Original Skin by David Mark

says nothing. He puts his hands in his pockets. Feels the outline of the mud-caked phone. Presses his fingers over the keypad. Pictures himself sitting at the kitchen table at home, delicately taking the machine to pieces with fragile tools held in too-large hands. Wonders again what possessed him to pick it up, and whether he has any damn right to root around inside.
    “Wish I’d brought a brolly,” muses Pharaoh, watching the rain as it scythes down into the square. She looks at McAvoy. “We wouldn’t fit you under it, though, would we? You’d have to hold it. Be my slave for a bit, eh?”
    He looks away before she can see him blush. Tells himself that she just teases him for fun, and not for meanness. Reminds himself how many times she has stood up for him. Comforted him. Risked her career to back him up.
    “Come on, then,” she says, when it becomes clear he will not respond. “Let’s get wet.”
    Pharaoh pushes herself off from the wall. Early forties, curvy, and habitually dressed in biker boots, a knee-length dress, and a cropped leather jacket, she does not look much like the head of Humberside Police Serious and Organized Crime Unit. But she’s damn good at a job she inherited under difficult circumstances, and she marshals the egos and neuroses of her team like an inspirational primary school teacher.
    “She really didn’t want to meet somewhere neutral?” asks McAvoy, squinting into the rain. “She wanted us to come to the house?”
    Pharaoh shrugs. “I gave her the option. She said to come to her place. I warned her, if you were wondering. Said I didn’t advise it.”
    McAvoy nods. “She knows what she’s doing, I suppose.”
    This time it is Pharaoh who remains silent.
    They turn off Trinity Square and walk in silence until they reach the damp cobbles of Dagger Lane. It’s only a minute from the Old Town and a quick sprint across the busy divided highway from the bobbing pleasure craft and empty pubs of the marina.
    “One at the end,” says Pharaoh, nodding at the row of redbrick terraced houses that occupy this old street, the origins of its intriguing name lost to history.
    “And she’s sure?” asks McAvoy.
    “Sounded it.”
    Pharaoh leans on the bell outside the slim, nondescript terrace. Turns to McAvoy.
    “Smarten yourself up, man. You know she fancies you.”
    “Guv, I . . .”
    The door swings open.
    Leanne Marvell is forty-one years old, and though she no longer works as a bouncer or competes in the bodybuilding contests that first tempted her into trying steroids, she remains a powerfully built and imposing physical specimen. Though she is not particularly tall, she has a masculine physique, and while her muscles are not as clearly defined as they are in the photographs that McAvoy has seen from her weight-lifting days, she still looks like she could beat him in an arm wrestle.
    Her large nose is the only wrong note in a relatively pretty face, which creases into a smile when she sees McAvoy on her doorstep.
    “Aector,” she says, looking past Pharaoh, “I wasn’t expecting you as well.”
    Self-consciously, Leanne begins to straighten her gray tracksuit trousers, and the belly that sticks out from beneath her workout top miraculously disappears as she breathes in and holds it.
    “Let us in, Leanne,” says Pharaoh, rolling her eyes. “And don’t feel obliged to say his name in Gaelic. It should be bloody Eichann, if you’re being picky. I read up on these things. Nobody else is called Aector. It’s just him being bloody awkward.”
    Leanne beckons them into the hallway. Presses herself against McAvoy’s damp body as she pushes the door closed.
    McAvoy begins to speak. Begins to outline the origins of his name, and the compromise his Gaelic-speaking father and English-speaking mother came to when they chose to name their second son. But he decides to close his mouth instead.
    “You’ll have to excuse the mess . . .”
    Leanne opens the door and ushers the two