• • •
PC Morrow—Hannah—is at the front desk when we arrive. She waves at me, a little trill of her fingers, and calls, “Hiya!” I wonder if Perivale has any idea how disloyal she is, how much she’s been spilling down at the café.
“Caroline Fletcher anywhere handy?” I ask Perivale as we parade the corridors.
“You don’t need Caroline Fletcher,” he says. “As you are the victim in this case, and not the suspect.” He stops dead outside a room, peers in through a small square window. “Unless you insist.”
“No, of course not. You’re right. Why would I need Caroline Fletcher?” His hand is gripping my elbow in a manner that is not reassuring. Just being here brings it all back, the terror and the claustrophobia. My legs feel sodden with dread.
He pushes the door open. It’s another of those small white cells, only this one has a desk, three chairs, and a computer. We sit down, and he fiddles about for a while. The red light above the CCTV camera on the wall blinks.
The door opens and PC Morrow scurries in, slinking into the third chair and mouthing, “Sorry, oops,” over Perivale’s head.
“Okay.” Perivale has got the information he needs up, though the screen is murky and PC Morrow has to lean over and show him where the brightness button is before we can see clearly.
“Right,” Perivale says, with a little extra pomposity to cover this blip in his technological prowess. “What you are about to be shown is a series of twelve short videos, each of a different person, face on and side view, matching the description you gave us of your stalker. Please study each video carefully and indicate to myself or PC Morrow if you see the man you recognize. This session is being filmed”—he points to the CCTV camera—“and voice recorded”—he points to a table in the corner—“to ensure neither myself nor PC Morrow influence your decision in any way.”
“No coughing or nudging,” I tell PC Morrow. “Got it?”
He sets the program in motion and I watch face after face shudder and spin across the screen. Short hair, squat features, wide faces. Millions of pixels. I wonder about the third. I am almost convinced by the fifth. I am losing confidence in my own memory by the eighth, but the ninth . . . “That’s him,” I cry. “That’s definitely him.”
“Percentage certitude?”
“Hundred percent,” I say. My eyes bore into the screen. The stocky stance, the narrow forehead, the bellicose set of the eyes. I shudder. “Yes, hundred percent. It’s the man who was outside my house, the man in the red Renault.” Perivale clicks off the machine and stands up.
I ask him if I was right, but he tells me he doesn’t know, that it isn’t his case. He couldn’t be in the room with me if it was. He will inform PC Evans, the officer in charge of this file, and someone will be in touch.
A spasm of unease. “So you don’t know if there were any fingerprints on the DVD?”
“I can find out.”
“And that man, do you know if he is in custody or—”
He winces. “He’ll have been video recorded, possibly cautioned, and released.”
“So. Yes. Okay.”
I push my chair back and join him at the door. “I don’t understand—if it’s not your case, why did you come and get me? Why did you sit with me just now?”
Perivale pulls down on his speckled jowls. “Come on,” he says. “Do you really imagine I would miss an opportunity to spend time with you?”
PC Morrow giggles nervously. I don’t know what to say. All the jokes I’ve made, the “no coughing or nudging,” is this what they have led to? This cringing stab at flirtation. Have I let him think he knows me? Or was Jack right? Is it just a sign of how misjudged this whole investigation is?
I’m so riled, I can hardly speak. “I wish I could say the feeling’s mutual,” I reply eventually.
• • •
Marta is back in the kitchen, standing at the island counter. Clara once said, in her experience (years of staff room coffee breaks), that people divide into two types: drains and radiators. Clara herself is a radiator: no question. Robin is a radiator. Marta is definitely a drain. I ask her if she saw anyone suspicious poking around this morning, and she shakes her head. “No. I see no one.” She has been eating cereal and she puts her bowl in the dishwasher and the milk back in the fridge.
I watch her as she shifts around the kitchen, small, careful movements. She sits back down at the table, her eyes scanning a magazine. I decide, this time, to skip the preamble. “I was spring cleaning this week,” I say, trying to smile, “and I had a little dust round your room.”
