Skin (18 page)

She crouched, swept the Maglite around. The cow parsley against the wall had been snapped, and the heads hung down limply. Something dark coated them. Careful not to touch the flattened area she plucked a stem and sat back on her haunches, inspecting it. In this light it wasn’t easy to see exactly what she was holding, but when she put down the torch, took off her glove with her teeth and pushed her fingernail along the stem, the dark stuff flaked and fell into her cupped hand.

Blood. She knew its properties and behaviour too well. It was caked blood. So this, this unremarkable stretch of road, was where Misty’s life had ended.

An image came: Thom leaping out of the car, his face drawn with shock. His panic – because that was what he would have done, panicked – when he saw the broken body in the hedge. Crying as he scooped Misty up, shovelled her into the boot. Her handbag must have been lying somewhere on the road, somewhere around here, its sequins glinting at him; he must have picked that up too and—

Crouching there on the verge with one hand holding the cow parsley, the other cupping the flakes of blood, the latex glove dangling from between her teeth, Flea became very still. Something lay in the vegetation to the left. Something small. Reflecting a low metallic glow from the moon. If it had been a dark night, if you weren’t crouched at this level, you wouldn’t have noticed it, she thought. Quickly she rested the cow parsley across her knees. Felt in the Bergen for the freezer bag. She emptied the flakes of blood into it, followed by the cow parsley, which she broke in two. She shuffled forward on her haunches, pulling on the spare glove. Gingerly, she pushed her hand through the grass, the roots of elder and hawthorn.

Misty’s phone.

She manoeuvred it out of the undergrowth and held it cupped in both hands. A Nokia, stainless-steel casing with diamonds encrusted, just like on the intelligence mock-up photos. But where was the on-off switch? On her own phone you needed to hold down the end-call button and it would spring to life, but on this phone there was a small button at the top of the casing, sunk low. And three more on the sides. Any one of those buttons could switch it on. Instantly it would send another signal to the phone masts.

She couldn’t drop it. She couldn’t leave it. The battery. Take out the battery. She remembered something about how certain phones carry GPS technology that stays active even with the battery out. Or was it just active with the phone switched off? She couldn’t remember. No. If it had GPS technology the police would have found it ages ago. It was safe to take the battery out. It had to be.

She turned it over. Eased her fingernail under the battery casing. From the forest behind her she heard a car. Going fast.

She snatched up the Maglite. Crawl-walked into the shadow of a large sycamore. Already the car’s headlights had hit the under-canopy of the trees at the far end of the road. She pulled herself into a tight ball around the torch, her knees hard into the verge.

The headlights fell on the hedge next to her. She put her face down into her chest, the phone and the torch jammed hard against each other. The car swept past and disappeared until all that was left was the residual sound of tappets and music in the silent night.

When it had rounded the bend she dropped forward on to her knees and looked at the phone. Dark and silent, she hadn’t switched it on accidentally. She let out all her breath at once, put her head back against the tree-trunk and stared at where, hovering in the air above the tyre tracks, like a feather caught in the airstream of the car, a single hair caught the moonlight as it seesawed down. White and kinked, it yawed and pitched through the air currents.

She knew the head it had come from. Misty Kitson’s. Not alive and open-eyed, tottering down the silent lane clutching her handbag and mobile phone, but silent, finished. Caked in body fluid and lying secretly in a bath ten miles from here.

26

It was gone midnight. Caffery found two flagons of cider in the pantry, pulled on his RAB jacket, locked all the doors and got into the car. He put the radio on loud and drove without a plan, not thinking where he was going, letting instinct take over. He was drawn to minor roads, the ones that laced around the Mendips and out east almost as far as Wiltshire. Every field he passed, every lane entry, he let the car slow, craning his neck to see over the hedgerows. Nothing – no red firelight, no flicker of flame in the dusk.

