Skin (36 page)

Hello, Stevie, darling. You’re a good boy. A good boy.

Listen to me. Get out of your fucking chair. Bitch.

Stevie – what’re you talking about?

Shut up about him now and—

Her eyes open. The light is too bright. Georges is there, his face close up. He’s smiling.

‘Get out of your chair,’ he says encouragingly. ‘Get out now.’

She pushes herself up. He’s wearing gloves, she thinks. Didn’t notice that before. He’s wearing latex gloves. But, then, everything today is strange, really strange, like a dream.

He puts his hand under her elbow and she lets him lead her to the door.

58

Years ago a trainer had told Caffery that if he ever felt faint on parade he should look at something green: a lawn, a tree. Colours had an effect on the brain – stopped it freezing and giving up – so when he got out of the car in the quiet country lane outside Georges Gerber’s house he stopped for a moment and rested his eyes on the grassy bank. His head was sluggish and staticky from lack of sleep. He needed it to be clear.

Darcy said Susan Hopkins had caught Gerber stealing. Lucy had been blackmailing him: maybe she’d threatened to take him to the GMC over the abdomectomy. Maybe she’d also witnessed the stealing, or whatever had been happening in the recovery room. It had taken him two years to get fed up with the blackmail and kill Lucy. With Susan Hopkins it had been quicker. Maybe she’d confronted him. Maybe he’d already been stirred up enough by Lucy’s murder to have killed again in quick succession.

An early butterfly flapped its lonely way across the lawn, then over the hedge that grew alongside the house, attracted by the blue of a disused swimming-pool. It was very clean – no slime growing on the painted blue walls. He stood on tiptoe and looked past it. About twenty feet on was the distinctive sand mound and manhole inspection cover of a septic system. The house itself was to the right: square and grey, set a long way back from the quiet lane. Everything was tidy, very well kept. Tidy but wrong, Caffery thought, dropping back on to his heels. In spite of the tidiness something felt out of kilter.

He licked his palm, pushed it through his hair and buttoned his jacket. The house had two entrances, one a blue-painted front door to the left, which looked as if it went into the main house. No one answered when he rang this bell so he went to the other entrance, where the house had been extended into a low-roofed building running out at an angle. The stone extension had shuttered casement windows, a narrow portico, and a small porch with an antique foot-scraper built at the left-hand side. He rang the bell. Waited, looking at the brass sign screwed to the front door: Georges Gerber FRCS (Plast) engraved in ornate script.

No answer. He went along the side of the house, glancing into the windows as he went. At the end he stopped. The shutters were closed. He got his Swiss Army Hiker from his pocket and prised off the catch. Pulled the shutter wide.

About ten centimetres into the room, a breezeblock wall had been constructed. He put his nose to the glass. The wall stretched up as far as he could see, and out to the sides as far as he could see. There was an airbrick about six blocks to his right.

Oh, goody, he thought, smiling against the pane. Oh, goody, Mr Gerber, I smell your blood.

59

In South-east London there had been long, complex issues around stop-and-search laws. When Caffery was a PC, his inspector had adopted a head-in-the-sand solution to the problem and thrown most of his manpower into meeting quotas on other crime. Breaking and entering fell to Caffery. In two short months he’d learnt a lot about the clever ways people had of getting into other folk’s houses.

He drove six miles down the road to a village ironmonger’s and got some of the things he needed. The rest Gerber had generously provided: in the unlocked maintenance shed near the pool. Didn’t people know about locking sheds? Hadn’t it sunk in yet? You were just as likely to have your shed burgled as your house. Hey, Georges, he thought, it’s difficult to comprehend this slack attitude to security. He carried the stepladder and the power drill to the side of the house so that he was hidden from the road. He would hear a car on that lane from miles away. There’d be time to hide the tools if anyone appeared.

