Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (21 page)

‘You checked out the mechanics and the owner, obviously.’

‘First thing we did. They were clean. I mean, they had a nice sideline in taking write-offs from car accidents and welding the front end from one to the back end of another and flogging the resulting monstrosity on eBay as a functioning car, but they all had alibis for the time she was taken and the approximate time she was killed.’

‘Okay. Sorry to interrupt.’

‘She’d been … tortured,’ he said starkly. ‘Horribly, and over the course of several weeks. Her fingernails had been pulled
out with pliers, for a start, and then the skin between her fingers had been cut and the fingers slowly pulled apart all the way down to the wrist. Her right hand looked like … like a bloody spider. Like something from a horror film.’

‘What about her left hand?’ Emma asked, feeling sick. ‘What happened to that? Was it taken?’

Gary’s normally pink face had gone pale now. ‘No. No, it wasn’t taken. It just wasn’t there any more. Not in one bit, anyway. The wristbones of her left arm had been cut through with shears from front to back, from the hand towards the elbow, and then the same thing that had been done to the hand was done to the arm: the flesh was cut down for a distance, and then the two bones of the forearm – the radius and the ulna – were gradually pulled apart. And when I say ‘gradually’, I mean over the course of several hours. It must have been … unimaginably painful. When we found her, the two parts of her forearm were at right angles to each other.’ He swallowed again. ‘It’s bad enough when things are done to people, and you find the bodies, but they usually still look like
bodies
, know what I mean? Lorraine – she looked like … I don’t know. Like someone was trying to take her apart like you’d take a car engine apart to see how it worked, but stopped after a while when they got bored and left the bits scattered around.’

‘And there was – ’ Emma stopped to swallow the flood of saliva in her mouth; precursor to her throwing up if she wasn’t careful – ‘no clue as to the perpetrator?’

Gary shook his head. ‘Nobody hated her enough to do that to her, and nobody who even disliked her had blank spots in their calendar long enough to cover what was done. Eventually we had it down to a predatory psychopath who’d just picked up a passing stranger, but then you would expect there to be
an element of sexual crime. She was, as far as the pathologist could establish, still a virgin.’

Emma’s forehead was hot, and she could feel sweat prickling it. The other people in the waiting area were looking at the two of them strangely; not hearing what was being said but aware from the body language that it was disturbing.

‘And the other disappearance?’ she asked. ‘Alison Traff?’

‘Some similarities, some differences.’ Gary seemed glad to change the subject. ‘She was thirty-five, married with two children. Disappeared one evening after filling her car up at a petrol station. She was on her way back from choir practice in the local church hall. The family lived out in the countryside, in a fairly remote farmhouse. The suspicion was that she’d either been run off the road or stopped to help someone in trouble, and been abducted.’ He shook his head. ‘The family were devastated. The husband had a rock solid alibi, and no reason to kill her. We did check. He’s still seeing a therapist to try and come to terms with it. The council have put the children into care, because the husband is having such a hard time.’

‘I hate to ask, but how was she found? I mean—’

‘I know what you mean.’ He seemed to brace himself. ‘This time the body was dumped in the car park of a holistic therapy practice in Frinton. The body had been pierced repeatedly with what the pathologist estimated were meat skewers. Pierced in every place you could put a skewer and still keep someone alive. You know that kids’ game when we were young where you had all these thin plastic rods going from one side of a Perspex tube to the other, going through all these small holes in the sides, and there were a whole load of marbles balanced on top of the rods, and you had to take turns pulling the plastic rods out and the loser was the one who caused the marbles to fall down the tube?’

‘KerPlunk? Yeah, I got it for Christmas once. I was eight.’

‘Imagine someone doing it in reverse, but to a human being. Imagine two people taking turns to stick skewers through another human being’s body over the course of several days, maybe a week, and the loser is the one who kills her.’ He paused, and Emma noticed that the corners of his mouth were turning downwards. ‘They were stuck through her arms, her legs, her shoulders, her cheeks, her fingers, her ribs … anywhere you can imagine, and places you really don’t want to imagine.’

‘Any evidence of two people being present?’

‘No. That was just an assumption on our part.’

