Nicci French - Beneath The Skin

“Couldn’t he have got away?”

“No, he couldn’t.”

“How did he react to being questioned?”

“He was a bit shocked, of course. But he was perfectly polite and cooperative. Nice young man.”

“Was he angry?”

“Not at all. Anyway, we didn’t mention you had given us his name.”

I leaned forward and put my teacup on the desk.

“Is it all right if I leave that here?”

“Yes, of course.”

I had nothing left. Everything seemed to have drained out of me. I’d thought I was safe. Now I had to go back out into it again. I couldn’t face it. I was too tired.

“I thought it was all over,” I said numbly.

“You’ll be fine,” Links said, still not looking at me. “The protection will continue.”

I got up and looked around for the door, in a daze.

“You must see it as a positive step. We’ve eliminated one potential suspect. That’s progress.”

I looked around.

“What?” I said.

“One less person to bother about.”

“Only six billion to go,” I said. “Oh, I suppose we can eliminate women as well and children. That’s probably two billion. Minus one.”

Links stood up.

“Stadler will see you out,” he said.

It was a matter of half leading, half carrying me out. On the way he stopped in a quiet stretch of corridor.

“You all right?” he said.

I moaned something.

“I need to see you,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking about you all the time. I want to help you, Nadia. I need you and I think that you need me. You need me.”

He touched my arm.

“Uh?” It took me some time to work out what he was doing. I moaned something again and shook him off me. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

Fear kicked in. I was legless with it; my insides felt molten with it. I crawled into bed and lay staring up at the ceiling, trying not to think, yet trying desperately to think. A few hours of hope and elation, and what now, then? What now, when I was back at the beginning where I’d begun just a few days, a week or so, ago? Except it didn’t seem like days, but months and years, a dreary and ghastly eternity of fear. I slept and woke and slept again, stale and itchy sleep, just under the first level, where dreams lurk and catch you like thick weeds waving under the surface of the water. It was dark and then it was dim and then at last light again, a steely sky outside the window. I lay and listened to a bird singing outside. I peered at my watch. Six-thirty. I pulled the covers over my head. What was I supposed to do with myself today?

The first thing I did was to ring Zach. His voice when he answered was thick with sleep.

“Zach, it’s me. Nadia. Sorry. But I had to. It wasn’t him after all. It wasn’t Morris. He couldn’t have been the one.”

“Shit,” he said.

“Right. What am I going to do now?” I found I was crying. Tears were dribbling into my mouth, itching against my nose, tracking their way down my neck.

“Are they sure?”

“Yeah, it’s not him.”

“Shit,” he said again. I could tell he was trying to think of something to add that wouldn’t sound so dismaying.

“I’m back at square one, Zach. He’ll get me. I can’t do this. I can’t go on like this. It’s no use.”

“Yes you can, Nadia. You can.”

“No.” I wiped the sleeve of my nightie over my teary, snotty face. My glands ached and my throat hurt. “No, I can’t.”

“Listen to me. You’re brave. I have faith in you.”

He kept saying that: I have faith in you; you’re brave. And I kept crying and snuffling and saying: I’m just me, and: No, I can’t. But somehow the repetitions made me feel a bit better; my protests thinned out. I even heard myself giggle when Zach swore I’d live to be a hundred. He made me promise to make myself some breakfast. He told me he’d ring me in an hour or so, that he would come round to see me later.

I obediently toasted some rather stale bread and ate it with a large cup of black coffee. I sat in the kitchen and stared out of the window. People walked past and I thought to myself: It could be him, with the baseball cap and the wide trousers, lips pursed in a whistle I couldn’t hear. Or him with headphones, towing the yappy dog. Or him, with the straggly beard and thinning hair, hunched inside his quilted anorak on a baking late-August day. Anyone. It could be anyone.

I tried not to think about Jenny after she had died. If I called to mind that photograph, panic almost closed my throat. Before I saw the files, the killer had been a lurking menace, something abstract and almost unreal. But there was nothing abstract about Zoe’s sweet face, or about Jenny’s grotesque corpse, and now there was a stirring, tentative part of me that was starting to feel personal hatred toward him: an intimate, purposeful feeling. I sat at the kitchen table and held on to that feeling, let it take clearer shape in my mind. He wasn’t a cloud, a shadow, something dreadful in the air I breathed. He was a man who had killed two young women and wanted to kill me. Him against me.

I found an unopened letter informing me on the outside of the envelope that I had already won a prize and I started to make notes on the back of it. What did I know? He had killed Zoe in mid-July, Jenny in early August. As Grace put it, he was “escalating.” A locket of Jenny’s, missing for weeks, had been discovered in Zoe’s flat, a photograph of Zoe had been found among Clive’s possessions, but those were the only things that had been found to connect the two women. The only link-weak and, as it turned out, meaningless-between me and Jenny was Morris. I thought of the other people who had been interviewed: Fred, of course, though never as a suspect since he had been cleared before the murder was even done; Clive; the real estate agent, Guy; a businessman called Nick Shale; a previous boyfriend of Zoe’s back from traveling round the world; Jenny’s crew of architects and builders and gardeners and cleaners. Now Morris. All the police had achieved, it seemed to me, was to eliminate the obvious suspects.

I sipped my cooling coffee. Where did that leave me? It left me sitting at my kitchen table, pathetically trying to be my own detective, watching men out the window, thinking: him, or him, or anyone at all. I was banging my head against the same wall the police had been banging their heads on for weeks.

I went into my bedroom and found the scrap of paper on which I’d written the names and addresses I’d filched from the files Stadler had shown me. I stared at them, until the writing blurred. Then, for lack of any better idea, I took a deep breath and picked up the telephone.

“Good morning, Clarke’s. Can I help you?” A woman’s voice, ringing with fake enthusiasm.

“I heard you’re selling a flat in Holloway Road. I wondered if I could have a look at it.”

“Hold on, please,” she said, and I sat for a couple of minutes listening to Bach played on a child’s miniature electric organ.

A male voice announced its presence on the line with a discreet cough.

“Guy here. Can I help you?”

I repeated my request.

“Great,” he said. “Superbly located. Extremely convenient for Holloway Road.”

“Can I see it today?”

“Definitely. How about this afternoon?”

“Is the owner there?”

“I’ll show you round myself.”

Lucky me.

I rang another number from my scrap of paper next. I don’t really know why. Perhaps because of all the people in the files, she was the only one who had sounded sad.

“Hello?”

How do you begin? I decided to be direct.

“I’m Nadia Blake. You don’t know me. I wanted to talk to you about Zoe.” There was a silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t even hear her breathing. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to upset you.”