Under Your Skin: A Novel

by Durrant, Sabine

  “No! You don’t need that. You just need me. Give me an exclusive, a nice in-depth profile, and I’ll turn this thing around.”

  I look at his face, trying to read it. A handsome face, but one Philip’s mother would call “lived in”—a large nose, smile creases on the cheeks, wild eyebrows, brown irises with strikingly dark rims. “How do I know you won’t do the dirty? You might be stitching me up.”

  He shrugs. “You just have to trust me.”

  He holds my gaze for a moment and then looks away. A firm chin, broad shoulders, a determined mouth: the sort of man who in a previous generation would have run a battalion, earned the respect of his troops. Journalism: the new armed forces. Is he to be trusted? Who knows? How old is he? The pent-up energy, the enthusiasm of a young man, but a fan of weariness around the eyes. That bitter flash earlier. About my age? But then I’ve started thinking everyone is “about my age,” until I find out they’re actually twenty-eight.

  “How old are you?”

  He shrugs. “Forty. Old enough to know better.”

  About my age. Well, almost.

  On the path, two young women with frog-shaped buggies have stopped, their heads turned toward us. There is a second when my face falls into its muscle-memory minor-celeb smile, but there is no smile back, no bashful dawning of why they recognize me. Their eyes narrow. I can hear whispers. They think I can’t see their lips move, or they don’t care. What do you think she was doing, getting mixed up with that dead woman? Obviously unhinged. Kicking a reporter like that. Did you see the bruise?

  I do need somebody, even Alison Brett agreed with that before she hung up. Perhaps Hayward knows how to tinker with search engines—bury my bruise way down on page twenty-three, where no one ever looks. Google-washing, Google-bombing, Google-bowling. We had a media manipulator on Mornin’ All a while back—some story to do with George W. Bush. I know it can be done. We can use each other. A symbiotic relationship. Goby fish and snapping shrimp. Or those birds that sit on the heads of African wildebeest.

  A large brown dog barrels over and starts digging the bark with its two front paws, pausing to sniff the newly formed hole and then frantically redigging. Earth is spraying onto Jack Hayward’s suit trousers; he’s collecting mulch in his cuffs.

  He laughs and calls the dog to him. “Come, boy.” The dog, tail wagging insanely, noses about a bit in his crotch, licks his hand, and gambols off. Hayward watches him disappear. Somewhere in the distance, a voice shouts, “ROGER!”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m probably mad, but okay.”

  “What, you’ll do it?”

  I nod. I shall have to be alert. That’s all.

  He makes a gesture with his elbow, and his fist and says, “Kerching!”

  “If you do that again, I’ll change my mind.”

  “Sorry,” he says, and then does it again, more mutedly, as if behind my back.

  He is pretending to be more carefree than he is. I’m intrigued. Perhaps he is playing a part, but he’s hardly alone in that. I will have to keep my eye on him. We will just have to see.

  I get to my feet and sweep a few globules of dog-displaced grassy mud from my lap, and we start walking back in the direction of the house. It has begun to rain. He is talking, with the attention to detail of someone for whom food is important, about the various goodies he has in his car—Italian sourdough from the bread stall on Northcote Road, some Somerset brie from the cheese shop—“thought it was worth trying”—and a couple of bottles of Belgian beer—“not very cold, but beggars et cetera.”

  “Are you thinking of coming back now?” I say. “This minute?”

  “If that’s all right?”

  Dark spots of rain on the path ahead, a rushing in the top of the trees. I frown, trying to look as if I am considering the matter, weighing the pros and the cons, still in control of the situation, while inside a tightness I hadn’t realized was there eases a little. Maybe it is loneliness, or despair, or the dread of an empty house, but I have that feeling—one I haven’t had in a long time—when you don’t want to let a person’s company go.

