Under My Skin (22 page)

“And could you?”

“Yes. I told him it was her Nichole Farhi culottes and her black Joseph waistcoat.”

Well, that must have knocked his British Home Stores socks off. But whether or not it was what he wanted to hear I had no idea.

“And then he asked if I’d seen her wearing a long black mac and hat. And I told him I had. It had been drizzling when she went to London in the morning and she’d had them on then.” The black mac. Of course. It certainly was a distinctive little outfit. The kind you wouldn’t easily forget. Not her, not me. And presumably, not someone else either. “I was right, wasn’t I? I mean to tell him?”

“If that is what she was wearing, then yes, you were right.”

“He seemed to think it was important,” she said, and I don’t think I’d ever seen her quite so uncomfortable.

“Yes. Well, then it probably was.”

“Can you help her?” she asked anxiously.

“I think that depends on what she’s done.”

And for the first time I could remember Carol Waverley didn’t have anything to say.

They were coming down the back stairs as I was going up them. They were like a little posse: Olivia and a woman policeman with the sheriff and his deputy bringing up the rear. She was looking so old I almost didn’t recognize her. Or maybe it was the daylight. For once she was a woman not in control of her lighting. “Hannah?” she murmured as she saw me, and the voice sounded rather dazed.

“Hello, Olivia,” I said cheerfully. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I need to talk to you. Could we have a quick word?”

I addressed it to the female police officer, who obviously had no idea what to do.

“Get out of the way, Miss Wolfe. If you don’t mind.” Rawlings at his most polite. No wonder women get on so badly in the force. Always letting the men do the talking. I ignored him and nodded at Grant. “Thanks for calling,” I said. “I got here as fast as I could.”

Well, at times like this you take pleasure where you can get it. And the look on Rawlings’ face as he turned to Grant was pleasure indeed. Grant shook his head quickly. To him and to me. “Hannah, don’t make this any more difficult than it is already.”

“What’s difficult? I assume you’re not arresting her?”

“No. Mrs. Marchant’s just helping us with our inquiries.”

“Fine. Then I’d just like a quick word with her. She is my client.”

“Ex,” said Rawlings.

“Wrong,” I said fiercely. “I’m still working for her. And I want to talk to her.”

“Listen, girlie—”

“No, you listen,
Rawlie
. I’d like to speak to my client,
Olivia Marchant. She’s not under arrest, she’s not been cautioned, and she can talk to whoever she likes. You have no right to deny her access to me and you know it.”

He opened his mouth to launch a salvo, but Grant got in before the blast.

“Constable, why don’t you take Mrs. Marchant to the office? Miss Wolfe? Let’s you and I have a word.”

In retrospect I think it probably represented a great step in his career. One of those Hollywood moments when a man does what a man has to do and everyone realizes that he was—well—a man all along, and no longer just a junior partner. Olivia and the police officer went off down the stairs. Grant turned to Rawlings. “Five minutes,” he said. “I’ll sort this out.”

He blew and snorted, then said: “You’d better, Mike. You’d better. What is this? Fucking amateur’s night out?” He stomped off, and you could tell that the swearing had made him feel better.

Well, now the bad language has started …

“Hannah—”

“You bastard. I gave you every scrap of information I had, saved you days of donkey work, cooperated absolutely, and you do this.”

“Hannah, officially I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“So why the fuck did you promise that you would?”

“Listen—”

“Or more to the point, why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie.”

“Looking for a black mac and hat, are we? What happened? Did the watchman undergo hypnotherapy or did some other mysterious witness come forward at the last minute?”

He sighed. “When we talked to him yesterday afternoon, he wasn’t sure. He is now.”

“Bullshit. Did you find the mac?”

“No. And how did you know about it?”

“Not from you, that’s for sure,” I said tartly. “Where does Olivia say it is?”

“She doesn’t have it. She says she thinks she must have left it at Marchant’s consulting rooms Tuesday afternoon.”

“Which Carol Waverley can back up. She saw her come home without it.”

