Shifting Skin

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Jon Spicer looked around what used to be his weight training room and sighed. Bare plaster walls faced him, exposed surfaces still raw from where he’d scrubbed them with sandpaper. The carpet was hidden by dust sheets that stretched from skirting board to skirting board. In the corner the steam machine looked like the victim of a clumsy shave, scraps of dry wallpaper stuck all over it.

He started peeling apart last week’s local paper, separating the pages and laying them across the small table in the middle of the room. Immediately, and even as he tried to look away, his eyes were snagged by the front-page headline: butcher of belle vue strikes again.

Quickly he flipped the page over, but it was too late. The horrific details of his latest case came streaming into the last place on earth he wanted them: the nursery.

The latest victim, Carol Miller, had been a midwife at Stepping Hill hospital. She was good-looking, her strong facial features complemented by a curvy, full figure. The sort of woman his dad would refer to in his strong Lancashire accent as ‘proper breeding material’. In his own way, he would have been right. She’d given birth to a thickset baby the year before. Jon had watched as the infant drained an entire bottle of milk without pausing for breath, blissfully unaware of the tears streaming down the face of his grandmother above him. Jon had sat with his tongue frozen in his mouth, thanking God the bereavement counsellor had come with him to inform the woman that her only child was dead. The counsellor had kept up a soothing murmur, the actual words of secondary importance to the comforting tone of her voice.

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