Skin (25 page)

In the maisonette Caffery peered up the silent stairwell. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got that key on you? To the studio?’

‘I wasn’t expecting this visit. Give me some notice next time.’

They went into the living room. Caffery put on gloves, switched on the computer and got into the cache folders, where all the cookies should be stored. There were just ten. For a while he sat at the desk, face close to the blank white space where the files should be. The recycling bin was empty too. Sometimes what is missing is the most crucial evidence of all, a CID trainer had once told him. Sometimes it’s not what you see but what you
don’t
see.

In the kitchen Mahoney put the sandwiches they’d bought in the pub on to a plate and brought it through. He stuck it on the table and stood behind Caffery, his eyes on the screen. Caffery knew he should wait. He should pass the PC to the hi-tech unit at Portishead, but he wanted this now. He scrolled around the free data-recovery sites and chose a shareware programme – Restoration – downloading it from a fast European site.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Unless someone ran a wipe utility, like Killdisc, the files’ll still be on the hard drive somewhere. As long as no one’s wiped the partitions, and as long as a system file hasn’t been allocated over those spaces, it should all still be here.’

They ate the sandwiches and waited for the download to finish. Then Caffery hit ‘set up’ and watched the programme unpack itself. He chose C drive to search, ticked ‘include used clusters by other files’, configured it to display the date the file was created, and set it in motion. The numbers in the ‘files found’ box spun round dizzyingly. In seconds the window had filled with folders, files of every extension, doc, xls, ppt. Near the top of the list a Word file had been created on 6 May, 9.30 p.m. Last Sunday. The day she’d gone missing. Titled ‘Goodbye’.

Caffery opened it and let all his breath out at once. The suicide note. He’d read it several times already at Wells and there wasn’t anything unusual in it: the same depressing stuff he’d seen too many times – too much pain to go on, life not worth living, no one who understands. Others killed themselves out of cowardice, or from the strain of living with the knowledge of what they’d done. People like Penderecki. But he’d never known anyone write a suicide note, print and delete it.

‘She didn’t write that,’ Mahoney said. ‘No way she wrote it. That’s not Lucy’s language.’

‘Someone else did, though. Wrote it and wiped it. If it had been on here, the search adviser would have found it.’

He scrolled through the list. ‘There are emails to the estate agent, all deleted, but he’s left others on the desktop. He’s only hiding specific things.’

Mahoney pointed to a folder halfway down the list. ‘Is that something?’

‘NatWest statements.’ Caffery restored it to its original location and opened it. It contained twenty-four jpegs, each titled by a month in the last two years. He opened one from January two years back. It was a scanned image of a bank statement. He gave a low whistle. ‘The missing statements.’

‘She was scanning them into the computer? To save space?’

‘Looks like it.’

Caffery opened the most recent one, dated this April. For a moment he and Mahoney stared at the screen, neither speaking.

Lucy Mahoney had died with the mortgage on her £200,000 house at just seven thousand pounds. There was another £190,000 in her savings account.

‘Je-
sus
,’ Mahoney muttered. ‘What the hell was she up to?’

‘All coming in in cash.’ Caffery clicked into the other months. ‘Two thousand here, another eight thousand in December.’

‘Jesus.’

‘And look.’ He tapped the screen. ‘This is where it started. Almost two years ago.’

Both of them peered at the bank statement. Twenty-six months ago Lucy had been receiving a regular wage from her job at the Christmas-decorations factory. Then, in the May after she and Mahoney had separated, she’d made a one-off payment of £7,121. It had been a cheque – no indication of who the payee was. Two weeks after the debit the cash deposits had started.

‘Any idea what that seven grand payment was for?’

Mahoney shook his head. Wearily, as if he’d come to the end of anything like rational thought, he picked up the plate. He trudged into the kitchen, leaving Caffery at the computer, clicking through the scanned statements. There was a lot of money here. If it wasn’t from a rich boyfriend, if she hadn’t got a job and she hadn’t got a loan, where the hell was it coming from?

