An old man crossing the farmyard with his dog stopped to see what they wanted.
‘You’re looking for Stone Acre? It’s the next farm down. That’s Tom Abbot’s old place.’
‘Do you know Sam Kirby?’ said Francis.
‘No, never heard of the bloke. But Tom’s kids have been renting the place out since Tom died. I took the fields off ’em but they’ve had several different tenants in the farmhouse these past few years. Go on two hundred yards, take the track off to the right, then follow it for a quarter or so of a mile. Can’t miss it.’
They followed his directions and at the head of the track was a wooden sign that read Stone Acre Farm. The paint was split and peeling, and the signpost stuck out of the verge at an angle. It was evident, as they drew into the yard of Stone Acre Farm, that the place was no longer operational. The slumping gate was propped open and weeds had invaded cracks in the concrete surface of the yard. The farmhouse garden was overgrown and the scattering of outbuildings all looked in need of repair. There was no car on the hard standing next to the house, no open windows and, frankly, no sign that anyone lived there at all.
As Francis got out of the car, Marni stayed seated. She wound down her window. The farmyard was silent – the noise of traffic on Ditchling Road was muffled by a dense copse, and in the lee of the hill, the wind hardly made a sound. Her skin crawled. Something seemed off. It was a feeling she knew well enough not to ignore, so she felt happy to be confined to the Deux Chevaux. A single raindrop hit the windscreen and then the heavens opened.
Between the creaky sweep of the windscreen wipers, she watched Francis stride across the concrete yard to the covered porch of the farmhouse. He pulled on a wrought iron bell pull and Marni heard a distant clang. The whole place reminded her of Cold Comfort Farm.
There was no one at the house, or at least no one answered his ring. Ignoring the rain, Francis came back to the car and stood by Marni’s open window. He pulled out his phone.
‘Rory? I’m at Stone Acre Farm, a mile on the Brighton side of the Beacon.’ He listened for a moment. ‘No, nothing to speak of. But I think you should get the team up here. I’ll call you when I’ve got more.’
He strode off across the yard in the direction of three near-derelict outbuildings. Marni watched him with slow dread seeping through her capillaries.
He disappeared into the first of the structures, a corrugated iron lean-to on the side of the far larger barn. As he disappeared from her view, Marni felt increasingly nervous. She looked around the car for something she could use as a weapon, should the need arise. There was nothing on the back seat, but she remembered there was a wrench in the boot.
As she got out of the car to fetch it, Francis reappeared and gave her a questioning look.
‘This place is creepy,’ she said, opening the boot.
‘Stay in the car,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here. I’ll be done in a moment.’
Marni grabbed the wrench and climbed back into the driver’s seat. She felt reassured with the heavy metal balanced across her lap.
Francis circumnavigated the main barn looking for an entrance, sniffing the air.
‘Something, somewhere round here, really stinks,’ he called out to her.
Marni stuck her head out of the window and inhaled. The rain must have dampened down the farmyard smells, but there was still a tang in the air that caught at the back of her throat.
‘We’re on a farm,’ she said.
He came a few steps towards the car. ‘With no animals.’
‘A dead animal?’
‘Maybe. But something else. Chemicals of some kind.’
He disappeared round the side of the barn but reappeared almost immediately.
‘The barn door’s locked. Shiny new padlock.’
‘You’ll need a warrant, won’t you?’ said Marni.
The tone of his voice had suggested he’d rather not wait. However, the law-abiding side of him won over and he spent ten minutes on the phone to Bradshaw explaining what he was doing there and convincing him to apply for a warrant.
Rory arrived with a couple of PCs, whom he instructed to make a safe perimeter around the area. Francis got out of the car to talk to him. Marni listened through the open window.
‘What the fuck is she doing here?’ Rory said, on seeing her, sitting behind the wheel of the Deux Chevaux.
‘She was with me when I found Kirby’s name and address,’ said Francis. ‘I wasn’t going to waste time taking her back to Brighton first. She’ll stay in the car.’
‘Jesus wept,’ said Rory. ‘First rule of policing – no civilians on crime scenes. If you allow her to contaminate the scene, we could lose the case.’
Francis wasn’t interested. ‘She’s an expert witness now. And, like I said, she’ll stay in the car.’
Expert witness? Bugger that!
Not for the first time, Marni regretted the moment she’d laid eyes on Evan Armstrong’s body, not to mention her subsequent call to the police.
It took a further hour for Hitchins to deliver the warrant. Tension ran high between the two policemen, and Rory sat on the cramped back seat of the Deux Chevaux, poisoning the air with resentment at being forced to smoke his e-cig outside in the rain.
Hitchins had been instructed to bring bolt cutters. Francis and Rory took them and all three disappeared around the barn, leaving Marni once again alone in the car. Only this time, she’d had enough. She opened the driver’s door, willing the hinges not to squeak, and, still clutching the wrench, scurried to the corner of the barn and looked round it. As she watched, Rory made short work of the padlock and the door swung open with a low hiss. Francis led the way inside, followed by the other two.
Forgetting her curfew, Marni hurried after them. As she caught up, she heard Rory’s gasp of shock, and when Francis reappeared in the doorway, she could read fear in his eyes.
