Skin

  There was a smell too. Old and unnameable, but familiar. He waited a beat, trying to place it, then realized it was coming from the bench he was leaning on. He turned, slowly, half of him not wanting to see what he had leant against. He raised his fingers. Rubbed them together. They were coated with something. He put them to his nose and sniffed. The smell made a cold line of suspicion move down his back. This was fat. Animal fat.

  He remembered the bench from yesterday. A worn breaking bench with a vertical blade, about four foot high, gimballed at the head. Tanners would have used it to ‘break’ animal skin. To soften it. They would sit on it, working the skin against the blade. The skin would be from something as big as a deer or an elk. Or something as small as a dog.

  The noise stopped.

  He turned, his fingers lightly brushing the ASP, to face into the darkness. Let’s go outside, he wanted to say. Let’s go out where there’s a bit more light and where my car’s waiting and I know I can get a signal on this piece of shit radio. But instead he kept his voice low and level. ‘I think we should talk,’ he murmured. ‘I suggest we switch the light on and talk.’

  Silence. A group of bats wheeled through the overhead struts, the fragile crack crack crack of their lower-frequency chatter circling down to him.

  ‘Are you there?’

  He thought of the mad customer, endlessly sorting her chandelier crystals. He recalled the blunt, defeated expression in her eyes. He thought of the gun, sitting in the glove compartment.

  ‘I said, are you there?’

  A click behind him and a loud boom. He wheeled around as the huge double doors slid closed, cutting out the night, leaving him in the darkness with just the blue light of the computer and his thudding heart for company.

  He pulled out the CS gas. Held it in front of him, arm rigid. Good job the gun was in the glove compartment because it could easily have been that. ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ he said. ‘I mean it. Don’t fuck with me.’

  The darkness lay hard up against his eyes as he moved the spray in an arc, ready to unlatch the safety button if something came hurtling at him. Every inch of his skin crackled, and his ears yawned open to pick up the smallest sound, the tiniest shift of air.

  ‘I’m moving now,’ he said. ‘I’m coming towards the door.’

  He took a few short steps, then stopped. His foot had connected with an object at knee height. As he pulled his leg back, he became aware that something was standing a few feet to his left. Something pale, spectral – something at head height, watching him. He didn’t turn to it. He kept facing forward, the hairs all over his face and neck standing up stiff, trying to study the shape out of the corner of his eye.

  A face, a pale, oval face, stared at him steadily from the darkness. About three feet away. Tall. Tall and big.

  ‘I can hurt you,’ he murmured. ‘I’m trained and you’re not. I can make you very uncomfortable. So step away from me.’

  The face didn’t move. Just went on looking at him.

  ‘Step away from me, I said.’

  Still no movement. Heart hammering, Caffery went through the move in his head, thinking of reaction distances and the effect of the spray – not just on the creep staring at him but on his own respiratory system.

  One, two, three, he counted to himself. One, two, three – and good to go.

  ‘Step back!’ He held his left hand against his face, right hand forward. Protect your own eyes first. ‘I said, step back, dickhead. Step the fuck back.’

  Three seconds of spray, then he released the nozzle and dropped his hand, taking a clumsy pace back, knocking something over, the other arm across his face, squinting through the cloud of chemical. The shape hadn’t moved. He lifted his hand slightly, his eyes watering from the chemical’s kickback, his heart thrumming low and deep in his chest. It was still there. A motionless, smooth face, the gas running slowly down it, forming at the chin into a rivulet and dripping away into nothing. Eyes open and glassy, none of the coughing or vomiting he’d expected.

  ‘Shit.’ He dropped his head. Spat on the ground. ‘Shit.’

  It was a fairground effigy, its brittle doll’s face impassive. He turned, breathing hard, to the doors. So where the hell was Pooley? Which avenue had he slid down? Which pile of furniture was he hiding behind? The doors, he thought. Start for the doors. He took a step forward. Felt his chest collide with something. Felt an arm lock around his neck, and a hand come up into his groin, immobilizing him and pulling him down.

