Under My Skin (26 page)

Back in the bedroom I stood by the window, face into the storm, swallowing down long, greedy breaths. London rain had never tasted so fresh. Enough now, Hannah, I heard Frank’s voice harsh in my ear. Enough. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. Close the window and call the police. Don’t touch anything else. It’s over.

The phone was by the bed. I was dialing the number when I noticed the second cord going from the wall into the back of one of the drawers. I put my finger down on the receiver and followed the wires. In the bottom drawer I found the answering machine. Of course. That bright little voice that had always been there even when its owner wasn’t. Next to the recording head the light was blinking furiously. I pressed the button and heard the high-pitch scrunch of voices rewinding. Then I pressed Play.

I listened, transfixed, as my own voice came over the airwaves, a private eye somewhat overplaying the role of curious journalist. Monday morning, a million years ago. Then came a beep, and another voice I recognized. An old man anxious not to lose his casino’s honeypot. “Hello, Belinda. This is Christo Aziakis. It is Tuesday afternoon at one
P.M.
I’m still waiting to hear from you.”

Then came a beep with no message, then another followed by a blast of a lively acoustic but no words: me in the Majestic reception area this afternoon, checking? No Maurice. But then, of course, this was only the machine. Chances were that if he had phoned her on Tuesday evening, she would have been here to take the call. The machine clicked off. So did something else, except the sound came from downstairs. Boy, for an empty house this place was positively jumping. The cat trying to crowbar its way into the Kitekat tin? I listened but all I could hear now was my own heartbeat. I picked up the phone and dialed the emergency number. As the ringing tone connected, I heard it again. This time it was more definite. So definite that I knew what it was immediately. Footsteps. Someone was moving about downstairs.

I slipped the receiver down on the bed and moved softly to the open door, snapping off both the lights in the hall and the one in the bedroom at the same instant. The night had slipped in under cover of the storm and the house turned to black under my fingers. Downstairs once again the noise stopped. But to my horror I was now paralyzed. An invisible hand plucked at my gut strings. How come I’m such a baby in the dark these days? Blame it on Joe, still the only man to make it regularly into my dreams. Below me the sound of steps started again, but quieter this time—soft footfalls on carpet, across to the bottom of the stairs. Then the unmistakable sound of the first tread upward.

I slid my way behind the door, pulling it close to me, my face brushing into something cold and oily as I did so. Across the room the telephone was talking to the bedcover. “Hello. Hello. This is the emergency services. Which service do you require? Hello, is anyone there?”

The footsteps were nearing the top of the stairs. I imagined the figure reaching the last step, standing in the hall, ears and eyes alert in the darkness. A streetlamp was throwing
a dirty light through the bedroom window, but it didn’t reach to the bed. “Hello? Hello?” They’d be trying to trace the call now. But even when they have an address the heart attack victim is usually dead by the time they arrive. A lot can happen in twenty minutes. Like now.

The figure moved into the doorway. Through the crack all I could see was a dark blur. I started to shake, my brain slipping back a cog into the memory of dark country air and a man’s fist. I picked up the image and hurled it like a mental discus far, far away from me. I watched it spin and shimmer into the distance. Then I braced myself, ready to jump the instant the figure entered.

But before I had a chance the door was wrenched away from me, with a sharp brutal movement that left me exposed. I took the oily thing with me, lifting and flinging it in the direction of my attacker. It covered the face and much of the body, obscuring any vision long enough for me to deliver a savage kick to beneath the knee. A man’s voice yowled. I rammed him with the full force of my body weight and he went over, but not before a hand had shot out to take me with him.

I let out a banshee scream of anger as I came down on top of him, using the corner of my elbow as a sharpened mallet to smash into his chest somewhere under the rib cage. I heard him groan. “Ha …” I hit out again and I heard another yelp. But I wasn’t listening anymore. Or counting. The blood was up and singing in my ears, the sweet sound of heart and body pumping in unison. Don’t mess with me…. The words came howling through me from below, from a past dark with panic and pain.

“‘Anaa … Oh, Christ.”

