Under My Skin

by Sarah Dunant

  “Any instructions with it or did you use your own initiative?”

  “The notes just said to stop the place working.”

  “Well, you did a good job. Have you still got them?”

  She shook her head. “I burned them. Like they told me to.”

  “And you’ve no idea who sent them?”

  But this time she didn’t even bother to answer. I tried a few more questions, but she wasn’t listening anymore, just disappearing into that round little body, closing up and closing down. In the end I let her be. After all, technically speaking, my job was done. The fact that solving one mystery had opened up another was for my employer to deal with, not me.

  I got Carol Waverley out of the shower. She didn’t seem to mind. We agreed to meet in her office in ten minutes. Which gave Lola and me just enough time to pick up the Nitromorse and the rest of the money (Jennifer was already asleep, her face turned to the photos on the wall). By the time we got to the office Lola was trailing behind me like some unrepentant schoolgirl on her way to see the headmistress. And not just the headmistress, as it turned out. Also the head of the governors.

  She eclipsed Waverley as the sun doth eclipse the moon. And she didn’t leave much light around Lola and me either. Of course I knew who she was the instant I walked in and saw her sitting there, all long Lycra legs and casually expensive sweater. She sat in a way that made you think she must practice it daily—an exquisite precision to every part of the body right up to the tilt of her head and the way her hair gathered around her face, with just the right amount of natural bounce. The lamp beside her cast a soft glow, carving the cheekbones Nefertiti-high and the skin even smoother. She was probably the only woman in the building who could put a finger up to the promises of the beauty salon. You could see how even looking at her might have driven Lola Marsh to violence.

  “Olivia Marchant, I presume,” I said, ignoring Waverley, who looked justly uncomfortable beside her.

  She inclined her head and gave a little smile, though not enough to alter the landscape of that seriously sleek face. “It seems I have a lot to thank you for, Miss Wolfe,” she said quietly.

  I gave her one of my “Oh, think nothing of it” nods. The praise could wait. First the end of the story. She turned her attention to her offending little employee.

  “Well, Lola Marsh. I didn’t expect to see you here. Why don’t you sit down. Don’t be frightened. No one’s going to hurt you. We just need to hear what you have to say.”

  But Lola didn’t sit. And she didn’t say anything either. Not a thing. She simply stared at Olivia Marchant. We all waited. A heavy silence settled on the room. She was the only one it didn’t seem to bother. For the guilty party she certainly had a monstrous confidence about her.

  “I just don’t understand how you could do it, Lola”—Carol, squeaky with incandescent rage, or maybe it was relief. “We always treated you well. You were lucky to get the job in the first place.” Given what you look like, she added without saying. It hardly mattered. We were all adept at reading the subtitles.

  “That’s enough, Carol.” Olivia’s voice was quiet but with steel in it. “There’s nothing to be gained from that now.Well, Lola?”

  But Lola still wasn’t talking. Unless the quick look of venom directed at Waverley could be called talking. Finally Mrs. Marchant gave up and turned to me. As I retold the story—or as much of it as I knew—she kept her eyes fixed on Lola, with a face as impassive as her employee’s. When I had finished, she sat back in her chair and continued to stare at the girl, while Carol and I sat holding our breath, waiting to see who would break first.

  It was hard to work out just what Olivia Marchant was feeling. There was such a still, silent quality to her. I found myself distracted by the perfection of her appearance. How old are you? I wondered. If I were to take one of those lovely firm thighs and saw it in half, would you ring-date? The body said my age, but the face, despite its sleekness, suggested older. Something about the taut smoothness of those cheekbones tugged at a loose end of my memory. But whatever it was, I couldn’t get to it. Maybe I was just wrong-footed by such glaring good looks. With the exception of Kate (who had weathered somewhat under the pressures of child care), my experience has always been that seriously beautiful women are more trouble than they’re worth.