When Caffery had left the Met he’d chosen Bristol for one reason: to track down the person they called the Walking Man. The Walking Man had been convicted of torturing a paedophile named Craig Evans, who had killed his daughter. In Caffery’s head this detail teamed himself and the Walking Man, because if Caffery knew one thing it was how to live with revenge in your heart. Ivan Penderecki, the ageing Polish paedophile who’d lived on the other side of the railway track from the Cafferys, had got away with Ewan Caffery’s murder, and with concealing his body, and this had rotted Jack’s spirit for years. Then, when Penderecki died, the revenge he’d never taken took over rotting his spirit.

So he’d come here to meet someone who had taken revenge, the sort of revenge he should have taken on Penderecki. What Caffery hadn’t expected was the strange, limping friendship that seemed to be starting between him and the Walking Man.

He found himself on the B-road running straight through the area that had been covered by the team searching for Misty Kitson. It ran along the bottom of the hill, straight past the entrance to the Farleigh Park Hall clinic: a vast lit-up mansion, with sparkling colonnades and imposing steps. He slowed, trying to imagine Misty coming out of that building, turning right, or was it left? Ironic, he thought, looking at the sign at the foot of the driveway glinting in his headlights. How ironic that Lucy Mahoney had been missing about the same length of time as Kitson and that while the force had thrown all their horses at the Kitson case, the whole of the high-powered MCIU engine, Lucy Mahoney had just one fashion-plate model of a DI, who hadn’t even stayed for the post-mortem, and a family liaison officer too lazy to let her relatives know she’d been found until she’d had every piece of her insides hauled out by Beatrice Foxton, weighed, sliced, tested and crammed back inside her ribcage.

Caffery drove slowly, past a rapeseed field that led up the hill and to the lake Flea Marley’s team had searched. The lights of a small hamlet opposite twinkled in the trees. He was out of the search radius now. He hit a road lined with poplars, like a European road, and speeded up. Got to the main crossroads and did a left. Drove another five miles then saw a lane he recognized on his left. He’d been there at the beginning of the week with the Walking Man.

He locked the car, climbed over a farm gate and, using the little flashlight on his key-ring, walked up the long hill, his bluish torchlight small and insignificant in the weight of the darkness. In the distance Bristol threw a halo of sodium orange into the sky. He stopped at the place the Walking Man’s campfire had been a few nights ago, buttoned his jacket, knelt on the cold ground and sniffed the faint residue of charred earth. It was cold.

‘Hey,’ he murmured into the dark. ‘Are you there?’

Nothing came back, just the distant movement of wind weaving through the trees. No Walking Man.

He went back to the car and reversed it along the rutted track. Retracing his steps, he turned left on the A36, then after half a mile took a right on to a small, meandering lane and drove for almost ten minutes. He caught glimpses of his own eyes in the rear-view mirror. Blue. Dark-fringed. His mother’s eyes. She had been a good Catholic girl from Toxteth. He hadn’t seen her for more than twenty years, not since she’d last given up on Ewan and left London – putting it all behind her. Even choosing to forget her younger son, Jack. Now he didn’t know if she was dead or alive. But he knew one thing for sure: if she was dead she’d gone to her grave with the rosary wrapped round her fingers and no one would have thought anything of it. He pictured a bracelet made of human hair to ward away bad spirits. ‘Crude beliefs’, had been Powers’s words. There are lots of paths to God, Caffery thought, fingering the back of his head where the hair was missing. A whole world of different routes.

He slammed on the brakes. It had been such a small glow that he’d nearly missed it. Somewhere in the fields down to his right, down where the riverbanks were thick with mud and bulrushes, there was a fire. He reversed the car up the silent lane, levering himself up in the seat to see over the hedge, put the car into a three-point turn and nosed it down the first farm track he saw, letting it bump on to a field, the exhaust banging on the furrowed earth. He turned off the engine and the lights, and for a moment he was still, looking out at the fire.

The Walking Man.

