Mo Hayder - Skin

A door shut off the top of the staircase, this one also open a crack. He put the tip of the fleshing knife on it and pushed. It swung open with a slow creak. The moment he saw what was ahead he took a step back, letting the fleshing knife come up in front of him.

It was a corridor, a replica of the one below except for one detail. About eight yards away, nearly at the far door, with his back against the wall, sat Gerber.

He was turned slightly away from Caffery, half in profile, one leg crossed over the other. He had changed and was wearing a white shirt and a beige travel coat pulled down off his shoulders. His right hand, nearest to Caffery, was stuffed into the pocket. The other was out of sight, resting near his thigh. That’d be where the gun was. When the door opened he didn’t turn immediately. He continued to stare out of the window, almost vacantly. That was his way, thought Caffery. He was content to sit and wait for his prey, a half-smile on his face. Snake in a hole. He had been clever enough to kill Lucy Mahoney. And Susan Hopkins. Clever enough to almost get away with it.

Caffery kept his back against the wall, out of range. ‘Show me your hands.’

Gerber didn’t react.

‘You heard me. Show me your fucking hands.’

Gerber allowed his right hand to flop out of his pocket, palm up. It was empty. Then he lifted the left about five inches above his thigh. It was holding the Hardballer. But it wasn’t pointed at Caffery. It drooped, hung limply for a second, then fell, clattering across the floor and landing up against the wall, only a foot away from Caffery.

Gerber’s eyes followed the gun but he didn’t make any attempt to pick it up.

Caffery scanned the corridor, the windows and the door at the far end. What was supposed to happen here? That door beyond – was it locked? He looked at the gun. ‘Whatever you think you’ve set up it ain’t going to work,’ he told Gerber. ‘You’re not going to dictate how this ends. I am.’

Gerber breathed out noisily. He turned his head a fraction and stared at Caffery. His face was pale, his lips painfully swollen.

Caffery frowned, puzzled. Something was very wrong here. He took a step forward and swiped up the gun, pointing it at Gerber’s head. Still Gerber didn’t move. If anything his chin hung a little lower, as if it was difficult to keep his head up.

Caffery took another step forward. Then another. Gerber stared at him with his heavy eyes, a drop of saliva gathering on his bottom lip.

Caffery stopped just out of arm’s reach and stood with the gun held out, contemplating the strange little man, with his wiry hair and his pale, flaky-skinned face. Now he was close he could see Gerber was trembling. He waved the gun in his face. Gerber’s eyes followed the barrel dully, but he didn’t move – didn’t try to grab it. The saliva grew into a long string, then broke and dropped on to the floor. Caffery peered at the glob on the walnut floor. There was blood in the saliva. He was beginning to get the first wave of understanding. He raised his eyes to Gerber’s face. ‘What’ve you done?’

‘Fuck off,’ Gerber muttered. He was shaking hard now. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. ‘Fuck off and die.’

His hand lifted slightly, as if to swipe at Caffery, but the effort proved too much and he dropped it on his lap, breathing hard.

And now Caffery could see why. His shirt on the left side, the side that was hidden from the staircase, had a long stain of blood from the collar to the waistband. Caffery leant forward, not so close that Gerber could spit at him or grab him, but close enough to see the wound in his neck.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘Look at that.’

The tear in the flesh began at the front, then moved diagonally up and finished at the back of his neck inside the hairline. Caffery could see all the way into the wound, could see the tell-tale dull glint of a bullet lodged in the bone behind the ear.

Gerber’s teeth were chattering.

‘Shot yourself, you cowardly dog turd. You shouldn’t do bad things if you can’t face the consequences. Don’t you know that? Shouldn’t mess with-’

He broke off. He looked at the gun on the floor. Back at the wound. Looked out of the window to the empty swimming-pool, dull and blue in the sun. No. That couldn’t be what had happened. Gerber hadn’t had time to open the cesspit, come back here and attempt suicide. From the cesspit the gunshot might have been inaudible, but from the swimming-pool, where Caffery would have been at the time, he’d have heard it clearly. Especially with the window open. And the blood on the shirt – some of it was dark and crusted. As if it had been there a long time.

He looked out of the window again. Back at Gerber.

‘This is all wrong,’ he murmured, fascinated. ‘All wrong.’

Then, as if in answer, from the front of the house, he heard a thin whine. The noise of a two-stroke engine. A lawnmower. No. It was more contained than that, more like a small scooter.

And then he got it. All at once. Gerber hadn’t opened the inspection cover – he hadn’t been able to. He’d been here all along. Leaking blood on the floor.

Caffery limped as fast as he could back down the steps through the refrigerator room and out into the gravel driveway. In the middle of the lane he stopped and stared south to where the sound was fading. The lane was empty from here to about a hundred yards down where it took an abrupt turn out of sight. The sound of the scooter dwindled in the still air, then was gone, and all he could hear were the birds in the trees.

The Tokoloshe. Amos Chipeta.

Caffery stood in the dappled sunlight, staring at the point where the lane vanished. What the hell am I supposed to think about you? What the hell do you want?

For no apparent reason, he’d saved Caffery’s life. And in doing so he’d opened a can of shit for himself that might take for ever to shovel away. The hair taken from the corpses was one thing – he’d probably have got away with that – but shooting Gerber? He’d go down just as fast as Gerber would. Even if he’d saved a cop.

But, as life will sometimes have it, when Caffery turned from the quiet lane and limped back inside, up to Gerber’s corridor where the afternoon sun was bathing the floor in a syrupy glow, he found that the tables had turned again.

He found that another door in the story had just opened. And this time it was one both he and Amos Chipeta could slip through like ghosts.

Prosecution lawyers sometimes talked to Caffery about the ‘ CSI effect’ – the way the American TV programme made people, specifically juries, believe forensic science was omnipotent. That there was a test for everything. That if the clue was there the crime-scene officers would automatically find it. The truth, as every law-keeper knew, was that the best forensic scientist was only as good as the investigating officer. All forensic science was intelligence-led, so it was exquisitely easy to manipulate.

Gerber was dead. In the few moments Caffery had been outside, his heart had pumped out the last of its sticky heat and was now motionless and grey, sunk in on itself. Which gave Caffery a chance to change the course of history. He limped around the house recovering his belongings: his phone, his quick-cuffs and pepper spray. Then he spent forty minutes orchestrating the scene: wiping prints, scrubbing at bloodstains, positioning Gerber’s body, so that when the teams arrived he would treat the place as if he was the investigating officer, not the victim, taking the CSI people around and selling them his own very feasible version of events.

The scenario: Gerber had known the net was tightening. He’d dumped Caffery in the cesspit, thinking he was dead, and had ended his own life with the illegal gun he’d kept wrapped in a tea towel in his desk. When Caffery had regained consciousness, he’d found enough of a signal at the top of the ladder in the cesspit to fire off a text to Turnbull. There was no mention of a gun in the text, Caffery didn’t know anything about a gun, he said he’d heard nothing down in the cesspit. It was all a terrible surprise when the teams arrived and released him to see what Gerber had done to himself.