Skin (3 page)

The countryside around the clinic had been searched: the police had ripped open every house, every wood, every livestock barn within a two-mile radius. It was unprecedented: the biggest land-based search the force had ever conducted and it had turned up nothing. No body. No clue. Misty Kitson seemed to have vanished into thin air.

The public were fascinated by the mystery, and by the unit handling the investigation. They pictured MCIU as an élite team: a group of dedicated, experienced men, pouring every ounce of energy into the case. They pictured the men clearing their heads and their lives for the case, dedicating themselves to the hunt. On the whole they were right: the officers on the case were one hundred per cent committed to finding Misty.

All, that was, except one.

Just
one
man was having problems concentrating on Misty. One man found that, no matter what he was supposed to be doing, what time he was supposed to be giving to finding Misty Kitson, the only place his head would go was backwards. Backwards to another case, one he’d worked on the previous week. A case he was supposed to have put away and moved on from.

That man was Detective Inspector Jack Caffery.

Inspector Caffery was new to MCIU, but he had almost twenty years of experience, most of it on the murder squad in London’s Metropolitan Police. In all that time he’d never had trouble letting go of a case.

But, then, he’d never had a case that had scared him.

Not in the way Operation Norway had.

At eight-thirty a.m. on the morning after Flea’s accident, at the other side of town from quarry number eight, Caffery sat in his darkened office in the MCIU building at Kingswood. The blinds were down, the door was locked. He was watching a DVD.

It showed two men in the unlit room of a derelict squat. Both were white. Both were under thirty. One wore a zipped-up S-and-M leather hood and was naked to the waist. The camera sat steady on him as he took some time to prepare tools and show them to the camera. This man was twenty-nine. The other man was also naked to the waist, but he hadn’t chosen to be dressed like that. He was unconscious, drugged and lying strapped to a bench. He didn’t move. Not until the hooded man moved the hacksaw to his neck. Then he moved. He moved a lot. He was just nineteen.

This video was infamous throughout the force. The press knew it existed and would have done anything to get a glimpse of it. It showed the death and near decapitation of Jonah Dundas. Caffery had arrived in that room just minutes too late to save him. Most officers who’d worked Operation Norway insisted on keeping the sound turned down if they had to watch the video. Not Caffery. For Caffery the soundtrack was another place to search for answers.

He let it run through to the place where he’d arrived and the hooded man had fled. Then he skipped back to the beginning, to the part he was interested in: the first five minutes when Dundas had spent time alone in the room, strapped to the bench, before the hooded man began the beheading. Caffery pressed the headphones to his ears and shuffled forward in his seat, his face close to the screen.

The name ‘Operation Norway’ was arbitrary. The case had had nothing to do with Norway, the country, and everything to do with Africa. The hooded man – ‘Uncle’, as they called him – had been running a scheme among the African community in Bristol. Through greed, sadism and chance he’d tapped into the community’s ancient belief, called loosely ‘
muti
’, or African black magic, that some parts of the human body could be used to treat certain medical and spiritual conditions. Over the last ten years there had been just eight cases like this in the whole of Europe and for the British police it was uncharted territory, but what they had learnt was that a human head, the head of a young man, especially one that had been removed when the victim was alive, would fetch a huge amount of money in some circles. That had been Dundas’s misfortune.

Operation Norway was broken apart before the head could be trafficked on and the police had arrested two people: the hooded man, who was local, and an illegal African immigrant, who’d been teaching him the customs, helping him to open up a network of customers for his merchandise. The African was in custody now, still trying to convince the police that his name was Johnny Brown and that he held a British passport. They’d searched him and found he was carrying a key fob with the Tanzanian national flag on it and that the T-shirt he was wearing was by a Tanzanian manufacturer, so MCIU was combing records from Dar Es Salaam to get a hit on him.