Little dust. I can’t even talk to her about this without making myself cringe.
She looks up, her eyes heavy.
“Found my jeans! They must have been put away there by mistake . . .”
She has flushed. She doesn’t actually have to say anything, and I can see the struggle in her face. Finally, she says, “I’m sorry. I borrow them. I just see if they look good.”
My heart softens slightly. “And did they?”
She looks down at the magazine. “No.”
“Well, that’s one mystery cleared up. The other thing, I couldn’t help noticing all the envelopes and the box of receipts under your bed.”
Her fingers spread a fraction on her mug. She is wearing black nail polish, with a diamanté star in the center of each nail, the sort of manicure that demands a nail bar or a beautician. The world seems to be shrinking to a few people, tight points on a graph.
“It’s just, I wondered . . .” She is waiting tensely to hear what I am going to say. “I don’t want you spending your own money on things like that,” I conclude. “Sending things home or whatever. You know, let me pay.”
Her face is rigid. “No,” she says. “Don’t pay. It’s fine.”
“But all those presents home.”
“Not presents. They are not presents home. I sell.” She puts down her mug, pulls the ends of her ponytail to tighten it. “I sell on eBay.”
“On eBay?” I can feel myself getting closer. “What do you sell?”
“Just things.”
I watch her carefully. “Things?”
“Things I find . . . things I buy cheap.”
A haze clears. The screen brightens. You just have to find the right button. It is as clear as it is shocking. She has been taking my clothes, siphoning off the odd item here and there, stealing them.
It’s a relief to sit down. My legs are leaden. “Did you sell anything to Ania Dudek?”
Her face closes. Her hands rest on the table, flat. “No.”
Is she lying? “Do you know,” I continue carefully, “I’ve got a big bag of clothes upstairs you could have. They’re just going to charity otherwise. Keep the proceeds. You’d be doing me a favor.”
She rubs under her eyes. “But . . .” she begins.
I am a little gratified to see the traces of mortification, a different sort of blush, higher on the cheeks. I should probably be outraged, but I am aware of a grudging respect. Was it so bad? I get sent so much. Some of those clothes still had their labels. I didn’t even notice them gone.
“Did you tell the police about your eBay business?”
“No.”
“Did they ask if they could see you again? Did Perivale ask you any questions earlier today?”
“No.”
I lean back. “I’m baffled. All the evidence they have about Ania Dudek’s murder is tied not to me but to this house. It could be anyone. Today, Perivale said he had dug up something else, though I’ve no idea what that is. It might not be connected. The peculiarity for me is, why aren’t the police questioning you as much as me?”
She shrugs. “Perivale tell me. He know I am not the murder.”
I find it harder than I imagine to put what I want to ask into words. “How do you know?” I say eventually.
“How do I know I am not the murder?”
I let out an involuntary laugh. “How do you know that he knows that you are not the murderer, yes.
”
“I know because I could not have done it. I was with another person the whole time.”
“Do you mind me asking who?”
She starts telling me a story, and to begin with, I can’t work out where it is going. It’s about Millie and a bad dream and how the night Ania was murdered “Millie was frightened and came into my bed.” Details land in my brain—Marta sang to Millie and told her stories about a chicken—but I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t hear how the story ends.
“Sorry? What did you say?”
“I said so I told the police I could not kill Ania Dudek, because I was with Millie all night.”
But I’m still not really listening, or concentrating, because I don’t care about that. I don’t care who killed Ania Dudek. Or whose alibi Perivale has followed up and whose he hasn’t. All I can think is that when Millie had a nightmare she went not to me, her mother, but to Marta; she curled into her back, tangled her limbs with hers. This woman, who may be complicated and a little bit deceitful, who may borrow my jeans and use my perfume, sung to my daughter the night Ania died and hugged her and kept her safe.
