Tooth and Claw Read Online Free Page A

been to stop blood pumping from the exposed flesh as the murderer worked, but that hadn’t stopped blood from the arm itself splashing across the duvet, the headboard and the pillow. And judging by the way the blood was smeared, Catherine Charnaud had been alive when the painstaking work of stripping tissue from underlying bone was started, although only time would tell whether she had been alive when it was finished.
    It occurred to Lapslie that there was no sign of the flesh that had been removed from the arm anywhere in the bedroom. Catherine Charnaud was a small girl, but even so there was enough meat on her right arm to fill a decent-sized dinner plate. The murderer had taken the stripped flesh with them, or disposed of it somewhere else in the house.
    There was something about the way that Catherine’s hand lay, palm upwards, thin fingers curled inwards like the legs of a dead and desiccated spider, that dragged Lapslie’s attention away from thoughts of evidence, motive and personality profile and kept it pinned. Terrible in the silence, the hand lay at the gravitational centre of the room, pulling everything towards it. Somehow the hand had avoided any splashes of blood. Perhaps the killer had accidentally shielded it with their own body as they flayed Catherine’s flesh away from her bone like a butcher preparing a joint of lamb for a casserole. Perhaps they had deliberately covered it for reasons that made sense only to them. Whatever the reason, it rested like a surreal joke; a perfect and untainted hand, fingernails painted pink, at the end of two lengths of yellow bone. And on the third finger of the hand, the golden band of an engagement ring glittered in the light of the dawn.
    Somewhere off in the distance, Lapslie thought he heard something: a pulse, a rhythm, a pounding of drums. For a moment he thought that he was hearing the sound of his own blood, thudding in his ears, but the rhythm was too complicated for that. He pulled the headphones off, thinking for a moment that they were somehow bizarrely picking up a radio station, despite the absence of any electronics inside. The sudden drone of conversation and the whisper of the papery coveralls flooded his mouth with salt and metal, but the drumming noise became neither quieter nor louder. His brain began to split it up, classify it into its constituent parts: four sets of fourbeats, the accent on the first beat of each quartet for the first three quartets, then the emphasis on the second, third and fourth beats for the last quartet. It was precise, organised, almost primal: like African tribal drumming. He’d heard something like it before: on the radio perhaps. He didn’t have any CDs – the music caused too many unplanned sensations – and he didn’t watch television for the same reason, but sometimes radios were hard to avoid.
    ‘Has someone got a radio on?’ he snapped, breaking the macabre silence.
    Faces turned towards him. Emma Bradbury frowned.
    ‘I asked if anyone’s got a radio on.’
    Several CSIs shook their heads.
    ‘I can’t hear anything, boss,’ Emma said, detouring around the bed and towards him.
    ‘I can hear music,’ he said. ‘Like drums. Can’t you hear it?’
    She tilted her head slightly, listening. ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Check downstairs. And see if anyone else can hear it. Might be neighbours.’
    ‘Unlikely,’ Emma said. ‘It’s a detached house, and the nearest neighbour is quite a way away. But I’ll check.’ She left the room, looking dubious. Everyone else returned to whatever they had been doing before he arrived.
    Lapslie found his gaze drawn again to the body on the bed. The flensed arm. The hand.
    ‘“Cover her face,”’ he quoted softly; ‘“mine eyes dazzle; she died young”.’
    ‘What was that?’ Sean Burrows said from his position bending over the body. His voice still had the blackberry wine taste that Lapslie remembered of old.
    ‘It’s a tragedy,’ Lapslie replied, but he wasn’t