Tooth and Claw Read Online Free

noticed. Huge – king size at least, and probably larger – covered with a duvet whose cover had probably once been blue but now glistened a rusty red. Tassels hung off it all around. Thin threads of congealing liquid linked some of the tassels to the carpet, like glutinous spiders’ webs.
    Lapslie was perversely grateful for the absence of cuddly toys. In his experience, young women tended to keep reminders of their girlish past around as they grew into adulthood, and some of the memories of previous cases that kept him awake at nightwere of teddy bears and velvety lions whose plush fur was matted with sticky red blood, whose eyes hung by threads and whose smiling faces were disfigured with slashes and gouges where white stuffing bulged through. But not here. The only things on the bed apart from the body of Catherine Charnaud were a circular pillow and a hardback book, cast cover upwards to one side up by the headboard. It had fallen open, or been placed that way to keep a particular page. Whatever the book was, wherever Catherine Charnaud had paused, it would never be completed. The story had ended too soon.
    And then there was the body, posed in the centre of the bed like someone posing for a painting.
    Catherine Charnaud had been beautiful, once upon a time. Looking at her now, her eyes wide in terror and pain and dulled by death, her mouth unnaturally wide, Lapslie remembered the times he had seen her on TV and in the gossip pages of newspapers and magazines. She had been one of those minor celebrities more famous for what she did in her private life than on screen. He had a vague memory that she had started out in children’s TV programmes before moving onto fronting news updates; one of those incessantly bright and bouncy blondes who tried to show that they were ‘down’ with the kids even as they went out and got wasted every night. ‘Ladettes’ – wasn’t that how they were referred to? She was thin – perhaps anexorically so, judging by the way her stomach fell away from the sharp edge of her ribcage and the corners of her hips stuck up like mountains rising from the plains of her groin. Her breasts were small, the nipples dark and raised now into tiny berries by rigor mortis; the tissue of the breasts themselves pulled downwards and sideways against her ribs by gravity. Her skin was porcelain-white on top, but what little blood remained in her body had pooled where her skin touched the duvet,looking like a bizarre tidemark all the way up her legs and body. Her arms were outstretched in a parody of crucifixion. They were tied to the bedhead by bands of some kind, like the plastic ties that builders and gardeners used sometimes, where a corrugated plastic tongue loops back through a slit in the top of the tie and is pulled tight, the zigzag corrugations engaging with the sides of the slit to hold the whole thing tight.
    And that led his gaze to where it had always been heading, even while he had tried to distract it by looking at the garden, the room, the clothes, the people, the bed and the body. Her arm. The terrible, impossible ruin that was her left arm.
    The flesh had been stripped from the radius and ulna from bicep down to wrist. The bones themselves were yellow and waxy; not the matt ivory of skeletons in museums. Pockets of gristle and bubbly fat surrounded the complexity of the elbow joint and the numerous small bones of the wrist where the killer’s tools, whatever they were, hadn’t been able to gouge all of the surrounding flesh away. It was clear that they had gone to some trouble to remove as much flesh as possible, and clean the bone back to its natural state – if the word ‘natural’ could be applied to what had been done here. Artfully distressed, rather than disintegrating due to nature.
    Looking closer, Lapslie could see that the skin above Catherine’s bicep and below her wrist was compressed by plastic ties, similar to those that were securing her limbs. The aim had obviously