Original Skin

by David Mark

  There is a pause, as if the other man were thinking. “I’m not . . . oh, hang on, yes. Yes, when we picked her up she said she had been ringing him for the few days before he was found. Hadn’t picked up. Hadn’t even texted back . . . Yeah, I guess that means he must have had a phone.”

  “Did you put that in your report? Did CID know that?”

  “It will have been in my pocketbook, that’s for sure. But, no, I think I’d written up the incident report before I spoke to his auntie.”

  McAvoy falls silent.

  “The other lads gay as well, were they?” asks Sergeant Arthurs, his tone jocular.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The other suicides. Gay as well?”

  “How do you know he was gay?”

  The man laughs. “I’m not being a twat, mate. He was gay, that’s all. You could kind of tell.”

  McAvoy feels himself get hot inside his damp clothes. “And how does one ‘just tell’?”

  “Well, I don’t know many straight lads with peacock feathers tattooed on their backs, do you?”

  McAvoy is silent. Swallows. “Well, no.”

  “Anyway, it said so in the paper, didn’t it? At the inquest.”

  McAvoy scratches his head. Watches the lady with the heavy shopping readjust herself, leaning the burden on a metal post.

  She puts her weight on a loose paving slab and dirty water splashes up her leg. Her face twitches. Tears begin to fall.

  He asks his next question straight out. “You think it was suicide?”

  Sergeant Arthurs blows out a noise that suggests deep thought. “I think so,” he says eventually. “I didn’t at first. Thought he was into that autoerotic stuff. Maybe a game went wrong. But, no, that was a lonely life. Was just a shabby existence. I think he bumped himself off.”

  McAvoy thanks the other man for his time. Is about to hang up, already hoping the actual case file will be more useful.

  “Oh, hang on,” says Arthurs. “There was one thing surprised me when I flicked through the file. There was no mention of the bruise.”

  McAvoy stops. “What bruise?”

  “On his back,” says Arthurs. “In among all the peacock feathers and the bloody baby oil.”

  ELECTRIC FIRE, lit to the third bar.

  Glowing red: hot against his cheek.

  No other light in this stuffy, airless room.

  McAvoy, squinting, struggling to see the words he is scribbling in his notebook with a pen that tears holes in the damp pages.

  “Do you think somebody killed him?”

  The question comes from nowhere, and is asked in a voice that sounds like an inquiry into whether he would like another piece of cake.

  McAvoy doesn’t raise his head. He doesn’t know what facial expression to pull. He does not know the answer. Does he think Simon Appleyard was killed? Her question forces him to consider his thoughts. He realizes he has been behaving as such from the start. Acknowledges that, in his heart, he already feels he is hunting a killer.

  Wonders why.

  He is a procedural, methodical detective, given to only occasional flashes of instinct and hunch. He has nothing on which to base his feeling that a life has been taken before its time.

  “I think there are questions to be answered,” he says, and hopes she will leave it at that. He is habitually beset by feelings of guilt and uncertainty, unsure of who or how to be. Here, now, in this tiny two-bedroom terraced house with its unmowed front lawn and unfashionable wallpaper, its impersonal prints and halfhearted tidiness, he feels he does not deserve to be treated so warmly. He fears that he is, to all extents and purposes, trying to make her cry. He needs her to harbor fears and doubts. Wants her to tell him to dig and claw and kick until he gets her answers. Needs to feel that he is prying into her nephew’s death for more noble reasons than his own macabre curiosity.

  He looks at her. Nods to show the tea is lovely, and commits her image to memory.

  Carrie Ford was probably very pretty twenty years and five thousand cheeseburgers ago. Beneath a hefty layer of fat, McAvoy can make out what was once a willowy, elegant frame. Her green eyes and quick smile are anachronisms in a doughy, makeup-free face that sits atop a careless, dumpy frame.

  She is dressed in her supermarket uniform. White polyester dress and green tabard, concealed beneath a plus-sized denim jacket. She looks her age. She looks as though six months of grief have carved a lifetime of wrinkles into her skin.