  50

  Katherine Oscar stood on the back doorstep, hand raised ready to knock again.

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ Flea let the sword clatter down and leant back against the wall, her hand to her forehead. ‘Christ’s sake. Don’t do that again.’

  Katherine examined Flea’s worn face. The way her hair hung in a shambles all over her shoulders. ‘Good heavens. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m tired.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  Katherine answered with a brief, efficient smile, as if she hadn’t heard. She seemed to enjoy catching Flea at her worst, stealing little victories from her every day: unwashed hair, out-of-date coats, no invitations to Ascot or Cheltenham. These were Katherine’s scoring points. ‘How are you, Phoebe? How is that bloody awful job treating you?’

  Not waiting for an answer she stepped forward, craning her neck to peer round the front door and into the hallway. Flea took an answering step sideways to block her view. Katherine was always trying to edge her way into the house and get a glimpse of the antique hoard she’d convinced herself the Marleys had amassed during their trips. There were a few things lying around in the upstairs rooms – African masks and Russian dolls and boxes of shells her father had pulled to the surface in Palau, the sword cane. But otherwise, Katherine was wrong: there was nothing of any real value.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then what Flea was doing seemed to sink in and Katherine took a step back. ‘I’m sooo sorry. So sorry – I’m so rude. My mother always said I’ve got no manners.’

  ‘How long have you been outside?’

  ‘How long? Only a minute. Why?’

  ‘You sure you haven’t been looking through my window?’

  ‘What a stupid idea. Of course I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Flea put her hand on the door, indicating the end of the conversation. ‘I’ll say goodnight.’

  ‘The electricity-meter man was here today,’ Katherine said. ‘I showed him where yours is.’

  Flea frowned. It was in the shed at the top of the driveway. ‘You went into my shed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never said you could go in there.’

  ‘You weren’t here. The poor man was ringing the doorbell for ages.’

  ‘I could have phoned in the reading myself.’

  ‘I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Next time just leave it. I’ll deal with it.’ She inclined her head politely, and began to close the door. ‘Goodnight, Katherine.’

  ‘He was amazed when he read the meter. Said it was sky high.’

  ‘Goodnight, Katherine.’

  ‘He said you must have got lots of things running off the power. More things than usual.’

  Flea stopped, the door half closed. Katherine’s sculpted face was made into concentric circles by the half-glazed glass door. There was a moment or two’s silence. Then she opened the door again. She knew her face had frozen. She could feel the blood stop under the skin, stop and go blue from cold. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘He says . . .’ Katherine glanced over her shoulder at the empty gravel drive, at the ornamental shrubs casting their shaggy shadows on the grass, as if she, too, suspected them of being watched. ‘He says something in your house is eating electricity. He says he’s never seen anything like it.’ She let her gaze wander to the garage with the brown paper in the windows. ‘He says you should have it checked out.’

  Flea closed her eyes, then opened them slowly. The cold
tick of fear was back. Somewhere down in her bowels. ‘What are you implying?’ she said slowly.

  ‘Nothing. I only came over to tell you what had happened. And to ask if you’ve thought any more about—’

  ‘No,’ Flea said coldly. ‘I haven’t. My mind hasn’t changed and it won’t change. Now, goodnight.’

  Katherine took a breath to reply, but apparently thought better of it. She shrugged, turned on one foot and walked sweetly away, a little hand held up, the fingers wriggling.

  Flea stood on the doorstep and watched until she turned the corner. Then she slammed the door, locked it and went into the garage. Everything was as she’d left it, nothing out of place. She checked the paper in the windows and that the bolts were run on the garage doors. She checked Misty’s corpse hadn’t been touched. When she was sure no one could have been in there or seen inside, she went back into the house and locked the inner door.