“Which only means she wasn’t wearing it. But somebody certainly was at around twelve-thirty
A.M.
The janitor is willing to swear that the person he saw leaving the building had it on.”

“Yeah, but then with his eyesight it would hardly stand up in court, would it?” I said sweetly.

He gave an apologetic little shrug. “He can see fine, Hannah.”

“Really. You astonish me. Still, I suppose it has occurred to you that you still don’t have a shred of proof. Whoever murdered Marchant could have found the mac in the office and put it on just to get out of the building. Which would be an altogether simpler explanation as to why she doesn’t have it now.”

“Maybe. But then there’s the problem with her alibi.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she can’t prove she was here that night.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Carol Waverley and half the staff saw her come back.”

“She could have gone out again.”

“Yeah, and Detective Inspector Rawlings could be a Buddhist. Where’s your proof?”

“The call she never took.”

“What call?”

He hesitated. And it was clear he thought I already knew.

“What call?” I said again.

“The one that came through from Maurice Marchant just
before eleven. I thought Carol Waverley would have told you. She was in the office working late when the phone rang. He said he’d been trying to get hold of his wife but she wasn’t answering her direct line and he wondered if there was a fault on it. So Carol plugged it through from the main switchboard herself. She still didn’t answer.”

Poor Carol. Everywhere she stood in this plot she put her foot in it. Anyone would think she was out to screw her employer. I stuck that one in the “to be thought about later” file. “Maybe she was asleep.”

“And maybe she wasn’t there.”

“You’ve tested the line?”

“It works fine.”

“So maybe she was in the shower. Or she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Have you thought of that?”

“Oh, come on, Hannah, we already know she had a flaming row with him about another woman.”

“Oh, don’t be such a ditz head,” I said crossly. “I was the other woman. He clocked me when I came to visit him that lunchtime. He knew I was some kind of snoop. When she saw him that afternoon, he accused her of trying to wreck the business by employing a private detective to check up on old clients.”

He stared at me for a second then gave a kind of nasty laugh. “Oh, yes. You have been hard done by, haven’t you, Hannah? Told us everything, while we just shafted you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It slipped my mind.”

But for the first time I had also surprised him. I could tell he was thinking back to the receptionist’s testimony, seeing if it would fit one interpretation as well as another. Obviously well enough to give him room for pause. “How do you know for sure?”

“Because Olivia told me. And,” I said before he could interrupt, “because it fits. It was clear he was suspicious of me at the time. He even mentioned Olivia to me to see what
impact it would have. Anyway, you haven’t found any other evidence of a lover, have you?” He shrugged. “Oh, come on, Michael. By now somebody must have checked the Amsterdam flight reservations for possible female names that might connect?”

He smiled just a fraction. “All right. Yes, and no. As far as we can tell, he was traveling on his own.”

“See.”

“But in which case why didn’t she tell us about the row?”

“I don’t know, maybe that klutz Rawlings doesn’t say please enough. Listen, the guy had had someone threatening him.”

“That’s only what she says.”

“What? You really think she tried to sabotage her own health farm, and sent a set of anonymous notes to her husband herself?”

He shrugged. “Put it this way. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Is that how you do it? Find a similar crime and solve it that way. What is it? A new kind of cost-efficiency saving?”

“Hannah …”

“I suppose you’ve checked the handwriting?”

“It’s not the same. But we’re having it analyzed.”

“How about forensics?”

“Well, Olivia Marchant’s fingerprints are all over his office, but,” he said before I could get in, “that doesn’t mean anything. We’ve taken scrapes from her apartment and we’re going over the car. We’ll know soon enough if there’s anything there.”

For “anything” read blood on the upholstery or bits of eyes on her clothes. In which case, bye-bye Hannah, hello lawyers. He was right. They would know soon enough. Though, of course, that was no guarantee they would tell me. It had to be said that things weren’t looking exactly rosy for Olivia. And she wasn’t helping. “But what I don’t get is
why she isn’t sticking up for herself more. What does she do during these interviews?”

He shrugged. “Not a lot. She just sits there looking blank. Very calm, very far away. Weird.”

“She needs a doctor.”

