Skin

  ‘And all I can say is, I hear the clink and clank of God ponying up right now – because I am right. You just haven’t heard everything yet.’

  Caffery turned his eyes sideways and held hers.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, her eyebrows raised. ‘Oh, yes.’

  She gestured to Fester and Lurch. Like Mahoney, Hopkins had been a big girl – it took two of them to roll her over. And when they did Caffery stopped chewing the gum. He stood quite still, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Beatrice said. ‘Do you see why I don’t think she killed herself?’

  On the backs of Hopkins’s heels an area of skin had been sloughed away. Little pinpoints of black showed gravel embedded in the grazes.

  ‘She was dragged? You’re telling me she was dragged into the garage?’

  Beatrice gave a low, humourless laugh. ‘At last,’ she murmured. ‘At last we’re reading from the same hymn sheet.’

  41

  Flea parked in the shaded trees, just out of sight of the road, and walked up the path to Ruth Lindermilk’s bungalow. The heat of the day was just leaving the air. The hamlet was quiet, the only sound a dog barking furiously inside one of the cottages. Flea didn’t go up the path to the door. She opened the gate and went around the side of the building to where the land dropped away sharply towards the road.

  Ruth was about ten feet away, her back turned. Hatless, dressed in a short white skirt and a denim jacket, she was busy dropping birdseed into one of the feeders.

  ‘Hello.’

  Ruth looked round, saw Flea, put the seed on the ground and began walking towards the house.

  ‘Ruth – please.’

  ‘Eff off. I’m going to get my gun.’

  ‘You haven’t got a gun. The police took it.’

  ‘Got another one. Going to get it.’

  ‘Christ, Ruth, this isn’t The Beverly shagging Hillbillies.’

  She stopped in her tracks and turned slowly to Flea. Without the cap she seemed older. Her badly dyed hair was cut short and greying at the back. Her makeup was caked in the corners of her eyes. She was sweating, breathing hard. ‘You’ve got some fuckin’ neck, showing your face round here.’

  ‘I’m sorry about last time, but the neighbours didn’t send me. You should at least believe that.’

  Ruth shook her head. ‘Then who are you? With your combats and your hat. Hasn’t no one never told you those are boys’ clothes? You look a right wanker.’

  ‘I’m a private investigator.’

  ‘A private . . . ? How comes you told me you were from the Highways Agency?’

  ‘It was the first thing that came to mind.’

  ‘I should’ve known you weren’t from the council straight away. Council’d never come out to see me. Now, if I was on the social it’d be different – if I was on the soash they’d have been straight round . . .’ She trailed off. ‘A private investigator? What do you want out of me?’

  ‘Can we talk? Inside? Don’t want to give your neighbours a show, do we?’

  Ruth’s mouth twitched. Her foxy little brain was working on the situation. She glanced at the road – at the other houses in the hamlet. Behind the puffy skin her eyes were grey and hard. Uncompromising. ‘You’ve got five minutes. Then I’m calling the police.’

  They went into the living room. It seemed bigger with the french windows wide open, and it smelt of cleaning fluid and burnt toast. Flea pushed some cats away and sat down on the sofa. ‘I’ll be absolutely honest.’

  ‘It’s not in your nature.’

  ‘I’ll be absolutely honest. Even though I shouldn’t, I’m telling you the truth. I’m in trouble.’

  ‘So what? Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a shit.’

  ‘This case is my last hope. If I don’t get it right I’m basically going to lose my job. That’s why I lied to you. I was desperate.’

  ‘Desperate?’ Ruth licked her lips. ‘How terrible for you. What? Down to your last million, are you?’

  ‘It’s a difficult case. My client’s husband’s been having an affair. He came home drunk last week. He’d had an accident. The front grille of their car was dented. He told my client he was parked in Bristol at a work do and that someone had driven into it in the car park.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘My client didn’t believe him. She thought he’d been seeing his girlfriend over at Tellisford. If he’d been in Tellisford he’d’ve had to drive along this road to get home. I think whatever happened to his car happened down there on the road. There are skidmarks. When I was looking at them yesterday I saw your telescope from the road. That’s why I came up.’