‘What’s all this?’ Superintendent Rolf Powers, the head of MCIU, opened the door at ten past nine. ‘No lights? It’s like my teenage son’s bedroom in here.’ He switched on the fluorescents. ‘Where were you? I’ve just done a whole press conference on the Kitson case without you.’

Caffery froze the DVD and rotated the monitor to face the superintendent. ‘Look at this.’

Powers did so. Frowned. ‘That’s Operation Norway. We’ve finished with that. The files should be with the prosecution service by the end of the month.’

‘Watch this.’ Caffery tapped the screen. ‘It’s important.’

Powers closed the door and came in. He was tall, wide and well dressed, and must have been athletic once. The lifestyle had taken its toll, though, and his body was spreading around the middle, the neck. He put the wallet he was holding on the desk and pulled the chair up to the screen.

The freeze frame of Dundas alone in the room before the attack showed another shape, standing close to Dundas’s head, its back to the camera. It was bent over, concentrating on doing something. After the arrests, when they’d got Dundas’s head to the morgue and examined it, they’d discovered that clumps of his hair were missing. In the same place on which the figure in the video was concentrating now.

Powers shook his head. ‘It’s the Tanzanian, Johnny Brown, or whatever he’s really called. The one we’ve got in the bin.’

‘It’s not him. He’s lying.’

‘Jack, the little shit’s ’fessed to it about a thousand times. Straight cough – said he cut Dundas’s hair, wanted to make some voodoo bracelet with it. And if it’s not him, then who the hell is it? The support group emptied that place out, raked the place clean. There was no one. And no way out.’

Caffery stared at the shape on screen. No one who’d seen the video had ever stated the obvious: that the figure on the screen didn’t look quite human. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not him. I had the guys in the custody suite measure him. He’s five four. Short, but not this short. The camera was set at exactly one metre fifty high and was two metres from the table. I’ve looked at the CSI plans. Johnny Brown would have stood here.’ He pointed at a place on the screen. ‘More than a head taller. And look at those shoulders. There’s something wrong there, seriously wrong.’

‘They dressed him up – he admitted it. They sent him out to scare people into buying their voodoo crap. Pretty crude beliefs, these people have – not that those exact words ever came out of
my
mouth, of course.’

Caffery stared at him stonily. ‘How’d they “dress” someone up to look like that? Look at it.’

‘Prosthetics. Lighting.’

‘There weren’t any prosthetics when we searched the place. And Brown didn’t have Dundas’s hair on him when they took him in, did he?’

‘Says he tossed it. And call me slow, call me a woollie, or however you Met people refer to us, but out here in the boonies someone ’fesses up to something like that, we kind of find it easier just to go ahead and believe him. No.’ His voice was suddenly efficient. ‘No, Jack. Let’s pretend we haven’t had this conversation. Operation Norway is over, OK?’ He stood. Pushed the wallet he was carrying across the desk to Caffery. ‘This is where the chief wants our time spent. This is the case I’m taking the beta-blockers for now. Open it.’

Caffery did. It contained six eight-by-ten glossies. Photos of clothing laid out next to a measuring tape. Women’s clothing. A dress. A pair of high-heeled sandals. A purple velvet coat. A silver mobile. ‘Misty Kitson?’

‘Of course. These are reproductions of what she was wearing. We’ve circulated them force-wide. Every person in every office across the force is going to have a copy of these pinned above their workstation by this evening, so even if they don’t read the papers or watch the telly they’ll’ve heard of her.’ Powers went to the map on the wall, put his hands in his pockets and studied it. ‘I can’t fathom it. I really can’t. A two-mile radius, the biggest search I’ve ever seen in the force, every inch gone over and we haven’t turned up a
thing
. Not a sausage and—Christ, you’re not listening to a word I’m saying. Are you?’

Caffery was sitting forward, staring at the post-mortem photograph of Dundas pinned up on the wall, at the way his hair had been clipped.