  She had been on her way to work when he knocked on the frosted-glass door.

  “Thought you were the taxi,” she says again, as she pours McAvoy a second cup of tea. Then, for the third time, “Work can wait, eh?”

  She is a nice woman. She lives alone in this two-bedroom semi-detached, a short drive to work and ten minutes from where her nephew died bug-eyed and helpless on a blue cord carpet.

  “That’s our Simon,” she says, waving in the direction of the mantelpiece.

  There are half a dozen birthday cards obscuring photo frames and ornaments, and McAvoy cannot see whom she means. She crosses to the fireplace. Retrieves a picture in a cheap frame. Hands it to McAvoy with a smile.

  “That’s from the class. Our class. The line dancing. See the smile on his face? That’s when he was happiest. Performing. Helping people learn. Getting other people excited.”

  In the poor light, McAvoy has to angle the picture as though trying to cast a shadow on the ceiling with the glass. Squinting, he looks at the picture of the lean, dark-haired lad. He is smiling broadly for the camera and the image, though far from flattering, is a happy one. Simon’s fringe is damp with exertion and flopping over his eyes, and there is a sheen of sweat across his neck and chest where it slopes into a sleeveless sweatshirt, slashed provocatively at the collar. McAvoy angles the picture again. Sees his own face in the reflection. Hurriedly tilts it back.

  “You had no indication?” he asks. “Never felt he was depressed?”

  Mrs. Ford sits down on the high-backed armchair.

  McAvoy, on the far corner of the matching two-seater sofa, wishes he had taken her up on her offer to hang up his coat. He is too hot, his damp clothes beginning to steam in the heat from the three-bar electric fire she had turned on instinctively as she led him into the tiny living room.

  “He had his ups and downs,” she says, and looks at the picture in McAvoy’s hands. Wordlessly, he hands it over to her, and is touched by the tenderness with which she looks at the photograph.

  “There was mention at the inquest of difficulties with his father. With his sexuality . . .”

  Mrs. Ford pulls a face. Holds the photograph to her chest. “Only person who had difficulties with his sexuality was his dad,” she says. “My brother, before you ask. Always was an arsehole.”

  “He didn’t have much to do with Simon as a child?”

  “Neither of them did. Mum or Dad.”

  “That can’t have been easy,” he says. “Nobody to talk to . . .”

  Mrs. Ford waves her hands, dismissively. “Simon knew what he was from being a kid,” she says. “Never bothered him. He was outgoing, you know? Full of life. He never hid who or what he was. And his dad had no right to even comment.”

  “But he did comment, yes?”

  She sighs. Looks again at the birthday cards on the mantelpiece. “They’re from my class,” she says. “Line dancing. Not many left now. Not the same without Simon. He was the attraction, I know that. So funny. Would have been a great DJ. Was him that got the crowds in. They didn’t come to learn how to line dance.”

  “I hear he was quite a dancer, too.”

  “Simon could do anything,” she says, and her voice sounds far away.

  “Everything I’ve heard about him suggests he was a lovely lad,” says McAvoy. Such lines often help.

  “I raised him, you know,” she s
ays, appearing to snap back into the present. “His mum wanted nothing to do with him, and his dad, well, he was bloody hopeless. He lived with me most of his childhood. Never had kids of my own. Never married, though don’t be thinking I’m some spinster. There have been fellas. Simon was the only constant thing in my life.”

  McAvoy realizes he is talking to a woman who was all but a mother to the dead man. Tries to understand how that must feel.

  “He grew up here?”

  “No, love. I only moved in here a few years back. Always lived in Anlaby, though. Him and me have lived in nigh-on every flat in the village. Gypsies, I think we are, though we never move far . . .”

  McAvoy sits back in the chair and lets her talk. Tries to craft a person from her memories.

  “His dad would come back now and then,” she says scornfully. “He’d ring, when he remembered. Would sometimes send a few quid. But there was no closeness there. His dad wanted a lad he could take to the football and down to the pub. Simon wanted to dance and write poetry. It was awful, watching him realize that everything about him was grotesque in the eyes of his own father. He was thirteen the first time his dad called him a poof. Can you imagine?”

