Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (2 page)

Down on the road, on the other side of the security barriers, a car went past towing a flatbed trailer. A donkey stood on the trailer, idly looking around as if being driven through traffic were an everyday occurrence. And that, Lapslie thought, summed up Islamabad to him: unusual sights taken for granted everywhere you looked.

The insect flickered and then vanished, presumably having relocated itself somewhere outside of Lapslie’s line of sight. He made a note to email Charlotte about it. She had the same kind of mind that Lapslie had: interested in passing oddities. She would probably have time to search on Google and find out what kind of insect it was: how rare, how poisonous.

They’d met at Braintree Hospital, where Lapslie was briefly being cared for having passed out very publicly during a press conference: a side-effect of the synaesthesia that was increasingly controlling his life at that point. The cross-wiring of his senses that led to things that he heard manifesting themselves as tastes in his mouth – or, rather, in his mind – had led to him becoming a virtual recluse. The most innocuous sounds – the wind in the leaves, passing traffic, the murmuring of people in a restaurant – would sometimes cause Lapslie to taste things so nauseating that he would be sick, or collapse. It had been getting worse, to the point where he was failing in his duties
as a police officer, but meeting Charlotte – a resident doctor specialising in anaesthesiology – was a turning point in his life. She had persuaded him to join a cognitive behavioural therapy group at the hospital in an attempt to develop what she called ‘coping strategies’. She had also researched some drugs that were undergoing clinical trials and managed to get him allocated to one of the test groups. Between them the CBT and the drugs had suppressed his synaesthesia to a point where he could function almost as a normal human being. To celebrate, he had bought her dinner – the first time he’d been able to stand being in a crowded restaurant with other people for more than a few moments. One thing had led to another and now they were a couple, much to Lapslie’s wonderment. He hadn’t expected, at this time in his life, to find love again.

It was a shame that Charlotte hadn’t been able to take time off from her hospital routine and join him in Pakistan. She would have loved the combination of exotic and familiar, despite having to cover herself up with a thin scarf and long-sleeved blouses. He’d felt alone, disconnected from humanity, for longer than he cared to remember, but loneliness was a new and uncomfortable feeling for him.

Still, Charlotte had said in her last email that she had a surprise for him when he returned: tickets for a concert. The thought made him nervous – all those people, all that noise – but he trusted her. And the nervousness was tinged with expectation: it was like being a teenager again, exposed to new sounds, new experiences.

Lapslie had bought her some presents during an escorted trip to a local flea market: a couple of pashminas and a necklace that the vendor said was jade, but was probably something less unusual. It didn’t matter: it was the look that Charlotte loved, not the knowledge that whatever it was he had bought her was
expensive or rare. She was sensual in the literal sense of the word: she had a direct connection to her senses in a way that other people seemed to have backed away from. Perhaps that’s why he had fallen for her. Perhaps that’s why she had initially been interested in him. No matter – now they were a couple for all the complex reasons that pulled people together, not just one.

The flea market had been fascinating for Lapslie. He’d been brought up in East London during the 1960s and 1970s, a stone’s throw from West Ham United football ground, and there was something about the arrangement of the stalls in the market, the way it was squeezed between the walls of nearby buildings, the combination of exotic fruits and household items like light bulbs for sale, and the Urdu language that was in use everywhere, that reminded him with a bizarre but unexpected jab of nostalgia of the Queen’s Market, just outside Upton Park tube station. He’d often wandered through the Queen’s Market as a child, initially with his mother as she shopped for food, and then later by himself. The smells were imprinted in his mind: rotting vegetables, sawdust, incense. And now, thousands of miles and tens of years from home, he’d found it again.

Back in the 1970s, the Queen’s Market had been located on the border of three different gang areas. South of the market had been the largely white area dominated by football thugs and the National Front. North-east up to Stratford had been the preserve of the Pakistani and Indian immigrants to the East End, some of whom had been around for several generations; indivisible to the outsider but riven by political and tribal affiliations internally. North-west to East Ham had been African-Caribbean territory: with the sound of reggae music drifting from windows and parties that seemed to go on for days. The Queen’s Market had been a neutral meeting point, a fulcrum around which the area revolved.

