Skin (33 page)

‘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.’

Caffery saw Lucy’s face on the video –
Welcome to my atelier
– remembered her hands fidgeting around her stomach. The way she wasn’t blushing. It hadn’t been something spiritual or a rise in confidence that had made the difference. It had been an operation. And somehow he’d missed it. He pulled hard on the cigarette. Everything –
everything
– he’d thought he knew about Lucy Mahoney before her death was wrong.

‘Why didn’t you—’

Beatrice held up a hand warningly. ‘I know what you’re going to say and you know what I’m going to say . . .’

‘That it’s all in your report? That I should’ve read it?’

‘Did you?’

‘We’ve been talking about nothing else for the last couple of days. There must have been a moment you thought to say something.’

‘I just asked, did you read my report?’

‘You could have told me. That’s all. You could have said something.’

‘I could have told you lots of things.’ She threw a tennis ball to the setter and it leapt away in the grass, its hindquarters bucking like a horse’s. ‘I could have told you she’d broken her ribs when she was, I don’t know, about twelve. Or that she had bad teeth – four crowns and five root canals. I could have told you the colour of her toenail polish and the brand of her bra. None of those seemed relevant so I put them in the report and didn’t talk to you about them. Cosmetic surgery two years ago not related to the cause of death isn’t something I’d have flagged up. It’s my job to think about cause of death, not ante-mortem behaviour, especially from two years ago.’ She whistled at the dog, beckoning it to come back. ‘That part, I’m afraid to say . . .’

Caffery sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know.’ He pinched out the cigarette and put it back in his tobacco wallet.

That part was his job.

53

‘I’m going to make an incision here – I’ll go in through your Caesarean scar – then pull this part back.’

Ruth is sitting on an examination table. She’s wearing her bra and her underpants. Her high heels are still on and she’s resting her feet delicately, so as not to go through the strip of paper towel and mark the leather underneath. The room is well lit, airy and wood-panelled, with the surgeon’s degrees framed and mounted. Outside a gardener is cutting the grass. No doubt about it, the clinic is top drawer. Not the sort of place that asks for money up front.

‘We need to expose the muscles under here.’ The surgeon lifts up the flesh around her abdomen. ‘Then I’ll pull them together like this. Remove a little of this fat and skin here. When you come round there’ll be a couple of drains – one on either side. Just for the first forty-eight hours. Sometimes with an abdomectomy this muscle here, your rectus muscle,’ he drew his finger down the front of her belly, ‘can get a bit sore afterwards. It might make you feel nauseous too so I’ll inject into it while you’re under. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘You know there’ll be a bit of discomfort?’

A bit of discomfort here? In the Rothersfield clinic with its fancy landscaped gardens and bellboys in smart little hats? With satellite telly in all the rooms and champagne cocktails on the menu if you’re feeling well enough? She can deal with that. She pulls on her T-shirt and watches him squirt Spirigel on his hands, wipe them with a starched towel and go back to the big leather-topped desk. He’s not good-looking. Not really. A bit dowdy. But he’ll be loaded probably. Just the sort she needs.

He opens her notes and scribbles a few words with a scratchy Montblanc. Makes circles around the stomach of an outlined diagram. Pulls out a sheet of pink paper and starts filling in boxes.

‘Do you smoke?’

Ruth wriggles into her skirt. ‘No.’

‘Drink?’

‘Only if you’re having one.’

He gives a small, pained smile. ‘How many units do you drink each week?’

‘I don’t know. I’m a social drinker.’

‘So, ten to twenty-one drinks a week?’

‘That’ll do it.’

‘Live alone?’

‘Now it sounds like you’re asking me for a date.’

‘It’s a serious question. We need to know if you’ll have someone to care for you on your discharge from the clinic.’

‘Yes. I mean – I do. I live on my own. But I could arrange for my son to come. He’d be happy to be there.’ She buttons her skirt. This guy might be minted but he’s got no sense of humour. She gets off the table and takes the seat opposite him, crossing her legs and tensing the muscles so her calves look nice. She rests her fingernails on her knee.

‘My, uh, my niece works here. She recommended you.’

‘Did she?’ He doesn’t look up. ‘Kind of her.’

‘She and I are very close. She tells me everything. She confided in me.’

‘Confided?’

Still writing. Still not interested.

‘Said she thought you were one of the best surgeons around.’

He looks up at this. ‘Thank you. Always nice to hear.’

‘I think she spoke to you about . . .’

‘About a discount?’

She breathes out, relieved. ‘That’s right. A discount. She did speak to you.’

‘Yes, she did. Marsha will deal with it. My secretary. When you make the appointment she’ll take you through all that. I’ve got some spaces late June.’

Ruth narrows her eyes. ‘When do I pay?’

‘Marsha will invoice you.’

Her heart jumps. Invoices take days. Weeks. Time to milk Little Miss PI a bit more. ‘When?’ she says.

The surgeon looks up. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he says. ‘We’ll be in touch after the procedure.’

54

Rothersfield clinic wasn’t dissimilar from the Farleigh Park Hall clinic to look at, Caffery thought, with its oak-panelled waiting rooms, marble staircase and rooms with sliding glass doors that led out on to sweeping lawns. But there the similarities ended. Here, there was a porter service, five-course meals chosen from handwritten menus, and no one expected you to clean the toilets as part of your treatment. Chauffeurs waited in the driveway in their Mercedes and Bentleys for their rich employers to recover from their facelifts.

In a little office at the back of the building overlooking a knot garden, where one or two patients were wandering in their towelling robes, the nurse, Darcy Lytton, was waiting for him. Not yet changed for work, she looked the part of the girl rumpled from a night with a boyfriend: she wore scruffy Atticus skinny jeans, a studded belt and a black T-shirt with the words ‘Don’t make me kill you’ slashed across the chest. Her eye makeup was last night’s too: it was smudged into the folds under her brown eyes. She sat with her hands jammed between her knees, biting her lip. She’d been crying.