  She caught my eyes upon her and gave me a small sharp look, then went back to Lola. The silence grew more insistent.

  “Oh, Lola,” she said at last. “What was it we did to offend you so much? It can’t have been the job, surely? You weren’t qualified. I explained that to you myself.” Lola was certainly listening now—you could see it in the way she held herself. I got the feeling something was building up inside her. Seismic activity at the core. Stand well back. Mrs. Marchant felt it, too. She waited. But nothing came.

  “Well, whatever it was, you’re on your own now. I can’t help you anymore.” And the way she said the words made it feel like a casting off. Then she turned to me. “You say she destroyed all the instructions?”

  “Yep.”

  “How about the envelopes?”

  I shook my head slightly.

  “Not even a postmark?”

  I was about to shake my head again when Lola spoke. “London,” she said clearly. “They came from London.”

  Mrs. Marchant focused on her again, not quite sure which way to step. “London? It’s a big place, Lola,” she said gently. “You didn’t notice what district?”

  But the oracle had spoken. And that was all we were going to get. The night grew longer as she made that clear. “How long has Lola been with us, Carol?” she said after a while.

  “Three months. You employed her at the beginning of the year.” From the way Carol spoke, it was clear that Lola had never been her first choice. I thought back to her own skillful makeup, hiding the hint of angry skin. Lola’s fresh little spots must have been a cruel reminder of the continual battle between beauty and nature. Nasty business, selling perfection. And from where I was standing it was getting nastier all the time. Only Olivia seemed untouched by it. But then she would, wouldn’t she?

  “Three months. All right, now you listen to what I’m going to say, Lola. When I’m finished, you go straight back to your room and pack your bags. In half an hour there’ll be a taxi outside the front door waiting to take you wherever you want to go. There’ll also be a letter of reference. It will say nothing about why you left. If another employer gets in touch with me, I will keep up that silence. You, in turn, will do exactly the same for me. It goes without saying that I could just as easily pick up the phone now and call the police. However, I promise you that if I ever hear the merest whiff of gossip as to what has happened here at Castle Dean, I’ll have you out of whatever job you’re in so fast it’ll make your eyes water. Is that clear?”

  Lola, who despite herself was aware of the remarkable generosity of what had just been offered, nodded and opened her mouth.

  “Don’t you dare,” Olivia Marchant cut in and, finally, the voice was angry.

  Lola moved her eyes from Olivia to me. Maybe she hadn’t been going to thank her after all. There was, it seems, still one unfinished piece of business. It was lying half in, half out of a brown envelope on the desk between them. She glanced down at it. And I must say the chutzpah of that glance was astonishing. Olivia Marchant saw it, too. She gave the smallest of laughs, then leaned over and picked the envelope up. She kept her eye on the girl while she pulled out the notes. She counted out four of them and threw them back across the desk.

  “A week’s salary. Now get out of here before I change my mind. Carol, go with her, please. Type out a letter and check that she doesn’t leave any last-minute souvenirs behind.”

  This time Lola went, turning on her heel like some eager cadet and walking straight out of the room, taking her powerful little force field of malevolence with her.

  As Carol got up to follow, you could see that this was not quite what she’d had in mind for herself, th
at she had been more looking forward to a celebratory glass of champagne and a pat on the back. But it was clear that people generally did what Olivia Marchant asked, and so she went, too.

  Which left me and her, alone at last. She sat for a moment looking at the desk, then leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath. “Well, I think I need a drink. How about you?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I’ve had it with rose-hip tea.”

  She smiled. “That’s not what I’m offering.”

  She got up from the desk and went over to a cabinet under the window. She took out a full bottle of single malt and poured two generous hits into a couple of mugs usually reserved for herb infusions. You could almost feel the porcelain shudder at the violation.

  We sat for a moment in silence, then she said, “You know, it wasn’t Carol’s fault. I told her to tell you I was still in London.”

  I nodded. “I assumed so. Why?”

