Original Skin

by David Mark

  “Go and make him happy.”

  The thrill of it all brings goose pimples to her skin. She reaches across for her high heels and slips her cold feet inside them, noting how her fingers tremble as she fastens the buckle. With a quick glance at her reflection in the too-dark mirror, she steps from the car.

  A gust of wind pulls at the tails of her leather jacket, and her legs feel unsteady as she totters across the tarmac on her high heels, closing the distance between herself and the vehicle in only a few strides.

  The man in the car watches her approach. His head almost reaches the roof of the vehicle. He has a thin, pinched face and rimless glasses. He is dressed in a nice suit, with his tie unloosened almost to the middle of his chest. He is red-faced, and a sheen of sweat is visible on his thinning scalp. As he winds the window down, Suzie is hit by the smell of booze. Bending forward to talk through the glass, she sees the man already has his trousers undone.

  “Want to play?”

  The line sounds silly and false as she says it, but she can think of nothing better.

  The man looks taken aback, and Suzie wonders if he had genuinely expected to find sex here tonight, or had just driven here to see if the rumors were true.

  “What you got in mind?”

  His voice is slurred, but whether through drink or nerves she cannot say.

  “It’s cold out here,” says Suzie, trying to sound sexy.

  “Do you want to get in?”

  Suzie remembers her instructions. Wonders if her new friend is watching. Whether he is sitting in the distant car, smiling as she fulfills his fantasy without ever having seen his face.

  “You can join me out here. The bonnet of your car looks soooo comfy.”

  The man fumbles with the car door. He steps from the vehicle, and a half bottle of Jack Daniel’s falls onto the road. The man kicks it under his car and stands up straight. He has to reach out to steady himself, and his eyes slide halfway shut.

  He is a good foot taller than Suzie, and twice the age.

  She looks up at him. Decides they will not kiss.

  She wonders if this is turning the watcher on. She is feeling only the slightest frisson of arousal, but that is to do with the sensation of being commanded, being watched, rather than by any desire to have sex with this man.

  She goes straight to work. Reaches out and squeezes his groin. He moans and she wonders how long he has been turning himself on, here, alone, in the dark.

  “Can I lick it? Lick you? Down there?”

  She does not want him to, and tonight’s architect had not commanded her to accept any such pleasures.

  She shakes her head. “Do me. Now.”

  Suzie walks as sexily as she can to the front of the car. It is warm and throbbing as she lays herself upon it, face-first, listening to the hum of the engine. Without a word she pulls up the hem of her dress. The cold night air and faint mist of rain feel wonderful on her bare skin.

  A moment later, he is behind her, pressing his still-clothed hardness against the backs of her thighs.

  She wishes she had her phone in her hand. Wishes she could text him to ask if he is enjoying the show.

  She hears the rustle of trousers falling to the wet ground. Feels rough and inexpert fingers between her legs, and then a hand in her hair.

  Suzie presses her face onto the wet metal of the car. Feels him fumbling, trying to find the way inside . . .

  “Get it over with,” she mumbles into the back of her hand.

  The sound of a car.

  Big, powerful engine roaring into life. Fat, expensive tires on wet tarmac. The sudden scream of a foot stamping on gas.

  Suzie turns around. Stares past the grunting, thrusting man. Her eyes widen. It is a sensation of genuine terror.

  The other car is screaming toward them, mere feet away and getting faster.

  The noise she makes is a strangled squawk. It is an unnatural sound, gargled in her throat.

  Desperately, she pushes back against the man, who pins her to the bonnet of his car. Hears him grunt and stagger as he tries to hold her where she lies.

  “Get off me!”

  Suzie knows she is about to die. Wonders if this is how Simon felt as he gave himself up to the noose.

  And then she is squirming, shrieking, slipping out of his grasp: the roar of the car engine drowning out her shouts to “Move!”

  She slips free. Throws herself into the dirt at the side of the road.

  Turns, just in time to see the four-by-four crush the man, half turning, against the bonnet of his own car in a crash of metal and flesh.

