Skin

15

The moon comes up fast in Somerset: racing across the lowlands, up the sides of the Mendips, into the Quantocks. It picks out the glittering windows of the cities in the far north of the county, creeps into the car in the mortuary car park where Jack Caffery plugs the key into the ignition. It finds Flea Marley in the north-east, standing on the blade of a hill, watching smoke rise. And ten miles to the east of her, in a quite different setting, it lingers on a lonely grey house. A house set back from a deserted lane, surrounded by fallow farmland, barns and outhouses and a disused swimming-pool. The moonlight fingers the windows of the single-storey extension. It tries but can’t reach past the breezeblocks into the specially adapted room.

Inside, the light is a different colour. Here there is only an unearthly blue glow, emanating from seven specialized refrigerator units, all of which have their doors wide open to reveal their contents: stack after stack of carefully inventoried containers, each filled to the brim with formalin.

The man is in the middle of the room on the floor. He is perfectly naked and sits with his legs crossed, almost in a yogic pose, letting the calming light from the units bathe him. He will never see a woman’s skin pegged out on his workbench. He understands this. Has understood it for years. That belongs to the realms of fantasy.

But his collection… His collection is his reality. It started as a small concession to the fantasy, but it has grown above and beyond that. It is more, much more. It is his life’s work. His reason to keep breathing. He’ll protect it at any cost. He’ll do anything, even kill.

He has a flash – a sudden photographic image of a face on a hospital trolley. The trolley is being wheeled away under fluorescent strip-lights. The patient is anaesthetized but as the gurney disappears something happens – something the hospital porters on either side don’t notice. The patient’s head tilts back, it twists a little and suddenly, unseen by anyone, her eyes fly open. She is awake. Awake and alert and can see everything. Everything.

He puts his face in his hands and concentrates.

‘Sssh.’ His voice is soft. A whisper. As if he’s soothing a child. ‘Sssssh. It’s OK. OK now.’

Things have gone wrong, but he’s set them right. It’s all behind him. All he has to do is keep calm and trust himself.

‘Sssssssh…’

He sits like this a little longer.

Then, irritably, he gets up. He goes around the room slamming the refrigerator doors.

He hates this life. He hates it.