The keys were in the drawer and they fitted the four locks. Another lecture in effective security coming your way, Mr Gerber. The padlock came off easily – a thirty-second squirt of pipe freeze, a crowbar inserted, given the right torque, and it shattered into four pieces. He opened the door.
As soon as he stepped inside the darkened room he smelt something bad. Something he knew from the mortuary and from undertakers. Something that made his throat close. Formalin.
He closed the door behind him, locking it for good measure. He could make out shapes in the half-light: a bank of floor-to-ceiling refrigerators to his left, a massive workbench to his right, like in an old-fashioned school laboratory. In the far wall a door stood slightly ajar. He went to it and peered round. It led to a small enclosed stairwell twisting up into daylight. He listened, heard nothing above him, so he pulled the door closed, locked that too, and switched on the overhead light.
It was a fluorescent strip and too bright for the size of the room, as if work went on in here that you’d need good visibility for. The refrigerators lined the wall to his right. In front of him the wall was decorated with medical diagrams, all showing the skin in varying styles: one depicted the body’s sweat glands, representing them in red on a black-and-grey genderless outlined human. Another showed skin lifted up on a hook to reveal its interior, the dermis, epidermis, the subcutaneous fat, hair erector muscles and blood vessels.
But it was what was on the work station in his peripheral vision that really sent a line of adrenalin through him.
Tools and racks laid out on the bench in a clear pattern as if they were expecting something. Some he recognized as a tanner’s – skinning and fleshing knives, a small gambrel – others he’d never seen before. They looked like specialized surgeon’s tools. In the centre there was a series of blocks with pegs in them. The sort of thing you’d stretch out an animal skin on.
Animal skin.
The skinned dog in the quarry definitely hadn’t been Amos Chipeta.
I’m getting near you now, my friend. I can feel you. I’m not far now.
He took a few steps forward and opened a refrigerator. It gave with a gentle vacuumy hiss, cold air coming out at him. He peered inside. Every shelf was crammed with vacuutainers: like the Tupperware sandwich boxes his mum used to put his and Ewan’s lunch in when they were kids. Each was labelled and through the sides he could see brown liquid, rocking lightly from the movement of his opening the door.
He pulled one out. It was cold, slightly sticky, the smell of formalin coming from it. Taped to the top was a photo of a young woman. First off he thought she was dead. She was lying on her back – the camera had shot her from above, the way they sometimes shot corpses in the mortuary – and she wore a mask strapped over her mouth and nose. She was naked, except for a bandage across her breasts and a tangle of flower-sprigged cotton bunched at her knees. Her eyes were closed, but she had too much colour to be dead. He looked at the fabric: an operating-theatre gown. The bed was a hospital bed. She wasn’t dead: she was under anaesthetic. Maybe just coming out because that wasn’t a laryngeal mask on her face.
Under the photograph was a printed box, intricate lines of text in it: ‘Name: Pauline Weir. DOB: 4.5.81. Op date: 15.7.08. Op: Breast reduction.’ Below the text was a diagram of a female – a little like the one on the wall. Two semicircles in red pen were sketched on the undersides of the breasts.
Caffery carried the container to the table and opened it carefully. Seven or eight slivers of skin in the clear brown fluid floated. Like an exhibit in a medical museum.
He clicked the lid shut, went back to the fridge, pulled out another. Another photograph of a woman on a bed, naked except for the gown that had been pulled down to her knees, and a bandage across her stomach. No anaesthetist would leave a patient’s side while they were unconscious, but they wouldn’t supervise the recovery period past a certain point: that would be left to trained recovery nurses who might be persuaded to leave the room. If they were instructed to by the surgeon. Was that what Susan Hopkins had meant by They’re all a bit thick, the recovery nurses, not to see what’s going on under their noses?
He opened the container. In it he found a single elliptical piece of skin, bleached and puckered by the formalin. He returned it, ran his fingers down the list of containers until he came to the M section. Mahoney, Lucy. He carried it to the table, opened it, and there he saw the last piece of the puzzle.
A piece of Lucy that hadn’t made it to the autopsy table. A piece of her pubis. The hairs were still attached.
For years and years and years this had been Gerber’s secret.
For years, by a series of crafty moves, in ways that would never be detected, he had been stealing the skin of the women he operated on.
60
Caffery heard the car coming from a distance. He shut the vacuutainers away and left the room silently, clicking the door closed behind him. He kicked aside the metal swarf and was stepping out of the front door as an immaculate blue Mercedes swept up the drive. A 500 AMG with all the bells and whistles.
He didn’t know if he’d been seen coming out so he stepped away from the building into the sunlight. The Mercedes came to a halt. There were a few moments’ pause, then the door opened and a small man with greying hair got out. He was about fifty, unremarkable, except for the odd tunic he wore. Yoked and made of brushed denim, it was the sort of thing an artist might have worn in the 1970s. There were damp spots on the front.
‘Georges Gerber?’
He glanced towards the road, then back at Caffery. ‘Who wants to know?’
He held up his card. ‘Inspector Jack Caffery.’
There was a slight pause. Gerber closed his eyes. And opened them. As if he was taking a picture of Jack. Then his face cleared abruptly. ‘Where are my manners?’ He pushed his hair back from his face with a chalk-white hand. ‘Do come in.’ He slammed the car door and took out a key, came forward and opened the front door wide. Smiled. ‘I’ll make you some coffee.’
Caffery pocketed his card and followed. While Gerber went to the corner of his office and busied himself with a coffee-maker Caffery stood next to a winged armchair, shifting it slightly so he could keep three things in plain view: Gerber, who had pressed two sachets into the machine and was now filling the cups, and the two doors – the one he’d come through and the other, which led to the refrigerator room where the padlock lay snapped on the floor.
‘So,’ Gerber said pleasantly, as he turned with the coffee, ‘you found me easily enough. How long have you been here?’
‘I just arrived.’ Caffery gave him a cool smile. ‘Why?’
‘A polite enquiry,’ he said lightly. ‘Simply making conversation.’
He put a coaster on to a little occasional table next to the chair and set the coffee on it. When he straightened Caffery noticed he was sweating. Nothing too obvious, just a faint sheen across his forehead. ‘My father was in the force. A chief inspector – Hampshire.’
‘Really?’
Why haven’t you asked me why I’m here yet? When are you going to ask?
‘I feel I’ve got an affinity with the police.’ Gerber pulled up a small table next to the sofa and put down his own cup. He went back to the coffee-maker and stood for a moment with his back to Caffery, opening a packet of biscuits. Something with a royal crest on the box. He shook them out on to a plate. ‘Fixing things. You know. Making the world a better place. Biscuit?’