Mo Hayder - Skin

With the bag over her shoulder, Flea pushed through the hedgerow and set off up through the dewy fields. The sun filtered down through the early-morning haze and, as she climbed, vague ghost shapes to her left and right slowly revealed themselves as stiles and trees. By the time she got to the top of Charmy Down, the old airfield, she had walked straight out of the mist and could see the disused mast ahead of her, glinting in the sun. The remains of her previous fire were still there. A flat circle of blackened grass, dew clinging to it, giving it a greyish pall. She put the bag on the circle, pulled out a flask, tipped the petrol on to the bagged belongings and phone and threw a match on to it.

Having retreated a few yards she sat, waiting for the fire to catch. Beyond, the sky in the east was streaked with dirty pinks and browns. In the valley the mist swirled. The neighbouring hills – places she’d known all her life – rose like dark islands above it. Solsbury Hill was half a mile off and, far away where the gap in the hills led out to Frome and Warminster, another line of smoke, like a finger, rose up into the blue sky.

She kept her eyes on that fire. Her body was aching from everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and there was a tingling in her fingers that she thought came from the cold of the quarry. But watching that distant fire gave her a kind of peace she couldn’t explain. She linked her fingers round her ankles and leant forward, gazing at it.

Look after yourself…

It was OK. OK to save herself like this. To do the wrong thing for the right reason. Sometimes all you can do is simply to continue moving forward. Making the choices that keep you alive.

Her own fire made a small whooshing sound and a flame shot up. It dropped, then shot up again, and more joined it, crackling, burning green, orange, blue. A line of silky black smoke guttered and rose into the sky, answering the fire on the neighbouring hill.

The fire of a man she had never met in her life.

Some humans have the instincts of animals. It comes from years of living without comfort. Even asleep the Walking Man sometimes appears to know what is happening in the waking world and who to expect. It’s as if his slumbering mind can creep coolly out, can float away over the hills and valleys, watching like a hawk those who are out at night. All those who move in his vicinity. And all the time his body lies next to the extinguished campfire, still and silent, only his eyes moving.

That night, as Gerber lay in a Trowbridge mortuary, as Flea submerged herself in the Elf’s Grotto quarry, the Walking Man slept soundly and peacefully. He was expecting someone. He had left out a spare foam mat with a sleeping-bag next to the fire.

Caffery arrived at three thirty a.m. He crawled into the bag and fell immediately into a torpid, drugged sleep.

When he woke two hours later in the cold, milky dawn, the mist was freezing and the only sound was the bleak cawing of crows in the high branches overhead. He sat up. The Walking Man was making breakfast. A long thin column of smoke rose from the fire. There was bacon and eggs for two people. Two mugs waiting.

‘Morning. Going to be a good one. The mist will clear.’

Caffery didn’t answer. The hospital’s codeine was still in his system, like something hot and feathery packed into his brain behind his eyeballs. He sat, his hands on his ankles, and gazed into the fire, at the twin tin cups of coffee, at the two frying-pans sizzling on the flames. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so tired, so numb, inside and out. His head drooped. He had to jam his elbows into his knees and prop his head on his fingers.

‘Why is your phone switched off?’ The Walking Man didn’t look up from the fire. ‘Usually you treat it like a second heart.’

Caffery took it out of his breast pocket. He put it on the ground and stared at it. Not as if it was a heart. As if it was a snake.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know what I’d do if I switched it on. Don’t ask me again.’

The Walking Man shrugged. He scooped the food on to two plates: each had four thick rashers of bacon, three fried eggs, two sausages and a slice of fried bread. He walked all day and he needed his fuel. His plates always brimmed over and he made sure his guests ate well too. He straightened, put one plate next to his bedroll and brought the other across to where Caffery sat. When he saw Caffery’s expression, the sick way he looked at the food, the way there was water in his eyes, he hesitated. ‘OK,’ he grunted. ‘OK.’

He straightened, took a few steps away from the fire and crouched to scrape the food off the plate on to the ground. ‘The badgers will like you for it.’ He went back to his bedroll, walking carefully because he only had his socks on, and if there was one thing the Walking Man had to do, it was care for his feet. He settled down, the tin plate resting on his knees, and ran a thumb and forefinger through his beard, studying Caffery’s face through narrowed eyes. ‘You know what you’ve come to.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘Don’t you?’

Caffery was sullen. ‘What?’

The Walking Man grinned. ‘Crossroads,’ he said. ‘Your absolute crossroads. And now, now , your hand is going to be forced. I don’t know why or what’s happened but when you switch on that phone you’ve got to make a decision. Haven’t you?’

Caffery stared at the Walking Man. The bastard was right. It had been coming to him as he slept. Hallucinations crossing and double-crossing him. That in the morning he’d have to speak to Powers. He’d have to make the decision. He’d have to tell him what he knew about Misty Kitson.

‘And this is the decision that’s been coming at you for years. You might not see it but this decision is about whether you stay facing death, or whether you turn the other way and choose life instead. That’s all.’

Caffery made a small, contemptuous noise. ‘I’m being preached to about choosing life by you ? Someone who’s chosen death? How does that work?’

‘Or maybe you’re being preached to by someone who’s been chosen by death.’

‘You’re not dead.’ He studied the Walking Man’s eyes. They were blue. Like his own. As if they were from the same family. Except Caffery knew that the wisdom in the Walking Man’s eyes wasn’t in his own. Not yet. ‘You’re still alive.’

‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ The Walking Man looked at his hands. Turned them over and over as if they belonged to someone else. ‘It seems I am.’

‘You’ve got a plan. I don’t know what the plan is, but it’s there. So you haven’t chosen death at all.’

The Walking Man laughed – sympathetically, as if Caffery was so simple, just a child. As if it would take him years to come to any maturity of thought or emotion. ‘When Craig Evans killed my daughter,’ he wiped his moustache, ‘when he told me what he’d done… when he told me how many times he’d raped her before he did it,’ he tapped his finger against his lips, as if for a moment he didn’t trust himself to complete the thought, ‘when he told me it all, I knew then that the choice had been made. For what she had suffered she had to be comforted. And to comfort her I had to follow her.’

Caffery leant forward. It was the first time the Walking Man had spoken directly about his daughter’s death. ‘Follow her where?’

‘Into the next world, of course. That was just how it had to be. It’s the natural way of things. Everything I do, every mile I walk, is my preparation. I have to find the time and the place.’ He looked up. ‘You don’t know what happened to your brother’s body.’

‘No.’

‘You’ve searched everywhere you can think of.’