Skin

  Jakes’s phone still hadn’t turned up, but the same team who’d worked on the Kitson case had analysed his signal patterns and worked out that the two calls after his death had been made from somewhere near here. The number wasn’t one Jakes had used before. Caffery had called it on the work phone and it turned out to be disconnected. It was a throwaway phone, pay-as-you-go, and he was pretty sure it had been disposed of already in a rubbish chute somewhere.

  Caffery picked up a stick and began to walk the perimeter, beating at the undergrowth as he went. The quarry had been searched when Jakes’s body had been found, but Caffery wanted to be sure there was nothing he had missed. No hidey-holes or evidence that someone else had been there on the night Jakes had died, maybe watching him from the bushes. He searched every square inch again, kicking around among the undergrowth, and after an hour the only thing he had found was a scooter lying on its side in the bushes.

  Someone had made an effort to conceal it – he had to crouch down and break branches to get at it. He dragged it out into the sunlight and set it upright, giving it a small shake. It had a tax disc, and petrol sloshed around in the tank. Jakes hadn’t had a scooter, Caffery was sure of that. He took a pen from his pocket and pulled back the callipers to check the brakes. No rust, so it had been used in the last twenty-four hours. He laid it on the ground, slapped his hands together to get the dust off and was about to turn back to the car when he noticed something else.

  About ten feet away to his right something blue and white was snarled in the roots of the buddleia. It was police tape, wrapped around the twigs. He went to it, pulled at it, and saw a length of blue butyl lying on the ground. It was about ten inches long and had come from a tube of some sort. He picked it up and studied it. At three-inch intervals letters had been stamped into it: USU. Underwater Search Unit. He knew the unit, and their sergeant, Flea Marley. She’d been the support unit officer who’d made the arrests on Operation Norway with him. Pretty. When Caffery had come out here to the West Country he’d made a pledge: he’d left a couple of lives ruined in London and he wasn’t going to do it again. There would be no more women in his life. Not without serious thought. But he hadn’t made any promise not to notice if someone was pretty.

  He pulled out his phone and called Kingswood. DC Turnbull, one of the men Powers had assigned him, answered. ‘I was just about to call you,’ he said, spruce and eager. ‘Got a couple of things. First off the Tanzanian in the bin, the one who keeps telling us his name is Johnny Brown? We’ve got a name. Clement Chipeta. Interpol had him in Dar Es Salaam until he came off their radar about a year ago. He was in serious trouble out there, not just with the law but with the gang he was working for.’

  ‘Who did what?’

  ‘Trafficking. They dealt in the ingredients for traditional medicine, mostly from endangered species, but some of it from humans. Which, I assume, is why the Operation Norway muppets found a use for him when he turned up here.’

  ‘You’ve let the custody officers know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘OK.’ He turned away from the quarry, his finger in his ear so he could hear over the lousy signal. ‘Listen, Turnbull, I need you to do three things. Give me a PNC on this number, will you?’

  He gave him the plate number for the scooter and Turnbull tapped keys, getting into the Police National Computer.

  ‘And when you’ve done that go online and look something up for me. Ever heard of free diving?’

  ‘Free diving? Sorry, boss, I’m from Birmingham. We don’t do sea, water, rivers. We like our concrete.’

  ‘Look it up when we’re off the phone. I want to know how long someone can hold their breath. How long they can stay under.’

  ‘Free diving.’ He could almost hear Turnbull frowning. The computer bleeped. ‘PNC’s back. The scooter’s a TWOC.’

  TWOC – Taking Without Consent.

  ‘When?’

  ‘This weekend. From a driveway over in Bradley Stoke. Nothing else.’

  ‘OK – let them know I’ve found it. Then speak to someone in the support unit. Find out what the underwater search unit were doing in quarry number eight, over in Elf’s Grotto.’

  Silence.

  ‘You there, Turnbull? Give someone in Support a call.’

  ‘I don’t need to, boss. I can tell you what the search unit was doing. They were searching for a misper. A woman. Yesterday.’

  ‘Did they find her?’

  ‘Not in the quarry. But they have now. That was the other thing I was going to call you about. They’re not far from you. Eight minutes if you drive legally. Four if you don’t.’

  7

  Lucy Mahoney had been missing for three days. Judging from the state of her she’d been dead for most of that time. Her body had been found by hikers out in the Mendips on the banks of the Strawberry Line, the abandoned railway the Victorians had used to transport strawberries from the fields around Cheddar. The countryside there was pretty, the poppies already out in the linseed fields, a pollen heat haze hanging over it. But there was nothing pretty about the corpse: visible from a hundred yards away, a tower of shifting flies hovering above, a blackened pile of clothing and skin.

  She was lying on her back. Dressed in a distinctive stripy sweater, skirt and flower-printed Doc Martens covered with leaves, she had already decomposed enough for some bones to protrude through the discoloured flesh. Flea led the team through the wrapping of the body: batting away the flies, pulling carefully to unstick the corpse from the fluids on the ground, log-rolling it into a linen sheet, and lifting it into a white body-bag – face up because the mortuaries hated corpses arriving face down. Mahoney had been well built and, even decomposed, she wasn’t easy to lift. Inside the suits the team were sweating: Flea could see the rivulets running down Wellard’s face.