  She held Ruth’s eyes steadily. ‘My client’s accident was last Monday. Some time before midnight. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘Course I do. He hit a deer.’

  ‘How do you know it was a deer?’

  ‘I could tell from the noise of the collision.’

  ‘You didn’t see it, then?’

  ‘I heard it. That was enough. The deer must have limped off because when I went down there later with the camera there was nothing. It probably died in one of the fields, the poor—’ She broke off, eyeing Flea suspiciously. And then she grinned. A gap-toothed beery smile. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There you go again – taking me for an idiot.’

  Flea looked at her stonily. ‘Are you going to talk to me or not?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘On what you can give me in return.’

  ‘I don’t know what I have to give you in return. What were you thinking?’

  ‘What do you think I was thinking?’

  ‘Money, I suppose. But you won’t get far with that. It’s against the ethics to pay for information.’

  ‘Ethics? Whose ethics?’

  ‘Mine. My company’s. My client’s.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you could find something. Ten K. That’s all I want. It’s not a lot. Not to someone like you.’

  ‘You’d be surprised what’s a lot to people like me.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ Ruth went to the bar and picked up a cracked glass with a drink in it. She raised it to Flea. ‘If it’s interesting enough for you, then it’ll be interesting enough for someone else.’

  Flea got to her feet.

  ‘Where’re you going?’

  ‘There’s no money. I’m going home.’

  Ruth shrugged. She put down the glass and went to the computer table. Pulled a cellophane envelope from the top drawer and slid out a black-and-white print. ‘My evidence.’ She came across the room and held it out. ‘I never got all his registration, only the last three letters. Otherwise I’d have called the police on him.’

  Flea looked at the photo, her heart thumping low and hard in her chest. Taken from the patio, it showed the road at night. A double set of tyre tracks ran down the centre and at the head of them, where it had come to rest, a car was parked, the driver’s door open. A man was standing at the back, as if he’d just slammed the boot. He had turned away from the camera, and although he was too far away for Flea to see what he looked like, if you knew Thom you’d know it was him standing there.

  The numbers on the plate were illegible because of the lighting, but the letters were clear: GBR. And just peeping out above the numberplate a tiny slip of something dark. Unless you were close to it, you wouldn’t notice it was there. But Flea noticed. And knew it was a section of velvet coat. He’d already put her in the boot and was leaving . . . So you didn’t see the whole thing. You heard the collision, but you didn’t know it was a person he’d hit. You didn’t see him put Misty in the boot. That’s why you thought it was a deer . . .

  She reached for the photo, but Ruth was quick. She shovelled it back into the cellophane, went to a small bureau in the corner, pushed it inside and turned the key. She looked back at Flea, smiling, something sly crossing her expression. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘It would be too easy, wouldn’t it?’

  ??
?Lend me the photo, Ruth. It would prove my client’s husband was there.’

  ‘No.’ She dropped the key down the front of her bra. Winked. ‘I don’t think I’ll do that.’

  ‘I’ll make a copy of it. It’ll take me a few minutes just to run it down to a copy shop. Then my case’ll be over and I can leave you be.’

  ‘The price has just gone up. Fifteen grand. That’s what it’ll cost you.’

  Flea opened her mouth. Closed it. What did the photograph prove? That Thom had stopped. That he’d got out of the car to check what he’d hit. They’d have to work that into his story. They’d position Misty far enough into the field for it to be believable that she’d been thrown through the hedgerow and that when he’d got out to check he hadn’t been able to see her from the road. Then he’d say he’d assumed it was a deer that had limped off. Just the way Ruth had told it.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She checked her watch. It was six thirty. She was meeting Mandy and Thom in Keynsham in forty-five minutes. ‘I’m sorry but I really don’t think that’s going to happen.’

