Skin (13 page)

He wasn’t going to chase her. He was going to chase the CSI guys. He wanted to know more about that dog.

20

Beatrice Foxton lived near Glastonbury Tor, down in the lowland, which only three hundred years ago had been a vast, marshy sea. Caffery met her and her dogs in a field near the house and they stood together in the wet grass, Beatrice smoking cigarettes and throwing sticks for the dogs. It was kind of reassuring to see a woman who cut dead people open for a living smoking. It made him wonder why he was breaking his neck trying to give up.

‘Thank you for coming out.’

‘That’s OK. The dogs needed the walk.’

She had two, a tall sleek setter and a slow, good-natured German shepherd. They wheeled and circled and hunkered in the grass, waiting for a stick. ‘She’s getting on a bit, the shepherd. She’s ex-job, but she had a bad time of it one year at Pilton and they retired her.’

‘Pilton’ was the locals’ name for the Glastonbury Festival. Every year in June a summer city sprang up in the dry valley at the head of the Whitelake river east of the tor. Rainbow tents spread across the hills, flags on medieval castles fluttered in the wind, people came and lived there for four days. They ate and drank, shat and slept, they danced and stole from each other, loved and sang. Some even died there.

‘One of the crusties who hang around after the festival – the ones who get paid to clean the site out? You know, ship all the abandoned tents off to Oxfam? Well, one of them, some charming Geordie, I believe, deduced it’d be easier to find any drugs left on the site with a drugs dog so he broke into a police van and took her. Trailed her round the site for two days on a rope and when she didn’t find anything he laid into her and broke both her back legs.’

‘Christ.’

‘Apparently it took two people to pull him off. Hadn’t bothered to check if she
was
a drugs dog. As it happens she was a GP. A general-purpose dog. Totally different thing, different training altogether. Course she couldn’t work any more, not after that. She’s still a beautiful dog, though. Hips holding up too.’

‘You like animals.’

‘Prefer them to people.’

‘A lot of pathologists feel like that.’

‘Yeah, well, we tend to live at the sharp end of what humans are capable of.’

The setter came and dropped the stick at Caffery’s feet. He picked it up and scratched the dog’s head, feeling the silky skin move over hard bone.

‘Here’s one for you, then. Lucy Mahoney.’

‘What about her?’

‘They’ve just found her dog.’ He threw the stick. The setter bounded away, tail leaving scars in the air. ‘It had been mutilated. Skinned. Slung into a quarry.’

Beatrice was silent for a moment. Then she threw the cigarette into the grass. ‘Just when you think you know how low people can go. What sort of dog was it?’

‘A spaniel.’

‘Gentle dogs.’ Her face was bitter. ‘Very gentle.’

‘I came to Lucy Mahoney’s post-mortem because I’m working on another suicide. A boy over at the Elf’s Grotto quarries.’

‘
Now
he comes clean about why he invaded my mortuary yesterday.’

‘This lad had been messed with after he died. Someone had cut his hair, which chimed with the job I was interested in. His body wasn’t a million miles from where Lucy Mahoney was found. I was hoping for similarities yesterday at the hospital, hoping to see her hair had been cut, but that drew a blank. Fair enough – except up pops this effing dog of hers. So what I want to ask you is this: were you a hundred per cent that no one got to her after she died? You’re sure everything was as it was supposed to be? No misgivings?’

Beatrice picked up the shepherd’s stick and slung it. It whirled into the air, throwing out drops of saliva and dew. She watched the dog for a while, then lit another cigarette. ‘I hope you’ve read my report before we talk about this, Jack. I find it irritating to have a long conversation about a job when my report hasn’t been read.’

‘I’ve read it. Cover to cover.’

‘You’re lying. You haven’t even seen it. I only emailed it to F District this morning.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll let it go. Since it’s you. And since you look rather nice when you take off your jacket.’ She took a lungful of smoke, put her head back and blew it out in a straight line. ‘There were a couple of little things. A couple of things felt a bit sticky. Taken in context they don’t add up to much.’ The setter came back with the stick, tongue lolling. Beatrice took it from him and threw it again. ‘There weren’t any experimental cuts on her wrists. The majority of suicides I see start off small – they need to decide what hurts, whether they can bear it or not. She hadn’t done that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Christ knows. You can’t infer anything from it, not taken in isolation. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule.’

