Skin

70

The countryside was deserted. The clouds had wrapped themselves across the fields, trapping everything, every leaf and branch, in an eerie, chalky light. Flea drove slowly, determinedly, taking the Focus down the small routes, the places she knew weren’t going to be monitored by the traffic guys at this time of night. Just a handful of other cars were out. She wondered what she’d look like to the oncoming drivers. Her face set and hard in their headlights. Gripping the wheel, eyes boring through the windscreen. Half possessed.

She pulled off the road. The Focus bumped along the rutted drive to quarry number eight. In the boot the body shifted against the cardboard. She found a weak place in the surrounding bushes, swung the steering-wheel, gunned the engine, and forced the car deep into the undergrowth. It came to a halt, the axle hard against a fallen tree-trunk. She got out, crunched her way back to the quarry edge. Stood on the deserted track, listening hard, peering back along the route she’d come. She hadn’t been followed. Elf’s Grotto was so remote, so isolated, no one ever came up here. Still, she watched the road for almost five minutes until she was satisfied.

About fifteen years ago, when she and Thom were still kids, a woman had gone missing from a nightclub in Bath. One minute she’d been there, the next she was gone. In the playground at school they used to scare each other: they’d say whoever had got the woman would go after kids next. It was only when Flea grew up and entered the police that she learnt the truth. The woman hadn’t been killed by a bogeyman but by the one-night-stand she’d left the club with. He’d reversed his car at her. Probably never meant to kill her, but did. He’d dumped her on a pig farm and Flea had spent three weeks one stifling summer pulling animal bones out of a pit there, steam-cleaning them, then passing them to an anthropologist. They never found the body and, without it, the CPS couldn’t bring the case. Even though everyone knew the truth.

It showed what you could get away with if a body was well enough hidden. The most sensible thing Flea could do right now was to hire a chainsaw and cut Misty into a thousand pieces. Scatter them in rivers and fields. But even this new, cold imperative of hers couldn’t look that solution in the eye. So she’d come to another frantic but rational conclusion – the only one she could think of.

She dragged her dive kit from the back seat, dumped it a few feet away and set about covering the car with sticks and branches. Then she pulled off her shoes, got into the drysuit, hauled on the buoyancy jacket and the cylinders, and gave the regulator three short breaths – one, two, three. She secured all the harness straps, deadlocked the car doors – checked again that it couldn’t be seen from the slip road – and carried her fins down to the edge of the quarry. She pulled them on, then the mask, and climbed down the rusting ladder that led into the quarry. At 1.13 a.m. exactly she slipped silently out of sight, into the dark waters of quarry number eight.

The Marley family had always dived. Mum and Dad had taught the children. They’d put them in junior Solar suits aged eleven. Most family holidays revolved around scuba- and wreck-diving: the Red Sea, Cyprus, once into Truk Lagoon half bankrupting themselves. It was how they had come together, the place they found comfort, the place they settled into something easier. Even the accident hadn’t changed that. But diving here now, alone and in the dark? It broke all the rules of danger and common sense. It was a dumb, stark invitation to death.

She sank slowly, letting out small amounts of air from the suit as she descended to fifteen metres. The divelight she held pointed downwards, its membranous beam picking out swirling particles in the pitch darkness below. The light pierced a long way down, maybe another fifteen metres, but it didn’t reach the bottom. She was in the deepest part of the quarry. There was still twenty-five metres – almost seventy-five feet – of unlit water beneath her.

Down another fifteen metres. She found the net from memory, its weed-coloured webbing faint and furred in the torchbeam. She handheld herself along it twenty feet until she could see the warning sign. The hole she’d made last week was still there, the frayed edges moving slowly like wafting sea anemones. She ducked through, twisting over as she did to stop the cylinders snagging – she didn’t want a repeat of last time. A few feet inside the net, at the place where the accident had happened, she stopped, turned around and around in the water, pointing the torchbeam into the swirling darkness.

Usually, when she did decompression stops, she’d clip herself to a rope with a carabiner and rest on her front, horizontal in the water. Tonight she wanted to stay vertical. Wanted to be able to turn, to see 360 degrees. Upping the buoyancy in her jacket, releasing a little air from her drysuit so it didn’t shoot up and gather round the neck seal, she found her neutral buoyancy, then let her arms drift out sideways. The divelight shone off to the side and she bobbed peacefully. Like a spaceman in the blackness.

