Original Skin
ALSO BY DAVID MARK
The Dark Winter
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com
Copyright © 2013 by David Mark
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mark, David John, date.
Original skin / David Mark.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-62111-0
1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Police—England—Fiction. 3. Hull (England)—Fiction. 4. Mystery fiction. 5. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PR6113.A7527O75 2013 2013001237
823'.92—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Nikki—like everything else
Contents
But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So if your eye—even if it is your good eye—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:28–30
Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.
Mignon McLaughlin,
The Neurotic’s Notebook
, 1960
PROLOGUE
SHOULD HAVE HOOVERED,
he thinks, picking a piece of fluff from his tongue.
Should have made it pretty.
He feels a pressure in his lower back.
Should have had a piss, too
.
He pushes himself up, raising his body from the floor, a mermaid ascending in a crash of spray, and attempts to brush the crumbs and cat hairs from his shiny chest.
All this bloody oil
, he thinks.
So slippy. So slick. Going to be like wrestling a dolphin . . .
The alarm on his phone bleeps. It is gone ten. His visitor is later than he had intended to allow.
Big girl’s blouse
, he calls himself, and then, in his father’s voice: “Fucking poof.”
The boy has been here some time. He is feeling uncomfortable. The wrong kind of dirty. Desire is starting to fade.
He wonders if there is a word to describe this opposite of ardor: the dissipation of lust; the moment when passion loosens its noose.
He is beginning to feel a little silly. A little undignified.
He tries to think of a better way to describe the sensation. He likes words. Likes to be thought of as articulate. Uses the apostrophe in the right place when promising to fulfill any lover’s desire. Takes an effort with his poetry.
Shabby.
He is suddenly aware of the shabbiness of this picture. Here, in his cheap, second-floor flat, naked on his cheap carpet, shooing away his cat when she appears at his bedroom door and fixes him with an expression of sneering superiority.
“Five more minutes,” he says again, and wonders if this will be another letdown. Whether he will have wasted time and expectation on another coward.
His back and shoulders are beginning to burn in the glare of the three-bar heater. It’s an odd feeling. The rest of him is shivering and goose-pimpled. He turns himself over, suppressing a giggle as he thinks of himself as a chicken on a rotisserie.
“Spit-roasted,” he says to himself, and laughs into his bare arm.
His face is now in the glare. It’s too hot. He turns back again, concerned that he will look red and sweaty. He raises a hand to pick more crumbs and fluff from his face.
The lad is in his mid-twenties, tall and thin. His face, beginning to carry the imprint of the dusty carpet that covers the entirety of his one-bedroom flat, is split by fleshy lips and a too-large nose. He is not attractive, but there are benefits to his company.
“I’m accommodating,” he says into the carpet, his mouth and forearm making a pocket of cigarette breath, and wriggles, willing himself back into character.
He is naked. Starfished, facedown on the floor of his living room. There is not much room for his gangly frame. He has had to push back the charity-shop two-seater sofa and throw the old takeaway pizza boxes into his bedroom to be able to suitably accommodate his visitor.
“Five more minutes,” he says again, reluctant to accept that tonight’s fantasy will remain just that.
He reaches out for his mobile phone, tucked inside one of his battered white sneakers. No new messages.
He reads the recent ones.
Oh, yes.
Feels the excitement build afresh. Has to reposition himself to accommodate the growing hardness between his legs.
Begins to feel the hunger. A languid luxury easing itself into his movements.
Time to walk like a panther
. He giggles.
Hard as nails. Pretty as a picture.
You should charge, boy. You’re a fucking treat.
Like a fleetingly sober drunk gulping whiskey, the returning rush of sexuality alters his perceptions. He begins to feel better about the picture he presents. Remembers kind words and grateful embraces. Preens a little as he imagines the picture he presents to the open door. He knows his back and buttocks to be a breathtaking display; the ink that crawls up to his shoulders worth the agony that he screamed into the tattooist’s table.
He will make his visitor happy.
There is a sudden creak on the stairs.
He smiles, and his breath comes out in a tremble.
Here we go.
He arches his back. Presents himself for inspection. Raises his face to ensure the belt, coiled snakelike, is where he left it.
“Is this what you wanted?” he asks, throaty and sensual.
There is silence for a moment. The floorboards creak.
Then he feels the familiar weight on his back. The sensation of being pinned beneath another human being. The excitement of welcome helplessness that comes with giving yourself to another.
In the periphery of his vision, the belt is scooped up in a gloved hand. He closes his eyes, eager to play.
“Am I your fantasy?” he asks again.