  Flea had had commendations for her work. Two. And she was only twenty-nine. She was scared stiff she’d only got them because she was a woman, scared stiff it was the only reason she’d made sergeant and was leading the unit. Being scared like this was why she over-compensated for her build and height. It was why she knocked herself out doing insane training circuits, running ten miles a day or working weights into the night – high weights, low reps – day after day after day. Under the water everyone was equal. On land she had to work twice as hard to hold her end up.

  They sealed the body in a yellow biohazard bag – XL, because corpses sometimes bloated to twice their original size – and carried it along the quarter-mile track to the rendezvous point, stopping every so often to rest and swap sides. From time to time they’d check for long-range press lenses outside the cordons, waiting for a chance to snap her and the boys covered from head to toe in body fluid.

  The rendezvous car park was packed with vehicles. The coroner’s private ambulance was there – two men in grey suits and black ties standing near it, smoking – and the head of the CSI team, a woman in a red Canada sweatshirt and jeans, sitting in the opened door of a car, drinking a cup of tea. It wasn’t until Flea had got the stretcher into the coroner’s van, had chucked her respirator into a little wheelie-bin, and was standing next to the unit’s Sprinter at the RV car park letting Wellard hose her down with bleach solution, that she noticed someone else.

  He was just outside the cordon, holding a can of Red Bull. Medium height, lean. Dark hair cut short. Maybe nine or ten years older than her. DI Jack Caffery. MCIU. The last time she’d seen him, on Tuesday, they’d been making an arrest together. That day something had passed between them. She knew it, and she wondered if they were ever going to talk about it. She watched him carefully as he ducked under the outer cordon, using the CSI’s aluminium tread plates to cross towards her. He wasn’t limping like she’d thought he’d be.

  ‘OK, Wellard. That’s enough.’ She pulled off her hood, undid the storm zip on her suit, then peeled it down, pulled her hands out so the gauntlets were left inside the sleeves and stepped free of it. Without lacing her trainers, she jammed her heels dow
n against the backs of them, and clomped across the car park. She stopped a few yards away from Caffery.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, taking her in from head to toe. She knew what he was thinking. The mosh-pit hairdo, the trousers sticking to her. The grey T-shirt glued tight with sweat. ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Yes. Nice to see you without an ASP in your hand.’

  ‘Nice to see you on two feet. Not on the floor.’

  ‘Bad, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Not your finest hour, I s’pose. Or mine. I still don’t know what axe they’re going to drop on my head. Keep getting memos from Occupational Health telling me I’m due for a free critical debrief, y’know. For the trauma. I haven’t taken it yet.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘I was going to call you. I wanted to say sorry.’

  ‘Sorry about what?’

  ‘About that.’ She gestured to his leg. ‘About your ankle. About what I did. I didn’t mean to give you grief.’

  He glanced down at his feet and gave the trouser leg a quick shake. To stop him savaging the piece of shit they’d been trying to arrest on Operation Norway she’d used her support unit stainless-steel ASP on Caffery’s anklebone. It’d been the only way she could bring him to his senses.

  ‘You’re not limping. I thought you might be.’

  ‘No. Not limping.’

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone. About what you did.’

  ‘I gathered. No rubber-heelers on my doorstep.’

  ‘Half of me regrets stopping you. I might’ve liked to have seen him with his head split open.’

  ‘Nice.’

  She shrugged. ‘Honest.’

  ‘Thank you. For not saying anything.’ He looked at her for a long time. And then, just when she was about to speak again, he glanced at her breasts. Only for a split second. But it was enough.

  ‘I saw that.’

  ‘Couldn’t help myself. Sorry.’

  ‘You’re my senior officer. You’re not supposed to look at me like that. It’s demeaning.’

  There was a pause. Then he raised an eyebrow. ‘Mmm. Is this the overture to an industrial tribunal? Sexual harassment?’

  She stopped herself smiling. Suddenly she felt light and easy, as if she’d just woken up from a long sleep. ‘Is that why you’re here? To see if you can get a grievance accusation? Is that the sort of frathouse-initiation thing they get up to in MCIU now?’

  ‘Frathouse initiation?’ He half smiled. ‘No. Sorry.’ He pointed at the coroner’s van. The door stood open. Inside was the bright orange blur of Mahoney’s body on the stretcher. ‘I’m here about her. Have you signed her over yet?’

  ‘They’re doing the paperwork now.’

  ‘Got any spare respirators?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve always got a couple spare to stop the CSI guys vomming. Why?’

  ‘I’d like to see her before the coroners take her.’

  ‘I thought it was District’s case?’

  ‘It is. I’m not really here. I’m just being nosy.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Hmm. One body. Female, but fully clothed. Knickers on, skirt not pulled up or disturbed. A bottle of pills next to her, a suicide note. I pulled out of the gunk a Stanley knife she’d used to cut her wrists. Sounds to my naïve ears as ninety-nine point nine a suicide. The pathologist isn’t going to work hard for his corn today, believe me.’ She gave him a suspicious look. ‘So what’s Major Crime doing? It’s totally off your radar.’

