Under My Skin (11 page)

Egged on by images of glamor, I called Milan only to get another answering machine, this time in glorious, speedy Italian. I left a message in dull, slow English. Let’s just hope she’d remembered to tell her husband about the facelift.

I was about to try Mrs. Muriel Rankin, the walking case of scar tissue with serious liposuction trouble, when the fax activated. Hold the front page. And the next call. When I’m rich and successful, I’m going to have a separate line for the fax, so I can talk and read at the same time.

I lay and watched it chuntering its way over the machine and onto the floor. The minute it stopped the phone rang.

“You haven’t broken the portable already, have you?”

“No. It’s switched off.”

“Good. Cos I’ll want it back when you leave. I presume you’ve written your letter of resignation?”

“What?”

“Well, you’re no longer at Castle Dean and you’re not at the office. And this is 11:33
A.M.
on a working day. Do you want me to send on your P forty-five?”

“Sod off, Frank. I worked all weekend. And how the hell do you know I’m not at Castle Dean anymore?”

“Because I’ve just spoken to them, that’s how. If you remember, Hannah, employees are supposed to call in every two to three days with a progress report. That is what we decided.”

For “we” read Frank. And for “employees” read me. He has these brainstorms sometimes. They usually don’t last
long. Truth was I was going to leave a message on the office answering machine yesterday, but then I’d got my head caught between a couple of overweight thighs and everything else had been wiped from the back memory. “What’s your problem, Frank? You got nothing better to do on a Monday morning than whine?”

“Au contraire, my little frog bait. As of 9:30 I’ve got a custody snatch case in Madrid and a tasty computer fraud job in Newcastle, both jumping up and down on my desk calling for volunteers.”

Madrid versus Newcastle. No prizes for which one I was being offered. Computer fraud in Geordie country, eh? More macho than tracking down women whose fat has been sucked out from the wrong bit of them, certainly, but in my experience regional detecting is like local radio—it’s a liability having a London accent. “Sorry, Frank. I’m afraid I’ve already got a job.”

“Oh? Have you formed your own company, or is this strictly moonlighting?”

“Frank! It would bloody well serve you right if I had. I haven’t noticed my name going up on the door yet, despite all those promises.”

Comfort and Wolfe: there was a time when I used to play with the sound of the words, like teenagers testing out rock stars’ surnames in place of their own. Fantasy. Good fun as long as you know that’s all it is. Of course it’ll never happen. I know Frank. He doesn’t want to lose the pleasure of bossing me around. And if I’m honest with myself, I’m not that keen on becoming the kind of person who runs the business rather than just does it.

To placate him I told him a bit about the job and asked his advice. He was sulky but not unhelpful. He pointed out the obvious connection of the handwriting, though said in his experience anonymous-letter writers could go to untold lengths to disguise themselves, using left hands instead of
right, or even holding the pen with their toes. He also found the fact that Olivia Marchant had kept everything from her husband a bit odd. But then that’s Frank for you. As he never fails to mention, he probably wouldn’t have employed me in the first place if he could have got a man cheaper. It is, of course, bluster. I tell you for nothing if I were in a tight spot and was offered a choice between Cat Woman and Frank Comfort I’d ditch my feminism any day.

I went back to the fax and all the little Castle Deanies who’d plumped for surgical self-improvement as a way of spending even more money. It wasn’t that long a list and on the second page in I found her—Muriel Rankin, or Mrs. Pear Shape with the slasher past. Forty-eight last year, she had spent ten days at Castle Dean in a super-deluxe room with all the trimmings. Ten days—she wouldn’t have come away with much change out of two grand. I checked out her occupation. She didn’t have one. Her husband did, though. He was the owner of a fleet of garages. No encouragement to walk, I suppose. Which is why she had such trouble with her thighs. And still did, despite her appointments with Maurice Marchant. I went back to his notes on her case. In the margin, by her return visit (to which she’d brought her husband), there was a little scrawl, made even scrawlier by the photocopier. I had noticed it yesterday afternoon but couldn’t be bothered to try and decipher it. Now I tried harder. “Unstable personality?” I think it read. Her or the garage owner?

