She opened the door and spat the blood on to the tarmac. Moving creakily, she released the seatbelt, pushed the door open as far as it would go and got out gingerly, not putting too much strain on her chest. The car was tight up against the tree. She had to squeeze herself against it and shuffle backwards.
It was a quiet lane, full of elderflowers and new poppies. Mingling with the mist was the acid smell of crushed cow parsley where the car had flattened the hedgerow. Dew from the overhanging tree had splattered across the windscreen. She walked around the car, inspecting the damage. When she got to the front and saw what had happened she let all her breath out at once. Somehow, maybe more by luck than judgement, she’d got it right.
She went back to the boot, opened it and pulled out the bin liner containing Misty’s handbag, phone, sandals and coat. The paint can she’d put in the back had tipped but not spilled so she used her Swiss army knife to lever the lid off and let it trickle out across the boot.
One last look at the car. The headlight that had hit Misty was buried in the tree-trunk, the front wheels had been driven sideways and back towards the passenger seat, snapping the axle out of line. The engine bay and the firewall would have cracked too. The car was a write-off. Earlier she’d cleaned the whole thing with a rag soaked in petrol, stripping away grease and fingerprints, lifting hairs and fibres. She’d taken two long hours over it, and she was confident. No one would be forensicating this car anyway. They’d have no reason to, as long as she reported she’d been driving it. All the evidence linking Thom and her to Misty Kitson was going to end up in a breaker’s yard. The remainder of the petrol was in a small flask in the bin liner.
With the bag over her shoulder, Flea pushed through the hedgerow and set off up through the dewy fields. The sun filtered down through the early-morning haze and, as she climbed, vague ghost shapes to her left and right slowly revealed themselves as stiles and trees. By the time she got to the top of Charmy Down, the old airfield, she had walked straight out of the mist and could see the disused mast ahead of her, glinting in the sun. The remains of her previous fire were still there. A flat circle of blackened grass, dew clinging to it, giving it a greyish pall. She put the bag on the circle, pulled out a flask, tipped the petrol on to the bagged belongings and phone and threw a match on to it.
Having retreated a few yards she sat, waiting for the fire to catch. Beyond, the sky in the east was streaked with dirty pinks and browns. In the valley the mist swirled. The neighbouring hills – places she’d known all her life – rose like dark islands above it. Solsbury Hill was half a mile off and, far away where the gap in the hills led out to Frome and Warminster, another line of smoke, like a finger, rose up into the blue sky.
She kept her eyes on that fire. Her body was aching from everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and there was a tingling in her fingers that she thought came from the cold of the quarry. But watching that distant fire gave her a kind of peace she couldn’t explain. She linked her fingers round her ankles and leant forward, gazing at it.
Look after yourself . . .
It was OK. OK to save herself like this. To do the wrong thing for the right reason. Sometimes all you can do is simply to continue moving forward. Making the choices that keep you alive.
Her own fire made a small whooshing sound and a flame shot up. It dropped, then shot up again, and more joined it, crackling, burning green, orange, blue. A line of silky black smoke guttered and rose into the sky, answering the fire on the neighbouring hill.
The fire of a man she had never met in her life.
74
Some humans have the instincts of animals. It comes from years of living without comfort. Even asleep the Walking Man sometimes appears to know what is happening in the waking world and who to expect. It’s as if his slumbering mind can creep coolly out, can float away over the hills and valleys, watching like a hawk those who are out at night. All those who move in his vicinity. And all the time his body lies next to the extinguished campfire, still and silent, only his eyes moving.
That night, as Gerber lay in a Trowbridge mortuary, as Flea submerged herself in the Elf’s Grotto quarry, the Walking Man slept soundly and peacefully. He was expecting someone. He had left out a spare foam mat with a sleeping-bag next to the fire.
Caffery arrived at three thirty a.m. He crawled into the bag and fell immediately into a torpid, drugged sleep.
When he woke two hours later in the cold, milky dawn, the mist was freezing and the only sound was the bleak cawing of crows in the high branches overhead. He sat up. The Walking Man was making breakfast. A long thin column of smoke rose from the fire. There was bacon and eggs for two people. Two mugs waiting.
‘Morning. Going to be a good one. The mist will clear.’
Caffery didn’t answer. The hospital’s codeine was still in his system, like something hot and feathery packed into his brain behind his eyeballs. He sat, his hands on his ankles, and gazed into the fire, at the twin tin cups of coffee, at the two frying-pans sizzling on the flames. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so tired, so numb, inside and out. His head drooped. He had to jam his elbows into his knees and prop his head on his fingers.
