Skin (24 page)

Caffery sat back in his seat and watched him. He thought again about his mother, wondering what she looked like now, wondering if she was in pain, if now the pain was physical, from joints getting tired of rubbing together, from muscles aching with hard work, or if there was still pain from losing Ewan. He wondered if time had changed the pain – mutated or softened it. ‘Colin? You left her. Why’s this difficult for you?’

‘Does it matter
why
?’

‘I’m trying to pull with you, mate, not against. Did she have a boyfriend?’

Mahoney rubbed his eyes and put down the menu. ‘You should know the answer to that. It’ll be in those statements her friends made.’

‘I want to hear it from you.’

‘Yes. She had a boyfriend. OK?’

‘A name?’

‘No. And her friends didn’t give you one. They don’t know either, do they?’

‘Weird . . . that she didn’t tell her friends her boyfriend’s name.’

‘Not that weird. She was the most private person I knew. And she was protecting him. He was married.’

‘Well,
that
’s interesting.’

‘Not really. They were sort of . . . lukewarm together. She liked him but there was nothing serious. Oh, don’t worry, I’ve thought about it, whether or not he had something to do with her . . . You know.’

‘And?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Doesn’t seem right. She didn’t feel threatened by him.’

‘He’s still interesting to me.’

‘I can think of something that’s more interesting.’

Caffery raised an eyebrow.

‘The money.’

‘The
money
?’ Caffery sat forward. ‘Well, you’ve got me by the goolies with
that
. Go on.’

Mahoney didn’t smile. ‘When we split up I gave Lucy some money, not a lot, just enough for a deposit on the house and a bit extra. She used to work for a company in Filton that made Christmas decorations. Designed bits and pieces for them, worked in the office, that sort of thing. But one day she announced she was giving it up. I didn’t give it much thought at the time but, with hindsight, her lifestyle didn’t change even when she stopped working. She still went shopping every weekend and came home loaded with things – oddments, paperweights. A proper pack rat. Well, you saw her house.’

‘A loan, maybe?’

‘Against what? Property prices didn’t go up much in that area and she had a ninety per cent mortgage anyway. But she went on four holidays last year.’

‘Did he pay for them? The boyfriend?’

‘No. He didn’t contribute, and that’s from the horse’s mouth. His wife would find out if he did. And he didn’t go abroad with Lucy. She was either on her own – I should know, I took her to the airport – or with Daisy. And then . . .’ Mahoney reached into his inside pocket and took out a folded piece of paper, pushed it across the table ‘. . . there’s this. In the post this morning.’

Caffery opened it. It was property particulars from an estate agent: a stone cottage with white-painted windows and a clematis climbing over the doorway. ‘Everything but the white picket fence.’

‘Look at the price on it,’ Mahoney said.

‘Six hundred K.’

‘The maisonette is worth almost two hundred now. But there was a hundred-and-forty-thousand-pound mortgage on it.’

Caffery turned the letter over to look at the back. Nothing.

‘Goland and Bulley.’ Mahoney nodded towards the window. ‘That’s them. Other side of the road. What do you think?’

‘I think . . .’ Caffery put down the letter and signalled for the waitress ‘. . . I think we’ll take those sandwiches to go.’

36

The girl in the estate agent’s was a bit like Keelie. Or, rather, a bit the way Keelie might have looked if she hadn’t, at some point in her teenage years, stumbled on the delights of crack cocaine. This girl had powerful swimmer’s shoulders and her body seemed too tanned and muscular for the navy suit she’d squeezed it into.

‘Mrs Mahoney?’ She typed in the reference number from the letter. ‘Obviously I can’t tell you very much about our correspondence. It’s confidential. But I can tell you whether she’s a client.’

Caffery put his warrant card on the table.

She peered at it. ‘Police?’

‘Police.’

A nervous laugh. And then, in the knee-jerk way honest people often did, suddenly she was spilling out facts like water. ‘Yes, well, I
do
remember her, of course. She was wanting something in the region of, uh, five to eight hundred. There’s a property to sell – we’re due to value it on, um . . .’ she searched the screen ‘. . . tomorrow.’

‘You may as well cancel that.’

‘I see.’

Caffery was sure she didn’t. Didn’t see at all.

‘Well, if I . . .’ She turned the computer screen to face him. ‘Is there anything here that could help you?’

The two men leant closer. The screen was filled with email correspondence. Nothing out of the ordinary: Lucy’s requests for information on property. The agent’s replies.

‘What’s the date on that one?’

‘Last Sunday.’

It was the day Lucy had gone missing. She’d been arranging house viewings on the day she was planning to kill herself?

‘Are we the first to visit? No other calls from the police about Ms Mahoney?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘They wouldn’t have come here,’ Mahoney’s voice was subdued, ‘because none of these were in her mailbox. I should know. I spent hours going through her emails. She must have deleted them.’

