Skin

30

When Caffery woke, stiff and cold, to find the campsite deserted, just a mottled dead fire to prove the Walking Man had been there, the first thing that came into his head was Benjy: that damned dog of Lucy Mahoney’s. It had been in his dreams: a skinless dog in a body-bag on a vet’s table. The smell, and the shelled-egg stare of its eyes. Mallows said the Tanzanian brothers hated dogs: would-n’t go near them. In Africa the dog was often considered a pest. There was plenty in the literature about muti using parts from endangered species, but nothing about dogs. So, had it been kids who skinned the dog? Or Amos Chipeta? And, if it was Chipeta, then, why? As Caffery tinkered around, rolling up the mattress and sluicing his mouth out with water from a bottle, he decided he wanted to know more about what had happened the night of Lucy Mahoney’s suicide.

He called Wells police station and when he arrived an hour later the property clerk was already waiting for him, pen in hand for him to sign out item eight, three mortise keys and a Yale, from the detained-property register. Beatrice Foxton had pronounced Lucy Mahoney a suicide and so, technically speaking, all the personal effects from the post-mortem were under the auspices of the coroner’s office. But the clerk agreed no one would miss any of them for a few hours.

Lucy had lived in a new development on the edge of Westburysub-Mendip. Caffery drove past row upon row of brick-built starter flats and maisonettes, tiny front lawns, empty driveways that, by night, would fill with Mazdas and low-end Peugeots, because this was a place for workers, not families. Lucy’s was a downstairs maisonette. Two dustbins and a recycling wheelie with ‘32’ painted on it in white stood outside a little porch. As he put the key into the lock he could see through the pane the takeaway food circulars on the floor. Domino’s, Chilli’s Curry, the Thai House.

He glanced over his shoulders, then stepped inside, not switching on the light. He stood behind the door and pulled on blue plastic bootees, and a pair of nitrile gloves. He closed the door, opened the inner one and padded through.

The living room was dark and cluttered. Not what you’d expect when you were looking at the place from the outside. A new Dell LCD monitor, a scanner and a digital camera stood on a desk in the corner, but everything else was worn, a little battered. A threadbare Turkish rug on the floor, embroidered cushions scattered around, furniture painted with flowers and vines. Every surface was crammed with wood carvings, aromatherapy bottles, Nepalese painted papier-mâché, a faded sculpture of a wading bird that looked Asian. Tacked on to the living room was a little dining area and beyond that a kitchen with hand-painted tiles above the sink. The curtains were pulled back from the large window to show distant hills. Glastonbury Tor was out there – a little blip on the horizon.

He went around the few rooms, peering at things, trying to get a feel for the place. Lucy was the collecting type. Paperweights seemed to be her thing. Paperweights with flowers in them. Paperweights with volcano bursts of red and orange. Paperweights with tiny, almost translucent shells set at angles. The place was clean, though – cleaner than it had a right to be. Weird, he told himself, looking at the kitchen. Weirdly clean. Nothing to start a parade over – sometimes suicides spring-cleaned the place before downing the co-proxamol. Even so, this cleanliness felt odd, out of whack. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he remembered something Stuart Pearce the search adviser had said: Lucy Mahoney’s suicide had broken all the rules.

He went upstairs and switched on a light. Three doors opened on to the landing. One was a bathroom tiled in dark blue, a resin toilet seat embedded with seashells, and two pairs of thick striped tights hanging from the shower-curtain rail to dry. The dog team would have left those behind because there’d be no scent on them. They’d have gone instead for pyjamas, underwear: stuff taken out of the laundry basket. The second door was locked. He rattled it. It wasn’t moving. He went downstairs and ferreted through the drawers for keys, then checked the coat rack in the hallway. Nothing. He went back upstairs and lay on the landing carpet with his face close to the gap. Closed his mouth and breathed in the air coming from under the door.

