Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  Stadler took the list out of my hand.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” I asked him. “I know you smoke, even though you don't smoke in front of me, because I've watched you out of the window. I watch you, you know, Detective Inspector Stadler. I watch you and you watch me.”

  He took a packet out of his pocket, took out two cigarettes and lit both, then handed me one. It felt oddly intimate, and I jumped away from him and giggled.

  “Clive's friends are odd,” I said, coughing extravagantly. The ground swam when I took a puff, and my eyes watered. “They look respectable, but I bet they all have affairs, or want to have them. Men are like animals in a zoo. They have to be put into cages in order to keep them from running all over the place. Women are the zookeepers. That's what marriage is, don't you think, we try and tame them. So maybe it's like a circus, not a zoo. Oh, I don't know.

  “I tried to think of everyone who had come to this house, even those people who weren't in my address book or date book. I don't know where to start. Obviously there's all the men working in the garden and in the house. Everybody knows the way that sort of men behave. But to be honest it's the same everywhere I go. I mean everywhere. When I see the fathers at Harry's nursery school, or when I've gone into Josh's computer club. There are some pretty odd fish there. And . . . there was something else I was going to say.”

  Grace laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “Jenny, come with me and I'm going to make you some breakfast,” she said.

  “Is it still only breakfast time? Goodness. Well, at least I've got plenty of time to clean the boys' bedrooms. But I haven't gone through the list properly.”

  “Come on.”

  “I got rid of Mary, you know.”

  “Did you?”

  “So now it's just me left. Well, me and Chris and Clive. But they don't count.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They're not going to help me, are they? Men don't, in general. That's been my experience, anyway.”

  “Toast?”

  “Whatever. I don't care. God, this kitchen's in a mess, isn't it? Everything is in such a mess. Everything. How on earth am I going to do it all, with nobody to help?”

  TEN

  Things got a bit misty after that. I said I wanted to go out shopping and I think I even started looking for my coat. But I couldn't find it and people all around me kept telling me not to. Their voices seemed to be coming in at me from all directions, and also scratching at me from the inside as if there were wasps inside my skull crawling around my brain and waiting to sting me. I started to shout at them to get them to go away and leave me alone. The voices stopped, but I felt them gripping my arm. I was in my bedroom and Dr. Schilling was so close to me that I could feel her breath on my face. She was saying something I couldn't understand. I felt a pain in my arm and then everything faded very slowly into darkness and silence.

  It was as if I was at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. Every so often I would emerge and see faces, which would say things I couldn't make out, and I would sink back into the comforting darkness. When I woke up it felt completely different. Gray and cold and generally horrid. A policewoman was sitting by the bed. She looked at me and got up and left the room. I wanted to go back to sleep, just be unconscious, but I couldn't make it happen. I thought of what I'd done and then tried not to think of it. I don't know what had become of me, but there was no point in dwelling on it.

  After a time Dr. Schilling and Stadler came into the room. They looked a bit nervous, as if they were coming into the headmistress's study. It seemed funny until I remembered that they probably just thought I would carry on behaving stupidly. I must have been feeling better because then I felt irritated by these people in my bedroom. I looked down and saw I was wearing my green nightie. Who had got me out of my own clothes and into this? Who had been present when it was being done? Another thing to try not to think about.

  Stadler stayed just inside the door, but Dr. Schilling came forward clutching one of my French earthenware mugs that are really for the children. People didn't understand. The Hintlesham kitchen was a complicated operation and nobody had it in their head except for me. God knows what else was being done down there.

  “I brought you some coffee,” she said. “Black. The way you like it.” I sat up to take the warm mug in the hollow of my hands. The bandage made it a little awkward but protected me against the heat. “Would you like your dressing gown?”

  “Please. The silk one.”

  I put the coffee down on the bedside table and got into the dressing gown with much wriggling. I thought of being thirteen years old and wriggling into my bathing costume on the beach while tightly bandaged in a towel. I was being as stupid now as I had been then. Nobody cared whether they saw me or not. Dr. Schilling pulled a chair up closer and Stadler stepped forward to the end of the bed. I was determined not to speak. I had nothing to apologize for and I just wanted them to go away. But I never have been able to bear silences, so I did speak.

  “It feels like visiting time in hospital,” I said with more than a trace of sarcasm. Neither of them spoke. They just kept looking at me with ghastly expressions of sensitivity and sympathy. If there's one thing I cannot stand, it is the idea of being pitied.

  “Where's Clive?”

  “He saw you during the night. It's Tuesday. He had to go to work but I'll ring him in a minute and tell him how you are.”

  “You must be pretty sick of me,” I said to Dr. Schilling.

  “That's funny,” she said. “Because I've just been thinking the same. I mean the opposite, I suppose. I think you must be pretty sick of me. We've been talking about you.”

  “I bet you have,” I said.

