Under My Skin (17 page)

Or maybe the reason I wasn’t getting anywhere was that I was looking in the wrong place. With no one else clamoring for my attention, my thoughts strayed back to little Lola, and that stubborn silence of hers. But even if I had got her wrong, it still didn’t make any sense. She might have been capable of malicious intent, but then why bother to pay herself seven hundred pounds to pretend it wasn’t? There was a copy of her application form in her file, but it was typed. The signature was big and rather childish and, anyway, didn’t have that many letters in common with the note. There was perhaps a certain similarity between the
s
’s, but the
m
’s and
a
’s looked totally different. But presumably you’d make an effort to disguise yourself. Frank would no doubt be able to dig out a handwriting expert from his old police Filofax, but there was no point in calling in precious favors unless I had more than one suspect to show him. In the absence of anyone more interesting I promoted her higher up the list. Her application form included a reference from a salon in West London. I made a note to go there the next day.

I had a second cappuccino and a doughnut. The pianist had stopped caressing the ivories and someone had put on a tape. Brian Ferry’s greatest hits. I paid the bill to the strains of “Let’s Stay Together.” And here’s one for a certain family in Islington. Hey, hey, Colin, the message is in the words.

It was already light outside as I shoveled all the stuff in the car. And later than I thought. Detecting can be engrossing business. Already after five. Well, tomorrow was going to be a full day.

On the road up past St. Pancras, a works lorry was unloading a whole set of orange bollards. Just what the new British Library needed. More pneumatic drills. I turned east to avoid it, round the back of Kings Cross, then out up by the Caledonian Road. I wasn’t that far from Kate’s house. Well, well. Funny the way your wheels turn when you’re not thinking about it. I crossed into the Liverpool Road and let the car do the driving.

Their street was awash with bird noise. A bloody great dawn chorus scattered over a line of elder trees, with a couple of fat blackbirds like conductors in evening dress leading the throng. Surprised anyone was still asleep, really. I parked a few yards down from the house and waited. I still wasn’t thinking. If you’d asked me, I probably would have said that no private eye likes to waste a good night’s work. And one suspect is much like another. I wouldn’t have believed it of course, but then that’s hardly the point. When I got tired of the birds, I played with the radio, bouncing my way up and down the dial. Lots of people wished me good morning. I had no reason to believe them. They also gave me time checks. The hour between six and seven positively sped by.

Three times a week, Kate had said. Not necessarily today, so it was up to fate and the calendar. At 7:04 a light went on in one of the upstairs windows. The bathroom. I knew it well; many a time I had sat on the edge of the bath while children water-bombed me or checked out the medicine cupboard on the nights I baby-sat, just in case. The light snapped off again. I counted the steps down from the first floor. The front door opened and Colin came out wearing a gray tracksuit. He was carrying a suit on a hanger and a plastic bag and briefcase. He trotted down the street away from me to his car. I watched him go.

I tried to look at him as someone else would, someone
more neutral than I. He must be—what?—forty-one, fortytwo now. Not a bad figure, spreading just a little (the imaginary gym wasn’t doing much to help that) and the hairstyle a little too seventies for my taste. But at least he still had some hair, and a reasonable face underneath it. Mr. Average, really. Middle class, middle aged, and middle browed (and none the worse for that, my girl, I heard my mother say, for all that you sneer at it).

He beeped his key at the car, which lit up in anticipation. That’s another thing I hate about him. Him and his gadgets. He carefully hung up the suit in the back, slid in the front, checked himself (rather than the road) in the mirror, and drove off. I waited fifteen seconds then did the same.

I played coy. Well, you have to be a little cautious when yours are the only two cars on the road. At Highbury Corner the pace quickened and others joined the dance. I let him keep one car ahead until he turned left halfway down Holloway Road. He was, as far as I could tell, heading straight for the Caledonian Road pool and gym, or the Cally as it’s known locally. I couldn’t decide whether I was pleased or disappointed.

