Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrong and how she’d managed to rub a hole in both of them just like that. She stopped for a moment next to them.
    It befuddled her. She’d always thought they were pretty bombproof and it made her feel really uncomfortable and thick that she hadn’t checked her equipment. She’d been so, so close. It was starting to feel as if she was on a run of bad luck. There was this, yesterday. Then on Tuesday she’d got into a hell bastard of an arrest with the MCIU people on Operation Norway, a job that had all but destroyed the member of the team now on compassionate leave. Not to mention the day before that when she’d got forced into a position again of covering for Thom. He’d come home paralytic one night, driving her car and trailing a cop car with him. Being the sap she always was for her brother, she’d stepped in for him, sworn to the jobsworth cop she’d been driving the car, even did a breathalyser for him. Thom had dodged a serious bullet for the hundredth time, and she was left wondering two things: if he was ever going to stand on his own two feet and how long she could continue to pull him up the hill.
    She pulled out the white wellingtons the team wore for body recovery and turned them inside out to check that no body fluids had run down into the absorbent interiors. As she got to the last pair, Wellard appeared in the doorway. She wiped her forehead and dropped the boots, defeated.
    ‘I give up. I’ve done everything. I’m going to have to go through all your bags next. Check for disgusting man underwear. Socks. That sort of thing. What’s the report, Dyno-Rod man?’
    ‘Drains are as clean as a whistle. Anyway, no point worrying about it now.’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Phone’s been ringing off the hook. You had the music up too loud.’
    ‘Who’s calling?’
    ‘Your friendly search adviser, Pearce. Got another body. More overtime.’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Yeah. They think they’ve found Lucy Mahoney.’
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    6
    Quarry number eight was deserted. Caffery stood next to his car and stared at the puffy clouds and blue sky reflected in the still, cold face of the water. At the head of the quarry, on the flat perimeter where the water hadn’t yet risen, two old cabin cruisers lay on their sides, chained together with a rusty anchor line. At the other end vast grey cubes of dimension stone had been abandoned in puddles of brown water. Buddleia clung to the waste tips sloping up on all sides.
    Caffery locked the car, shrugged his jacket closer and went to stand at the quarry edge, peering into the water. Beyond his reflection the water was a clear twilight blue. A yellowish haze of embryonic plants clung to the rock edges and below that, about twenty feet down, the vague suggestion of something misshapen. A boulder maybe, or submerged pumping equipment, or the quarry wall, following the hewn-out rock edge.
    Africans believed the Tokoloshe was a river-dweller. They believed he hung around the banks, made nests in the rushes and could stay submerged for hours. Whatever the witnesses in Bristol had seen, one thing they were all clear on: it had come out of water, from rivers and quarries, once even from Bristol’s floating harbour. They swore it had simply ‘surfaced’, as if it had been under the water for some time, lolling on the bottom, rolling content as a crocodile in the mud. And there was no breathing apparatus – the witnesses were adamant on that point: the hellish face was naked. So how the hell had the Operation Norway gang managed to fake those unexplained submerged minutes?
    Caffery straightened and looked across to the hills of grout. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and for a while something heavy seemed to hover over the water, as if the air itself had got darker. Ben Jakes had been at those slopes when he’d killed himself. A bit of old police tape was still hanging in the bushes and some dead flowers in cellophane that some of his university buddies had brought. There had been