Skin Read Online Free Page B

pathologist’s given you. I can’t picture him writing any of those in the report. They never commit when it comes to time of death.’
    ‘You’re right. But I don’t need his say-so. Vodaphone coughed up Jakes’s phone records. They showed calls made on his mobile at eight p.m. that night. Brown had been in custody for five hours by then.’
    Powers lifted the blind and glanced outside. One or two reporters had taken up permanent residence outside since the Kitson case had come to MCIU. He stared at them for a while. Then he dropped the blind and gave his DI a long look. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me?’
    ‘A week. A week on this. Give me two men and a week off from the Kitson case. I want to know how Brown cut Ben Jakes’s hair when he was twenty miles away at the time. I want to know what he wanted the hair bracelet for. And . . .’
    ‘And?’
    ‘And I want to know what prosthetics you’d have to use to make a human being look like that .’
    4
    Caffery left the MCIU offices at half past ten. He used the back entrance and walked round the side, away from the Kitson reporters, and straight into the low-ceilinged car park. It was sheltered there, but even so he walked fast, head down, collar up. He didn’t get into his car, an unmarked fleet Mondeo, but stopped, facing it, thighs just touching the bodywork, and took a moment to scan the car park, checking that the shadows behind the other cars were lying flat and still. After a while he crouched, looked under the car. Then he straightened, opened the car, got in and central locked the doors.
    However they’d managed it, whatever tricks they’d used, the players on Operation Norway had convinced people they were seeing something they couldn’t explain. Something that made them nervous. Some of the earlier witnesses didn’t have a name for it – they could only describe the glimpses they’d had: something human-like, but too small and stunted to be properly human. Then there had been the witnesses who had a name: a name that came from the darkest parts of the darkest continent. A Zulu word that Caffery hadn’t spoken out loud to Superintendent Powers because the sound of it put hairs up on the back of his neck.
    Tokoloshe .
    Three simple syllables, but they meant something powerful to those who believed. They meant deformity, brokenness. They meant all African superstition in one creature: the size of a large baboon with the body of a monkey and the face of a human. A witch’s familiar, a creature from the heart of the velds. Sitting in the shadows. Watching, unblinking.
    Caffery couldn’t square the shadowy figure in the video with Johnny Brown, but the alternative explanation was, of course, close to insanity: a theory he would never vocalize, even to himself. But he couldn’t help thinking about whatever it was he was hunting by that eerie Zulu word: Tokoloshe.
    Now he leant over, flicked open the glove compartment and checked through the things in there. All front-line officers were issued the basic self-protection standards – quik cuffs, a pepper spray, and an ASP, a metal baton that could break bones. He’d been on the receiving end of an ASP during the Norway arrests at the beginning of the week. It had hurt like a bastard, but it was laughable as protection when the lowlifes out there were carrying Mach 11s and Magnums. Now it lay on top of a buff envelope file in the compartment. Underneath it, wrapped in oilcloth, was a gun.
    Five years ago, back in London, he’d had a dodgy mate working on Operation Trident who’d put him in touch with a character who’d lived in Tulse Hill all his life, but spoke, inexplicably, as if he’d been born in South Central LA and never took off his LOCs so you never knew exactly what he was thinking. When Caffery had turned up at his place he’d taken him into the kitchen and shown him two guns in a shoebox under the liner of the pedal bin: a model 17 Glock and a stainless-steel