‘Why is your phone switched off?’ The Walking Man didn’t look up from the fire. ‘Usually you treat it like a second heart.’
Caffery took it out of his breast pocket. He put it on the ground and stared at it. Not as if it was a heart. As if it was a snake.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know what I’d do if I switched it on. Don’t ask me again.’
The Walking Man shrugged. He scooped the food on to two plates: each had four thick rashers of bacon, three fried eggs, two sausages and a slice of fried bread. He walked all day and he needed his fuel. His plates always brimmed over and he made sure his guests ate well too. He straightened, put one plate next to his bedroll and brought the other across to where Caffery sat. When he saw Caffery’s expression, the sick way he looked at the food, the way there was water in his eyes, he hesitated. ‘OK,’ he grunted. ‘OK.’
He straightened, took a few steps away from the fire and crouched to scrape the food off the plate on to the ground. ‘The badgers will like you for it.’ He went back to his bedroll, walking carefully because he only had his socks on, and if there was one thing the Walking Man had to do, it was care for his feet. He settled down, the tin plate resting on his knees, and ran a thumb and forefinger through his beard, studying Caffery’s face through narrowed eyes. ‘You know what you’ve come to.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘Don’t you?’
Caffery was sullen. ‘What?’
The Walking Man grinned. ‘Crossroads,’ he said. ‘Your absolute crossroads. And now, now, your hand is going to be forced. I don’t know why or what’s happened but when you switch on that phone you’ve got to make a decision. Haven’t you?’
Caffery stared at the Walking Man. The bastard was right. It had been coming to him as he slept. Hallucinations crossing and double-crossing him. That in the morning he’d have to speak to Powers. He’d have to make the decision. He’d have to tell him what he knew about Misty Kitson.
‘And this is the decision that’s been coming at you for years. You might not see it but this decision is about whether you stay facing death, or whether you turn the other way and choose life instead. That’s all.’
Caffery made a small, contemptuous noise. ‘I’m being preached to about choosing life by you? Someone who’s chosen death? How does that work?’
‘Or maybe you’re being preached to by someone who’s been chosen by death.’
‘You’re not dead.’ He studied the Walking Man’s eyes. They were blue. Like his own. As if they were from the same family. Except Caffery knew that the wisdom in the Walking Man’s eyes wasn’t in his own. Not yet. ‘You’re still alive.’
‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ The Walking Man looked at his hands. Turned them over and over as if they belonged to someone else. ‘It seems I am.’
‘You’ve
got a plan. I don’t know what the plan is, but it’s there. So you haven’t chosen death at all.’
The Walking Man laughed – sympathetically, as if Caffery was so simple, just a child. As if it would take him years to come to any maturity of thought or emotion. ‘When Craig Evans killed my daughter,’ he wiped his moustache, ‘when he told me what he’d done . . . when he told me how many times he’d raped her before he did it,’ he tapped his finger against his lips, as if for a moment he didn’t trust himself to complete the thought, ‘when he told me it all, I knew then that the choice had been made. For what she had suffered she had to be comforted. And to comfort her I had to follow her.’
Caffery leant forward. It was the first time the Walking Man had spoken directly about his daughter’s death. ‘Follow her where?’
‘Into the next world, of course. That was just how it had to be. It’s the natural way of things. Everything I do, every mile I walk, is my preparation. I have to find the time and the place.’ He looked up. ‘You don’t know what happened to your brother’s body.’
‘No.’
‘You’ve searched everywhere you can think of.’
‘Yes. There’s nowhere else. Once I thought I got close. A long way from here. Out in the east, not the west.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was wrong.’
The Walking Man nodded thoughtfully. He eyed Caffery a little longer then picked up his fork, settled down and began to eat, his eyes on the horizon. Caffery watched him. He noticed how he kept his beard clean of food, wiping his fingers on a cloth. The Walking Man was filthy, from his head to his toes, but there was something strangely fastidious about the way he cared for himself.
‘You’re not as lucky as I am,’ the Walking Man said after a long silence. ‘I have no choice, and that makes me fortunate. But you? You still have to choose. And that’s more difficult. Particularly now. When there’s a new complication in that choice.’
Caffery frowned. ‘How do you—?’