  Caffery looked at the CSI woman. She’d lowered her face and was pretending not to be listening. He turned his back to her and lowered his voice. ‘OK,’ he murmured. ‘Last week there was a suicide only a few miles from here. Young guy. Ben Jakes.’

  ‘Not one of mine.’

  ‘No. Well, excuse me for being rude but maybe he was a little fresh for you. They found him in hours.’

  ‘There are suicides around here all the time.’

  ‘Except this was different. Something had happened to the body. Someone had got to him post mortem.’

  ‘What’d they do?’

  ‘Cut his hair. Actually shaved it. At the back of his head. The psychologist’s telling us there’s something ritualistic about it.’ Caffery tipped the remainder of the Red Bull into his mouth, half crumpled the can, put it into his jacket pocket. Copper habit, this: so close to a possible crime scene you do things automatically. ‘“Ritualistic” was the word he used. Ring any bells?’

  ‘Operation Norway bells?’

  ‘Exactly. And it’s got me wondering. Have you ever asked yourself if we missed someone that day? When we came into the squat. Are you sure we got everyone? There wasn’t a chance for someone to have got away?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I mean, there was a window grille, Sitex. It had been bent back, but not enough for someone to get out.’

  ‘What about a child? Could a child have got out of it?’

  ‘A child? What would a kid have been doing in a hellhouse like that?’

  ‘Do you remember this word?’ He glanced over his shoulder then turned back, leant into her and whispered, ‘Tokoloshe.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ she said cautiously. ‘Of course. And I remember they dressed someone up to scare the living crap out of people, but I thought you had him.’

  ‘No. The guy we arrested was too big. Too big to be the Tokoloshe.’

  Flea started to laugh, but when she shaded her eyes to study him, she saw he wasn’t joking. She’d heard that some of the people in London who’d worked on a muti case there had developed a taste for Africa, that now they took family holidays in Botswana and Ghana, not Margate. They told their colleagues they were brushing up for a future in hostage negotiation with one of the securities agencies like Kroll, when actually they’d fallen in love with the dark continent. Maybe Caffery was like them and had started to believe in the mumbo-jumbo. She’d have liked to say something, but there was an unwritten law in the police: thou shalt never ever make thine superior officer look a tit. She narrowed her eyes and kept her mouth shut.

  ‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said, ‘because one thing all the witnesses said was that it came out of the water like it had been submerged. I wanted to know how you think it achieved that.’

  At that she dropped her arms. Now she got it. Now she saw what was going on. The boys had leaked she’d been narked that day and set Caffery up for this wind-up. Someone else in the water in quarry number eight? An African monster swimming around in the water? Yeah, right. She folded her arms and gave him a measured look. ‘You must think I’m spectacularly stupid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You must really think I’m a twat. You must think all I do is . . .’ She trailed off. She’d just caught sight of Wellard. He was busy hosing down the wellingtons, not looking at her. If this was a joke he’d have been watching her carefully. Smirking. And when she looked back, Caffery’s face told her he wasn’t kidding either. Wasn’t his style. ‘Oh,’ she said lamely. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No one asked you to wind me up?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Nothing.’ No. She’d been at fifty metres that day. Too deep for someone without equipment. Wellard said the surface of the quarry had been like glass. It had been a hallucination. Happened all the time with narcosis. You saw any crap the imagination could churn out. And if Caffery had suddenly turned into a true believer it was nothing to do with what she’d seen. Nothing to do with her. It was SEP: someone else’s problem. ‘Yeah, well, that’s your business. And my business is getting this body to the coroner without anything going missing.’

  He nodded. ‘Do you think you can spare me that respirator first?’

  ‘You’re not going to be able to see anything.’

  ‘Humour me?’

  She shrugged, went to the dive truck and got two clean respirators. They approached the van with its blacked-out window, ‘Private Ambulance’ in yellow letters on the side. She le
ant inside and unzipped the bag. A few flies crawled out. Fat and drugged. She hated the flies the most, hated their habit of laying eggs in the mouth, eyes, ears, genitals and nostrils, even the anuses of corpses. All fair game to a bluebottle. Lucy was no different. Maggots had eaten away most of the exposed flesh and taken her face back to the teeth in some places.

  Caffery peered at her.

  ‘Not much to see.’ Flea’s voice was muffled in the mask. ‘Is there?’

  He motioned for her to zip up the bag. They went over to the unit van, where the smell couldn’t reach them, and took off the respirators.

  ‘Well? What’s your professional opinion?’

  ‘My professional opinion?’ She laughed. ‘That you’re going to have a trip to the mortuary this afternoon.’

  ‘Then what about your personal opinion? I don’t think you’re short of those.’

  ‘Personally? I wasn’t looking when we did the recovery, but I don’t think there was anything unusual. Not on her head. You’d need to get all that yeuch rinsed out to be sure. It’s really not our business to be going through her hair out there in the field, y’know, so get thee to the mortuary, Mr Caffery.’ She took his respirator from him and chucked it into the truck. ‘It’ll be the Royal United in Bath, I should think. The on-call pathologist’s over there today.’

  8