It was all so easy I was almost ashamed.

I
won’t bore you with the journey. One trip round the North Circular is much like another and although the A10 may end up in the romantic fens of Cambridgeshire, it passes through a lot of crap on the way.

Not her address, though. It was on the outskirts of a sleepy little town called Hoddeston, and although the house may have been built on axle grease it was sound-enough property. Neo-Georgian I think the term is—all new brick, fake cornices, and carriage lamps, the kind of thing that makes brave young architects want to throw themselves from the Lloyd’s Building lifts to draw attention to the alternative. It had probably always had a queasy relationship to kitsch, but the dozen or so brightly colored garden gnomes scattered liberally around the front garden had definitely pushed it over the edge. Weird.

It was mid-afternoon by the time I had parked the car and walked up the front drive. The weather had reinvented itself in the way only English weather can, and after the rain of the day before, there was now warmth and stillness, summer already kicking at the heels of spring. I rang the doorbell. No one answered. I wasn’t surprised. They probably couldn’t hear it over the sound of Roy Orbison blasting out from the back. “Pretty Woman.” In this case not so much a song as an attempted way of life. I peered through the front windows into a large dining room, empty save for a handsome table and a set of removal boxes stacked at the sides.

I went round the side to the back garden. It was what estate agents call “well established,” mature fruit trees and flower beds framing a cricket-pitch lawn. There’s a limit to what a girl can learn from tending a window box, but it so happened I had just been listening to “Gardeners’ Question Time” on the car radio, and they’d been getting so excited about bedding plants that even I noticed the gap at the front of the beds where this year’s petunias should have been. Put that together with the packing cases and you might be forgiven for thinking that someone was leaving. I tell you, people pay me money for this kind of thing.

They hadn’t taken everything, though. The art remained. The French windows were flung open and on the lawn were a number of large paintings, some propped up against boxes, some just lying on the ground. On closer inspection they were all by the same artist.

There was one straight in front of me as I turned. Large, maybe ten by twelve, it was a family portrait: a blond man and a redheaded woman sat on a sofa with two little girls around Amy’s age in front of them, all staring directly out of the canvas. I’m not a great one for art appreciation, more of a “I know what I like” kind of girl, but even I can read crude homage when I see it. The artist didn’t have anywhere near the subtlety or talent of Lucien Freud but did share some of his obsessions—most notably nakedness and a Leigh Bowery size of body.

It wasn’t quite what you expected in your average happy family. The word
dysfunctional
crept into mind (another gate-crasher or a helpful social addition?) and I found myself checking out the man’s penis for signs of unacceptable life. But when I managed to find it, a curled slug on a bed of crispy kale, it seemed remarkably benign, not to mention almost forgotten. I thought back to the before and after pictures of Mrs. Rankin’s bottom and thighs. And I must say I was rather disturbed.

The other pictures were more of the same. In some of them the background was different—for sofa read a kitchen table (the chairs looking dangerously uncomfortable and spindly under the weight of their occupant) or a garden rug—but the nudity and the bulk of the family remained the same. And so did the gaze. Look at us, the figures seemed to say, aren’t we challenging?

“What do you want?”

I turned to see her standing in the frame of the French windows, the sun straight on her. My first thought was how small she was, lost in a pair of baggy men’s overalls, untidy long fair hair caught up in a dirty band. My second, how young.

“Hello. Are these yours?”

“You’re on private property. You’d better leave.”

“Actually I was looking for Mrs. Rankin. Muriel Rankin?”

“She’s gone. She doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Oh.” I glanced down at the paintings. “Did you—”

But she just wasn’t the chatty type. “This is my house now.”

“Fine. Well, if you could just tell me where I can find her?”

She stared at me, eyes squinting into the sun, then she sniffed loudly and rubbed her hands down on the side of her overalls. “Sure. It’s not far. If you go back out of here and take the first turning on the left. Follow that road for about three, four hundred yards and the entrance is on your right, just after the traffic lights. You can’t miss it. Hers is one of the new ones.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling her eyes on me as I walked away.

