Mo Hayder - Skin

‘Yes. There’s nowhere else. Once I thought I got close. A long way from here. Out in the east, not the west.’

‘Yes?’

‘I was wrong.’

The Walking Man nodded thoughtfully. He eyed Caffery a little longer then picked up his fork, settled down and began to eat, his eyes on the horizon. Caffery watched him. He noticed how he kept his beard clean of food, wiping his fingers on a cloth. The Walking Man was filthy, from his head to his toes, but there was something strangely fastidious about the way he cared for himself.

‘You’re not as lucky as I am,’ the Walking Man said after a long silence. ‘I have no choice, and that makes me fortunate. But you? You still have to choose. And that’s more difficult. Particularly now. When there’s a new complication in that choice.’

Caffery frowned. ‘How do you-?’

‘It doesn’t matter how I know. What is important is the choice you make and why you make it. Look at me.’ He put down his plate and turned to Caffery, his arms wide, his filthy padded jacket falling open to show his torso in the stained thermals. ‘You, dear policeman, are learning to judge me for what I am, not for what you think I am.’

‘So?’

‘So?’ He closed the jacket and picked up the plate. ‘So be careful to use the same judgement here, Inspector Caffery. Be careful to judge only when you have the whole picture. It will take time but when you can see it all, things may look very different.’

The whole picture. More images came to Caffery. Flea’s face that day in her new car at the quarry: the tight, anxious set of her forehead. The look in her eye early this morning as she pulled Misty’s corpse into the water. The way she seemed to be apologizing. As if she hadn’t meant it to happen.

‘And something else.’

Caffery looked up. ‘What else?’

‘Something I shouldn’t need to remind you of.’ The Walking Man lowered his head and stroked his moustache, his hand hiding the ironic half-smile on his mouth. ‘That before you pass judgement on another human being, you should always look back a little. Maybe into your own past?’

Caffery fixed his eyes on the Walking Man. It wouldn’t surprise him one bit if somehow the Walking Man knew all about that too: his secret, one he’d carried for nearly ten years now, how back in London there had been a killing. He’d murdered a man there – secretively, and with his own bare hands.

He leant forward and pulled the mobile phone closer. Rested his finger on it. He was so, so tired. Maybe it was true, maybe choice really was the root of all human happiness – and of all human sadness.

‘It’s time,’ the Walking Man said. ‘You know it’s time.’

Caffery took a deep, weary breath and picked up the phone. He stood, looking at the blank screen. ‘Don’t watch me. OK?’

The Walking Man gave a long, slow smile. He inclined his head politely and held out his hand, indicating Caffery should move away from the campfire.

Caffery got up and walked in the opposite direction from the trees. He stood at the edge of the hill. The mist had cleared, as the Walking Man had said it would, and from here the land opened up, with all its mounded green forests and glacial ridges. A long way from Bath he could see the misty Avon valley, the vague smudge of the White Horse at Westbury. Closer – from Charmy Down on the other side of Solsbury Hill – another line of smoke rose in the air. It was like the Walking Man’s, only this one was darker. Black and concentrated. Leaving smears on the sky.

He switched on the phone, jabbed in Powers’s number and, his eyes on the black smoke, waited for the phone to connect.

‘Boss. Did I wake you?’

‘Yes, you did.’ Powers kept his voice low. He coughed a couple of times. ‘Jack, what was all that about earlier, then? You put the phone down on me. I called back but you’d switched off.’

Caffery checked over his shoulder to see if the Walking Man was listening. He wasn’t. He was looking out across the countryside in the opposite direction, a small smile on his face, as if he had already decided what Caffery was going to do.

‘Where’ve you been? The CSI are going crazy. E District’s had people over at your house trying to find you. You’re not answering your phone. They’ve been trying all night.’

‘I know. I saw the messages.’

‘My guess is you’ve been with your snout. Am I right?’

‘Yes. He’s unearthed something.’

The line went quiet.

‘It’s credible,’ Caffery said. ‘Very credible.’

Again there was silence. In a dry voice, Powers said, ‘Give me an outline, then.’

‘Gerber. Gerber did Kitson too.’

‘No. No fucking way.’

He looked up at the line of smoke. He didn’t know why but it comforted him, that black smoke coming from someone else’s fire. It was as if the world wasn’t such a lonely place at all. ‘She had an appointment with him. Used a fake name – we don’t know what. Maybe she talked him into not recording it. Didn’t want the press getting hold of it. But as soon as everyone wakes up, when everything comes on-line, I suggest you get some soil people out to Gerber’s place. There’s a couple of spots out there they could run a ground radar over.’

‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure about this?’

Caffery didn’t answer for a few moments. The wind had caught the black smoke on the far hill and was moving it slowly across the sky. When he’d killed that man in London he’d had his reasons, reasons that still seemed sound and good. Flea’s reasons would be clear too, they’d be as understandable as his were. There was nothing in the ground at Gerber’s house – nothing except the opportunity to buy some time. Time enough to do as the Walking Man said, to see the whole picture and decide whether to go at things the straightforward way. Or whether to leave Flea in peace, to make her own mistakes and atonements.

‘Yes,’ he said calmly. And something in his chest seemed to lift a little as he said it. ‘I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.’

After leaving school at fifteen, Mo Hayderworked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. She has an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University.