Mo Hayder - Skin

The offices in Almondsbury were silent. The smell they’d played hide-and-seek with for the last two days had gone. Surprise, surprise. The place smelt like a dentist’s surgery. There was a note on her desk from Wellard saying the HSE had picked up the umbilicals and would be in touch when the tests were completed. That meant ages. It also meant they weren’t going to question her about the circumstances of the accident – how deep she’d been, for example. Any other day, that would have lifted her spirits.

She worked fast and silently: from the storeroom she got foot covers, gloves and three yellow Tyvek biohazard suits. There were webbed straps in the dead-body recovery locker: she took three, two pieces of plastic sheeting and a handful of zip ties. She shoved it all into a mesh drysuit duffel bag and carried it to the car. With the radio on full blast she drove out on the ring road, stopping at various convenience shops and the Threshers in Longwell Green for bags of ice. At a Smile store in Hanham she found ten pink and green trays that would make ice cubes in the shapes of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. She bought all ten. Paid cash.

Thom still wasn’t answering his phone.

It was eleven when she got home. She checked for footprints in the gravel – her habit, accustomed as she was to the way the Oscars, her neighbours, would casually wander on to her property as if it was their own. The Marleys’ garden had once belonged to the Oscars’ house. They made no secret that they wanted to buy it back and reinstate their access to the valley. The garden was huge and stupid and rambling, far too large for her to care for, and somewhere down in its wilderness was a big problem: a folly built by one of the young men of the manor in the nineteenth century. Now it was collapsing. A surveyor in a yellow hard hat had come to inspect it and said it broke all the laws of physics and was dangerous. It needed to be either repaired or demolished. But she wasn’t going to give in. The garden had been Mum’s pride and joy. It wasn’t going to be sold off, no matter how troublesome it got.

There weren’t any footprints. The house was exactly as she had left it. She parked the Clio on the gravel and went inside. Even in the hallway the smell coming from the garage hit her immediately. How in Christ’s name had she been able to walk back and forth past the Focus for the last couple of days, even drive the sodding thing, without noticing it?

She slung the ice bags in the garage, carried everything else into the living room and stripped down to her underwear. The Tyvek suit was two grades higher than the ones the crime-scene guys used and hot. She dragged it on, knotted her wild hair at the back of her head and pulled on the hood. Then, holding on to the sofa, she lifted her feet, and shoved them into bootees, cross-wise, the way she put on fins. The facemask she left dangling under her chin. From the kitchen she got a bottle of water and, slugging it as she went, traipsed clumsily down to the garage.

‘Right.’ She slammed the garage door behind her. ‘Let’s look after you.’

The body needed to be cooled. The nights were still cold and there’d been a couple of chilly days, too, which meant she had to slow down the decomposition process to the level it would be at in the open. She couldn’t freeze the body then thaw it: the process left signs a good pathologist would pick up immediately. They would spot the telltale traces of ice crystals in the muscles, particularly the heart. Still, the process had to be reined in somehow.

She plugged in the giant chest freezer in the corner. It hadn’t been used for years. Not since the day Dad had brought the family to the electricity meter and made them watch, in awe, the way the little red dials hummed when the freezer was plugged in, and how they slowed when it was off. A power hog, it was switched on only for parties and at the height of summer when Mum made ice cream. Flea filled the ice trays with water and rested them inside on the diamond-pressed aluminium bottom, piling them one on top of another. She closed the freezer, opened the ice bags with her teeth and emptied all the cubes into the old iron bath that stood in the corner among the mowers and diving equipment.

When the boot was open again the smell was overwhelming. With just the mask and no respirator she had to turn away for a few moments and take long, deep breaths to stop the gag reflex overpowering her. Then, when her throat stopped spasming, she got to work, the suit rustling like dry leaves.

She sealed the contents of Misty’s handbag in a green plastic bag, took out the Focus’s parcel shelf and levered down the back seats into the storage position. She put a sheet of plastic on the floor next to the back wheel and another below the bumper, its top end folded inside the boot and tucked under Misty’s left shoulder and left knee. She got into the back seat and leant over to work two webbing straps under Misty’s shoulders and hips. Then she crawled out and went back to the boot, finding the trailing ends of the straps, dropping them on the ground on top of the plastic sheeting and placing her feet firmly on them. Leaning over she caught the other ends of the straps and, taking a deep breath, began to pull.

There was a pause. Nothing happened for a moment, then the body gave with a tearing sound as it unstuck itself from the boot liner and rolled sideways so that Misty’s face was resting against the lip of the rear bumper. Flea pushed her knees under her to stop her falling on to the ground. She took a few breaths.

The back of Misty’s head was matted with blood and now Flea could see what had killed her. There it was: a massive blow to the left side of the head where it had come into contact with the roof of the car. She could see all the details of Misty’s ear where it had been torn away from the skull: she could see the folds and crevices and canals – a swift image of them being formed years ago, a dizzying slideshow of a baby taking shape: being born, growing, losing teeth, getting ankle socks and grazed knees. She saw first lipstick, first boyfriend, first heartbreak. She saw the drugs and the drink, the diets. She saw it as clearly as she could see her own past, and although she knew who Misty was, and that if they’d met in life they’d have had nothing to say to one another, something cold and lonely opened inside her.

She turned her head sideways and breathed hard. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed, clenching her teeth. ‘Stop it.’ She craned her neck and wiped the sweat off on her shoulder. She’d never lost it on a body recovery and she wasn’t going to now.

‘OK.’ She looked at Misty’s torn scalp again, at the thick blonde hair. ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry about the way I’m dealing with this. Please believe that.’

She paused for a second, as if Misty might reply. Then, grunting with the effort, she lowered the body slowly on to the sheeting. She was used to doing this with three other people to help, but Misty was light and rolled easily, her right arm dropping back down at her side so that her face was exposed. Flea stood, hands on her knees, breathing hard, and studied her for a while. Misty was so swollen that even her mother wouldn’t recognize her, let alone the tabloids and the fans. How long would it have taken for her to get like this lying next to a roadside? Longer than the four days she’d been in the car.

She folded the plastic sheeting lengthwise over Misty’s face, giving it a neat pleat fold along the top, the ends into goosenecks secured with zip ties. With an effort, feeling the strain in her back, she carried the cocoon to the bath and settled it carefully among the ice.

She paused for a second, looking down at Misty, at the smudged outline of a person. Already a faint fog was coming up from the ice, shrouding her, sending iced air past plastic, into skin, muscle and nerve.