Powers picked up a photograph of Misty’s clothes and stuck it, pointedly, over the one of Dundas. ‘Jack, you’ve got three DSs and four DCs out there waiting to hear what you want them to do.
They
all want to find her.’

Caffery opened his drawer and pulled out the photographs of another post-mortem that had taken place two nights ago. It had come to him yesterday on the Centrex Guardian database and had everything he needed. He got up and pinned it over the photo of Misty Kitson’s clothing.

‘Ben Jakes. Twenty years old. Student at Bristol University. Can’t face his exams, girlfriend leaves him, ends up with a penknife and a case of
wkd reds
. Down in the Elf’s Grotto area. It’s pretty there. You can see the lights of Bristol. Very popular suicide spot.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘His phone was missing – still hasn’t been found. He’d been robbed. Roommate said he had money, a twenty at least, plus cards, never been used. Even sandwiches in his rucksack. They were gone. Oh, and he was naked.’

‘Stripped off to kill himself? What was it? A full moon?’

‘No. The thief took the clothes too. At first the officer in charge had it down as a murder. It was in the “too hard for district” file for a while, even flagged up on a watchlist for us, until the PM came back as suicide. The clothes came off him more than twenty-four hours after he died, says the coroner. Plus the other evidence – depression. No one’s got any doubt it was a suicide; even his parents said they’d half expected it. But this is what I want you to look at.’

Powers took off his glasses and peered at the photograph.

‘See it? His hair?’

‘It’s been cut.’

‘Shaved. Remind you of anything?’

Powers frowned again. He took the photograph off the wall and turned it over. It was stamped by the Audio-Visual unit at Portishead. ‘Where did you say it happened?’

‘Quarry number eight. Down near Elf’s Grotto.’

‘And it’s the hair that’s the important factor? Because it’s the same as what happened to Dundas?’

‘The same person did it. The marks are almost identical.’

‘So?’

Caffery gave him a grim smile. ‘The pathologist, being a pathologist, is typically vague about when Jakes died. But he’s admitted that whoever rolled up and stole his clothes did it a minimum of six hours after death – there’s livor mortis to prove that. The roommate says it’s six a.m. when Jakes leaves his room. We don’t know how he gets to the quarry but it’s got to take at least an hour, probably more, assuming he doesn’t stop on the way, which gives us seven a.m., so our thief has to come along at one p.m. at the
absolute
earliest. Meanwhile Brown was in that place,’ he jabbed a finger at the screen, ‘at two that afternoon. I saw the bastard with my own eyes. Can you really see him cruising out to the quarry, shaving Jakes’s head and winging it back to the other side of Bristol within an hour?’

‘I take it these are on the quiet, these timings the pathologist’s given you. I can’t picture him writing any of those in the report. They
never
commit when it comes to time of death.’

‘You’re right. But I don’t need his say-so. Vodaphone coughed up Jakes’s phone records. They showed calls made on his mobile at eight p.m. that night. Brown had been in custody for five hours by then.’

Powers lifted the blind and glanced outside. One or two reporters had taken up permanent residence outside since the Kitson case had come to MCIU. He stared at them for a while. Then he dropped the blind and gave his DI a long look. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘A week. A week on this. Give me two men and a week off from the Kitson case. I want to know how Brown cut Ben Jakes’s hair when he was twenty miles away at the time. I want to know what he wanted the hair bracelet for. And . . .’

‘And?’

‘And I want to know what prosthetics you’d have to use to make a human being look like
that
.’

4

Caffery left the MCIU offices at half past ten. He used the back entrance and walked round the side, away from the Kitson reporters, and straight into the low-ceilinged car park. It was sheltered there, but even so he walked fast, head down, collar up. He didn’t get into his car, an unmarked fleet Mondeo, but stopped, facing it, thighs just touching the bodywork, and took a moment to scan the car park, checking that the shadows behind the other cars were lying flat and still. After a while he crouched, looked under the car. Then he straightened, opened the car, got in and central locked the doors.