Nicci French - Beneath The Skin

“Nadia?”

I turned and saw a woman about my size, about my age. She was dressed in a sleeveless yellow top and a very red skirt, which was so short I could almost see the curve of her buttocks; her bare brown legs were strong and shapely. Her glossy brown hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail; her lips were painted a red to match her skirt. She looked bright, alert, pugnacious. My spirits rose.

“Louise? I’m glad you came.”

She smiled reassuringly. Together we went into a dingy entrance hall and up the narrow stairs.

“This is the living room,” said Guy unnecessarily as we stepped into a cramped space, which smelled musty and unlived in. A pair of thin orange curtains were half drawn across the small windows, and I stepped forward and opened them. What a depressing little flat.

“Tell you what,” I said to Guy, “would it be all right if we just looked round it without you? You can wait outside.”

“Don’t you…?”

“No,” said Louise. Then, as he left, “Creep. Zoe couldn’t stand him. He asked her out. Kept hassling her.”

We smiled at each other sadly. I felt tears prick the back of my eyes. Zoe with the lovely smile lived here. Through that door, she died.

“I like the sound of her,” I said. “I wish-” I stopped.

“She was great,” said Louise. “I hate saying ‘was.’ The kids at the school adored her. Men were smitten too. There was something about her…”

“Yes?”

Louise was walking around looking with eyes that clearly saw things I couldn’t. When she talked it was almost to herself.

“She lost her mother when she was young, you know. And somehow she always seemed like that-like someone who didn’t have a mother. It made you feel protective towards her. Maybe that’s why…”

“What?”

“Who knows? Why does a woman get picked on?” She caught my eye.

“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said.

I walked round the room, looking: Nothing had been cleared away yet, although somebody had obviously tidied everything up. Books were neatly stacked on surfaces, a couple of pencils, a ruler and an eraser lay on top of a lined notebook on the small table by the window. I opened it up and there on the first page was a list of lesson ideas, neatly listed and numbered. Zoe’s handwriting: small looped letters, neat. On the wall was a framed page from a newspaper, with a picture of Zoe, surrounded by dozens of small children, holding a giant watermelon.

We went into the kitchen. Mugs stood on the draining board; some dead flowers drooped in a vase. A single bottle of white wine stood by the kettle. The fridge was open and gleamingly empty.

“Her aunt owns the flat now,” said Louise, as if I had asked her some questions about arrangements.

I picked up a calculator that was lying on the counter surface and idly pressed a few buttons, watched a sum appear on its screen.

“Was she terrified?”

“Yeah. She stayed at my place. She had been completely out of it, but she seemed calmer on that last day. She thought it was going to be all right. I was outside, you know.” Louise jerked her head toward the street. “Waiting on a double yellow line in my car along the road. I waited and I waited. Then I tooted the horn and waited some more and cursed her. Then I rang the doorbell. Finally I called the police.”

“So you didn’t see her body?”

Louise blinked at me.

“No,” she said eventually. “They would not let me see it. It was only later they brought me to look at the flat. I couldn’t believe it. She just got out of my car and said she wouldn’t be a minute.”

“Are you ladies all right in there?” called Guy from the stairwell.

“We won’t be long,” I shouted back.

Together we went through into her bedroom. The bed was stripped and a pile of sheets and pillowcases lay stacked on the chair. I opened the wardrobe. Her clothes were still there. She didn’t have many. Three pairs of shoes stood on the wardrobe floor. I put up a hand and fingered the cloth of a pale blue dress, a cotton jacket with an unstitched hem.

“Did you know Fred?” I asked.

“Sure. Very charming. Zoe was better off without him, though. He wasn’t exactly supportive. It was a relief to her when she finally told him it was over.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Briefly I closed my eyes and let myself see the photograph of her corpse, peaceful on the floor as if she had gone to sleep there. Maybe she didn’t suffer. I opened my eyes and there was Louise, looking at me with mild concern.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What’s all this for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hoped I might learn something, but I’ve no idea what it would be. Maybe I’m just looking for Zoe.”

She smiled. “Are you looking for a clue?” she asked.

“Stupid, aren’t I? Is anything missing?”

Louise looked around.

“The police wanted to know that. I couldn’t really tell. The only thing I noticed was that there was a wall hanging that Fred had given her. That was gone.”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw that in the file on the murder scene.”

“It seems a funny thing to steal. It can’t have been worth anything.”

“The police assumed that the killer used it to carry stuff away in.”

Louise looked puzzled. “Why not just use a plastic carrier bag from the kitchen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose people are all that rational just after they’ve killed someone.”

“Anyway, she didn’t have that many things. Her aunt may have helped herself already. And the police will have removed stuff, of course. Mostly it looks just like I remember it. Dreary place, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“She hated it. Especially by the end. But it doesn’t give you any idea of what she was like.” Louise went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. “On her last day, we went shopping together. Just to buy her a couple of things to wear until she collected all her stuff, you know. We got her a pair of knickers and a bra and some socks, and then she said she wanted to buy a T-shirt. Mine were all too big for her. She was a skinny thing, and she’d lost weight with all the fear. So we ended up going to this kids’ shop down the road from my flat and she found a light summer dress and a white T-shirt with little embroidered flowers all over it. Size ten to eleven, it said on the label. Ten to eleven: It fitted her perfectly. She tried it on in the fitting room and when she came out wearing it she looked so-so sweet, you know, with her hair all mussed up and her thin arms and her bright face, giggling a bit, in this kids’ T-shirt.”

Tears were trickling down Louise’s face. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

“That’s how I think of her,” she said. “She was twenty-three, with a proper grown-up job and a flat and all that. But when I think of her, I see her standing giggling at me, wearing clothes made for a child. She was so little, so young.” She fished inside her bag and pulled out a tissue, wiped her face. “That’s what she was wearing when she was killed. All dressed up in her brand-new clothes. Clean and fresh as a daisy.”

“Ladies,” called Guy again, putting his head round the door. He looked confused when he saw us hugging in the middle of the room, tears streaming down our faces. I didn’t know who I was crying for, but we stood there like that for a while, weeping, and when we left Louise put her hands on either side of my face and held me like that for a moment and stared at me.

“Good luck, Nadia, my new friend,” she said. “I’ll be thinking of you.”

Just before seven on the following evening I was lying on the sofa in my flat when the front doorbell rang. Up to that point, the day had gone wrong. In the night I’d been thinking about Zoe and Jenny. I thought of them like friends now. More than that, maybe. I lay in bed that night and thought of myself as walking on a footpath and knowing that Zoe and then Jenny had walked this footpath before me. Sometimes I would see traces showing they had passed and always I knew that they had seen what I was seeing. They had gone ahead, and, in that early morning with the light around my curtain edges, I thought of them waiting for me out there, in the darkness and nothingness.