Under Your Skin: A Novel

by Durrant, Sabine

  “I lucked out, didn’t I, finding you waiting for me at the top of the escalator.”

  “Robin, we’re the ones who lucked out.”

  I can hear Charlie fussing, hiccup-worrying in the way babies do when they want to go to sleep and don’t know how.

  “Come on, hop to it,” Robin says. The cries become more insistent. “Oh, come on. I need you to sleep. I’ve got to get blimmin’ cooking.”

  “Do you remember that brilliant advice you gave me—that you should rock a baby really quite forcefully? It’s counterintuitive, but it works. Eventually you reach that moment when the crying becomes rhythmic and then their eyes slowly close.”

  “You should have more,” she says.

  I almost sing my answer. “Too late now.”

  We talk a bit longer—about the baby and his erratic sleeping patterns, how Ian’s mum thinks a bottle would help. I keep talking, telling her what a great job she is doing, what a wonderful mother she is, because I can tell Robin needs the cheering and the distraction, but after a few minutes, her voice gets quieter. “So, are you all right?” she whispers.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  Robin yawns. “I might grab forty winks.”

  “That’s my girl,” I say.

  • • •

  A man is sitting in a car outside my house when Steve pulls up. I think of ringing the police, but it turns out they’re here already.

  DI Perivale has brought PC Morrow with him this time. She grins when I stop in the doorway of the kitchen, a wide-mouthed “me again” Wallace and Gromit grin. Marta has let them in, though she has gone out to collect Millie, “leaving them to it,” in DI Perivale’s words. My cleaner is in the house, PC Morrow adds, as if I might be worried about security. I can hear Nora shunt the Hoover back and forth in Marta’s room, the gurgle of water in the pipes as she Mr. Muscles the guest bath.

  I lean against the doorframe for a moment, not sure I have the strength to move. My legs feel wobbly. “Haven’t I answered all your questions already?”

  PC Morrow, who is sitting on the bench, wrinkles her freckled nose. Her forehead is without lines. She is wearing tiny gold hearts in her ears. “I know it’s a real pain,” she says, “but . . .” DI Perivale, at the head of the table, is studying a piece of paper in his lap, and because he’s not watching, she rolls her eyes and shrugs.

  “If you wouldn’t mind sitting down for a few minutes,” he says, looking up, as if I have just been ushered into his office. “It won’t take long, but it is important.”

  I unpeel myself from the doorjamb and sit. I think about offering a cup of tea, but something in his tone tells me I shouldn’t.

  “Have you seen this woman before?” DI Perivale asks. He has a slither of lettuce caught between two incisors, and a blob of what might be dried ketchup on the upper breast of his zip-up Adidas top. If I were a forensic pathologist, I’d say he had had a Big Mac on the way over.

  He spins a photograph toward me.

  I dread looking at it.

  It was taken in a garden, by a climbing frame. Two children are stretching from the lower bars. One of those red plastic climb-in toddler cars has been abandoned at her ankles, and she is leaning back to grab the smaller child’s legs, smiling broadly. She has those front teeth that lean in a bit, as if they have been pushed, and her dark red hair is pulled back in two bunches. She is slight, with a thin, narrow face, and thick fake eyelashes. One of her earlobes has about six rings in it.

  The picture makes me unbearably sad.

  “Are those her kids?” I ask.

  “Do you recognize the woman?”

  “Yes, of course . . . Who is she? Are they her kids?” I ask again.

  “We know she was Ania Dudek, aged thirty, of Fitzhugh Grove, SW18.” Was, he said, not is. “The family she worked for in Putney reported her missing when she didn’t show up on Saturday. It’s their children in the photo. She was working for them in the capacity of weekend nanny.”

  “Ania Dudek,” I repeat. A nanny. At least they weren’t her children. A nice job with a nice family in Putney, that congenial safe suburb where Nick Clegg lives. Not really two lives colliding at all.

  “Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Nothing.”

  “You ever been to Fitzhugh Grove?”

  “No. I know where it is, of course.” It’s a group of high-rise buildings on the edge of the common, formerly owned by the local authority. “But I’ve never been in.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod.

