Original Skin

by David Mark

  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.”

  “So all you can tell me is that you were here on Tuesday night and you’ve no idea how your fingerprint ended up on the glass bottle thrown at the van.” Pharaoh smooths down the front of her jacket. “Bit shit,” she says.

  “The rain looks pretty on your tits.”

  The younger man is staring at Pharaoh’s chest. She gives an incredulous little laugh. “Sorry, son?”

  “Pretty,” he repeats, and raises his head to look her in the eye. “Bet they don’t look so bouncy when you take your bra off, you old bitch.”

  Pharaoh opens her mouth, but before she can speak, Rourke has slammed a meaty hand into the younger man’s chest and pushed him backward. He spins to face him, grabbing him by the lapels and pulling his face close. “You can’t help it, can you?” he spits.

  “Maraigh!” shouts the younger man, his feet scrabbling on the drive. “Maraigh!”

  Neither Rourke nor the two detectives have any time to react. The command, screamed in Gaelic, means nothing to Pharaoh or Daniells, but the Rottweilers respond to it as if a bell had been rung.

  Time seems to slow down.

  To her right, Daniells is reaching into his pocket, trying to extricate his extendable baton from the confines of his battered coat.

  Rourke is turning back to her, his eyes widening as his mouth drops open.

  The young man is staggering backward. Turning. Preparing to run.

  In a heartbeat, the two animals transform into snarling, ravenous killers. Barking, jaws snapping, they turn on the strangers.

  Jaws open, spit drooling from finger-long teeth, they leap.

  Pharaoh’s arms fly to her face but her eyes do not close in time to spare her the image.

  Her vision fills with black-brown fur. Fangs. Pink tongue and yellow eyes.

  As she falls, she knows with cold certainty that the word means “Kill.”

  “HOPE THE DOGS have had their shots,” says Colin Ray, leaning across the table to take a chip from Helen Trember
g’s plate and managing to drop a blob of ketchup on his mucky pin-striped suit.

  “Yeah, would hate for them to get sick,” says Shaz Archer, taking a sip from her can of Diet Coke. She then gives a bark of a laugh. It sounds like the braying of an upper-class old man, and not a petite young woman in an expensive dress and patterned tights.

  Neither McAvoy, Tremberg, nor Ben Neilsen join in.

  “Cheer up, you fuckers,” says Ray, reaching for another chip and laughing when Tremberg pulls her plate away from him. “She’s all right.”

  They are sitting in the canteen at Courtland Road Police Station. The news is flickering soundlessly on the TV in the corner of the room, and two uniformed officers are playing pool on the table near the serving hatch, where a fifty-year-old woman in a tabard and hat is red-facedly offering a choice between cottage pie, lasagna, chips, or going hungry to a couple of visiting software salesmen in gray suits and name tags.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Davey has just finished stumbling his way through the emergency briefing. Ray and Archer are now entirely in charge of the investigation. The cannabis factories, Rourke, and the attack on their senior officer have all been rolled into one. Ray and Archer are on their way to interview the onetime armed robber, who is busy going mental in the cells and threatening retribution against anybody who refuses to tell him what is happening to his two dogs. The rest of the Major Incident Team are circling, here to help, and ready to take over, if asked . . .

  Pharaoh is in a hospital bed with bites to her chest, throat, and hands. Daniells, fresh stitches in his palms, is painfully typing up his witness report on a borrowed desk in the MIT suite.

  The teenager with the ginger hair, who gave the order to kill, has not been seen. Every patrol car in the division is out looking for him.

  “New boy says she’d be dead if Rourke hadn’t called them off,” says Ray chattily. “Did the damage in about five seconds.”

  “Long enough for the lad to leg it,” says Archer.

  “We’ll have an ID by morning, I promise you,” says Tremberg through a mouthful of chips. She is appalled at what has happened to their boss, but has an appetite that cannot be slowed by inner turmoil.

  “We promise you, too,” says Ray, blowing her a kiss. “Paddy will be singing in five minutes, I guarantee it.”

  “He’s not Irish,” says McAvoy, with his eyes shut.

  Ray pulls a face. “Name like Rourke?”

  “Irish descent. Born in South Yorkshire. Traveler family. It’s all in his file. You should read it.”

  There is silence for a moment. “Gyppo, is he?”

  Tremberg shoots McAvoy a look. He is staring at the ceiling, his face nearly gray. She knows about his wife’s traveler roots and knows, too, of his sensitivity about such subjects. He had arrived at the briefing red-faced and panting for breath, clearly having run all the way from whatever he had been up to when the call came over the radio that Pharaoh had been hurt and that her team were required immediately at Courtland Road. As he heard what had happened, she saw something in his face that was at once bewilderment and despair. She has not yet seen him angry, but has no doubt the feeling is in there somewhere, and that Colin Ray would do well to stop talking.

  “He’s from a traveler family,” says McAvoy again deliberately.

  “Gyppo, that’s what I said,” says Ray, and he and Archer share a laugh.

  The two are inseparable. There was a time, when this unit was first being formed, that DCI Ray was expected to get the top job, together with his hard-faced but extraordinarily attractive protégée as number two. Pharaoh had got the gig instead, and the older man had not taken it well—and even less so when he was asked to be her deputy.

  “Daniells gave us a good description,” says Ben Neilsen, piping up. “Skinny lad, shaved ginger hair, little shit . . . can’t be hard to find.”