The reply, when it finally comes, is hissed into his ear: a tumbled rush of excited words.
“To die for.”
There is a sudden, biting, flesh-ripping sensation, as though his Adam’s apple is being forced up into his skull.
“Her name!”
Spittle hisses from between his ghoulishly parted lips, frothing on his chin, into the dust and crumbs. His eyes bubbling, popping, like microwaved soup . . .
In an instant, his faculties are at once dulled and frenzied, his thoughts twisted and squeezed.
Too tight, too hard, too much; fantasy becoming fear.
The words again . . .
“Your friend. Pink blossoms. The laughing girl.”
There is only confusion and hurt, a sensation of becoming somehow less; of reducing, melting, puddling into nothing . . .
“The girl. Laughing at me . . .”
Darkness closes in as his oily fingers and skinny legs drum on the dusty floor.
An instant of clarity. A sudden heartbeat of understanding. What this is for. Why he is dying. Why the life is leaving his body and the poetry leaving his soul. What they want. What he must do . . .
The voice again, wet in his ear.
Anger. Venom.
“The one who looked and laughed . . .”
A knee now, hard in his spine; his back arching, teeth bringing blood to his thin lips, blood thundering in his ears . . .
He wants to plead. Wants to beg for his life. Wants this to stop. Wants to live. To write and create. To fuck and dance.
“Name. Her fucking name.”
He knows now. Knows these will be his last words. Knows that all the warnings were for nothing. He’s going to die, and his final act in this life will be one of betrayal.
The cord loosens for the slightest of moments. The strong hands readjust their grip.
The boy takes a gulp of air. Tries to swallow it. Manages only to hiss, before the cord cuts back under his jawbone and an explosion of sweet-smelling blood flowers and flows from his eyes.
“Suzie . . .”
Her name at once an act of treachery and a dying invocation.
“THEY WEREN’T
here when I went to bed at midnight. Bold as brass when I got up at six a.m.” The man waves an arm, despairingly. “I mean, when did they turn up?”
Detective Constable Helen Tremberg shrugs her shoulders. “Between midnight and six, I’m guessing.”
“But they made no noise! And now listen! It’s bedlam. How did they not wake anybody up?”
Tremberg has nothing to offer. “Perhaps they’re ninjas.”
The man fixes her with a look. He’s in his late thirties and dressed for an office job. He has graying black hair and utterly style-free glasses. Something about his manner suggests to Tremberg that he is on a low-risk pension plan, and has a tendency to examine the contents of his handkerchief after blowing his nose. She fancies that after his second glass of wine, his sentences begin to start with the words “I’m not a racist, but . . .”
He saw the travelers from his bathroom window as he was brushing his teeth. Saw, in his words, “the sheer pandemonium” and rang 999. He was not the first person on the leafy street overlooking the football field to do so, but he is the only one who has decided to get in Tremberg’s face about the situation.
Until half an hour ago Tremberg had been looking forward to today. She has been pretty much deskbound since her return to work, unable to take part in even vaguely interesting operations until she completed her chats with the force psychologist and had her doctor sign the last of the seemingly endless forms promising that the slash wound to her hand has left no permanent damage. Tonight, all being well, she’s allowed back to the sharp end of policing, watching her boss, Trish Pharaoh, slap cuffs on the wrists of a gangland soldier and close down a drugs operation. She wants to be involved. Needs it. Has to show willing and prove she hasn’t lost her bottle. Wants to demonstrate to anybody who doubts it that nearly getting her throat cut by a serial killer has been laughed off and dealt with “old-school”—voided from her system with vodka and a good cry.
“When will they be gone?” the man is asking her. “What are you going to do? This is a nice neighborhood. We pay our taxes. I’ve nothing against them, but there are places. There are sites! What are you going to do?”
Tremberg doesn’t offer an answer. She has none. She does not want to talk to this man. She wants to get to work. She doesn’t want to be leaning against the goalposts of the playing fields that stitch the affluent villages of Anlaby and Willerby together. She feels like a goalkeeper watching a match take place at the opposite end of the pitch.
“Should have stayed in the car,” she says to herself, and looks past the man to where the caravans are parked up, not far from the halfway line of the adjacent rugby pitch. Drinks in the pandemonium.
Six caravans, four off-road cars, a Mercedes and three horse boxes, at least two generators, and, as far as she can see, a portable toilet. They are arranged in a loose semicircle around three floral-print sofas and a sun lounger on which a rapidly multiplying number of traveler women and children are sitting drinking tea, talking to uniformed officers, and occasionally shouting at the schoolchildren and bored motorists who have got out of their motionless cars to watch the commotion through the park railings.
