Original Skin (11 page)

He asks her the question outright, as she had asked him.

She does not answer for a time. Just looks at Simon’s picture and strokes the glass.

“I don’t know,” she says eventually. “In my heart of hearts, I suppose I’m frightened he died doing something a bit . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . a bit mucky. I’ve read what people are into these days. I hope it wasn’t that.”

He wants her to say it. Wants her to fear he was killed. Wants to turn his sense of disquiet into a sterile, official, evidence-led investigation, and needs her pain to make it so.

“Mrs. Ford, do you have suspicions about third-party involvement?”

McAvoy is aware he’s leaning forward, perhaps pushing too hard.

She meets his eyes.

“I’m not sure if I want to know,” she says, dropping her head. “I can cope with him dead. It hurts, but I know how to grieve. If I thought somebody had hurt him . . .”

She looks back up.

Her eyes are wet but there is no danger of tears.

“‘Dead’ sounds so much more peaceful than ‘killed,’ don’t you think?”

McAvoy doesn’t answer.

He is certain he will soon destroy her peace.

•   •   •

SUZIE IS SITTING
at the kitchen table in the flat she rents above the florist on Anlaby Road. A fine rain mists the single-glazed window. The raffia blind and homemade curtains billow inward as the breeze finds the cracks in the paintwork around the frame.

It is getting dark beyond the glass. Dark enough to switch the light on, should she find the inclination. The gaudy yellow of the streetlights lends the view from the window an industrial, unnatural quality.

Sweet tea, that’s what they swear by in the books. Good for shock. Calms your nerves. Better than Prozac, apparently. “Lying tossers,” she says, under her breath. Suzie has drunk pints of the stuff since last night. Has put in enough sugar to give an elephant diabetes. And yet she still can’t hold the mug steady as she raises it to her lips. She looks again at the
Hull Daily Mail
website. Three paragraphs and a phone number. Headline in blue, text in white.

MAN HURT IN EAST YORKSHIRE REST STOP

A 44-year-old man is in intensive care after being involved in a suspected hit-and-run at an East Yorkshire beauty spot.

The man, visiting the area on business and said to be from West Yorkshire, was found by motorists at Coniston rest stop on the road to Bridlington late on Tuesday night.

Detectives are keen to talk to the person who made a 999 call from a nearby telephone box shortly after the incident. Anyone with information should call Humberside Police on 0845 6060222, or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

It doesn’t seem enough, somehow, but Suzie is pleased there is no more. Were it on the front page, she thinks she would probably buckle. She would call the number. She would admit it was her. She would tell them how she gets her kicks.

She stares at the laptop screen for an age. Reads the story over and over. Eventually the screensaver comes on. Herself and Simon, dressed for a seventies night at the Silhouette nightclub. Orange Afros, silver flares, and huge collars. Big smiles.

Her head drops to her hands. She cried all she needed to when she got home last night and only lasted an hour at work this morning before telling them she felt sick and had to go home. She cried her last when she read the
Hull Daily Mail
story the first time. She has no tears left now.

She pushes the tea away. Crosses to the worktop and takes a packet of chocolate biscuits from a cupboard. Tears it open and stuffs two into her mouth as she leans back against the draining board. Wishes he were here.

She makes her way back to the table. She does not know what to do.

Flicks, distractedly, to the other stories on the site. There is a special article by the paper’s crime reporter on the future of Humberside Police. It predicts swingeing cuts and redundancies. Suzie does not know what the word
swingeing
means, but it doesn’t sound good. She reads a quote from the new chairman of the authority. He promises to secure all the funding he can during his tenure at the top, but warns that there are tough times ahead. The article says he is tipped to be the next MP for Haltemprice and Howden. Suzie wonders if people ever read this kind of shit for fun.

She opens another story. Skims through the details of a nasty-sounding attack on a man down Hessle Road. Anonymous thirty-three-year-old beaten unconscious on his own doorstep. Neighbors claiming that he had been growing marijuana to help him deal with the pain of a motorcycle accident. Witnesses sought. Descriptions given of two heavyset white men and a smaller, younger man, who left the scene in a four-by-four. Said to be the latest in a worrying explosion of drug-related violent incidents, and has been linked to the discovery of a body in the city’s Dagger Lane . . .

Suzie loses interest. Turns away from the screen.

Next to the laptop, her mobile sits dead and lifeless. She has not had the courage to turn it on.

Was it him?

