Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  “And make some plan for the day,” he continued. “I don't know if you've got any arrangements.”

  “Yes,” I said. “At half past four me and Zach have to be at a children's party in Muswell Hill. And there are two more on the weekend. Maybe more if anybody else rings up.”

  “That's no problem,” said Cameron. “Lynne can accompany you to those.”

  “It might be a bit obtrusive,” I said.

  “I'll sit outside,” Lynne said. “I can give you a lift.”

  “Better and better.”

  Lynne still had a half-full cup of coffee and half a croissant.

  “There's no hurry,” said Cameron, unnecessarily.

  It turned out that there really wasn't any hurry. Lynne sipped her coffee slowly and only toyed with her croissant. She was in the process of buying a flat herself and she started to ask about what it had been like buying mine. Had I sold a flat of my own before buying this one? It was quite a long story and the shorter I tried to make it, the longer it got. Meanwhile Stadler walked around the room scrutinizing it in some supposedly expert and dispassionate way, picking up objects, opening drawers. I couldn't help feeling that he was looking at me as he did it, finding out more things I wanted to keep to myself. Finally we exhausted the subject of flat-buying. Lynne turned to Cameron.

  “Nadia has certain concerns about our plans.”

  “Basically, I don't know what they are,” I said.

  “I'll discuss it with her,” said Cameron dismissively, and turned away, not continuing the conversation.

  She continued holding her coffee. Hadn't this woman had enough of me? Didn't she have a job to do?

  “So I'll see you back here about one?” said Cameron.

  “Are you going out?” she asked.

  “Whatever we do, we'll be here at one.”

  She nodded.

  “Fine. See you later, Nadia.”

  “See you, Lynne.”

  She was out of the door. I saw her legs going up the steps outside and reaching the pavement. The legs walked away. Safe. I turned toward Cameron.

  “About yesterday . . .”

  And he was on me, holding me as if I was unbearably precious, his hands touching my face, stroking my hair. I pushed him away slightly and looked him in the eyes.

  “I . . .” I stammered. “I'm not . . .”

  “I can't . . .” he murmured, and kissed me again.

  I felt his hands behind me now, on my back, then under my T-shirt, feeling for my bra, discovering there wasn't one.

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  “I don't know. No.”

  He took my hand and led me into my bedroom. It was different from the day before: more relaxed, more deliberate, slower. I sat down on the bed. He walked to the window and pulled the blind down. Then he closed the bedroom door. He removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and took that off too. It occurred to me that sex with a man who needed to remove a suit and tie was almost a unique experience.

  “I can't stop thinking about you,” he said, as if it were a symptom. “I see you when I close my eyes. What shall we do?”

  “Take your clothes off,” I said.

  “What?” He looked down, almost as if it were a surprise to see he was still dressed.

  He took his clothes off as if in a dream, tossing his trousers into a heap on a chair, looking at me all the time. I reached out my arms toward him.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait. Let me. Nadia.”

  I lay in a fog of pleasure, and then at last he was inside me and later, when it was over and we lay there entwined, he was still looking at me, stroking my hair, saying my name as if it were some kind of magic spell. After a time we moved away from each other and I propped myself up on a pillow.

  “That was lovely,” I said.

  “Nadia,” he said. “Nadia.”

  “And I feel confused,” I said.

  A spell had been broken. He moved back slightly; a shadow crossed his face; he bit his lip.

  “Can I be honest with you?” he said.

  Suddenly I felt like shivering.

  “Please,” I said.

  “This job is my whole life,” he said. “And this . . .”

  “You mean this,” I said, gesturing at the bed.

  He nodded.

  “It's so not allowed,” he said. “It is so fucking not allowed.”

  “I won't tell anyone,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “No,” he said bleakly.

  “What is it?” I asked. He didn't reply. “Fucking what is it?”

  “I'm married,” he said. “I'm so sorry. I'm so so sorry.”