Perfume. Perfume and joss-sticks. And something else. Turps, maybe. The room would have been unlocked by the search teams when they came through here looking for her when she first went missing. Someone must have come and locked it since. Lucy’s ex, maybe. He’d been listed as next of kin because her parents were dead.

The last door was the bedroom. Green velvet curtains, crystals and doeskin dream-catchers hung in the windows, and sequined belly-dance shawls had been draped over lamps – as if she’d had a lover recently. He went to the window and studied the photo in the frame on the sill: a little girl at a fête, wearing a wide-brimmed black straw hat, her arms around an old-fashioned rag doll. This would be Daisy, the daughter. The property clerk at Wells had said the Mahoneys had had a daughter – that she was staying somewhere near Gloucester with the ex-husband and mother-in-law.

There was a noise at the bottom of the stairs, a faint clunk and a shuffling. Caffery picked up the heaviest paperweight he could find and went out on to the landing. He stood in the doorway, weighing it in his hand and counting in his head.

A light went on in the porch. The door opened and a face appeared at the bottom of the stairs. It was the ex-husband, rumpled in a suit that looked as if it belonged on an insurance salesman. He blinked up at Caffery, at his hands in the nitrile gloves and the paperweight. Then he looked down at Caffery’s booteed feet. ‘And who are you again?’

‘DI Caffery.’ He came down the stairs. ‘We spoke yesterday at the hospital. I can’t remember your name either.’

‘Colin Mahoney.’

‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Picking up the post.’

‘You’re divorced.’

‘We were still friends. Didn’t know there was a law against being friends with your ex. They told me I wasn’t going to hear anything else until the inquest.’

‘No one’s been in touch, then? No one from F District?’

‘No. Should they?’

‘Have they told you about the dog yet?’

‘Yes. He fell in the quarry. Apparently.’

‘That must have been hard. Hard to take.’

‘Yeah. Well, sometimes life kicks you in the face. And when it does your teeth fall out.’

Mahoney walked into the sitting room and sat down. He put his hands on his knees and looked around, as if there might be an answer to something in the walls of the crowded room. Caffery followed him in and stood in front of him.

‘Here.’ He handed him some gloves. ‘Try not to touch anything.

Mahoney took them. ‘Which unit did you say you worked for again?’

‘I didn’t. Major Crime Investigation Unit.’

‘Major Crime? That’s the murder unit?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘On Friday you told me it wasn’t your case. And now it is.’ He stared at the gloves. ‘I didn’t think Benjy fell in the quarry. Not for a second. He wasn’t stupid. They wouldn’t let me see his body and that didn’t sound right either.’ He raised his eyes. ‘Well? Is it a murder? Is that what you’re here to tell me?’

‘No.’ He set the paperweight on the coffee-table next to the two A5 ‘Searched Premises’ forms the search team had left. ‘We do random checks – just reviews on suicides, here and there. It’s something the Home Office are testing in Avon and Somerset. Then they’ll roll it out nationwide.’

‘Is that true?’

Caffery held his eyes.

‘Is it?’

Caffery cleared his throat and nodded at the gloves. ‘Can you put those on?’

‘Why? The place has been searched. Has something changed?’

‘Put them on, please.’

Mahoney did what he was told. Caffery sat down opposite him. ‘Mr Mahoney, I’ve got some more questions for you.’

‘I gathered.’

‘Do you think Lucy was the sort to kill herself?’

‘Of course not. I’ve been saying it all along. Haven’t you got this in your notes?’

‘Like I said, I’m reviewing the case. It’s come to me cold. First thing I knew about it was Friday morning. Did she know the Strawberry Line? Did she know the area well?’

‘She knew it was there, but I’ve never known her go over there.’

‘Didn’t have any friends in the area?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘What about the quarries over at Elf’s Grotto? Quarry number eight? They call it the suicide quarry.’

‘I’m not even sure why you searched it.’

‘Her car was found near by. Half a mile away. But you’re telling me she never went to the quarries?’