  He is pinned between the cars, legs and buttocks still bare, shirttails comically parted like stage curtains to reveal a dying erection.

  Suzie cannot make a sound. Her throat has squeezed shut. Her eyes will not close. She stares, unable to yank her gaze away from the man’s gulping, gasping mouth, opening, as if with the dying gasps of a fish, as his head falls forward onto the bonnet of the vehicle, which pins him where he stands.

  Beneath where Suzie lies, semi-sprawled, the ground is cold. Wet. Her knees are bleeding where she landed on stone. Her mouth is open as if in mimicry of the dying man.

  Finally, she is able to raise her dirty hands to her face. To momentarily block it out. To stop her memory from absorbing any more.

  She looks up again only when she hears the larger vehicle move. She watches as the four-by-four reverses, pauses, and then turns in a semicircle. It does not pause again. The sound of a boot stamping on the gas rings in Suzie’s ears.

  A moment later, she is alone, sitting in a ditch at the side of a rest stop, watching a stranger slide to the ground as if made of damp paper; his legs a ruined mess of skin, blood, and bone.

  She forces herself to move. Pulls down her dress as if suddenly terrified of being seen. Moves, in jerky increments, to where the man lies.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, though the sounds do not come out.

  She staggers back to her own car. Fumbles with the door. Cries. Tries a dozen times to get the key in the ignition. Breaks a heel as she presses the accelerator to the floor.

  She has driven five miles with trembling hands before it occurs to her to call 999.

  It is another two before she can find a phone box.

  She is nearly home before she has the presence of mind to go back and wipe her prints from the receiver.

  LILAH IS WHIMPERING. Thrashing. Kicking fat little limbs the color of uncooked sausages. Turning her cheeks into cold, slapped flesh with the power of her sobs.

  “Please, baby girl. Please . . .”

  McAvoy’s giant hand is splayed upon his daughter’s heaving belly, trying to soothe her with his gently massaging fingers.

  He leans over the cot. Fills her world with his face. Tries to saturate his eyes with truth, to wordlessly convey to his frightened, agitated child that she has nothing to fear. That Daddy is here. That she need never be afraid or lonely or sad . . .

  He scoops her up. Holds her to his chest. Strokes the soft down that covers her warm crown. Shushes her, his stubbled cheek against her soft, untainted skin.

  Gradually Lilah settles. One of her tiny hands finds McAvoy’s lower lip, and she grips it territorially as she begins to drift back into sleep.

  Content to let her keep whatever part of his face she wants, McAvoy leans back against the wall and stares through the glass. Takes in the symmetry and newness, the bland homogeny of the estate.

  Allows himself a brief moment of memory. Recalls the gloss of condensation. The smell of smoldering turf. The chill stone floor of the family croft. That view: across the heather and peat of the undulating fields down to the glassy black waters of Loch Ewe . . .

  He shakes it away. Concentrates on now. On Hull. Its sky and its streets.

  McAvoy has never had cause to use th
e word in conversation, but he fancies the color of the morning sky, as it bleeds from the orange-tinged black of night to the cloud-covered gloom of day, it could be labeled isabelline. It is a word he read in a book as a child, and its cheeky definition ensured it would lodge in his head forever. The word lends itself to the gray-and-yellow parchment hue reputed to be the color of the underwear worn by Isabella, archduchess of Austria, at the end of a three-year siege of her castle home.

  It is a word that always makes his nose wrinkle, but it seems strangely appropriate for this damp and ghastly morning.

  McAvoy checks his watch. It’s just gone six a.m.

  He listens for any other sounds inside the house, but there is silence save Lilah’s gentle snuffling against his chest. Roisin and Fin remain asleep. He has a moment to himself.

  Soundlessly, he crosses back to the cot and tenderly lays Lilah back down. Moving on tiptoes, he leaves the room and closes it behind him, conscious even as he does so how foolish he must look; a man of his size tiptoeing like a burglar, clad only in boxer shorts and suffused with the scent of smoke and too little sleep.

