Skin (15 page)

22

Flea sat in her father’s chair, legs pushed out, a glass of Tanqueray and tonic in her hand, and stared at Farleigh Park Hall on the TV. A neo-classical mansion with wraparound porticoes and a sandstone loggia, it had been spruced up by the clinic owners for the programme: the windows had been newly cleaned, the twin fountains at the front were playing and a pair of peacocks wandered near by, pecking idly at the grass. A girl appeared on the screen and walked down the front steps. Her yellow hair was dull – as if it could absorb sunlight. The sandals, Flea thought. They’ve got those wrong. They were silver, not gold. Silver. But everything else . . . everything else is right on the nail. The neon green dress, the purple velvet coat. In her hand she carried a sequined bag that glinted as she moved. There’d probably be a heart-stamped Nokia in that bag too. Every detail was important.

This morning at eleven, while she’d been in quarry two, MCIU had staged a reconstruction of Misty’s last hours at the clinic. When the cameras went to a wide shot of the clinic you could see how many people had turned up for it. Vehicles overflowed the improvised car parks in the fields, live-feed vans bristled with uplink satellite dishes, reporters stood in front of cameras twitching at their hair and ties, crews milled around adjusting tripods, microphones. Groups of cops were standing around, talking in low voices. Up near the fountains a grey-haired man in a dark blue raincoat looked suspiciously like the chief constable.

Pessimism settled down neatly on Flea’s shoulders. It would take a miracle for the force to drop this case.

She killed the TV and carried her drink into the kitchen. She couldn’t sit there waiting for Thom to call any longer. She had to do something now, had to start looking for the place of the accident. The newest water-cooler intelligence said the forensic lab in Chepstow was testing hairs and fibres lifted from several breached places on the clinic perimeter, just to give them a lead on which way Misty might have left the grounds. She didn’t have access to the techniques and budgets the force had. All she had was her brain. She’d have to think harder, faster and neater than the whole force put together.

In the kitchen she took the few things off the table – a pepper grinder and the earthenware mug Mum had always kept cutlery and napkins in – then spread out the paperwork she’d brought home from the office: the photos of Misty’s clothes and the Blue 8 map print-offs the unit had used on the Farleigh Park lake search three days ago. She sat in the place she’d sat at all her life, on the left, between where Thom and Dad would have sat opposite Mum, and tried to think.

The police knew which direction Misty had left the clinic. They had a fix on her from her mobile phone. Pearce had been talking to Caffery about it at the Strawberry Line suicide. Phone masts usually had sectored antennae heads that beamed out segments making up 380 degrees. The signal from a particular mobile phone could be placed within one of those sections: some masts had as many as six heads, which narrowed these so-called ‘cells’ to about 60 degrees, so it was possible to tell at what angle a phone was from a mast, but not how far away. Unless another mast came into the equation. And then, especially if the phone was close to one of the masts, the search segment could be reduced at times almost to a pinpoint.

Misty’s phone had been a Nokia flip-open. Flea had studied the mock-up photograph. Its casing had been stainless-steel and it had an LCD screen – a little like her own phone except that Misty had customized hers with stick-on jewels in the shape of a heart. It wasn’t in the sequined handbag, it wasn’t in the coat pockets and Thom hadn’t trousered it, she was sure of that. So where was it?

She hooked her laptop out of its case, fired it up and went into Google Earth. The satellite photos of Farleigh Park Hall had been taken on a summer’s evening. The building and surrounding trees cast enormous shadows across the lawns. She found a pencil and paper and pulled the map towards her, comparing it to the satellite photo, running her fingernail over the woodland and the lake. Pearce, the search adviser, had said they’d got a ‘ping’ from the macrocell phone mast. There it was on the satellite photo, its long shadow lying across the field. On the map it was marked about half a mile away to the north. She loosely sketched pie slices coming from the mast and studied the south-easterly one. There was a tiny white flash of light there. She zoomed in and saw the creamy slash of a track running up to it. The lake. The one she hadn’t wanted to search.

