Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  “No.”

  “You're a bumhole.”

  “Christo!” I seized his upper arm and pinched it fiercely.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  I let go of his arm and turned to Lena, who was looking demure.

  “Today is a bit complicated,” I said vaguely. “Maybe you and Christo could go to the park, take a picnic, go to the bouncy castle.”

  “I don't wanner picnic.”

  “Please, Christo.”

  “I wanner stay with you.”

  “Not today, darling.”

  “Come on, Chrissy, let's choose your clothes.” Lena stood up. No wonder Christo loved her. She never got cross, just chanted things at him in her funny voice.

  I put my head in my hands. Dust and dirt everywhere. Ironing to be done. No one to help me. Clive in the police station, answering questions. What questions? Do you hate your wife, Mr. Hintlesham? How much do you hate her? Enough to send her razor blades?

  They left together, hand in hand. Christo wore red shorts and a stripy shirt. I stared at the congealing food on their plates. I stared at the window, which needed washing. And there was a spider's web on the light above me. Where was the spider, I wondered.

  The doorbell rang and I jumped. It was Stadler, crumpled and sweaty, with stubble on his face. He looked as if he hadn't gone to bed.

  “Can I just ask a couple of questions, Jenny?” He always called me Jenny now, as if we were friends, lovers.

  “More questions?”

  “One,” he said, with a tired smile.

  We walked downstairs, where he turned down offers of coffee and breakfast. He looked around.

  “Where's Lynne?” he asked.

  “Sitting outside in her car,” I said. “You must have passed her.”

  “Right,” he said dully. He hardly seemed awake.

  “You wanted to ask a question?”

  “That's right,” he said. “It's just a detail. Can you remember where you were on Saturday July seventeenth?”

  I made a feeble attempt to recall and gave up.

  “You've got my appointment book, haven't you?”

  “Yes. All you wrote on that day was ‘Collect fish.' ”

  “Oh, yes, I remember.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was at home. Cooking, preparing things.”

  “With your husband?”

  “No,” I said. Stadler gave a visible start, then a smile of suppressed triumph. “I don't see why you need to look surprised. As you know, he's hardly ever here.”

  “Do you know where he was?”

  “He had to go out, he told me. Urgent business.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I was cooking a meal for us. He told me in the morning he had to go out.”

  I remembered the day clearly. It had been Lena's day off. Harry and Josh had lounged around and squabbled, before going out with separate friends; Christo had watched television most of the day, and played with his Legos, and gone to bed early, worn out by heat and bad temper, and I had sat in the kitchen with the ruined day behind me and my beautiful meal spread out on the table, long-stemmed wineglasses and flowers from the garden, and he hadn't come back.

  “He was out the whole day then?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can you be precise about times?”

  As I spoke I could hear my own voice, flat, sad.

  “He left too early to be able to go to the fishmonger's. He came back at about midnight. Maybe a bit later. He wasn't there when I went to sleep.”

  “Are you willing to make a statement repeating all that?”

  I shrugged.

  “If you want. I assume you're not going to tell me why it matters.”

  Stadler startled me by taking hold of my hand and holding it.

  “Jenny,” he said softly, his voice like a caress. “All I can tell you is that all of this will soon be over, if that is of any comfort to you.”

  I felt myself going red.

  “Oh” was all I could manage in response, like some village idiot.

  “I'll be back soon,” he said.

  I didn't want him to go, but I couldn't say that, of course. I pulled my hands away.

  “Good,” I said.

  I lay on my bed in a puddle of sunlight. I couldn't move. My limbs felt weighted down and my brain sluggish, as if I were under water.

  I lay in a cool bath and closed my eyes and tried not to think. I wandered from room to room. Why had I ever liked this house? It was ugly, cold-hearted, unsatisfactory. I would move from here, start again.

  I wished Josh would call me. I wanted to tell him that he didn't need to stay there if he hated it so very much. It wasn't worth the wretchedness; I saw that now.