  “And Ania Dudek has never been here?”

  “No.” I look across at PC Morrow, who has put on a sort of “rather not be here, but I have to” face, a stab at female solidarity. I smile at her. “Never.”

  “Interesting.” He produces another sheet of paper. It’s a torn-out page from a magazine—a cutting—in a thin plastic folder. It’s an advert from the Lady for a live-in nanny in the Wandsworth area. The moment I see it—from the shape of the words, the layout—I know it is the ad I placed last summer after Robin gave in her notice.

  “Any notion why this might have been stuck with a magnet to Ania Dudek’s fridge?”

  I had sinusitis last winter and the infection went to my inner ear, causing sudden lurches of imbalance—unilateral vestibular dysfunction, the doctor called it. It wasn’t so much vertigo as a precipitous spinning; the room would shift on its axis. I have this sensation now. I’m staring at the table, at the plastic folder; I can see the sky and the clouds reflected in its transparent surface, and for an instant or two, I don’t know if I am sitting or falling.

  I manage to say that I have no idea. DI Perivale is asking questions, which I can hardly hear, because, as the dizziness passes, I am left with a roaring confusion in my head.

  “Did she come for an interview?” It’s the first time PC Morrow has spoken. She’s nodding, as if already confident of the answer.

  “I wish I could say she had,” I say eventually, “but she didn’t.” I cast my eyes around the tidy kitchen. “If I could lay my hands on last year’s diary I could show you who came. Oh I know, I’ve got a file with their CVs. I could dig it out.”

  “Just tell us what you remember,” PC Morrow says.

  “I remember everything from that summer. My mother was ill and our old nanny, Robin, was getting married—which was obviously wonderful, but also meant she was leaving us, so that was sad. For us, I mean.”

  DI Perivale looks impatient.

  “Anyway. I had two days of interviews. I saw about six young women. Actually, that’s wrong—five women, one man. Two were English; one was going to university in September, so that was hopeless; the other couldn’t drive. There was an older Armenian woman who wanted to come up by train from Croydon every morning. The man was South African: great if we’d had boys. A nice Portuguese lady: she seemed great, but her English was nonexistent . . . I had a few more to see, but my mother’s health worsened, and on the third day, we found Marta.”

  I am talking too much, trying to give them as much information as I can. Then an idea, an obvious thud of explanation. “I mean, maybe this . . . this Ania thought about applying for the job, if that’s her profession, and didn’t.”

  “Yeah, that could be it,” PC Morrow says. She looks at Perivale. “That makes sense.”

  “You know,” I continue, with relief, “how sometimes you stick things on the fridge and forget about them?”

  “Yeah.” PC Morrow wrinkles up her nose. “I’ve got some all-protein diet stuck on ours. Have I looked at it?”

  “You don’t need to diet,” I say, “and that high-protein Dukan thing—terrible for your breath.” She gives a squeezed hunch of her shoulders, as if she would laugh if she could. I think again how young she is. “Our fridge” is probably her mum’s.

  DI Perivale takes the plastic envelope, puts the photograph on top of it, and lines them up in front of him on the table. I can see specs of dandruff in
his part. I wonder if he is married, has kids.

  “Okay. One more question.” He hasn’t looked at me, but he does now—his eyes seem to bore into mine. “I have asked you this before, but I am going to ask again. Did you touch the body?”

  “The body.” I gaze at him. I try and think back. My head is fuzzy. If I can’t bear to think about her body now, how could I have touched it then?

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know I touched her hair.”

  “Did you take anything from the body?”

  “No.” I feel uneasy again. I don’t understand the direction these questions are taking. I feel as if I have forgotten something important.

  “You didn’t take a St. Christopher on a chain from round her neck?”

  “No. Why on earth would I do that?”