  McAvoy closes his eyes. Takes a sip of his cold tea.

  “At the inquest there was talk of some text messages? An argument with his dad?”

  Mrs. Ford puts her hands together in her lap and her leg begins to jiggle. She is either nervous or trying not to let her emotions get the better of her.

  “Who hasn’t done that? Who hasn’t had a couple of drinks and sent some text messages telling the world you’re pissed off? That’s life. It is these days, any road.”

  McAvoy nods. “He texted a lot?”

  “Fiend for it,” laughs Mrs. Ford. “Hundreds of them a day if you were daft enough to reply more than once. Him and Suzie almost starved themselves to death trying to get enough cash to buy one of those fancy phones. He was still saving when it happened. Silly lad. Should have spent it before he did it, don’t you think? Go out on a high.”

  McAvoy makes a show of looking through his notebook. “Suzie?”

  Mrs. Ford pinches the bridge of her nose, as if suddenly beset by sinus pain. She looks down at her name badge. Reads it, as if looking for proof of who she is.

  “Thick as thieves, them two.” She smiles. “Wish I could tell you her last name. Awful, isn’t it, not knowing, but you don’t ask these days, do you? Lovely girl. Mad as a box of frogs, of course. The clothes! Looks like she’s in fancy dress half the time, but would do anything for my Simon. Inseparable, they were.” She stops. Appears to be struggling with something. “I don’t think they were bad influences on each other or anything. Just brought out the devil in each other. Suzie split up with her fella just before she and Simon became friends. Simon was a good listener. They had some silly idea for getting back at her ex. Made some silly mistakes. But they learned from them . . .”

  McAvoy has had time for only the quickest of glances through the case file and has found no mention of any female friend. “School pal?”

  “No, they met on a writing course,” she says, with a touch of pride. “That’s what he would have liked to do, I think. Be a writer. Or a poet, in a different time. He had such a lovely gift with words. Even when he was texting he’d try and make it sound pretty.”

  Placing his teacup down on the floor beside the sofa, McAvoy leans forward. “Mrs. Ford, it doesn’t sound as though you think for a moment that he took his own life.”

  She grimaces, and then breathes out a sigh that appears to have come from the heart. “What do any of us really know about anybody else?” she asks. “No, I wouldn’t have thought of Simon as being that sort of person. He didn’t smile all day like a clown, but he enjoyed enough of life to make the bad stuff okay. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Life.”

  McAvoy looks away so he doesn’t have to answer.

  “Mrs. Ford, I need to ask you about Simon’s personal life.”

  “His sex life?” She smiles, warm and friendly. “We’ll both end up blushing.”

  “He was promiscuous?”

  “He was young.”

  “He had a lot of sexual partners?”

  “He enjoyed himself.”

  McAvoy looks at his notebook. “Mrs. Ford, I need a little bit more. We have evidence that suggests Simon had made contact with a new sexual partner some time before he died.”

  She shrugs. Looks at the photograph in her hands. “Sergeant, I was his auntie. More of a mum than his real one. We had fun together and giggled more than most, but he didn’t think to ring me every time some new bloke rolled off him.”

  McAvoy instinctively pulls a face. She spots it. He tries to cover it up with a cough. Wants her to know it was her unnecessary crudeness and not the act that she described which caused him to shudder.

  “So you didn’t meet any boyfriends?”

  “I met ‘friends,’” she says, smoothing down nonexistent creases in her uniform. “Sometimes he’d get picked up from the church hall by a lad, or he’d tell me he’d been to see a play or for a drink or something and mention some bloke or other, but I didn’t like to pry.”

  “You indicated he was promiscuous . . . ,” he says cautiously.

  She sits forward in her chair. It appears she is about to stand up and put the photo back on the mantelpiece, but she seems to decide against it and stays where she is.