Whatever Gerber was getting up to in that strong-room he wouldn’t be wanting a key-holder or the police rolling in if the alarm ever went off. Which meant that the system probably wouldn’t be connected to a control centre, and was probably designed just to unnerve an intruder. Even so, Caffery chose a point about ten metres from the house and snipped the telephone wire. He carried the ladder back to the house, fitted a 9 mm bit in the drill chuck, climbed to the alarm box and made a hole in the ‘T’ of the company name, right where the print was at its darkest so it wouldn’t be visible from a distance. He shook a canister of expanding foam, eased the nozzle into the hole and filled the interior of the box until the face plate made a low noise and popped out a little. He placed a square of black gaffer tape across the strobe unit, climbed back down and returned the stepladder to the shed.

The house and the grounds were silent. Not a single car or truck or motorbike had passed on the lane the whole time he’d been there. Things could happen out here and no one would know. To the left of the front door there was a small window with pebbled glass that looked as if it belonged to a toilet. He gaffer-taped the top vent and smashed it with the butt of the drill. Reached in, undid the latch on the big window. Climbed through, on to the toilet lid, jumped down and went out into a flagstoned corridor.

Somewhere in here would be the internal box. When it let go, the noise would be mind-numbing. He had maybe ten seconds left.

He came to what looked like an office, oak-panelled with plush carpets and tasselled, floor-length curtains. The furniture was classic but not especially elegant: an ornately tooled mahogany desk with a green-leather inset, a button-tufted Queen Anne sofa, large gilt-framed oil landscapes adorning the walls. The windows looked out towards the swimming-pool. No alarm box. He carried on, passing a kitchenette, a boot room with wellingtons lined up and Barbours hanging on pegs. He came to a second corridor, sunlight falling through the windows on to an expensive walnut floor. More than ten seconds had passed and there hadn’t been a noise. But now he could see the box at the end of the corridor, mounted above a padlocked solid oak door.

The light unit wasn’t flashing. No klaxon either. Infrared eyes blinked at him from both sides of the ceiling and the door had two contact sensors, one on either side. He realized the klaxon wasn’t sounding because the alarm wasn’t designed to go off at an intrusion into the house. It was designed to protect the breeze-block room and only that room.

He went to the box. Broke the infrared beams and instantly the strobe unit began to blink. The circuit board usually sat just behind and above the battery – it was best to destroy them both. He put the drill bit against the box and leant into it. Curled swarf flew everywhere as the bit popped easily through the door, deeper into the workings. The drill jumped in his hands, clattering around in the box, causing havoc. The klaxon started and wailed deafeningly for two seconds before the drill bit found circuitry. It leapt around some more, doing its work, then the wailing died abruptly.

Silence. Ears ringing, he jiggled the chain and tried the door. It wasn’t only protected by the padlock – there were four more deadbolts in the door. He went back into the office and opened all the drawers on the desk. The top one was locked so he used the drill again. He didn’t much care what Powers would think about the damages Gerber might claim – he was already in a world of trouble and disciplinaries with what he’d done to the alarm box. In for a penny, in for a pound.

The keys were in the drawer and they fitted the four locks. Another lecture in effective security coming your way, Mr Gerber. The padlock came off easily – a thirty-second squirt of pipe freeze, a crowbar inserted, given the right torque, and it shattered into four pieces. He opened the door.

As soon as he stepped inside the darkened room he smelt something bad. Something he knew from the mortuary and from undertakers. Something that made his throat close. Formalin.

He closed the door behind him, locking it for good measure. He could make out shapes in the half-light: a bank of floor-to-ceiling refrigerators to his left, a massive workbench to his right, like in an old-fashioned school laboratory. In the far wall a door stood slightly ajar. He went to it and peered round. It led to a small enclosed stairwell twisting up into daylight. He listened, heard nothing above him, so he pulled the door closed, locked that too, and switched on the overhead light.

