Skin (17 page)

Amos Chipeta
. So who or what was the Tokoloshe? Just a young man crippled by a birth defect? Out there somewhere now, existing God only knew how and trying to find help in a cold, alien country – but still able to find beauty and clarity and maybe even love in the face of a twenty-quid-a-trick prostitute from Hartcliffe? Or was he a monster? A half-human sloping off in mud and dirty water, making a living from raiding graves and cutting the hair from corpses.

Caffery closed one eye and then the other, letting the TV light prism through the liquid gold in his glass. Years ago back in London – he’d have been about fifteen at the time – he was in love with one of the girls at his school. Couldn’t remember her name now. But he could remember the name of the guy she was in love with: Tom Cadwall. He could remember, too, breaking into the Cadwalls’ garden early one morning. Climbing a tree. Hanging in the branches like a bloody possum. He’d stayed there all day, hoping to see inside Tom Cadwall’s bedroom. He wanted to know what Cadwall had that he didn’t.

Caffery dozed: right where he was, one hand curled round the glass on his chest. He saw Tom Cadwall. He saw him standing at the bedroom window all those years ago. He saw a woman come into the room and speak to him. She was slight, wiry, a mass of hair bleached by sun and salt water. She crossed the room and leant into Tom. She sniffed his chest, reached her hand to the back of his head, laced her fingers in his hair and began to tear at it.

Caffery woke with a start. The glass rolled off his chest and smashed on the floor. He lay there, heart thudding, the hairs on the back of his neck standing rigid. Something had woken him. Something was in the room.

Slowly, without moving the rest of his body, he freed one hand and lifted it so it was ready to cannon up and out. Keeping his breathing slow and controlled so that if anyone was watching him he’d seem calm, he scanned the room, trying to place where the bastard was hiding. He thought about the Hardballer – outside in the damned glove compartment of the car.

In one motion he rolled on to his back, snatched up the bottle and held it in front of him, training his eyes into the darkness. ‘Right.’ He breathed hard. ‘Whatever you want, let’s do it. Let’s get it over with.’

All that came back to him was the flicker of the TV screen. An insurance commercial, a bulldog nodding at the camera. From downstairs he could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. He pulled back the duvet and ran his hands lightly across the surface of the sheet. It was bumpy and uneven. Damp. And now he could smell stagnant water. Rivers and quarries. The bastard had been lying in his bed.

He threw the duvet on to the floor. Tucked under the pillow something glinted. Scissors. His own nail scissors from the bathroom cabinet. The sort that had been used to cut Jakes’s hair.

He ran his hands across the back of his head. Right at the bottom, at the very nape of his neck, a tiny patch was missing. The size of a penny.

He breathed, long and slow, trying to calm himself.

The little casement windows were open, just the top pane. No one and nothing could have come in through those. What about downstairs? Could someone have opened one of the doors and crept in without him knowing? And the bathroom? He put the scissors on the bedstand and got up, still holding the bottle in front of him.

A noise. Downstairs. The sly sound of the front door opening. Just a tiny creak. It was enough. He got to the top of the stairs just in time to see a shadow, a suggestion of something slightly darker than its surroundings, slip out of the front door.

He launched himself down, two stairs at a time, threw open the door and ran out in his bare feet. There were clouds over the moon and no street-lights this far out in the Mendips, so the garden was dark. He came to a halt in the middle of the driveway and stood with the bottle still thrust out, listening. From the forests to his right came the ghostly calls of two owls, battling it out over territory. Somewhere on the other side of the trees to his left he heard the brook that ran along the bottom of the garden and way, way to the north, the monster whine of a distant jet starting its descent into Bristol. Nothing else. No scooter. No footsteps.

The car keys were in the living room. He went and got them. When he came out again the garden was still silent. He took the 45 Hardballer from the glove compartment. Slammed the door. Listened again. There was something at the end of the driveway he hadn’t noticed last time. About ten metres away. A glitch in the darkness. A smudge of light where there shouldn’t be any.

