Original Skin

by David Mark

  ALSO BY DAVID MARK

  The Dark Winter

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  Copyright © 2013 by David Mark

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mark, David John, date.

  Original skin / David Mark.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62111-0

  1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Police—England—Fiction. 3. Hull (England)—Fiction. 4. Mystery fiction. 5. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

  PR6113.A7527O75 2013 2013001237

  823'.92—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Nikki—like everything else

  Contents

  Also by David Mark

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgments

  But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So if your eye—even if it is your good eye—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

  Matthew 5:28–30

  Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

  Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

  PROLOGUE

  SHOULD HAVE HOOVERED, he thinks, picking a piece of fluff from his tongue. Should have made it pretty.

  He feels a pressure in his lower back.

  Should have had a piss, too.

  He pushes himself up, raising his body from the floor, a mermaid ascending in a crash of spray, and attempts to brush the crumbs and cat hairs from his shiny chest.

  All this bloody oil, he thinks. So slippy. So slick. Going to be like wrestling a dolphin . . .

  The alarm on his phone bleeps. It is gone ten. His visitor is later than he had intended to allow.

  Big girl’s blouse, he calls himself, and then, in his father’s voice: “Fucking poof.”

  The boy has been here some time. He is feeling uncomfortable. The wrong kind of dirty. Desire is starting to fade.

  He wonders if there is a word to describe this opposite of ardor: the dissipation of lust; the moment when passion loosens its noose.

  He is beginning to feel a little silly. A little undignified.

  He tries to think of a better way to describe the sensation. He likes words. Likes to be thought of as articulate. Uses the apostrophe in the right place when promising to fulfill any lover’s desire. Takes an effort with his poetry.

  Shabby.

  He is suddenly aware of the shabbiness of this picture. Here, in his cheap, second-floor flat, naked on his cheap carpet, shooing away his cat when she appears at his bedroom door and fixes him with an expression of sneering superiority.

  “Five more minutes,” he says again, and wonders if this will be another letdown. Whether he will have wasted time and expectation on another coward.

  His back and shoulders are beginning to burn in the glare of the three-bar heater. It’s an odd feeling. The rest of him is shivering and goose-pimpled. He turns himself over, suppressing a giggle as he thinks of himself as a chicken on a rotisserie.

  “Spit-roasted,” he says to himself, and laughs into his bare arm.

  His face is now in the glare. It’s too hot. He turns back again, concerned that he will look red and sweaty. He raises a hand to pick more crumbs and fluff from his face.

  The lad is in his mid-twenties, tall and thin. His face, beginning to carry the imprint of the dusty carpet that covers the entirety of his one-bedroom flat, is split by fleshy lips and a too-large nose. He is not attractive, but there are benefits to his company.

  “I’m accommodating,” he says into the carpet, his mouth and forearm making a pocket of cigarette breath, and wriggles, willing himself back into character.

  He is naked. Starfished, facedown on the floor of his living room. There is not much room for his gangly frame. He has had to push back the charity-shop two-seater sofa and throw the old takeaway pizza boxes into his bedroom to be able to suitably accommodate his visitor.

  “Five more minutes,” he says again, reluctant to accept that tonight’s fantasy will remain just that.

  He reaches out for his mobile phone, tucked inside one of his battered white sneakers. No new messages.

  He reads the recent ones.

  Oh, yes.

  Feels the excitement build afresh. Has to reposition himself to accommodate the growing hardness between his legs.

  Begins to feel the hunger. A languid luxury easing itself into his movements.

  Time to walk like a panther. He giggles.

  Hard as nails. Pretty as a picture.

  You should charge, boy. You’re a fucking treat.

  Like a fleetingly sober drunk gulping whiskey, the returning rush of sexuality alters his perceptions. He begins to feel better about the picture he presents. Remembers kind words and grateful embraces. Preens a little as he imagines the picture he presents to the open door. He knows his back and buttocks to be a breathtaking display; the ink that crawls up to his shoulders worth the agony that he screamed into the tattooist’s table.

  He will make his visitor happy.

  There is a sudden creak on the stairs.

  He smiles, and his breath comes out in a tremble.

  Here we go.

  He arches his back. Presents himself for inspection. Raises his face to ensure the belt, coiled snakelike, is where he left it.

  “Is this what you wanted?” he asks, throaty and sensual.

  There is silence fo
r a moment. The floorboards creak.

  Then he feels the familiar weight on his back. The sensation of being pinned beneath another human being. The excitement of welcome helplessness that comes with giving yourself to another.