  I went into the boys' rooms and fingered the clothes in their wardrobes, the trophies on their shelves. We were all so very far from each other. I caught sight of myself in the long mirror in the hall—a thin, middle-aged woman with greasy hair and bony knees, wandering about like a lost thing in a house that was too large for her.

  Outside, the sky was hazy with heat and fumes.

  Maybe we could move to the country, to a small cottage with roses round the door. We could have a swimming pool and a beech tree the boys could climb.

  I opened the fridge and stared inside.

  The doorbell rang.

  I was unable to speak. It was just not possible. It wasn't real. I just shook my head as if I could clear the confusion away. Links leaned closer, as if I were short-sighted and deaf as well as mad.

  “Did you hear what I said, Mrs. Hintlesham?”

  “What?”

  “Your husband, Clive Hintlesham,” he said, as if it had to be spelled out, detail by detail. “An hour ago. We charged him with the murder of Zoe Haratounian on the morning of July seventeenth, nineteen ninety-nine.”

  “I don't understand,” I repeated. “This is mad.”

  “Mrs. Hintlesham, Jenny . . .”

  “Mad,” I repeated. “Mad.”

  “His solicitor is fully involved. He will appear at Saint Steven's Magistrate's Court tomorrow morning. They will make a bail application. Which will be refused.”

  “Who is this woman, anyway? What's she got to do with Clive? With me and the letters?”

  Links looked uneasy. He took a breath and spoke in a slow, patient voice, quietly, even though there was nobody around to hear.

  “I can't tell you in detail,” he said. “But because of the special circumstances I thought I should prepare you. It seems that your husband was having an affair with her. We believe he gave her your locket. Her photograph was among his possessions.”

  I remembered the photograph I had seen last night: an eager, laughing face, a glass in her hand lifted in a toast to the future she didn't have. I gulped, and a wave of nausea swept over me.

  “That doesn't mean he would kill her.”

  “Miss Haratounian also received letters like yours. Written by the same person. We believe that your husband threatened her, and then killed her.”

  I gazed at him. A jigsaw was beginning to click together, but the picture that emerged made no sense, it was just a scribble of violent images. A bad dream.

  “Are you saying that Clive was the person writing those letters to me?”

  “All we are saying at the moment is that your husband is charged with the murder of Miss Haratounian.”

  “Tell me what you think.”

  “Mrs. Hintlesham . . .”

  “You must tell me. It doesn't make any kind of sense.”

  Links was silent for some time, visibly trying to make up his mind.

  “This is very painful,” he said. “I wish you could be spared it. But it is possible that he wanted to rid himself of this woman, for whatever reason. Then, having done that, it seemed that nobody knew that he had met her. For that reason, if you were . . . well, targeted by the person who did that murder, he wouldn't be a suspect.” Anothe
r long silence. “It's one way of looking at it,” he said uneasily. “I'm sorry.”

  “Could he loathe me that much?”

  Links didn't speak.

  “Has he admitted it?”

  “He still denies even knowing Miss Haratounian,” Links said dryly. “Which is a bit rich.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “That's your right. Are you sure?”

  “I want to see him.”

  “You don't believe this, Jenny? Jens. You can't possibly believe this ludicrous charge?” In his voice I heard a mixture of anger and fear. His face was red and unwashed, his clothes were stained. I gazed at him. My husband. Jowly cheeks, a thickening neck, eyes that were slightly bloodshot.

  “Jens,” he said.

  “Why shouldn't I believe it?”

  “Jens, it's me, Clive, your husband. I know things have been shaky recently, but it's me.”

  “Shaky,” I repeated. “Shaky.”

  “We've been married for fifteen years, Jens. You know me. Tell them it's ridiculous. I was with you that day. You know I was. Jens.”

  A fly settled on his cheek and he brushed it away violently.

  “Tell me about Gloria,” I said. “Is it true?”

  He flushed and tried to speak and then stopped.

