by Mo Hayder
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.’
‘She bought paperweights from you too.’
‘That was her other interest.’ He went back to the cabinet, replaced the box and took out a pair of paperweights, both a deep, cerulean blue, holding them in his palms like two fat plums. ‘Pretty, aren’t they? I got them from a shop in Andover – these parochial outlets, they haven’t a clue what they’ve got half the time. These are French. From the Clichy factory. Quite old. I got them with her in mind. I thought she’d like the colour especially.’ He put them on the desk. Then, tongue between his teeth, he returned to the cabinet, walked his hands delicately over the other objects in it, selected a few and brought them across. ‘I had her in mind with these too.’
He put out three paperweights, two filled with a riot of oranges and reds, the third a plain white, its top surface nipped and stretched upwards as if the glass was reaching for the sky. ‘They’re not my thing, to be honest, too contemporary, but I think Ms Mahoney liked them. I always meant to suggest to her she took them. See? You could line them up like this. Maybe on a windowsill.’ He sat down and steepled his hands, making a tall, narrow shape with them. ‘If there was something out of the window you wanted to draw attention to, for example.’
‘The items she bought from you?’ Caffery wondered what it was about the one in the centre that was making his head tick. ‘Would you have a record of that somewhere? Sales dockets?’
‘Sales dockets. Yes, I . . .’ Pooley paused. He collected himself and gave a calm smile. ‘I keep most of my invoices at home. Can I get back to you on that? I could bring them to you.’
Caffery reached into his pocket for his wallet, taking time to do it because he was thinking, trying to decide if there was something else, something more he should have asked. But just as the answer was about to pop into his head, his phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out. Beatrice Foxton’s number was flashing on the screen.
‘What’re you doing?’ Her voice was echoey. He guessed she was in the mortuary. ‘Where are you?’
‘Brislington.’ Caffery pushed back the chair and stood. He fumbled a business card out and put in on the desk in front of Pooley. ‘Call me,’ he mouthed. ‘Why, Beatrice? Where do you want me to be?’
‘Southmead Hospital. Like now.’
40
Fester and Lurch, the morticians, were tidying up the body when Caffery arrived. He left his coat in the office and was pulling on the little white wellies the mortuary provided when Beatrice met him in the doorway, mask below her chin, a glass laboratory beaker in her hand. ‘Hello, Jack.’ She shook the beaker in his face, sloshing the contents around. He got a sharp whiff of vomit. ‘Glad you could make it.’
‘Thanks.’ He turned his head away, felt in his pockets for the Airwaves gum and squinted sideways at the beaker. ‘Stomach contents?’
‘Coca-Cola, salad, bits of something I think must have been a pizza, coffee and about eight half-digested temazepam tablets. Like Lucy Mahoney.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ Caffery said dully, putting his hand on the beaker and pushing it away from his face. ‘This is not what I need to hear.’ He looked over her shoulder into the dissection room where Lurch, in mask and a sunny yellow tunic, was stitching up the long Y incision in the body on the table. ‘What’ve you got, then?’
‘A suicide. Or, rather, a death that’s supposed to look like suicide. Come on.’
Tipping two gum lozenges into his mouth Caffery followed her into the room. The woman lying on the block in life had been plump, with pale skin and fair pubic hair. She had a tattoo of a swallow on her right breast, but her face and hair weren’t visible. A second mortician stood at her head and was using both gloved hands to peel her face gently up and over the skull. Beatrice would have made an incision at the back of the skull and pulled the skin and hair down over the front of the head, letting it gather in folds under the chin. Now the autopsy was over it was Lurch’s job to peel it back up, flatten it and make it presentable for the relatives. Beyond him a man wearing a navy blue raincoat stood with his side to them, a mobile glued to his ear. A divisional DI, Caffery guessed.
‘She’s not long dead?’ Caffery walked around the table, studying the body, the dark stitching burrowing deep into her flesh. The Y cut had circumvented the navel so it was attached to the left flap of stomach wall – Lurch stitched the little lump of gristle back to the opposite flap of skin. ‘Not in rigor yet.’
‘We think it probably happened yesterday evening some time before midnight. Her name’s Susan Hopkins.’
Beatrice put her hand out to the CSI man, who passed her a sheaf of photos. She gave them to Caffery. They showed Susan Hopkins in belted jeans and a black-and-white floral-print blouse, lying on the floor of a garage, a dark pool of blood around her. She was young, quite pretty, with a flat face and a small nose. Her blonde hair was worn short. Neat, not showy.
‘She was a nurse in a private clinic out near Yate. She’d done an early shift and was supposed to be meeting her friend at seven for a drink – they were going to celebrate because her boyfriend was coming off the rigs in Aberdeen after three weeks apart. She never showed for the drink. The police found her this morning at three in her own garage. No sexual assault, no underwear disturbed. No robbery. The parents – poor bastards – are on holiday in Croatia. Someone’s trying to find them now.’
‘And you’re not convinced she pulled the plug because . . . ?’
Beatrice glanced at the DI to make sure he wasn’t listening. ‘She was lying down,’ she murmured. ‘On her back. Just as you see her now. The same way Mahoney was.’
‘And?’
‘Most suicides are in a sitting position. Or half propped up. You never seen that? If they arrive when they’re still in rigor it’s like trying to fit a chair on the table – legs sticking
out everywhere. But no. I don’t break bones to get them to lie flat in case that’s what you’ve heard. I have other methods.’
‘So she lay down to die. That’s suspicious?’
‘All right, all right.’ Beatrice sighed. ‘Give an old lady a chance here. Of course if a suicide comes to me lying flat on their back, hands at their sides, it means nothing. It’s a little unusual, that’s all. But you add it to the big picture and . . . I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting bored out here in the wilderness with the woollies. Looking for murder on every corner, eh?’
She lifted Susan’s right hand and showed Jack the inside of her wrist. It was a clumsy cut, made in the same longitudinal direction as Mahoney’s had been.
‘No experimental nicks?’
‘Just like Mahoney. They both went straight in there for the biggie. Same as the lying-down thing. You take it in isolation and it means nothing. But there are other things.’
‘What other things?’
‘She did it the same way Mahoney did. Benzos and the knife. And, just like with Mahoney, the temazepam is only half digested.’
‘Where does this leave us, then?’
Beatrice rubbed her forehead with the tip of her finger. ‘You tell me. Lucy Mahoney had temazepam on prescription for an operation, but Hopkins . . .’ She looked up at him. ‘So far no one can work out how she got her hands on those tablets.’
Caffery peered at the cut on Hopkins’s wrist. He could see past the skin right down into the mechanics of the arm: the duncoloured tendons, the slippery fascia of muscle. ‘I don’t know. Feels a little like you’re stretching it a bit.’
Beatrice pushed a stray strand of grey hair off her forehead and gave an exasperated sigh. ‘You know, I didn’t expect you to propose marriage to me over this, but I have to say I’d hoped for a different reaction, Jack. I’d kind of hoped for some sort of appreciation. Even just a nod. A smile that I bothered to call you, maybe.’
Caffery glanced across at the DI, who hadn’t looked up and was still muttering into the phone, one finger in his ear to block out the roar of the air-conditioning unit. ‘It’s just that if you’re right,’ he muttered, leaning into her, ‘then all I can say is, God help me.’