Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation Read online

  Which was probably why she’d failed her Inspector’s Exam last time she’d taken it. And the time before.

  She debated writing a note for Dom, but he’d never read it. He’d ring her if he wanted to know where she was.

  Actually, if he really wanted to know where she was he’d probably get some criminal crony to trace which mobile phone mast her mobile was currently registered with. He’d done it before.

  She slipped out of the house and started up her Vauxhall Tigra: a present from Dom to replace the Audi that she’d previously owned and lost in a motorway crash which had left her shaken but uninjured but which had totalled the car and several others. Punching the postcode in, she pulled away, peppering Dom’s Jaguar with gravel.

  The drive took just over an hour, including a pit-stop for a pee and a takeaway coffee at a Starbucks, and she spent the time trying to remember what she’d picked up about Canvey Island during the course of her time stationed in Essex. It turned out to be virtually nothing, with the exception that there was a track called ‘Canvey Island’ on an album by British Sea Power: one of her current favourite indie bands.

  Dom didn’t like British Sea Power. He didn’t like her taste in music full stop. He was stuck back in the 1970s, with Jethro Tull, Tangerine Dream and Yes. The only band that sat in the area where their tastes overlapped was the Ozric Tentacles.

  Eventually, Emma found herself on a long, curving, elevated causeway that led across a landscape of creeks, fields and banks of mud. Off in the distance to her right was a series of thin metal chimneys and fat storage tanks – an oil refinery looming like some science fiction cityscape over the tiny houses that surrounded it.

  By the time she left the causeway she was part of a steady stream of commuter traffic and school-run people-carriers on the roads. Canvey Island looked just like any of the more modern conurbations in Essex: tacky 1970s houses all based on the same design, built with the same bricks and tiled with the same red tiles.

  With less than half a mile to go she found herself driving through a small industrial estate. The satnav directed her to turn into what appeared to be a disused petrol station; the lack of an obvious police presence caused her to keep driving until she saw the collection of police cars, unmarked vans and people standing around aimlessly that generally marked a focus of police activity. She parked in the shadow of a strangely shaped yellow plastic box on a grey metal pole, about ten feet above the ground. The box looked a bit like a beehive: slatted, with openings all around.

  ‘DS Bradbury,’ she said to a young constable who approached her car with the obvious intent of shooing her away with as much condescension as his twenty-two-year-old frame could muster. He nodded, as if he’d known that all along, and gestured her towards an open gate in a ten-foot-high wire fence that led into a car park.

  The building in whose shadow she left her car was large, warehouse-shaped, made out of metal and painted in bright pink with large yellow spots: the kind of thing she expected to see at three a.m. on a Saturday after an evening drinking a combination of absinthe and Red Bull, not at nine a.m. on a weekday. Stuck to the front of the building was a large cut-out sign featuring a meerkat-like creature wearing a waistcoat in the same colours and winking at any passers-by. A sign to one side of the meerkat proclaimed: ‘Marty Meerkat’s Maniac Playground!’

  ‘What the hell?’ she said, getting out of the car.

  A passing constable nodded at her, probably thinking that she was with Forensics, rather than the ranking officer. ‘Psychedelic, isn’t it?’ he said chummily.

  ‘Disturbingly so. What is it?’

  ‘Children’s play area. Place for the mums to bring their kids and sit around having coffee and cake while the carpet-crawlers tire themselves out. It’s filled with padded climbing frames and slides and stuff. All perfectly safe.’

  ‘What’s wrong with a patch of waste ground and a rusty bicycle?’ Emma wondered.

  ‘Or a street corner and a vial of crack cocaine?’ the constable replied with a smile.

  ‘Point taken. If you don’t provide them with somewhere to go, they’ll make their own entertainment.’

  ‘Can I help?’ he said, emboldened and changing direction towards her. She’d seen that smile, and that body language, so many times before.

  ‘DS Bradbury,’ she said wearily, flashing her badge. ‘Apparently I’m taking over.’