She closed the laptop and sat back, holding the map. Just because Misty’s phone had given its last signal in that 60-degree cell there was no way of telling if the phone had been a foot from the mast or miles. Which made several square miles to search. If Misty had switched the phone off she could have walked on anywhere, any distance. She could have crossed into an entirely different segment of the macrocell mast. Or crossed into the cell of another mast. She could have left Farleigh Park Hall and walked due south or due east, which meant the accident could have been on three different stretches of road: the A36, the A366 or the B3110. It could have been on one of the myriad C-class roads that laced the fields in that area. Flea scratched her head. There were miles to search. And she’d thought she was ahead of the game. She’d thought that knowing Misty had met her death on a road would give her an advantage over the police.

She must have been there for ten minutes, staring at the map, the ice in the G-and-T melting, when she suddenly thought of something. She thought of Lucy Mahoney. Of her body going into the bag yesterday and of the way her shoes had looked.

She got a freezer bag from the drawer, her latex gloves from the cloakroom, where she kept her work stuff, and a pair of tweezers from her vanity unit.

Inside the garage it was humid, even though the fan in the corner was whirring silently. Now the body was cooled and the boot liner was disposed of, the smell had subsided to just a faintly unpleasant trace – as if someone had left a bag of rubbish in there. She pulled on gloves and a mask and went to the bath. She’d replaced the ice the moment she’d come in and the plastic shroud was milk-coloured now, as if Misty had breathed on the inside. Her outline was there in places: a piece of green material pressed against the plastic, a dull yellow circle of skin where the back of her wrist made contact: the suggestion somewhere under it all of blonde hair.

‘It’s me. Just me again. I’ve got to move you.’

She grasped the bottom end of the cocoon and hauled it along so Misty’s feet were leaning on the edge of the bath. Ice water sloshed and slapped on to the floor. Moving quickly, she unsnapped the zip tie and unwrapped the sheeting. The inside of the plastic was smeared with lines of half-frozen brown slush. The feet in the silver sandals were cold and hard.

She cupped one heel in her hand, lifted the shoe into the air and inspected it carefully. Grass and mud were skewered on the high heels along with other vegetation. Very, very carefully she tweezered away a section and dropped it into the freezer bag. Breathing through her mouth, she lifted the other foot and tweezered off a similar section, careful to get as many of the different types of leaf and soil as she could.

‘Thank you, Misty.’ She wrapped the feet up, slid the body back into the bath. Christ, this was awful. ‘I won’t disturb you again.’

When she got back to the kitchen the sun was sinking, parting the clouds and sending epic beams of light across the sky. The cabinets and the walls were painted gold, like firelight. She found a piece of kitchen towel and emptied the pieces of grit and soil and leaf on to it. She poured another G-and-T and, using the tweezers, began carefully to sort through the debris.

Most of it was grass, clotted with a reddish soil that might have been clay. She glanced across at the map. Dad had had an amateur love of geology, and even now the shelves in the house were crammed with the stones he’d collected over the years. He’d given her and Thom lessons over breakfast: the Avon Vale, the strip of land running alongside the river, was clay. It gave way to oolite limestone on the higher ground. That could mean Misty had gone east rather than west, towards the river rather than away. Even so, Flea couldn’t be sure where the clay soil ended and the limestone began. She separated out the bits of vegetation, pushing the grass aside, until, as if she was uncovering gold, she stopped at what looked like a wrinkled piece of brown paper.

Tongue between her teeth in concentration, she unfolded it, using her fingernail and the tweezers. As it opened she saw it wasn’t paper but two conjoined petals – probably yellow before they’d been crushed and half frozen. A scrap of stamen clung at their centre. She looked at them for a long time. It must have needed four petals to complete the flower head. It would have been small. But it wasn’t delicate and was too tough for its size. A thought came into her head: Maybe it’s part of a bigger flower . . . And the answer came quickly after it.

Rapeseed.

The flower of the canola plant.