  In the living room she took a decanter from her father’s old oak bureau and uncorked it. This port had been open five years. It was crusted with sugar around the top and when the stopper came out the rich Christmas scent nearly floored her, with all the memories it brought of her dad, home from university in his outdoor coat and smelling of rain and cigarette smoke from the station platform, tipsy in a party hat on Boxing Day, sitting on the sofa asleep and smiling. Or standing in the study on a dry Saturday morning, his old Oxford shirt on, his glasses at the end of his nose, ponderously picking through the stones, occasionally calling into the kitchen, ‘Jill, the granite – is this from the karst window in Telford or is it from Castleton?’

  She found a crystal glass and filled it to the top, knocking back the liquid in one. She refilled it and drank again. Sat on the floor, her arms around herself.

  If she was someone like Caffery’s Tanzanian, Amos Chipeta, she wouldn’t be shaken by Misty’s body in the garage. She’d know what to do with it – it would be commonplace to her. But this situation wasn’t commonplace. And she couldn’t be controlled or sensible or easy about it. Not any longer. Not since Thom had betrayed her.

  She looked at the clock. Eleven p.m. In thirteen hours she’d have the money. She’d have the photo of Thom.

  And what she did then was anyone’s guess.

  51

  ‘I almost fucking killed you!’ Pooley shook Caffery furiously, forcing the blood into his brain, making his face bulge. They were on the floor where they’d both fallen, their heads up against a steamer trunk. Pooley’s hands were on Caffery’s collar. His breath was stale on his face. ‘Did you hear me? I could have killed you.’

  Caffery’s guts screamed where Pooley had grabbed his balls to take him down. He could hardly breathe, but he groped blindly in his pocket for the ASP. Just as he was sliding it back, ready to crack it down, Pooley thrust him back against the trunk, then crawled away a small distance and collapsed in a sitting position, his back to a stack of Victorian stained-glass doors. Caffery curled up in a ball, gulping air.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Pooley spat on the ground. ‘How did you get past Security?’

  Caffery fumbled the ASP back into his pocket and took a moment or two to recover. Slowly he sat up, loosening his shirt and tie. There were raw, raised areas around his neck where the fabric had dug into his flesh. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple was hard and sore. ‘That.’ He nodded to where his warrant card had fallen out of his shirt pocket and lay about three feet away on the polished concrete floor. ‘My get-out-of-jail-free card.’ He swallowed again, rubbed his throat. ‘Why the vigilante stuff?’

  ‘I thought you were a burglar. There was a break-in last week.’

  ‘And what about that – that torture bench you’ve got over there? What’ve you been doing with it?’

  Pooley glanced in the direction he was pointing. ‘The tanner’s bench?’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  Pooley opened his hands wearily as if this was all irrelevant. ‘From a tannery. Why?’ He moved his head slightly and now Caffery saw, in the blue light from the computer in the office, that his face was wet. He’d been crying. The creepy noise like an animal panting.

  Caffery pulled the warrant-card holder back, pocketing it. ‘Why’re you crying? Is it Lucy? You knew her more than you said, didn’t you?’

  Pooley shook his head. ‘Christ, oh, Christ.’

  ‘I’m right. Aren’t I?’

  ‘I miss her . . . I miss her so much . . . I never did the best for her, never. It would have pushed Jane over the edge if I’d left.’

  ‘Jane? Your wife?’

  ‘You saw her.’

  ‘Your wife? Yesterday? With the chandelier?’

  ‘She’s not well.’

  Caffery blew a little air out of his nose. Too bloody right she’s not, he thought. He felt in his pockets for the bag of tobacco he carried everywhere. Sod the Nicorette chewing-gum, but there were times, he thought, when you had to stick your good intentions and hotline nicotine into your system. ‘How long had you been seeing Lucy?’

  ‘Two years. Since she left him. Colin. Bastard.’

  Caffery rolled the cigarette, using the tip of his tongue to moisten the gummed strip on the inside of the paper. ‘How often were you with her?’

  ‘Once or twice a week.’

  ‘When your wife wasn’t around?’

  ‘On the days she goes to her family.’

  ‘And the sex toys?’