Don’t mess with me … I come from a place where fear is its own muscle and fury an endless fuel.

“‘Annah. Stop … Hannah.”

Hannah. Me. I registered the name in the shout at the
same time as an arm shot out to deflect a further blow. He used the leverage to pull me sideways and throw himself on top of me. He was heavy. Heavier than he looked. “Hannah,” he shouted again. “It’s me, Grant. It’s OK. You can stop.”

“I know it’s fucking you,” I said, as I smashed into him again, at the same time arching my back violently to throw him off. “I know. I know.” And as I said it, I realized I was screaming, too.

It took a while to stop, the message in the brain not the same as the one in the body. But when he pinned my arms down to the floor, suddenly it all went out of me. I felt it go, a great woosh sluicing through my system, almost like a rush of urine when you can’t hold it anymore. I fell back against the floor, feeling its hard wood against my back, gulping in air, looking up into his silhouetted face. “God, Hannah,” he said, half laughing, half coughing, “you’ve got some punch.”

The violence passed. It took us both a while to find our breath. The mood changed. The picture stilled. Slow mo—the biggest cinematic cliché in the book. You could almost hear the music. He relaxed his weight further onto his hands, his head coming fractionally closer to mine. Here we go. The bit in the movie where you kiss her. Come on, you know the rules.

Hard to know if it was the film buff or my body talking. I heard myself laugh. It was a mad sound. He frowned, his lips parted in a kind of bewilderment. “Hannah?” he asked quietly.

“I wouldn’t try it,” I said, louder than I intended. “I’d probably bite your tongue out.”

“What?” He laughed in astonishment.

God, was I in some trouble. Maybe Colin wasn’t so wrong about me after all. Maybe Joe had inflicted a more lasting damage than the eye. No time to think about that
now. I shook my head frantically, looking to cover my nakedness with the plot. “I’ve found her,” I said, and it struck me later when I tried to remember the moment that I may have been crying, but I’m still not sure. “She’s in the bath. She slashed her wrists. There’s blood everywhere.”

And so it was only afterward, after he had helped me up and held on to me for the longest shortest time to check I was OK, that we both realized that the oily cape we were lying on was, in fact, a full-length PVC black raincoat.

I
called Olivia to tell her the good news when I finally got home early the next morning. She was groggy, but at the right end of the sleeping pill to hear the phone. She didn’t say a lot, but then I suppose there wasn’t that much to say.

It still took the lads from the lab to really get her off the hook, though. Just Rawlings’ way of being nasty to the end. I can’t tell you how threatened he had felt, finding Grant sitting in the car with a new partner. I had to take a bollocking for all the things I’d touched, even though I had worn gloves. But by then I had recovered and took it like a woman. After all, we both knew it wouldn’t affect the final outcome. As indeed it didn’t.

When the reports came in thirty-six hours later, they showed that while Olivia’s car and apartment were forensically spotless, bits of the inside of her husband were to be found all over Belinda Balliol: on her clothes, in her shower, on the mac, and in some tasty little stains on the upholstery of her car. Even more importantly her fingerprints were all over Maurice Marchant’s office.

According to the PM, she died around 3:00 that morning, having taken enough Nembutal to knock herself out a couple of hours before. The phone company’s records showed that she’d made a call to Marchant’s office earlier that evening and spoken for five minutes, while a neighbor who had been out walking his dog said that he had seen her car drive off at around 11:10. Her body showed signs of bruising around the upper arms, commensurate with a slight struggle.

It was her car that clinched it. The aging janitor turned out to have had the eyes of a cat. (And Grant the honesty of a weasel.) Not only had he seen a tall woman in a raincoat leaving the premises just before 12:30
A.M.
, but he’d also spotted a vehicle, driving away into the night as he ran out after it. Far too dark and too quick for anything as sophisticated as a whole registration number (although he thought he’d seen a
Y
), but he had once been a car mechanic, and he certainly recognized a newish Ford Fiesta when he saw one. Popular little woman’s car. Perfect for the about-town health farm manageress. Which was, of course, another reason why the police had been quite so full of themselves when it came to Olivia Marchant’s guilt, especially when they discovered her Fiesta’s number plate had a
Y
in it.