  “Not in a bad way, I hope. One of the things we've been arguing about. Or, rather, talking about.” She gave a glance across at Stadler as she said this, but he was fiddling with the knot in his tie and didn't seem to be paying any attention. “I feel, we feel, that we may not have been open enough with you and I want to do something to correct that. Jenny . . .” She paused for a second. “Jenny, firstly I want to apologize if you feel that I've been intrusive. I think you know that in my day job I'm a psychiatrist treating patients. But here my job is to do anything I can to help the police catch this dangerous person.” She was talking to me very gently now, as if she was a doctor talking to a child in bed with a temperature. “You have become an object of somebody's obsessive attention. One of the ways of catching the person is to find out what it is that has attracted the attention, and that can sometimes mean that I become pretty intrusive myself. But I just want to say that I know that you already have a perfectly good doctor and I don't want to replace him. Nor do I want to tell you how to run your life.”

  I gave her a sort of sarcastic frown, if such a thing is possible. I suddenly had this image of the two of them deciding to come in and treat me delicately and “sensitively.” That funny Jenny Hintlesham who needs careful handling.

  “I suppose you've discovered that I'm completely batty,” I said. This was planned to be a crushing put-down but it came out all wrong. Dr. Schilling didn't smile.

  “You mean yesterday?” she said. I didn't say anything. I wasn't going to talk about anything that had happened with her. “You're under a great deal of pressure. We're all here. We're trying to do something to help. But the pressure is on you. You're the one it's hard for. I want you to know that we appreciate that.”

  I held up my bandaged hand and looked at it. Maybe it was just my silly imagination, but it seemed to hurt more when I looked at it.

  “You feel my pain, do you?” I said with some bitterness. “I don't want you to be sympathetic with me,” I added quietly. “I want you to make all this go away.”

  I expected Dr. Schilling to get cross or flustered, but she hardly reacted at all.

  “I know,” she said. “Detective Inspector Stadler is going to talk to you about that.”

  She moved her chair to the side, but still close to me. Sta
dler shuffled forward. He had the expression of a kindly local constable who had come to a primary school to give the little tots some road-safety advice. It looked very odd on his libertine's face. He pulled up a chair.

  “All right, Jenny?” he said.

  I was slightly shocked by his using my name just like that, but I just nodded. He was very close. I saw for the first time that he had one of those dimples in his chin. They almost tempt you to put your finger into them.

  “You're wondering why we can't just catch this man, and I know what you mean. It's supposed to be our job, isn't it? I'm not going to give you the standard lecture, but the fact is that most crimes are bloody easy to solve. Because most people don't put much effort into their crimes. They hit somebody or steal something and somebody sees them do it and that's it. We just pick them up. But the sort of person who does this is different. He's not a genius but this is his hobby, and he puts a lot of effort into it. He could just as well have been wearing an anorak and spotting trains. But he's picked on you instead.”

  “Are you saying you can't catch him?”

  “He's difficult to catch in the normal way.”

  “He's come to the house. Under your noses.”

  “Give us a break,” Stadler said with an embarrassed smile.

  “But that's crucial,” Dr. Schilling interrupted. “He could just attack women if he wanted. But for him the point is to demonstrate his power and control.”

  “I don't care about his psychology,” I said irritably.

  “I do,” said Dr. Schilling. “His psychology is one of our main ways of catching him. We can use it. And one of the main ways of doing that is to see you the way he does. That's not nice for you, I'm afraid.”

  “We're depending on you,” Stadler said. “It puts even more pressure on you, but we'd like you to think about your own life and to let us know if there is anything out of the ordinary.”

  “This isn't just an ordinary Peeping Tom,” said Dr. Schilling. “It could be somebody you bump into in the High Street more often than you expect. It could be a friend who's suddenly a bit more attentive to you, or a bit less attentive. He wants to show his power, so the main thing is to be aware of your surroundings, for anything new or out of place. He wants to show he can get things to you.”

  I gave a snort.

  “It's not so much a matter of new things arriving,” I said. “It's more the old things disappearing.”

  Stadler looked up sharply.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing that will be of any help to you. Have you never moved house? It took two moving vans to shift us and I'm convinced that there is a small van somewhere going round the M25 with all the objects that didn't make it. Shoes, bits of food mixers, my favorite blouse—you name it.”

  “This was all during the move?” asked Stadler.

  “Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “This man couldn't have stolen all of that unless he'd pulled up with a van and four helpers. Even you would have noticed that.”

  “Still . . .” said Stadler, looking lost in thought. He leaned over to Dr. Schilling and whispered to her, as if anything they were saying could be interesting enough to be secret. Then he looked up. “Jenny, could you do us a favor?”

  It looked like a rummage sale organized by a blind madman. After phoning ahead, the two of them had taken me to the police station and to a special room where, Stadler told me, there would be objects on display. In the car, Dr. Schilling put her hand on mine in a gesture that gave me the creeps and said that I should just look at the objects and say whatever came into my mind. The only thing that came into my mind was what a wretched lot of hocus-pocus it all sounded.

