Under My Skin (25 page)

“Hannah?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you—have you seen or spoken to Colin at all since I’ve been gone?”

I took a deep breath. “Why do you ask?”

“Um … It’s just that he called today. He wants to see me. He’s coming up tomorrow and we’re going out for a meal.”

“It’s a weekday,” I said.

“Yes. He’s taking time off work.”

“Is he ill?”

She had the grace to ignore it. “Listen, he asked me if I’d talked to you at all.”

“He did?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d mentioned that we were having some trouble. He was furious. He said that you’d always made it your business to undermine him, and that wasn’t what we needed right now. I told him you’d been very sympathetic, but he made me promise not to talk to you again until he’d seen me.”

“So what are we doing now?”

“Well, I suppose … I just wanted to check. I know how you two feel about each other and I didn’t want you … er …”

“Going round and shouting abuse through his letterbox?” She laughed, evidently relieved. “Something like that.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of seeing or speaking to Colin before you do.” Technical truths. Not the same as emotional lies. “What do you think he’s going to say?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know,” she said at last.

But you’ve missed him, I thought. You’ve missed the scumbag, I can hear it in your voice. And that means whatever he tells you, you’ll give him a second chance. Erring men and forgiving women. They were coming at me from all
angles. Ah well, what did I know about true love? Or even untrue love for that matter. But I tell you, I was learning.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll … I’ll give you a call when we get home.”

Can’t wait. I went back to homicide. The British Telecom repairs operator for the 328 area took a while to answer. I was so worried I’d missed them that when I did get through I had trouble sounding like a bored engineer.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m checking fault lines on this prefix. Can you plug me through to routing and records please?”

The line clicked, rang, and connected again. A man’s voice answered, crisp, busy. “Yep, R and R.”

“Hi. I’m working on a fault on 328 9999?”

“Yeah, and I’m going home. What’s your problem?”

“The problem is it’s not the line. I think it must be in the house. Can you confirm the address for me? I’ve got seventeen Cotleigh Road,” I said, lifting up my finger from it’s resting place in the middle of square J7.

“Hold on.” He punched the number up on his computer and came back to me. “No. You’re way out. It’s Fairbray, on the other side of the Kilburn High Road. Number twenty-two. Who gave you Cotleigh?”

“Obviously somebody who’s working for Mercury,” I said, but I’m not sure he got the joke. “Thanks, anyway.”

“No prob. Didn’t know we had a woman working on this sector.”

“Positive discrimination,” I replied. “It’s the only way forward.” And I blew him a kiss down the line.

I didn’t bust a gut to get there. Well, if she had been doing something violent on Tuesday evening, she wasn’t likely to have stayed around to answer questions. She might even have been telling the truth and be sunning herself in Mexico. Nice place if you can afford the ticket.

Outside it was airless as a heavy sky created an early dusk. A city on the edge of a thunderstorm, so leaden and forbidding that people already had their lights on.

I used the drive to make up some stories about Belinda Balliol. First I started with the facts. As part of a selfimprovement campaign, she’d gone to Maurice Marchant sometime last summer and bared her chest to him. He had done his stuff but she hadn’t been satisfied with the result.

From here on fact turned to fiction. Or possibly faction. If she was the lady I was looking for, then during the next couple of breast examinations his hands wandered (or had been guided) farther south and the result had been a new body both for Belinda (free offer?) and for Maurice. The lovelier she became, the more infatuated he was with his own work. Until, that is, she started asking for more than new body parts. Then came Olivia’s ultimatum, his rejection, and her cold withdrawal. Six months ago, Olivia had said. Which was the same time as Belinda started to behave oddly at work, moving house and failing to give anyone her new address. A couple of months after that Marchant started getting letters, while Belinda made inquiries about Castle Dean health farm, perhaps even went there to meet the dour Lola.

Hardly surprising then that when I appear on the scene asking questions, she freaks out, going out of her way to lie about the operation and avoid seeing me again. The following afternoon Olivia shows Maurice a copy of the anonymous note. He recognizes the handwriting and calls her number. She does or doesn’t reply. Either way he ends up with an eye operation he didn’t need, while she loses her job and disappears into the blue yonder.

