Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (19 page)

Lapslie’s phone rang: the usual sweeping motif of the Bruch Violin Concerto. He answered it. ‘Lapslie.’

‘DCI Lapslie? This is Sean Burrows again. From the forensics lab. You remember the sound file you gave us to analyse?’

Lapslie smiled. ‘How could I forget, Mr Burrows? In fact, Sergeant Bradbury and I were just talking about it.’

‘We’ve been continuing the analysis here. You remember that I mentioned there was a sound that we’d identified in the background? A distinctive sound, like a musical instrument?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we’ve tracked it down. It turns out that it’s a bell. A church bell.’

Lapslie grimaced. ‘That doesn’t sound like it’s going to help much. There must be thousands of church bells in Essex.’

‘Yes, but not like this one. Church bells are usually tuned to fall in a diatonic scale without chromatic notes; this bell falls between the usual notes. I’ve managed to track it down: it was a special bell made for one particular church.’

Lapslie felt a thrill run through him. The hunt was back on. ‘Which church?’

‘All Hallows Church in Bishop’s Stortford.’

‘Thanks. I owe you one.’

Lapslie rang off and turned to Emma. ‘We know where the sound file was recorded. Let’s go.’

The drive took less than an hour, and Lapslie spent the time wondering how a church was connected to a murder. Emma Bradbury spent the time sitting in the passenger seat of Lapslie’s Saab making phone calls and alternately cajoling and shouting at people to get what she wanted. Whatever that was. Lapslie didn’t bother listening in.

The Church of All Hallows was a square, red-brick edifice set back from the main street by a low wall and a tarmac car park. Lapslie swung his car off the road and parked across several of the unoccupied bays. There were no fences, no chains across
the entrance to the car park, no signs of any security at all. Perhaps the owners were trusting to God to look after it. Or, given that it had been deconsecrated, perhaps they were hoping Satan would arrange for it to be burned down by local arsonists, leaving them to collect the insurance.

Leaving the car, he gazed up at the building. It looked more Russian Orthodox than Church of England; more ornate and decorated than was actually necessary. Each corner of the building bore its own tower, topped with a grey lead spire that looked four-sided at first glance but on closer inspection revealed itself to be octagonal. The front elevation was enormous, rising higher even than the four towers, and framed a huge stained glass window. From the size of that window Lapslie assumed that the inside of the church must be one large space, but the outside seemed to be divided into two storeys by a band of cream-coloured stone. The windows that lined the first floor were arched and bordered in the same cream-coloured stone, while the windows on the ground floor were rectangular and narrow – too narrow for a burglar to get in. They reminded Lapslie of the kind of arrow slots one saw in castle walls. A few circular windows were scattered around the church’s exterior, and a single narrow octagonal bell-tower rose from one side of the front elevation to tower over the rest of the building. Somewhere behind the towers and spires, Lapslie assumed there was a standard pitched roof covered in lead tiles.

‘What a fantastic place,’ Emma said, joining him.

‘Isn’t it. What have you learned?’

‘It used to be a popular church, back in the thirties. The acoustics inside are apparently phenomenal. So good, in fact, that record companies used to come here in the fifties and sixties to record classical music albums – not just organ recitals – the organ
used to be incredible, by the way – but also violin recitals, guitar recitals, choral pieces, all kinds of things. Trouble is that congregations in the area dropped away all through the seventies and eighties, and the church decided they couldn’t afford to keep this one going. The first step was not replacing the vicar when he retired in 1995, but shipping in other local vicars on a roster basis to hold the fort. Inevitably the remaining members of the congregation drifted towards the vicar of their preference at their own church, and this building ended up a hollow shell. The organ was ripped out in 1999. The rumour is that the church wanted to sell the building to a development company to be split up into executive flats, so they had it deconsecrated, but there was some kind of covenant in the building’s terms of ownership that stopped them, and it’s been stuck in a legal limbo ever since.’

‘Surprising that it’s stayed intact,’ Lapslie mused. ‘I would have expected squatters and drug addicts to be using the inside, and local enterprising youths to have been peeling the lead off the roof. So what’s the significance of the bells?’

