Skin

24

Caffery wasn’t sure he would stay in Bristol. Like a boat slipping anchor, the release from what had been holding him in London for years – Penderecki, the paedophile who’d murdered his brother Ewan – had sent him to wander, not to rest. He’d sold his house in Brockley and come west with an inflated bank account and no desire to put down roots. He’d gone into a letting agency and put a deposit on the first place he could move into straight away, without even seeing a picture of it. It had turned out to be a little stone-built cottage just in sight of the ancient and lonely Priddy Circles.

Priddy was a strange place adrift in the damp Mendips. Unpopulated and bleak, the area was pocked with lead mines, sink holes and legends. Local people swore that Jesus himself had once visited the neolithic circles. They said he’d floated in a low boat up from Glastonbury, across what had then been sea, standing proud in the bow. His uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, had been in the stern. And who was to say they were wrong? ‘As sure as the Lord walked in Priddy,’ Caffery had heard a woman in the local newsagent’s say only two days ago. To her it was like saying, ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

Caffery hadn’t settled there. The rooms were too small, and in the morning he had to bend to look out of his bedroom window, it was set so low in the wall. The thatched roof was like the picture on a chocolate box from a distance, but he was woken most mornings by the scratch of squirrels nesting in it and one had already found a way of creeping into the house and crapping on the kitchen table. The cottage hadn’t welcomed Caffery so he had agreed to dislike it in return: most of his boxes were still in the garage and even two months along he hadn’t unpacked many of his clothes. They lay gathering dust on the spare-room bed in their suit protectors. Maybe girls like Keelie were more than just his way of staying out of relationships. Maybe they were also a way of stopping him coming here. To the emptiness, the smells and the shadows.

He got back to the cottage at nine and went around opening windows to let out the squirrelly smell. He knew he should eat something. Instead he went into the lounge and filled a tumbler with Glenmorangie. He paused to consider the glass, then picked up the bottle of malt and carried it up the narrow, lumpy little staircase, his head bent. The ceilings here were low, the plaster was old and sagging, probably made of horsehair, and he’d learnt not to try to put pictures on the wall. But the bedroom was about OK. There was a satellite hook and a TV on an old box chest near the bed.

He put the bottle on the bedstand, pulled off his shoes and socks, tie, shirt and trousers, clicked the TV on and lay down in his underwear, his hands behind his head, staring at the screen. There was a programme on about a women’s football team from Iceland. One of the players had a harelip that had been badly operated on. Birth was a lottery, he thought. The tiniest mutation in a gene could create a monster. The Icelandic woman. The Tokoloshe. Amos Chipeta.

A check through the Guardian database and Interpol had confirmed it: Clement Chipeta had a brother, Amos, who’d left Tanzania at the same time and was still unaccounted for. He’d grown up in the mangroves of the Rufiji delta and, before he’d turned twenty, had found a living with the gangs who operated illegal divers – some without breathing apparatus – to raid the shipwrecks. None of it was covered by local law and there was a lot of money in the operations. For Amos it was just the beginning of the criminal career that had brought him into contact with the trade in body parts and eventually to the UK. Last December someone called Andrew Chipeta had gone to a GP in Southall, London, asking for referral to a specialist. The doctor had looked at the deformed spine, the overlarge ribcage, the gorilla-sized jaw, and was sifting a range of diagnoses in his head, scoliosis, kyphosis, diastrophic dysplasia, but ‘Andrew’ had left in a hurry when the doctor had asked the formal questions they’d put to any new patient: his address, his circumstances, his age and country of origin.

Amos Chipeta. So who or what was the Tokoloshe? Just a young man crippled by a birth defect? Out there somewhere now, existing God only knew how and trying to find help in a cold, alien country – but still able to find beauty and clarity and maybe even love in the face of a twenty-quid-a-trick prostitute from Hartcliffe? Or was he a monster? A half-human sloping off in mud and dirty water, making a living from raiding graves and cutting the hair from corpses.

Caffery closed one eye and then the other, letting the TV light prism through the liquid gold in his glass. Years ago back in London – he’d have been about fifteen at the time – he was in love with one of the girls at his school. Couldn’t remember her name now. But he could remember the name of the guy she was in love with: Tom Cadwall. He could remember, too, breaking into the Cadwalls’ garden early one morning. Climbing a tree. Hanging in the branches like a bloody possum. He’d stayed there all day, hoping to see inside Tom Cadwall’s bedroom. He wanted to know what Cadwall had that he didn’t.