It was all different now. The Urdu and Punjabi lettering on the shop-fronts in his old stamping grounds had been replaced by Cyrillic now: the Pakistanis, Indians and African-Caribbeans supplanted by Poles, Chechens, Balkans and Russians. And every second shop was selling codes to unlock mobile phones.

Lapslie remembered patrolling the Queen’s Market, back in the early 1980s, and passing a dozing West Indian boy with dreadlocks emerging from beneath a towering leather cap. He was slumped against a stall selling Scotch bonnet peppers and chunks of goat. Partially aware of something passing in front of him, he jerked awake, saw Lapslie and performed a perfect double-take, then jumped to his feet and raced off, presumably to warn his brethren that the police were around. Almost exactly the same thing had happened in the Islamabad market. The Western policemen, shepherded by their Pakistani bodyguards, had passed by a stall selling chunks of chicken and fresh mangoes. A local man, small and unshaven with a random scattering of teeth in his mouth, sleeping with his head on his knees, had suddenly jerked awake and seen the parade of Westerners passing by. He too took off, the difference being that he had been pulling a mobile phone from his
kameez
as he ran. ISI or Taliban? Lapslie didn’t know, but the tour of the market was abruptly cut short and they were bussed back to the Serena. Strange how things at opposite ends of the world could be so similar.

Thoughts of his past, and of the East End, reminded him of Dom McGinley. The two of them had first met in the warren of back streets between Plaistow and East Ham tube stations: in pubs like the Green Man, the Boleyn and the Black Prince. Pubs where tough men in leather jackets and women with Essex facelifts – hair scraped back into ponytails so severe that their skin was stretched – drank for hours on end, and the smell of
stale urine from the toilets drifted out to mix with the spilled beer and the cigarette smoke in the bars. Lapslie had been a police constable, McGinley a runner for the Clerkenwell Syndicate, run by the legendary Adams family. And now Lapslie was a detective chief inspector, McGinley was emotionally involved with his sergeant, Emma Bradbury, and the Adams family still controlled half the crime in London. It was, as someone had once observed, a funny old world.

Which reminded him: in the time since they’d caught the serial killer Carl Whittley, Emma had avoided being alone with him for more than a few moments at a time. Lapslie had promised her that they would talk about her new relationship, but she had made sure that the chance had never presented itself.

That would change, when Lapslie got back.

The symposium was scheduled to run for another two days, and Lapslie was down to give a presentation on the Braintree Parkway bomb and the subsequent forensic investigation. He hated public speaking – a feeling that had multiplied exponentially since his collapse at the news conference a few months back – and he wasn’t looking forward to it. The problem was that Inspector Dain Morritt – a supercilious police officer in a sharp suit and Masonic cufflinks who had taken a dislike verging on hatred to Lapslie – would be in the audience. He was giving a presentation on how computer profiling could separate dangerously extremist Muslims from the broad sweep of perfectly innocuous ones. Lapslie knew that he would be able to feel Morritt’s eyes on him all the time, just waiting for him to falter, to fall. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Lapslie’s police laptop, open on the bed and connected to the Serena’s broadband internet service by a bright blue cable, went ‘ping’, indicating that he had an email. Turning away from the window, and the endlessly fascinating vista of
Islamabad, he crossed to the bed to check on who was trying to communicate with him. The odds were that it was either spam offering to help him satisfy his partner in bed by the use of various herbal concoctions or a Nigerian criminal gang pretending to be an innocent banking official who had control of some money from the estate of a recently deceased long-lost relative to send to him once they had received a goodwill payment of £100; but there was always the chance that it might be Charlotte, making contact. He did a quick calculation in his head, subtracting five hours and getting to some ungodly time in the morning in the UK, but Charlotte kept doctors’ hours, and therefore could be awake at any time. Much like a policeman.

The subject line wasn’t encouraging:
You Need To Listen To This
; and the sender’s address was an anonymous Hotmail account consisting of a hash of numbers and letters. Lapslie nearly deleted it unread, but decided at the last moment to take a quick look. He was bored, and there was always the chance that it was a communication from one of the various informants that he had kept with him over the years. And his computer was installed with the latest anti-virus software and internet firewalls.