Caffery stared at her. She hadn’t mentioned this before. It was the last thing he’d expected. ‘You’re talking about how she died? You mean you’re not a hundred per cent it was suicide?’

‘The toxicology makes interesting reading.’

‘Benzos?’

‘They’re the obvious choice because there was a bottle of temazepam next to the body. The knife killed her, but when I ladled out her stomach there were seven or eight partially dissolved temazepam tablets. Nothing odd there. People will quite often use both methods. First they get trolleyed on booze and pills until they’re numb enough, then do the cutting to make doubly sure everything goes to plan. But I found myself standing there, looking at the stomach contents, looking at the pill bottle, and I’m thinking, Why? Why didn’t she take them all?’

‘There were some left in the bottle?’

‘About five. Why didn’t she take those?’ Beatrice smiled, took another drag on the cigarette. ‘See, just so happens, Jack, that you’re not the only detective in town. It just so happens that Mrs Foxton herself is no slouch. Because I looked at the pills in her stomach and I speculated about them. I speculated that those seven or eight pills might not have been for Lucy at all. That they may actually have been for me.’

‘For you?’

‘A red herring – a false trail. I said to myself, Mrs Foxton, if this young lady on your table didn’t take her own life then what did happen? Might you speculate, perhaps, that mystery Person A slipped this young lady a Mickey Finn? In her drink, maybe? He wouldn’t be able to slip her temazepam like that because it wouldn’t dissolve properly – she’d notice the powder in the bottom of her glass. It would need to be something colourless, tasteless, a street drug, perhaps, because anything on prescription is loaded with Bitrex – you can taste it a mile away. Then when she’s good and under, when she’s like jelly, mystery Person A could give her a few pills. Pathologist B would find them in her stomach, jump to conclusions, and only test for that breed of benzodiazepines.’

‘You’d need to retest.’

‘I’m ahead of you. I asked Chepstow to dip for all the street drugs: Rohypnol, GHB, ketamine, clonazepam and Xanax, pretty much everything I could think of. There’s a nice little invoice winging its way to F District. I’ve had several long and rewarding fantasies picturing that miserable git of a DI’s face when it lands in his in-tray.’

‘What came up?’

She gave him a grim smile. ‘That’s where it falls down. They all came up negative. Meanwhile the temazepam level was sky high and much, much higher than we’d expect from what she had in her stomach. The only explanation is that those seven in her stomach were the second dose. The first was earlier and had had time to dissolve. So they registered in her bloodstream but were already gone from her stomach.’

Caffery watched the shepherd trying to keep up with the setter and failing. Clement Chipeta may have had the opportunity to kill Lucy, but he wasn’t sophisticated enough to have done it like this. And the monster – the Tokoloshe? If he existed, this didn’t have his stamp on it either. Neither of them was in a position to convince a healthy, well-adjusted white woman to swallow drugs. ‘There were no signs of violence? No signs she’d been forced to swallow anything?’

‘Of course not. Do you think I’d’ve missed that?’

‘Then how did he do it?’

‘Do you want my SWAG?’

‘Your what?’

‘My Scientific Wild Ass Guess?’

‘Go on.’

‘He didn’t coerce her. He didn’t force her. Because none of this happened. Because we’ve gone into Fantasy Land, Jack, let our imaginations go walkabout. There was no mystery Person A. No clever plan. Lucy Mahoney decided to kill herself. She printed a suicide note. Signed it. Took something in the region of ten temazepam, got into the car and drove to the quarry with her dog on the back seat, a bottle of brandy and a Stanley knife in the front. Parked, let the dog out because he’d get more chance there than locked in the house. By now she’s worried the temazepam hasn’t taken effect so she takes some more – the ones I eventually find in her stomach. She walks – staggers, probably, poor thing – the last half-mile to the railway line, sits down and, though I’m surprised at this point she can hold her head up, she finishes the job.’