Like most of East Yorkshire, Tremberg is stuck here. Her car is a few streets back, snarled up in the bimonthly gridlock caused by a local transport infrastructure with the breaking strain of a Kit Kat.
Bored, with nothing to do but look at the dark, gloomy sky through the dusty glass of her Citroën, she had switched on the radio in the hope of finding something soothing. She was two minutes into “California Dreamin’,” and idly wondering why it appeared to be the only song owned by Radio Humberside, when the traffic report cut in. Half a dozen horses loose on Anlaby Road, and travelers causing uproar on the playing fields by the embankment. She’d had little option but to get out of the car and see if she could lend a hand.
“Are you going to shoot the horses?”
Tremberg gives the man her attention. “Pardon?”
“The police! Will you shoot the horses?”
“Not personally,” says Tremberg, close to losing her patience. “The Animal Control Unit is on its way. They’re stuck in traffic, too. We’re doing our best. I could go get one of the bastards in a headlock if you keep hold of its legs . . .”
Ken Cullen, the thin, bearded, uniformed inspector currently in charge of trying to bring some degree of order to the scene, overhears the dangerous note in the detective’s voice and hurries over.
“I’m sorry, sir, we’re doing everything we can. If you could just return to your house for the moment and allow us to deal with this . . .”
Tremberg turns away as somebody better equipped to tolerate wankers sends the busybody on his way. The inspector fixes her with a bright smile as he spins back to her.
“Bet you wish you’d never stopped to help, eh?”
“Nothing better to do, Ken. Stuck here with every bugger else. Thought I’d see if I could assist, but this really isn’t my cup of tea.”
“Dunno, Helen. You’ve got the physique for crowd control!”
Tremberg shares a laugh with her old uniformed sergeant recently risen to inspector, who has moved, like her, across the water from Grimsby.
“I was pleased to hear you’re on the mend,” he says, and means it. “All better now?”
Tremberg flicks a V sign at him. “Lost none of my dexterity,” she says, smiling.
Cullen gives her a quick once-over. Takes in the thin sports poncho she wears over a sensible pin-striped trouser suit and white blouse. Her hair is cut in a neat bob and she wears no makeup or jewelry. He knows from quiz nights and good-bye parties that she scrubs up well and has extraordinary legs when she hitches her skirt up, but Tremberg is deliberately sexless when on duty. Many female detectives have adopted her approach, appalled by any suggestion they have used their femininity to gain favor, but in so doing have opened themselves up to suggestions of lesbianism. Tremberg frequently wishes she could possess the carefree, fuck-you attitude of Trish Pharaoh, who wears what she wants and doesn’t give a damn whether people think she is after dicks or dykes.
For a while the pair of them grumble about the local council closing off the rat runs and giving commuters nowhere to go if the main arteries in and out of town are snarled up. They agree that the local authority is staffed with do-gooders and morons and that the new chair of the Police Authority will no doubt balls it up even more.
Their pleasantly English moan is turning toward the gray skies and the cost of petrol when a young WPC approaches. She looks harassed and windblown in her muddy yellow raincoat.
“We’ve got all but one of them, sir,” she says, in a voice that suggests she has struggled to avoid using a more vulgar term. “Sergeant Parker and Dan managed to box them in. They’re in the car park in the Beech Tree. Can’t get out. Another bloke with a Land Rover blocked the gap. The owners are trying to get them roped now. It’s chaos, sir. Poor Mickey’s ripped his trousers trying to pull one back by the hair. The mane. Whatever. Half of Anlaby’s covered in horse shit. And the bloody pikey kids aren’t helping, singing bloody ‘Rawhide’ . . .”
Tremberg has had to hide her face as she pictures the local bobbies desperately trying to round up the escaped animals, clapping and hollering and trying to stop the nags from eating the herbaceous borders of anybody important.
“And the last one?” asks Cullen, pulling on his peaked cap.
“It’s a real nasty shit. Pikey said it was a stallion who smelled a mare in season. Put a dent in half a dozen cars so far. Seems to particularly hate Audis.”
“And the animal team?”
The WPC snorts, herself momentarily horselike. “Having a very helpful meeting in the back of their unit. Lots of flicking through guidelines and phoning vets. I’m not expecting much in the way of action. I’m backing the big fella.”
This last she says with a genuine smile.
“Big fella?”
She turns herself to Tremberg. Smiles in a way that the detective is starting to recognize. “Scottish bloke from your unit. The one who . . .”
“McAvoy?” Tremberg’s eyebrows shoot up and she looks around as if he may be watching.
