Nicci French - Beneath The Skin

“Comforting,” I said dryly.

“I didn’t think you were asking for comfort. I don’t think you have ever asked me for comfort. That’s not your style, is it? Morris, well, Morris is different, of course, and maybe you could call him mad, in the same way you can call anyone who commits senseless crimes mad. Or evil, if you believe in those kinds of terms. But that doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? Because what troubles you is that for all the terror and all the horror and the death, this has no lesson, no label.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly.” We walked on, back to the path we had left, and for a few minutes we didn’t speak.

“Can I ask you a question, Nadia?”

“Sure.”

“It’s been bugging me. How on earth did you get to see all the files?”

“Oh, that. I had sex with Cameron Stadler and then I blackmailed him.”

She looked at me as if I had just slapped her face. Her face looked comical.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”

She started laughing then, an unsteady and not entirely cheerful sound, but I joined in and soon we were holding on to each other’s arms, giggling and chortling like teenagers. Then she suddenly stopped and her expression became grave.

“You can’t go round feeling guilty for the rest of your life,” I said.

“Want to bet?”

“Not really.”

We came to a fork in the path and she stopped. “I go this way,” she said. “Good-bye then, Nadia.”

“Bye.”

She held out her hand and I shook it. Then I started walking back the way we had come, to where the kite still swung in the air.

“Nadia!”

I looked back. “Yes?”

“You saved us,” she called. “Us, yourself, the other women who would have come after. You saved all of us.”

“It was just luck, Grace. I was lucky.”

It was too cold for snow. The sky was icy blue and the pavement still sparkled with the frost of the previous night. My breath smoked in the air, my eyes watered, my nose felt red and sore, and my chin stung above the itchy wool of my ratty old scarf. The wind was a knife. I walked quickly, head down.

“Nadia? Nadia!” A young voice gusting across the street. I turned and squinted.

“Josh?”

It was. He was with a group of boys and girls about his age, all of them muffled up in thick jackets and hats and jostling against each other, but he crossed the road to me. “I’ll catch up with you,” he shouted at them, waving them off. He seemed solider than I had remembered him, less pallid and weedy. He stopped a few feet from me and we smiled at each other a bit awkwardly.

“Joshua Hintlesham, I’ve been thinking about you,” I said, aiming for the bright notes.

“How are you?”

“I’m alive.”

“That’s good,” he said, almost as if there were some doubt about the issue. He looked around edgily. “I should have got in touch,” he said. “I felt bad. Coming around with Morris, all that. Everything.”

It seemed more than five months ago since he had sat on my sofa, a pitiable heap of frail bones. I didn’t know what to say to him, because too much lay between us: a great mountain of horror and loss and fear.

“Do you have time for coffee or something?” He took his woolly hat off as he spoke, and I saw he had dyed his hair a bright orange and put a stud in his ear.

“What about your friends?”

“That’s all right.”

We walked together without talking until we came to a small Italian café. Inside it was dim, hot, and smoky, and an espresso machine hissed and spluttered on the counter.

“Bliss.” I sighed, and peeled off my coat and hat and scarf and gloves.

“I’m buying,” he said, trying to be casual, looking pleased with himself and jingling the coins in his pocket.

“Okay, rich boy. I’ll have a cappuccino.”

“Anything to eat?” he asked hopefully.

I didn’t want to disappoint him. “One of those almondy croissants.”

I sat at a table in the corner and looked at him while he ordered. Jenny’s eldest son, leaning over the counter with his orange hair, trying to be a man, trying on his cool and his confidence in front of me. He must have turned fifteen, I calculated. He almost was a man now. In a few years he’d be finished with school.

He set my coffee and croissant down in front of me. He had ordered hot chocolate for himself and he sipped it carefully, a small frothy mustache forming on his upper lip. We smiled at each other again.

“I should have got in touch,” he repeated.

We took gulps of our drinks and looked at each other over the rims of the cups.

“I heard that you fixed Morris pretty good,” he said.

“It was him or me.”

“Was it really with an iron?”

“That’s right.”

“It must have hurt him.”

“Oh yes.”

“I guess I should be pleased about that,” he said. “You know those Yakuza gangs in Japan? When they kill you, they do whatever they do until you’re unconscious. Then they drag you outside and drive a car over and over you, breaking all your bones. There’s a theory that you suffer pain on a very primitive level so you feel it even when you’re in a coma and dying.”

“Nice,” I said, pulling a face.

“I felt for some time that I ought to do something to Morris. I thought of him hanging around with me and all the time him knowing what he’d done to Mum.”

“I think that was part of the point.”

“Then I thought, Fuck it. But maybe when he gets out.”

“He won’t get out until he’s a doddery old man.”

“A doddery old man with an arthritic knee,” Josh said with a grin.

“I hope so. Fred will be out sooner. I was talking to Links about it. The trial won’t be until next year, but for something minor like strangling your ex-girlfriend because she dumped you, he won’t serve more than eight or ten years.”

He put his cup down on the table and ran a thumb over his top lip, rubbing away the chocolate.

“I don’t know what I want to ask you,” he said in frustration. “I think a lot about asking you about it all, but now I don’t know what I want to ask. I know what happened and everything; I know all of that-it isn’t that.” He frowned and stared hopelessly at me with those eyes of his that had always made me think of Jenny, and he looked suddenly much younger, like the Josh I remembered from our ruinous summer.

“You think there’s something I should be able to tell you.”

“Something like that,” he mumbled, and drew a finger through a small heap of sugar on the table. I remembered saying almost the same to Grace, all those months ago on the heath. I took a breath.

“Your mother was murdered by Morris for fun. Then he picked on me, and if I hadn’t been lucky you could have been sitting here with the next woman he chose, or the one after that. There’s no reason. It could have been anyone, only it happened to be Jenny. And I’m really sorry,” I added after a pause.

“ ’S’all right,” he muttered, still making patterns in the sugar, not looking up.

“How’s school?”

“I go to a different one now. It seemed a good idea to change.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s better. I’ve got friends.”

“Good.”

“And I’ve been seeing someone.”

“You mean a girlfriend?”

“No. Someone. To talk about things.”

“Oh, well, that’s good as well.” I looked at him helplessly.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“What are you doing now?”

“This and that.”

“You mean the same as before?”

“No, I don’t,” I said vigorously. I gestured to the small nylon hold-all tucked under my chair. “Do you know what’s in that bag?”