  And he started crying. I was lying there with a naked detective crying in my bed. About eighteen hours of the relationship and we'd already moved from first lust to the weeping and recrimination. I felt sour inside. I didn't say anything. I didn't pat him and stroke him and say that everything was all right, there, there. Finally he gave a huge sigh, as a sign that he was pulling himself together.

  “Nadia?”

  “Yes?”

  “Say something.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Are you furious with me?”

  “Oh, Cameron,” I said. “Just fucked off. And I suppose your wife doesn't understand you.”

  “No, no, I don't know. I just know I want you. I'm not messing you around, Nadia, I promise you that. I want you so much. It means so much to me I don't know what to do. Is that all right? What do you think? Nadia, tell me what you think.”

  I swung round and looked at my frog-shaped clock on the bedside table. Then I leaned over and kissed Cameron's chest.

  “What do I think? I have a rule not to sleep with married men; it makes me feel bad. I can't stop thinking about the wife. But I mainly think this is your problem, not mine. And I think that Lynne is due back in about seven minutes.”

  The speed of putting clothes on was almost amusing. It felt companionable.

  “I wonder if I should put different trousers on,” I said. “Just to test Lynne's detective skills.”

  “No, no,” said Cameron, looking alarmed.

  “Oh, all right,” I said.

  And we kissed, smiling at each other through the kiss. Married. Why did he have to be married?

  That was on the Wednesday. On Thursday he only had time to talk to me on the phone, while Lynne was in the room, a strange conversation with passionate protestations on his part and blank statements on mine: Yes. Yes. Of course. Yes. I feel that as well. All right. On Friday morning, a team of men moved into my flat and fitted new locks on every door and iron grids over each window. And after lunch he came, and Lynne was needed to provide a report. We had time for a bath.

  “I'd like to see your show,” he said. “I'd like to see you perform.”

  “Come tomorrow,” I said. “We're performing for a group of four-year-olds just up the road in Primrose Hill.”

  “I can't,” he said, looking away.

  “Oh,” I said primly, hating myself. “Family business.”

  “I can't get out of it,” he said. “I would if I could.”

  “That's quite all right,” I said. This was why I didn't sleep with married men—the shame and the pain and the guilt of it.

  “Are you cross?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Do you want me to be cross?”

  He picked up my hand and held it to his cheek. “I'm in love with you, Nadia. I've fallen in love.”

  “Don't say that. It frightens me. It makes me feel too happy.”

  She thinks they are invisible. I see them. Kissing. My girl and the policeman kissing. Crashing to the floor. As he stands at the window to close the blinds, I see on his stupid face the besotted, thickened look of a man in love.

  I love her more. Nobody can love her the way that I love her. Everyone looks in the wrong direction. They look for hate. Love: That's the key.

  EIGHT

  Five- and si
x-year-old girls make the best audiences. They are sweet and admiring, and sit in decorous rows in their silky pastel dresses, with their hair in plaits and their feet in patent leather shoes. When I call one of them up to the front to help me, she'll put her finger in her mouth and speak in a whisper. Eight- and nine-year-old boys are the worst. They jeer at us, and shout out that they know the disappeared object is in my pocket, and they push each other about and surge forward to inspect my box of tricks. They snigger when I drop a ball. The puppet show is for sissies, they say. They sing “Happy Birthday” in a sarcastic shout. They burst all the balloons. And Zach and I have an unbreakable rule: Nobody in double figures.

  This party was for five-year-old boys, with a few girls drifting round the edges. It was in a large and handsome house in Primrose Hill that had steps leading up to the front door, an entrance hall you could turn several cartwheels in before reaching the other side, a kitchen the size of my flat, a living room filled with children that stretched back, across a pale, deep carpet, to French windows. The garden was long and well tended, with a patio, a goldfish pond, a series of trellised arches, clipped box hedges, white roses.

  “Blimey,” I whispered at Zach.

  “Just don't break anything,” he whispered back.

