Mo Hayder - Skin

In the living room she took a decanter from her father’s old oak bureau and uncorked it. This port had been open five years. It was crusted with sugar around the top and when the stopper came out the rich Christmas scent nearly floored her, with all the memories it brought of her dad, home from university in his outdoor coat and smelling of rain and cigarette smoke from the station platform, tipsy in a party hat on Boxing Day, sitting on the sofa asleep and smiling. Or standing in the study on a dry Saturday morning, his old Oxford shirt on, his glasses at the end of his nose, ponderously picking through the stones, occasionally calling into the kitchen, ‘Jill, the granite – is this from the karst window in Telford or is it from Castleton?’

She found a crystal glass and filled it to the top, knocking back the liquid in one. She refilled it and drank again. Sat on the floor, her arms around herself.

If she was someone like Caffery’s Tanzanian, Amos Chipeta, she wouldn’t be shaken by Misty’s body in the garage. She’d know what to do with it – it would be commonplace to her. But this situation wasn’t commonplace. And she couldn’t be controlled or sensible or easy about it. Not any longer. Not since Thom had betrayed her.

She looked at the clock. Eleven p.m. In thirteen hours she’d have the money. She’d have the photo of Thom.

And what she did then was anyone’s guess.

‘ I almost fucking killed you! ’ Pooley shook Caffery furiously, forcing the blood into his brain, making his face bulge. They were on the floor where they’d both fallen, their heads up against a steamer trunk. Pooley’s hands were on Caffery’s collar. His breath was stale on his face. ‘Did you hear me? I could have killed you .’

Caffery’s guts screamed where Pooley had grabbed his balls to take him down. He could hardly breathe, but he groped blindly in his pocket for the ASP. Just as he was sliding it back, ready to crack it down, Pooley thrust him back against the trunk, then crawled away a small distance and collapsed in a sitting position, his back to a stack of Victorian stained-glass doors. Caffery curled up in a ball, gulping air.

‘What are you doing here?’ Pooley spat on the ground. ‘How did you get past Security?’

Caffery fumbled the ASP back into his pocket and took a moment or two to recover. Slowly he sat up, loosening his shirt and tie. There were raw, raised areas around his neck where the fabric had dug into his flesh. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple was hard and sore. ‘That.’ He nodded to where his warrant card had fallen out of his shirt pocket and lay about three feet away on the polished concrete floor. ‘My get-out-of-jail-free card.’ He swallowed again, rubbed his throat. ‘Why the vigilante stuff?’

‘I thought you were a burglar. There was a break-in last week.’

‘And what about that – that torture bench you’ve got over there? What’ve you been doing with it?’

Pooley glanced in the direction he was pointing. ‘The tanner’s bench?’

‘Where did you get it?’

Pooley opened his hands wearily as if this was all irrelevant. ‘From a tannery. Why?’ He moved his head slightly and now Caffery saw, in the blue light from the computer in the office, that his face was wet. He’d been crying. The creepy noise like an animal panting.

Caffery pulled the warrant-card holder back, pocketing it. ‘Why’re you crying? Is it Lucy? You knew her more than you said, didn’t you?’

Pooley shook his head. ‘Christ, oh, Christ.’

‘I’m right. Aren’t I?’

‘I miss her… I miss her so much… I never did the best for her, never. It would have pushed Jane over the edge if I’d left.’

‘Jane? Your wife?’

‘You saw her.’

‘Your wife? Yesterday? With the chandelier?’

‘She’s not well.’

Caffery blew a little air out of his nose. Too bloody right she’s not, he thought. He felt in his pockets for the bag of tobacco he carried everywhere. Sod the Nicorette chewing-gum, but there were times, he thought, when you had to stick your good intentions and hotline nicotine into your system. ‘How long had you been seeing Lucy?’

‘Two years. Since she left him . Colin. Bastard.’

Caffery rolled the cigarette, using the tip of his tongue to moisten the gummed strip on the inside of the paper. ‘How often were you with her?’

‘Once or twice a week.’

‘When your wife wasn’t around?’

‘On the days she goes to her family.’

‘And the sex toys?’

‘Purely aesthetic.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. She just thought they looked nice, that was all. Her ex, though, Colin, he never came to terms with it. Never.’

‘Yeah. I know.’ Caffery twisted the end of the rollie. Felt in his pocket for the lighter. ‘So. Were you the only one? For Lucy?’

Pooley lifted his chin and stared at him, his eyes hard.

‘No need to look at me like that – you see a woman once or twice a week and you don’t expect her to hang around waiting for you while you’re at home playing happy families.’ He lit the cigarette and studied Pooley, squinting through the smoke. ‘I’m just trying to make sure you were the baby’s father.’

‘The b-?’ Pooley retracted his head, taken aback, frowning. ‘What baby ?’

‘Don’t give me that. Some time in the last two years Lucy Mahoney had a baby. What happened to it?’

Pooley dropped his arms limply. ‘No,’ he murmured, his voice a little scared, a little puzzled. ‘No. You’ve got that wrong. There was no child.’

Caffery studied him. The guy was doing a bomb-ass acting job. ‘Nah. I’m not falling for this. You can’t magic a child away, no matter how hard you try.’

‘I’m not,’ Pooley said. ‘Seriously I’m not. I don’t know who you’re talking about, but Lucy, my Lucy, she never had a baby .’

The call came through just before morning prayers. One of the nurses who’d worked with Susan Hopkins at the Rothersfield clinic had been with her boyfriend all night, her mobile switched off. The first she’d heard about Hopkins ’s death was when she’d arrived at work in the morning. She’d dialled 999 because she thought she knew something that the police didn’t – something that none of the staff who’d been interviewed yesterday would know. Control told her to wait at the clinic. Someone would be right there.

Beatrice Foxton lived only a few miles away from the Rothersfield clinic. When Caffery called and told her they needed to talk she said it was time to walk the dogs anyway. There were fields surrounding the clinic, so why didn’t they meet there before he went in?

They stood talking in the morning sun watching the two dogs run great loping circles around them. Caffery was smoking again, his shoulders slightly hunched, tension in his arms and neck.

‘Lucy Mahoney.’

‘What about her?’ Beatrice was dressed for the summer in a white linen blouse, trousers and canvas espadrilles. Incongruously she wore a battered gardening glove on her right hand to throw the tennis ball for the dogs.

‘She had an abdomectomy.’ He looked up the driveway to the clinic, at the neatly cut lawns, the box hedges, the colonnades and the expensive cars in the car park. This was where Lucy’s seven grand must have gone. James Pooley hadn’t liked talking about the operation. Lucy hadn’t wanted people to know about it, he said, and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t protect her privacy even though she was dead. But he did tell Caffery where she’d had it done. Up here at the Rothersfield clinic. The same place Hopkins had been working when she’d died. Whatever connected Mahoney to Hopkins had happened at the end of this driveway. Caffery just didn’t know what yet. ‘A tummy tuck. Two years ago, her boyfriend says.’