  In the periphery of his vision, the belt is scooped up in a gloved hand. He closes his eyes, eager to play.

  “Am I your fantasy?” he asks again.

  The reply, when it finally comes, is hissed into his ear: a tumbled rush of excited words.

  “To die for.”

  There is a sudden, biting, flesh-ripping sensation, as though his Adam’s apple is being forced up into his skull.

  “Her name!”

  Spittle hisses from between his ghoulishly parted lips, frothing on his chin, into the dust and crumbs. His eyes bubbling, popping, like microwaved soup . . .

  In an instant, his faculties are at once dulled and frenzied, his thoughts twisted and squeezed.

  Too tight, too hard, too much; fantasy becoming fear.

  The words again . . .

  “Your friend. Pink blossoms. The laughing girl.”

  There is only confusion and hurt, a sensation of becoming somehow less; of reducing, melting, puddling into nothing . . .

  “The girl. Laughing at me . . .”

  Darkness closes in as his oily fingers and skinny legs drum on the dusty floor.

  An instant of clarity. A sudden heartbeat of understanding. What this is for. Why he is dying. Why the life is leaving his body and the poetry leaving his soul. What they want. What he must do . . .

  The voice again, wet in his ear.

  Anger. Venom.

  “The one who looked and laughed . . .”

  A knee now, hard in his spine; his back arching, teeth bringing blood to his thin lips, blood thundering in his ears . . .

  He wants to plead. Wants to beg for his life. Wants this to stop. Wants to live. To write and create. To fuck and dance.

  “Name. Her fucking name.”

  He knows now. Knows these will be his last words. Knows that all the warnings were for nothing. He’s going to die, and his final act in this life will be one of betrayal.

  The cord loosens for the slightest of moments. The strong hands readjust their grip.

  The boy takes a gulp of air. Tries to swallow it. Manages only to hiss, before the cord cuts back under his jawbone and an explosion of sweet-smelling blood flowers and flows from his eyes.

  “Suzie . . .”

  Her name at once an act of treachery and a dying invocation.

  “THEY WEREN’T here when I went to bed at midnight. Bold as brass when I got up at six a.m.” The man waves an arm, despairingly. “I mean, when did they turn up?”

  Detective Constable Helen Tremberg shrugs her shoulders. “Between midnight and six, I’m guessing.”

  “But they made no noise! And now listen! It’s bedlam. How did they not wake anybody up?”

  Tremberg has nothing to offer. “Perhaps they’re ninjas.”

  The man fixes her with a look. He’s in his late thirties and dressed for an office job. He has graying black hair and utterly style-free glasses. Something about his manner suggests to Tremberg that he is on a low-risk pension plan, and has a tendency to examine the contents of his handkerchief after blowing his nose. She fancies that after his second glass of wine, his sentences begin to start with the words “I’m not a racist, but . . .”

  He saw the travelers from his bathroom window as he was brushing his teeth. Saw, in his words, “the sheer pandemonium” and rang 999. He was not the first person on the leafy street overlooking the football field to do so, but he is the only one who has decided to get in Tremberg’s face about the situation.

  Until half an hour ago Tremberg had been looking forward to today. She has been pretty much deskbound since her return to work, unable to take part in even vaguely interesting operations until she completed her chats with the force psychologist and had her doctor sign the last of the seemingly endless forms promising that the slash wound to her hand has left no permanent damage. Tonight, all being well, she’s allowed back to the sharp end of policing, watching her boss, Trish Pharaoh, slap cuffs on the wrists of a gangland soldier and close down a drugs operation. She wants to be involved. Needs it. Has to show willing and prove she hasn’t lost her bottle. Wants to demonstrate to anybody who doubts it that nearly getting her throat cut by a serial killer has been laughed off and dealt with “old-school”—voided from her system with vodka and a good cry.

  “When will they be gone?” the man is asking her. “What are you going to do? This is a nice neighborhood. We pay our taxes. I’ve nothing against them, but there are places. There are sites! What are you going to do?”

  Tremberg doesn’t offer an answer. She has none. She does not want to talk to this man. She wants to get to work. She doesn’t want to be leaning against the goalposts of the playing fields that stitch the affluent villages of Anlaby and Willerby together. She feels like a goalkeeper watching a match take place at the opposite end of the pitch.

  “Should have stayed in the car,” she says to herself, and looks past the man to where the caravans are parked up, not far from the halfway line of the adjacent rugby pitch. Drinks in the pandemonium.

