Under My Skin (2 page)

The drive curved round to offer up a big house and an even bigger sign.
CASTLE DEAN—HEALTH WITH STYLE
. One hundred and one things to do with a stately home. Very nice, assuming you had the money. The place reminded me of a certain French château it had once been my pleasure to solve a crime in. But it’s not wise to rest on old laurels when new triumphs lie ahead.

Close-up the house turned out to be younger than it looked—the facade a rather crude fake Gothic, probably late nineteenth century.

The entrance lobby kept up the illusion: baronial William Morris with a lot of help from the Sanderson’s catalogue. The girl at the reception desk looked fit but not invincible. I felt heartened. I gave her my name. In return she gave me a key, a welcome pack, and a place to sit while she looked for Mrs. Waverley. Once she’d disappeared, I leaned over the desk and checked out the reception book. Whatever problems they’d been having, the guest list still looked
healthy enough. I sank into an overstuffed floral print settee. A couple of long-legged ladies in white toweling robes strolled by, hair wet from the shower. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back. Let’s be nice to the new girl. On the coffee table among copies of
Good Housekeeping
and
Cosmo
I spotted last week’s
Hello
. Well, we all have our guilty secrets. I was heading for the center spread on Ivana and her new Trump card when Mrs. Waverley arrived.

“Miss Wolfe?” She was of average height and in better than average shape, with slightly troubled skin only partly disguised by clever makeup. Age? Thirty-something probably, like me. But with more poise. And no doubt a more coherent career plan.

“I’m Carol Waverley, the manager. Welcome to Castle Dean,” she added for the benefit of anyone who might be listening. No one was. Which was a bit of a shame, because she’d made a real effort with the diction: sweet and crisp, and a considerable way from wherever it was she’d been born.

She ushered me across the hall toward a door marked “Private” and into a small office overlooking the guest car park. Not the greatest view, but at least the place was healthy, with its own water machine and a set of herb teas where the serious caffeine equipment should have been. She offered. I took a rose-hip. She made it herself. I watched her as she poured the boiling water into the mug, carefully crushing the tea bag with the spoon and depositing it into the bin with the precision of a Patriot missile. I bet you’re the kind that irons your underwear, I thought. Interesting how quickly you can take agin someone. Come on, Hannah, it’s hardly her fault that you’re not out busting international drug smugglers.

The tea arrived with a dry biscuit. I nibbled delicately to make it last while she sat and told me what I needed to know. When it got interesting, I took notes. Good thing I
didn’t do shorthand, or I might have had trouble remembering I wasn’t her secretary.

Castle Dean was, apparently, a very successful health farm catering to a middle- to top-notch clientele and offering a range of high-class health and beauty treatments with value-for-money prices. I nodded vigorously. On the video I fast-forward through the adverts, but it was a little too early in the job to offend the client.

The picture, however, had got decidedly less rosy twelve days ago. A guest had gone into the sauna, only to find that when it got too hot she couldn’t get out again. “Fortunately one of the other guests came in to use the shower and heard her banging. A chair had been pushed up against the door just under the latch, with a big box of fresh towels on it. She called a member of the staff and together they managed to unwedge it and let her out.”

“How was she?” I said, writing the word
Parboiled
in my notebook.

“A bit panicky, but all right. Technically speaking, we were in the clear, since we expressly ask guests not to use the equipment unless there are staff on duty.”

“And you’re sure it was deliberate?”

“Not at the time, no. The chair could well have just been pushed against the door by accident. At the time that’s all I thought it was—just a careless accident.”

Not three days later, though, a Marks & Spencer’s senior buyer emerged from her morning peat bath to find herself a less than fashionable shade of indigo.

“Then, of course, I knew. Only one of the baths had been affected. Out of four made up from the same batch by the same person.”

“Who was?”

“Oh, one of the senior beauticians. She’s been here since the place opened. But after she’d done the baths, she’d been called away to take a phone call. She was gone about
ten to fifteen minutes. Anyone could have got in then, and the water’s such a dark color you wouldn’t notice anything was wrong until you were in it.”