She rested to start with. Eyes closed. Concentrated on emptying her head so there was nothing, no thought, no sound, just the in-out-in-out of her breathing. She’d heard once, years ago, that some seabirds have an internal compass that they use to navigate across oceans, around half the world, and always come back to the same breeding ground. The birds don’t have to think about it, they give themselves up to something ancient and miraculous – the fact that their bodies know what their heads can’t: which is north and which is south.

She tried to imagine herself as a seabird. Put her head back. Turned her face to the surface. She wanted to be told a direction. She wanted to be like a seabird and be told which way to go.

The minutes passed. Between each noisy breath her pressurized ears played tricks on her. From everywhere she was being pulled by imaginary sounds, her attention drawn first right, then left. She let them wash over her, waiting to feel where her body wanted to lean, what it wanted to do.

‘You’ve got to look after yourself…’

Her eyes flew open. The torch beam came up in front of her, seesawing against the black. She gripped it. Steadied it. Turned it from side to side, hunting out the sound.

‘Mum?’

No answer.

‘Mum?’

She sculled with her free hand, turning herself in the water. The beam of light yawed around her. It was a hallucination.

‘Mum? Are you there?’

A movement. To her left. Just outside the beam of her torch. She swung the light across. About twenty yards away she saw feet. Human feet. Swimming away from her, fast.

Amos Chipeta.

She pushed her arms out into the darkness, the Salvo divelight clenched in both hands. The beam danced crazily across nothing. The feet had gone. All the light picked up was emptiness.

Heart huge in her chest she tipped the top half of her body down and began to swim towards where the feet had been. Her instinct was to switch off the light, not wanting to give herself away to whatever was disappearing ahead of her into the darkness, but without it she was blind. Shielding it with her hand, letting a pinkish half-light filter through her fingers, she moved carefully through the water.

According to the compass whatever it was had been travelling west and slightly upwards. She reached the underwater rockface of the quarry edge, shone the torch along it and saw nothing. The other way. Nothing. She checked the depth gauge. She was still a hundred feet below the surface. Turning the light above her head, she moved it in an arc. Even going fast Chipeta should still be within the beam. When she shone it down and swung it from side to side, covering every angle, there was still nothing to see. Just the plant life on the side of the rock. Moving lazily.

Something occurred to her. It was rumoured that the quarry connected with local caves left behind by the Roman lead miners. That there were tunnels here. Wedging the torch in her buoyancy jacket she moved her hands along the slimed surface.

It jumped at her, almost as soon as she’d started looking. A cavity. A place darker than the rest of the rock. It wasn’t on the quarry schematic – she was almost sure of that. She pushed her hand into it and shone the light around the edges, then into its depths to get the measure of it. There was no end to it. The beam shone into blackness. The diameter of the hole was big too: you could fit three men through here, even if they were wearing full diving gear.

Even in diving gear. She screwed up her face. No excuses, then.

One kick propelled her up and into the opening. She kept her hands on the walls, walked her fingers along, knowing how easy it would be to come into a narrowing so fast that the ceiling ripped the cylinders off her back. People had died like that, in places like the Eagle’s Nest sinkhole, or the Yucatan cave systems, not like her parents, in a fatal freefall to the bottom, but tangled in guide lines, lodged between unforgiving rocks, trapped in water-filled sumps and crawl spaces. She thought of them struggling on and on in the lonely darkness. Until the air gauge hit critical. Until the pony cylinder was dead and lungs sucked at a vacuum. Clangtanking, they called it. The worst way to die.

The floor sloped upwards. She was entering a chimney: a narrow tube about four feet wide heading vertically. Undeviating. The beam showed it was one straight ascent, the sides smooth, almost as if they’d been machine cut. She forced herself to take a brief decompression stop – breathing slowly, picturing the nitrogen fizzing out of her muscles. The clock numbers tumbled round. Six minutes. It would have to do. She filled her jacket with air and entered, one hand raised above her.

The expanding gas in the system lifted her fast. The walls whirred past, streaks of black limestone. Up and up and up, the long bore sucking the circle of light ahead of her, like a dream, look after yourself thudding in her ears with every heartbeat. Until at last, unexpectedly, she surged out of the top. Into air.

It was dark. She fumbled one elbow over the side of the chimney, breathing hard. Held herself level, only her face at the surface. Her legs she wedged in place, keeping her shoulder near the edge. If anything came at her she’d ram the dump valve against the rock, offload the air from her suit and drop straight back down the chimney. She concentrated on her breathing. In and out. In and out.