“Yeah. One of the lads gave him a ring. Said he knew about animals. Farmer’s boy, or something, isn’t he? Just turned up a minute ago. Don’t know where he parked his car but I think he ran here.”
“And what’s he doing?”
The officer takes off her hat and gives an appreciative little shake of her head.
“About to start playing tug-of-war with a horse.”
• • •
DETECTIVE SERGEANT
Aector McAvoy spent his first months in plain clothes taking the title literally. He all but camouflaged himself in khaki-colored trousers, hiking boots, and cheap, mushroom-hued shirts, tearing them fresh from polythene packets every Monday. The disguise never worked. At six foot five inches, and with red hair, freckles, and a Highlander mustache, he is always the most noticeable man in the room.
It was his young wife, Roisin, who put a stop to his attempts to blend in. She told him that, as a good-looking big bastard, he owed it to himself not to dress like “a fecking Bible-selling eejit.” Roisin has a way with words.
Despite his objections, he had let her style him like a child playing with a dolly. Under her guidance, and blushing at every alteration to his wardrobe, McAvoy had become known within the force as much for his smart suits and cashmere coat, for his leather satchel and cuff links, as for his detective skills and scars.
Now, flat on his back, staring up at the swollen clouds, with mud and stallion spit on his lapels and horse shit streaking one leg of his dark blue suit, he wishes he were back in khaki.
McAvoy tries to ignore the cheers of the onlookers and climbs back to his feet.
“Right, you bugger . . .”
He had been on his way to the Police Authority meeting when the call came through. One of the constables tasked with corralling the escaped animals had lost his temper after being dragged into the side of a bottle-bin by one of the mares, and had decided it was time for some specialist help. The officer had worked with McAvoy only once, up on the Orchard Park estate. They had been tasked with guarding the door to a crime scene until the forensics van turned up, and had not been made welcome by the locals. He and McAvoy had tolerated the abuse and even the first few bottles and cans, but when the snarling pit bull had been let loose with instructions to see them off, it had been McAvoy who stood his ground while the junior officer tried to persuade a brick wall to absorb him. The giant Scotsman had dropped to his knees and met the dog face-on, turning his head and opening his eyes wide, showing his broad, flat palms to the creature and flattening himself to the cracked pavement, submissive and unthreatening. The dog had stopped as if running into glass, and was on its back having its tummy tickled by McAvoy’s great rough hands by the time backup appeared and the crowd were chased away. The young PC had taken McAvoy’s number, having the foresight to realize that such a man was worth knowing. Today he had figured the big man was worth a call.
McAvoy, who would have agreed to a head-butting contest with an escaped antelope if it meant taking his mind off the impending Police Authority meeting, had been only too glad to dump his car and sprint to the scene.
He limbers up. Stretches his arms and cracks his neck from side to side. There are a few hoots from the watching motorists, and from the corner of his eye, McAvoy is appalled to see that many of those watching are recording the footage on their camera phones.
“Just shoot it,” comes a voice from somewhere in the hubbub. It is a suggestion met with murmurs of approval by some.
“Can’t you tranquilize it?”
“I’ve got a tenner on the big man!”
McAvoy tries to ignore the voices, but the laughter and groans that rang out when he was knocked flat by the charging stallion have turned his cheeks the color of crushed cranberries.
“You shoot that horse, I’ll fecking have your eyes.”
The voice, its accent unmistakable, causes a momentary silence, and McAvoy turns. The man who has spoken stands to his left, leaning against the bonnet of a blue Volvo. The car’s owner has adopted the peculiarly English expedient of pretending he cannot see the large, daunting traveler who is pressing his buttocks into the bonnet of his car.
The gypsy is squat and balding, with a round face and shiny cheeks. Despite the cold and gathering clouds, his arms are bare. His flabby gut and torso are not flattered by the white sleeveless T-shirt or too-blue jeans.
“Yours?” asks McAvoy, with a nod toward the horse.
The man answers with a shrug, but the length of rope in his hand suggests he had been about to try and reclaim his property before he saw McAvoy take the burden upon himself.
“In season?”
The man nods again. “Horny as a Cornishman, first day out the mine.”
“Bloody hell.”
He’d nearly had him moments ago. The stallion had only been a few feet away, tearing some daffodils from a grass verge of one of the side streets leading off the busy thoroughfare. McAvoy’s soft voice and gentle movements had allowed him closer to the animal than anybody else had managed since this unexpected carnival had begun, but as the beast swished its head back and forth, one of the passersby had loudly shouted encouragement, and the burst of noise had spooked it, sending McAvoy, and his expensive clothes, into the dirt.