  ‘Purely aesthetic.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. She just thought they looked nice, that was all. Her ex, though, Colin, he never came to terms with it. Never.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’ Caffery twisted the end of the rollie. Felt in his pocket for the lighter. ‘So. Were you the only one? For Lucy?’

  Pooley lifted his chin and stared at him, his eyes hard.

  ‘No need to look at me like that – you see a woman once or twice a week and you don’t expect her to hang around waiting for you while you’re at home playing happy families.’ He lit the cigarette and studied Pooley, squinting through the smoke. ‘I’m just trying to make sure you were the baby’s father.’

  ‘The b—?’ Pooley retracted his head, taken aback, frowning. ‘What baby?’

  ‘Don’t give me that. Some time in the last two years Lucy Mahoney had a baby. What happened to it?’

  Pooley dropped his arms limply. ‘No,’ he murmured, his voice a little scared, a little puzzled. ‘No. You’ve got that wrong. There was no child.’

  Caffery studied him. The guy was doing a bomb-ass acting job. ‘Nah. I’m not falling for this. You can’t magic a child away, no matter how hard you try.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Pooley said. ‘Seriously I’m not. I don’t know who you’re talking about, but Lucy, my Lucy, she never had a baby.’

  52

  The call came through just before morning prayers. One of the nurses who’d worked with Susan Hopkins at the Rothersfield clinic had been with her boyfriend all night, her mobile switched off. The first she’d heard about Hopkins’s death was when she’d arrived at work in the morning. She’d dialled 999 because she thought she knew something that the police didn’t – something that none of the staff who’d been interviewed yesterday would know. Control told her to wait at the clinic. Someone would be right there.

  Beatrice Foxton lived only a few miles away from the Rothersfield clinic. When Caffery called and told her they needed to talk she said it was time to walk the dogs anyway. There were fields surrounding the clinic, so why didn’t they meet there before he went in?

  They stood talking in the morning sun watching the two dogs run great loping circles around them. Caffery was smoking again, his shoulders slightly hunched, tension in his arms and neck.

  ‘Lucy Mahoney.’

  ‘What about her?’ Beatrice was dressed for the summer in a white linen blouse, trousers and canvas espadrilles. Incongruously she wore a battered gardening glove on her right hand to throw the tennis ball for the dogs.

  ‘She
had an abdomectomy.’ He looked up the driveway to the clinic, at the neatly cut lawns, the box hedges, the colonnades and the expensive cars in the car park. This was where Lucy’s seven grand must have gone. James Pooley hadn’t liked talking about the operation. Lucy hadn’t wanted people to know about it, he said, and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t protect her privacy even though she was dead. But he did tell Caffery where she’d had it done. Up here at the Rothersfield clinic. The same place Hopkins had been working when she’d died. Whatever connected Mahoney to Hopkins had happened at the end of this driveway. Caffery just didn’t know what yet. ‘A tummy tuck. Two years ago, her boyfriend says.’

  ‘I know.’

  He sighed. ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘It was the scar that looked like a Caesarean. Remember? After you left I opened her up and her uterus hadn’t been touched. She was G zero.’

  ‘G zero?’

  ‘Gravida zero. Never gave birth and had never been pregnant. The incision didn’t go into the deeper aspects.’

  ‘You said it was a mess. What did you mean?’

  ‘Not untidy – there was a lot of skill there. And I mean a lot. But I got the feeling the surgeon cut far too low – lower than he needed. Cut away half her pubis. And she had a sympathectomy. It must have happened at the same time, judging by the healing.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘She had the sympathetic nerve cut. It’s the nerve that controls blushing and sweating in the face. Remember those nicks under her arms?’

  He remembered them. Two scars in the armpits.

  ‘It’s the sort of thing you’d see if someone had had a lung biopsy done through a video-assisted feed. You insert a thin tube into the chest cavity and push the blade down through it. But in this case he was going for the nerves, not the lungs. Lots of people have it done. Usually it’s a bloody disaster – they have to have it reversed. And that fails too. Surgeons in the States are waking up to it. They clamp the nerve now in case the patient changes their mind. We’re a bit behind, though.’