He slammed the magazine into the pistol grip and – gun pointing down away from him because it was only in the movies you held a loaded pistol in the air where it could be easily knocked out of your hands – padded over to the shape. It was a shoe. A rubber Croc. He lifted his eyes and studied the darkness again. The silent trees. The blank walls of the cottage. He picked up the shoe and went inside.

The house was dark. He put the chain on the front door and went into the kitchen. When he switched on the light he saw that two cupboards stood open. A bag of rice lay tipped over on the floor, its contents splayed across the tiles. And inside the cupboards, where there had been the usual blokeish collection of cans, baked beans, soup, stuff he could heat in five minutes, now there was nothing. Just a scattering of dried pasta and the white backboards. He went around and checked what had gone. Food – every bit of food in the house. The CD player on the sideboard was still there. And a portable TV set still in its box on the floor.

He put the Croc on the table next to the gun and sat down, his elbows on the table. The sandal was dark khaki, dusty and very large. He turned it over. Size twelve.

Fucking mutant.

No way am I sleeping with a mutant.

He looked at his hands. They were shaking. This was enough. This was too much on his own. He needed to speak to someone.

25

There had been clay on Misty’s feet. It probably didn’t mean much but there wasn’t anything else to go on. So Flea chose the rapeseed field nearest the river.

If she was right Misty must have headed south-east from the clinic. She would have been lost, confused, and would have walked for hours through difficult terrain, some of it in the dark. Probably, if she had any sense of direction at all, when she hit the road she would have tried to navigate her way back to the clinic, going west. The collision hadn’t happened long after she’d come out into the road – the mud, grass and rapeseed hadn’t had a chance to be walked off, so her time there had been limited. Flea was going to comb the whole stretch of road from the clinic to a mile past the rapeseed field. If she found nothing she would turn around, go to the other field and do the same thing there.

She left the car in a pub car park in Norton St Philip – it would be less conspicuous there than in a lay-by – and walked the half-mile down to the lane using a footpath, keeping the lights of the road to her right and reaching the south-westerly end of the lane before ten p.m. She dropped the rucksack and rummaged in it until she found the squares of paper and the Maglite. Using a rubber band she lashed the paper to the top of the torch, adding a second piece to block off the open side. She held the torch at arm’s length, turned it from side to side and adjusted it until no light was leaking around the edges. The beam was focused white and thin. It wouldn’t be bright enough to spot from a distance unless someone was actively looking for it.

Keeping the torch pointed down, she moved slowly along the lane, hugging the southern side, counting her steps in her head. One. Two. Three. Four. She kept her attention on the road, monitoring the few buildings she passed out of the corner of her eye for signs of life. Some were close, others were distant, homely flashes of lights in the trees. No traffic went by. There were just a few shadowy cows in the fields, the slap of her feet on the tarmac and her own breathing for company.

A hundred and ten, a hundred and eleven, a hundred and twelve, a hundred and thirteen.

The moon came up and the road glowed silver, winding away in front of her like a stream. In this light the plants had no colours; the crops, the trees and the grasses were the same uniform grey as the shadows they threw at her feet.

A hundred and twenty-one, a hundred and twenty-two, a hundred and twenty-three . . .

She stopped, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. There had been a sound, almost indecipherable above the jingling of the Bergen on her back. A shifting in the hedgerow. She turned cautiously, the torch held out like a weapon, and scanned the lane. It had been on the other side of the hedge, about two yards behind. She was sure, without quite understanding why, that it had come from about waist height.

‘Hello?’

Her voice was hollow, flat in the cold air. She blinked at the silvery fretwork of hedge and tree. It could be livestock in there. A fox or a bird. Definitely an animal. She thought of quarry number eight. She thought of a house she’d visited on Operation Norway: a house with dark rooms. A place that had made her feel that wherever she went a small shadow was moving behind her at waist height.