Indeed, so convinced was Rawlings they’d got the right murderer that he showed little interest in investigating Olivia’s alternative story, at least until forensics told him any different. So it was Grant who took the files home that night from Castle Dean, and Grant who found Belinda Balliol interesting enough to call at her place of work. Mr. Aziakis, of course, had been expecting him. Not only did he tell him all about her body work and how she hadn’t been there since Monday night, but also, under Grant’s questioning, revealed that for the last six months or so she’d been driving to work regularly in a Ford Fiesta.

From there it was just a question of using police shortcuts to put an address to a telephone number and to get hold of the letting agency. The house had been on a year’s lease, six months’ rent paid in advance. The lease had begun in November, which was the month in which Maurice had given her the push and which, by further coincidence, was also when Belinda Balliol had bought the year-old Ford Fiesta, whose registration number began CYR…. And all on a croupier’s salary? It didn’t take a genius to work out that someone had given Belinda a helping hand. But was it
a payoff or blackmail? Either way, according to her current bank statements, she needed more money. Because not only was the bank getting worried, so was the letting agency. They had already sent a letter threatening her with a notice of quittal if payment wasn’t forthcoming. The police found it at the back of a drawer in the study. It perhaps goes without saying that nowhere in the house, the car, or her bag was there any sign of any ticket or travel document for Mexico.

And the sleeping pills? Well, they came from a doctor she had seen seven weeks before, complaining of nerves and insomnia. When pushed further, she had talked of personal problems. He had assumed a matter of the heart and prescribed her only ten, just in case. She must have used them sparingly.

Now all the bits were in place, I checked them against the fantasy of my car journey. It wasn’t a bad fit. Except maybe the fact that she had used her precious savings to fund the sabotage. That seemed a little profligate, though she’d obviously thought it worth the money. But then given the payoff six months before, she was probably right. At least it showed the Marchants that she meant business. It must, then, have given her the fright of her life when I turned up out of the blue asking questions. Maybe she thought he—or even worse they—had put me on to her. Either way she had little time to think about it. When Marchant called, she must have been more than ready. I saw her at her cupboard, picking out the right clothes, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, making up that lovely new face so she might prove irresistible to an old lover. She’d already gone out of her way to show how suitable she could be. Nice house. Same car. Maybe she had been trying to turn herself into Olivia so he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Apart from the rings around her rival’s neck. And the ones Olivia had hooped around his soul.

But it hadn’t worked. We were back in that consulting room in the middle of the night. Except now there was no one to tell us what had gone on. The silence of death. Nothing quite like it. According to the pathologist’s report, the woman who had killed him must have been either pretty strong or pretty angry. The first blow had severed an artery. I watched the blood spurt out all over that gorgeous cream sweater. Maybe he had told her there was no more money and she had just lost her temper.

I thought of Joe, and the violence I had found in myself once the right button had been pressed. But violence is one thing. Mutilation another. She must have loved him a lot to hate him so much. I had said as much to Grant, as we sat together in the car waiting for the sirens to roll in.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Hannah. You should have seen as many corpses as I have. You’d be amazed by what people can do to each other in that moment, then not remember a thing about it afterward. Defense mechanism, I suppose. Particularly for women. Anyway, what is it they say? Hell hath no fury …?”

And I smiled, because that was one of Frank’s favorite quotations, too. A case of the sentiment fitting in with prejudice.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. It’s just for a moment there I’d almost forgotten you were a policeman.”

Which brought us to the aftermath and what happens when the fury dies away. But there even the forensic boys couldn’t help, couldn’t turn the facts into feelings. I thought about her leaving the building, shaken and shaking, her bloody clothes encased in Olivia’s long black mac. That would have been a bonus, finding something to cover the mess she was in. Did she realize how it might look: a tall woman in the same coat, driving away in the same make of car? Maybe there had been some method to her madness
after all. The possibility of setting up her rival and watching the whole family implode. Except she decided not to stay around to enjoy the show.