It was a fluorescent strip and too bright for the size of the room, as if work went on in here that you’d need good visibility for. The refrigerators lined the wall to his right. In front of him the wall was decorated with medical diagrams, all showing the skin in varying styles: one depicted the body’s sweat glands, representing them in red on a black-and-grey genderless outlined human. Another showed skin lifted up on a hook to reveal its interior, the dermis, epidermis, the subcutaneous fat, hair erector muscles and blood vessels.

But it was what was on the work station in his peripheral vision that really sent a line of adrenalin through him.

Tools and racks laid out on the bench in a clear pattern as if they were expecting something. Some he recognized as a tanner’s – skinning and fleshing knives, a small gambrel – others he’d never seen before. They looked like specialized surgeon’s tools. In the centre there was a series of blocks with pegs in them. The sort of thing you’d stretch out an animal skin on.

Animal skin.

The skinned dog in the quarry definitely hadn’t been Amos Chipeta.

I’m getting near you now, my friend. I can feel you. I’m not far now.

He took a few steps forward and opened a refrigerator. It gave with a gentle vacuumy hiss, cold air coming out at him. He peered inside. Every shelf was crammed with vacuutainers: like the Tupperware sandwich boxes his mum used to put his and Ewan’s lunch in when they were kids. Each was labelled and through the sides he could see brown liquid, rocking lightly from the movement of his opening the door.

He pulled one out. It was cold, slightly sticky, the smell of formalin coming from it. Taped to the top was a photo of a young woman. First off he thought she was dead. She was lying on her back – the camera had shot her from above, the way they sometimes shot corpses in the mortuary – and she wore a mask strapped over her mouth and nose. She was naked, except for a bandage across her breasts and a tangle of flower-sprigged cotton bunched at her knees. Her eyes were closed, but she had too much colour to be dead. He looked at the fabric: an operating-theatre gown. The bed was a hospital bed. She wasn’t dead: she was under anaesthetic. Maybe just coming out because that wasn’t a laryngeal mask on her face.

Under the photograph was a printed box, intricate lines of text in it: ‘Name: Pauline Weir. DOB: 4.5.81. Op date: 15.7.08. Op: Breast reduction.’ Below the text was a diagram of a female – a little like the one on the wall. Two semicircles in red pen were sketched on the undersides of the breasts.

Caffery carried the container to the table and opened it carefully. Seven or eight slivers of skin in the clear brown fluid floated. Like an exhibit in a medical museum.

He clicked the lid shut, went back to the fridge, pulled out another. Another photograph of a woman on a bed, naked except for the gown that had been pulled down to her knees, and a bandage across her stomach. No anaesthetist would leave a patient’s side while they were unconscious, but they wouldn’t supervise the recovery period past a certain point: that would be left to trained recovery nurses who might be persuaded to leave the room. If they were instructed to by the surgeon. Was that what Susan Hopkins had meant by
They’re all a bit thick, the recovery nurses, not to see what’s going on under their noses
?

He opened the container. In it he found a single elliptical piece of skin, bleached and puckered by the formalin. He returned it, ran his fingers down the list of containers until he came to the M section. Mahoney, Lucy. He carried it to the table, opened it, and there he saw the last piece of the puzzle.

A piece of Lucy that hadn’t made it to the autopsy table. A piece of her pubis. The hairs were still attached.

For years and years and years this had been Gerber’s secret.

For years, by a series of crafty moves, in ways that would never be detected, he had been stealing the skin of the women he operated on.

60

Caffery heard the car coming from a distance. He shut the vacuutainers away and left the room silently, clicking the door closed behind him. He kicked aside the metal swarf and was stepping out of the front door as an immaculate blue Mercedes swept up the drive. A 500 AMG with all the bells and whistles.

He didn’t know if he’d been seen coming out so he stepped away from the building into the sunlight. The Mercedes came to a halt. There were a few moments’ pause, then the door opened and a small man with greying hair got out. He was about fifty, unremarkable, except for the odd tunic he wore. Yoked and made of brushed denim, it was the sort of thing an artist might have worn in the 1970s. There were damp spots on the front.