‘A suicide, then.’

‘A suicide. And I’m not going to change my judgement because of a feeling. There’s no theft, no sexual assault, as far as we could tell – this is just me bringing my suspicious London mind to the gentle folk of the west. If you want to link it to your other suicide – your lad at the quarry – then, please, give it your best. But the two bodies were found a long way apart. They don’t have anything much to link them.’

‘Except the dog. My target had a history of dealing with body parts. Did you hear about Operation Norway earlier this week? That’s why I think he needed the hair from my suicide at the quarry.’

‘Hair is one thing – sounds like what Norway was all about. But a dog? A dog’s different.’

Caffery didn’t answer for a moment. She was right, of course. It
was
different and it
did
feel a bit out of step, that pathetic animal carcass at the bottom of the quarry. If Clement Chipeta or the Tokoloshe had done it, why had they left the skin with the body? The vet they’d taken the dog to had said that, apart from the removed pelt, there was nothing missing from its corpse – no part that could be used for
muti
.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘assuming there isn’t someone
else
out there sick enough to skin a dog—’

‘There are plenty of those, believe me. Little ASBO kids from the Southmead estate, find a spaniel wandering around lost, they’d be capable of something like that.’

‘Assuming it’s my target who did it, it gives me a serious pain in the butt. I’ve got to square these two different MOs. Hair removed from the first suicide, and a dog mutilated in the second.’ He shrugged. ‘Dunno. It’s all over the place.’

The dogs brought the sticks back, dropped them and sat like bookends eyeing Beatrice, waiting for her to throw again. The setter had white flecks of saliva on its muzzle.

‘Well, Jack Caffery,’ Beatrice ignored the sticks, ‘if you’re not going to seduce me, or try a Lady Chatterley with me up against a tree-trunk, I suppose I’ll take my best friends and go home.’

He watched her walk to the car, throw down blankets and whistle to the dogs. When she’d slammed the back door he called to her. ‘Beatrice?’

‘What?’

‘I wish you were serious. I really do. About the Lady Chat stuff.’

She gave a small laugh. The wind blew her grey hair across her face. ‘I wish I was too. I wish to God I had the energy to mean it.’ She dropped the cigarette and ground it under her sneaker. ‘I’ll speak to the DI, Jack. I’ll tell him I had misgivings about the way Lucy died. But it’s verbal. I’m not rewriting my report. I’m not reversing any decisions.’

Caffery watched her drive away, then looked down at the cigarette butts she’d left. He thought again how great it was to stand in the open air and smoke with someone at your shoulder. He’d like someone at his shoulder for the next part. The part where he had to find out what the Tokoloshe had wanted with a dog. And why, having gone to the trouble of flaying the animal, he hadn’t taken away the skin.

21

Ian Mallows had survived the Operation Norway attacks. Or, rather, most of him had. He’d been in intensive care for five nights, but now he was out. They’d put him in a private room, not on the ward, because whatever the staff told him he couldn’t stop himself yelling at the other patients, telling them to
stop fucking staring at me
. They couldn’t stop staring, of course. Who could, under the circumstances?

When Caffery arrived Mallows was quiet. He was lying on his side facing the door. Fast asleep. The sheet was pulled up to his neck, and the TV on the wall played silently.

Caffery closed the door quietly and placed the chair next to the bed. Put the two hundred Bensons he was carrying on the floor, took off his jacket, draped it on the back of the chair, and settled down to wait, eyes on the TV, hands linked on his lap. His thumbs made loops one over the other.

‘Yeah? What is it? What d’you want?’

Caffery looked up. Mallows hadn’t moved. His eyes were still closed, but his mouth was open, a bit of wet red in there. His hair, which he’d kept shaved, was coming back in a blue-black shadow. Over his left ear was a spider-web tattoo, its lines thick and blurry. A sewing needle job done in the slammer. Mallows definitely paddled in the shallow end of the gene pool, Caffery thought – he was never destined to make it in this life. Even without the injuries he’d sustained on Norway. Those were still hidden under the sheets.