‘It doesn’t matter how I know. What is important is the choice you make and why you make it. Look at me.’ He put down his plate and turned to Caffery, his arms wide, his filthy padded jacket falling open to show his torso in the stained thermals. ‘You, dear policeman, are learning to judge me for what I am, not for what you think I am.’
‘So?’
‘So?’ He closed the jacket and picked up the plate. ‘So be careful to use the same judgement here, Inspector Caffery. Be careful to judge only when you have the whole picture. It will take time but when you can see it all, things may look very different.’
The whole picture. More images came to Caffery. Flea’s face that day in her new car at the quarry: the tight, anxious set of her forehead. The look in her eye early this morning as she pulled Misty’s corpse into the water. The way she seemed to be apologizing. As if she hadn’t meant it to happen.
‘And something else.’
Caffery looked up. ‘What else?’
‘Something I shouldn’t need to remind you of.’ The Walking Man lowered his head and stroked his moustache, his hand hiding the ironic half-smile on his mouth. ‘That before you pass judgement on another human being, you should always look back a little. Maybe into your own past?’
Caffery fixed his eyes on the Walking Man. It wouldn’t surprise him one bit if somehow the Walking Man knew all about that too: his secret, one he’d carried for nearly ten years now, how back in London there had been a killing. He’d murdered a man there – secretively, and with his own bare hands.
He leant forward and pulled the mobile phone closer. Rested his finger on it. He was so, so tired. Maybe it was true, maybe choice really was the root of all human happiness – and of all human sadness.
‘It’s time,’ the Walking Man said. ‘You know it’s time.’
Caffery took a deep, weary breath and picked up the phone. He stood, looking at the blank screen. ‘Don’t watch me. OK?’
The Walking Man gave a long, slow smile. He inclined his head politely and held out his hand, indicating Caffery should move away from the campfire.
Caffery got up and walked in the opposite direction from the trees. He stood at the edge of the hill. The mist had cleared, as the Walking Man had said it would, and from here the land opened up, with all its mounded green forests and glacial ridges. A long way from Bath he could see the misty Avon valley, the vague smudge of the White Horse at Westbury. Closer – from Charmy Down on the other side of Solsbury Hill – another line of smoke rose in the air. It was like the Walking Man’s, only this one was darker. Black and concentrated. Leaving smears on the sky.
He switched on the phone, jabbed in Powers’s number and, his eyes on the black smoke, waited for the phone to connect.
‘Boss. Did I wake you?’
‘Yes, you did.’ Powers kept his voice low. He coughed a couple of times. ‘Jack, what was all that about earlier, then? You put the phone down on me. I called back but you’d switched off.’
Caffery checked over his shoulder to see if the Walking Man was listening. He wasn’t. He was looking out across the countryside in the opposite direction, a small smile on his face, as if he had already decided what Caffery was going to do.
‘Where’ve you been? The CSI are going crazy. E District’s had people over at your house trying to find you. You’re not answering your phone. They’ve been trying all night.’
‘I know. I saw the messages.’
‘My guess is you’ve been with your snout. Am I right?’
‘Yes. He’s unearthed something.’
The line went quiet.
‘It’s credible,’ Caffery said. ‘Very credible.’
Again there was silence. In a dry voice, Powers said, ‘Give me an outline, then.’
‘Gerber. Gerber did Kitson too.’
‘No. No fucking way.’
He looked up at the line of smoke. He didn’t know why but it comforted him, that black smoke coming from someone else’s fire. It was as if the world wasn’t such a lonely place at all. ‘She had an appointment with him. Used a fake name – we don’t know what. Maybe she talked him into not recording it. Didn’t want the press getting hold of it. But as soon as everyone wakes up, when everything comes on-line, I suggest you get some soil people out to Gerber’s place. There’s a couple of spots out there they could run a ground radar over.’
‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure about this?’
Caffery didn’t answer for a few moments. The wind had caught the black smoke on the far hill and was moving it slowly across the sky. When he’d killed that man in London he’d had his reasons, reasons that still seemed sound and good. Flea’s reasons would be clear too, they’d be as understandable as his were. There was nothing in the ground at Gerber’s house – nothing except the opportunity to buy some time. Time enough to do as the Walking Man said, to see the whole picture and decide whether to go at things the straightforward way. Or whether to leave Flea in peace, to make her own mistakes and atonements.
‘Yes,’ he said calmly. And something in his chest seemed to lift a little as he said it. ‘I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.’
Mo Hayder, Skin
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