  • • •

  Jack goes to the car to collect his gubbins—as he calls them—so I am alone for a few minutes. I try Alison Brett again, but she doesn’t answer. I didn’t think she would. I pull a comb through my hair and make a stab at lunch. I chop tomatoes and slice mozzarella, chuck on salt and olive oil. I grate a couple of the zucchini-substitution carrots from the supermarket delivery, grating my finger along the way. Now they’re grated zucchini-substitution carrots with extra finger. I rack my brain. Didn’t Carol Vorderman do something clever with carrots in the Mornin’ All kitchen? I throw in some dried tarragon and a slop of orange juice from the fridge. I’m hurrying, which is ridiculous, because there is no hurry—no one, it seems, is going anywhere.

  I look up and see Jack crossing the lawn. I must have left the back door open. I’m disconcerted—it seems a bit forward, if nothing else—but I don’t have time to think because in seconds he is in the kitchen. His hair and clothes glisten. He makes one of those horsey brr noises that people make to express any sort of cold or discomfort, and unzips his mac. I ask if he needs a towel, but he says, “I’ll survive.” Unlacing his shoes, he bends over the edge of the bench. Rain scatters against the window, blurring the garden into green clumps. I chuck him a clean tea towel, whether he wants one or not. Overarm. See how casual I can be? It floats to the floor a few feet from him. He stoops to pick it up and gives his face a quick rub before handing it back.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  I’m rootling around in the fridge for a bottle of wine when he says, “Top salads. Where did they come from? It’s not bread and cheese. It’s a feast.”

  That’s why I was hurrying. I wanted him to see the salads spirited onto the table and be impressed. I was showing off. And now he is impressed—“a feast,” he said—and I feel foolish. It’s just carrots and orange juice and he’s just a hack. I am not the sort of woman to need male approval. If Jack Hayward thinks I’m nice, that’s enough. I don’t need him to move in. What is the matter with me? Why am I flustered?

  I’m holding a bottle of rosé, but I slide it back in next to the milk and take out the carton of juice instead. “Orange juice okay?” I say. “Though you’ve already got some of that in the carrots. Or would you prefer tea or coffee?”

  “A hot beverage,” he says in a funny voice, which makes me think he’s feeling awkward, too. He has laid the bread and the cheese on the table, spreading out the wrappers as if they were bone china platters. He is browsing the recipe books on the island shelf. He isn’t a big man—a little less than six foot—but he’s stocky, broad in the shoulder. He seems to take up more room than I’d bargained for.

  “I’ve got a Nespresso machine,” I say pointlessly. “Krups.”

  “Or I’ve got these Belgian Trappist ales, but they could do with chilling.”

  He crosses to the fridge and, clinking them out of a carrier bag, finds space for them inside. If he sees the bottle of rosé, he doesn’t say anything.

  I click on the kettle, just for something to do, and find plates—wincing with the clatter—and the two of us sit at the kitchen table. He has hung his waterproof politely over the back of a chair.

  Serving, I hold the spoons at a self-consciously high angle. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t said yes. There are stages I have missed. I should have checked his credentials, confirmed Jack Hayward exists, that he hasn’t made up the name, or co-opted someone else’s, that he is who he says he is. I remember Alison Brett saying never to let a journalist in the house. Even writers on the high-class Sundays want to make jokes about your bathroom fittings. Too late now. We eat. It’s an odd feeling—the rest of the house is so shuttered and dark—peculiarly domestic. “Pass the salt,” he says. “A pinch of salt is bloody good with these toms.”

  Philip and I haven’t sat at the kitchen table in months. If we’ve eaten together, we’ve eaten out.

&nb
sp; “They’re Riverford,” I say.

  “River what?”

  “You’ve heard of Riverford—organic veg boxes up from Devon, left on the doorstep every Tuesday. Our old nanny, Robin, introduced us to them.”

  “Very posh. Muddy veg for the middle classes.”

  “Don’t give me that—you and your Somerset brie that you ‘thought was worth trying.’ ”

  “All right, you’ve got me there. And yeah, I’ve seen their vans.”

  This exchange makes me feel better, less twitchy. This man isn’t looking around—sizing up the house, valuing the Craigie Aitchison. I’m the one studying every gesture, dissecting every word.

  “What do you think of the brie?” he asks, stabbing a chunk of it on the end of his fork, studying it like a botanical specimen. “Pleasant but not quite brie-y enough, is it?”