‘Blackmail.’ Mahoney had come back from the kitchen. He was holding out a steaming mug of coffee to Caffery. His eyes were cold and hard. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Caffery said. ‘It’s one explanation.’

‘It’s the only explanation. She was blackmailing someone. They got fed up with it. Decided to put a stop to it.’

Caffery took the mug. ‘Tell you what, let’s start slowly, sensibly. Let’s start by getting the case reclassified.’

39

Caffery drove slowly back towards Kingswood, thinking about how he’d get Powers to authorize a warrant on the £7,121 cheque so the banks would go back into their records. It would take days. But the cheque was important. The more he thought about it, the more he thought Colin was right – Lucy had been blackmailing someone. And that seven grand was pivotal to the whole thing. She’d bought something – something expensive – and someone she’d encountered in the process was the one she had started blackmailing. Whoever it was had got fed up. Maybe her demands had become too much. They’d killed her and worked hard to cover the paper trail. He didn’t have much doubt that that was how it had happened.

Mahoney said she hadn’t felt threatened by the boyfriend. Caffery believed that. But the boyfriend was the key to all this. Not because he’d killed Lucy, not necessarily that, but somehow, somehow, he held a key. Whether he knew it or not.

Caffery slammed on the brakes. Behind him, a lorry had to swerve to avoid going into the back of his car, and the driver leant on the horn. Caffery pulled his unmarked Mondeo on to the kerb and came to a stop next to a bus shelter. Unsnapping the seat-belt he swivelled round, elbow on the back of the seat, and looked out through the back window. On the other side of the road, a sign was mounted on the roof of an electrical superstore. He must have driven past it a hundred times and never noticed it. Now it made things pop in the back of his head.

It was a golden oval set on its side. In black letters tooled into the middle was the word ‘
EMPORIUM
’. He waited for the pedestrian lights behind him to go red, then pulled out, did a U-turn into the opposite lane, and slipped into the turning that ran behind the superstore.

Something of an industrial estate had grown up down there, unplanned and piecemeal. Various businesses were dotted around in a hodgepodge of buildings overlooking a central car park that must have once been a farmyard. The Emporium was housed in what might have been an old farm building. As long and high-ceilinged as a hangar, with daylight and breeze coming in from both ends, it had the feel of a scrapyard under a tin roof. Everywhere reclamation pieces were piled high, vague walkways meandering around them.

A customer stood in the middle of the building, head down, concentrating on untangling the wire attachments on a crystal-drop chandelier. She wore a tribal-print dress tied with a belt and had very pale skin, her dark hair was backcombed and tied with a printed scarf. Her features in profile were beautiful, unusual, but closer he saw that the dark eyeshadow and plum lipstick were smudged. She didn’t look up or acknowledge him as he passed.

He skirted crumbling sash windows stacked in rows, a set of merry-go-round horses, a ship’s figurehead hanging from the ceiling. He went past the innards of a cider press, a row of knives in a worn leather tool-belt, and a low oak breaking bench, polished by years of use. The office was a square glass and wood-sided construction at the far corner. Inside, every shelf and surface was covered with oddments: old shell casings, dust-coated chandeliers, a cracked 1930s Betty Boop mannequin, a yellowing wedding cake in the shape of a church with a tiny dusty bride and groom in the doorway. Paperweights were wedged into the spaces – and for a moment he wandered around studying them, thinking he was alone. Then he noticed a man staring at him from the corner, standing half bent over the open drawer of a filing cabinet, so motionless that for a moment Caffery thought he was one of the fairground curios. ‘Hello.’

‘Yes?’ The man closed the drawer and straightened. ‘Can I help?’

‘You are?’

‘James Pooley. Who wants to know?’

Caffery opened his warrant card. ‘Got a moment?’

Pooley closed the cabinet, came forward and looked at the card. He was slim and vaguely feminine, his brown turtleneck expensive and finely woven, the thin leather jacket worn open, cuffs and collar turned up. There was more jewellery on his hands than a man should wear. His thick hair lay down to his collar.