  He came to a dead stop and bounced back a step, a mask of professionalism slipping rapidly across the thinly disguised wolfish interest. ‘I think the Sarge would appreciate that. We don’t normally get anything like this around here.’

  He nodded to her, and moved away, presumably to tell everyone that an outsider had arrived and was pulling rank. There was probably a word for ‘outsiders’ in the Canvey Island slang. ‘Grockles’ was the favoured term on the Isle of Wight, where she had grown up

  She pushed open the entrance doors and went in.

  The interior of the building was floored with rubber gymnasium matting and filled, floor to ceiling, with what appeared to be a massive structure constructed out of scaffolding poles covered with foam rubber which itself was coated in brightly coloured wipe-clean plastic, all attached to the scaffolding with plastic builders’ ties. The scaffolding divided the structure into cells of various sizes and shapes which were walled with nylon netting and interconnected by holes, tubes, tunnels, gates, slides and ladders. Some of the cells were nearly filled by inflated spheres which the kids presumably had to manoeuvre their way past if they wanted to get from the entrance on one side to the exit on the other. A slide that must have been ten feet wide ran from a platform at the very top of the structure to a pit at the bottom which was filled with foam rubber balls, intended to cushion the impact of landing. On the other side a series of ropes allowed the kids to swing themselves safely from one end of the structure to the other. The overall effect was something like a kids’ board game – KerPlunk or Mouse Trap, perhaps – blown up to giant size.

  ‘Dear God,’ Emma murmured to herself. ‘You don’t even realise these places exist if you don’t have kids.’

  She looked around, trying to work out who was in charge. Or at least, who had been in charge until her arrival. Uniformed policemen and Crime Scene Investigators in white papery coveralls were dotted around the place. The CSIs were dusting for fingerprints, taking photographs or generally taking a close interest in things too small for the human eye to see. The uniformed police were standing around looking lost. Over to one side was a coffee bar area, with round tables and metal chairs, presumably for the parents to sit at. The chairs didn’t look particularly comfortable. Presumably that was so that the parents didn’t settle down for the day, and to guarantee a degree of turnover in the clientele. ‘Churn’ – wasn’t that the term? She headed over there, if for no other reason than the best place to find a senior officer was where bacon baps and coffee were available.

  A harassed-looking uniformed sergeant was trying to deal with three subordinates at once. He saw Emma and broke off what he was doing.

  ‘DS Bradbury?’

  ‘The very same. And you are …?’

  ‘Sergeant Murrell. Keith Murrell.’ He stuck his hand out. Emma took it, surprised at his friendliness. His grip was firm.

  ‘Sorry,’ she found herself saying, ‘but I was told to report here and take over. That’s about the extent of my knowledge.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ he replied. ‘I’m out of my depth here. Yeah, Canvey Island gets deaths like any other area, but most of them are fights in pub car parks that get out of hand or domestic disturbances that have been brewing for years. Cold blooded murder is something else.’

  Emma glanced around. ‘I feel embarrassed asking, but where’s the body?’

  ‘Follow me.’

  He led the way over to the ball pit at the base of the slide, which was accessible via an archway in the padded scaffolding. One CSI was taking photographs while two others were carefully picking out foam rubber balls a
nd sealing them individually in plastic bags, numbering them, then placing them carefully in a storage box. Each one was about the size of a tennis ball, made from foam rubber and coloured red, blue, yellow and green, although there seemed to be a larger preponderance of red than Emma would have expected.

  And then she realised that some of the red balls weren’t originally red.

  They were covered in blood.

  Sergeant Murrell nodded to one of the CSIs. ‘Can you show us the body without disturbing it any more than it has been already?’

  One of the CSIs looked up, nodded, then reached into the ball pit. She fished around for a few moments, then took hold of something and pulled it carefully up.

  Emerging from the ball pit like a whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean came what looked initially to Emma like something from a butcher’s shop window. Pale skin with slices taken off to reveal white bone and yellow fat. An eye, isolated in raw flesh. Meat, raw and bloody.

