Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  “Fine.”

  I was early, but she was already there. It was a warm morning, but she was huddled up in a long coat, as if it were winter. Her hair was pulled back austerely, which made her face look curiously flat, and older and more weary than I had remembered. We shook hands formally and started walking up the hill, where a solitary man was flying a huge red stunt kite, which flapped and jerked in the wind.

  “How are you?” she asked, but I just shrugged. I didn't want to be talking about my mental health with her.

  “What is it?”

  She stopped and took out a pack of cigarettes; struck a match into the cup of her hand and inhaled deeply. Then she looked at me steadily with her gray eyes.

  “I'm sorry, Nadia.”

  “Is that the important thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well.” I kicked a stone out of our path and watched as it clattered away into the grass. Above us, the red kite swooped and danced. “And what did you want me to say back?”

  She frowned but didn't reply.

  “Do you want me to forgive you or something?” I asked curiously. “I mean, it's not me who's dead.” She winced. “I can't just hug you and say there, there.”

  She made an impatient gesture with her hand, as if she were swatting a cloud of insects away from the space between us.

  “I don't want that. I'm saying sorry because I'm sorry.”

  “Did they send you, then? Is this a group apology?”

  She smiled and took a drag of her cigarette. “God, no. Everybody has been forbidden to have contact with witnesses.” Another dry smile. “Pending legal proceedings and internal inquiries. And TV documentaries.”

  “Are you in trouble then?”

  “Oh yes,” she said in a vague tone. “That's okay. We should be in trouble, Nadia. What we did was—” She checked herself. “I was about to say unforgivable. It was unprofessional. Stupid. Blind. Wrong.”

  She dropped her cigarette on the path and ground it out with the toe of her narrow shoe.

  “Maybe I should be taping this for Clive's solicitor.”

  She frowned. “Yes, he's taking legal action. And Zoe's aunt. I don't care, really. I do care about Zoe and Jennifer. And you. I care about what you went through.”

  We turned off the path and walked down the hill, toward the pond. Ruffles of wind blew across the surface of the water and showers of leaves fell at our feet. A small child stood with his mother, throwing chunks of bread at the fat, indifferent ducks.

  “It wasn't really your fault,” I said cautiously. “It wasn't your decision, was it? I mean, not telling us what was going on.”

  She looked at me and didn't respond: She had decided to take the blame full on, not slide away.

  “For what it's worth,” I plowed on, “I think that within the limits of the situation, you weren't as dishonest as you could have been.”

  “Thanks, Nadia. But I don't think I'm going to put that on my résumé. It's strange,” she continued. “I am always talking about taking control of one's life, but it got out of control. One step taken—to keep the press out of Zoe's death, not to scare the local population, not to make ourselves look incompetent, or worse—which led to the next step, then the next, and before they—we—knew it, we were on this road and couldn't turn back. And we ended up lying and lying and not looking after the people who looked to us.” She smiled ruefully at me. “That's not an excuse, by the way.”

  “All that fear,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I've never really been able to believe in God. Have you?”

  She shook her head.

  “There are these two women,” I said, “I feel connected to, though I never met them. And then there are these two men, who I did meet, of course. Did you?”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I met Fred when he was questioned after Zoe, and then I met Morris of course after you had discovered he knew both you and Jennifer Hintlesham.”

  “I need your help here, Grace. You know about this. They seemed normal. Could you imagine them, you know, when you met them, could you see that they could be killers? Was there anything about them—I mean, Fred, for instance. Did he have a history of violence?”

  “He does now.”

  “I mean . . .”

  “I know what you mean. You want me to say that these men are different, don't you? You want to put a label on them: dangerous. Or: mad.” We stopped by the side of the pond and she lit another cigarette. “That's what's going to happen, of course. People like me will question Morris and they'll discover that he was abused or neglected, that he was hit or pampered, that he saw a video or fell on his head off a climbing frame. And someone will eventually get in touch with the press to say that Fred hit them five years ago, or whatever. And then there will be politicians and various pundits getting hot under the collar and saying why wasn't it spotted.”

  “And?”

  “There wasn't anything to spot. When people commit murder most of them do it to someone they know. That's what the numbers say. Fred was jilted by Zoe and he was humiliated and furious and then, by bad luck for both of them but especially for Zoe, found himself alone with her. And he killed her. It's as simple as that. It happens all the time. He's probably no more murderous than a lot of people, except he happened to commit a murder that went unnoticed because the woman happened to be receiving threatening letters from somebody else.”

  “Comforting,” I said dryly.

  “I didn't think you were asking for comfort. I don't think you have ever asked me for comfort. That's not your style, is it? Morris, well, Morris is different, of course, and maybe you could call him mad, in the same way you can call anyone who commits senseless crimes mad. Or evil, if you believe in those kinds of terms. But that doesn't get us anywhere, does it? Because what troubles you is that for all the terror and all the horror and the death, this has no lesson, no label.”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly.” We walked on, back to the path we had left, and for a few minutes we didn't speak.