‘No. Odd, isn’t it, that she parked up near them? And she definitely would never have taken Benjy there either. She never took him near water. Didn’t like him getting wet.’

‘There was a Stanley knife.’

‘So they tell me.’

‘Do you know where it came from?’

‘Upstairs. Her studio. She used it for her framing work.’

‘That’s the door that’s locked.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why locked?’

He shrugged. ‘She didn’t like people in there. It’s got all her paintings in it. She was sensitive about them. She didn’t mind me seeing them but hated anyone else in the studio. Once the search team had come through I locked it.’

‘Can we get into it?’

‘The key’s at my mother’s. It’s an hour’s drive there and back.’

‘But the knife’s definitely missing?’

‘Yes. I checked the other night, after they’d found her.’

Caffery looked around the room. At the paperweights catching the light. All clean and sparkling. ‘You last saw Lucy on Sunday?’

‘I was here. We had coffee together. I left at five thirty.’

‘And she seemed OK to you then?’

‘Absolutely fine. Very relaxed.’

‘She didn’t tell you she was anxious about anything? Depressed?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Any of her friends say anything about her being depressed?’

‘No. The police went through her address book and interviewed them all and no one could come up with anything. Everyone feels the same way I do. Everyone feels…’ He trailed off and Caffery saw the look in his eye. He saw it and he saw his mother again – saw her screaming in the kitchen, holding on to a police officer in the hallway, begging him, ‘Find my little boy. Just do it – go out there now and find my little boy.’

Caffery closed his eyes. Then he opened them. ‘It’s clean in here. Did you clean it?’

‘No. This is how she left it.’

‘Was it normal for the house to be this clean?’

‘No. To be this clean was unusual. Lucy had…’ he hesitated ‘… priorities. And, as you can see, she had tastes. Some I don’t share.’

Caffery picked up the paperweight on the coffee-table and turned it over, idly studying the bottom. ‘The Emporium’ was printed on a gold lozenge-shaped sticker. ‘We never found her phone.’ He replaced the paperweight and picked up another. The same sticker on the bottom. ‘I was at Wells and I went through all the possessions she had on her. I was looking for bills but the officer in charge tells me he left them here. He said it was a bugger of a job because most of the bank statements and bills were missing. In fact, he said there were hardly any records of any sort in the house.’

‘I know. I was told they’d got a warrant out. I was told Orange were supposed to be releasing the missing bills.’

Mahoney was right. But here again the system had favoured people like Misty Kitson whose phone records had come back in hours. When Caffery’d checked he’d found Lucy Mahoney’s records had never arrived. They were jammed in the system somewhere and now her body had turned up no one would bother to chase them. Caffery had Turnbull chasing another warrant to track them down, but it’d be days before they had access to them, days before they learnt what had really happened to Lucy Mahoney in her last hours.

‘Didn’t she have somewhere she kept her paperwork?’

Mahoney pointed to a box file next to the computer. ‘Over there.’

Caffery put down the paperweight, went to the desk and opened the box. It contained four phone bills, mostly from last year. Only one from this year – January. There were twelve electricity bills, two council-tax bills and ten bank statements, all dating from more than two years ago. He turned round and held out the file to Mahoney. ‘Like this, was it? When you first came in.’

‘Exactly like this.’

‘Do you know why she’d keep statements for these months and not for others?’

‘She was secretive, that’s all I can say. When the police questioned her friends they couldn’t find out anything about her. It was like that even when we were married. I never knew what she was thinking.’

Caffery gazed around at the walls, the higgledy-piggledy furniture. ‘I can see how she lived, but I’ve got no idea what she looked like. No photos.’

Mahoney got up. He went to the computer, switched it on, pulled out a small stool and held out his hand. ‘Help yourself. It’s all in here.’