  I looked at him, the hairs in his nostrils, the grime of dirt on his neck, the flaky skin by his ears, dandruff in his hair. He looked good only when he was carefully groomed. He wasn't one of those people, like Stadler, for example, who actually look better after staying up all night. Who could stay up all night and still seem sexy.

  “I don't think there's anything more to talk about, do you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “You'll see,” he shouted. “You'll see and then you'll be sorry. You are making the biggest mistake of your whole stupid, little life.” His fists came down on the table between us, and the moon-faced policeman at the door stood up. “I will make you suffer for it, see if I don't.”

  There was only one police officer outside my house now, and he lay in the car, half asleep behind a paper. Clive's office looked like a burglar had been in there. The house was a building site of half-finished rooms. The garden was a wasteland; nettles grew in the beds that Francis had prepared for the flowering, sweet-smelling shrubs; the grass was yellow.

  I opened a bottle of champagne and drank a glass of it, but it made me feel violently sick. I ought to eat something, but that didn't seem possible. I wanted Grace Schilling to come in and make me another herb omelette, runny and good. I wanted Josh to call me and say he was coming home.

  I sat alone in the kitchen. I was shamed and I was free.

  FOURTEEN

  A day of frenetic activity calmed me down. That was what I needed. It stopped me from dwelling on things too much; it muffled the jangling in my head that I couldn't make go away whatever pills I took for it. The morning was sunny and it hadn't yet got horribly hot, and as I sat at the kitchen table with Lynne, I felt almost calm. She was wearing her uniform again. There was a feeling of things being over and winding down and farewells. We had worked our way through almost a whole cafetière and I'd made some toast that we both nibbled. Lynne asked if she could smoke and not only did I say she could but I asked for a cigarette myself and went and found a saucer we could use as an ashtray.

  My first puff felt sinful, as if I was fourteen years old, and then I felt soothed. Maybe in my new life I'd start smoking again.

  “I used to do this to lose weight,” I said. “At least it was a welcome by-product. I gave up when I was pregnant with Josh. My bottom and thighs have never been the same.”

  Lynne smiled and shook her head.

  “I wish I had your figure,” she said.

  I looked at Lynne with a critical eye.

  “You wouldn't like it,” I said. “You haven't seen it the way I see it.”

  We both took puffs from our cigarettes. Mine felt amateurish after all these years. I would need a lot more practice.

  “So you've been busy?” Lynne asked.

  “An awful lot of things need sorting out.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “I'm flying to Boston this evening.”

  “Do the boys know yet?”

  I very nearly laughed at this.

  “The idea of informing Josh over the phone that his father—well, it didn't seem such a good idea. No, I'm sure that Dr. Schilling would recommend doing it face-to-face.”

  “It's probably better.”

  “And I spent most of the afternoon on the phone to my architect and my various builders and Francis, my brilliant gardener. We're flying back at the beginning of next week and then we can get going on the house.”

  Lynne lit another cigarette and then caught my eye and lit me one.

  “Won't that feel strange?” she said. “Starting all that again?”

  “It's different this time,” I said. “That's why it took so long on the phone. They're going to come and patch things up, slap some white paint on the walls, put some shrubs in the garden. Then I'm putting the house on the market.”

  Lynne's eyes widened in surprise.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “What I'd really like is to burn the house down with everything inside it and make a run for it. But selling it will have to do.”

  “You've only just moved in.”

  “I can hardly bear the sight of it. I've been unhappy here. I suppose it's not the house's fault, but still . . .”

  “Have you talked to Dr. Schilling?”

  “Why should I talk to her?” I said, a bit belligerently. “Grace Schilling's job was to use her professional skill to catch the man harassing me. Well, he's caught.” I stopped myself. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to shout. Again.”

  “That's all right.”

  “In fact, all in all, this probably hasn't been the most enjoyable job you've ever had to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Trying to look after a bad-tempered, miserable woman.”

