Under My Skin (30 page)

“What happened, then, Olivia? Did he agree to give her up but find he couldn’t do it? He did try, though, didn’t he? Or maybe he just knew you were watching, staying in London, hanging on his every move, checking his phone calls, making sure there were no diversions on his way home or into work. He certainly never went near her house all that time. Or if he did, he made damn sure none of the neighbors saw him. But even you couldn’t be with him every minute of the day. As you once told me—such a busy man, such a ferocious schedule. Up early every morning to go into the office or the hospital before the day’s operations. His day starting just around the time hers finished. And you know what they say about doctors’ couches. That they see more action than most beds. Not to mention the fingerprints left all over the place.

“How long did it take you to realize, Olivia? Did you follow him to work one day? You must have known you didn’t stand a chance the minute you saw her. Not just because she was younger, but because she was his. Because Maurice had fallen in love with a woman he had created. Just as he’d created you twenty years before.”

“No.” She spat it out. “You’re wrong. She wasn’t anything like me. You met her, you saw her. She wasn’t that lovely or that special. The jaw was good, I’ll give you that, but the nose was awful—vulgar, cute, no real character at all, the kind of thing he used to despise. And the breasts, well, they were just crude, all size and no shape. Cowboy standards. No. Maurice didn’t fall in love with her because of his own brilliance. He fell in love with her because he was
getting sloppy and he couldn’t tell the difference. You must have noticed it going through the files. There were more complaints in the last two years than in the preceding ten. He’d got lazy, stopped trying. And he just wanted to be with someone who wouldn’t remind him of that.”

“And was that enough to kill him for?” I asked quietly.

“I’ve no idea,” she said, her voice smooth again. “But presumably you have a view on that.”

Despite myself I smiled. I like her more like this: the original Aeyesha rather than the whimpering monkey second time out of the flame. Give me them sassy every time. But then she knew that about me. Knew I would fall for that kind of bait.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I think happened. I think you could just about bear the idea of them together until you found out about the trip. Found out that Maurice was taking her to the conference in Chicago, that he was using her as his advertisement just as he had once used you. That was what you couldn’t handle. And that’s when you decided to kill them.

“I must say you went to a lot of trouble over it, but then I suppose you always were the business end of the partnership. Still, it took some planning—using her love letters to write the anonymous notes to him, faking a request for health farm details, even targeting your own business to make the threats look serious. Using Lola for the sabotage—now that was clever. She could never be traced back to you, but you knew for certain that she would respond. Because you knew that Lola was really Cilla Rankin, the daughter of one of Maurice’s more disastrous failures, herself out for a bit of revenge after her mother’s death. What happened? Did you follow up her references and find out she never existed?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t need to. She looked just like her mother. She was already going to fat. Thighs and upper
arms. Carol didn’t want me to take her in, said her references weren’t good enough, though of course she meant her looks. But I knew she’d come in useful. She was such an angry little soul. Better to have her inside than out. I knew she’d bite. And I knew if you were any good at all you’d manage to track her down.”

Me. Yes. This was where I came in. “Thanks,” I said. “And which phone book did you pluck me out of?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, I suppose not. Except, when you think about it, you were looking for a particular kind of person. Someone independent enough to try and solve the case on their own, but suggestible enough to be controlled.”

She didn’t say anything.

“So, first I find Lola for you, then I’m flattered and spoiled enough by your attention and money to see if I can get to the mastermind behind the threats. You’re a great help of course. All those files, all those suspects. Just a question of narrowing them down for me, and making Belinda’s complaints look a bit more desperate, adding a phone number to make sure I’d know where to find her, basically making sure she made it to near the top of the pile. Which, of course, she did. I saw her early on. As you knew, when you called on Tuesday morning. Which meant you also knew that when the time came I could vouch for her being difficult and nervous.

“So now you had it all mapped out. Maurice was leaving Wednesday morning first thing, so you could be sure he’d be working late in the office the night before. You planned to see him in the afternoon, so you could tell the police later that that was when you showed him the anonymous note and he recognized the handwriting. But it didn’t quite work out like that, did it?

“How nearly did I blow it for you, Olivia? By going to see him against your orders? Because of course he recognized
me immediately. Belinda must have given him my description. The minute I walked in and he spotted the scar, he knew I had to be employed by you. And that really freaked him out, didn’t it? Because then he knew you were up to something. What happened in your row, Olivia? Did he tell you the truth? That not only was your relationship over, but it had been for years and this time no pleading or threatening would stop him from leaving you.”

She stared at me. Her left eye twitched, as if more subterranean activity were about to take place, slipping her face another few centimeters back toward ugliness.

“What did you do? Beg him to think about it one more time? Say you’d call him that night to talk about it further? Except by the time he was trying to get in touch with you, you were already on your way somewhere else, weren’t you? Having put yourself to bed in front of the whole of Castle Dean, you were already out again, halfway to Fairbray Road. What did you tell her? That you knew everything and that you’d come to meet the woman your husband loved more than you, to have a drink and make your peace and send them on their way with your blessing?

“She wasn’t that bright, was she? God, she must have been petrified of you. Did she notice how much dope you’d put in her drink? Or did you have to force some of it down her throat? Upper torso bruising, commensurate with a slight struggle. You must have been grateful for all those workouts. Then, as soon as she starts to fall asleep, you go into her bathroom, take out some dirty clothes from her laundry basket, and put them on over your bodysuit. You leave your car where you’ve parked it a couple of streets away, then take her keys and drive her Fiesta to Maurice’s office.”

I paused. She was all concentration now, eyes fixed on mine, body rigid, but whether from anxiety or memory it was hard to say.