  The birthday boy was called Oliver, and he was small and plump; his cheeks were blotchy with excitement; his friends raged round him like random atoms while he ripped wrapping paper off presents. His mother was called Mrs. Wyndham, and she looked very tall and very thin and very rich and already seemed terminally irritated by the party that was just beginning. She looked doubtfully at me and Zach.

  “There are twenty-four of them,” she said. “Rather boisterous. You know what boys are like.”

  “We do,” said Zach, dolefully.

  “No problem,” I said. “If the children go into the garden for a few minutes, we can set up in the living room.” I walked into the living room and clapped my hands. “Kids, run outside now. We'll call you when the show is about to begin.”

  There was a stampede through the French windows. Mrs. Wyndham ran after them, wailing something about her camellia.

  Zach and I had made the puppet theater together. We had sawed and nailed. On a canvas sheet we had painted blue mountains, a green forest, the inside of a cottage. We had even made one of our puppets, a lion, out of papier-mâché. It was messy, took ages, and looks like a lump of dried plasticine with a wonky face painted on its knobbly, asymmetrical surface. We bought the rest from a specialist shop. We have a couple of short plays, which Zach wrote. After all, he's the writer. That's what he says he does when anyone asks him. “I write novels,” he says firmly, maybe adding as an afterthought that he subsidizes his writing with other things, like being a children's entertainer.

  His puppet shows are short and complicated and involve too many different voices. Today's had a boy, a girl, a wizard, a bird, a butterfly, a clown, a fox. I always feel very sweaty afterward.

  Zach already knew about the letter, of course, and the police, and all of the precautions they were taking. He'd met Lynne today, for we had given him a lift to Primrose Hill, and he'd sat in the front beside her and talked to her about chaos theory and how the population of India was about to pass one billion while she maneuvered through the traffic, looking dazed.

  As we were slotting together the theater, he asked me if I was at all scared by the business.

  “No.” I hesitated as I hooked the curtains across the miniature stage. But I had to tell someone. “More excited, as a matter of fact.”

  “That sounds a bit perverse.”

  “The thing is, Zach, can you keep a secret?” I didn't wait for him to reply. I knew he couldn't. He's famous for being like a sieve. “I'm having a thing with one of the policemen.”

  “What?”

  “I know. It's a bit weird, but—”

  “Nadia.” He took hold of my shoulders so I had to stop what I was doing. “Are you insane? You can't do this.”

  “Can't?”

  Zach gestured wildly, as if he couldn't show by words alone how badly I was behaving.

  “It's not on. It's wrong. It's like having an affair with your doctor. He's taking advantage of you, of your vulnerability. Can't you see? Look, I'm sure that you see it as something beautiful and pure and important, but you've just split up with Max and you're jumping into bed with someone who's supposed to be protecting you.”

  “Shut up, Zach.”

  “Father figure. You have to stop it, Nadia.”

  “He's married,” I added miserably. Just saying it made my chest hurt.

  Zach gave a sarcastic snort. “But of course.”

  “He's very attractive. I mean I'd never have thought . . .” I shivered as I remembered that morning, just a few hours ago, when he'd taken over from Lynne for an hour, and we'd made love in the bathroom, up against the tiled wall, fumbling at each other's clothing, desperate.

  “Nadia,” Zach said urgently. “Oh fuck, here they come.”

  The boys had returned from the garden.

  After the show, I got Oliver to help me do my pathetic magic trick, and the wand collapsed every time he touched it, and all the children shouted “Abracadabra!” as loudly as they could, and Mrs. Wyndham winced in the doorway. Then I asked them to give me strange objects that I could juggle with. One vile child, called Carver, presented me with a cheese grater he had found in the kitchen, but I didn't think Mrs. W wanted blood on the carpet. I chose a melon, a napkin ring, and a drumstick, and I didn't drop any of them. Zach blew up long balloons and twisted them into animal shapes. Then the children bolted into the kitchen for sausages on sticks and jam-filled biscuits and a birthday cake in the shape of a train. And it was over. Zach was desperate for his cigarette, so I pushed him outside.