  It was only when the CSI’s hand emerged from the balls supporting a gore-streaked mane of blonde hair that the individual parts came together to form a complete picture, and Emma realised that she was gazing at a woman’s head that appeared to have been repeatedly slashed by someone with a long knife or a sword.

  ‘Good God,’ Emma murmured.

  ‘Not based on this evidence,’ Sergeant Murrell responded softly.

  ‘Is the rest of her in there?’

  ‘As far as we can tell, the body is intact – with the exception of those slices of flesh that appear to have been removed.’

  ‘Naked?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And those cuts – are they confined to the head or do they extend over the whole of the body?’

  He grimaced. ‘We’ve not conducted a full visual examination as yet, but there are certainly cuts to the hands, arms, shoulders and chest. One breast has been completely sliced off. The legs have some shallow cuts to them, and the feet appear to be untouched.’

  Emma tried to visualise what she was being told. ‘The cuts to the arms and hands: do they look defensive?’

  Murrell shrugged. ‘That’s a valid interpretation.’

  ‘So – someone hacked away at her while she was standing or crouching, and she defended herself until the blood loss was too great.’

  Again, he shrugged. ‘I can’t argue with that interpretation, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

  ‘Forensics and the post-mortem should be able to confirm or deny it.’ Emma thought for a moment. ‘The flesh that appears to have been sliced off – have you found it?’

  ‘There’s no indications of another crime scene within the building, and with that amount of blood loss I’m sure we would have spotted it. The bits that have been removed might be buried underneath the balls, they might have been taken by the killer or they might have been left at the place where she was killed, wherever that was.’

  Emma nodded. ‘So there’s likely to be another crime scene that we haven’t discovered.’

  ‘That’s the way my thoughts are going.’ Murrell swallowed, and looked away. ‘Some of the men are talking about … cannibalism. Is that a viable theory?’

  ‘At this stage,’ Emma said, ‘anything is a viable theory, but try to discourage too much speculation. We don’t want to get so focused on one path than we miss evidence for another.’

  ‘Understood.’ He nodded. ‘So, what’s next? What do you want us to do?’

  ‘You’ve got the CSIs here already, which is good. They’ll process the evidence and document everything photographically. I presume the pathologist is on the way?’

  ‘Expected within the hour.’

  ‘Who discovered the body?’

  ‘The manager of this place. His name is Gareth MacFarlane. He said he arrived at around eight o’clock to open up, and found that the door had been forced. He called the police straight away, assuming that the cash register had been raided. When the initial response team got here they found the cash register was intact, but looking around they spotted traces of blood on the rubber mats, as if something had been dragged. They followed the drag marks to this ball pit. They were debating whether to call it in or wade into the pit and see what was there when one of them saw a hand sticking out. So they called it in.’

  ‘Wise move.’ Emma suddenly realised that the CSI was still patiently holding the slashed head up for her investigation. ‘Okay, you can settle that thing back down now.’ She looked at Sergeant Murrell again. ‘It looks like you’ve got a grip on the processing of the scene. This manager bloke – Gareth MacFarlane? – is an obvious initial suspect, so let’s get him down to the local nick and take his statement. The next thing we need to do is to identify the victim, so let’s get someone checking missing persons reports, especially ones from yesterday, and let’s also see if we can go through her pockets for identification. A driving licence would be good.’

  ‘She’s naked,’ Sergeant Murrell said patiently. ‘No clothes.’

  ‘Clearly,’ Emma replied, feeling a blush spread across her cheeks but recovering ground quickly, ‘but her clothes or her handbag might be buried under the balls as well. Let’s have a fish around, eh? Oh, and make sure the door and the lock are processed. At the moment that’s the only thing we know for sure that the murderer touched apart from the body.’ She glanced around. ‘No chance of security cameras?’