  “Oh, I think it’s quite brie-y,” I say.

  “I know what it needs.” He jumps to his feet and collects the beer, which can’t have had time to get much colder, and unscrews the tops.

  “Can you cook?” I ask, taking one from him.

  “Not bad,” he says. “I’m an everyday cook. I like simple ingredients, seasonal.”

  “Saying that these days has become tantamount to a moral code.”

  He laughs. “True. My mum was good. Four kids. I’m the only boy. She taught us all to cook. You?”

  “My mother wasn’t really the teaching-to-cook kind. More of a baked-beans-out-of-the-can sort of person.”

  “I’d say you have natural talent. The . . . er . . . carrot salad has an interesting flavor.”

  I sip the beer straight from the bottle. It tastes like caramel. I can feel it slipping down my throat, like that ad they used to show for Castrol oil. “Do you live locally?”

  “Brixton. For now. I’ve got a flat above a launderette, which is handy.”

  Intriguing: a man of his age in a flat above a “handy” launderette. “No Mrs. Hayward?”

  He prongs another corner of brie onto a torn piece of bread. “No current Mrs. Hayward.”

  Divorced, then, getting back on his feet. “Kids?”

  “Ah.” He wipes the olive oil juices on his plate with a piece of bread. He has barricaded the carrot in one corner. He’s working hard to avoid it. It wasn’t tarragon Vorderman used, now I think of it, but coriander. “Really good those toms. No. No kids.”

  I ask him how he ended up as a reporter and he launches into his life story—South Yorkshire, youngest child, mother dead, dad still alive, did a journalism course somewhere, a London evening paper, followed by the Express—or does he say the Mirror?—freelance these days. I don’t take much in. I’m after different sorts of information—how clever he is, how kind. Can he really disentangle me from this mess? Will he write a good piece? Is he to be trusted? That slight Yorkshire accent, associated with honesty, sharpens when he talks about his family—the short vowels, the g in youngest clung to like a security blanket.

  “Anyway,” he says after a while, “enough about me.” He gives a quick shake of his head, as if to say “I’m being boring,” though I am not finding him boring.

  “Ania Dudek,” he says abruptly.

  A ringing starts up in my ears, a surge of panic. I feel guilty. I had forgotten this was about her, as well as me. I have managed to put her out of my mind for a bit. “Ania Dudek,” I repeat, waiting for something inside me to still.

  He pushes his plate to one side, reaches into his pocket, and stops, brings his hands out again. Cigarette-less. “Now there’s a conundrum. From what I’ve picked up, hanging around out there, she was a hardworking Polish woman, training to be a teacher at Froebel College in Roehampton, doing jobs all hours of the day to make ends meet: nannying, dog walking, babysitting. She was learning ballet and had applied for British citizenship: get that. She was intelligent, making something of herself, putting down roots, and she ends up dead, strangled with a narrow ligature in her own flat and dumped a few feet away in the middle of Wandsworth Common. Pregnant,” he adds, as if the fact needs its own pause around it.

  I just wait. Sometimes I close my eyes when I think about her being pregnant.

  “And the police think you did it.”

  I let out a small involuntary noise because the juxtaposition of that is hard to hear.

  Hayward has moved the cheese wrappers and the bowls of salad farther down the table, as if clearing the decks. “Word is it’s an idée fixe with Perivale.”

  “An idée fixe?” I say, raising an eyebrow.

  He gives me an old-fashioned look. “An idée fixe. Mickey Smith of the Mirror—he’s a proper crime reporter, been around the block a few times—says DI Perivale has got a handful of facts and is determined to slot them into place. The policewoman—what’s her name?”

  “Morrow. PC Morrow.”

  “PC Morrow is not happy with the way the investigation is going. Mickey overheard her in the pub talking to one of the other coppers about how ‘blinkered’ Perivale is. Most people are killed by someone close to them—husband, wife . . . The big question is Ania’s boyfriend. I don’t know why they’re not looking at him. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s the boyfriend.”

  “He wasn’t in the country when she was killed,” I say. “Perivale told me that.”