  “Do you mind?” he asked. “Clearing up the stuff?”

  “No, go on, scarper.”

  “Remember what I said, Nadia.”

  “Sure, sure. Now push off, partner.”

  “You're not going to stop, are you?”

  I shut my eyes for a moment, felt in my imagination his mouth against my throat.

  “I don't know. I can't say.”

  Parents and nannies started arriving—I can tell the difference between the two a mile off. I dismantled the theater and started to stack it into its box. A pretty young woman came up to me with a cup of tea.

  “Mrs. Wyndham asked me to bring you this.” She had silver-blond hair and a funny, lilting accent.

  I took it gratefully.

  “Are you Oliver's nanny?”

  “No. I came to collect Chris. He lives just down the road.” She picked up a puppet and examined it, put it on her hand. “It must be hard, your job.”

  “Not as hard as yours. Do you have just the one?”

  “There are two older ones, but Josh and Harry are at school. Does this go in the bag?”

  “Thanks.” I gulped at the tea and started loading up. I had this down to an art. She stayed, looking at me. “Where do you come from? Your English is fantastic.”

  “Sweden. I was meant to go home but there was a bit of fuss.”

  “Oh,” I said vaguely. Where was that wand? I bet Oliver had wandered off with it and worked out how to bend it into segments. “Well, thanks, er . . .”

  “Lena.”

  “Lena.”

  She disappeared back into the kitchen, where the other nannies were gathered round their charges, watching them stuff chocolate pieces of train into their mouths and talking about boyfriends and nightlife. Children started leaving. “Say thank you,” I heard, and “Where's my party bag?” and “Harvey's got a blue one—I want a blue one too.”

  I picked up all my stuff. Thank God Lynne was out there with her car. There were some advantages to being followed around by a blushing, stubborn policewoman. A small fair-haired boy bumped into me in the hall. He had violet smudges under his eyes and a chocolate smear round his mouth.

  “Hi,” I said brightly, determ
ined to make a quick exit.

  “My mummy's dead,” he said, fixing me with his bright gaze.

  “Oh well,” I said, looking around. The mother was probably in the kitchen somewhere.

  “Yup. Mummy died. Daddy says she's gone to heaven.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “No,” he said, taking a suck of his lolly. “I don't think she's gone that far.”

  “Well . . .” I said.

  “A man killed her dead.”

  “That can't be true.”

  “In true life,” he insisted.

  Lena returned, carrying his jacket. “Come on, Chris, home,” she said.

  He took her hand.

  “I want my party bag first.”

  “He says his mother was killed,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “What? Really?”

  I put down the box and bent down to Chris again. “I'm very sorry,” I said again, ineptly. I couldn't think what to say.

  “Can I have my party bag now?” He tugged on Lena's hand impatiently.

  “When did this happen?” I asked Lena.

  “Two weeks,” she said. “It's a terrible thing.”

  “Christ.” I looked at her with fascination. I'd never been near someone who'd been near someone who was murdered. “What happened?”

  “Nobody knows.” She shook her head from side to side so her silver hair swung. “It happened in the home.”

  I gawked at her.

  “How terrible. How terrible for everyone.”

  Mrs. Wyndham came up with a party bag for Chris. It looked three times as big as everyone else's.

  “There you are, darling,” she said, and planted a kiss on the top of his head. “If there's anything I can do . . .” She sighed, as if it hurt her just to look at him. “Little lamb.” She glanced round at me. “I'll get you your money, Miss Blake. I won't be a minute—it's all ready.”

  “I've got two packets of sweets and Thomas only got one,” said Chris triumphantly. “And I've got a slime ball.”

  “Here's your money, Miss Blake.”

  From her tone of finality, it didn't sound as if we would be asked back.