“He must have been surprised to see you,” I said quietly. “What did you do? Tell him that you’d come to make peace with him, too, then once he was off his guard kill him and take his eyes out to make sure he’d got the message? After that it was easy, just a question of covering your tracks. You wore your own coat out of the building, making enough noise to rouse the janitor into seeing a figure and at least a glimpse of a car. Back at her flat you showered, left her clothes on the floor, put her in the bath, and started the blood flowing. You wiped off any fingerprints, erased Maurice’s last message to her on the answering machine, and burned just enough of her letters so that her handwriting could still be identified. Then you drove home and got to bed in time to be woken by the news of your husband’s murder.

“And from there on it fell into your lap. You just played the grief-stricken widow, too poleaxed even to defend herself against the police accusations, knowing that as long as I was out there rooting for you it was only a matter of time till you could help and guide me—and them—back toward Belinda Balliol, thereby letting you off the hook. Longsuffering, loving wife, jealous, abandoned mistress. Textbook stuff.”

It was only when I stopped talking that I realized I was shaking, the retelling rekindling the rage and reminding me of all the ways in which I had been used and manipulated by her. She must have seen the anger in my eyes. But she sat absolutely still, watching me carefully, as if I and not she were the dangerous one. But her fake serenity was cruelly undermined by a series of violent skin shudders. Not cruel enough, some would say.

“I owe you an apology,” she said evenly. “I never meant to insult your intelligence. I rather thought you’d be, well, pleased. That it might be a kind of triumph for you, getting to Belinda Balliol before the police did.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was great. Particularly her rotting body in the bath. I’ll treasure that one for a long time to come.”

She swallowed slightly and dropped her eyes away from mine. Now, finally, it seemed as if she were in some kind of pain that was not directly connected with her own appearance. I felt the need to make it hurt even more. I thought of Belinda’s swollen face, her mushy skin, the color and smell of the bathwater around her. Then I thought of Maurice. After the violence comes the cleanup. The more scientific cuts of the pathologist, the quick-freeze and the neat plastic bags, all the blood and ooze carefully washed away. A clever mortician might even be able to put his eyes back. I decided to dig them out again. What had Michael said about killers not remembering what they’d done? Maybe they just didn’t get the right kind of reminders.

“Tell me, how difficult was it, Olivia? Stabbing your husband in the back and then gouging out his eyes?”

She didn’t reply immediately. And when she began to talk she didn’t open her mouth fully, as if afraid she might trigger off another seismic tremor. “It was his own fault,” she said so quietly I had to strain to hear it. “He turned his back on me. Turned away from me while I was still talking. He said he didn’t want to hear any more because there was nothing more to say. He was going and I had better make the best of it. He even suggested I’d benefit from the ‘fresh start.’ Fresh starts. Of course, Maurice was an expert at those: cutting out the dead wood, making it all smooth and new again.” She laughed. “You know, the only one he didn’t transform was himself. You should have seen him naked: the flab and the sag starting everywhere. But of course on him it didn’t matter. Because he was the designer, the one with the knife—until, that is, I picked it up.” She stopped for a second. “You should think about it, Hannah. I only did to him what he’d done to others. I even left the
messy bits till he was dead and couldn’t feel the pain. He didn’t hurt that much, anyway. I’d say that on balance I’d suffered more hurt over the years than he did. Lost more blood. And more flesh.” She shook her head. “He should have listened to me. He knew the rules. We wrote them together twenty years ago, the price of his fingers under my skin. I just took what was mine.”

“Your pound of flesh,” I said quietly. “And what about her, Olivia? What rules did she break?”

“I don’t care about her,” she answered with a sudden fierce clarity. “She was a silly little opportunist who knew a good meal ticket when she saw it. She probably would have left him as soon as she could have been sure of his money. I would never have touched her if he’d stayed with me. He made the choice. They could both be alive now if it wasn’t for him.”

And it was clear, for what it was worth, that she actually believed that. I found myself as much disappointed as disgusted. I suppose somewhere I’d hoped that as a woman she might feel more remorse than a man, suffer more sense of horror at discovering the violence in herself. But maybe there are some ways in which we’re more equal than we’d like to believe.

As for poor old Belinda, well, even her death was just a footnote in someone else’s love affair. Her real sin had less to do with being an opportunist than not understanding the passions she had walked into, the small print of the contract she had helped her lover to tear up. Of course her punishment had not fit the crime, but then that’s the point about victims—they get what they don’t deserve. At least this way she’d never need more cosmetic surgery. Unlike the woman sitting in front of me, whose face was coming apart at the seams. The face, but not, it seemed, the mind.

“You do realize, of course, that you can’t prove a word of all this,” she said quietly, straightening her back and
smoothing down her skirts. Fresh starts. It wasn’t just Maurice who was an expert. “That all you’ve got is a good story, while the police have the conclusive forensic evidence.”

It was the least I expected. I leaned over to the little tape recorder, and pressed the Play button. Well, if she felt no guilt then why should I? She started for a moment, thinking I had fooled her all along, but when the voice came out it wasn’t hers. It was mine. Followed by Martha’s.

I switched off the machine. She stared at it for a moment. The silence grew louder and longer. She turned her attention to the back of her hands and started stroking them gently, running her fingers along the line of the veins. And you know the strange thing was that, in spite of the surprise, she didn’t seem that upset.

“I don’t suppose you’re interested in money?” she said after a while, and the voice was almost gay, as if she knew what the answer would be.

I shook my head. “Sorry, I’ve tried it. It doesn’t seem to make me happy.”

She smiled. “Nor me. Though it did for a while. And you know what? Neither does the beauty. Not really. Not anymore. Not without him.” She paused. “You know, I
didn’t lie to you about everything, Hannah. Not about the important things. Not about Maurice and me.”