He’d heard Caffery’s car but he didn’t look up, just sat nonchalantly next to the fire, scratching his oily beard and staring into the flames as if they’d been telling him a story and now he was giving it some thought. His belongings were arranged around him, lit red by the crackling fire: his sleeping-bags, his all-weather gear, his plastic bottles of cider. Two plates sat ready for the food he was cooking in the pot. Two plates, Caffery noticed. Not one. He was expected. This was the way with the Walking Man. It wasn’t possible to just
find
the Walking Man:
he
decided when the time was right, then – as if their shared histories chimed on some element – exerted a casual magnetism on Caffery. He threw out an invisible lariat and drew him in.

He got out of the car, taking the two-litre flagons of cider with him.

‘Took a long time to find me,’ said the Walking Man, as Caffery approached. He took good care of his feet and his clothing was expensive outdoors gear, but to look at him you’d think he’d been soaked in tar: he was black from head to toe as if he slept in the charcoal of his campfires. ‘You’ve been looking for me for two hours now.’

‘How do you know that?’ Caffery said, though it didn’t surprise him.

The Walking Man didn’t answer. He stoked the fire and edged the tin plates closer to the flames. Caffery set down the cider. The Walking Man had more than two million pounds tucked away in a savings account somewhere yet he drank scrumpy cider, the worst the local apple presses could cough out. And he never, ever slept under a roof. It was just his way.

‘I’ve plotted your routes on a map.’ Caffery unrolled the piece of bed foam the Walking Man had waiting for him, warming next to the fire. ‘I can see the beginnings of a pattern.’

The Walking Man snorted. ‘Yes. Of course you’d feel the need to study me. You’re a policeman.’

‘I’ve got an intelligence database to help me. When people see you they call in the sighting.’

‘Because they’re scared of me.’

‘They know what you’re capable of.’

Craig Evans, the killer of the Walking Man’s daughter, had been only half alive at the end of the torture. They had him down as DOA in the ambulance. And when they’d patched him up and seen what the Walking Man had removed from him, most of the professionals thought privately he’d have been better off dead. With no eyes, no genitals, it wasn’t going to be the best of lives. It would have been better for Penderecki to end like that. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d stolen the chance and killed himself by hanging from a ceiling beam in his bathroom. The lost opportunity stung Caffery even now.

‘I gave you some crocus bulbs the other night. Been asking myself about them. What’s going to happen to them?’

‘They’re here.’ The Walking Man patted his breast pocket. A small rustling noise came through the night. ‘Safe in here.’

‘When are you going to plant them?’

The Walking Man looked up. His eyes were the same colour as Caffery’s: dark blue ringed with dark eyelashes. ‘When the time is right. And how do you know I haven’t already planted some? I won’t be asked about it by you again. Jack Caffery. Policeman.’

Caffery gave a wry half-smile. He was used to this from the Walking Man. He was starting to understand how it worked, that things would be explained in their time. While the Walking Man attended to the food Caffery uncorked the cider, poured for them both in tin cups and leant back on the bedroll, one hand drifting up to finger the gap in his hair. The night settled around them. The sounds of the river gurgling and rolling its way through the fields, the clicking of his car engine cooling. The faint electronic buzz of a weir further downstream. About fifty feet away someone, some kids maybe, had hooked a tyre on a rope from a tree that leant out over the river. It hung motionless in the starlight, the ghosts of all the children who had swung from it over the years, the yells and the laughter and the crashes of water, swarming silently around it.

‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ Caffery said, after a while. ‘The last time I came to you it was there. It wasn’t my imagination – there was something watching me from the trees.’

The Walking Man grunted. ‘Yes. There was.’

‘You weren’t scared of it.’

‘Why would I be? It wasn’t coming for me.’

‘And if it was? If you were me? Would you be scared then?’

The Walking Man was quiet for a while, thinking about this. He spooned the food on to the tin plates and added fresh herbs collected during the day, maybe from private gardens he’d crept into. The food next to this campfire was some of the best Caffery’d ever had, straightforward, always steaming hot. The Walking Man distributed it between them and added forks, pushing one plate to him.