Under My Skin (28 page)

Dope. Don’t you just love the philosophical depths into which it plunges you? I took a slug of champagne and climbed back into the ring. After all there was still a conversation going on.

“… if you feel you can handle that?”

“What? Sorry. I was still thinking about Colin.”

“Hannah!” She laughed. “You don’t think they’re right, do you?”

“Who?”

“The people who say marijuana rots your brain?”

“Nah,” I said. “They’re just jealous. What were you saying?”

She poured the rest of the champagne into her own glass and took a gulp. “That we want you to come to supper next Saturday.”

“We?”

“Yes. Colin, too. He says if we’re going to turn over a new leaf, then you might as well be included. That it’s time you and he stopped behaving like a couple of school kids.”

“Well, he can—”

But she got in before me. “He knows that I talked to you. He knows that you know. I really think this is his way of trying to make peace.”

Either that or I’m going to be the dinner; chopped and fricasseed in that big shiny Habitat wok of his and served with a cheeky little red from Oddbins. Except, with Colin’s financial problems, it would probably have to be Safeway from now on.

But the joke was on me, really. He held all the trump cards. And given the depth of my guilt, it would be altogether easier to believe in his charity. Or his therapist. Maybe I should get her name. Maybe she could turn me around, too. After all, he wouldn’t be needing his 7:30 appointment any longer.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’d love to come, but maybe I could take a rain check? This last job finished in blood and tears and I need to get away for a bit. Maybe in a couple of weeks, when I get back—” I paused. “I promise.”

She nodded and didn’t push it. She left quite soon afterward. Well, even the new Colin needed some help to put the kids to bed. But she had one more gift for the giving. As she dug around for her car keys, she came across it.

“Oh, look, I almost forgot. This is for you. It was in one of the drawers at home. I thought you could put it on your notice board. For dart practice.”

She handed me a photograph, worn and yellowing, with
little whitish triangle marks at each corner showing that it had once been in an album. It was taken in the garden on that hideous swing settee that my mother had got with a trillion Green Shield stamp books about a hundred years ago. She and my father were sitting in it together, with Kate and I cross-legged in front of them, desperately trying to look older than our eight and nine years.

They were holding hands. My mother’s hair was permed in that Hedy Lamarr way that forever divides fifties parents from the following decades. Her face seemed firmer and plumper than I ever remembered it. Olivia Marchant was right. My mother had once been much younger. I thought of her now—wrinkles like dried-up little tributaries feeding into the thin line of her lips, and the more generous spread of her stomach and thighs. Maybe that was the real reason Olivia had never had children. Whatever pleasure they might bring to the soul, their growing up would have been too savage a reminder of her own aging. Or perhaps, even worse, she feared they would have become competition. I was suddenly glad that my mother wasn’t part of the generation that longed for eternal youth, that she at least had the maternal courage to show me how to grow old. Mind you, the way I’d treated her over the years had probably hastened the process. Even in the photo I was snarling.

“Don’t you love it?” Kate said. “Look, you’re the only one not smiling. Mum told me she remembers it being taken. You wanted to wear a miniskirt and she made you put on a proper dress, and you had a huge row about it and didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day.”

We both laughed, and then she grabbed hold of me tight and hugged me to her. I hugged her back. Sisters. Could be they’re the only good thing to come out of families.

After she left, I wrote a letter to Colin. Well, it was better than doing it face-to-face. It came out a little rambling,
but was truthful and had a good deal more humility than I realized I had in me. I was pretty sure he would accept it. And then maybe I’d feel OK about going to supper.

I was on my way to bed when the phone rang. There was a policeman on the other end of the line. Maybe he could smell the dope. I blew some smoke down the receiver just to make sure. But he didn’t arrest me.

“I thought you’d like to know that the inquest is provisionally set for the thirteenth. You’ll need to be there, of course. Can you make it?”

“Probably,” I said. “I’m thinking of going away for a while, but I should be back by then.”

“Yeah, takes it out of you, doesn’t it?” Pause. “How you doing?”

“Great,” I lied.

