Skin

48

It was a cool evening with no hint of the heat from earlier in the day. Flea wore a Powerlite tank and shorts set and ran a two-hour circuit along the lanes that meandered lazily through the hills north of Bath. Years ago, before Mum and Dad’s accident, she’d had boyfriends. Lots of them. One had been an ex-marine who’d trained in Quantico – they used to run together. He taught her the Fartlek technique, and she still used it: two-kilometre sprint, five-minute walk, then a long, loping run, extended stride, comfortable pace, interspersed every three hundred metres with sixty-metre sprints. Every ten sprints she checked her heart rate: average 173. Way further into the cardio range than usual. But it was what she needed today.

After ninety minutes she calculated she’d already gone over the lactate threshold twenty times. She should ease off into cool-down, drop back a little and come home on a jog. But she didn’t. She kept pushing it to the wall, pounding the lanes until the sun dropped behind Bristol, until the shadows were long in the fields, until her legs were shaking. Until she was calm. She ran until the only thing she felt was a residual sadness – an ache located somewhere near her lungs – to remind her of her brother.

On the homeward leg, a narrow stretch of tree-lined road with a small stile and horse fields on her right, she thought she saw something at the entrance to the house. Something small like an animal. A large dog, maybe, standing on its hind legs, looking back down the dark lane towards her. She slowed to a jog. Narrowed her eyes. Whatever it was had gone. Must have been the shadows playing tricks with her eyes. There was nothing. Just the long straight trunk of the neighbour’s eucalyptus tree at the edge of her drive.

She trotted on to the point and did a short circuit of the area, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The place was empty. The garden was silent. It was almost dark now and just a vague yellowish light came from the Oscars’ windows high in the wall.

She began to unlock the door but stopped for a moment or two, sweat streaming off her, her mind working. Then she took the key out of the door and went about two yards along the wall to a place where the wisteria hung in heavy fronds.

For years it had been the family’s habit to leave a spare door key on a nail under the wisteria. For emergencies. It was hidden behind the thickened stem so even in the winter it would only be visible to the initiated. She pulled aside the leaves and scrutinized it. It hung there just as it had for years: a little rusted, completely hidden. There was nothing different about it. She was sure. Nothing wrong. Nothing amiss.

She turned slowly, watching the stillness of the trees, the cold disc of the moon coming up, a Hallowe’en filigree of branches splayed in front of it. She thought about human feet disappearing above her in the bubbles. About Caffery: Have you ever asked yourself if we missed someone that day? When we came to the squat?

After the raid on the squat in Operation Norway, Wellard had complained he’d ‘felt watched’ when he was coming out of the building. ‘Watched’ was the word. They’d all felt it. And that night, when it was all over and she was at home, she’d had a moment of feeling something had been wrong about the arrest.

She unhooked the key from the wall, put it into her pocket and went inside. The empty hallway was cool, with just a moth battering the ceiling light. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello?’

She switched on lamps in all the downstairs rooms, went into the garage and stood for a long time staring at the shape in the bath, at the places where the plastic showed over the rim. She’d been in here before the jog. Had scooped out the water earlier and refilled the ice. Nothing had moved since. Nothing.

She went into the kitchen and looked at the things on the shelf: her mother’s pots and pans, her father’s old safe, which no one could open and contained God only knew what. She took the key out of her pocket and put it on the mantelpiece. There were only two people who knew where the key was kept. One was Kaiser, her father’s friend, and one… Well, one was Thom.

From somewhere above her in one of the bedrooms she heard a small creak. She turned her face to the ceiling, her eyes watering a little. The hot water came on at six every night. Sometimes the pipes had a life of their own. They made the old house creak and complain.

She went into the hallway. The moon had come up and its light came through the half-glazed back door, giving everything fizzy, metallic outlines: the runner carpet, the polished floorboards on either side, the umbrella stand and the old carved mirror at the foot of the stairs. Her wellington boots stood patiently at the back door as if someone had just stepped out of them. They seemed a million miles away. As if the hallway had lengthened itself stealthily while she’d been in the kitchen.

The umbrella stand contained no umbrellas, but was full of bric-à-brac – a hunting stick, an old dog leash from a pet long dead, a malacca sword cane Dad had brought back from Poland years ago. Eyes on the staircase, on the dark gulf of the landing above, she went to the stand and silently fumbled the sword out of its sheath. She held it in front of her and went up the stairs. The boards squeaked underfoot.

The landing was dark. She went along the corridor with its lumpy floor and low ceilings. Into the bedrooms, quickly and quietly, following her professional search-and-clear training: her own room, Mum and Dad’s room – their bedding in piles on the floor because she still hadn’t found the heart to put it away. The room where Dad had slapped Thom that day. Two spare rooms at the end. Empty. There was no one here except herself and the hot-water pump.

She sat down on the top step, fished her phone out of her pocket and dialled Jack Caffery.

‘I’m driving,’ he said. ‘I’ll put you on speaker.’ There was a pause and a clunk. Then she could hear the muffled thud and vibration of the car travelling at seventy m.p.h. somewhere out there in the night. ‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Did you ever find him?’

‘Find who?’

She rubbed her legs, trying to smooth down the goosebumps that had broken out. ‘The thing you were looking for, the Tokoloshe.’

‘You thought I was mad. But it turns out I wasn’t. There was someone else in the squat that day. Someone who escaped. His name is Amos Chipeta. He’s an illegal immigrant.’

‘How old is he? He can’t be an adult. An adult would never have got out of that window.’

‘But someone with a birth defect might. Ever heard of bone dysplasia?’

She massaged her temples, a slideshow of images starting in her head. There’d been an illustration of the Tokoloshe in a book on African superstition she’d read during Norway, and when she mentally superimposed it over the sort of images she’d seen occasionally in medical textbooks, she could see what Caffery was talking about. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘But I suppose I can imagine.’

‘And you’ll like this. Remember the free-diving stuff? Amos started his life like that, wreck-diving. Ends up dealing in muti and graduates to teaching our local thugs how to cut up bodies. Nice CV.’

‘Jesus,’ she murmured, thinking about the feet in the water. She’d been so cynical about those fifty metres, but some of the world’s best free divers had started life wreck-diving. And then she thought about the spare key on the mantelpiece downstairs. Amos Chipeta taught the people on Operation Norway to cut up dead bodies. What might he do with what was in the garage? ‘What’s MCIU doing about him? Where is he?’

A pause. ‘We don’t know.’

‘You mean he’s out there?’

‘Yes. He’s hiding somewhere. Probably living rough. We don’t know.’

‘Is he… When you say cutting up dead bodies, you don’t mean he’s still dangerous?’

‘Dangerous?’ Another pause. The low throb of the car hurtling through the night. ‘I don’t know that either. But I think-’ Caffery broke off.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, her arms very cold now. ‘You think-?’

‘The tor,’ he said distantly. ‘The bloody tor.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing.’

And before she could answer he’d hung up. She was left holding the phone, the screen light dying, the noise of his car still vibrating in her ears.

She sat there for a long time, staring at the phone in her hand, her body cold. An illegal immigrant? Out there in the night somewhere? Creeping through hedgerows and forests?

She got to her feet, steeling herself to go back into the garage and check Misty Kitson’s body again.

And that was when the knocking started at the back door.