The question is killing her. Was the man who insisted she perform for his pleasure merely setting her up? Was that his fantasy? To see her crushed beneath the weight of a half-naked stranger amid the sound of grinding metal and frothing blood? Or was it a mere accident? Was the man even there when it happened? Could he have seen something? Could he be a witness? Worse still, she thinks, what if he has already contacted the authorities and told them about her?

She looks at the door, imagining two uniformed policemen banging on it with angry fists, leading her away in handcuffs, her secrets pored over by all.

Suzie takes another bite of biscuit. Looks at the story one more time. At the newspaper’s masthead. She remembers how the paper had dealt with Simon’s death.

For no other reason than to change the picture on the screen, she types the name Simon Appleyard into the newspaper’s search function.

Two stories.

One offering a name and age of the young man found dead in an Anlaby flat two days before.

The other from the inquest; held three weeks ago and too painful to attend.

A Hull woman has paid tribute to her “gregarious and loving” nephew, who took his own life after sinking into a depression over his sexuality.

Hull Coroner Martin Duffy heard yesterday how 24-year-old Simon Appleyard was found dead at his Springfield Court flat in late November last year.

He had tied a length of rope around his neck and to a wall-mounted knife rack in his kitchen. He had been dead for four days when his landlord found his body.

Simon, who worked for a car valeting service in Wincolmlee, had won awards at a national level for line dancing and ran a club in Anlaby.

His aunt, Carrie Ford, of Saffron Close in Willerby, told the inquest: “He had times when he was down, like we all do, but it came as a shock to all who knew and loved him that he would be so unhappy. He had so much to live for. He was always so full of life and happiness. He was such a character, really outgoing and gregarious, with such a loving nature. I don’t know what I’ll do without him around to make me laugh.”

The court heard Mr. Appleyard had been treated for depression as a teenager and had twice been prescribed antidepressants. As a teenager, he had had difficulty accepting his sexuality and clashed with his parents when he came out as gay at the age of nineteen.

Although no note was found, text messages shown to the court by Mr. Appleyard’s father show he was feeling unloved and suicidal in the weeks before his death.

Kevin Appleyard, who traveled to the inquest from his home in Derbyshire, said, “He said he was a disappointment. Said we were better off without him. Said I wouldn’t accept who he was. I just wish I could hold him one more time . . .”

Suzie turns away from the screen, as disgusted now as when she had first read the stream of lies.

She feels sick that Simon’s dad is even mentioned in the article. Disgusted that the man who battered and bullied her friend throughout his childhood would dare to suggest he had ever even hugged his son. Wonders whether, before he gave it to the coroner, Kevin Appleyard had the foresight to change his son’s name in his phone to “Simon” from “poof.”

An e-mail pops up in the corner of the screen. Instinctively she clicks on it.

Still on for Saturday? Am already getting in the swing of things? Xx

The message is from a couple she knows as J & J. The male half of the relationship is an unattractive blond lad with Leeds United tattoos and poor spelling. The female J is a dumpy brunette with pierced nipples and glasses, who in Suzie’s mind at least always seems to be wearing Band-Aids on her heels. They met at a party perhaps a year before. They were quite funny and lived near enough to Simon and her to make them worth being friendly to. The strategy had saved them a fortune in fuel.

She wonders if she should ignore the message. Concentrate on her worries and woes. Manages to hold out for a full ten seconds before deciding she has nothing better to do than drop them a line back in return.

Hey you. Not sure about this time. Not feeling too good. Think I may bring the mood down. XX

She presses
SEND
.

Gives it a minute, drumming her fingers on the table. Has another biscuit. Starts to reread the
Hull Daily Mail
report of the hit-and-run, then gets bored with herself and closes it down. She stares at the screen for a while as if debating, then clicks on one of the
FAVORITES
on her Internet browser. It takes her to the Xanadu homepage.

As ever, she feels a rush of excitement. In the picture at the center of the screen is a group of middle-aged men and women. They have blurred faces, thoroughly average bodies, and are unashamedly nude. With wide grins, they are all giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

Behind them, the flat, green fields of Lincolnshire make the image look like a postcard. It just needs a slogan.

“We’re fat and getting plenty,” she had once suggested to Simon.

Or, pointing at the thumbnail image of a sixty-one-year-old woman in a love swing and gimp mask, “Does my bum look big in this?”

Go on, Blossoms. It’s not a party without you. XX

Suzie can’t help but smile. There’s a birthday bash at Xanadu this Saturday night. The owner, a tax inspector with matronly boobs and a liking for nipple clamps, is turning fifty. Christine and her husband, Big Dunc, have run Xanadu for eight years. As swinging clubs go, it’s pretty plush. Set in a dozen acres, two miles from the nearest house, it’s Lincolnshire’s best-kept secret. Christine and Big Dunc hold three get-togethers a week. One for couples, one for singles, and one where anything goes.