Almost a minute passed. No hands grabbed her head. No face appeared in front of her mask. Tentatively she lifted the light out of the water and aimed it in front of her. The beam floundered in the darkness and hit rock about twenty feet away – a mossed, dripping rockface. She moved the beam to her left: more rock. No mist, no moon, no trees. Instead, when she turned it skywards, the light found a roof almost forty feet above. The rumours had been true. She’d come out in one of the old lead caves.

There’d been accidental deaths in other UK dive units and after those it had been drummed into her in training: never take the mask off. Not until you know what the air’s like. She inched herself up with her feet, pulling herself out so she was kneeling astride the hole, sitting on her heels, tensed, the torch rammed out in front of her like a weapon, all the time ready to drop straight back into the chimney. Slowly, with her free hand, she lifted the mask webbing away from her ear, tipped her head to one side, held her breath and listened.

Something was breathing. Somewhere in the darkness. Hiding in the rocks.

She lifted the mask. Sniffed. Tasted the air. Waited. It was clean. Damp and full of the smells of water and rotting leaves. But clean. She looped the mask on one wrist so it was ready to pull back on, and put the fingers of her right hand on the floor. Leg muscles screaming, she tipped forward a bit and trained the flashlight on the sound.

The beam hit black rock and slithered around. Then, wedged between a crevice, something glinted. Eyes. Elliptical, set straight and level about three feet above the ground. Human eyes, but yellow and polluted. Staring at her. They blinked in the light and then, for a second, a large hand came up to shield them. Now she could judge the size of his head. It was anvil-shaped, the jaw too big, the neck squashed, almost non-existent. She could see the protruding tops of the ribcage, the way the bones looked too big. Could hear laboured breathing. Not an elf. Not a troll or a pixie or a gnome. Not a Tokoloshe. This was a human being. Wearing a threadbare sweatshirt and shorts, mashed-up flip-flops on his feet. She held herself steady. Held herself calm.

‘I’m police. Don’t move. Don’t come near me.’

The eyes blinked.

‘You take one step towards me and you’ll find yourself in the biggest shit fight you could imagine. OK?’

A hesitation. Then he nodded.

She pushed herself upright. Faced him squarely.

‘Amos. You’re Amos. Have you been following me?’

He shook his head.

‘What about that day in the squat last week? The day we broke in?’ She ran the back of her wrist across her mouth to clean away the taste of the quarry. ‘There was me and another officer. A man. In plain clothes.’

Silence. The eyes regarded her carefully, and now she glimpsed something else in the torchlight. A glimmer of plastic – storage containers, white plastic. The sort of thing you’d see in a teenager’s bedroom. Four, maybe five, stacked one on top of another. Then she saw more belongings. Smelt something burning. Saw a battered sleeping-bag. And it struck her that he was living here. Here, in the dark among the moss and the rotting leaves and the dead insects, he was trying to carve out an existence.

‘I don’t know who you are, but you’re not from England. You’re African. From Tanzania.’

The eyes stayed steady. Gazed at her. Waited for her to continue.

‘You’re illegal. And you’re in serious shit. Here and back home too.’ She moved her tongue around, tried to coax some saliva into her mouth. ‘I could make that shit deeper. I’ll do it if I have to.’

The head must have tilted a little, because the angle of the eyes changed. They were still focused on her, but the breathing had altered too. It was softer. Deeper and slower. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from those eyes. Watching her. Not blinking.

‘I’m going to give you something now. You’ll understand when you see what it is. You’re going to sort it and you’re never going to speak about it again. You try and turn it back on me and you’ll regret it. I know what the police will look for so I’ve done some things to the…’

She had to break off and press her fingertips to her throat to stop her voice wavering. The compressed air was making her throat dry.

‘I’ve done some things to the body that’ll stop them tracing her to me. If you try to go to the police they’ll think it was you who killed her. But…’ she had to pause again, get her voice in control ‘… if you do this properly, with respect, I’ll find a way to help you. I don’t know how but I will. I’ll find ways to protect you. It’s a simple thing. A straight swap.’

For a moment the little man was motionless. Then, his movement barely perceptible, he lifted his head and lowered it. He was nodding.

She wiped her nose and took a deep breath. ‘Good. That was all I needed to say.’

She lifted her mask, pulled the webbing down over her wet hair, letting the visor sit on top of her head. Putting her hands on the floor she crouched down next to the chimney mouth, swung her legs round and dropped them into the water. She waited a moment or two, holding the man’s gaze. ‘One more thing.’

His eyes lifted a little. Questioning.

‘I’m sorry. Very sorry.’

Then she pulled up her mask and was gone, lost in a burr of bubbles that broke and spat in the darkness.