Skin (7 page)

It was hard and cold and lonely to think of a woman’s life reduced to this: a smell other people struggled to wash away. There had been days, especially when she’d first started in the unit, when every dead body she handled took something vital out of her. But she’d grown more pragmatic over the years and today she put the thought of Lucy Mahoney away easily and drove with the window open, the countryside flying past. The phone sat in the central console. Caffery’s mobile number was in its contacts list. She could call him any time. She could just pick up the phone and call.

By the time she got home to the house she’d grown up in, high on a hill overlooking the distant city of Bath, she was hungry. A long time had rolled past since breakfast. She parked on the gravel and climbed out, automatically going to the back to put her kit holdall in the boot for the next morning. But as she aimed the key at the lock she remembered: the boot was stuck. It had been like this for four days, ever since Thom had borrowed the car the night he had come home drunk. The lock made an odd little electronic bleep and seemed to click open, but when she tried to lift it, it jammed. She put the key in and turned it. Again it clicked. And again she couldn’t open it.

Swearing now, she dropped the holdall in the gravel, squatted at eye level to the lock and saw what was jamming it. A piece of material was trapped in the latch. She gave it a tug, thinking somehow she’d shut her overalls in it, but the fabric was wrong: it was soft, velvety, not slick. She tipped back on her haunches, puzzled. Running her fingers over it, she tried to remember what she’d put in here. And then she noticed something that made everything go into slow motion.

The smell.

She stared at the lock. Sniffed the air. Now she thought about it, the car had smelt this morning on her way to work. Yesterday too. Maybe the stench in the offices hadn’t been the team’s fault at all. Maybe they’d cleaned the equipment properly. Her car had been parked near the air-conditioning unit. This smell could have been sucked into the building from the boot.

Four nights ago Thom had taken the car to a meeting.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, she thought. Thom? You were upset that night. Too upset. Was it really just the drinking and the police car you trailed in with you?

She straightened. Stepped away from the car. Scanned the garden, the driveway. Her parents’ house was on a remote hillside, but there were neighbours, the Oscars, who often watched her from their windows high above the driveway. There was no one at them today, though. Lucky. Head down, she went to the garage door and threw it open. Then she went back to the car and swung herself into the driver’s seat. Inside, the smell came back at her. How the hell had she missed it all this time?

She spun the car round under the huge wall of the Oscars’ house and reversed into the garage, spraying gravel everywhere. The garage was a triple one, but even when her parents had been alive no one had ever parked in it. Instead the walls were lined with the family’s detritus: old lawnmowers, a Victorian cast-iron bath, rusting shears, a freezer, a rolled-up tent and some of her father’s old diving cylinders propped in a row in the corner. There was just enough space to squeeze in the Focus. Its exhaust filled the place, poisoned the air.

She killed the engine, got out and slammed down the garage door, then slid across the interior bolts – rusty because no one had ever used them. Among a pile of tools near the door was a jemmy. She took it to the car and inserted it carefully under the lock, then paused, half of her not wanting to know. Taking a deep breath through her mouth she leant on the handle. The lid flew open with a rush of stinking air. Inside was a bloated corpse.

‘Shit.’ She slammed the lid shut and took a step back. Dropped the jemmy with a clatter. ‘
Shit
.’ She put her hands into the air and stared at the boot, breathing hard. What the
hell
had Thom done?

She clenched her fists. Unclenched them. She grabbed the jemmy from the floor and popped the boot again, keeping well back when it opened.

It was a woman. She lay on her side with her left arm squashed under her, the right elbow over her face at an unnatural angle. She was dressed in a purple velvet coat, a neon-green dress belted at the waist. The four days of being cooked and simmered by the sun on the car had made her limbs swell fat and shiny, enough for the straps on her high-heeled silver sandals to have disappeared into the flesh. From the small part of her face that was visible Flea could see her eyes and lips protruding. Mottled, like a frog’s.

She shut the boot and went shakily into the house through the side door, kicked it closed and sank to the floor, her back against the wall. She put her arms on to her knees and dropped her face, staring blankly at her legs in the dark blue trousers. This was insanity. It was insanity.

After a while she got to her feet and went around the rooms, gathering things in her arms until she’d found everything she needed: brown paper, tape, one of the facemasks her team sometimes used for body recovery, and the blue inner gloves she wore for diving polluted water.

Back in the garage – the smell was unbearable now and already a few flies were circling the boot – she stood on a box and taped brown paper to the windows, sealing them carefully so no one could stand on tiptoe and stare in. Then she pulled on her gloves and facemask and went back to the boot. She stopped to take a few deep breaths and wipe her head with her forearm, then opened it again.

The body was still there. Yeah, right. Like it might have got up and left? She stepped nearer. Forced herself to look. Her breathing was loud in the facemask.

The woman didn’t seem very old – mid-twenties maybe, with nicely manicured nails, highlighted hair and expensive gold hoops in her ears. Her arm was dropped across one as if she was trying to shield herself. The coat lay across the lock, part of it jammed into the mechanism. Flea looked hard at it, wondering if there was something important about it. Where had she seen it before? One of Thom’s girlfriends, maybe?

She lifted the woman’s elbow, careful not to disturb the clothing. No injuries to this side of the face. There was a long graze on the underside of the arm. With her index finger pressing the facemask tight to her nose, she bent, squinting at the graze. Something was embedded in the skin. Something dark and hard, like small stones. Or tarmac. An idea began to work in the back of her head.

Lowering the woman’s arm carefully she went to the front of the car. The Focus had belonged to her parents – their priorities in life had had everything to do with experiencing the world and nothing to do with nice-looking cars: it was battered and well used. But now, and she crouched next to the headlamp to be sure, she was pretty certain this dent hadn’t been there before Thom had borrowed it.

