Nicci French - Beneath The Skin

It took two days. For two days I just worked, morning till evening. It was like meditation. I could have thoughts without really thinking, let memories bob around without pursuing them, without tracking them down to their source. I didn’t feel euphoric, and I hardly even felt relieved, but bit by bit I felt I was crossing back over into my life. I picked up Morris’s business card from my desk and remembered his bright eyes watching me as he had been carried away, and put it with the other rubbish in the bin bag. I screwed up the paper covered with my jottings from the case files Cameron had filched for me and threw that away too, though not before copying down Louise’s address. I collected two small buttons from the floor. Cameron’s? I held them for a minute in the palm of my hand before depositing them into a shoe box, which from now on would be where I kept my sewing things.

I screened all my calls-and there were a lot of them, because the first tremors of the story had reached the media. There were even pictures of us-Zoe, Jenny, and me, though I didn’t know where they had managed to get hold of the one of me-in a line across the top of page three of the Participant , as if we had all of us died. Or all lived. Reporters rang, and friends suddenly wanted to get in touch, and Cameron rang several times with a hissing, secret urgency, and people I had met once or twice in my life rang, breathless with discovering that they knew someone who was suddenly and briefly a little bit famous. I didn’t pick up the phone.

Not until early on the morning of the fourth day after, a blowy beautiful day when the sun was streaming in through the open French windows and the first few autumn leaves were scattering themselves under the pear tree, where I had first put my arms round Cameron and kissed him. I was thinking about beginning on my garden next, hacking down the nettles, when the phone rang and the answering machine clicked on.

“Nadia,” said a voice that made me stop in the middle of pouring boiling water over a tea bag. “Nadia, it’s Grace. Grace Schilling.” Pause. “Nadia, if you’re listening to this, can you pick up the phone?” Then: “Please. This is urgent.”

I crossed over to the telephone.

“I’m here.”

“Thanks. Listen, can we meet? There’s something important I need to tell you.”

“Can’t you tell me over the phone?”

“No. I need to see you.”

“Really important?”

“I think so. Can I come to your flat in, say, forty-five minutes?”

I looked round at my gleaming home that smelled of bleach and polish.

“Not here. On the heath?”

“I’ll come over to your side. Ten o’clock, by the pavilion.”

“Fine.”

I was early, but she was already there. It was a warm morning, but she was huddled up in a long coat, as if it were winter. Her hair was pulled back austerely, which made her face look curiously flat, and older and more weary than I had remembered. We shook hands formally and started walking up the hill, where a solitary man was flying a huge red stunt kite, which flapped and jerked in the wind.

“How are you?” she asked, but I just shrugged. I didn’t want to be talking about my mental health with her.

“What is it?”

She stopped and took out a pack of cigarettes; struck a match into the cup of her hand and inhaled deeply. Then she looked at me steadily with her gray eyes.

“I’m sorry, Nadia.”

“Is that the important thing?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well.” I kicked a stone out of our path and watched as it clattered away into the grass. Above us, the red kite swooped and danced. “And what did you want me to say back?”

She frowned but didn’t reply.

“Do you want me to forgive you or something?” I asked curiously. “I mean, it’s not me who’s dead.” She winced. “I can’t just hug you and say there, there.”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand, as if she were swatting a cloud of insects away from the space between us.

“I don’t want that. I’m saying sorry because I’m sorry.”

“Did they send you, then? Is this a group apology?”

She smiled and took a drag of her cigarette. “God, no. Everybody has been forbidden to have contact with witnesses.” Another dry smile. “Pending legal proceedings and internal inquiries. And TV documentaries.”

“Are you in trouble then?”

“Oh yes,” she said in a vague tone. “That’s okay. We should be in trouble, Nadia. What we did was-” She checked herself. “I was about to say unforgivable. It was unprofessional. Stupid. Blind. Wrong.”

She dropped her cigarette on the path and ground it out with the toe of her narrow shoe.

“Maybe I should be taping this for Clive’s solicitor.”

She frowned. “Yes, he’s taking legal action. And Zoe’s aunt. I don’t care, really. I do care about Zoe and Jennifer. And you. I care about what you went through.”

We turned off the path and walked down the hill, toward the pond. Ruffles of wind blew across the surface of the water and showers of leaves fell at our feet. A small child stood with his mother, throwing chunks of bread at the fat, indifferent ducks.

“It wasn’t really your fault,” I said cautiously. “It wasn’t your decision, was it? I mean, not telling us what was going on.”

She looked at me and didn’t respond: She had decided to take the blame full on, not slide away.

“For what it’s worth,” I plowed on, “I think that within the limits of the situation, you weren’t as dishonest as you could have been.”

“Thanks, Nadia. But I don’t think I’m going to put that on my résumé. It’s strange,” she continued. “I am always talking about taking control of one’s life, but it got out of control. One step taken-to keep the press out of Zoe’s death, not to scare the local population, not to make ourselves look incompetent, or worse-which led to the next step, then the next, and before they-we-knew it, we were on this road and couldn’t turn back. And we ended up lying and lying and not looking after the people who looked to us.” She smiled ruefully at me. “That’s not an excuse, by the way.”

“All that fear,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never really been able to believe in God. Have you?”

She shook her head.

“There are these two women,” I said, “I feel connected to, though I never met them. And then there are these two men, who I did meet, of course. Did you?”

She took a deep breath.

“I met Fred when he was questioned after Zoe, and then I met Morris of course after you had discovered he knew both you and Jennifer Hintlesham.”

“I need your help here, Grace. You know about this. They seemed normal. Could you imagine them, you know, when you met them, could you see that they could be killers? Was there anything about them-I mean, Fred, for instance. Did he have a history of violence?”

“He does now.”

“I mean…”

“I know what you mean. You want me to say that these men are different, don’t you? You want to put a label on them: dangerous. Or: mad.” We stopped by the side of the pond and she lit another cigarette. “That’s what’s going to happen, of course. People like me will question Morris and they’ll discover that he was abused or neglected, that he was hit or pampered, that he saw a video or fell on his head off a climbing frame. And someone will eventually get in touch with the press to say that Fred hit them five years ago, or whatever. And then there will be politicians and various pundits getting hot under the collar and saying why wasn’t it spotted.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t anything to spot. When people commit murder most of them do it to someone they know. That’s what the numbers say. Fred was jilted by Zoe and he was humiliated and furious and then, by bad luck for both of them but especially for Zoe, found himself alone with her. And he killed her. It’s as simple as that. It happens all the time. He’s probably no more murderous than a lot of people, except he happened to commit a murder that went unnoticed because the woman happened to be receiving threatening letters from somebody else.”