She flicks through the website, pulling faces and wondering what else she will do this Saturday if she decides not to go along for her slice of cake and free glass of champagne. She’s lonely. The thought makes her close her eyes. She has never really acknowledged it before. Since Simon, she has been lost.

Suzie licks her lips. Prepares to type.

A thought occurs. Had she told him? Had she mentioned the party and the location? She has no way of checking without switching on her phone and scrolling through her messages, and she does not want to do that, so decides that she did not.

But last night . . .

It comes back again. The sound of the cars colliding. The crunch of bone. The splat of body hitting wet concrete.

Don’t go, Suzie
, she tells herself. It’s not the same anymore.

Would it be so bad? Were she ever asked to justify herself, Suzie would try and explain that there is a big difference between a swinging party and an orgy. The last one she attended at Christine’s place, she had spent most of the evening in the kitchen, helping the host make snacks and flicking through a copy of
Good Food
. She spent an hour nattering over a glass of wine with a nice woman from Dorset, talking about the best ways to iron a plastic bra.

Her fingers twitch above the keyboard. The story of the hit-and-run is open at the bottom of her screen. The report of Simon’s inquest to the right. But the page that holds her attention offers freedom and fun; a Saturday night of being young and hedonistic. A night of escaping from all the crushing reality.

You nearly got killed last night
, she tells herself.

The reply, in her mind, comes in Simon’s voice.

All the more reason to live.

She nods. Makes up her mind.

What time are you leaving? XX

“IS IT TWO TEES
or two els?” asks Daniells, his tongue wedged in his lower lip.

Pharaoh turns her head, slowly, a snarl already forming on her face.

“What?”

“Rottweiler,” he says, gesturing at his open pad with his Biro. “Double
t
or double
l?
”

For a moment, she doesn’t answer. Then she leans across, plucks the pen from between his forefinger and thumb, and with as much force as she can muster in the cramped confines of the little sports car, throws it at the side of his head. It bounces off and lands in the footwell.

Daniells pulls a face. Closes his pad and puts it back in his inside pocket. Then he mimes zipping and locking his mouth.

Pharaoh turns back to the window, where the larger of the two guard dogs continues to snarl, occasionally leaping up with an extra riot of barking to leave spit, steam, and paw prints on the glass.

She would like to tell herself it had been a strategic and orderly retreat, but in truth she and Daniells had run for the car like Olympic sprinters when the dogs appeared and bared their fangs. It had been the right thing to do. The dogs had lowered their heads and torn after them in a gnashing fury, and Daniells had lost the tail end of his coat when he slammed the passenger door.

“This is why we should have guns,” says Daniells, who has lost none of his cheer and appears to still be enjoying himself, despite very nearly having his leg chewed off by an angry Rottweiler.

“What?”

“Guns,” he repeats.

She turns back to him. “You’d shoot the dogs?”

He makes a gun of forefinger and thumb and mimes shooting the muscled, black-and-brown beast that is licking his window. He purses his lips and blows on the tip of his index finger, as if it were smoking. “Would be nice to have the option,” he says.

Pharaoh says nothing for a moment. Just stares. It’s a look that makes him give an odd, nervous half grin. “Get out,” she says.

“Pardon, guv?”

“You’re safer out there than in here.”

They sit in silence, broken only by the sound of the growling dogs and the thunder of rain on the glass.

“We could go,” says Daniells. “Come back with the dog squad.”

Pharaoh has been thinking the same thing, but the fact that Daniells has offered advice makes her bloody-minded. “We’re going nowhere,” she says.

The two-seater is parked on the driveway of Alan Rourke’s bungalow. It’s an attractive three-bedroom property with imposing double-glazed bay windows framed by luxuriously gaudy drapes of crushed velvet and lace. The doorbell, when they pressed the buzzer, rang to the tune of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” They had been remarking on Rourke having a nice, albeit tasteless, pad when the two devil dogs emerged from the rear of the property and chased them back to the car.

“He must be able to hear them,” says Daniells. “And his neighbors.”

It’s a quiet cul-de-sac. A dozen detached properties with neatly tended gardens and leylandii trees; Mercedes Estates parked on patterned redbrick driveways and well-tended hanging baskets next to uPVC double doors.

