Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation by Nigel McCrery Read Free Book Online

around four-thirty he had a low-grade buzz in the back of his head that told him his body needed food and sleep in order to reset itself.
    The police officers on the gate were armed with Heckler and Koch semi-automatic carbines. They watched him as he crossed to the reception cabin; muzzles pointed at the ground, left hands locked around the stock, right hands protectively caressing the grip. He wondered briefly when, if ever, they had last fired those guns for real. It was something like an insurance policy, he supposed. You armed your guards in case of terrorist attack, hoping that the attack would never come.
    There used to be a joke, he recalled, that the armed police on gate duty at these establishments were issued with guns if the alert level went up to ‘Amber’, and then given the bullets if it went up to ‘Red’. That was before the Al Qaeda bombs in London in 2005. Now, Lapslie suspected, those guns were fully loaded at all times.
    Despite the fact that he was a familiar face to the ladies on reception, he still had to be given a plastic pass incorporating his photograph, taken by a webcam above the head of the receptionist. He left his car in the external car park and walked through the trees towards the single-storey blocks that housed Sean Burrows’s team.
    The forensics laboratory was built on the site of an old Napoleonic fort, and Lapslie soon found himself passing a grassy mound to his left that he’d been told had once been the location of a local militia armed with flintlock rifles, eager to give Napoleon a bloody nose if he dared invade. As he walked he considered the ironic counterpoint between the original explosives in use on the site – gunpowder – and the kind of hightech experimental explosives being developed by terrorist groups and tested here on site by Burrows’s people.
    He found Burrows sitting in his office, sleeves rolled up, reading something off his computer screen. He refocused his eyes on Lapslie and smiled.
    ‘Detective Chief Inspector,’ he said in his warm Irish brogue. Previously it had tasted of blackcurrant wine, but now Lapslie could detect no taste within the words. ‘Most people wait until they come back from a foreign trip before they give out their presents. You sent me one while you were still away.’
    ‘I thought you probably wouldn’t appreciate a pashmina, which is about all they had at Islamabad Airport.’
    ‘Quite right too. How was Pakistan?’
    ‘An odd combination of the very familiar and the rather unusual. Have you ever been?’
    ‘Not as yet. There’s a possibility that I might fly out later in the year to set up a training course on forensic examination of bomb debris. A recurrent problem, if the media reports are to be believed.’ He shook his head. ‘A friend of mine in the Army was over there last year to evaluate their bomb disposal methods. He told me over a couple of pints one night that they picked him up at the airport and drove him straight to a Pakistan Army base where they’d proudly laid out on the parade ground all the fragments of terrorist bombs they’d collected over the past year, and all the material they’d recovered in raids. He said he stood there looking at live packs of explosive with fuses hanging out and drums of what appeared to be unstable ammonium nitrate, while Pakistan Army personnel wandered past him with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and small children played in an Army nursery across the road. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end he spent an hour rendering safe everything he could see.’
    ‘Lovely. We didn’t get that far, although I did get the impression that their evidence collection technique was little better than picking stuff up and having a close look at it.’
    ‘And how are you feeling now? Jet-lagged?
    Lapslie smiled. ‘“The enormous wheels of will drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet,”’ he quoted. ‘That about sums it up, I think.’
    Burrows looked