Skin (38 page)

He fumbled down his torso. The radio was gone. No phone either. No phone, no ASP, no wallet, no CS gas, no Swiss Army knife, no quick-cuffs. All that was left him was his watch. He squinted at it in the gloom. Two thirty p.m. He’d been out for three hours. With his erratic appearances at the office probably no one would even wonder where he was until the end of the day.

His head stopped spinning and the blurred light began to take form and perspective. He tried to listen to what was happening outside. At first he couldn’t pick up anything, just silence and the echo of his own breathing. Then he heard a bird singing and the distant grumble of a tractor. He sniffed again. A pungent, old scent, almost sweet above the tang of blood and his sweat.

And then he knew where he was.

He was in Gerber’s cesspit.

Wincing, he raised himself on to his elbows and squinted around. The pit was empty and probably hadn’t been used for years, but the evidence of its function was still here. He could smell it. The hazy light above him was daylight filtering through the cracks in the access cover – a ladder ran up the side of the wall to it. To its right was a large pipe hung at right angles to the ceiling, the baffles to carry the waste up to the sandbank drainfield. At head height a yellowish layer of grease about a foot deep coated the walls. Caffery lay for a few minutes, ignoring his thumping head, eyeing the cover the way he’d eye up an opponent.

He counted to three, then pushed himself up on to his good leg. Shakily, not putting weight on his right foot, he limped to the ladder and climbed up a few steps. He looped the good leg into the ladder rung, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and, gritting his teeth, reached up and jammed both hands against the manhole cover. It made a small creaking noise. And stopped. He gave it another shove. Rigid. Another. Nothing.

He clung to the ladder, breathing hard. Most inspection-chamber covers like this rusted up and needed a sledgehammer to open them, but this was the only way into the cesspit. It was the only way Gerber could have got him down here so it must have been opened recently. He ran his hands around it, trying to work out the secret. He found a lump – a triangular piece of metal, the apex of the triangle at the dead centre of the lock. This was the sort of cover that locked with a slip bolt. Ordinarily the mechanism would be underneath, but Gerber had inverted the cover and locked it from above. The bastard. There was no way anyone down here could release the lock without tools.

He disentangled his leg, came down the ladder and felt around underfoot. The floor was an uneven mix of unfinished sharpstone and ballast, covered with a hardened layer of grease and toilet paper. Moss and a few weeds were growing in it, making it smooth to the touch. He let his fingers skim the surface and found a couple of rusting old bolts, a food wrapper of some sort, blown in here maybe when the pit was decommissioned. And a long slim tube. Hard plastic or Perspex. It was wider than a needle but slimmer than a rose stem.

A Perspex tube?

He found another one. And another. They were gathered in the place he’d been lying. Clinking together like wind chimes. He sat down and held his wrist canted over so the dim fluorescent green of his watch face illuminated them. The ends were dark and sticky with blood. He turned them over and over, trying to guess their function. The blood was fresh. Still tacky. His blood. Had to be. But why?

He rested the tubes against the wall in the corner, where he’d be able to find them again, stood and gave the baffle pipe at the edge of the pit a sharp thump with the heel of his hand. There was a faint sound of rust flakes falling to the floor, a creak of old metal, but the pipe was solid. It had been set into the mortar of the bricks and nothing short of a sledgehammer would move it. He turned to the ladder and tugged at that. Again, solid. It was designed to hold the weight of a man and there was no way he’d be able to pull it off. He gave in to a moment’s anger and booted it. Something soft gave in the back of his leg. He felt the wound reopen, begin to leak.

He bent over and locked his hand around his calf. The pain was so bad his teeth felt metallic, but he kept his head up and back. Couldn’t afford to faint.

When he’d got hold of himself he examined his leg. He took his hand away, and as he did, a strip of flesh about the width of a piece of tape flopped from the top of his calf almost to his ankle. It was still attached at the bottom where it hung like a piece of stripped bark, twisted inside out so the fleshy underneath was open to the air. Bits of brick dust, wood and things he didn’t want to give much thought to clung to the flesh. Blood came out new and warm, soaking into his socks.

