Original Skin

by David Mark

  Suzie enjoyed last night’s chat with Dom. He seemed genuine. She has been playing these games for a couple of years now and knows that, nine times out of ten, the blokes begging her to fulfill their every fantasy when they’re texting each other’s brains out will chicken out before meeting up. She has had text sex with countless online finds, but only a handful have had the bottle to say hello in the flesh, and fewer still have been able to deliver on their promises.

  “I want you to make me cry.”

  Suzie presses SEND. Waits a minute. Hopes for an immediate response.

  This is the thrill of it. For her, it is not the sex itself. It is the game of it all. The naughtiness. The apprehension and excitement that make her shiver and wriggle as she checks her screen time and again, waiting for a new message, like a wartime bride awaiting a love letter.

  Are you a big brave girl? You want to show me what you’ve got?

  Suzie grins as she reads the message and takes another sip of her juice before replying. She had half expected last night’s flurry of messages to be a one-off. She is used to the swift curtailment of her cybersex: all too often the result of a spouse coming home early or knocking on the bathroom door.

  “I am yours to command.”

  She stares at the screen for a moment, and when no answer is immediately forthcoming, she opens up one of the Internet pages stored in her FAVORITES section. She looks at the latest tattoo designs and wonders whether she would suit the small posy of dandelion seeds highlighted as the “tattoo of the day.” She isn’t sure. Her tattoos are all designs she has created herself, though it is the lilies and pink cherry blossoms that wind from the backs of her thighs to the nape of her neck of which she is most proud. She and her friend had gone on the same day: he to be adorned with peacock feathers, she to become a Chinese garden. The results were stunning. The tattooist couldn’t stop smiling. Took their pictures from every angle and asked if they would mind him using the images in his promotional material. They had preened and agreed, loving their own prettiness.

  Want to see what you can do.

  The message flashes up in the corner of the screen. She wrinkles her nose in disappointment. She has a limited amount of time. Wants him to send something not just suggestive, but filthy and obscene.

  “Anything.”

  The memory of the day of blissful agony in the tattoo parlor brings her down. Such thoughts always do. It is six months since she lost her best friend. Half a year since the boy with whom she giggled and cried and gossiped and played wrapped a cord around his neck and hanged himself in the kitchen of the flat she had one day planned to share.

  What you doing tonight?

  Simon used to keep her safe. They played these games together. Best friends. True friends. He keeping her safe from herself, and providing a reassuring closeness as she indulged in the liaisons that helped her feel alive. She giving him reasons to feel loved and needed; an escape from the dark thoughts that made him seek out punishment and abuse, threatening to pull him under . . .

  You promise you’ve got tattoos?

  Suzie sighs, excitement dissipating. “Pink blossoms all over my back. Butterflies on my wrists. A zip on the back of my thigh. All begging for your tongue to trace.”

  There is no reply. Suzie wonders if this is where it will end. She will not be disappointed. This is the game.

  Her phone beeps.

  Tonight. Want to see your blossoms. Want to see you get nasty.

  Suzie gives a little grin, crossing and uncrossing her legs as she allows herself to imagine that this one may actually happen.

  She has no time to reply before the phone beeps again.

  Come alone.

  • • •

  HALF A MILE AWAY, raining twice as hard . . .

  Trish Pharaoh looks her sergeant up and down. Then back up and farther up. She places her takeaway cup of coffee between her knees. Reaches forward. Takes his tie in both hands, and wrings it out as if she were throttling an eel.

  “Road-testing a new antiperspirant?” she asks sweetly. “It’s not working.”

  McAvoy presses his lips together. Smiles a little, unsure what facial expression to pull, and eventually lets his features settle into a mask of embarrassed gormlessness. It is a countenance he has grown used to wearing in his boss’s company.

  Pharaoh lets go of his tie and shakes the water off her hand. Wraps both palms around the polystyrene cup. Points at the rain, which billows wavelike across the deserted square. “You did this,” she says accusingly.

  McAvoy sniffs. “It’s coming in off the sea . . . ,” he begins defensively.