‘Let’s get it over with,’ she hissed. ‘I’m in a hurry.’

Silence again. The distant sound of an aeroplane slipping into the Bristol air corridor, the faintest movement of a light breeze in the hedgerows to her left. She went back a few steps to the place the sound had come from and kicked into the hedge. Her foot hit twigs. Nothing moved. She went a few yards along and did it again. A couple of yards further still. No response.

She took a few deep breaths, then shook herself. Jack Caffery and his fantasies were getting to her. She stuck a finger up at the hedge, pissed off now, and turned away, picking up the search where she’d left off. The lane was on an incline, marked with passing spaces, with entrances to fields, and she walked close to the edge, training the torch down, searching for anomalies. By now the moon was high and after about a hundred yards she turned a corner and found the land had levelled out, the lane opening into a wide, flat road with central markings. You could see almost a quarter of a mile along it. If you were in a car you’d be able to get your speed up here. You could accelerate, drive fast enough that if you hit someone you’d kill them instantly.

The field was on the left. The flowers were greyed out by the moon. But it was unmistakable. Rapeseed. It sloped down to the road to her left. Further along on the right, where the land rose up, a few lights twinkled among the trees. A tiny hamlet nestled against the hillside, the moon picking out tiled roofs, a chimney, two thatched roofs. Anyone in those houses wouldn’t see the torch from this distance but they might spot her, stark and unprotected on the road. She moved to the side of the road where a line of poplars stood straight and ordered, as they did on the Roman roads in France. Keeping in the tree shadows, she moved along, scuffing her feet on the ground, moving the torch from side to side, checking the trunks, the grass, the tarmac.

And then she stopped.

About twenty feet to her right there was a set of very clear, very distinct skidmarks on the road.

She stared at them, her pulse picking up. They were so perfect it made her want to turn around and check it wasn’t a set-up. That someone wasn’t watching her, smiling slyly at her reaction.

She approached slowly, shining the torch up and down them. They bent gently towards the centre of the road as if someone had swerved to avoid something. She walked the length of them, pacing carefully, about forty feet from start to finish, a yard or so into the oncoming lane.

She was breathing hard now. Whatever wheelbase had made these tracks it wasn’t too wide, or too narrow, and if she’d had to bet she would say they came from a family saloon car. A Focus, maybe. If Thom had made these marks he must have been coming from the east. Misty must have been in this lane, on the opposite side of the road from the rapeseed. He would have seen her almost two hundred feet away. Reaction time would have been slow – he’d drunk two bottles of red wine that night. He’d slammed on the brakes and hit her somewhere around here, on the central road markings. Misty had gone over the roof, and probably, since the dent had been above the driver’s side, fallen off the car and come to rest somewhere in the oncoming lane or on the verge opposite.

Flea shone the torch around the ground, inspecting the tarmac – a piece of glass glinting at her here, a scrap of chewing-gum paper there. Just where the grasses from the verge overhung the road, slightly countersunk where the tarmac had softened in the sun, she could see a hair slide. A pink one. It might have belonged to a small child. A little girl who had mourned its loss from the open window of a car. Or it might have belonged to Misty Kitson.

She took off her rucksack and pulled out gloves and a plastic freezer bag. Quickly, because she didn’t know when a car might come, she crouched at the side of the road and carefully prised the hair slide out of the tarmac with a nail. It was more like a child’s clip now she could see it properly. She pushed it into the freezer bag anyway. Then something to her left caught her eye.

About a yard away a hole had been made in the grass on the verge. Whatever made it must have been big, heavy. Not as large as a deer, bigger than a badger. The grass stems had been broken in an almost circular shape, as if it had lain down there to sleep for a while. Above the hole, between the verge and the rapeseed field, there was a low dry-stone wall. Four stones at the top had been dislodged. One hung precariously over the field. It looked as if it might fall at any moment.