“They’ll be used to it,” says Pharaoh, pulling down the vanity mirror and checking her mascara and lipstick.

She had not really given the animals much thought when she read through Rourke’s file. The last contact the police had had with him was over a complaint that his two dogs had attacked a toddler who had been playing with a ball in his grandmother’s garden. The file offered nothing more on the incident except to say the complaint had been withdrawn. Pharaoh could only hope that the incentive to do so was financial rather than fear.

“Come on,” she says, more to herself than to her subordinate.

She stares at the door, as if willing it to open.

“Do you think he knows we’re police?” asks Daniells.

Pharaoh gestures expansively, a display that takes in the tiny two-seater sports car and their plain clothes. “I wanted the model with the flashing light but couldn’t afford that and the CD changer,” she says.

She blows out a sigh. Eases down the electric window a fraction.

“Mr. Rourke,” she shouts. “This is Detective Superintendent . . .”

Her words are lost in a cacophony of snarling and barking. Yellow teeth and frothing spit crash against the side of the car.

“For fuck’s sake.”

She puts her head in her hands. Wishes McAvoy were here. Despite his having the social skills of an excitable five-year-old, she rates DC Daniells as an officer. He is enthusiastic and eager. She has spent her working life surrounded by jaded cynics who can convince themselves that anything they can’t be bothered to do is not worth doing. Daniells happily throws himself into the most skull-crushingly tedious tasks and is never less than grateful for the opportunity. She had been feeling well disposed toward him when she asked him to tag along for her chat with Rourke. He had called in a favor and managed to speed up the forensic results yielded by the shards of glass found at the scene of the petrol bombing. He had been so excited, she almost offered to pull in at the service station to get him some sweeties as a tip.

She has to bite down on an involuntary smile as she imagines McAvoy, folded up and cramped in the passenger seat. She wonders what he would do. Presumes he would never have run from the dogs in the first place. Would have hummed them to sleep or banged their heads together. She wishes she had seen him talking to the escaped stallion. Can understand fully how he calmed the animal with his big eyes and soft words. Has experienced his almost otherworldly tenderness and empathy. She finds herself oddly jealous of the horse. It got the best of him. She wonders if the horse realizes just what an annoying bugger her brilliant and hopeless sergeant can be.

“Nice place, isn’t it?”

They are in one of the handsome villages that lie to the west of the city, Hull’s version of a commuter belt and not the sort of place she would associate with a man like Rourke.

She reaches back onto the parcel shelf and grabs the printout of his record.

The mug shot shows a surly, stubble-cheeked man in his mid-fifties scowling out from beneath a shock of coiffed black hair turning gray at the temples. He is sporting a luxurious mustache she would associate with a Breton onion seller, and his eyebrows could use a trim.

“Seven years,” she says, running her finger down his long list of offenses and prison terms. “That’s a stretch.”

“Was that the GBH?”

“No, that was the armed robbery. Only got two years for the GBH. Provocation, apparently.”

“I’ll bet.”

“He’s been busy,” she says, and as she reads, she finds herself growing more hopeful that she may have struck lucky. That the man she has come to interview is involved with the drugs gang she is so desperate to take down.

“Hang on . . .”

From the back of the property two men are emerging. One is unmistakably Rourke. He is dressed in black jeans, white sneakers, and an oversize Fred Perry T-shirt that is too tight around strong, tattooed biceps and an impressive, overhanging gut. With him is a younger man in bright green tracksuit trousers and an expensive leather jacket worn over a vest. He is thin and pinch-faced, and his hair, though recently shaved, is growing back ginger. He has a cigarette clamped between his lips, and it rises skyward as he sneers angrily at the two occupants of the car.

“Mr. Rourke, I’m Detective Superintendent . . .”

Her voice sets the dogs barking again, and the younger man laughs as she hurriedly pulls her mouth back from the slightly open window.

Rourke removes a tiny, unlit roll-up from his mouth. “Ben. Dara. Cut.”

Both dogs stop their barking. They pad, obediently, to his side. He fondles their heads without taking his eyes from Pharaoh. Both dogs lick their muzzles happily. They could be different animals.

“Coppers?” Rourke asks the question.

Pharaoh nods.

Rourke gives a jerk of his head to indicate they are at liberty to get out of the vehicle. Pharaoh takes a deep breath and does so. As she hauls herself free of the low, cramped vehicle, her skirt rides up to reveal a large slice of attractive thigh. She pushes her hair back from her face and straightens her jacket, straightening her back with a movement that accentuates her figure.

Rourke does not change his expression, but the younger lad gives a leer.