And for a moment that’s all that matters.
• • •
When my mobile rings, I almost don’t answer. I have been lying on my bed in semidarkness. Marta has gone to her evening class. Creaks and groans and rasping come from the walls. Traffic on Trinity Road is heavy tonight, or the wind is in the wrong direction. Every now and then, the house shudders. My thoughts have returned to turmoil, rationality subsumed by indecision and fear.
“Hi,” Jack says. “I’m ringing to say I’m sorry.”
I try to sound unconcerned. “What are you sorry about?”
“I’m sorry I was rude and insensitive.”
“That’s okay.”
“Well, it’s not, is it? I should never have called you ‘TV’s Gaby Mortimer.’ You’re not TV’s Gaby Mortimer.”
“Well, that’s nice!”
“You know what I mean. You’re more than just TV’s anything.”
“Thank you.”
“I was being a cock.”
“A cock?”
He laughs. “Do we not use the word cock?”
I smile. “Not if we can help it.”
“Okay. I was being an arsehole.”
I raise my eyebrows. “An arsehole?”
“Is that banned, too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“A tosser?”
“You can probably get away with tosser.”
“It’s just . . . I don’t know . . .”
“What?”
“Well. You know. You’re funny and sweet, and you are in trouble, and we seem to get on quite well, but one minute you want my help, and the next minute you don’t.”
Funny and sweet: the words are like daisies. I could reach down and pick them, turn them into a chain and hang them round my neck. It’s such a long time since anyone has called me funny, or sweet. They seem like cheats, words from somewhere in the past. “I am sorry if I keep putting you in a bad mood,” I say eventually.
“I was probably just hungry.”
I smile. “Well, it had been at least ten minutes since you’d had something to eat.”
“I wasn’t that keen about the whole thing at first. To be honest, I thought I’d play along just to get you to give me the interview, but now . . . now I’ve got to know you, I want to sort your problems out. I really do. So I wish you’d let me.” His voice is scratchily deep, as if he has a bad chest, or has just had a cigarette, a nice voice, the kind of voice a nice girl should fall for.
I caterpillar my head off the pillow so it is flat on the duvet. My feet dangle off the end. A small black dot comes into focus on the ceiling. It might be a tiny spider, or a fly, or it might just be a black smudge. Is it moving? Is the space between the black spot and the chandelier increasing or staying constant?
“Thank you,” I say after a bit.
“You know, I was thinking. Christa knows something. I’m sure of it. We need to ask her if we can see Ania’s diaries, Gaby, don’t we? See if we can find out what was going on, dig up anything that might take the focus off you.”
I should tell him now what Christa said about Ania’s other man. But it has been a long day. I am ridiculously tired, too tired, even, to keep trying to clear my own name. What does it even matter anymore? And I’m liking this conversation now, as it is. Here is a man who knows I am in trouble and is desperate to help—unlike Philip. And maybe it’s awful of me—I think fleetingly of that woman we had on the program once, who was recovering from Munchausen syndrome and had made up illness after illness in search of the sympathy and attention she had never had as a child. This is probably a sort of Munchausen’s, keeping the information back for a bit, letting the warmth of Jack’s concern lap over me. I wish I could say I don’t tell him because I am keeping my word to Christa, battling with my conscience, but it’s not that. It’s wanting the focus, the solicitude on me, just for now. So no, not honorable. My motives are altogether more dubious.
“You okay?” he says.
“Yes.” My voice is a squeak. “It’s just the beginnings of a cold.”
“Gaby, something is up. What is it?”
The black dot on the ceiling hasn’t moved. It’s not an alive thing at all. It’s just a black dot, a smudge of dirt.
I give in to temptation—let him feel even more sorry for me than he already is. “The police have got new evidence. I don’t know what it is. Perivale told me today when I . . . when I was down at the station.”
“You were down at the station? Why were you down at the station?”