  “Hush now.”

  She turns away from him. Sips her coffee.

  “I didn’t get you one,” she says, gesturing at her drink without any hint of apology. “Figured you would file a report about attempted bribery or sexual harassment.”

  McAvoy nods solemnly.

  “Oh, bloody hell, Aector, you are as much fun as paper cuts.”

  McAvoy apologizes. Hangs his head.

  They are standing under the awnings of a jewelry shop in Trinity Square. The gray slabs of the piazza have been washed, then varnished, by the downpour, and the great wooden doors of the city’s biggest church, a hundred yards from where they stand, have been soaked to a rich chocolate brown. McAvoy gives the church only the briefest of glances. He cuts this thought dead before he begins to question how much rain it would take to wash away the blood that was spilled within Holy Trinity’s embrace just a few months ago . . .

  “Were they bastards?” asks Pharaoh, finishing her drink and pausing for a moment until the bells of St. Mary’s, half a mile away, finish chiming the hour. “The authority? This new bloke as much of a bully as they say he is?”

  McAvoy still hasn’t made up his mind. “He’s in your face,” he says, thoughtfully. “Big man. Big personality. Very well informed.”

  Pharaoh looks at him, expecting more.

  “He’s clued up on what we’re up to. The unit. Seems to read the reports and retain the info.”

  “That’s the last thing we need,” says Pharaoh, throwing her cup in one of the bins that dot the square.

  “He wants real progress on the drugs, guv. Wants arrests. Busts. A bit of action is what he said.”

  Pharaoh rolls her eyes. “He wants to be an MP, Aector. He wants some good publicity so he can bugger off to Westminster.”

  McAvoy says nothing. He puts his hands in his pockets. Feels the outline of the mud-caked phone. Presses his fingers over the keypad. Pictures himself sitting at the kitchen table at home, delicately taking the machine to pieces with fragile tools held in too-large hands. Wonders again what possessed him to pick it up, and whether he has any damn right to root around inside.

  “Wish I’d brought a brolly,” muses Pharaoh, watching the rain as it scythes down into the square. She looks at McAvoy. “We wouldn’t fit you under it, though, would we? You’d have to hold it. Be my slave for a bit, eh?”

  He looks away before she can see him blush. Tells himself that she just teases him for fun, and not for meanness. Reminds himself how many times she has stood up for him. Comforted him. Risked her career to back him up.

  “Come on, then,” she says, when it becomes clear he will not respond. “Let’s get wet.”

  Pharaoh pushes herself off from the wall. Early forties, curvy, and habitually dressed in biker boots, a knee-length dress, and a cropped leather jacket, she does not look much like the head of Humberside Police Serious and Organized Crime Unit. But she’s damn good at a job she inherited under difficult circumstances, and she marshals the egos and neuroses of her team like an inspirational primary school teacher.

  “She really didn’t want to meet somewhere neutral?” asks McAvoy, squinting into the rain. “She wanted us to come to the house?”

  Pharaoh shrugs. “I gave her the option.
She said to come to her place. I warned her, if you were wondering. Said I didn’t advise it.”

  McAvoy nods. “She knows what she’s doing, I suppose.”

  This time it is Pharaoh who remains silent.

  They turn off Trinity Square and walk in silence until they reach the damp cobbles of Dagger Lane. It’s only a minute from the Old Town and a quick sprint across the busy divided highway from the bobbing pleasure craft and empty pubs of the marina.

  “One at the end,” says Pharaoh, nodding at the row of redbrick terraced houses that occupy this old street, the origins of its intriguing name lost to history.

  “And she’s sure?” asks McAvoy.

  “Sounded it.”

  Pharaoh leans on the bell outside the slim, nondescript terrace. Turns to McAvoy.

  “Smarten yourself up, man. You know she fancies you.”

  “Guv, I . . .”

  The door swings open.