  ‘Not inside. There’s all kinds of regulations about recording pictures of children. The argument is that it gives paedophiles carte blanche to snap away if there’s no valid reason to stop them. Outside is a different matter, but the manager informs me that they’re just for show. They’re not connected to anything.’

  ‘Okay.’ She quickly ran through a mental checklist, in case she’d missed anything. ‘I think it’s all sewn up. Make sure the constables on the perimeter keep any journalists out – the moment they get a sniff of this they’ll be trying to sneak in through the back door or take photographs through the windows. I’d rather not see this splashed all over the front pages – even if it’s just the front page of the local freebie newspaper.’

  ‘Understood.’ He glanced at the gore-smeared foam rubber balls that hid the body. ‘I’ve … never seen anything like this before. I’m not sure how to react.’

  ‘I’ve seen too many things like it,’ Emma said soberly. ‘And I still don’t know how to react. I think if you ever get to the point where you can take it in your stride then you need to find another job, and quickly.’

  ‘I guess,’ he said quietly, ‘if you can look at a body like this one and not feel something, then you’re only one step away from looking at your wife or girlfriend in the same way.’

  Emma left Murrell supervising the CSIs in the ball pit and spent the next hour prowling around the building. At one stage someone came up and handed her a polystyrene cup of coffee, which she took gratefully. In the back of her mind she could hear the voices of children playing: screams, laughs, the occasional frustrated yell or triumphant shout. The ghosts of previous customers, still haunting the premises.

  Would any parents bring their children here again, knowing that a mutilated body had been discovered there? Would any mother or father let their children roll around in the ball pit ever again? She suspected not. And despite what she’d said about photographers, it wasn’t the police’s job to suppress straight reportage. The place would go out of business, slowly or quickly.

  By the time she’d got back around to the ball pit most of the balls had been removed and catalogued as evidence and the pathologist was supervising the removal of the woman’s naked body. Emma moved alongside her.

  ‘Doctor Catherall.’

  Jane Catherall glanced up at Emma. ‘Detective Sergeant Bradbury, how pleasant to see you here, at the edge of the known world. Is DCI Lapslie also around?’

  Emma gazed down fondly at the pathologist. She knew, from what Lapslie had told her, that Jane Catherall was one of the last people in the UK to have suffered
badly from polio as a child. As a result, her back was twisted, her torso malformed and her eyes protuberant. And she was simultaneously the sweetest person and the most fastidious pathologist that Emma had ever met.

  ‘No, the DCI is sampling the local food in Pakistan under the pretence that he’s attending a conference on law enforcement and counter-terrorism.’

  ‘And they’ve let you out alone?’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘How lovely for Mark. I do hope the sound of the jet engines won’t set his synaesthesia off.’

  ‘He’s actually being treated for it at the moment. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him.’

  Jane Catherall smiled, and her face transformed. ‘Good for him,’ she said.

  Emma watched as the body was carefully transferred into a black bag and from there onto a wheeled stretcher. ‘When can you get around to doing the post-mortem?’

  ‘I’ve actually got a space now. I’ll start straight away when we get back.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll come with you.’

  She crossed over to where Sergeant Murrell was standing and told him that she would be back later, and that he was in charge while she was gone. ‘Get all the balls from the ball pit individually sealed in plastic bags, tagged and sent to Forensics,’ she added.

  ‘Are you joking?’ he asked, looking at the thousands of balls. Noticing the look on her face, he added, ‘No, you’re not.’

  Following the stretcher outside to where the unmarked pathology van was parked, she watched it pull away, then got into her Tigra and followed.

  The drive back to Braintree took over an hour. Emma resisted the temptation to overtake and zoom ahead at speed; all that she would accomplish would be to guarantee herself an hour’s wait in the mortuary car park. As she trailed the van through traffic, past people-carriers and white vans, down streets lined with neat, semi-detached houses and past rows of local shops, she was struck by the fact that nobody they passed knew how close they were to a mutilated dead body. And after half an hour of thinking that, she started wondering what other secrets were lying in the vans and the houses that she was passing, and she shivered.