Skin (6 page)

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 leant 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

‘Sir?’

Flea might have said something else to Caffery that day. She might have said a little more and things might have panned out very differently if at that moment Stuart Pearce, the rolypoly search adviser who’d ordered the quarry search, hadn’t interrupted them.

‘Sir?
Sir?
I’d like a word.’

They both turned to watch him come across the car park, smiling at Caffery, his finger held up in the air as if he was making a point. He stopped a few feet away, breathing hard from the exertion. He had a soft face and a thick, sunburnt neck. His hair was combed across his balding pate. He addressed Caffery, acting as if Flea didn’t exist. ‘You’re the SIO, are you, sir?’

‘No – he’s gone. Wells station. You’ll catch him there in about ten.’ Caffery started to turn away, but Pearce wasn’t going to be put off.

‘Is it Lucy Mahoney in there?’ He gestured at the coroner’s van pulling out of the car park.

‘Who wants to know?’

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a business card. ‘I was the search adviser on her disappearance. Today’s my rest day but I thought I’d better come in when I heard they’d found someone.’

That figured, she thought. He was the type: an officer freshly trained in a new job, full of enthusiasm, such a need to be involved that he’d turn up on rest days probably for no pay. All because he liked the glory. He was the sort who’d accidentally let his warrant card drop out of his wallet on to the bar when he was trying to pull someone. Thought women were more likely to open their legs for a cop.

‘You can see, can’t you, now that you’ve got the lie of the land, how I would never have put this place on my search parameters? I’d never have found her with what I had to go on – it was like a needle in a haystack.’

‘Don’t waste your breath, mate,’ said Caffery. ‘I’m just floating here. It’s not mine, it’s F District’s. I’m MCIU.’

‘MCIU?’

‘Major Crime.’

‘Yes. I know what MCIU is.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘You must be doing the Kitson case, then. I was the search adviser on that too, before the review got it bumped up to you from District.’

Bloody celebrity junkie, Flea thought. People like Pearce loved the media scrums that the Kitson case was attracting, the spotlight on the force. God, she didn’t like the guy. The more he talked, the more he ignored her, the more the fuses popped in her head.

‘I heard you got a fix on her phone from the Macrocell base station?’ he said. ‘Used that call analysis team, right?’

‘You’ve had your ear to the ground, then,’ said Caffery.

‘That mast was in the parameters I drew up, but it wasn’t a good area – not well covered by masts.’ Pearce put his hands on his hips and, head back, gazed out across the trees. Then he squinted in the other direction, at the horizon. ‘Somewhere like this would have been better. If Misty Kitson was out on that railway line we’d have got a fix on her in no time. But her phone was switched off, wasn’t it?’

‘Whose?’ Flea could hear irritation creeping into Caffery’s voice.

‘Lucy Mahoney’s. It was switched off, District told me. Bizarre, if you ask me – usually suicides use their phones. Make last-minute calls, even just to hear someone speak, or texts before they pull the plug. You can see why my job was difficult, can’t you? She broke all the rules.’

‘What rules?’

‘All the geographical profiling rules, everything. To start off, look how far away her car is – she had to walk half a mile to get here. Why didn’t she park nearer?’

‘She was wandering? Distressed?’

‘Nah. Suicides generally know where they’re going to do it before they set out. And, anyway, I spoke to the ex-husband and he said she doesn’t know this area. She never walked her dog here or anything like that. There was nothing connecting her to this place. I mean, most suicides are less than half a mile from a road, and she must be topping that, surely? And they go somewhere high, suicides. They go and sit somewhere – somewhere they can see lights, buildings, so they can see what they’re saying goodbye to. But not her. You can’t see a thing from that embankment. I’ve been over there. Had a look.’

Flea’d had enough. She stepped forward. Hand up. Big smile on her face. ‘Hi.’ Her best, brightest voice. Waved the hand for good measure. ‘Remember me? Sergeant Marley? The one who did most of your searching?’

He gave her a cool look. ‘Yes.’

‘We dived the quarry yesterday. You missed it.’

‘I was looking at other possible sites.’

He turned back to Caffery, but she’d started now and she wouldn’t stop until she’d got in his face. ‘Yeah, well. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t think she’d be in there anyway.’

‘Of course not,’ he said quietly, his eyes still on Caffery, ‘because you’re psychic.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You knew she wouldn’t be in the quarry. So you must be psychic.’

She started to laugh, but stopped when she saw the look on his face. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’ve had to come in on my rest day for this. And it doesn’t help when whatever blood, sweat and tears you throw at it, whatever profiles, Blue 8 mapping you generate, some people still won’t believe you. This is the second time you’ve undermined my authority.’

She knew what he was talking about, of course: earlier this week she and Pearce had got into what Wellard called ‘a full and frank discussion’ about whether the team should be searching for Misty Kitson in a lake near the rehab clinic. Flea hadn’t thought Kitson would be found in the lake and she’d told Pearce so. She probably hadn’t done it in the sweetest way imaginable either. ‘Misty Kitson again?’

‘You decided
she
wasn’t going to be in the lake either. Didn’t you? A bit dispiriting, that – being told I was wrong before you’d even finished the search.’

‘I was right, though, wasn’t I? She wasn’t there. You get an instinct after a while. She was never going to be in the lake. She was never going to drown herself, a girl like that.’

‘You’re going to tell me the lottery numbers next.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can’t reason with you so I think I’m finished here.’ She put her arm out, gesturing for Pearce to stand back so she could pass, but he didn’t move, didn’t meet her eyes. She tried to go round him the other way but he shifted his boxy body a little, hemming her in. He held Caffery’s eyes while he did it, a half-smile on his face.

She stopped and raised her eyes to his. ‘You know what?’ She was calm. ‘It’s been years since I got my hair off over a case like Kitson just because the victim was a celeb. You know why?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’d be just a
little bit
afraid someone would turn around and call me an effing media monkey. Now,’ she paused, breathing hard, ‘are you going to step out of my way, you combed-over old twonk? Or do I have to push you?’

Pearce’s nostrils widened a tiny amount. There was a moment when she thought he might just take his life into his hands and stand his ground. But in the end he hadn’t the balls. He rubbed his nose and stepped out of her way.

She made a small, victorious noise in her throat, slung the towel over her back, turned and trudged back to the unit van. Bloody Newbs. Probably moved up from the Specials, that one. She just didn’t have the patience.

‘Marley,’ Caffery called. But she raised her hand, goodbye, and continued to where the team were throwing the last few pieces into the van. She got into the Focus, started the engine and pulled out on to the road. The sun was beating down on the windscreen, making patterns in the dust. As the car park disappeared in her rear-view mirror she allowed herself to smile.

Do I have to push you, you combed-over old twonk?

Good one, girl. She jacked up the volume on the end of that Arctic Monkeys CD. She liked the way Caffery had looked at her breasts. As if the T-shirt wasn’t even there. As if he could see right through it, and as if her breasts were round and big and something to be respected. It was an age since someone had looked at her like that. An age. She’d like it to happen again.

She laughed and opened the window.
Combed-over old twonk.
Yeah. She was proud of that one. Really proud.

9

Back at base everyone was hot and tired. And they still couldn’t get rid of the smell. Even after they’d showered and showered, decontaminated the suits over and over again, shoved their underclothing into airtight sacks, even after all that, somehow, it seemed to linger. Flea wasn’t even sure she couldn’t smell it on her clothing when she got into the car to go home. She sat at red traffic lights and wafted the neck of her T-shirt. Bent her face down for a sniff test.