Skin

11

Small though Flea was, she knew how to use her body. Dressed in her force combats, a neat white T-shirt and dark glasses over her red-rimmed eyes, she was a force to be reckoned with as she stood blocking the entrance to the driveway. The moment he saw her the taxi driver pulled up short. She held up a hand and swung straight into the back seat. No one, she thought darkly, was going to take a car to the front of her house for a while.

It was a warm afternoon and the taxi driver had the air-conditioner on, but they’d only gone a few hundred yards before he began to sniff. Flea, sitting stonily in the back, her arms crossed, her feet planted solidly on the floor, raised her eyes and found him looking at her in the rear-view mirror. He sniffed again, narrowing his eyes suspiciously, trying to look down at her clothing in the reflection. ‘Off somewhere nice?’ he said steadily. ‘Going somewhere nice on this nice day?’

‘No.’ She opened the window to let the air in. ‘I’m not going anywhere nice. I’m going to see my brother.’

She pulled out the phone. She’d called Thom six times already. Each time he’d dumped her straight into his mailbox. There was no point in calling him again. She could call her dad’s oldest friend, Kaiser, but he’d never had sympathy for Thom. Anyway, she’d leant on him too much in the last few days. She dropped the phone into her lap and leant back in the seat. The air coming in was sweet, warm and full of buttercups, bringing with it a sense of the west, a sense of the sea out past Bristol and Wales. She’d known these lanes all her life. She’d grown up here with the views of the seven sacred hills, the Georgian townhouses of Bath cradled between them, with the distant view of Sally-in-the-Wood and beyond it the Avon valley.

She thought about Thom, about how everyone had worried over him as a child. He was underweight, too small for his age. He got infections easily, learnt to walk late, and always seemed to find the fastest way to trouble. Mum and Dad had had to dig deep to keep their patience with him. And sometimes they’d failed.

She remembered coming in from the garden one day. Out of the sunlight, into the cool. It was the school holidays and her parents were in but the house was silent, which made her hesitate and go upstairs quietly. She found her mother first, sitting on the edge of the bed in the big double room. She was dressed in shorts and green Scholl sandals, and was staring at herself in the mirror. Her long white fingers pressed a pair of headphones to her ears and something about her posture, about the tension in her hands, the way her feet were crabbed up in the sandals, told Flea not to approach. Then Jill Marley had looked at her daughter. There was no expression on her face. They held each other’s eyes for almost a minute. Then Jill had turned back to the mirror.

The door to Thom’s room on the other side of the landing was half open. Flea tiptoed over to it and inside saw an odd tableau. Dad was in the middle of the room, kneeling. Thom, who was about eight at the time, stood a pace away, facing him. They weren’t speaking or moving, just staring at each other. Dad’s face had the look on it that he sometimes got when he was determined to do something, as if he believed the force of his gaze was enough to cut through mountains. At first Flea thought they were having a conversation. Then she saw it wasn’t a conversation they were in the middle of. It was violence.

David Marley took a breath, closed his eyes and slapped his son across the face. It wasn’t the first slap that afternoon, Flea knew. She could tell that this had been going on for a long time: Dad staring at Thom, Thom staring back, every few seconds Dad lifting his hand and slapping him. She understood what was happening, too. Dad was trying to make Thom react. But he wouldn’t. She could’ve told Dad he was wasting his time. Thom stood, mouth slightly open, eyes focused in mid-air. He wouldn’t react. He wouldn’t cry. That was just Thom for you. Irritating, distant and otherworldly. Not quite with it.

And now he was all she had left in the world. With Mum and Dad gone, Thom was all she had left to convince her that their childhood had really happened.

After their parents’ accident Thom had refused to move back into the family home with his sister and now he lived in a thirties semi on the outskirts of Bristol. It was built identically to the others in the street, with tile-hung walls and diamond-shaped leaded panes in the windows. It was tidy. There was an empty milk bottle with a note in it on the immaculately swept doorstep. Thom hadn’t been able to find a job in years and recently his energy had gone into tending the tiny house while his girlfriend went out to work. Thom – poor, hopeless Thom, so ill-equipped to deal with the world. And so, so stupid.

‘You should have called first.’ He opened the door a crack, just allowing his face to peer through. ‘You should have called. Why didn’t you?’

‘I did call,’ she hissed. ‘Your phone was switched off.’ She stepped forward, pushing the door, expecting him to give way. But he didn’t. ‘Thom. You know why I’m here.’

‘It was an accident,’ he whispered. ‘An accident.’

‘Let me in.’

‘It was an accident – I didn’t mean it to happen. She just stepped out of the trees. It was a fast road. I didn’t have a chance.’

‘We’ve got to talk. Let me in.’

‘Mandy’ll be home soon.’ He pulled a handkerchief out of the top pocket of his shirt and rubbed it against his eyes, his mouth. ‘She’ll be wanting her tea…’

Flea pushed open the door, stepped inside and went past him. ‘I don’t care about Mandy. We’ve got to talk. Now. Come on.’

She walked into the sitting room with its vase of plastic flowers, its glass ornaments on the little table, everything neat, dusted and in its place – you could see the reflection in the TV screen, it was so highly polished. Not like Mum and Dad’s careless house. Thom wasn’t like a Marley at all.