But we never got to the Cally. Instead, he took a left down Camden Road and then did a square dance of oneways until we landed up in a tree-lined street at the back of Kentish Town. He stopped so quickly halfway down that I had no option but to sail right past him and turn the corner. By the time I had done the circuit he was nowhere to be seen. He could have gone into any one of a dozen houses. I parked about fifty yards back in the direction he wouldn’t be traveling and waited. How long would it take? How long’s a piece of string? Sorry, Colin. Didn’t mean it personally.

In the car I listened to “Today.” The same stories were coming around again when he emerged, nearly an hour later, up some stairs from the basement flat across the road. He walked smartly to his car. But then he was smart now, all
dressed and ready for work, the tracksuit presumably in the bag by his side. Well, if you’re going to take your clothes off, why not change them at the same time? Ready for the office. A new man. Interesting. I’ve always suspected that really they are just the same as the old ones underneath.

I watched as his car drove past me. I had to resist the urge to hit the horn. A little blast up the backside. So Kate had been right. Colin was on the razzle. A man with a mistress. Oh my, oh my, oh my. Who would have believed it? It was the kind of thing Pete Pantin probably had a song about. Remind me not to buy the album. Question was, what next? I don’t exactly remember making the decision to get out of the car and cross the street. But once I was there, I was pleased I had. No. 34. My lucky number from last night. I went down the stairs and rang the doorbell loudly. It took a while, but at last she opened it.

She wasn’t exactly Julia Roberts—probably in her late thirties, early forties, dark hair in no particular style, with a slash of lipstick across the mouth and a smattering of mascara. She was already dressed in trousers and a sweater. Nothing special. I have to say she didn’t look much like a woman for whom the earth had just moved. But then that’s Colin for you.

“Yes?” She was, however, definitely edgy.

“Good morning. I’m looking for a Miss Peters, Gillian Peters?”

“There’s no one here of that name.”

“I see. Is this thirty-four Stratton Gardens?”

“No, it’s Fairwood.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I wonder—”

But I didn’t get any further. Behind me I heard footsteps on the stairs and I turned to see a man of around fifty carrying a briefcase and an umbrella. When he spotted me, he went decidedly pale and hesitated. Bloody hell.

“Excuse me,” she said to me sharply.

“What? Oh yes, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

He kept his eyes well down as I moved past him and clattered up the stairs. Behind me I heard the door shut.

I stood in the street feeling like someone had just smashed me in the ribs. It did, of course, all make an appalling kind of sense suddenly: the regular timing, her less than glamorous appearance, the cash going out every month. Gentlemen callers. Christ, I thought they went out with the ark. Mind you, our Colin has always been a traditionalist at heart.

The humor didn’t get me far. Back in the car I began to get an idea of what Pandora must have suffered—the way in which the minute she’d opened the box the very air was thick with the malevolence of what had been released. But at least in her case everybody knew about it. Mine was still a secret until I chose to share it. And who exactly was I going to tell? “Hi, Kate, you’ll be relieved to know it’s not anyone special, just some professional in Kentish Town.”

What would Kate do? Change the locks? Burn his underclothes in the front garden and pour the ashes into his petrol tank? Or maybe swallow her pride and ring up marriage guidance. I suppose that would depend on how much she wanted to hold her family together. And at what price. Not something Colin had given much thought to obviously. He’d just followed his prick and now couldn’t get out of the hole he’d fallen into. The image was not an enticing one. Maybe I should just drive straight to Colin’s office, lift him out of his seat by the lapels, and batter his head on the inkwell for a while till he saw things from my point of view.

I tell you, there are some moments in your life when you realize you are neither as wise nor as brave as you hoped you were. This was one of those. Finally I decided to go for a second opinion.

Unfortunately Frank had made it one of his late mornings. Or maybe he was already in Madrid. I was still trying
to open the triple office locks when I heard the phone go and the machine click in. I almost didn’t make it in time. Although the way her voice was shaking certainly gave me an added incentive.

“Hello. Hello. This is a message for Hannah Wolfe. I’ve been trying to call her at home, but there’s no answer.

“Mrs. Marchant needs to talk to you urgently, Hannah, there’s been—”

“Hi. Hi. Mrs. Waverley? It’s me, Hannah. Sorry, I was just coming in the door. What’s the problem?”