  Leanne Marvell is forty-one years old, and though she no longer works as a bouncer or competes in the bodybuilding contests that first tempted her into trying steroids, she remains a powerfully built and imposing physical specimen. Though she is not particularly tall, she has a masculine physique, and while her muscles are not as clearly defined as they are in the photographs that McAvoy has seen from her weight-lifting days, she still looks like she could beat him in an arm wrestle.

  Her large nose is the only wrong note in a relatively pretty face, which creases into a smile when she sees McAvoy on her doorstep.

  “Aector,” she says, looking past Pharaoh, “I wasn’t expecting you as well.”

  Self-consciously, Leanne begins to straighten her gray tracksuit trousers, and the belly that sticks out from beneath her workout top miraculously disappears as she breathes in and holds it.

  “Let us in, Leanne,” says Pharaoh, rolling her eyes. “And don’t feel obliged to say his name in Gaelic. It should be bloody Eichann, if you’re being picky. I read up on these things. Nobody else is called Aector. It’s just him being bloody awkward.”

  Leanne beckons them into the hallway. Presses herself against McAvoy’s damp body as she pushes the door closed.

  McAvoy begins to speak. Begins to outline the origins of his name, and the compromise his Gaelic-speaking father and English-speaking mother came to when they chose to name their second son. But he decides to close his mouth instead.

  “You’ll have to excuse the mess . . .”

  Leanne opens the door and ushers the two officers into a joyless and compact living room. It contains a floral two-seater sofa, a cheap coffee table covered in pouches of tobacco and rolling papers, and a huge flat-screen TV. The old-fashioned stone fireplace that is set into the far wall contains no fire: just two wires gaffer-taped to the stone. The walls are papered in a swirl of peaches and pinks, and the only picture that stares down at them is hanging askew. It shows a younger, fitter Leanne, flexing in a purple bikini and fake tan, collecting an award from a man with a shaved head and too many teeth.

  “Shaun’s not expected?” asks Pharaoh, taking off her coat and hanging it over the back of the sofa, then reaching into her handbag for a hairbrush, which she uses to slick back her hair.

  “Not for hours,” says Leanne to McAvoy. “You taking yours off, Sergeant?”

  “I’m fine,” says McAvoy, refusing to catch Pharaoh’s eye.

  “Sit down, Leanne. Tell us what we’re doing.”

  Leanne perches on the edge of the coffee table. She reaches under the sofa and pulls out a formidable-looking dumbbell. Begins to perform curls with her right arm. If the effort pains her, she does not show it.

  “Tonight,” says Leanne, looking down at the dirty white sneakers on her feet and the dirtier carpet beneath. “I promise. It’s going to be there tonight.”

  “You sure?”

  “I read his phone. He was passed out. I’ve been reading it all the time. I feel like I’m spying on him.”

  “You are, love.”

  “I know, but I don’t like the feeling.”

  “He doesn’t know? He’s got no idea?”

  “He trusts me.”

  “And you’re sure? Really sure you want to go down this road?”

  “I’ve got no choice.”

  Pharaoh nods. Leanne has already made her decision. She made it months ago while leaning, wet-faced, against the wall of Hull Royal Infirmary, with blood on her clothes and Trish Pharaoh’s cigarette at her lips.

  Leanne has fallen far since the days she represented her country in weight-lifting championships and landed rosettes and trophies for her bodybuilding. She’s one of the Old Town’s more colorful characters. Sober, she’s caring, thoughtful, and considerate. A good friend. A decent neighbor. Drunk, she’s a demon. She’s a ferocious ball of anger, who lost her two kids to social services and her job to her criminal record. She has convictions for dealing, possession, wounding, and only escaped a charge of attempted murder when an ex-boyfriend refused to press charges.

  McAvoy has read and reread her file, and always found it difficult to reconcile the flirty, friendly woman with the photos of the damage she has caused when the steroids in her bloodstream exploded into rage.