  He rubs his face, his eyes, with his thumb and fingers. “Look—Edmond Locard. The Locard Principle: every contact leaves a trace? Have you heard of that? Well, it’s one of the first things you learn at Hendon. Hair, flecks of paint, fibers, makeup—particles travel, move, shift. Every mote of dust has its own identity. Cotton has twisted fibers that resemble ribbon; linen looks like tubes with pointed ends.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And although the killer seems to have sprayed her neck with bleach—”

  “So that was the smell?”

  He nods, and continues, “We found certain fibers, certain DNA on her collarbone, which . . . It would just be helpful if you could rack your brains. Now, I know you were traumatized, in need of victim support”—he gives me a gnomic jut of the chin—“but if you could just tell us everything that you remember, it would help us a great deal in our enquiries.”

  I look up. Nora has tiptoed into the kitchen with a bucket and mop. I didn’t hear her coming. She wears slippers when cleaning; her feet whisper as she walks. I get up from the table to rummage around in the hall for my purse and dig out her money. It occurs to me to postpone paying her until next week, but I hate to do that. She has a family back in the Philippines and sends most of her wages home.

  When I walk back into the kitchen, DI Perivale asks if Nora is local (maybe he wants to check her papers), and I realize I couldn’t tell him, even if I wanted to. She has cleaned for me—emptied my bins, scrubbed my loos—for years and I don’t know where she lives. I sit down. Is it my imagination or do PC Morrow and DI Perivale exchange a look?

  “So just to be clear,” PC Morrow says, “apart from the hair, nothing of you touched anything of Ania Dudek’s?”

  You know if you forget a word or a name, the worst thing can be to rack your brain; that often it is when you think of something completely different that it comes to you? Maybe it was the reflective diversion about Nora that prompts me. Or maybe I would have got to it anyway, in my own time.

  “I did touch her,” I say. My head has cleared. “I mended her bra strap. It was one of those bras that attaches at the front and the strap was dangling out; it had come unpinged. So I did touch her. I did it up. I don’t know why I didn’t mention this earlier. I think it was because you said ‘body’ and I know I was careful not to touch the actual body.” I’m shaking my head. I remember suddenly the stiffness of the hook at the top of her bra, the coldness of the fabric. “I can see myself doing it. I don’t know why I did it, but I did, she just looked so . . .”

  “Aha.” DI Perivale sounds as if he has just solved a clue in the Times crossword. He asks if I have suppressed taking the St. Christopher, too. I shake my head fiercely. “Okay.” He nods.

  I ask if they know what killed her, and he says, “Cardiac arrhythmia, caused by pressure on the carotid artery nerve ganglion. The superficially incised curvilinear abrasions: self-inflicted bruises as she struggled to remove the ligature from her neck.”

  I feel myself blanch. “And what about who? Do you have any leads on that?”

  Perivale stares at me.

  “No boyfriend?” I say. “Aren’t they usually the first in the frame?”

  “A boyfriend.” He nods. “But not in the country at the time.”

  “And no obvious murder weapon,” PC Morrow adds.

  I am desperate for them to leave now. I don’t want to hear any more, but Perivale starts talking more about fibers—polyester threads, apparently, look like smooth, unwrinkled rods—and then he asks, for the sake of elimination, if he can take away the clothes I was wearing that morning. I fetch the jogging bottoms and the T-shirt and the gray running top as quickly as I can. And then, just when I think we must be done, he asks me where I was the night before the killing, between 4:00 PM and midnight. I don’t understand why he is asking this.

  “Well, I wasn’t on the common,” I say, “not then.”

  “She wasn’t killed on the common,” PC Morrow says chattily. “She was killed in her flat. We know that from the pooling of the blood in her body.”

  An exasperated frown knits DI Perivale’s brow. “When the heart stops,” he continues, in the dum-di-dum tone of someone repeating information for the umpteenth time, “blood settles in the lowest part of the body, causing the skin to become pink and red in that area. The hypostasis on Ania’s body suggests she was killed with her legs in a lower position to the rest of her—this is consistent with indentation marks found on the cover on the bed in her flat. There were two cups of tea there, one untouched, and a glass of water that had been knocked over.”

  “I was here,” I say, “at home. I had a nap, a run—just a quickie—then a shower, some supper, read to my daughter, watched a bit of telly . . .”

