Skin (11 page)

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘I’m serious. I don’t.’

‘Then we’re going to drive until you
do
remember. I’ll see you in half an hour.’

‘
No!’
he hissed.

She pressed a finger into the bridge of her nose. ‘Look, if we don’t deal with this now it’s going to get worse and worse. It’ll finish us both.’

‘I can’t.’

‘It happened in Farleigh Park, didn’t it? Somewhere near the rehab place?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, it must have. She can’t have walked far.’

There was silence at the other end of the phone. She pushed herself away from the car and stood with her hand in the small of her back above her hip, where her body armour sometimes gave her gyp. ‘Thom, this isn’t going to go away – whatever you think or hope it’s going to come out somehow. And if you leave it, and if they find out you shovelled her up and put her in the sodding boot of the—’ Her voice was rising, speeding. ‘Oh, God help you, you’ll be up in Long Lartin before you know it. They’ll know your sister’s a cop. And even if you got vulnerable status that would just put you in with the IPPs.’

‘The IPPs? What’re they?’

‘The ones they keep in for public protection – the nonces, the sex offenders, the real nutters. Not good. Not good at all. Now get in the car and meet me.’

‘But Mandy’ll know. She’ll find out. She suspects anyway. Just from the way you spoke to her she knows something’s up.’

‘You’ll have to tell her eventually.’

‘I can’t. I just can’t.’

‘Then I’ll do it. Go and wake her up. Give her the phone.’

‘No! No, please. Please!’

‘
Thom!
Just wise up, will you?
Just wise up
.’

There was a long silence. Embers and black plastic floated into the air. Beyond them the moon, hot and white, glowed faintly through the clouds. Then Thom spoke, his voice thick. Sullen. ‘OK. OK – I’ll do it. I’ll tell her.’

She breathed out. ‘Good. You do that. And call me when you have.’

15

The moon comes up fast in Somerset: racing across the lowlands, up the sides of the Mendips, into the Quantocks. It picks out the glittering windows of the cities in the far north of the county, creeps into the car in the mortuary car park where Jack Caffery plugs the key into the ignition. It finds Flea Marley in the north-east, standing on the blade of a hill, watching smoke rise. And ten miles to the east of her, in a quite different setting, it lingers on a lonely grey house. A house set back from a deserted lane, surrounded by fallow farmland, barns and outhouses and a disused swimming-pool. The moonlight fingers the windows of the single-storey extension. It tries but can’t reach past the breezeblocks into the specially adapted room.

Inside, the light is a different colour. Here there is only an unearthly blue glow, emanating from seven specialized refrigerator units, all of which have their doors wide open to reveal their contents: stack after stack of carefully inventoried containers, each filled to the brim with formalin.

The man is in the middle of the room on the floor. He is perfectly naked and sits with his legs crossed, almost in a yogic pose, letting the calming light from the units bathe him. He will never see a woman’s skin pegged out on his workbench. He understands this. Has understood it for years. That belongs to the realms of fantasy.

But his collection . . . His collection is his reality. It started as a small concession to the fantasy, but it has grown above and beyond that. It is more, much more. It is his life’s work. His reason to keep breathing. He’ll protect it at any cost. He’ll do anything, even kill.

He has a flash – a sudden photographic image of a face on a hospital trolley. The trolley is being wheeled away under fluorescent strip-lights. The patient is anaesthetized but as the gurney disappears something happens – something the hospital porters on either side don’t notice. The patient’s head tilts back, it twists a little and suddenly, unseen by anyone, her eyes fly open. She is awake. Awake and alert and can see everything. Everything.

He puts his face in his hands and concentrates.

‘Sssh.’ His voice is soft. A whisper. As if he’s soothing a child. ‘Sssssh. It’s OK. OK now.’

Things have gone wrong, but he’s set them right. It’s all behind him. All he has to do is keep calm and trust himself.

‘Sssssssh . . .’

He sits like this a little longer.

Then, irritably, he gets up. He goes around the room slamming the refrigerator doors.

He hates this life. He hates it.

16

The next morning a low-pressure front nosed in from the Atlantic. Clouds hugged the Mendips, rain fell hard in the cities, flooded the storm drains. Traffic threw up dirty spray on the motorways. At quarry number two, almost at the end of the Elf’s Grotto quarries, no light was getting down into the water – it felt as if dusk had come early. Flea had to take the Salvo divelight down with her into the water.

‘What is it about you, Sarge?’ Wellard’s voice was loud in her ear. ‘You’ve got another audience. Traffic guys again. Even a couple of CID, I think.’

She established her jackstay line, got her heading and began to swim.

‘I think they fancy you, Sarge. Except no. Probably not you. Me. My eyes are prettier.’

‘Give the line a tug.’

‘Eh?’

‘Give the fucking line a tug.’

‘OK, OK.’ Wellard pulled the umbilical hurriedly. The line strained at her chest. ‘Clear?’

‘Clear.’

A pause. Then, ‘Bit hormonal again, are we, Sarge?’

‘Don’t talk to me. I’m concentrating.’

Thom still hadn’t called. She’d been up half the night waiting and now she was pissed off. Seriously, seriously pissed off. She was wondering how long she should leave it before she gave up. Threw him to the lions.

‘Sure you’re OK?’

‘Course I’m sure. Now be quiet and give me another bar.’

This was her first time in the water since her accident with the air line and the Health and Safety Executive would self-combust if they knew how many hours’ sleep she was doing this on. She kept thinking of the hallucination. This quarry was at the end of the horseshoe and only a quarter of a mile from number eight where she’d narked and nearly drowned. Maybe there were connecting tunnels out here. Old air shafts that were flooded now and had things moving through them.

Bollocks. All bollocks. Narcosis. She’d been narked. That was all. She’d been down at fifty metres. No one could swim at fifty metres.

