Mo Hayder - Skin

There was a noise at the bottom of the stairs, a faint clunk and a shuffling. Caffery picked up the heaviest paperweight he could find and went out on to the landing. He stood in the doorway, weighing it in his hand and counting in his head.

A light went on in the porch. The door opened and a face appeared at the bottom of the stairs. It was the ex-husband, rumpled in a suit that looked as if it belonged on an insurance salesman. He blinked up at Caffery, at his hands in the nitrile gloves and the paperweight. Then he looked down at Caffery’s booteed feet. ‘And who are you again?’

‘DI Caffery.’ He came down the stairs. ‘We spoke yesterday at the hospital. I can’t remember your name either.’

‘Colin Mahoney.’

‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Picking up the post.’

‘You’re divorced.’

‘We were still friends. Didn’t know there was a law against being friends with your ex. They told me I wasn’t going to hear anything else until the inquest.’

‘No one’s been in touch, then? No one from F District?’

‘No. Should they?’

‘Have they told you about the dog yet?’

‘Yes. He fell in the quarry. Apparently.’

‘That must have been hard. Hard to take.’

‘Yeah. Well, sometimes life kicks you in the face. And when it does your teeth fall out.’

Mahoney walked into the sitting room and sat down. He put his hands on his knees and looked around, as if there might be an answer to something in the walls of the crowded room. Caffery followed him in and stood in front of him.

‘Here.’ He handed him some gloves. ‘Try not to touch anything.

Mahoney took them. ‘Which unit did you say you worked for again?’

‘I didn’t. Major Crime Investigation Unit.’

‘Major Crime? That’s the murder unit?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘On Friday you told me it wasn’t your case. And now it is.’ He stared at the gloves. ‘I didn’t think Benjy fell in the quarry. Not for a second. He wasn’t stupid. They wouldn’t let me see his body and that didn’t sound right either.’ He raised his eyes. ‘Well? Is it a murder? Is that what you’re here to tell me?’

‘No.’ He set the paperweight on the coffee-table next to the two A5 ‘Searched Premises’ forms the search team had left. ‘We do random checks – just reviews on suicides, here and there. It’s something the Home Office are testing in Avon and Somerset. Then they’ll roll it out nationwide.’

‘Is that true?’

Caffery held his eyes.

‘Is it?’

Caffery cleared his throat and nodded at the gloves. ‘Can you put those on?’

‘Why? The place has been searched. Has something changed?’

‘Put them on, please.’

Mahoney did what he was told. Caffery sat down opposite him. ‘Mr Mahoney, I’ve got some more questions for you.’

‘I gathered.’

‘Do you think Lucy was the sort to kill herself?’

‘Of course not. I’ve been saying it all along. Haven’t you got this in your notes?’

‘Like I said, I’m reviewing the case. It’s come to me cold. First thing I knew about it was Friday morning. Did she know the Strawberry Line? Did she know the area well?’

‘She knew it was there, but I’ve never known her go over there.’

‘Didn’t have any friends in the area?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘What about the quarries over at Elf’s Grotto? Quarry number eight? They call it the suicide quarry.’

‘I’m not even sure why you searched it.’

‘Her car was found near by. Half a mile away. But you’re telling me she never went to the quarries?’

‘No. Odd, isn’t it, that she parked up near them? And she definitely would never have taken Benjy there either. She never took him near water. Didn’t like him getting wet.’

‘There was a Stanley knife.’

‘So they tell me.’

‘Do you know where it came from?’

‘Upstairs. Her studio. She used it for her framing work.’

‘That’s the door that’s locked.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why locked?’

He shrugged. ‘She didn’t like people in there. It’s got all her paintings in it. She was sensitive about them. She didn’t mind me seeing them but hated anyone else in the studio. Once the search team had come through I locked it.’

‘Can we get into it?’

‘The key’s at my mother’s. It’s an hour’s drive there and back.’

‘But the knife’s definitely missing?’

‘Yes. I checked the other night, after they’d found her.’

Caffery looked around the room. At the paperweights catching the light. All clean and sparkling. ‘You last saw Lucy on Sunday?’

‘I was here. We had coffee together. I left at five thirty.’

‘And she seemed OK to you then?’

‘Absolutely fine. Very relaxed.’

‘She didn’t tell you she was anxious about anything? Depressed?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Any of her friends say anything about her being depressed?’

‘No. The police went through her address book and interviewed them all and no one could come up with anything. Everyone feels the same way I do. Everyone feels…’ He trailed off and Caffery saw the look in his eye. He saw it and he saw his mother again – saw her screaming in the kitchen, holding on to a police officer in the hallway, begging him, ‘Find my little boy. Just do it – go out there now and find my little boy.’

Caffery closed his eyes. Then he opened them. ‘It’s clean in here. Did you clean it?’

‘No. This is how she left it.’

‘Was it normal for the house to be this clean?’

‘No. To be this clean was unusual. Lucy had…’ he hesitated ‘… priorities. And, as you can see, she had tastes. Some I don’t share.’

Caffery picked up the paperweight on the coffee-table and turned it over, idly studying the bottom. ‘The Emporium’ was printed on a gold lozenge-shaped sticker. ‘We never found her phone.’ He replaced the paperweight and picked up another. The same sticker on the bottom. ‘I was at Wells and I went through all the possessions she had on her. I was looking for bills but the officer in charge tells me he left them here. He said it was a bugger of a job because most of the bank statements and bills were missing. In fact, he said there were hardly any records of any sort in the house.’

‘I know. I was told they’d got a warrant out. I was told Orange were supposed to be releasing the missing bills.’

Mahoney was right. But here again the system had favoured people like Misty Kitson whose phone records had come back in hours. When Caffery’d checked he’d found Lucy Mahoney’s records had never arrived. They were jammed in the system somewhere and now her body had turned up no one would bother to chase them. Caffery had Turnbull chasing another warrant to track them down, but it’d be days before they had access to them, days before they learnt what had really happened to Lucy Mahoney in her last hours.

‘Didn’t she have somewhere she kept her paperwork?’

Mahoney pointed to a box file next to the computer. ‘Over there.’

Caffery put down the paperweight, went to the desk and opened the box. It contained four phone bills, mostly from last year. Only one from this year – January. There were twelve electricity bills, two council-tax bills and ten bank statements, all dating from more than two years ago. He turned round and held out the file to Mahoney. ‘Like this, was it? When you first came in.’

‘Exactly like this.’

‘Do you know why she’d keep statements for these months and not for others?’

‘She was secretive, that’s all I can say. When the police questioned her friends they couldn’t find out anything about her. It was like that even when we were married. I never knew what she was thinking.’