  42

  A modern cider pub had been built where the old lock-keeper’s house in Keynsham used to be. Flea, Thom and Mandy went down to the rickety fishing platform so the roar of the weir would blunt their voices and tried to look normal. They’d ordered long pints of thick orangy cider, but none of them felt like drinking. Thom rested his glass on a supporting post and stood with his arms folded, looking down at his toe, which he moved in circles as if he was writing something with it. He wouldn’t look either woman in the eye.

  Flea stood shoulder to shoulder with Mandy, gazing morosely into the river. She’d pulled a body out of there once. A seventy-year-old man with throat cancer. While his wife was at Somerfields he’d taken a mallet and bolster to part of the garden wall, chipped out seven bricks, zipped them into a rucksack, which he’d padlocked round his chest, then come out here and stepped straight into the water. A wedding party in the pub grounds opposite watched him do it. His body had been pulled under and held against the weir by the current. It had taken the underwater search unit six hours to get him out, and when they did, his face, some of which had already been removed during his treatment, had slammed into the weir so many times it was like uncooked hamburger.

  ‘We need to come up with a plan.’ Mandy was wearing a black linen dress that stopped mid-calf, and fading blue Birkenstocks. The heavy tops of her arms had small reddish pimples scattered over them. ‘For everyone’s sake, we need a plan. We need to decide the best way out of this for all of us.’

  Flea glanced up at the pub. A few people stood on the terrace. Some wore business suits; some, shorts and T-shirts. No one was paying them any attention. She took a step closer to Mandy anyway, lowering her voice. ‘Look, it’ll be easier than you think. There’s a huge shake-up going on at the moment in the forensic system and most investigative teams don’t have big forensic budgets to start with. The autopsy will show she was hit by a car. With a confession from Thom they won’t look at it too closely. There’d be no reason to order extra tests.’

  ‘What sort of extra tests?’

  ‘Tests that would show she hadn’t been out in the open for all that time. That’s the only hot button. If they ever find out she was put in the car . . .’

  ‘You’ve thought it all through.’

  ‘The car has to look right because they’ll test the point of impact. I’ve burnt the boot lining and you’re going to have to take a trip somewhere – London, maybe – to buy a new one. You’ll need to pay cash. I’ll take care of her clothes, get rid of fibres from the boot. The only other thing is her body.’

  Mandy winced. ‘Yes. That.’

  ‘She’d have decomposed differently in the boot than if she’d been in the open. On the roadside there’d’ve been animal artefacts. Rats, mice, foxes. They’re not discerning about what meat’s on the menu.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Thom muttered. ‘This is a nightmare.’

  Mandy gave him a sharp look. ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘So, this is the crucial part. We’ve got to hide her somewhere it’s plausible she landed, but where she won’t be seen from the road. She needs to lie out there for a night or longer – as long as possible, really, so the animals can do their thing. Move her around. Destroy some evidence, make it believable.’ She took a sip of her drink and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘And that’s where it gets tricky.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s in a remote place but someone’s got a view of it. A good view. That’s where you come in, Mandy. I’m going to ask you to distract someone.’

  ‘How am I going to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. You like animals, don’t you? Maybe you tell her your cat’s gone missing and you’re searching the neighbourhood.’

  ‘I’m not an actress.’

  ‘You might not have to be. This woman’s a drunk. If we time it right you won’t have to work hard to convince her.’

  She took another sip of cider, put the glass down and got a pellet of chewing-gum from the packet in her pocket. Easy on the booze – the last thing she needed was to get pissed. ‘And it’s tonight. We’re going to get started tonight.’

  Mandy and Thom didn’t speak. They both stared at her.

  ‘I know, I know. But it’s got to be done. When it’s done we’ll all feel better.’

  ‘OK.’ Mandy scratched her head. ‘One last thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take me through what really happened again. That night. Because at the time you told me he was in the back garden. I phoned you three times and you told me each time he was in the back garden.’

  ‘We’ve gone through this.’

  ‘Just so it’s clear in my head.’