Emma pointed to the slender tower that rose above the bulk of the church. ‘There’s only one, and it’s up there. Most churches will have a set of bells, but for some reason lost in the mists of time this church had only one. It’s called a Sanctus bell, and it’s traditionally rung at the singing of the Sanctus and again at the elevation of the elements, to indicate to the locals that the moment of consecration has been reached.’

‘Okay, so why’s this one still making noise?’

‘Apparently it was left in a fixed state, where it wouldn’t ring, but the support it was hanging from rotted when rainwater got into the tower. The thing swung loose, and now if the wind blows in through the louvres in a particular direction then the clapper gets blown against the bell. Which really annoys the
locals, by the way. They’re raised petitions to get it sorted out, but it’s all tied up with that covenant thing.’

‘Okay.’ The sound of a car engine behind him made Lapslie turn. A car was pulling into the car park. It parked next to a metal pole that had been stuck in the ground outside the church. A yellow plastic box with vents in the side sat on top of the pole. It didn’t look like something belonging to a church.

‘Who’s that?’ Lapslie asked.

‘That’s the man with the keys to the building.’

‘The caretaker?’

‘Not quite. Again, it’s all tied up with the covenant. The keys are lodged with a firm of solicitors. This is Mr Tulliver. He’s the solicitor’s clerk.’

The man who emerged from the car was young, small and birdlike, with a pointed nose and deep-set eyes under a thatch of blond hair. His suit was too large; his wrists emerged from his cuffs like twigs. ‘Good morning,’ he said, looking from Emma to Lapslie and back. ‘Which one of you is DCI Lapslie?’

‘I am,’ Lapslie said. ‘Can we get this place opened up?’

‘Firstly, can I establish that you have no actual warrant?’

‘We have,’ Lapslie said heavily, ‘no actual warrant. We actually have due cause for a warrant, and we actually have reason to believe that a crime has been committed inside the building, which means that we don’t actually
need
a warrant, but do we actually
have
a warrant? No.’

‘That’s fine,’ Tulliver said chirpily. ‘I just wanted to check.’ He delved in his pocket and brought out a set of keys on a ring, marked with a brown cardboard tag with a number written on it. ‘Let’s go, then.’

He scurried up the steps to the front doors of the building and hefted a large padlock attached to a chain that was strung between two large handles, one on each door. He glanced back
over his shoulder. ‘Lock doesn’t appear to have been disturbed.’

‘There are,’ Lapslie pointed out, ‘other ways into a building than through the front door.’

Within a few seconds the padlock and chain were on the stone steps and the doors were swinging open.

The smell that drifted out was a complex combination of wood polish, dry rot and something ammoniac, probably bird droppings. And overlaying all of that, a smell like rust. An old, familiar smell.

Blood.

The doors led into a small entrance hall lit only by the weak sunlight filtering in through the narrow ground-floor windows. A barrier straight ahead was set in front of what were probably the doors into the church itself, so that the parishioners had to file either left or right to get past it. Lapslie went left; Emma Bradbury went right. They came together in front of a set of swing doors. Lapslie pushed them open.

The church was, as Lapslie had surmised, a large, open space. Dusty buttresses of light braced the vaulted ceiling against the walls and the floor. The pews, altar and furnishings had been removed years before, leaving lighter patches on the stonework. Every movement sent echoes fluttering like birds.

For a moment, Lapslie thought that there was nothing in the building apart from dust and shadows, but then he saw a fine network of glints in the otherwise empty space. Glittering lines as fine as a spider’s web caught in early morning sunlight. The more he looked the more he saw: they criss-crossed the space diagonally, horizontally, vertically; dividing it up into cells and sections.

‘What’s that?’ Emma breathed.

‘I don’t know.’

Lapslie stepped closer, but the lines remained maddeningly
difficult to focus on. Tracing the lines to their ends, he could see that they were fastened to the walls with hooks and eyes that were either screwed into the masonry or stuck to it. He reached out with his fingers, brushing one that seemed to be closer than the rest.

A single, pure note rang out through the building.

‘Wire,’ he breathed. ‘It’s metal wire, under tension. Like a guitar string, but tens of metres long.’

