Skin

28

Early the next morning the lanes around the rapeseed field were silent. Sunlight caught at the diamond points of dew in the grass. Flea stopped the Clio on the tarmac, got out and walked along the road in her trainers, casually passing the place Misty had been killed. Stopping a hundred yards past it, she turned and retraced her steps.

It was only seven a.m. but she knew it was going to be a warm day. The line of thaw in the grass was a few inches behind the shadow of the sun creeping up over the hill. A few cows stood watching her, breathing heavily, clouds of breath and steam wreathing them. Back at the car she stood for a moment, looking about, listening, checking nothing was coming. The lane was silent. This place wasn’t just a long way from the clinic: it was also outside the base station cell. In range of a different mast, in fact. Misty had switched off the phone a long time before the impact. MCIU would never have thought to search out here.

But – she turned to look up the hill – if the case went on any longer they might turn their attention to places this far afield. Maybe not to search but for house-to-house enquiries. Like in the hamlet up there. The sleepy roofs and chimneys of a short row of Victorian houses and five or six older cottages scattered above the terrace. Some were thatched, some reminded her of her parents’ home, their tiled roofs mossed and dank. Below the cottages, on the lower slope nearer the road, sat a modern bungalow. Out of whack with its surroundings, it had a side gabled roof and PVC windows.

Something, a light or a reflection, flashed from the back of it.

Slowly she raised a hand, shielded her eyes and stared. The flash came again. A brief square of white light. Then nothing. Maybe it was a window opening and closing. Someone in the bungalow was moving around. They might be watching her.

She dropped her hand, shrugged the collar of the jacket up around her neck, went back to the car and drove half a mile along the lane into the trees at the bottom of the hamlet. There was a small ingress on the right. She pulled into it and parked the car deep in the trees where no one would pass, deadlocked it, got out and followed a small footpath that led away from the ingress in the direction of the bungalow. The path was overgrown and choked with nettles, but it climbed steadily towards the hamlet. She stopped when the trees cleared and she found herself at a low brick wall, looking at the bungalow’s back garden.

It was large and unkempt, spreading away across the hillside: grass and the first dandelions were coming up through the brown skeletons of last year’s bindweed. Brambles had strewn themselves across the lawn like tentacles, and everywhere fibrestone lawn ornaments nestled in the wet grass: cats and dolphins, a Pegasus with a broken wing, a donkey next to a manger. Plastic bird feeders, in faded sherbet shades of pink, orange and yellow, hung in the trees and saplings. A Siamese cat, a real one, the colour of crème brûlée, sat under one, blinking sleepily at Flea.

The house was as shabby as the garden. The paint on the window frames had once been a deep red but had faded with years of sun and rain. It, too, was studded with animal statuary: chipped and peeling butterflies flew up the walls; three cast-concrete cats squared off at each other on the roof ridge and another appeared to be crawling head first into the chimney. No windows were open. But she could see where the sun’s reflection had come from – not a window. On the patio, next to french windows, a telescope was mounted on a tripod. Next to it, also on a tripod, was a camera.

She climbed stealthily over the wall. She walked quickly to the side of the house and the sun-cracked hard standing where a faded old Volkswagen sat, covered with white bird shit. The house was almost silent – just the faint sound of a TV playing inside, a high-octane voice, shrill, rising. She took a step nearer the french windows. Listened again. No one was moving in there. The telescope was just feet away. She stared at it, trying to work out what it was focused on. She looked down at the road. You could see the tyre tracks from here. They were like a beacon. You couldn’t miss them.

Enough. This was enough. Someone here might have seen the accident.

She went back down the garden the way she’d come. She got to the ingress and, sitting on the Clio’s warm bonnet where she couldn’t be seen from the road or the house, pulled out her phone and plugged in the force communications number.

She and Thom had to be very, very careful. Any risk, however small, had to be taken care of.