Well, you have to admit it did have a certain swing.

Which was more than can be said for Kilburn. Rumor has it that it’s an upwardly mobile area now, but then rumor can be a dangerous thing. As far as I could tell, it
hadn’t changed since the last time I crawled through its traffic jams and walked its littered High Street.

On the other hand, Fairbray Road certainly took me by surprise. The houses there turned out to be very nice indeed. Double-fronted most of them and worth a good few bob. Even renting you’d be in need of a good income. Bigger than hers would have been, that’s for sure. Unless someone had given her a down payment.

Number 22 looked pretty shut up to me. The curtains, upstairs and down, were all drawn and the windows locked tight.

It was so muggy I found it difficult to breathe. I rang the bell, keeping my finger hard down while I sang an entire verse of “Heatwave.” Nobody came to join in the chorus. The glass panels in the door were wired and the street busy with people coming home, so I decided to go round the back.

Things were a lot easier there. It was quiet, not overlooked, and the back door was flimsy; old wood and older glass. I wrapped my jacket round my forearm and gave it a smart backhand. I didn’t even cut myself finding the lock inside.

The passage inside was dark. The first thing I noticed was the smell, sickly and rotting as if someone had left some meat out too long. It was the kind of aroma to make a private eye nervous, especially in an empty house with a missing suspect. I pinged on a hall light and let my nose do the detecting.

It took me as far as the kitchen. It was seriously foul in there, though the fridge was empty and the work surfaces clean, just as you’d expect of someone who’d gone to Mexico. I finally tracked the smell down to under the table where a cat’s bowl had been pushed to the back of the wall. It could easily have been overlooked in any lastminute departure. There was half a tin of food still in it. Or,
to be more precise, trying to get out. I recognized the seething movement. They were becoming something of a feature in this story, maggots. Some clues come wriggling.

It made me sure of one thing. I should be wearing gloves. I dug out a pair of thin plastic ones from my bag and stretched them on. My hands were now the same color as the maggots. I picked up the bowl, slammed it in the sink, and turned the hot tap on full. The water came out scalding. They writhed and squirmed their way down the plug hole. I threw the bowl in the dustbin, checked the two reception rooms and made my way upstairs.

The smell lingered, curling its way around the banisters, hovering like mist in the air. There was still no sign of any cat. Maybe it had gone to a cattery. I certainly couldn’t remember seeing a cat flap anywhere.

On the floor above I started with the main bedroom. The double bed was made, but with a slight indentation in the cover, as if someone had lain on it afterward, and there was a towel on the floor nearby. On the bedside table were a glass and a bottle of pills with two left at the bottom. Nembutal, prescribed on the fifth of April, according to the label. Maybe her conscience had been keeping her awake. In the wardrobe I found a set of tasty-looking clothes neatly pressed and hung up. Underneath was a suitcase. It was empty, but then she might have had two.

Across the landing there was a sparsely furnished study. On a desk sat an Amstrad computer. I thought about all those computer-printed notes to the health farm and went through the drawers looking for discs or bits of paper that might connect one to the other. Nothing. The place looked as if it had been cleaned out. I had to make do with the wastepaper basket. I was lucky it was made of metal, Otherwise it would have been more than the papers that would have burned. Fortunately for me she’d made a bad job of it. Either she’d been in a rush or not come back to check. The
sheaf of pages had been so tied together that there had not been enough oxygen to carry the flame.

I lifted out a couple of half-charred sheets. They were letters, written in a long loopy hand on plain white paper. I held one of them up to the light. A blackened edge had eaten into the words:

The rest of the sentence was gone, not burned this time but cut away with a pair of scissors. What word would you have put next? Hurt? Damage?

Outside, the sky moaned with distant thunder and the trees shivered with the prospect of rain. I picked another letter out of the bin. There was an awful monotony to the text: love, need, exhortations to leave. Other people’s love letters—nothing so private, nor so painful. Especially these, since their presence here all together must mean that the man they’d been written to had given them back. But when? Only one date had survived the flames. October 24. Just weeks before Maurice had admitted he was having an affair. I looked again, this time studying the words for their shape rather than their meaning. The
m
’s and the
a
’s. I found the word
me
. It was, of course, already familiar. A tall swoop—up down, up down—and a tightly curled little
e
hanging on for dear life.