  “Because I wanted to see how good you were.”

  “And?”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” I said. “I couldn’t even get her to tell me why she did it.”

  “You mean the job she didn’t get?” She shrugged. “To be honest I’m not sure it was the right reason, anyway. Lola came to me about eight weeks ago. She told me that she wanted to leave the health business for a job in London, working with my husband. There were no vacancies available, and even if there had been she wasn’t qualified. So I refused. She was upset. But it hardly seems enough to warrant her trying to wreck the place.”

  “Maybe she just got fed up with not being a size ten.” She looked at me, but let it pass. “What was the job, anyway?”

  “Nurse/receptionist.”

  “Nurse?” I frowned a question mark. She took a slug of her drink and put it down slowly in front of her, moving her tongue around the top of her lovely lips. What had Carol called him? A consultant? How come I had assumed business rather than medicine? “Your husband’s a doctor?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking me straight in the face. “I thought Carol told you? He’s an aesthetic surgeon.”

  Ah, ha. The night silence was temporarily disturbed by the sound of a satisfying number of pieces falling into place: the posters in the beauty salon, the emphasis on reconstruction, young Julie’s born-again enthusiasm. And something else. That uncomfortable fact I’d been trying so hard to remember as I studied those fabulous cheekbones. The answer was Marlene Dietrich. It must have been in the same magazine as Barbara Hershey’s lips—an exquisitely gruesome story of how on the cabaret circuit Dietrich later in life had taken to gluing up bits of her cheeks to her ears in a primitive attempt at a face-lift. I remember thinking at the time how it explained why she never seemed to open her mouth wide enough to get the words out properly. But times and technologies have changed. And now there are women who have face-lifts in the family.

  So—was I looking at the results of one of Julie’s beloved chemical peels or something more drastic? Whichever it was, I found myself a little disappointed. Not to mention embarrassed. Olivia Marchant watched me thinking it through. Presumably people always wondered at this point. I have to say it didn’t particularly faze her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he’d picked her rather than made her.

  When you can’t ask one question, try another. “I’m interested to know why you didn’t call the police?”

  She shrugged. “The police would mean charges, and charges would mean publicity. These are difficult enough times for the health business anyway without making it worse with rumors of sabotage. I couldn’t risk it.”

  “You could just have let her go. You didn’t need to be so generous.”

  She sighed. “I suppose I felt a little sorry for her. And a week’s salary is hardly generous. Anyway, I could say the same about you,” she said with a slight lift of the eyebrow.

  I was absurdly grateful for the show of facial mobility. I frowned.

  “Martha,” she continued softly. “You could easily have got her the sack. Carol’s terribly cross you wouldn’t tell her who it was.”

  I shook my head. “If I’d given Carol Martha, then I wouldn’t have had any leverage to get her to talk to me. It was Martha who led me to Jennifer and from there to Lola. And, I presume, led you, too,” I said, thinking back to the figure on the lawn.

  She shook her head. “No. Martha didn’t tell me anything. I just happened to see you go into the girls’ block. I never saw which room.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure I believed her but I decided to let it go. “So how do you know about Martha?”

  “Aah.” She paused and smiled. “Well, I’ve known about Martha for some time.” I waited. “Well, I’d hardly be a good owner if I didn’t, wouldn’t you say?”

  And then I remembered the little note on her file in that delicate italic hand. What was the gist of it? Good rapport with the clients? “But you turn a blind eye because she’s good for business?”

  She gave it some thought. “Something like that. Besides, Martha’s destined for higher things. She was up for Carol’s job, you know. In the circumstances I couldn’t really give it to her. But she’s almost certainly got an assistant manager’s post in one of the London salons. I wrote her a reference the other day.”

  “Which means that when she goes you’ve got a way of keeping her quiet, too.”

  “Yes … Yes, you’re right, though I hadn’t thought of it until now. Thank you.”