‘Did you recover the skewers? You say the pathologist had to estimate that’s what did it.’

‘No – they’d all been removed, very carefully. The pathologist did say two interesting things. The first was that the skewers had probably been sterilised with an antiseptic before being inserted, which indicates a desire to keep her alive for as long as possible, and a certain fastidiousness.’

‘And the second?’ Emma asked when it became clear that Gary wasn’t going to continue under his own volition.

‘The second interesting thing was that, judging from the scar tissue in the wounds, the skewers had been pulled in and out several times over the course of the days or weeks she was tortured.’

‘Oh.’ Emma tried to imagine it, and then quickly tried not to. ‘What killed her?’

‘In the end? Believe it or not, it was a simple infection. Although her captor had taken care with his sterilising procedures, some opportunistic bacterium got in.’

‘Okay.’ Emma was about to ask another question when the door to the courtroom opened and a small man in a suit poked
his head through. He nodded at Gary, the family and the group of assorted civil servants, then withdrew.

‘Got to go,’ Gary said. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’ Impulsively she hugged him again, and kissed his cheek.

‘Stay in touch.’

‘I will.’ She turned to go, then turned back. ‘I suppose the black humour of the situations occurred to you? The woman whose arm was dismantled was left in a car garage, and the woman who was stuck through with skewers was left in a holistic therapy centre where, I presume, they practised acupuncture.’

He nodded. ‘It didn’t escape us. We could never prove that the murders were carried out by the same person, but we always assumed they were. We called him “The Comedian”. It would have been “The Joker”, but the press would have connected that up to
Batman
if they’d got hold of it, and made us look stupid and unfeeling. Which we certainly weren’t.’

Emma turned to go again, and this time it was Gary who stopped her. ‘Has something else happened?’ he asked. ‘Another body?’

Emma nodded.

‘How was this one killed?’ he asked.

‘Do you want to sleep tonight?’

‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘Get him, Emma. Whoever this “Comedian” is, get him.’

‘I will.
We
will.’

‘You’ll need a lot of luck.’

‘Or witchcraft,’ she said, and left.

In the car, driving on the long and curving road out of Southend, Emma’s mind ranged back and forth over everything Gary Ellender had said. There was a distinct pattern there – a murderer who abducted his victims, kept them alive for several
days or weeks while torturing them, and then disposed of them in some blackly ironic way. With only two cases there wasn’t enough to make more than a cursory connection; Catriona Dooley’s case hadn’t been around for long enough, and the postmortem results were still on sufficiently close hold, that nobody apart from Emma had made the connection. No sexual assault, which was odd. Perhaps the killer masturbated while he was torturing his victims. Perhaps that was the only way he could get off.

But then there was the fourth case; the one she hadn’t talked to anyone about yet. The one she had discovered in the files.

On an off-chance she took a diversion, heading not for Chelmsford but up past Brentwood and towards Harlow. She recalled from the files that the fourth case – chronologically, the second – had taken place there.

Harlow Police Station was a two-storey building of relatively modern construction, built in a square around a central staff car park. It looked something like a new comprehensive school, a similarity emphasised by its location next to a sports centre.

Parking, and showing her warrant card again, Emma was soon inside. She found Detective Inspector Bill Ponting on the phone in his office. He waved her to a seat.

‘Sorry,’ he said as he put the receiver down. He was a big man, barrel chested, with cheeks that were too red to be healthy and a mass of back-combed white hair. He wore a pin-stripe suit that his size couldn’t really carry off properly. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘DS Bradbury,’ Emma introduced herself. ‘I’m working on a case where a woman was abducted, tortured and then dumped in a public area. I believe you had a similar case. I was hoping you could tell me about it.’

Ponting looked surprised. ‘Woman? Ours was a man. Decided it was gang-related. Lot of that in Harlow.’

‘I don’t want to rule anything in or out at this stage,’ Emma said, and then added a little white lie. ‘Ours might be gang-related as well, of course, even though it’s a woman.’

‘Where was she found?’ Ponting asked.

‘Canvey Island.’

‘Ah. There you are.’