  “Ah.”

  I laugh. “So there goes your theory.”

  He looks thoughtful. “Odd, though, his obsession with you. Mickey thinks it goes back to the morning you found the body.”

  “That was my big mistake,” I say, “finding the body.”

  “Your DNA all over the place . . . didn’t look good.”

  “I fixed her bra and I forgot to tell him. I touched her hair . . .”

  “A simple explanation. Then there are these other clues. The soil—I’m sure if we did a survey along every street round here we’d find traces of Italian mud on the front path of every other house. Anyone could have trodden it in: the milkman, the postman, someone delivering pizza flyers.”

  He has been busy. He seems to know everything. “What about the other connections?” I ask, intrigued. “The cuttings . . . the physical resemblance between us . . . The police think maybe she was stalking me.”

  “Here is what I think. She told her neighbor that she was going to apply for a job as your nanny. She was excited, nervous. She’d seen you on the television.” He catches my expression. “You have no memory of this?”

  “None. I promise you. She didn’t come for an interview. I would remember, even though it was a bit of a hard time for me. I can remember everyone I saw and I didn’t see her.”

  He is looking at me expectantly. “Hard time?”

  I’ve slipped up. “My mother had been taken ill. She died that week.” I say it as flatly as I can, but of course anything with death in it is loaded.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “Cancer?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Nothing prepares you, does it?”

  “You’re right.” I smile, a woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother, but he is wrong. I could tell him how prepared I had been, how for years I had known it was coming, but I won’t.

  He leans back in his chair, the pose of someone at ease with his own body, who has had enough to eat and is quite enjoying stretching his muscles. Where his shirt parts from his trousers, between two buttons, is an arrow of bare flesh.

  He sits forward again. “So you were distracted. Maybe you did interview her, or she turned up and there was no one here? Either way, I can understand why she might have become intrigued by you, cut out the occasional article to send home to her mother.” He shakes his head. “The clothes, the pizza receipt, on the other hand: baffling.”

  I don’t know if it’s the beer, but the way he shakes his head sends a shiver of relief through me so intense it’s almost delight. To be in the company of somebody who knows so many facts, in such forensic detail, and still believes in my innocence: I could sing. My friends might believ
e me, but it’s my version they have heard, whereas Jack Hayward’s information is unfiltered. An idea begins to grow.

  “Listen,” I say. “How about this. I give you your interview; we agree you can ask me anything you like. But before that, you help me dig about for a few days. You seem to have the contacts. I wouldn’t know where to start. And I’m not saying investigate, just do a bit of poking, ask a few questions, look where the police aren’t. Maybe we’ll find something that clears my name, maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll just kick-start Perivale. But at least we will be doing the right thing by Ania. I . . . I owe her that.”

  Jack doesn’t answer at first. He looks troubled, possibly a little panicked. I wonder if I have made a mistake. All this chat, all these opinions about the case, were they just to win me over?

  “But you’ll be back at work on Monday,” he says. “How much time can you really spend on this?”

  “I won’t be at work, sadly.”

  He makes an enquiring gesture with his head.

  “I’ve been . . . suspended.”

  A long pause. He seems to scrutinize my face. I’ve almost given up hope, when he says, “All right.”

  I breathe out. “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like I’ve got anything else on. And I can see how it might work. Two worlds collide, but in more detail, with a bit of investigative journalism thrown in. Might even flog it to the Sunday Times News Review.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and brings out a small dictaphone. “Where shall we start?”

  The dictaphone makes me feel uncomfortable and I am about to ask him to put it away, when my mobile rings. The phone is on the table and Jack looks at the screen before I do. It’s Philip. “Oh,” I say, “that can wait,” and I put the phone in my pocket.

  “Yes, where shall we start?” I echo. “Well, I have one possible explanation for the clothes and the pizza receipt, which is Marta, my nanny. But don’t tape any of this. It might not be for the article. It’s not that I think she killed Ania, just that maybe she knew her and has some reason for keeping quiet about it. She told the police she had never met her, but she told me she might have seen her a couple of times at church.”