Caffery sat down. The computer was the newest thing in the place. It was good, fast, a 2.9-gig processor. He took a quick look through her documents. Nothing of interest. The search team would have gone through them with a fine tooth-comb. He opened her email account – two new emails. Both junk. Clicked on to Explorer and dropped down the search-history file. The terms were Pot Plants, Hollyoaks, Mascara, Body Toning, Crystals. Nothing very interesting. He opened her video folder and chose one at random.

The clip opened in a field. It was some time in the summer because the grass was green, the trees thick with leaves. A tall, heavy woman in a calf-length black dress stood in the middle distance. Her arms were stretched out, trying to catch the legs of a slight girl in pink shorts who was hopping around throwing wobbly handstands. The woman was laughing. She had very short auburn hair. Her face was ruddy, heavy-boned. It was a jump to link her to the blackened pile on the table in the mortuary.

‘I filmed that one.’ Mahoney came to stand behind him. ‘That was three summers ago. The year Daisy decided Nastia Liukin had competition.’

‘Daisy? Your daughter?’

‘She’s staying with my mum. Broken-hearted, of course.’

Daisy threw another handstand. This time Lucy caught her legs. There was a long, precarious moment while Daisy tried to hold the position. Then her arms buckled. Lucy tried to maintain it but Daisy rolled on to the ground and lay on her back, her hands on her stomach, giggling. The camera zoomed in on Lucy. She was laughing too, but when she saw she was being filmed, the smile faded. ‘Oh, no!’ She shook her head and held up a hand to block the camera’s view. ‘Don’t. Please. You’re making me blush now. Leave me alone.’

The camera swung away. There were a few frames of a lawn and the fumbling noise of the camera being switched off. The screen went blank.

‘“Don’t make me blush.”’ Mahoney went back and sat on the sofa. ‘Yes. That was Lucy all over. Everything embarrassed her.’

‘She loved Daisy.’

‘Everyone loves Daisy.’

Caffery opened another file. This one was dated just three months ago. It showed a small room, dull daylight coming through the window. A woman was standing side on to the camera, looking at an easel with a canvas on it. Lucy. Her red hair straggled down her back – it was much longer – and her clothes were different, colourful. She wore a red waistcoat over a sapphire blue shirt with a flowered bandanna tied in a knot at the front of her head. She was holding a paintbrush in one hand; the other fiddled with the shirt. She was thinner here. Much thinner. In three years she’d developed a waistline.

‘Who shot this one?’

‘I don’t know. A friend, maybe. I wasn’t there.’

The camera came in close. Lucy turned and looked steadily at the lens. She didn’t blush. She didn’t try to turn away. She smiled ironically, held up the paintbrush and spoke in a mock-French accent: ‘Welcome to my atelier, little one. This is where the magic is made.’

The video stopped and for a moment the room was silent. Caffery tapped his finger on the mouse pad. This is where the magic is made. Something was here, in this video. Something important. He played it again, looking carefully at her face, at the way her hand fiddled with the shirt, self-consciously touching her stomach. This is where the magic is made. What are you trying to tell me, Lucy? What are you trying to say?

A noise behind him made him turn. Mahoney was sitting forward, peering at the table. ‘That’s odd,’ he murmured. ‘That’s very odd.’

Caffery pushed back the chair. ‘What is?’

‘Those.’

He looked to where Mahoney pointed and saw nothing out of the ordinary: just the search forms, the paperweight and Lucy’s door keys where he’d left them earlier.

‘Her keys? I booked them out from the station at Wells.’

Mahoney leant over. Picked them up. ‘Was this how you found them?’

‘They were in her pocket. Yes.’

‘Just these two. The Chubb and the Yale?’

‘They fit the front door.’

‘But one’s missing. There should be a back-door key. Usually it’s up there, on that nail.’

Caffery turned. The nail was empty. He glanced at the front door, then the back door. For a moment he felt a small chill. As if something had just come into the room and settled down with them.

‘And…’ He gave a small cough. ‘And I take it you haven’t got it?’

Mahoney turned his eyes to him. The pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. ‘No. And if you haven’t got it,’ he said, ‘then who the hell has?’