He tore off a strip of trouser leg and used his teeth to rip it in half. Clumsily he pressed the strip of flesh back into the wound hole, smoothing it into place. The debris would have to be cleaned out later. For now it was enough to stop the bleeding. He wrapped the trouser material around his calf, laying his leg back hard on the floor to get the pressure, and, wincing at the pain, tied the material against his shinbone. The blood pumped on for a few seconds, trickling through his fingers. Then it slowed until it was just running out of the edges of the wound.

He thought of the spots on Gerber’s tunic. Lucy and Susan would have bled a lot. He wondered what their last thoughts had been. He recalled their wrists. The way Gerber had sliced them. Up and down. Not left to right.

And then he got it. He let out all his breath and slumped back against the wall. He’d just figured out what the Perspex tubes were. And it wasn’t good. Not good at all.

It meant Gerber would be back before long.

63

Flea’s team were trained in MOE – method-of-entry techniques. A smart name for the time-honoured skill of kicking in doors, except that when the police did it, it was with specialist equipment and the blessing of the law. The unit went back each year for a day’s requalification training. The last session had been only a month ago and Flea knew that the forced-entry tool-bag – which Wellard called the Bag of Bollocks – was still to hand in the office.

She drove back fast, using roads the traffic units didn’t bother with, grabbed the bag and the heavy cylinder of the thermal lance the team used to cut through metal, put them both in the car and headed back towards Farleigh Park Hall. She didn’t have very long.

She was pissed off with herself. It was brainless to have dealt directly with Ruth Lindermilk. She shouldn’t have tinkered around. She should have treated her like an object, should have got in there, taken the first opportunity she had, kicked the door down and grabbed the photo of Thom. Time had just been slipping out of her hands. And all the time Misty had been decomposing.

She parked further up the road, careful not to go anywhere near the body-recovery scene. There might still be police there. Hiking the bag on her shoulder, she headed up through the undergrowth.

As always the hamlet was hushed – deserted. It was only the one or two cars parked down the lane that told her anyone was at home. Someone somewhere was watching sport – she could hear crowds cheering as she passed a window. At the bungalow she took a moment to go to the top of the garden and peer out over the wall, just to satisfy herself that no one was watching, then went to the back of the house and set to work.

First she tried all the doors and windows: no point pulling out the heavy artillery if Ruth had simply left a door unlocked. Everything was tightly closed, about what you’d expect with Ruth’s paranoia. The bungalow had quarter-lights in the lower windows, which were small and easy to break. She went to the kitchen ones and studied them. If she remembered rightly the sink and the dishwasher were under them. She recalled a butler sink. Solid. It would hold her weight.

She pulled on gloves and fumbled in the bag, past all the big equipment, for the smallest in the arsenal of tools: the tiny spring-loaded centre punch. They called it the Glasgow key. It took no effort at all, and now she gave just the smallest of taps against the pane. A sharp
crack
and a spider-web break zigged out into the float glass. It was the tiniest sound, but even so she held her breath and checked over her shoulder. The garden stood motionless – not a breath of air, not a sound of wildlife moving, only the distant hum of the television in the still air.

Tongue between her teeth she pulled out the pieces of glass, cleaning off the edges with a cloth. The last thing she needed was blood, forensic evidence that would link her to this break-in. When it was clean she pulled her sweatshirt sleeve all the way down over her hand and pushed her arm inside, feeling for the latch. She found it, tugged at it. It was locked, so, groping around, she found the other. That was locked too, with no key in it. She stood back, swearing to herself. It’d have to be the little wrecking bar, then. This time it worked like a dream. It fitted perfectly under the locks. The first came out after two or three wrenches and the second with no effort at all, splinters scattering everywhere.