“How’s the arm?”

“Fine,” I lied again. The bruise from his fingers was already a study in purple. “How about your knee?”

“Bloody painful. As is my chest. I’ve sustained less damage on a GBH charge.”

There was a little silence during which no doubt we both thought about our time on the floor together. Do I fancy you? I thought. Will I ever fancy anyone again? You don’t know till you try, Hannah. How bad can it be, fucking a policeman?

“I wondered if you wanted a drink sometime?” he said casually.

“Is this official?”

“Yeah, a double date with Meredith Rawlings. Does it sound official?”

“Er—I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a little off beam still.”

“OK. Well, I just rang to check. Look after yourself, Hannah.”

“Michael—”

“Yes?”

“Maybe when I get back—” I paused. Oh well—I could always blame it on the dope later. “How about the day after tomorrow?”

And he laughed. “Should I wear a uniform?”

Now that’s what you might call an ending. Except, of course, it still isn’t one.

The next day the weather broke with the morning and I looked out on a leaden sky, the wind whipping up the crisp packets, and children in duffel coats on their way to school. Another English summer reasserting its right to perversity. Maybe going away hadn’t been such a dumb idea after all. A way out of a bad date and a break before an even worse inquest. Could be just what I needed, as well as could afford, for once in my life. I did a quick piece of addition. Olivia’s varying moments of generosity came to just under two thousand quid, even after I had paid the windscreen man and the car pound. Well, I had earned it.

Belinda Balliol’s
Time Out
was still sitting where I had left it on the table five days before. Nothing so out of date as an old listings magazine, except for the travel ads. Because it was still technically evidence, I had found myself unable to throw it away. Remind me to stick it in a cupboard if Grant ever ends up in my sitting room.

I made myself a cup of coffee and flicked through to the back of the mag. In my imagination I was already halfway to Tuscany and that heartaching early evening light that makes everything rosy, both in landscape and in life, when my eye was caught by something else on the page. A box ad that had been ringed in careless blue pen. Zenith Travel: the best prices to North America. And by the side of it a name scribbled in that loopy little hand I had grown to know so well. “Richard.” Richard?

So I rang the number. Well, it was just a phone call. No
time, no trouble. Just a way of closing the book. Richard had just walked into the office. I could hear him drinking his cappuccino as he said good morning, slurping his way through the froth. I told him I was a friend of Belinda Balliol’s and that she’d recommended him to me.

“Balliol?”

“Tall girl, blond, good-looking?”

“Oh yeah. Booked about six weeks ago. Picked up the ticket two weeks ago. How’s she enjoying Chicago?”

“Chicago?” I said, quietly putting my own coffee cup down on the table.

“Yeah,” he said. Then it unfolded like a flower before me. “Let me see. I can usually get this in one. Wednesday the twenty-eighth, afternoon British Midland flight to Amsterdam, then catching a KLM connection to Chicago that evening. I could have got the same price for her flying straight out of Heathrow, but that was the route she wanted. How’s that for memory, eh? So. Where can I do you for?”

I
said I’d get back to him. I don’t know whether he heard me or not. I was having some trouble with my ears, the sound of my own blood pumping too hard through the inside of my head. Chicago via Amsterdam. A long way from Mexico and exactly the same travel itinerary as someone else in this story. Although neither of them made their planes. What was it his secretary had said when I tried to book in for an appointment? “I’m sorry. He’s not available from Wednesday. He’ll be in Amsterdam and Chicago.”

So Belinda was going to the same places as Maurice? Although not scheduled to reach Amsterdam at the same time. Of course, I knew that already. Grant had checked the passenger list. But then people would, wouldn’t they, I mean if they were suspicious? At least some people. Probably better to be safe than sorry. But Amsterdam to Chicago? Could be people hadn’t thought of checking that one.