Or rather out of it again. “Was it permanent?” I asked, finding something mildly irresistible about the idea of a blue Marks & Spencer’s buyer.

“No. But it took a long time to get it off.”

“So what did you do?”

“A mixture of soaking in a clean bath and rubbing with cleansing lotion.”

Once a beautician always a beautician. I smiled. “Actually I was thinking more in the way of an investigation.”

“What? Oh, well, of course, yes. I talked to everybody who’d been on duty. But no one knew anything.” She sighed. Caught up in the drama of the story, the real Carol Waverley was starting to slip through the cracks, certain carefully rounded vowels flattening out as they moved farther north in search of their homeland. At least it was more natural. “After that it was just a question of waiting for the next thing to happen.”

“Which was?”

“The nails in the G-five pads.”

“The what?”

“G five. It’s a massage system. Electrically operated. The sponge heads vibrate and whirl round. Then you press them down into the flesh. It’s very popular. We were lucky the operator spotted them. At that speed the nails would have ripped the skin apart.”

“Have you still got them?”

She moved to the desk near me and opened a small drawer. She took out a small envelope and emptied its contents into my hand. A set of tiny little nails no bigger than new fivepenny pieces lay glittering there, sharp and eager. Could be bought at any hardware store, I thought. Like finding a needle in a haystack. And probably as painful.

“Your girl must have had sharp eyes.”

“Not really, but she did have some nasty little wounds on her legs. In the circumstances I could hardly criticize her for using the equipment.”

G5. Must be pretty nice if the operators do it to themselves. I made a note to try it out sometime.

“So, you think the equipment was tampered with during the night?”

“I have no way of knowing. The treatment rooms are locked at night, but until recently there was always a key in the supervisor’s office. Anyone who knows the place could get hold of it. I’ve had it removed now.”

“But when you found the nails, you knew you were in trouble. What did you do?”

“I called Mrs. Marchant in London.”

Ah, ah. The elusive client. “And what did she say?”

“She gave me permission to close down the whole treatment area. I told the guests there was a fault in the heating system and did an inspection on my own. Since then I’ve double-checked everything in the building myself before it’s used. Which means I know for certain that it was between midnight last night and seven this morning that someone took the carp out of the fishpond in the garden and put them into the Jacuzzi, then switched the heating on. They were dead when I found them, oily, slimy, floating on the surface. That’s when Mrs. Marchant called you.”

“She was still in London?”

“Yes. She’ll be back tonight or tomorrow.”

“Is that usual, her being away so much of the time?”

“Yes … no … I mean Mr. Marchant works in London, so she spends some of the week up there with him and some down here.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a consultant.”

Isn’t everybody these days? “But from what you’re saying she’s not a particularly hands-on owner?”

“It depends. We’ve only been open a few months. At the beginning she was very involved. But since I’ve come, she’s taken more of a back seat. Left it to me.” She paused. “She’s a good employer,” she added, as if I needed to know it.

“And neither you nor she has had any contact with the saboteur?”

“I don’t understand …”

“No notes, no threats, no demands for money or anything like that?”

“No. Nothing.”

Either they were biding their time or we were looking at a malice over profit job. More interesting psychologically, but for that reason harder to crack.

She picked up a pile of files from the desk in front of her. “Mrs. Marchant told me to give you a copy of the employees’ records. She said you’d probably want to see them. We have twenty-four girls altogether. Twenty live on the premises, the other four in the local village. Then there are two visiting nurses and a doctor, but they’re only part-time. I’ve included details of everyone’s work shifts over the last two weeks so you can see who was where at what time.”

“Thanks. Yours are here, too, are they?” I said casually.

“Of course. Right on top,” she said, her diction sharpening up again at the hint of trouble.

“Good.” I paused in case the silence made her feel uncomfortable. It didn’t. “I’m assuming that none of the staff know who I am?”

“Absolutely not. You’re booked in as a regular guest.”

“Even though I’m here talking to you?”

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary. I often make it my business to meet new guests.”