“She’s seen one. She’s in mild shock, but nothing bad enough to stop her answering questions. Listen, Hannah, nobody’s out to screw her. It’s just there’s stuff building up against her and she isn’t that interested in denying any of it.”

“So let me talk to her. Maybe I can find out why. It might save you some time in the long run.”

He made a clicking noise. “Rawlings’ll have me back on traffic duty.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I can see that he scares the living daylights out of you. Let me see her just for one minute. It’s going to look dreadful on your record, harassing the wrong woman.”

I
got what I wanted. I took Olivia into Carol’s office, where we had sat five nights before, where she had been so lovely in the night glow and so very certain of herself and her cause. Now, with the daylight streaming in, it was something of an illusion exposed. The face was still impressive, although a little ironed out around the eyes. But the sunshine was crueler to the neck: look closely and you could spot a few telltale rings, a few dry little creases. Had her face not seemed so young, you probably wouldn’t have noticed, would have thought her an attractive woman growing old gracefully. It was the contrast that made it so much more unsettling. Maybe necks are harder to keep young. Or maybe there had been limits to Marchant’s powers after all. Now I realized that in all our other meetings she had worn some kind of scarf or polo neck. It seemed she no longer cared. Oh, Olivia. What are you going to do now he’s gone? Who’s going to iron out life’s wrinkles and pin up those jowls? But she had other things on her mind.

“They think I did it,” she said at last.

“Yes, they do. But then you’re not telling them any different.” She shrugged. “Why didn’t you answer the phone Tuesday night when it rang?” I said sharply.

She sighed. “Because I’d taken a sleeping pill. I was tired and upset and I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“But you didn’t tell
them
that?”

“I said I was asleep. They weren’t interested in knowing any more.”

“And what about the row the receptionist overheard at the office that afternoon? Why didn’t you tell them it was about me. If you don’t tell them, they don’t know.”

“They don’t want to know. They just want quick answers.”

“Christ, Olivia, what is wrong with you?”

She stared at me with a slightly puzzled look on her face. “Why should you care anyway? I thought you weren’t interested anymore. I thought we had to ‘leave it to the police.’” She shook her head slightly. “Does this mean you’re still working for me after all?”

“Only if you didn’t kill him,” I said to see what kind of response it got.

She gave a bitter little smile. “See. Now you think it, too.”

“I don’t think anything, Olivia. Except that if you didn’t do it I can’t believe how a woman of your intelligence can be so stupid, however much pain you’re in.”

The remark stung her, as I intended it to do. She looked up at me. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

She looked at me for a moment. I had seen that look once before in this room, when she was staring at Lola Marsh, watching, waiting, trying to define the malice in the motive. Then eventually she spoke.

“You want to know if I killed my husband, right? Let me tell you about Maurice and me. I was twenty-nine when I met him and for as long as I can remember I had been ugly. My mother used to say—what was her phrase?—that I’d been ‘ruined by a trick of nature,’ inheriting her body but my father’s face. I don’t remember him well—he died in a car crash when I was nine—though he never struck me as ugly. She was right about me, though. D’you know what I looked like?—one of those women from the Habsburg dynasty after centuries of inbreeding. We had a
portrait once in the gallery I worked in. A Spanish duchess, she was. I couldn’t even look at her. It was like looking in a mirror.

“Then I met Maurice. He was just starting out in reconstructive surgery. He was interested in me right from the beginning. It was at an opening and I’d been working late. He came up and started talking to me. He said he’d been looking at me across the room and did I know that I had the most lovely eyes. I thought he was laughing at me. But he was absolutely serious. Then he told me what he did and how easy it would be to make my eyes light up my face. Those were his words. I remember them exactly. I was so embarrassed I was rude to him. He didn’t care. He was excited. For him it was a challenge. He was so sure, he even offered to do it for free, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He came back the next day, took me out to dinner, and asked me again. Three weeks later he did the first work on my jaw.

“It took four operations in all. Step by step I didn’t notice the difference. Then one morning I woke up, the bruising was gone and there I was, a Habsburg no longer. And he was right. I was beautiful underneath.