KLM had, though. They gave me a list of their noshows for the 773 morning flight out of Schiphol last Thursday. And guess what? Both of them were on it. And not only on it, but prebooked into adjoining club-class seats. I suppose, of course, it could just possibly have been a further planned persecution. Possible, but not, when you think about it, probable. Because if that was so, how come we didn’t find her ticket? Tickets aren’t like love letters. There is nothing painful or emotionally humiliating to hide there. No point in destroying them. On the contrary. Might even be there was something to celebrate in keeping
them. They would certainly have packed an emotional punch even after death.

I sat for a moment trying to take it all in. I tried to see her flat again, to call to mind all the places I might have missed in it, but the picture kept fading. Instead, I was sitting in my car in a Kentish Town street, watching a man going into a basement, seeing another following him. Then meeting a rather cautious woman in an ordinary skirt and top with some hastily applied mascara. Finding infidelity where there was none. Putting one and one together and making eleven. Easy mistake when you know. It’s not what you see, it’s the way you see it. Or the way you
want
to see it. What had Colin said? “You’re a stupid prejudiced woman—and you don’t have the first clue about what is happening here.”

On the desk I saw my own scribbled sums, totting up Olivia Marchant’s considerable generosity to me. I thought of how slowly but surely I had become more involved in her story. I dug out Belinda Balliol’s file and read it again. And again. I saw the number for the casino scribbled in the margin, and realized how it had been the perfect shortcut to her. I thought some more about her car and that coat and her life over the last six months. And gradually, in the same way that staring long enough at a negative allows you to invert the image and see a positive picture, I started to see things from Colin’s point of view, and to conclude that maybe this was a traditional detective story after all.

I spent the rest of the day visiting a few places and talking to a few people. Then I came home and wrote everything down. Well, it wasn’t easy and there were a lot of details I had to get right. The most important thing was that it all fit, it all made sense. Except, that is, for one character, Lola Marsh—the girl of the grudges and the face packs. Come to think of it, she’d never really been properly
accounted for, anyway. Stubborn in more ways than one. I went into the kitchen to refill my coffee cup and, as I waited for the water to boil, I saw the family snapshot grinning out at me from the board. Two little girls, one scowling, one smiling. One following in Mother’s footsteps, the other desperate to get away. Family dynamics. Maybe it was always like that—the rebel and the acolyte.

Shit. It was so long ago I had almost forgotten them. The roly-poly bodies, the thick and thin thighs, the new marble stone. And the two sisters, one fair-headed, one red. If one didn’t hold a grudge, that didn’t necessarily mean the other had forgotten. I scrabbled about in my notebook. First I rang the Chiswick beauty salon, where I was much nicer to the manageress, and she in turn was much nicer to me, especially when I called her plump redheaded ex-employee by the right name. Then I rang the girl herself. Or rather the place where I thought she might be. And sure enough, a young female voice answered. You could almost hear the sunshine in the background.

“Hello,” I said. “Is that Cilla Rankin?”

“Yes?”

“Hi, Cilla, how’s the weather? Better than here I bet. What happened? Did you go straight from Castle Dean to Majorca? Good idea to get away. Your dad must have been pleased to see you.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s OK. I’m a friend. We’ve met before.”

There was a silence. “I know who you are. Farah said you’d been to see her, too. I didn’t have anything to do with his—”

“I know you didn’t. No one’s accusing you of anything, Cilla. Honestly. You were just in the right place at the right time, that’s all. But I do need to ask you a few questions. Is that all right?” There was a silence on the end of the
line. I heard a man’s voice in the background. “Or maybe I could have a word with your dad about it all. Though he’s probably trying to put it behind him.”

“No. Not Dad,” she said quickly. “Wait a minute. Let me go to another phone.”

And after that I didn’t really need a holiday. There was too much fun to be had at home.

I called Castle Dean to tell them I was coming. Or rather tell one of them. It took me a while to track her down because she wasn’t in her office. But that was because, strictly speaking, it wasn’t her office anymore.

“I’m glad you called. I was going to ask Olivia for your address, to write to you. To say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”

“Yes. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Why? What happened?”

“You’ll have to ask Olivia about that. All I know is what she said to me. That she wants a fresh start. To put all the unpleasant stuff behind her. It seems that I remind her of the unpleasantness.”