I let out a sigh. “A man was caught poking about outside my house this morning—the same one as yesterday. The police took him in, but they’ve released him.”
“Have you locked all the doors?”
“Yes.”
“Are you on your own?”
“Marta is at her evening class.”
“I’m coming round.”
A car engine idles outside the window. I let myself wonder when Philip last made me feel looked after like this. Ambition and drive: they can leave ordinary kindness behind. In the last few days, I have felt stripped down to something bare and ordinary, and Jack wants to take care of that ordinary, bare person. It stirs up doubts I don’t know what to do with.
Jack says, “Do you want me to come round?”
There is a tone in his voice, in the seriousness of it, that makes me think about his hands, the span of them, the blunt shape of his fingers. I think about his face and how his moods flicker across it in such a simple, uncomplicated way. I reflect with impartiality on his body and how heavy it might be if he lay across me, the soft texture of his hair entangled in my fingers.
“I’m not doing anything,” he says. “Stuck here on my own. Highlight of my evening was going to be a glass of cheap plonk and a takeaway pizza.”
A glass of cheap plonk and a takeaway pizza. A flat above a launderette, bunk beds full of kids. If I hadn’t met Philip, perhaps Jack is the sort of man I would have married. Perhaps he’s even the sort of man Philip might have been, with a few more knockbacks, a little less success. Could Jack be my alternative ending?
WEDNESDAY
The bottom sheet is wrinkled and bunched; the duvet half across me, half off. My clothes lie twisted in a trail across the floorboards: my T-shirt and my bra, my everyday M&S pants inside my jeans. My armpits bear the salty dampness of fresh sweat.
The loo flushes, and he stands in the door to the bathroom, naked, his face ruddily tanned, his body lily white. He smiles and flops face forward across the bed. The mattress exhales.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hello.”
Extending his arm along my upper back, he rolls me over so we’re spooned. His chin rasps against my neck; his mouth and nose nudge my naked nape. “I do like it short,” he says. “I really approve.”
“Well, I am glad,” I s
ay. “Your approval is obviously paramount.”
• • •
He came directly from the airport, straight to the house, not the office. I can’t remember when he last did that. The door, the thump of his bag, the cry of my name, and he was in the kitchen. I was eating cereal, and the spoon catapulted muesli and milk onto the table. There was no time to swallow my shock. He was just there, arms outstretched, an outpouring of anguish and emotion—half drunk, half jet-lagged; I don’t know. A tide of hyped-up sentiment. He decided to surprise me. As soon as his meetings were done and dusted, he had wanted to get home. It was all he cared about. There had been a boat trip planned—he had been keen to go, but . . . My mouth was squeezed into his shoulder, my whole body crushed. When I laughed, taken off guard, it came out like hiccups.
“I’ve got to see Millie,” he said, pulling back.
“She’s in Suffolk with Robin and Ian. I told you.”
He arm-lengthed me for inspection. “Your hair!” he said. And then, careering straight into a speech I imagined him planning on the flight, the queue for passports, the taxi: “I’m sorry for everything, Gaby. I know you’ve been through hell. It’s all going to be different. We’ll start again. We’ll do anything, go anywhere you want.”
“Okay.”
“What’s happening with the police? Have they . . . ?”
“They haven’t charged anyone yet.”
“Have they left you alone?”
“Sort of.”
“Thank God. And work? They gave you some time off?”
Did he really not know?
“Sort of,” I repeated.
“Gabs. I’m so sorry about everything. Not just with . . . what’s been happening to you, but with how I have been . . . I can’t believe . . . Come here.”
He pulled me to him. It was like a full-body massage. He wasn’t himself. He was trying too hard. Marta was coming into the kitchen, and we exchanged a look of alarm. She backed up the stairs and disappeared. I heard her door shut and floorboards creak overhead.
“Do you not have to go to the office?” I asked.
“No. They can give me a bloody day off.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Just those minibottles of rioja on the plane.”
Under Your Skin: A Novel Page 24