  Lynne looked serious.

  “You shouldn't say that. It was awful. We all felt terrible for you. We still do.”

  “Still?”

  “Look, we're glad we caught the person who did this. We're not glad for you that it was Mr. Hintlesham.”

  I took some time to reply. I was looking over Lynne's shoulder at the garden. It was difficult to believe that even Francis could get this into a salable shape within a fortnight. We'd see.

  “I just keep remembering details of our marriage and wondering how it could have happened. I know we had difficulties, but I don't see why he had to hate me so much. What had I done to him, what had that poor girl, Zoe, done except climb into bed with him?” Lynne looked me in the eyes. She didn't turn away, I'll say that for her. But she didn't reply. “And even if he hated me so much, would he have wanted to kill me? And to make me suffer? Well, could he? Say something.”

  Lynne looked a bit shifty.

  “I've got to be careful,” she said. “With the committal hearing and everything. But people do things like that. Mr. Hintlesham had met somebody else. He knew that you wouldn't give him a divorce.” She gave a shrug. “The last murder I dealt with, a fourteen-year-old boy killed his granny because she wouldn't lend him the money to buy a lottery ticket. It's like one of my sergeants used to say: You don't need qualifications to be a murderer.”

  “So he could have done it. Do you think he'll be found guilty?”

  Lynne paused before speaking.

  “The Crown Prosecution Service say that we've got to be confident of a seventy-five percent chance of conviction before we charge anybody. As far as I know, there was no hesitation about charging your husband. We've got the clear connection with the dead girl, Zoe, and his attempts to lie about it. There's the lack of an alibi. His threats against you, his affair and motivation. We've got a good case.”

  “What if the murder is tried separately?” I asked c
autiously.

  “No chance,” said Lynne. “The identical notes to the two of you make the cases inseparable.”

  “Half the time I think that he's innocent and will be found guilty. The other half I think he's guilty and that he'll go free. He's clever. He's a lawyer. I don't know what to think.”

  “He won't get off,” said Lynne firmly.

  We drank up our coffees and finished our cigarettes.

  “Have you packed?” she asked.

  “That's on my list,” I said. “I'm only taking a small bag.”

  She looked at her watch.

  “I think I'd better go,” she said.

  “I'll feel strange being unsupervised,” I said.

  “You won't be entirely unsupervised. We'll keep an eye.”

  I pulled a slightly sarcastic face.

  “Does that mean you're not entirely sure?”

  “Just to see you're all right.”

  And she was gone.

  I didn't have lunch. No time. Packing was a little more complicated than I had suggested to Lynne. Normally I'm a world champion at packing exactly the right amount, but I was feeling a bit strange and I felt I was doing everything a little bit slowly, as if I were underwater or on the moon. And even though I was doing things more slowly, I also had to think about them more carefully.

  The phone kept ringing, as well. I had rather a long conversation with Clive's lawyer. It consisted of us slightly dancing around each other. I wasn't at all clear that we were on the same side, and by the end of it I was wondering whether I oughtn't to think of getting my own lawyer. Several people rang for Josh: his violin teacher, that fellow Hack from the computer club who said Josh had asked him to drop a game round, and Marcus, one of his friends. And a couple of my friends—or Clive's friends—called who had clearly heard that something funny was going on. In each case I put them off with a series of excuses that didn't quite amount to bare-faced lies.

  With the state I was in, I thought I'd better leave in hugely good time for the plane, so I ordered a cab and ran around the house in a frenzy of closing windows and half-closing curtains. I had phoned Mary. She would come in and switch on lights in the evening. Anyway, what was there to steal? They were welcome to it. One thing more. Long transatlantic flight. Soft shoes. I had a pair of nice blue canvas slip-ons. Where were they? Had I even unpacked them since the move? I remembered. Bedroom cupboard. At the top. I ran upstairs. In the bedroom—our bedroom I would once have said—I looked around. I could see nothing I'd forgotten.