Mo Hayder - Skin

She left the car in a pub car park in Norton St Philip – it would be less conspicuous there than in a lay-by – and walked the half-mile down to the lane using a footpath, keeping the lights of the road to her right and reaching the south-westerly end of the lane before ten p.m. She dropped the rucksack and rummaged in it until she found the squares of paper and the Maglite. Using a rubber band she lashed the paper to the top of the torch, adding a second piece to block off the open side. She held the torch at arm’s length, turned it from side to side and adjusted it until no light was leaking around the edges. The beam was focused white and thin. It wouldn’t be bright enough to spot from a distance unless someone was actively looking for it.

Keeping the torch pointed down, she moved slowly along the lane, hugging the southern side, counting her steps in her head. One. Two. Three. Four. She kept her attention on the road, monitoring the few buildings she passed out of the corner of her eye for signs of life. Some were close, others were distant, homely flashes of lights in the trees. No traffic went by. There were just a few shadowy cows in the fields, the slap of her feet on the tarmac and her own breathing for company.

A hundred and ten, a hundred and eleven, a hundred and twelve, a hundred and thirteen.

The moon came up and the road glowed silver, winding away in front of her like a stream. In this light the plants had no colours; the crops, the trees and the grasses were the same uniform grey as the shadows they threw at her feet.

A hundred and twenty-one, a hundred and twenty-two, a hundred and twenty-three…

She stopped, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. There had been a sound, almost indecipherable above the jingling of the Bergen on her back. A shifting in the hedgerow. She turned cautiously, the torch held out like a weapon, and scanned the lane. It had been on the other side of the hedge, about two yards behind. She was sure, without quite understanding why, that it had come from about waist height.

‘Hello?’

Her voice was hollow, flat in the cold air. She blinked at the silvery fretwork of hedge and tree. It could be livestock in there. A fox or a bird. Definitely an animal. She thought of quarry number eight. She thought of a house she’d visited on Operation Norway: a house with dark rooms. A place that had made her feel that wherever she went a small shadow was moving behind her at waist height.

‘Let’s get it over with,’ she hissed. ‘I’m in a hurry.’

Silence again. The distant sound of an aeroplane slipping into the Bristol air corridor, the faintest movement of a light breeze in the hedgerows to her left. She went back a few steps to the place the sound had come from and kicked into the hedge. Her foot hit twigs. Nothing moved. She went a few yards along and did it again. A couple of yards further still. No response.

She took a few deep breaths, then shook herself. Jack Caffery and his fantasies were getting to her. She stuck a finger up at the hedge, pissed off now, and turned away, picking up the search where she’d left off. The lane was on an incline, marked with passing spaces, with entrances to fields, and she walked close to the edge, training the torch down, searching for anomalies. By now the moon was high and after about a hundred yards she turned a corner and found the land had levelled out, the lane opening into a wide, flat road with central markings. You could see almost a quarter of a mile along it. If you were in a car you’d be able to get your speed up here. You could accelerate, drive fast enough that if you hit someone you’d kill them instantly.

The field was on the left. The flowers were greyed out by the moon. But it was unmistakable. Rapeseed. It sloped down to the road to her left. Further along on the right, where the land rose up, a few lights twinkled among the trees. A tiny hamlet nestled against the hillside, the moon picking out tiled roofs, a chimney, two thatched roofs. Anyone in those houses wouldn’t see the torch from this distance but they might spot her, stark and unprotected on the road. She moved to the side of the road where a line of poplars stood straight and ordered, as they did on the Roman roads in France. Keeping in the tree shadows, she moved along, scuffing her feet on the ground, moving the torch from side to side, checking the trunks, the grass, the tarmac.

And then she stopped.

About twenty feet to her right there was a set of very clear, very distinct skidmarks on the road.

She stared at them, her pulse picking up. They were so perfect it made her want to turn around and check it wasn’t a set-up. That someone wasn’t watching her, smiling slyly at her reaction.

She approached slowly, shining the torch up and down them. They bent gently towards the centre of the road as if someone had swerved to avoid something. She walked the length of them, pacing carefully, about forty feet from start to finish, a yard or so into the oncoming lane.

She was breathing hard now. Whatever wheelbase had made these tracks it wasn’t too wide, or too narrow, and if she’d had to bet she would say they came from a family saloon car. A Focus, maybe. If Thom had made these marks he must have been coming from the east. Misty must have been in this lane, on the opposite side of the road from the rapeseed. He would have seen her almost two hundred feet away. Reaction time would have been slow – he’d drunk two bottles of red wine that night. He’d slammed on the brakes and hit her somewhere around here, on the central road markings. Misty had gone over the roof, and probably, since the dent had been above the driver’s side, fallen off the car and come to rest somewhere in the oncoming lane or on the verge opposite.

Flea shone the torch around the ground, inspecting the tarmac – a piece of glass glinting at her here, a scrap of chewing-gum paper there. Just where the grasses from the verge overhung the road, slightly countersunk where the tarmac had softened in the sun, she could see a hair slide. A pink one. It might have belonged to a small child. A little girl who had mourned its loss from the open window of a car. Or it might have belonged to Misty Kitson.

She took off her rucksack and pulled out gloves and a plastic freezer bag. Quickly, because she didn’t know when a car might come, she crouched at the side of the road and carefully prised the hair slide out of the tarmac with a nail. It was more like a child’s clip now she could see it properly. She pushed it into the freezer bag anyway. Then something to her left caught her eye.

About a yard away a hole had been made in the grass on the verge. Whatever made it must have been big, heavy. Not as large as a deer, bigger than a badger. The grass stems had been broken in an almost circular shape, as if it had lain down there to sleep for a while. Above the hole, between the verge and the rapeseed field, there was a low dry-stone wall. Four stones at the top had been dislodged. One hung precariously over the field. It looked as if it might fall at any moment.

She crouched, swept the Maglite around. The cow parsley against the wall had been snapped, and the heads hung down limply. Something dark coated them. Careful not to touch the flattened area she plucked a stem and sat back on her haunches, inspecting it. In this light it wasn’t easy to see exactly what she was holding, but when she put down the torch, took off her glove with her teeth and pushed her fingernail along the stem, the dark stuff flaked and fell into her cupped hand.

Blood. She knew its properties and behaviour too well. It was caked blood. So this, this unremarkable stretch of road, was where Misty’s life had ended.

An image came: Thom leaping out of the car, his face drawn with shock. His panic – because that was what he would have done, panicked – when he saw the broken body in the hedge. Crying as he scooped Misty up, shovelled her into the boot. Her handbag must have been lying somewhere on the road, somewhere around here, its sequins glinting at him; he must have picked that up too and-