Emma wasn’t sure where ‘there’ was, or why exactly she was ‘there’, but she smiled sweetly. Ponting continued: ‘David Cave. Small-time drug dealer, car thief and runner for one of the larger gangs. Word was that he’d got someone’s daughter pregnant. He disappeared. Found his body six weeks later. He’s been worked over with what the pathologist concluded was a potato peeler. Whole top layer of his skin had been removed, front and back. Looked like a freakshow exhibit.’

‘Where was he found?’ Emma asked.

‘Bakery,’ Ponting said. ‘Left bundled up in one of the ovens. Break-in. Someone has a sick sense of humour.’

‘And you put this down to gang activity?’ Emma asked, trying to keep the critical tone out of her voice.

‘He ran with the gangs, he got someone’s daughter up the duff, he was tortured and dumped. What else could it be?’

‘Good question.’ Emma stood. ‘Thanks. I don’t think I need bother you any further.’ She crossed to the door, then turned back as a thought struck her. ‘This may be a silly question, but I don’t suppose David Cave was a singer in any way?’

Ponting fixed her with an unnerving gaze. ‘Funny you should ask. Did a lot of karaoke in local pubs. Got quite a lot of cash winning competitions. Is that important?’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ she said sweetly, and left.

In the car on the way back, she mulled over the information
she’d collected. Information that wasn’t all in the official police records. Three disappearances that had turned into tortures and murders, and in all three cases the victims had some connection with singing. One sang in a band, one in a choir and one in pubs for money.

What were the odds that Catriona Dooley had been a singer as well?

‘Interesting idea,’ Lapslie said. The cold mid-morning wind whipping around the corners of All Hallows Church in Bishop’s Stortford cut into him like a shoal of piranhas. He could hear the growl of Emma’s car engine in the background of the mobile phone transmission. ‘Why would someone kidnap singers?’

‘I’ve often thought of doing the same with Lady Gaga,’ Emma replied.

‘Who?’

‘She’s a singer. Kind of falsetto soul. Never mind.’

‘I hope you’re on hands-free,’ he growled.

‘I am.’

‘It’s just that I’ve never seen a hands-free kit in your car.’

She sounded aggravated. ‘I’m on hands-free, okay?’

‘I only mention it,’ he said mildly, ‘because judging by the sound of your car engine you’re doing well in excess of the speed limit, and if you’re caught doing that
and
using your mobile phone the consequences could be horrendous.’

There was a pause, during which the sound of Emma’s engine noticeably changed. ‘I’d better go,’ she said eventually.

‘Yes, you better had. Have you slept, by the way?’

‘Have you?’ she asked.

‘I managed to get home, grab six hours’ kip and get back
here again as fresh as a daisy. I suspect you’ve worked through. It’ll catch up with you, you know.’

‘But I’m young,’ she said. ‘I can take it.’ He couldn’t see her expression, but he assumed she was grinning.

‘I’ll check into Catriona Dooley’s background,’ he said. ‘You go back and check the files again for people who have disappeared and never found, alive or dead.’

‘There’ll be thousands of them!’ Emma protested. ‘You know how many people go missing in England every year?’

‘Just check for singers,’ Lapslie said. ‘That appears to be the common thread.’

‘I still don’t understand.’ Emma sounded frustrated. ‘I already spent twelve hours checking through the files. I found all the disappearances that looked similar to Catriona Dooley’s case.’

‘No,’ Lapslie explained patiently, ‘you found all the disappearances where the bodies were found some weeks later, and it then turned out that all the ones you discovered had good singing voices. What I want you to look for now is reverse the process: look for all the cases where people who have good singing voices have disappeared and never been found.’

‘You think he’s still got some kidnap victims alive!’ Emma breathed.

‘We know he discards some in an obvious and blackly ironic way. The question is: does he discard all of them, or just the ones that don’t match his twisted criteria? Remember the voice on the sound file – “That’s gash”, he said. He’s looking for something, and I’m guessing it’s connected with their voices. According to what Doctor Catherall told you, Catriona Dooley was given food and water. If you’ve got somebody tied up, you can keep them alive for quite some time if you’re prepared to feed them.’