  “What did you watch?”

  “I can’t remember. Mad Men, I think.”

  “Can anyone corroborate that?”

  “Marta. Millie, for the early part of the evening.”

  “And what about later?”

  “I went to bed early, alone. My husband was at work and then out with colleagues.” I am being helpful, but I am also wondering why they want to know where I was. I found the body. Do they think I killed her? I can feel panic and the beginning of fear. Is this what a police investigation is? Pointless queries? Bureaucratic quagmires?

  Maybe he just has to ask, though. Maybe it’s policy—like having an HIV test when you’re pregnant—because then he moves on and asks a couple of questions about my stalker: the file on it “has drifted to the surface.” I tell him the stalking, if you can call it that, began at the end of last summer, which DI Perivale at least finds sufficiently interesting to write down.

  “It may just be a coincidence,” I say, “but I’m sure I saw someone watching the house on Saturday, and when I came in just now, there was a thuggish man, looking a bit suspicious, in a car outside.” I try to speak casually; I don’t want them to think I’m making a fuss.

  They both stand up. PC Morrow makes a circular movement with her shoulders, massaging out the tension.

  “That thuggish man outside?” DI Perivale shrugs. “He’s one of ours.”

  • • •

  After they leave, I take a run. It’s like getting back on a horse: I have to do it sooner or later. I don’t have my Asics, or my favorite running clothes—I don’t know when I’ll get them back—but I’ve got a pair of old Dunlops hanging around and some tracksuit bottoms, which will have to do. I tie Philip’s gray hoodie round my waist. I probably won’t need it, but it hides my bum.

  You can get to Fitzhugh Grove across the common—a path leads from the soccer field into John Archer Way, a new road created out of nothing when they built the modern housing estate, and then along a row of towering chestnut trees. If you take that route, though, you have to broach the police cordon, and even if you work round it, those big chestnuts, with their thick, reaching branches, turn the path into an uninvitingly dark corridor, so instead I pace along Trinity Road beside six lanes of thundering traffic. At the entrance to the grove, rattling in the vibration from passing lorries, is a yellow sign, appealing for witnesses. I jog on the spot for a bit, pretending to
read it, and then I walk a little bit farther in—just to where the cars are parked, blocks of flats separated by scraggy patches of grass. I can see the roof light of a police car whirling by the second tower, turning the wall intermittently orange. I feel drawn in, entangled. At the last minute, I turn on my heels and run home instead.

  Nearly at my house, just before the gate, a bulk comes out of the shadows, between me and it.

  I stifle a scream.

  “Oh, don’t,” the man says, putting out his hand. “Sorry. Gosh. Sorry. Did I scare you? What an idiot. Sorry.”

  I push quickly past him. He doesn’t block me—he moves easily out of my way. I catch a whiff of Polos, and tea, and the artificial bouquet of fabric softener.

  “Sorry,” I say, when I have put the front gate between us.

  “No, I’m sorry. After the shock of what’s happened, your nerves must be shot to shit.”

  I laugh. “Shreds.” I can see him properly now. He is not much taller than me, with curly hair and mad, haywire eyebrows. He has big brown eyes, appealing, slightly crinkled at the side, quizzical.

  “Shreds. Shit?” He makes a surprised face. “Where did that come from? Anyway, sorry to bother you like this.” He puts his hand out. “Jack Hayward. We spoke on the phone.”

  I nod, shake it. “Two worlds collide sort of thing.”

  “That’s the one. I thought it was worth a try to ask you personally. It’s such a good story. I’ve found out a few more things since then. I’m freelance. I need a break. Give me a break.” He opens his hands.

  “Have you thought of getting a proper job?” I ask, not unkindly.

  “I tried a proper job. You know, they make you go every day? And you have to wear a tie and sit at a desk?”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “People go on about the watercooler and how much fun it is around there, but have you been to a watercooler recently? Dead. Nothing. Some guy from accounts, that’s all. I’m telling you the party’s moved on.”

  “Maybe you’re just going to all the wrong watercoolers.”