  The stuff itself almost made me laugh. A comb, some rather tacky pink knickers, a fluffy teddy, a stone, a whistle, some definitely pornographic playing cards.

  “Honestly,” I said. “I can't see what you expect—”

  And at that very moment I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach and given an electric shock all at the same time. There it was. The funny little locket. I remembered different things at the same time. A day and a night in Brighton on our first anniversary. We'd gone to better places in later years, but that had been the best. We walked in all those little dinky shopping streets just away from the front and we'd laughed at the awful souvenir shops, and then at the same moment we'd spotted that in a jeweler's and Clive had walked in and bought it just like that. And another stupid thought had come into my mind: That night in the hotel Clive took all my clothes off but left the pendant on. It had hung down between my breasts. He had kissed it and then kissed my breasts. It's mad, the things that stick in your mind. I felt myself blushing and almost had to stop myself from crying. I picked it up, felt the familiar weight in my palm.

  “Nice, isn't it?” said Stadler.

  “It's mine,” I said.

  The most idiotic expression came over his face. It was almost comic.

  “What?” he said, almost in a gasp.

  “Clive gave it to me,” I said, as if in a dream. “It was lost.”

  “But . . .” said Stadler. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course,” I said. “There's a fiddly clip at the back that opens it up. There's a lock of my hair inside. Look, there.”

  He stared.

  “Yes,” he said. Dr. Schilling was gawking as well. They were looking at each other, open-mouthed. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

  And he ran, ran, out of the room.

  ELEVEN

  I didn't understand. I didn't understand at all. Not anything. I felt as if I were looking at one of Josh's wretched computer games that get posted through our front door and that make his grumpy face light up, but I didn't even know the language, the alphabet it was written in. It was just dots and dashes and signs and codes to me. I looked over at Dr. Schilling, as if she could tell me what was going on, but she just offered me her meaningless reassuring smile, the one that gave me the shivers. Then I looked at the locket again, sitting among the curious pile of objects. I reached over and touched it with one finger, lightly, as if it could blow up in my face.

  “I want to go home,” I said, not really meaning it but needing to say something to break the silence in the drab little room.

  “Soon,” said Dr. Schilling.

  “I want to have something to eat. I'm hungry.”

  She nodded, but in an absentminded way. She had a little frown on her face.

  “When did I last eat? It must have been ages ago.” I tried to remember back through the last few days, but it was like peering into inky darkness. “Is anybody going to tell me how my locket got here?”

  “I'm sure they'll—”

  But then she was interrupted by Stadler coming back into the room with Links. They both looked intensely agitated as they sat down opposite me. Links picked up the locket by its chain.

  “You are quite sure this belongs to you, Mrs. Hintlesham?”

  “Of course I'm sure. Clive's even got a photo of it somewhere for our insurance.”

  “When did you lose it?”

  Now I had to think.

  “It's hard to say. I remember wearing it to a concert. That was on the ninth of June, the day before my mother's birthday. A couple of weeks later I wanted to wear it to Clive's work's bash, but I couldn't find it.”

  “What date was that?”

  “You've got my date book, for goodness' sake. But it was in June sometime, the end of June.”

  Stadler looked down at a notebook in his lap and nodded as if he was satisfied.

  “What's important about it? Where did you find it?”

  Stadler looked into my eyes and I made myself not look away. For a second I thought he was going to tell me something, but the moment passed, and he looked down at his notebook once more with that secret satisfaction on his face.

  There was a brief, strange hush in the room, then I raised my voice:

  “Won't someone please tell me what is going on, for goodness' sake?” But my hear
t wasn't in it. My anger seemed to have all seeped away. “I don't understand.”

  “Mrs. Hintlesham,” said Links, “can we just establish—”

  “Not now,” said Dr. Schilling suddenly. She stood up. “I'm taking Jenny home. She's been under great strain; she has been unwell. Later.”

  “Establish what?”

  “Come on, Jenny.”

  “I don't like secrets. I don't like people knowing things about me that I don't know. Have you caught him? Is that it?”

  Dr. Schilling put a hand under my elbow and I stood up. Why on earth was I wearing these cotton trousers? I hadn't worn them for years; they didn't suit me at all.

  Everybody was behaving oddly. The house was full of a new kind of energy, as if the curtains had been pulled back, the windows thrown open. Nobody told me anything, of course, but Dr. Schilling came back with me and a bored-looking woman officer. Links and Stadler pitched up soon afterward. They were all beckoning to each other and muttering things to each other and looking at me, then looking away when I caught their eye. Dr. Schilling didn't seem as happy as the others.

  “Do you think you could phone your husband, Mrs. Hintlesham?” asked Stadler, following me into the kitchen.

  “Why can't you phone him yourself?”

  “We want to talk to him. We thought it might sound more civilized from you.”

  “When?”

  “Straightaway.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “We need to clarify a couple of points.”

  “We've got a drinks party this evening. An important one.”

  “The quicker we can talk to him, the quicker he'll be free.”

  I picked up the phone.