‘Oops,’ he said, giving a thin smile, showing neat teeth. ‘Does this mean I’ve caught something again? Accidentally downloaded a virus? A few non-kosher pieces lurking in the recesses?’ He gestured out of the office window at the huge amount of merchandise on display. ‘It’s so difficult, these days – the fences get better and better, more and more sophisticated. Couldn’t tell some of them apart from a Christie’s clerk, they know their game so well.’

‘It’s about a customer.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, eyeing Caffery. ‘OK. Why don’t you sit down?’

Caffery sat opposite Pooley in a vintage desk chair, its wooden arms worn thin and smooth by years of traffic. In his pocket he had a copy of the misper poster, which he unfolded and put on the desk. Pooley studied it, his nose very close to the photograph. There was a long, long silence while all Caffery could see was the top of his well-conditioned hair. Then at last he looked up. ‘Yes. I know her. Lucy Mahoney. She’s a customer.’

‘Was.’

‘Was?’ Pooley gave a nervous laugh. ‘Not a nice sound, the past tense. Never have liked using it when talking about a customer.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Dead? How?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

There was a pause, then Pooley’s face lost a little of its control, as if it was crumbling at the edges. ‘Good God, good God.’ He shook his head. ‘What a tragedy. What a waste. She was young.’

‘Very.’

‘How terrible. Tell me – her family? Are they taking it very badly?’

‘About as well as can be expected. She had a daughter.’

‘Yes, of course. Well, if there’s anything we can do, here at the Emporium, any condolences we can extend . . . She was a valued customer.’ He looked at his hands on the table. He moved a stray rubber band and put it into a desk tidy. He had very fair eyelashes – almost non-existent – and his skin was very smooth. The hands moving the rubber band were nice too, sort of manicured. ‘And I . . . I suppose you think it was a sex killing?’

‘What?’

‘A sex killing. I suppose that’s what it was?’

Caffery folded his arms and eyed Pooley. ‘Are you having a laugh?’

‘No. Good God, no. It’s just that . . .’ He paused, tilted his head. ‘You do know about her? Don’t you?’

‘“
Know
” about her? No, I don’t.’

Pooley eyed Caffery, the way he was sitting comfortably, as if he was settling in for the duration. He glanced out of the window at the dark-haired woman in the scarf, who was still fiddling with the chandelier crystals, her head bent. Then, with a brief smile, he pushed his chair back, got up, went to a glass cabinet at the far side of the office and unlocked it. He brought out a velvet-lined case and set it on the table. Caffery leant over.

Several lumps of stainless steel were set into the green velvet. It took him a few seconds to realize what he was looking at. Sex toys. Beautifully carved instruments. Dildos. Butt plugs. Nipple clamps. In ivory, jade, glass. A human-hair scourge with a gold-embossed handle. Some were engraved with Chinese characters. The prices on the tags started in the low hundreds.

‘She bought this sort of stuff from you?’

‘She did.’

‘How long has she been coming here?’

‘Eighteen months? More. I couldn’t say for sure.’

Lucy, Caffery thought, you’re not the girl I thought you were. There’s another side to you. Did you play sex games? Maybe that was when someone gave you the pills. Did he tell you they’d help the sex?

‘When she visited, would she always be on her own?’

‘I believe so.’

‘And she never seemed anxious?’

‘No.’

‘Never said anything about feeling she was in danger?’

There was a pause. Then Pooley said, in a careful voice, ‘She bought things from me. I don’t think she ever came here expecting to share her secrets. I only knew her well enough to exchange pleasantries. I knew what she liked to collect and sometimes I acquired things with her in mind, but our connection was purely aesthetic.’

Caffery looked at the human-hair whip. At the butt plugs. ‘Aesthetic?’

Pooley curled a nostril, as if Caffery smelt bad. ‘I shared her taste in collectibles, Mr Caffery.’ He snapped the box shut. ‘Her taste in the bedroom? Well, please – she was a customer.’