Caffery dozed: right where he was, one hand curled round the glass on his chest. He saw Tom Cadwall. He saw him standing at the bedroom window all those years ago. He saw a woman come into the room and speak to him. She was slight, wiry, a mass of hair bleached by sun and salt water. She crossed the room and leant into Tom. She sniffed his chest, reached her hand to the back of his head, laced her fingers in his hair and began to tear at it.

Caffery woke with a start. The glass rolled off his chest and smashed on the floor. He lay there, heart thudding, the hairs on the back of his neck standing rigid. Something had woken him. Something was in the room.

Slowly, without moving the rest of his body, he freed one hand and lifted it so it was ready to cannon up and out. Keeping his breathing slow and controlled so that if anyone was watching him he’d seem calm, he scanned the room, trying to place where the bastard was hiding. He thought about the Hardballer – outside in the damned glove compartment of the car.

In one motion he rolled on to his back, snatched up the bottle and held it in front of him, training his eyes into the darkness. ‘Right.’ He breathed hard. ‘Whatever you want, let’s do it. Let’s get it over with.’

All that came back to him was the flicker of the TV screen. An insurance commercial, a bulldog nodding at the camera. From downstairs he could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. He pulled back the duvet and ran his hands lightly across the surface of the sheet. It was bumpy and uneven. Damp. And now he could smell stagnant water. Rivers and quarries. The bastard had been lying in his bed.

He threw the duvet on to the floor. Tucked under the pillow something glinted. Scissors. His own nail scissors from the bathroom cabinet. The sort that had been used to cut Jakes’s hair.

He ran his hands across the back of his head. Right at the bottom, at the very nape of his neck, a tiny patch was missing. The size of a penny.

He breathed, long and slow, trying to calm himself.

The little casement windows were open, just the top pane. No one and nothing could have come in through those. What about downstairs? Could someone have opened one of the doors and crept in without him knowing? And the bathroom? He put the scissors on the bedstand and got up, still holding the bottle in front of him.

A noise. Downstairs. The sly sound of the front door opening. Just a tiny creak. It was enough. He got to the top of the stairs just in time to see a shadow, a suggestion of something slightly darker than its surroundings, slip out of the front door.

He launched himself down, two stairs at a time, threw open the door and ran out in his bare feet. There were clouds over the moon and no street-lights this far out in the Mendips, so the garden was dark. He came to a halt in the middle of the driveway and stood with the bottle still thrust out, listening. From the forests to his right came the ghostly calls of two owls, battling it out over territory. Somewhere on the other side of the trees to his left he heard the brook that ran along the bottom of the garden and way, way to the north, the monster whine of a distant jet starting its descent into Bristol. Nothing else. No scooter. No footsteps.

The car keys were in the living room. He went and got them. When he came out again the garden was still silent. He took the 45 Hardballer from the glove compartment. Slammed the door. Listened again. There was something at the end of the driveway he hadn’t noticed last time. About ten metres away. A glitch in the darkness. A smudge of light where there shouldn’t be any.

He slammed the magazine into the pistol grip and – gun pointing down away from him because it was only in the movies you held a loaded pistol in the air where it could be easily knocked out of your hands – padded over to the shape. It was a shoe. A rubber Croc. He lifted his eyes and studied the darkness again. The silent trees. The blank walls of the cottage. He picked up the shoe and went inside.

The house was dark. He put the chain on the front door and went into the kitchen. When he switched on the light he saw that two cupboards stood open. A bag of rice lay tipped over on the floor, its contents splayed across the tiles. And inside the cupboards, where there had been the usual blokeish collection of cans, baked beans, soup, stuff he could heat in five minutes, now there was nothing. Just a scattering of dried pasta and the white backboards. He went around and checked what had gone. Food – every bit of food in the house. The CD player on the sideboard was still there. And a portable TV set still in its box on the floor.

He put the Croc on the table next to the gun and sat down, his elbows on the table. The sandal was dark khaki, dusty and very large. He turned it over. Size twelve.

Fucking mutant.

No way am I sleeping with a mutant.

He looked at his hands. They were shaking. This was enough. This was too much on his own. He needed to speak to someone.