  I stifled a yawn. Not so much boredom as the lack of food beginning to bite. Much longer on this calorie intake and I’d be dead before I got thin. I looked at my watch. It was after midnight. Time for her to change into a mermaid and me from a wealthy health guest back into a regular private eye. Shame. I’d rather been hoping to see her in the daylight. See if I could spot the joins.

  “Well, if that’s everything, I think I’ll be getting a little sleep and be on my way in the morning.”

  “What about payment?” she said, not moving.

  “Oh, the office will invoice you later.”

  For “the office” read me struggling over a VAT form. She looked mildly surprised. They all do. Funny how people still think it ought to be cash in a plain envelope, just like in the movies. I tell you it’s hard for this profession to shake off its sleazy reputation.

  “Perhaps I could give you a bonus.”

  She picked up the envelope and tossed it across to me. I turned to greet it and in the glow of the desk lamp there was something so exquisitely old-fashioned about the whole scene: a beautiful dame, a wad of notes, and a definite sense of unfinished business. At that moment I didn’t even mind about her face-lift, or whatever it was. Truth is, I must like the sleaze after all.

  A couple of fifties fell out as the envelope landed in front of me. Eight more inside. That made five hundred—a bonus more than the job was worth. Must be nice to have the money to be so flamboyant. But then of course it wasn’t hers.

  “Well, what am I going to do with it?” she said as if in answer to my silent question. “Put an ad in the paper and try to give it back to them?” I smiled. “Unless, of course, you’d like to do that for me.”

  “Mrs. Marchant,” I said. “Are you trying to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

  Chapter 6

  We got through most of the bottle of malt that night. Which surprised me—partly because I didn’t think that I could handle so much booze on an empty stomach and stay upright, and partly because Olivia Marchant didn’t give the impression of being a drinker. But she was. She told a good story, too: a family saga about the Marchant couple and the possible enemies they might have made during their rise to wealth and success.

  At fifty-one, Maurice Marchant was, apparently, one of the country’s leading aesthetic surgeons, working out of a private clinic in Harley Street and catering to large numbers of the rich, famous, and physically imperfect. I resisted the temptation to ask for names, and she was too discreet to offer them. I think she already knew I found t
he whole idea a little less than kosher. But then, as of midnight, I was either working for her or unemployed. Fortunately she needed me as much as I needed her. Because though the massage nails and the Nitromorse may have been the most dramatic statement of malice, they had not been the only one.

  Mr. Marchant, it turned out, had also been having trouble; in the last month or so he had been receiving some anonymous notes, calling him all manner of nasty names and even threatening violence. Nothing else had happened, but it was only a few days after the last one that the sauna door had stuck and the Marks & Spencer’s lady had turned blue.

  “How did they come?”

  “Brown envelopes. Various postmarks, mostly central London.”

  “Exactly like Lola’s.”

  “Exactly like Lola’s. Except the notes inside weren’t printed. They were handwritten, but with the words all chopped about.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Oh, stuff about how if he hurt people he deserved to be hurt back, that kind of thing.” She gave a little shudder.

  “Have you still got them?”

  “Only one.” She shrugged. “I’m afraid I threw the others away. They were so unpleasant and I was sure they were written by a crank.”

  “Can I see it?”

  She dug something out of a desk drawer. She’d obviously been pretty sure I’d take the job.

  It was a standard brown office envelope, badly crumpled at the edges. Inside was a folded sheet of regular A4 with nine little words glued onto it separately.

  “You have damaged me so I will damage you,” it read. Hmmm. To the point and with a neat sense of chill. Quite an art, anonymous letters. Often the drama can overload the style. But not here, though it was a bit of a giveaway to use handwriting. Unless, of course, it wasn’t their own.

  “What did you think?”

  “Well, I thought it might be an ex-patient.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t know. I mean it wouldn’t take much to find out about the health farm. In the business our partnership is quite well known. But it seems a bit extreme—to go for both of us.”