  He retrieves his mobile phone from the pocket of the trousers which lie outside his bedroom door, alongside the tie, socks, and underpants he has already picked out for the day. He is used to leaving at strange hours. Does not like to wake his bride by dressing in the bedroom.

  McAvoy pads downstairs, checking the messages on his answering service.

  He enters the kitchen. Pours himself a glass of milk and adds a squirt of strawberry syrup, then downs it in a gulp.

  Within moments he is heading back upstairs. Pulling himself into his clothes and replaying the message that he wishes to God he had picked up when it was left for him at two a.m.

  “McAvoy. This is Desk Sergeant Pulis from Queens Gardens. Your request just crossed my desk. I’m sorry, this didn’t ring any bells before now. Shaun Unwin, yes? You’re looking for him or Leanne Marvell, I understand. Shaun’s been with us. In the cells. He’s due to be released first thing, but I’ll hold him if I hear back from you . . .”

  • • •

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER McAvoy is walking briskly across Queens Gardens. The skies have not yet unleashed the lake they hold in their bellies, but the air is damp and the morning gray. He is grateful for the long woolen coat he took the time to pick up off the back of the sofa before silently slipping out of the house. He had pushed the car, hand brake off, for two whole streets, before turning the ignition. He wants his family to sleep soundly.

  He follows the paved walkway through the neatly tended landscape of duck ponds and grass and up the stairs to the glass-and-concrete frontage of Queens Gardens Police Station.

  The sergeant behind the glass raises his eyebrows as the detective walks in, and swivels his eyes to look up at the clock behind him.

  “My, you’re up with the lark.”

  “Shaun Unwin,” says McAvoy, crossing to the desk. “Has he been released?”

  The sergeant, whose name McAvoy recalls as having a military connection, opens a plastic folder and runs a finger along a list of names.

  “Released at four forty a.m.,” he says. “Pulis told him he could have breakfast before he went home but he was itching to get going.”

  McAvoy closes his eyes.

  Remembers the sergeant’s name.

  “I gave instructions, Sergeant Uxbridge. It was essential I speak to him . . .”

  The sergeant bristles. “I wasn’t on shift, mate. Was it a paper request? Only they sometimes get misfiled, see. Now, when it’s on the computer, it should flash up to tell you not to let any bugger go if somebody still wants them, but even then it’s a hit-and-miss business . . .”

  Exasperated, McAvoy turns away. Runs his tongue around his mouth and rasps his hand over his unshaved face.

  His mind fills with the snippets of information he was able to piece together on the drive over, in between phone calls to Pharaoh, that had left his head ringing.

  Shaun Unwin had been arrested for disorderly conduct at 3:15 p.m. the previous day, even as Pharaoh and her team sat planning the raid at St. Andrew’s Quay. He had been knocking back drinks in the Mission. Sparked up a cigarette and refused to put it out. Swung a punch at the barman and smashed his forearm into the Plexiglas frontage of the jukebox. Made a prick of himself, and told the owners that if they didn’t like it, they should call the cops.

  He didn’t run when the police turned up. Seemed to give himself up without any of his usual aggression.

  The constable who made the arrest said he could get nothing out of Unwin. Had got no reply when he, like so many others, tried to find Leanne Marvell to inform her of her partner’s arrest.

  McAvoy closes his eyes. Last night’s bust was doomed to failure from the start. Leanne had told her boyfriend that she had told the police. He had gone and got himself banged up, and whether intentional or not, that news would have rung alarm bells with the gang who paid him. Calls would have been made. The cannabis relocated. And then some bastards in a Land Rover dispatched to deliver a flaming warning to the coppers who had thought they were dealing with the usual class of scum . . .

  His phone rings. Wincing in advance, he answers as quickly as he can.

  “Guv?”

  “I already know,” says Pharaoh, shouting above the noise of her sports car on the noisy road that leads from her home across the water up to the Humber Bridge. “Fucking idiots. Have you tried the house? He’s just thick enough to go back there.”

  “No, guv. I came straight to Queens Gardens . . .”