‘You mean this whole place has been strung like a musical instrument?’ Emma asked.

‘God knows why, but that’s the effect.’

‘This wasn’t the way we left it,’ Tulliver said from behind them. He sounded affronted, as if decorating the building with metal wire was equivalent to sticking upside-down crosses on the walls and sacrificing goats at the far end, where the altar had been.

And then he noticed the rust-like discoloration on some of the wires, and the strands of … something … that connected them to others and to the floor. And he saw the scraps of meat that lay on the ground beneath them, all dried up and leathery. And he imagined a woman, running through the building in the dark, panicked and blind, and blundering into the wires, feeling them cut into her flesh, slice it open, carve it off like turkey at a Christmas lunch. And out there, in the darkness, someone recording the whole thing. Watching and listening.

‘“And through the cavernous slaughter-house,”’ he murmured bleakly, ‘“I am the shadow that walks there.”’

‘I’m not even sure,’ Sean Burrows said, ‘how we’re going to catalogue this place.’

Emma Bradbury, standing beside him, nodded in agreement. ‘Rather you than me’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

Powerful spotlights had been set up in the corners of the deconsecrated Church of All Hallows, illuminating the inside with a bright wash of light, but the wires that had been strung across the inside of the nave were still nearly invisible, apart from the ones that were coated with the dried remnants of Catriona Dooley’s blood.

‘I can’t send anyone in to look for evidence,’ Burrows went on, ‘because they might cut themselves to shreds. It’s a health and safety issue.’

He was dressed in the usual CSI working gear of papery white coverall with hood, plus white gloves and white plastic bags covering his shoes. With his quiff of white hair emerging from the elasticated hood he looked like Frosty the Snowman. Or at least that’s what Emma thought.

Behind him, his team of Crime Scene Investigators were standing around waiting for instructions.

‘I don’t want to tell you your job,’ she said carefully, ‘but I’d
have thought that the first step would be to take the wires down, surely.’

‘Not so,’ Burrows replied. ‘The position of the wires might be important. We need to be able to re-create the whole thing later, in the lab. Doctor Catherall might be able to make a better judgement about the injuries on the corpse if she can see how the wires are arranged. We also need to know what order the victim blundered into the wires – which one was first, which last. It’s all grist to the mill. All stuff the Crown Prosecution Service will need later on, if you ever manage to nab the villain.’

‘Thanks for the support,’ Emma muttered, then louder: ‘You’ll need to catalogue the position of the fixtures in the walls, then work out which fixtures are connected together.’

Burrows sighed. ‘So the first step is high definition pictures of each wall. I’ll probably have to take several dozen photos and then mosaic them together. Once I’ve done that, I can get the resulting mosaics printed out onto A1 sheets of paper and number the fixtures.’

He was talking to himself by this stage, but Emma kept listening. She loved the way that Crime Scene Investigators thought: the rigorously logical, analytical way they broke everything down, no matter how difficult, into a series of very small things that could each be solved or accomplished. It was the ultimate reductionist approach to life, and that’s what made them – Burrows especially – so good. It was the opposite to the way DCI Lapslie worked, which was largely gut instinct.

‘We’ll call the left wall “A”, the wall ahead of us, where the altar used to be, “B”, the right-hand wall “C” and the wall behind us “D”,’ Burrows mused. ‘That way, we can locate every fixture.’ He pointed to a loop of metal that projected from the wall over to their left. ‘That one would be “A1”, because it’s the first fixture on wall “A”. We’ll number the fixtures on each wall
from top left to bottom right. Then we’ll have to work out a mapping, so that we know there’s a wire from “A1” to –’ he followed the nearly invisible wire that led across the nave from the fixture he’d identified as ‘A1’ – ‘to, let’s say, “C56”.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘Then we’ll have to put labels on each wire, saying where it starts and where it finishes.
Then
we can start taking the wires down and storing them for later analysis, confident that we can re-create the room either practically or in a computer simulation later, knowing the dimensions of the room.’

‘What about the fixtures on the ceiling?’ Emma asked.

‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘That’ll have to be “E”. And the floor will be “F” – there are some fixtures there as well.’