entered.

‘DS Bradbury. I wasn’t expecting you so soon.’

‘Please, call me Emma,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the preliminary results of the autopsy. We’ve confirmed that it’s a murder, so I need to set up an incident room and get going on the investigation. How many staff can you spare?’

‘And I’m Keith. I’ve got five full-time PCs and nine PCSOs,’ he replied, ‘and although they’re not exactly overworked, they’re not sitting around with their thumbs up their arses either. We don’t get a lot of murders here, but there’s a fair amount of antisocial behaviour and domestics. Something about being at the far edge of the country brings out an almost Scandinavian moroseness in people, I find. I can probably spring a PC and two PCSOs for a while – anything else would compromise the visible patrolling that we like to do here.’

She debated briefly whether to push for another PC, but she didn’t want to alienate Murrell – not just yet, anyway. She nodded. ‘That’ll be fine for now. Where can I set up an incident room?’

‘We’ve got a crew room, where the team can grab a cup of
tea and read the paper during their breaks. If necessary, we can turn it into an incident room.’

‘Again, it’ll have to do. Apologise to your team for me for taking their crew room away.’