He opened the email.

There was no message, no signature; just an attached file. Judging by the . wav file extension it was a sound file. A recording.

Who would be sending him a sound file? And why?

He double-clicked on the icon representing the sound file.

The Microsoft Sound Recorder program opened up in a separate window and started to play the sound file, representing its volume graphically as a series of green mountain peaks against a black background. For a few moments the file was silent, and then the sound started.

It was someone screaming.

Lapslie flinched at the raw agony in the sound. Shocked, his synaesthesic brain pushed back against the drugs and the coping strategies to flood his mouth with beetroot and salt. He almost vomited. Swallowing hard, he hit the pause button on the laptop screen.

The sound cut out. Peace and quiet filled the hotel room.

Lapslie took a deep breath, settling himself. He used the laptop’s touchpad to move the slider showing the progress of the sound file back to the beginning.

This wasn’t spam, and it wasn’t a casual message from a friend or a colleague. It sounded like someone being tortured.

Sliding the volume control down to a lower level, he pressed the ‘Play’ button on the Sound Recorder window. The file began mindlessly to play again.

Now he was concentrating, he heard something in the opening seconds: the ones he thought had been silent on first hearing. Behind the hiss of the recording process, almost hidden, was the sound of someone breathing. Ragged, hoarse, on the verge of panic. And sobbing, muffled as if the person didn’t want anyone to hear them, or to know how close to complete nervous collapse they were. Then there was a scuffling, as someone moved. Footsteps, dragging on a dusty surface.

Then the screaming. First a sudden, shocked sound, as if the person had run into something hard, or sharp and quickly pulled themselves away. Then another scream, followed by rapid scuffling. Whoever was making the noise wasn’t moving carefully any more; they were running. Running fast. More screaming, continuous now, driven by fear rather than pain, but punctuated by occasional sharper screams. Something was happening, but it was impossible to tell what it was.

The screams were getting weaker now, more desperate, and there was a sense from the scuffling noise that whoever was there was blundering around blindly and hitting things, or getting caught by things.

And then there was another scream, sharp and shocked.

Then sobbing, as heartfelt as if it was being pulled from a soul who had just found out that God did not exist, salvation was a joke and all was darkness.

A low, indistinguishable noise, over as soon as it began.

Then silence. No sobbing, no breathing, no scuffling. Nothing.

The sound of someone who had just died.

Lapslie leaned back until he was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

It could be a con: an actor making noises to convince the listener that they were being killed. But why the mystery? Why not make the cause of death obvious: the repeated sounds of stabbing, a gunshot, the choking as they were strangled? Or it could have been an extract taken from the soundtrack of a horror movie; one of the so-called ‘torture porn’ movies:
Saw
and its sixodd sequels,
Hostel
and its two sequels, plus various others with one- or two-word titles and stark posters. But didn’t films usually have some kind of soundtrack music to emphasise what was on the screen: ominous chords or heavy rock? No, Lapslie kept coming back to the same thing. This was real. Someone had died, and their death was recorded in that sound file.

A ‘snuff’ recording.

But why send it to him? Did they expect him to do something about it? Then why not send something more obvious: something pointing him to where the death occurred, or who it was that had died?

He rubbed his eyes and sat up again, the taste of beetroot and salt still spiking his tongue. Questions like that would just
lead him around in circles. There was an obvious course of action. Either other clues would fall out of that course of action, or they wouldn’t. He could only take one step at a time.

Working quickly, Lapslie composed a quick email to Emma Bradbury asking her to forward the sound file on to the Essex Police Forensics Laboratory for analysis, and also to notify the hierarchy within the police that a new incident needed to be recorded and a team formed up to investigate it. He hesitated before pressing ‘send’, wondering how quickly Emma would get it. If she was on leave for a few days, or engaged on a case, it might just hang around in cyberspace like a lonely orphan. He copied in Sean Burrows, the Head of Forensics, on the email and changed the text slightly to reflect the new instructions. Then, having finally consigned the email to its electronic fate, he phoned British Airways to check whether his flight could be brought forward to that evening. It turned out that it could: he had an open ticket, and there were empty seats on the flight.