  “Can I ask you a question, Nadia?”

  “Sure.”

  “It's been bugging me. How on earth did you get to see all the files?”

  “Oh, that. I had sex with Cameron Stadler and then I blackmailed him.”

  She looked at me as if I had just slapped her face. Her face looked comical.

  “Don't ask,” I said. “You don't want to know.”

  She started laughing then, an unsteady and not entirely cheerful sound, but I joined in and soon we were holding on to each other's arms, giggling and chortling like teenagers. Then she suddenly stopped and her expression became grave.

  “You can't go round feeling guilty for the rest of your life,” I said.

  “Want to bet?”

  “Not really.”

  We came to a fork in the path and she stopped. “I go this way,” she said. “Good-bye then, Nadia.”

  “Bye.”

  She held out her hand and I shook it. Then I started walking back the way we had come, to where the kite still swung in the air.

  “Nadia!”

  I looked back. “Yes?”

  “You saved us,” she called. “Us, yourself, the other women who would have come after. You saved all of us.”

  “It was just luck, Grace. I was lucky.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was too cold for snow. The sky was icy blue and the pavement still sparkled with the frost of the previous night. My breath smoked in the air, my eyes watered, my nose felt red and sore, and my chin stung above the itchy wool of my ratty old scarf. The wind was a knife. I walked quickly, head down.

  “Nadia? Nadia!” A young voice gusting across the street. I turned and squinted.

  “Josh?”

  It was. He was with a group of boys and girls about his age, all of them muffled up in thick jackets and hats and jostling against each other, but he crossed the road to me. “I'll catch up with you,” he shouted at them, wavi
ng them off. He seemed solider than I had remembered him, less pallid and weedy. He stopped a few feet from me and we smiled at each other a bit awkwardly.

  “Joshua Hintlesham, I've been thinking about you,” I said, aiming for the bright notes.

  “How are you?”

  “I'm alive.”

  “That's good,” he said, almost as if there were some doubt about the issue. He looked around edgily. “I should have got in touch,” he said. “I felt bad. Coming around with Morris, all that. Everything.”

  It seemed more than five months ago since he had sat on my sofa, a pitiable heap of frail bones. I didn't know what to say to him, because too much lay between us: a great mountain of horror and loss and fear.

  “Do you have time for coffee or something?” He took his woolly hat off as he spoke, and I saw he had dyed his hair a bright orange and put a stud in his ear.

  “What about your friends?”

  “That's all right.”

  We walked together without talking until we came to a small Italian café. Inside it was dim, hot, and smoky, and an espresso machine hissed and spluttered on the counter.

  “Bliss.” I sighed, and peeled off my coat and hat and scarf and gloves.

  “I'm buying,” he said, trying to be casual, looking pleased with himself and jingling the coins in his pocket.

  “Okay, rich boy. I'll have a cappuccino.”

  “Anything to eat?” he asked hopefully.

  I didn't want to disappoint him. “One of those almondy croissants.”

  I sat at a table in the corner and looked at him while he ordered. Jenny's eldest son, leaning over the counter with his orange hair, trying to be a man, trying on his cool and his confidence in front of me. He must have turned fifteen, I calculated. He almost was a man now. In a few years he'd be finished with school.

  He set my coffee and croissant down in front of me. He had ordered hot chocolate for himself and he sipped it carefully, a small frothy mustache forming on his upper lip. We smiled at each other again.

  “I should have got in touch,” he repeated.

  We took gulps of our drinks and looked at each other over the rims of the cups.

  “I heard that you fixed Morris pretty good,” he said.

  “It was him or me.”

  “Was it really with an iron?”

  “That's right.”

  “It must have hurt him.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I guess I should be pleased about that,” he said. “You know those Yakuza gangs in Japan? When they kill you, they do whatever they do until you're unconscious. Then they drag you outside and drive a car over and over you, breaking all your bones. There's a theory that you suffer pain on a very primitive level so you feel it even when you're in a coma and dying.”

  “Nice,” I said, pulling a face.

  “I felt for some time that I ought to do something to Morris. I thought of him hanging around with me and all the time him knowing what he'd done to Mum.”

  “I think that was part of the point.”

  “Then I thought, Fuck it. But maybe when he gets out.”

  “He won't get out until he's a doddery old man.”

  “A doddery old man with an arthritic knee,” Josh said with a grin.

  “I hope so. Fred will be out sooner. I was talking to Links about it. The trial won't be until next year, but for something minor like strangling your ex-girlfriend because she dumped you, he won't serve more than eight or ten years.”

  He put his cup down on the table and ran a thumb over his top lip, rubbing away the chocolate.

  “I don't know what I want to ask you,” he said in frustration. “I think a lot about asking you about it all, but now I don't know what I want to ask. I know what happened and everything; I know all of that—it isn't that.” He frowned and stared hopelessly at me with those eyes of his that had always made me think of Jenny, and he looked suddenly much younger, like the Josh I remembered from our ruinous summer.