Very carefully she opened the window and lifted the bag of tools through it. The curtains were closed as usual and when she peeped through there were no lights on, only the illumination of the green light on the boiler and the little pilot flame flickering blue. She could smell cats and food, lasagne or something – maybe what Ruth had eaten last night. Did she know, as she put the food into the microwave, that it was the last thing she’d ever eat in her life? It didn’t feel right, this suicide. Not at all right. Yesterday on the phone Ruth had sounded fine. Happy, even.

Not now. Don’t think about it now. She pulled her sleeves back and hoisted herself up into the window, arms trembling. Even though she worked at it – going into the office gym and doing high-weight, low-rep lifting whenever she found a spare moment – she didn’t really have the upper-body strength for her job at the best of times. And recently, with no time for the gym and not enough food, it had got worse. She had to fight now just to lift her own weight up into the kitchen.

She fell inside, into the half-gloom, knocking over a bottle of washing-up liquid, landing among the dirty crockery in the sink – something smashing as she went. She dropped down on to the kitchen floor and found that her trousers were soaked. Water dripped on to the earth on her shoes, clinging to the tiles and leaving a perfect print. She scuffed it with her heel. Cleaned off the worst of the mud with a kitchen towel. In the cupboard under the sink she found plastic freezer bags – should have thought of this before – and pulled two on over her trainers.

The living room was ghostly. Just the light from the broken kitchen window behind her filtered through on to Ruth’s possessions, the books and photos, the piles of paperwork and the empty glasses. A large glass of Coke was on an occasional table, an opened bottle of champagne next to it. Cats’ eyes blinked in every corner.

She went to the bureau where Ruth had put the photo and tested the drawer. Still locked – no key. She gave the rest of the bureau a cursory search for the key, checking inside a small papier-mâché cup, fingering her way through a desk tidy full of paper clips. She dropped some in her hurry, leaving them where they fell – it didn’t matter. There was no concealing there’d been a break-in.

She found the small pry bar in the bag and inserted the head into the gap in the drawer. From the wall Ruth Lindermilk and her son stared down impassively at her. Someone says, ‘I’ll take a photo,’ and you let them, she thought. You let them whether you want it or not, and before you know it that moment – that unthought-out, unplanned and out-of-control moment – is all you have left to mark a life. And then you’re dead.

She turned away from the photos and jemmied the lock in one hit. It caved with a loud splintering. She let the jemmy clatter down and wrenched open the drawer.

It was empty.

She stood there for a moment, staring stupidly at it.

‘Shit, Ruth.
Shit
.’

The cats shrank away, cowering nervously behind chairs and sofas. She slammed the drawer on to the floor and stood in the middle of the room, her hands out, staring at the rows and rows of books. If Ruth hadn’t left the photo in the drawer, where
had
she left it?

‘Come on, Ruth. What the hell did you do with it? What were you thinking?’

She turned. Ruth had got the photos from here – she remembered her taking them from the computer table. She opened the top drawer, pulling things out, rummaging through the contents. All that was in here was magazine cuttings and old clothes brochures. She pushed aside the sofa, swept a whole shelf of haphazardly piled chick-lit and romance stories off the bookshelves on to the floor and squatted next to the pile, scrabbling through the books, shaking the big ones, throwing them aside. She moved on to the next shelf, scattering everything. Within five minutes all the bookcases were clear and she was standing calf deep in books.

No photo.

She widened the search, going fast. The house was small – the only thing she found on the ground floor was a tea chest filled with framed photographs: wedding shots of Mr and Mrs Lindermilk, black-and-white shots of a baby. Not the photo she was looking for. She went up the stairs two at a time, hauling herself along on the banister to the small landing. There was a chest pushed up against the wall. She threw it open and pulled out everything inside: clothes, hats scarves. Nothing. Sweating now, she went into each bedroom and rummaged through divan drawers, under pillows, even in the pockets of coats hanging in wardrobes. She had got to the fourth one – had just emptied four shopping bags out on to the bed – when it caught her eye.