Nicci French - Beneath The Skin

I could hear the rise and fall of voices coming from inside the house. It was midday on Saturday and the bereaved widower Clive was hosting a small social event with his lover. I could hear the clink of glasses.

“It is urgent, actually.”

“Come in, then.”

The hall was huge and cool, and from here the sound of voices was louder. She had lived here, I thought, gazing round. This is the house that she had wanted to turn into her dream home, but now Gloria was presiding over the dream home, for the workmen had obviously come back. The room in front of me was full of ladders and pots of paint. There were drapes over the furniture at the end of the hall.

“Would you like to wait here?” she said.

I followed her through anyway. Together, we went into a large living room, obviously freshly painted in slate gray, with large French windows giving out onto a newly dug-over garden. On the mantelpiece there was a photo in a silver oval frame of three children. No Jenny. Was this what would happen to me, if I died-would the waters just close over me like this?

The room had maybe ten or twelve people in it, all holding glasses and standing in clusters. Maybe they had been friends of Jenny’s and now they were gathered here to welcome the new mistress of the house. Gloria went up to a solid-looking man with dark, graying hair and a jowly face. She put a hand on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He looked up sharply at me and walked across.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sorry to butt in,” I said.

“Gloria said you had something to tell me.”

“My name is Nadia Blake. I’m being threatened by the same man who killed Jenny.”

His face hardly altered. He looked around shiftily as if he was checking whether anybody else was paying attention.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, what do you want?”

“What do you mean? Your wife was murdered. Now he wants to kill me.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said evenly. “But why are you here?”

“I thought you could tell me things about Jenny.”

He took a sip of wine and began steering me toward the edge of the room.

“I’ve told the police everything that’s relevant,” he said. “I don’t quite see what you’re doing here. This has been a tragedy. Now I am just trying to get on with my own life as best as I can.”

“You seem to be managing pretty well,” I said, looking round the room.

His face turned purple.

“What did you say?” he said furiously. “Please leave now, Miss Blake.”

I felt in a panic of rage and mortification. I started to make a stammering attempt at self-justification. Even as I spoke, I saw a boy, a teenage boy, sitting alone on the window seat. He was skinny and pale, with greasy fair hair and dark smudges under his eyes, pimples on his forehead. He had about him all the awkward spindly hopelessness of male adolescence; all the messy, terrified confusion of a son who has lost his mother. Josh, the eldest son. I stared at him and our eyes met. He had huge dark eyes, like a spaniel’s. Lovely eyes in a plain face.

“I’ll go now,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. It’s just that I’m scared. I’m looking for help.”

He nodded at me. Maybe his face wasn’t so cruel, really, just a bit stupid and complacent. Maybe he was just like everybody else. A bit weaker, maybe, a bit more selfish.

“Sorry,” he said with a helpless shrug.

“Thanks.” I turned on my heel, trying not to cry, trying not to care that everyone was looking at me as if I was some beggar who had forced her way in. In the hall a little boy on a trike pedaled furiously across my path and stopped.

“I know you. You’re the clown,” he shouted. “Lena, the clown’s come to visit. Come and see the clown.”

“I’ll have everything,” I said firmly. “Eggs and bacon, fried bread, fried potatoes, tomato, sausage, mushrooms. And what’s that?”

The woman behind the counter inspected the contents of the metal container.

“Black pudding.”

“All right, I’ll have that. And a pot of tea. What about you?”

Lynne had gone slightly pale, maybe at the sight of what was being piled onto my plate.

“Oh,” she said. “A piece of toast. Some tea.”

We carried our trays out of the café into the sunny garden on the edge of the park. We’d arrived when it opened and we were the first. I chose a discreet table in a corner and we unloaded our plates and cups and metal teapots. I began eating. I attacked the fried egg first, cutting into the yolk so that it spread around the plate. Lynne looked at me with what I took to be fastidious disapproval.

“Is this not your sort of thing?” I said, wiping my mouth with the paper napkin.

“It’s a bit early in the day for me.” She sipped her tea delicately and took a caterpillar-sized nibble out of her toast.

It was a beautiful morning. Tame sparrows stalked around the table legs in search of crumbs, squirrels were chasing each other along branches of the large trees on the other side of the wall in the park proper. For a blessed few seconds I just pretended Lynne wasn’t there. I took bites of my heart-attack breakfast and washed it down with mahogany-brown tea.

“Do you want me to move away from the table?” Lynne asked. “When your friend arrives.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “You know her.”

“What?” she asked, looking startled.

This was the bit I enjoyed. It must have been the magician in me.

“It’s Grace Schilling.”

I took a triumphant bite of grilled tomato attached to a piece of bacon.

“But…” Lynne stammered.

“Hm?” was all I could manage from my full mouth. I could see she was trying to decide which of fourteen questions she was going to ask.

“Who… who arranged it?”

“I did.”

“But… does DCI Links know?”

I shrugged.

“Dr. Schilling may have let him know. That’s not my problem.”

“But…”

“There she is.”

Dr. Schilling had walked into the eating area. There were several tables occupied now-people with children, couples spreading out the Sunday papers-and she hadn’t spotted us yet. She was smartly dressed as usual, maybe just a bit more casual. She wore dark blue trousers that came only halfway down her ankles and a black V-necked sweater. And she wore sunglasses. She caught sight of us and walked across. She took the sunglasses off and put them on the table with a bunch of keys and, I was interested to see, a packet of cigarettes. She looked at us warily. She had her normal cool expression and I felt in an amused way as if I had been caught sitting in a pigsty with my head in the trough.

“Do you want some breakfast?” I said.

“I’m not really a breakfast sort of person.”

“Black coffee and a cigarette?” I said.

“That’s usually all I can manage.”

I looked over at the aghast Lynne.

“Could you get Dr. Schilling a coffee?” I asked.

Lynne scampered off.

“It’s a bit like having a PA,” I said with a smile. “I quite like it. Did you talk to Links?”

She lit a cigarette.

“I told him you had asked to see me.”

“Is that all right?”

“He was surprised.”

I cleared up the last of the egg yolk with my fried bread.

“Can you be discreet?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the files,” I said. “Well, some of them. It wasn’t exactly through the normal channels, so I’d rather you didn’t talk about it too much.”

She was startled. Of course she was. I was getting used to the look. She took a deep drag of her cigarette and shifted in her chair. She was ill at ease. Did she feel she had lost control? I hoped so.