Mo Hayder - Skin

‘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.

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.

‘Go on.’ He didn’t open his eyes. ‘Tell me what you want.’

‘I’m police.’ Caffery reached for his card, but changed his mind. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Jack Caffery. Think back. You’ll remember me. I was the one who came in and pulled you out.’

Now Mallows opened his eyes. He swivelled them to him. ‘You were with that bird? The fit one?’

Caffery crossed his legs, pulling the right foot up and resting it on his knee. ‘The doctors wouldn’t let me see you until now. You’ve been critical this week. They thought they were going to lose you.’

‘Going to get some stick off my mates on that. Letting ourselves get rescued by a tart. It’s been in the papers too.’ Mallows rolled on to his back, and pushed himself upright on his elbows. Caffery stopped tapping his feet and stared. Mallows’s arms had come out from under the sheets. Where his hands had been removed in the squat, the bandaged arms ended in boluses the size of melons. He moved them slowly, painfully. It was like watching a giant praying mantis moving grotesquely around the bed.

He caught Caffery staring and laughed. ‘I know. Pretty fucked up, eh? Doctors reckon they’ve swollen up three times what they should’ve.’