My, what a poetic shock it would have been if he
had
opened them himself, to read what had once been words of love regurgitated into hate. I dropped them back into the bin.

And as I did so, I heard a noise—a rasping kind of sound, fierce and frantic, coming from somewhere across the landing. I moved out of the room. There was another closed door on the other side of the bedroom. I walked up to it and stopped. Silence.

“Hello?” I said, scaring the shit out of myself with the sound of my own voice. In response the wood shook a little.

I put my hand on the handle and turned quickly. As the door opened two things hit me at the same instant. The first was the cat, teeth bared, flinging itself out with all the strength that its little body could muster. Poor little sod—it looked hungry enough to eat the maggots. The second was the smell. First rotting food and now feces—the perfumes of neglect. The animal didn’t stop to complain. It went streaking down the stairs, yowling its hunger to the world. I stepped into the darkness left behind it.

The air inside was damp as well as rank. I took a few steps in search of the light and put my foot into what I knew from its consistency had to be a pile of cat shit. I flicked on the switch. It started a fan whirling somewhere nearby, but still it was dark. I opened the door as wide as I could. The light from the landing splashed its way in, picking up more little deposits on the floor, then a pile of what looked like clothes next to a laundry basket. I fumbled my way in over them, past a shower unit, to the bath. Over the sink I found a light that worked. Except there are some things that should best remain in the dark.

At least I knew why the cat hadn’t died of thirst. On the contrary he would have had more than enough to drink, although it might have been a little off-putting to the taste buds. The water in the bath was a murky dark color. My brain short-circuited to a certain Marks & Spencer’s buyer, except the dyeing here didn’t have the same spelling. She was lying with her body almost completely submerged, the tops of those designer breasts peeping up from
the surface. They didn’t look so good now, though this time you could hardly blame Maurice Marchant. Her eyes were closed, that lovely face already a sallow, grayish hue, puffy, slightly overblown. Water preserves, of course, but from the look of her she’d been there for a couple of days at least and in this heat things must have been starting to curdle inside. My eyes were drawn back down to the breasts. Where the water met an armpit I spotted the delicate ridge of a scar. Did he run his fingers over it as they made love, admiring his work, checking its progress, contrasting the feel of the surface with what was inside? Maybe simple caresses were an anticlimax after such bizarre intimacy? Even the thought of it made me feel sick. On the edge of the bath behind her lay a dinky little razor blade, the kind women use when they can’t stand the thought of the wax, and next to it a half-empty bottle of whisky and a glass.

I braced myself and plunged a hand down into the icy water until I found an arm. It was cold and squishy to touch, almost too heavy to lift. As it broke the surface the hand fell limply backwards, white as white can be, except for a jagged slash of black across the main artery of the wrist, through which a life had washed away. Tremendous. I’d come looking for a murderer and found a suicide. Question is how were the two related?

A crack of thunder like a cannon shot hit me from behind. I dropped the arm back into the bath and the bloody water splashed me. I jumped away, and for that second it got to me. I stood wiping my hands on my trousers with a Lady Macbeth kind of energy. Too many cuts. This whole damn thing was full of too many cuts, and too many women with not enough respect for their own flesh.

I could feel my stomach turning. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper. Something came out, but it was more spit than vomit. At least it was out. I steadied myself and turned my attention to the bundle of clothes, picking them up by an
edge of fabric so as not to disturb anything. I didn’t need to look far. It must have been a classy sweater once, a creamcotton weave, soft as soft. Except for the hard black stains all down the front, and the spray of black spots over the sleeves. The trousers were the same, blood and stuff all over them, too. Underneath I found a handbag, one of those sack affairs in which women carry their lives as well as their car keys. I opened it up carefully. In the bottom I saw a purse, a credit card wallet, and a makeup bag tubby with contents. Nestling next to it was a long, nicely proportioned surgical knife, half wrapped in bloody tissues. Of course: the missing letter opener. A nice irony, given the mail it would have opened.