  “He says it came from nowhere,” adds Tremberg. “The attack, I mean. Rourke was answering the boss’s questions. Wasn’t exactly friendly, but nothing to worry about. The lad said something about the boss’s boobs, and Rourke gave him a clip. Then the lad shouted for the dogs to attack. Whether he wanted them to go for Rourke or the boss, Daniells couldn’t say.”

  “They would never go for their master,” says McAvoy quietly. “Not in a million years.”

  “So why set them on the boss?”

  “Maybe he wanted to prove he had the balls.”

  McAvoy rubs a hand over his face and looks at his watch. He is trying to stay in control of his emotions. He is furious not to have been asked to take over the investigation, but is also well aware that he has no right to expect it and that to even entertain such a hope is somehow to suggest he sees his boss’s injuries as an opportunity. He holds himself still.

  “Where were you, anyway?” asks Ray. He is twisting in his chair to watch the two lads play pool and does not turn as he asks the question. “Thought you were pen-pushing for Everett or something. Was there a really interesting spreadsheet needed your attention somewhere?”

  McAvoy finds himself coloring. “I was taking a look at an old case,” he says.

  “Cold case?” asks Ray, turning back to the table and giving a hand gesture that suggests he does not think much of the standard of pool playing. “That’s Operation Fox, not us.”

  “It’s more recent than their remit. Just something that deserved some proper attention.”

  Archer leans forward. McAvoy notices that the lacy design of her bra is visible through the white silk of her blouse, and turns away quickly. She is well practiced in using her looks for effect and results, and seems to positively purr when she spots his discomfort.

  “Picking and choosing now, are we?” she asks.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Forget it.”

  Archer drains her can of drink and then stands up, pulling her coat from the back of the hard plastic chair and pulling it on. Colin Ray pulls himself upright, too, and brushes the remnants of his sausage roll from his front. His pin-striped suit was probably expensive when he bought it, but is stained on the lapels and wrinkled at the crotch.

  “We’ll be off,” he says, taking one last chip and winking at Tremberg. “Call us if there’s any improvement.”

  “Yeah, we’ll be worrying about those dogs all night.”

  The pair are laughing as they push their way out of the swing door, so don’t hear Tremberg say, “Wankers.”

  Neilsen, Tremberg, and McAvoy sit in silence. “What’s the case?” asks Neilsen eventually.

  McAvoy looks at him. Tall and good-looking, he’s from a Hessle Road fishing family who don’t quite know whether to be proud or ashamed that their youngest is a policeman.

  “Young lad,” he says, after a pause. “Found a few months back hanging in his kitchen. Barely any investigation. I’ve got his old phone. It’s full of messages from some sexual partner that there’s no trace of in the report. They stop suddenly. It feels wrong. There’s more to it.”

  “Forensics?”

  McAvoy pauses. Appears to make a decision. Reaches into his bag and pulls out the report and his notes. He pulls himself closer to the table.

  “There’s no doubt he died from strangulation,” he says, reading from his pad. “Pathologist said the rope around his neck was definitely the one that cut off the blood to his brain. Fibers embedded in the skin, she said. He’d been sexually active at some point in the previous twenty-four hours. Had been anally penetrated. No DNA recovered. He was covered in baby oil, apparently. Had eaten a microwave tagliatelle and a Penguin biscuit around two hours before his death. Drank a glass of orange squash.”

  “And then decided he’d had enough? Those microwave meals are awful, like . . .”

  “The file went up to CID and they gave it about thirty seconds. The coroner recorded an open verdict because there was no note, but there’s bee
n no investigation. The inventory of his flat’s contents make no mention of his mobile, even though he was on it nearly all the time.”

  “But you’ve got it?” asks Ben curiously.

  I don’t know. Maybe. If he kept his own number in his phone.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he says, waving his hand. “Look, I’ve spoken to his aunt today. She says there’s no reason to think he would kill himself.”

  Tremberg and Neilsen turn to face each other. Something passes between them, and Tremberg is elected spokeswoman.

  “Do you not think it would be better to keep our heads down?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s just after the cock-up the other night, and now this with Pharaoh, do we really want to be saying CID missed something or didn’t give a shit? Do we need to have a murder on the books when we haven’t got a suspect? What’s that going to do to the crime statistics?”

  McAvoy looks at her with what looks like disappointment. He seems almost heartbroken.

  “I really don’t think that matters,” he says, and leaves it at that.

  They sit for another few minutes. McAvoy tells them no more about Simon. He has made up his mind. Pharaoh’s injuries are sitting in his guts like a snowball, but in her absence he cannot help but see opportunity. His line manager told him to take a look. And she’s not around to be contradicted.

  They say cheerful good-byes and pull up their collars as they run across the darkening, rain-lashed car park. McAvoy throws open the door of his car and throws himself inside. Turns on the engine just in time for the seven p.m. headlines. A police officer has been hurt in a dog attack in Anlaby. Detectives have renewed their appeal for witnesses to a petrol-bombing incident which took place on St. Andrew’s Quay and which is the latest violent incident being linked to an escalation in drugs-related violence . . .

  He watches Tremberg’s car pull out into traffic. Gives a wave, obscured by the pelting rain, as Neilsen’s Suzuki Swift follows. He gives it thirty seconds. Switches off the engine. Steps out of the car and runs back across the car park.

  He pulls the telephone from his pocket and holds it in a warm, damp palm as he makes his way to the Technical Support Unit. As he knocks on the white double door and tells them that Trish Pharaoh insisted that they get the results asap, he hopes they put his blush down to his sprint in bad weather, rather than shame at his lies.