She was right. It wasn’t hard to find. And hers was one of the new ones. Three and half months to be exact.

In terms of size Muriel Rankin had definitely traded down. The stone tried hard to make up for that. Pink marble, veined and carved. Fancy. Worth a few bob. The writing was fake gothic script. The kind they used to put on the tombs of Dracula’s victims so the master would know where to find his loved one again.

That was it. No words of comfort, no hope for the future. Dust to dust. I wondered how far the worms had got with their alternative method of flesh reduction. Not the world’s most comforting thought. Maybe I should have accepted Frank’s offer of the computer fraud after all. The only thing overweight there would have been the numbers.

I stood for a while working out how much petrol I had wasted on the journey. But those naked bodies kept coming back into my mind—mother, father, and little Sarah and Cilla, and I knew I wasn’t finished with the Rankins yet. Not least because Big Daddy was still alive.

I drove back and parked outside the house. Roy Orbison had given way to Bonnie Tyler. “It’s a Heart Ache.” She was singing her lungs out. For a young girl she had old tastes. Maybe it was her mother’s collection.

She was standing in the lawn with a brush in her hand, staring at one of the canvases. It was the portrait of the family around the kitchen table. The sun had been chased away by some showery clouds and the garden looked a little less vibrant. The paintings, though, were still striking. “Well,” she said, her eyes on the figures. “Did you find her?”

Good hearing, I thought. “Yes, thanks, I did.”

She didn’t say anything for a while, just kept on looking. Not so much emotional as professional. And the animosity from before seemed to have faded away. Sarah or Cilla? Not Cilla, surely?

“I’m sorry.” But she didn’t say anything, just gave a little shrug. “I … wonder if I could ask you some questions, Sarah?”

“Farah.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The name is Farah.
F
not
S
.”

Gothic script. It plays havoc with the curly ones. Farah and Cilla. God save the children of mothers who watched too much television.

“Farah, then. I’m Hannah Wolfe. I’m a private investigator.”

“Really,” she said with a hint of bad American in her voice. “I thought they only existed in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping round hotel rooms.”

I have to admit that my mouth dropped open with surprise. I mean for me Raymond Chandler is just part of the myth, the kind of thing PIs read instead of fairy tales, but I don’t expect others to be so well versed. Or so interested. But was it the book or the movie? “How do you know that?”

“Muriel had this video of a film—”

“
The Big Sleep
?”

“Yeah. She used to play it all the time when we were growing up. She was in love with the woman in it.”

“Lauren Bacall.”

“Yeah, that’s her.”

In love with Lauren Bacall, eh? She wasn’t the only one. I shot a glance at the big woman in the painting. They didn’t look like they had a lot in common.

“In the same way she loved Farrah Fawcett Majors?”

The young woman laughed. “No, that was more of a crush. The kind of thing you get when you’re pregnant. Poor me, eh? At least Cilla’s famous again.”

Eight weeks on and she was coping very well. Now I could see her better I realized she was indeed as young as her name suggested. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Cilla presumably would be older. “Can I ask how your mother died?”

And now she turned toward me. “Why? What makes you want to know?”

I gave her a massaged version of the truth.

“Marchant? Yeah, I remember him. I didn’t think he was that bad. She’d been to others who’d done worse.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. She was quite an expert on cosmetic surgery, was my mother. Before the guy in Harley Street she’d had her nose and tits done at some clinic, and then her face lifted somewhere up north.”

Cowboys, that’s what Olivia Marchant would have said if she’d been here. “Had they been successful?”

She laughed. “I’ve no idea. She looked a bit smiley, though.” She put up her hands and pulled her cheeks tight back against her ears. Her face took on a definite death-skull look. She released the skin. Boy, the young. They sure know how to bounce back. “It never made her look like Lauren Bacall, though, that’s for sure.”

“And she minded that?”

“Listen … My mother minded everything. She spent her entire life wanting to be someone else. Having her hair done to look like a magazine picture, her teeth fixed so she smiled better, her thighs sucked to make her legs look longer. And the more she did, the worse she felt.”