“And if I need to contact you urgently …?”

“You can dial me direct from your room. I’ve added both my office and room numbers to your notes.”

“Fine. OK. Well, I’ll need a plan of the place, a list of the clients who have been here in the last two weeks, and someone to show me round. Oh, and I think I forgot to bring a swimsuit.”

From under the desk she picked up a large bag with
CASTLE DEAN
written in big fluorescent letters. “I got you this in case you didn’t have time to pack. The suit is size ten, but it stretches. If it doesn’t fit, let me know. I’ve booked you in for a full day’s treatment starting tomorrow morning at eight-fifteen with water aerobics in the pool.”

I could feel my muscles twitching in anticipation. I got up. “Anything else?”

“Not really,” she said, and then with admirable aplomb, “Although you might start by concentrating on the waist.”

Any more like that, lady, and you could find yourself the victim of bodily harm.

D
espite Carol Waverley’s taunt the good news was the costume fit. The bad news was the body hair it revealed. The legs I could probably get away with, the pubes were another matter. Designed with beauty-salon profits in mind, the suit was cut high enough into the hip to call for some serious waxing. Unless, of course, you had the nerve to go without. Given my natural aversion to masochism, I would normally not even have considered it. But in this case I was being paid to fit in, and what if the girl who did the waxing also did the sabotage? You know what the pundits say about small acts of violence leading to larger ones. I decided to sacrifice myself for the cause. I slipped into my old but happy tracksuit and went down for the guided tour.

After a quick zip around the dining room and lounges (more catalogue decor) we moved on to the serious stuff. The health section was in the new extension behind the main wing. The heart of the complex was surrounded by the pool under a vaulted glass ceiling and some clever trompe l’oeils of tropical seascapes. Through arches of fake palm trees, a number of corridors led to the treatment rooms. Our tour guide, Marianne, otherwise known as the Client Liaison Officer, whizzed us round the facilities. I loitered a while in the doorway of the G5 massage parlor. The machine, which looked like an elaborate vacuum cleaner, stood by the massage bed, its sponge heads lying limply over the top. I closed my eyes, the better to imagine the screams and the walls splattered with blood.

On the floor above, the last aerobics class of the day was coming to an end with some frenzied jogging to hype up the heart rate. I looked through the doors at the backs of some twenty women bopping up and down like a clutch of overage cheerleaders practicing for the big game. The sight much reassured me. Despite all the ad talk, Castle Dean was clearly not the kind of health farm which doubled as a finishing school for super models.

On the other hand, as the gym next door showed, it did have its health freaks. In a corner two women were pumping serious iron on the chest and leg machines. One of them was more or less a normal shape, but the other was built like a piece of flex. You could almost feel the electricity pulsing through her. They both looked some way away from climaxing. Know how you feel, I thought. I have the same problem with working out as I do with sex. Low boredom threshold. Whatever’s pumping. Near the door an older woman was cycling slowly to nowhere, overshadowed by her Olympic companions. I gave her a reassuring smile.

In the heat treatment area the figure in the sauna looked hot but voluntarily so, while the six or seven women in the steam room—well, I’ve already waxed lyrical about them.

I was ready to take my clothes off then and there, but that wasn’t allowed. Not yet, anyway. Before the treatments you needed to have a treatment plan, and that meant seeing the nurse.

She turned out not to have quite the customer charm skills of the lovely Marianne. No doubt she had learned her trade in the National Health Service, and was having trouble adapting to the private sector. After a tight little smile and a few brisk personal details, she had me “popping” off my clothes and onto the scales. The weights danced between the eight- and nine-stone mark, coming to rest nearer the latter. It was the kind of revelation that might have driven Naomi Campbell to suicide, but I gained comfort from a
more historical perspective: if Naomi and I had both been naked in front of Rubens, it would not have been her who would have made it to the National Gallery.

Staff nurse Ratched, however, was more of a Giacometti fan. The treatment she worked out for me involved rigorous daily exercise and a week on the reduced-calorie diet. She made it sound like a penance.