  Flea sighed. ‘OK. Like I said, I was covering for him. He went to meet some people about importing chandeliers from the Czech Republic, didn’t you, Thom? He thought you’d lose it if you knew. So we lied. Simple as that.’

  ‘It’s just that, on the night when I called, you told me, over and over again, he was down at the bottom of the terraces. You said he was pruning some tree or something.’

  ‘Mandy.’ Flea kept her voice patient. ‘Concentrate. Read my lips. I. Was. Lying. Thom was out. He had a drink with his business contacts and came home drunk. Come on, Thom? Haven’t you explained all this? She’s not listening to me.’

  ‘I . . .’ he began hesitantly. ‘I – I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Just explain, for Christ’s sake. We’re wasting time.’

  He glanced at Mandy, then away. He had exactly the same distant expression he’d get as a kid when Dad would try to pin him down over something. ‘I – I can’t remember,’ he muttered. ‘You know, it’s a bit of a haze.’

  ‘A bit of a haze? A bit of a haze? Wake up, Thom. This is serious.’

  Mandy put her hands into the air. ‘Let’s calm down. Phoebe. We’re only trying to get to the truth of what happened.’

  ‘The truth? I’ve told you the truth.’

  ‘Yes, but do you see our point? That’s what you said to me on the night of the accident. You said you were telling the truth then. But you weren’t. You were lying then, so how do I know you’re not lying now?’

  ‘I’m not fucking lying, Mandy.’

  ‘No need to shout.’

  ‘But I’m not lying. Why the hell would I be lying?’

  Mandy’s face became calm. ‘To save yourself? Maybe?’

  Flea put her hand up to shade her eyes from the lights in the pub and studied Mandy’s face. ‘Are you being funny?’

  ‘It was you driving the car, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, it was you driving the car. You swore to the cop it was you driving.’

  ‘Swore because I was protecting Thom. He was off his tits.’

  ‘Says who?’

  Flea let all the air out of her lungs. ‘This is fucking insane. Insane. I can’t believe this is coming out of
your mouth.’

  ‘You were so high-strung that night – you know how you get. You were upset with work – upset about your parents.’ Mandy’s tone was pained, uncomprehending, as if it was not the sort of thing she’d understand but she was willing to be flexible about what others did. ‘You drove when you were upset and got followed home by the policeman. He breathalysed you. There’ll be a record of it somewhere.’

  ‘Tell me you’re not serious. Tell me you’re not trying to turn this on to me.’

  Mandy didn’t answer.

  Flea gave a low, disbelieving whistle. ‘You fucking bitch.’

  ‘Be careful what you say.’

  ‘Right.’ She put her glass down on the platform. ‘We’re going to the police.’

  Mandy didn’t move. ‘I don’t think so. It’s your word against Thom’s. Mine. And the cop’s.’

  ‘That’s not going to work, Mandy. You take the gloves off, mate, and you lose. I’ve got proof I wasn’t driving the car.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘A photo. Showing Thom hit Misty.’

  Mandy sighed. ‘What is it about you, Phoebe, that always makes whatever you say sound so unfeasible? Where is this photo? Shall we have a look at it?’

  ‘It exists.’

  ‘Then show us.’

  ‘It exists, Mandy. You’d better believe it.’

  Mandy smiled and put a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘I’m sure it does. Somewhere – maybe in your imagination. But there’s no need for you to invent things because we’re not going to tell anyone anyway. No, you’ve got nothing to worry about from us. We’ll protect you. We’re not going to say a thing.’

  Flea snatched her arm away. ‘Don’t fucking touch me.’

  She went to the car. Sat inside, windows closed. Turned up the Snow Patrol album as loud as it would go and tapped out the music hard on the dashboard. From the pub balcony one or two people were staring at the little Clio. On the fishing platform Mandy and Thom stood facing her, shoulder to shoulder. Their faces were in shadow but she could tell they weren’t speaking. They were doing nothing. Just watching her.