‘Go back to the car, Marni,’ he said on seeing her. There was a tremor in his voice.
As she continued towards him, Rory appeared at his side. He understood Marni’s intent and stepped forward with his arms outstretched.
‘This is a crime scene,’ he said, blocking her path.
She needed to see what they had found. She tried to look beyond him, through the doorway, but she was overwhelmed by a wall of putrid air.
It was the smell of death.
The smell of death, and of something far worse.
37
Francis
Never had Francis been so relieved to step away from a crime scene. The overpowering stench as they opened the door had told him enough – and he pulled Rory back straight away. Three minutes later, appropriately kitted out in white suits, overshoes and masks, they were as ready as they could be.
Francis took an experimental breath as they reached the open door. He’d pasted the inside of his mask with Vapo-Rub. The fumes were stinging his eyes and each breath he took in carried the sharp cut of menthol. Having done the same, Rory was coughing and there were tears running down his cheeks, saturating the top edge of his mask.
‘Right, let’s do it,’ said Francis.
He faltered on the threshold, feeling both dread and compulsion over what they were about to find. Rory crowded behind him, forcing him to take the plunge.
There was a switch just to the right of the door and he flicked it with a gloved hand. Strip lights, suspended from a joisted ceiling, flooded the space with a harsh white glare. It was instantly apparent that the inside of the building had been renovated, even if the outside hadn’t.
Francis glanced around the cavernous space. The first thing that snagged his attention was a row of white plastic fifty-litre barrels that lined the left-hand wall of the barn. Then he noticed that the walls were covered in blown-up images of tattoos. What the hell had been going on in here? He hardly dared walk across the smooth co
ncrete floor towards the barrels. As he came closer he could see that each was full to the brim with liquid. Here was the source of the putrid smells. He could barely breathe and he knew without looking what they would contain.
‘Jesus,’ said Rory, following him in. ‘I know what this is. Took Liz and the kids to Marrakesh last year and got taken round the tanneries. Stank just like this.’
‘Someone’s curing leather?’ said Francis.
He fought against the impulse to head straight for the door and drive away from the hellish place as fast as he could.
Instead, he edged forward and forced himself to look inside the first bin. Below the surface of the dark liquid, he could see pale shapes drifting, like dying fish in polluted water. One of them slowly twisted to reveal the dark outlines of a tattoo on its other side. Bile rose in his throat and he had to look away.
‘He’s curing human skin,’ he said, as everything fell into place – why the killer was taking tattoos, what he was doing with them afterwards.
Rory stood next to him. ‘Oh, fuck.’
With gritted teeth, Francis looked along the remaining barrels. There were different liquids in them but not all of them contained tracts of skin. It was hard to tell which of the barrels was the culprit for the smell, or if it was a combination of the fumes. The SOCOs would send all of them for chemical analysis, but the precise nature of the chemicals hardly mattered. The crime was obvious.
Francis turned away, sickened. There was a workbench along the opposite wall, cluttered with bottles and vials of unnamed chemicals, wooden boards with dark stains, a knife block and a container of assorted surgical instruments. A cardboard box of latex gloves. A row of books on taxidermy, and there was also a stuffed squirrel at one end of the bench. At the other end of the bench was a large stone sink. Francis hated to think what had been sluiced down that drain.
‘Boss?’
‘Yes?’
Rory was at the far end of the workbench.
‘You need to see this.’
He was pointing at a shallow dish. Francis went over.
There are things a policeman sees that can never be unseen and Francis had come across his fair share of them. But nothing like this. Crumpled in the glass dish, protected from drying out with a layer of cling film, was an orb of skin that looked like a deflated balloon. The web tattoo on it was unmistakeable, even though the skin appeared white and bloated. Rory pushed the dish with the end of his pen and the tattoo quivered like a jelly.
‘We’ve got him, haven’t we, boss?’
Francis shook his head. ‘He’s not here.’
Rory pulled out his phone. ‘Hitchins, when SOCO arrive I want that farmhouse to be taken apart and stripped right back to its bones. I want every inch of this property to be taken to pieces. We need to have the drains inspected. Look for slurry pits, look for signs of digging or burials, and find out who the hell this person is . . .’ He’d had to lower his mask to talk on the phone, so he covered his mouth with his hand to take a breath. ‘Yes, overtime is authorised. Get every man that John Street can spare up here, now.’
Rory had warmed to his task as the man in charge.
After he hung up, they both gazed at the wall of tattoo images. There were pictures of the tattoos that had been taken from Evan Armstrong, Giselle Connelly and Jem Walsh. There were pictures of Dan Carter’s body suit. There was a large poster from the Saatchi Gallery exhibition. And among them, there were pictures of other tattoos that Francis didn’t recognise.
‘Future victims or bodies we haven’t discovered yet?’ said Rory.
‘We need Marni in here.’
‘No way. Her presence will contaminate the crime scene.’
‘Not if she’s in here in her capacity as an expert witness.’
‘No.’
‘Come on, Rory. She was right about the connection between the victims and she could give us vital information on these tattoos that could well end up saving a life. I’m going to fetch her.’
