Nicci French - Beneath The Skin

“What are you doing?” Lynne asked.

Francis looked at me. I nodded and he gave a shrug.

“First we dumped concrete and rubble into a skip,” he said. “We’ve brought soil in. Now we’re doing some landscaping and laying paths.”

“Are you doing this on your own?” Lynne asked.

Francis smiled.

“Of course not,” I said. “Francis has got his collection of lost boys who come and work for him when he needs them. There’s a whole subculture of gardeners drifting around London. They’re like the pigeons and the foxes.”

I gave a nervous glance at Francis. Maybe I’d gone too far. People can be so touchy. Lynne actually got out her notebook and started asking about working hours and firing questions about the fence and access to the house. She wrote down the names of all the casual workers he used.

All in all, it was a relief to leave the house, however late. Or that’s what I thought, until Lynne told me that she would be coming with me.

“You’re not serious.”

“Sorry, Jenny.” Yes, she calls me Jenny, although I haven’t told her she could. “I’m not sure about the level of support we’re providing, but for today I’ve got to stick with you.”

I was about to get cross when the doorbell rang. It was Stadler, so I protested to him instead. He just gave me his smile.

“It’s for your own safety, Mrs. Hintlesham. I’m just here to touch base and make a couple of routine checks. Do you have any objection to us monitoring your telephone calls?”

“What does that involve?”

“Nothing that you need bother about. You won’t even notice it.”

“All right,” I grumbled.

“We want to compile a register of people you have dealings with. So over the next day or so, I’d like you to sit down with Lynne and go through things like your address book, appointment book, that sort of thing. Is that all right?”

“Is this really necessary?”

“The more effective we are now, the quicker we can wind all this up.”

I’d almost stopped being angry. I just felt a mild disgust.

First stop was at the reclamation center for the brass hooks. I nearly bought a round stained-glass window that had come out of an old church but at the last minute changed my mind. At least Lynne didn’t come into the shop.

She did come into the shops in Hampstead, or at least stood just outside staring neutrally into windows full of women’s clothes. God knows what the shop assistants made of her. I pretended to ignore her. I needed something for Saturday. I took an armful of clothes into the changing room, but when I came out wearing a beaded pink top, wanting to see myself in the long mirror, I caught sight of Lynne’s face, staring through the window at me. I left empty-handed.

“Find what you wanted?” she asked as we left. As if we were friends on a spree together.

“I wasn’t actually looking for anything,” I hissed.

I popped into the butcher’s to buy the sausages the boys like so much, and then wandered round the next-door antique shop. I had my eye on a mirror there, with a gilt frame. It cost £375, but I thought I might be able to get it for less. It would go perfectly in the hall, once we had it painted.

I had arranged to meet Laura for lunch, so after I had picked up Christopher’s name tags for all his Lascelles school clothes, I drove down the hill, Lynne’s car in my rearview mirror. Laura was already waiting. It should have been fun, but it wasn’t. Lynne sat in the car outside eating a sandwich. I could see her as I fiddled with my arugula and roasted red pepper salad. She was reading a paperback. If an axman came into the room she probably wouldn’t even look up. I couldn’t quite concentrate on anything Laura was saying to me. I cut the lunch short, saying that I had to dash.

Next stop, Tony in Primrose Hill. Normally I love having my hair done. It makes me feel cosseted sitting in the little room full of mirrors and steel, trolleys laden with colored lotions, the smell of steam and perfume, the lovely crisp sound of scissors cutting through locks of hair.

But today nothing worked. I felt hot, cross, out of sorts. My head banged and my clothes stuck to me. I didn’t like the way I looked after the cut. The new shape of my hair had a peculiar optical effect that made my nose too big and my face too bony. In the traffic on the way home a kind of road rage engulfed me, so that I revved impatiently at traffic lights. Lynne kept patiently behind me. Sometimes she was so close that I could see her freckles in the mirror. I stuck out my tongue in the mirror, knowing she couldn’t see it.

For the rest of the day, she followed me like a faithful dog-the kind you want to kick. She followed me when I took Chris to play with a chum of his down the road, a scrawny little boy called Todd. What kind of parent calls her child that? Then I had to collect the boys, because it was Lena’s night off. Wednesdays are always a nightmare. Josh was at the school after-hours computer club, which was always held in a trailer that stank of boys’ sweaty feet. Usually when I come to collect him he is paired with another boy called Scorpion or Spyder or whatever stupid nickname they’ve chosen. Josh used to call himself Ganymede, but last week he decided that was too effeminate and changed it to Eclipse. That’s his password. His best friend is called Freak, spelled with a Ph: Phreek. They’re all madly serious about it.

But this evening Josh was sitting slumped in a chair and the rather sweet young man who came in to teach them every week was crouched down beside him, talking to him intently. I remember that when I’d first met him a few weeks earlier, he told me that everybody in the club called him Hacker. I think I’d pulled a face and he’d said that that wasn’t his real name and I could call him Hack. “Is that your name?” I’d asked, but he only laughed.

All the boys were still in their uniforms but Hack was wearing ancient torn jeans and a T-shirt with lots of writing in Japanese on it. He was pretty young himself, with long, curly dark hair. He could almost have been one of the sixth-formers. At first I thought Josh must have had an accident, or a nosebleed, but as I drew nearer they both looked up and I saw that he had been crying. His eyes were red-rimmed. This startled me. I couldn’t remember when I last saw Josh actually cry. It made him look much younger and more vulnerable. How bony and pale he was, I thought, with his bumpy forehead and his protruding Adam’s apple.

“Josh! Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The tone was cross rather than miserable. He stood up abruptly. “I’ll see you next term, in September, Hack.”

Hack. Honestly. No wonder Josh was such a mess.

“Or lose you. To a summer love,” said Hack.

“What?” I said.

“It’s a song,” he said.

“Is everything all right?”

“What, that?” he said, gesturing at Josh. “It’s no big deal, Mrs. Hintlesham.”

“Jenny,” I corrected him, as I do every week. “Call me Jenny.”

“Sorry. Jenny.”

“He seemed upset.”

Hack looked unconcerned.

“It’s probably school, summer, all that stuff. Plus he just got whipped on-screen.”

“Maybe his blood sugar’s low.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Give him some sugar. Jenny.”

I looked at Hack. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me.

Harry was round the other side of the school, in the large and drafty hall that doubled as the theater once a year for the school play. When Josh and I went in, he was standing by the side of the stage with a yellow dress over his trousers and a feather boa round his neck. His face was scarlet. The sight of him seemed to cheer Josh up considerably. Up on the stage was a motley crew of boys, a couple of whom were also wearing frocks.