After a while, when he saw she wasn’t going to leave, he followed.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

He sat obediently on the edge of the armchair. ‘Well? Are you going to dob me in?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m an idiot. A soft touch. Stupid enough to give a crap about you, you useless piece of shit.’

‘I deserve that.’

‘Yes. You haven’t even got the comprehension for the can of shit you’ve opened.’

He shifted in his chair, not meeting her eyes. He was dressed in his smart corduroy trousers, a chequered shirt under a sensible brown pullover. He was very blond and pale, and his ears stuck out just enough to give him a vaguely nerdish look. It was impossible to imagine he could have killed a woman, even accidentally, and not told someone: that he could coolly have picked her up, put her in the boot and driven all the way back to Flea’s house.

‘Did you know her?’

‘I told you, she stepped out in front of me. I was driving along and the next thing it was all over. I panicked, Flea. I just panicked.’

‘But you know who she is, don’t you?’

‘I’ve been watching the news. Every second of every day I’ve been watching it.’

‘Then you know they’re never going to stop looking for her. Not until hell freezes over.’

‘I know.’

She sighed. ‘I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.’

‘I’ve got no idea, no idea, what to do next.’

There was a taste in her mouth she didn’t think she’d ever get rid of. She sat on the sofa opposite and, arms folded, looked at him steadily. ‘OK. Here it is. Like I said, I won’t go to the police.’

‘No?’

‘No. But you will.’

Thom sat back in his chair. He let all his breath out.

‘Listen.’ She held up a hand. ‘I’m going to remind you of what happened, OK? You’ve been depressed. Since Mum and Dad died you’ve been really unwell. We’ve got doctors’ records to prove it.’

‘I’ve been better since I’ve been with Mandy. Things were getting better.’

‘You’ve been depressed. And that night you borrowed my car because everything had got too much. You wanted to drive somewhere, just to get your head together. You weren’t drunk but you were crying – you admit that. Hysterical, even. You hit something on the road. At the time you thought it was an animal, but then, when you thought about it, when you saw the headlines, you started wondering if…’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘Thom. It’s the only way. Your papers are all up to date, aren’t they? Your driving licence?’

‘Yes.’

‘My insurance is watertight for you driving and the car was in perfect nick, MOT only a month old. We’re in a strong position. We’ll get a psychiatric evaluation, plead diminished responsibility or recognized medical condition or whatever they call it these days, and there’s not a judge in this country would automatically bang you up. It’s more likely they’ll hand you a hospital order. Keep you in the psychiatric-evaluation tumble-drier until eventually the sun goes down and someone spits you out of the system.’

Thom lifted his thin hands and massaged his temples. The veins were blue through his skin.

‘The first thing we’ve got to do is return the body.’

‘God, please, no. Not that.’

‘We return it to the place the accident happened. Then we leave it for a couple of days so the wildlife can get at it. We need to destroy some bits of evidence and create others. In the meantime you go off and get yourself sectioned.’

‘Sectioned?’

‘We’re going to build a psychiatric case. We’ll do some research on the best way to go about it. But first we get the body back.’ She stood. ‘Now. We’ll take your car. You’ve got to show me where.’

He didn’t move.

‘She has to go back to the same place, Thom. There’ll be forensics at the scene proving it was an accident.’

He shook his head and looked at his hands, as if he’d find an answer in the soft skin on the back. She ran her fingers tiredly down her face. ‘Now, listen to me. And you’d better listen really well. I’d do anything for you because you’re my little brother. But I can’t take away what you’re going to have to do.’ She leant forward. ‘You’re going to take me there now. Did you hear me? Do you understand?’

He didn’t answer. In the hallway someone was unlocking the front door.

‘Mandy,’ he hissed. ‘Quick.’

Flea sighed. She stood up, arms still folded, while in the hallway Mandy moved around, putting down keys, flicking through the mail on the side table. After a moment or two she came into the living room, stopping when she saw Flea and the pinched look on her face.

Mandy was older than Thom by several years: a short, square woman who dressed in sludge-coloured linen with lots of Indian jewellery. Today she was wearing an olive green jacket and white trousers. She’d had her short hair styled and coloured: a deep dark red, almost purple, cut in a bob against her round face. In one hand she was carrying a half-open rucksack with papers and files peeping out of it. Now she set it on the floor and began slowly to unbutton her jacket, her eyes going carefully from Flea to Thom.

‘OK,’ she said, at last. ‘I’ve come in at a bad time.’

There was a moment’s silence. Thom licked his lips. In spite of his reserve, he’d never been brave – he was terrified of Mandy. And she knew it. She dominated him, never letting him out of her sight, expecting him to cook and clean. She’d spent a lot of the inheritance money too, on supporting a fringe theatre group from Easton. Ordinarily she and Flea didn’t have much to say to each other.

‘Mandy, I was just leaving. Thom, you give me a call when you’ve had a think, will you?’

He stared at her, the skin around his mouth faintly blue.

‘Thom?’ she said, meaningfully.

His trance broke. ‘Yes,’ he muttered hurriedly. ‘I’ll call you. Later. I swear.’