She pulled the computer over and Googled rapeseed. Scourge of asthmatics, delight of farmers living on subsidies, for a time in the 1990s there had been too much rapeseed in England. Every hillside, every dale was patchworked with its distinctive acid-yellow flower. This time of year it was just coming into bloom, the fields were crossing from green to yellow, and now, on the screen, there was a petal identical to the one on the table.

Misty Kitson had walked through a rapeseed field to reach the road where Thom had hit her.

Flea switched to Google Earth and zoomed out one click until the screen approximated the search area. Bending closer, she centred the satellite on the clinic, with its leaded roofs and pilasters, then pulled the image back to show the little houses in the hamlets surrounding it – the farmhouses, the petrol stations, the B-and-Bs on the big main road. And the lake.

At the time the photo was taken the rapeseed was at its brightest. But although there was an ochreish field to the west of the clinic, there was nothing that resembled rapeseed. She zoomed out, up a stage, so the whole area was on the screen.

Two rectangular patches of yellow stood out so brilliant with colour they seemed to phosphoresce. They were miles away from the clinic, well out of the area the team had searched. One was to the south, almost two and a half miles away, straddling the edge of the mast segment. The other was to its left, even further away, straddling the other edge. Both were too far away to be in the clever little dick of a search adviser’s parameters.

She put the tumbler into the sink, shoved the gloves and the tweezers into her jacket pocket and grabbed more freezer bags. She got a heavy maglite from Dad’s study, wellington boots, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a bottle of water. From the recycling bin she pocketed a few squares of stiff paper – advertising inserts from last Sunday’s newspaper. She got her old Bergen rucksack from the study.

She came to a halt on her doorstep. A few feet away in the gravel, the late-evening sun making a halo of the hair around her chiselled face, stood Katherine Oscar, dressed in a Musto coat under a sheepskin jerkin that must be very ‘country’ because it looked so uncomfortable. A copy of the local paper was held loosely in her fingers at her side. She had a look on her face that Flea recognized from years of living next to the Oscars. It said that nothing the Marleys could do would surprise her.

‘Phoebe!’ She was one of the only people in the world apart from Mandy who used Flea’s real name. ‘You always fascinate me.’

Flea slammed the door behind her and stepped out on to the gravel. ‘Fascinate you? Why? What have I done now?’

Katherine laughed. She touched the sides of her hair, patting them into place. ‘Oh, just – you know. The sort of cars you always have. Like this one. Is it new?’

‘It is.’

‘What is it?’ She bobbed down to inspect the badge. ‘Ah! A Renault. A sweet little Renault. I suppose it’s a kind of city car?’

‘A kind of city car?’

‘Yes. A runaround. You know.’

‘It’s not a Land Rover. Is that what you mean?’

‘No. No, it’s not. Is it?’ She smiled, folded her arms and made a show of looking around herself. The garage light was off but the light was on in the hallway, making the brown paper in the windows glow softly. ‘I see you’ve blocked off the windows in the garage. What are you doing in there, so Secret Squirrelly?’ She gave a laugh. ‘Not cutting up dead bodies, I hope. With your job, my imagination runs riot.’

‘You caught me. I admit it. I’m cutting up dead bodies. You know, the people who irritate me. I’ve got a list. Want to see it?’

‘You Marleys, you crack me up.’

‘We aim to please.’

She moved past Katherine, pointing the keys at the Clio. It unlocked and blinked its lights at her. Her hand was on the door before Katherine hurried round to the front of the car. ‘I’m sorry, Phoebe, we’ve got off on the wrong foot again. You know, it’s only that I’m hoping you’ll rethink – about the garden? The press are quite clear about it. Look – it’s here in the paper. The credit crunch has taken hold, property prices are sliding. We’ve made you a good offer. We’d honour it, of course.’

The garden was Flea’s headache. It would be the easiest thing in the world to sell it – maybe even half of it, the half with the folly – and let Katherine take on the responsibility. But then Flea thought about Mum, how she used to spend all her time out there. She threw the torch on the Clio’s passenger seat and got into the car. ‘I don’t think so.’

Katherine hesitated for a moment, then hurried round to the window, her face flushed. ‘My God, you’re as bad as your bloody parents.’