  Six caravans, four off-road cars, a Mercedes and three horse boxes, at least two generators, and, as far as she can see, a portable toilet. They are arranged in a loose semicircle around three floral-print sofas and a sun lounger on which a rapidly multiplying number of traveler women and children are sitting drinking tea, talking to uniformed officers, and occasionally shouting at the schoolchildren and bored motorists who have got out of their motionless cars to watch the commotion through the park railings.

  Like most of East Yorkshire, Tremberg is stuck here. Her car is a few streets back, snarled up in the bimonthly gridlock caused by a local transport infrastructure with the breaking strain of a Kit Kat.

  Bored, with nothing to do but look at the dark, gloomy sky through the dusty glass of her Citroën, she had switched on the radio in the hope of finding something soothing. She was two minutes into “California Dreamin’,” and idly wondering why it appeared to be the only song owned by Radio Humberside, when the traffic report cut in. Half a dozen horses loose on Anlaby Road, and travelers causing uproar on the playing fields by the embankment. She’d had little option but to get out of the car and see if she could lend a hand.

  “Are you going to shoot the horses?”

  Tremberg gives the man her attention. “Pardon?”

  “The police! Will you shoot the horses?”

  “Not personally,” says Tremberg, close to losing her patience. “The Animal Control Unit is on its way. They’re stuck in traffic, too. We’re doing our best. I could go get one of the bastards in a headlock if you keep hold of its legs . . .”

  Ken Cullen, the thin, bearded, uniformed inspector currently in charge of trying to bring some degree of order to the scene, overhears the dangerous note in the detective’s voice and hurries over.

  “I’m sorry, sir, we’re doing everything we can. If you could just return to your house for the moment and allow us to deal with this . . .”

  Tremberg turns away as somebody better equipped to tolerate wankers sends the busybody on his way. The inspector fixes her with a bright smile as he spins back to her.

  “Bet you wish you’d never stopped to help, eh?”

  “Nothing better to do, Ken. Stuck here with every bugger else. Thought I’d see if I could assist, but this really isn’t my cup of tea.”

  “Dunno, Helen. You’ve got the physique for crowd control!”

  Tremberg shares a laugh with her old uniformed sergeant recently risen to inspector, who has moved, like her, across the water from Grimsby.

  “I was pleased to hear you’re on the mend,” he says, and means it. “All better now?”

&n
bsp; Tremberg flicks a V sign at him. “Lost none of my dexterity,” she says, smiling.

  Cullen gives her a quick once-over. Takes in the thin sports poncho she wears over a sensible pin-striped trouser suit and white blouse. Her hair is cut in a neat bob and she wears no makeup or jewelry. He knows from quiz nights and good-bye parties that she scrubs up well and has extraordinary legs when she hitches her skirt up, but Tremberg is deliberately sexless when on duty. Many female detectives have adopted her approach, appalled by any suggestion they have used their femininity to gain favor, but in so doing have opened themselves up to suggestions of lesbianism. Tremberg frequently wishes she could possess the carefree, fuck-you attitude of Trish Pharaoh, who wears what she wants and doesn’t give a damn whether people think she is after dicks or dykes.

  For a while the pair of them grumble about the local council closing off the rat runs and giving commuters nowhere to go if the main arteries in and out of town are snarled up. They agree that the local authority is staffed with do-gooders and morons and that the new chair of the Police Authority will no doubt balls it up even more.

  Their pleasantly English moan is turning toward the gray skies and the cost of petrol when a young WPC approaches. She looks harassed and windblown in her muddy yellow raincoat.

  “We’ve got all but one of them, sir,” she says, in a voice that suggests she has struggled to avoid using a more vulgar term. “Sergeant Parker and Dan managed to box them in. They’re in the car park in the Beech Tree. Can’t get out. Another bloke with a Land Rover blocked the gap. The owners are trying to get them roped now. It’s chaos, sir. Poor Mickey’s ripped his trousers trying to pull one back by the hair. The mane. Whatever. Half of Anlaby’s covered in horse shit. And the bloody pikey kids aren’t helping, singing bloody ‘Rawhide’ . . .”

  Tremberg has had to hide her face as she pictures the local bobbies desperately trying to round up the escaped animals, clapping and hollering and trying to stop the nags from eating the herbaceous borders of anybody important.

  “And the last one?” asks Cullen, pulling on his peaked cap.

  “It’s a real nasty shit. Pikey said it was a stallion who smelled a mare in season. Put a dent in half a dozen cars so far. Seems to particularly hate Audis.”