  “It’s just things that Suzie and he said to each other,” she explains, waving a hand, vaguely. “Maybe they were teasing each other, I don’t know. They were like two kids. He’d make her blush, telling me to ask her what she’d been up to some night or another. She’d crack jokes about Simon being too worn out to give his all at some classes. Just the usual.” She glances at her watch. “He wasn’t shy, I know that much.”

  McAvoy wonders if there is any more to be gained from this. Whether there ever was. He looks at his notes.

  “He had tattoos, I’m told . . .”

  “Oh, yes,” she says brightly. “Goodness, they were lovely. Got his first when he was just turned sixteen. Some lyric from a band he liked. Got a real taste for it after that.”

  “I’m told his back was a work of art.”

  She smiles. “He’d have loved to hear you say that. They were in a magazine, you know. An advert in that glossy mag. I saw it in a doctor’s waiting room, not long back. Simon would have been over the moon if he knew. I wasn’t sure about it when he told me. You not being from round here, you’ll not know, but peacock feathers are awful bad luck.”

  “They are where I come from as well.”

  “Really? I thought it was a Hull thing.”

  “No, I think it’s the same everywhere.”

  Mrs. Ford sticks out her lower lip as though mulling over whether this matters. Decides it doesn’t. “Either way, I wasn’t sure about them, but he was mad keen. He was going through his more, erm . . .” She searches for the word, before finishing with “flamboyant phase.”

  “And this was?”

  “Not more than a year ago. He and Suzie got their tattoos done the same day. They were both walking like they had sunburn for a few days afterward, but when he showed me, I thought it looked lovely.”

  “Why peacock feathers?”

  “It was something he’d read, I think,” she says, looking at her watch again with a sudden expression that suggests work might not be able to wait much longer. “Seemed to like peacocks for a while. It suited him. Just a phase, I suppose.”

  McAvoy drums his fingers on his notepad. Taps his pen between his teeth. Wonders if he has learned anything. Turns his face away from the three-bar heater and presses the backs of his hands to his too-warm cheeks.

  “Do you think somebody may have killed him?”

  He asks her the question outright, as she had asked him.

  S
he does not answer for a time. Just looks at Simon’s picture and strokes the glass.

  “I don’t know,” she says eventually. “In my heart of hearts, I suppose I’m frightened he died doing something a bit . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . a bit mucky. I’ve read what people are into these days. I hope it wasn’t that.”

  He wants her to say it. Wants her to fear he was killed. Wants to turn his sense of disquiet into a sterile, official, evidence-led investigation, and needs her pain to make it so.

  “Mrs. Ford, do you have suspicions about third-party involvement?”

  McAvoy is aware he’s leaning forward, perhaps pushing too hard.

  She meets his eyes.

  “I’m not sure if I want to know,” she says, dropping her head. “I can cope with him dead. It hurts, but I know how to grieve. If I thought somebody had hurt him . . .”

  She looks back up.

  Her eyes are wet but there is no danger of tears.

  “‘Dead’ sounds so much more peaceful than ‘killed,’ don’t you think?”

  McAvoy doesn’t answer.

  He is certain he will soon destroy her peace.

  • • •

  SUZIE IS SITTING at the kitchen table in the flat she rents above the florist on Anlaby Road. A fine rain mists the single-glazed window. The raffia blind and homemade curtains billow inward as the breeze finds the cracks in the paintwork around the frame.

  It is getting dark beyond the glass. Dark enough to switch the light on, should she find the inclination. The gaudy yellow of the streetlights lends the view from the window an industrial, unnatural quality.

  Sweet tea, that’s what they swear by in the books. Good for shock. Calms your nerves. Better than Prozac, apparently. “Lying tossers,” she says, under her breath. Suzie has drunk pints of the stuff since last night. Has put in enough sugar to give an elephant diabetes. And yet she still can’t hold the mug steady as she raises it to her lips. She looks again at the Hull Daily Mail website. Three paragraphs and a phone number. Headline in blue, text in white.

  MAN HURT IN EAST YORKSHIRE REST STOP