Rory scowled but did nothing to stop him.
Five minutes later, Marni was standing next to him, studying the images tacked to the wall. Her face above the mask had gone pale but she’d stayed calm even when she’d realised they were in the killer’s workshop. Rory had gone outside to make a call, and Francis could only guess who he was speaking to.
‘These all look like tattoos by the artists from the exhibition,’ she said. ‘We were right with our theory.’
‘Your theory,’ said Francis.
Marni shrugged.
‘What about these ones we’ve not seen before?’ he continued. ‘They must be his future targets. If we can identify them, we can protect them.’
Marni walked along the row of images.
‘Recognise any of them?’ he asked.
‘I can hazard a guess at the artists – after all, we know who they are from the exhibition. But the people in these pictures . . .’ She shrugged helplessly.
Rory came back in and joined them.
‘Well? What can you tell us?’ His tone verged on aggressive.
Marni ignored him and continued looking at the images.
‘There are more tattoos here than there are artists,’ said Francis. ‘He seems to be giving himself choices.’
‘I expect some of them are easier to track down than others,’ said Marni. She was looking at a full leg sleeve, the woman’s image cropped to show no more of her body. ‘This one’s definitely by Iwao. It’s the Japanese mythology he specialises in.’
‘And this one?’ said Francis, pointing to a man’s back. The tattoo was black and grey, showing the fall of Lucifer.
Marni looked at it and looked away.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t breathe through this mask.’
She looked shaky on her feet.
‘This is a beauty,’ said Rory, on his return.
Marni and Francis turned in his direction. He was pointing at a picture of a woman’s back piece, Japanese in style, featuring a pair of fiery orange koi carp in a pool and the figure of a kneeling geisha with tears falling from her face into the water. The branch of a maple tree arced across the top left corner, shedding its distinctive leaves across the scene.
‘Iwao again?’ hazarded Francis.
‘Frank, I think I’m going to faint.’
He only just caught her.
xii
I have a sense of foreboding. It nags at me all the way up Ditchling Road. I trust these intuitions – I’m very attuned to disturbances in my equilibrium. Recent events have taken a toll on my psyche. I have to recognise that. What happened in East Street knocked me off balance. I need time alone with my skins to ground myself.
I can’t shake off the feeling that something’s wrong.
Because something is wrong. A car pulls out from my lane and I’m immediately suspicious. A silver Mitsubishi. The only vehicle, other than my own, that ever comes down the track is the post van. I slow down as it passes me in the opposite direction.
I know the driver. It’s one of the plods who was at Evan Armstrong’s funeral. And I know the passenger. It’s Marni Mullins. What the hell were they doing on my property?
I drive straight past the farm and on towards the Beacon. My hands are shaking. I need one of my pills, so I pull into the Beacon’s parking area.
Switch off the engine.
Breathe.
Lean forward and rest my head on the horn to cover the howl of rage I can no longer contain.
When I feel better, I take my binoculars from the glove compartment and a knife from my pack. A fifteen-minute walk through the fields brings me to the boundary of the farm. From the top field, I can see down into the yard. There are more cars, some of them police cars, some unmarked. A van. And people, swarming over my property. Coming in and out of the house. Emerging from the barn.
> I feel like something inside me has been ripped away. And I can’t even begin to think of how I can tell the Collector.
And there’s the man who’s done this to me. The red-haired policeman, standing in the middle of it all, giving out directions and feeding on the information. Like a spider in the centre of his web. I know him. I know what he wants. But he isn’t going to have it. I won’t be caught so easily. My work is too important to allow a little man like that to interrupt it.
My blood sings for vengeance.
38
Rory
How dare he? Sullivan was acting as if he was in charge again. He should have kicked him off the site as soon as backup had arrived. Him and Marni Mullins. Instead, he’d allowed Mullins into the crime scene, and she’d passed out. After which he’d lost Hollins for a couple of hours as someone had had to drive her home. What a screw-up. And letting Sullivan and Mullins have the information that had led them to Diamond and Stone Acre Farm had been another screw-up. There was no doubt in Rory’s mind now that Sam Kirby was the man they were looking for and they’d broken the case. They had enough evidence in that barn to put him away for life. Somehow, he’d have to make sure he took the credit for the discovery, along with Bradshaw.
Rose Lewis arrived and parked her van at the entrance of the yard, and Francis and Rory went out to meet her. The yard itself was now counted as part of the crime scene and the SOCO boys and girls would be all over it in a minute. They led Rose into the barn, waiting in silence for a few minutes as she took in the enormity of the find. One of her SOCOs slowly circumnavigated the barn, taking multiple photos of the vats and the workbench.
‘He’s processing leather here, right?’ said Francis, when Rose finally signalled she was ready to talk.
‘There are more steps to the process than people would imagine,’ Rose said. ‘Most of them involve soaking the skin in a variety of chemicals – to remove the fat and hair, to neutralise the pH, to cleanse it of previous chemicals, to stabilise the proteins in the skin . . .’
‘How long do all of them take?’ said Francis.
The Tattoo Thief Page 20