“They should be locked up,” says Pharaoh, nodding at the dogs as she walks down the driveway and comes to a halt near enough to Rourke to encroach on his personal space. He smells of coffee, nicotine, hair gel, and horses.

“They wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he says, and his accent contains a tinge of Irish.

“I couldn’t care less about flies,” she says. “It’s sinking their teeth in my arse that I’m not keen on.”

“That’s a pity,” says Rourke, and the younger man laughs louder than the joke deserves. “You look like the sort who’d enjoy it.”

Daniells has arrived at Pharaoh’s side. He gives them all a big smile. “Are they safe to stroke?” he asks brightly, seemingly having forgotten his desire of moments ago to put a bullet in their heads.

“They don’t like coppers,” says Rourke. “So, yeah, stroke away.”

Daniells moves forward with his hand out, but Pharaoh pulls him back.

Rourke smiles. “He a bit soft upstairs?” he asks, jerking his head in the direction of the young, open-faced detective.

“He thinks the best of people,” she says, locking eyes with Rourke. “We’re chalk and cheese.”

Rourke shrugs. He pushes his damp hair back from his face with a dirty, cigarette-stained hand. “What do you want?”

“Getting out of the rain would be a start,” says Pharaoh, looking up at the gray sky.

“Place is a pigsty,” says Rourke. “We’re grand here.”

Pharaoh doesn’t push it. “Who’s your friend?”

The younger man takes his eyes off her cleavage and raises them to her face. “I’m what you’ve been waiting for all your life,” he says.

If he means the words to be ironic, his face does not betray it.

“Really?” Pharaoh’s voice oozes seductive menace. “You don’t look like a lottery winner.”

Rourke gives a grin at that. His mood seems to soften. “RJ here is doing a bit of work for me,” he says.

“Work? Heard you were allergic.”

Rourke gestures at his house. “I’m doing okay.”

“Bank robberies pay well, I see.”

“All in the past, sister. I’m a good boy now.”

When he smiles, there is something endearing about Rourke. Although she has skimmed through his record, Pharaoh has to fight to remind herself that he is a violent criminal and not some lovable rogue.

“Tuesday night,” she says. “Where were you?”

Rourke lifts his unlit, tiny roll-up to his mouth. Sucks on the end while thinking. “Here,” he says. “Like as not.”

“All evening?”

“I’ll have been drinking,” he says. “Can’t remember much after
EastEnders
. But, aye, I’ll have been here.”

“Can anybody confirm that? Your wife, perhaps? Your little friend here?”

“Doubt it,” he says, and his blue eyes twinkle with something Pharaoh can only think of as “charm.” “I ain’t seen the bitch in nigh on three years. And Ro here has business of his own of an evening. Treats the place like a hotel . . .”

“So you live alone?”

Rourke nudges the younger man with a meaty elbow and gives him a playful smile. “I entertain the occasional lady caller,” he says, affecting an upper-class English accent.

Pharaoh nods. “Do you want to know why I’m asking?”

“Not really,” says Rourke. “But I don’t really want you here, either, and that’s happened, so chances are you’re going to tell me.”

“Your fingerprint was found on a shard of glass,” she says.

“And?”

“Glass from a bottle that was filled with petrol, set alight, and thrown at a police van I happened to be sitting in.”

If Rourke is concerned, he does not show it. He pulls a face and smooths down his mustache. “I’m a bit old for petrol-bombing coppers. Young enough to do other stuff to them, mind.”

Pharaoh’s patience snaps. “Mr. Rourke, try and imagine what’s going on in my head right now.”

“Pretty picture?”

“It involves me ringing for a vanload of uniformed officers who will trample all over your front garden, kick in your front door, tranquilize your dogs, lead you out of here in handcuffs, and throw you in a cell. Then we’ll have this conversation again, and you’ll wish you’d just helped me out when you had the chance. So here’s your chance. Why do you think your print would be on that bottle?”

Rourke looks down at his dogs. Gives them a stroke and plays with their ears.

“Where did this happen?” he asks at last.

“Down by the Lord Line building on St. Andrew’s Quay. We were involved in a surveillance operation.”

“Surveilling what, love?”

“We believe a nearby warehouse was being used as a cannabis farm.”

Rourke scoffs. “Cannabis? Who gives a crap?”

“I agree,” says Pharaoh. “Couldn’t give a chuff, to be honest. But the people who run it are very nasty people, and they hurt somebody nice, so we’d like them to go to prison.”

Rourke nods. “Fair enough.”