“Oh, you’re there. Thank God. The police are here. They’re with Olivia now.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

And she took a big gulp before she told me. “Maurice Marchant’s dead. They found him this morning in his consulting room.”

And cruel though it is, I have to tell you that for that brief moment I was relieved to have something else to think about.

F
or this journey I put on the blue flashing light inside my skull. It was so bright, it wiped out most of the other activity in there. I would have exceeded the speed limit if I could, but then central London during rush hour has no speed to exceed.

The address Carol Waverley had given me was a posh one, an apartment just off Wigmore Street. Olivia Marchant had been picked up by the police from Castle Dean just after 7:00
A.M.
and driven to London to make a formal identification of her husband’s body in the morgue at Westminster. The list of what I didn’t know was so long there seemed no point in trying to invent things. No doubt the police would tell me as little as they could get away with, and I would find out as much as I dared.

I played safe with the parking. The police, of course, just flaunted it, their go-faster stripes sitting proud on a double yellow outside the apartment block. I resisted the temptation to break in and use their car radio.

It was the kind of place that had its own full-time receptionist. I didn’t need him. Carol Waverley was waiting for me in the entrance hall. She greeted me in a way that made me feel we’d been best friends for years and hurried me up in the lift. As we rose, I got what I could. Apparently he’d been found by a cleaner in the early hours of the morning in the Harley Street consulting room. The weapon had been a knife. More than that she didn’t know.

They lived on the fourth floor. Big, very nice. But no
one was talking interior design right now. The sitting room door was closed. In the kitchen a uniformed police woman was on the phone. I nodded to her and moved toward the door.

“Hang on a minute, Alan.” She put her hand over the receiver. “Hey, you can’t go in there.”

But I already had. Start as you mean to go on, that was today’s motto.

The room was in semi-gloom, a set of fabulous French windows partially obscured by curtains drawn against the sun. She was sitting on the sofa, in a pair of jeans and a soft white polo-neck T-shirt, her legs tucked up under her, her body still and taut, the half-light falling softly on that designer face. But this time she didn’t so much look beautiful as unreal. You see more than your fair share of distress in this job—well, people don’t usually come to private eyes when they’ve got something to celebrate—but in my experience you can always tell the grief that comes with death. There’s a particular quality of blankness to the eyes, as if they have emptied in sympathy with the dead. It might also explain the sense of rigor mortis in her face. Though in this case that might have had more to do with Maurice Marchant alive than dead.

She looked up and saw me just as the two plainclothes officers in the room turned to give me trouble.

“Hannah Wolfe,” I said, as I passed them. “Private detective. Mrs. Marchant’s my client.”

The older one nodded. “Yes, she told us. Well, Mrs. Marchant, thank you for your time. We’ll be back in touch in a while. And please accept our condolences.”

I looked at them. They didn’t seem particularly sorry. But then, of course, they had no reason to be. They didn’t know him. He was just today’s unfinished business. And the other bad news was that I was part of it. “We’d appreciate
a word, Miss Wolfe, after you’ve finished,” the older of the two said, waving a card in my face.

I waved mine back. “As many as you like, Officer,” I said with all the grace and civility that three years’ working with Frank has bestowed upon me. The younger officer raised an eyebrow. It takes one to know one.

They closed the door. Her eyes followed them out, then came back to me. I moved into the room and sat where they had sat, the sofa still warm from their bodies. Grief. You ought to be able to earn a proficiency diploma. Not quite the same as life-saving. In the end I resorted to cliché. “I’m so sorry,” I said softly.

She nodded. The face remained the same: serene, as if it had been finished in marble. But behind the face there was a pain, trapped, welling up in the eyes, desperate to get out. The tears broke free and started rolling slowly down her cheeks. She did nothing to stop them. The effect was mesmeric, like watching some venerated statue of the Madonna cry, or worse, one of Amy’s ghastly dolls that weeps when you press the right part of its anatomy. Look at you, I thought, he’s sewn you up so tight you can’t even grieve for him properly.