Caffery didn’t answer. He was thinking about the search history on Lucy’s computer.
Hollyoaks
. Pot Plants. Body Toning. Now he thought about it, those searches had never fitted with his impression of Lucy. They sounded more like the sort you’d invent for a woman you didn’t know much about. To disguise the fact that the cache had been emptied.

And then it came to him. An idea, hard and complete, the way ideas often did. The suicide note Lucy had been found with hadn’t been handwritten. It had come from a computer. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to wonder why it wasn’t on her computer at home.

‘Come on.’ Caffery pushed back his chair and got to his feet. ‘Let’s have another look at Lucy’s computer.’

37

Mandy called Flea at midday on the dot. She and Thom had had a long talk. They were calmer now. They’d meet her in Keynsham tonight after work to discuss the ‘way forward’.

‘Where are you now?’ she wanted to know. ‘You sound distant.’

‘I’m outside the district-council offices.’

‘Where?’

‘Trowbridge.’

‘What are you doing there?’

‘Something important. Someone we need to think about. I’ll explain later.’

It didn’t take Flea long to find the department she wanted: down a prefab corridor with dirty windows and a fireproof carpet underfoot. The head of the department was harried, careless: he didn’t namby around asking for warrants – a flash of her card was enough as he took her down to the desk where he thought Ruth Lindermilk’s correspondence would be held.

The clerk dealing with it was a bubbly blonde, in her fifties with an out-of-season lamp tan and lots of gold jewellery, busily working her way through letters that overflowed from three plastic letter trays. ‘We call this CYA corner,’ she told Flea. ‘I work on CYA corner – great, isn’t it?’

‘CYA?’

‘Cover Your Arse. I get all the stuff the other departments want to put in the bin. You know, old ladies complaining the local post office is closing and how the council really wants to deal with the UFOs over Salisbury Plain.’ She indicated a pile. ‘I’ve sent answers to these already. Don’t expect to hear back but I’ve got to file them, keep them for a while just in case.’ She pulled one of the baskets towards her. ‘You said this letter was sent last week?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘And the name?’

‘Ruth Lindermilk.’

A small smile twitched at the corner of the secretary’s mouth. ‘Lindermilk?’

‘Yes?’

‘I know that name. It’s distinctive.’ She took two stacks of letters in rubber bands and put them to one side. She flicked through the next pile and came up very quickly with a letter on council headed paper, stapled to a piece of flowered notepaper. ‘This covering one is the reply we send them all. Just standard, you know, “we’re dealing with your complaint”. Yacketyyackety.’ She folded the reply letter to the back, ironing it flat with her palms, and scanned the notepaper underneath. ‘Yes, this is her. Ruth the snitch, I call her, because she’s always trying to get these motorists into trouble.’ She passed Flea the letter. ‘Obsessed with wildlife – feeds the hedgehogs and the badgers, and if someone hits so much as a wood louse on the road Ruth the snitch is on to it. Thinks we should be doing something about every frog, mouse and worm that gets squished.’

Flea took the letter and sat on the low plastic bucket chair. The letter was handwritten, bordered with roses and sparrows. It was dated 18 May. The morning after Misty was killed.

To whom it may concern.

Since my last communication to you of 3 January I haven’t heard hide nor hair from you and I’ve now got four more incidents to report. It seems to me like absolutely nothing is being done. One of these last night is a really serious incident where a deer got hit. You will ignore me at your peril.

As I’ve said on numerous times, I am of the opinion that all of these drivers should be brought in and really hit where it hurts. If these were human casualties you would of solved them no doubt a long time ago. They would be called hit-and-run and the police would be involved. I’ve got evidence I can produce in court if you can get it that far.

Once again, I call for you to chase these wrongdoers and hit them where it hurts. IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE ANOTHER OF MY CATS IS KILLED. This worry is causing me sleepless nights and has shortened my life. You can be sued for that too.

Ruth Lindermilk

The secretary had got up from her seat and was bending over a filing cabinet, pulling out sheets of paper from a low drawer. Flea watched her, seeing her but not really seeing her. May 17. Ten past eleven. A silver Ford Focus with the last letters GBR. A ‘deer’ hit on the road at the bottom of the hamlet.

‘Here are the others.’ The secretary came back to the desk and dumped the letters next to the piles from the in-tray. ‘These are all from Ruth Lindermilk.’

Flea pushed them around with her fingers, looking at dates going back to 2001. They were written in the same feverish hand, tabulated with the same columns in which Ruth had carefully entered dates, times, licence plates.

‘Been sending us letters for years. She’s obsessive.’ Flea stacked the old letters up and pushed them towards the secretary. ‘You’re right. She’s mad as a box of frogs. Obviously.’

The secretary took them back to the filing cabinet and dropped them into their slots. Flea folded Ruth’s May letter and slid it into the back pocket of her jeans before the secretary noticed. From the in-tray piles on the desk, she pulled out another letter at random and folded the council’s reply back over it, to conceal that it wasn’t Ruth’s letter. She held this letter up and got the woman’s attention.

‘Thank you for this.’ She pushed it carefully back to the bottom of the pile, where it would take the secretary a few days to deal with. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

38