She studied it carefully. She’d seen a lot of road crashes. Only last month she’d been woken at two in the morning to cut a body out of a car wreck: a thirty-six-year-old mother of three had impaled her car on a motorway barrier. She was alive and unhurt, talking to everyone on the scene, but stuck in the car like a pig in a poke. The fire that had started in the engine had cooked her alive. Flea had been the one who had pulled out her skinless corpse and put it into the coroner’s van. No one said the obvious, that she looked like an anatomy lesson with all her musculature so exposed. Yes, what a car could do to a human body was something she knew a bit about. And what a human body could do to a car – she knew a bit about that too.

She straightened and went to the other side of the Focus, checking along the sills and the doors for anything unfamiliar. She studied the bonnet, the wheels, the windows, careful not to touch. Then she stood on tiptoe, and immediately saw what she was searching for. There was a crumpled area about two foot in diameter on the roof just above the driver’s seat, with a small crescent of blood caked on it. A picture was forming of the way a body could fly into the air, cartwheel through the moonlight, bounce on a roof and land on the road, tarmac and grit scraping itself into the skin. Thom had been drunk that night.

She went back to the boot and put her hands into the pockets of the woman’s dress. Empty. The coat pockets too. Then her hands closed around something else, wedged just under the woman’s hips. It was crackly and cool against Flea’s gloved fingertips. Turning her face away because each time she moved the body a waft of decomposition came into her face, she gripped the object between thumb and forefinger and tugged gently. Surprisingly, it came away easily, dragging briefly against the clothing and popping out so fast it almost made her take a step backwards.

It was a handbag, sewn intricately with large, faceted sequins dangling and catching the light. Something about the design, the natural fabric at its base, told her it was expensive. Flea opened the clasp and peered in.

Most of the things inside it were cosmetics. She laid them carefully on the garage floor: a tube of Benefit concealer with a picture of a fifties girl on a telephone, a sachet of Hard Candy body shimmer, a stick of Chanel lipstick, colour ‘Boudoir’ – things Flea could never have afforded, even if she’d wanted them. Deeper in the bag was a compact Tampax tampon wrapped in green plastic, a half-finished blister pack of paracetamol, some banknotes folded into a diamanté clip. She put everything on the floor and ran a gloved finger through the rest of the bag. There was a handful of change but otherwise nothing. Just a few coppers and a bit of dust. No ID.

She was replacing everything in the bag when something made her stop. It was the diamanté clip. On one side it was straight but on the reverse side the diamanté was formed into a single letter. She stared at it. It was an M.

The letter M.

The air came out of her lungs fast. She sat down on the garage floor and put her head back, trying to breathe. She knew where she’d seen the coat before. It hadn’t been on one of Thom’s ex-girlfriends. It had been at work. The photo of a replica of this coat had been circulated to everyone in the force that morning. That and the green dress and a mobile phone, spread out on a table. There was even a copy of the photo pinned on the noticeboard over her desk.

Dropping the clip, she got to her feet and kicked open the door into the house. She went to the toilet, squatted at the bowl and retched, letting everything come up, heaving until it was just thin brown trickles of saliva. She stayed there for a while afterwards, one hand on the seat, the other holding her hair out of her face, spitting the taste out of her mouth, staring blankly at the bottle of Toilet Duck sitting on the floor behind the U-bend.

It wasn’t the smell of that poor contorted human in her boot that was making her throw up. It wasn’t any of that. It was that M on the money clip. M for Misty.

Misty Kitson. The missing footballer’s wife.

Flea spat again, sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth. Thom was in more trouble than he could possibly, possibly imagine.

And she didn’t know what to do next.

10

When Caffery arrived at the mortuary the remains of Lucy Mahoney were already on the central table, the lights powering down on her, the huge fans in the floor and ceiling roaring, sucking air in from the outside and drawing away the foul smell. The brown-smeared sheet she’d been wrapped in lay open on another table. In it, a scattering of maggots squirmed and crawled over each other.

Caffery put on the mortuary’s bootees and gloves, came into the room, crouched at the head of the block and peered into the mess of her hair.

‘You’re DI Caffery.’

He glanced up. The district DI, a guy who looked as if he spent a lot of time in front of the mirror each morning, stood a pace away. He had his hands in his pockets and was half turned sideways so he didn’t have to look at the body. This was a suicide but Lucy was female, and protocol put a CID officer of at least inspector level at the post-mortem: to rule out rape or sexual assault. From his face Caffery guessed the DI wasn’t ecstatic at having to be there.

‘We met at that SIO’s investigation policy meeting in Taunton. Remember?’

Caffery straightened. ‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Good to see you again. How’s it going?’

‘Fine.’ He jingled the loose change in his pockets. Still didn’t look at the body. ‘But Major Crime? For a suicide? Anything about this I should know?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No one warned me.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Forget I’m here.’

‘Would be nice to know, that’s all.’

‘Hello, boys.’ They turned. The pathologist stood in the doorway pulling on latex gloves, eyeing them both. Beatrice Foxton. Caffery knew her from London – they were both refugees from the Met. A formidable woman in her late fifties and drop-dead gorgeous. Beatrice smoked, drank, raced horses and took trekking holidays in places like Uzbekistan. She also had perfect skin, cornflower blue eyes and lots of hair that she wore as it grew out of her head: long, grey and wavy.

‘Lucky me.
Two
men.’ She made a show of snapping on the second latex glove. Pulled it carefully down her fingers. Gave a dirty smile, as if she was going to ask one of them to bend over. ‘Right. Who’s first?’

Caffery gave a thin smile. ‘Beatrice. You haven’t changed.’

‘Really, Jack. I’m insulted. I
meant
which of you has primacy? I see two DIs. I don’t know which I’m working with. I have to ask.’