  It was temper that brought her to Pharaoh’s attention. The night that the two Vietnamese drugs farmers were found at Hessle Foreshore, Leanne was in Accident and Emergency with her boyfriend, Shaun, handcuffed to two different police officers, having been arrested for attacking her partner with a corkscrew. She had managed to get the weapon halfway into his ear, and twice into his chest, before he managed to wriggle free by braining her with a brass ashtray. Quite what they had been arguing about they had been unable to tell the uniformed officers who broke their door down and carted them off to hospital. But it had clearly been important.

  As they were being dragged into reception at Hull Royal, Pharaoh was standing at the nearby coffee bar, listening as one of the junior doctors gave her his appraisal of the condition of the two Vietnamese men. She had been scowling into her latte, wincing at the calmness with which he described the nail-gun wounds to the victims’ hands and knees, to the burns on their backs and torsos. A paint stripper, he had speculated. Turned the skin to jelly . . .

  The doctor had recommended both victims be taken immediately to a specialist unit in Wakefield, where their wounds could be better treated. Pharaoh had acquiesced. Made arrangements. Had the two men wheeled down from the ward, cuffed to the sides of the hospital bed. There was an ambulance waiting outside for them. A police escort, too. Pharaoh had been taking no risks.

  And then one of the Vietnamese men spotted Shaun. He was wrestling with two of the constables, trying to get his hands free, desperate to be allowed to speak to Leanne. He was shouting that he loved her. That he would kill anybody who came between them. That he forgave her the fact he was bleeding from his ear and his heart.

  Then Shaun stopped. Fell utterly silent. The sudden cessation of noise was more potent than a shout. Heads turned, including Pharaoh’s. And she saw the way Shaun was staring at the two men in her care.

  The color had drained from his face. The officers holding his arms found the strength had gone out of him, and wrestled him to the floor.

  And both of the drugs farmers let fly with a stream of impassioned invective, a gibberish that meant nothing to anybody in the great open lobby, but which told Trish Pharaoh that her victims knew this man, and knew him well.

  With the victims safely transported to Wakefield, Pharaoh played a hunch and insisted upon Shaun and the woman he was brought in with being kept apart.

  She got their names. Pulled both their records. Acquainted herself with their criminal pasts. Shaun’s rap sheet was petty. He had never done more than a week on remand. Had convictions for drugs possession and public violence. She had been more impressed with Leanne’s. She had done serious time, and was looking at more.


  Pharaoh had found her in a private room, cuffed to a constable, a doctor stitching up the wound on the back of her head and asking that she do her best to stop crying, as it was making it difficult to keep the stitches small.

  “He’s going to leave me, I know it,” said Leanne through the sobs, talking to nobody and barely registering Pharaoh’s presence. “He’s too young for me. He’s got his whole life. He doesn’t need this. I’m dragging him down . . .”

  Pharaoh had asked the constable to slip the cuffs off. Asked the doctor if he was done. And then she had led Leanne Marvell outside and pressed a cigarette to her lips.

  Vulnerable, scared, and doped on a cocktail of painkillers and steroids, Leanne had been perfectly primed for careful questioning. And Pharaoh had obliged. Told her that two Vietnamese drugs farmers had been found tortured and mutilated at Hessle Foreshore, and that they had identified Shaun. Pharaoh had been careful to keep it vague. Had left most of the work to Leanne’s imagination. And she had thanked her lucky stars that McAvoy was not there to tell her off.

  Despite her formidable appearance and the time she had spent inside, Leanne crumbled. Told her what she knew and begged her to help keep Shaun out of prison.

  She had promised to help Pharaoh however she could.

  Now, safely registered as a police informant and fully briefed on what will happen if she lies, Leanne is about to earn her pay.

  McAvoy, who is legally bound to appear at all meetings between Pharaoh and any of her registered snouts, has an affection for Leanne. She is almost schizophrenic in the change that comes over her when in drink, but here, now, she seems a good person, trying to do her best by her man.

  “You can’t ever tell him,” she says, though she has already had assurances on this point. “You have to say you lost the evidence or something. He can’t be the only one to go down for this.”

  Pharaoh puts a hand on her knee. Offers her a cigarette and then lights it for her. “It’s all taken care of, Leanne. We’ll look after you.”