  “You think there's something I should be able to tell you.”

  “Something like that,” he mumbled, and drew a finger through a small heap of sugar on the table. I remembered saying almost the same to Grace, all those months ago on the heath. I took a breath.

  “Your mother was murdered by Morris for fun. Then he picked on me, and if I hadn't been lucky you could have been sitting here with the next woman he chose, or the one after that. There's no reason. It could have been anyone, only it happened to be Jenny. And I'm really sorry,” I added after a pause.

  “ 'S'all right,” he muttered, still making patterns in the sugar, not looking up.

  “How's school?”

  “I go to a different one now. It seemed a good idea to change.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It's better. I've got friends.”

  “Good.”

  “And I've been seeing someone.”

  “You mean a girlfriend?”

  “No. Someone. To talk about things.”

  “Oh, well, that's good as well.” I looked at him helplessly.

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “This and that.”

  “You mean the same as before?”

  “No, I don't,” I said vigorously. I gestured to the small nylon hold-all tucked under my chair. “Do you know what's in that bag?”

  “What?”

  “Among other things, five juggling balls.”

  He looked at me as if he didn't understand.

  “Five,” I repeated. “What do you think of that?”

  “That's amazing,” he said, clearly impressed.

  “My master plan is to get out of this work altogether, but in the meantime I haven't exactly been standing still.”

  “Show me,” he said.

  “Here?”

  “Go on, show me.”

  “Do you really want me to?”

  “I have to see it.”

  I looked around. The café was almost empty. I took the balls out of the bag, three in one hand, two in the other. I stood up.

  “Are you paying attention?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You have to concentrate.”

  “I'm concentrating.”

  I began. It went right for about one second and then they went everywhere. One hit Josh, one hit my empty coffee cup.

  “That gives you the general idea,” I said, and scrambled under the table for one that had bounced into the corner.

  “Is that it?” he said, smiling.

  “Well if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

  “No, it was great,” he said, and he started laughing and laughing. Maybe this was my gift to Josh, and my good-bye: Nadia the jester, the one who didn't die, throwing colored balls around in a dark little café. A giggle, or maybe it was a sob, rose in my chest. I gathered the balls and put them back in the bag.

  “I better get going,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  We kissed at the door of the café, once on each cheek, and then went out into the blasting cold. As we turned to walk off in our separate directions, he said:

  “I still put flowers on her gravestone, you know.”

  “I'm glad,” I said.

  “I don't forget.”

  “Oh Josh,” I said. “You're allowed to forget sometime. Everyone's allowed to forget.”

  But as I went down to the canal path and walked along it, toward my flat, I thought to myself: I can't forget. I won't forget them, the women who died. Zoe and Jenny. Sometimes I know that they are gone. They are not here, and never will be again, no matter how I wait for them, these women I never met. But I still catch myself believing that I will see them when I round the bend in the road, when I climb on board a crowded bus and make my way up the aisle looking for a seat, when I scan the faces in a moving crowd looking for a friend I was supposed to meet, when I open my eyes in the morning after a dream that seemed real, even when it was over.


  I know their faces so well, better than the faces of anyone else, better than the face of my mother, my father; better than the face of a lover I once gazed at with passion and hope. I know their faces like my own face in the mirror. I have stared and stared at them, searching for clues, begging them to yield up their meanings, to help me. The tilt of a nose, the lift of a chin, the exact way she smiled, teeth gleaming; the exact way she frowned, with that little furrow between her eyes. Every wrinkle, groove, line, shadow, hollow, blemish, hurt.

  I never met them, yet I miss them. I never knew them then, yet I know them now, when it's too late. I know them in a way no one else ever could. They would have known me too. We might not have liked each other, but we are sisters under the skin, for their fear was my fear, their shame was my shame, their rage was mine, and their panic, and their violation, and their sense that there was nothing they could do, and their knowledge that the horror was coming nearer and nearer. I know what they felt. I felt it too.

  Others will gradually forget them, or at least they will let them go. That's how it should be when someone dies. The people who told them they loved them will say the same words to someone else. That's fine, that's right; that's the only way we can cope with life. We'd go mad if we remembered everything—and hung on to it. So they'll slide away. All their flaws and their irritating habits and their particular ways will fade, and they'll become vague, less vivid and less human. Too good to be true: blank, shiny surfaces where other people can stare at their own reflections. Their graves will be visited more and more infrequently; soon only on anniversaries and days of special importance. People will tell stories about how they once knew them, for proximity to tragedy makes us feel somehow important. They will use a reverent and hushed voice to talk of them: Oh yes, wasn't it terrible, what happened to Zoe, to Jenny? Wasn't it sad?

  But I can't forget them like that. I have to carry them with me wherever I go now; through the life I have got back again, through the years they didn't have, all the love and loss and change they never knew. Every day I say to them again: Good-bye.

  END OF BENEATH THE SKIN

  About Nicci French