Mo Hayder - Skin

‘Oops,’ he said, giving a thin smile, showing neat teeth. ‘Does this mean I’ve caught something again? Accidentally downloaded a virus? A few non-kosher pieces lurking in the recesses?’ He gestured out of the office window at the huge amount of merchandise on display. ‘It’s so difficult, these days – the fences get better and better, more and more sophisticated. Couldn’t tell some of them apart from a Christie’s clerk, they know their game so well.’

‘It’s about a customer.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, eyeing Caffery. ‘OK. Why don’t you sit down?’

Caffery sat opposite Pooley in a vintage desk chair, its wooden arms worn thin and smooth by years of traffic. In his pocket he had a copy of the misper poster, which he unfolded and put on the desk. Pooley studied it, his nose very close to the photograph. There was a long, long silence while all Caffery could see was the top of his well-conditioned hair. Then at last he looked up. ‘Yes. I know her. Lucy Mahoney. She’s a customer.’

‘Was.’

‘Was?’ Pooley gave a nervous laugh. ‘Not a nice sound, the past tense. Never have liked using it when talking about a customer.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Dead? How?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

There was a pause, then Pooley’s face lost a little of its control, as if it was crumbling at the edges. ‘Good God, good God.’ He shook his head. ‘What a tragedy. What a waste. She was young.’

‘Very.’

‘How terrible. Tell me – her family? Are they taking it very badly?’

‘About as well as can be expected. She had a daughter.’

‘Yes, of course. Well, if there’s anything we can do, here at the Emporium, any condolences we can extend… She was a valued customer.’ He looked at his hands on the table. He moved a stray rubber band and put it into a desk tidy. He had very fair eyelashes – almost non-existent – and his skin was very smooth. The hands moving the rubber band were nice too, sort of manicured. ‘And I… I suppose you think it was a sex killing?’

‘What?’

‘A sex killing. I suppose that’s what it was?’

Caffery folded his arms and eyed Pooley. ‘Are you having a laugh?’

‘No. Good God, no. It’s just that…’ He paused, tilted his head. ‘You do know about her? Don’t you?’

‘“ Know ” about her? No, I don’t.’

Pooley eyed Caffery, the way he was sitting comfortably, as if he was settling in for the duration. He glanced out of the window at the dark-haired woman in the scarf, who was still fiddling with the chandelier crystals, her head bent. Then, with a brief smile, he pushed his chair back, got up, went to a glass cabinet at the far side of the office and unlocked it. He brought out a velvet-lined case and set it on the table. Caffery leant over.

Several lumps of stainless steel were set into the green velvet. It took him a few seconds to realize what he was looking at. Sex toys. Beautifully carved instruments. Dildos. Butt plugs. Nipple clamps. In ivory, jade, glass. A human-hair scourge with a gold-embossed handle. Some were engraved with Chinese characters. The prices on the tags started in the low hundreds.

‘She bought this sort of stuff from you?’

‘She did.’

‘How long has she been coming here?’

‘Eighteen months? More. I couldn’t say for sure.’

Lucy, Caffery thought, you’re not the girl I thought you were. There’s another side to you. Did you play sex games? Maybe that was when someone gave you the pills. Did he tell you they’d help the sex?

‘When she visited, would she always be on her own?’

‘I believe so.’

‘And she never seemed anxious?’

‘No.’

‘Never said anything about feeling she was in danger?’

There was a pause. Then Pooley said, in a careful voice, ‘She bought things from me. I don’t think she ever came here expecting to share her secrets. I only knew her well enough to exchange pleasantries. I knew what she liked to collect and sometimes I acquired things with her in mind, but our connection was purely aesthetic.’

Caffery looked at the human-hair whip. At the butt plugs. ‘Aesthetic?’

Pooley curled a nostril, as if Caffery smelt bad. ‘I shared her taste in collectibles, Mr Caffery.’ He snapped the box shut. ‘Her taste in the bedroom? Well, please – she was a customer.’

‘She bought paperweights from you too.’

‘That was her other interest.’ He went back to the cabinet, replaced the box and took out a pair of paperweights, both a deep, cerulean blue, holding them in his palms like two fat plums. ‘Pretty, aren’t they? I got them from a shop in Andover – these parochial outlets, they haven’t a clue what they’ve got half the time. These are French. From the Clichy factory. Quite old. I got them with her in mind. I thought she’d like the colour especially.’ He put them on the desk. Then, tongue between his teeth, he returned to the cabinet, walked his hands delicately over the other objects in it, selected a few and brought them across. ‘I had her in mind with these too.’

He put out three paperweights, two filled with a riot of oranges and reds, the third a plain white, its top surface nipped and stretched upwards as if the glass was reaching for the sky. ‘They’re not my thing, to be honest, too contemporary, but I think Ms Mahoney liked them. I always meant to suggest to her she took them. See? You could line them up like this. Maybe on a windowsill.’ He sat down and steepled his hands, making a tall, narrow shape with them. ‘If there was something out of the window you wanted to draw attention to, for example.’

‘The items she bought from you?’ Caffery wondered what it was about the one in the centre that was making his head tick. ‘Would you have a record of that somewhere? Sales dockets?’

‘Sales dockets. Yes, I…’ Pooley paused. He collected himself and gave a calm smile. ‘I keep most of my invoices at home. Can I get back to you on that? I could bring them to you.’

Caffery reached into his pocket for his wallet, taking time to do it because he was thinking, trying to decide if there was something else, something more he should have asked. But just as the answer was about to pop into his head, his phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out. Beatrice Foxton’s number was flashing on the screen.

‘What’re you doing?’ Her voice was echoey. He guessed she was in the mortuary. ‘Where are you?’

‘Brislington.’ Caffery pushed back the chair and stood. He fumbled a business card out and put in on the desk in front of Pooley. ‘Call me,’ he mouthed. ‘Why, Beatrice? Where do you want me to be?’

‘ Southmead Hospital. Like now.’

Fester and Lurch, the morticians, were tidying up the body when Caffery arrived. He left his coat in the office and was pulling on the little white wellies the mortuary provided when Beatrice met him in the doorway, mask below her chin, a glass laboratory beaker in her hand. ‘Hello, Jack.’ She shook the beaker in his face, sloshing the contents around. He got a sharp whiff of vomit. ‘Glad you could make it.’

‘Thanks.’ He turned his head away, felt in his pockets for the Airwaves gum and squinted sideways at the beaker. ‘Stomach contents?’

‘Coca-Cola, salad, bits of something I think must have been a pizza, coffee and about eight half-digested temazepam tablets. Like Lucy Mahoney.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Caffery said dully, putting his hand on the beaker and pushing it away from his face. ‘This is not what I need to hear.’ He looked over her shoulder into the dissection room where Lurch, in mask and a sunny yellow tunic, was stitching up the long Y incision in the body on the table. ‘What’ve you got, then?’