‘Sure you’re OK, Sarge?’

‘Christ, Wellard.
Yes
.’

‘Nothing worrying you?’

‘No. I’m just looking forward to the pleasure of seeing who this guy is. That’s all. Pulling his body out. Now, will you shut it?’

The job had come in first thing this morning. Three hours ago, at school drop-off time, a Lexus had been carjacked from a small town in north Somerset. A nine-year-old schoolgirl, in a tunic and a grey blazer because it was a top-drawer private school, was sitting in the back. The jacker had driven her for twenty miles, talking to her all the way, before stopping in Wells and ordering her to get out on the roadside, where she’d stood, crying and shaking, for ten minutes, watching the cars go by on their way to work, until a minicab driver had thought to stop. Then the jacker had driven the car another five miles over to the Elf’s Grotto cave system where he’d run the Lexus off the road through a disused car-repair garage and straight into quarry number two.

It was a similar MO to another carjacking a year or so ago. That time the victim had been a six-year-old girl. In Flea’s opinion it was the same guy. In her opinion he wasn’t a carjacker at all but a paedophile. If the jacker today was the same person he wouldn’t be the first paedophile to make a try at acting out his fantasies, failed and committed suicide. She hoped he’d kept his windows shut and that they hadn’t smashed when he’d entered the water. She hoped he’d taken a while to die.

She got to the end of the first twenty-metre section out into the quarry and turned, wishing it was night-time. Cars were a cinch at night-time – the headlights often stayed on, even in the water, but the jacker’s lights probably hadn’t been on, in spite of the rain. The team usually looked for ‘primary indicators’ before they dived, tips as to where the car had gone in, but today there weren’t any: no oil floating on the surface or scuffmarks on the edges. Kind of strange. So they’d had to assume the Lexus had come in on the only place leading out of the car park – the slip road on the west side.

She picked up the jackstay weight – the marker they used to delineate their search pattern – and dropped it. Harder than necessary.

‘Hey, Sarge? Let’s hope it is a body you pull out.’

‘Eh?’

‘Hope it’s not someone wanting a fight with you. You know, freak air pockets ’n’ stuff.’

‘Jesus, Wellard, you been standing too near your car exhaust again? Just can it, will you?’

The team had been at the office when the call came and they had got to the quarry in under an hour and a half. But the witness who’d seen the Lexus go in didn’t have a mobile. He’d driven five miles down the road to a payphone so at least two hours had gone by. No. No chance the bastard was still alive.

She finned on, not looking over her shoulder. She didn’t think about or picture the yards and yards of dark water back there, but kept her attention focused forward to where the ground dipped away into pitch darkness. A little silt kicked up from the floor. A shape emerged from the darkness below. She realized she was looking at a boat, moss-covered and very old, something to ask the quarry company about. She checked inside. It was empty and thick with weed. Maybe they’d left it as a dive attraction. She put her hand on it and used it to pull herself along, following the compass.

She stopped just a few feet past the boat, sculling lightly to keep her position, peering into the gloom. Something was down there, about three metres below, nestling between the few plants and tree branches at the bottom of the quarry. The silt whirled, cleared.

Something cold went through her – the way water sometimes flushed through a wetsuit. She thought she knew what she was looking at. She kicked her legs up behind her, and swam slowly down. The object was stuck between two boulders. She trained the Salvo on it. Examined it. ‘Wellard? Do we know if the Lexus family – did they have a—’

She stopped. No. This couldn’t have been thrown free of the car today. It was decomposing – you could tell that from the fine mist of pollutants floating in a miasma around it. It had been in here for longer than a couple of hours.

‘Did they have a what, Sarge?’

‘Nothing. Just give me a moment here.’

She put her hands under it and lifted it, and then, when she saw what it looked like underneath, she knew it hadn’t come here by accident.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Send down a body-bag.’

‘Have you got the target?’

‘No.’ She released the object, letting it fall back. A moment’s nausea came and went. The cloud of decomposing matter swarmed around her. ‘No. But have a word with the CSI guys, will you? Tell them it’s a bit off-message. Tell them I haven’t got the target, but I still want a body-bag down here. Actually, Wellard, make it two.’

17

A long time had elapsed, too long for the carjacker to have survived, but the ambulance and fire crews had turfed out anyway. They loitered half-heartedly on the quarry edge, peering into the water and watching the various police units come in. As the CSI team took videos and the dive team worked, one by one the emergency services gave up the vigil, trundling off to other calls. The last were going as Sergeant Marley was coming out with the body-bags.

Caffery sat in the heavy afternoon light, car window wound down, and watched the men on the pontoon take the bags from her, disentangle her from the umbilical, and throw an aluminium heat blanket over her. They washed her down and helped peel her out of her drysuit. When the CSI team had gone and she was alone – sitting on the tail plate of the unit van, he approached with a cup of coffee he’d finagled out of the fire crew earlier.

Her face was patchy and swollen and her nose was running. She looked at the coffee dully.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Smile now and you’ve got it over and done with. For the whole day.’

She looked him up and down. ‘So they’ve sent MCIU out. I’m glad. Even if he’s not in there I’m glad you’re taking an interest this time. I always knew he was going to do it again, the jacker.’

‘The unit didn’t send me.’ Caffery sat down on the tail plate close to her and handed her the coffee. ‘It’s me. I wanted to speak to you.’

‘Yeah?’ She didn’t sound interested. ‘About what?’

‘Free-diving. Ever heard of it?’

‘Competitive apnoea. I’ve heard of it.’

‘What do you know about it?’

‘I know it’s the fastest way to kill yourself. That or jumping off Clifton Suspension Bridge. It’s a toss-up which is most effective. Why? Been a bit depressed lately?’