It was easy to imagine what the garage would look like from the outside – new paper shields on the window and, suddenly, the lights on for hours at a time. The Oscar family would notice it. She switched off the overhead lights and found a torch, then used it to hunt for a while along the walls, searching through the remnants of her family’s life. Here was an old semi-drysuit her father had abandoned, neoprene flaking at the elbows and knees, there a weight belt, a collection of masks. Dad’s first great love had been diving the dangerous and most extreme places the planet had to offer. He’d infected the whole family with it.
She pulled back a wheelbarrow that was leaning against the wall and found what she was looking for. An old container of engine oil, streaked and syrup-coloured with grass cuttings sticking to it. She picked it up, found an empty can at the other side of the garage, a length of rubber tube, gathered up the bin bag and carried it all out to the Clio.
The clawed cloud was still lowering over the house. It hadn’t given in to rain yet. She turned the car out of the driveway and took the low road, down through the deserted residential streets at the foot of Solsbury Hill. Up the bypass, she found the tiny single-lane track that led up the side of Charmy Down Hill. The top was flat. In the war it had been used as a night-fighter station for Hurricanes to land. The control tower and the changes in the colour of the grass where the runways had been were still visible.
She pulled the Clio on to the airfield, wedged it next to a wartime bunker so it was completely hidden by insect-heavy buddleia and elderberry, got out and stood for a moment, looking westwards at the underlit clouds closing down on the spires and crescents of Bath. It was strange here, to be able to see everything for miles around. She turned and looked at the deserted airfield, at the clumps of waist-high grass and weed, the disused buildings, the piles of tyres and rusting farm machinery. There wasn’t a soul up here – not even a bird, a fox or a cat. It was like crossing into a dead world.
One a.m. It had to be done now. She threw open the boot, pulled out the bin bag containing the boot liner and the chopped-up parcel shelf, threw it on to the ground and went to get the can of oil. With her feet planted on either side of the bag, she opened the can and let the oil gloop in long loops down on to it until it was covered. She gathered up the length of tube from the boot, unscrewed the petrol cap, shoved one end of the tube down into the tank and the other into the empty can. Pinching her nose, using her tongue as a splashguard she closed her lips over the tube and sucked hard, hard, until the oily petrol foamed up from the tank. Quickly she pulled back, thrusting the pipe down into the can and holding it there while the petrol drained.
Keeping her feet spaced and well back to stop them being splashed, she drizzled the petrol over the bin bag. When it was drenched she screwed the cap on the can, put it in the Clio boot with the oil can, replaced the petrol cap and locked the car. There was a box of matches in the bottom pocket of her work combats. She struck one, dropped it into the bin bag and stepped back. The petrol caught instantly, with a blue woomp, burning off in a second and leaving a baby flame in the centre – a lone curl of black smoke rising testingly into the air. She walked backwards a hundred paces and stopped next to the car to watch the dark shape of the bag let off a tendril of smoke and oily air, then bloom and thicken into flame. Sure now that it wasn’t going to go out she pulled the phone from her pocket and dialled Thom.
The phone rang and rang, then clicked into answerphone. She dialled the home number, watching the incandescence of the fire lighting the undersides of the grass and trees around. When the home phone went to answerphone she dialled his mobile again. This time it rang four times. Then there was a muffled click and the sound of him breathing.
‘Thom?’
Silence. She put an elbow on the roof of the Clio. ‘Speak to me. Are you there?’
Another beat of silence. Then his voice, thick and nasal, as if he’d been crying. ‘Yeah, I’m here. It’s really late.’
‘And Mandy? Is she still-’
‘She’s asleep. I don’t want to wake her up.’
‘OK. Get in your car and meet me somewhere. Saltford. At the pub on the river.’
‘No.’
‘You’ve got to show me where it happened.’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Of course you can.’
‘I’m serious. I don’t.’
‘Then we’re going to drive until you do remember. I’ll see you in half an hour.’
‘No!’ he hissed.
She pressed a finger into the bridge of her nose. ‘Look, if we don’t deal with this now it’s going to get worse and worse. It’ll finish us both.’
‘I can’t.’
‘It happened in Farleigh Park, didn’t it? Somewhere near the rehab place?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well, it must have. She can’t have walked far.’
There was silence at the other end of the phone. She pushed herself away from the car and stood with her hand in the small of her back above her hip, where her body armour sometimes gave her gyp. ‘Thom, this isn’t going to go away – whatever you think or hope it’s going to come out somehow. And if you leave it, and if they find out you shovelled her up and put her in the sodding boot of the-’ Her voice was rising, speeding. ‘Oh, God help you, you’ll be up in Long Lartin before you know it. They’ll know your sister’s a cop. And even if you got vulnerable status that would just put you in with the IPPs.’
‘The IPPs? What’re they?’
‘The ones they keep in for public protection – the nonces, the sex offenders, the real nutters. Not good. Not good at all. Now get in the car and meet me.’
‘But Mandy’ll know. She’ll find out. She suspects anyway. Just from the way you spoke to her she knows something’s up.’
‘You’ll have to tell her eventually.’
‘I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘Then I’ll do it. Go and wake her up. Give her the phone.’
‘No! No, please. Please!’
‘Thom! Just wise up, will you? Just wise up.’
There was a long silence. Embers and black plastic floated into the air. Beyond them the moon, hot and white, glowed faintly through the clouds. Then Thom spoke, his voice thick. Sullen. ‘OK. OK – I’ll do it. I’ll tell her.’
She breathed out. ‘Good. You do that. And call me when you have.’
15
The moon comes up fast in Somerset: racing across the lowlands, up the sides of the Mendips, into the Quantocks. It picks out the glittering windows of the cities in the far north of the county, creeps into the car in the mortuary car park where Jack Caffery plugs the key into the ignition. It finds Flea Marley in the north-east, standing on the blade of a hill, watching smoke rise. And ten miles to the east of her, in a quite different setting, it lingers on a lonely grey house. A house set back from a deserted lane, surrounded by fallow farmland, barns and outhouses and a disused swimming-pool. The moonlight fingers the windows of the single-storey extension. It tries but can’t reach past the breezeblocks into the specially adapted room.
Inside, the light is a different colour. Here there is only an unearthly blue glow, emanating from seven specialized refrigerator units, all of which have their doors wide open to reveal their contents: stack after stack of carefully inventoried containers, each filled to the brim with formalin.
The man is in the middle of the room on the floor. He is perfectly naked and sits with his legs crossed, almost in a yogic pose, letting the calming light from the units bathe him. He will never see a woman’s skin pegged out on his workbench. He understands this. Has understood it for years. That belongs to the realms of fantasy.