  “Right. Well, fucking run. Why do these people think they can think? If he wanted to be out of the way, Leanne could have asked us. We could have planned it another way. He could have had nothing to do with any of it. To be sitting in the cells while we were sitting waiting for him—what does he think his bosses were going to think?”

  The doors swing open as McAvoy walks back out into the cold. The rain is still holding off, and his feet are steady on the slick pavements as he jogs back across the gardens and over Parliament Street, down onto Whitefriargate, with its shuttered chain stores and its full gutters stuffed with dead leaves, empty bottles, and polystyrene takeaway cartons.

  He makes his way across Trinity Square and onto Dagger Lane.

  Answers his phone as it vibrates against his thigh.

  “Well? Anything? Shaun?” A pause. A note of real concern. “Leanne?”

  The street is deserted. The light from the streetlamps shows up the haze of moisture in the gray air, and McAvoy instinctively shivers as he looks at his coat and sees that somehow, despite the absence of rain, he is soaked through.

  A voice in his ear: “McAvoy?”

  “Nearly there, guv.”

  “She’ll be okay. You’ve seen her. She’s hard. It’s not her that told. They just put it together themselves . . .”

  They both attempt to persuade themselves into happier, more positive thoughts. They fail.

  “Not a sound, guv. He wouldn’t come here, though, and we’ve been trying Leanne all night . . .”

  McAvoy stops.

  Swears.

  “Aector?”

  The door to Leanne’s terraced house is an inch ajar.

  He closes his eyes for a moment.

  “The door’s open, guv.”

  “Fuck, Aector. Right, I’m on my way. Call for uniform immediately.”

  McAvoy eyes the doorway. Reaches out a hand and touches the wet wood. Pushes it open and steps inside.

  “Aector, I’m not far off the bridge. I can be there in twenty-five minutes maximum. Don’t you even think about going in there.”

  McAvoy nods, steps back.

  Then he smells it. Smells the soft, earthy scent of suffering: of tears and pain. It is an infusion in the air, a whisper of a taste. It catches in his nostrils and s
tuffs its fingers down his throat.

  “Guv, there’s somebody inside.”

  McAvoy says no more. Ends the call and then switches off his phone. Moves, as if trying not to wake a child, back within the embrace of the house.

  His feet make no noise as he takes the stairs. He moves slowly, but takes the steps three at a time so as to cut down on the likelihood of one creaking.

  He sniffs: a great stag checking the morning air for predators. For prey.

  He finds himself moving toward what he presumes to be the bedroom. The door, white-painted and featureless, has been pushed to but not fully closed. He inches toward it. Pulls the extendable baton from his pocket, and then puts it back. He has never swung the weapon. Has seen what it can do. Does not want to add his name to the list of officers who have found themselves disciplined or guilt-ridden after allowing their adrenaline to overtake them while armed with something so deadly.

  He pushes open the door.

  Shaun Unwin has been tie-wrapped by the ankles to a hard-backed chair. He is naked. His hands are palms down upon his knees, a gory mimicry of a well-disciplined schoolchild.

  The room smells of blood. Of lighter fuel. Of burning flesh.

  The skin on Shaun’s torso has been melted down to bone.

  His feet sit, unmoving, in a puddle of blood that runs down from where the nails have been driven through the backs of his hands and deep into his kneecaps.

  His head lolls forward: lifeless.

  McAvoy crosses the room. Lifts Shaun’s head. Recoils as he stares into the slack-jawed ruination of the man’s mouth. At the stumps of broken teeth. The blue-black blood. The perforations in his gore-lacquered cheeks.

  Shaun’s mouth has been filled with a fuel-soaked rag and then set on fire. His tongue is melted black.

  McAvoy, fighting his instincts, reaches out a hand and presses his fingers to Shaun’s neck.

  Moves back to the wall and retrieves his phone.

  Pharaoh answers before he can speak.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he, Shaun. I bet the fucking idiot walked straight in the front door.”

  “They hurt him, guv,” says McAvoy, softly. “Must have worked on him for a time. I can’t see Leanne. Fuck, what a mess . . .”